Beff's semester finishes today, and she is due home after dark tonight. Tomorrow night we take Big Mike out for Chinese buffet
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----------------------------------------------- MARCH 21 (Friday evening). Breakfast today was lite breakfast sausages with 2% cheese,orange juice and coffee. Lunch was miso soup, Tom Yum chicken soup, and salmon teriyaki. Dinner was two Boca sausages in hot dog buns with mustard, hot sauce, and jalapenos. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 18.5 and 52.9. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS Carmina Burana with silly fake words (thanks, Danny). LARGE EXPENSES THIS LAST TWO WEEKS Mac Book Pro, precise amount unknown, new cushions for the Adirondack chairs, $99 (15% off at K-Mart). POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: In the last music concert of my elementary school years (that would be eighth grade), Mr. Bernstein (the music teacher), Jim Hoy and I did a trio -- 2 Chicago tunes: Colour My World (yes, the European "u" is in "colour" in the actual title) and 25 or 6 to 4. Jim played drums, Mr. Bernstein the piano, and I played trombone. At this great distance (in time), I can't imagine it sounded like much but hey -- the big hit from the band's part of the concert was "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on my Head", so how could we have been worse? On the other hand -- the melody of "Colour My World" played on trombone .... eww. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: dorknop (ancient Icelandic, nobody knows what it used to mean, but there is a drawing of a bicycle next to the word in an ancient cave. The "k" is pronounced while breathing in). THINGS I HAVE GROWN WEARY OF hearing about Obama's pastor, hearing about McCain's spiritual advisor, below average temperatures. RECENT GASTRONOMIC OBSESSIONS spicy olives, lemon/orange/grapeheads. DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK the crocuses, naturally, though they were less "discovered" than "observed". And they're on their tenth day out. THIS WEEK'S NUMBER BETWEEN 1 AND 10: maznalard (we don't know exactly how much it is, but a number with its own name must be really important). REVISIONS TO THIS SITE: This page, Performances, Bio. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: I removed a tick from Cammy's neck, in three stages (not "cute", but a factoid nonetheless) and Sunny's tail gets all puffy sometimes when he's outside. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: only 3! FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE I once had a poem published in the St. Albans Daily Messenger. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: Every time you turn on a flashlight, Davy gets a nickel. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 11,037. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE THIS WEEK: $3.09 at Cumberland Farms in Maynard, $3.15 at the Shell station at the end of South Street in Waltham. OTHER INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE a crumb that just now fell off a Triscuit, a siren that sounds like it's being played backwards, a bright orange hoodie that magically appeared on one of the left-handed desks in Slosberg 212, the screw that holds together a pair of scissors. Dates are better when they are not foolish. However, becoming one requires the suspension -- nay, the disposition -- nay, the supposition -- of disbelief. Even though the cats would have preferred mice to anything -- anything -- beginning with "f". Rock on. The semester has ramped up to its intensest, yet smoothest, point, and it's all cruise control from here. As late readers of the last update would have discovered, the first crocus made an appearance on March 11, and they have spread slowly but surely around the yardage in back of the garage. In addition, the leaves of the first daffodils have gesprungen (in a manner of pretentious speaking), and last weekend while Beff was ending up her school vacation, on Friday, we put the back lawn into warm weather mode. This included bringing the little chaise lounges from the side porch onto the gazebo (this had to go through the kitchen, and I brought them out while wearing -- gasp! -- slippers), bringing the associated cushions, bringing Beff's work table onto the gazebo, bringing the Adirondack chairs and footrests from the shed into the yard, bringing out the picnic table and chairs from the basement into the yard, putting together and placing the hammock, and transferring the two bicycles from the basement into the shed. I also oiled the bikes and took a bike ride to Erickson's Dairy and back -- and boy are my legs out of shape. It got warm enough briefly last Saturday that Beff used the gazebo for reading and working (though she didn't seem to be able to get the internet on her computer), and I spent some time in the gazebo briefly while the house was being cleaned. Incidentally, we get the house cleaned by professionals every fourth week. They are called The Maids. Meanwhile, Brandisian things continue at their fevered pitch, and the semester now seems to be flying by. Only four weeks of teaching left until the Passover break (and only three days of school after that), and it really feels like it just started. Until I stop and think just how many scores I've handed out this term to my theory students to illustrate various musical concepts. For the record, dear reader, these last two weeks were ALL ABOUT "other" modulatory techniques than common-chord, and a survey of musical forms. To that end, I delved into the slow movement of the Beethoven Op. 10 No. 3 and attacked it from many angles -- how crazy was young Beethoven? Doing common chord modulations from D minor to C major to A minor and cadencing -- and then a DIRECT modulation to F major, where he should have been modulating in the first place. That's nutty! What's more, there was a bunch of F major in the A minor section, always contradicted by D-sharps that turned it into the augmented sixth! That's nutty, too! And the D-sharps resolved a minor ninth higher! And there was no NEC teaching this week, as they are on vacation. This gave me Monday afternoon free to do errands, shop, and feed Zoe the dog at Maynard Door and Window. This especially highlighted that I do only one hour at Brandeis on Mondays (teach 11-12), and everything else is just a light. And that free afternoon turned into a day and a half off -- so on Tuesday I got an oil change at Jeefy Loob, stopped in at Dunn Oil to ask if we were entitled to routine furnace maintenance by contract, and they sent someone at 3, did a bit of food shopping in West Concord, got some stuff at Staples, and did yard work. The yard work consisted of trying to gather up some of the soil deposited into clumps in the yard by the snow plowing service, picking up countless bits of pine branches blown off by various wind storms, and doing yet more MWA ha ha decimation of the apple tree -- it's down to two large branches going straight up now, and I may yet find the energy to MWA ha ha saw them off, too. Beff, meanwhile, was in the second week of her two-week vacation, and she used Wednesday and Thursday -- two VERY FULL Brandeis days for me -- to go to Maine and do some beezy work that otherwise would have taken up the weekend. So Beff took her computer out to the gazebo and got a wi-fi signal but no internet -- meanwhile I got internet just fine with my iPod Touch. I decided to test the wi-fi with MY laptop, and when I got it out there, it was black -- and wouldn't start up. Because, dear reader, the battery had been drained for the last time and had no juice left in it. So it can only be used when plugged in. I tried my spare battery, but all that happened during startup was for the fan to come on really loud -- and the battery was hot, hot, HOT. So I tossed that one. As I was researching where to get another spare battery, Beff asked how old the laptop was -- I remembered that I got it with a Dinosaur Annex commission the summer after my sabbatical, which would have been '03 -- which also coincides with the dawn of Beff's video age, since I got Final Cut Express for 99 bucks as part of Apple's promotional deals that summer. So Beff resolved to get me a new laptop for my birfday (which is in June, by the way). And now (as of right now) my new laptop is in Beff's office -- or the Beffice, as we never refer to it. Apparently I'll be computing up a storm, once I (sigh) update all my software. Good thing I haven't done any installs of my Finale 2008 yet ... alas, it doesn't have the Mass Mover any more, anyway. But I did purchase Microsoft Office 2008 Student and Home edition. And all that. Meanwhile. Jim Ricci suddenly e-mailed that he had occasionally been capturing the text of these updates (he had asked me if I archived them, and I rhetorically asked what's the point of that) since the very beginning, and I've decided to continue the tradition. See the sky blue "News archive" link to the left, which will be updated every time I update this page. If I feel like it. Reading through some of the old posts, I was astonished at how very chipper I tended to seem during the Year of Great Excitement, despite how very depressed I was. And that I posted weekly! I noticed Jim didn't get the one where I simply posted "No more posts here until further notice" or the one from a few days later that began "I. Resigned. As. Chair." But enough of that. We're back in the future now, at least with regard to what is past. Are you with me? There is not much to complain about with Them What Make lately. Flooding in the midwest, and a meteorologist in the newspaper saying it's a result of the jet stream "on steroids". Is illegal doping possible with the weather? What would be an appropriate penalty? I'm searching long and hard for a joke here, and I'm just not getting one .... One thing that takes up very much beezy work and time at this time of year is the annual compiling and writing of my faculty activity report. It used to be that you got a Word document with the headings set up, and you typed the appropriate stuff below the headings, printed it, attached a CV, and gave it to the department administrator, who copied it and gave copies to the Chair and Dean. For the last two years there has been a fancy schmancy online program for doing your faculty report, with some of the answers -- courses taught, for instance, and committees on which you serve -- filled in automatically for you. And the reporting format for "Research" is mondo complicated, since first you click on "add publication", and you get about 20 radio buttons from which to choose what kind of research. The only ones germane to composers are "musical composition" and "sound recording" -- though now that I think of it, there may be a way here to report a performance, too. So once you choose which type of thing, you get an endless bunch of text boxes in which to enter stuff -- and it's very cumbersome. What's more, I tend to have to report the same piece twice -- once to report that I wrote it, and a second time, later, to denote that it has been published. And reporting performances -- it would be far too cumbersome to put them all in, so I cut and paste my list from this website into "Activities outside of Brandeis". Meanwhile, new compositions, etc., I have to explain in a separate space, because even though I have to enter for what instruments and how long pieces are for the research reporting, the activity report generated by this program and sent to the Dean, etc., doesn't insert any of that information. But anyway. It's due at the end of this month, and I am always remembering other things I did that I should report that I hadn't thought about or remembered to put down. So new stuff trickles in daily. One of these days I'll actually submit it like the good boy that I am. In the middle of Beff's vacation, Beff and I went into Brandeis to hear Rachel's musical, which I had advised. It came off well, with a few especially good performances, and with Beff quoting the "I Didn't Do It" number on the way home -- and there was a long "I'd like to thank ..." session by Rachel after it was over. That means I got some tulips for the kitchen. And eventually, a DVD of the whole show. The only other thing we went in for was the grad composers concert last Saturday, which was, again, very entertaining and uplifting, and certainly about nothing but itself. And Ken and Hillary were there! And someone that I met at Northwestern! And, and .... We also, on a lark, spent a few hours around lunch time that Friday in downtown Lexington. What the heck! Mostly so we could have lunch at Not Your Average Joe's, which we did. I had pizza, and Beff didn't. Them What Make had said it would be very windy today. They were certainly right. It howled overnight, and this morning I went into Brandeis for John Aylward's dissertation defense. John is now Dr. Aylward, and well he should be. And by the way, the outside reader was John McDonald, who had good questions, and there were three members of the public who came as well. We ate at the Tree Top Thai restaurant afterwards and ... this is why I started with the weather ... on the way back I saw two large trees that had been blown down and were blocking part of Route 117. Wow. Now that's nutty. We have been having a search for a musicologist with a Renaissance specialty, and I am on the search committee, and two of the candidates have had interviews already, so I've been getting a lot of free food. Another one comes Monday, and more in April. Then there won't be any more coming. Two of the candidates are going to teach my section of Theory 1, which puts me off the hook. Yes! Including this Monday, the day that WRITING MINUETS FOR STRING QUARTET is the topic at hand. It's going to be a weirdish week, to wit. Monday I teach the 10:00 section of theory (part of my payback for Whit Brown teaching my sections when I was in North Carolina and DC), watch the 11:00 section be taught, drive to NEC and teach, get driven to Tufts to do a colloquium, get driven back to NEC to drive myself home. Tuesday is a Tuesday. Wednesday I teach until about 1:30, drive to New York, listen to the 2nd of the Keys to the Future Piano Festival at Greenwich House (Amy D is playing four etudes as well as other stuff), drive back to Maynard. Thursday I teach my 10:00 student at 9, teach the 10:00 and 11:00 theory sections, and teach my 12:30 student but not the 1:30 student, who will be out of town. Friday -- I forget what I'm doing Friday. Maybe it will finally be warm enough for a gazebo nap. Then, next thing you know, it's April. This time it's personal. Incidentally, Danny Felsenfeld posted a link to a send-up of Carmina Burana on Felsenmusick. See the "Carmina" link up and to the left. Today's pictures start with the cats enjoying the fact that as it gets warmer we occasionally open windows for them to do their cat thang; then we see Sunny on a piece of pavement dug up by the snowplow and frozen into the snowbank (this snowbank is now nearly gone, and the piece of pavement stacked next to the garage); one of our little fields of crocuses on Tuesday; Beff working in the gazebo; Beff speaking to her sister after a walk downtown; and a cool shadow made by a recycling receptacle I spied in downtown Lexington. Bye. Jeasas Dear Mummy APRIL FOOL'S DAY. Breakfast today was lite breakfast sausages with 2% cheese,orange juice and coffee. Lunch was crackers with 2% milk cheese slices and kim chee. Dinner last night was chunky chicken soup. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 20.8 and 62.6. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS Dave Stromes's minuet from 2002. LARGE EXPENSES THIS LAST WEEK AND A HALF Logitech Webcam Pro 9000 (or something like that), $78, two Maxtor half-terabyte drives, $258 plus tax, Microsfoft Office 2008 for Mac OS X, $129 for student/home edition. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: In high school in the summers I played trombone in the St. Albans Citizens Band and the Enosburg Town Band, with rehearsals for the summer season beginning in late April or early May. Ed Loomis conducted the Citizens Band, and Sterling Weed the Enosburg Band. After one zippy runthrough of "Alexander's Ragtime Band," Maestro Weed remarked that no one could call this band old-fashioned! At which point I looked on my sheet music and found the copyright date of 1918. I played first or third trombone, depending on what was needed, usually third after I got the trombone with the F attachment. My favorite tune, only in the repertoire of the Citizens Band, was "Red's White and Blue March," which was written by "There were these two seagulls, Gertrude and Heathcliff" Red Skelton himself. Subsequently, and before I started to write my own music, I transcribed some of the incidental music from the Red Skelton Show, which was written by "There were these two seagulls, Gertrude and Heathcliff" Red Skelton himself. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: blaskin (origin obscure, but it's presumed the original Icelandic settlers brought it back to Norway and spit on it). THINGS I HAVE GROWN WEARY OF the school year not being over, them what make being slightly alarmist. RECENT GASTRONOMIC OBSESSIONS kim chee, Bubbies pickles, celery sticks with hot sauce. DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK the iSight, and Skype. THIS WEEK'S NUMBER BETWEEN 1 AND 10: Numberwang. REVISIONS TO THIS SITE: This page, Performances, Home, Lexicon. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: They love going under the side porch now that we've unblocked it, and they spend outdoors time under the gazebo, too. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST WEEK AND A HALF: zero! FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE I was briefly on my high school track team, and competed in the 100 yard dash in exactly one track meet. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: Fossil is respelled fostle. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 11,061 (and a different number on the Mac Book Pro). WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE THIS WEEK: $3.11 at Cumberland Farms in Maynard, $3.45 on the Merritt Parkway, $3.15 at the Shell station near Brandeis. OTHER INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE a bottle of Snapple before the Snapple and the label are put on it, a spent shotgun shell from 1976 recently dug up, a rock shaped like Elvis Presley's nose, a hundred doodads. Merely ten days since the last update, and boy are my arms tired. It's April Fool's Day, and April is coming in like a griffin -- even though we know it's March that has animals -- and actual ones at that -- associated with its comings and goings. Since the last update, there has been much single-day driving, much use of technology and therefore transfer of files and installation of software, and plenty of doing stuff for which they pay me. Dear reader, you know who "they" are. So therefore, I expect you to tell me. NOW. The weather has broken suddenly and decisively on the warm side (mid 60s as I type this), and I'm in and out while typing this update. Why? Because I am taking advantage of the gazebo (which is outside, where it is in the mid 60s as I type this) and lying down and napping and what have you, to indulge my spring fever (Doctor! Doctor! Can't you see I'm burning? Burning?). While at the same time checking e-mail (because wi-fi reaches the gazebo) on my iPod Touch, and marveling at how airy it is outside (airy = windy if you're not a Vermonter or a speeding locomotive). Indeed, this morning I went out without a jacket to get staples (milk, orange juice, hot and sour soup mix, chicken breasts, hamburger, celery sticks, tomatoes, in case you needed to know) and did some yard work (pulling old forsythia and various vines from the way back, moving yet another large fallen pine tree limb -- it's been a bad winter/spring for them) -- AND I did my Theory 1 grading, in the gazebo, which gives me the rest of the afternoon to do as I wish. MWA ha ha. And by the way, it's been a good day out to air the house. But first the usual mundane stuff about teaching. My NEC students have slowed down a bit, which leaves more time for antics and/or discussions about other musical issues. Jeff is preparing for an orchestral reading session, so very particular types of stuff have been bandied about (what's it all about? Bandy!). Travis has an egregious deadline, so the occasional suggestions to make wholesale revisions were not to be made. And Miriam is thinking both in the present and the post-B.M. future. In Theory 1, we are now looking at Haydn minuets, as well as talking about minuetness, and all the homework, save the minuets themselves, for the entire term has now been passed out. I did my usual trick of showing Haydn using the Tristan chord in Op. 54 #2's minuet and trio, and I have yet to show the weirdness in one of the G major ones. MWA ha ha. I've given some analytical handouts that also ask students to identify how Haydn uses humor, and many don't get the idea of humor in music. So I've allowed them to parrot me (Brother, can you parrot dime?) And so it goes. As far as how it goes goes, that's it. The main event of the last ten days was last Wednesday, a day I made into extreme craziness. For you see, after finishing my teaching for the day at 1:04, I drove to New York City. Get outta town, that's nutty! Yes, it is. And even with a few accidents on the southbound lanes of the Hudson Parkway that slowed us down, I parked in Chelsea by 4:45. After which point I walked to the Christopher Street subway stop area -- it was 62 and sunny in New York and nothing remotely like that in Waltham -- and hung out a little while waiting to meet Gene Caprioglio -- THE MAN for us composers at CF Peters -- for dinner. We had dinner at Pennyfeathers, just a half block south of the subway, and I had salmon with my Bloody Maries. Peters paid, and I'm guessing I spent, on my own, a year's worth of print royalties (which I know because I just got my 2008 check). And then, and then, ... it was time for why I drove to New York in the first place (I don't usually drove 400 miles round trip just for bloody Maries and salmon) -- the Keys to the Future piano festival, Greenwich House, Concert 2. Concert 2. Wow. So there was Amy, in a piano practice room upstairs from the concert hall, and we said hi, and I introduced her to Gene. I got a freebie ticket, and a chair had been reserved for me, for DAVID RAKOWSKI COMPOSER. I was afraid to sit anywhere else. Good crowd, and the first pianist played Chet Biscardi's tango and failed to acknowledge Chet, who was right there in the audience. Stephen Gosling and Joe Rubenstein also played some hard stuff, and Amy did a foursome Davytude set along with a set of ragtime-like stuff by John Halle and Derek Bermel and John Musto and William Bolcom, among other -- all of it spectacularly. Amy even did "Plucking A" in my set, and had to do a little patter while an assistant did the thing where they hold down the sostenuto pedal with external hardware (in this case a Sharpie marker, I was told). Of the pieces not written by me, I liked best the Halle and Musto pieces, not least because both of their last names are five letters. Don Hagar, whose last name is also five letters, was there, but there was no time to hang. For you see, I had to get back to teach at Brandeis at 9 the next morning -- so after saying my hi's and bye's to John Halle, Derek Bermel, and Joe Rubenstein, and another send-off to Amy, I got on the subway, got to the parking garage, paid thirty bucks (why, I never) for my 5 hours of parking (why, I still never), and hightailed onto the West Side Highway (getting delayed by an accident at 125th Street and then a stalled car, also at 125th Street), and was in bed, after doing e-mail, by 1:30 am. Given how much sugar (five-flavor lifesavers) and caffeine (one-flavor coffee) I ingested to keep it together, I fell sleepwards remarkably quickly. And STILL woke up in advance of my 6:00 alarm. I DID do a full day of teaching (even filling in for Whit's Theory 1 section because he had filled in for me when I was in DC/North Carolina, etc.), and politely declined all requests for meetings later than my prescribed time of leaving. Because I'm worth it. Meantime. Over the previous weekend I cracked open the new Mac Book Pro -- ooh, dual Intel something something, 250 gig hard drive, new trackpad controls that let you scroll, resize and rotate using two fingers, and blazingly fast. I spent some time importing my iPhoto library through the network (I didn't want to do the direct connect because the fan on the G5 iMac came on REALLY LOUD when I put it into external hard drive mode), and the format in which it arrived was a little screwy -- it doesn't scroll continuously, but by its own "events", and if you care, dear reader, you've come to the wrong place. Download 2.79 Mb. Share with your friends:
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