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Sniffling and coughing, but otherwise hanging in

Count me as a casualty of our energy-decadent society where, no matter how hot it gets outside, office interiors must be kept at frigid temperatures more suitable for penguins than humans. Absurd as it seems, I must take a sweater to work every day, in the middle of summer. And what if I don't? Well, I come down with a sore throat, which inevitably turns into a sinus infection and thereby a couple of weeks of hacking and coughing of the sort that leads nearby companions to fear the loss of vital organs. Can't we have just a little sanity, please?

This cold seems to be on its way out more quickly than most, thanks to a day off from work last Friday during which I finally took much needed rest. Not only for my immune system -- accumulating emotional stresses over the last several weeks must have caught up to me and contributed to my unwell condition. In any case, with a few days of doing next to nothing, I feel in about a week further into my recovery than I would expect to be after so few days.

It's confirmed that at the very least I will be going to Shanghai Conservatory in October to give a two-hour lecture demonstration and also perform on a concert in the evening. By that time I hope to be on leave -- I will certainly need the time to prepare!

A setback, but new determination

Bad news this weekend. I hadn't posted about this before, but for the past few months, I've been in touch with one of the professors at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music about a possible faculty position for me. Things seemed to be going well up until this weekend, when I got an e-mail not saying quite outright, but strongly implying that it would not be possible. That's tough to deal with -- in my mind I was already there. I thought it was just a matter of paperwork, but it seems the administration had different ideas from the faculty.

So this weekend I haven't done much of anything. I went swimming today. The French Open finals were on (where Nadal entered the ranks of the Bjorn Borg-level players, and Federer received a whipping the likes of which I've never seen him endure) as well as the US gymnastics championships -- starting to get Olympic fever!

Otherwise, it's been thinking, letting emotions come and go. Going to Shanghai represented a new chapter where, even as I would leave home geographically, I would come back home spiritually to being a musician. It isn't going to happen exactly that way, but the sense is much more acute now of just how much my musical talents are frankly going to waste because of my current work situation. It's difficult to realize this. I love the people I work with, I find the challenges genuinely fascinating and I'm very good at what I do. I do find satisfaction in all these things, but the price is that my musical work is stuck in neutral. Something has to give.

I'm not sure what form that will take. In some ways, the best case would be to slow down to a part-time schedule, but that might neither be possible, nor the best option. I have some hard thinking to do in the coming months. But I know what the focus is -- to bring my life back into balance. It hasn't been balanced for a long time, and that's even more important than one opportunity denied.

It's scarier with recent economic news. I hope at least this will bode well for the Democrats this fall. It's a shocking irony that the Republicans, formerly the "party of fiscal responsibility," have become the party of profligacy and it's up to the Democrats to come into power every decade or so to clean up the mess. Then the stupid and ungrateful American people hear the siren call of the "spend but don't tax" Republicans and send the country into another supply-side death rattle. It's no longer the case that those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it -- now, nobody remembers what happened even 20 years ago!

Who is proofreading over at iTunes music store?

Their "Classical Music Spotlight" email spam this week includes a writeup of Hilary Hahn's new recording of the Schoenberg violin concerto. Somehow they managed two distinct misspellings in the same paragraph: Shoenberg and Schoeberg.

Genius.

Oh, that's right, all the geniuses at Apple work in retail-land helping people with the cupholders in their computers.

SuperCollider exposé (hush hush!)

I decided to put up the PDFs of the so-called "scores" for the two supercollider pieces I wrote up recently on my website. They are pretty technical documents (and not enough in themselves to reproduce the pieces) but I think they're interesting as documentation of some of my compositional thought processes.

Sangha flower / audio excerpt (from a different performance)
Got an itch to scratch / audio excerpt

For the musical notation, I discovered that I could export snippets from Finale into Encapsulated PostScript files, and then OpenOffice Writer could import them just like any other graphic. So I got the notes in the middle of the text, and everything is vector graphics so it looks great no matter how much you zoom in.

Getting back in touch with older pieces

Busy as always... just haven't had time to post! That situation is not likely to change anytime soon.

Recently I had the opportunity to go over some past pieces: a couple of supercollider tracks and also my Ph.D. dissertation. (Perhaps later I'll explain why.) A most interesting exercise to lay out the results of several years' work in an admittedly highly technical form, but one that I hope has a chance of being intelligible to a human being other than myself. I wouldn't have that expectation of the supercollider code! It's also a pleasure to note that, years later, my dissertation strikes me as stronger work than I remembered. After finishing it, I think I just wanted to put it behind me and move onto the next phase of development, but now that seems to be a mistake. Too much of the piece is emotionally gripping to let it go to waste. Perhaps it isn't too late to find players.

The violin piece is moving out of the concept stage -- notes are coming together and I feel like I'm picking up some momentum.

Recent listening: I've been looking for a long time for a decent recording on period instruments of Bach's flute sonatas. I became deeply intimate with the main six sonatas (BWV 1030-1035) and the solo partita in a minor (BWV 1013) as an undergrad, though I didn't get to know the fabulous G major trio sonata (BWV 1039) until graduate school and somehow missed the g minor (BWV 1020) sonata altogether. Then, not long ago while listening to an online Baroque music radio station, I heard recordings of some of the sonatas in the hands of Lisa Beznosiuk and admired both the technical excellence and strong interpretations. Lo and behold, the iTunes music store carries the entire set, so I bought it online and have been enjoying it ever since! The pieces are every bit as exciting as I felt they were when I was learning to play them, and I've really enjoyed getting back in touch with some repertoire that meant a great deal to me in college.

Although one Amazon reviewer panned the recording engineering, I find the sound quality entirely pleasant, and any quibbles here are easily overshadowed by the exquisite playing. Beznosiuk's tone is ravishing and her interpretive decisions are impeccable, well thought through and daring in places. I'd recommend this recording without hesitation.

Three months! Really??!!

Has it really been almost three months since my last post? I knew it was a long time, but I didn't think it was that long. It's been full, and exceptionally busy. A quick summary --

The book, of course, was delayed. My materials were ready early in January, but some people took more than a month after that. At the same time, supercollider 3.2 was supposed to be ready at the beginning of the year, but that got pushed back into late February as well! I was not even close to successful in distancing myself from that process. Some of the areas of the program that were getting significant rewrites are ones that I have a large stake in, and just as I thought it might be settling down, another issue would come up.

The upshot of that is, where I thought I would be able to start on my new piece early in the year, I didn't actually get to start on it until the very tail end of February. That's put me a bit off where I wanted to be, but such is life... then, my company sent me to London for the first week of March for an emergency situation at a customer site. Under other circumstances, I would have been thrilled to go to London, but to me it meant yet another week's delay getting started on the piece. The trip was better than I thought it would be (and I got to meet up with some supercollider users for curry on Brick Lane, delicious!), but I'm still a little sore about the loss of time. I hope to parlay that into an extra paid vacation day.

I am, however, terribly excited about the new project. I had proposed the idea of a string quartet and computer piece to the Ciompi Quartet at Duke sometime ago. Well, the quartet wasn't interested, but their first violinist, Eric Pritchard, wondered if a solo violin and computer piece would be an alternate possibility. Well, he's a terrific musician for whom I have tremendous respect, so of course I jumped at the chance -- who could refuse? So we're looking at it for his spring 2009 faculty recital.

So far I've been working on how to organize the code for a scored piece. That's a different challenge from running the piece interactively, as I've done so far. Some sections will have to run for a specific amount of time; others will have flexible timing and move on based on some signal from the performer. Also, I want to read pitch information from the violin and generate harmony based on the pitches that has been active recently. I finally got that logic working today, with a really handsome graphical view that shows the pitches rise and fall in energy.

It's now a lot easier to write longer posts because MacSpeech, the only company making viable dictation software for the Mac, have just come out with a new product, MacSpeech Dictate, that is easily an order of magnitude faster and more accurate. I get the feeling it isn't quite finished yet -- there's no correction mode and it can't learn from your speech -- but it's so accurate as it is that I can live with. That's not to mention that iListen 1.8 was so awful that even an unfinished upgrade feels like an improvement to me.

My good friend from Duke, Chris Adler, just sent me his new CD entitled Ecstatic Volutions in a Neon Haze, Terrific work as always, especially the title composition, which slowly develops a simple ostinato into thunderous, rock-influenced riffs. I'm listening to it now, for the third time today... so yes, I like it. That's one of the things Chris has always been able to do with his music -- get under your skin and light you up inside in places you might have forgotten you had.

A moment's rest

My final review draft is in! That gives me the luxury of thinking of something other than this one text, for a few minutes... just few minutes... I also have to write some bigger examples for the CD-ROM that will accompany the book.

This is the point where I really have to put a lid on my perfectionistic tendencies. I saw yesterday that I could keep reading and keep tweaking little sentences here and there, but that would accomplish nothing besides making sure it's never finished. It's good enough now as it is.

In other news, Pam's House Blend ("... always steaming!") reported yesterday that a hotel within walking distance of my house is, as I write this, hosting a thinly disguised white supremacy conference. It's the Crown Plaza Dulles Airport Hotel, just on the other side of the toll road from where I live. Insane. I could literally walk down there, start blowing kisses at the attendees, then get followed home and shot on my doorstep by one of these nutjobs.

On second thought, maybe that isn't such a good idea.

Here's one of the resident lunatics on the Queen Latifah show, arguing that racial profiling is right and just because it's true.



I actually had trouble paying attention to what he had to say -- I was distracted by the disturbing degree to which he sounds exactly like Hank Hill of "King of the Hill." I kept waiting for him to proclaim kerosene to be the fuel of the devil and insist that God-fearing Christians should only use puh-ropane. Kind of hard to take him seriously after that.

What are the chances I ever stay in a Crowne Plaza any time in the future? I would say, roughly zero.

Second draft; funny kittehs

With the second draft in, I can take a little breather and update my blog!

This draft is a nearly complete rewrite of the first. Before, the structure was all wrong and I was trying to cram too much material into the 5000 words. This time around, I simplified the code examples, organized the discussion around working methods rather than the dry, boring and incomplete descriptions of components of my library (which didn't leave any room to explain why anybody should care). I feel really good about this one, and I think it's pretty close to the final form.

Lately when I need a pick me up, I've been surfing over to http://icanhascheezburger.com, a peculiar mélange of pet pictures (ranging from the sickeningly cute to the freakish) combined with post-literate captions melding the kinds of misspellings, I suppose, cats would make if they tried to write English, with 21st-century text messaging conventions. The humor level varies; some are "funny" only because they recall someone else's joke from months ago that truly was funny, while others are truly original gut-busters. Some favorites:


moar funny pictures


moar funny pictures


moar funny pictures

Then there's this, which makes me want to cry. Sometimes they say it's funny because it's true. This would be funny if it weren't true.


moar funny pictures

First draft in!

Whew! Finally got the first draft in. It's crap, of course... well, I exaggerate -- there's plenty of good material in it, but it's quite a bit over the word limit, meaning tough decisions about what makes the final cut. It's been too much of an obsession lately anyway, so I think now as a good time to leave it alone for few days and come back to it with what I hope will be a fresher perspective.

A recent Washington Post article demonstrates why I no longer attend Catholic Church:

If a Catholic were to vote for an abortion rights candidate expressly because of that candidate's position, that voter would be "guilty of formal cooperation in evil," the draft [of a bishop's letter "Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship"] says. Voting for an abortion rights candidate for other reasons is still "remote material cooperation" with evil. It can be permitted only if there are "proportionate reasons."

So what if you agree with the church that abortion is no moral good, but you disagree that criminalizing it is the best (or only) response? What is an "abortion rights candidate"? Do we reserve that label for the kind of insanity that fails to recognize the intense suffering that leads to the decision to have an abortion (not to mention the further suffering that follows) -- that is, for policymakers who are so out of touch with human reality that they actually think abortion is nothing but positive? (Does anybody seriously believe this anymore, anywhere?) Where does this leave "safe, legal and rare"?

Or is that label for anybody to the left of Sen. Brownback of Kansas (who opposes even rape or life-of-the-mother exceptions to abortion prohibitions)?

It disturbs me to see a church with such a rich intellectual history try to tighten its vise grip this way. I don't quite see how this is any different from the sorts of brain-damaged litmus tests you see in the nutball evangelical right wing: it is a sin not to vote our way.