My life has been pleas­antly absorbed with summer rituals: dumpling-making, mushroom-hunting, karaoke-singing, lazily commis­sion-writing, new Pixar movie-seeing (I loved WALL‑E, espe­cially the Jon Ive-esque design aesthetic, but wasn’t as emotion­ally affected by it as I was by Rata­touille).

The other day I recorded a big flute-and-piano piece of Alex’s called Stile Antico. This was actually the second time I’ve recorded it. Alex explained that it’s gone through four iter­a­tions. I remember hearing the première, I think at one of our new music marathons a while back, when it was a huge, stately mass of ecto­plasm; since then, it’s gone from about 25 down to 13 minutes, all lovely and trim and concise. I really admire composers who are able to do that; for me, it’s some­times hard to find anything of value in a four or five-year-old piece, much less to tackle the thing all over again and make it sound fresh. I guess I just don’t have the patience. It makes me wonder what propor­tion of my music is fat and gristle; if I started doing Alex-style revi­sions, I’m scared I might end up with a bunch of two or three minute-pieces (perfect for radio!)

Stay tuned for the new record­ing of Stile Antico; you can hear one of the previous versions here. The flutist I played with most recently is the wonder­ful Daria Binkowski, who by now is probably up at Bangle­wood at Mass MOCA. (Check out this creepy story on their website.)

Happy late Inde­pen­dence Day. There is a bill­board here in town for a local salon that promises “Beau­ti­ful patri­o­tism” and features a flag-bearing blonde in a camo skirt. What does it mean?