Writing a poem (Day 5/365)

Posted on by Dale

Before I begin, I’d like to comment on a piece of software I came across this summer which has proven to be quite useful. Unlike most software I own, it has no bells or whistles. It is simplicity itself, and that is its power.

It’s called WriteRoom, and it’s a text editor. You might wonder why I would need a text editor. I already have TextEdit, AppleWorks, Pages, MS‡‡‡ Word, plus a host of other applications which can handle text. Why would I need another one, especially one which does not even allow you to indent or italicize?

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Starting a poem (Day 4/365)

Posted on by Dale

As I wrote my “high tech corridor” piece, even as I was driving through Georgia’s High Tech Corridor (which got that way via House Resolution 1327 in 2001), I mused whether this impression could be expressed in a poem.

Clearly, since I wrote an essay, nothing suggested itself to me naturally, so I’m going to try this the hard way. WARNING: long and pointless post ahead.

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A report (Day3/365)

Posted on by Dale

In addition to my 365 project, I’m also embarking on a bit of a self-improvement thing. I promised myself this summer that I would begin walking for exercise each evening, and that I would use the time for this project.

One of my weakest skills as a composer is my interval-recognition abilities. You would think I would be able to hum a melody and write it right down, but history has proven that I’m pretty hit or miss about these things. I have very good relative pitch when I’m singing, so my sight-singing in a chorus is very accurate, but just making up stuff and transcribing it? Not so much.

So in order to get better at this, I have bought a Moleskine pocket notebook with music staff paper in it. I carry it with me on my walk, and I force myself to compose melodies and write them down in the notebook. I will also be using it to work on my harmonic analysis skills. Eventually, of course, I’ll get to be just like Beethoven, seized with ideas and whipping out my notebook to sketch in a symphony or two.

Last night I went for my first official walk, and other than working up a sweat, I filled eight staves with ideas for a theme for Symphony #1. I have not tested them yet to see if they sound at all correct. It also occurred to me that a sonatina for piano four-hands I wrote some years ago could yield a theme for the final movement, so I wrote that down. (To be clear, I wrote down the idea, not the theme; I couldn’t remember it exactly. I had to open up that particular piece and copy the theme this morning.)

Actually, the Beethoven example is pretty germane to what I’m trying to do with this project. He was notorious for scratching out more than he wrote. Ideas would come to him, and as he began to work on them, he found himself dissatisfied with them in some way and so began to modify them. He rewrote the opening to the Fifth Symphony at least eight times. The first attempt is recognizable, but clearly imperfect.

This is important for those of us who create with a little less giftedness than Ludwig: if someone as godlike as Beethoven couldn’t get it right the first time, why do we think we ought to? Get it out there, get it on the paper, and then revise it.

I know this, but I find it hard to follow. Back in 2004 when I was working on the “penguin opera,” I would start a piece by writing “abortive attempts” at the top of the score paper. Just go ahead and name it as a wasted attempt. Whatever I put on the page, I had no expectations of it except that it would be a failure. And then, two or three revisions later, I’d have something that worked.

But heavens how I hate it.

A small essay (Day 2/365)

Posted on by Dale

When you’re heading to the coast of Georgia from Newnan, you can take I-75 down to Macon and then get onto I-16. That will take you through the deadest stretches of interstate this side of the Mississippi, down to Savannah, and then you get to use I-95 down to the isles. Out of your way, but clean.

Or you can go straight there by getting onto U.S. 41 at Griffin and just staying straight on 341 all the way to Brunswick. It cuts through the state like a royal highway, and most of the time you’re alone. That is its appeal to me: no real traffic, no flocks of semi’s, no clumps of maniacs trying to go five miles per hour faster or slower than you. You’re surrounded by green, and yes, you have to slow down for the towns along the way, but to me that’s a plus.

After you squeeze through Perry you’re onto the long stretch leading to the coast. And there, in the first pecan grove, is a sign: GEORGIA’S HIGH TECH CORRIDOR.

Right, you think. On and on the road goes. It widens into four lanes, four lanes divided, more pecans, a lot more pine trees, and every now and then another sign: GEORGIA’S HIGH TECH CORRIDOR.

Only, really, it’s not. There’s nothing to indicate that this ribbon of highway is flanked by anything other than that which it’s always been flanked by: utter rurality. There aren’t even real farms anymore, just pecan groves and pine plantations, and occasionally a small town that used to serve the farmers but no longer has that purpose, nor indeed any purpose.

You check your laptop to see if, incredibly, you might be getting a wireless signal, but of course you aren’t. The endless pine trees are not wired. Perhaps they’re being raised by satellite?

Your iPod broadcasts random music to your radio that you are fairly certain, and I don’t think you’re being overly unfair to the homes you pass, that has never been heard in those homes, or even heard of: Berio, Gottschalk, Dohnányi, Adams.

You don’t dare check your cell-phone to see if you have coverage, because what would be the good in that? Knowing that you’re cut off from the outside world would only lead to feelings of uneasiness.

In fact, the only indication of any high tech in this particular corridor is a sign, hand-lettered, by a rundown shack in a nearly abandoned community. It says, “COMPUTER WORK.”

Right under that, it says, “BOILED PEANUTS.”

Where does one go from there?

The answer to life, the universe, and everything

Posted on by Dale

When I was a young person, I somehow became fascinated by symphonic music, “classical” music, if you will. Heaven knows how, because I don’t come from a family from whom I would have absorbed that kind of taste. But my father bought a stereo one year, one of those huge pieces of furniture of the early-1960s, all spiffy in its moderne design. (Looking back, I’m sure it was one of those things that he didn’t tell my mother about, sort of like most of my computers, and I’m sure it had the same chilling effect on their relationship.)

He also bought a couple of cheapo hi-fidelity LPs (if you don’t know what an LP is/was, click here), and it was from those that I began my musical journey. It was all what I would call “trash music,” the thrilling cheap stuff that we discount at our soul’s peril: von Suppé overtures, operatic marches, that kind of thing. But it was enough. I was hooked.

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More educational research

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Those of you who have been with me for a while may recall a post I wrote on educational research, in which I stated my overall disdain for most research. One set of data beloved of our current administration’s education minions is the NAEP, the National Assessement of Educational Progress, the “only test administered across the nation in all the states.” In fact, it bills itself as “The Nation’s Report Card.” That’s how important it is.

Well.

Back when I first became aware of the NAEP, I thought, well, at least it’s consistent, right? Only sort of no: after I thought about it, I realized that my school was not taking this test every year, and in fact I didn’t remember it ever taking the test. So where is this report card coming from?

The way it works is that schools are randomly selected from across the country each year to be the data sources. Well, that’s okay, sort of, because you can get a “scientific sample” to give good data.

Only sort of no: within each randomly selected school, a small number of students is chosen to take the test. It’s not even random, because selected students and their parents must agree to be the guinea pigs. This small number of students then takes the test, which lasts less than an hour, and it’s from this set of data that we get our Report Card.

That’s right: when you read about how “scores are up” or “down” or our children are the stupidest of all civilized nations, this is the test they’re talking about. A 50-minute test administered to a not-quite-random sample of students scattered across the nation.

It gets worse. I often wondered at the drop off in scores between elementary and high school. You’ve read about that, how our 4th graders are up there with the rest of the world, but somehow they all get stupid by 8th grade (which makes sense, if you know middle school), but then get even stupider in high school. How does this happen?

As a principal of my acquaintance told me, when she was in charge of the test at the high school, the only students who would agree to the test were the losers who simply didn’t want to be in class. Not one of our best and brightest were included. The AP kids, the gifted kids, didn’t want to miss class.

At least at the elementary level, they work their little hearts out on the test. We tell them it’s important, and they believe us. The scabs at the high school don’t care whether it’s important or not. They just slough their way through it and kick back, enjoying their hour of freedom before sauntering back to “Life Skills Math.”

Nor does the NAEP gather any data about what might produce a school’s scores. Funding? Nope. Funding for the media center? Nope. What reading series do K-3 classrooms use? Nada. They scope out the kids’ home language and whether the family owns a computer, and that’s about it. (Their database of info on schools only includes data from the 2003-2004 school year. Their population data for my school, for example, is about 200 students off. Next year, if they follow the same schedule, they’ll be about 500 off.)

So there it is. The next time you read about the requirement to use “research-based strategies” in improving student “achievement,” remember that it’s from the same people who bring you the “Nation’s Report Card,” with about the same level of rigor in their “research.”

A full confession

Posted on by Dale

Wow. I didn’t think anyone would figure us out, but Chris Mathews nailed it.

So I might as well confess that we liberals are in league with Osama bin Laden, just as Chris Mathews (and now many other Rovian mouthpieces) claim. How else do you think he is still free four years after the Bush administration swore to get him dead or alive? That was me.

It’s also because of me that we attacked Iraq. It’s my fault we have killed over 2,000 American troops and so many Iraqis that even I’ve lost count. But it was Michael who suggested sending not enough troups to actually secure the country, guaranteeing destructive chaos and a rapidly rising insurgency.

I’m the one who set up the insurgent training camps in Iraq where there were none before, and my good friend Jobie ramped up the “ongoing war within our lifetime” meme.

Jill, on the other hand, managed the weakening of the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments, and I think it was Peter who first suggested wasting $20 billion on “reconstruction efforts” and then abandoning the effort. I know it was Peter who first realized the implications of a $300+ billion war effort in terms of domestic programs such as FEMA and that drug program thing. (I don’t know much about our domestic terrorism efforts; that’s a different cell under the direction of a woman they call Counselor Kay.)

Of course, I never heard any of us, not even Peter, suggest that establishing a universal Caliphate was a good idea, nor that attacking civilians in cold blood was a moral action, but perhaps I missed a meeting. Chris Mathews and Pat Buchanan seem convinced that we liberals are equivalent to Osama bin Laden, and who are any of us to disagree?

Because if we’re not responsible for everything I’ve mentioned, then who is?

Liebestod

Posted on by Dale

Oh my God: how could I have forgotten the “Liebestod”?

Today, I was toodling around doing my errands, stocking up on tonic water for the long weekend, that kind of thing, and my iPod chose John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine. Very fun piece, and thrilling, and I was driving along, trying to remind myself to go pick up the laundry too, and then I began to imagine some kind of video to go with the music: a short ride starting at Battery Park in Manhattan and proceding across the continent, zooming across the plains and through the Grand Canyon, ending with a swoop up the side of the Rockies and an abrupt fall down the hills of San Francisco to a sudden stop at the Pacific Ocean. Could be a lot fun for someone with imagination and enough computing power. One of you needs to get on that.

Anyway, I was thinking about computer-generated videos for classical music, and I happened to recall early attempts at this kind of thing, back in the 80s, including one for Wagner’s “Prelude and Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde that seemed fairly accomplished at the time. (The author of that particular video seems to be Ron Hays, from a quick Google search.)

I found myself wondering whether in fact that video would appear as accomplished now. (It’s not online, alas.) What would be possible with today’s technology that could match that soaring, gorgeous sound?

That’s when it dawned on me that I did not in fact own the “Liebestod.” Wagner is a difficult proposition from any angle: either you hate him or love him (“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds,” smirked Mark Twain), and even if you love him, you either own whole days’ worth of his music or Top 10 compilations.

Thus it happened that I owned Solti conducting his way through the hummable bits of the Ring Cycle, but nothing from Wagner’s other works. Not a problem: that’s what iTunes is for, ne-c’est pas? After twenty minutes deliberation, I downloaded Daniel Barenboim and some French orchestra playing bits from Meistersinger and Parsifal and finally Tristan und Isolde.

I’ve been playing it all evening, this “Liebestod,” and I have to tell you that it’s one of those pieces you should not play while driving, because you risk running into something when your eyes roll back in your head.

Wagner was a damnable man, personally vile in the extreme, but heavens, what music! A simple motif expands, growing ever and ever more passionate until it effloresces into literal waves of sound, which crash against your ears again and again and again, and just when you think the music cannot take you any higher, it does, in a climax that is, not to put it too delicately, orgasmic.

You don’t even have to know the plot of the opera: Tristan goes to pick up King Mark’s new bride, Isolde. Abetted by a servant’s love potion, they fall in love on the boatride back, but she goes through with the marriage. Alas, they cannot keep their hands off each other, and he is wounded by one of Mark’s minions. Isolde stands over his body and sings this music, willing herself out of this mortal life and into a whole other, higher plane. (“Liebestod” means “Love-Death.”)

There is of course, in one irony, a new movie opening this weekend with a modified version of this story, but somehow I doubt that it’s going to end quite so transcendently.

The other irony of this post is that Birgitt Nilsson, the great Wagnerian soprano, died over Christmas; her death was announced yesterday in the Times. I also downloaded her performance of this from the 1966 Deutsche Grammophon recording, just out of curiosity; I am not one of those who own days’ worth of Wagner’s music. People, even if you don’t like opera, this piece will leave you goggle-eyed and weeping. There is an irrational ferocity in the accompaniment that Nilsson just soars above as if it were nothing, as was her wont, apparently, and when she hits that climax, she threatens to drag you into that higher plane of existence with her. Sumptuous stuff, just sumptuous.

Ho ho ho

Posted on by Dale

Here’s my take on the Christmas/Holidays issue: Bah, humbug.

And it is humbug, an artificial, entitled aggrievement of the right, a dangerous division put about by people who want to take what should be a gentle wish of good cheer and turn it into a partisan battering ram.

I make it my personal business not to be offended by other people’s religious beliefs. If someone were to wish me Happy Hannukah or Blessed Kwanzaa or even Super Solstice, that’s great. The more good wishes coming my way, the better, I say.

However, Mr. Bill O’Reilly (the one they call the big, fat liar) has decided to bolster his sagging ratings by inventing some kind of bogus liberal war on Christmas. Rally the troops, he cries, and boycott any business that doesn’t acknowledge this nation’s Christian founding by wishing you a Merry Christmas, damn it.

And there you have it. Shouldn’t he be advising you to avoid churches that refuse to use the C word? No, it’s the businesses who are at fault for not recognizing your deeply held belief in Jesus Christ as your lord and savior.

This is crazy talk. Businesses are in business, and their business is to make money from customers who may or may not be Christian. The crazies cry that anyone who might be offended by a Christian greeting is free to shop elsewhere, but folks, that’s not what this country is about. Separate economic, political, and educational systems for different religious sects is what you get in places like Iraq.

If you want to cling to the idea that this nation was founded by Christians as a Christian nation, you will want to follow that idea to its very roots: the Puritans did not celebrate Christmas. In fact, they outlawed it. They saw no connection between the birth of Jesus Christ and the licentious feasts and gift-giving of the homeland.

And you know what? They were right. There is no connection. We celebrate two entirely separate holidays on December 25. One is a religious commemoration of deep significance to a majority of believers in this country. The other is a great social festival that has become vital to the economy of retailers everywhere. They happen to have the same name, but they have nothing to do with each other, unless you count the tenuous connection of “peace” and “good will.”

So the next time you manage to get yourself all offended because a place of commerce hasn’t acknowledged your religious beliefs, you need to ask yourself: exactly where are you worshipping?

Merry Christmas.