23 June 2008

The moment I've been waiting for for what feels like my whole life has finally arrived: my induction into the Oberlin College Library system. Irving S. Gilmore, better step it up.

7 June 2008

There is something I love about moving. I have moved every year for the past five years; even if only across a courtyard, it was cause for excitement. This year we are two people moving across town. The apartment we spent the past year in was cozy and nice enough, but really only the living/working space had much personality. The new place is much bigger, so it feels almost spendthrift even though it’s a fantastic deal; New Haven is completely spoiling my real estate sense of the real world.

What I find exciting is making all my stuff disappear into boxes and then emerge in a different environment, and then adjusting all of the little rituals that make up my life in order to adapt to those differences. Taking out my contacts, boiling pasta, or putting on my shoes takes on new significance by making me stop and think about each step of the action. In my current apartment, for instance, I adopted a completely new and revolutionary concept of face-washing in the morning— over the bathtub, because the sink is too small to contain all the drips and splashes. It looks ridiculous, but I can be as messy as I want.

I also like the moment of the last look around an empty room, which I always find quite sad, but so loaded with anticipation— not a feeling I’ve experienced in any other situation.

Next week is moving week, and it’s also WWDC! So ready for an iPhone nano. My dad is there and will be sending back live reports.

1 June 2008

Every year I go through a cycle of redesigning my website, liking the design a lot, gradually liking it less and less, and then redesigning again. This has pretty much been happening since 2001, so
I might as well instate it as an annual tradition. I haven’t kept very good records of the old designs, which is a pity, because some of them were really bad and hilarious. Here is what the home page looked like in 2001 (no joke!):

As you can see, I have gotten over the rounded rectangles thing, but I still like gray.

The 2008 redesign is more of a collection of refinements than a real overhaul. The fonts are different; I decided that Meta was looking too corporate (not that Helvetica isn’t the epitome of corporate, but it can also be a lot of other different things). The page headings are now in Gotham and Hoefler text (hooray H&FJ!). As soon as I started working with Gotham I began to notice it absolutely everywhere, from Obama to Martha Stewart to Banana Republic, so I guess I’m still pretty much a corporate poseur. But it is nonetheless a great font.

Some more changes have taken place behind the scenes, as I’ve switched from GoLive to Dreamweaver. I don’t like either program; Dreamweaver is finicky (though perhaps in fewer respects than GoLive) but I still think GoLive has a better user interface. Dreamweaver feels like a Windows app, with features thrown together in a bunch of palettes (all of which operate in slightly different ways) without much regard to organization or visual hierarchy. The WYSIWYG compositing tools are better and more reliable than Golive’s, though, which is really what counts for me since I don’t know how to program.

I will be making more incremental improvements over the summer. In the meantime, I leave you with this picture, which can be magnified courtesy of Cabel Sasser’s pretty sweet FancyZoom:

13 May 2008

Just got back from a road trip to Cornell, where Nick, Hannah, Becca and I played in an all-Gorbos concert. Steve Gorbos is a great composer and a seriously cool guy. The concert was actually his DMA recital, meaning he is now Herr Doktor Professor Gorbos. My group played two quartets: Bridges, a piece from a few years ago that’s one of my favorites, and a new one called Footprints which, if possible, is even more tender and beautiful. You can listen to Bridges at Steve’s website; here’s hoping our performance of Footprints goes up there soon. [UPDATE: IT'S UP!!!]

I’d never been to Ithaca before. There’s some quality about upstate New York (and the more remote parts of New England) that is simultaneously depressing and exalting; I can’t quite pin it down but I think it has something to do with the light and the shape of the landscape and the falling-downiness of all the buildings. Though Cornell looks to be in good shape. The campus is very insular, unlike Yale's, where even when you’re surrounded by university buildings, you still feel like you’re in the city of New Haven. We played in a strange, T-shaped hall that creaked loudly with every gust of wind. The green room was furnished with some interesting old keyboard instruments, all in perfect playing condition, and an old green-naugahyde Eames sofa. I couldn’t decide which I wanted to strap to the roof of my car!

Right now I am off to lunch with my composer friends before we all disperse for the summer. I will be staying put in the Elm City, moving to a new apartment come June, working on several new pieces under uncomfortable deadlines, and also helping out in the recording studio, scavenging for old furniture, and attempting to grow loquats from seed. I’m also trying to learn Dreamweaver by working on a website redesign. Anyone passing through should call up and distract me.

25 April 2008

The front page of my website looks different from the rest of my website. I’m in the middle of a renovation so please excuse the continuity errors.

I had two great performances of I Found it by the Sea this week, by my usual crew (Nick, Anne, Hannah). These guys are a composer’s dream. I’m terribly grateful. Next week I will cook all of them an extravagant five-course dinner.

Ted and I both received this weird email that I think might be the world’s first composer-targeted spam. Here’s the message. I’m putting a big [sic] at the end:

Dear Timothy:

Art and culture are good reason for establishing communication between nations.more over there is poetic art which improve each nation in many different aspect.Your works introduce me to a new world;some beautiful works without any artificiality,any of which is as great as a masterpice.I wanted thank you for letting me into your secret,wonderful world with your music.your works expresses the most sublime aspects of human life.I don't know how to thank you for your precious gift.these are my poems.please read them and send your idea about them.can you compose a music with my poems? I admire your music.I want to building a bridge with my poem and your music between Iran and English-speaking people, including in the United States. this is my big goal.please help me in this project.admirer you and your works.

Mostafa Mojidi

[SIC]

Appended to the email are pages and pages of “psalms”. Choice line: “My pockets/ are loaded/with drops of tears”.

If anyone knows anything about this guy, or about his master plan to build a bridge out of poems, please let me know.

13 April 2008

I finished Piano Concerto for Dave in good time, a couple of weeks ago. Also I decided to call it Home Stretch. There are a few reasons for this, but mostly I wanted to give Dave something that had to do with fast cars, which he is obsessed with. You should see that guy when he walks by a ’67 Jaguar or something on the street. It’s actually kind of scary.

The main concept behind Home Stretch was that it would be one long, gradual acceleration, in three main sections. What I didn’t realize initially was that I’d never written that big a chunk of uninterrupted music before (it’s about 18 minutes). Shy and Mighty, even though it’s about an hour, is divided into more or less discreet tracks, none of which is more than 10 minutes. So it required lots of effort and a good deal of fiddling and adjusting proportions to make Home Stretch feel right.

Here’s a preview of the first section. The strings hold everything down with very long, sustained chords with slight pulsation, which I wanted to sound like an idling engine heard from a distance of several blocks. I fooled around with a few different ways of notating pulsation in a static chord, but here’s the one Aaron liked best:

For the past couple of weeks I’ve also been working on an honest-to-goodness professional graphic design gig. The Yale Symphony hired me to do their publicity for the last concert of the year. Here’s the standard letter-sized poster (click for full size):

Since the program consists of late Brahms and early Mahler, I wanted to do something that didn’t show them both on equal footing. Brahms was so firmly entrenched in the culture of German music by the end of the 19th century, when Mahler was working on his first symphony, that the “anxiety of influence” felt by the younger composer must have been overwhelming. Mahler responded to it by combining his influences with a hyper-romantic, almost hallucinogenic worldview, which is what makes his symphonies thrilling and original, yet ties them to the German tradition. So Mahler is represented on the poster as almost despairing, having cast aside his glasses— the instrument he uses to view the world— while Brahms is the stern, immovable monument which must be confronted.

In reality, though, those are my glasses— it's a secret double meaning!

11 April 2008

Has anyone else been following Top Chef Chicago?

What is the story behind this tapioca-pearl faux-caviar? Why is it suddenly appearing on top of otherwise perfectly good dishes, night after night? Tapioca is not fit for human consumption. And the passing resemblance to caviar is just insulting. If you can’t afford caviar, why would you replace it with tapioca? Just give me a homely anchovy or something and I’ll be happy.

1 April 2008

I feel like Times New Roman somehow got a bad reputation just because it is the default font for everything. If you go on Facebook and there are 155 TNR-devoted groups, most of which are called believable things like “Times New Roman is hindering my creativity” or “Times New Roman is responsible for all of society’s misfortunes”.

Well. Check out this site. I did a double take when I went there because I couldn’t believe it was TNR. It’s so beautiful! I think the actual problem with TNR is that it doesn’t do itself any favors as a default. It’s so unadorned and utilitarian, it needs some extra care from the designer to really bring its flavor out.

And I mean, things could be worse. Would everyone rather Arial were the default font? Oh, wait.

15 March 2008

This past week has been spent rather hermetically. It’s spring break for Yale, which means New Haven is pleasant and empty (disrupted only by last weekend’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, a riotous city-wide, Guinness-fueled, verdure-clad affair, accompanied by much brawling). I’ve been working doggedly to finish Dave’s concerto, and though so far he’s been admirably patient with me, I’m setting next weekend as my personal deadline. We’ll see how that works out.

Otherwise, I’ve kept busy doing odd jobs around the recording studio, experimenting with new Thai noodle recipes, and raptly tracking the shipment of a new Macbook Pro (which seems to be taking the slow boat from Shanghai).

My friends at Cordarounds shipped me some beta pants yesterday, which I’ve been field-testing. I think they’re the best summer-weather trousers ever devised, and strongly recommend them to all eligible wearers (which, sadly, excludes all but the very brawniest of women). You can read all about the science behind the wales here.

The Times advertising supplement (sorry, T Design) has a feature on one of my favorite designers, Naoto Fukasawa. Like everything in the T magazines, it’s a little light on substance, more just an excuse for everyone to talk about how great he is. Even Dieter Rams has nothing but breathless praise, and he’s German! Somebody should straight away get to work importing those +/-0 products. Otherwise, I might just have to move to Tokyo.

9 March 2008

I had the pleasure of hearing Ted Hearne’s Katrina Ballads live two and a half times last week: one and a half times in New Haven and again last night in New York. It’s an album-length oratorio, of sorts, which mixes instrumental numbers with vocal settings of primary-source texts taken from the week following Hurricane Katrina.

Music that tries to make a political point rarely convinces me— which is probably my personal failing, since the two seem to have gone together since the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of politics. What makes Katrina Ballads surpass the category of political music is that its politics are almost beside the point; it feels more like a work about understanding than one about propaganda. If Dennis Hastert happens to come off as a cold-hearted lunatic, or George W. Bush as a stuttering blockhead, that’s because they actually did that week. Katrina Ballads has a message, certainly, but it’s given to us with admirable perspective and remarkable selflessness; I never once felt I was being preached to, or emotionally manipulated. (Incidentally, I wonder if the choice of the word “Ballads” has anything to do with Rzewski’s North American Ballads; the last piece of that set, Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, is the only other politically-motivated work I can think of that is as successful and affecting.)

Perhaps another reason Katrina Ballads feels so different from other political music is that the music itself is always the first priority. I’ve always known Ted is a good composer, but what I hadn’t known is that he has the ability, chameleon-like, to blend his style into practically any musical genre that suits his purpose, and he makes them all work together as a consistent whole. He sets Barbara Bush’s infamous “This is working very well for them” quote (from an NPR interview—it’s still shocking to hear it) to easy-breezy but harmonically subversive ragtime, Kanye West’s impassioned tirade (from a live NBC telethon) to slowly-building gospel/R&B (though it’s not made explicit until the climactic line “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”), and Anderson Cooper’s blustering anger in high operatic style. Though most of this music is quite accessible, it never sounds cliché or facile. The instrumental writing is beautifully handled, skillfully employing more “new music-y” tricks (multiphonics, looping pedals, piano-drumming) to serve the greater dramatic purpose.

Of course, the piece wouldn’t be such a hit if the performers weren’t so intense and dedicated. Ted’s hand-picked band (including many Manhattan School new-music stalwarts) clearly love the music, and love playing together. The five singers are pitch-perfect, navigating Ted’s difficult passages and stylistic shifts with aplomb. Mezzo Abby Fischer was eerily, smarmily composed as Barbara Bush; soprano Allison Semmes was in turn preternaturally unflappable as Sen. Mary Landrieu, then vulnerable and affecting as flood victim Ashley Nelson. Tenor (maybe countertenor? that stuff was pretty high) Isaiah Robinson really stole the show in the Kanye West movement; the climax of the song was an almost joyful release of angry passion. Ted himself took a break from conducting to deliver the virtuosic “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”, a Nixon-esque disintegration of the president’s comment to former FEMA head Michael Brown. And baritone Anthony Turner, singing the text of another hurricane victim, conveyed utter desolation and despair in “My wife, I can’t find her body”.

I’m pretty much in awe of Ted right now. He’s expended a tremendous amount of time, effort, and money to bring all these people together and perform (and in a couple weeks, record) this huge, difficult piece, which he not only wrote, but also conducts and sings. I think Katrina Ballads has a great future, and I can’t think of anybody better to advocate it than Ted. I hope it makes him famous.

5 March 2008

We filled Roulette to capacity for last Saturday’s IGIGI concert. Representatives of three generations of my family were there! The generation gap was definitely in attendance, too; Lainie’s Tongue of Thorns, a raucous four-axe homage to the Velvet Underground, provoked some ear-plugging by the over-50 crowd, while the 20-somethings grooved contentedly in their seats. It made me wonder how many composers’ parents listen to their progeny’s music on a regular basis; how many could even stand to? I loaded up some of my music on my Mom’s new iPod, so I’ll have to sneak a look at her play counts.

I think part of the reason for this new-music generation gap is that people my age have no real concept of what “New Music” is, or how to approach it. We’ve grown up exposed to a much wider variety of sounds than our parents, which both desensitizes our ears but also makes them open-minded. Our parents, on the other hand, were the last children to have been brought up with the ideal of the concert hall as Sacred Space, and its confluent Modernist notions of “pure music”. They expect music to operate at several different levels of activity, all at once, all the time: intellectual, narrative, and performative.

From this standpoint, a piece like Jen Stock’s Grainary doesn’t make sense as a concert work, because it creates an atmosphere with spare, repetitive sounds and video rather than a rigorously developed progression of musical “material”. For me, though, it evoked something my old teacher John Halle said in regard to Alvin Lucier’s music: “something that should be boring, but isn’t”. Large-scale mechanical/industrial processes are one of those things, and I think Jen hinted at this potential fascination in Grainary. I always love those terrible segments on the Food Network or the History Channel where they show the mesmerizing insides of a camera-lens factory, or the candy assembly line. Here’s a great photo essay of how Legos are made. I think why I love watching these and why I love listening to repetitive music stem from the same part of my brain.

Lainie’s music continues to enchant me in this regard. Her two new pieces, Tongue of Thorns and Do You? revealed an even stricter minimalist bent than her earlier music. I thought the melodica-clarinet-voice trio in Do You? was particularly cool, and I'm always a sucker for those insanely catchy fractured rhythms, though I think it could have been even better if the instruments were amplified and mixed to ensure proper balance (and boost the volume).

Alex’s new pieces mix his incredibly catholic tastes in surprising, intriguing, often quite funny ways. I actually LOLed during Slightly Less Awkward People, which I don’t do nearly enough of at concerts in general. I played The Last Resort Party Band with my Yale friends and composer-saxophonist Emilia Tamburri, which we recorded the next day— I’m eager to hear it— and then Alex performed his melodica/piano piece Inland himself. I’m really interested in the possibilities of this combination; the toy-like melodica holds up remarkably well.
I’m looking forward to more collaborations with these wonderful composers in the near future... stay tuned. I have lots more updates that might have to wait until next week.

20 February 2008

Thanks for the shout-out, sequenza21! You can go there and read all about the upcoming IGIGI concert at Roulette. I totally didn’t write the press release. Actually I did.

I also designed this poster:

Has anyone else noticed the scrabulous Facebook app is a completely superior way to keep up with your friends than the entire rest of Facebook itself? I am hopelessly addicted.

11 February 2008

I heard the first performance of Talking About Dancing at Stony Brook yesterday. To get there, I had to take a boat, which I don’t do nearly enough. It really feels like an accomplishment, making a boat journey. I also like the feeling of ferry-boats, which all seem to originate from the same era (maybe the 60’s?) after which they apparently stopped making them. I’ve never seen a new ferry. The Martha's Vineyard Islander was my favorite when I was six, and she apparently just retired last year!

The SUNY campuses also seem to have been built around the same time as all ferries, at the height of the kind of impersonal modernism that everybody now hates. The buildings are brown-brick monoliths with huge, featureless spaces between them. The interiors of the buildings are identical corridors of white cinderblock. I’m sure that if I went to school there, I would get lost most days, especially since there are no windows with which to orient oneself.
Flying Forms put on an incredibly ambitious concert of seven world premières. I think this means that the modern repertoire for Baroque trio just increased by about 30 percent. My friends Robin and Zach both wrote really enjoyable pieces, Robin’s a pretty literal interpretation of ancient Scottish folk-song practice, and Zach’s a spicy neoclassical tribute to the Greek muses. Even though many of the pieces referred to the past for inspiration (mine included) I was impressed with the variety of styles and instrumental idioms that people came up with. The trio played tirelessly, in fact even seemed to gain energy towards the end of the concert, when they were joined by an awesome soprano named Elisabeth Holmertz.

Last Thursday was another New Music New Haven, one of the strangest I’ve been to: two and a half hours of weird stylistic juxtapositions. Tom Duffy dressed up in a half-black-half-white tuxedo, with makeup and hair... paint (there was music that went along with that, too). Derrick had an improv... techno? piece? And don’t forget Alvin Lucier’s Silver Streetcar for Orchestra, a 15-minute triangle solo spectacularly played by Mike Compitello. Then Jay had a moody, atmospheric piece for trombone and sampled trombone. In between those were some more normal pieces, which I think only seemed normal compared to their surroundings (my piece, Play it by Ear, again included).

I had a strange experience the morning of the concert. I woke up not hearing well in my right ear; it felt sealed off somehow. The health service discovered that in fact both my ear canals were almost completely blocked. I’d been hearing everything through two pinholes for who knows how long. So they shot some water all up ins and that seemed to do the trick. I spent the day being entranced by what I had thought were familiar sounds; a running faucet, rustling bedclothes, typing on my computer, and so forth. All those high frequencies I’d been missing! I could even hear the beats in Fideliotrio (just in time)! I can’t imagine a better state of mind (and body) in which to listen to Lucier’s music (OK, perhaps I can), most of which is based on the unhurried exploration of natural sonic phenomena. I really enjoyed Silver Streetcar. Triangles have some truly amazing overtones.

6 February 2008

Here’s a nice article from the New Haven Advocate about tomorrow’s New Music New Haven.
Here’s another nice article ummm... what?

The mythic "Young People" are skipping out on piano recitals because pianists move too much? Could’ve knocked me over with a feather.

31 January 2008

As D. points out, today is the last day in January, and there won’t be another one until next year. Well, rabbit rabbit everyone.

I’m sorry updates have been so unsubstantial. Recently my duties as a school-child have been taking up whole days, weeks even. That, and I’m currently in rehearsals for about eight different things, working three jobs, co-producing a concert, writing a piano concerto... I don’t even want to list it all because it will only make me feel feckless. The more things I have going on, the less time I have to write about them (ah, that explains why my blog entries last semester were so dull!).

I think it says something, therefore, that the reason I feel called upon to write is that I taught my Mom to read this, so she is expecting new material. She has become very technologically adept, and can be spotted now and then listening to recorded books on her tiny, tiny iPod.

I am about to step out the door for the first rehearsal of Play it by Ear. Then tomorrow is the first rehearsal of a little piece I wrote for Cameron Arens called Speed Trials. I haven’t rehearsed a new piece since Shy and Mighty got underway last Spring. First rehearsals can be terrifying, but I’m excited about these because they are with groups of friends.

Everyone should come hear New Music New Haven next Thursday, to hear Play it by Ear and a couple of other new pieces by my school chums. I’ll also be playing in Alvin Lucier’s Fideliotrio, in which the cello and viola slide very, very slowly between G sharp and B flat over the course of 12 minutes— twice. (And I play only the A between them.) I guarantee that if you listen closely you will be completely riveted, or else fall asleep, which might not be totally beside the point.

20 January 2008

If you are craving scones, I’m not sure why you came to my website. But this is a good recipe.

15 January 2008

In celebration of having nothing better to do today, I converted my iTunes library and Last.fm profile to a composer-centric cataloguing system (rather than the performer-centric one I’d used up until now). I’ve gradually come to the realization that the iTunes ecosystem just isn’t designed to support track info for “classical music”, where the “artist” and “composer” are different people. Even though iTunes does support the “composer” tag, it’s only useful for organization within iTunes, because no other programs recognize it.

In my re-organization, the name of the person or group most associated with the creation of the track goes into the “artist” field. For example, “Jean Sibelius” for Finlandia, not “Berlin Philharmonic”. For album-centric music, the primary creator can be the performer, not the composer: “Bill Evans” is the artist for a My Funny Valentine, even though Rodgers and Hart wrote the original song. Despite requiring me to make these judgement calls, I think the new way is more intuitive. Also, my Last.fm profile will now tell me more about my listening habits; instead of an incomprehensible list of performers and disembodied tracks, I’ll see a nice, clean stack of composers and pieces. My performer tags are now in the “comments” slot, and don’t get uploaded. A new year, a new profile.

Oh! This also gives me the opportunity to recommend one of my favorite sites: Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes. Applescripts are tiny programs designed to automate repetitive tasks; this is how I was able to re-tag 9,000 tracks without going through each one by hand (I don’t have that much free time). So, for instance, one Applescript switched my artists to the “comments” field, then my composers to “artist”, and another one reformatted the composers to “First name Last name”. You can find a script to do pretty much anything you’d ever want, and they’re accessible from a menu right in iTunes— a huge timesaver for anyone with a big library.

10 January 2008

I love Radiohead for many reasons. One of them is this video. The song they’re playing (The Smiths’s Headmaster Ritual) is one of my favorites, and you can tell it’s one of theirs as well; I imagine them as timid English schoolboys in 1985, clustering around the hi-fi, listening to Meat is Murder and thinking “That’s what I want to be doing with my life”.

Besides being really touching, it’s also just a great performance. There’s a “cover band” stigma in the rock world: the act of interpretation garners little respect, while much more value is placed on originality (exactly the reverse of the current classical-music paradigm). I think in the future we’ll see a gradual increase of rock musicians recreating the canon, with the original recording acting as the authoritative version instead of a musical score. More performances like this one wouldn’t be bad.

6 January 2008

In the past few months, I've finished three or four new pieces, and I had to think up names for all of them. I used not to put any effort into titles (here's an example). At some point during college, I had a two-part epiphany. Part one was: would I want to read a book called Bildungsroman, Op. 4? (OK, actually that sounds interesting, but not terribly evocative). Part two was: I suddenly realized that many composers give their really great pieces really bad titles. Bad titles, especially ones that sound vaguely new-age, make my spine crawl. And I can't understand why composers, all in all a pretty smart bunch, are allowed to get away with them.

On a related note, the pluralized-abstract-noun + number thing is just not working anymore. That's a major cop-out. My friend Alex (who has some great titles, by the way) once made a list of all the plural-noun titles he could think of off the top of his head, and there were something like 400 of them.

I find Sufjan Stevens's paragraph-long song titles a bit self-conscious, though I like the general language of them.

Here are some titles I love: Before and After Science. Hallelujah Junction. It Takes Twelve to Tango. All the pieces on Lost and Safe. Schumann's Kinderszenen, which are incredibly abstract musically, yet have perfect titles. Most of the songs on Mr. Bungle's California. The Boards of Canada have a lot of very similar titles, but I think they are pretty ideal. Here is Julius Eastman CD that costs $54 and is full of really memorable titles (I especially like If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?).

So how do I think up titles? I like phrases and combinations of words that are easy to pronounce, and feel like something I would say in conversation. There's something prepossessing about a title that's in regular, everyday English, rather than one that forces you to step back and regard it as Art.

Naming a piece is like how I imagine naming a fictional character would be; you can decide to make it really significant and symbolic, or you can just choose something that sounds more or less suitable. I keep a list of phrases I think would make good titles, some of which are preposterous and will probably never find a complementary piece (example: Everything Seems Edible). I play around with different variations on a title as I'm working on a piece. Usually the most streamlined version ends up working best, and it's often the one I thought of first.

All this goes to show that titles are less meaningful than you think (and than program notes would have you believe). People often ask me what Shy and Mighty means. The answer is "not much". It's just the first thing that popped into my head.