

Home \| News \| Music \| Bio \| Forum \| Links \| Contact

News / Current Projects

Dire Predictions: As 2008 is coming to a close, I've been thinking about what the future holds. I just had to share a couple pretty good ones! The first prediction is in an article predicting the end of the United States in 2010.

Bummer, right?

But that's okay because the world is ending in 2012 anyway, right? Mark your calendars, people!

Hello, Jetsons!: You know from a previous post that I'm involved with a new service on the web that we're calling SCOREcast. One of the fringe benefits of such an undertaking is I have the opportunity to hone my ability to work with people who are in different geographic locations from me. Perfect example, tonight the SCOREcast core team are getting together for our first planning meeting. Half of the team is in Los Angeles, half is in Austin, and we're meeting via videoconference. Most of the team have Macs, which has some awesome videoconference capability through iChat. But luckily iChat works with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), so I'm using that on my PC.

I've used videoconferencing at work many times, but it's usually a big deal involving very expensive equipment, insane bandwidth, reserving special conference rooms, coordinating with people "across the pond", training classes on how to use it all, and so on. But this stuff, iChat and AIM, is as easy as using the telephone. And that's the coolest thing about videoconferencing these days. When I was growing up watching Jetsons, Star Trek, and so on, everyone always spoke face to face over monitors, holograms, handheld screens, or whatever. Well that day is here, folks. I say we take advantage. And speaking of taking advantage, let's not forget, videoconferencing like this is FREE. The only problem with videoconferencing right now is similar to the problem when telephones were still "new": not many people had one, so its usefulness was limited. So go out and get set up. And to my family: This Means You!

SCOREcast: Facebook is pretty cool.

Over the last few weeks I've been getting to know a great group film score composers. A couple weeks ago, Deane Ogden sent out a note that he's rebooting his film score podcast, SCOREcast. SCOREcast is a free podcast, having to do with all things related to film scoring. The way Deane tells it, he started SCOREcast as a way to answer all the questions he would get from people, in a way that benefits everyone, and keeps him from having to write a ton of individual emails a month.

Well he's refreshing SCOREcast, but a few of us have been brainstorming on a web site to supplement the podcast (official name forthcoming). It's intended to be a destination site (rather, THE destination site) for film score composers, fans of film scores, and for people who aspire to become composers for film. The site will be a community for composers in all stages of their career. We even plan to court the A-list guys to do some guest articles or somesuch. For the seasoned guys it'll give them a chance to share experiences, techniques, network, and to mentor others if they choose. For the newbies, it'll be a place of learning, a reference library, and whatever else we want to make it. For all it'll be a great source of news, community, and support. And let me be clear on one thing: this will not be a "bunch of guys got together and built a site" site. It will be a legitimate, professional site with important information, useful resources, stuff available nowhere else. Our goal is to make it an indispensable resource to film composers- the type of site where you're considered out of touch if you're not on it. So if you are a film composer, aspire to be a film composer, or are a fan, contact me! We'll keep you up to date on progress.

The SCOREcast podcast is available on iTunes, here. It's available now, so please subscribe. Thanks!

Bar Stool Economics

During lunch I was reading the ongoing conversation on Twitter about the '08 Election, when someone posted there was a hilarious "flame-fest" going on at this URL: http://tinyurl.com/6pzo4w about how ABC was not going to air the 30-minute Obama infomercial (or whatever it's called). So I decided to check it out. The comments following the aritcle were your typical name-calling stuff until I came upon this interesting response. I'd heard this illustration once before many years ago so I'm glad I finally found it. With thanks to David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D., Professor of Economics, University of Georgia, I'm pasting it here. Just for fun.

"Our Tax System Explained: Bar Stool Economics

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.

The fifth would pay $1.

The sixth would pay $3.

The seventh would pay $7.

The eighth would pay $12.

The ninth would pay $18.

The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that's what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. 'Since you are all such good customers,' he said, 'I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.' Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free.

But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?'

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.

So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).

The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).

The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).

The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).

The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).

The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

'I only got a dollar out of the $20,'declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,' but he got $10!'

'Yeah, that's right,' exclaimed the fifth man. 'I only saved a dollar, too.

It's unfair that he got ten times more than I got' 'That's true!!'

shouted the seventh man. 'Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!'

'Wait a minute,' yelled the first four men in unison. 'We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!'

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D.

Professor of Economics

University of Georgia

For those who understand, no explanation is needed.

For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible."

Well anyway. An interesting illustration. This will be the first and last remotely political entry on my blog, so with that I have one last request:

Think, do your research independently of the spin doctors on both sides, then (and ONLY then) vote.

Add Comment

Checking out SoundCloud: One of my friends turned me on to SoundCloud a couple months ago, but I never really messed around with it. At first it wasn't open to the public, so I didn't get much value out of it. But a few days ago SoundCloud finally opened up to the world, so I'm giving it another look.

At first glance SoundCloud seems a sort of "me too" when it comes to music hosting. It allows artists to upload their music so other people on the site can discover it. But there are a few things that makes SoundCloud cool. One is the concept of the DropBox. Let's say you and your friend are on SoundCloud, and you find a cool song you want him to hear. Just drop it in his DropBox, sort of like a "song email" without clogging up your friend's email. My friend could send me music in the same way through my DropBox. But they've also just come out with a couple nice Facebook apps that exposes SoundCloud content to folks on Facebook. There's the DropBox app, which is basically the same functionality as the SoundCloud DropBox, but on Facebook- my friends could drop music in my box for me to hear. Going the other way there's the SoundCloud Player Facebook app, where I could drop music into the player and folks on Facebook would have access to it.

So yes, this sounds like any other player. An additional fun piece of functionality makes using SoundCloud cool: SoundCloud provides a waveform display of the song itself, and allows users to place "time-based" comments within the timeline of the song. Usually it could be something as simple as "I love this part". But artists could also use it to give fans additional insight into the song.

Taken as a whole, SoundCloud seems pretty cool, and the combination of the DropBox feature and in-line commenting could make SoundCloud especially useful for long-distance collaboration.

I think I'll try it out for a while and see if it sticks. By the way, I'm at http://www.soundcloud.com/jamesolszewski.

New Projects

CD Project

Well I've finally gotten off the couch in the evenings and started my new CD project. (By the way, DVRs are evil- I have HOURS of my favorite shows to catch up on! Oh well.) I had done some planning for the project earlier, but hadn't really actually sat down at the keyboard until last night.

The new CD will be called Shelter, which I think I mentioned in a previous post; it'll be new arrangements of old hymns. This is a bit of a challenge actually, because if you're familiar with hymns, they're usually short and repetitive. Obviously this doesn't make for a great instrumental contemporary classical CD! So I'll need to be very creative, writing additional passages, maybe merging hymns, and so on. But I'm optimistic, especially from the piece I started last night.

Film Project?

Another project (which may actually delay Shelter) that may be in the works: I may get the opportunity to write some cues for a film student doing a feature length documentary. We'll see how that works out; until then, I'll continue working on the CD.

Other Stuff

Taxi forwarded one of the pieces I wrote for the Olympics to the requestor. That means it's possible it could be used in something- a commercial, DVD, whatever. I'm not sure who the requestor is, but my best guess is an ad agency or a company that makes sports-related equipment. Anyway, however it's used, if it is, is fine with me.

Add Comment

Halloween Music is Ready!: I've finished putting together my Halloween music! I'm looking forward to playing out the window on Halloween. I'll be playing it from my daughter's boombox, but I wish I could play it from some larger speakers. There are some really low frequency parts, below the range of smaller speakers, but I guess it'll have to do. I don't want to bring the "big system" downstairs. Maybe I could play it from my window on the second floor? Well whatever. I'm excited about it.

By the way, come and get it! It's a free download on the Halloween page.

Halloween Music

Every Halloween my neighborhood does it up big. I'm talking block parties, house parties, haunted houses, people decorating their yards, awesome candy, creepy music, thousands of people, and so on. In fact our neighborhood has become "famous" enough in my town that people actually drive from other parts of town to be part of the fun.

In a previous post, I mentioned that Austin has an awesome radio show on film music hosted by Brian Satterwhite, called "Film Score Focus". For a while I got into the habit of downloading Brian's shows and listening to them at work (sadly KMFA has since had to remove its archived shows off its web site or I'd give you a link). One such show was called "The Scariest Music I Ever Saw", a great collection of really creepy film music. Brian mentioned he loved to play this for the Trick or Treaters on Halloween. Well this got me to thinking. Maybe I could make a "Trick or Treating soundtrack".

So that's what I'm doing!

Coming soon to jamesolszewski.com, 60 minutes of creepy Halloween music. And even better: I'll post it as a free download! So feel free to burn it to a CD, play it from an iPod, or whatever, and play it out your window on Halloween! The music will simply be ambience- atmosphere- no really "music" to it. But hey it's free- it's worth a try.

Assuming all goes as planned, I should have it posted within a few days. Oh and I'm taking suggestions for titles- just add it as a Comment on this post.

Add Comment

Wordle: Blogging Toy: Someone I'm following on Twitter just posted a tweet about Wordle, a cool little app that takes the words from your blog and turns them into these cool "word clouds". I just ran it on my blog: here's the result! (Click for a larger version)

Rant: You know what bugs me? When people say "You need to earn my respect." That's such a negative attitude in my opinion. What that means is really "Every person in the entire world does not deserve my respect, unless I know them and they've proven themselves to me." This seems to be a most arrogant, self-centered, lazy, and unintelligent outlook.

I come at the concept of respect from the opposite angle: "You earn my disrespect." Basically, I'm starting off assuming everyone in the world must have some inherent value and thus deserves my respect. Even strangers, even people I don't know, even people I'll never know. There are people in this world I don't respect, and I can at least articulate why I don't. To me, this seems like not only a more positive way of seeing ther world, but healthier and more intelligent.

Looking at people, you can see how they view the world by how they treat others, especially strangers. Nowhere is it more noticeable than in two places: while driving, and on the Internet. Have you seen how people treat one another online, or when they're separated by their cars? You can see the blind disrespect; it's everywhere- and not just in the US. Every once in a while you'll see others treat each other kindly for no reason. But it appears to me that those people are in the minority.

Olympics! I Hope.: I'm taking a side-trip from my work on my next CD project, to instead work on three pieces of music that I hope will be used in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Taxi (see previous posts) has a few Olympics-related listings, and I've decided I can't pass up the opportunity. Basically I'll submit the music to Taxi for this listing, they'll evaluate it, and hopefully send it to the producer(s) who requested it. The producer(s) will evaluate it as well and, if they decide they can use it, they'll contact me and play "let's make a deal".

I need to get these pieces done quickly- the Olympics starts on August 8th! I've never written orchestral pieces quite as quickly as I need to write them for this listing. Writing orchestral takes quite some time since you have to write so many parts. It's like writing the same song- but slightly modified- 14 times! Yes, I write each part individually. Sure, there are quicker and easier ways to get a similar sound, but not if you want it to sound as perfect as possible. As I compose, I actually consider the "playability" of each part as if an actual musician were to play it. For example, you can't have horn parts that never take a breath. And tuba requires more "breath pauses" than trumpets. For string parts you have to account for the length of the bow and so on. So I go to the trouble to get it right. And for this listing, since it likely won't be rerecorded, it needs to be perfect or it doesn't stand a chance. The biggest compliment I can get is "What orchestra performed this?"

But this weekend I had a really productive composing marathon- 7 hours straight, no breaks, no meals. Writing for several hours without stopping is rare for me because I have so many other commitments. But on Saturday my wife and daughter went shopping and left me all alone in the house. So I forsook my chores and other distractions and hammered out a bunch of work I'm pretty happy with. Nice to be able to keep my train of thought going strong! As a result I have the song completely laid out, the roadmap complete, and the orchestration about 2/3 finished. So another couple days and I'll be done. As always, I'm getting that anxious excited feeling of wanting to hear with my ears what's running around in my mind.

When I finish the piece, I plan to post it online somewhere (for streaming) in a private area for members of my mailing list. Please sign up if you haven't already on the jamesolszewski.com home page.

Target and Amazon: ReverbNation has a great feature called "Web Buzz", which aggregates pretty much everything about me onto my artist page. I check it every once in a while just to see if anything has changed. This morning I noticed a new mention of me- on target.com!

Apparently Target is selling Speaking in Whispers. Navigating to the site I confirmed this. But not only that, my Target page had a "powered by Amazon.com" badge. So I went to Amazon.com and sure enough, I'm there too! How cool.

But I have a couple issues to figure out now; Target and Amazon both say "out of stock", and there is no album cover image. So I need to figure out how to get the artwork to them and to tell them "I'm not out of stock!"

Still... pretty cool. All the reading I've done said it's tough to get on Amazon. But I'm on Amazon without even trying.

Film Score Fun

There is a great radio program on every Saturday here in the Austin area that I've been really enjoying lately. The program is called "Film Score Focus". It's hosted by Brian Satterwhite, a talented film score composer and huge fan of film. As you may guess, the show is nothing but film score music.

I've gone through nearly all the archives of the show, and I thought I was finally approaching the "present". Happily though, it appears I didn't download every episode, so I have more awesome film music to enjoy before I'm caught up! Even now though, I find myself bewildered by not only trying to identify my favorite music, but now I'm more motivated than ever to finally go rent some of those movies I always wanted to see but never got around to it.

My favorite shows I've heard so far include:

Terror in the Scream of C-Sharp- Awesome Halloween-oriented show of horror movie music. GREAT stuff.
Music with Eighty-eight Keys- Solo piano film scores.
In Memory of Heath Ledger- A great tribute show with some awesome music.
Academy Awards Show 2008- The Kite Runner music is amazing. Not to mention Atonement, Ratatouille, Michael Clayton, and 3:10 to Yuma.

Other ones I've not heard yet but can't wait to check out:

Tom and Jerry and Scott- This looks like a bunch of Tom and Jerry scores which I've always found fascinating, even as a kid.
The New Battlestar Galactica- One of my favorite shows, very interested in concentrating on the music.
So many others...!

All of these shows are available in the Film Score Focus Archive.

I'm frankly ecstatic that I found a number of shows I've not heard yet. A bit like waking up thinking you have to get up for work- then you notice it's 3:00am, and you still have 3 hours left to sleep.

I highly recommend this show if you're the least bit interested in film music. Even if you're not, this may change your mind. Some classical "purists" assert that film scoring isn't "proper" music because it was written to go with something else- that it's just window dressing, or even little more than "sound effects". Listening to these broadcasts will give you a different perspective, showing how the music is truly beautiful even for its own sake. Check it out.

Add Comment

Twitter?: A few weeks ago I joined Twitter (http://twitter.com/jamesolszewski), to see what it was all about. I had heard a little about it in the news and at work, and one of my church buddies is active on the site. So, to answer my "what's the point?" question, I joined.

Well I'm still not too sure what the point is! I'm also on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1151123690). On Facebook, I found a application (a little bit of functionality you can "install" on your profile) that will take your Tweets (your entries on Twitter) and transfer them to your Facebook status. Okay so that's interesting I guess. So not only will a person's Twitter "Followers" know when they're eating a marshmallow or whatever, but the Facebook contacts will too. Fascinating. Last, I use Google Desktop Sidebar at work to keep up with news headlines and stock quotes. On a hunch, I searched for and found a "widget" I could add to my sidebar that would let me make Twitter updates from my sidebar. So now I can type on my desktop and seconds later it appears on Twitter and on Facebook.

But still... what's the point?

People may be fascinated by the power trip of telling the world that they just caught a fish, or that they're super busy at work- but for the most part, I don't care about the trivial things strangers are doing. Sure, if my family joined it would be a great way to keep in touch. But they're not joining. They don't see the point.

Yet I'm on Twitter. Why? Mostly for the same reason I have a blog. I have a web site that I want people to visit- in order to do that, it can't be static. Twitter and blogs make it easy for me to make tiny updates as I think of them, instead of sitting down once a week "to update my web site". Besides, I like the idea that I can make a change in one place and it ripples throughout my other places. I should think about integrating my tweets into my web site itself. I bet MySpace has a Twitter applet similar to the Facebook one. Probably LinkedIn too.

From a "fan" standpoint though, I think Twitter can be pretty cool. For example, for whatever reason I think it would be funny to know what Michael Dell is doing right now, or Dan Rather, Terri Erwin, or Snoop. I could sort of be my own paparazzo. If the people I'm interested in were on Twitter. So maybe if you're famous and want to connect with your "audience" in a more personal way, Twitter is an easy way to do that.

Other than the above, I can't think of a good reason for Twitter.

'Shelter' Kicked Off: My schedule has finally freed up enough to start work on Shelter, my next project. As I've mentioned before, Shelter is a collection of hymns, mostly my favorites, other some friends' favorites, rearranged and orchestrated into unique standalone instrumental pieces. Most of the pieces will likely be traditional orchestral works, but I'm not limiting myself. More than anything, my goal of the project is to help listeners rediscover these old songs, or to just look at them in different ways.

So far, I plan to have 16-17 tracks on the CD. This may change though, as some songs may merge to produce longer medley-type works. I haven't decided whether to include choral parts in any of the pieces; depends on whether I feel like it's needed, and if I can get a choral group together.

Release date is very fluid, subject to other projects that may come along (such as film score work, special commissions, etc.) But initially it looks like it may release around September, 2009.

Subscribe to Feed