I got nothin’. Absolutely no time outside of getting a massage and attending a dinner. Oh well, hi ho the glamorous life.
Struggling (Day 72/365)
I worked on Sun & Moon Circus, but I just can’t get the orchestration right. It’s too shrill, when it should be lightly spooky and then raucous at the end. I will persevere.
Other work today: put up some 100 Book Club teaser thingies, which look like this:
They’re six inches tall and three feet wide and there are a couple dozen of them all over the school. Children are beginning to wonder.
I put together a FAQ brochure for students, and a checklist for teachers, challenging them to see if they would be members of the 100 Book Club. (With trepidation, I checked off mine: I had read 159 of the 500+ books. Whew.)
I also worked more on the New York trip page of the Masterworks Chorale. That’s been fun to put together. If you have any suggestions for that page, please email me.
An incredulous rant (Day 71/365)
No time to do anything creative myself today, although I did create a very cool bulletin board at school today: a background made up of hundreds of titles of books, with a central poster that says, “Are you ready for a challenge?”, followed by the mysterious 100 Book Club logo.
Anyway, we’re off to see The Light in the Piazza at the Fox, so I don’t have time to orchestrate anything.
I leave with you instead a small rant.
The Republicans’ latest battle cry is “What did Nancy Pelosi know and when did she know it?”
Excuse me?
More Wise Cow (Day 70/365)
And I wasn’t through with it. I went back and listened again and worked to lighten the opening up. I added a measure at the beginning and stripped the strings out of the first bits, just leaving the muted violas to move into the woodwind motif at the end of the phrase.
Is the marimba the right instrument for the bass line? I may try a muted cello. It’s just that with the synthesized orchestra, there is not the delicacy that I know a live player could attain. (Just listen to the way the violas just shut off in the first three measures, ack!) Right, Stephen?
At any rate, here’s the updated mp3 of 7. The Wise Cow Enjoys a Cloud. It’s still not playing the rallentando at the end, and the Adagio should kick in on the harp’s glissando, but I can’t seem to make the tempo changes stick.
Wise Cow (Day 69/365)
I’m not sure I’m through with this one. This is 7. The Wise Cow Enjoys a Cloud. It was one of my earlier “experimental” pieces, the experiment being that I wanted to see if I could do away with that iambic beat in the music, just erase the barlines, as it were.
As it happens, I literally erased the barlines in the piano score. What I’m still not sure about is whether I’ve gotten the delicacy I need in the scoring.
Fire (Day 68/365)
11. When We Come Home, Blake Calls for Fire is the first of the William Blake’s Inn poems that I ever set to music, in 1983, if I recall correctly. It’s remained one of my favorites, so I began to worry that it would not fit any more: it comes right after 10. Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way, the last one I composed. Twenty-something years of composition separate them, and their styles might seem glaringly dissimilar.
Not to worry. As I orchestrated it this morning, it came alive all over again. I remain proud and a little thrilled. Here are the score and mp3. The mp3 is a little messed up in the forte section: my laptop’s age and lack of memory and speed make for some glitches in the recording process. They’re small, however, so though you may notice them, I think you will have no problem being swept away.
CSS explorations (Day 67/365)
I fiddled more with CSS, this time on a site for school. I’m working on a project called The 100 Book Club, wherein gifted readers abandon Accelerated Reader and are called upon to read more challenging books, and to read more reflectively. Somehow, between 2nd and 5th grade, they must read 100 books, selected from a list of more than 500. For each book, they write a short blog post in a personal, behind-the-firewall blog (sample here), part of a reading blog community. Could be very exciting.
Anyway, I slaved away getting together this list of books, and I needed a way to share it with my faculty and get their input. I came up with this page, which lists all the books.
The creative part came in getting the CSS to work. Notice how the explanatory material on the left does not scroll down. Pretty cool, huh?
The very nice thing about CSS is that if I decide I need to make the authors’ names smaller, or change the color of the line above their name, I can do that in the stylesheet, and the whole page changes. You can imagine how useful this would be in revamping an entire site.
It’s how one can change the look of one’s own blog, by the way. All the “themes” are simply different stylesheets.
Sunflowers (Day 66/365)
I didn’t think I’d get anything done today, since Thursday is not normally a working night for me, and since my father-in-law is in town for a visit (and the Shubian’s Rift premiere Saturday night), but I had some time to work, so I skipped ahead to 8. Two Sunflowers Move Into the Yellow Room.
Again, this is a bit of a cheat, since when I more or less scored it when I wrote it. Still, transferring it to GPO sounds and deciding exactly which instruments to assign where was not nothing.
Tonight’s puzzle: see if you can tell what my own questions are about how I’ve scored this. I have some, so it’s a fair question. Herewith, the piano score and the mp3 of Sunflowers.
For staging purposes, I think it’s too short, but it would be perfectly easy to insert a dance sequence between the two verses. It’s one of the loveliest pieces in the whole work, so it would be nice to hear the melody a couple of more times.
In other news, you probably need to head over to http://www.nanowrimo.org/. I mean, after all, it’s not as if it’s 365 days of commitment, you know. I’d do it, but I’m busy.
Piddling (Day 65/365)
Another day of not a lot: I continued to play with CSS, working on a webpage for my new 100 Book Club at school, and I designed a really nifty invitation for a get-together we’re having for parents of Grayson’s friends, now that they’ve had a chance to adjust to the children being away. The outside has a photo of some street punks: “It’s 10:00. Do you know where your child is?” And inside it says, “Us either. Join us for cocktails and complain about it.”
Otherwise, I cleaned house for the arrival of my father-in-law. His 75th birthday is Sunday, so he’s coming here and I get to cook. Also, it’s the premiere of Shubian’s Rift on Saturday. Who could miss that?
Nothing (Day 64/365)
Once again, I was prepared to tackle “Sun & Moon Circus,” but a late supper and other business kept me away from the computer.
I do want to say, though, that the Republican leadership’s outrage over the politicization of Rep. Mark Foley’s boy-sex scandal is raising my eyebrows and pursing my lips. How many tax dollars did these same guys spend on the Monica Lewinsky scandal? “It’s vile. It’s more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction.” Said Mark Foley at the time.
And someone, don’t have the reference, sorry, today made the claim that one reason the Republican leadership tippytoed around the problem of a sexual predator in their midst was that they knew he was gay and they were afraid of being politically incorrect. Ah, yes, the right wing of our Congress is readily recognized by their sensitivity towards our gay citizens.
Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge both blame the boys: “sexual beasts,” which sounds to me as if they’ve given a little too much thought about this kind of thing. Dennis Hastert wonders why no one’s investigating the 16-year-olds.
James Dobson blames the internet and our permissive society, which is quite Christian of him, for him. I’m sure he’d do the same for Rep. Barney Frank.
Rep. Tom Reynolds, chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee (to elect more people like this), rented a daycare facility, children and all, to hold a press conference today. When a reporter asked if they could get the little kids out of there so they could have an adult discussion of the Foley scandal, including what Reynolds knew and when he knew it, Reynolds declined. “I’m not going to ask any of my supporters to leave.” Who were these children? “…some of our thirty-somethings, I’ve watched these children being born…” Only not, of course.
All in all, a queasily satisfying display of conservative meltdown. I do hope it lasts.