As New Haven descends further into the cold and dark, I was surprised and most pleased to find, of all things, loquats. Not a tree, sadly, but a flat of them at the Chinese grocery. I’ve heard that these fruits are so delicate that they are almost impos­si­ble to ship, yet these ones looked handsome, so I bought a whole bagful. Loquats remind me of growing up in Berkeley, where they grow on street­corners, and my dad would hoist me onto his shoul­ders so I could pick them.

I had deli­cious loquats last summer, when D. and I were in Paris. We spent a day wander­ing around the Marché aux Puces in Clig­nan­court, and late in the after­noon became suddenly very hungry; a large loquat tree presented itself just in time, and I climbed up and gathered a late lunch. The fruits were a little overripe and very sweet; I’m not sure if they were the best loquats I’ve had, or whether the circum­stances made for such a memo­rable experience. 

Notes to self, to be re-read before I write my Phil­har­mo­nia piece next year:

1. Have one or two good ideas. If you have more than that, save the rest for later.
2. Don’t write any details because no one will ever hear them in Woooooooolsey Haaaaaaall.
3. You don’t need to fill up your allotted time; better too short than too long. Just as in cooking, it’s easier to add stuff than to take stuff out.

Friday night was the Philharmonia/New Music New Haven Concert, or, how the second-years spent their summer vaca­tions. I always look forward to these (I’ve even reviewed them in the past) as it’s the only time the Phil ever plays anything New, and when I was a small, small under­grad, it was really inspi­ra­tional to see all the cool Older Kids writing such cool stuff. (Unfor­tu­nately, now that I’m actually an Older Kid, I realize we’re not partic­u­larly cool. Damn.)

The other side of it is that I’ve been secretly plotting my revenge, I mean my orches­tra piece, for the past several years now, and by seeing so many other composers run the gauntlet before me, I’ve been able to glean more or less what works and what doesn’t. Thus, the notes to self. The main problem composers run into is Woolsey Hall itself, which was built with a huge organ, not orches­tras, in mind. It is essen­tially a giant bathroom. No matter how fastid­i­ously controlled a perfor­mance, every detail is over­whelmed by the acoustics. Not only that, but the orches­tra just sounds small, which is a shame because they really play with a lot of gusto.

These hand­i­caps were turned into advan­tages in Ingram Marshal­l’s piece, Kingdom Come. In true Ingram fashion (and when I say fashion, I mean fashion) the orches­tra is treated more as an atmos­pheric back­ground for the pre-recorded compo­nent, which consists of various Balkan folk singers. Ingram gener­ally builds layers of reverb into his music (either through orches­tra­tion or elec­tronic manip­u­la­tion), so in this case, the hall just added another dimen­sion of moisture, helping the orches­tra and elec­tron­ics to merge. Harmon­i­cally, the piece is clear enough so that muddi­ness was never a problem. Ingram also has a way of fooling with time scales, so that I’m never sure how long his music is. I seri­ously couldn’t tell whether Kingdom Come was 10 or 25 minutes, and neither would have surprised me.

About the Length Issue. Every time I bring this up with Ingram, he says, “Aren’t you the one who wrote that hour-long piano piece?” Touché. Maybe I’m not qual­i­fied to talk about this. But I still feel as though most New pieces I hear are inter­minable. Perhaps it’s an issue of expec­ta­tions; I never know how long to expect a piece of New music to last (as opposed to a pop song, which I know will be over in five or so minutes, or a Brahms sonata allegro, which I know will last about 10). This is closely related to the Form Issue, which is that when composers make up their own forms, I usually feel lost in them. I have no feeling of antic­i­pa­tion, and when that happens, the piece loses its ability to surprise.

Last night’s excep­tion to this was when I read Derrick Wang’s apoc­olyp­tic-voiceover styled program note for his piece Action [Trailer], I said to myself, “This had better only be one minute and 30 seconds.” Which it turned out to be, and I was quite happy.

Yuan-Chen Li worked hard to solve the Woolsey Issue by really tailor­ing her piece to the space, which meant putting soloists in the balconies, and using the organ as a sort of rein­force­ment to the orches­tra. Her piece was soni­cally adven­tur­ous and unex­pected and I really liked it.

Dan Vezza’s piece was called there was never, never was there so I expected it to be some sort of palidrome. Actually it was in two sections, the first very gestural (kind of reminded me of how toddlers treat pianos— just glissing up and down the keyboard in great clumps) and the second totally aleatoric, even­tu­ally coalesc­ing around a repeated F‑sharp trombone solo, which went on long after the rest of the orches­tra had ceased to play. It was spec­tac­u­larly weird. I felt bad for John Concklin, the conduc­tor, who just sort of stood there for the second half. Maybe he should have pulled out a kazoo or some­thing and joined in the fray.

I some­times feel that Ted Hearne’s music is the closest of all my colleagues’ to my own sensi­bil­i­ties, and then some­times he just goes and does some­thing totally differ­ent, which is great. Patriot was defi­nitely one of those pieces. I think it might have been polit­i­cal, I’ll have to ask him about the title. There was a lot of activity through the whole piece, little disso­nant brass fanfares and woodwind machi­na­tions. I really had the sense that I was missing a lot because of the acoustics, so I’m looking forward to hearing the record­ing of the concert next week. I also want to ask Naftali Schindler about his piece, which sounded like distorted recol­lec­tions of West Side Story. He wasn’t at the concert because it was on the Sabbath.

NPR has a new music-devoted subsite. It looks pretty promis­ing, as these things go. There is a nice mix of genres, which are all given equal billing. The design of the site is clean, though EVERYTHING IS IN CAPS so it probably feels more chaotic than it could. There are also some deli­ciously weird juxta­po­si­tions result­ing from the genre-neutralness—the heading “ROCK/POP/FOLK right under­neath a big picture of Mahler, for example. Here’s an inter­view with Grizzly Bear. I’m currently digging Yellow House.

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 website 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).