A Shattered Trinity: A Symphony In D Major
I’ve always wanted to write a full symphony. I like the structures, I like the idea of having to compose for such a large group of instruments, and I like the flexibility I get beyond my more guitar based influences, although I also enjoy writing songs in that mode. So one day I asked ChatGPT to describe for me an example structure for a Baroque style symphony. That outline led to my most recent work.
There were song structures I’d never heard of, tempos I’d never composed in, time signatures I’d never thought to attempt despite my foray into odd meter on nearly every album I’ve published. Any other time I’ve tried to start an idea like this I’ve experienced writer’s block trying to come up with compelling themes, especially considering I didn’t quite understand how to use themes in classical music in the first place. But I recalled a simple bit of melody from Servings Of Sadness that had come to me as I sang it to myself while making lunch, and decided if it was compelling enough to be sung, it would be a compelling enough start. That six note motif became the Motto, the base, for the set of themes I crafted for my symphony, including a theme each for the two protagonists, a Love Theme, a Battle theme, and more.
I found many of the structures limiting at first; fugues in particular with their predefined key changes were difficult. On occasion I would get stuck, and when I couldn’t get myself out, I’d take some advice from ChatGPT on potential solutions. Eventually, the story became evident: two young men, friends in fact, fall for the same young woman in a Renaissance era city filled with festivals and joy. The city itself is a character, an observer, to a tragic tale of love and loss.
Three concertos and an orchestral suite later, A Shattered Trinity is born.
You can learn more about this album here.
Available on Spotify, YouTube, and Amazon Music.
A Prompt Response
Today’s Prompt
What is your middle name? Does it hold any special significance?
My middle name is David.
I’m named after the oldest brothers of my parents, Robert Dearth on my mother’s side, and David Hope on my father’s side. I’m not a particularly sentimental person, so while those names have meaning to my parents, I’ve never reflected on that fact too much.
That said, there was a significant time period where I considered going by my middle name. My name has been a source of consternation for much of my life. There were many times in my childhood where we relocated, changing schools and homes, and any one of those presented an opportunity to make a change. Such things were not as prevalent or encouraged as they might be today, so I stuck it out.
I don’t like the nickname Bob. For those of you who don’t know who Bob Hope is, you might not find this relatable. But the sheer amount of Bob Hope jokes that plagued my youth still haunt me to this day. Jokes about USO tours and Brooke Shields and on and on and on. My wife can relate to a degree; her family name is Scully and Vin Scully provided similar, well, amusement I suppose. And I guess because of the famous name, shaking the nickname Bob was difficult.
I don’t particularly care for Robbie, or at least I didn’t once I hit my teen years. My uncle, one of the most important people in my life, settled for calling me Robe (short for Bathrobe) for some reason; I made the mistake of admitting that during a team event at work and that stuck for a bit. I’ve pretty much chosen Rob as my nickname since high school.
Generally I’m fine with Robert, there are many people I know who call me that.
People ignored my wishes, in fact often they still make the mistake of calling me Bob to this day. I remember a little league coach calling me out to my mother about how I ignored him when he called on me by the name Bob. She reminded him it wasn’t my name and suggested he make a change. Today I let it go, but I still do my best to make sure that my nickname is in use on things like my company’s directory and my LinkedIn profile.
At the end of the day, I don’t think of myself as a David or a Dave…so I’m glad I didn’t take that step.
This post is one of many in my responses to random prompts surfaced by the application that tracks my website statistics, as well as any others I encounter.
An Occasional Coding Exercise Leads To Puzzle Book Sales
There was a time back in my early Amazon career, when I was managing the Independent Publisher Portal, also known as Kindle Direct Publishing, that I wanted to end to end test the publishing process for print on demand. The challenge with doing so was that the publishing workflows were really good at recognizing duplicative content as part of its fraud detection. This made testing repeatedly close to impossible, because each test required a new, unique book.
I decided to pop open Visual Studio, fire up my rusty C# skill, leverage Microsoft Word’s XML based formatting, and write some code to automatically generate books. Because I wanted them to be legitimate, repeatable, and make it to the Amazon marketplace, I couldn’t just randomly generate text files.
So I wrote a program that automatically generated Sudoku puzzles. First, I wrote a randomizer that would generate a random 9×9 sudoku grid filled with a solved and valid result. Then I wrote a sudoku solver to validate that the puzzle in its final form had a solution.
I then decided I wanted to have three different levels of solvable sudokus, with about 30 of each in a book. So, for each level, I removed a certain number of random digits from the puzzle, one by one, until the solver determined that the puzzle was no longer solvable. I then stepped back to the last solvable version and marked that as a “hard” puzzle, added two more digits back for a “medium”, and then two more digits back for an “easy” puzzle.
With that code written, I went online and downloaded a free use sudoku puzzle image, and created a Word document template including the cover file. I saved that file so I could open it later, along with a few fields I could merge in, such as the volume number, as well as the colors for the cover so any books I created could be unique. With that, a few parameters could be passed in to my program, generate 60 puzzles, add them as pages to the Word document, and save out a new, unique puzzle book.
I was able to successfully test my publishing workflow. Ten of these puzzle books were published out to Amazon. They remain available for sale today, and I still occasionally sell one.
With that done, I decided to go back and write a different puzzle output, adding a dictionary integration and code that created word search puzzles. There are ten of those out at Amazon as well. It was a fun little project that took a bit of thinking to get through, and over the course of several years managed to pay for a couple of dinners.
Be welcome and true.
Rob Hope 