February 2022 - Wrap Up

The world has taken a turn again, as if we didn't have enough of unexpected things already happening to us in the past years and while I generally want to keep this Patreon politics free as much as possible, there are times when it is necessary to take a clear position. 

My opinions and words are of course insignificant in the grand scheme of things (especially here in this very confined space) but there are no words big enough to condemn the invasion of Putin into the Ukraine, destroying a political order in Europe that has brought peace and prosperity to the continent for many decades. Of course, I stand with the victims of this heinous attack, as should anybody else with a sane mind in these times. 

Two days ago, I attended a concert by the Berlin Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, who were playing Mahlers 2nd Symphony ("The Resurrection") and they dedicated this performance to the victims of the attack. The room was illuminated with the Ukrainian flag and before the concert started there was a moment of silence for the victims. You could have heard a needle fall to the ground in the room. The performance that followed was one of the most moving concert experiences I have ever had.

As a last word on this: One of the things that I'm hopeful about is how (most of) the rest of the world and particularly the arts stand as one against these aggressions, the solidarity and binding forces that have been shown in the last couple of days are really extraordinary and I do hope they remain intact past this conflict.

Getting back to this Patreon, in one of last week's post I was talking about the Vanity Fair article and briefly mentioned the debate about the Oscars not broadcasting a few categories live, including the Best Score Oscar. There has been a considerable backlash including calls for boycott by the composer community on this decision (and I would presume similar reactions in the communities of the other affected categories), so I would expect that there might be a reversal of this decision coming up. 

One of the recent Polls of the Week was quite interesting. The question of how happy you are artistically and financially showed that artistically you are mostly quite happy but financially there is a wide spread between people being happy and being unhappy. Of course we only have data points of (so far) 16 votes so this is far from being representative but at least for these votes the general presumption of you can either be artistically or financially happy but very often not both seems to not be true. This is a very interesting field as there are general presumtions in the community about these things that I'd like to tackle in more polls in the future.

Other than that, I will keep on posting as regularly as my workload allows me. The more parts I write about film orchestration the more I notice what a box of the pandoras I opened with this series. In fact, there is just so much stuff to talk about in this regard, especially if I also (as I intended) want to cover notation for the instruments in these parts as well, especially considering notation for scoring sessions. So I think I can feed this Patreon for many years to come with this topic alone.

Anyway, I hope you and your loved ones are well in these times and as always, thank you so much for supporting this Patreon. It really means alot to me.

Robin