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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| Klaus had sent us a gift package from Germany, including Harissa and hot pepper chocolate, and some Lavazza coffee. Which brought back Civitella memories, and I thought for Lavazza I should have one of those low tech espresso makers such as we had there (Whole Foods also sells Illy coffee, supposedly the cream of the crop there, so I got a can there, too. So there) and I got a 6-cup and later a 3-cup version. The coffee was much better than the other stuff we've been drinking. And.
Meanwhile, I finished part 1 of the Many Musics of Hecuba and entered it into Finale. Lots of inside the piano stuff, but that's a given. More to come after I finish with this update, so there, so there. This afternoon the ka-ching twins (classic version) are set to arrive here (Carolyn in town for family after having moved to DC and Big Mike getting back from Christmas vacation this afternoon) for Korean dinner just as it gets dark today. So there. Then, everything else is as it seems. 2009 will definitely be the year that follows 2008. Now to sum up. What did I write in 2008? A few memos, a bunch of e-mails, and some new pieces. Including etudes 83 to 88, Stolen Moments (the 25-minute response to jazz piece for 10 instruments for Merkin Hall) and some Hecuba music. Also two flute etudes using specific techniques. Everything for the BMOP/Sound CD (text, pictures, etc.) is just about ready, except for the actual music. Etudes Volume 3 from Bridge has been through first edits, having been recorded by Amy in June. And that does it for now. 2008, the year in 320x240 pictures, monthly, is below. JAN the kitties enjoying the side porch on a warm day FEB the special midwinter light on Great Road at sunset MAR Beff on the phone with her sister shortly after I brought out the Adirondack chairs APR grape hyacinths in the back yard MAY thunderstorm rolling across Lake Champlain while we are in Burlington JUN Amy on the second day of recording sessions JUL the Civitella Ranieri castle in context of the Umbrian hills AUG sunset on Lake Champlain SEP the house with its new siding and painting OCT maple and hydrangia foliage NOV Susan, Beff and Hayes hiking about the Tea Town Lake place DEC Kitty TV shortly after the second snowstorm. Bye. JANUARY 11, 2009. Breakfast this morning was fake eggs with a slice of cheese cooked in the microwave (weird, but tasty), orange juice, and coffee. Dinner last night was leftover spaghetti and ravioli. Lunch was a leftover slice of pizza. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 4.6 and 42.3. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS The MIDI of the "Something will Happen" Hecuba cue. LARGE EXPENSES THIS LAST TWO WEEKS None, really. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: The one time I got my name in the St. Albans Daily Messenger for a sports-related feat was in a losing effort by our semi-pathetic freshman basketball team. Something like "Dave Rakowski pumped in 8 in a losing effort." (It makes me think that "pumptinate" should be a real word). I do recall that a little later a poem I wrote for an English class with all the textbook hackneyed apposite-ironies ("Though I am blind, you think I cannot see", etc.) was surreptitiously taken by my mother and caused to be published in said newspaper. When my bestselling biography is written, this chapter will not be held up as an example of early creativity (or, for that matter, standards). NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: Cammy nuzzles at night, making it a chore to get out of bed to use the bathroom, or, indeed, anything else that you can do when not in bed; and Sunny keeps wanting me to follow him into the guest room to pet him on the sleeping bag. UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Bio, Home, Compositions. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: pluke, a derivation of the old Dutch word plook, and suspicions are it was onomatopeoia for the sound of something being tossed into a bowl of water. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 16. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE I have never been to North Dakota. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: The phrase "Ponzi scheme" is banished from newspapers everywhere and replaced with "Fonzie scheme". No matter what I give here as an example of such a thing, it can't beat your imagination, dear reader. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 12,880. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE THIS WEEK: $1.59 in Maynard; it was $1.69 the next day. THINGS THAT DON'T BELONG BETWEEN YOUR TEETH free credit reports, polka dots, ladybugs (living or dead), the Triumphal March from Aida. The dada paragraph that has been showing up here will be a sporadic feature beginning in 2009, which is what it is, and what it is, too. This time we move on. But we can hope for the best. Welcome to 2009, which is the first odd-numbered year we've had in more than 350 days. It being school vacation, there is hardly much to report, since I've stayed at home and worked, and occasionally have gone hog-wild with trips to K-Mart, Roche Brothers grocery, and Trader Joe's. Don't that beat all. Nonetheless, like the Riddler having to give Batman a clue before every job, I have a responsibility to infuse and enfuse readers with ennui (and en nuit) at regular intervals. So lemme splain. As I type this, six inches of snow showers is a-winding down outside, and even before the semester has officialy gotten under way, I'm already thinking about soaking up hurricanes in a culture-free society merely for the sake of the weather. Then I slap myself silly (or sillier) and return to the angst, dry skin, and the sound of large snow-moving equipment, and marvel that all three are essential components to the creative artist. You may have remembered that I reported the two foot-deep storms around Christmas had mostly melted; now we have the detritus of a half-foot storm, a slop storm, and a new powdery half-foot one to kick around. Cool. Cold. So Beff and I rang in the New Year by being asleep. On a walk for supplies, I had gotten a rose champagne at a convenience store, and that was our bubbly. We were awake for British new year, but not our own. But dagnabbit, the next day it was shonuff 2009. And strangely enough, all the checks I've written (one) have had the correct year on them. How 'BOUT that! The New Year also coincided with the continuation of my writing cues for the Brandeis production of Hecuba. To review, the arc of the play is: I can't believe how bad things are, things are worse still, worse still, things are only getting worser, woe, woe, woe, woe, revenge. And gouging eyes out seems to be pretty much de rigeur in these old Greek plays. Which makes me think that --- one of these days I'll make a pun on Incredible Edibles as Incredible Oedipals. Right HERE, dear reader, your imagination kicks in. Okay, that's long enough. Back to ennui. So once I'd written a buttload of cues and sent them to the players, all that was left was some chorus things for musical settings. Since the production is a new adaptation from a fresh translation (it's an -ation fest! or perhaps, -ation fusion), I can't set any of the myriad translations already in existence. My request for the text by New Year's Day went for naught, and alas, I am still waiting. Which is cool, because I thrive on deadlines even if others don't. Meanwhile, Beff had to go to Maine for the meat portion of the week that just transpired, to do Chair and teaching stuff, which gave me the house to myself. MWA ha ha. So two of those days were spent activity-free -- indeed, for forty-eight hours I lived to serve the needs of the cats, and if that included lying in the guest bed with Sunny for extended periods, far be it from me to do actual work. After snapping out of that, I moved on to actual composition (you may remember that I occasionally call myself a composer), and so far, two pieces, with references below and to the left, have sprung. First, two of my double-fivers who are musicology grad students are doing a voice and keyboard recital in the spring, and Gil (who often drops the "ad" in his name -- Adgil is a funny name, anyway) suggested I write a piece for his freakish seventeen-octave voice using only the text "Hey Davy". Which I did on Tuesday morning (in the middle of which I drove to the hardware store for ice melt and then to Dunkin Donuts for coffee and a croissant). I have a Vocal Writer version of the MIDI which is funny enough to withhold from you, dear reader. And the piece is called "High Def", which has the same initials as the text that is set. Wednesday was the Day Of The Slop Storm, and I was occupied during a lot of the day with slop removal. It was almost a replay of the December ice storm, except here there was snow under sleet under melting freezing rain under rain. And since our plowing contract stipulates 3 inches before they plow, the 2-1/2 inches of slop, which was very, very, very, very, very heavy to shovel had to be pushed aside by the person who is typing this who loves to refer to himself in third person. They sometimes like to refer to themselves in third person plural, even. So I, back into first person, went out three times, putting the big hurt on the shoveling muscles, and as I finished the third pass, the plow guys pulled up to the driveway and called out, "Dave, you all set?" I think they only know one-syllable words. So for the final part of the week, Beff returned and there was lovely salmon from BJ's, chicken from Whole Foods, and chicken sandwiches to be had. And I had discovered bird poop in a concentrated area on the front porch. Of course weather takes care of that kind of cleanup, but it took me a little longer to discover that the light fixture on the porch was not entirely glassed in, and that a bird (a nuthatch, I believe) was using it as its winter home. And there was a well-organized bit of poop in the fixture, too. SO I stuffed the fixture with newspaper (we can't turn on the light at the moment), and chirped loudly at the encroaching bird -- I think I either used naughty words in birdspeak, or I said, "wool on travesty shining". Birdspeak is a very delicate, nuanced, tonal language. Thinking about said bird somehow caused me to listen on Thursday morning to the many birds (well, maybe a dozen) that were spending the winter here and doing calls in the sunshine. It was really boring. Just a bunch of chips and chirps. So when thinking about a tood idea, after piling through a few that were so much like other pieces (some of them by me), a tood on two-note warbling figures was the one to pursue, for at least three reasons: 1) I had no such tood already, 2) it's a strange weird challenge, and 4) WTF? Plus, if you inflect the title just right ("This Means Warble") you can get Beff to laugh. See yellow "Warble" link to the left. I finished said tood yesterday morning while Beff was in Plaistow, New Hampshire for some sort of chamber music festival thingie. At the beginning of the week, I packaged up all the Fundamentals exams by students that wanted them returned and put them in envelopes, then picked up all my other Brandisian stuff and -- went to Brandeis! on its first open day since Christmas. Where I got them ready to send out, and picked up a whole bunch of handouts for the classes I am teaching this spring. Why? Because I can, but mostly because I can, but even mostlier because Beff got me this lovely HP all-in-one with a multipage scanner autofeed (now there's a title). And for most of the afternoon I used the hardware to create lovely multipage PDFs of the standard handouts (for orchestration: 22 beginnings of piano music to arrange for various combinations; for Theory 2: various sets of variations). Now the students can print them themselves, but more pertinently, I can project them on the screen to refer to them in class. Technology is best when you pronounce the "ch" like you are throwing up. And then yesterday was a fun, fun, fun, fun day. Despite the looming snowstorm (they say it's a clipper, but my fingernails are still the same length) and all, Beff did an early morning drive to this Plaistow thing (up at 5:30, out the door at 6:30, back in at 6:31, back out at 6:32), I finished the warbletude, and for the afternoon, I went to the Joel Gordon house in Lexington (14.4 mile drive) to listen through the first edits for the BMOP/Sound CD, which was a three-hour activity that was ... actually ... fun. David Corcoran was there as the editor, Gil selected the takes, and we listened and listened, perhaps rejecting about 15 takes and replacing them with other ones. Gil had a complicated spreadsheet with all the takes, which was useful, since when I heard, say, a cello pizz. a beat early, Gil could immediately point out all the other takes with that excerpt, and dropping the other take in was fairly painless. At least for me. And in one part of the piano concerto's cadenza, there is scimmiamerda stuff where one important D major arpeggiation was good only in one take, but the other takes were better around it, and ... ooh, am I giving away too many secrets? Gil did mention that the scherzo of the piano concerto is "really hard". So hard, in fact, that even the brass players kept their eyes in their parts instead of cutting up and breaking out the beer (which is what I would have done if I were still a trombonist). Gil, by the way, now has a beard. In fact, he has one more beards than he does working furnaces, at the moment. As to the CD. Apparently it's got a fantastic cover, but somehow, all I've actually seen of the print part is the track listing. I was promised something to proof pronto (another great title I'l never use. Okay, I take it back. It's not a great title). Amazingly, if things go as planned the CD drops in February and is catalog number 1010. BMOP/Sound 1010 wins! Beff, meanwhile, spent the night in or near Plaistow, thanks to the storm. Which is probably a good thing. And when the storm finishes, she will up and drive all the way to Maine. Because, as they say in Portugal (except when they don't), things are ramping up again with a new school year. Including for me. No time for details, but I have a gonzo time of it starting next week and going right up to about March 3. And for the record, I am up and at them starting on Wednesday. Also for the record, I want it to be much warmer, please.
Today's pix begin with the end of this particular storm as viewed from the front and back, the obligatory cat pictures, outdoor shots showing the fallen pine limbs and the state of the pine trees currently, and a shot of our espresso-making accoutrements. Bye. JANUARY 30. Breakfast this morning was a bagel with light cream cheese, orange juice, and coffee. Dinner last night was grilled salmon from Trader Joe's, asparagus, and salad. Lunch was a Trader Joe's noodle meal. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE -3.1 and 41.4. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS Fourth movement of Cantina. LARGE EXPENSES THIS LAST TWO WEEKS Driving and parking, meals in New York, Virginia and Baltimore, Amazon.com purchases $146. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: In the late summer days of grad school, a bunch of us used to do small softball games on the Princeton fields, and there were sufficiently few of us on each team that only balls hit between second and third base were considered fair balls. Lee Blasius was on the opposing team in one of those games, and he kept grounding out. And I was playing shortstop. Near the end of the game, he finally hit it very hard, but in a line drive right at me, which I caught. And he was mad that the ONLY time he finally hit it hard, I caught it. My bad. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: The cats were in Maine two weeks and are back, and Cammy's sleep-on-Davy's head thing is happening again. Meanwhile, Sunny is just very needy in the morning. UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Performances, Home. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: strischinar, very slightly derived from the Italian word for stripe, referring to the icicles that form clinging to the sides of buildings. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 6. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE I occasionally drink pickle juice, especially the brine in which the PickleLicious hot pickles come in. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: Wearing sunglasses night (so I can, so I can, keep track of visions in my brain). PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 12,892. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE THIS WEEK: $1.72 in Maynard, $1.67 on the Garden State Parkway, $1.94 on the Merritt Parkway. THINGS THAT LOOK BETTER IN THE DARK the economy, swordfish entrails, the 12x12 matrix for the Schoenberg Violin Concerto, my winter boots. People on the left had to move in order for the ladybugs to get their hair wet. So we put a Post-It into the trash next to Racine's Pizza. At Racine's you could draw a slash through your zeroes to indicate frivolity, but they wouldn't give you a discount unless you danced to the Adagio for strings. 19 days since the last update, and two major cold snaps have come through, and it's been a total icebox. Plus, the last storm of a couple of days ago was a slopfest -- snow to sleet to rain -- followed by frigid temperatures making for iciness wherever you go. Since the last update, the last of the cues for Hecuba got written (by me), a recording session got scheduled for them, school started, I took a long trip, I missed a day to illness, and my employer became the object of much villification and hand-wringing in the local and national press. So, first things first. Hecuba is over, and I have released the music, so to speak. I told J, the sound designer, that he can use the 33 pages of music I wrote, once it's recorded, any way he wants, including layered, backwards, speed-changed, sideways, what have you, or even not at all. Eric, who was to get me words for the chorus to sing, was involved in Brandeis emergency financial stuff as a member of the Senate council, so it came late, but it did come, and my settings for the chorus were simple and within a small range. And when it was done, there were scores and parts to produce, etc., all of which finished just in time for school to start -- the Wednesday before MLK Day. Dear reader, view the complete Hecuba cues with the link down and to the left. And meanwhile, all the listening to the edits for the BMOP CD happened at Joel Gordon's house -- first listening for edits, then sound quality and balance. Coolly enough, the recordings had six tracks from six mikes, so one place where the piccolo solo got buried, we were able to get it to the front of the mix. And so on, and so on. It was a very fun couple of days with Joel and Gil. And Joel asked me to do a program for an extension of the Art of the States project he runs. Soon after, I got the drafts of the CD booklet and art to proof, and it was fun to do that -- I had just a few comments. One WTF moment was an e-mail from Hannah (who runs the BMOP/sound label) asking me to register the music with Harry Fox so they could get a mechanical license, and I had no idea what that meant. It turns out that Harry Fox is a mechanical rights agency that a lot of publishers use, but CF Peters doesn't use them -- they take care of mechanical rights themselves. But now I know what Harry Fox is, at least in musical terms. So I got no info about an expected release date except that Gil had mentioned once the printing stuff was finalized, it was two and a half weeks to when a release could happen. And then I found the CD on amazon with a drop date of February 10. Woo hoo! Dear reader, BUY IT. So I had a theory class and two orchestration classes to teach before the three-day weekend -- which should have been for me a four-day weekend if Tuesday hadn't been given a Monday teaching schedule. So in theory we listened to some Debussy and talked about ideas of tonality and ideas of variation, and in Orchestration I gave two rather dense foundational lectures -- including some terms that I think I may be the only one to use, such as handoff, composite gesture, composite instrument, timbre shift, etc. And as usual I used Manhattan Transfer's "On the Boulevard" to show a subtly produced vocal handoff for a backup line that covers two octaves. The class is slightly larger than the last time I taught it, and there seem to be fewer players of orchestral instruments in it. Beff and I spent our MLK break doing what we do best, except with a storm the day before MLK Day, Beff had to go to Maine on Saturday, rather earlier than planned (she had makeup lessons on MLK Day itself), and a strange storm droped nearly a foot of the white stuff, so that meant snow-raking and shoveling off the flat roof outside the master bedroom window. Which I did, Oscar, I did. That, and a bunch of napping, dontcha know. We did do a little brief trip into Lexington downtown, eating at Bertucci's, just for the fun of it, and also a Friday lunch at the Cast Iron Kitchen, just for the food of it, and it was good. Shortly we were to discover in the Boston Globe magazine the Cast Iron Kitchen in the list of Great New Things In 2008 -- "Finally Maynard has good food." Which was fatuous, since Maynard has always had good food. Later in the teaching week and at the beginning of the following teaching week I had to execute a handoff of my own, as I had a long and complex professional trip to take, and could depend on Yu-Hui to talk about clarinets in orchestration and variations in Theory 2. So my Monday theory teaching happened on Tuesday and my Wednesday teaching happened on Wednesday, followed immediately by me up and getting into my car and driving to New York. But let me back up. Because of this trip, Beff took the cats with her to Bangor on that day before the snowstorm, which meant a strange emptiness in the house here during the dark times -- every little creak or banging of radiators first gave the impression that a cat was near. But alas, it was not so. On the plus side, there was no litterbox cleaning duty or water-changing, etc. The cats returned last night with Beff and were glad to be in a bigger house that has more warm places to sit (as Beff expresses it). After some checking out the place to make sure everything was still as it should be, they immediately wanted to go out the computer room window to look around, in the dark. And so they did. So first I went to New York, where I had a nice dinner with Sergio -- whom I know from Civitella -- and his wife, who teaches at Columbia and thus I met them in Columbia housing, very beautiful, renovated. We had a campari and wine drink from Civitella and then went to a restaurant called Toast on Broadway and about 122nd for excellent beer and a spectacular burger. At least mine was -- and I also got us an appetizer of Buffalo wings, done in a nouveau way. Note to self: never be afraid to put a little cilantro onto Buffalo wings. Woo hoo! From New York it was on to Burke, Virginia where I stayed a few days with the Colburns, took them out to an excellent barbecue meal, went to an excellent Marine Chamber Orchestra concert, then did pizza and salty wet snacks with them before it was time to retire. The concert was the same place Cantina was premiered, in Alexandria, and was an all-Haydn affair -- the trumpet concerto and the Bear and Military symphonies. The audience was very big and mostly AARP. The playing and interpretation were very good, and I only caught a couple of clams, one in a second violin upbeat, and one in a viola arpeggiation. I like Haydn, especially the part about listening to it. As to the barbecue, which was the night before the concert, I got us some Buffalo wings, then I got the chicken and ribs combo plate, which came with all sorts of stuff to fill you up. Including corn on the cob, which I had some of before I remembered that corn is considered to be a possible cause of diverticulitis, and as you know, dear reader, I am sucseptible therein. The post-concert meal was a bit of order-in pizza that comes with potato on it (I didn't understand it either, but it sure was filling). Download 2.79 Mb. Share with your friends:
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