Tag: music

who is governor?

the suspence is killing me

Other News

the wife

christi really likes her Paris apt (maybe she posted this in her own blog). she called my housemate today and said he should tell me that she loves me. awww. 🙂 She’s apparently fighting jetlag. and I’m not supossed to mail her brownies because they’ll rot while sitting in customs.

the house

My home away from home now has a futon, so if you want to <subliminal>come visit</subliminal>, there is now a place for you to sleep. Visitors are highly encouraged to first stop by my house in Berkeley and grab a set of queen size sheets before coming (flying out of Oakland is cheep). Don’t worry. Although I don’t have any queen size sheets here (although I have many sets in Berkley, including a flanel set that Tiffany gave me to use here that I thought I packed, but can’t find), I do have a hostel-style sleep sack to put you in. You will have a warm and squishy (but not too squishy) place to sleep.

Bells in France

No, not Belles. For news on Christi, see the wife item. Church Bells in France.
Archeologists have dug up casting molds for medival church bells in France. from these casts, one can tell the height, shape and thickness of the bells. I learned this by chatting with the Monastic Utopia professor. He says that he knows of no reasearch determining the tuning of these bells, nor any sound modelling. (!!!!) I asked Ron about this and he got really excited and told me to go talk to bell makers about materials. It might be that the material is very important for the pitch and tambre (tambre is tone or “color”) and that’s why nobody has written a paper on it. Or it may be that nobody has thougt about writing a paper on it because the computer modelling is hard, not yet developed, or so new that nobody has yet applied it to this research. I’m strongly hoping that it’s the later. I’m hoping that I can create a bell program in SuperCollider that takes archeological measurements and returns a synthesized bell tone. If I can’t do that, I hope to be able to at least determine the tuning of the bells.
this is a fantastic research project because once the computer program is written, the project becomes really easy. Just dig through mountains of archeological records to find bell measurements, plug them into the prgram and get results out the other end. and if nobody’s done it before, it qualifies as a possible thesis. I can’t do it for my final project in supercollider, though, because I need to play my final project at SUNY.

SUNY Gig

Because of the disasterous Rhode Island nightclub fire last year, the SUNY firemarshall now requires that out-of-state acts submit the names of two contacts who are willing to certify that the act in question does not contain pyrotechnics.
I need to find two people to swear that I don’t set things on fire as a part of my laptop music (which has never been peformed). So much for my idea of hooking up heat sensors to giant fireballs.
I’m hoping that I can get Jack Straw to be my one witness and Ron to be my other, since it’s going to be a class project.

Denominational

I did a wordlcat search on the mystery play about Joan of Arc. worldcat is a nifty tool that lets you search university libraries all over the world. anyway, I found the text of the original play in old French and new French, a face to face translation from a language that I can’t read to another language that I can’t read. It’s possible that I could make out old French like one could make out middle English. The play was written in 1429 and this was around the time that english and French were seperating into distinct languages. Before that, everyone spoke the Norman language. anyway, the book is in 43 libraries worldwide, but it turns out that one of them is one of the three library consortium that Wesleyan is part of. Trinity College actually has a very large number of books of 15th Century French Catholicism. And modern Catholic stuff too (I was doing a search of the music of Dom Remy, Joan of Arc’s neighborhood cathedral). Their name is “Trinity.” Frankly, I’m becoming suspicious of the secularism of that school.
Speaking of secularism or lack therof, the chapel rennovation here is now done enough to have concerts. the first concert in the Wesleyan chapel (the building with the most seats, in case one wants to give a concert) was a priemere of an organ piece written by Christian Wolff specifically for the new organ. the concert sold out weeks ahead of time and Alvin Lucier ordered his class to go, only to find out that the necessary 50 tickets for them to attend were not available. So he invited Wolff to speak to his class and then walk over to the chapel for a sneak preview.
Half of the music department crammed into the evil basement classroom to hear Wolff speak. He talked about a piano piece that he wrote in the 50’s. for some reason, he prepared the piano in the classroom, maybe just to show how it was done, as he didn’t play anythign once it was prepared. then he talked briefly about the organ piece and we walked over to the chapel.
I had never been in the chapel before, but Alvin had trold me that it was nondemonational and that the organist played student works. Lately, rumors had been flying about the mazing programmable organ. Each stop is separately addressable. (I now know what an organ stop is, but I’ll skip it for now.) We got to the chapel and sat down. It’s so non-demoninational that you can’t even tell which northeastern protestant sect the chapel is dedicated to, but I’ll hazard a guess and say Methodist. the windows are stained glass pictures of Jesus and the apostles (no stars of David, no blessed virgins, no buddhas…). there’s no cross in front put the pews have hymninals (“cof Colleges and schools”) and some prayer books (something that resembles a missal, but is protestant and thus has a different name) with pictures of jesus on the front. Clearly, “non denominational” is a word with different meanings to different people.
the Mills chapel, for example, could be called non-demoninational. The big stone altar is in the shape of a square cross, but it looks very pagan and it’s right in the centre of the round building. There’s a pipe organ. the glass is not stained. AFAIK, there are no pictures of Jesus. the pagan group used to have rituals there when it rained. (cuz who wants to stand around ina field in the rain?). anyway, I’m sensing that this is one of those east coast / west coast things.
So we sat down in the chapel and somebody went looking for the organist. the chapel inside wasn’t finished and there were carpenters with saws, hammers, drills and hardhats busily assembling the alter region. the organist (who is so so so gay) talked about the organ for a few minutes and explained that not all the pipes had arrived. He then began to play Wolff’s piece, sans some of the pipes, while the carpenters continued to work.
the piece had several quiet spots (or maybe just the pipes were missing) that got completely drowned out by the carpentry. It was 20 minutes long and hard to focus on in the din. Also, the audience’s focus was difuse and distracted, further making it harder to concentrate on the peice. not that they were making noise (not that it would have made a difference is they did), but just that the energy wasn’t right. It was a very odd organ concert. We clapped at the end.
It was reminding me of a John Cage story, published in Silence and recited in Indeterminancy. In it, Christian Wolff was playing a piano piece next to an open window. through the window came many loud sounds from passersby and automobiles and boat horns and airplanes that made it hard to hear the music and occasionally drowned it completely out. after he had finished playing, somebody asked him if he could play the peice again, but with the window closed. He replied that he would be happy to do so, but the outside sounds had no interfered with or obstructed the piano piece at all.
so we asked Wolff (the same Wolff as in JC’s story) what he thought of the recital and he said that he thought it was great, didn’t mind the carpentry at all. Maybe he should have a carpentry percussion part to go with it. Some of us (christi) giggled.

Dulcimer Piece

I have no dynamics (loudness) markings nor do I have pedal markings, nor anything else except notes and rests. Long Version, Short Version. I think the long one may be too long, but the piece isn’t over at the short one because the two parts don’t line up yet. So I think I have have to do a retrograde or inversion or a retrograde inversion for the second part. Except that the last notes sound very final, so I may need to open with the retrograde inversion. On Wednesday, I’ll get feedback on this from Alvin Lucier, so, you know, my time here isn’t being wasted by stupid paper and whatnot and even if this piece doesn’t draw on anything I didn’t know before, well, the feedback will.
I will be playing for a half hour at SUNY Stonybrook on Dec 6th. I’ll prolly be doing laptop music (even tho, officially, I hate laptop music) because I’ll prolly be playing a project from my SuperCollider class. Now that I have pressure on my projects, I have absolutely no idea what to do. My ideas flew out of my head or don’t seem robust enough or whatever. Of course, I could (should?) play several songs, or at least multiple movements during the half hour unless I can somehow create something that evolves over time, so it’s changing in an algorythmic way or something. How would you do that? changing notes and rythms here and there, but it would have to be changing in an interesting way, like going from a plainsong kind of thing to Ars Nova to Ars Subiliot. That last word is mispelled. It was an outgrowth of ars Nova that was really popular around the papacy at Avinion, but got dropped when the schism ended, even tho it was more complicated and possibly more interesting. The writer of a book I just read said it was more interesting, but I duno, as I haven’t listened to any yet. the scores and recordings section of the library closes at 5:00 pm on saturdays and today I haven’t left the house today.
Aaron (the housemate) brought a futon back today, so now there is a place for you to sleep when you come visit. Tell me when you’re coming and I promise to buy a second set of sheets! the futon used to belong to Scott Rosenberg who went to Mills as a music student when Christi and I were there. Everyone go hum It’s a Small World to yourselves until you go insane.
If I very clearly picture myself getting a package in the mail containing vegan brownies, maybe one will appear. Christi’s mom was always sending brownies when Christi was a freshwoman at Mills. Brownies . . . Brownies . . . Brownes on a cold fall day . . .
My CD burner just made a Bad Sound….

PlayPlay

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My Copious Free Time

I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t know what “copious” means. I just know this phrase means that one is unlikely to get to whatever project is being proposed. “I’ll get to that in my copious free time.” Is it ironic? I’m so ignorant.
You may be wondering what I do with myself when I’m not reading hundreds of pages about composers, writing homework assignments in Super Collider, and sitting in 27.5 hours of lecture and 3 hours of Gamelan playing per week. Well, sometimes I walk Xena. sometimes I got the store to buy produce (alas the produce store is closed on mondays). sometimes I sleep.
I went to a party at Sumarsam’s house yesterday. He’s the professor in charge of the Gamelan. He’s also director of the grad program. He had a party for faculty, grads and gamelan players yesterday. Only a few grads came because it was not well publicized before thursday night. there are not classes on friday, so many folks go to a nearby big city for the threeday weekend and thus didn’t hear about it until it was too late. Anyway, it was groovy. there was a lot of food, all of which was really, really good. Alvin Lucier came (THE Alvin Lucier) and I heard a student comment “this is the first time that I’ve seen Alvin at a party.” I haven’t really talked to Alvin since arriving, since I didn’t think he remembered meeting me from before and he’s kind of intimidating. Well, he’s not intimidating but the famous composer thing is intimidating. Anyway, he sat down next to me and said he was “mixing” at the party and asked who I was. when I told him that I met him in the spring, he remembered that, which is good, as I was initally alarmed thinking that perhaps I had been entirely forgettable. Anyway, he asked what I was writing and I explained that I was in three seminar classes and he said that I shouldn’t spend all my time on papers or I would give composers a bad name, since we’re supossed to be lazy. He told me to bring by my latests composition project on wednesday.
So right now, I’m writing a paper about RCS (see previous post) due wednesday morning. I’m preparing a lesson plan for teaching analog synthesis to grad students and undergrads (this is a half hypothetical pedagogy exercise. I actually will be presenting synthesis to undergrads) due tuesday night. God knows what due for for the Supercollider class on tuesday. Periodically I email code to Ron (the teacher. My advisor.) that is somehow related to what we did in class, but often only barely. The class is covering SuperCollider 2.x. the latest version is 3.0bx, out for OSX instead of OS9. [You can skip the geeky stuff] My OS9 system is pretty much ded, and I like being cutting edge, so because I want the class to be useful six months from now and when I go home, i keep trying to do stuff with SC3. The main difference between 2 and 3 is kind of an obscure thing (OSC is some UCB thing that’s very popular these days and is important in SC3 and absent in SC2, so there’s a semi-major redesign), which causes many of the methods of creating a “synth” and getting it to play to be completely different. As you can imagine, getting something to play in a computer music is pretty important. the help files in SC3 contain broken code. After all, it’s only beta. Christi thinks I’m being stupid (that’s not her exact words) and I should just do what the rest of the class is doing. she has a point. OTOH, why am I taking a class to learn something that I can’t use? It’s not like I need more experience taking CS classes. Especially one taught by a music professor. Ye gods.
anyway, ron seems happy about what I’m up to. Right this very second, I’m compiling the latests CVS version of SuperCollider 3 on the computer in the recording studio. I have root passwords to all department lab machines. Go me

Perfect Lives

the geeky portion is over. skip down to here

Blue Gene Tyranny is coming here on wednesday. It has something to do with the Bechstein piano in Russel house, I think. This school is swimming in pianos. From where I’m sitting I can see four of them (and three harpsichords) in just two classrooms. But some alum decided the school needed another one and so donated a turn of the century german baby grand made by Bechstein. It has been lovingly restored and put in Russel House, an admin building. They shoudl ahve stuck it India House. India House only has an upright and something traumatic happened to it and so it sounds like it’s been possed by demons. Deborah tried tuning it, but suceeded only in lowering some of the tuning and making it sound more weird. Anyway, there’s a new (old) Bechstein and the piano-type people (which seem to be lurking around in disturbing numbers) and very excited. A concert series is going on. Angela and I went on saturday to see Neely Bruce play Debussy and Chopin on the piano. It was a house concert and we showed up when it was supossed to start and ended up sitting three rooms away from the piano, althought I was line-of-sight to the keyboard. Loud motorcycles periodically went roaring past on the main drag, and the School is conviently located right in the middle of all the emergency services, so some sirens went by, and it’s next to the Italian Catholic Church, so some bells rung. It reminded my of John Cage’s story in Interdeterminancy about Christain Wolff playing the piano. Wolff was playing next to an open window and outside noises were sometimes drowning him out. someone asked him to repeat playing the piece with the window shut. He said that he would, but the sounds coming in through the window had in no way interrrupted or interfered with the music.
I dunno what Chopin or Debussy would have thought about mid 20th century experimentalist ideas, but I was ok with it. Actually, the bells provided some unexpected nice sonorities.
Anyway, Blue Gene Tyranny is coming, so I checked Perfect Lives out of the library. This is Robert Ashley’s opera for television. BGT is in it as Buddy, the World’s Greatest Piano Player. He improved all his parts and was (i think) a mjor collaborator in the compositional process. It’s organized in seven half hour long segments. It’s “some songs about the Corn Belt and the people living in it. Or on it.” It aired on BBC 4 about 20 years ago. Despite it’s intensely American theme and that the visual FX were very similar to what would have been in a music video of that era, and thus it’s relative accessibility, it was too weird for even PBS, I guess. Anyway, Angela and I watched all of it. Deborah watched a section or two and was disturbed about the oddness of it and went to do other work, so maybe PBS was right. Actually, I’m copletely ignorant of it’s broadcat history outside of it’s BBC premiere, maybe PBS aired it. I dunno.
One of the main charecters in it, who is going to Indiana to get married is a vegetarian theosophist. Ruth Crawford Seeger was a theosophist, something I’d never even heard of before wednesday. It’s weird how things intersect like that. Dane Rudhyar and a bunch of midwestern composers in the 1920’s were also into theosophy. It got it’s start in the US at the Chicago world’s Faire in the 1890’s. I’m sure that it’s inclusion in an opera about the Corn Belt is no coincidence. (there is no coincidence.) (I’m surprised to see it classified under “occult” in dmoz. It ought to be moved. And someone ought to add @links to the theosophist composers. ok, i just emailed the editor.)

writing music

I’m writing a piece for hammer duclimer, for Deborah. It’s going to be based on the fibbonacci series. One part will be 8 – 5 – 3- 2 – 1 and the other will be 2 – 3 – 5 – 8- 5. I’m using half rests as seperators. So for 8, there will be 8 beats of information (including quarter rests) and then two beats of rest. for five, there will be five beats of information and two beats of rest. For three, there will be three beats of information and two beats of rest. I say “information” because I haven’t yet decided whether I will use solresol for musical material or a pentatonic mode (don’t worry, i don’t know what a pentatonic mode is either.) If I use solresol, I only have acess to words that are four notes long, so I will have to use rests between words, and the rests are needed to keep the words seperated, so they count as information. So one part has 29 beats and the other has 33 beats. So, if the go ostinato (that means repeating over and over again), there will be 957 beats until they line back up. If it goes at one beat per second, that’s a very repetitve 16 minute piece. I just have to get some of that down by Wednesday

That is all

I have now squandered my class time. I could have returned my overdue Perfect Lives tapes to the library. I could have downloaded the solresol dictionary. I could have gone back to sleep. My alarm clock has tweaked out. It now rings within about 15 or 20 minutes (either direction) of when I set it. the alarm thignee is analog, so it wasn’t all the precise to start out with. It and my cell phone are in danger of being flung from open windows. If I went to bed earlier, it wouldn’t bother me to wake up half an hour earlier in the morning. yeah. zzzzzzzzz

I have no class

Neely Bruce’s wife’s aunt died and thus my class this morning was cancelled. (what did you think I meant?
I haven’t been posting much lately because I am busy busy busy. Also, since my DSL isn’t arriving for five more days (or thereabouts. i’m not sure. i think the phone that tiffany gave me might be broken. either that or i have no working phone jacks), i have to walk to the puter lab to blog and usually i won’t go to the lab unless i have a paper to write and i’m so studious that i never wait till the last second, trying futilely to print at 2:00 am. *cough*

Ruth Crawford Seeger was so queer

My paper this week will be about Ruth Crawford Seeger: groovy composer related to Pete Seeger, I think as a step mom. She was so so so queer. Of course, her biographer does convoluted summersaults trying to explain away how Crawford wrote in her diaries that she was burning with desire for Madam whats-her-name. It’s clearly a spiritual sort of desire. It means nothing that the thought of getting nookie with her boyfriend repulsed her (the only one by the time she’s 20-something) . The close friendship that she formed with a woman right after that, in which she nearly went for the neck and had to ponder “the lesbian question” afterwards in her diary, well, she didn’t go for the neck, so she must be STRAIGHT. Yes, she finally married her very critical and evil composition teacher, so she must be STRAIGHT. Bi people don’t exist and she’s not a lesbian because she married Charles Seeger (and stopped composing and got into his folk song trip instead) so she’s STRAIGHT. Pay no attention to the queerness behind the curtain.
If you have to ask “the lesbian question,” the answer is probably yes. You’re prolly queer. You’re a bidyke or you’re a homodyke. Don’t die wondering. Ect.

Grumpy paper

Celeste Hutchins

Proseminar

17 September 2003

 

Harrison writes in his Music Primer,

To Avoid the Monstrosities that might be done to your vocal works in
translations, make one version yourself directly in the international language
endorsed by UNESCO – Esperanto. This language is particularly musical anyway,
more so, I think, than the majority of ethnic tongues, which, like Topsy, “just
growed.” (p 22)

Harrison
is clearly very serious about Esperanto, even going as far as to teach it
through a gay organization in San Francisco and to write several E-o (E-o is
the “official” Esperanto abbreviation for “Esperanto”) manifestos. Amy Cook,
Lou‚’s sign language instructor, describes him as “passionate” about E-o. So
much so that in his primer, he goes so far as to list Dr. Zamenhof, inventor of
Esperanto in his list of the most influential figures of the nineteenth
century.

Morris,
Blake, Zamenhof, Whitman & maybe Dolmetsch – Darwin too & Thoreau;
those are the great geniuses of the west in the 19th century, the
ones still disturbing, awakening, arousing, fertilizing & revealing us. (p
41)

The E-o “movado” was equally taken by Harrison,
sending a delegation out to meet him in Tokyo, when he arrived for the 1961
East-West Music Encounter in Tokyo. (Miller p. 57) Similarly, the E-o community
at San Francisco State provided him with a premiere of his work, La Koro
Sutro. Charles Amirkhanian, former
music director of KPFA (and current director of Other Minds), recalled the
concert in an email,

I do remember attending that concert and it was
packed. I think it was in Knuth Hall in the Music Dept. and they used Lou’s
first gamelan, the American gamelan built w/ Bill Colvig. We did find a tape in
the archives of Lou speaking about that time about that gamelan, made with
metal pipes used normally to route electrical lines. The conduit was ground
down by Bill using an oscilloscope to get exact tunings. Lou was wild with
enthusiasm about the sound and tuning and that Bill could pull off this
miracle.

About
the lectures, Amirkhanian said, “We do have a recording, I think, of the 1972
performance of La Koro Sutro. We don’t have the lectures. I guess there wasn’t
much hope of broadcasting an entire lecture in Esperanto.” Despite KPFA’s fears
of an insufficient audience, Miller reports that “329 participants from
twenty-eight countries” attended the lectures. (p 64) ELNA, the Esperanto
League for North America sells a CD of La Koro Sutro, via their E-o book catalog. They describe it saying,
“[T]his collection by the world famous Lou Harrison is . . . a masterpiece in
any language. An innovator of musical composition and performance who
transcends cultural boundaries, Harrison’s highly acclaimed work juxtaposes and
synthesizes musical dialects from virtually every corner of the world.” (http://esperanto-usa.hypermart.net/butiko/butiko.cgi)
He was awarded a lifetime honorary membership to ELNA and is well known
throughout “Esperantio.” Someone
on an E-o email list concerning music asked, “Cxu ekster Lou Harrison neniam
ekzistis emo, ‘serioze’ verki pri iaj esperantaj poemoj?” Do there exist,
outside of Lou Harrison, serious works with Esperanto poems? (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/per-esperanto-muziko/message/232)

         Despite
how seriously Lou took E-o and how seriously the movado takes him, Miller clearly does not take this
seriously. For instance, she describes the premiere of La Koro Sutro as taking place, “during a week-long seminar at San
Francisco state University.” (p 64) It is extremely likely that the “seminar”
was actually NASK, La Nord-Amerkio Sumera Kursaro, an annual E-o language summer school, which, “[p]rior
to 2002, . . . was hosted for 31 years at San Francisco State University.” (http://www.esperantic.org/educationalprojects.htm)
On the same page, she says that “this postconfrence” followed “the 1972 World
Esperanto Convention in Portland.” There does indeed exist an annual
international convention of E-o speakers. The correct name for this is the Universala
Kongreso.

         She
similarly fails to accurately report names of E-o organizations when talking
about the 1961 Conference in Tokyo, saying, “Harrison wrote to the fine arts representative
of the International Esperanto Association in Tokyo.” (p 57) I would very much
like to read a copy of this letter, but I can find no mention of such an
organization via Google searches in English or E-o. There does exist a Universal Esperanto Association. There also exists a “passport
service,” which provides the kind of lodging and translation services that Lou
received from the representative of this mysterious organization. There also
exists a Japana Esperanto-Instituto,
which has existed continuously (except for 1944) since 1906. Many organizations
in Japan that want to reach an international audience use E-o, including some
scholarly journals. I have an impression of Japan as an extremely wired
country, so it seems like the “International Esperanto Association in Tokyo”
would be mentioned somewhere on-line.

         Lou
took sign language as seriously as he took E-o, yet it merits hardly a mention.
Amy Cook (who was my housemate for a few years) taught Lou sign language twice
a week, in 1.5 hour sessions from 1991 until 1996 or 1997. I talked to her by
phone after finishing Miller’s book. Amy was unhappy to learn that she was not
mentioned in the book, since she was very close to Harrison. During the time
she was my housemate, Lou called her and said that he and Bill Colvig wanted to
adopt her and told her she should find and fill out the appropriate paperwork. She
considered this offer, since her own parents are gone, but in the end, decided
against it. I remember this happening, star struck as I was, that Lou
Harrison was calling her up on the
phone!

         During
all the time that she taught Harrison sign language, Cook reports that he never
once mentioned his deaf former roommate, who is mentioned twice in the
biography. Cook explained that Lou’s neighbor George, which whom Lou was very
close, had gone mostly deaf. Her classes initially included Bill, but her
dropped out very quickly. After that it was Lou, George and Marian, George’s
girlfriend. Harrison was the organizer of the class. He was enthusiastic and “unafraid”of trying new signs. He “would go to any deaf event he could go to.” Cook
recalled a flying with Harrison to Seattle to see a sign language play and was
struck by his generosity in paying her way. He combined some of his interests
in constructed languages by reading about gestuno, an international sign
language, similar in motivation to E-o.

            Cook
painted a less saintly image of Harrison than Miller. She said, “He had a lot
of things going on . . . internally‚” and said that, “he seemed complicated”
and to be ‚”going through complicated stuff.” She went so far as to call him “high
maintenance.” She attributed some of this to health problems, such as pain in a
nerve in his face, and some to his “brutal” schedule. He was booked a year in
advance and always seemed to be writing something. He worked hard and continuously,
writing, traveling and teaching gamelan at Cabrillo Community College. He was continuously
doing something, if not working, then partying and was generally very
passionate about everything. Cook hypothesized that he welcomed the relief of
the sign language classes and so created unintensive lesson plans. He would stop
everything else that he was doing during the lesson time and objected strenuously
if he was disturbed during that time.

            His
sign language lessons started in 1991, which would have been during the
creative crisis that Miller reports him suffering around the first Gulf War. When
I asked Amy about this, she thought and said that eventually, he was always
writing, but said that she recalled him working on something even when they first
met. I asked her if this might have been Homage to Pacifica and she explained that although she was a music major
at the time and a percussionist, he gave “social cues that [music was] not an
avenue of conversation.” She could and did ask him questions about music and he
would answer them, but he looked bored when he did. She recalls him having a
bust of Ives in his house. When he found out that she didn’t know who Ives was,
he became exasperated.

            Lou
was ‚”thunderous.” He was “used to having his way” and would “storm around”
until he got it. However, his thunder was all sound and fury signifying
nothing. He yelled at Bill, but Bill’s hearing was poor and Bill didn’t take it
personally. Amy never saw tension between them. They were clearly in love, she
reported.

            Miller’s
biography of Harrison is similar to Cowell’s biography of Ives in that they
both were written during their subject’s lifetime and were both written by
people who were fans of their subject. Unsurprisingly, they both have a tendency
to fawn. Miller however, unlike Cowell, is sloppy with her subject matter and
should strongly consider collaborating with an Esperantist before another
edition of this book is released.

christi is here

Which is really nice for many reasons. yay christi. i have a bad cold though. but i’m reading a book about Lou Harrison and it’s making me homesick. he was an east bay kind of guy, even after he moved to aptos, he regularly commuted to Mills. there’s a chart in the book about the tuning syetm on the Mills gamelan (which he designed). and apparently, he wrote the graduation processional played by the mills gamelan at graduations. they played that at my graduation, but i can’t remember it.
Mills was quite the happening place in the 30’s. they did these summer session where they had up-and-coming artists, musicians, dancers, etc come and teach short classes. Lou wrote a score for a Mills Drama dept production. It was commissioned. these days there isn’t even a drama department and certainly no money for a summer session. The college president then understood that such events added to the presitge of the school and thus paid for themselves eventually. Mills is still banking on the the afterglow of what it did in the 30s. But what is it doing now? Alas, mills is a shadow of her former self. If only we could bring Rheinhardt back from the grave and re-install her as college president.
But i have a new school affiliation now and new academic politics to bemoan. it’s against the rules to write messages in chalk on campus. this is the biggest political issue. this was a stroke of genious on the part of the admin. every other student issue is subsumed by the chalking debate. they’ve stopped all other criticism. it’s brilliant.
I was checking my home email account and i didn’t unsubscribe from all my lists, so I got email from the Berkeley Socialists about an upcoming event where they will explain why revolution is necessary. and the annual Anarchist vs. Communist soccer match is looking for a pep band. and things seem to be still going well on the left coast. the brass liberation orchestra is continuing it’s debate on politics vs. muscianship. on the right coast, well, we’re worrying about whether or not it would get you in trouble to chalk “i love wesleyan” or “i love president bennet” in front of the president’s house. duh. yeah. and you can’t buy beer on sunday. for real. i went to the supermarket and tried to buy beer today. you can’t buy beer after 8:00 either. people here think of californians as backwards wackos, but at least we can go into a store and buy beer at normal times.
somebody told me that somebody tunred the us on it’s side and shook it and all the oddballs rattled down to california. great. i don’t disagree entirely with this assesment. everyone running for governor should return to their home state. anyway.
so i’m not doing anything political but reading Chomsky books and getting email from the Kucinich campaign. they mesh well together. chomsky says that if there’s a progressive candidate (like a real progressive, not backed-by-buisiness Dean) on a major ballot, then progressives have already won. the Kucinich meetups are during my Gamelan class though. And i might skip class to go sit in or protest something, but i’m not skipping class to discuss fundraising strategies. sure, i’ll got hit up impoverished grad students for donations. the undergrads actually have cash, but i think they should organize themselves to fundraise it. i don’t want to have a Kucinich house party to get cash out of undergrads, for example. the power balance seems wrong.
anyway, lou harrison was the quintissential california composer. he was highly political and fought the good fight. he built his own instruments (ca people do that. somebody once attributed it to the weather). the east coast and he did not get along. so he returned to relatively rural isolation, but was still connected to a university-type community. east coasters didn’t take ca-types seriously. ca composers had to go to the east if they were “serious.” people tried to get famous enough to new york. then, if they were famous there, they could come back and THEN the bay area would take them seriously, but not before. yeah, things have sure changed in the last 60 years…
weather here: 85 degrees F and humid enough to rain rain rain. i can’t wait till i get famous enough to move back home. i’m starting a band with a clarinetist, angela, and my housemate aaron, who plays drums and is from nyc and heck, maybe we’ll get some gigs.

Bummed

I spent four hours today in the mandatory graduate pedagogy session. We learned not to humiliate students and that people have visible or invisible identities blah blah blah. Four hours. It ws a beautiful day outside. I could see it through the windows. Some people are planning on going to NYC tommorrow, but I wasn’t planning on going. But I probably should . . .
Because it seems like I’m the only dyke grad student in the entire damn school.
People here just aren’t very out. I saw somebody wearing a queer awareness day T shirt, but it was a boy. Het people sometimes want to tell me they’re ok with gay folks, so they tell me about a lesbian that they met at a confrence once. Great. this doesn’t help. But it’s better than the people who find out and then stop talking to me. Which has happened at parties here.

Conversations

God

Other Grad Student: (more or less out of the blue) But even if you don’t beleive in gravity, it still exists.
me: It’s a quantifiable phenomenon
OGS: even if you don’t believe in Jesus, He still rose from the dead.

Later, with same student

Other Other Grad Student From the Sticks: (after passing some people) It’s hard for me to get used to not saying “hi” to people.
me: Then just say hi. It’s a small town.
OGS: those weren’t the sort of people you say hi to.
OOGSFS: Why not?
OGS: Because they’re loitering by a tunnel that smells like urine.
me & OOGSFS: Maybe they want a private place to talk. Hanging out doesn’t mean they’re bad people and you shouldn’t say hi to them
OGS: I’m sure they’re lovely people. Let’s go say hi to them. Maybe we can have them over for dinner
Did I mention they were also people of color? Is it classism? Is it racism? Is it both? why didn’t I remind her that Jesus wants us to love everyone?

with friends like these

So let’s say I’m too confrontation-adverse to do anything but let it drop. Let’s say that as an isolated queer I’m ok, but if I write “dyke power” in chalk on a campus sidewalk, she purses her lips. Let’s say that I really have a massive friend shortage. Let’s say that the only evidence that I have that there are other lesbians over 22 in Middletown is that I found a Naiad Press book at the library sale today. Let’s say that I’m bummed.
Everytime I see an undergrad with blue hair or a mohawk, I have hair envy. But I’m a grad student. If I come across now as serious and studious, that will be the reputation that I have for the next two years. All the evaluations and grades I get will be colored by the image I present during the first six weeks to first semester I spend here. If I want to go on in academia (which I’m not at all sure about, but it is a possible career path), I’m not sure it would be best if all the perceptions of me were Punky Color Blue.

Famous Composer Anecdote

We had the first Colloqium last week. All the faculty introduced themselves. anthony Braxton gave a little speech wich I wish I had a transcription of. He talked about how these were interesting times and like the 1960’s and how he lived in the music house in the 1960s and people not in the music house need to get organized, not just in happy theory, but also in the physical plane. And it’s an exciting time because of all the things that people in the music house could do to get active. He’s looking forward to getting to know all of us better. He went on. I felt inspired. How can we, as musicians, get active to counter imperialism (and other isms…)?
I’m not sure that all the other grad students were equally inspired, but Angela was, which is good, because she lives in the music house, now known as India House.
So how do we get active now on the physical plane? that means, to me, not just talking about “peace through music” in a happy theory, but actually using music to create a utopian model or as propoganda to communicate the meme of peacefulness. something like Rock for Peace is an obvious answer. Also, one could write peace hymns, like Down by the Riverside, that large groups of people can sing in demonstrations. Activist marching bands, like the BLO, are another answer and one that works well with peace hymns. One could write a choral piece or an opera which featured a struggle against imperialsm (like Joan of Arc, for example). Or, as the latest rounds of state based violence have a definte influence of religious-based hatred (was in Anne Coulter who said that we should invade the entire Middle East and make them all convert to Christianity?), one could strive to create rituals replacing functions currently filled by religious institutuions. Secular funeral services and hymns. Secular naming (“christening”) ceremonies. Secular weddings. Secular regular meetings to build community, listen to speakers and sing hymns. the sorts of music one might write for these secular functions may also be good practice if one were later planning on writing an opera.
I have a plan. Now I just need friends and a community.
(Just cuz you believe in Jesus doesn’t mean that xtainity isn’t a death cult that venerates images of turture and torture implements.)