I officially declare this blog to be boring.
Where is the wit, the observation, the soul-bearing? Feh. It is to laugh.
So I’m thinking to myself, what I need is a new project. This would be in addition to Coriolanus over at lacunagroup.org, and in addition to prepping William Blake’s Inn for UGA. After all, those only take me through October, right?
I have before me two books. One is A quiet strength: meditations on the masculine soul. The other is Affirmations for artists. Never mind why I have them, I just have them.
So I think what I need to do is to discipline myself to write every day, to open one of these books and to respond to the topic on the first page and work my way through the book. I wouldn’t necessarily respond to the actual meditation, mind you, because they’re pretty lame, but perhaps I can do better with the material.
The Quiet strength book is actually daily meditations, so that would last an entire year. The Affirmations book is only 200 or so terms in alphabetical order, so that would only take me through next spring.
What is the sense of the assembly?
The end of GHP is always heartbreaking. Even though I’ve done it for 24 years, it’s still the first time for each year’s group of students and the loss is devastating to them. It gets to me every year.
Things that make me sad:
It’s the last week of GHP, and boy are my arms tired. This place will wear you out, both physically and emotionally.
Remember this list?
Let’s see what I accomplished during the last five weeks. I poked at the double bass suite, knocking out a trivial Fanfare without an ending. (I also got the first 20 measures of the Trio for Piano, Trombone, and Alto Sax written, but that’s a bonus. And I’m almost finished with the two-piano arrangement of “Milky Way.”)
That’s it. That’s all I’ve managed to do. And you will have noticed that I certainly haven’t blogged this summer, unlike last summer when I was in the final throes of my 365 project. It’s been an odd summer.
It hasn’t been a bad summer by any means. The kids have been sweet and productive, the faculty has been great, and even VSU hasn’t been too unsupportive. There have been some amazing moments: the foreign language Cabaret, the choral concert, a couple of the chamber pieces. The kids attending my period dance seminars have been eager and adept. I’ve had friends around me. I’ve lost anywhere from seven to nine pounds, depending on the day.
But on the creative front, it’s been a bust. I don’t know why I’m going through such a dry spell. Part of it is time and energy: at 1:30 in the afternoon, I somehow can’t manage to get my brain to kick in to produce anything. I’m a morning person, or a late night person.
I am excited about the future. The Lichtenbergian/Lacunians are kicking around an all-male production of Coriolanus, and that’s the first script I’ve been eager to do in years. I’ve also discovered, via Jobie, a new way of doing theatre that I’m excited about sharing and exploring once I get back home.
I also think that once I’m back home and settled in, all the creativity/work involved in getting Coriolanus on the boards will jumpstart all my other projects. The two choral works are due in August, so I’ll have a deadline to work against. All this is to the good.
This is completely rambling. Sorry about that. It’s been that kind of summer.
UPDATE: At breakfast just now, one of the students came up to the table and asked one of the teachers to take a picture of him with me. A gentle reminder from the universe that you don’t always get to assign the meaning to your life.
I sent the unfinished “Fanfare for Double Bass Duo & Marimba” to be looked over by the musicians. I had an ending to it, but it was silly, so I lopped it off before sending the rest of it.
I’ve been working on a two-piano arrangement of “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way,” or as the Lacuna chorus always referred to it, “Ah, Number 10…” My reasons for doing so? It’s a beautiful piece, and it’s not going to get performed any time soon with the orchestral accompaniment, and the original “piano score” was actually a sketch using a piano voicing but is way too spread out to be played by two hands. Two pianos can actually cover all the notes, plus the ones I added when I orchestrated it. One piano would be easier to convince someone to do, but I’m sticking with two for the moment.
Anyway, that’s been going well, and it’s not hard. I just duplicated the piano part, and all I’ve had to do is go back and delete some notes, double other notes, and revoice some of it.
And today, I actually made myself do some abortive sketches for Maila’s Trio. Ironically, I went back to read the Lichtenbergian Assignment featuring the nonexistent work to get some ideas for it.
Here’s the fragment I got done today. It’s kind of nice, I think. Where the trombone is going to fit in, God only knows.
In accordance with the Lyles Policy Towards Double Bass Music (that would be Grayson, and “more of it” pretty much sums it up), I have worked this morning on “Fanfare for Double Bass Duo & Marimba.”
You may recall that last summer I wrote “Dance for Double Bass Duo & Marimba,” and it was well-received. And you may also recall that I have posited creating companion pieces for it, i.e., “Fanfare” and “Threnody.” That’s what I’m working on this morning. To be realistic, if I wanted it played this summer, I’d need to finish it this morning. There are only three weeks left in the program.
However, I’m taking a break. We’ll see if I get back to it today.
One of VSU’s cataloging librarians stopped me during preplanning and asked for a second copy of the score and parts to “Dance.” I had given copies to the GHP collection last summer, and had cataloged it for them for good measure. This particular librarian worked for GHP a couple of summers and is a nice guy; he wanted a copy for VSU’s collection, although both copies are shelved in the same place. You can see for yourself by going to the Odum Library catalog and looking up “Dale Lyles.” For kicks, look at the full display.
Anyway, that was gratifying.
What’s going on in Pan-Dimensional Mouse Land? I am, curiously, more often than not feeling that I am only a bit in this dimension. I am not disconnected, mind you, but I do feel more as if I were in more places than this, dabbling in the running of this program in one dimension while doing… something else?… elsewhere. If that makes any sense.
This is the All-Campus Chorus weekend, and we’ll be doing Fauré’s Requiem this afternoon. It should be quite lovely; the chorus is first-rate and practically had it ready for performance the first rehearsal on Friday night. (Half the chorus is made up of vocal majors and minors, but the other half just showed up Friday night to sing this weekend.) Pronunciation of the Latin has been a non-issue; notes have been almost perfect; even phrasing has been easy. That’s fun.
The strings/orchestra are really good again this year. The strings will handle the first half of the concert on their own, with Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, which is a pretty piece; and Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, which is one of the most sumptuous pieces ever written. Given how well the strings knocked out the Holst St. Paul Suite last Thursday, it should be most satisfying.
I got to teach some Shakespearean nuts and bolts to Amy Cain’s theatre majors for the last three days, about an hour each day. We covered how to disentangle all those words by using our English grammar skills: find the root sentence, and then figure out the vocal arc of that. Then start adding all those clauses and phrases and lists and appositives back in, always maintaining the arc of the root sentence.
We glanced at Lessac-ian issues of vowels and consonants and airstream. We looked at how you could explore opposing emotional impulses using the same text. We worshipped at the altar of Maggie Smith, who is after all a goddess. I had a great time.
I’ve been wearing my Utilikilt since last week, a couple of days a week, and it no longer attracts attention, except for the random kid (usually a boy) who feels compelled to affirm my rad-ness.
Jobie’s been showing Lord of the Rings in the lobby of the dorm on Saturday nights. We’ve been having a good time with that, admiring the movies while taking potshots at them. A never-ending source of debate, given the jumble of genders and sexualities present in the lobby at any given time, is who’s hot and who’s meh.
Three weeks down, three weeks to go.
From today’s Composers Datebook:
In the Guinness Book of World Records, the record for the biggest, longest, most massively orchestrated symphony of all time is held by the “Gothic Symphony “of the British composer Havergal Brian.
This Symphony was composed between 1919 and 1922, but didn’t receive its first performance until some 40 years later, on June 24th in 1961, when Bryan Fairfax conducted it for the first time in Westminster.
Brian was born in 1876, to working class parents, and despite his talent and the encouragement of his fellow English composers Edward Elgar and Granville Bantock, and the leading German composer of his day, Richard Strauss, to whom Brian dedicated his “Gothic” Symphony, Brian’s musical career never caught hold. Perhaps it was class discrimination, or simply poverty resulting from the personal disruption of two marriages and several children.
Whatever the reason, for most of his life Brian toiled on in obscurity. With the deaths of Elgar and Bantock, Brian lost what little collegial support he had. Only late in his life did his work start to attract attention, when composer and BBC music producer, Robert Simpson, discovered his music and arranged for some performances.
By the time of his death in 1972, Brian had completed 32 symphonies. Although the BBC had committed to performing all of them, not a note of his music was commercially issued on record during his lifetime, and Brian died without ever having heard most of his symphonies performed.
There it is. I actually acquired the “Gothic” years ago. It is a huge, sprawling, messy, glorious affair.
I have been enjoying myself immensely creating ein Spaß for the campus, which I’ve chosen to call the Fool’s Errand. I have stolen wholesale the concept of Improv Everywhere‘s mp3 experiments, and almost wholesale the script and structure of their fourth endeavor, adapting it for the VSU campus and the GHP mindset.
The idea, for those of you who have not seen IE’s video, is for people to download an mp3 to their player, not listen to it, and then show up at the appointed time and place. Upon a signal, they begin to play the mp3 and to follow the directions from Steve, the omnipotent voice from above.
What follows is gentle silliness, the madness of crowds, and all-round street theatre. They follow a leader (Jobie in a fool’s hat), play a “fun game” on the pedestrian walk using the bricked streetscape, gather on West Lawn, take photos, do the “human dart board” thing, play freeze tag, and then suffer a ridiculous relaxation exercise from Kevin, Steve’s eternally annoying sidekick.
It’s been a lot of fun studying the original IE experiment, walking out the structure of it on our campus, making some creative changes, and finally writing the script and producing the mp3. In doing so, I’ve learned how to use GarageBand, Apple’s sound machine software. Very cool. I had started to use Logic Express, their consumer-level pro sound software, but GarageBand was a lot easier to deal with and accomplished exactly what I needed to do. Logic can wait till later.
Just now, as I went to transmogrify the .m4a file that GarageBand saves to disk into an .mp3 file for general consumption, I discovered that I own a third pro sound software tool: Apple’s Soundtrack. I honestly didn’t know I had it. It must have been installed with Final Cut Express, the video editing software that I use a lot. It allows you to preview your video in a little window and create literally the soundtrack for that video. After you get the timing right (and it has all those little video timing things), then you import the soundtrack into your video file. Sounds right handy, if one’s main focus in life were doing that kind of thing.
Anyway, I was thinking I might score the Fool’s Errand myself, but clearly I was not thinking clearly. I had two pieces from my new age album, Stars on Snow, both the title work and a bagatelle called “Air Pudding,” but that wasn’t nearly enough, and I don’t know how I thought I was going to have the time actually to write 25 more minutes of music.
So I ended up using other people’s music, a nice melange of Ray Lynch, Tosca, and that fraud Constance Demby. I did use “Stars on Snow” as the relaxation bit.
It should be a lot of fun. I’m keeping my authorship a secret from the kids, so it will be fun to go and be a part of it and watch it unfold. I’ll post a report on how it went.
Here I am in Valdosta, prepping for the 2008 Georgia Governor’s Honors Program. It is always a very strange mise en scene: I arrive, alone in the dorm, with three other administrators, who are in other dorms. The campus is nearly empty between semesters; the very sidewalks have an unreal quality, as if carved out of someone’s imagination for the occasion and witnessed by me in some kind of hallucination.
It is my job to begin the incantations to bring this place to life, to begin generating the lists and pieces of paper and keys and classrooms and bedtime stories that make it possible for this place to rise from the haze of the Valdosta heat every June.
I have a script I follow: over the years I have put together a step-by-step How to Start GHP kind of document. I have come to rely on it and am consequently startled by some of the steps. Because I’ve written them into a document, a booke of magyck, I don’t have to remember them, and sometimes I don’t.
My competence is comforting to me. A couple of years ago I found myself in charge of the keys to the classrooms. They were just handed to me, in a tangled mess from previous years, and I had to hammer out the truth of who needed what and what we had to give them and what we had to squeeze from Key Services. In accordance with the Lyles Theorem of Process Development, it is the third summer of my being in charge and I have perfected it. Tonight I hit a button in my database, printed out a sheet of paper for each instructor, and pulled keys from this super-organized key box I made them buy me last summer.
What took me weeks of agony the first summer was done, and accurately, in about 40 minutes. I have two people who need completely new sets of keys, but I know who they are and what they need. By the time they get here tomorrow, their keys will already have been requested.
There are always glitches, of course. This year it’s the fact that VSU’s semester just ended on Friday, so they’re scrambling nobly to switch our classrooms out from their rows of desks to our tables and chairs, and to deliver the hundreds of boxes of stuff to all the rooms. My problem is that the sixteen or so crates of stuff for the faculty dorm have not been delivered. I usually am through unpacking all of that by now. However, that’s kind of minor. I can work around not having my office supplies for the most part, although I wish I had my bathmat and my martini glasses. Let’s get our priorities straight here!
I’ve even had time to exercise, if you can call a brisk stroll around the Magic Square exercise. No time to work on anybody’s music, of course. That probably is not going to happen until next week, after I get the minors sorted out on Thursday.
Tomorrow the faculty arrives. Sunday the kids arrive. And so it begins again.
It’s Sunday night, June 1. I have packed my worldly possessions for the Great Trek south tomorrow morning, I’ve cooked a nice meal for my family, and now I sit in my backyard by the fire, blogging and thinking.
I’m alone, because it is 9:00 and I fear it is too late to call anyone to see if they’d like to come sit and drink with me. I know that’s wrong. I know at least one Lichtenbergian is sitting at home, wondering if there is fire and drink to be had anywhere in the Society, but I fear rejection. Sorry, guys.
I’ve watched Patagonia go up in flames, I may have mentioned that I weeded a couple hundred books from my collection at school: 25-year-old treatises on various countries that were above K-5 reading level anyway, and now wood is joining the fire.
Brief interlude, in which I have gone across the street because the neighbor lady’s young dog has been hit by a car. It is dead. Grayson and I have dug a grave for the poor thing, after assuring its owner that it is actually dead. I had just actually met the dog this afternoon, although it has been living there for at least a month after having taken up with the neighbor. Bless everyone’s heart. It is something of a mystery to put a still-warm being into a bag.
I have a new blog to read, World on Ice, written by my old friend Robyn Ice, an attorney in NYC. It was she who, years ago in the UGA costume shop, who first figured out there was something between Miss Henninger and myself and who asked about the nature of that relationship. I told her I was not sure what Miss Henninger felt, but I was certain that she was The One. “Then go and get her,” Robyn said. And so I did.
Robyn’s still-young blog sounds just like her: literate, warm, charming, witty. So far, it seems to be a lot about the great mysteries of being a Grown-Up. How did we get here, and how do we keep fooling the rest of the world?
I was going to bid on another Utilikilt on Ebay, but I missed it in being called to deal with the dog. Oh well. I should know by now that I should just order a new one and be done with it. (Although the model I was bidding on does not seem to be available right now from utilikilts.com.)
As I try to seal off my life here and get out of town for the summer, Jeff Bishop has written me asking me to contribute heavily to his article about the history of musicals in Newnan. I don’t like musicals. That’s why we did them only every other year, and why we never did the Top 10. But I’ll write something nice for public consumption.
Yes, I’m rambling, but it’s been a long day and I am coming to a point.
Here’s the point: tomorrow I drive to Valdosta to perform my duties as the assistant program director for the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program. All the data we have indicates that we are not bragging when we joke that we’re the best summer gifted experience around. If we’re the best in the U.S., then more than likely we’re the best in the world. And I’m the person with the most direct influence on what goes on in the classroom. I love this.
So other than working from 6:00 a.m. until 11:30 p.m. for six weeks, what do I hope to accomplish? Here’s a list:
And of course there’s the Lichtenbergian/Lacuna production of Coriolanus. So far, so interesting.
Does anyone have anything else they’d like me to work on?