Last day of goofing off (Day 316/365)

Posted on by Dale

No, honest, this is it. From here on out, I will have something to show for most days. Probably.

It’s the Friday of the first full week of GHP, and the faculty always celebrates in the lobby after minors. (The fact that we actually have to work Saturday morning is irrelevant.) It’s great to see everyone relaxing, snacking, talking, and in general having a great Pan-Dimensional Mouse of a time.

There was nothing on the calendar for the evening, which meant that technically after supper I should have had hours and hours to sit down in my apartment here and work on something. But you know what? Celebration of a task well-accomplished is too important to shut down.

Not only that, but for me to have come into my apartment and closed my door in order to get work done would have been seen as a serious exclusion of my happy faculty. Some would begin to worry about me, damned blues, while others would have been offended that I didn’t care to party with them.

I might have left my door open, but that’s the sign that anyone is welcome to barge in and meet/talk/play. I’m one of those people who take a good 20 minutes to get into the flow, and who among us believes that flow would happen with intermittent interruptions of happy faculty?

So I bagged it all and had a good time with my faculty. Tomorrow is another day, and I know that the happy faculty will either be going home, going to a movie, or taking long naps. I can work then, after I take my nap.

A concert (Day 315/365)

Posted on by Dale

Yes, I’m behind. Yes, this is being written two days late. No, I have no excuse other than working 6:00 a.m. till midnight trying to smoothe out the little roadbumps that are inevitable when starting up this program.

On the creativity front, I at least got to attend the GHP faculty recital, a splendid affair that might have been on the long side, but at least it in the “too much of a good thing” category.

Nothing, and a lot of it (Day 314/365)

Posted on by Dale

Creative product today? Minor registration day? At GHP?

It is to laugh.

My job on the first Wednesday of the Governor’s Honors Program is to sort 700 children into their first or second choice of a minor, the class in which they will spend the rest of the summer every afternoon. That’s 700 pieces of paper I must touch at least six times each: collecting, dividing into preselected and non, shuffling, sorting into first choices, counting, redeploying overages, and counting again. Repeat the last two steps until every class is within its limit and every child has his first or second choice.

And after that, I have to type in all 700 choices into the database. The whole process takes about five hours. At 9:30, I have to print out three copies of the list and take them to the dorms. I do not post them. I dump them with the RAs on duty and leave.

Then, at 10:30 pm, I have to call down students whose forms were not filled out correctly and put them in whatever class is still under its limit. And then I have to make the adjustments in the computer and print out rolls for the teacher. This year I made it to bed at midnight.

The only thing even close to being creative I did today was to attend Cinema GHP, which showed Casablanca as the first movie of the summer. Just to witness the perfection of that movie is a creative act.

Technology (Day 313/365)

Posted on by Dale

You would be forgiven for expecting that I would accomplish nothing today, what with ramping up the LotPDM, but such is my foresight, my planaheaditude, that I actually had free time during the afternoon.

And so I got to an item on my TTD list: extract orchestral parts for Milky Way. Of course this is not actually difficult; Finale does it for you. But I still have not done it in a very long time (and even then I wasn’t extracting a whole orchestra).

I dimly recalled that one of the improvements to Finale 2007 was better part extraction, so I was bold and opened the piece in that version. (You may recall that I stuck to the 2006 version because the plug-in that plays the orchestra doesn’t really work in the 2007 version.) Indeed, the management of part extraction is pretty incredible.

For example, the glockenspiel plays pretty heavily, but the timpani plays once, the bass drum once, the cymbals once. Actually I had forgotten I had put the cymbals in there, because I had used the wrong note and so they weren’t playing, it’s complicated, I tell you, and I may take them out, but there they were. It seemed to me that I didn’t need to print three different parts for those instruments when clearly it would take only one bored percussionist to handle them.

Finale allows you to combine those kinds of parts into one sheet, and it was quite intuitive as to how to accomplish that.

What wasn’t intuitive, after I had exported the parts, was how to make the parts show up on 9×12 paper rather than the 11×17 of the score. I could go through each of the nineteen parts and change the size of the paper, but that goes against my rule of repeating an action more than three times without technological assistance. My presumption is that a task like that is embedded somewhere in the software. It should do it for me.

Back to Finale, looking around the Extract Parts bit. It wasn’t there, but it was in the Page Layout area. You can actually set the size of paper for the score and the parts within the score. Apparently Finale 2007 manages parts as an extension of the score, which is cool if I ever have to make changes to the score. Not that that would ever happen.

So I exported them again. Then I noticed that nowhere on the parts did it say what part it was. Shouldn’t that have been automatic? Rooting around in menus and options gave me no clue, so I was forced to resort to reading the manual. I know, but sometimes it it’s necessary.

It appears that Finale 2007 will put the part name on the part automatically, but Finale 2006 did not, so if you’ve converted a file there were extra steps to take. That’s when I found out that you can actually pull up parts within the score file and edit them before you export them. Cool!

So I exported them again.

We’ll see whether that’s good enough. What I probably need to do is to go through all the parts and move all the little bits around (pizzicato markings sitting on top of measure numbers, that kind of thing) and then export them. Again.

Nothing (Day 312/365)

Posted on by Dale

As predicted, I have nothing to show for today. As the program gets under way, little things start to pop up, all those potholes or cave-ins in the road that one simply does not notice as one surveys the glorious landscape over which one is about to travel. This is not even taking into account the ambushes from hostile indigenes.

53 days to go.

Land of the PDM (Day 311/365)

Posted on by Dale

All is well here in the Land of Pan-Dimensional Mice. Incredibly well, actually. I have a good staff, the copier is installed and working, everyone has a key to his/her classroom, and I even have my own parking space this year.

And today the pan-dimensional mouselings arrived. That also went smoothly: 700 students arrived on campus (complete with complete families), unloaded all their stuff, and got their cars out of the way, in about four hours.

And then, most miraculously of all, after the student orientation meeting, at which they were polite and attentive, all 700 of them went to the dining hall and were seated and eating supper in about twenty minutes! By the time I got there 45 minutes later, the crowd was actually thinning out.

After the horrors of last summer, with a copier that wouldn’t work even after being installed a week late (and in the men’s laundry room), and a dining hall under renovation so that we were fed in the Old Gym (poorly), and a host of other administrative nightmares, this is fairly Elysian.

Tonight, after the faculty met with their students for the first time, they came back to the dorm all rosy and optimistic, and I’d had about all the perfection I could stand. I reminded them of what Jeff Goldblum’s character says in Lost World: “Oh, yeah. ‘Ooooh, ahhh’, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s the running and screaming.”

And so it begins.

Thought and news (Day 310/365)

Posted on by Dale

Two interesting things today, one for Moonlight and one for William Blake.

Having started some actual work on songs for Moonlight, I made a sincere effort to keep the lyrics for “Love Song of Thurgood…” in my head so that maybe others would come. But what I found myself doing was playing with melodies for the words I had.

This is probably a good idea. Hammering out words that fit some metrical scheme (which may not be apparent from the words on the page, actually) to fill out the first verse is a good place to start, and then I think if I can begin setting those words to music, that gives me a rather complete framework to start writing the second verse, the ‘B’ section, and the third verse.

Question: having seen the gist of the first verse, do you think I need to strive for any kind of character development in the song, i.e., we know more about Thurgood at the end than at the beginning, or we see some change in him from beginning to end, or is it going to be acceptable for this to be yet another comedy song? I have a feeling we can fill this show with comedy songs. Is that going to be OK?

In other news, I handed off the score to “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way” to Stephen Czarkowski, our orchestra maestro extraordinaire, to peruse. Never mind that I sent this to him in April. Never mind that I’ve been on pins and needles since he replied that there were a “few problems” and that he never told me what they were.

You understand my anxiety: I am a total fraud, without a real clue as to what I’m doing when I create an orchestral score of some proportions like “Milky Way.” For all I know, none of it can be played. Well, that’s not exactly true. I have some real knowledge of the woodwinds and sort of for the brass and percussion. Strings, though, I am quite in the dark.

I can look at a score by one of the masters and see that my music is not as “hard to play” as theirs, but I have no idea if there are certain intervals or fingerings that just can’t be done.

So I reacted apparently noticeably when, in a meeting with the GHP music department, Stephen says, “Oh, your ‘Milky Way’ score? There are some parts… Unplayable.”

Geez.

I’m thinking all kinds of horrible things: what if all those arpeggiations in the celli are just not doable? What if whole chunks of the thing cannot be played? That lovely music, everyone’s favorite, just gone because it’s… unplayable.

Geez.

He finally crosses my path again later this afternoon, bringing the score with him. Here, he says, measure 57, these two notes in the viola, out of their range.

And that was it? A part I copied and pasted from the second violins and transposed down, and never checked the range on? And I never heard the note was missing because it’s a complex section and the violas are doubling the violin IIs anyway? And I clearly never ran the plug-in that checks for range issues?

Before I could get too upset at the whole thing, Stephen says they plan to give it a readthrough during the sixth week of the program, i.e., basically after everything is accomplished and things are winding down. That’s as it should be, actually. I have no claim on the students’ time here at this program in this way, although I would like to think that might change after the readthrough.

But “Milky Way” will get at least an orchestral readthrough in late July. I’ll keep you posted.

Love song (Day 309/365)

Posted on by Dale

Aha! I did something today.

I could not bear posting yet again what a sluggard I was, so I forced myself to go for a walk around the Magic Square (that’s where we PDM live) and work on the lyrics for at least one song for A Day in the Moonlight.

I had had an idea for “The Love Song of Thurgood J. Proudbottom” recently that I thought I’d use to get me started: Thurgood and Alexandra are in the garden, hiding from their children, and it’s the occasion for Thurgood to sing to her. I am seeing a steamy tango, which the two dance.

After a very steamy walk around the Magic Square, I’ve made a start:

You’ll never know how much I love you
(if I can help it).
Every day and every night you’re on my mind
(I wish you’d move it.)
And… something something something
(like a pig in velvet)
‘Cause people say that love is blind
(And this should prove it.)

There: the start of a first verse. I’ve done something creative. Now I’m going to do something relaxing.

Temps perdu (Day 308/365)

Posted on by Dale

I may as well confess it, since Marc will blow my cover if I don’t: this post was written tomorrow.

The problem with the Land of the Pan-Dimensional Mice is that time is a mouse:

The Mouse Whose
Name Is Time

The Mouse whose name is Time
Is out of sound and sight.
He nibbles at the day
And nibbles at the night.

He nibbles at the summer
Till all of it is gone.
He nibbles at the seashore.
He nibbles at the moon.

Yet no man not a seer,
No woman not a sibyl
Can ever ever hear
Or see him nibble, nibble.

And whence or how he comes
And how or where he goes
Nobody dead remembers,
Nobody living knows.
–Robert Francis

And so today/yesterday passed with nothing creative from me. The Time Mouse ate it all up.

My great fear, and I knew this when I started this project last August 1, is that the rest of my days will be nibbled by the Time Mouse here at GHP. It’s entirely possible. I know for a fact that I will not, cannot, get anything done before next Thursday. It will be the first day of minors here, which outside the Land of Pan-Dimensional Mice means “I will have 1:30-4:00 free.” It is realistically the only time I have to work on anything of my own: dawn to 1:30 is spent supervising the instruction here, plus lunch; 4:00-5:30, I usually am meeting with staff about the morning; 5:30-9:30, supper plus whatever evening activity is on; and 9:30-11:00, mopping up the day’s damage.

So I freely admit that today was a total miss. Or yesterday, depending on when you believe I wrote this.

Could have been worse, of course. I considered channeling Francis Urquhart and writing, “I was creative today in ways I cannot possibly talk about.”

Friends (Day 307/365)

Posted on by Dale

Today is always a wonderful day, although I feel as if I have been rolled down a hill. Today is the day the faculty arrives at GHP.

In so many ways GHP is like Brigadoon: we only exist once a year, and for a very brief time. (Weird thought popped into my head here: what happens if the village’s land has been developed into a strip mall or “lifestyle center” in the intervening 100 years?) The difference is that we don’t go to sleep and wake up a hundred years later. We actually live the time in between.

So we don’t just wake up and go about our business with our friends and relations. We haven’t seen them in 10 months, and today is the day we get to pick up our “other life” and continue with those who live it with us.

And it is an “other life.” Sometimes I feel like the mice in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, members of a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who poke only a tiny bit of their being into our universe (a bit that looks just like a mouse to us). I don’t think I am different at school or around town, but that most of who I am and what I do is never seen, or sensed, by people outside my immediate circle.

Here at GHP, however, we’re all pan-dimensional mice. We get to stretch our legs a bit without worrying about scaring the earth people. And it’s wonderful as people start showing up and checking in with me. It’s like a fabulous family reunion with a family that you actually look forward to spending six weeks with, if you can imagine such a thing.

Another difference between us and Brigadoon is that the villagers simply lived their everyday life. Our whole purpose, as pan-dimensional mice, is to set up an environment where extraordinary things happen. That makes for a certain anticipatory excitement in our gathering: what kind of students will we get this year? What kinds of wonderful things will they accomplish? What kind of spectacular crashings and burnings will we witness? How high will we fly, and how low will we go?

And so it begins.