Day 47

Posted on by Dale

Happy Shakespeare’s birthday!

I directed the first Shakespeare in Newnan, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in 1978. I directed the last, The Taming of the Shrew, in 1999.

I say “last,” but that’s just a bitter, depressed guess: the Newnan Theatre Company has been served eviction papers from the building, they haven’t paid the rent in over a year, and the board has voted to vacate. My understanding is that they intend to go on, somehow, but I know no details.

This has disturbed me a lot more than I thought it would, and more than I think it should. I guess I have enough vanity to be disappointed that something I spent nearly 30 years of my life building should come unravelled within five years of my leaving it, and leaving it on sound footing, I might add.

We had money in the bank, full houses, and a growing subscribers list. We had a Main Stage season, the Second Season, and the children’s season, and a teen season. We performed more than 40 weekends out of the year. There simply were no more weekends in the year to squeeze in another show.

We did Shakespeare. We did musicals. We encouraged new works. We experimented with new forms and approaches. We built our costumes and sets. We designed our costumes and sets. We trained people in all the crafts of theatre. We did theatre, not put on plays.

Ah well, easy come, easy go. I may have more to say later, over at lichtenbergian.org.

A beautiful afternoon

Posted on by Dale

What a beautiful, beautiful afternoon! I hope you were able to sit in your green, cool, sun-drenched back yard as I was, and finish reading War & Peace, as I was.

What an odd, odd, enormous book. After the fall of Moscow, after (spoiler alert!) the death of Andrei and the capture of Pierre as a prisoner, the book just sort of dissolves into an essay on the necessity of historical events. Yes, we drag along with the French Armée as they try to flee Russia and are pursued by Russian partisans, and we do finally get back to Pierre and his rescue from the French, and he finally declares his love for the grieving Natasha and everyone’s going to be very happy.

But the book itself ends with Pierre leaving Natasha to go to Petersburg to settle his disgraced dead wife’s debts, and Natasha exclaiming:

“Only what’s he going to Petersburg for!” Natasha said suddenly, and hastily answered herself: “No, no it has to be so… Right, Marie? It has to be so…”

Boom. End of novel proper. There follows an 87-page epilogue, in which we catch up with Pierre/Natasha and Nicolai/Marya, but we just swoop in and out of their story while listening to Leo Tolstoy hold forth about historical imperatives. It doesn’t end so much as evaporate.

Which is probably why the thing was decried as “not a novel” when it was published. I have to agree with Count Lev that it is what it is, and more than anything what it is, is amazing. A huge undertaking (which still took him only five years of writing: did you get that, J.K. Rowling?), it sprawls on a vast canvas, and we are invited to inspect it minutely. It is cinematic in both scope and treatment. One moment we’re overlooking a battlefield and only seeing tiny wisps of smoke in the distance; the next, we’re examining the irrational thoughts of one of our characters who is caught up in the thick of the violence. He zooms, he pans, he cuts, he fades. It’s pretty astounding.

Highly highly recommended.

Question

Posted on by Dale

Here’s an I Ching kind of question:

If you get Chinese take-out, but leave the fortune cookie on your kitchen counter for a couple of weeks before eating it, does the fortune/advice apply to the day you ate Chinese or the day you ate the cookie?

50 days: Almost

Posted on by Dale

My goal this week is to finish III. Allegro gracioso, which means essentially getting it orchestrated.

This morning I got all of it done except for the last big bit, and I want to dig in and listen to what I’ve got so far before tackling it.

A week from today, the countdown will be 42 days, which is the number of days in GHP, so it’s kind of a temporal mirror thing I’ll have going on here. Now it gets scary, because the following week will be more or less lost to me: Tuesday and Wednesday nights, my regular composition nights, I’ll be in Atlanta with the STAR program, so I won’t get any work done at all on my nemesis, IV. Lento.

However, I have to say that in listening to what I’ve got (and it’s all in tatters now with all the crap I’ve inserted and left lying around), I’ve swung back into the mindset that it’s not so bad after all. May Apollo keep me in that mind.

Also, as long as we’re counting days, the last six or seven days will also be lost, because I will be in Valdosta setting up GHP. I will not be composing anything at that point. That leaves, what, about 35 actual days? Sheesh.

Am I disappointed that I won’t have a complete symphony by June 2, the day I leave for Valdosta? A bit. But I’ll be happy to have the final two movements done, and maybe I can get at least a sketch for the first done while I’m there.

The second? Slow movements have been my downfall forever. However, I did come across this sketch from previous thinking, and you know what? It’s not too bad a beginning, I think.

54 days: tiny steps

Posted on by Dale

Despite allergies that will not let go, I was determined to get some work done tonight, and I did.

It was not much at all, but tiny steps are better than lying down and whining about only having 54 days left to finish two movements.

For the Lento, I was able to suggest a couple more approaches to thematic development, on paper at least. My problem at this point is that I’ll have to scrap what I’ve got so far in order to use any of the new stuff, because wedging it into what is already there is just not practical. Maybe I’ll just print it out at school and literally cut and paste it into the new configuration.

I keep hearing fully articulated, traditional, organic development at the edges of my consciousness, but not front and center enough for me to be able to transcribe. It’s very frustrating. What I get onto paper is stodgy and strophic when it needs to be fluid. I will persevere.

When I’d had enough of that, I went back to the Allegro gracioso and began to orchestrate in earnest. I got three strophes done that sound very nice. I think I’ll tackle the end next, and then work my way back from there.

I am assisted in this movement by some Johann Strauss scores in Google Books. It’s very helpful to see how he’s orchestrated his greatest hits, even if mine sound completely different.

Still no mp3s.

55 days

Posted on by Dale

No, I didn’t get anything done on the symphony all weekend. Leave me alone.

However, I was struck by an ad on the TV. You may have seen it. In it we are told that “we [the U.S.] didn’t wait…” to be told or shown how to do a string of wonderful things, and now we’re not going to wait before solving the global warming problem.

Okay, I just googled it and have discovered that this is an ad from Al Gore. The mind boggles. How this got out of the brainstorming phase is beyond me, because…

We didn’t wait…

  • …to storm the beaches at Normandy. Actually, yes, we did. Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. We didn’t bother getting involved until everyone else was waist-deep in that particular Big Muddy.
  • …on civil rights. Hello? What??? Then where exactly did all those images of thousands of people clogging the Mall come from?
  • …to put a man on the moon. Well, after Sputnik captured our attention, certainly, we worked our ass off, but until then we had no such ambition.

Sorry, Al, baby, you lost me on this one. Admirable sentiment, but historically illiterate. Abysmally.

59 days: on the road

Posted on by Dale

We’re headed up to Guilford for the weekend, and that means I won’t get any work done on the symphony while we’re gone. I am carrying the score for III. Allegro gracioso with me so I can make notes as I listen to it on my iPod, but I doubt I’ll get anything real accomplished.

Listen to Prairie Home Companion tomorrow night and let me know if I won the sonnet contest.

60 days

Posted on by Dale

I revisited IV. Largo yesterday and just started plugging in some new stuff. You may recall that I had a sweet little variation that I had plugged some weeks ago and wasn’t sure I liked. I still not sure about that, and now it’s got two more bits plugged in after that. I’m creating this Frankenstein of a score, all kinds of crap just stitched together. It’s getting less organic by the minute. But I’m going to try just sticking stuff in there and then taking stuff out. However, my major accomplishment yesterday was to realize an ending for III. Allegro gracioso. I’m not telling you what it is. I can now start orchestrating for real, and you’ll hear it when I’m done. I think it’s going to surprise you.

I’ve been getting The Atlantic for a couple of months now. Some airline that I had a few points with sent me a letter saying I needed to get rid of them, and here were all these magazines I could get for free. So I loaded up: Architectural Digest, The Week, Time, Bon Appetit, and The Atlantic.

The articles are good, usually, but what caught my eye yesterday were the ads. Not the ones up front, the full-page numbers from national corporations that are sandwiched in between the lead articles. No, I finally noticed that the back third of the magazine goes from a two-column layout to a three-column, and the editorial content is shoved to the center and the outside column is given over to advertisement that, taken as a whole, give you a pretty good snapshot of the kind of person The Atlantic‘s ad sales division is convinced reads their magazine. Or at least has convinced these advertisers.

A tour: a book ad for Who’s your city?, by Richard Florida, the man who gave us “the creative class.” Now he’s trying to show you how you, as a member of the creative class, can decide where to live. www.WhosYourCity.com. I smell marketing.

Full-page ad from Oxford University Press with their latest offerings: Fixing failed states: a framework for rebuilding a fractured world, Fair trade for all: how trade can promote development, The bottom billion: why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it, How to change the world: social entrepreneurs and the power of new ideas, and In defense of globalization. Sorry, no more books for me.

StressEraser. Grundig shortwave radios. Another book, 10 excellent reasons not to hate taxes, from The New Press, a “short, snappy, essential handbook that counters the anti-tax, anti-government rhetoric that permeates our culture.” Tempting, but no more books.

Gary Weeks & Company, furniture makers.

“The World’s Most Wonderful Enamels: 800 original designs of art, science, and culture. Visit us on your trip to Alaska.”

w. end ave: an e-journal of culture & politics (That was the entire ad.)

Another book: Blessed unrest: how the largest social movement in history is restoring grace, justice, and beauty in the world. From Penguin Books. Sorry, no more books, and also, I must have missed the evidence in my world because I cannot think what this social movement might be.

The HP Printing Mailbox with Presto Service, so you can spam those aged relations who don’t want a computer. (It took me a moment to realize: it’s a color fax machine.)

Some garish rings from John Christian Designers & Craftsmen.

An interesting painting of a tiny figure on a beach, approaching an enormous man, loinclothed and topknotted. THINK BIG: The thief of Baghdad special edition DVD, from the Criterion Collection.

The Bow Tie Club. (We’re getting into the really small ads now.)

SnowLion Expeditions: Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Everest, India, Japan, Koreas, K2, Mongolia, Tibet, Vietnam.

Some more books…

Hats! Panamas, Akubra Hats (?), more, from David Morgan.

Daffodil bulbs. A kik-step! Inuit art. Cruises on what appears to be a three-masted yacht. Upton Tea Imports. Andrew Sullivan.

More books: Harvard University Press, University of Wisconsin Press, Grove/Atlantic Press.

Special introductory price! $19.95 (reg. $39.50-49.50) for 100% cotton pintpoint oxford dress shirt! Paul Frederick Menstyle.

Endless Pool! (I really want one of these.) CoffeeMakersEtc. Grace Rare Tea. The Wallet Pen: now, you always have a pen! (One of Oprah’s favorite things!)

Retire to Fearrington: a charming country village near Chapel Hill, NC, with bluebirds, belted cows, and fascinating people of all ages. (I’ve actually seen billboards for this one.)

And we’re done. There is the whole “emporium” section, where you can find pheromones, Celtic jewelry, handcrafted wooden jigsaw puzzles, 14K gold eagle rings, and cufflinks made from Yankee Stadium seats, but on the whole, I think we now have a pretty good idea of the kind of person who reads The Atlantic.

61 days: more productivity

Posted on by Dale

I was very productive today, albeit not entirely with the symphony. I got the herb garden mulched, I got new life insurance, Marc and I checked out the new parks downtown as performance venues, I did a lot of reading (War & Peace and the Dissanayake), and I almost went to the auditions for David Wilson’s 4th of July play, but I forgot about them until too late.

With the symphony, I did listen to III. Allegro gracioso while I drove around town, but am no closer to an ending.

I decided to work outside the score on IV. Largo, trying, as I’ve said previously, break up the agitato motif and create a workable theme with it. I’ve filled a page and a half with “abortive sketches,” one or two of which show promise. I had to keep stepping back and reminding myself that the theme, whatever it ended up being, had to elicit some kind of triumphant, joyful feeling. I think I’ve got some bits to do that with now.

Part of what helped was also listening to Dvorak’s Symphony No. 8 as I drove around, listening once again to how he did it. (It is also in G major, interestingly.) I pulled out my copy of the score this evening and studied some pieces that had struck me earlier in the day; I’m not sure I learned anything concrete, but that’s my lack of academic training in such matters.

Anyway, I’m hearing some bits more clearly now, and I may go back to IV. Lento tomorrow and see what I can put into practice. No mp3s tonight.