celesteh – Page 64 – Les said, the better II

Monday

I woke up with Owen lying next to me. Matthew, Jenny and Owen stayed over with us rather than driving back to Mnt View late at night and Christi hijacked OAT to try to wake me up in the morning. It worked. All of us, including Tiffany and Christi’s mom went for breakfast at Tomate cafe, which has improved a lot recently. Then we returned and I complained that my relationship to Owen was way too complicated to explain, so Jenny said that Christi, her mom and I could all be godmothers.
Everyone went back to their homestates or work or whatever, and I called up Best Music about my tuba and they told me to go to Best Repair. When I lived in Cupertino, I got all my tuba work done by a guy named Sousa (what elese could you do with that name?) in San Jose. So I was wondering about Best Repair, since I was unfamiliar with them. When I purchased my tuba, the old owner told me that BOBO (the world’s greatest tuba player, who is with the La Philharmonic) had seen it in a shop after the 5th valve was added and tried to buy the horn, but the owner refused to sell, lending it to him for a couple of seasons instead. This story took place, I figured in LA, but the shop was called “Best” something-or-other. Anyway, I walked in with my horn and put it on the counter and the guy looks for about 5 seconds as I point at the worn cork on the valves and says, “I did all this valve work.” He went on to explain that he added the fifth valve. I asked him about the story with Bobo and he said that he knows Bobo, but the story was wrong. He also told me that he didn’t add the spring-loaded tuning thingee, so maybe that’s where Bobo saw it, or maybe the whole Bobo-connection is a myth. Anyway, I feel very good about having that guy work on my horn, since he’s already worked on it extensively and done a great job. I’ve left in good hands.
Then I came back home and got the mail, where there was a thin letter from Wesleyan. I feared the worst, but since I got into Cal Arts, I could go someplace if I wanted, and I’m not sure if I want to, cuz it’s a lot of money and who knows how valuable an M.A. in composition is anyway? Christi told me years ago that the average salry of a music graduate declines as their education increases. I’d do better financially if I just have a B.A. and not a M. A. and if I went back to high tech and anyway. Wesleyan’s short letter explained that they are happy to offer me admission,a full ride and a stipend. I started jumping up and down and jumped on christi and then ran over to my neighbor’s house where I jumped up and down and frightened her dog. Then I jumped up and down some more.
Then we took the framed fine-art scores to Christi’s office, cuz I always worry about things getting harmed when I have them and they’re not mine. when we got back, Christi told me that she had a long conversation with Lyn Liston of the American Music Center with at the Other Minds festival. Christi and I met Lyn at the Composing A Career confrence last spring. The AMC is holding three carrer building workshop thingees coming up soon. I think I posted the info to the call for scores blog, linked to in the left margin. Anyway, Christi and I will be unable to attend the SF one, because we have to play in Seattle right afterwards, but there’s one in Seattle the next weekend that we were going to go to. Lyn told Christi that the AMC has been advertising our “Meet the Composer” thingee in Seattle as an adjunct to their confrence. Obviously, they would comp us in to the festival since we’re featured, etc.
Blinking extensively at that news, I stumbled over to a computer where I had email from my dad telling me that he purchased me a whole case of Girl Scout Thin Mints.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a day quite like yesterday before. Certainly better than any day I had last year. It was just one good thing after another. My my fairy godmother’s sabatical just ended or something. I still have deadlines creeping up though, and yesterday was not a good day for working on stuff. I’m still blown away.

Old News

In the old days of HTML, everything needed a title and when you send an email, it needs a subject, so I feel compelled to title every blog entry, even if the title is insipid. is this a dumb idea or good practice thinking up titles, since every piece of usic needs a title, no matter ow insipid. Of course, I’ve been titling some of those by date. Hmmm

Untitled Blog Entry

Wednesday

Last Wednesday, I did not go to work with Christi for some reason. None of my car pool really wanted to go to the Rorem reception, so I skipped it. I didn’t drink the good wine. I didn’t meet the composers or the board of directors. I didn’t hear Tom Armanio’s speech. He had two minutes allotted to him in the schedule. I understand he went somewhat over time. In retrospect, I have no idea why I didn’t just go with Christi to work that morning.
I did see the concert, although not the pre-concert talk. The only song of Rorem’s that I’d really heard before was I am Rose, which is not my favorite song, so I went to the concert with low expectations. It started and was very neo-romantic. His songs seemed to be composed primarily with intellectual conciet, to show off his skill at setting the words, rather than to highlight the meaning of the words. He used a whole bunch of poetry about love, life and death, mostly death. as the piece went on though, the power of the words began to build intensity and his setting seemed more to highlight the intensity. finally, by the third part, in the midst of a long and emotional, angry, worried poem about AIDS that the baritone was belting out with all the anger and intensity that belonged in the poem, the audience was moved to tears. There was a lot of sniffling in the auditorium. I reached for my hankerchief.
There was a lot of ego in the settings, but also a lot of artistry. The singing and piano playing was excellent. All of the songs were played through with only minimal pause. At the end, the applause was tremendous. the Palace of Fine Arts is not a resonant hall and applause tends to die very quickly, but the audience was very enthusiastic and clapped for a long time.
Then one of the opera singers, two pianists and the gay men’s chorus came out to play and sing christi’s arrangement of King David’s Lament for Johnathan by Lou Harrison. It was moving and fit very well with Rorem’s work. It also personalized and made immediate all of the song and poetry about death. Some of the poems were very immediate and personal that Rorem set, but Lou just died and many of the singers, players and even audience members knew him. He was featured in the previous year’s festival and spoke briefly at the film festival, so many folks there had at least seen him before. The song is a wonderful and beautiful lament and Christi’s setting flowed very well from soloist, to chorus to chorus and audience singing. The San Francisco Chronicle review described it as “moving.”
Christi, however, was not happy. There was no time for a tech rehersal, so the micing of the chorus was uneven and they were quiet (the acoustics in the hall are not good enough for anyone to sing unamplified, even a full chorus). the sound guy tried bumping up the volume and good a bit of feedback. Also, one of the piano players apparently did not have time to reherse. The piece opens with a piano line that continues throughout and some nice tone clusters. One of the pianists missed some of the opening notes and although the performance notes called for them to link arms, Christi said they did not do so. The piano part quickly came together, though. and the audience’s singing was surprisingly good, given the difficulty of the vocal line. There were clearly some excellent singers in attendance.
afterwards, I was listenign to what folks around me were saying and it was all good. Charles told me that he felt bad for Christi when the pianist missed the notes, but I don’t think many folks in attendance noticed it, or if they did, they forgot by the end.
All in all, and excellent evening and the largest audience of the entire festival.

Tired

I was telling Nancy on Saturday that I was super tired from partying the last two nights and I would probably be partying that night too and so stay exhausted and she asked if I was whining or bragging. Good question. But I’m too tired now to update my blog except to say that I unscrewed the back of my tuba valves today at band practice (being very tired is as good as being drunk and anyway, if I combined the two, I might drop the tuba on the cement and harm it.) and the middle finger, ring finger and pinky valves all had green corosion in them. I put sewing machine oil on all of them. Tony Clements, my high school tuba teacher, told me to use sewing machine oil someplace on the surface of the valves, but I can’t remeber where, so I’ve just been putting sewing machine oil around the outside for the last two times I’ve played it. I think the valves are faster, but I’m not sure how to oil them and I’ve heard that using the wrong oil can actually hurt the valves. So I’ve decided to take my tuba to Best Music to get it serviced. It’s like a tuba lube job. I’m hoping that they will take it apart and clean it for me and I can ask questions about all the care and maintance things that I’ve forgotten. for example, I know you can’t get cork soaked, but I can’t remember what the inside of rotary valves have in them, so I don’t know if I could even submerge my tuba in a large bathub or not. You know that you’ve always wanted to sit in jacuzzi with a tuba. When I was a youngun, every couple of months or so, I would completely disassemble my trumpet and put all the pieces (except that piston valves, which have cork in them) and soak it in the bathtub. Then I would run a cleaning snake through all the pipes and clean the non-lacquered tuning thingees with brasso. I’d rinse the valves under the faucet and then I’d dry and oil the whole thing and re-assemble it. I’ve never done this with a tuba. First of all, I don’t have a snake that big. I could have used my parents’ giant bathtub. My high school tuba only got cleaned once a year, by a music shop. I’ve never cleane dmy current horm, as far as I can recall. And then I stored it a long time without planning to or preparing it, and now the valves are somewhat greenish. I only hope that it’s not damaged.
Right now, it seems like a good idea for me to become a professional tuba player and to get a harness for my lap horn so that I can stand up and play it at the same time. I’m also having thoughts of scheduling a lesson with Tony, so he can remind me of everything I’ve forgotten. I know that there’s work for tuba players out there. Yes there is. Maybe I’m just very sleep deprived. Apparently, when I woke up this morning, I angrily ordered Christi to sell the drumset on ebay. I have no memory of this, so my theory is that she dreamed it.
I’m trying to stay up till 10:00. I tried to explain why to Tiffany, but it didn’t make any sense. I’m sure I must have a good reason. Maybe to build endurance for when I’m touring with my tuba or something?

Email forward Questionairre

1. LIVING ARRANGEMENTS? lofty thing with Christi and tifanjo
2. WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING NOW? um.. reading? oh, maybe the Scarecrow of Oz
3. WHAT’S ON YOUR MOUSE PAD? Sibelius keyboard shortcuts
4. FAVOURITE BOARD GAME? Sweet Valley High!
5. FAVOURITE MAGAZINE? Um… Mother Jones, maybe
6. FAVOURITE SMELLS? sautee-ing onins
7. FAVOURITE SOUND? Bart train sounds, especially in the station. Prepared paino sounds. contact mics on machinery. Any noisy sound through a fixed filter bank, especially freeways. Ocean waves. Digital aliasing on mp3s, when emphasized a lot. rich baritones talking. digeridu. Moog spring reverb (if you put your ear to the reverb, you can hear the sounds you’re processing). the sounds some street signs make when you hit them. big trucks going by on the freeway, hitting a rough patch of pavement. my cat yowling. tea kettle whistle. bowed metal. Moog or V8 low pass filter. diesel engines. break drums. boomwackers. wineglasses. flutter toungue. baseball card in the spokes of a bicycle.
8. WORST FEELING IN THE WORLD? watching someone you love die and not being able to do anything to help
9. WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU THINK OF WHEN YOU WAKE UP? “the alarm clock must die.”
10. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE COLOUR? yellow! no… blue! auuuugh!
11. HOW MANY RINGS BEFORE YOU ANSWER THE PHONE? the phone answers to me
12. NAMES OF YOUR CHILDREN? really, i’m not that kind of cat owner. They’re just cats, not children.
13. MOST IMPORTANT THING IN LIFE? music?
14. FAVORITE FOODS? Christi’s shepherd’s pie!
15. CHOCOLATE OR VANILLA? is it any wonder that vanilla has become synonymous with “boring”
16. DO YOU LIKE TO DRIVE FAST? i like fast bicycles, fast trains and fast women.
17. DO YOU SLEEP WITH A STUFFED ANIMAL? does Christi count?
18. STORMS COOL OR SCARY? cool. we don’t have dangerous weather around here, although I used to knowa guy who was struck by lightening in Sunnyvale.
19. WHAT TYPE WAS YOUR FIRST CAR? my first bike was a strawberry shortcake bike. My first roller-skates were clip on. The first bus I rode was Valley Transit. My first car was a 1990 toyota pickup.
20. IF YOU COULD MEET ONE PERSON DEAD OR ALIVE, WHO WOULD IT BE? Everybody says Jesus and Einstein. It’s proof she was lying to you.
21. FAVOURITE ALCOHOLIC DRINK? mitch’s beer
22. WHAT IS YOUR ZODIAC SIGN? aquarius
23. DO YOU EAT THE STEMS OF BROCCOLI? no
24. ANY JOB, WHAT WOULD IT BE? composer. maybe a professor too.
25. EVER BEEN IN LOVE? yes
26. IS THE GLASS HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL? Has anyone tested the glass to make sure it doesn’t have lead in it?
27. FAVOURITE MOVIES? Aelita: queen of Mars
28. DO YOU TYPE WITH YOUR FINGERS ON THE RIGHT KEYS? no
29. WHAT IS UNDER YOUR BED? probably a cat, a dog or a dog toy
30. FAVOURITE NUMBER? 13
31. FAVOURITE SPORT TO WATCH? goooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallll!
32. SAY ONE NICE THING ABOUT THE PERSON WHO SENT THIS TO YOU: he can play guitar with his teeth and i have the photos to prove it! Um, and he’s fun.
33. NAME A PERSON YOU SENT THIS TO WHO IS MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND? to my blog? i dunno. Prolly jean. She’s cool. I whined about a shortage of peopel to record and she came over with somebody.
34. PERSON YOU SENT THIS TO WHO IS LEAST LIKELY TO RESPOND: to my blog? I think I only have three readers. Maybe christi, since she’s busy right now
35. YOUR BIRTH DATE? Every year!
36. YOUR NAME AS IT APPEARS ON YOUR BIRTH CERTIFICATE? What is this identity theft stuff or something?
37. FAVOURITE SONG OF ALL TIME? The Mitch Happy Song!
38. IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME AND START ALL OVER AGAIN, WHAT DATE
WOULD YOU GO BACK TO? Re-living the past doesn’t sound like very much fun right now.
39. WHAT IS YOUR NATURAL HAIR COLOUR? I have no idea. Probably the color of my roots right now. Brown
40. NAME ONE PERSON YOU ADMIRE: only one? um. Joan of Arc.
41. WHERE DID YOU SPEND YOUR BEST VACATION? I spent the summer of 2001 in (mostly western) europe. I want to go back. I wish I was there right now.

New News

Protools

Protools is softare that is used of sound editting. It does everything that you can do with a multie track tape recorder and a mixing board and a bunch ofthings you can’t. It’s got 24 possible tracks and splicing and just like photoshop quickly automates things that used to take hours with razor blades and splicing tape. It’s very cool.
I’ve got some heardware that lets me record up to eight tracks at once (actually, I could go 16, if I attached some other stuff, but only two mic pre-amps) anyway, I have two versions of protools. One for OS9 and one for OSX. I’ve been having problems with both versions. Right now, I can create a file and record to it on OS9 and play it back and edit it in OSX. I haven’t tried recording in OSX yet, but all the other things won’t work in theother operating sysem. I can’t create files in 10. I can’t play them back or edit them in 9. Just thought I’d share.

Installation

I finally got five minutes of bart sound mixed into a file. The file has problems, but we’re going to have the judges look at a websirte to listen to them and the mp3 conversion hides the flaws. Thank goodness, technology is working in my favor for once! The voice-over part is not finished being editted to pieces yet. I have have a very nice sample of jean saying wistfully, “well, i guess that’s unemployment.” My midiverb seems to be on the fritz (what’s going on with my equipment, anyway? did the pentagon test it’s EMP missle offshore or something?), so i added a 13 milisecond delay with 50% feedback at a 20% mix for reverb. Many, that’s got some aliasing… I’d use if for noise FX, but it’s wayyyyy to cheesy. URL of website will be posted here. We’re calling it “Mind the Metro” with a subtitle that somehow explains that metros are the same everywhere, even though they’re different and the universality of the urban commuter.

Other Minds

I spent all day yesterday working in the OM office. I processed email unsubscribe requests so they can send out their giant reminder email. And i put inserts into programs. about 2000 of them. And I put comp tickets in envelopes. I don’t want to speculate on the number, but I’ve heard a rumor that 25% of the audience is going to be comped in. Ushers get two free comp tickets for another night. It would be cheaper to pay the ushers a living wage than give them these tickets. It’s the most generous ushering thing that I’v ever heard of. Anyway, I continued helping Christi with comp tickets until midnight, when I fell asleep on the floor with my head in her lap. Maybe that was somehow helpful.
the festival starts today. they’re playing a piece arranged by Christi. If you don’t have a ticket and want to go to a night aside from tonight, I have an extra ticket. I’ll be plaing on friday night. Contact me if you want to go.

Brain Tumors

Somebody on one of my mailing lists might have one. I met somebody with a brain tumor when I was in Portland and I guess I looked visibly freaked-out when Renee told me because she and a number of other peope asked if I was alright.
The last holy candle has burned out.

Things that keep me awake at night

More brain tumors…

I can’t hear as well in my right ear as in my left. Normally, I just wonder why this is so (I always hold the telephone on the right. I’m on the right side of the band I play in… hrm, but I was on the left when I played in hgihschool band. My tuba bell was on the right though…) and make vague plans to get an earwax removal kit. but at 3:00 AM, it’s a brain tumor. “Can I see as well with my right eye? I don’t think very creativly! Maybe my right brain is being impacted.” Yeah, the thing that are giant at 3:00 AM are stupid by morning.

Purgatory

Fundamentalists have the death thing all figured out. You die (or get raptured) and go to heaven where you get to spend an eternity with people who agree with you about everything and get to bad-mouth all the folks in hell and occassionally yell down that they can’t have any of your bottled water.
Catholics always have to go and make everything more complicated. Because of that story with the grape pickers, whether or not you get into heaven has to do with whether or not you’re in a state of grace when you die. That’s it. If the pope cursed god as his last thought, he’d go to the fiery pit, whereas if Dubya Bush’s last thoughts were, “oh my god, what was I doing? Jesus, forgive my misdeeds!” he’d go right to heaven. Everybody is equal in heaven.
except that everybody is not equal in heaven. There are all these saints floating around. Saints are God’s special friends. You can’t square it, if St. Joan of Arc is God’s special freind, how can she be equal with Bob the foul-mouthed butcher from down the street? And what about Bob’s swearing? He was never sorry for it. It was a sin on his soul, even though he was good enough for heaven, he still wasn’t perfect. Hence: purgatory. If you didn’t finish your penance on Earth, you get another shot after you die.
Purgatory is the great equalizer. Basically, non-saints are imperfect and need to cleanse sin from their souls. So they go to a temporary hell for a while and burn for their sins. when a fundamentalist’s mother dies, he gets comforting thoughts of Mom having afternoon cofee with Jesus, bad-mouthing sinners, just like at home. But Catholics geet to lie awake at 3:00 AM wondering if their devout mother is burning for her sins. It can keep you awake for sure.

Say a Prayer

fortunately, like Americans have Mis Manners, Catholics have the Baltimore Catcheism to give us algorythms to handle problems. Your prayers can get folks out of purgatory faster. It’s like writing letters for convicts or something. This is the prayer:

Come holy Spirit, fill the hearts of thy faithful
and enkindle in them the fire of thy love
Send forth Thy Spirit and they shall be created
And thou shalt renew the face of the earth
Let us Pray
O God, who didst instruct the hearts of the faithful
by the light of the Holy Spirit, grant us in the same
spirit to be truly wise, and ever to rejoice in His con-
solation. through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

saying that prayer every day for a month gets you a five year plenary indulgence with the usual conditions applying. I don’t know what that means except five years less purgatory for mom. See, you can say prayers like that and transfer the indulgence to a nother person, provided the person is deceased. Also, in the Middle ages, thrity people fasting for one day was equivalent to one person fasting for a month. after a while, they decided that you couldn’t pay other people to fast for you anymore, so the group fasting fell out of fashion. but if they did it for free, it still counted.
this means that if thirty people recite this little prayer to themselves today, my mom spend five fewer years in purgatory. this is what the internet is really all about. Sending money to debtors, a dollar at a time until they can pay off their credit card debt, or saying prayers for dead people.
My mom sure believed in all this stuff. I’m not too sure about it. It all seems kind of overly structured and fair to me and I’ve seen no sign of anything else God made being fair, but at 3:00 AM, it all seems very reasonable. So maybe I could sleep better at night. Say a prayer for my mom. And that guy on my mailing list who might have a brain tumor.

My Dad

He’s taken up being a camera guy for pledge breaks on KTEH channel 54 in San Jose. Sometimes he films the phone bank volunteers and sometimes he films the host’s finger as s/he points at pledge gifts. One day, he may work his way up to being a sound guy. I offered him use of my mixing board if he wants to practice at home, but he declined. He’s also got a red BMW motorcycle. It’s a nifty looking bike. I haven’t seen his leather outfit yet.

Rock Band

I was drunk. I played the tuba instead of bas. If I’m drunk next week, I’ll play the tuba again. I think learning to play rock while drunk helps with the rock and roll lifestyle thing. I’m ready to be a rockstar.

ELNA

Ok, so I was sitting talking with Christi and Jenya last night about our installation plans when the phone rang. I answered it “Saluton!” since that seems to make telemarketters hang up. But then a strangers started talking quickly and fluently to me in Esperanto! I was flabbergasted. Not knowing what to make of it, I agreed to everything the person said, cathcing only that she was from ELNA. She thanked me about 100 times as she hung up. I have no idea what I agreed to. Maybe I’ll be cleaning restrooms at ELNA headquarters. anyway, I think I might have told her I was Christi. It was very confusing.

right now

Mate is a stimulant tea thingee from south america. It inspitres me to write too many words while avoiding tasks such as walking to the drugstore to get an earway removal kit or working on editting my 11 year old neighbor yelling VJ-style into a mic about how BART is dangerous for little kids.

Grad Skool

Well, I’ve gotten one letter from CalArts saying “yes,” and have heard only rumors from other schools. I’ve heard via a third party that Alvin Lucier thinks I sound “interresting.” A certain bitter ex-member of the Mills Community says that their financial sitution makes my acceptance there near certain. Oh, well, gee, uh. I didn’t think they took economics into account for admissions, but what do I know. I don’t mend benefitting from affirmative action, but I’d prefer it to be the “we need a better male-female balance” kind rather than the “we need more cash” kind. This is because I’m a contrary leftist and nobody on the right is suing to stop the second kind of class-based admission system. And I’ve heard from another individual that CalArts is not an easy school to get in to and that Mills has already made it’s descision and the letter will be mailed shortly.
The more I think about it, the more I just want to move to Seattle and screw grad school. Honestly, it’s not like my music career matters. If all 15 people who care about electronic tape music think that I’m cool, well, that’s swell, but it’s still only 15 people. I think that in the US art is dead. If it’s not dead, it’s terminal and twitching. In the 80’s it was doing that reaching it’s arm up towards the light thing and a bunch of folks decided it was about to go for a walk, but nope it was that increased wakefulness before death thing. (I haven’t read too many hospice pamphlets, not me.) Give art some more morphine, talk quietly in it’s presence, hold it’s hand for a moment, hold your breath each time it breathes in, waiting to hear if it will breathe out again.

Possible Personal Ad Photos

Mitch has got his nifty blog (see link on the left) and his personal ad, and he’s got pictures of himself up. I’m not saying the picture is bad, I’m just providing additional options:

Option 1: Mitch standing at Resurrection Elementary School in Sunnyvale (circa 1993)

Option 2: Mitch the serious, smoldering artist working on his installation at the Exploratorium in 2001

I like option 2 a bit better. The original is a bit under-exposed. But I have the PSD from the original scan (at 800 dpi) if you want to clean it up a bit, since it’s beyond my ability.

Other News (and then I’ll stop typing and quit boring you)

This morning I spent a couple of hours on BART, recording to DAT with two SM57s, one poinbted up at the BART car, the other pointed down at the wheels. It’s cool, you can hear the clutch and stuff that you don’t normally hear. I also had binaural mics stuck in my ears (these are tiny microphones that record what you hear, since they’re in your ear. It picks up all the directional stuff that you hear too. I’ve heard rumors that if you listen to a binaural recording of a rollercoaster, you can actually feel dizzy and sick, but this was just BART, so it will be ok.) and recorded those to a Sony Minidisc walkman. The downside of the mics, is that they hear everything I hear, so when I swallow, it makes a noise. Try for a few minutes, trying to sit perfectly still, while thinking, “don’t swallow! Don’t swallow!” Next time, I’m taking a sudafed first. The sounds from the DAT though are startlingly good. After a struggle, I got them into a protools session.
Jean, the great and wonderous Jean, brought a friend and came over to be recorded talking about transit. So I recorded them to DAT, with the intention of getting them into a protools session later.
Jenya came over to scan pictures of people to add them to digital pictures of our mockup thing for Singapore. She’s doing all the design for that. She is an awesome designer. At the same time, I was trying to use USB to upload the minidisc recordings to her PC, since Sony’s MD software only talks to PCs and not macs. All I could do with the software was name the track. The consumer-designed minidisc has four ins, including a mic preamp and two digital ins, but not a single out besides headphones. There’s no way to get sound off of it. The software has stuff to “check in” and “check out” songs, but it turns out that that’s just some super-lame copy protection scheme so that you can’t make too many copies of your music collection. There’s no way to use my recorded to get sound off of a disc. It’s the Hotel California of audio equipment. you can check out any time you want, but your data can never leave.
Fortunately, this was all part of my original plan. The plan was to buy a used professional minidisc with sufficiently advanced playback algorthyms, but less than optimal recording ones. Then I could use it’s digital outs to get data off of my discs and it wouldn’t be very expensive. I could get dern good recordings (provided I don’t swallow) on cheep media with a cheep player that I don’t worry about, like I worry about my DAT recorder. Anyway.
christi came home with a big envelope from CalArts that she removed from the mailbox. They’re delighted to inform me that they want a heck of a lot of money. I had no idea the tuition was so high when I applied. Anyway, this is good news.
I went to wineglass rehersal. The woman next to me told me that she loves public transit and wants to talk to me about it. I asked her to wait until later because she could be a rich and wonderful source of audio (she’s a singer too) and I want to have the time to treat it properly. I’m worried about playing the wineglasses in concert. I don’t know my part. The composer says don’t worry, the conductor will cue us. Sounds like a great conductor. Sometimes I don’t understand why people make a big deal about who conducted what, since the conductor doesn’t even make sounds, but other times, I get it and this could be one of those times.

Today (techinically yesterday) – I’m recording sounds of household appliances that use water. This for a call for acousmatic music. So far I have the clothes washing machine and dryer (those were part of an old project that i’m recycling, so the dryer counts), the tea kettle and the dishwasher. Coming up on the list is the garbage disposal, the tiolet, the sink and a shower, especially the wine at the end. It’s sure a good thing I went to music school… I feel so pretentious working on this piece, which is I guess appropriate since I think my list of favorite composers has gotten me a reputation for pretentiousness online, which shouldn’t annoy me but does anyhow. Anyway, all my middle-class water-wasting, electricity-eating gadjets will soon be musical, and I won’t even need to go to the laundrymat, which is too bad, since the washing machines there are extra cool sounding, especially with contact mics on them. Makes me wish I had a fixed filter bank to process all of this. I could write one in MAX. I could write a whole application for generating laptop music and call it the acous-a-matic and check my email while generating sounds for audiences pretentious enough to like it.
Matthew, Jenny and Owen came over. Matt had his first interview with East Bay MUD today. He expects a second interview. Then we all went over to Jenya’s house to talk about our proposal for the Singapore installation. It has a postmark deadline by Saturday, which means it has to be done friday. I have zero recordings for it. None. I was too busy recording my dishwasher because I completely forgot about the due date. I suck. So tomorrow, instead of going to the Other Minds office to file things, I’ll be riding BART around. Jenya has a PC with USB, so I can do a DAT and minidisc recording at the same time and be able to dump the minidisc data to her computer. Then, I need to interview people about their thoughts during commute rides. Will I walk up to folks on bart? Interview my neighbors? I’m screwed! And I have a wineglass rehersal tomorrow night, I think. I emailed two people to ask them for the rehersal schedule, one of them was the composer, and neither emailed me back yet.
Lord I’m a flake. I need to program due dates into my yahoo calendar and tell it to nag me. Hey well, if you (whoever is reading this) want to play the wineglass in the Other Minds concert on friday March whatever, drop me a line, and I’ll send you the rehersal schedule if anyone sends it to me. If you want to be recorded free-associating about public transit, or rather talking about what you think about (or would think about if you are a car commuter) while riding on the train, well, then email me in that case too. Tomorow afternoon would be a good time for that. Or after 10:00. Or, you could just record yourself talking about what you think about on BART (think voice over for movie or something) and send me/post a WAV or AIFF file (mp3 ok encoded at 160 or better), that would be extra groovy. Put the mic right next to your mouth for a good close-mic effect. If you put the mic around your nose or a bit below your chin, it will not catch air bursts (called “plosives”) from ‘p’ sounds. Don’t run processing on it. I’ll put on some reverb for a dreamy effect. Or hell, put on your own reverb, i don’t care. I procrastinated too long! I need male voices. Maybe one voice will be fine. Speaking in a non-english language would be super excellent. I need a five minute example tape for Singapore. tomorrow, I’ll post about the benefits of planning ahead and remebering deadlines. :p

Tape Music

I like tape music. Here’s an easy definition: music composed for tape, CD or other recording medium. Wasn’t that easy? If I write music that only exists on a recording and it isn’t played live, that’s tape music. I write load of tape music. It’s easy and fun. Record some synthesizer sounds, tweak them in protools and viola! tape music.
but all the calls for scores these days want “electroacoustic” music. What does that mean? some folks say it means musique concrete. It’s always good to define jargon in terms of other jargon. I know it’s why folks love computers. Anyway, musique concrete is an extinct French school of tape music where sounds from real life were recorded and used to make tape music. No synthesizers allowed. Americans liked using synthesizers and not found sounds. After a while, the two nations put their differences aside and started using synth and found sounds together. We all ate French toast to celebrate.
But dark days are here again and once again the US and France are split. The high-art world, as always, is taking the French side. American mavericks like John Cage (and me of course) are being ignored! Why no calls for scores for tape music that’s electronic? I like electronic sounds. My dog never starts inexplicably barking on electronic recordings. Airplanes flying overhead do not interfere. No freeways, no computer fan, no refrigerator, no doorbells, no dishwasher, no fistfights between my cohabitants, nothing but the electronic sounds. And I don’t need to invest in good microphones or pre-amps.
I’m looking at a call fro atpes right now that wants “acousmatic” music. I don’t know what that word means either. Clearly, I’m ignorant. I blame the American education system. I don’t know the capital of Wyoming either. Although the devious, French pacifists behind these musical terms don’t know the capital of Wyoming either, so I’m only two points behind them. It’s very hard to google a definition for electroacoustic, but this one I’ve had more luck with. Clearly,

Acousmatic music is a particular kind of tape music. To quote Jonty: “Acousmatic music on the whole continues the traditions of musique concrete and has inherited many of its concerns. It admits any sound as potential compositional material, frequently refers to acoustic phenomena and situations from everyday life and, most fundamentally of all, relies on perceptual realities rather than conceptual speculation to unlock the potential for musical discourse and musical structure from the inherent properties of the sound objects themselves – and the arbiter of this process is the ear.”

An acousmatic piece, then, grows upwards from the sounds used in the piece, rather than downwards from an overall concept. Because acousmatic pieces grow upwards from the sounds, they represent a “qualitative” and “organic” approach to composition, according to Jonty, as opposed to the “quantitative” and “architectonic” thinking of much traditionally notated music, and also much electronic music.

Diffusion, in this context, is a electroacoustic performance art. It is the practice of taking a (typically) two-channel piece and playing it back on many more than two speakers, the performer manipulating the spatial distribution of sound in real time. Jonty considers that this approach represents an organic approach to space in opposition to an architectonic approach, where an 8-channel work (say) is played back over an 8-channel speaker system and all the spatial placing of sounds is worked out in advance.

(from http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/ACMA/AcousmaticExperience.htm) Well, that clears everything up. but wait, there’s more! http://www.electrocd.com/notice.e/9607-0002.html says, “An English neologism, which comes from the French acousmatique , has its origins with Pythagoras (6th century BC) who was (it is said) delivering his�uniquely oral�teaching behind a curtain to prevent his physical presence from distracting his disciples, allowing them to better concentrate exclusively on the content of his message. ” While my education was skipping Wyoming, it certainly wasn’t spending the saved time on the classics. That quote is from a paper (at the above link) about the definition of “acousmatic.” A whole paper. somebody else wrote a whole book about it! http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~muswlw/pubs/wlwthesis/wlwthesis_ToC.html A Perceptual Approach to the Description and Analysis of Acousmatic Music It’s a PhD thesis. which explains the recent spike in calls for scores for this kind of work. Clearly, they need to find out if their grad students are just making stuff up or if there’s actually folks making this kind of music. The internet defeats them. I got a call for scores. I saw a new term, I googled it, I got the paper, I read the paper and then I made music to conform to the paper’s thesis. It becomes real when it’s written down. It’s so post-modernist I could cry. this is like a monument to my generation.
the most popular definition seems to be “Acousmatic sound is sound one hears without seeing their originating cause – a invisible sound source. Radio, phonograph and telephone, all which transmit sounds without showing their emitter are acousmatic media.” (from http://www.filmsound.org/chion/acous.htm) How this is different from my good old fashioned tape music, I don’t know. sometimes you have to invent new terms to get rid of all the fakers and folks not keeping up with the lastest things. That might be me.
I still have no idea if any of my existing songs qualify as electroacoustic or acousmatic. What’s clear here is that I really do need a graduate education, because I don’t seem to know enough about tape music.