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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| Meanwhile. I mentioned last time that getting to work intensely on a piece made it easier for me to conceive how to continue with it. Alas, with all the interruptions, I haven't thought about my microconcerto for two weeks, and I don't think I remember the brilliant solutions that were parked in my brain a mere two weeks ago. So, slogging again will I.
So Beff goes to Maine tomorrow for Chair stuff and returns Tuesday. Wednesday we go to Vermont for two weeks, and to that end, we bit the bullet and got a full-size keyboard to bring with us to use for composing on. Whether we leave it there for the winters or take it back and forth has yet to be determined. Yesterday, BEFORE breakfast, I assembled the keyboard stand, which was marked "quick and easy to assemble" and was neither -- though "short end goes on the outside" was interesting text on the one diagram. Too bad it was the only text. And to think I scored so high on spacial conception.... After which is July, and then August. Wow. With so much still to write this summer, I'm stoked. Or something like that. Incidentally, Saturday is my birthday. It will be the first time in many years that my age is evenly divisible by seventeen. And there's a YEHUDI birthday concert at Brandeis that night. Holy usurpation, Batman! Today's pictures begin with a cell phone shot of the rear of my former car; next, the Auvillar nuclear power plant nearby; the VCCA property viewed from the back and front; the center of Auvillar with the old grain market building; a church in town; John Aylward leading a rehearsal at the VCCA rehearsal space; the Etchings group at the wine festival; dwunken wevelwy by the locals during the festival; and sunset our last night there. Bye. JULY 1 Breakfast this morning was rice sausages with cheese, orange juice, and coffee. Dinner last night was a Theo's Chicken Skewer from whole foods. Lunch was nothing. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 45.7 and 83.8. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS the first movement of Stolen Moments. LARGE EXPENSES SINCE LAST UPDATE Whole Foods, $156; PickleLicious, $132; Finale 2010 upgrade $129.90, first car payment on new Corolla, $414. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: We had occasional spelling bees in our eighth grade English class, and I almost always won them -- like Linus in Peanuts, I could have grown up to get a job spelling. There was one spelling bee that essentially nobody won because no one could correctly spell "rhythm" My shot, R-H-Y-T-H-U-M, eliminated me, but the other four left standing also were eliminated, substituting the other available vowels where I had said "U". I remember also choking in another spelling bee on "labyrinth" (gee, that's kinda an advanced word for eighth grade) because the teacher running the spelling bee said it with two syllables. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: When in Vermont, the cats sometimes look wistfully (or listlessly, or wistwesswy) out the front door at a chipmunk that they will never catch because we dont' let them out. And sometimes their positions on the furniture is cute -- see Cammy the Whale below. UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Compositions, Reviews 4. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: saronnosaric, a Medieval remedy for gas and bloating. It didn't actually work, but it knocked you out long enough to recover, anyway. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 1. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE I always have about 7 or 8 different kinds of pickles at the ready. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: As many tickets are issued for driving really slow as for driving really fast. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 13,585. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE RECENTLY $2.69 in Vermont and $2.59 in Maynard. THE LIST YOU MADE BUT FORGOT WHY my head, ladybugs, a tree trunk, manhole covers, 'Round Midnight. The palindromes they gave me started to make sense, in that Liliputian way, until I had some tomato sauce on my car for lunch. Could it be that the head of the pin was where they were putting all of our leftover gerunds? I'm not sure they'd fit if we included the cheese as well, but someone in Accounts Invective told me that pine trees rule. To that I say "garoosophone". Slabs of honey found their way into the chocolate sidewalk, and that's where we made the scissors really count. Dear reader, this is a longer-than-usual time since the last update because I've been out of town, and thankfully, also getting plenty of work done -- even, dare I say, good work. I also went to the bathroom as many times as I wanted, and so did both cats. There was an update right here a coupla days after the last posting showing a picture of the new blue Corolla "S" in our driveway, and a different one is posted below for this update. We drove in the correct direction to get us to Acton Toyota, got all the paperwork in order, and drove home. We celebrated by having dinner at the accustomed time, and this time I believe it was chicken. The next day, Friday, Beff had to drive to Maine for some sort of Open House thing that she only has to do because she is Chair, so I was grateful to have a car of my own. Now of course a lot of people reading this know that it's been miserably cloudy, foggy, and damp in this part of the country pretty regularly since the first week of June (it is to clear up this Friday in time for the holiday, but what do they know?). So in the misty foggy poopyness (or is it "poopiness"?) in the Friday morning, I up and drove to Brandeis via the far-less-scenic route, involving driving to near BJ's to get on the Mass Pike eastbound. And why? Well, I'm glad I asked me that. I rescued my Fast Lane (like E-Z Pass except it's Massachusetts) from the totalled Corolla's window but had no way to affix it to the new car's window. And there's a Fast Lane service center at the rest area between Framingham and the Brandeis/Waltham exit -- where I also gave them the new car info, and got two cute little "sticky feet" to use to mount my transponder. And mount it I did. Then at Brandeis I up and got me a new parking sticker. There they asked me what color I had had before, and I could have said anything -- ooh, if I'd said GOLD, I could park anywhere on campus without penalty. But really, Gold parking stickers are only given for 25 years of service, and I don't teach that fast. So I got me a red one, which was correct. Numbered 1008, for those playing along at home. I then drove home and tried to figure out what to do next in my so-called microconcerto thing. Not much, as it turned out, though I did decide to follow through on my quasi-recap, which has an ironic twist: it's a half-step higher than before, and eventually through the magic of Davyness(tm), a whole-step higher than before. And then the ending has a bunch of tremolos, because it is what I decided to do. PLUS, there's a dissolution that slows the notes down and introduces the ostinato that is going to dominant the movement to follow. I rule. Ruling is done by me. Ruler, c'est moi. The next thing of dire importance was Yehudi's usurpative birthday concert on Saturday night, which was on my birthday. I had gotten several birthday greetings from people who look at that section of newmusicbox, and His Rossness sent me a nice Pat Metheny Trio CD which I like. But I spent the evening portion of being newly evenly divisible by 17 hearing some Yehudi pieces I knew and some I didn't. In particular, the violin and piano duo that is reputed to have made his first big splash was done by Danst Epner and Yehudi, and it was a real gas -- not sounding at all like something from the mid '50s. A.Y., I spent the rest of my birthday at home. Beff got back Monday, and we spent time packing for Vermont, where we were to spend two weeks or perhaps more. Preparing the new 88-key keyboard for transport along with the keyboard stand was among the stuff, plus going through lists of stuff mentally that we wanted to make sure not to forget. Then on Wednesday the 17th (I believe that may be Dennis Slavin's birthday) in the morning, we packed up the kitties, the keyboard, and our stuff, and off we went. It was a fairly eventless drive except for the many, many one-lane diversions made possible by the federal stimulus, and I made it in 3 hours 20 minutes. We had to uncover stuff and I had to find the old cat litter box and leave some food out, and Beff did the majority of the setting up when she got in. She had the keyboard, of course, since she's got a hatchback, and since I had the cats. And we stayed in Vermont until June 29, since Beff's sister requested some time this week, plus we both finished big projects on Monday. More on that later. Of course we had to do a big shop, and Hannaford's is a mere four minute drive, so we got ourselves situated to be self-sufficient. It was still kind of cool and misty and pooplike, and since the place faces the lake, it is often considerably colder than even a hundred feet further from the lake. So hunker down we did, and setup was achieved, and we relaxed. On our first full day we did our official celebration of my birthday. In olden times (when I had hair), we made a point of going to the Ground Round and getting Buffalo wings. This time we drove into downtown Burlington, went to the Burlington Brew Pub, got some of their internal specialties (Irish red, bitter, IPA, etc.) and I got their wings. The wings themselves are not great, but I love the sauce, and I even dipped the lettuce from my salad in it. Because it is what I do. Then we tooled around downtown a little, even getting some grapefruit-eating paraphernalia at a store called Kiss The Cook, and noticed that the recession shonuff hasn't hit Burlington very hard. It was jam-packed, and all the restaurants had lines waiting to be seated. Wow. With the coolish and dreary weather keeping us in, mostly, we had plenty of time to work -- though we took bike rides whenever the weather allowed, which I think was 7 out of 11 days there. I finished my microconcerto first movement, and then followed through on Beff's comment when I first mentioned that I was making it a chamber concerto for not only the likes of Geoffy, but for Geoffy himself, his bad self! And that comment was, "ooh, and you can write a funk movement." Given that I'd also decided to make Geoffy AND Bob (ze percussionist guy) play melodicas -- Bob's melodica made a cameo appearance in the first movement -- another dimension (if you want to call it that) to the movement would be a dueling melodicas passage. So I wrote an opening passage for piano alone that's reminiscent of Absofunkinlutely, with the instruments sneaking in eventually, and it's fun. I followed that with music that uses the same licks but sounds suspiciously like cafe music, for all but the piano, got to a place where the clarinet played a big scale lick, and brought Geoffy in on the melodica near the top of the instrument -- and for several bars before that, Bob's been playing the same licks over and over. And I sent the score up to that point to Geoffy and told him I'd do whatever he suggested I do next. And I did! Rich harmonies between the two melodicas, then a badass lick for Geoffy, and ... well, you can see for yourself. I finished the piece on Monday and was already to call it "Microconcerto", but during a restaurant lunch with Beff (where we'd gone so I could do more wings), she reached all the way back to ARMY OF DARKNESS and pulled out the title Micronomicon. And since it's to be pronounced Mick-ronomicon rather than Mike-ronomicon, I used a K, in deference (?) to Bartok. And then I saw the evil version of the main character declaring, "You'll NEVER get the Mikronomicon!" followed by a different reference: Good, bad. I'm the one with the gun. So dear reader, you may view a complete score at the blue link to the left, as well as MIDI of the outer movements in the yellow numeric links. For you see, it is what I did. In the midst of all that working -- Beff was writing songs plus doing a big academic promotion document, and watching the three color movies Red, White, and Blue at night -- we had a nice visit from my colleague Yu-Hui and her husband Bill, her daughter Emmaline, and her future offspring trapped inside. We did a nice time at the beach on Saturday afternoon, we did a grilled salmon and corn and vegetables and salad dinner, saw the Burlington waterfront on Sunday morning, and off they went back to Boston. They had visited Taiwan just previously, so there were pictures to share there. And we shared our France pictures. And there was one night that the usual party by a local family was given, at which I remember having baked beans, and the stereo playing the same six Beach Boys tunes over and over (California Girls, Surfin' USA, you know the drill). We decided to have an ironclad excuse to be out of town, and it was the night that a concentrated bunch of strong thunderstorms was passing through. In any case, Beff had been reading the local artsy rag, where she found an ad for a high class (or so it implied) in my own hometown of St. Albans -- Chow Bella. She made a reservation online, and we drove there, encountering a downpour only in the last few minutes of the drive -- a severe thunderstorm watch for St. A was to expire just before we got there. This restaurant is an interesting oasis in a sea of dullness (the town itself -- remember, I grew up there, so I'm entitled), and is in the place where Doolin's was when I was growing up (they sold chick stuff). It had the exposed brick thing, and an expensive menu, and even a cocktail pianist, and we got pork medallions and stuff. After we ordered our drinks (local beer on tap), I noticed that the pianist was my high school music teacher, Verne Colburn -- also the father of the Marine Band director, Michael. So we talked, caught up, and left a nice tip. We knew all the tunes he played except one, and he actually used the canned groove tracks on his keyboard. Which was always a trip when he finished a tune and was going through the Fake Book for the next one, since you'd hear just the groove and maybe a bass line doing 1-5-1-5 ... and then we drove back to find that there had been a lot of wind and rain while we were gone, and some of our stuff was wet. The water that blew in came periously close to the surge protector into which our keyboard was plugged, and my computer bag was moist, and so was my suitcase -- but I guess you gotta get used to this in rural living. We celebrated by doing what the locals call "drying off" our stuff. And so yesterday morning we collected the kitties and most of our stuff, except for the keyboard stand, and at 7:15 am I set off, with Beff about an hour behind. The kitties were very glad to be back home, especially the part about getting to go outside. And as usual, they spent much of their time sitting in windows. Of course, since there was little of value to eat in the fridge, we shopped -- and did so separately. Beff did staples at Shaw's Market nearby and I went to Whole Foods for more exotic stuff. To wit -- they're usually out of the Manga Acai white tea half-gallons, and since they had it, I got six of them. And since they are usually out of the masaman curry soup -- I bought them out. Plus, it's skewer season at Whole Foods, so I got chicken of various stripes, etc., plus some -- you guessed it -- gourmet pickles. This morning, since we are nearly out of coffee beans I also made a run to Trader Joes, got stuff at Staples with a rewards coupon, and got cat treats at K-Mart. And I hardly mentioned that I had to mow lawns. The grass was long and wet, so it was a bit more labor intensive than usual, and I still have to do the front and west side. But it looks nice in the back, and the newly sculpted area where the ice storm hit looks good. Indeed, that grass was very long, and very thick. And the mint and catnip we planted are doing very well, thank you. So now with Mikronomicon in the "I exist" pile, next up is piano four hands for students -- the one that comes with a trip to LA next July and a guaranteed number of copies purchased from Peters. There's also the trip to Utah next month, and an appearance at Tanglewood to meet a (hopefully not scared doodyless) etude-playing pianist. Meanwhile, Vermont was great and I got good work done. But here I've got spicy pickles from PickleLicious. And you, dear reader, probably don't. Today's pictures include the new Corolla, three kitty pix from Vermont, the Bill and Yu-Hui experience (big log version), two shots of my working area, and three sunset-related shots. Bye. JULY 14 Breakfast this morning was freezer waffles, orange juice,and coffee. Dinner last night was salmon teriyaki, broccoli/asparagus, and salad. Lunch yesterday seemed to be be not much more than spicy pickles. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 49.5 and 82.2. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS the tune from a Road Runner cartoon where Wile E. Coyote set up a "Learn the Play the Piano" thing in the road that the road runner picked at with its beak. LARGE EXPENSES SINCE LAST UPDATE Whole Foods, $188; Trader Joe's $72, Finale upgrade $129.90. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: There was a massive change of educational venue in St. Albans in my sixth and seventh grade years. There had been 3 regional grades 1-4 schoolhouses, a grades 5-6 building, and a junior high. Apparently the new grade 1-8 school was finished late, since in grade 6 the former Catholic high school in town was rented for grades 5-8. And in grade 7, the new elementary school was ready, and it came with a new principal. Who was Mr. Walsh. He was a butch haircut-roam the halls and yell at slackers kind of principal, and we didn't know he was the brother of a very busy character actor on TV, Emmett Walsh. One evening after school it was announced on the school PA, in his voice, "Mr. Walsh's brother is going to be on Julia tonight." Being that we were seventh graders at the time, we did our best Beavis and Butthead (way before our time, dontcha know), the thing where the newly hormoned try to sexualize everything. "Huuh huuh, he said ON JULIA huuh huuh." NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: Cammy naps under the grill, and Sunny naps under the Adirondack chairs. Not that there's anything wrong with that. UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Compositions. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: inorectic, a condition wherein you can't stop eating bugs. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 2. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE I own one pair of red socks. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: People see me and weep spontaneously. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 13,638. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE RECENTLY $2.59 in Maynard. NOT JUST FOR BREAKFAST ANY MORE my head, ladybugs, a tree trunk, manhole covers, 'Round Midnight. Today I shall avail myself of round sugary candies. For you see, it is Pastille Day. Though when they talked about storming the Pastille in history class in junior high, I didn't really get it. The reception food was great, though. I am scrupulously back to my Tuesday update schedule, even though it's a bit less than two weeks since the last update, and there's really not much to cover this time. Unless you like having your life full of needless detail. You do? Oh yeah, that's why you're still reading. So after "Mikronomicon" was finished, there was the business of extracting and producing the parts, and sending them to the Musica Viva office. This being summer and all, of course, no acknowledgement yet -- probably because it's obviously a piece where you have to put on your thinking cap. Of course, it being a microconcerto and all, Geoffy had to get his part separately, and for that I got to bring out all the massive stuff -- I printed it onto 11x17 paper, trimmed it down to 11x14, and had to run it through the binding machine twice -- since the only available bindings are 8.5 inches long. Which made the other, normally sized, parts a piece of cake (that's an expression we use over here). And when that was all done, there was a day of relax. Which was fine, since Beff had to go Mainewards to do official chair-type stuff. Including going to a hastily called meeting whose point escapes me no matter how many times Beff describes it. Of course, that gave me kitty duty doody, which is way more fun to say than it is to do. Plus, those two professional letters listed above were far more substantial than mere recommendation letters, and the two of them took up a whole day. Why? Confidential. So there. I made up for it by getting zero haircuts. Meanwhile, given that the Musica Viva piece was in the can, it was time to move on to the next gig -- piano four hands pieces commissioned by the MTAC -- Music Teachers' Association of California -- for a target demographic of piano students aged 11-13. Obviously I had some restrictions there, and Catherine O'Connor of the MTAC, with whom I'd corresponded, tried to help me pinpoint the expected level of difficulty. Those pieces I wrote for Jim Goldsworthy's students in 2004 -- harder than that. What Bolcom and Hartke and Chihara wrote for them -- easier than that. Help! So onward I went, quite a bit more methodically than usual (whatever that means), and by yesterday had finished a set of "Etude-Fantasies", seven of them, which turned out to have hit the center of the demographic. And engraving (entering? copying? what verb do we use when we use Finale, or Sibelius, anyway?) this piece presented a few challenges. First, I had just installed Finale 2010 on both my desktop and my laptop (first time my Finale's have been in sync since 2005), oohed and aahed at some of the newer features (page view is also a left-to-right scroll view now, very Sibeliusesque, and there is auto rehearsal letters, which on first effort appeared to be a dud in this incarnation), tried to transfer my very fussy tie settings, and then there was the format of piano four hands music itself. Left hand pages are the SECONDO part and right hand pages the PRIMO part, which is sort of opposite in order to how the music is conceived (presuming the top down approach, duh), and then there is the issue of making sure the primo and secondo are exactly parallel (so entry points are easy to find when rehearsing) -- plus the auto rehearsal letters don't work, since the parallel portions where such a thing would go on the primo part would be, technically, later than on the secondo part, etc. This is why the sideways scroll in Finale 2010 was nice -- I could see the facing pages, make sure the lines were parallel, and even visually so. Cool. Of course, no midi playback, but that wasn't an issue here. After the seven etude-fantasies were done, I had to decide whether to number them or name them -- I chose names. Snakes, Hammers, Invention, Forgotten Song, whatever. Yesterday all the effected parties -- CF Peters and Catherine -- got their copies, and it's time to go to the next project. Which I hope to postpone as long as possible. So, etude 91 -- not yet written. Any etude ideas out there? (by the time you read this, that question may be moot) After going to the post office to mail the masters to Peters, Beff and I went to Dunn Oil to prepay for a third of our winter oil (in July!), and try out the Buffalo wings at a restaurant called 51 Main Street in Maynard. It wasn't hard to remember the address. The wings were good, but there weren't a lot of them. MUCH earlier -- soon after we returned from Vermont -- I had an eye exam and contact lens fitting at Look Optical. It turned out D'Ambrosio, near Stop and Shop, where I'd been doing my eye and lens things, doesn't take the new eye insurance attached to my Tufts Medical health plan (it's called EyeMed, and if you can see well enough to realize a space is missing in the name, do you need it?). So I was directed, on my health card, to a website where I could find local providers that accepted it. And up came the name of a place right in downtown Maynard I had never noticed in my nine years here. Probably because it has only existed since last October. SO -- I got pictures taken of my eyes, an optometrist did the usual "This ... or this? ..." thing that is so familiar. Said my eyes are bad, but can be corrected to 20/15, so that's good. And I will be test-driving a bunch of ... what did he call it ... amazingly oxygen permeable lenses. The optometrist hinted that the new prescription may actually be less strong than the old one. Oh yeah -- and Beff, who has been paying full price for her eye stuff, has Cigna eye plan, which Look Optical also takes. So there. And SHE has an eye exam there this afternoon. Download 2.79 Mb. Share with your friends:
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