Author: Dale

Listening

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In the Ongoing Listening Project, I am done listening to the Gesualdo Tenebrae. As promised, the harmonies are twisted and startling. The texts are unfamiliar, however, so they don’t jump out at me or stick in my head.

The other problem is that half of each piece is extended recitative/chanting. Very nicely done, but not memorable, and the motets themselves get lost. I tuned out the chant and wouldn’t even be listening by the time the motet started.

So this will go into the collection, but I don’t think I’ll be downloading it to the iTunes collection.

I moved on to a CD called Pacifica, by one Fred Frith, if that is his real name. This is a CD that Marc discovered online, decided it sounded interesting, and in what I’m sure was an act of kindness sent it to me as a gift back during one of my “Oh woe why can’t I compose” periods. Marc has always encouraged me to break free of the tyrannies of Western formal music, forgetting that I don’t play any instrument well enough to improvise. (I downloaded the iPhone app Ocarina last night, so maybe I can learn that.)

So I popped it into the CD player in the van, and I toughed it out for several days. It has not grown on me. I understand the process, but I am not engaged by the product. It’s mostly ugly. This one goes into the Lacuna Fun Tub so I can share it with Marc.

Now I’m listening to another Mercury Living Presence re-release, entitled Music for Quiet Listening. This is the one filled with mellow pieces from the middle of last century, all winners of a competition funded by a music-loving businessman who hated the serialism that was so fashionable in our schools and conservatories at the time. He put his money where his mouth was and commissioned pretty music.

I’ll report back in a few days.

I do not understand

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So today’s Composer’s Datebook talks about Ellen Zwilich’s “The Gardens” Symphony, and it sounded interesting enough for me to buy it, if I were allowing myself to by anything before June.

What I do instead these days is go to Amazon and put it on my wishlist. That way, when I finally run out of things to listen to and read and am honest about being able to buy stuff again, I haven’t lost any of my momentary interests to the flood of time.

However.

On Amazon, there is “one new or used” CD of this piece, for $68.88. It was released in 2000 and is clearly out of print. It is nowhere on the iTunes Store.

Why is this? In this day and age, there is no reason, none, not one, why a complete back catalog cannot be available on demand. It’s on CD, for heaven’s sake, it’s already digital. Just plop it on a server and serve it up!

Someone is missing the point out there.

Tango lessons

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Last night Ginny and I went up to the Take Hold dance studio/ballroom on Miami Circle (off Piedmont Avenue), where a concern called Tango Bohemia offers Argentine tango lessons. It’s a series of eight lessons for beginners.

Despite our past with dance, despite the fact that our ability to partner each other was a major attraction in those first hormonal months together, we were a bit at a loss as how to do this. Since we haven’t had an opportunity to dance with each other, I mean actually dance, in so long, we’re going to have to relearn that touch. Still, we had a great time and look forward to the next seven weeks.

I don’t know what we think we’re going to do with this skill once we’ve learned it. I mean, does Alamo Jack’s have tango nights? I’ll put in a dance patio on the upper part of the back yard where the Mercedes used to sit, overlooking the labyrinth. We can string paper lanterns for illumination, and dance with the glitter of fireflies and our love.

Labyrinth, 2/1/09

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Beautiful day outside, and actual free time. So I worked in the back yard all day, finally getting the labyrinth seeded with grass seed.

Since it’s been over a month since I finished getting all the topsoil in, I had to go back and till the entire thing with my handy little garden weasel style tiller. Sounds hard, but it wasn’t, since the dirt was two inches of loose dirt to begin with. It only took about an hour to churn up the whole thing.

Here it is partly finished. I thought this was a pretty shot:

Here’s a close-up. In the afternoon light, the chunks of dirt formed lovely patterns:

Then I had to go back and break up all the chunks with a garden rake. That also took about an hour:

Finally, I mixed my two bags of deep shade grass seed with the bag of winter rye, and proceeded to sow my seed. Finally I covered it all with straw. You will notice that although my supplier sold me too much dirt (I’m still figuring out what to do with about three wheelbarrows full), they didn’t sell me enough straw. Or maybe I don’t know how to distribute it. No matter, I will buy more tomorrow.

I also did a general cleanup of the back yard, cutting up limbs and stacking wood; moving patio furniture around; and cleaning up where the old Mercedes -Benz used to sit. (We sold it last week.) The dirt there smells awfully of gasoline.

Quick rant

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All right, people, screw bipartisanship. Working with your ideological opposites is not a Good. It’s just a nice idea. And since I cannot say it better than Jamison Foser over at Media Matters, I will simply quote him:

Sure, people want the politicians to stop bickering and get things done. But, more specifically, most people want the politicians to stop bickering and do things they want done. A single mother working two minimum-wage jobs to feed her kids might want politicians to come together in a spirit of bipartisanship — but she doesn’t want them to pass bipartisan legislation lowering the minimum wage; she wants a bipartisan bill raising the minimum wage. If she can’t have that, I suspect she’d take a party-line minimum-wage increase, even if it means a decrease in the bonhomie at Washington cocktail parties she’ll never attend.

That is all.

Doodling, 1/29/09

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Many things to do tonight, starting with this post.

In support of our explorations over at Lacuna Group, Wednesday nights if you’d like to join us, and you really really should, I dragged out the 341 poem, which, if you recall, was the first thing that emerged during the 365 project.

It’s actually not bad stuff, and so I made a decision last night to work seriously on it for a while. I may not keep everyone updated as I did back in the day, but if something good happens you’ll be the first to know. You can read all the posts about the poem as it stands now here.

The first thing I have to do, of course, because I want this to be a thing I can work on diligently, is to give it its own Moleskine notebook. I’ve pulled out a small one from my music drawers and am in the process, as I work on other things during the evening, of painting a cover on it.

This is not exactly the waste book approach, but this is not exactly a waste book process. I can focus my “poem energies” in this one place. Or so goes my theory.

In other news, I have listened to John Adams’ Gnarly Buttons and John’s Book of Alleged Dances in the van for a couple of days now and can report on its status. (This is from the stack of CDs on my desk that I’m trying to whittle down.)

Gnarly Buttons is a little mini-concerto for clarinet and is very appealing in many ways. It has some back story to it, but I didn’t read that until I had already made my decision about the piece.

It’s rhythmically complex, almost excessively so, and scored for an extremely oddball assortment: English horn, bassoon, 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass, banjo/mandolin/guitar, and two sampler/pianos who play all kinds of weird sounds, including at one point a moo. (That’s right, a moo.) However, the orchestration is deft and never uninteresting.

There is even actual emotion in several places. On the whole, I think Gnarly Buttons is a keeper.

I’m still unsure of John’s Book of Alleged Dances, a set of 11 short bits for string quartet and prepared tape. It’s not uninteresting, but after I’ve listened to it I’ve already forgotten it. I’m thinking I will not be adding it to iTunes like Gnarly Buttons.

Next up: Tenebrae, by Don Carlo Gesualdo, actual Renaissance prince of Venosa. Gesualdo felt no compunction to follow anyone’s rules, societal or compositional, and his music is usually described as “lurid.” It is good to be the king.

Teaching and testing

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I’ve spent the past few days working with 1st graders, trying to show them atlases and dictionaries, and then at the very end of the session, sneak the internet in.

Why? Because on one standardized test or another, there is a question which asks them which would be the best place to find a picture of some animal. Would you look in an atlas, in a dictionary, or on the internet?

Whoever wrote the test item knows that dictionaries don’t have pictures. Except, of course, when you’re six years old, and the whole frickin’ dictionary is pictures.

Up and down the grade levels, our standardized tests ask similarly narrow-minded questions about reference sources that indicate that the people who wrote the test items do not know how the information society works, at least since 2000.

This has been a message for those who think that they’re getting reliable data from those standardized tests.

More good times in teaching

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Last fall I applied for and got a National Endowment for the Humanities package called Picturing America: twenty or so gorgeous prints of notable American works of art that illustrate one or more American characteristics. These are double-sided, heavily laminated, and are accompanied by a really good teacher’s guide.

I’ve been posting them on my bulletin board, with the heading I Have a Question… I post a question, and the first student who researches the correct answer gets a free book.

This week, it’s been Norman Rockwell’s “The Freedom of Speech”:

The first question is “What’s going on in this photo?” And a kid we’ll call Jimmy figured out that it was a debate. (Technically, it’s a town hall meeting, but let’s give the little Southern kid a break here.)

Then I asked, “Where does the freedom of speech come from?” And Bobby quickly found the 1st Amendment.

Finally, this afternoon I posted, “What exactly does freedom of speech mean?”

Jimmy was back in the media center, this time with his friend Huck. Huck and Jim had a pretty good idea what it meant, but they weren’t putting their finger on the crux of the issue. They found a Constitutional dictionary. They found a book called Constitution translated for kids. They even found the vertical file folder on the Constitution.

Every time, they reported what they found, but it was never the exact answer I was hoping they’d find. Finally, I asked if they had read the actual Amendment itself. They quickly pounced on a copy, and within 60 seconds Jimmy was at my desk, announcing that the freedom of speech meant that the government could not control what was acceptable speech and what was not.

Bingo.

And to make it even more wonderful, he selected as his book a Star Wars novel that Huck had been shooting for and gave it to Huck. I love my job.

A revelation!

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Get me the President on the phone. I’ve just had an insight that’s bloody brilliant in re: negotiating with our new BFF, the Republicans, over the stimulus package.

I am reminded of Green Acres, that masterpiece of American absurdism, whenever Oliver Douglas went to haggle with Mr. Haney. Oliver would behave in a rational manner, starting with a low bid, and then when Mr. Haney countered with something higher, attempting to meet Mr. Haney somewhere in the middle.

Except it never worked like that. Every time Oliver would raise his offer, Mr. Haney would respond by raising his. Rather than the paradigm of honorable compromise that Oliver was following, Mr. Haney saw that he didn’t have to give anything away because his opponent was willing to give up what he had started with.

This is in fact what is happening now with the Republicans and the stimulus package. President Obama stated his goals with the stimulus package, and the Republicans immediately made a counteroffer: more tax cuts. The President offers to cut taxes, the Republican counter with “no contraceptives!” And so it goes.

Instead, the Current President should enter that room with the Republicans this afternoon and deal with them like Lisa Douglas: they say to ditch the contraceptives, he returns with raised taxes. They respond with OK, you can keep the contraceptives. He responds with draconian regulation of Wall Street. They say, OK, Clinton-level income tax rates, but that’s our final offer.

You see how that works? When you’re dealing with Mr. Haney, you have to be Lisa Douglas.

Hm. Haney. Cheney. Mere coincidence? I think not.

Random thoughts

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Today (Jan. 27) is the birthday of both Mozart and Lewis Carroll. I’m setting my iTunes now to celebrate. (Yes, I could celebrate Alice on iTunes, had I actually uploaded David del Tredici’s In Memory of a Summer’s Day, one of his several pieces based on the Alice books. It opens with sweeping strings and a wind machine, a thrilling effect.)

Have you ever noticed that a person who drives 35 mph in a 45 mph zone will maintain that speed when he hits the 25 mph school zone? From this we are allowed to conclude that such a person is senile or drunk or both.

The rightwing noise machine is in full roar:

  • making up Congressional Budget Office reports
  • making up Al Qaeda operatives released from Guantanamo (61 is the magic number, pulled from its ass by the Pentagon, and let us not forget the actual releasees are prisoners freed by the Previous Administration because it had completely botched their interrogation/imprisonment)
  • stating flatly that terrorists are going to be let go in the middle of our fair country (we need to invest in companies that make rubber bedsheets and Depends, apparently)
  • stating flatly that an extension of Medicaid benefits in these troubled times for the victims of the PA’s policies is nothing more than pork spending by Pelosi on contraceptives (because if you’ve lost your job, you should not be having sex!)
  • stating flatly that the stimulus package won’t benefit anyone for years and years and years (despite an actual CBO report that says the opposite)
  • and in trivial matters, comparing the cost of Bush’s last inauguration minus the cost of security to that of Obama’s plus the cost of security

There’s more, there always is, but it’s too wearisome. I am curious to see whether the public will fall for the terror!+egregious spending!!+people-not-like-you-and-me having sex!!!! smokescreens this time. I work with some who do so only too gladly, and the number of media people who parrot these lies without correction is very disturbing. Still, I have hope.