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.