Beams of Light, Waves of Sound

"Whenever I'm working on something, I break it down into small pieces, and I make exercises out of every little piece... I see kids practicing, and really the way that they practice sometimes isn't going to give them the best results, because if you practice bad habits, you're gonna sound like you have bad habits. So what I recommend you do is that musical meditation, it's really focusing on something until it sounds great to you, until it sounds exactly what you're hoping for. And the way that you get it to sound that way is you imagine it sounding that way, because you can't work towards something that you don't know what the end result is. What you're looking for is every note has to have its own zip code. It has to have its own life, it has to be its own personality."

-- Steve Vai

----

In Priorities, I made the bold claim that I would keep music at the very top of my priority list no matter what. As is apparent from this week's poor total (the lowest thus far, in fact), this just isn't always possible. My time was absolutely devoured by a dance show for which I volunteered to co-design the lighting. In theory, this was something I could have gotten paid for if I had jumped through all the right hoops ahead of time, but that was of no concern to me whatsoever. When asked by one of the choreographers why I would put so much time into something so close to final exams without getting paid, I responded, "I like putting effort into projects and seeing them come out well. I wasn't getting that excitement from classes."

There were, of course, some rough moments. When I first presented my lighting to Meryl, the choreographer who had gotten me involved in the first place, she told me that it was completely wrong and that I had to start over. Another piece had a nice warm stage wash against an orange cyc, which I thought would look great. Then the dancers came out in brown dresses, and the entire stage suddenly became one giant blob of indistinct earth tones. Timings were off, pieces weren't finished, and instruments had to be swapped out. Somehow we had to make it all work in just two days of rehearsal.

On Friday evening, at some point around midnight, I was 20 feet above the stage in a genie lift re-focusing instruments to fill in dark spots. My co-designer looked around and said "I remember someone telling me that no one little fix will make the show look noticeably better, but a lot of little fixes can make a huge difference." From my perch I called down to him "Absolutely! Even if the audience isn't aware of the individual decisions being made, the collective effect of all of the decisions can completely change the way the performance is perceived."

And then it all came together, and I smiled.

----

Week 24 total: 12.5 hours
Grand total: 572.5 hours
Required pace: 461.5 hours (+111)