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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| On Monday I had to drive to Baltimore but not until the afternoon, and the Colburns had morning stuff to do, so it was just me and Winifred (the dog) for a while. I took Winnie out for four walks, and she managed to expel waste on every one of them. And meanwhile, the cheerful forecast of sunny days on Monday and Tuesday was suddenly replaced by a winter weather advisory and a winter storm watch for Weather to happen in the late night after the concert I was going into Baltimore for. So I steeled myself to leave after the concert instead of the next morning, because I have experienced Maryland drivers in the snow -- the same people who make a run on bread and alcohol in the stores when a 2-inch snowstorm is forecast.
In any case -- the drive to downtown Baltimore from Burke involved using the famed Washington beltway as a road, and I got to Baltimore rather more quickly than I had planned. I parked in the neighborhood of the concert, had a chicken sandwich at a pub, and when 4:00 finally happened, I checked into a hotel and took a nap. After my nap, I packed my stuff and ambled to "An Die Musik", where the concert was happening. And what was this concert? A full recital by Amy Briggs, including a Gusty Thomas premiere, a David Smooke piece, and seven etudes of mine. Woo hoo! Amy and David and Judah Adashi (who runs the series and whom I know from Yaddo 2006) and I did a pre-concert thing with the usual questions about collaborations and piano writing and inspiration. Then the concert began. Amy's playing was, as usual, superb, and David and I had to say a few things before our pieces, and I got a few yuks out of the usual jokes -- hey, after all, Amy was doing Schnozzage, not that there's anything wrong with that. Rachel's mom was there, and we got some autographs for her, there was a reception going on with lots of nice people, pictures to be taken, and around 10:45 I ambled to the hotel, checked out and got on the road. The master plan was to make it at least an hour into New Jersey -- where there were no winter weather advisories -- and nap or sleep in a rest area. But somehow my body refused to tire, so I kept going. After filling up in the Delaware service center, I up and went into New Jersey, and just kept going. It was spooky to have a large portion of the Garden State Parkway to myself, as well as the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut, and durned if I didn't pull into my own driveway at 5:50 am. So technically, I pulled an all-nighter. At 11:50 I reawakened from my postponed night's sleep, dealt with a large pile of accumulated e-mails, and went back to bed. And woke up with a stomach virus. So I stayed home. Did my Thursday teaching, though, and I killed. Not literally. Beff got in the early evening with the cats, I made salmon and so on, and today Beff had some oral surgery. Now she's high on Advil and loving it. Meantime, more people are asking for pieces to be written by me, and eventually they will be. Upcoming are two normal teaching weeks followed by, already, vacation. Then during vacation I have to go to New York to meet with our accountant, take a train to Buffalo for a residency with Amy at SUNY Fredonia (Hail!) and come back. Not really much of a vacation, but it will have to do. Then at the end of the month it's a few days in Cleveland, after which my schedule thankfully empties back up. But it sure has been cold here. As the weather people mentioned on TV (so it must be true), there was no January thaw this year. Cold damn. Today's pictures begin with Gil Rose and Joel Gordon during the listening sessions -- Gil is wearing a mask that Joel had just brought back from Mexico. Following, my CD cover. Then a few highlights of the Marine Band display at the concert site, then two examples of window ice from when it got REALLY cold. Bye. FEBRUARY 15. Lunch today was a Three Cheese Flatbread Pizza and Turkey Hill Diet Green Tea. Breakfast was microwaved fake eggs and cheese, orange juice, and coffee. Dinner was a half-rack of ribs, and onion strings. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 2.8 and 60.3. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS Dancing Queen (thanks, Beff). LARGE EXPENSES THIS LAST TWO WEEKS Shirts from Sierra Trading Post, about 50 bucks, PickleLicious, about 90 bucks. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: Back in my font-making days, a software company offered me $5000 for a license to include 30 of my shareware fonts with their product for a year. The catch was that they had to be PC fonts, which I could not do. So I asked Eileen Wharmby, back in LA and a friend on the DTP forum on Compuserve, to convert them for me, and things were under way. The $5000 went directly to Columbia Composers, who bought a DAT recorder with the money for concerts, plus had a few more players available that year. The company had an option for another license after a year, but apparently they went out of business, or into another line of work. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: The cats are on their way back to Maine, and both of them were needy all morning. UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Performances, Compositions. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: starbo, apparently referring to maple sap still on the maple tree that has frozen, melted, and refrozen several times. It is reputed to be a delicacy, especially if you don't mind the taste of stick. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 5. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE My socks are poorly organized. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: Vice presidents with a 9 percent approval rating keep their mouths shut after leaving office. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 12,928. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE THIS WEEK: $1.87 in Maynard, $1.89 in Acton at the place with a carwash. ROUND THINGS THAT WOULD LOOK FUNNY TRAPEZOIDAL my head, ladybugs, a tree trunk, manhole covers, 'Round Midnight. No dada paragraph in this update. It is the day after Valentine's Day, and I am on vacation. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Especially the being on vacation part. Nonetheless. Plenty has transpired since the January 30 update, and it's not very interesting at all. First and foremost, there were two weeks of teaching and thirteen extra office hours for students in second year theory, who are writing variations. Plenty of them availed themselves, some a lot and some not so much. Plus, all of the brass section of the orchestra has been covered in the orchestration class, and that involved plenty of students (them) and faculty (me) demonstrating range, tone, mutes, and personality. While the office hours for theory continued and they are still writing varations, I started talking about writing for voice -- which included listening to a Wagnerian baritone recording of the Slow March that Ives wrote at the age of 14 about the death of his dog. Not on purpose, of course. And meanwhile, there were TWO composer colloquia at Brandeis on consecutive Thursdays -- Rosenzweig of the Morris variety, and Diesendruck of the Tamar variety. Both were fun, worthwhile, and got the students talking. Of course thanks to the economy we couldn't take either of them out to dinner, as has been the case in the past. So we had to be sated with celery and cheap wine. During this period, there were also three faculty senate meetings -- they're having a lot of them, thanks to what's goin' down in the economy -- of which I could only attend one. I was in Maryland for one of them, and was with the Lydian Quartet and Yu-Hui recording the Hecuba music during the other one (it was called an "emergency" meeting). The one I did attend was as it was designed to be, and it made me late for the Diesendruck colloquium of the Tamar variety. Meanwhile. Beff was able to make it Maynardwards both weekends, and we took our customary walking rituals (we call them "walks"). On this weekend, on Friday morning, Beff got the stitches out from her oral surgery, and was much relieved, what with a piece of thread just rolling around in her mouth like that. While she was de-stitched, I was re-oiled, of the Corolla variety. At Jeefy Loob. After which I finally got my car washed, since the weather lately has been responsible for Mr. Salty Car. Indeed, that storm that chased me out of Baltimore so early arrived here a few days later (Wednesday, to be exact), and slopped up the place, and for days slopped up the cars. But you know that, dear reader. There was another Arctic blast after that storm, which I had decreed would be the last. So far, so good. After almost a week of sunny and very cold (meaning lots of icicles, and even the icicles clinging to the front of our house, in the shade), we had a real thaw -- two of them, in fact, which even included an overnight rainstorm with an hour-long downpour. This means all the roofs, including garage, shed, and gazebo, are now free of snow, and little by little the yard is reappearing. Beginning with near the stand of pines. And as a side note, I calculate it is 24 to 29 days to the first crocuses. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Of course, no music has been written in this period, but plenty has been splained. And some has even been recorded. But I am getting behind myself (assuming I switch roles). Tuesday of this week was the big day to record the cues for Hecuba (after which I held two of those much-vaunted theory 2 office hours), and I must say it went rather well. The Lyds and Yu-Hui were the performers, J was the recording guy, and there were some undergrad sound people also there to get people to stop using practice rooms. We put down 12 cues lasting around 20 or 25 minutes, and J did a rough mix --- four of them are to the left and below, dear reader, in green. The in-and-out for the piano in the Overture was a bit much for Yu-Hui, or anyone, so some of the inside slapping and note stopping was done live, by me. Thankfully, there was no conducting for me to do, too. Before everything was settled, I made some sound effects inside the piano to be recorded -- harmonics and scratching -- and while waiting for some people to be shooed from the practice rooms, the quartet recorded some scratch tones, col legno, and glissandi, also to be used as sound effect. And so it was. N.B. the two "chorus" cues accompany stuff to be sung by the (duh, Greek) chorus, and are named after the most frequently used words in them. And then at about 6:45 pm on Thursday my vacation kinda sorta started. Except for the small matter of spending a large part of daylight hours yesterday with my composer colleagues doing the first wave of graduate admissions. Any applicant looking in to see your status therein, we made no decisions, and will meet next on Monday the 23rd, which happens to be Droolie's birthday. And who is Droolie? You have to ask? When I got back from the meeting, Beff and I did the walk to the Assabet bridge by the wildlife refuge and back, to be greeted on our return by a message from Mindy Wagner -- she and her daughter Olivia were in Sturbridge in a hotel and how about dinner? It being Valentine's Day, the Cast Iron Kitchen was booked up solid, so we got a bar table at the Blue Coyote Grill, and spent the whole time being excessively silly. Olivia is 10, so there's some energy there. Meanwhile, Beff and Mindy had soup and salad, I had ribs, and Olivia had ... I don't remember. Before dinner, though, we treated both Mindy and Olivia to at least four different kinds of pickles. After we showed them the gazebo in the dark, they went back, where they plan to visit Old Sturbridge Village today. On Thursday, I got the second edits for Volume 3 of the 'Tudes with Amy, and on Friday spent a large part of the day listening. I came up with a few small issues, but they're almost ready, waiting just for the notes and album design, and rights clearances, and all sorts of other little details that add up. Meanwhile, another package arrived from PickleLicious, which is good, because I ordered from them and they charged my credit card -- two gallons of hot pickles, two quarts of spicy olives, one quart of jalapeno-stuffed olives. They will be closed up in the basement for a little while, since the complicated second half of February will soon be under way. And what does that mean? It means the complicated second half of February will soon be under way, silly. Tuesday I drive to New York, park, see Jonathan, our accountant, on Long Island, stay in a hotel, have lunch with Greg of Merkin Hall Wednesday, Thursday take a 7:15 train to Buffalo. Rob "Rob" Deemer picks me up, and that night Amy and I gale and regale a bunch of students and others at SUNY Fredonia, where it will not be hailing (it may be snowing). Friday I do ... I don't know what I do during the day ... but at night Amy does her Baltimore concert, possibly with a few changes. And there I will be. Saturday, back to NYC by train, then drive back to Maynard from there. Long day. Then teaching starts again, and Thursday of that week I fly to Cleveland, do things on Friday, Saturday, Sunday at Cleveland Institute of Music, where Claude Baker will also be resident, and Monday I fly back for my premiere of the Phillis Levin Songs with Collage. I may not even hear a rehearsal before the performance! And then things quiet down. At which point I will be saying that I expect the crocuses in 9 to 14 days. But when I get back home, Beff will be back with the cats (you may have noted that she took them to Maine with her a short time ago), indeed, having been back with them for about four days. And she will be at the beginning of her two-week school vacation. Whoopee! And the only other thing that takes me out of town is, for the third time, an Amy recital, on the 26th of March, at the University of Maine. I will drive straight from Orchestration, and make little "zoom-zoom" noises with my lips the whole way. Amy 'n' Beff 'n' I will all be a-stayin' in the little yellow bungalow, so cramped quarters will be the name of the game. Dimes, too. Then it's like five or five and a half weeks of teachingness for me before our Passover break starts. I can already hardly wait. One other yet-resolved issue is the BMOP CD Winged Contraption. All the online sellers have the release date as February 10, but my source (who runs the label) doesn't expect "product" till the end of this week. And boy oh boy, then there'll be no a-stoppin' me, no sirree bob. And with the cats out of the house again, it's weird hearing creaks in the house and thinking it's one of them. Today's pictures begin with a snap from right after Amy's Baltimore concert as I am on my way out to drive a really long and dark time -- Judah Adashi, David Smooke, Amy, moi -- under that the asymmetric melting on the gazebo, since only the part that faces south melted -- to the right, the housicle on the front of the house from our weird cold weather. Then, three snaps from the Hecuba recording session. Bye. MARCH 6 Breakfast today was grapefruit, light breakfast sausage, orange juice, and coffee. Dinner last night was Whole Foods jambalaya, broccoli, asparagus, and salad. Lunch was nonexistent unless one hot PickleLicious pickle counts as lunch. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 5.5 and 60.4. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS The "Something Will Happen" cue from Hecuba. LARGE EXPENSES THIS LAST TWO WEEKS Hotel in New York $335, internet access in New York $28.08, Jonathan's tax return fee, parking in New York $152, parking at Logan Airport $109, baggage fee on Continental $15 each way, various lunches and dinners in Fredonia and Cleveland, final edits on etude CD $337.50. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: When I was in sixth grade, Mr. Bostwick, our music teacher, arranged to send me to the high school district music festival at BFA, in which I played second trombone. For some reason, I was also made to play a solo for the solo and ensemble concert, and my selection was a cheesy arrangement of the triumphal march from Aida. This would be my first encounter with Verne Colburn, who was my accompanist (I didn't suck so much as I bit). As I may have reported in this space some time in the past, I purloined my parts from that festival, got a tape of the concert, and played along (much to the detriment of the sanity of my parents) for months and months afterwards. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: They are very needy in mornings, follow us everywhere, and want kitty TV. UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Compositions, Reviews 4. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: trinstle, a wooden dowel painted with polka dots and used for obscure sacred rituals by people whose names lack an "n". RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 7. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE Beff and I own three air conditioners, but usually only install two -- the last time we installed the third one, in the guest room, a bird made a nest on it and raised birdlets. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: The story of Moses is conflated with the plight of the Republican party, and dittoheads are renamed bullrushes (rim shot, please). PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 12,942. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE THIS WEEK: $1.87 in Maynard, $1.79 in Maynard. THINGS THAT WOULD LOOK FUNNY WITH A LANDING STRIP my head, ladybugs, a tree trunk, manhole covers, 'Round Midnight. No dada paragraph in this update either. 19 days between updates, and we have to hit the ground a-runnin'. Since the last update, I have embarked on and returned from not one, but TWO complex trips, had world premieres in not one, but TWO countries, stayed in a hotel in New York City not one but TWO nights, and have done not one but TWO weeks of teaching, after not two but ONE week of winter vacation. Are you still with me? You can leave any time you want to, you know. So first our wild and wacky weather. I hear from friends in New York that they got some snow on Monday with this surprise storm that zipped up the coast and gave us a big March snow (by virtue of the fact that it was snow, and in March), and they (actual people, not straw men) were glad to see it because New York has had so little this season. I'm here to tell ya that the Boston area is about two feet of snow above the average for the winter, so come on over if you like snow, and while you're here, shovel my driveway and walks for free. Free, I say, free! So the second half of February featured a-warmin' temperatures (thanks to my banning another Arctic outbreak, done in this space) and a slow retreat of the snow cover. Indeed, by last Saturday all we had left was the piles made besides driveways and the shadiest spots such as our front yard. Then, I got a call from Beff while I was in a restaurant in Cleveland warning me that snow was coming on my "day of return" (so called because it was the "day" of my "return") and indeed, she was right. Though Them What Make got the amount wrong, as usual. It was apparently a full-bore clobber, but only about 8 inches, not the double that that was a-fear'd. Hee hee, I said "that that". So now the narrative. On the Tuesday of my vacation week I drove to New York City, parked, took my luggage and computer to Penn Station, had lunch at Charley O's, took a train on the LIRR to Lynbrook, and had my appointment with Jonathan for our taxes. This was a wild and wacky event that featured Jonathan leaving for a haircut in the middle of my appointment, and watching Geoff Burleson playing Clave on YouTube while Jonathan told a secretary "that's Geoff!" The K-1 from Beff's father's estate is STILL not here, so he can't complete the returns yet, but onward. So back got I on a LIRR train to Penn Station, and checked in I did at Park Central Hotel. Which had a super-discounted rate, and is right acoss the street from Carnegie Hall. And I didn't even have to practice! The super discount rate was a mirage, however: breakfast was not included (thus I got myself a nice little breakfast for $14 across the street), and internet access was $14.04 per day. Rasta rattin frattin. Wednesday was a free day, so I did free things. Also, I took Greg Evans -- director of Merkin Hall -- to a nice Japanese place around the corner for lunch, and we talked about hall directing things. Then I bedded early because I had an early train to have been catching. Which means that on Thursday morning I up and walked the whole distance from the hotel to Penn station, beginning at 5:45 am. For you see, I was on a train, in business class, destined for Buffalo-Depew station in order to spend some time at SUNY Fredonia with Amy B and Rob Deemer. The trip was long, but I could do e-mail on my phone, and read stuff, and listen on my iPod, and see the GORGEOUS Hudson River scenery for the first two and a half hours, and watch the scars of the December ice storm in the forested regions transform gradually from severe to nonexistent. I also used the bathroom. And learned, for the first time, that Rochester has skyscrapers. And that Rome's train station is officially what you would call piddlin'. Rob and Amy picked me up at the station and drove us through a bit of lake effect snow to Fredonia (they are so hardy up there that they don't consider driving difficult until it is complete white-out, which it was not) and to our vintage 1880ish hotel in downtown Fredonia. And boy was it cold! So after some setup and Amy's getting used to the piano in the hall, we ate with students in a cafeteria, and then did our presentation thing. It included both of us talking about our history, about toods, and Amy playing several both live and virtually (projected on the back wall from my laptop). Things finally got interesting (and possibly useful for the composition students) when we responded to questions and stopped using the microphones. Then back to the hotel for a beer (Southern Tier, on tap) and wi-fi (which worked in the hallway but not in my room). Friday was a dense day, which included lunch with Rob at "Wing City" -- of the 15 or so wing varieties, we went with "Buffalo hot" and "Japanese", a public colloquium (I did the piano-etudes-lead-to-piano-concerto spiel), bloody Maries, the actual concert by Amy (smokin') in which I did my usual Davyspiel before my pieces, and a party at the hotel afterwards that featured cheesecake. I had SO much fun there and Rob was SUCH a gracious host and I ate SO many Buffalo wings that ... fill in the blank here and you may win a free glass of orange juice! Next morning we were driven by Jay to the train station (me) and airport (Amy) and my ride unfortunately featured the transformation of business class to a frat house, as a bunch of loud and profane guys were a-takin' the train (or, in their words, the fuckin' train) to a prize fight at Madison Square Garden. Most of the guys had laughs that sounded exactly like Saturday Night Live parodies, but hey, I was a-livin' it! Anyway, when we were a half hour shy of Penn Station, suddenly the train stopped for a long time. A bridge had been raised for a boat and would not settle back down, and that bridge was on our path. So after a long delay, the train backed up and got onto Metro North tracks, then left us off at Spuyten Duyvil station, where a Metro North train came to take us to Grand Central Station (much to the delight of people already at the station waiting for a train to Grand Central who suddenly got to ride one for free). An hour and a half late we were, and in I got into a cab, got my parked car, and drove to Maynard. I arrived safely home at 8:30, thus making the length of my entire trip 13 hours and 15 minutes. Or, as my business class mates would have put it, fuckin' 13 fuckin' hours and fuckin' 15 minutes. Sunday was my day of rest, and gearing up for teaching. For you see, I had to rest, and gear up for teaching. And teach I did. Wind ensemble in 'stration, and vocal writing in 'eory. But on Thursday out I was to go again, this time to Cleveland to see my old friend Keith Fitch at Cleveland Institute of Music, and Claude Baker, who was also out to be a-hangin' there. But I did not have to leave my house until 11 am, and it was kinda nice out. So I took some excess energy, removed two of the fence sections damaged in the ice storm, and stuck them in the leaf discard area. And THEN I drove to the airport. Uneventful was what was next, Mike Bratt picked me and Claude up at the airport, and Claude and I talked about old times and outpunned each other gradually. We got put into the Glidden House for four nights, and it is right next door to the CIM, and across the street from a ho-hum Frank Gehry building (oh, look -- it's got nonfunctional curvy metallic stuff on it like every other Frank Gehry building). Keith took us out to dinner next door to the Glidden House at Sergio's, a really fine restaurant, and on Friday we started our official duties. Download 2.79 Mb. Share with your friends:
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