So appar­ently at CalTech, they have over 130 olive trees around campus and press their own olive oil. I could not possibly be any more jealous. Things like this make me feel even more dismal facing the long New Haven winter. 

I spent last week at my family’s ances­tral home in Wash­ing­ton, CT. I don’t remember what I did, exactly, but I think it involved many days of alter­nately cooking and eating.

I also got to play the piano badly and for fun, which is not some­thing I usually have the time or energy to do in New Haven, perhaps because I don’t have a piano in my apart­men­t’s living room. I took out all my volumes of Schubert sonatas and even pounded through the Hammerklavier. It was epic.

My brother Wells’s violin playing has blos­somed to the point where he can sight-read Brahms and Beethoven with aplomb. We were reading through Brahms’s third sonata, and I had a shocking real­iza­tion in the first movement devel­op­ment: it has a constant dominant pedal. I can’t think of any other examples of this in the clas­si­cal liter­a­ture. Can I even still call it a “devel­op­ment”? It’s really just an extended dominant pedal leading into the recap. Here, listen:

Robert Mann, violin; Stephen Hough, piano

I guess what aston­ished me was not the presence of the pedal, but how it threat­ens and ulti­mately subverts the feeling of sonata form in the movement. There is none of the bluster and bombast that Brahms usually brings into his devel­op­ments; all the tension is roiling just beneath the remark­ably calm surface. Instead, all of the outward drama gets post­poned until the recap’s tran­si­tion into the second theme, which swings wildly and at top volume between harmonic regions. In the normal trajec­tory of a sonata, one has a sense of “release” or “return” at this point; here, that sense has been completely under­mined by the relative stasis of the development.

Just wanted to briefly plug a cool show I’m excited to be a part of, coming up this Saturday. My friend Doug Fisk has brought together a group of nine composer/pianists, each of whom will perform one of their own pieces. This show is at Fire­house 12 in New Haven, and we’re gearing up for another one at Miller Theater Merkin Hall in NYC this spring. More info over at the calendar page (along with some new events).

Here’s the poster I designed for the event, which reveals my contin­u­ing obses­sion with the work of Josef Müller-Brock­mann (click for larger):

Instead of your tradi­tional puff piece on voters’ states of mind today, NYTimes.com has a puff multi­me­dia widget. I like this trend. (I also like Helvetica.) 

For the record, I am feeling both excited and distracted. Connecti­cut isn’t exactly the most thrilling place to be today, and I voted absentee weeks ago in my hometown. But for some reason it still feels like a holiday. I have a new piece called Some Connecti­cut Gospel, which I wrote over the last couple of months. It’s partly about Ives, and how his music and inim­itable person­al­ity have become a legend for composers, and also about these strange feelings (hope? patri­o­tism?) that have been welling up inside me recently (see my Oct. 10 post).

This is not some­thing I’m partic­u­larly used to. Connecti­cut is unlike some other states, whose resi­dents seem to have a strong sense of group identity and even pride. I never feel “Connecti­cut­ian”; I tend to think of myself as a misplaced Cali­forn­ian, even though I only spent the first five years of my life in the Bay Area. Why is that? Did Connecti­cut used to have more of a person­al­ity? Before the facto­ries shut down, before every city became a depressed corpse, before Route 7 became a parade of strip-malls and the south­west corner a spec-house paradise, the state must have had some real charm. Some Connecti­cut Gospel is a song of praise to this imagined place— Ives’s Connecti­cut. It will be premièred in Miami (of all places) on January 30^th by members of the New World Symphony, and likely reprised up here in New Haven in February.

We went deep-sea fishing yester­day and hung out with some Repub­li­cans! Actually, I’m only kidding. We didn’t talk to them, but we did gawk a lot and talk about them. I was initially kind of shocked to see someone wearing this hat— non-iron­i­cally (not an early Halloween costume or anything!). But it made me think about how in a certain way my circle is very narrow, much more even than when I was an under­grad (the School of Music is, predictably, much less diverse). It made me wonder that I wasn’t seeing the world wrong from some deluded, far-left point of view. When I listen to or read the news, I like to think I know how to spot bias, and that as a result I “know the facts” about all the “issues”. But truth­fully, I haven’t even given the other side a chance.

My gut reaction is to scorn conser­v­a­tives I’ve met who are really just like me— who’ve inher­ited their ideas from their parents and have never had to deeply question their own world­view. It’s a terrible double standard, and I’m sure I hold conser­v­a­tives to many more. Should I be doing more ques­tion­ing of my polit­i­cal beliefs, simply because I hold the same views as my parents (and their parents)?

I caught four good-sized bluefish (the first four fish I’ve caught in my life!). The Repub­li­cans looked like they caught about 27 each, but really, isn’t sport-fishing exper­tise prac­ti­cally a require­ment for joining the party?

Connecti­cut Ruling Over­turns Ban on Same-Sex Marriage

This may be the first day in my life I’m actually proud to be a Connecticutian.

D. works in a lab here at Yale studying aspects of taste and smell. As one of her on-the-job “perks” she came by a couple of tablets of Mira­c­ulin, made from Miracle Fruit, which causes sour and bitter foods to taste sweet (there was an article about this in the Times a few months back).

I just had my own private “flavor-tripping” party and here are the results:

1. The pill itself tastes really sour, which is not what I expected. D. and I both thought it tasted a little like plain tamarind (which is not one of my favorite things— I’d prefer to use it in Pad Thai). So letting the thing dissolve on my tounge was not pleasant. But it was over soon enough. The effects are supposed to last about 20 minutes.
2. First thing I did was boldly bite into a suprèmed lemon. It was deli­cious. Tasted like fresh lemonade with just the right amount of sugar, but in a solid fruit. 
3. The lime was similar; it was like perfect lime soda.
4. The grape­fruit was my favorite of all the citrus, though more subtle; it just tasted like a really good Texas grape­fruit (which it wasn’t. I tasted it before­hand for comparison).
5. D. advised me to try some Greek yogurt, which is very thick and unsweet­ened. The flavor was nicely balanced, a little rich for me— I could imagine it being good spread on a scone or some toast.
6. The cucum­bers tasted no differ­ent, so I used them as pallette cleansers between courses.
7. The sushi ginger was not notice­ably differ­ent either, maybe because that stuff is pretty heavily sweet­ened already.
8. These sun-gold cherry tomatoes are also quite sweet to begin with, but like any good tomato, they have a strongly acidic bite. The mira­c­ulin played up the sweet­ness while covering up the acid, which made for an initially exciting but ulti­mately lacking tomato expe­ri­ence. Adding the purple basil just tasted like adding basil.
9. This white wine had been sitting in my refrig­er­a­tor awhile, and it was getting pretty sour. I had high hopes that the mira­c­ulin would render it a deli­cious Sauternes or Gewürz­traminer, but it still tasted like bad wine. Just really sweet.
10. The tamarind (that brown chunk in the middle of the photo) tasted like one of those tamarind lollipops from Mexico. It didn’t win me over.
11. Hot soppre­satta remained just that.
12. The balsamic vinegar was still very potent; I think this might have had some­thing to do with the fumes. It was drink­able, though, certainly no less than strong alcohol.
13. The sweet­ness of Sriracha was played up to the point of being a bit cloying; I wouldn’t squirt it on my dumplings if it always tasted like that.

So, I think the grape­fruit was the clear winner, with the other the citrus coming in close second. Why not order some for yourself?

I got a new camera last week on eBay. I’d only been saving up for about eight years. Here are some test shots from the Yale farm today (click for larger):

At long last, the calendar and visuals sections are up and running. Maybe I should also start a “victuals” section. Also a new page for my orchestra/string quartet piece for New York Youth Symphony: Senior.