Potpourri Blog: Getting better at blogging?

I go through periods of time where I completely forget about this blog. I also go through periods where I remember I started this blog, but I still don't make a post.  Honestly, I'm not sure why I struggle with making new posts regularly.  I have the time.  I have plenty going on, and even more to talk about.  I will resolve to be better at blogging, but I rarely honor my resolutions.  To my loyal readers: Thank you for bearing with me.

Composition: School is back in session and we are finishing up week 4 right now!  I got so much going on at school.  I'm organizing an outdoor concert for UNC Music Day, October 7, but first I got to make sure I have a sound permit. I'm organizing our studio recitals for this year, November, February, and April. I'm writing an opera scene for my masters thesis, and trying to organize a chamber ensemble for that. And I'm organizing my masters recital for next semester. And that's just the stuff I'm doing for school.  I just finished up a piece for solo violin and piano called "Off Topic" and have handed that off to its commissioner, and I have two more commissions that I have yet to start on.  I got time.  Somehow I always manage to honor commitments when it comes to composition. (unlike blogging, lol)

Green Party: Since my last post, Jill Stein visited four cities in Colorado, and I was tabling for my local chapter at two of those events (Fort Collins and Denver).  I was able to get in contact with several Greens in Weld County, and at our last Platte Valley Green Party meeting we added two new voting members, passed chapter bylaws, and voted to endorse Colorado Amendment 69: Colorado Care, which would provide healthcare coverage to all Colorado Residents. My focus with the Green Party right now is building the chapter. I'm trying my best to devote time to the Stein/Baraka and Arn Meniconi campaigns, but I got my own ideas about which I should prioritize. That reminds me, I have some work to do for Arn after I finish this up.

Pokemon: I still do not have the Buddy System update for Pokemon Go, and I'm so jealous of all the people showing off its awesome new features online.  I'm not sure if I will ever get it.  Regardless, I still make time for Pokemon Go everyday, mostly between classes on the campus wifi. I'm currently Level 24, Team Instinct, Pokedex: 109 seen/caught, walked 238.5 km, caught 2,078 Pokemon total, evolved 314 Pokemon total, hatched 81 eggs total, and visited 2,369 PokeStops total, and I'm not currently defending any gyms. Other than Pokemon Go, the hype for Pokemon Sun and Pokemon Moon are real.  Every week I watch the new official revelations as soon as they become available to me.  With all the crazy new features, this is the first generation since Generation 3 (Ruby and Sapphire) where I think I might actually get both games in the paired release. I'm definitely getting Sun first though. Between Pokemon and the 2016 Election, I feel like trying to finish up my masters this year was poor planning on my part. I should have applied to grad schools a whole year earlier. Oh well.

RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars Season 2: #spoileralert #teamAlaska #getcaughtup! Seriously, yesterday's episode gave me more life than any previous episode of RuPaul's Drag Race, All Stars or not. I cannot cannot cannot wait for next weeks episode. The SHADE, THE SHADE OF IT ALL!!!

Single Gay/Cis Man Life: I'm still not seeing anyone. I'm still good with that.  I still don't see myself trying another relationship anytime soon.  I'm in an open relationship with myself.  This does not make me sad.  I know most people who are reading this won't believe me, but I really feel like my life is better lived this way --- at least for now, while I'm finishing up my masters degree.

Thanks so much for reading my blog. Don't forget to subscribe.  And maybe tell me that you actually read this post, or any of my blog posts, because you don't. But whatever (whateva), you do what you want.

Update Blog: My crazy busy summer!

Hello readers!

It's been a jam-packed summer, and per usual I fell off this blog for a little while there. This summer I had two world premieres: Aurora, Colorado Vatiations performed by Aurora Symphony Orchestra in Aurora, CO, and Clarinophony performed by Clarinet Madness in Rapid City, SD.  A recording of the July 24 performance in Rapid City is available on my SoundCloud. check it out!

I also did a lot of travelling.  I went to Chicago to visit my friends Amanda and Stephen and their newborn baby Shepard. While in Illinois I got to visit many of my old college friends in Chicago and Peoria. I went down to San Antonio for my ten-year high school reunion. I went to Denver Pridefest and visited Denver and Aurora many times this summer. I went camping in Red Feather. I toured the Black Hills of South Dakota and visited Devil's Tower in Wyoming. I attended the Green Party National Convention in Houston as a Colorado delegate, and canvassed Cheyenne and Laramie to gather signatures to put Dr. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka on the ballot in Wyoming.

I had a great summer, and though I say this every year, it was the Best Summer Ever!!!

Classes start tomorrow for my second and final year as a masters student at U of Northern CO. Wish me luck!

Take care!

Composer Blog #1: Aurora, Colorado Variations

Aurora, Colorado Variations made its world debut last Sunday at the final Aurora Symphony Orchestra concert of the 2015-2016 season. I got a chance to speak with many of those in the audience during intermission and after the concert, and I received very positive comments.  It was a thrilling experience to be able to present this work to the community. 2016 marks the 125th anniversary of the City of Aurora, and, as the title suggests, this piece was programmed to commemorate this occasion.

Aurora, Colorado Variations is about nine to ten minutes long and is scored for double woodwinds, two horns, two trumpets, percussion and strings. The title itself was not intended to commemorate the 125th anniversary, that was just a happy accident.  In fact the music itself does not really depict or represent the community in any way. The title simply explains that this piece is a set of variations composed in Aurora, Colorado for the Aurora Symphony Orchestra. It is also a reference to the Los Angeles Variations by Essa Pekka Solonen, in an attempt to somehow elevate the status of Aurora, CO to that of Los Angeles, CA.

Unlike a traditional set of themes and variations, each variation is significantly longer than the theme and the previous variations. As such within each variations are several variations.  The theme has four sections: a slow chorale, a moderate-tempo sarabande, the return of the slow chorale, and a moderate-tempo contredanse.  Each variations expands these different sections with repetition, variation, modulation, and the introduction of new elements. What results is a rhapsodic form that is loosely tied to the theme and variations.

It was a great honor to have my piece performed by the Aurora Symphony Orchestra and to recieve such positive feedback.  I want to especially thank conductor Norman Gamboa, the members of the Aurora Symphony Orchestra, and the board, for giving me this wonderful opportunity, and for putting so much work into realizing my vision.  Thank you!

Green Party Blog #1

Disclaimer: This blog is Joseph Scardetta's personal blog. This blog does not necessarily represent the positions, views and/or opinions of the Green Party of Colorado, the Green Party of the United States, or any of its members, chapters or affiliate groups. This post is not official Green Party literature, news, or media of any kind. This post is a personal expression of my personal understanding, experience, memory, thought, post of view, belief system, etc, which is wholly unique and unlike anyone else's Green or otherwise. I am a voter-registered Green and active within the Green Party of Colorado and I am relaying a personal message about my recent experience within the Green Party.- Joseph Scardetta 4/11/16.

For those not familiar, the Green Party of Colorado (GPCO) is the state arm of the Green Party of the United States (GPUS). The Green Party is an independent political party built upon 10 Key Values: 1. Grassroots Democracy, 2. Social Justice and Equal Opportunity, 3. Ecological Wisdom, 4. Non-violence, 5. Decentralization, 6. Community-based Economics, 7. Feminism and Gender Equality, 8. Respect for Diversity, 9. Personal and Global Responsibility, and 10. Future Focus and Sustainability. In reality, the Green Party is a global party with a political presence in many different countries around the world, and is truly the only global political party in the United State. The ultimate goal of the Green Party is to achieve world peace and create a sustainable global society seamlessly integrated into the Biosphere by means in line with the 10 Key Values.

On April 3, 2016, the Green Party of Colorado held its nominating convention for state and federal offices in the 2016 election. These offices include: President, U.S. Senate, U.S. House Congressional District 2, U.S. House Congressional District 6, and Colorado State House District 34. While we had five candidates to choose from for the Presidential nominee, all other races had just one candidate running who won by consensus. Here are the results of those races:

US Senate: Arn Menconi
arnmenconi.com
This U.S. Senate seat is held by incumbent Democrat, Sen. Michael Bennet since 2009.

US Congressional District 2: Cliff Willmeng
http://www.facebook.com/Willmeng-For-Colorado-Green-For-US-Congressional-District-2-1126285650725158/
This U.S. House seat is held by incumbent Democrat, Rep. Jared Polis since 2009.
CO-2 covers Boulder, Ft. Collins, Vail, and Rocky Mountain National Park. It's situated in the north-central part of Colorado, just northwest of Denver. It covers the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains from our northern state boarder with Wyoming to just south of Breckenridge.

US Congessional District 6: Robert Lee Worthey
http://wortheyforcongress.weebly.com/
This U.S. House seat is held by incumbent Republican, Rep. Kike Coffman since 2009.
CO-6 covers much of Aurora, Brighton, and Centennial, part of Littleton, a small rural area just east of Denver International Airport. On a map it looks like a jaw about to take a huge bite out of Denver and the northern suburbs. I used to live in this district before I moved to Greeley.

Colorado House District 34: Jenice JJ Dove
I have neither a website for this candidate, nor incumbent information for this district.
If you've cracked the code to Denver-area street names, this district pretty much stays between Federal and Sheridan. It stretches from 52nd (north) down to Exposition (south). There are some areas east of Federal covered by this district. It's basically the western edge of Denver.


As for President of the United States of America, there are five national-party candidates: Darryl Cherney, Sedinam Kinamo Christin Moyowasifza-Curry, William P. Kreml, Kent Mesplay, and Jill Stein. Colorado gets to send five delegates to the GPUS national convention in Houston this August to cast votes for President. Per GPCO bylaws candidates are awarded delegates based on the percentage of the vote they receive, and voters may only vote for one candidate. This time, Jill Stein won all five delegates, and I am one of them!!!

President: Jill Stein (5 delegates)
jill2016,com

Yes, if everything works out financially, I will be headed to Houston to be a delegate at the GPUS national convention, and I am super excited to see how it all happens.  I became involved with the Green Party during the 2012 Presidential Election, when I marched with other Jill Stein supporters on the Presidential Debate between Obama and Romney when it was held at the University of Denver to demand open debates. Since then I've been regularly attending annual GPCO meetings, and briefly served as co-chair of the Green Party of Arapahoe County. I love being involved with the Green Party, and I always enjoy myself at these big state functions.

I'm a Green because I believe in voting my values, and the 10 Key Values are pretty much in line with my own values. I also enjoy voting for my friends, and it's pretty cool to be able to get to know these candidates that share these values. As for the politics behind all this, I'll save that for another time.

Coming Soon to My Blog...

Here are something that will be taking place in the very near future which I plan to post about on this blog.

Green Party: This Sunday, the Green Party of Colorado will be meeting to vote on nominations for the upcoming 2016 election, including President and U.S. Senate. I'm a registered Green and fairly active within the state party. We have one candidate, Arn Menconi, running for the open U.S. Senate seat in Colorado, and five candidates running nationally for President. Of the five candidates, I will be supporting Jill Stein this weekend. Jill Stein was the Green Party presidential nominee back in 2012 when I first became affiliated with the Green Party. She is proposing a Green New Deal for America which offers real solutions to the problems facing our country with Climate Change at the center. By working together as a nation to solve the problem of Climate Change we can improve our health, create jobs, combat racism and sexism in a meaningful way, and maybe even save the planet. I'm super excited for this meeting and I plan to post about it next week.

UNC Composers Recital: On Thursday, April 7, the UNC composers will put on a recital featuring compositions all by UNC student composers.  The concert will feature freshman pianist, Katie Hughes, who will be playing on nearly half the numbers on the concert. We had a lot of submissions for this recital, and the program will be about two hours in length including a short intermission. The recital will begin at 8:00pm in Frasier Hall room 90 on campus. This concert is free and open to the public. I plan on posting a review of the recital next weekend.

The Graphic Scores Project: On Wednesdays, April 6 and 13, I will be leading a small group of UNC composers in teaching students from Prairie Heights Middle School in Evans, CO how to make and interpret graphic scores. This is an exciting pilot project which, if successful, I hope to spread to more schools next year, and kick start a program that can be continued by future UNC composers well into the future. The project will finish with a concert on Friday, April 15 at 5:00pm, where PMHS students with UNC students will perform the graphic scores created by PHMS students. The concert is free and open to the community. I plan on posting about my experience two weeks from now.

That's all for now.  Check back for these future posts.

Pokemon Blog #1: Pokemon X Story Review

For those not in the know, Pokemon X is a handheld RPG video game belonging to a long series of games related to the core video-game canon associated with the Pokemon brand.  Pokemon X along with its sister Pokemon Y are apart of the Sixth Generation of Pokemon games.

With the recent announcements of the Seventh Generation games, Pokemon Sun and Pokemon Moon, I decided it was finally time for me to play one of the Sixth Generation games. My good friend Daniel even let me borrow his Nintendo 3-DS so I wouldn't have to buy a whole new system, which was pretty much my reason for not playing it sooner.  So just before Spring Break I went to Target and bought a copy of Pokemon X on sale $8 off, no doubt in response to the announcement of Gen-7.

So I spent a lot of Spring Break playing Pokemon X, and this past weekend I completed the story by defeating the Elite Four, the Champion, and (spoiler alert) a 3,000-year-old giant named AZ. So, without any better ideas of what to post in my blog, I'm going to tell you what I think about it.

But first a little bit about who I am as a Pokemon trainer.  The story mode dominates my experience when playing Pokemon. I do not play Pokemon competitively. I like to watch videos of really amazing competition battles, but it's not my thing. I really like to develop relationships with my pokemon through the story. I know it sounds lame or weird, but that is the biggest joy I get from Pokemon. It's why it's the only video game I spend money on. I play through stories multiple times, and when that gets boring I do Nuzlockes. Nuzlocke is a way of making the difficulty of the games much more by following self-imposed rules, and it creates much deeper bonds between the player and their Pokemon.

That being said, at 27 years old I have been playing Pokemon since Pokemon Red Version.  I got Pokemon Red Version for Christmas when I was 11, and I loved it right from the beginning.  I was a huge fan of the anime, and to be able to have my own Pokemon experience when I choose how I battle and with whom was absolutely thrilling.  I still remember the smell of the Pumpkin Spice Yankee Candle my mother had lit that Christmas morning.

Before Pokemon X, I had played through the stories of all the previous generations. (Gen-1: Red and Yellow; Gen-2: Silver; Gen-3: Ruby, Sapphire, Fire Red, and Emerald; Gen-4: Pearl and Platinum; Gen-5: Black (1) and White 2.) The Second Generation was by far my favorite, and the Third was my least favorite, for reasons well-known to us Gen-Oners out there.  Since then, I have liked each new generation more and more.  So, what do I think of Pokemon X?

I love it!  The graphics and overall design are absolutely breathtaking. I love the whole concept of the value of beauty in the world and how it was expressed throughout the game.  I love the new region, Kalos: it's huge, it features a variety of environments, and (being based on France) its full of public art and a whole lot of scenery that is just fun to look at.  I've visited Paris and Versailles and the character of both those places was captured so perfectly while still remaining in the aesthetic boundaries of previous settlements and cities in the Pokemon World, especially Versailles (Parfum Palace and Route 6). The new fairy typing helped to mix things up and keep battling feeling fresh, while asserting itself as a logical expansion of the elemental types. The actual story itself is pretty good too as far a Pokemon stories go and the ending is by far the most beautiful ending to any Pokemon story. I nearly cried. It was perfect.

I did have a major criticism halfway through the game, but I turned it into an opportunity.  In Pokemon X and Y, game designers did two things that really sped up the leveling-up process for Pokemon in the game, so much so that I was way ahead in level than my challengers in the story about halfway through the story (the fifth gym badge). They re-engineered the Exp. Share item to give all Pokemon in your party Exp. points in battle. Now a lot of people online fault this as the main reason why this happens, but I will remind you that this is how it was back in the First Generation. Before Exp. Share, there was EXP. ALL, and it functioned the exact same way. But, back then you didn't get it until after your second or third badge and you needed to have caught, i think, 20 Pokemon. You get it pretty early on in Pokemon X and Y. They biggest change in these games that I think was the main cause of my problem was that Pokemon now received Exp. points in battle if you catch the wild Pokemon you are battling. Combine that with the largest Regional Pokedex to date (450 pokemon available in Kalos), and such a huge region with so many challengers, and you end up 10 levels ahead of the Lumiose City Gym Leader. The Exp. Share, just meant I didn't have to keep swapping Pokemon.

So what's a Pokemon story fan like me supposed to do in that situation? Well, I took a radical step that I had never taken before on a Pokemon journey, and it paid off.  By the fifth gym, my team had pretty much solidified at that point, which in and of itself is weird for me.  I had no Legendaries yet, and I deposited my mega-evolving gift Lucario in the PC. So, not being OK with this, I decided to deposit all six of my best Pokemon that had pretty much been my team since the second gym, and train up a whole new team, which I affectionately called my B Team.  That paid off so well on the enjoyment factor.  By the time I reached the Elite Four I had 12 awesome Pokemon to choose from, all just under the average level of the Elite Four, so it made my final challenge so much more fun and significant than in previous games where I train up full one team.

All in all, Pokemon X definitely measures up to and even exceeds the standards set by the main-series games of the five previous generations. This summer I plan to play through Pokemon Omega Ruby or Pokemon Alpha Sapphire, the other two games in this generation that are remakes of the Gen-3 games Pokemon Ruby and Pokemon Sapphire. If they are as good as I am reading, the Sixth Generation of Pokemon may surpass even my love of the Second Generation.

Starting Out

Hello all!

My name is Joseph Scardetta. I am a composer living in Greeley, CO. This will be my personal blog. I will use this blog to write about things going on in my life, to explore topics of interest, and to promote important events.  I will make posts related to my career in music composition, my affiliation with the Green Party of Colorado, and my various personal hobbies and interests. I'm not sure what this blog will become or how often I will make posts, but we'll see.

Right now, I am a graduate student at the University of Northern Colorado (UNC) pursuing my Master of Music degree in Music Theory and Composition. I also work as one of two graduate assistants for the Music Composition section of the UNC School of Music. I sing in the UNC Mixed Chorus. Outside of UNC, I play double bass in the Aurora Symphony Orchestra (Aurora, CO) and the Powder River Symphony (Gillette, WY).

I'm also involved in the Green Party of Colorado. I am a former co-chair of the Arapahoe County Green Party, and I am trying to start a chapter in Weld County. I am trying to be a delegate to the National Convention this August in Houston, TX. We'll see how that goes.

As far as my hobbies, I like to doodle and crochet. I have a few TV shows I obsess about, currently: Fuller House, House of Cards, RuPaul's Drag Race, Daredevil, and Game of Thrones.

Other important things about me: I was born and raised in San Antonio, TX, and I'm a gay man.

This is my first post.