This might be the most viscer­ally adorable design I’ve seen since the original iMac (and there’s some­thing of a family resem­blance). I really hope Sony puts it into produc­tion— not because I really want a “little TV that rests in the palm of your hand,” but because it would be a step up for Sony’s consumer designs, which have felt pretty stagnant for the past decade. The little TV is inter­est­ing from a tactile stand­point, because it is soft and squeez­able (not qual­i­ties gener­ally asso­ci­ated with elec­tron­ics). Func­tion­ally, it reduces the distance between itself and the viewer, which allows it to shrink dras­ti­cally and offer a compa­ra­ble expe­ri­ence. I admire it when design­ers totally rethink quotid­ian activ­i­ties like this. But it also takes a leap of faith on the corpo­rate side, some­thing I think Sony has not been so good at lately. Though I have been eyeing one of these beauties. Think of all the musique concrète I’ve been not writing by not having one!

Last night I hosted a dinner party for the compo­si­tion first years (Fernando, I can’t find a link for you!). The level of social grace was, for a sampling of composers, among the highest I’ve seen; it’s one thing to write cool music, quite another to interact in the real world. Though I would love to invite Frederic Rzewski over to dinner sometime. If by some chance you read this, Fred, you have a standing invitation.

Over the course of the meal, the question came up about whether we listen to our own music. This is an inter­est­ing corol­lary to the rhetor­i­cal question I posed a few months back about how many composers routinely listen to their colleagues’ music. I’ve always felt that I should listen, and want to listen, to my own music; if it’s not some­thing that comes up regu­larly on my last.fm, do I really want to subject others to it? I do find myself listen­ing to my cleaner recordings/performances, simply because they’re more flat­ter­ing. I think what I’m doing, somewhat subcon­sciously, when I listen to my music, is refining my ideas and tech­niques in prepa­ra­tion for future pieces, so I can spend less time writing the same piece again and again. Andrew was on the other side; he said that he can’t stand to listen to his own music, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on. This usually happens to me only with older pieces (which is why I keep pruning my back catalogue).

Does this make me self-obsessed? Or worse, compla­cent? Please weigh in.

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).

My apolo­gies to those of you using Firefox. I’ve been fresh­en­ing most areas of the site and have yet to get them to display correctly. Safari seems to do a good job, though, as does Internet Explorer, oddly enough. I’m working on a fix in the meantime.

U P D A T E : Things should look fine for the time being. Please let me know if you encounter any problems.

I went to a pretty remark­able concert last night. The Yale Schola Cantorum performed Sofia Gubaiduli­na’s Sonnenge­sang: The Canticle of the Sun, a sprawl­ing setting of St. Francis of Assisi’s text for chorus, percus­sion, and cello soloist (the afore­men­tioned Hannah Collins). After reading Matt Barn­son’s excel­lent program notes during the interval, I was fairly certain I was going to hate the piece, not least of all because I’d heard it was 40 minutes long, and also about some reli­gious mumble-jumble. (“In each of my works I expe­ri­ence the Eucharist as fantasy”? Please, spare us.) Then they brought the tuned water-goblets out on stage, and I really expected the worst.

Actually, though, I should­n’t have worried, because we’re talking about Simon Carring­ton here (he’s the conduc­tor). He’s a man of taste. You should see the convert­ible he some­times drives. It was because of Simon that I got to play in Dallapic­co­la’s Canti di Prigio­nia a few years back—what a hair-raising piece.

Canticle of the Sun was also hair-raising, in a completely differ­ent, much more ecstatic sort of way. The cellists has to act as a sort of protag­o­nist figure, a wanderer in search of some sort of reli­gious salvation—which I under­stand was achieved, to judge by the awesome F‑sharp major closing minutes. Over the course of the piece, Hannah had to de-tune her C string down to A flat, then back up again, get up and play a gong, super­ball a bass drum (and let me just say, she super-balled it), and go bow a flex­a­tone in the chorus’s face. There’s a really thin line here between drama and cheesi­ness (the bad kind, not the Alex kind)—but I was not, at any point, embar­rassed for the sake of anyone onstage, so I think that means every­thing was just fine.

There were some real musical high points, too. The whole language was very fresh-sounding, espe­cially in the more static sections (at one partic­u­larly engross­ing point, the percus­sion­ists had to play their water-glasses for about five minutes straight, without pausing to re-wet their fingers. How did they do it??) I was also really intrigued by the large-scale gestures in the music—for instance, the cello’s obvi­ously symbolic and incred­i­bly protracted ascent from low A‑flat to high god-knows-what toward the end of the piece, and how the opening solo intro­duces the chorus with a jaunty glis­sando. There were, of course, some sections where my mind wandered, but then, I get distracted during Webern’s Fünf Orch­ester­stücke, so perhaps I’m not the best judge.

Simon warned all of us before­hand that there was a great deal of silence in the piece, and please not to cough, shuffle our program, call our mother, etc. and I think it made the audience slightly on edge. There was defi­nitely more coughing as a result. Also, one unfor­tu­nate choris­ter forgot to silence his ringer, and it went off, painfully, in his tuxedo pocket. I don’t think it would have been so painful if everyone weren’t paying such close atten­tion to the music, so I guess the jolt in my stomach was a good sign.

As a lifelong Mac user (and pursuer of all things Apple) I’m excited about the Leopard release tomorrow (though I probably won’t install it on my over­bur­dened old power­book). But I have to say, what is with the gross sci-fi pack­ag­ing? I feel as if I’m about to be swal­lowed by a purple nebula of backed-up files. Part of what I enjoy about being a Mac user is the whole “thought­ful mini­mal­ism” design culture, but lately, some­body’s been slather­ing on the useless eye-candy with alarming abandon.

On a completely unre­lated note, I made Pad Thai today from scratch. It was my first time working with Tamarind. I wonder how many people know that this slightly sugges­tive-looking pod is the main flavor­ing in Pad Thai. I certainly didn’t. It’s really sour, so you have to combine it with an equal amount of sugar. The first batch I made came out of the pan as a single crunchy, oily unit. The next two batches improved dras­ti­cally (you have to cook Pad Thai one serving at a time, or else it doesn’t cook evenly). The whole project seems kind of ludi­crous, because I could just hit up any of the five places within 200 feet of my apart­ment that sell perfectly good Pad Thai. But that’s exactly why I wanted to see if I could make it myself, because it’s one of those things I’ve only ever eaten at a restau­rant. Actually, people in Thailand never eat it at restau­rants; it’s sold only on the streets there, the equiv­a­lent of our hot-dog and pretzel carts.

I was reading Pitch­fork today and saw a great big banner ad for the always-insight­ful Alex Ross’s new book, The Rest is Noise. I can’t remember the last time I saw an ad for any book, much less a gigantic tome about 20^th-century music. I guess Pitch­fork knows its target demo­graphic, and I am it. (I don’t have a copy yet, but I’m looking forward to it.)