SubscribeStar Saturday: Heptadic Structure

20 April 202419 April 2024 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive. To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more. For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Yours portly took a brief break from composing to catch up on some other work, but I’m back to composing, albeit not with quite the same intensity as during the late winter months. I released Leftovers II earlier this month, and Four Mages is coming very soon (2 May 2024). I’ve also completed a funk album, Advanced Funkification, which is coming on 7 June 2024.

If you’d like to listen to Leftovers II, you can find it at the following sites:

Bandcamp ($5 digital download; free streaming for the first three plays): https://tjcookmusic.bandcamp.com/album/leftovers-ii
Amazon Music: https://amzn.to/3xhlvpf
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/leftovers-ii/1735073852
Qobuz (I didn’t even know this service existed!): https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/album/leftovers-ii-tyler-james-cook/hjdpc1g41uucb
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4tLWAlU5O8&list=OLAK5uy_mHn2PKIwpFAbXD8MicZpWdGLHzkql9Dvg

I figured that was a pretty good slate of releases, and that I might take a rest. But then I started jotting down a little melody in the incredibly rare (and, admittedly, self-indulgent) time signature of 7/16:

What resulted was the piece “Heptadic Structure.” The piece itself is exactly twenty-one written measures (although it’s technically longer with repeats).

That gave me an idea: if I wrote seven pieces in 7/X time consisting of twenty-one measures each, I’d have a total of 147 measures of music. 14 + 7 = 21. There’s a beautiful mathematical symmetry there.

Why 21? It’s the multiple of 3 and 7. Three represents the Holy Trinity; seven is God’s Number, a heavenly number. So 21 is a reference to the Trinity and Heaven.

I came upon the term “Heptadic Structure” when looking for a title for this piece. Apparently, the concept of a heptadic structure is nothing new, and is a major concept in the rather esoteric field of Biblical numerology. The argument is that various portions of the Bible breakdown in mathematically consistent and beautiful ways, always with the number 7. It’s a fascinating concept, one about which I only possess a passing familiarity, but I love these mathematical structures. Maybe it’s all a grand coincidence—or, more likely, it’s all part of God’s Grand Design.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Chasing Pokémon at the Egg Scramble

13 April 20246 April 2024 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

My sweet niece recently forced me to download Pokémon Go to my cellphone in that self-serving way that women do when they want something: she wanted me to be able to send her gifts, and to have another phone on which she can play the game (to be clear: she does not have her own cellphone; she plays on her mom’s phone). Being the agreeable and easily buffaloed uncle that I am, I obliged. We downloaded the game and merrily went about catching Pokémon, the lovable little monsters from the smash hit video game franchise.

A week or two later she texted me (again, from her mom’s phone) asking me to be her friend in the game. I was teaching a piano lesson. After about fifteen minutes, she wrote, “I’ve been waiting on you for quite awhile. 😠” Again, being the agreeable and buffaloed etc., etc., I hastily figured out how to accept her little request (it’s harder than it should be!) and we started sending each other little presents in the game.

That was the extent of my Pokémon Go-ing for a few weeks. I grew up playing the Pokémon games and loved them—I still do!—but I didn’t think much about this little mobile app that seemed to have reached its peak in the first two or three months following its release in 2016.

Then Spring Break hit and, while yours portly kept fairly busy, I still had a good bit of downtime. I also found myself taking a lot of walks with my dad. While he’s technically retired, he still works part-time as the town administrator for a small town here in South Carolina, and conducts a great deal of his business on the phone while walking the dogs (perhaps the most Boomer work habit conceivable; they love being on the phone as much as us Millennials hate it). That got me looking for something to do with my hands while he dictated life-changing decisions to bureaucratic functionaries, so I pulled out Pokémon Go.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: The King in Yellow Review

6 April 20245 April 2024 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

The artwork for today’s post is the cover of the instrumental piece “Yellow Knight,” from my upcoming release Four Mages. The album releases on 2 May 2024, and a YouTube video for “Yellow Knight” (linked above) will go live on 14 May 2024.

Recently I purchased a copy of Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow, a classic work of “weird fiction” that would inspire writers like H.P. Lovecraft. It’s a book I’ve wanted to read for sometime, especially with the idea of a malevolent play that is so terrible and beautiful, it drives anyone who reads it mad. That play, of course, is the titular The King in Yellow, the text of which—beyond a couple of snippets—is never quoted in the book.

The book is a collection of ten stories, the first four of which share the thread of the infamous play. The rest of the book consists of stories that take place mostly in Paris, specifically the Latin Quarter, and revolves around the lives of young American art students in the City of Light. Indeed, Chambers published In the Quarter, a collection of stories about the Bohemian lives of the Latin Quarter’s residents, a year prior to the publication of The King in Yellow.

The four proper TKiY stories are quite good, and succeed as horror stories that unsettle, more than they scare. The hidden gems of this collection, however, are the Latin Quarter stories, which depict a freewheeling, fun-loving period in French history before the unhappy days of the First World War ruined France and the West forever.

I reviewed one of those stories, “The Street of the First Shell,” earlier this week. Today, I’d like to examine the entire book, which really is two shorter books in one. There are the stories clearly connected to the “Yellow King” mythos. The rest are all stories that take place in the Latin Quarter. Unlike “The Street of the First Shell,” however, most of the rest are comedic romances, though some are a bit heavier than others.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Disco Elysium

30 March 202425 March 2024 The Portly Politico3 Comments

I recently picked up the “final cut” of Disco Elysium during the Steam Spring Sale at the amazing price of $9.99 (it usually MRSPs for $39.99). It’s a game I’d heard about since its release in 2019, but always with an air of mystery around it. It’s a roleplaying game, yes, but totally different from the typical fantasy-inspired roleplaying worlds of, say, The Elder Scrolls series or even the sci-fi roleplaying of Cyberpunk 2077 or Starfield (Ponty’s promised a review of CP2077, and I am quite excited to read it).

There have been non-fantasy roleplaying games before, to be sure, and even those that take place in the modern-ish world. Disco Elysium, however, is unlike any other game I’ve ever played, roleplaying or otherwise, and after just a few hours of gameplay—and having not even solved the first case yet!—I love it.

It also turns out the game can be had on consoles—and much more affordably than the default Steam price. Amazon has it on the Nintendo Switch ($25), the Playstation 4 (marked down $16.90 at the time of writing), and the XBox One ($24). If I’d known it was on the Switch I likely would have got for that console (and may still do so), but I think the game is meant to be played on the PC. That said, I can tell it’s quite console-friendly based on the controls.

What sets Disco Elysium apart from other games, I think, is that most of the game is dialogue—with your own mind. And not just one, unified mind, but your character’s entire nervous system. It is probably the closest simulation I’ve ever experienced to what goes on in my mind, although I’m not a drug-addled 70s-style super cop down on his luck.

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This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. Any purchases made through those link result in a bit of additional revenue for yours portly, at no additional cost to you.

SubscribeStar Saturday: Sartorial Decline

23 March 202417 March 2024 The Portly Politico5 Comments

People are not dressing well anymore.

I’ll include myself in that assessment. When I first started teaching, I wore a coat and tie every day, although I’d shed the coat pretty quickly. On Fridays, when teachers were allowed to wear jeans, I’d make myself wear a tie if I wore jeans, as a compromise (that also used to be my stage look—jeans, sports coat, tie).

Since The Age of The Virus, everything has loosened up. I happily wear polo shirts—tucked in!—to work most everyday, aside from the six weeks of frosty winter we sometimes get in South Carolina. Fiddling around in an un-air-conditioned football pressbox in August is far more pleasant when I’m not wearing a long-sleeve button-up with a goofy tie.

Indeed, teachers can now wear jeans, so long as they are of a darker hue, any day of the week. My female colleagues avail themselves of this privilege fairly shamelessly. As I descend elegantly into middle age, I’ve adopted the uniform of my people: five-pocket workman’s slacks with a tucked-in polo or short-sleeve button-up shirt.

What has stirred my sartorial ire is not form-fitting jeans or polo shirts, but the prevalence of pajamas—yes, outright pajamas—among the general population.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Advanced Funkification

16 March 202415 March 2024 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

My forays into avant-garde, self-indulgent composing continues unabated. While I have not been able to do as much of it the past two weeks, I did manage to jot down some funky grooves.

I made it out to open mic night this past Tuesday, 12 March 2024 for the first time in a very long time. It was a serendipitous evening: two of my former students were in attendance, both on their respective college’s spring breaks. One was busking his way from Maine down to Savannah, Georgia, before heading back up the East Coast—a very interesting, albeit exhausting, adventure. The other was decompressing in a more traditional fashion, rusticating at his parents’ place while recovering from a very difficult semester. My jaundiced eye picked up right away that he is burned out.

So is yours portly. My Spring Break can’t get here fast enough, but it’s still two weeks in the future. I have hit that point in the school year where the neediness and learned helplessness of modern teenagers is wearing on me, and while I love all of my students, I’m ready to have a few days of not seeing them.

But I digress. During open mic, I popped open my music journal and, in some bits of staff paper not covered over with notes from lessons, jotted down some funky lines:

“Open Mic Funk I” Original Manuscript, 12 March 2024

“Open Mic Funk II” Original Manuscript, 12 March 2024

“Open Mic Funk IIII” Original Manuscript, 12 March 2024

During a blessed half-day Wednesday (during which we had intermittent parent-teacher conferences in the afternoon), I plugged these rhythms into NoteFlight, and managed to arrange three groovy tracks.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: SCISA Music Festival 2024

9 March 20248 March 2024 The Portly Politico3 Comments

This past Thursday was the annual South Carolina Independent School Association (SCISA) Music Festival, a major event for my music students each year. The Music Festival is an opportunity for students to perform solo and ensemble pieces for judges. The judges are typically doctoral students at the University of South Carolina School of Music, and they often give excellent, detailed feedback to students.

Students can earn one of three scores: a Gold/Superior/I; a Silver/Excellent/II; or a Bronze/Good/III. Even students who earn a Gold/Superior often get invaluable comments (in other words, not just things like, “That was amazing!” without further elaboration, although that does happen occasionally). While I stress to my students that our aim is to get a Gold on our performances, the real value lies in 1.) challenging ourselves as musicians in the first place and 2.) taking constructive feedback to heart so that we can improve as musicians.

I also make sure they know that simply playing at the Festival is a testament to their courage as performers, as it is very difficult to expose one’s self to criticism, even when that criticism is designed to help us improve. For me, signing up and working hard to prepare a solo is the most important victory; everything else is icing on the cake.

That said, I am very pleased to announce that both my Middle School and High School Instrumental Ensembles earned Golds for their performances. The Middle School Music Ensemble performed an instrumental arrangement of Giuseppe Verdi’s “La donna è mobile” from his opera Rigoletto (you can purchase sheet music of my now-award-winning arrangement here, here, and here). The High School Music Ensemble played the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves.”

Our Choir Director had a great day, too: her choir earned a Gold, and each of her vocal soloists earned Gold as well.

Here is the (rather dry) update I sent to my administration after school, which I am sure they have blasted out onto social media by this point:

On Thursday, 7 March 2024, forty-two (42) student-musicians travelled to the SCISA Music Festival at the USC School of Music in Columbia, South Carolina to perform adjudicated solo and ensemble pieces. Students competed in the categories of Small Vocal Ensemble, Small Instrumental Ensemble, Large Instrumental Ensemble, Vocal Solo, Drum Solo, Piano Solo, Guitar Solo, and Violin Solo.

The Small Vocal Ensemble, the Small Middle School Instrumental Ensemble, and the Large High School Instrumental Ensemble all earned Gold (Superior) ratings.

Vocal soloists earned five (5) Gold ratings, two (2) Silver ratings, and one (1) Bronze rating.

Instrumental soloists earned eight (8) Gold ratings, three (3) Silver ratings, and one (1) Bronze rating.

In total, students gave twenty-three (23) musical performances, earning sixteen (16) Gold/Superior ratings, five (5) Silver/Excellent ratings, and two (2) Bronze/Good ratings.

The results demonstrate the musical talents of the [school’s] student body, and speak to the cultivation of those talents in the Music program.

So, what does it take to get such results? Let’s dive in.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: In Praise of Valentine’s Day

24 February 202418 February 2024 The Portly Politico4 Comments

A couple of weeks ago Americans celebrated Valentine’s Day. Wednesday, 14 February 2024 was the feast day for Saint Valentine, the patron saint of engaged couples, happy marriages, beekeepers, love, and even the mentally ill. Perhaps that last one is a commentary on how love can—sometimes literally—drive us crazy.

It’s become something of a trend to denigrate Valentine’s Day as a commercial cash grab, a blatant invention of the candy and floral companies to boost their bottom line in the doldrums between Christmas and Halloween. That’s true, of course, but that’s just the modern iteration of Valentine’s Day. It’s worth looking at the deeper roots of the holiday to appreciate it.

Another trend is to decry Valentine’s Day as some kind of attack on the single and their emotional fragility. I’ve been single on more Valentine’s Days than not, but it never bothered me to see explosive expressions of love. Red and pink hearts never drove home my own singleness, or made me feel bad for not having a girlfriend. Thus, we have “Singles Awareness Day” and “Galentine’s Day”—even “Palentine’s Day.” I’m not opposed to cutesy nomenclature, per se, and people having a bit of self-aware fun, but there is a certain anti-Valentinian undercurrent to it all. And isn’t being anti-Valentine’s Day the same as being anti-love?

Well, that’s a false dichotomy on my part, but I do think we have a serious anti-romance problem.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Four Mages

10 February 20247 February 2024 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

I’ve been composing like a madman lately, so much so that my brother is calling me the “Stephen King of Composing,” not because my pieces are particularly horrifying, but because I am slamming them out with the speed and consistency of the great horror writer.

I’ve just released Firefly Dance, which is on every streaming service other than Spotify. You can even find it on YouTube. I have another release coming on 1 March 2024, Epistemology; subscribers can listen to the title track here.

I thought I’d take a short break from composing, but within a couple of days I was back in my music journal and Noteflight, composing new works. In the process, I’ve stumbled upon my next project: Four Mages.

I started with composing two pieces in my music journal, “Blue Mage” and “Red Mage,” which I then polished and altered in Noteflight. That start got me the idea that I needed a “White Mage” and a “Black Mage” to accompany those pieces.

Here’s a video version of “White Mage,” which I think is my favorite so far:

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SubscribeStar Saturday: “Epistemology” Preview

3 February 202428 January 2024 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Last Saturday I spent pretty much the entire day working on music. It started with an extensive composing session to write “Epistemology,” the title track of my next release, Epistemology, which hits on Friday, 1 March 2024 on Bandcamp and all streaming platforms, sans Spotify (by the way, my newest album, Firefly Dance, released yesterday, and is available now on Bandcamp and streaming platforms—you should get it!). After a long, late nap, I finished up artwork and the rest of the particulars necessary to get the files and metadata uploaded to CD Baby for digital distribution (I might need to write a post about that some day, but it’s not exactly a sexy topic).

I’d written the other nine tracks first, but was searching for some theme or album title. Then I saw poet Stacey C. Johnson‘s “On Knowing,” and that gave me the idea to write a composition based on the different philosophies of knowing, or asking, “how do we know what we know?” [For a good Christian introduction to the topic, check out W. Jay Wood‘s Epistemology: Becoming Intellectually Virtuous on Amazon. —TPP] In this case, it was the title more than the poem’s content that inspired me (although it’s a great poem!), but two of Johnson’s other poems inspired me to write pieces for this album (“Updrafting” and “Waltz“). In a way, I owe Johnson and her writing a huge debt of gratitude for Epistemology, because her work inspired a good chunk of it.

So while my American History students took a quiz on Friday, I rapidly jotted down the basic ideas for “Epistemology.” I wanted to write a repeating theme—like Hector Berlioz‘s idée fixe from his Symphonie Fantastique—that would evolve throughout the different sections. That theme or motif represents Truth as filtered through the various epistemological philosophies, starting with skepticism and proceeding through empiricism, rationalism, idealism, and postmodernism, before finally arriving at God’s Truth. I wanted that last bit to be the seventh part, as seven is traditionally understood to be the number representing God; to do that, I had to shoehorn in “Observation” as the second section. I also specifically wanted the chaos and uncertainty of “The Postmodernist” to be sixth, representing man’s number and his fallen—and confused!—nature.

Epistemology will release on Friday, 1 March 2024 (if you want to know the minute it comes out, take a minute and follow my Bandcamp page). But for you—my adoring subscribers—you get to hear the title track today.

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