Beff's semester finishes today, and she is due home after dark tonight. Tomorrow night we take Big Mike out for Chinese buffet

It is now three weeks since the last update, and there are a few things to report. Short version: all of Beth's siblings plus nephew here for Christmas, eating, flying, two weeks in the United Kingdom, flying, catch up. So let's break those down in order, shall we?

Around the last time I posted, I finished my 75th piano etude -- on "melodic thirds" -- and called it "Twilight", after the "Zwielicht" movement of the Opus 39 Liederkreis that I quoted in the piece's coda. The etude has some boring bits that are rescued by the parts that aren't boring. And some triads, but that is neither here nor there. I finished just in time to enter it into Finale before relatives started arriving for Christmas. And arrive they did.

On the Saturday before Christmas, Beff's sister Ann and her son Jack arrived, and we did what we could to make things interesting. It became a running gag for me to ask Jack -- age 11 -- if he was monumentally bored yet. Apparently not, since he probably knew he was going to be opening an XBox 360 on Christmas day. We went to the Quarterdeck that night, and Jack was not yet bored. Next day there was plenty of cooking and it being warmish outside, and watching of TV, and finally there were the Christmas eve gifts to open. I don't remember what mine was.

On Christmas Day itself there was much opening of presents and the staggered arrivals of Beff's other siblings Matt, Bob, and Jim. I made my usual celery and cream cheese snackies, and as usual Ann had brought enough food for about 20 people, and the late afternoon dinner, cooked by Ann, was a roast beef sort of thing, au jus (or as the relatives were saying, "with au jus"). My only part in the big cookoff was to steam a bunch of very long and fat asparagus, and there ended up being too much, so I had to sautee it. Normally at this sort of affair Bob's second whole plate of food would be mashed potatoes, but he was deprived. So I think he may have had an actual bite of asparagus. After the usual toasts and stuff, the siblings were off, and more TV was watched -- indeed, the entire first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I think Jack got hooked. This marks him as one of the family, i.e., a serious geekzoid.

On the day after Christmas we were scheduled to be picked up at 5 to be driven to the airport, so the morning consisted of packing (I brought way more clothes than I used), disassembling the Christmas tree and chucking it, walking downtown and back, and picking up Seunghee at the train station, as she was to be the catsitter for two weeks. She got here early enough, and it was warm enough (57) that we three took a nice walk around the old rail trail, etc. And then we left.

The jet stream that guides weather systems has been going nuts this winter -- bringing giant snows to Colorado and record warmth to this area (see temperature extremes, above) -- and a storm that had just deposited a bunch of rain on Christmas day was now in eastern Canada. We apparently flew right over the most turbulent part of it, since our flight was a real doozy. In fact, the anticipated tail wind was so great that our 6-1/2 hour flight was scheduled to be 5-1/2 hours, which the captain called "very short". In typical British fashion, he also warned that with the tailwind it would be "a bit bumpy". He was right -- the first hour and a half ranged the full gamut from scary to downright terrifying. Compound that with our being in the very back of the plane (a 747) and the plane apparently being from an era when humans were a foot shorter (which would explain the near absence of leg room), and I pretty much decided to cross British Air off of my list of possible future air carriers. I passed the time alternating between being absolutely terrified and watching our route on the virtual map on the screen in front of us. At one point it said the tail wind was 300 mph. Wow.

So naturally we were woolly and harried when we got off the plane, and our time in England began with a 55-minute wait in line just for passport control (Beff said that it was worse in Costa Rica, but somehow that didn't solve the problem at hand). So when we finally got to a customs agent, we got asked "relationship?" "Married." "How long?" "Eighteen years" -- then Beff figured out "how long" referred to how long we were staying. We revised the answer to two weeks. And after all that wait, there was STILL another half hour wait till our luggage appeared. Boy, I'matellayou, these European airports.

And so naturally we were frazzled and very tense when we finally met Martler -- who had waited an hour and a half hisself. The drive to Brighton was uncomplex, and we finally saw for the first time his and Cora's place in Hove -- a lovely and funky two-story townhouse that has its own cat. I quickly acclimated myself to Martler's schedule: morning coffee, lovely lunch, 6:30 trip to pub for two pints, dinner, and to bed. It's the pub that I remember best, of course, since it was pretty much unvarying no matter where we were. And Cora did a lot of impromptu and improvised cooking of meals that turned out quite excellently, thank you.

And so for the first week it was a drive to nearby Lewes for lunch and antiquing (Beff got two ceramic pieces), a walk on the Brighton pier, Thai food in Brighton, a tour of the Brighton Pavilion (an early nineteenth century gaudy palace), a train ride to London to view the play Frost-Nixon (Cora got us first-row rush seats), a 6-hour drive to Wales -- with the Brighton cat (named Violet but called Bitey or Bidge) on Cora's lap -- where we stayed in the place Cora co-owns for several days, and lots of windiness on the shore. The place (Chesterton) is gorgeous and very comfy, and RIGHT ON the water, and we spent some time doing e-mail (they have wi-fi) and watching a British series "The Lakes". On New Years Eve we went to the closest pub and people were there in costume (a Welsh new years thing?) and instead of returning to the pub for the stroke of midnight, we took some champagne out to the back veranda (winds varying between 35 and 50 mph) and had our own blowout. So to speak.

So the day after New Years we visited Aberystwyth -- just south -- and visited the breathtakingly unimpressive Welsh National Library. Then of course there was the pub at 6:30 -- as well as for lunch.

Next day Beff and I boarded a bunch of trains (some operated by Arriva, some by Virgin) to Glasgow, where we sat close to a guy who droned on and on and on and on about boring details of places he'd been that no one has ever heard of. It made it easier to fall asleep. We got to Glasgow, found our hotel, and immediately set out to find a nearby restaurant ("The Buttery") highly recommended by Beff's SCOTLAND GUIDE BOOK. Turns out it was closed. Had been for months, maybe years (we now think only for about six months). So nearer the hotel we gambled on a Thai restaurant that turned out to have good food but very bad music (a pentatonic MIDI jerkoff-fest whose only satisfaction was an occasional actual leading tone or chord based on virtual scale degree 4).

Then we spent two days walking all over the city, mostly in search of Charles Rennie Mackintosh stuff, which we like very much. We did the Willow Tea Rooms (or their current incarnation), the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow Cathedral, the shopping streets, the museum of modern art, the Hunterian Gallery with the reconstructed Mackintosh housw with original Mackintosh furniture and a bunch of Whistler paintings, the Kelvingrove Museum, the Two Fat Ladies restaurant (I got me a apron with their logo), beer at the Babbity Bowster, a meal at the Ubiquitous Chip, and a final meal at a pub near the train station. Good beer, those Scottish. And Beff got a liter of Ancnon Scotch to bring back, mostly because we had never heard of it.

On our last morning in Glasgow, we walked around some places we hadn't been -- the sun seems not to have risen before 8:45, by the way, and was alwas very low in the sky, all day -- and encountered a self-standing building labeled RAVEL CENTER. Beff was excited, as we had never heard that Ravel had dealings in Scotland. Beff took a picture with her camera, and when we got closer to the building to see what was inside, we noted lots of maps, plane and rail schedules, and package prices. Then we were close enough to notice the skeleton of the letter "T" before RAVEL CENTER. We had a big tee hee about that, pardner.

The trip back to London by train was fine -- it's always good to get on at the beginning of the trip since you get priority space for your baggage, and that was in tremendously short supply on the Virgin train we rode. Upon arrival in London, we cabbed it to Cora's place next to the British museum, and went with their friends Domini and Adrian to the Mayflower restaurant in Chinatown and had an amazing meal -- including an EXTREMELY peppery hot and sour soup that was as tasty as it was painful. But hey -- painful is my game. Next day it was back to Brighton and back to teaching for Martler, a lunch with Cora, and some walking through "The Lanes" -- a Berkeley-type area of Brighton. For our farewell dinner, Martin couldn't take us to his place of choice (duh, it was closed), so we had the second choice -- a small French restaurant. We got some wine and my choices were an asparagus and something pastry followed by some nice pasta.

The squeamish are invited to skip this paragraph. So while eating the pastry thing, I started to feel a scratching in the back of my throat, as if there was a fish bone stuck there or something, and it just felt very scratchy and awkward. I was unable to swallow the damn thing, and I tried to cough it up, but nothing was doing. I didn't want to make a scene -- have I mentioned that we were in a French restaurant? -- so I hopped downstairs, quickly, to the mens room, and tried to cough it out violently. Nothing doing. Couldn't swallow it either. So, sigh. I felt the next step was to do the bulimia thing and stick my finger way back in my throat to see if I could upchuck violently enough to dislodge the thing, and that didn't work either. At this point, I started to feel where the thing was, so the next step was to try to scrape it out of where it was, and luckily I had just enough fingernail to do that -- of course, it was deep enough so that each time I tried that I got the gag reflex big-time. But after five or six tries, finally I felt whatever it was move to the side of my cheek very deep. A few more scraps and gag reflexes later, Martler showed up to see what was up, and I finally got it out and onto the counter. It was a short piece of very thin but rigid wire, an inch and a half to two inches long. After gargling a little water and swallowing some, we both went back to our table, I brought the piece of wire, and I finished my starter. My throat felt rather scratchy (duh), but I finished the entree as well. Martler paid, then brought the wire up to the waitstaff and explained what had happened to me -- explaining that he was avoiding a big scene, and the chef ought to know what's in the stuff he is serving. The response was -- nothing. Later when we were leaving, we were given assistance with our coats, and one of the waiters said to me, "sorry about your starter, sir". Wow. Oh, those French.

So that was my last night in England. For those of you whose future travel plans include Brighton, I will merely say that the name of the restaurant previously referenced is La Fourchette, on Western Street.

So the next morning we went with Martler to his job at the U of Sussex, and occupied ourselves until he drove us to Heathrow, where we arrived four hours before our flight. We had anticipated long queues (we were starting to talk like Britons), but from the time we entered the terminal to the time our e-tickets printed, our baggage was checked and we went through security, it was only twelve minutes later. So we had a lot of time to walk around, play with our phone card, have a little lunch, and be frustrated at Duty Free in our quest for Amaro (Beff noted that one of the more plebian wines that you can get here was offered as a luxury item there for oh so much more than it would have cost here). Then there was the flight itself, which was delayed by an hour because, again -- high winds over the Atlantic were causing a bottleneck in the available routes, and I steeled myself for another bumpy flight, but even longer. It turned out the flight WAS very long, but was also extremely smooth. Wow. Customs and baggage claim were very quick, and we were home by 9:30 at night. With an AVALANCHE of stuff upon which to catch. And we were VERY glad to see our cats. And they were glad to see us.

Now our dollars weren't worth very much in England. The cost of a Pound Sterling varied between $1.92 and $1.95 while we were there, and we used the least expensive option to get cash -- debit card at cash machines. With the one percent plus five dollars per transaction that our bank charged, it ended up being almost exactly two to one -- two bucks bought a pound. Problem was, a pound bought about $1.40 worth of stuff, so everything turned out being, by our standards, vastly overpriced. A simple lunch at Two Fat Ladies (including the purchase of an apron for 12 pounds) ended up costing us a hundred bucks, in fact -- but by then we were so desensitized to the exchange rate that it felt like we were paying dollars and not pounds. And the cause of the crappy exchange rate? Bush's trade deficit, and Bush's government's spending deficit. Caused in no small part by Bush's war. So all in all, W cost us an extra 700 or 800 bucks. More than the seemingly large tax rebates we got in '01, dontcha know. But I digress.

Upon our return, I quickly wrote some rec letters that I had been asked for when I was gone (these things can never wait unless you happen to be Peter Westergaard, and then it's okay to wait three years), and then of course the next day we were jet lagged on the wake-up-early side. I was upandattem at 5:30 am, and Beff was up at 5:45. We started doing work to get stuff out of the way -- including six loads of laundry, and breakfast -- and actually had to wait around for the post office to open at 8 am so we could pick up our two weeks of mail. Followed by a shop at Shaws, and the purchase of a new light bulb at Ace Hardware and a new smoke detector -- since one of the old ones refused to stop doing the "battery low" beep every ten seconds. There was a buttload of mail and a buttload of groceries with which to deal, and then while Beff was vacuuming, the vacuum cleaner broke. So we went to K-Mart, got a new one, and got some new pillows and kitty treats as well. There we met Seunghee, who had done a great job housesitting, and she took her last bit of food with her, and I gave her some good paper for the string ensemble piece she had nearly finished.

Meanwhile -- amongst the pile of mail was news that my piano concerto was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation for lots and lots of money, so I had to get them the paperwork to start getting paid for it, and that meant registered mail at the post office. While on that trip, I mailed a bunch of bills, Beff did the bank, and we stopped at Door and Window to see what we had to do next for the upcoming bathroom conversion. We were told the strategy for the tile we want, and were given a tile place to look --- down by Home Depot in Natick. Where we dutifully drove, and hated, hated, HATED the place ("please register with receptionist for design consultation"). We went from there to the brand new Lowe's to see what they had for tile and storage cabinets for the new bathroom, and at least settled on a storage cabinet model. Then it was BJ's for cat litter, Loratedene, hamburger dills, what have you. Amusingly, or not amusingly -- we were in the 8 items or less line behind someone with about 20 -- who separated them into bits of 8 items, 10 items and 3 items, and paid three times with the same debit card. Now there's someone who knows how to work the system.

And finally -- I had promised Frank Oteri I would write a little rememberance of Dan Pinkham for New Music Box, and I did that this morning before Peter M. was coming out for a little lesson on his quartet; it's already been posted. We had our lesson, I did my Mus 103 syllabus, uploaded some files to the online course space, and here I am. Tonight's meal is a Szechuan stir fry. And that's the truth. Upcoming? 2-hour dentist appointment Tuesday (sigh), Winged Contraption performance and recording NEXT weekend, and oh yes, the start of school.

And -- sorry to bring this up again -- my jaw hurts today. There were some days in the UK when I had no pain whatsoever, and I thought that bedding and pillows were at least part of what were responsible. The new pillow is, so far, not working. And we had already trashed five old ones. So tonight, an old one to see if it's better tomorrow. Sigh.

Pictures this week are all from the UK trip, as follows. Martler and Cora's townhouse in Brighton, and the Brighton skyline at night take from the pier. Me 'n' Beff on the beach in Borth, all the others in the kitchen in Borth, Violet/Bitey/Bidge in Borth, Beff lookin' out the kitchen window in Borth, a Borth sunset, the other three at midnight New Year's Eve (note wind), Beff in Glasgow with restaurant, a bangers and mash meal I had at the Ubiquitous Chip, Glasgow Cathedral, Kelvingrove Museum, and Martler and me posing

with the headless statue in the London place.

Remembering Dan Pinkham By David Rakowski Published: January 11, 2007

[Ed. Note: Just as the holidays were getting underway, composer Daniel Pinkham (1923-2006) passed away on December 18. We asked his one-time (not composition) student David Rakowski, who was en route to Europe at the time, to offer a few words in his memory. – FJO] Daniel Pinkham's death last month at the age of 83 was very sudden and shocking to me. I did not know him well—in fact, every time I saw him I was a little surprised that he remembered who I was—but Dan was frequently brought up in conversations with any number of Boston musicians, and usually as the source of a new, amazing joke or story. More often than not, conversations would begin, "Wanna hear the latest Danny Pinkham joke"? (Example: "What comes between fear and sex?...Funf!") When I was applying to colleges to study composition, my high school band teacher, Verne Colburn, a New England Conservatory alumnus, said that NEC would be the best place for me, especially since Daniel Pinkham was on the faculty there. The name Pinkham was familiar from a number of choral pieces that were in the school library (with his name in those big capitals you get on CF Peters scores), and indeed those were very good pieces. At the time, I remember reading a publication that called Pinkham "America's most performed composer." I did get into NEC, and I did go, but it was not possible to study composition with Dan Pinkham there—he taught music history and early music, but not composition. I therefore encountered him first as my teacher for a history of medieval and renaissance music class that I took in 1977. I remember that he had an authoratative manner with the material, that his lectures were extremely enthusiastic, and especially that when he got to the point of a substantial story, he would sit up straighter, cock his head a little, and smile broadly. Three things stand out from that class I had with him. First, the absolute delight he had in pronouncing the Squarcialupi Codex. So much so that he repeated it several times and had the class repeat it. Second, a sleuthing story that brilliantly demonstrated the importance of historical musicology: It was about a four-part motet that someone had discovered actually had five parts. The fifth part was nowhere to be found. Then research uncovered for what church and event it had been written, and digging through that church's archives revealed a part book containing the missing part to that (plus presumably another) motet. The third hooked in to Dan's parallel career as a performer. To demonstrate the difficulty of coming up with a suitable tuning system, the syntonic comma, and the "wolf" fifth, he spent the greater part of one class simply tuning the harpsichord. I remember the strange seriousness of his expression as he listened to each note, how he made the class confirm that each successive note was in tune, and the triumphant grin he had when he played a circle of fifths progression and landed on the "wolf" fifth—especially when a cellist in the class grimaced. I was also pleased that Dan had a practice of excusing a few of the best students in the class from the final exam. Because I was one of those students that year, and I was able to use the time to write some bad music. Since that class, I would frequently encounter Dan in the hallway—he always seemed to be rushing to something, head cocked with a jaunty walk and jingling keys. But he would always pause to say hello to me and offer another joke. Once I screwed in enough courage to ask him why he didn't teach composition, and he smiled very broadly and said, "I had a choice between getting performances and teaching composition, and I chose the performances." During one trip back to my hometown after this, I attended a high school district music festival on which was performed a big choral piece by Dan (I don't remember the name). It was eclectic and very changeable, climaxing on a very thick cluster chord. I had not thought it was possible to write such hard stuff for high school choirs, and I asked a friend how he got his note. He shrugged, "They told us to choose a note, and that was my note." I couldn't resist telling him I had taken a course with the composer. He said, "Wow, he must be really cool, huh?" In the last twenty years or so I encountered Dan sporadically, usually when I visited NEC. He always had a new story, he always remembered me, and he even remembered what we talked about the last time we saw each other. I continue to remember him as a spry and lanky professor in his early 50s with that big smile and quick wit. Perhaps that is why his death caught me unawares. His passing is a great loss. ***