The moment I’ve been waiting for for what feels like my whole life has finally arrived: my induc­tion into the Oberlin College Library system. Irving S. Gilmore, better step it up.

There is some­thing I love about moving. I have moved every year for the past five years; even if only across a court­yard, it was cause for excite­ment. This year we are two people moving across town. The apart­ment we spent the past year in was cozy and nice enough, but really only the living/working space had much person­al­ity. The new place is much bigger, so it feels almost spend­thrift even though it’s a fantas­tic deal; New Haven is completely spoiling my real estate sense of the real world.

What I find exciting is making all my stuff disap­pear into boxes and then emerge in a differ­ent envi­ron­ment, and then adjust­ing all of the little rituals that make up my life in order to adapt to those differ­ences. Taking out my contacts, boiling pasta, or putting on my shoes takes on new signif­i­cance by making me stop and think about each step of the action. In my current apart­ment, for instance, I adopted a completely new and revo­lu­tion­ary concept of face-washing in the morning— over the bathtub, because the sink is too small to contain all the drips and splashes. It looks ridicu­lous, but I can be as messy as I want. 

I also like the moment of the last look around an empty room, which I always find quite sad, but so loaded with antic­i­pa­tion— not a feeling I’ve expe­ri­enced in any other situation.

Next week is moving week, and it’s also WWDC! So ready for an iPhone nano. My dad is there and will be sending back live reports.

Every year I go through a cycle of redesign­ing my website, liking the design a lot, grad­u­ally liking it less and less, and then redesign­ing again. This has pretty much been happen­ing since 2001, so I might as well instate it as an annual tradi­tion. I haven’t kept very good records of the old designs, which is a pity, because some of them were really bad and hilar­i­ous. Here is what the home page looked like in 2001:

As you can see, I have gotten over the rounded rectan­gles thing, but I still like gray. 

The 2008 redesign is more of a collec­tion of refine­ments than a real overhaul. The fonts are differ­ent; I decided that Meta was looking too corpo­rate (not that Helvetica isn’t the epitome of corpo­rate, but it can also be a lot of other differ­ent things). The page headings are now in Gotham and Hoefler text (hooray H&FJ!). As soon as I started working with Gotham I began to notice it absolutely every­where, from Obama to Martha Stewart to Banana Republic, so I guess I’m still pretty much a corpo­rate poseur. But it is nonethe­less a great font.

Some more changes have taken place behind the scenes, as I’ve switched from GoLive to Dreamweaver. I don’t like either program; Dreamweaver is finicky (though perhaps in fewer respects than GoLive) but I still think GoLive has a better user inter­face. Dreamweaver feels like a Windows app, with features thrown together in a bunch of palettes (all of which operate in slightly differ­ent ways) without much regard to orga­ni­za­tion or visual hier­ar­chy. The WYSIWYG composit­ing tools are better and more reliable than Golive’s, though, which is really what counts for me since I don’t know how to program.

I will be making more incre­men­tal improve­ments over the summer. In the meantime, I leave you with this picture, which can be magni­fied courtesy of Cabel Sasser’s pretty sweet Fancy­Zoom:

Just got back from a road trip to Cornell, where Nick, Hannah, Becca and I played in an all-Gorbos concert. Steve Gorbos is a great composer and a seri­ously cool guy. The concert was actually his DMA recital, meaning he is now Herr Doktor Profes­sor Gorbos. My group played two quartets: Bridges, a piece from a few years ago that’s one of my favorites, and a new one called Foot­prints which, if possible, is even more tender and beau­ti­ful. You can listen to Bridges at Steve’s website; here’s hoping our perfor­mance of Foot­prints goes up there soon. (UPDATE: IT’S UP!!!) 

Stephen Gorbos: Footprints

I’d never been to Ithaca before. There’s some quality about upstate New York (and the more remote parts of New England) that is simul­ta­ne­ously depress­ing and exalting; I can’t quite pin it down but I think it has some­thing to do with the light and the shape of the land­scape and the falling-down­i­ness of all the build­ings. Though Cornell looks to be in good shape. The campus is very insular, unlike Yale’s, where even when you’re surrounded by univer­sity build­ings, you still feel like you’re in the city of New Haven. We played in a strange, T‑shaped hall that creaked loudly with every gust of wind. The green room was furnished with some inter­est­ing old keyboard instru­ments, all in perfect playing condi­tion, and an old green-naugahyde Eames sofa. I couldn’t decide which I wanted to strap to the roof of my car! 

Right now I am off to lunch with my composer friends before we all disperse for the summer. I will be staying put in the Elm City, moving to a new apart­ment come June, working on several new pieces under uncom­fort­able dead­lines, and also helping out in the record­ing studio, scav­eng­ing for old furni­ture, and attempt­ing to grow loquats from seed. I’m also trying to learn Dreamweaver by working on a website redesign. Anyone passing through should call up and distract me.

The front page of my website looks differ­ent from the rest of my website. I’m in the middle of a reno­va­tion so please excuse the conti­nu­ity errors.

I had two great perfor­mances of I Found it by the Sea this week, by my usual crew (Nick, Anne, Hannah). These guys are a composer’s dream. I’m terribly grateful. Next week I will cook all of them an extrav­a­gant five-course dinner.

Ted and I both received this weird email that I think might be the world’s first composer-targeted spam. Here’s the message. I’m putting a big [sic] at the end: 

Dear Timothy:
Art and culture are good reason for estab­lish­ing commu­ni­ca­tion between nations.more over there is poetic art which improve each nation in many differ­ent aspect.Your works intro­duce me to a new world;some beau­ti­ful works without any artificiality,any of which is as great as a masterpice.I wanted thank you for letting me into your secret,wonderful world with your music.your works expresses the most sublime aspects of human life.I don’t know how to thank you for your precious gift.these are my poems.please read them and send your idea about them.can you compose a music with my poems? I admire your music.I want to building a bridge with my poem and your music between Iran and English-speaking people, includ­ing in the United States. this is my big goal.please help me in this project.admirer you and your works.

Mostafa Mojidi

[SIC]

Appended to the email are pages and pages of “psalms”. Choice line: “My pockets/ are loaded/with drops of tears”.

If anyone knows anything about this guy, or about his master plan to build a bridge out of poems, please let me know.

I finished Piano Concerto for Dave in good time, a couple of weeks ago. Also I decided to call it Home Stretch. There are a few reasons for this, but mostly I wanted to give Dave some­thing that had to do with fast cars, which he is obsessed with. You should see that guy when he walks by a ’67 Jaguar or some­thing on the street. It’s actually kind of scary.

The main concept behind Home Stretch was that it would be one long, gradual accel­er­a­tion, in three main sections. What I didn’t realize initially was that I’d never written that big a chunk of unin­ter­rupted music before (it’s about 18 minutes). Shy and Mighty, even though it’s about an hour, is divided into more or less discreet tracks, none of which is more than 10 minutes. So it required lots of effort and a good deal of fiddling and adjust­ing propor­tions to make Home Stretch feel right.

Here’s a preview of the first section. The strings hold every­thing down with very long, sustained chords with slight pulsa­tion, which I wanted to sound like an idling engine heard from a distance of several blocks. I fooled around with a few differ­ent ways of notating pulsa­tion in a static chord, but here’s the one Aaron liked best:

For the past couple of weeks I’ve also been working on an honest-to-goodness profes­sional graphic design gig. The Yale Symphony hired me to do their public­ity for the last concert of the year. Here’s the standard letter-sized poster (click for full size):

Since the program consists of late Brahms and early Mahler, I wanted to do some­thing that didn’t show them both on equal footing. Brahms was so firmly entrenched in the culture of German music by the end of the 19^th century, when Mahler was working on his first symphony, that the “anxiety of influ­ence” felt by the younger composer must have been over­whelm­ing. Mahler responded to it by combin­ing his influ­ences with a hyper-romantic, almost hallu­cino­genic world­view, which is what makes his symphonies thrilling and original, yet ties them to the German tradi­tion. So Mahler is repre­sented on the poster as almost despair­ing, having cast aside his glasses— the instru­ment he uses to view the world— while Brahms is the stern, immov­able monument which must be confronted.

In reality, though, those are my glasses— it’s a secret double meaning!

Has anyone else been follow­ing Top Chef Chicago?

What is the story behind this tapioca-pearl faux-caviar? Why is it suddenly appear­ing on top of other­wise perfectly good dishes, night after night? Tapioca is not fit for human consump­tion. And the passing resem­blance to caviar is just insult­ing. If you can’t afford caviar, why would you replace it with tapioca? Just give me a homely anchovy or some­thing and I’ll be happy.

I feel like Times New Roman somehow got a bad repu­ta­tion just because it is the default font for every­thing. If you go on Facebook and there are 155 TNR-devoted groups, most of which are called believ­able things like “Times New Roman is hinder­ing my creativ­ity” or “Times New Roman is respon­si­ble for all of society’s misfortunes”.

Well. Check out this site. I did a double take when I went there because I couldn’t believe it was TNR. It’s so beau­ti­ful! I think the actual problem with TNR is that it doesn’t do itself any favors as a default. It’s so unadorned and util­i­tar­ian, it needs some extra care from the designer to really bring its flavor out.

And I mean, things could be worse. Would everyone rather Arial were the default font? Oh, wait.

This past week has been spent rather hermet­i­cally. It’s spring break for Yale, which means New Haven is pleasant and empty (disrupted only by last weekend’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, a riotous city-wide, Guinness-fueled, verdure-clad affair, accom­pa­nied by much brawling). I’ve been working doggedly to finish Dave’s concerto, and though so far he’s been admirably patient with me, I’m setting next weekend as my personal deadline. We’ll see how that works out.

Other­wise, I’ve kept busy doing odd jobs around the record­ing studio, exper­i­ment­ing with new Thai noodle recipes, and raptly tracking the shipment of a new Macbook Pro (which seems to be taking the slow boat from Shanghai).

My friends at Cordarounds shipped me some beta pants yester­day, which I’ve been field-testing. I think they’re the best summer-weather trousers ever devised, and strongly recom­mend them to all eligible wearers (which, sadly, excludes all but the very brawni­est of women). You can read all about the science behind the wales here.

The Times adver­tis­ing supple­ment (sorry, T Design) has a feature on one of my favorite design­ers, Naoto Fukasawa. Like every­thing in the T maga­zines, it’s a little light on substance, more just an excuse for everyone to talk about how great he is. Even Dieter Rams has nothing but breath­less praise, and he’s German! Somebody should straight away get to work import­ing those +/-0 products. Other­wise, I might just have to move to Tokyo.

I had the pleasure of hearing Ted Hearne’s Katrina Ballads live two and a half times last week: one and a half times in New Haven and again last night in New York. It’s an album-length oratorio, of sorts, which mixes instru­men­tal numbers with vocal settings of primary-source texts taken from the week follow­ing Hurri­cane Katrina.

Music that tries to make a polit­i­cal point rarely convinces me— which is probably my personal failing, since the two seem to have gone together since the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of politics. What makes Katrina Ballads surpass the category of polit­i­cal music is that its politics are almost beside the point; it feels more like a work about under­stand­ing than one about propa­ganda. If Dennis Hastert happens to come off as a cold-hearted lunatic, or George W. Bush as a stut­ter­ing block­head, that’s because they actually did that week. Katrina Ballads has a message, certainly, but it’s given to us with admirable perspec­tive and remark­able self­less­ness; I never once felt I was being preached to, or emotion­ally manip­u­lated. (Inci­den­tally, I wonder if the choice of the word “Ballads” has anything to do with Rzewski’s North American Ballads; the last piece of that set, Winns­boro Cotton Mill Blues, is the only other polit­i­cally-moti­vated work I can think of that is as success­ful and affecting.)

Perhaps another reason Katrina Ballads feels so differ­ent from other polit­i­cal music is that the music itself is always the first priority. I’ve always known Ted is a good composer, but what I hadn’t known is that he has the ability, chameleon-like, to blend his style into prac­ti­cally any musical genre that suits his purpose, and he makes them all work together as a consis­tent whole. He sets Barbara Bush’s infamous “This is working very well for them” quote (from an NPR interview—it’s still shocking to hear it) to easy-breezy but harmon­i­cally subver­sive ragtime, Kanye West’s impas­sioned tirade (from a live NBC telethon) to slowly-building gospel/R&B (though it’s not made explicit until the climac­tic line “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”), and Anderson Cooper’s blus­ter­ing anger in high operatic style. Though most of this music is quite acces­si­ble, it never sounds cliché or facile. The instru­men­tal writing is beau­ti­fully handled, skill­fully employ­ing more “new music‑y” tricks (multi­phon­ics, looping pedals, piano-drumming) to serve the greater dramatic purpose.

Of course, the piece wouldn’t be such a hit if the perform­ers weren’t so intense and dedi­cated. Ted’s hand-picked band (includ­ing many Manhat­tan School new-music stal­warts) clearly love the music, and love playing together. The five singers are pitch-perfect, navi­gat­ing Ted’s diffi­cult passages and styl­is­tic shifts with aplomb. Mezzo Abby Fischer was eerily, smarmily composed as Barbara Bush; soprano Allison Semmes was in turn preter­nat­u­rally unflap­pable as Sen. Mary Landrieu, then vulner­a­ble and affect­ing as flood victim Ashley Nelson. Tenor (maybe coun­tertenor? that stuff was pretty high) Isaiah Robinson really stole the show in the Kanye West movement; the climax of the song was an almost joyful release of angry passion. Ted himself took a break from conduct­ing to deliver the virtu­osic “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”, a Nixon-esque disin­te­gra­tion of the president’s comment to former FEMA head Michael Brown. And baritone Anthony Turner, singing the text of another hurri­cane victim, conveyed utter deso­la­tion and despair in “My wife, I can’t find her body”.

I’m pretty much in awe of Ted right now. He’s expended a tremen­dous amount of time, effort, and money to bring all these people together and perform (and in a couple weeks, record) this huge, diffi­cult piece, which he not only wrote, but also conducts and sings. I think Katrina Ballads has a great future, and I can’t think of anybody better to advocate it than Ted. I hope it makes him famous.