100 scrappy mp3s to celebrate 2009. New discoveries, longtime tracks held dearly, and the in-between. LINK (393MB). Schnitzelstu:cke!

Previously: Scrap Happy 2008

For the months that don't show any activity, assume I spent them worrying about something or other.

Prelude & Fughetta fl., vln., & vcl. | student performers (January)
The In Between , solo cello (February)
White, Those That Stayed Still, SATB a capella (May)
The Animal Estates Home Buyers' Tour, children's musical (July) | Songs: Purple Martins' Majesty, Big Brown Bat, Beaver Dam!, At Least We're Eastern Mud Turtles, Awesome Possum, We All Know Some Animals / Animal Estates
Always Call Your Parents, children's musical (July) | Songs: Always Call Your Parents, Come on Over to the Old Piany, Johnny Hotstuff, The Robot Tango
A Single Winter's Day, holiday musical (September) Songs: A Winter Town in the Winter Time, It's Never the Same Without Snow, Four Seasons of Fun, Ice Pact, The Last Minute Plan, Plant a Seed, Just Adjust
Arrangements for Robert Honeywell's Lord Oxford Brings you the Second American Revolution, Live! (September)
Songs for BMI Musical Theater Workshops (ongoing)

Complete list on the music page

Once again, a list of books I read, and mostly remembered. Links go to LibraryThing (Social bookmarking! Get it?!)

Jack Kerouac: The Dharma Bums
Alex Ross: The Rest is Noise
Hunter S. Thompson: Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72
Douglas Adams: Life, the Universe and Everything (reread)
Alan Moore: V for Vendetta
Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep
Ben Mezrich: 21: Bringing Down the House
Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policeman's Union
Janna Levin: A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
Malcom Gladwell: Blink
John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley
Jack Kerouac: On the Road
Okakura Kakuzo: The Book of Tea
H.G. Wells: The Time machine
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Ernest and Other Plays
Amy Sedaris & David Sedaris: The Book of Liz
David Mamet: Glengarry Glen Ross
Ursula K Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness
Roald Dahl: Tales of the Unexptected
Nathanael West: Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locusts
Eugene Ionesco: Rhinoceros (reread)
Harold Pinter: The Homecoming
Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire (reread)
Walker Percy: The Moviegoer
Steve Martin: Born Standing Up
Michael Lewis: The Blind Side
Tony Kushner: Angels in America

CHILDREN'S BOOKS
Roald Dahl: The BFG
Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't as Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, ... Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out
Matthew Reinhart: Star Wars: A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy
C.S. Lewis: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis: The Magician's Nephew
C.S. Lewis: The Horse and His Boy
C.S. Lewis: Prince Caspian

Lincoln, NH *
New York, NY *
Alajuela, Costa Rica
Puerto Jimenez, Costa Rica
La Leona, Costa Rica
Playa Samara, Costa Rica
Liberia, Costa Rica
San Jose, Costa Rica
East Northport, NY *
Mexico City, Mexico
Puebla, Mexico
Verzcruz, Mexico
Somerville, Mass. *
Boston, Mass.
Pittsfield, Mass.
Bolton Landing, NY
Montreal, Canada
Quebec City, Canada
Winsted, CT
West Hartford, CT

One or more nights spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited on non-consecutive days and deserve special recognition. Up with cities!

Previously: Year in Cities 2003-2007

My favorite ASCII character has to be the pipe: |.
- It is immediately recognizable as a separator, an orthographic scythe.
- In that capacity, It is more unassuming than the forward slash /.
- It's right there on the keyboard, an underdog key, coupled with the wretched blackslash.
- It is the tallest, lankiest character on the keyboard, taller than uppercase i and even taller than the square bracket: I [ ) |
- It has a cool, monosyllabic plosive moniker.
- Why not make the pipe your favorite ASCII character, too?

I love these. James Plakovic ingeniously draws these photo-music-mosaics, painstakingly creating a mashup of rhythms and crosshatching. Skip the audio examples, since those are more of an afterthought to the expertly executed "scores."

Ursula K. Le Guin
Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness

A sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive intellect.

Two passages from Okakura Kakuzo's The Book of Tea
Online version

The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing. What a tempest in a tea-cup! he will say. But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup. Mankind has done worse. In the worship of Bacchus, we have sacrificed too freely; and we have even transfigured the gory image of Mars. Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucious, the piquancy of Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself.

Continue reading "Life as a Cup of Tea" »

... blogging for NewMusicBox from VocalEssence's Essentially Choral New Music readings. 1, 2, & 3.

Roger Angell, writing in Fall 1985
Season Ticket, Houghton-Mifflin, 1988, p251-252

   If there is an impatient or aggrieved sound to these remarks, it is not directed at the Yankee players, whom I mostly admire and wish well.  I would like to root wholeheartedly for the Yankees one of these days, but somebody is always jumping up and spoiling the view – the owner, the manager, some of the fans.  The resonance of the game up at the Stadium has gone sour, and often comes across as being ill-tempered, distracted, patronizing, and frantically concerned with winning.  That tone is perfectly represented by the Stadium organ music – if that is the right word for the puerile and infuriated assault of noises, nudges, and schlocky musical references with which the management (it must be a management decision, after all) attempts to cajole the players, bait the visitors, and whip up the helpless captive masses in the stands.  The mighty electronic wurstmaker is scarcely silent for the duration of a foul tip, it seems, and its mindless and almost ceaseless commentary abrades the fabric of the game and the soul of the watching fan.  This year, forcing myself actually to listen to the thing for once, I tried to pick out the main phrasings and modulations of a mid-inning concerto furioso:

   Organ: "Buh da-da-da-da! Buh da-da-da-da! Buh da-da!buh da-da- da-da- da-da!" (theme from "Gaîte Parisienne," here repeated in mad up-tempo.) Pause.  "Tah-tah-tah-tahhh!" (Beethoven's Fifth, opening theme.) Pause.

Continue reading "Roger Angell on the Yankee Stadium Organist, circa 1985" »

Welcome, Whitney Museum Artist’s Choice, Artist’s Voice Workshop families! HERE is the mp3 of Big Brown Bat! Read more about Fritz Haeg's Animal Estates installations on his site. Enjoy!

Schott Music has published my arrangements of Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin -- one for piano trio and another for violin and piano. Thanks to Laura Metcalf, Monica Chung and Jannina Barefield for instigating the arrangement (and of course for performing it). And thanks to Mark Steinberg and Jeremy Denk for helping to smooth out the rough edges of the violin and piano version.

Distributed in the USA by Hal Leonard.
Other publications listed on the music page.

` Semana Santa in Mexico City, Puebla and Veracruz. Exploring a bit of central Mexico ... and leaving ... a carbon footprint!

LINK to Flickr set.

Sketch pages for my orchestra composition Sic Semper Nobis appear in the Fall/Witner 2007 issue of the literary journal The Kean Review. During Summer 2007 at the MacDowell colony, visual artist Mary Lum gathered sketches from those of us composers there who wrote to paper (rather than writing directly to computer). She presents the musical sketches in the magazine as an variety of graphic design. With no prefatory material before the music itself, the effect is one of score-as-art, QED.

Score sketch pages by Tarik O'Regan, Yevgeniy Sharlat and myself. Available via The Kean Review or at Barnes & Noble.

Philip Roth's rhapsody to baseball The Great American Novel contains so many wonderful vignettes, but my favorite is his passage about the life of an umpire. Embattled umpire Mike "The Mouth" Masterson passionately explains his plight to the young superstar Gil Gamesh:

"Son, listen to me. I don't expect that you are going to love me. I don't expect that anybody in a ball park is going to care if I live or die. Why should they? I'm not the star. You are. The fans don't go out to the ball park to see the Rules and the Regulations upheld, they go out to see the home team win. The whole world loves a winner, you know that better than anybody, but when it comes to an umpire, there's not a soul in the ball park who's for him. He hasn't got a fan in the place. What's more, he cannot sit down, he cannot go to the bathroom, he cannot get a drink of water, unless he visits the dugout, and that is something that any umpire worth his salt does not ever want to do. He cannot have anything to do with the players. He cannot fool with them or kid with them, even though he may be a man who in his heart likes a little horseplay coming down the street, he will cross over or turn around and walk the other way, so it will not look to passersby that anything is up between them. In strange towns, when the visiting players all buddy up in a hotel lobby and go out together for a meal in a friendly restaurant, he finds a room in a boarding house and east his evening pork chop in a diner all alone. Oh, it's a lonesome thing, being an umpire. There are men who won't talk to you for the rest of your life. Some will even stoop to vengeance. But that is not your lookout, my boy. Nobody is twisting Masterson's arm, saying, 'Mike, it's a dog's life, but you are stuck with it.' No it's just this, Gil: somebody in this world has got to run the game. Otherwise, you see, it wouldn't be baseball, it would be chaos. We would be right back where were in the Ice Ages."