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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| Beff and I also took our financial guys' advice, and recommendation, and started the official process of doing the will and the health care proxy. Plus a few other pro forma forms (hence the name) to keep blah blah blah and all that. That involved a trip to Boston and an elevator to the 19th floor of One Financial Center, and thus a nice Asian meal in Porter Square. Not to mention a nice view of Boston Harbor. So the blah blah blah will be happening soon, and then we will pay for it. Blah blah blah costs less than Current Conditions paid, but not by a lot. Our lawyer, by the way, has a name that is a homonym with the name of one of my best former students.
Oh yeah, and the four cello thing. Sweet, too. It's for Rhonda Rider "and her constellation", and she plans on doing it with her cello seminar at Music from Salem (New York) in June -- and it will be played FROM SCORE. Which means no part-extraction, woo hoo over here over and over and over again. Which is nice, since I spent the sun's-not-up-yet part of this morning doing the parts for AhChim AnGae, the piece for Korean fiddle and string trio from way back last summer. Parts are no fun, but at least they have "art" in them. Or as a high-paid idea guy would say, you can't have parts without art. And then he would choose bad fonts. Maybe I would add that you can make parts with strap, but why would you? I haven't decided what this paragraph is about yet, so I'll just stop right here. No I won't. You can't have sturm und drang without strum and gnard. Oh yeah, and the title of the four cellos piece. It had the working title of Cello Shots, which is only funny when the moon is in a certain phase. I had an e-mail exchange with Rick Moody about a name, and we massaged the options into: 'Cell'Out. It's my only title with two apostrophes AND which begins with one AND in which one is preceded and followed by letters without any space. That is definitely the first time I ever typed that particular sentence. Definitely, definitely. So in 48 hours or so I will be back in the teaching saddle, which if you really think about it is kind of an icky metaphor. It'll be a similar kind of situation to last term -- Theory 2 and about 8 private students -- except this is the composing semester in Theory 2, and that means massive extra office hours on my part. Though in 48 hours, we will be listening to Nuages and trying to start a conversation about how you talk about it and how you analyze it. For the second time in this update, I feel compelled to end a paragraph with MWA ha ha. Upcoming -- going to Chicago in about three weeks. My appointment with the NY accountant is February 17, during our Brandeis vacation. March seems to be mostly empty. Oh, and graduate admissions, and, and ... well, of course, plenty of writing of letters for various peoples. And see the green links on the left of stuff writed during this vacation -- the flutude from December, being from December, is, like, way long ago, and thus gone. Today's pictures include my Aldwell/Schachter textbook getting the fate it deserved (after the Theory class took swings at it with an axe), Saturday's version of Beff's grand slam breakfast, the entire sketch of Current Conditions, Sunny's tracks toward the gazebo that he then thought better of, and the cats continuing to love my sister's holiday gift box. Bye. JANUARY 30 Breakfast was Trader Joe's French toast, bacon, coffee and orange juice. Dinner was salmon teriyaki and garlic spinach. Lunch was the Cast Iron Kitchen steak sandwich, salad, and puff pastry pizzas (which we were not asked to say five times fast). TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 5.0 and 55.0. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS a funk tune whose name I don't know but whose refrain is "get up on the dance floor" and which is by Grand Central Station. LARGE EXPENSES SINCE LAST UPDATE car payments, mortgages, cell phone bills ... bill for half a winter's driveway and sidewalk snow removal, $180. COMPANIES THAT HAVE NOT COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY whomever is in charge of getting the Nov 20 performance recording of Mikronomicon to me, which I still do not have. COMPANIES THAT HAVE COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY the NECN Weather person who correctly predicted, 24 hours in advance, a snow squall with rapid accumulation moving through here between 5 and 6 pm on Thursday. PET PEEVE drivers who don't stop for pedestrians at crosswalks--actually, only when I am that pedestrian. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: Beff and I, and Lee Blasius, and others, were in the pit band for a Princeton production of L'Histoire du Soldat, with sets by Michael Graves and a professional cast. The Devil was played by Mark Metcalf, also known as Niedermayer in Animal House, Obnoxious Guy in the Twisted Sister videos, and The Master on Buffy. One night Beff kept the band together when the conductor got lost, and another night I recognized The Devil came in a bar late and so I did, too, thus avoiding calamity. After one rehearsal, Metcalf handed me a note from Patti that read "after rehearsal, take a flying fuck", and he said, "I hope you know what that means." I did. It was our name for the jumbled-up sculpture in front of the library. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: Now that it's cold again, the cats sit in the windows facing the sun, plaintively gesturing for us to open the windows. UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Bio, Compositions, Performances. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: scerainon, a substitute for rubbing alcohol in certain Asian countries before it was discovered to be tasty to cockroaches. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 7. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE I can lock my legs in the lotus position and walk on my knees. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: Half-moustaches. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 14,411. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE RECENTLY $2.67 in Maynard. A FEW THINGS THAT WOULD BE ABOUT AS EFFECTIVE A PRESIDENT AS THE CURRENT ONE my head, ladybugs, a tree trunk, manhole covers, 'Round Midnight. Triskadekaphobia has nothing on me. It's had its way with truffle snatchers, but it could never sing vowels in tune -- at least not the ones we found in the clover. Now that the dogs have been let into the lighthouse, I suppose snatching an extra Post-It is not only out of the question, it's also something to be savored in soft focus. So then the lights went out, and we ate them. Dear reader, I have the strange pleasure to report that it is sunny outside as I type this, though my usual line of sight that includes the south-facing window in the computer room is pretty a-covered in ice condensation. The sort of thing that's charming on a Currier and Ives postcard, somewhat nuisancy otherwise. I can see, though, that it's sunny, and that the usual places that become barren of snow earliest are becoming so yet again. And it's cold -- 7 degrees, according to my Weather Bug. But, since I rag on Them What Make so much (because deserving being ragged on is so oftenly being done by them), I will repeat my compliment, and its complement, first noted the upper section. The beginning of this week was rather warm for this time of year -- a big rainstorm accompanied by temps in the mid-50s -- and it was still above average by midweek. Then Them What Make predicted a cold front passing through with really cold air, triggering some very light snow showers and a squall or two. On Wednesday's 5:30 show on NECN, the weather person said "and probably just before the front passes, there will be a snow squall with a quick half inch or so in the western suburbs between 5 and 6". So then on Thursday, Derek J came over at 5 for a consultation on his dissertation (since, duh, I am his dissertation advisor), and the yards were a little frosty from the snow showers and the roads bare. We spent an hour looking at his piece, and at 6 we looked out, saw that it was clear, but with a half inch of new fluffiosity outside, and the roads looked slippery. Well done, Them What Used to Make and Will Still Make. But digressing is being done by me. Beff's schedule and mine are complex to the edge of believability coming up -- indeed, Beff was trapped in Maine last weekend due to a concert by her faculty ensemble (one of my electric violin pieces was on it -- the one marked "Fumando", to which a Beffleague (conflation of Beff and colleague) remarked, "Do you think Davy meant 'smokin''?" and I like typing four consecutive punctuation marks). Beff will be hosting David Feuerzeig at U Maine in two weeks, and then giving a concert at UVM in four weeks -- for which she has just pulled out the E-flat clarinet and is practicing my "The Squeaky Wheel". Obviously a piece I wrote in order to use the title, and what it is, too. February 25 in Burlington, Vermont, and she's doing some of her own music, too, and some flute and clarinet stuff with her colleague Liz -- who by process of elimination can be discovered to be a flautist. And since that paragraph was typed, I drove Beff to the South Acton commuter rail station so that she can make Flip video for a piece she's writing for orchestra and video. The underlying visual motif is trains, and she's already got a whole mess o' train movies I made in Bogliasco, and some in Harvard station, and she decided she wanted a view of the tracks from the POV of, I guess, the engineer. So she's on that train to get that POV. This Tuesday, I had tried getting a similar movie along the tracks at a nearby crossing from one of our bike rides. As in, I walk along the tracks and film, and this is something like what they did for the forest scenes in the Return of the Jedi. The idea being, speed it up a lot and it'll be like being in a train. Well, no -- with the gravel and snow on the tracks to step on, around, and over, my movies sped up are more like being a Bobblehead engineer on the train. If Beff ever does a bobblehead visual motive, she's already got starter movies. In any case. Beff wants to let you, dear reader, know that there seems to be sufficient compression of the steam within our forced-steam radiator heating system that when it revs up, the knocking is loud, loud, loud and "last night's sleeping was like sleeping in the middle of a percussion ensemble." Well, a percussion ensemble with fractal rhythms and only one kind of articulation, sure. What the fractal? In the meantime, a new semester started, while another one was trickling to an end -- Incompletes from the fall being resolved -- and my teaching schedule is nearly identical to last semester, except just a bit longer on Mondays, as Jared's lesson melts into an independent study on Dutilleux's Metaboles. A great, great piece, by the way. And in Theory 2, after a WTF day listening to and trying to come up with ways to talk about Nuages (it's by Debussy, dontcha know), we embarked severely on the Variations unit. MWA ha ha, and sorry, that just sorta slipped out. In these composition units this semester, it means much less regular grading, but many more scheduled extra office hours with which to compensate. You will, Oscar, you will. This Monday we shall hear the Schumacher variations, and what it is, they are, and have been, MWA ha ha. Last week was being the week of the BMOP winds concert, which included the east coast premiere of Harold Meltzer's concerto for piano and winds -- with Ursula Oppens as the soloist. Indeed, Harold's rehearsals began on Tuesday -- the day before my first class -- and that afternoon he drove here, we went to the Cast Iron Kitchen, he stayed in the guest room, and I left for school before he even got up. I am that way. All evidence points to him having left a little bit later, having had very little of the coffee I made. On Friday the BMOP show happened, and I got into Boston a bit early in order to do the Pru and Newbury Street and dinner at the Pour House. Indeed, dinner at the Pour House is extremely cheap, and the beers are the size of your head, AND I used to go there often with Julie K regularly, about 25 years ago. And of course, I am clever enough to know not to tell my 20-year-old waitress, "hey, I used to come her a lot, five years before you were born ..." Anyway, the BMOP show had the customary pre-show dialogue with all the composers available, which in this case was this list: Harold. Marti Epstein was the interviewer, and the questions and answers were more or less standard issue -- 'ceptin' the part about lawyers who become composers. The concert itself was brilliant, and I listened from the balcony. Where I also sat. And there was a weird-ass Grainger piece to end the first half which began with an organ sound that made it seem as if Whiter Shade of Pale was going to be what was to follow. At this point, I direct the reader to a few common expressions nowadays, which are the ATM Machine and the PIN Number. Which, unpacked, yield the Automatic Teller Machine Machine and the Personal Identification Number Number. I tell you this by way of noting that the ICE ensemble is in residence at Brandeis this weekend, where they will play a "rep" concert, a grad student composers concert, and do readings on Monday for undergraduates. So the ICE Ensemble -- the International Contemporary Ensemble Ensemble -- is reputed to be among the best in the world, and how could we afford them in this economy? Well, the grad students who booked them said, "we'll take five, please. And let them be guitar, piano, flute, clarinet, and percussion". And what has my part in this grand scheme been? I'm glad I asked me that. I have been teaching the students writing for this performance, and answering most technical questions about guitar writing with the standard "how the frack should I know?" Plus, with the reading to happen on Monday, I have solicited my undergrad composition students to submit scores. Yes, I was being quite solicitous. Lurching back to the Harold experience. Whenever I talk with Harold, he always has a list of bizarre piano etude suggestions, many of which seem tailored to a title. This time was no exception. Case in point: how about a prepared piano etude where only the B-flats are prepared? (the error here is that it should be the B's -- read further) It could be called Preparation H. (rim shot, and see, B is what Germans call H, silly). Then he also suggested a knocking and hitting etude simply to be called "Knock Knock". That one seemed silly enough to pursue (and since I'm no longer pursuing my PhD nor pursing my lips, my purs- time is pretty free). But me no likee that particular title, especially since knocking is not as nice a sound as hitting -- from the pianist's standpoint. Still, though -- I thought of calling such a piece Knock Turn, but Harold rightly pointed out that that thing is all over Harry Potter, including the toy section of amazon. So, I decided to call it Knocksville. Even though I was, for a while, considering Tutti I Battuti (Italian for all the hits). A fair amount of time writing it consisted of deciding on the notations for where and how to hit and making a Key -- and then, while writing, remembering them all. But I squeezed the piece out in my non-teaching time (obviously), and there's a link to the score and MIDI up there's on the left. The MIDI is fun -- since with the piano sound it arpeggiated an F major 7 chord. I retooled it to play the standard MIDI gunshot sound (helicopter just didn't cut it, which I guess is a weird kinda pun), which is way funnier. AND would not fit in as well with the first bar of "Colour My World". Now I mentioned earlier that we've had some warm-ass weather here. So warm, in fact, that most of the snow, at least that in the sunnier places, had left and gone away, Joltin' Joe-like. With the warmth persisting for the first half of this week, it was perfect for me to go out and start to clean up the proliferation of many, many fallen pine cones. Indeed, I collected half a barrels worth, which I now officially add to the fall 2009 leaf raking total to yield 109 barrels. SO FAR. Because there are still many pine cones up to pick, the long tail (but not the ears for hats) of the fall 2009 raking season will overlap somewhat with First Crocuses season. But also with respect to the weather, there was a nuisance storm of great heaviness on the day before classes started, with many things coinciding. The Maids, who clean our house monthly, came at 9:30 in the morning, so I skedaddled out to Trader Joe's for provisions and to get firewood on the way back. Meanwhile, a sloppy snowstorm started, and began accumulating. When I got back, the Maids car was still at the top of the driveway, the bottom of the driveway was blocked by a Maynard Door and Window truck, and two guys were taking off some old storm windows and putting new ones on. In the snowstorm. So, off I parked on a side street, asked the guys to get out of the way when the Maids left and to let me in my own garage, and much running and maneuvering happened at that point. A big avalanche of snow fell off the roof, missing the guys by a few inches, and then they had to shovel a path on the back porch roof to get to the upstairs bathroom window, the last window they were replacing. And again they just missed a roof snow avalanche. But now the north-facing rooms downstairs are now brighter, and so is the upstairs bathroom. Fascinating. And not one, not two, but three times in this reporting period -- I napped on the sun porch with the cats. All the spring fever that welled up with those naps has been crushed by today's 5-degree weather. With complicated scheduling stuff upcoming for both of us, Beff is taking the cats to Maine either this weekend or next, AND I'm going to Maine at the beginning of my February break to bring them back -- while, incidentally, seeing Beff's colleagues and eating out. And now the next piece on the docket -- a Davy-tinged piano styling of "Ladies Who Lunch." I love these weird commissions. Today's pictures is the back yard with much snow gone, the view out the computer room window this morning, Knocksville as it looked while I was writing it, the path to the bathroom window on the little roof, a bit of the class-made list of ways to vary themes on the board, and Goldie Celeste (soon to become an older sister) trying out the ACTUAL toy piano used in the Piano Concerto recording (from Marilyn's cell). Bye. FEBRUARY 15 Breakfast was nothing. Lunch was a can of Campbell's Chunky Chicken soup. Dinner last night was Buffalo tenders, the grilled Teri Tuna Sandwich, and fries, at the Sea Dog Brewery in Bangor. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 8.8 and 42.4. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS Ladies Who Lunch. LARGE EXPENSES SINCE LAST UPDATE taxis in Chicago, $140, lunch for 4 in Chicago $180, Logan airport parking $88. COMPANIES THAT HAVE NOT COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY the crab place in Chicago for the exceedingly dry fish taco they served me, the O'Hare Airport Doubletree for charging EXTRA for wi-fi, and Them What Make for the 8-inch snowstorm predicted here that turned out to exaggerate by about 1000 percent. COMPANIES THAT HAVE COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY United Airlines, for TWICE getting my bag on the baggage carousel before I arrived at it, and cab companies in Chicago for giving me long rides in a 10-inch snowstorm. PET PEEVE my personal lack of omniscience. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: On the first full day of the Rome Prize year, the Fellows in residence were assembled in the Tapestry Room in a semicircle for introductions, and all were asked to give a five-minute, at most, presentation on what they planned to do in the year in Rome. Several scholars and artists were before me, and they mostly talked about going to the Vatican for research and splurted names and dates that would only make any sense to me later as I got to know those Fellows. Nathan Currier, the other composer, went before me, talked about something I forgot, and went to the piano to play a movement of a piano sonata of his -- thus far exceeding his five minutes. When it was my turn, my entire spiel was, "I'm David Rakowski, I'm a composer, and I'm going to make stuff up". No one chastized me for ending my sentence with a preposition, and neither did those who followed me follow my model of brevity. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: They made the trip to Bangor and back, and Sunny became The Lump In the Bed during the day. Now that they're back, they want to look out EVERY WINDOW and go through EVERY DOOR. UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Performances. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: stooscy ("stooshy" in the Southern dialect), the tendon on the very back of the shoulder blade. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 8. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE my forehead is pretty flat, hence the CD cases I can stick to it. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: Tried and true becomes mysterious and false. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 14,434. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE RECENTLY $2.79 in Maynard, $2.63 in Bangor, $2.53 in Maynard. A FEW THINGS THAT WOULD BE ABOUT AS EFFECTIVE A PRESIDENT AS THE CURRENT ONE sticky gold stars, the corner of the bedroom, some wainscotting I forgot about, a head of steam. Dear reader, today I do no dada -- and that sounds like it should be a palindrome, and if it isn't, then why not? Much travelage was accomplished by he who is I in the last two weeks, and much of it was not even predicted in the last update. So lemme splain. The International Contemporary Ensemble Ensemble was in residence at the 'Deis the last time I was typing here, and they gave two concerts. The Saturday night concert was the "rep" concert -- all the rep was very, very notey and dazzlingly performed, and with one exception, it was dullsville stuff. The Sunday night concert was student works, which was again dazzlingly played, and showed a very wide range from our grad and undergrad students. The International Contemporary Ensemble Ensemble's performers who came were all exceedingly nice people as well as hot caca performers, and were nice out with which to hang at the post-concert reception. On the Monday after, they also did a reading session for undergraduates that were interested, as well, as a reading of one of the pieces being written for the Sunday concert that didn't get finished in time. It was more hot caca in evidence, and the recordings came out nicely as well. Yoni, a freshman, remarked that the high school players he'd given his duo to couldn't come close to playing it, while the ICE people read it down perfectly. I missed out on the second half of the reading due to a composition lesson (I was giving it), as well as the Advice For Composers session about which nothing had been known, in advance, by me. And then it was onto the mundaneness of my actual job (you know -- teaching, grading, teaching, etc.), and that even included getting Jeremy S to sub for my Theory 2 class on Monday the 8th while I was in the central time zone (it's just this thing I like to do) during a chat at the after-concertness on Sunday. Then there was the actual teaching, which when you are looking at existing variations and critiquing variations being written by class members is hella fun. We even used a laser pointer for reasons that are a bit complicated to explain here. By complicated, I of course mean dumb. And on the Sunday of the second ICE concert, Beff made her traditional trek back to Bangor, and with the cats. Because of my complex travel schedule (well, not complex, just considerable), it was either get Janine to look in daily and feed them, or give them more of the Bangor experience (thus making them appreciate even more the Maynard experience, and what it is, too). This meant that when she came for a day and a half of the weekend that followed, it was she who was abandoning the cats and not I. MWA ha ha, I always say, even when it's not germane. Especially when it's not germane. And of course on that day and a half we did the Cast Iron Kitchen (woo hoozers!) and took some of our usual walks. She had to go back early on Saturday to get to a recital, and that was fine, since I was to leave for the airport at (oh lawdy) 6:45 am on Sunday. You may find this hard to believe, dear reader, but I did just that. Download 2.79 Mb. Share with your friends:
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