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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When searching for meaning, don't confuse reality with reality. For you see, on top of mud house references, an argument could be built, through and through, for the conservation of (and irridescence of) things with holes. But I may be speaking from the roof of my mouth, and if that is true, there won't be straw in your soup tonight, and we know what that means -- yes, yes, yes, it's the place for someone's head to have been somewhat less than if it had been somewhat more. But I digress. Geoffy was here for one night earlier in this reporting period, and he marveled at the "new feature" of these updates in which the first paragraph is nonsense. Alas, I had nixed that feature last time, so I guess that makes the above paragraph a return to "classic" days. Now there's something you don't see every day. One new feature in the household is that the internet no longer goes down when the phone rings (something that wasn't supposed to happen with DSL ("talk on the phone while you surf!", said the brochures) but did with cordless phones). More on this later. Excellent, so my nefarious plan is working. We are plopped in the middle of my Brandeis Passover vacation, and Mother Nature has cooperated with gorgeous weather -- a spell of quite dry weather with a gradual warm-up from the low 60s last Saturday to 83 yesterday (84 in Boston, 2 degrees removed from the record), and today after the passing of a front, it cools down to the mid-70s. The greenth around us has cooperated fully, with leaves of maple trees exploding into the light yellowish green color, the asparagus is bursting forth (see below), the rhubarb is near the picking stage (but further removed from the grinning stage), and heck, I even had to mow a part of the lawn where the grass had (duh) gotten high. Funny how I never tire of spring fever. And, dear reader, you may have noticed by now that I like it when it gets warm. That's nutty! Indeed, indeed! At the end of the last update, I talked about the cold and gloomy weather that was then happening that day, and then Them What Make got it horribly, wonderfully wrong -- instead of cloudy and 52, it became hazy-sun and 75. I took the opportunity to do yard work (lots of pulling of vines and trimming of dead branches), and take a bike ride (West Acton) and lounge on the hammock. I had heard a knock on the front door, which I tend never to answer --- since in the eight years we've been here, previously such knocks mean only one of two things: Jehovah's Witnesses or Domino's delivering to the wrong address. So I didn't answer. Whoops, meanwhile I had to fax an unexpected K-1 to our accountant, which made me vulnerable -- the knock came again, and I was evident to anyone peering in. Sigh, so I answered. And it was door-to-door Verizon people signing up people for FiOS internet and phone service. I said yes, signed a bunch of stuff, while faxing away. More details to follow, below, and that's nutty! Before this glorious vacation beginned, though, there was still much teaching to accomplish to make it this far, plus I had to convince my Patriots Day students at NEC (as in, Monday, first day of this vacation, Boston marathon) that it was REALLY HARD to get into NEC on the day of the Marathon. They were convinced, luckily. Meantime, there was more minuetness to discuss in theory classes (I spent, like, 45 minutes showing different ways you could use applied chords to ornament a I-V-V-I progression), there were a few minuet consultations, and there was a department meeting (in which, as always, issues that should take 5 minutes to resolve take 25), followed by the Daronius experience. Now there's something you don't see every day. So yes, my upbeat to my vacation was actually a Daron Hagen colloquium, and it was quite excellent. Daron played a double concerto without venturing to explain or elucidate it, and then spent a very entertaining time riffing on the music biz thing -- and the students really, really liked it. After the event was the reception and dinner, and it was me and Yu-Hui and Daron at the Asian Grill, with Daron being the first this spring (this was my seventh time there, what with the job search candidates) to order the all-you-can-eat sushi. And that comes on a boat-shaped thing that looks like it would actually sink like a stone in water. Daron was on his way the next day to Seattle, and those people (in Seattle) were covering the cost of a hotel for him, so we made our way to Maynard afterwards, had scotch (Daron) and beer (moi) in the gazebo for two and a half hours, giggled uncontrollably at times, and at eleven a car service (AAA Limo) took Daron to his hotel. Now there's something you don't see every day. And with the start of my vacation official, I was able to concentrate on summer planning, and the actual writing of music. I scheduled three days in Chicago at the end of May to work with Amy on etudes -- and to make movies of them -- since there's the recording session in New York at the beginning of June. Beff and I thus were able to schedule a week in May, leading up to Memorial Day, at the Vermont place. Meanwhile, Beff was here for the weekend, and it was in the cooler portion of this dry spell, but the sun made it nice. So we did the Boon Lake bike ride, and what it is, too. And on Sunday, Johnny A and MJ came by and we walked through the Assabet wildlife preserve -- formerly known as the National Guard Training Grounds. We also served rhubarb and pickles. After that was done, Beff brought the cats with her to Maine for a two-week stint there caused by her students having lots of weekend recitals, etc. Now there's something you don't see every day. So last February I tried to write an etude for Nathanael May based on some weird parameters. Meanwhile, my colleagues in composition decided to take our vacation days to have group meetings to do graduate admissions, which in retrospect we all agreed was a colossal waste of all of our time. Because a) VACATION, people! and b) things go much faster when we look at the materials invidually and THEN meet, and c) WORST VACATION EVER. And I tossed that etude. So it was incumbent upon me to try again, which I did, beginning on Patriots Day. I finished it yesterday, and titled it as a weird pun on Nathanael's last name: "M'Aidez". Work it out with a pencil (see blue link to the left). The ideas being etuded are so strange and disparate that I couldn't come up with an aphorism for what it's "about". So I just left that part blank. TODAY I was at a loss for new etude ideas, and as I awoke I thought of overlapping repeated note/chord hairpins in some minimalist music I neither like nor dislike. So I started an etude, #84, on that idea, this morning. The first five bars were extremely easy to write. I think I may also do the etude-pair thing like I did with mirror etudes and cool-chord etudes and do another etude on syncopated repeated note patterns -- taking care not to make it sound too much like a Morse code etude. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- and it's something you don't see every day. And the latter part of Monday featured Buffalo wings with Ken -- a supplementale, as he called it. We walked to the Village Pizzeria for those, and then to Erikson's Ice Cream for ice cream, took some zany pictures with the iSight, and Ken had to get back to his job that wasn't in vacation mode. But to backtrack a bit. Last Wednesday was a doozy of a day, not just because there was a lot of teaching stuff to accomplish and not just because the sunniness meant my office was getting hot again. But that extra K-1 meant more work for our accountant, and extra tax returns to file (we had already e-filed Federal, Maine, and Massachusetts), and they arrived that day, meaning FOUR checks to write (Vermont is now in the mix) and a quick trip to the post office. I also lounged on the gazebo and planted grass seed near the apple tree-cum-sculpture. But that night was also Seunghee's recital, including premieres of etudes #80 and #81, and I got to hear them and film them before the concert -- though with no page turner there for the runthrough, there's lots of stoppage, and in the videos there are some breathtaking jump cuts for the sake of continuity -- see red links to the left. And it was a fun affair, what with 3 Chopin etudes and the third Chopin sonata also done from memory. Now there's something you don't see every day. And backtracking even further. The previous Sunday was Festival of the Arts mondo-day and I had to introduce Seunghee's performance as well as attend performances of pieces by my charges (Rachel's musical, excerpts, and Dave G's jazz band phase piece). I had no idea what Seunghee was going to do, but I introduced her anyway, and it turned out to be good -- some piano pieces of her own in response to some Korean engravings. While I was at Brandeis I also caught some of the stuff going on elsewhere, including a Brahms quartet at the Rose Art Museum. Now there's something you don't see every day. So jump-cutting back to our current reality. Verizon was scheduled to come and install our fiber optic stuff on Tuesday, and by 2:00 no one had showed up -- slightly distressing considering TWO machines called my machine to let me know to expect a four to eight hour installation duration (not even remotely related to the conjunction junction, but we can dream, can't we?). Though at 8:30 and 11:30 Verizon trucks could be spied across the street with workers hoisted on hinged ladders a-messin' with the makin's of telephone poles. But finally -- a dude with a ponytail, goatee, and an orange flak jacket showed up, did the nasty of a-stringin' a long wire through the plumage of a maple tree from a telephone pole to the side of our house, and made various drilling sounds, while I was a-writin' away, and occasionally enjoying the gorgeous weather. Finally at about 6:30 things were ready to roll. And what did I have? A new big white box on the side of the house, a new big white box in the basement, a new hole in the house in the computer room, a new VERIZON FIOS router, and a play-by-play of the Red Sox game that had just started (Ellsbury homered to lead off). Now there's something you don't see every day. So Verizon guy tried to do some configuring from the Mac Book Pro downstairs, but the Verizon software was weird, so he did it from the Windows computer. I now have another e-mail address -- drakowski at verizon dot net as well as ziodavino at verizon dot net (attached to the DSL in Bangor), and I had to call earthlink to tell them I wasn't doing DSL OR home networking any more (and now that I think of it -- the extra ten bucks a month for home networking we paid was unnecessary, wasn't it?) and I'm downgraded to e-mail and webspace only. Then he did the speed test, which confirmed we have very fast internet. When I moved from 56k dial-up to 768K DSL, the speed change was vast. Now we moved from 768K DSL to 20M FiOs, and it screams --- the first thing I did was watch some Daily Show videos that previously skipped and jumped, lumberjack-like. And it worked! And then Beff and I Skyped, and I brought the Mac Book all the way out to the edge of the yard and confirmed that the network goes pretty far and wide. Zounds! And now the Apple Airport Extreme and Airport Express are relegated to the attic. Or perhaps we'll find somewhere else to use them. Oh yeah -- and we have unlimited long distance phone calling now, too. Now there's something you don't see every day. So getting this screamingly fast internet thing -- sort of like spring fever. When the first warm days come, there's no way I want to spend it indoors, since it feels like I have to get outside and soak in the warmth before it goes away. Same with the fast internet -- I was trying to invent ways to utilize fully the new fast stream of 0s and 1s before it ... goes away? So I was doing the Daily Show excerpts, and other various things that show video and -- eww -- I even went to hulu.com and suffered through almost an entire minute of an episode of I Dream of Jeannie. Meantime -- I look forward to un-interrupted, non-jerky internet viewings of 30 Rock and Ugly Betty when Beff is back. That's nutty! So all that's left is three days of school once we return, plus lots and lots of minuet consultations, a dinner out with my NEC charges, two PhD orals, a faculty senate meeting, blah blah blah. Last year at this time there was no easing into the summer work season -- as I went straight to MacDowell the day after classes ended, and any Brandeis biz was an official intrusion. This year, the academic year will sort of peter out gradually, what with minuet readings and those orals and other meetings and all that. And hey -- I'm going to commencement! May 18, and that's contractually my last day I have any obligations to Brandeis until classes start again. I look forward to wearing our Princeton robe, black with orange stripes on the arms. Much more succinctly, I look forward to not wearing it. Woo hoo! Excellent, so my nefarious plan is working. Pictures this week are fairly self-explanatory. Obviously the cats now have a perching place by the door on the porch, and every spring there is an obligatory action shot of a beer clutched while lounging. And the Nikon continues to take kickass close-ups, this time of the asparagus just starting to emerge. Then there's me and Ken and Geoffy on the iSight. Bye. MAY 8. Breakfast today was lite breakfast sausages with 2% cheese,orange juice and coffee. Lunch today was a Caliofornia Kitchen frozen 4-cheese pizza reheated to eating temperature. Dinner last night was 2 Bloody Maries, clam chowder, Caesar salad, and a spinach-wrapped salmon filet. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 29.1 and 78.1. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS Dan Beller's Theory 1 minuet. LARGE EXPENSES THIS LAST TWO WEEKS Filling up the tank, more than $30 now, dinner for my NEC charges $178 including tip, and other sundry things. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: I learned to play baseball in Mike and Pete Gray's backyard when I was 6, and as is usual for kids, when they put you in the game, they expect you to know already how it is played. I recall being 2nd baseman, fielding a grounder, and throwing it back to the pitcher, and then excoriated for not throwing it to first. Later, the little games happened in our "way back" yard, which was surrounded by fields and trees, so foul balls and home runs involved a lot of rooting through vegetation to get the ball back. Once I recall being hit in the forehead by a line drive and not flinching, thus proving that I had a hard head. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: Not exactly cute, but Cammy starts trying to wake me up when the birds start to sing, which is around 5. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: endoctology (obviously a medical term referring to something so secret we don't even know if we spelled it right). RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 7. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE The 1990s fad for distressed type was all my fault. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: McCain gets actual scrutiny by the press. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 11,191. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE THIS WEEK: $3.59 at Cumberland Farms in Maynard. OTHER INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE whatever McCain is eating, a trial size of Scope mouthwash, a bone that didn't get cut out of a salmon filet, distant lightning that brings back moments from your childhood, but not good ones. The grammar of noticeability was formulated after years of chocolate research; we couldn't help laughing, at the time, because Johnny's head kept turning into a pot, and that made the microwave oven smile a little bit. So if we presume "ancillary" and "flapjack" are homonyms, we run into a classic case of poodle rot -- which, on the one hand, enriches the Southern hemisphere, but on the other hand, makes pinkness seem almost normal. The mosquito population reported a run on enhancedness, but when I asked my bicycle where it had found that half-kitten, everything seemed to be shaped like parallelograms. Dear reader, since the last update, my vacation ended and my vacation started. This is why I am a composer -- I can embrace, and lovingly so, apparent contradictions, and turn them into contradistinctions. I want to rub it all over my body. So after that screamingly fast Verizon FiOS was installed, and after I got sufficiently accustomed to having it (i.e., I wasn't constantly logged on to breathe in the bandwidth as if it were going to disappear if I didn't keep using it), my life went a little back to normal -- except for the part about making toll calls for free, which also now happens on our phone line. I also called Earthlink to downgrade my service from DSL with home networking ($40 + $10 and I'm pretty sure that extra 10 bucks was a ripoff) to e-mailbox and webspace ($10). 768K DSL just wasn't doing it, and 20,000k FiOS actually costs LESS. As does the phone bill, by the way, especially since caller ID was costing us nine bucks a month, and it's included in the new package. Now there's something you don't see every day. Aw, geez, I hate this stupid program. I had typed another four or five paragraphs after the ones above, saved it, quit, and came back to find those paragraphs missing in action. Which makes me mad. And -- that which follows was added after the first posting of News, and that ain't just whistlin' Dixie. Friday morning of vacation week, I awoke and noticed that way up on my right leg, maybe two inches below the, uh, buttcheek, I had a big pimple that I'd never noticed before. Pulling the pimple revealed that it was a tick, which had probably gotten onto me during our walk through the nature preserve the previous weekend, and that's a big eeew. It wasn't one of the teeny ones that carries disease, but it was small and the consistency of a little raisin -- basically the same sort of thing I pulled off of Cammy several weeks earlier. I did the "eww, gross!" thing and tossed it on the floor, but then came to my senses, found it, and put it on the nightstand for a proper viewing. Then it locomoted a little with its teeny-weeny legs, and I immediately brought it to the outdoor trash bin. Subsequent examinations of the scar reveal no bullseye or lingering poopiness. That's nutty! So let's see, what did I report next? Um... um, ... crap. Well, okay, once I got used to the gorgeous weather and fast internet, I got back on the etude-writing horse -- this being the week of tragically imperfect metaphors. I had gotten stuck in my brain (or between my teeth, I forget which) a simple repeated note figure with a chromatic wedge (i.e. getting louder and then softer). And I thought I might try to write a piano etude that started out as if it were going to be minimalist, but then turns into anything but (anything but minimal, but not literally anything -- I don't think puddle geometry would be in bounds here. Imperfect metaphors, people. Hello, is this thing on? If you've read this far into the paragraph, then you must be invested in its outcome, so here goes....breathing inward....). So the dynamic wedges overlap and a few simple polyrhythms get layered in, and often one hand has to do independent wedges for two contrapuntal voices, and I exerted enough self-control to get at least 75 seconds of music before the chord changes. After which it changes a lot faster, blah blah blah. And then the final cadential chord and its figures just keep repeating, keep repeating, keep repeating. Because it's not what I do, but it is what I did. I came up with a title that is now officially the third goofiest in the etude canon: What's Hairpinning. I didn't even consider the title "Wedge Issue", because I only just thought of it right now, but that just goes to show you -- see blue link on the left. Excellent, so my nefarious plan is working. So very soon after I finished the wedge piece, Beff arrived, cats in hand (I'm speaking figuratively, or perhaps metaphorically here) for the weekend, and stuff was done by us -- including Beff catching up on 2 episodes of Top Chef (in which she is invested, but I'm on the sidelines), watching 30 Rock on SCREAMING FAST internet, taking walks in the cooler weather, and having good food cooked by Davy. And then back she went. I want to rub it all over my body. So the teaching week included the last day of classes WOO FRIGGIN HOO, which was Wednesday, but I went in, and went in very early, all five days that week. For you see, with sunrise coming so early now and the birds beginning to sing at 4:20 (believe me, I know), Cammy gets restless and tries to wake up Davy around 5ish most mornings now -- which means I tended to succumb around 5:30 every morning and I got to work very, very early. So on Monday I looked at Seunghee's new piece, did theory, set up minuet consultation times, drove to NEC and had my last meetings with Travis, Miriam and Jeff, and back I came. Tuesday was a day of many minuet consultation meetings -- oh, rooting out that bad voice leading is very taxing. Wednesday included doughnuts and orange juice for Theory 1 as well as the usual lessons for the grad composition seminar. Thursday was a day of neither classes nor exams, but there I was doing my Thursday teaching to make up for one of the days I was in North Carolina. Friday was a day of Derek J's PhD oral and many more minuet consultations. Meanwhile, Geoffy was here practically all week and I saw him but once, for about a half hour, on Monday night. Now there's something you don't see every day. Beff got in Friday night, just about in time for dinner, which was salmon burgers from Whole Foods (half the size of what they give you). It was cool again, but we did our exercise, and Beff watched the Kentucky Derby while I made KILLA salmon with garlic aioli, and schedules were such that Beff could stay until VERY early Monday morning. And we were both out the door by 6, eww. That's nutty! On Monday I went in for a generic block of office hours for any students who wanted last minute minuet consultation advice -- thus bringing my EXTRA office hours for this project in this eight-day block to fourteen. I had some clients, and when I was done it was warm-ish. So home I came, and bike ride I did. Meanwhile I noticed on New Music Box that it was HAYES'S BIRTHDAY, so I e-mailed him, and then decided to do a chromatic, Wagnerian harmonization of Happy Birthday (can I say that on TV?) -- which I arranged for string quartet and sent to Hayes immediately. The string quartet thing was because the Lyds were going to be doing the Theory 1 minuet readings the next day and hey, why not get them to read this thing? What's the point of having power if you can't abuse it? The blue "Hazed and Confused" link is the score, the green one the reading. Excellent, so my nefarious plan is working. Meanwhile, also on Monday, I finally got a CD from the Chamber Choir's performance of my 32-year-old SATB piece. Over on the left, the blue "Sonnet 22" link is the score and the green one the performance. You can certainly hear that I was listening to Hindemith in 1976, and had read through, at the piano, "The Swan" from "Six Chansons" right around then. I want to rub it all over my body. And woo hoo! Got up real early Tuesday again (thanks, Cammy! You are a cat! I'm not! Woo hoo!), bided time till the quartet readings, and little by little shepherded the student from both theory sections into the performance hall, where the Lyds were already rehearsing. I forced them to read Hazed and Confused while I checked the levels on my Edirol (I called it the "Ice Breaker" on my schedule for the readings). And then the Lyds did splendiforously, reading through 26 or 27 (I didn't count) final projects. And as usual, the students who had five weeks worth of worry wrinkles on their faces from this project, started grinning from ear to ear. Even the imperfect ones sounded fantastic in the readings, and the very, very good ones seemed, in context, transcendent (meaning ... they go from cend to cend?). I also took Flip Videos of five of the minuets. Immediately afterwards I burned all the Edirol sound files onto one CD, which I gave to one student to share, as it were, and when I got home I put the video files onto some CDs, made a bunch of audio discs of the raw readings, edited a few of those in my section, converted them to mp3, and e-mailed them. Now there's something you don't see every day. Download 2.79 Mb. Share with your friends:
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