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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| Back we got, unpack we did, feed the cats we did, and we watched a Julia Roberts movie in front of a not-so-roaring fire we did.
Upcoming: end of the semester! More grading! Writing of music! Including a brief piano trio movement on a hymn tune! Cataloguing the desperate expressions of students asking for extensions! And shopping. This week's photos begin with me 'n' Geoffy (second person: you 'n' Geoffy) reading through the dueling melodicas part of Mikronomicon under the watchful camera eye of Beff -- then, Geoff airing out the melodica at the BMV rehearsal to which I went. Next, our nicely raked back yard, with local dog; Beff's grand slam breakfast, with computer; two obligatory Thanksgiving Day meal pictures. And the new Art Nouveau chair in its new context, contextualized with and without Sunny. Bye. DECEMBER 13 Breakfast was grapefruit, potato pancakes, orange juice, and coffee. Lunch was tomato sandwiches and roasted asparagus from Whole Foods. Dinner last night was salad and Buffalo wings at Sadie's in Waltham. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 15.8 and 66.6. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS Flutude #1, "Ram Tough". LARGE EXPENSES SINCE LAST UPDATE Two small Ionizers (room air fresheners) $198. Christmas tree $35. Pizza for Theory 2 class $63. Parking in NYC for Beff $45 for 4 hours. Down payment to Maynard Door and Window for six replacement storm windows, $510. Second half of chimney rebuild in Bangor, $600. COMPANIES THAT HAVE NOT COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY K-Mart, for enormous computer glitches that forced me to stand at the counter holding a whole mess o' stuff for a long time. And Fanfare Magazine, for offering to do a published interview with me if I took out an expensive ad. COMPANIES THAT HAVE COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY Staples dot com and amazon, for very quick turnaround after we made orders. Also Sadie's in Waltham for large portions at low prices -- though I must add that the quality of the Buffalo wings is so-so. PET PEEVE people who go right on red in full view of the NO TURN ON RED sign. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: In eighth grade I got one of those President's Physical Fitness patches, even though in the large litany of stuff you have to do for one of those I was deficient in pull-ups. I ran the 50-yard dash in 6.2 seconds, and the standing broadjump was 8' 5-1/2". That last number exceeded everyone in my class by at least two feet. It also exceeded my standing broadjump in ninth grade by about two feet, since I was doing it in old, slippery sneakers. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: Cammy has gotten to the sleeping near my head thing that usually goes on in the winter, and Sunny is as needy as ever. UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Performances, Compositions, Home. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: sengloit, a vestigial organ in the throat not discovered until the 15th century, after which point it mysteriously disappeared. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 11. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE In Kindergarten I could read at a fifth grade level but flunked a color test because I was never taught the names of colors. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: Bankers don't get bonuses but bone us's PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 14, 235. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE RECENTLY $2.57 in Maynard. LET'S CALL THE WHOLE THING OOF my head, ladybugs, a tree trunk, manhole covers, 'Round Midnight. Dear reader, I type as I usually do while it is dreary and dank outside -- a condition commonly known as "December". Since the last update, we have had the first Arctic outbreak and the first two accumulating snowfalls -- the second of which --ding! -- put us in debt to Maynard Door and Window for snow plowing. And them what make have been up to their usual tricks. But let he who is me backtrack a bit. He who is me is really he who is I, because I know a thing or two about the predicate nominative. Classes ended exactly when they were supposed to, and I finished up my rhythm lecture, said a few things about the Agnus Dei from the B minor mass, and bought $63 worth of pizza for the class to have on the last day, at which time we also took some swings at the Aldwell/Schachter textbook outside with my axe (the comical part there was having to open the book to "the chapter where he calls the same chord FOUR DIFFERENT THINGS!"). Yes, we were in agreement that, as an undergraduate theory textbook, the Aldwell/Schachter is, on a scale of 0 to 10 where 0 is pretty good and 10 is the worst ever, a 12. And then they had a week to write a final paper of a length of 3 to 10,000 pages. Naturally, several of the class apparently listen to classic Beatles songs, particularly "Eight Days a Week" and interpreted it literally. I also went in for makeup composition lessons, thus extending my part of the teaching semester by a week. And when it came time for grading, the time necessary was legion: final Waldstein analyses took a full afternoon and evening to grade, while the final papers took two evenings and a full morning. For you see, this year's class is three-halves the size of last year's, and I should thus have assigned two-thirds of the work (it's called a reciprocal, and anyone can have one). There were several bouts of very windy weather, and the pine trees have been very cone-fecund this year. I had reported that this year the leaf rakage was over and the barrel amount frozen at 104. But then, TWO windstorms blew a buttload of pine cones into the yards, and after the first storm Beff collected five shopping bags of them for the fireplace and I raked up two whole barrels worth for discard. Later there was another windstorm and a barrel and a half to collect and discard. Give the bagged cones credit as a barrel, and the grand total for the year is now at 108 and a half -- with another buttload recently fallen and STILL MORE to come down. I hate it when that happens. And when that happens, I hate it (speaking of reciprocals). In the midst of all that kinda stuff, Beff did two normally-lengthed weekends in Maynard, and I did both of my usual Friday lunches at the Cast Iron Kitchen. Beff, of course, had her own grading to do, as well as a bunch of scores to produce, so we kept quite busy, being interrupted mostly by our usual walks -- over and around the Assabet, etc., and this morning to the new Walgreen's in Maynard and back (had to get soap, fiber supplement, and wrapping paper). Speaking of which, Beff's other large task in this period was assembling the yearly Christmas boxes for my relatives, sealing them, and sending them off via UPS from Staples. Beff likes going to Staples for such things because it means she can stock up on handy dandy quick lunches for the office. But this most recent Friday I was alone at the Cast Iron Kitchen for lunch because Beff was doing her twice-yearly drive to New York City for an ACA meeting, which she does because she is on the "Board". This gets her going at 8 and returning at 10, and when she talks about what happened in said "Board" meeting, I think about jell-o and pretend I'm not bored out of my mind. Well, one of those things, anyway. There are random buttons inside my head that cause me to say "Mmm hmm" or "Oh" or "Really?" or "Huh", and I seem to be able to press them randomly -- when there are pauses in Beff's "Board" stories -- to disguise the fact that I'm really just thinking about jell-o. As to the weather, our first proper storm was punted severely by Them What Make, who waffled between zero snow and 4-6 inches of snow, and as the snow started firmly put our area in a swath of 5" predicted. Actual result: less than an inch. How did I remove the offending snow? With a broom. Since that storm was on a weekend, not much of my required driving was affected by the inclemency. Meanwhile, Wednesday, my last day of makeup teaching, the more substantial storm came through, and if I had not gone to California I would have not had to go in to do makeup lessons, and ... well, it was so icky in the morning that I drove to South Acton station, on the way getting stuck behind a car with awful tires that didn't seem to be able to go more than 3 miles an hour, which I finally drove around, and took the commuter rail toand from Brandeis. Of course the precip changed to rain around 11 am, which means that when I got back, there was very wet heavy stuff with which to deal -- and about five inches of snow to brush off my car. Then my driveway was poorly plowed -- very narrow, not even wide enough to get two cars into the two-car garage -- and I found out that a substitute plow guy had done the driveway, and someone else had to come back to do the proper plowing. And I shoveled both walks of that really heavy snow, even though I pay to have that done. So there. In the meantime, sort of out of the blue, Mary Fukushima (whose website is the domain marykirkendoll.com) sent the recordings of her October premiere of my two flutudes from October 2008 (composed in that white heat during a 12-day teaching hiatus offered by the Jewish holidays that year), and not only was the recording of a very high quality, the performance itself was smokin'. I mean, really, off the charts hot (who knew beatboxing was so cool?). And the pieces, which I had completely forgotten, were pretty good, too. So immediately it occurred to me that I had to write more. On Tuesday I wrote down a few notes on a piece of ... gee, I hadn't used it in so long I forgot what it was called ... "manuscript paper" ... for a flute etude on harmonics and arpeggios, taking off on a few licks in both flutudes. And yesterday -- I finished flutude #3! Beff and I made the usual stabs at punny titles, and the winner, such as it is, was "Harm's Way". This way each flutude has a two-word title. Am I going to write a fourth one? Dunno yet. Meanwhile, dear reader, you can witness Mary's a-smokin' performances with the yellow links on the left and see the new flutude at the green link. And you can even relive classic times by watching my condensed instructional video with Mary demonstrating some of the special effects I was supposed to be using, at the white "Flute demos" link therein. So there. That movie was made in June 2008, and what it is, too. Lurching way back in time -- the Drinkwell pet fountain of which I wrote in the last update (a little cascade of drinking water for the cats) arrived at the beginning of this reporting period, and it was easy to put together and get going. This also involved reconfiguring the cat feeding area from a funny blue all-in-one contraption to a Drinkwell and a separate bowl for dry food. And guess what? That's what I did! And at Beff's urging, I took Flip videos of both cats encountering the device for the first time. You, dear reader, can witness those videos by clicking on the light gray "Cammy" and "Sunny" links to the left. Yes, you can! Yesterday (the day before today, but after Friday, which was the day that Beff spent fourteen hours of her day for an ACA "Board" meeting and jell-o thoughts for me) was a sparklingly busy day. Not only did I finish my flutude in the morning and start the Finale-ing at that time, but we also went to the parking lot at Shaw's to get our yearly Christmas tree -- we got a smallish one this year -- and gave a guy 35 bucks, drove it back, set it up, watered it, and Beff did the decorating. I like how shiny it is when the lights are lit. And not only did we do that -- we then had to go to Brandeis because I was doing one last makeup lesson, and while we were going in we thought we'd try out Sadie's Bar and Grill and Waltham, which had been recommended to us as a good place for Buffalo wings. The portions were huge for the price, and the wings were -- okay. Somewhere between mediocre and good. I could talk about the peppery aftertaste that lingers on the tongue, which I liked, but I won't. Because I am thinking about jell-o. Then was the lesson and the concert and we came back. The concert was pretty good, by the way. So there is still a bit of Theory 2 grading to do (I like to procrastinate, when I can get around to it, and that reminds me to develop a joke some time with a line in it similar to "Why has it taken you so long to start procrastinating?", but given the funny quotient maybe I won't), and pieces to write. Next up, I think, is a piano trio thing taking off on a hymn -- Beff has this commission, too -- and I chose a couple of hymns in Spanish as my taking off point. Also there is this four cello monstrosity, maybe a piano etude, and maybe some work on a Sondheim project whose details I don't have fully yet. I have plenty to keep me busy the next five weeks. And by the way, number of hours until my sabbatical just fell below 3500. Last Monday, by the way, ended on a high note. After three hours of makeup lessons in the morning and an afternoon spent on a panel awarding grants for the Festival of the Arts, I got to be in the Provost's office along with UV, the Dean, and a vice president for a surprise do wherein Eric Chasalow was awarded the Irving G. Fine Chair in Music. Which means he is now the Irving G. Fine Professor. UV and I milked the occasion for all the wine it was worth, and we made Eric tell stories. Eric tells good stories. And for the sake of mathematical completeness. On Thursday I went to the dentist. Coming up: no driving to speak of. Dinner with the Chafes at the Cast Iron Kitchen. The pieces to write mentioned above. Christmas in Maynard with all of Beff's family. And eating, drinking, and going to the bathroom. Next update: year-end roundup! This week's pictures begin with a view of pineconeness in the non-snowy version of the yard, followed by a grand slam breakfast I made for Beff on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Geoff and I got identical ones. Next is the Schroeder bobblehead in my office with some accoutrements. Then, SNOW! pictures. The first is the back yard in two-tone mode, since in light storms it doesn't accumulate in a small portion of yard. Next is the morning shot just after sunrise, trees seen from the front porch, and on the Assabet. The final shot is a closeup of part of the sketch for Harm's Way. Bye. DECEMBER 26 Breakfast was potato pancakes, fake bacon, orange juice, and coffee. Lunch was Trader Joe's French Onion Soup. Dinner last night was pork roast, cherry compote, soup, mushrooms, white wine, white wine, white wine, and red wine. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 7.9 and 41.5. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS Stairway to Heaven. LARGE EXPENSES SINCE LAST UPDATE Various charitable donations totalling $1000, new storm windows $1014, $28 for a new windowshade, shopping at Whole Foods $massive. COMPANIES THAT HAVE NOT COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY none. COMPANIES THAT HAVE COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY The Cast Iron Kitchen for the lunches and dinners (tonight, too!), and the 5&10 in West Concord. PET PEEVE cars in parking spaces that don't stay between the lines. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: My Four Lost Years began right after my four year stint at Princeton was up, and for the first year I took temp jobs in the area -- both of them at Educational Testing Service. I did about 4 weeks full-time at TOEFL, took a week off, and then got sent to the Test Center Administration of ETS for my second stint; they hired me away from the temp place at a steep cost, or so they said. I spent the days typing letters to people who were were getting someone to administer their standardized tests at remote places where no testing was otherwise available. It was less boring than it sounds, and I also occasionally used the Telex machine (oooh!). Best/worst pun I came up with while there -- a supervisor came to a nearby typing table to use the typewriter and asked, "doesn't this table have wings?"I answered, "Sometimes when I'm typing, the phone wings." Career note: during this first lost year: premiere of "Slange", which was to be my first published piece. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: Silent meows from Cammy when he is sleepy, and Sunny still visiting the little catnip patch near the gazebo. UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Performances, Compositions. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: Vrimskglot, the pattern formed on the inside of your mouth by your saliva just before you drool. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 6. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE The rage for distressed typewriter fonts in advertising in the mid 90s is largely my fault. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: Sunny weekends. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 14, 290. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE RECENTLY $2.57 in Maynard. THE POSTMAN ONLY RANG ONCE my head, ladybugs, a tree trunk, manhole covers, 'Round Midnight. As is usual for this part of this space, I am able to give you reportage that it is dreary outside, as this part of the country is brushed by the second "massive storm" in the last two weeks. For those of you with slide rules, that's an average of one massive storm per week. More on that later. No, wait. More on that now. Them What Make were up to they's old tricks for *last* weekend. That first Massive Storm had been forecast to pass to our east, thus giving us at most a dusting, though Cape Cod was supposed to get a foot or two of snow. About 48 hours before the storm's passing, we still had "snow showers" forecast for the weekend. Then suddenly -- Them What Make only do such things suddenly -- there was a Winter Storm Warning. And what we got was about 8 inches of very powdery and light stuff. Granted, in New England in February, 8 inches is a dusting (I can go elsewhere with that joke, but I won't), but before Christmas it has the stuff of calamity. Or clamato, I forget which. So our plow guys came and plowed us, and I shoveled the flat roof over the side porch, because it is what you do when you have a lot of snow on a flat roof and rain is predicted for later in the week. By the way -- today is later in the week, and it is raining. The freezing rain Them What Make warned of for this second massive storm (passing well to our west) -- well, of course it didn't happen. I waited until the last possible minute to record my grades online -- which was the 22nd -- after which there was the relief of a burden. That burden being the posting of my grades. This year's Theory 2 crop averages a bit better than last year's, but that's just because I'm older, and worth it. Meanwhile, as all we who read this space knew, I had finished a third flutude, whose link is still posted below. After that, it was to the second vacation piece on tap, which is a weird commission if ever there was one. It was Phoenix Concerts, for a 3- to 4-minute piano trio, for a hymn-themed concert in which all the new pieces take off on existing hymns (I like saying that because I can say "off" and "on" consecutively -- I wonder how many more ways there are to do that -- as well as also to use words that end "mn"). Beth has this commission, too. We were sent copies of possible hymns to use, and Beff chose one from "The Church Triumphant" section of the hymnal. I chose two that were in Spanish. I started before Beff and therefore finished before Beff, and I chose the formal scheme "fantasy" -- i.e. whatever the hell I wanna do whenever the hell I feel like it. I finished my piece, made scores and parts and sent them off on Tuesday of this week, and Beff finished hers on Wednesday. My title has Lennonesqueness to it -- Double Fantasy. Because, you see, I did whatever the hell I wanted to whenever the hell I felt like it, thus giving the piece fantasyesqueness, and it's based on two hymns, and ... well, dear reader, you fill in the rest. See green "Double Fantasy" link and the red link below it for the source hymns. And so what's up next? A weirder commission yet. Another brief piece, 3-5 minutes, this one for full orchestra (with piano!), for a kid's concert in May in which I write my music but hide quotes from Beethoven's Fifth inside. Je ne te merde pas. The concept of the whole concert is a bit complicated to go into, but they *are* doing a movement of "Stolen Moments", which will be an example of "a style", of which there will be several on the concert. And the audience will be asked to guess which composer could have written -- the piece I am about to start. My initial idea, given the premise, was to write a Stolen Moments II (This Time It's Personal), and that is cute, because then I would be responding to responding to jazz. And maybe I will, maybe I won't. I'm going to start work on it on Monday, but as of this typing I only have very vague musical ideas. Especially since -- how do you shop around a 5 minute orchestra piece? So, the current rattling in my brain is that it will be something like an "essay for orchestra" (say it again, Sam), to be joined, eventually, by more essays. Please don't make me call it an Etude. Oh yes, and the group is ... the Marine Chamber Orchestra, they will do the parts themselves, and I'll be there to own up to my theft of Beethoven. May 9, Alexandria, Virginia, and what it is, too. And by the way, I usually have quite a bit more lead time than this for orchestra music. But this leaves open the question of more movements for the four-cello piece, which I had also planned to work on during this vacation. It remains to be seen if I'll be able to get to it. So this makes this vacation already much more productive than last year's winter break, which was spent mostly waiting for Eric Hill to tell me just what he wanted for the Hecuba music, and then ... writing it. Speaking of which ... a video of a small part of the production of Hecuba got posted on vimeo as an example of someone's backdrop designs, and you can hear some of the music I writed. And the sound that happens when the staffs strike the floor is some combo of me hitting piano strings and col legno battuto noises, I think. See yellow "Hecuba" link below. Meanwhile, there was eating and drinking to do, and we did as much as we did, but not more, and we took walks and went to the bathroom, but never at the same time (at least that we are aware of). Beff arrived for a long stint last Friday, we did the Cast Iron Kitchen, did a call with our financial advisor, took walks, did shopping and all that. On the day after the 8 inch dusting, we drove into Brandeis because Beff wanted to see a particular orchestration in Pulcinella, and the Brandeis library was the closest place with a score of said piece of music, and we drove in, got the score, stopped at Whole Foods on the way back, and had a fire. Beff is, herself, working on something for orchestra -- the U Maine one -- and one guesses she wanted to do something like that Pulcinella orchestration. The conductor, by the way, wants her to integrate video in the piece, and she's finally going to use the massive train footage that we accumulated some while ago -- including 13 movies of trains in Bogliasco, Italy, from May 2006, and a VCCA train in January 06. Just to make sure there was footage to work with, we went to West Concord specifically to get a movie of the gates closing as a train approaches the commuter rail station, and I had the iPod nano and Beff the Flip. Beff positioned herself to film the train approaching the station, and me across the street to get the gates closing -- and wouldn'tcha know, the iPod ran out of battery as it was doing the movie, and the Flip -- Beff didn't manage actually to press that little red "record" button -- bad design, especially if it's 17 degrees and you are wearing gloves. But hey, I got some candy there for Martler, so it wasn't a totally wasted trip. And my spring semester schedule continues to morph -- that May 9 thing in Virginia being just one of the new events on my calendar. I had been slated to be on an external review committee for UC Santa Cruz in February, and meanwhile the Chicago Chamber Musicians programmed Hyperblue on one of their concerts happening at the same time (the concert was actually curated by my homey Lee Hyla, who has fewer letters in both names than I do in my last one). So I was SOL. The review, though, got postponed by a year at least, which freed up those days for going to the Chicago performance, which is what I will do. And even do some sort of colloquium at Northwestern the day after. So there, smarty pants. I also know my Utah dates -- April 5-6 for UU and 7-8 for BYU. As to my thing at Eastman, no idea still. But May 9 -- definitely I'll be in Alexandria, Virginia, playing the part of the thief. Download 2.79 Mb. Share with your friends:
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