3 November 2007

My website has some new clothes as of this week, and a little new content. The upgrades (I hope!) were inspired by a need, I thought, for greater ease of use on both ends: yours and mine. Yours, because interacting with my website should be smooth and pleasurable and easy, or at least not annoying; mine, because I plan to make more frequent updates in the near future, and updating the old design was a huge Chore.

I’ve become very interested in the design of interfaces, and the particulars of how humans interact with them. Little details have begun to catch my attention more and more. For instance, why do the credit-card readers at Shaw’s say, “Welcome to Shaw’s!” on the screen? The only time I interact with it is when I’m buying my groceries and am about to leave. Plus, they have a human greeter at the door to make me feel welcome when I come in. Why does the machine need to be friendly, anyway? Can't it just be simple and direct? I wonder who made this design decision. Today, when I was building some new composition pages, I was trying to figure out how to provide controls for my imbedded audio clips. Turns out, in GoLive, you have to actually type the word “true” in the box next to the word “controller” in the “attribs” tab. Why not just a simple on/off check box?

My website is the main arena that I can do experiments having to do with interface design, and as such, it’s a labor of love. The new design provides all kinds of new useful (I hope) visual and navigational feedback. Links are now more obvious and plentiful, and color-coded according to the section of the site; forward/backward buttons provide little text rollovers; page headings are more strongly delineated; audio samples, as I mentioned, are imbedded into the page, so you can read about the piece while listening to it; there are now little “click-back” maps at the tops of more deeply-buried pages, to let you know where you are. The structure has changed, slightly, with the contact and headshots sections now rolled into the biography page instead of their own separate pages.

The entire experience of using the site should be faster, too, because I’ve converted most of what used to be images into nice, CSS-formatted Helvetica text. This is the main improvement on my end of things, cutting down my editing time by about 75%. The overall result is that the sebsite is now more purely typographic; I've done away with most of the needless graphical frippery (no more roundrects!) and replaced it with 3-point horizontal lines and styled text. The exception, of course, is the icon bar, which I refined back in May. I think the icons still serve their purpose well.

Oh right, and new content, too: Sorbet finally has its own page, with a recording kindly furnished by Jay. Shy and Mighty has some new audio files, too, as well as the one-piano version of How can I live. Also, new links aplenty, and some new upcoming events (stay tuned for more).

As always, don’t hesitate to email me if you encounter any problems/aesthetic conundrums with the site. Still to be updated: the performance and especially the visual aids section (that divided circle has been on my website ever since its first incarnation back in 2001).

31 October 2007

Richard Taruskin in the New Republic:

There are two ways of dealing with the new pressure that classical music go out and earn its living. One is accommodation, which can entail painful losses and suffer from its own excesses (the "dumbing down" that everybody except management deplores)....Orchestras have accommodated by modifying their programming in a fashion that favors the Itzies and Pinkies and little divas. Composers have accommodated by adopting more "accessible" styles. Love it or hate it, such accommodation is a normal part of the evolutionary history of any art.

Oh, right. It's not that I just happen to like triads and melodies and pulse, or anything. It's just that I've gone and caved to the market's demands. Sure. Accessible. Thank you, Mr. Taruskin, for calling me (and the rest of us) out.

30 October 2007

My apologies to those of you using Firefox. I've been freshening most areas of the site and have yet to get them to display correctly. Safari seems to do a good job, though, as does Internet Explorer, oddly enough. I'm working on a fix in the meantime.

U P D A T E : Things should look fine for the time being. Please let me know if you encounter any problems.

28 October 2007

I went to a pretty remarkable concert last night. The Yale Schola Cantorum performed Sofia Gubaidulina's Sonnengesang: The Canticle of the Sun, a sprawling setting of St. Francis of Assisi's text for chorus, percussion, and cello soloist (the aforementioned Hannah Collins). After reading Matt Barnson's excellent program notes during the interval, I was fairly certain I was going to hate the piece, not least of all because I'd heard it was 40 minutes long, and also about some religious mumble-jumble. ("In each of my works I experience the Eucharist as fantasy"? Please, spare us.) Then they brought the tuned water-goblets out on stage, and I really expected the worst.

Actually, though, I shouldn't have worried, because we're talking about Simon Carrington here (he's the conductor). He's a man of taste. You should see the convertible he sometimes drives. It was because of Simon that I got to play in Dallapiccola's Canti di Prigionia a few years back—what a hair-raising piece.

Canticle of the Sun was also hair-raising, in a completely different, much more ecstatic sort of way. The cellists has to act as a sort of protagonist figure, a wanderer in search of some sort of religious salvation—which I understand was achieved, to judge by the awesome F-sharp major closing minutes. Over the course of the piece, Hannah had to de-tune her C string down to A flat, then back up again, get up and play a gong, superball a bass drum (and let me just say, she super-balled it), and go bow a flexatone in the chorus's face. There's a really thin line here between drama and cheesiness (the bad kind, not the Alex kind)—but I was not, at any point, embarrassed for the sake of anyone onstage, so I think that means everything was just fine.

There were some real musical high points, too. The whole language was very fresh-sounding, especially in the more static sections (at one particularly engrossing point, the percussionists had to play their water-glasses for about five minutes straight, without pausing to re-wet their fingers. How did they do it??) I was also really intrigued by the large-scale gestures in the music—for instance, the cello's obviously symbolic and incredibly protracted ascent from low A-flat to high god-knows-what toward the end of the piece, and how the opening solo introduces the chorus with a jaunty glissando. There were, of course, some sections where my mind wandered, but then, I get distracted during Webern's Fünf Orchesterstücke, so perhaps I'm not the best judge.

Simon warned all of us beforehand that there was a great deal of silence in the piece, and please not to cough, shuffle our program, call our mother, etc. and I think it made the audience slightly on edge. There was definitely more coughing as a result. Also, one unfortunate chorister forgot to silence his ringer, and it went off, painfully, in his tuxedo pocket. I don't think it would have been so painful if everyone weren't paying such close attention to the music, so I guess the jolt in my stomach was a good sign.

25 October 2007

As a lifelong Mac user (and pursuer of all things Apple) I'm excited about the Leopard release tomorrow (though I probably won't install it on my overburdened old powerbook). But I have to say, what is with the gross sci-fi packaging? I feel as if I'm about to be swallowed by a purple nebula of backed-up files. Part of what I enjoy about being a Mac user is the whole "thoughtful minimalism" design culture, but lately, somebody's been slathering on the useless eye-candy with alarming abandon.

On a completely unrelated note, I made Pad Thai today from scratch. It was my first time working with Tamarind. I wonder how many people know that this slightly suggestive-looking pod is the main flavoring in Pad Thai. I certainly didn't. It's really sour, so you have to combine it with an equal amount of sugar. The first batch I made came out of the pan as a single crunchy, oily unit. The next two batches improved drastically (you have to cook Pad Thai one serving at a time, or else it doesn't cook evenly). The whole project seems kind of ludicrous, because I could just hit up any of the five places within 200 feet of my apartment that sell perfectly good Pad Thai. But that's exactly why I wanted to see if I could make it myself, because it's one of those things I've only ever eaten at a restaurant. Actually, people in Thailand never eat it at restaurants; it's sold only on the streets there, the equivalent of our hot-dog and pretzel carts.

17 October 2007

I was reading Pitchfork today and saw a great big banner ad for the always-insightful Alex Ross's new book, The Rest is Noise. I can't remember the last time I saw an ad for any book, much less a gigantic tome about 20th-century music. I guess Pitchfork knows its target demographic, and I am it. (I don't have a copy yet, but I'm looking forward to it.)

14 October 2007

How did two months pass by so quickly? Oh, right, I am in grad school now. I forgot how busy "school" makes a person. Highlights: working with Alma and Miki on the Ligeti horn trio, chilling (in the truest sense of the word) with Ingram Marshall, getting to know my new composer colleagues, 8:20 AM "Hearing" with Panetti (respeck, Joan), getting intimate with the gamba, Diya's and my birthdays (celebrated in typically glamorous fashion by seeing LCD Soundsystem and Arcade Fire), the Free New Radiohead (on my birthday, no less), harvest at the Yale Organic Garden, learning the ins and outs of the Fred Plaut Recording Studio, taking Intro Typography (this blog is beginning to hurt my eyes), this sudden Fall weather.

And composing. My new piano piece for Richard Dyer, Sorbet, is compleat, as is Play it by Ear, the nonet for Hindemith Ensemble. Right now I'm working on a piece for Marie Dalby's trio, Flying Forms (gamba, baroque violin, and harpsichord). It's interesting trying to adapt my gestural language to unfamliar instruments and a completely different style of playing. My goal is a synthesis of Baroque idioms and my own harmonic language, so that if you started listening at any random point, there'd be a few seconds of total confusion when you wonder what century you're in.

Next up—a piece for the superb cellist Hannah Collins. Expect very few (if any) premières this Fall, and then a string of them in the Spring.

1 September 2007

I've always been a big eater, but over the past couple of months I've become obsessed with food. For the first time in my life, I have my own kitchen, as well as the responsibility of keeping two people reasonably well-fed. My daily routine go straight from work to one of several purveyors (Nica's Market? Hong Kong Grocery? Or, god forbid, Shaw's?) and immediately start cooking when I get home. It's gotten to the point where I lie awake at night mulling over the next day's menu in my head, wondering how long that giant bunch of basil in the refrigerator will keep, formulating the exact process by which I will prepare polenta, deciding what I'll throw into my next batch of aïoli (maybe that basil?). I read cookbooks in my free time, even watched straight through the second season of Top Chef, and no, I can't believe that hack Marcel made it to the final round. (You know what would be really great, though? Top Composer. Think about it.)

I have similar values in the food I cook as in the music I write. I like simplicity. One of the best food I've ever had is blue crabs, steamed in their shells with plenty of red pepper and Old Bay (I was reminded of this while visiting my Grandparents last week). Crabs really speak for themselves. Similarly, I don't like to gussy up my music with a lot of surface sheen or virtuosic frippery. If the materials can't stand up by themselves, I don't use them.

This is not to say that a dish, or a piece, has to be totally conceptually integrated. Most of the time, I make it up as I go along. Most of my effort is expended trying to make disparate ingredients work well together, to complement each other. Sometimes the unexpected juxtaposition of two elements is enough to justify the whole, though not always.

I've been chronicling my cooking/eating experiences on my Flickr page. Feel free to stop by and leave a comment, or better yet, a recipe.

19 August 2007

I just updated the performance section of the site, which hasn't seen new content in... awhile. Specifically, I put up a bunch of audio clips from my May concert at Steinway Hall, selected mainly on the basis of number of Glaring Errors. So, you get to hear me play Beethoven, I get to hide my mistakes behind the curtain, and everybody's happy. No, but really, I will send you the full audio if you want. It's just too big to post on my server, which seems to be getting slower by the day. If anybody knows a good and cheap hosting company, then please challah at me.

I mentioned before that I've been writing a couple of new things this summer, and here is what they are: a solo piano piece and a nonet for THE. The piano piece is for Richard Dyer, who has been about to retire for, as far as I can tell, the last two or three years. I was initially intimidated by the prospect of writing music for a music critic. (Does anybody know any historical examples of this?) The idea I ended up going with was pretty much the first thing that came to me, namely that a critic spends most of his time doing what most people do only on special occasions. It's a pretty enviable position, on one hand, but actually I think it must take a whole lot of dedication to drag yourself to the orchestra night after night, or even to eat at restaurants all the time if you are a food critic. So what I thought I could provide is the "sorbet" between courses, something of a light palette-cleanser that also would be a good preparation for listening to other, heavier music. This piece will be premièred in Boston sometime this fall.

The nonet is a pretty single-minded piece which takes a long melody line and just jams, man. Seriously, after a year of writing exclusively piano music, I was hankering for some sustainin' action. So it ends up being clarinet-driven. It has a kind of autumnal feeling, which I know is meaningless, but for me is a desirable quality. New Haven is at its best in the fall. If you come over to my house, I will cook root vegetables.

3 August 2007

We had a dumpling-making party last night and listened to The Most Unwanted Music, which you can listen to here (MP3). It's the result of a purportedly "scientific" study on people's musical likes and dislikes by the duo Komar & Melamid (its companion piece, The Most Wanted Song, is terrifically banal). The results are predictable: people like cheesy five-minute rock/R&B love songs much more than they like accordions and childrens' choirs. (What's funny is that people equally wanted and didn't want "synthesizer" and "intellectual stimulation," I suppose because both these things can take so many different guises.)

Anyway, The Most Unwanted Song is great party music. It covers a bewildering stylistic range, from rap-opera to advertizing jingle to faux-German Sprechstimme. The subject matter includes, as far as I can tell, How Awesome Being a Cowboy is, How Awesome Shopping at Walmart is, and Wittgenstein. The huge orchestra, which often indulges in Day in the Life-esque atonal freak-outs, includes a pipe organ, bagpipes, banjo, harp, and the most persistent woodblocks you've ever heard. For all its weirdness, it's quite a happy, rousing piece of music, mostly because you're rolling around on the floor after about three minutes (the whole thing is 25 minutes long, which really takes stamina).

29 July 2007

Judging by the unscientific evidence I've gathered in the field, it seems as if composers don't make a huge effort to really listen to and study their peers' music in depth. This seems kind of strange. I mean, of course they hear it, on "composers' concerts" and "New Music New Haven" and other such Composers-Only events. But there's only so much you can gauge on first hearing (and especially from the first playing).

I was wondering because I've been listening to my "Colleagues" iTunes playlist recently, which is where I put my generation's music. I've got some newly-acquired Greenstein and Gorbos, two of my favorites, and I realized that I liked their music better than almost any other "contemporary" music. It's worlds away from most of the pap that gets big commissions. And while it's really cool that I can link to free MP3's on their websites, I'd really like to be able to buy, say, an all-Gorbos CD in a store. (Naxos? You listening?) This guy has the right idea, but I still can't stop in at Cutler's and and walk out with Speaks Volumes.

What I guess I'm trying to say is that I hear something in the music of my peers that I don't in that of their teachers. Composers have been espousing the idea of "eclecticism" for a couple of decades, but I think it's taken until now for that to really sink into the music in a meaningful and coherent way. Even when Big John tries to do it, things like this come out (though, respeck). But a curious mind like Alex Temple somehow assimilates and synthesizes his influences, instead of just dumping them in a misbegotten salad. I mean, you don't necessarily hear Pere Ubu in Grass Stem Behaviors, but ask Alex, it's probably in their somewhere. Same thing with Steve's Alleluia (hey hey hey) in which you can probably name about 30 different elements, all various and distinct, and they come together in this incredibly profound soup.

I've gleaned as much from listening to my friend's pieces as I have from years of attending composers' symposiums, and it's one thing I'm hoping to continue to do whilst Graduate Schooling.
Speaking of which, someone tell Mark to update his website.

18 July 2007

This summer is pretty quiet, especially in comparison to last year's Fairly Busy one. There are a number of projects on my plate, which I tell people I'm working on, but actually the majority of my time has actually been occupied by Homemaking. I moved in to my first real apartment a few weeks ago, and there are all these things I never even thought about needing, like dishtowels.

I had my first experience playing in a pit orchestra recently, for a show the Martha Graham Dance Company put on here in New Haven. As such, I have still never seen the Martha Graham Dance Company perform, only heard their (remarkably loud) footfalls overhead. The Times had some nice things to say about our playing, which from my perspective could've politely been called "scrappy".
The best thing about the gig by far, though, was that we got to play Copland's original ballet score of Appalachian Spring. There's a certain point in the score, right around where the Simple Gifts melody comes in, where you realize the music is starting to sound unfamiliar, and before you know it, you're in completely uncharted territory. I told my friend Cameron that it was like discovering a secret room in the house you've lived in your whole life. What's especially interesting to me is seeing the choices Copland made about what to keep and what to throw out in the orchestral suite; mostly, it's just a superfluous bar here and there, except for one really huge section that splits the Shaker variations right down the middle. This "bastard section" is musically the strangest and most problematic. Plot-wise, I am told it accompanies a sort of athletic fire-and-brimstone dance by the preacher character, and the subsequent religious awakening of the bride. Sound-wise, it's much more like the Copland of Piano Sonata and Piano Variations— both of which I think are about as close to perfect as any pieces I know— but it sounds starkly different from the rest of the ballet score, somehow lacking the wide-eyed quality, much more cynical. I think the cuts to the concert version of Appalachian Spring make it a sweeter, easier piece without the internal tension that this missing section adds. I wonder if Copland felt that he was sacrificing an integral part of the piece, or instead paring it down to its essential elements.

Speaking of paring things down, I just bought a book by/about the fantastic industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa. It's a pity his work isn't more readily available in the US, because it is some of the most beautiful, thoughtful, and thought-provoking art I have ever seen (I wonder if anyone else could manage to elevate the design of, say, a humidifier to "art" status). What really inspires me about Fukasawa's work is how each element that makes up a whole is true to itself and the whole, creating an object with such a sense of inevitability that you can't imagine it being any different. Things like taste and aesthetics just fall by the wayside; you might as well ask if a tree or a cloud has taste. This is something I also sense in Copland's piano music. You don't hear or feel the work that went into shaving off each extraneous note or millimeter of plastic, you just know that there are the right number of notes, exactly the right dimensions.

5 July 2007

I just got back from Mexico yesterday, which was a relief after a 36-hour travel mishap much too tragic to detail here. But San Miguel itsself was just perfect. That place makes the most intriguing noises at night, a combination of strange birds and frogs, distant mariachis, and the bells of about 147 different churches, all tuned differently. If you ever find yourself there, you should stop in and visit Barbara at her store.

On the way back my iPod did the most amazing thing ever (besides just existing, which it also does admirably). Namely, I put it on shuffle and it played three songs in a row: The Smiths's The Headmaster Ritual, Radiohead's Bishop's Robes, and The Decemberists's The Sporting Life. What is amazing about this is not just that it played them in chronological order, but that all the songs deal with basically the same subject matter— feeling like an outcast at a conservative boarding school. I mean, if it had played three songs about How Much I Miss You, that wouldn't be so special, but this is pretty specific subject matter here. Just compare the lyrics (linked from the song titles)— they all talk about being hurt on the "playing fields" which I guess is what they call them in Britain. It's pretty obvious that the Smiths's song inspired the other two, which are not nearly as good (Radiohead was self-aware enough to leave the overly-morose Bishop's Robes a b-side). The Headmaster Ritual manages to evoke, in the music as well as the lyrics, that feeling of unbearable outrage at, as well as powerlessness in the face of authority (the total opposite of "We don't need no education," instead it's "Give up education as a bad mistake"). The pacing is also weird and perfect, sort of hurtling forward, stream-of-conciousness, with the breaths coming out almost like sobs.

In conclusion, my iPod is either a) Morrissey; b) possessed; or c) too smart for its own good.

2 June 2007

Shy and Mighty has been premièred and recorded, and I've put up some samples for your perusal in the compositions section. Alex and Dave did a great job on it and really put in a lot of work, and Mateusz's sound engineering is nothing less than an acoustic miracle. If you have a space with two pianos, let me know, and we'll come put on a guerilla performance.

Also, I've slowly been "freshening" the site design, so let me know if you encounter any problems, or worse, aesthetic conundrums.

I'll be in Paris for the next couple of weeks. Later this month, come hear The Hindemith Ensemble accompany Martha Graham Dance Company in the New Haven Festival of Arts and Ideas. After that, if you find yourself in Mexico, you should definitely come to my San Miguel concerts in July! See you there, undoubtedly.

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