While in Georgia last week, I stopped by the Buford Highway Farmer’s Market to shop for some food with my mother. While we were there, we stopped by a kiosk inside where handmade dumplings were made. Now, these were really something else, the quality of the dumpling really in a class of its own. The man who made them–a real professional, an artist really–explained to me quite a bit about his dumplings. He had been a dumpling maker in South Korea for years and had moved to America a few years ago. I had mentioned to him that I was a fan of Chinese dumplings, to which he mentioned that he used to make pork dumplings in Korea, but that the quality of pork in America was so bad that he wouldn’t make them anymore here. He also showed me one of his dumpling wrappers, stretching and stretching away without the slightest tear, and afterwards putting it on top of the back of my hand to show me how smooth it was. Amazing! I was invited to pull on the wrapper as well and was amazed at the quality of it.

The dumpling he did make had absolutely no fat in them as well as were made with three different types of mushrooms amongst other things. He cooked them in a very unique way of having boiled water put in a large bowl and dropping the dumplings within it, then after a little time getting them out with a strainer spoon.

The end result was an absolutely fantastic handmade dumpling! It was really something to experience, both the dumplings and the man. It’s really quite startling to see someone who really is a master of his or her craft doing their work, showing such an obvious mastery and passion at what they do. I was really humbled by it all. Perhaps one day, with many more compositions under my belt, that sort of mastery over musical material will manifest itself. I can only continue working and find out.

^_^

Warning: If you’re interested in nasal irrigation, please do research the topic before trying. I’m not a doctor, just a person with a story to tell.

Last week my father told me an amazing story. For as long as I’ve known, my father has had issues with his sinuses and allergies, with even some 5 or 6 years ago getting surgery to try to alleviate the issue(that only helped for a short period of time). He told me last week that he actually had a great fear of dying by suffocation from his sinus issues, as he had been suffering from these sinus issues since he was a kid in Korea, some forty to fifty years by my estimate.

Well, while we were at home we were talking about the health benefits of salt water and ways it could be used, discussing bamboo salt in particular, when we go on to the topic of nasal irrigation with salt water. Now, this is a practice I’ve heard of, usually with a neti pot, where one flushes the sinuses with salt water, but the way my father did it was a little different, using both nostrils for getting the water in and allowing the water to drain out either the nose or to the mouth and spitting it out.

He said he had heard of and tried salt water a few times before in his life but only doing it once or twice and thinking it didn’t do much. About a couple of months ago, though, my mother had told him of a patient she saw that had sworn by the salt water irrigation as curing his sinus ailments (he said he had used a gallon of water at a time, which my father thought was probably a bit of an exaggeration). The story was enough to pique his interest in it once again, but this time he had determined that he would really give it a concerted effort, to do it “religiously” as he said. After two weeks of irrigating daily, he told me that his sinuses were clear, that he could breathe freely, and that his allergies were mostly gone, and have been the past two months.

Incredible, dealing with something that affected the quality of his life for such a long time, he was able to be cured with such an amazingly simple solution. I’m so happy and relieved that he’s breathing freely and no longer has that to worry about.

^_^

A couple of nights ago, Lisa and I saw Dear Frankie, a beautifully touching film, and while walking home we were discussing how wonderfully the characters developed through out the movie. As we walked, my thoughts drifted toward how characters are presented within the framework of a movie’s storyline, and how the presentation of the characters and the story contribute to the experience of the movie.

In some movies, characters are presented early on in the movie in full. They’re there as the medium by which the story unfolds, the focus centering on the action of the movie. The characters as people take a secondary (if any) importance to the experience, and development of the characters isn’t as much a contributing factor to the experience as what they do within the context of the story.

In other movies I’ve seen, characters are introduced into the story as they are in every day life, with only a hint of who they are, and as the story develops, the details of the person are slowly fleshed out. Who the character is is revealed as the movie progresses, in their actions and reactions to the situation that is the issue of the movie. The actions of the movie serve more then to illuminate and explore the characters; the experience as a whole is synergistic as the situation and the characters illuminate each other.

These characterizations are somewhat towards the ends of the spectrum, with many movies falling somewhere in between, their focus split between the exploration of the characters and the exploration of the story which is the action of the movie.

The movies I’ve found myself appreciating most usually focus very much on the development of the characters. A good story is required for a character to develop well, so that too is a necessity, but I walk away from the movie with a strong sense of who the characters are and how they deal with their situations and might deal with others.

Of these movies I often find that the ones I enjoy are often rooted in reality in some way, whether it be an actual or possible reality(one which that may not be real for me, but one in which I could imagine could be true). The situations of the story touch on the everyday (or at least, something one could imagine happening to oneself or to someone one knows), and the characters themselves are a reflection of what someone sees or can imagine seeing in the people around them.

Perhaps it is not that these experiences are necessarily about or within the context of everday life, but that the experience can be translated and brought into the context of my everyday life…

…I’ve always been fond of the idea that should one find themselves in need of change, that perhaps it is not the environment one must move away from but rather one should move closer to it to observe more closely, such that the desired change is within one’s self. There is fascination there, in the quietness of action in the seeming regularity of the day to day, that upon closer viewing perhaps it’s really not so regular, and that there is a much deeper richness in it all…

Thinking of the movie and the unfolding of these characters brought Feldman’s later music to mind, how his music too has this quality of an exploration of an idea whose character is slowly revealed as the piece continues on. The situation of the music, the interaction of these different musical ideas, illuminates the ideas themselves as they grow together and alone, a synergistic experience. Something very human to these ideas, as if they were all individuals interacting in such a lovely way, and how these ideas develop over time, repeating but not repeating, the motives returning but always altered, bringing with them something new to the group, yet clearly growing from where they themselves came from…

I’ve found Feldman’s music is very much rooted in the every day experience of life, in observing the everyday and finding a simple thing become much more interesting in quiet observation. Like a movie who’s characters are developing in time, the motives within Feldman’s music too develop as the piece progresses, slowly growing and illuminating themselves, their interactions with other motives creating an identifiable experience, yet, without sacrificing the individual idea’s identities.

Thinking of my own music, of where I am and where I’m going, I am once again pondering its relationship to the everyday, and how its own characters are developing in time…

The other day while working on my current piece I decided try out some different tunings as things didn’t quite sound right with the ji_12.scl Scala file I was using. At first, I tried just listening to the piece with regular 12TET to find that it felt really colorless (strange, how I’ve read that before about 12TET, but not until I spent time working otherwise and coming back did I really hear that in the sound). Then switching over to a few other non-12 scale degrees per octave tunings of Wendy Carlos’s, the piece sounded very foreign, but the piece was worked in with 12 tones per octave in mind, so that was more for curiosity than interest.

However, I had for some time had a note to myself to try out Werckmeister III, and so I set the tuning for my blue project to use that scale, and truly, the sound of the tones and harmonies really settled in together and were very rich and brilliant. Lovely! In some ways I find that I still don’t know the quirks of this tuning and it’s still not quite yet in my ear, but I’ve found it very satisfying thus far. I’m looking very forward to further work on the piece and getting to know this sound.

^_^

Last week, I finished reading The Art of Happiness at Work, a book by the Dalai Lama and psychologist Howard C. Cutler. I found a great deal many ideas in the book valuable in keeping things in perspective. Many of the ideas weren’t new to me, but reading them again and getting the ideas fresh were well worthwhile.

One of the sections that most grabbed my attention was the section discussing the pyschological state of flow, or being in a flow state. The description involved being in a state so focused that the person is unaware of the passage of time, that they were completely absorbed in what they were doing. Further reading through the chapter, I found it remarkably describing many of the very things which I am looking for in music (whether it be my own or other’s). A topic which I will certainly investigate further.

Altogether, a fantastic read. A friend of mine from work loaned me The Art of Happiness, the first book of this series. After reading the introduction, I am looking forward to spending time with this book as well.

The San Francisco Public Library is a fantastic resource for music, be it scores, texts, or recordings. Yesterday I stopped by to return some scores and pick up some books I had looked for online, picking a number of Lou Harrison CD’s as well as Gustave Frederic Soderlund’s “Direct Approache to Counterpoint in the 16th Century”. Reading the book today, I came across a passage that really struck me: one of the things he discusses doing as part of the recommended exercises is to notate the exercise both with and without barlines. I had looked at early scores before, both with and without barlines, but for some reason when looking at it today that there was something more there when looking at examples shown both with and without barlines. In the music without barlines, the line’s contour and structure seemed so much clearer than that with the barlines. In reading and humming along, I really did feel as if the line was more free, that somehow reading it without the imposition of a larger metrical structure gave the experience of performing it a sense of freedom and cohesion of the line as a whole.

I always did find the issue of notating musical ideas particularly tricky, in how to represent the idea as it is and balancing that with notating the idea in a way that would best make sense to a performer. Back in college, I remember spending quite some time before finally settling on a method of using unmetereed music that contained bars only when necessary for helping synchronize music between performers (largely inspired my Messiaen’s Piano writing). I had found that this made the music the most performable for the ideas, but it was always tedious to notate and I was never satisfied with how foreign the written form was compared to the sonic one. For example, taking a motive that was originally straight eighth notes, then repeating but using two quintuplet quarter-notes for every eight note, so starting on the upbeat would then require notating in quintuplet eight notes to get the idea into something somewhat performable, but how daunting that appeared, when really it was just a motive slightly augmented and translated in time…

One of the primary reasons I created blue was so that I could do these types of freely breathing transformations of motives and have them so that the visual representation could maintain the essence of the musical structure and display them in a way that would make the form of the music transparent. In some ways, after all this time, certain aspects of blue’s visual feedback still do not do enough, but on the whole, that goal has been achieved. The musical ideas are written as if without bar lines, the sounds freely moving, the idea transparent, all together in the same space, breathing in time…

Today ended a Tai Chi workshop my teacher Lenzie gave, a very rewarding three days of form corrections, posturing, discussion of principles and ideas, and a lot of push-hands. I felt that this workshop was really incredible, to be able to to really go in depth into ideas which we normally don’t have enough time to cover in classes, to visit ideas that don’t come up very often, as well as just a lot of experiences in a short amount of time. Very rich material and altogether very inspiring.

One of the biggest ideas that stuck with me from the workshop was that our daily Tai Chi practice should have elements of:

• Form as a Flow
• Posturing
• Standing Meditation

Now, these ideas are things we go over and go through in all of Lenzie’s classes, but somehow, by stating these three things together, it really stuck in my mind this time. I’m looking forward to incorporating into my daily practice posturing in the mini-form exercise as we practiced with Lenzie in the workshop. I’ve always been on and off with doing posturing in my daily practice, but something about the mini-form and posturing(perhaps the proportion of it?) seems very inviting to do and something that I can do every day.

(I think that posturing somehow never got into my daily practice sheerly out of habit, as when I had studied with Sy, posturing was something we didn’t focus on much, and my daily practice consisted of mainly going through the form and working on individual sections of the form as a flow. Hopefully, with the mini-form exercise, it will be a start to getting posturing incorporated into a regular part of my training.)

One of the other big points that Lenzie made was in regards to Tai Chi as a way of working on our virtues, on working on the higher aspects of ourselves. That was something I think I’ve always thought about but never could so clearly label in my mind what it was that drew me so much to Tai Chi.

Besides the many ideas from workshop, I think one of the most important things I realized was how much I appreciate having such a great teacher and such a great group of people I get to study with. Being able to be around such a wise group of people who really commit to bettering themselves and being positive is truly an amazing thing to experience. I’m really grateful to have that in my life, and appreciate it more and more each day.

During standing meditation in our Tai Chi class yesterday, the idea of “effortless effort” came into my mind. Sort of a strange thought to come to mind, but I thought about it and it seemed an interesting idea, when even though you are exerting yourself in work it is not belabored. At times in class I find that to be the case, that although posturing can be tiring, my mind is so focused on principles and ideas and checking the body that the exertion of the body isn’t on my mind. That’s sort of an effortless effort in a way I guess. I think too to times when composing or programming and being so focused on the work that hours will go by without noticing it, that sort of intense focus on a task makes the work not seem so effortful. Either way, an idea for me to think about…

Last week when walking to work, Lisa and I noticed the sounds of birds of chirping. A beautiful day, the birds not of the usual crowd, we seemed have caught these small visitors on their way to another place, perhaps on their yearly migration. How lovely it was to hear those birds, to see these strangers in the place I know.

It struck me how I’ve probably come across birds on their way many a time before, but not until now did I really ever notice, nor appreciated the experience…

Today is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz…

I was struck by the pictures I saw today on the news websites. How incredibly saddening it is to think such a place existed, that such atrocities could be within human capacity…

I had gone to see Auschwitz and Birkenau a couple of years back when I was staying in Krakow; seeing the images today and reading the stories reminded me of that visit, of walking through those camps, imagining what those people experienced. I think really only being there can one even begin to understand the weight of it…

A very intense story of a survivor from Auschwitz