I spent most of today at Clayton State, hosting the parent orientation video for the Governor’s Honors Program. Ten times I listen to my voice narrate the same video, and then I answer many of the same questions afterwards. Not hard work, and the parents are mostly nice and not too frantic about the situation. (Notice that I was at Clayton State, not at Pebblebrook, where the dance mamas are all frantic.)

I continued opening the orchestral scores in Finale 2007, converting them from Finale 2006. There are some strangenesses occurring. For example, most ritards/rallentandos, anything that uses a gently sloping line to define the slowing of the tempo, essentially stopped playing. I switched all of those from using the gently sloping line to just slowing the tempo down. The orchestra will read rallentando, and the mp3s will sound as if they’ve slowed, so it’s the best compromise for the moment.

Some files lost track of which instruments had been assigned to which staff. That’s tedious to fix, but not a terrible thing.

The strings are interpreting any nonslurred sixteenth notes as spiccato, which is rarely the way I want them played. That must have to do with the Garritan Personal Orchestra instruments and the way they are interpreted by the new program. It sucks. I’d like it if Garritan fixed all their stuff soon.

The ratchet, which shows up in Postcard, is very timid, not like the nice loud whacker in 2006.

Some frustrations.

Later: after spending all day informing parents about what GHP is about, I joined Ginny at the Ferst Center for Momix’s Lunar Sea. Gimmicky, but fun, and often very beautiful.

The whole show was behind a scrim, onto which hallucinatory images were projected. Behind the scrim, the dancers were clad in blacklight costumes, and that’s all we saw the whole evening, costumes and props. Often there would be partners clad completely in black, so that the blacklight dancers appeared to float or otherwise defy gravity. Like I said, very gimmicky, but often compelling images.

The curtain call was the most fun curtain call I’ve seen in a long time: first, a company call (minus the scrim) in their black suits, then a second one in their spandex, followed by individual dance riffs by each dancer, presumably to impress upon us that these are “real” dancers. And they were. The men especially were quite impressive in their little spandex shorts: built like bodybuilders, they moved with balletic speed and grace. They were beautifully strong and beautifully graceful. Damn them.