Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

The Update continues

and it would have continued sooner, had i not just spent so much time trying to figure out what was wrong with my stoopid airport network. the base station had to be restarted. of course, it took a long time to figure that out, because my old base station only had to be restarted once in a blue moon. i’ve barely had the new one for a week and already it’s crashed. my old hub (which admittedly, doen’t have nifty features like wireless) which is so old that it pre-dates 100baseT, has never needed to be restarted. New technology is bad. Upgrading is a myth. If you get new software, your old hardware can’t handle it. If you get new hardware, your old software can’t handle it. anyway, i now can connect to the internet (again) in OS9. huzzah! You may wonder while I’m still partly on OS9? Well, apple didn’t put any sound drivers or MIDI support that was good enough for audio processing into OSX until 10.2.3. Now that this update is available, software is struggling to get caught up. I’m not on Jaguar yet. It’s $129 extra dollars and I’m not spending it until all the software I want can run on it (which is also a bunch of extra money). I’d stay on 9 forever, but this machine has head room to upgrade. It was built with OSX in mind, but the hardware was ahead of the software. If you buy the fastest computer you can get your hands on, it lasts twice as long. the upgrade it until it’s at optimum performance and never upgrade it again.
Anyway, when last we left off, it was night time and the 12th was turning into the 13th, a most unhappy birthday, as the other person most intimately connected with that occurance is no more.

February 13, 2002

I am now 27 years old.
We had breakfast with Christi’s parents and then they left to drive their car back to Portland. they dropped us off at University of Washington and we walked around campus looking for the teachers of the Digital Arts department. We left phone messages for them, but to no avail. the digital Arts department is located in the basement of an International studies building. the building directory does not list the department. The building secretary doesn’t know about it. The department head’s office is through a secured door, in the basement, across from the biolder room. He wasn’t there. The whole center was hidden, windowless and strangely hip. It is obviously not the pride and joy of ther University. the music building, which is not connected, is next to the ROTC building. There were a lot of uniforms walking around campus. The architecture is nice though. It reminded me of Copenhagen.
after failing to contact any faculty members, christi and I walked 1.3 hours over to Capitol Hill, the gay neighborhood, where we met Ellen F. for coffee. I had too much (way too much) caffeine, but thelatte was excellent. Better than Gaylords even. We talked about the arts scene in Seattle. Joan wants us to move there. Ellen says it’s boring, but wants us to move also. She left the coffee shop breifly to get a scheduled haircut and then came back and we got lunch. We went over to the international disctrict. On the way, she showed us a building that she wants. It’s a former candy factory. She had a candy factory when she lived in texas and would like to have one again. The former factory (now for sale or rent) is in or around 23rd in the International district. At lunch we talked about lack of arts funding. I’m trying to figure out what to do about this. Ellen is internationally known and her work is really good, but she can’t quit her day job as a graphic designer. The Seattle Times called up Christi’s cell phone to interview her about her piece in the Klavier Nonette. Ellen said that never happens. Joan is trying to make it look as if it’s exciting, but it really isn’t.
After lunch, Ellen gave us a lift back to Capitol Hill and said goodbye to go do some work. christi and I went to a revolutionary bookstore there and asked about the state of the far left in town. (It’s now an open question: relocate to Seattle or no?) The bookstore clerk said it was healthy in the region and reminded us of the anti-WTO protests. Also, we saw anti-war signs everywhere. More than I’ve seen in Berkeley.
we walked back to the uniersity District. Mitch called up to sing happy brithday. It was very sweet. I got the phone number of his sister, but didn’t hook up with her because I was pooped from not sleeping the night before. It’s hard to sleep in hotels. I tried to remember how I slept while travelling for the summer in 2001, and I think it was sheer exhaustion plus a few respites of nice places to stay, like the flats we had in Copenhagen and Amsterdam. anyway, we headed back to Jack Straw where Joan tried to plead exhaustion to get out of our dinner plans, but christi wouldn’t let her, because we are the featured composers for the April composer forum thingee and we needed to know more about that. So Joan agreed and while she finished up for the day, Christi and I popped more coins into the juke box and listened to several more pieces. I think we’ve heard about half of them.
we went to a himilayan restaurant on University Ave. It was excellent. We talked to Joan (actually, christi did almost all of the talking, since the caffeine spring has finally wound down… I must have acted like a maniac around Ellen, being so wried and miserable at the same time…) about war and peace. She hates bush as much as Christi does. as an aside, Ellen said earlier that she was in France during the 2000 presidental elections and the newspaper headlines there said “Coup D’eta.” Joan and Christi also talked about the state of public transit in Seattle (bad but looking up) and the April thingee. We made plans. We are going to write some pieces for Cello and tape (where tape = CD with some niose on it, which Renne will accompany on her violincello). We will also write audience partcipation pieces with boomwhackers (which are long plastic tubes you wach into thhings, like the ground. They’re tuned to different pitches. It’s like low budget handbells). Joan will be in the Bay Area in March and we will meet back up then.
And then we walked back to our hotel room and passed out quite early. Christi was being super-sweet. It would have been a very happy day, had the date not been making me so sad. Alas. woe. poor me.

Back from the Pacific Northwest

I got back Sunday night from the Pacific Northwest. I know you are all anxious to hear about my exciting adventures. Of course, Christi already chronicled them, probably better than me, but here goes anyway.

February 12, 2002

Flew into Portland last night and drove up to Seattle this morning with Christi and her parents. We went to Pike’s Market. It’s a famer’s market, a fish market and a bunch of shops, bot no chain stores. It was nifty and interesting. Also, it goes on every day, which is very cool (and must compete with grocery stores quite a bit). Christi wanted to buy a hat for Owen, but didn’t. Poor owen will have to wait until we go back in april.
then we went to Jack Straw Productions, where we heard our pieces on the toy piano nonette. It sounds much better on the toy pianos than it did in MIDI realizations. the room is small and very live (that’s sound engineer jargon for “echo-y”) so the pieces really fill up the space, but apparently it sounds good in dead (that’s sound engineer jargon for “not echo-y”) rooms too. Joan Rabinowitz, who I met at a confrence last spring and who is the director of Jack Straw, took us on a tour of the building. they have two nice studios and two control rooms. One big and one small of each. They’ve got macintoshes running protools, but also have other tape technology, including analog reel-to-reel. Everything is labelled in Braille, because blind kids come in and do production work. Apparently they really dig the reel-to-reel machine. there’s also a small room of KRAB radio archives. (KRAB was a community radio station, but is no more.) There are many fewer tapees in the archive than KPFA, but the tapes are worse organized and may be in worse shape. they have no production facilities like Fantasy in Seattle, so no professional service can do tape baking for them. (Tape baking: sometims, when tapes get old, the glue that holds the magnetic material to the plastic strip corrodes and the magnetic material falls off, taking all of the sound recording with it. If the tape is heated (I think it’s 200 degrees F for ten hours, but I don’t really know), the glue can temporarily rebind long enough for the tape to be played once, so it can be backed up to something else.)
We checked into our hotel and then went back to Jack Straw (the name has nothing to do with British politicians, btw, the director is a pacifist) to hear Trimpin speak. (Trimpin is the guy who thought up and built the nine toy piano juke box.) Ellen Fullman was there. She was a featured composer at the Other Minds festival last year, and I the driver for that festival. she asked Christi and I why we were in town. christi said, “we came up for this.” Ellen replied, “You did not!” Ellen is also in the Klavier Nonette but hadn’t noticed Christi’s and my names on the list.
Trimpin talked about sonic sculptures and building controllers for them. Before computers, he used player-piano-roll sort of technology. Now, he custom builds processors to control celenoids. His stuff is made out of a lot of scrap-yard pieces. The toy pianos were all broken. many were purchased from ebay and the shipping costs often exceeded the price.
We listened to Ellen’s peice. (Janice Gitech, who was a presenter at the same confrence when I met Joan was also hanging around. It’s the old-girls-network or something). Ellen’s piece uses 64th notes. One piano will start a phrase and another will start the same phrase one 64th note later. It sounds like an auto harp, the notes are definitely sperated, but a 64th note is a very short duration. Her piece has a nice use of spaces and silences. It’s interesting nd beautiful. It’s also her first traditionally notated piece. We went out to dinner with her. Christi’s parents thought that we had just met her that evening. they also thought we had just met Joan. they were confused as to why people kept hugging us if we had just met them. Maybe they’re just friendly. anyway, there’s going to be a festival of Ellen’s work in holland. A whole festival of her and folks collaborating with her. It sounds very exciting.

Augusta Read Thomas (b. 1964)

Augusta Read Thomas (born in 1964 in New York) is a Professor on the composition faculty at Northwestern University, and is on the Board of Directors of the American Music Center. She previously taught at the Eastman School of Music, and she is currently Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (through May 2000).
Ms. Thomas’ chamber-opera LIGEIA won the prestigious International Orpheus Prize.

Melinda Wagner (b. 1965)

Melinda Wagner (c.1965), winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion, has graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania.

She is the recipient of numerous honors including a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a 1996 Howard Foundation Fellowship, three ASCAP Young Composer Awards, resident fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and an honorary degree from Hamilton College.

Chen Yi (b. 1953)

Chen Yi was born in 1953 in Guangzhou, China. She received degrees from the Central Conservatory in Beijing and from Columbia University, New York. She joined the faculty of the University of Missouri-Kansas City and served as composer for other entities including the vocal ensemble Chanticleer. Awards and fellowships are numerous.
She has been the Lorena Searcey Cravens/Millsap/Missouri Distinguished Professor in Composition at the Conservatory of the University of Missouri-Kansas City since 1998. Chen has served on the composition faculty of Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (96-98) and has been Composer-in-Residence with the Women’s Philharmonic, Chanticleer, and Aptos Creative Arts Center in San Francisco (93-96), supported by Meet The Composer’s New Residencies Program.

Fellowships have been received from Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and American Academy of Arts and Letters (Lieberson Award). Honors include the first prize from the Chinese National Composition Competition (Duo Ye for piano solo), the Lili Boulanger Award (National Women Composers Resource Center), the Sorel Medal (New York University), the Alpert Award (CalArts Institute), a Grammy Award, the Eddie Medora King Composition Prize (University of Texas), the 2001 ASCAP Concert Music Award, the 2002 Elise Stoeger Award from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Friendship Ambassador Award from the Snow Memorial Fund, the honorary doctorate from Lawrence University, WI, and the adventurous programming award from the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers (for Music From China in New York).

Libby Larsen (b. 1950)

She has created a catalogue of over 200 works spanning virtually every genre from intimate vocal and chamber music to massive orchestral and choral scores.
Libby Larsen has received numerous awards and accolades, including a 1994 Grammy as producer of the CD: The Art of Arleen Aug�r, which features Larsen’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. Her opera Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus was selected as one of the eight best classical music events of 1990 by USA Today. The first woman to serve as a resident composer with a major orchestra, she has held residencies with the California Institute of the Arts, the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, the Philadelphia School of the Arts, the Cincinnati Conservatory, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Charlotte Symphony, and the Colorado Symphony.
In 1973 she co-founded the Minnesota Composers Forum.
She has served as composer-in-residence with the Minnesota Orchestra and the Charlotte Symphony and is the newly appointed Composer-in Residence with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra.

Among her awards are the National Endowment for the Arts Composer Fellowships, the American Council on the Arts Young Artist Award, a Bush Artists Fellowship, commissions from Meet the Composer/Readers Digest Lila Wallace Foundation, and mant other commissions. She has been Composer in Residence with the Minnesota Orchestra (1983-87), a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota and California Institute of the Arts, as well as a guest lecturer at colleges and universities throughout the country, and is a Co-founder of the nationally acclaimed American Composers Forum.

Shulamit Ran (1949-)

confessed to being composer, teacher, wife, mother, and chocolate lover. Yet she also won a Pulitzer Prize and a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award for her Symphony. She has written in a number of genres, including opera.
Shulamit Ran won the Pulitzer Prize in Music for Symphony in 1991.
She served as Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1990-1997) and with the Lyric Opera of Chicago (1994-97). Her Symphony earned the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in Music and the 1992 Kennedy Center Friedheim Award; recent honors include a 1998 Koussevitsky Foundation Grant.
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Music/Composition/Composers/R/Ran,_Shulamit/

Tofu SoyRizo Scrambler

  • 1/2 onion (or two green onions) chopped
  • 4 cloves garlic, minced
  • spalsh of olive oil
  • 1 medium block o’ tofu, chopped or crumbled
  • 1/2 tsp turmeric
  • 1/8 tsp cumin
  • 2 Tbs Braggs sauce (or soy sauce)
  • 1/2 package soyrizo
  • Optional mushrooms, spinach, chard or other scambled egg-type items

Combine onions, garlic and oil and saue until the onions are translucent. Add everything else and saute until rizo is defrosted or tofu is lightly seared. (soy rizo is much easier to remove from the plastic when it is frozen…) Cook till moisture has gone away. 2 or more servings.
This is high in protein and is a complete protein group. Great for vegan-atkins weirdos or other folks looking for extra protein. Good for any meal, not just breakfast. Heck, I just had it for dinner and it was yummy.