The Fredösphere

Well, bless my little heart: I'm on sale at Amazon. For only $0.89 you can own your very own Fredösphere! And I am coming soon to an iTunes near you, as well as Rhapsody and Napster.

(I'm amused and more than a little saddened to see I'm the #2 result when you search Amazon for They're Made Out of Meat, because that's a higher ranking than the Terry Bisson book that the original story comes in. Yow.)

And now, more about the making of They're Made Out of Meat:

For any work of art too large to fit in the creator's mind as a single flash of intuition, it's creation is really the discovery or invention of the appropriate creative process. After fumbling around for a bit, I found a time and place I could make headway.

Serendipitously, my son's basketball practices during the winter of 2008-2009 gave me an environment where I could work one hour a week utterly free of distraction. I sat on the stage of the gym at York Baptist Church with no one to talk to and nothing to do (because I deliberately left books and iPod at home). I found I could concentrate on the vocal lines and compose them in that noisy, but music-free, room, surrounded by other parents and motivated by the strange, vain frisson that came from knowing I was the only person in the place writing an opera about two alien beings trying to wrap their heads around the concept of a meat-based life form.

With the vocal lines in place, I could begin to see the general shape of the whole piece. That moment of intuiting the shape is an important one; once it occurs, one can confidently create various small sections of the work knowing how those sections relate to the whole.

Next time, I'll talk about musical motifs. Meanwhile, git yer li'l clicky finger busy and buy the dag-nabbed song!

Labels: They're Made Out Of Meat