Avoiding work: rare books

Posted on by Dale

I’m avoiding working on the music this afternoon by cooking. And while I’m waiting for my Sugar-Crusted Breton Butter Cake to rise, I’m continuing to avoid work by reading the New York Times Book Review.

The first two pages are an ad for Bauman Rare Books, so I thought I’d buy a couple with my lottery winnings.

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, first edition, first issue, in original cloth-gilt. What’s not to like? As Hemingway said, “All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain. It’s the best book we’ve had.” And he’s right. A wonder of story-telling and sly satire often missed by some of our more racially sensitive friends. $17,500.

Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, first edition, “a stunning copy.” If you haven’t looked at an original Potter recently, go pick one up. The writing is charming and her illustrations are inimitable. If you’ve only read it with some other person’s sad little drawings, you need to seek out the real thing. $17,000.

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, first edition, in the original dust jacket. Wow. I’ve love to have this one. $16,000.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Workes of Geoffrey Chaucer, one of fewer than nine known copies of a 1551 edition, illustrated with woodcuts, early 19th century calf binding. Maybe if I owned this I might finally read the whole thing. Yes, I know, but my early lit professor had us read Troilus and Criseyde instead. $55,000.

Charles Dickens, The Christmas Books, first editions of all five. You know why. $28,500.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Cinquieme Sinfonie, first edition of the Fifth. That would be so cool. Then I could pay musicians to play so I could conduct from it. $13,500.

Hm. Maybe Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer, Come Rain or Come Shine, first edition, inscribed by Mercer to Judy Garland. It’s camp, but it’s cheap at $6800.

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, first American edition, $16,000.

Let’s see, that comes to $170,300 all told. Not bad for a couple of minutes shopping. Of course, I know I’d have to read them with white cotton gloves on, and I’d probably have to buy a whole new house with a climate-controlled library, but they’re all nice additions to my collection, I think.

Don’t worry, though, I’ve left plenty for you guys: Einstein‘s The World as I See It, $18.500. E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web, original dust jacket, $2400. F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, first edition, special tipped-in “Author’s Apology,” $16,000. William Bligh, Narrative of the Mutiny, first edition, $22,000. A 1610 Geneva Bible, folio volume in calf binding with brass fittings, $16,500. Robert Frost, Complete Poems, signed, $3600. Marc Chagall, Dessins pour la Bible, first edition, $9800. James Joyce, Ulysses, first edition, one of only 750 copies printed on handmade paper, uncut and unrestored copy in original wrappers, $65,000.

I knew that would get your attention, Marc and Jeff. Don’t start a bidding war. So unseemly.

Here’s their website. Anything else you see that you like?

Working, sort of

Posted on by Dale

I actually got back to work yesterday, sort of.

Having chosen the “least of these” text for the Outside the Bachs piece, I sat down to work on it. And nothing happened.

I have in my head a vague Presentiment of what I want the piece to do, but the problem is the text. It is not even close to metrical, which shouldn’t be a problem in the long run, but at the moment it has me stymied. I mapped out its rhythm and tried applying notes to it, but everything I diddled with sounded either trite or aimless.

After an hour of that, I gave up and did the crossword puzzle.

Here’s what I’m thinking: set the text to a quiet, chantlike episode, perhaps a capella. Follow it with a nasty, loud, militant outburst from the organ, perhaps with a snare drum on the side. After the organ’s statement, return to the text, quiet, unaccompanied. The organ rebuts with a louder, nastier section. Repeat.

Two antecedents would be Charles Ive’s Symphony No. 4, 1st movement, and Carl Nielsen’s 5th, with the insistent snare drum in the final movement.

Even if I’m successful with this, it will be too polemical by half, especially if I include recognizable bits of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the organ interludes. I’ve almost decided not to conclude the piece with the congregation singing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” and I know you’re relieved to hear that. But I haven’t ruled out members of the choir stating flatly, “I was hungry, and you did not feed me. I was thirsty, and you didn’t give me water. I needed clothes, and you didn’t clothe me. I was a stranger, and you did not take me in.” And so on.

Too much? I’m in a mood.

It’s official. Sort of.

Posted on by Dale

I reported the demise of the world premiere of William Blake’s Inn to the Newnan Arts Commission yesterday. They were completely sympathetic and supportive, but no one suddenly agreed to take on this project.

Still, since Jan Bowyer has been working steadily to bring 25 Scottish kids over here, the question arose, for what? That didn’t seem to bother anyone. They have a year, after all, right? Someone did suggest they could sing “excerpts” from William Blake’s Inn. I suggested they could sing the whole thing, albeit in concert mode. A lot cheaper, indeed, especially if we’re talking a single performance.

Hm, they said. So I cheerfully told them to let me know if they needed copies of the music and departed. I was out of there.

JoAnn Ray did pull me aside and give me a name and an address to send it to over in Alabama, a foundation of her family’s connected with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. That’s another packet I’m mailing today. The others are to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (do they even get unsolicited manuscripts?); the Center for Puppetry Arts; the Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago; and the Sarasota (FL) Arts Council.

Diane has also suggested the Sautee Nacoochee Center up in north Georgia, which I’ll add to my list today.

And I have to get working again. The Outside the Bachs competition is due at the end of the month, and yes, I have to work on Day in the Moonlight at some point. I really really really want to finish that by Christmas.

Any suggestions for a religious text for the Outside the Bachs piece?

Anxiety

Posted on by Dale

I know, I haven’t written in over a week. It’s not as if I’ve been doing nothing. Oh, wait, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Never mind.

Well, actually, I have been doing a little. We had the Barnes & Noble thing, of course, and that got me thinking/worrying about exactly where William Blake’s Inn is. Of course, the short answer is nowhere. No one in our fair city is in the least bit interested in being the chair of the WBOC.

Just to make sure, though, I personally contacted one of the best candidates for said chairmanship, who very promptly turned me down (not without praising the work and me without stint.) That’s it, folks. William Blake’s Inn will not have its premiere in Newnan.

I will report on this fact to the Arts Commission on Wednesday, and then I will drop in the mail proposals to various performing organizations around this country.

That’s what I’ve been working on this weekend: cover letters, synopses, printouts of vocal scores, etc., all aimed at specific groups for whom the Inn would be a good fit. After I get a CD label designed and printed, and the CDs burned, everything’s ready to go in the mail.

It is very scary how easy this is. I was done with the Atlanta Symphony and the Center for Puppetry Arts long before lunch yesterday morning. Lookingglass Theater in Chicago took a little longer this morning, because they have very specific things they’re looking for and don’t want a copy of the piece itself, just a synopsis.

But I could really have everything in the mail by tomorrow afternoon. Whoosh, as my email program would say.

And that’s scary. I don’t know why, because it’s not as if I’m using these groups to validate the piece. I know it’s good, and I know it would be a good fit for any of them. If they reject it, as is almost certain, it’s not going to crush my spirits.

I guess it’s because I know by putting the Inn out there, I allow myself to hope that it might find a home. Looking back over the Lacuna workshop blogposts, I was struck by how hopeful we sounded. We were certain that people were working to pull together to form the WBOC. This was going to be a wonderful opportunity for all of us. This time, it would be totally different than the way the arts in Newnan have been dealt with in the past.

Only, of course, it wasn’t. Everyone applauded politely then turned away. Everyone loved the music, everyone thought our staging was cool, no one wanted to work with us. It was that simple, and we should have seen it coming. Well, I should have seen it coming. That’s all I ever saw in the 25+ years I was involved in active arts production in this city: oohs and aahs and brief spurts of interest — can we even count the number of “arts councils” that have been formed here? — but no sustained, organized support. Why I thought it would be different this time, I have no idea.

So dropping William Blake’s Inn into the mail to find its fortune elsewheres is very scary, because I have to commit to hope again. Not to do so would be even more exhausting.

::sigh::

Posted on by Dale

Today’s “Writer’s Almanac” daily email features Maxwell Perkins, the brilliant editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, among others. (Remember Auntie Mame’s cry of delight when she finds she’s getting an editor for her book? “Who? Maxwell Perkins??”)

It concluded with, “When Maxwell Perkins died, he still had a pile of manuscripts next to his bed.”

Now I’m depressed.

Ars longa, vita brevis, and a truer word was never spoke.

In other news, they’re auctioning off a complete autographed set of the Harry Potter novels, the only known set to exist. They (I forget whom) are expecting $20,000 for it; proceeds go to an organization which gets books into the hands of children in developing countries.

Hey, I’d pay that for the set. In fact, with my lottery winnings, I’ll do even better. I’ll give them $250,000 if Jo sits down to dinner with us (I’ll cook) and then autographs my two sets after dessert. That sounds fair, doesn’t it?

On a lesser scale, consider giving to our local Ferst Foundation effort.

Archaeology

Posted on by Dale

Recently I took a look around my study and decided that after three years of having part of my study floor clogged with the stuff from my office at the Presbyterian church, it was time to stash it. I bought a big old plastic tub and tonight I began sorting.

What seemed to take up piles and piles on the floor, plus a great big box, collapsed rather neatly into a few small piles in the tub. I took the precaution of creating a word processing document (searchable via my laptop’s indexing) which lets me know what I’ve stuck in there.

Some surprises as I worked through the piles, like the mantel clock which was a gift from the cast of Lying In State, the world premiere comedy we did back in 1998, nearly ten years ago, folks! That will go to school with me.

I also found a great many of the original scores for all my early stuff, all the One Fish Two Fish pieces, plus the Symphony for Band in C minor. And there were all my notebooks.

Back in the day, before the computer would allow me to write my music, and play it back, I had to do it all by hand. Shockingly primitive, I know. But music paper was hard to come by, and so whenever I came across notebooks, I’d buy all I could and hoard them. Most of these notebooks are mostly empty, with various projects grouped here and there in them: Christmas Carol, some anthems, a snatch of William Blake here and there.

After getting the tub loaded, I went through all these notebooks, even the juvenilia from the early 70s, and played through everything in them. Most of it was sketches for stuff that either worked out and got used, or was terrible and should have been erased, but there were some bits and pieces which were nice enough to salvage for new projects. I found some lyrics (for what, I have no idea) that will be used in Day in the Moonlight, and I found more than few fragments of music that will show up either in one symphony or another or in the Stars on Snow album. I even found some themes from an early idea for a symphony that actually still resonate.

So it was not exactly what you’d call a productive evening, but it was fun and a little bizarre to dig back through my early, mostly incompetent self. I had some good ideas, but I was clearly clueless about how to develop most them. Although I will say I found one or two babysteps that showed I had a clear understanding of structure even then.

Anyway, I’ll be putting all those fragments into Finale files so I can stash them away for future pilfering.

In other news, Lacuna sang the complete Visit to William Blake’s Inn last night as the special guests of Barnes & Noble. It is most likely the last time Newnan will hear the piece. Unless someone prominent steps up in the next two weeks to be in charge of the Organizing Committee, I’m going to start shopping it around to other places.

The performance was very nice indeed, give or take one or two King of Cats solos being fluffled. I’ll miss working with the chorus.

Tale of the Tailor

Posted on by Dale

I’ve been wrestling with the new version of Finale all week, trying to get it to work as expected and/or advertised, so that I could get Blake Tells the Tiger the Tale of the Tailor orchestrated for this Tuesday night thing at Barnes & Noble.

We were asked to sing A Visit to William Blake’s Inn at the opening party for the new Barnes & Noble, so I said yes, and my intrepid octet has been working very hard to re-polish the work. I decided it would be as good a time as any to go ahead and orchestrate one of the two remaining pieces.

However, I didn’t count on the new Finale being such an incredibly opaque piece of software. I will not bore you with all the details, but it has been right up there with working on an actual Windows computer. I have three different Garritan libraries, and none of them were doing what they should be doing, in this case allowing me to notate the strings as playing pizzicato, and they actually do that in playback. Hadn’t been a problem before, but now it was. No combination of libraries or instruments worked. I was halfway through the piece when I decided I had to do something.

I decided that it must have something to do with opening a piece done in Finale 2007, the piano score (which actually had originally been done in Finale 2006) and copying melodic lines over to the orchestral arrangement. So I started a brand new file, which seemed to make the program happy. That was this morning. It took me all morning just to get back to the halfway point, just putting in the music I had already done.

Late in the afternoon, I tackled it again, and shortly before I had to pack up and go to our final rehearsal, I finished it. It’s clunky in more than a few spots, but at least it will work for Tuesday. Parts of it are already nice, but on the whole, I don’t feel I have as much control over the sound as I did with the Finale 2007 GPO. I’m sure the company would tell me that I have a lot more control, but what I’ve found over the years is that having all that control usually means that you are forced to dig deeper into the program’s innards to gain it.

At any rate, here it is.

Leadership

Posted on by Dale

I haven’t written a lot about our political situation because I might have to start actually ranting. Let’s face it, Microsoft’s crimes against humanity are nothing, nothing, compared to the current administration’s. For one thing, the current administration’s crimes are actual crimes that could be tried in The Hague with some degree of success, not to mention the intriguing daydream of public execution. And I’m not even talking about the high crimes and misdemeanors that could be laid at their impeachable door.

Their whole mise-en-scene these days involves staying in Iraq. Something blows up and kills people: it means we need to stay. Something goes moderately well (only 150 people died instead of 155): it means we need to stay. The insurgency is swelling: we need to stay. The corrupt sheikhs of Anbar have been paid off to turn against the insurgency: we need to stay.

At no point does anyone in power, either the scumbags who got us into this hellish situation nor the Loyal Opposition, say, “You know what? I think it’s been one six months too many. What say we cut our losses and bring our army home?”

Will Iraq collapse if we come home? As compared to, say, what it’s doing right now? Just today, the “progress” on the sharing of oil revenues went south. Oops, there went the political progress we’ve spent how many lives and how many billions of dollars on?

Some say Bush should call for new elections. Parse that one for a moment. Bush should jerk the rug out from under the duly elected (we all saw the purple fingers, right?) government of the country we’re occupying? That should set well with the insurgency. George W. Bush cannot even run this government, much less the non-government of al-Maliki.

Okay, I’ll stop there, or I will go mad.

What prompted all this, besides the recent barrage of lies and half-truths, was a brief into today’s Times about Russia:

The governor of a central province told employers to contribute to a Kremlin campaign to boost the birthrate by giving couples the day off to have sex… This is the third year the Ulyanovsk region, famous as the birthplace of Lenin, has dedicated a day to encouraging couples to produce more babies. (NYT, 9/13/07, A6)

I mean, don’t you wish our leadership was as innocuously inept?

Oh dear

Posted on by Dale

I’m home alone, and after giving up on a glacial Onegin (Ralph Fiennes and Liv Tyler), I was flipping through channels. I stumbled upon Disney’s High School Musical 2. I threw up in my mouth a little. I stopped flipping through channels and turned off the television.