Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Symphony No. 1 in G major

Posted on by Dale

I know—two posts in one day!

I’ve been cleaning up both my study and my hard drive, rearranging both to be more efficient.  One thing I’m doing on the hard drive is to update all my old music files into the new Finale so that nothing gets left behind. Some pretty old stuff in there, too!

One of those items was the Symphony No. 1 in G major.  I was asked to write it by the strings teacher at GHP in 2007 to be performed the following summer.  (I won’t name him here since I don’t want to embarrass him, since he should already be embarrassed about never playing the Cello Sonata Stephen Czarkowski!!)  When he decided to not to return to GHP for the next summer, I abandoned the work.  I was past the point of putting that much work into something that would never be performed.

Now that I’m retired, however, things are different.  Who cares if it’s never performed?  If it’s worth finishing, then it will give me something to do.

And I think it’s worth finishing.

Here’s the third movement, Allegro gracioso, which I had finished the day before I abandoned the work.  It’s rather nice.

And then there was the fourth movement. Problematic, resistant to completion or even to persuasion, it was a problem child.

But my, there’s some lovely stuff in there. I will post it here, but you have to realize that it’s a pastiche, just stuff I was throwing at the wall to see what stuck.  You will hear passages with just a piano; those are sketches for what might come next or bridge a gap.  You will hear gaps: my method was to skip a few measures and plop some new section in and worry about getting from point A to point B later.  There is no ending.  And Finale is its usual less-than-subtle self in translating an old file to the new format. But there is some nice stuff going on.

IV. Lento; allegro mp3

Speaking in tongues

Posted on by Dale

Every once in a while, back when I was media specialist at East Coweta High School, I would peruse a copy of Popular Mechanics or Car & Rider just to see if they were still written in code. They always were.

I got the same feeling during curling during the Olympics, and again this afternoon at an airport bar where they had a golf tournament on closed captioning. The sentence was:

“The question now is whether he has to lag it or cozy it down.”

I mean to say, wot? (Of course, all sports talk sounds like this to me.)

Yes, I know, it could very well be bad lip reading on the part of the automated CC’er. (For giggles sometime, go to YouTube and turn on closed captioning.) But somehow I don’t think it is. I think it’s plain old jargonitis, the curse of insiders and specialists everywhere.

They think they are speaking to fellow aficionados, and as long they’re sure about that audience I have no problem with it. But if there’s even the slightest chance that some of the people listening to you are not part of your club, and it is part of your mission to make them a part of your club, THOU SHALT NOT SPEAK IN JARGON.

I am saying this not as a complaint about CBS’s sportscasters—because as far as I’m concerned they are correct in ignoring me as a viewer—but as a warning to my fellow educators. Do not ask your students to fleem the gnargles or to adjust the gobo on the miniPAR or click on the widget in the navbar without double–checking your own assumptions about what those words mean. If there’s any chance that your audience’s eyes might glaze over, stop it..

Just stop it. Stop talking to the boys in the club. Start teaching instead.

Lichtenbergian goals, 2014

Posted on by Dale

It’s that time of year again for me to explain myself: the Lichtenbergians had our Annual Meeting last Saturday night, and as usual we had to declare our creative goals for the coming year.

I was astonished to find that I had actually met some of my 2013 goals, mostly because I could not remember what they were.  (I was not astonished to find that I hadn’t even blogged about them last  year.)  Honestly, all I could remember was that I had once again listed the Five Easier Pieces and a song for John Tibbetts as goals, and that I had done neither.  Also honestly, “continuing to work on the Book of the Labyrinth” was not that arduous a goal, but after the year I’ve had, I’ll take what I can get.

But recently I think I may have gotten traction in my creative impulses, and so I’ve gotten bolder for my 2014 goals.  Here they are:

Five Easier Pieces

A set of piano pieces that serve as companion to and apology for Six Preludes (no fugues).  I actually struck a blow at these over the year, but I think now I’m ready to proceed.

A song for John Tibbetts

This one just gets tougher the longer I wait, because the longer I wait, the more he becomes friends with real, world-wide famous composers and the better taste he develops. I have written the text, so that’s a start.

SUN TRUE FIRE

One of the most common form of spam comments on blogs these days is the kind that uses a netbot to assemble random passages of text from the internet at large and then paste them into the body of emails in blocks of about 50 words, accompanied by links to dangerous places.  Mostly these are about one “paragraph” long, but recently the Lichtenbergian site received one that is magnificent in its length and in its poetry.  You can see it here.

I want to write a work for chorus, soli, and orchestra based on this text.  In 2014, my plan is immerse myself in the possibilities of the text and to quite frankly “steal” bits from pieces of music that appeal to me and to write fragments of music based on those bits.  It’s kind of a training year in that regard.  In 2015, perhaps, I’ll start to work on the piece directly.  SUN TRUE FIRE.

Waste Books

To that end, and to all these ends, I am going to embark on a year-long waste book project.

One of the things Georg Christoph Lichtenberg is famous for is his aphorisms.  (I would direct you to the Lichtenbergian website to see some of them, but the Quote Rotator plug-in broke on the last WordPress update.  Try here.)  His practice was to jot down in a notebook all the random thoughts that occurred to him, and then to transfer them to better notebooks later.

He got the practice from merchants, who would scribble the day’s transactions down in such a “waste book” during the hurly-burly of business, then transfer them cleanly to the account books in the evening.

This is not an uncommon practice, of course.  Any writer worth his/her salt does this anyway; many do it electronically these days.  But I’ve found that I can get more ideas written down and remembered if I use pen and paper.

The impetus was an email from a fun company in Chicago that linked to one of their brands, Field Notes.  Always a sucker for office supplies, I actually subscribed to their “Colors” year-long subscription, not because I thought I would be getting the coolest notebooks ever—sorry, Field Notes, that’s still Moleskine—but because it would force me to do it: to write down every thought that comes to me about the various projects I’m working on, or thinking about working on, and then expanding on those thoughts in project-specific notebooks.

I even bought the cool little pine box to store them in.  It comes with dividers and a calendar.

I will have to add that the Field Notes notebooks are very nice indeed, and the guys at the company are pretty generous: in addition to the things I actually ordered, they threw in extra notebooks, pencils, etc.  I’m starting the year with fifteen notebooks altogether, three of which I have already begun.

Burning Man

I turn 60 in May, and I’m determined that I am going to go to Burning Man Festival this year.  My friends Craig and David, also celebrating milestones this year, are planning to be part of the team.  (There may be others in the months to come.)

Part of the gestalt of Burning Man is that you have to be a participant, not an observer, and an image of what I and the team could do to contribute to the process came to me last week.  I’m using the notebook to flesh those ideas out, document the process as it were.  That’s all I’m going to say about that for the time being.

A Christmas Carol

In a meeting with Newnan Theatre Company’s artistic director Tony Daniel recently, I offered NTC a shot at William Blake’s Inn and also a revival of my Christmas Carol.  He seemed interested in CC so I said I’d try to reconstruct the entire show, since all those MIDI files from decades ago have vanished.

You may imagine my astonishment when I was told at the Lichtenbergian meeting that indeed NTC was announcing my CC for next December.  Well.  It seems one of my goals for 2014 is to completely reconstruct the score for the show from my original hand-written score from 1981, since there’s nothing else to go on.

Over the years we did the show, it grew from a piano and cello kind of thing to a full-scale MIDI orchestral accompaniment.  The Overture, in fact, was never written down but developed completely in the sequencing software I was using at the time.  I’ve decided to go back to live accompaniment: piano, synth, cello, clarinet/flute, and glockenspiel/bells.  Essentially I’m having to approach the thing as a new work, and we all know how well I respond to that.

Still, it’s a public performance of my music and I mustn’t sneeze at that.  I’m really looking forward to it, because in reviewing the piece over the last month I was super-pleased to find that it still held up, and when I mentioned it on Facebook there was an immediate flurry of reminiscensces and quotes.  Heartwarming and encouraging, it was.

So there are my goals for this coming year.

Cras melior est.

The Great Cross Country Caper: The Day After

Posted on by Dale

In which a Woman fulfilled her Dream of Driving across This Great Land of Ours, accompanied by her Husband, who Hates to Drive

Starting a new job* sure eats into blogging time…

It’s been a week since we got home from our Great Cross Country Caper, and I think it’s time to do a post mortem.

It was amazing in the extreme.  My claim of hating to drive is true, but all that discomfort dissolves in the face of the incredible landscapes through which we drove.  Okay, in Texas that became an issue, but on the whole I was not going mad.

So let’s look at our itinerary and evaluate.

San Francisco

Do it.  It’s a great city with tons to do.  We only scratched the surface.  Plan ahead for hotel rooms and Alcatraz.

Fisherman’s Wharf is fun.  Don’t miss the Musée Mechanique.  You can skip Ghirardelli Square: it’s a puny shopping mall, and you can actually get the chocolate cheaper at the Walgreens at Fisherman’s Wharf.

Don’t miss the sea lions at Pier 39!  Shopping/dining is not bad there, either, although of course it’s all touristy.

Do drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and go up to the headlands overlook.  Be advised: you have to pay a toll going south back into the city, and they no longer take money.  Go here and link your rental car license plate with your credit card.  You can set a time limit on that, e.g., I set it for the two days we were in SF.

Cable cars are fun, but plan better than we did.  Riding the thing all the way from one end to the other is kind of pointless unless you have a destination; if the ride’s the thing, consider going up and down a couple of hills, then hop off and catch the next one going back.

Things we’ll do when we go back: Alcatraz; the Science Museum; The Presidio; Chinatown; art museums; the north headlands (which we would have had time for except for rescuing Chinese tourists).  Also, we’ll make it to Yosemite.

Muir Woods

It’s an hour north of the city.  Go. Just go.  Plan to spend 2-3 hours exploring this beautiful spot.  (Remember you have to pay the toll on Golden Gate coming back.)  Send me a banana slug postcard!

Las Vegas

Unless you’re with a group of great friends with whom you can yuk on America’s Gomorrah, you can skip it.  Really.  Trust me.  If your goal is the Hoover Dam, there are hotels between Vegas and the dam that would work just as well as Vegas and probably be cheaper.  I think we would have done better to use that two days to visit Yosemite/Sequoyah/Death Valley.

Hoover Dam

Go.  Its size and beauty make it an imperative.  Take the full tour.

The Grand Canyon

Go, and stay at least three days.  The lodges in the park require planning at least a year in advance—if Congress doesn’t crap all over your plans—but the hotels in Tusayan (right before the park) are fine.

The National Geographic Visitor Center there in Tusayan has a nifty iMax movie on the history of humans in the Canyon.  It’s both fun and awe-inspiring.

The Pink Jeep tour is fun—book it at the National Geographic center—and the Sunset Tour was especially handy for us since we planned a too-short stay, but if you have a couple of days you can find your own way.

In the park itself, start at the welcome center (which we didn’t get to) and then just meander.  The El Tovar Lodge is a good place to start, but make sure to go out Hwy 64 to the Watch Tower.  That’s a good spot to watch the sunset, but also consider Moran Point, which is where we were taken.

Save your pennies and go on a helicopter ride.  There are no words to describe the canyon as you fly through it.

Things we’ll do when we go back: hit the visitor center; stay in the park; raft; hike; take the 12-hour helicopter ride and land on the canyon floor to drink champagne.

Monument Valley

This is Navajo Nation property, so your National Parks card won’t get you in, but it’s cheap.  Again, staying at The View hotel would be great, but you have to book way in advance.

If you don’t have four-wheel drive, I wouldn’t risk driving the valley on your own.  Take one of the tours, preferably at sunset.  Tell someone you want to end up at the last Artist’s Point for sunset.  Dress warmly.

The gift shop is a good one.

Things we’ll do when we go back: camp overnight in the valley (not with my lovely first wife, but with my fellow Lichtenbergians).

Santa Fe

Take it easy here.  You really are going to be hit by the altitude.

Get a hotel close to the Plaza.  Ours, Las Palomas, was beautiful and convenient.  From there, most everything was walkable.  There is also an on-demand shuttle which will take you practically anywhere in the downtown area plus Museum Hill, although we didn’t use it.

The Georgia O’Keefe Museum is worth seeing, although as I stated before, all her iconic works belong to other museums.

The Plaza is fun, although it’s trending upper scale.  The galleries are fun to visit, especially if you’ve won the lottery or embezzled on a grand scale.

Canyon Road I’m going to recommend sight-unseen.  Just driving down the street was enough to convince me to come back and take an entire day poking around all those galleries.

The Museum of International Folk Art is by itself worth the trip. Do. Not. Miss. It.

Things we’ll do when we go back: Canyon Street galleries; more of the museums downtown and on the hill; more walking about side streets.

New Orleans

Again, try to stay 2-3 days.  There’s a lot of the city we didn’t get to see, and it’s worth seeing.

Bourbon Street is great fun.  Take ones and fives to distribute to the street performers: pay for your art, people!  Royal Street (one street over from Bourbon) has fun shops: antiques, arts, some entry level souvenir stuff.

The famous restaurants are famous, but our best meal was on a side street.  Don’t be afraid to get off Bourbon Street.

Jackson Square is OK; the street art sucks, but I highly recommend the fun of having a Tarot reading on the north side.

RiverWalk will probably be finished by the time you get there, but my guess is that it’s not going to be anything other than a mall.

Things we’ll do when we go back: the Arts/Warehouse district; more French Quarter; the cemeteries; neighborhoods of historic homes; actual jazz clubs.

Amtrak

We cannot praise Amtrak’s Crescent enough.  It was comfortable, convenient, and clean.  The food was excellent, and the staff was first-class.  We’re already planning our next train ride.

General advice

The two weeks we traveled were a very good time: no crowds, moderate weather.  I highly recommend early fall.

As you calculate the cost of the trip, remember to consider gas, tolls, admissions, entertainment, meals, postcards, postage, souvenirs.  It adds up.

Get a comfortable rental car.  We ended up with a brand new Ford Explorer.  If you’re going to Monument Valley, you will need four-wheel drive.  Ask if it has USB ports to a) charge your phone; and b) use your phone as a GPS device and as a music device.

Ask also for the driver’s manual for the car: there were things we never did figure out how to do on that car.  Make sure you know how the buttons and levers for the lights and the windshield wipers work before you leave the rental place.

Buy a National Parks Pass. It’s $80, and it gets your car and its passengers into every park and recreational area on your trip.  You can pick one up at Muir Woods and at other parks.  There’s a list of places on the website.  If you buy it ahead of time, it can take a couple of weeks to get, so plan ahead.

Check the 10-day forecast on your Weather Channel app as you pack.  It’s more the highs and lows you’re packing for, not necessarily rain.  It was a high of 90°-ish in Vegas and New Orleans, and a low of 28° in Grand Canyon and Monument Valley.

Whenever you’re driving, charge your phone.  Also, if you’re in an area where there is no signal, switch your phone to airplane mode so that it’s not draining your battery by constantly searching for a network.  Hint: major swaths of this country have no cell phone service at all.

Before you start your day’s journey, fill your gas tank.  There will not be another exit over the hill, and if there is, it will have no development attached.

When you arrive at your starting point, go to the nearest grocery store/Walmart and buy a case of bottled water to keep in the car.  Snacks are also a good idea. You can also save yourself the headache of flying with liquids by buying everything you need once you get there, especially if you’re not flying back.  Save plastic bags to clean out your car every day or two.

Make a plan for getting photos off your phone/camera if you don’t have enough storage for the whole trip.  Dropbox [dropbox.com] can make that automatic for you.

iPhone tip: Form the habit of swiping up from your lockscreen to get directly to the camera, rather than swiping open and then tapping Camera.  Saves precious seconds when that elk is standing right there.

Apps I was glad I had

  • TripIt: You can store all your reservations, plans, maps, etc. in this one app.  Needs internet to do its thing.  Trips are shareable with fellow travelers.
  • Hotel Tonight: Every day at noon, participating hotels in major cities (i.e., not Amarillo) dump rooms they’re trying to get booked for the night.  You can get some really good deals.  If America’s Cup is in town, it will let you know that.  They classify hotels as Basic, Solid, Luxe, or Hip.  You can book from within the app.
  • Hotels.com, Kayak, etc.: It doesn’t hurt to be able to check on reservations, book new ones, etc., especially if you’re really going to just wend your way across the country without a schedule.  We used these and Hotel Tonight once we got past Santa Fe.
  • SimpleResize: If you’re blogging and need to upload smaller, optimized photos, this will do the trick.  Once you’ve adjusted the settings for width, etc., they stay that way until you change them.  The program saves back to your Photos app as a duplicate; you have to do a little eyeballing and mental tricks to remember which ones are your duplicates when it comes time to upload. Protip: save a bunch at one time and the duplicates will all be in a row. The app takes you back out to the list of folders after every save, but that’s a minor annoyance.  (iPhone only, not iPad)
  • FTPOnTheGo: Only if you’re like me and prefer to upload photos directly to your own location on the server rather than let your blogging software put it where it wants.  Simple to use, but set it up and test it before you hit the road and realize all your server settings are on your laptop back home.
    Protip: develop a naming system for your trip photos (mine was cc + day number+ underscore + location + ordinal number); as you upload the first one, rename it and copy the stem, i.e., cc5_canyon.  That way you can hit the little x to erase the gibberish name, then slow-tap to bring up Paste, paste in the stem, and then just type the next number on your list.
    Also protip: I had a miniature Moleskine notebook in my pocket, and I wrote down each of those numbers and a reminder of what the photo was.  Made it a lot easier to write coherently and insert the right photo without fumbling.
  • DropBox: For storing excessive photos.
  • StarWalk: OK on your phone but phenomenal on your iPad.  (You need this one whether you’re traveling or not!)
  • iWant, AroundMe, and Yelp: We tended to ask our hotel people for recommendations for dining, but on the road it helps to know how many hundreds of miles away the nearest food is.
  • AAA: Didn’t help me any with the Chinese tourists because my phone was dead, but boy it would have been useful!
  • Forecast: I use this all the time anyway because it’s phenomenal: it compiles data from weather radar maps and tells you how much it’s going to rain and when: light rain in 3 minutes; medium rain for 26 minutes, then clear for 15 minutes.  It’s not an App Store app; it’s a web app.  Go to forecast.io on your phone.  It will prompt you how to save it to your home screen as an app.
  • Wonkette.com: Because snark-deprivation is a terrible thing.

—————

We—my lovely first wife and I—are among the fortunate: we could afford to do this, to fly to  San Francisco and then take two weeks to drive back.  If I hadn’t had to start the new job* we would have taken three weeks.

It was expensive, but here’s a lesson we learned when we were a lot younger about travel: it’s worth it.  True, had I still been unemployed I might have held back on buying a few things, but probably not.  I had a charge card, and I was prepared to use it.  And to pay it off for months if necessary.  If you see something that really speaks to you, buy it.  You will not pass that way again, and if you do, it won’t be there.

Even if you’re on a budget, plan to splurge on a really nice meal every two or three days.

—————
* I have not blogged about this, but the Monday after we got back from the trip, I started at my new position as director of Online Faculty Develoment at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton.

The Great Cross Country Caper, Day 3: San Francisco Opera

Posted on by Dale

Dear Mr. Pickett,

I got to see the San Francisco Opera’s production of your new show, Delores Claiborne, last night. I bet lots of people have offered you their thoughts; here are mine.

First of all, I think you were entirely correct in thinking that Stephen King’s novel would make a good opera, and for all the reasons you talked about in the program. The characters had issues, big issues, and the ways they chose to work through those issues are no more ridiculous than Rigoletto or Lucia or Tosca.

My personal taste for opera is that it must be theatre first, to which the old argument about words and music must defer. I’d like to talk about all three, if you don’t mind, starting with your music.

It seemed to me that in the preshow lecture, when you were asked about Michael Daugherty‘s comments about your student work back at Julliard, you were a touch defensive about being influenced by Elliott Carter and Charles Wuorinen. I’m sure if they had been my teachers, I would have gone all 12-tone and atonal as well; after all, one has to make good grades, and all that midcentury nonsense was the fashion of the time.

However, I think you still resist your natural affinity for tonality, and to the detriment of your opera. To really break our hearts, you have to engage our emotions, and my experience has been that you can’t do that if you’re challenging our heads. I followed your patterns last night, but sometimes that just devolves into bean-counting, you know?

Some of your atonal work last night was effective and appropriate, but more often your better work was lyrical: “Six pins not four” and “Accidents can be a woman’s best friend,” for example. (Was that a Siegfried joke in Vera’s aria? If so, it was delicious.)

In general I disapprove of the modern fashion of writing vocal lines consisting of nothing but whole notes. It must be easier to sing, but it makes hash of the language and therefore of the character’s motivation. How many times did you have a character singing a preposition on a longer note than its object? It was silly. It also makes your work sound academic, and that is not a compliment.

Another aspect of the long note vocal lines may sound ridiculous to you, but if you picked up the pace of what your characters are saying, then you can pack a lot more in. The show was only two and a half hours long, and as I’ll discuss in a moment, it could have been longer, but you could have given us a lot more in that two and a half.

So let’s talk about the words. Sandy McClatchy had some effective work as well—I really liked the line “There should not be stars” in Selena’s aria during the eclipse—but on the whole I found the lyrics shallow and not up to the task of portraying the complex inner lives and motives of the characters.

I realize that audiences have a hard time accepting in English the kinds of over-the-top lyrics they regularly enjoy in Italian. But it is still possible to give us the fire and ice of a Tosca in words that make us thrill to the metaphors and poetry. Sandy’s libretto mostly failed at that.

Finally, let’s talk about the theatre.

I didn’t see a dramaturg listed in your creative team. You need one.

Let’s start with the biggest problem, the ending. We’ve been promised a “shocking revelation” from Vera on the night she died, but I’m here to tell you that there was no one in that audience who thought she actually had children. Her confessing to that lie was not shocking, it was sad. That one flaw completely deflated the denouement.

Nor are we given a reasonable explanation of why Delores harps on how much she hated Vera when we’ve just seen her behaving in a tender, if resigned, manner to the old woman. We were anticipating a big reveal in that scene which would have triggered some kind of anger/hatred in Delores. We didn’t get it.

So here’s your alternate ending, free of charge:

  • Vera starts with her “I lied” lyrics, confesses that she had no children. Delores is not surprised. Just as Andy says that the whole island knew that Delores killed Joe, everyone knew that Vera invented adoring offspring. Not a shocker.
  • Vera repeats, “I lied,” and we assume that she’s going to keep on about the kids, but no, she confesses that she never killed her husband, she just told Delores that to goad Delores into killing Joe. If you want to get really tawdry, Vera can have had an affair with Joe and needed to get rid of him. (Why does she keep seeing her husband in the corner? She’s delusional—it’s all ambiguous.)
  • Either way, Delores now realizes that she might have had other options to rescue Selena and herself. Acrimony ensues. Vera’s confusion mounts. She flees to the stairs. Delores does not push her. She falls.
  • She begs Delores for deliverance, but Delores taunts her: she wants Vera to suffer. Vera dies. Delores breaks down, cradles Vera’s body, sings a tortured farewell.

Screw Stephen King. Go with this version.

I will say that we were shocked that Delores’s final aria was so short. This should have been her “Mama Rose” moment. The current lyrics are an acceptable coda, but the body of the aria should have been a showstopper.

If you shortened your vocal lines and/or added 30 tight minutes to the show, you could show us more of the relationship between Vera and Delores, adding some truth to Selena’s complaint that her mother didn’t help as much as she thought she did. You could show us more of Delores and Selena’s inner lives.

By the way, were you aware that Selena was a name for the Roman moon goddess? There’s some metaphor in there. Poetry. Mythos.

This has been rather long and perhaps a little harsh. Let’s end with the good stuff.

The cast was very very good, weren’t they? I’m writing this on the road and don’t have my program with me, so forgive my failure to remember their names. You were fortunate to have such wonderful singers for whom to write, and their commitment to your music was obvious.

The staging was brilliant, beautiful, and impressive. I’ve never seen projections used so beautifully.

Act 2 was theatrically sound; your music was much more powerful and propelled the action much more effectively, up to the point where Vera failed at shocking us. But even then, that was the script’s fault, not yours.

And finally, at the end of the show, I found myself wanting more of Delores. Part of that was the failure of the scenario to dig deeper, but largely it was due to your ability to create interesting characters who engaged the audience. (I haven’t talked about Joe: great character, great actor/singer. Kudos all round.)

If you were preparing this show for Broadway, you’d find that you as the composer had a little more power over how it looked, but even moreso, you’d also have the support of a more powerful director and a dramaturg, and when audience surveys showed that the ending was flat, you could avail yourself of a show doctor to advise you. It is very unfortunate for Delores Claiborne that the world of opera does not afford you that power.

Cheers,

Dale

—————

On the way to Hoover Dam (Day 5), I read the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle reviews.  <georgetakei> Oh my. </georgetakei>

Implied projects

Posted on by Dale

Let’s look at all the creative projects implied by the mess in my study.  I think I’ll just list them.  Commentary would be superfluous.

  • A Perfect Life, a rambling memoir of sorts of what life was like for an educated upper middle class white male in the turn of the 21st century
  • painting:
    • the Field series
    • the Epic Lichtenbergian Portrait
    • general drawing
    • Artist Trading Cards
    • learning to mix colors, especially for portraiture
  • rescore A Christmas Carol
  • rescore William Blake’s Inn
  • find a home for William Blake’s Inn
  • archive all the GHP stuff
  • compose
    • Five Easier Pieces
    • the Symphony
    • a song for John Tibbetts II
    • other stuff…
  • continue my reading/writing/exploration of ritual and meditation
  • make the little icon/box
  • learn counterpoint so that someday there might actually be a Six Fugues (without preludes)

Wow.  That’s not a lot.  You’d think I would have already gotten all this done.

Stuff

Posted on by Dale

I began unpacking my old office stuff, and doing so raises an issue: what to do with all that stuff.

I had four large plastic tubs filled with stuff from my office: books, folders, decorative items, a veritable medicine cabinet, a small flock of tools, rulers, pens, inks, markers, sticky notes, labels, teas, a coffee maker, memorabilia, and an  “idea card stadium” with hundreds of idea cards.

All of this flotsam was largely in duplication of stuff I already have at home.  Those of you with an office know how it is; you need a second stick of deoderant at work for those days when your brain can’t even manage the unconscious ritual of your morning toilette.  (Oh, right, like that hasn’t happened to you…)
So what is one to do with an actual duplicate desk?  How does one merge two worlds when one of them no longer exists, especially when there’s barely enough room for the one that’s already there?

Truth be told, that’s why it’s taken me a month to even look at those tubs.  It wasn’t going to make me all maudlin about my cubicle in the Twin Towers overlooking the Capitol—I just couldn’t manage thinking about where I was going to put everything.

I’ve kind of done it.  At least the tubs are empty; not everything has found a home yet, nor will it for a while longer.  But the tubs are empty. Now I’m looking around my study and thinking I need to completely overhaul it so that I will have a place for all my stuff.

Why I could go to work for 36 years and not be bothered by the fact that I didn’t have a place for all my stuff is quite irrelevant.  Now that I’m at home all day every day and rapidly approaching that new period where I will actually start being productive/creative again, it is critical that I reorganize/redesign/restructure the study so that I have a Place. For. All. My. Stuff.

I mean, look at this:

 

click to embiggen

 

Let’s just look at the stuff here and pinpoint why it’s even in my study.

On the left, a big blue tub of material I used to carry to GHP as assistant director.  It didn’t make the trip in 2012 or 2013.  Atop that is a box of my old choral music, and on top of that is memorabilia from my office.

Ignore the books in the back.

At the bottom of the photo, underneath where you can’t see it, a tub of material from Lacuna Group’s work on William Blake’s Inn.  Atop that, a painting (unfinished) from the Field series; a box of art paper and envelopes; to the right of that, a desk tray, and an old wooden box with office supplies, and under that, the large blank book in which I will write A Perfect Life (some day).  To the right of that, my leather satchel, formerly used for travel to the office, now my Lacuna kit.

On the table, markers, glue, paint for various thinks, like Artist Trading Cards and more paintings; books on the creative process; more cards/envelopes.  A large wooden box with drawers of music score paper and other implements.  On top of that, two DVDs on mixing colors; books on orchestration and composition, rhyming dictionaries, drawing books, and three study scores: Brahms’ 4th, Shostakovich’s 15th, and Strauss’s Death & Transfiguration.

Under the table where you can’t see them, my drawing box/kit, a Lacuna Group tub for our “bear/giraffe” piece, and the original pages of my Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.  Plus two blank Moleskine notebooks that I have just now reclaimed to begin doing morning pages.

On the shelves behind the table, books, but also folders of materials for setting to music; copies of William Blake’s Inn and A Christmas Carol; stationery; blank books, some of which have ongoing narratives in them (Figaro, William Blake, the Symphony, etc.); a box of videocassettes of the 2002 production of Figaro.

In front of the shelf, a folder of paperwork for my mother’s estate; full scores for William  Blake and the Symphony, plus a pile of scores of three decades of abortive attempts; the keyboard; letters from Craig, and trailing out there on the right, more stationery and a book on counterpoint.

On the desk itself, on the left, a stack of books on ritual and liturgies, topped by The Book of the Labyrinth.  Behind those, the source books for the 24 Hour Project, plus folders of texts.  The little triangle thingies are a fold-out box that originally held Singer sewing machine attachments and which I am configuring as a little assemblage/icon piece.  Behind that, the aforementioned idea card stadium, noticeably empty.

A stack of papers that haven’t found a home yet, including my separation paperwork from the DOE; another blank book, half buried; two computer keyboards (duplicates, remember?); desk detritus; the copper of my Lichtenbergian Chalice, silently affirming my inactivity; a small wooden pencil box containing ink pen nibs for lettering in The Book of the Labyrinth; the computer monitor, with two sticky notes of 24 Hour Challenge texts; a lifetime supply of sticky notes; the laptop; inks for Book of the Labyrinth; another book on ritual; a blinking red reindeer nose; pens; paper towels; a reference book on knots.

You can ignore the trashcan.

Continuing on the other side of the desk…

click to embiggen

 
The backside of the technology, including a little shelf unit for the multiplugs and chargers; my old G4 and Grayson’s old iMac; a mess of mostly audio cables which used to live comfortably in a purple computer bag; another keyboard and stand; printing paper supplies; every box of every Apple product I’ve bought in the last ten years; paper for the printer and drawers that haven’t been opened in fifteen years; old issues of Mac magazines; my Lovely First Wife’s old quadraphonic stereo (and 8-track player!); shelves of old software and books that are largely useless; my old SE-30 and two old synthesizers; a Memorex turntable that could potentially digitize any album we want to if we’d take it out of the box and set it up.

I will spare you the photos of the other bookshelves, the CD shelves, and (behind me in the two photos above) my college drafting board; various art supplies like chipboard, canvas boards, sketch pads, a paper cutter (one of two now), rulers, Lacuna Group stuff.  Plus a tall cabinet of art supplies and printing supplies, and a filing cabinet.

I should be a busy, productive artist, but it will take me until 2014 to reconfigure all this stuff.  Don’t expect new works from me until then.  At least that will be my excuse.

—to be continued…

An odd precedent

Posted on by Dale

Last night, a very strange thing happened: I got to hear one of my pieces performed.  Live.

The composer and his Muse

Maila Springfield, that goddess of the piano, asked me to write her something that she could play when performing with her estimable husband David and another friend.  She was their accompanist, and she wanted something cool for herself.  That was in 2009/10, and so when I took the summer of 2010 off, that became my project.

The result was Six preludes (no fugues), and I think I did an admirable job, if I do say so myself.

Maila premiered them in the fall of 2011, but I didn’t get to hear them because of something something argle bargle.  Last summer, after the Music Faculty Recital, she confessed to me that she thought about asking to perform them but didn’t think I’d like it.  Conflict of interest, etc.  I set her mind at ease: any time you want to play them out loud with me in the audience is fine with me.

And so this year she did.

Wow.  She launched into #1 with a ferocity that took my breath away (and I think a lot of the audience’s).  #2 was gorgeous.  #3 was once again everyone’s favorite.  #4 was quiet, sustained, simple.  #5 was massive, and the ending rocked me back in my seat.  #6 wended its way through each variation, and the ending was boffo.  The crowd went wild.

She did lose her way in #1, a ferocious little two-part invention that careens down the keyboard like some X-treme snowboarder in an 11-measure passage before sticking the dismount at the bottom, and then jumping back to the top and doing it again.  She said, “I don’t know what happened; I looked up and suddenly didn’t know where I was.  I shouldn’t have looked up!”  She’s wonderful.

It has inspired me to wish I were actually working on Five Easier Pieces for her.

24 hour challenge #13

Posted on by Dale

From Dave, way back in 2009, 3-187-13:

they are given to
hold close, not
air, not each other

From “Knee Lunes,” by Robert Kelly.

No, I don’t know what to do with this, nor have I ever.  See you tomorrow night.

[If you’re just joining us, here are the instructions for the 24 hour challenge, as well as previous efforts.]

4/23/13, 10:36 pm

Okay, it sucks, but really, I don’t even.  I mean to say, wot?

24 hour challenge #13, “Knee Lunes,” for Dave: score [pdf] | bassoon [mp3]

The return of the 24 hour challenge: #12

Posted on by Dale

I know.  It’s rather unbelievable.  What have I gotten myself (back) into?

But in a longstanding Lichtenbergian tradition, I have resurrected 2009’s 24 hour challenge in order to avoid working on Five Easier Pieces, of which I have exactly three abortive attempts.

For those who cannot recall exactly what I am talking about, head over to the 24 hour challenge page and refresh your memory.

And here we go:

From Mike, who will be astonished to learn that his numbers (4-1081-33) finally came up:

Come Sweete & frolick then with vs
Noe Longer doate on Telaphus
A youth aboue thy fate
A wanton Wench & rich beside
Hath him in twofould bondage tie’d
Nor does he proue vngrate.

That’s ll. 31-36 from “Maecenas Birthday,” by the Roman poet Horace, translated by one Thomas Pestell, an early 17th c. poet about whom not even Wikipedia has a thing.

Let’s see if I can get this up by tomorrow midnight.

4/19/13, 8:58 p.m.

Well, what do you know?  I did it.

A little background: entries #12, #13, and #14 have all been on sticky notes on my monitor since 2009.  I had to look at them every morning and every night, right above my Lichtenbergian chalice.  So it’s not as if I haven’t give these scraps some thought.  Even before I had to stop the 24 hour challenge because of decamping to Valdosta in June 2009, I knew that I wanted to set this one as a kind of Cole Porter beguine, a song for a 1930s chanteuse, as it were.

See what you think.  I think the tempo could be a little slower.  It would have to be interpreted, of course, by the artistes.

24 hour challenge #12, “Maecenas Birthday” for Mike: score [pdf], bassoon [mp3]