Category: General

This past weekend I went to Seattle with my girlfriend who was there for the AMS/SMT joint conference. I wasn’t there for the conference myself–though I did attend a few papers–but rather to just spend time experiencing Seattle and to see some extended family whom I haven’t seen in quite some time.

We left very early in the morning Thursday and arrived in Seattle around 9:00AM, welcomed with an absolutely gorgeous day. With some time to spare before the conference began, we were able to spend a little time at the Pike Street Market and walking around the city before Lisa headed off to the conference and I to the hotel.

The next three days were overcast and gray, so I guess we were par for the course with one day beautifully sunny and the rest beautifully gray.

A busy few days, the hilights of my trip were:

The First Day
The first day was gorgeous and really left quite an impression on me, how wonderful a town Seattle is. It was nice being able to spend time with Lisa on our own to take in the city and quietly walk around the town.

The Public Library
An absolutely wonderful building, the exterior only a hint at the marvel of space held within. I managed to go through twice, taking wonderful walks from the top of the building down the spiral floors, exploring, marvelling at the colors and structures.

Vivace Coffee
At the recommendation of Tom Hart, I took a bit of a walk from downtown to Capitol Hill and after a bit of searching I found this amazing coffee shop. The cafe had a wonderful spacious feel, a view of trees to the rear, and fantastic coffee drinks. I sat with a cappucino and my laptop, completely relaxed in this wonderful environment, and worked away with blue and lilypond, completely satisfied.

Seeing My Family
It had been some 12 or 14 years since I had seen my Aunt and cousins and it was an absolutely joy to see them after so much time and to catch up. Seeing family is always great and I really hope to be able to spend more time with them in the future.

All in all, I found Seattle to be quite a beautiful town. I hope to be able to go back sometime soon and to explore the city and perhaps some of the gorgeus natural settings that surround it.

My new piece On the Sensations of Tone will be premiering in Athens, GA at the Alumni Electronic Concert on November 10th. The performance will be at 8:00pm in the Dancz Center for New Music.

Many thanks to Dr. Leonard V. Ball for inviting me to be a part of this concert, as well as for being a great teacher and friend.

Unfortunately I will not be able to attend this premiere as I will be in Seattle, November 11th-14th, for the AMS (American Musicological Society) and SMT’s (Society for Music Theory) conference. (I am not attending the conference but will be accompanying my girlfriend there. If you happen to be in Seattle during those dates and would like to meet, please contact me and perhaps we can arrange to meet up.) If you are able to attend the concert in Athens, please do let me know what you think!

I will be releasing audio recordings of On the Sensations of Tone on November 11th. The site will be updated at that time to include this new work and make it available for download.

Sunday night, I stayed up until 5:30AM to work on finishing a piece I have been working on the past four or so months for an alumni concert I was invited to be a part of by my old professor, Dr. Leonard V. Ball. I had been putting in a lot of hours over the past months to work on this piece, a lot of time contemplating, listening to it over and over, trying to understand the character of the piece, seeing what I wanted in it and where it wanted to go. (A couple times there were three week stretches between when I was able to move forward with the piece, and all that time was spent just listening and wondering what was to come next…) The past week the work on the piece really started to pick up as I began to have a better idea of it as a whole. This past weekend I set aside all of my free time for the piece, with Sunday night all of it really coming together.

The long night, accompanied with coffee and tea, reminded me of my times when composing in college, staying up in to the early hours of the morning, listening, contemplating, exhausted, focused. That type of exhaustion, when you don’t have the energy to entertain stray thoughts, I find can lead to certain level of focus. Working at that time of night that the rest of the world seems to be asleep always has a wonderful sense of peacefulness to it, a sense of there being all the time in the world to work and to allow things to happen rather than to force it due to time constraints. The experience of that time was wonderful, and the morning, though exhausted, I was exhilarated.

It’s been a long time since the last piece I wrote and this one… At times it’s been frustrating not to be working on music as much as I’d like, and then even when working on one to lose focus or interest. I think a lot of that has to do with exploring musical ideas that ultimately really weren’t me, but also just learning to balance out all of the responsibilities of the day. I’ve found the past months working on this composition though to be very different than the other years between, much more focused, and sense of connection again with the music I’m working on.

This new piece marks the beginning of a new period of actively composing in my life. The years that have passed between the last finished piece and this one were filled with many musical explorations as well as many life experiences. The time spent establishing a career as a programmer, experiencing the world’s events, and simply living life has been rich and rewarding. The exploration of musical ideas has provided many lessons from which I feel I am only now beginning to understand within the context of my own music.

It’s been an amazing journey to arrive at this piece, and I am looking forward to the music to come.

The new piece, entitled “On the Sensations of Tone”, will be released shortly. Please check back later for an announcement of it’s release.

I received an email today from Jason Thomas that a piece of mine, Four Quarters, is being performaed on Mark So‘s “Quiet Music at Night” concert over at CalArts. Not everything seems to be set in stone, but the details that are worked out are that the concert will be November 9th, 10pm-3am, at the CalArts Main Gallery. As I get more details I will certainly post it here.

I’m very excited to hear that another performance of this piece is being done as I’m quite fond of this piece. A big thanks to Jason Thomas for letting me know and Mark So for organizing the concert!

A while ago when subscription music services first started I had tried out Napster, but for some reason or another I decided to stop using it. Perhaps it was that I found that downloading albums took up too much space, and perhaps I wasn’t using it so much at the time.

Today, however, after discussing Hillary Hahn’s CD’s with Will, I decided I wanted to try out one of these services again. At first I thought I’d try Napster again, as I remembered the service to being alright, but decided instead to try out Real Rhapsody. So far, I’m enjoying quite a bit. I like that it’s focused on streaming on-demand music and not downloaded files. I find that having access to any music on a whim to be a very liberating experience. I like very much that the playlists I create are saved on a server as that allows me to move from computer to computer and have access to the playlists.

So far, the music selection has been very good. It’s nice that they have Naxos’s collection as it contains a great deal of Lutoslawski and other 20th century composers I’m very much interested in. I was able to find Bruckner’s and Brahm’s symphonies, and am looking very forward to delving very deeply into all of the symphonic music that I can.

I think this type of service very well addresses my needs in that I’m not very much interested in managing music files or allocating space for them. I don’t want to own this music as much as I’d like to have access to it. It feels to me very much like a public library, in that I am able to have access but not own these items, and that suits me very well.

The only down side to all of this is that it only runs on Windows, as my preferred OS to use at home is Linux. At work it’s absolutely fine as that is what I use there, and at home it’s not a problem for me to log into Windows as I the tools I use for my musical work and other work are available on any platform I use. So, all in all, I’m pretty satisfied.

Real Rhapsody has a 14-day free trial and so I am taking advantage of that now. As these are all my first impressions, perhaps I’ll stop using this as I did Napster, I don’t know. I guess I’ll see how I feel in a couple weeks when the trial is over. ^_^

I woke up this morning and finished reading John Luther Adams’ Winter Music, which I found to be quite enlightening and just a wonderful way to start the day. He simply is just an amazing artist and human being. So much in his work and way of seeing the world to admire.

In reading the book I came across a number of things I wanted to explore, particularly the books of Barry Lopez (which should be coming in sooon) and the book The Cloud of Unknowing (which I picked up yesterday). I’ve found that most of the things I’ve come across have been through this amazing web of connections, from finding an artist I like and reading about them, finding what they liked and reading about those influences or those texts. It’s been such a journey from one person to the next, to read about their views and to read what influenced that view, and through these encounters to find myself in a new world. I find myself very fortunate to have come across this world of art and ideas that has exposed me to so many different aspects of the world I may have never ventured to explore otherwise.

Tonight I went to hear an sfSoundSeries concert where amongst the pieces they played, they performed an arrangment of Morton Feldman’s “Three Voices”. Now, Three Voices happens to be one of my favorite Feldman pieces, one I’ve listened to many, many times on CD and have also had the good fortune to hear live, sung by Joan La Barbara at Carnegie Hall. (That performance was absolutely amazing and left quite an impression on me, performed at a tempo such that the piece lasted an hour and a half, and of course that wonderfully gorgeous voice…)

Tonight’s arrangment was… unbearable. Everything that I so much adore in Feldman’s music was so completely absent in tonight’s “rendition.” (I don’t know what to even call it.) The use of different families of timbres didn’t work at all for me; the fluctuations in tempo really lost the continuity of the piece; the use of whispered words didn’t come close to the effect of the original. (Listening to the Joan La Barbara recording now, it’s such an amazing moment when words are introduced into the music…). I found tonight’s arrangment to be a very insensitive handling of the original music, really doing very little justice to it.

Perhaps my utter disappointment is obvious by now. But if not, I should say I was very disappointed in tonight’s performance.

I recieved my copy of John Luther Adams’ Winter Music from Amazon today and am very much looking forward to reading it. For a long time I’ve been an admirer of his music and work, as well as his character. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the book also comes with a CD of some of his pieces (it’s stated on the site but I didn’t notice it the first time). Such a nice way to start the weekend. ^_^

I have for a long time very much loved a recording of hers of Swedish songs, entitled “Wings in the Night“, and while in the store yesterday I came across her albums and purchased “La Bonne Chanson“, an album full of French songs which is absolutely delightful. Her voice is as beautiful on this recording as the other I have, and only makes me want to purchase everything she’s ever done, as her voice is certainly amongst my favorites. (I have quite a love of mezzo-soprano voices…).

(All of the albums I’ve had the fortune of getting yesterday have all been wonderful, and it’s quite a joy to be so interested in listening to music actively. It seems to come in waves lately, the desire to spend time really listening to music and spending time otherwise, perhaps just a matter of the music I’ve come across. It really is such a joy to find new music that one finds so much in…)

I came across this cd while looking at the cold blue music website which I found after looking at John Luther Adams‘ website, and finally got around to purchasing it at Tower Classical Records yesterday. How absolutely gorgeous! It makes very much sense to me that these two should be on the same label as they seem to have very similar aesthetics, an aesthetic which I very much love. Quiet, serene, lush sounds floating along…