Hello! Welcome to Clang Jingle Clang, a project in form of a blog.

I am a composer and performer who, between September 2010 and September 2011 created, recorded, and posted a new piece of music online, every day. It was a great experience, and I hope you take a minute to browse through the archive of pieces I wrote using concert instruments, toys, tools, computers, friends and anything else I could get my hands on. Also, check out the "Best of the Blog" page to hear some of my favorite blog pieces.

Also, you can listen to some recordings of my more traditionally-created concert music on the Recent Works page.


Thanks for listening!

Please feel free to contact me at kerrith.livengood@gmail.com with any questions, or if you're interested in commissioning or collaborating with me.

364 and 365. Final blog post: spinning farewells

You know those whirligigs? that you can spin over your head and get overtones? Well, you'll see what I mean. For the final blog, I bought some pool vacuum cleaner tubes; cut them into slightly different lengths; and then exploited Jonathan (again) into starring in a video of him cavorting around the park across the street while spinning the homemade whirligigs. Jonathan spun them so enthusiastically that he has four or five blisters on his hands now.

 Looking back at this year-long project, I'm sort of happy and also sort of sorry it's over. I think I achieved some of my goals: learning to plan and execute a project on a short deadline, finding musical potential in about everything I could get my hands on. I think I could have learned more about talking about my music, and I certainly could have learned more new computer and recording technologies than I did. Sometimes, when I was exhausted and had no good ideas, making a new piece was a ginormous pain. However, more often than not, the blog was fun and gave me opportunities to try out unusual ideas without worrying about polishing them up for a serious performance. Plus, just putting something new out every day was immensely satisfying.

So on to new things. New state, new people, and a couple short months to complete my dissertation before giving birth to a baby boy. I miss Pittsburgh, and finishing the blog feels like closing an era in more ways than one. 

I hope to get a "best of the blog" feature up soon, so that subsequent visitors to this site can hear what I consider to be the coolest things that came of this enormous project. Thanks deeply to everyone who kept checking back to listen to new posts, and to everyone who gave me feedback.  Also, a lot of love and thanks to Jonathan, who helped with numerous projects and gave me all kinds of support, when I felt it wasn't worth continuing this blog.

Clang Jingle Clang isn't dead; in a way, now that it's complete, it's just begun. More updates about things I'm doing will no doubt be posted here, and I hope everyone who is interested in what I've done will check back here from time to time.

But, for now, Mission Accomplished. Yeah, yeah, a day late, I know. :)

(Bonus video! after John was done frolicking in the park, we took the whirligigs out for a drive down the highway.)

  

363. cenotaph

Okay. Remember blog 100? when I got all excited and was going to make a piece out of 100 virtual cellos? and it turned out to be pretty horrible. And blog 200? and 300? Totally didn't try to do anything special with those, because when the pressure was on, I drew a blank.

But this here is the penultimate blog, #364. And yes, I'm a day behind. But I really, really want to end this weird era of compositional activity with something special. And this little piece isn't it. So I'm going to put the official LAST POST up tomorrow. I have something in mind-ish. It just might take a while.

Plus, I have some vicious heartburn and a doctor's appointment in the morning, so I'm going to bed. But tomorrow will be the real finale.

362. come and gone

An interesting site is this Piano Migrations project, which turns cities along a route you pick in Google maps into virtual music box notes. Samples in this project are all variations on my route from Pittsburgh to Champaign, and back again.

Tomorrow is the official last day of the one-year blog; it'll probably be a double blog, which will bring the total count of posts to 365, so that I may soothe myself with the thought that I at least tried to follow the spirit of my own rules. I plan to assemble some sort of "best of the blog" playlist; if you're reading this and you've been a visitor to the blog before, do you have any favorites to put on the list?

360. so hard to keep try 361. princess daybed and her consorts

1. Flute and drums at the same time!!!1 which might be a live performance thing someday for me.



2. Most ancient of keyboard samples. Gonna be a dance party at my house where everyone brings a Casio from the '80s and we get down to the sample drum tracks.

359. elbow dancing

My dancing is confined to where I'm sitting these days. Well, maybe I'm just lazy. Or really, really pregnant.

357. mimesis, 358. lovely fade

mimesis: very noisy pseudo-techno, featuring blender sounds. Do not listen to if over 45 years old.



lovely fade: doesn't actually fade and isn't all that lovely, but has lots of kazoo-singing in it.

356. mailing it in

STuff! and more stuff!

355. you have a kitty

Just a lovely and sentimental melody. Hey, there's only a week of the blog left! (cough)...plus the four or five extra blogs to make up...

After a year, it's going to be odd to be free of/finished with the blog, with nothing to distract me from the exciting duties of dissertation-writing and baby-raising.

I'm sure I'll think of something.

353. hydration, 354. overhydration

hydration: two water glasses full, with ice cubes; gradually the pitch changes as I drink from one glass while rattling the ice in the other. Exciting! and good for you! Also, some sounds made by a salad spinner filled with rocks.



overhydration: the same thing, but with the sounds altered to create a richer harmonic quality, plus the sound of John's pocket watch.

352. aquarium

Some cello pizzing and more water glockenspiel! (That's 'pizzing' as in lots of pizzicati.)

350. sandings, 351. a kitchen that smells of beats

two blogs: me sanding a table and other things (like a music stand and drums); and me playing water-glockenspiel, having taking off some keys and dangled them from a string.

349. peanuts in a blender

westward again

Old saxophone stuff, back from the good ol' days of me trying to play the sax for the blog. Don't run shrieking in horror though! Other good things will follow.

347. flotille

A short soundtrack by me to the first three minutes of a video of some very delicately unfolding water origami, by Etienne Cliquet, a visual artist who does both high-tech programming and low-tech paper folding art (you can watch the entire video here).

345. cluster duster, 346. harping on it

1. Electric organ, located in Ben's dining room. How many times has something of Ben's ended up on this blog? Answer: around seven, or a lot.



2. Harp samples found on someone's wedding-music-advertising website; it no longer sounds like Pachelbel's Canon or My Heart Will Go On.

344. these shorts will do

As I get larger, my options for clothing get limited; it's down to men's basketball shorts for today. So, yes, on that note, lots of effort went into this partiklar blog. Better one later! maybe with video again!

343. my dizzying route to the light bulb

Hey, a normal one-blog post for once.

These might be old oboe samples? Don't know. It was a long day on the road. Back visiting Pittsburgh this week. It's a little weird, I keep wanting to go home to our old apartment. I'm sure the new tenants wouldn't mind.

341 and 342. two blogs: five tool player, weighing wind and time

Number one, flute and drums. Number two, a storm brewing, a bathroom scale, and a carriage clock.

340. clock music

I've wanted to do video and music projects for sometime, as a way of doing something special as the blog draws to a close; here's one of a clock in Switzerland. They love their fancy clocks, the Swiss do.