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Xibalba Project

MunchyBear 12 November 2019

Hey,

Been working on arranging Xibalba for myself and an oboist. Freshman year I played this piece-- otherwise I wouldn't have known it existed. I'm surprised I did it back then! Funny to think of what we were capable of even as beginners. Some solid keyboard licks in it.

Here's a video about some stickings that should be interesting:
https://youtu.be/Mko9Yedn13s

I talk about weight on beats and using laterals to organicize phrasing.

And a link to a demo I made of the piece from top-rehearsal 16:
https://soundcloud.com/shawn-muench/xibalba-demo-2

Score is here if you'd like to look while listening: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bANx_dXhajpYoFrO7vKQ_jScgmaChuxw/view?…

Messed around with recording actual hi hat and snare. One pass-- it's hard to be consistent! Will definitely complete and update this demo. Then I'll be figuring out what to play live. We'll probably do the piece with the backing track plus a click. A local approached me and asked if I play weird music because I'm a percussionist and I said absolutely! Happy to have a new project.

Comments

tonymiceli Wed, 11/13/2019 - 12:45

This is great and you are a natural teacher!

How old are you? Did I already ask all this? Tell me about you? You look young but I can't see all of you.

This is what builds the community and helps the instrument. we need more people like you! we have some and some here and we need more.

Email me, I should send this to Leigh and get him to put it out on his streams. tonymiceli@gmail.com
And if not now then sometime in the future you should be on the Malletech team IMHO.

I'm a fan! I love the blender analogy. wow!

MunchyBear Wed, 11/13/2019 - 14:43

27 and finished 6 years of college for my ed degree. Main background was drum corps (MN Brass and Phantom Regiment) and played a TON of marimba in college. Hope to buy a 5.0 the next couple years and tour schools a bunch. 10 grand is a lot for a working musician. My main employment is in church music but really just to pay the bills. I studied ~3000 hours of philosophy since graduating, so that is a hobby of mine. Big emphasis on Thoreauvianism and phenomenology plus Eastern studies.

Really I'm just trying to come up with meaningful projects. I've taught myself how to record and produce music. So I want to tour schools, play recitals, make educational videos, and record music now. I guess a dream job would be composing for a podcast or touring with a marimba full time. Would love to be a professor but it's all so tight at the universities now. Stiff competition.

I'm passionate about keyboard playing. I'm good at teaching it and I really miss college! It's much harder to make connections and find meaning outside of college. Maybe I'll go to grad school. Would love to be a conductor because I'm a great troubleshooter and aesthetician.

That's really it! I've taken big breaks from my playing to study and now I'm trying to get back into actual musician stuff. There's a crazy amount to learn to produce, compose, and play music well. I also hope to get jazz figured out at some point... Big gaps in my knowledge!

Love the site-- gives me a useful place to share things! I've enjoyed videos of yours from YouTube. If you're interested in making recordings let me know! We'll send tracks back and forth and get some cool results.

rogersvibes Thu, 11/14/2019 - 14:48

Cool! You are probably wise to stay out of the academy. There are very few jobs. I am struggling to make it with music as a hobby, and sometimes I think I might be better off as a musician! In any case, I think all musicians should be philosophers, and perhaps more controversially, all philosophers should be musicians (at least Plato would agree!).

c.stallard22 Sun, 11/17/2019 - 18:59

Ugh yes, stay out of grad school before it traps you unless you *really* want the degree. I'm on year 6 of a supposedly "5-year" PhD program, probably with two more years to go for research and writing my dissertation. I went from lots of classical and jazz gigs and practicing 4-8 hours a day as an undergrad to maybe 8 hours a month in grad school and like, four gigs a year. At this point it's getting better because coursework has ended and I make my own schedule (not to mention that I found a cool project and will hang with marimba bands in South Africa this summer), but man, unless you go for performance, grad school can rip apart your music routine. Maybe getting just a Master's is different but if I went back in time I don't think I would have gone the PhD route knowing how much life it sucks up. Just my two cents!

MunchyBear Wed, 11/20/2019 - 13:48

I SO want to get more connections going and be a touring marimbist or something. Or like a percussion duo. But I think I could cook that up without going to grad school. I hope you're able to crank out that degree and do something awesome with it! I wish the professor jobs weren't drying up, but I'm just a generation late for that to be realistic. Not to mention the obscene education costs going on now because we decided to stop taxing the rich. Makes me really passionate about alternative education models rather than neoliberal training grounds.

ie. why are band programs not more focused into INSTRUMENT programs? Better training for the students and more cost effective...

So I'm pretty interested in touring schools and doing more teaching that way instead of getting involved with the grind. Offer opportunities for students to network if they're really gung ho. I just don't want to teach slackers.

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