A Long Past Due Note About This Blog

When I retired from 25 years as a public school teacher I was faced with several choices. I could get another job, but doing what? I didn’t want to teach anymore, it already killed my hearing anyway. Be a “composer?” Though I had kept reasonably busy during that time, churning out piano music and the odd bit of occasional chamber music for the Kansas City contemporary music ensemble newEar, I was not really known for my original music outside of a handful of local artists.

I needed a kick start, so I decided to apply to the University of Missouri at Kansas City conservatory for admission into their doctoral composition program. The program only admits approximately four new students per year, most of them international and in the past 20 years or so only one other “local” student was admitted so it was a long shot at best.

To my surprise I was accepted. My first day of classes was in 10 months. Now I had to do it.

The problem as I saw it was I was admitted on the basis of relatively old compositions I had composed for newEar at least 10 years previously, and I was feeling pretty rusty composition-wise.

Thus Tuna Day came into existence (I wasn’t calling it that at the time). I decided for the next year, or at least until classes started, To get me ready I would work on my inner ear by trying to imagine a melody and harmony of sorts and write it down unassisted by any keyboard then archive it. I would do this daily. I allowed myself the ability to edit (which I referred to as polishing a turd) and if I thought it was just too poor and would take too much work to fix I would start over, but I didn’t particularly care about the quality, at least at first. My standard was the tune had to merely be plausible.

After classes began I still had a few months before the year was up so I continued until I had done this for a year. Because I started getting into it some days I would compose more than one tune. This happened often enough that by the time the year was up I had some 435 tunes in the collection.

The UMKC composition department had a printer that was dedicated for composition students to print only their own works, so I used it to print an edition, complete with incipits, of all these tunes. Later that day the head of the composers guild ran me down to tell me we weren’t allowed to print books, only our own stuff (I’d pretty much emptied a toner cartridge doing this). He was somewhat floored when I told him that it was only my stuff and then showed him the phonebook thick edition of what by then was named TunaDay.

The composition professors were equally bug-eyed when I whipped that out at the first years review, which they have for all new students to see if they’re able to cut the muster, so to speak.

Over the course of my doctoral program I went back to that book several times to mine all sorts of useful material. Just because it was in lead sheet form with typically traditional harmony didn’t mean I couldn’t use that material in more contemporary settings. Even Morton Feldman resorted to a melody every once in a while.

It was really unfortunate that I lost the book in a house fire. It was just the attic that burned but when they put it out the ceiling collapsed right onto my studio and that book was reduced to a pile of wet pulpy goo.

When I resumed TunaDay a few years ago it was as much to keep me busy as anything else. I don’t get too many opportunities to compose, though I do some for the mandolin orchestra (mostly I arrange for them), so this keeps me busy.

Whenever I thought about sharing this activity online the main issue was the limitations of online ABC tools. ABC is used frequently online, but primarily to archive folk tune collections. While it’s great for that, virtually none of the online options translate the accompaniments I add to these pieces. ABC has a gchord function (which unfortunately stands for “guitar chord”). This is what is responsible for the bass notes and chords you hear along with the melody in the audio that accompanies my tunes. Sadly, none of the online programs implement gchord functionality which means if I try to post one of my tunes as raw ABC data online, instead of the snappy bass & chords you will be lucky to hear a single block chord every measure. That sucks. My solution was, finally, to physically record every performance from my ABC compiler (easyABC) and post the audio and a screen shot of the PDF for each post.

If I could post the raw ABC data and get the kind of playback I need there would be no need for anybody to be upset when I put a piece in C# mixolydian, or any other key, as they could transpose the data to whatever key they like.

Dave B left a comment wondering what do we call these tune, and I’ve often wondered that too. TunaDay is a bad pun. Tuna Knot barely makes sense. Are these folk tunes? Sometimes, but not usually. Are they jazz? Again, sometimes.

I think the answer is somewhere in what my eccentric Uncle Bill had to say about Duke Ellington, which I paraphrase here:

Everybody says Duke Ellington composed jazz. He didn’t. He composed Duke Ellington music.

So, by that definition, this is Philip DeWalt music.

Now if I could just find a bigger audience would be great!