Category Archives: Web Design

Nick Norton’s RSS Feed

Yesterday afternoon, composer Nick Norton, with whom I’ve had an email correspondence for at least a year, linked to a blog post from his Twitter account. The post started with one of Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics, which I read religiously. I was, obviously, hooked on Nick’s blog. Jerry McGuire may have had whatsherface at “hello”, but Nick had me at “T-Rex”. I needed to have his blog in my gigantic pool of Google Reader subscriptions.

The only problem was that Nick didn’t have an RSS or Atom feed to subscribe to.

So, I did what any web-obsessed person would do: sent Nick a Tweet asking if he had a feed. This, as I’m standing on the corner of 142nd St & Riverside, overnight bags at my feet, waiting for my boyfriend to pick me up to spend a long weekend at his parents’ house in Montauk. (Rough life, huh?) What would I do without a smartphone, to ask such pressing questions?

It turned out that, no, Nick’s site was sans RSS, despite his blog being prominent on the site. Nick uses Frog CMS (seriously, Nick, dump the Frog – it’s not worth the trouble), which I’d never heard of. As a semi-serious web designer, that was a pretty major red flag. Frog also – let me digress for a moment – hasn’t had a new stable release since April 2009, which tells me that it’s essentially defunct.

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, and I genuinely love helping out my fellow composers, I said, “Let me research this and get back to you.”

By the time we got to Bridgehampton, I had it all planned out in my brain: use PHP to create an XML file from the blog info in his MySQL database, and run a Cron job every hour to update it. Or, in layman’s terms: Use a bunch of acronyms and jargon to do magical things. Then we got to the house, unloaded the cat, had a few drinks and watched some episodes of the Ricky Gervias Show on HBOGo before crashing.

Morning came. Ok, late morning came. Ok, almost noon came, and I rolled out of bed, showered, and sat down with the laptop at the dining room table (i.e., my Montauk office). Several hours of work later, I realized that my initial plan was, in effect, stupid. It wasn’t going to work for reasons that I don’t want to talk about, largely because it’s boring and I’d like to spare your brain cells, Dear Reader.

Fortunately, Nick had sent me the log-on to his site to get things working (mwahahahaha), so I resigned myself to working within the Frog Content Management System to get things done since my original idea wasn’t going to work. *Sigh*

After several more hours, interrupted by giving the cat a bath, nearly drowning in the torrential rains while attempting to get lunch, and making dinner for the family, I finally – at 11pm – and in the past-tense words of Tim Gunn – made it work. You don’t really want to know how, even though it involves none of the XML/Cron/MySQL stuff (though it did involve some PHP, and working with code like “$this->find()”). Fewer acronyms, just as much magic.

So.

If, like me, you want to read Nick’s blog via Google Reader or whatever aggregator you use, you can now.

And the link is: http://nickwritesmusic.com/rss.

Let me tell ya – that’s a lot of work to go to just to be lazy and not have to check in on the blog regularly.

And while we’re at it…

I made a little change to my own blog recently and added a blogroll. Check it out over to the right. Or, if you’re reading this via Google Reader, come on over to the site and check out the stuff I decided is fun enough to read. I’ve got several categories of sites that I link to: the Blogroll is general stuff, including the NewMusicShelf and articles that I “share” via Google Reader; Composers is pretty straight-forward; Fun Stuff is just that; Gay News, self explanatory; and Publishing Blogs gives you a sense of the stuff that I read that makes me so hardcore about self-publishing and being entrepreneurial.

And say hello to my little Twitter feed just below the blogroll.

DennisTobenski.com goes mobile

I spent a few hours this afternoon hammering out a mobile version of the site since the regular site was never exactly mobile-friendly. The mobile version has a little less information than the “desktop” version, but is still pretty content-rich, with Bio, Works, and Calendar pages, as well as an upcoming Listen page. Mobile devices should automatically redirect to the mobile site. So pull out your phones, check it out, and let me know what you think!

Getting over the hump

Thanks to the economy tanking in September 2008, everyone seems to have had a difficult time making ends meet. I certainly know that I have. Being a composer is not a particularly lucrative vocation, being a young composer especially so. As a result, since moving to New York City in September 2004, I’ve made my living as a temp.

I give up roughly 40 hours of my week hopping from office to office in Manhattan. I’ll spend days, weeks, or even months in an office, performing mostly menial tasks – filing, data entry, and rarely (very rarely) a bit of reception work (which I invariably loathe). I was very fortunate prior to the economic crash – I had found a great long-term temp gig in the Alternative Fund Services department of HSBC. The VP who oversaw the area that I assisted was also a musician, so he understood my situation and did his best to keep me on for as long as possible. Ultimately, I was there for three and a half years, not including a several-month stint where I temped for a jewelry company. In the middle of this 3.5 years, I spent about six months as a full-time, salaried employee of HSBC – I was a Fund of Funds Administrator (basically, I was an administrator for a particular type of hedge fund) – but it was too great of a draw on my time, so I quit, left on very good terms, and was called back again as a temp when I finished with the jewelry company. I stayed until about two weeks before the crash, when every single temp in the company was let go at once.

After that, the economy was so terrible that my temp agencies had a very difficult time finding me work. From September 2008 until August 2010, I worked a total of maybe 10 weeks – not because I didn’t want to, but because the work just wasn’t there. I was fortunate in that I could draw Unemployment for a year, and I was able to design a website or two, but none of this was enough to pay the rent, let alone bills. After my Unemployment ran out, I was in pretty dire straits. Consequently, I got myself into a bit of a financial pickle, and was fortunately bailed out by my parents earlier this year. (Hooray for parents!)

The constant financial worry was obviously a major draw on my mental abilities. The anxiety and subsequent depression made it pretty much impossible to write. I even had a rough go of it during my stays at artist colonies – I couldn’t maintain my concentration, and kept feeling as though maybe I shouldn’t be there at all, if only because I couldn’t afford to travel or be away from potential jobs. And while I was in the City, I spent almost zero time writing – I would sleep embarrassingly late and then fritter away the remainder of the day. Not an existence indicative of a healthy mind.

I managed to write only a handful of works during that period, most of which had pretty strict deadlines, and it was still like pulling teeth to get me to sit down to write, even with the promise of money.

For quite a while I thought that the problem was that I didn’t have a draw on my time – that I needed to have less of my time available to me so that I would value what little time I had to write and use it properly. Now there may be some validity to this, but it never once crossed my mind until a few weeks ago that my problem was that I couldn’t think except to worry about the five dollars in my checking account and thirteen cents in savings. The worry would keep me up at night. I was afraid to buy anything. I was terrified every time I swiped my debit card, expecting that the tiniest purchase would be denied because I might not have enough money in my account.

Some of the haze finally cleared a few weeks ago on the plane en route to Santa Fe, NM to see my friends Danny and Kaity get married and hear the premiere of The Gallant Weaver, which I arranged for solo guitar as their processional. In August, my boyfriend’s sister recommended me for a freelance temp job in the Finance office at New York City Center, where she had worked in Development. That assignment lasted “officially” from mid-August to October 1. I say “officially” and put it in quotes for two reasons: 1. I’ve been asked back for a while to help out in the Capital Projects office, and 2. I’ve been offered (and I’ve accepted) a full-time position in Finance starting December 13. I’ll be taking over for a really great guy who’s been at City Center for quite a while, and is retiring at the end of the year. Big shoes to fill!

It was around the time that my boss-to-be began making job-style overtures in my direction that I started to realize that my compositional problem hasn’t been too much time on my hands – it’s been incessant, gut-wrenching, debilitating anxiety/depression over the fact that I’ve had no money for the past two years! So once there was a light at the end of the tunnel, an oasis on the horizon, I was finally able to think more clearly and realize that my creative process had been hijacked by paralyzing anxiety and a real, deep depression.

Now it feels as though a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I still have to live a little frugally until the job starts in mid-December, but I’ve been able to breathe and sleep easier.

And the music has begun to flow again! In a matter of days, I wrote a 4-minute choral work that I’m really excited to hear when it’s premiered at Illinois State University the weekend before I start full-time at City Center. I feel energized to write and write and write!

I intend to attack the Songbook Project again, and I’ve got an interesting series of short chamber works bubbling away in my brain. Also, I’ve found a direction for the orchestral piece I started at Ucross last year that I think is going to propel it into something quite good – important, even. So let’s get to work!

September Catch-up

Once again I fall off the face of the blogosphere! What have I been doing to warrant having neglected my dear, dear readers? Not enough to excuse myself, but enough to fill a short post with!

The Gallant Weaver
About a month ago, I finished a solo guitar transcription/arrangement of "The Gallant Weaver" from And He’ll Be Mine. The piece will be premiered at the wedding of my good friends Danny Stone and Kaity Volpe in Santa Fe, NM on Sept. 18.

Soliloquy
Last week I finished revisions to my first solo flute piece from 2004, Soliloquy, for Kristi Benedick, a flautist I went to Illinois State University with. Mostly, the revisions took the form of renotation of the original score into traditional notation. However, I also tightened up a few sections – dropped a few phrases here and there, and elided others. Kristi will perform the piece on November 14 at Southeast Missouri State University. She will also premiere the flute and piano version of at least a moment in Spring 2011.

Duo for Violin & Piano
I’m also revising my Duo for Violin & Piano, which should be finished soon. I’m extending the opening section, and fixing a pesky transition that didn’t work in the original.

MichaelKorie.com
I’ve picked up a new web client. (Did I tell you this? I’m too lazy to check.) I’m currently designing a website for lyricist/librettist Michael Korie, who I met through another of my clients. More news as the site develops.

Keyed Up Concerts
I started a mock-up today for another client, the Keyed Up Concerts, run by my good friend Marc Peloquin.

PatriciaLeonard.com
Next month, I start yet another site for composer Patricia Leonard!

DavidShohl.com
More websites! I’m in the data entry stage of the creation of a website for my friend David Shohl, also a composer. David was actually my first web client, but as we both have an amazing capacity for procrastination, and David later fell seriously ill (he’s much better now – hooray!), we haven’t gotten around to making it happen until now.

Split Second Piano Ensemble
Yet another website that’s in the data entry stage is for the Split Second Piano Ensemble, made of the duo Marc Peloquin and Roberto Hidalgo.

New Commission
In the next week, I’ll be starting work on a new choral work for the Illinois State University Madrigal Singers. Karyl Carlson, the Director of Choral Activities, has been a great proponent of my music, and she’s commissioned this new work for the 55th Annual ISU Madrigal Dinners, which coincide with the 40th Anniversary of the founding of the ISU College of Fine Arts. The new piece will be performed alongside two of my other choral works, Fair Robin I Love (2005) and Take All My Loves (2009), both written for the ISU Madrigal Singers.

NewMusicShelf.com
NewMusicShelf is chugging along – I’m still building the composer roster, which is taking a little more time than expected, as getting composers to put their scores together is like herding cats. However, I’ve made a lot of improvements to the site, and am still looking for ways to make the site better.

New Day Job
To top off this list of busy-making things (and in addition to a 10-day trip to visit family in Illinois), I’ve started a new short-term, part-time day job assisting the Finance Office at New York City Center. I’ll be there through the end of September, when I’m back out on the streets looking for more ways to pay the bills.

NewMusicShelf.com

About two weeks ago, I finished up another of the many temp jobs I’ve had. The end of this particular day job was a little unexpected, so the typical anxiety attendant at the end of a bout of gainful employment was considerably magnified – doubly so thanks to my financial worries over the past year. As usual, I started to worry about where my next paycheck would come from (truth be told, I’m still worrying about that).

Then I happened to read a Wikipedia article about a web comic that I particularly like (Overcompensating.com). I didn’t learn anything that I didn’t already know, but the story of the artist’s merchandising company mixed with my worry and desperation, and sparked a new idea based on an idea that I’ve been idly toying with for years.

In 2006, around the time that Jeff Algera and I formed our concert series, I started thinking about starting a small publishing company. Something akin to the Cos Cob Press. I would publish works by young and emerging composers. I did a lot of research into startup costs and general overhead costs for such an endeavor, and decided that there was no way that I could make it work without suddenly winning the lottery or coming into a large inheritance. So, I set the idea aside, and I sigh over it every so often.

Since 2006, I’ve made some significant steps in selling my own music. I set up my ASCAP Publisher account, I put together a system of identifying codes for my works, and I started the Tobenski Music Press online store on my website. The thing that I’ve not managed to do is to get people to the site to buy scores. That’s the problem – generating traffic. I’d spent a surprising amount of time during the last week of that job thinking about how to bring traffic to my site, but, while I’d come up with a few potential promotional ideas, I didn’t have a long-term solution.

What I needed was distribution.

And that’s where “Overcompensating” came into the equation. When Jeffrey Rowland – the creator of “Overcompensating” and the founder of TopatoCo (the merchandising company) – started doing merchandise for other web comics, he quickly became the one of the biggest distributors of web comic merchandise. So, why shouldn’t I do the same for concert music and start a distribution company?

The idea percolated for the remainder of the work day, then my brain went into overdrive as I walked the 4.5 miles from the office to my boyfriend’s apartment. By the end of that hour-and-a-half walk, I’d come up with the basic business model and fee structure, and pared the idea down to its essentials. At first, I thought it would be feasible to sell bound scores, but too many questions got brought up, and the idea was dependent on too many variables: who prints/binds/mails the scores? If I mail them, do I have to have them printed and bound, as well, or do the composers send me copies in advance? If the former, then the fee structure depends on the specifics of the score (number of pages, size of pages, special printing needs, weight of the bound score); if the latter, then I don’t have enough space in my apartment to act as a warehouse – I barely have enough space for me, and I can’t afford a separate storage or office space. Maybe when there’s a sale, I send the money to the composer, who then prints and mails the score to the customer, in which case, I’m dependent on every composer to be a) completely honest, and b) not a flake; otherwise, my business is made to look bad.

In the end, I decided on purely digital distribution of PDF scores. If that goes well, I can add MP3 recordings in about a year, and then start distributing bound scores as well in about 5 years.

Then started the beginning of the actual work – I needed to make the website, and get it running. I quickly found a lot of open source shopping cart software that was very trustworthy, but settled on OpenCart because of its general layout and the ease with which it could be modified. It took me a week to learn the basics of the software and how to bend it to my purposes. The site was officially live exactly a week after I’d had the original idea for the company.

I really think that this could be the “next big thing” for concert music sales.

As it stands, composers’ works are either published by a major publishing house like Boosey & Hawkes or G. Schirmer or Edition Peters, etc, or composers publish their own works. Those whose works are published through a major publisher automaticlaly get distribution through that publisher’s established channels. Those who self-publish have next to no distribution. We may sell our scores on our own websites, or we may find a way to shoehorn our scores into a site that doesn’t cater to musicians. Regardless, the only way to find our works is to actively look for them. You have to know who Dennis Tobenski is before you can go traipsing off to buy my scores. Granted, you could stumble across my site by accident, but that isn’t a long-term solution to getting exposure for my scores.

NewMusicShelf.com offers a central location for scores by self-published composers. A one-stop shop, if you will. Ideally, performers and other buyers of new music scores will know of the site and go there to look for new works, and they needn’t have a specific composer in mind when they arrive.

Also, the inventory will be very dynamic – as new composers sign up, their catalogs will be added to the site, and composers already selling their scores there will continue to create new works. The site is not dependent on the production schedules of publishing houses, only on the output of the composers who sell their works there.

I’ve spent the last week drumming up interest in the site and preparing for what I hope will be an onslaught of submissions and purchases. It’s an interesting exercise writing FAQs and Returns Policies. I’ve been trying to anticipate most questions and situations, which I know is impossible. But it’s definitely caused me to refine my ideas about the site and the business.

The response so far has been incredibly positive. Quite a number of composers are very excited about the site, and are currently pulling together their scores and accompanying information. And the performers I’ve talked to love the idea because it means a wider base of repertoire for them to draw from.

Obviously, I’m very excited!

Check it out!

Site evolution

Visitors to the site may have noticed some little changes taking place over the two or three months, and particularly in the past two weeks. Here’s a little rundown of recent tweaks I’ve made to the site.

In March, I decided to drop my Twitter feed from the front page of the site since I hardly use the service anymore. I’m not dumping Twitter completely (I’ve still left a Twitter widget on the sidebar of the blog here), but I felt that a listing of my next performance would be infinitely more useful, especially since the Twitter feed so often mimes this blog, which is represented on the front page, as well.

Less noticeable is a line at the bottom of most entries in the Works and Current/Recent Projects pages that reads “Last Updated:” with the date and time that I last edited that particular entry. I don’t expect the information to change regularly, but I feel as though it’s a nice little indicator to show how recently I’ve tinkered with the information for that particular work or project.

And in a stroke of coding genius (no, not really, though it only took me about an hour to do), I separated the Vocal works into subcategories to avoid confusion between song cycles and individual songs. I even went a step further and separated out Starfish at Pescadero for being a “Song Cycle with Instrumental Ensemble”. I like this little bit of code because it only affects the Vocal works, even though the works.php file controls all of the different groupings together. Probably not terribly exciting to the world at large, but I’m quite pleased with it.

Also, I reworked the photo gallery to look a little nicer. The old gallery was a holdover from DT.com 3.0, and it just didn’t work for me anymore. Each subgallery could only hold 5 photos, which felt very limiting. I’ve kept the subgallery headings, but placed all of the thumbnails on a single page, which allows for easier access to the photos and room for growth within each subgallery. I also find it easier to work with the Lytebox to display the photos, which frees up a lot of space on the page.

I suspect that I’ll be making more changes like this in the coming weeks – it seems natural that the site should continue to evolve.

Looking Back and Looking Forward

2009 turned out to be a particularly slow composing year for any number of reasons. Last year I finished the final quarter of “Permanently” from at least a moment; wrote one choral work and four short songs; and started – but didn’t finish – a short work for orchestra.

One reason for my lack of significant output turned out to be a little surprising – I didn’t have a teacher anymore! I’ve always been quite a self-starter, so I was a little surprised to realize that one reason why I wasn’t churning out music was that no one was looking over my shoulder, and I didn’t have to have a certain amount written each week for someone else to look at. I’ve temporarily changed that state of affairs – this past weekend, I started private study with Chester Biscardi, a web client and good friend (also the Director of the Music Program at Sarah Lawrence College). We’ve decided to use the orchestra piece I started in Ucross as a jumping-off point. I’m glad to be finishing the work finally, and to be working with Chet because he’s a fantastic composer – and by all reports a great teacher, as well!

While working on the orchestra piece (still as yet untitled!), I’ll also be working on a paraphrase of at least a moment for solo piano. Marc Peloquin and I have been putting together the next Tobenski-Algera Concert lately, and, while I didn’t plan on having one of my own works on the progrm for once, Marc insisted that I write a new piece for him to help balance the program. So, rather than wrack my brains for new material under such a tight deadline (the concert is March 9!), I’ve decided to rework the Koch cycle – shorten it considerably, and fold the vocal line into the piano. I consider it a “paraphrase” – a la DDT’s Acrostic Paraphrase, but I’m making the work shorter rather than three times the original length! I’ve made the bulk of the cuts already, so my next task is to start folding the vocal line into the piano part. I’ve been aching for a premiere of the cycle, so this performance will be a bit of a palliative.

In keeping with the arrangement kick…. Last year, I showed Chet the finished score of at least a moment – or, rather, emailed him the PDF of the score with MP3s of the MIDI playback from Sibelius. Since I loathe the voice sample used in Sibelius’s Kontakt Player, I always use flute instead. After listening to the MP3s and looking at the score, Chet made the comment that the vocal line stands so well on its own that I could easily pull out the text and use it as a flute piece. So, I shall! The only decision that remains to be made before I jump in with the Delete button is whether to transpose it or not. As it stands, the piece goes a minor third too low for a standard flute (the piece bottoms out at A3), though it’s ideal for an alto flute. So I have to decide whether to leave it as is and say it’s for alto flute, or bump it up a minor third. Or I could do a version of both!

Further on the compositional horizon – past the completion of several other works that have been in my compositional queue for far too long (completing the piccolo trumpet & string quartet piece for David Glukh; writing a duo for violin & piano for Roger Zahab) – I’ve been thinking quite a lot on a musical subject that I’ve frequently been told I should pursue: opera. Probably the main impetus for my starting to think seriously in this vein (I’ve frequently, and idly, thought about writing opera throughout the years, and have several ideas for larger-scale projects that I won’t tackle for a little while) is the fact that I’ve been lucky enough to go to the Met several times in the past few months: I saw Janacek’s From the House of the Dead (liked the music, hated the production) and Strauss’s Elektra (wonderful) and Ariadne auf Naxos (absolutely divine). I’ve started grabbing recordings of operas where I can find them and putting them on my iPod to listen to at work. (Recently heard Der Rosenkavalier for the first time and was absolutely transported!)

So I’ve been thinking about how I would go about writing an opera – what a good starting point would be. I may start with an existing short play, since that would probably be the simplest in terms of getting started and working on my own. I’ve definitely got my eyes peeled for a potential librettist, though. There are a few ideas bouncing around in my skull at the moment that have got me excited (not so much plot ideas, as structure and general concept), and I’d like to pitch them to a librettist. That is, if I can find one! I suspect that I could make one of my large-scale ideas happen fairly easily (and, frankly, I need to do it quickly if it’s going to happen!), but I’d like to have a chamber opera or two under my belt first. More details as things progress.

This sudden burst of compositional thought and action ties in closely with the second reason for my dearth of output last year. I spent all but a month and a half of 2009 unemployed (2009 didn’t manage to be the Year of Buying DVDs – instead it was the Year of Falling Behind on Rent!), which left me with a lot of free time. By all rights, I should have been churning out new works right and left! The problem, though, was that I had too much free time, and I fell into a horrible habit of intense procrastination. I would wake up late every day (between 10:30 and noon), putter around the apartment for a while, then settle in front of the computer for the rest of the day – frittering away the hours with blogs, silly internet videos, and watching movies and TV shows on Netflix. Needless to say, there was a bit of honest-to-goodness depression involved here, which also stemmed from the fact of my unemployment. I found that when I don’t have a draw on my time, my time tends to become somewhat valueless, and therefore meaningless. A day job – the eternal enemy – is actually a necessity at the moment. And for more than just paying the bills!

I recently started a new day job – some temp work, which allows me the flexibility to function as a musician – and the result is that I can now both pay the bills and feel as though I want to write again!

Now that I’ve discovered two creative danger zones for me, I can address the issues and fix them.

Hopefully 2010 will be a Year of Writing a Lot of Music. 2009 was a let-down in a lot of ways. Compositionally, I wrote far too little. Financially, I was always anxious and falling behind. Economically in general, things just sucked. And politically, the year was a little disappointing – although some good things were accomplished, those accomplishments went largely unnoticed amid the noise of Balloon Boy; the hyped-up, insane expectations of The First 100 Days; the utter absurdity of The Second 100 Days (as though we hadn’t head enough talking heads talking about other talking heads’ evaluations of etc); etc. But with the success of the first new T-A Concert, and the start of a new day job, I’m feeling energized and positive about this year.

HoSprings.com

Tomorrow morning marks the launch of a new site that I’ve spent the past few months working on: HoSprings.com, a web novel by Pam Satran, who I met while we were in residence together at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2007.

Unlike my previous web projects, I didn’t do the design elements on this site – my role was largely implementation. Katie Mancine, a very talented graphic designer, created all of the images, as well as mockups of the layout, and I turned those elements into a living, breathing website. This is, by far, my most complicated project to date – it’s a series of 6 interlinked blogs along with 12 “Pages” of static content, all running under a WordPress Multi-User installation. I really had to learn on my feet with this one – while my own website blog is powered by WordPress, I’d never had to work with the Multi-User platform, which necessitated a lot of fast research. And I had to learn some pretty crazy and complicated bits of coding in order to make the site seem as simple as possible.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the novel progresses, and watching the subsidiary blogs (a series of music videos, a collection of recipes, and musings of three characters from the novel – all written by other writers) grow.

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