Two passages from Okakura Kakuzo's The Book of Tea
Online version

The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing. What a tempest in a tea-cup! he will say. But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup. Mankind has done worse. In the worship of Bacchus, we have sacrificed too freely; and we have even transfigured the gory image of Mars. Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucious, the piquancy of Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself.

Continue reading "Life as a Cup of Tea" »

... blogging for NewMusicBox from VocalEssence's Essentially Choral New Music readings. 1, 2, & 3.

Roger Angell, writing in Fall 1985
Season Ticket, Houghton-Mifflin, 1988, p251-252

   If there is an impatient or aggrieved sound to these remarks, it is not directed at the Yankee players, whom I mostly admire and wish well.  I would like to root wholeheartedly for the Yankees one of these days, but somebody is always jumping up and spoiling the view – the owner, the manager, some of the fans.  The resonance of the game up at the Stadium has gone sour, and often comes across as being ill-tempered, distracted, patronizing, and frantically concerned with winning.  That tone is perfectly represented by the Stadium organ music – if that is the right word for the puerile and infuriated assault of noises, nudges, and schlocky musical references with which the management (it must be a management decision, after all) attempts to cajole the players, bait the visitors, and whip up the helpless captive masses in the stands.  The mighty electronic wurstmaker is scarcely silent for the duration of a foul tip, it seems, and its mindless and almost ceaseless commentary abrades the fabric of the game and the soul of the watching fan.  This year, forcing myself actually to listen to the thing for once, I tried to pick out the main phrasings and modulations of a mid-inning concerto furioso:

   Organ: "Buh da-da-da-da! Buh da-da-da-da! Buh da-da!buh da-da- da-da- da-da!" (theme from "Gaîte Parisienne," here repeated in mad up-tempo.) Pause.  "Tah-tah-tah-tahhh!" (Beethoven's Fifth, opening theme.) Pause.

Continue reading "Roger Angell on the Yankee Stadium Organist, circa 1985" »

Welcome, Whitney Museum Artist’s Choice, Artist’s Voice Workshop families! HERE is the mp3 of Big Brown Bat! Read more about Fritz Haeg's Animal Estates installations on his site. Enjoy!

Schott Music has published my arrangements of Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin -- one for piano trio and another for violin and piano. Thanks to Laura Metcalf, Monica Chung and Jannina Barefield for instigating the arrangement (and of course for performing it). And thanks to Mark Steinberg and Jeremy Denk for helping to smooth out the rough edges of the violin and piano version.

Distributed in the USA by Hal Leonard.
Other publications listed on the music page.

Sketch pages for my orchestra composition Sic Semper Nobis appear in the Fall/Witner 2007 issue of the literary journal The Kean Review. During Summer 2007 at the MacDowell colony, visual artist Mary Lum gathered sketches from those of us composers there who wrote to paper (rather than writing directly to computer). She presents the musical sketches in the magazine as an variety of graphic design. With no prefatory material before the music itself, the effect is one of score-as-art, QED.

Score sketch pages by Tarik O'Regan, Yevgeniy Sharlat and myself. Available via The Kean Review or at Barnes & Noble.

Philip Roth's rhapsody to baseball The Great American Novel contains so many wonderful vignettes, but my favorite is his passage about the life of an umpire. Embattled umpire Mike "The Mouth" Masterson passionately explains his plight to the young superstar Gil Gamesh:

"Son, listen to me. I don't expect that you are going to love me. I don't expect that anybody in a ball park is going to care if I live or die. Why should they? I'm not the star. You are. The fans don't go out to the ball park to see the Rules and the Regulations upheld, they go out to see the home team win. The whole world loves a winner, you know that better than anybody, but when it comes to an umpire, there's not a soul in the ball park who's for him. He hasn't got a fan in the place. What's more, he cannot sit down, he cannot go to the bathroom, he cannot get a drink of water, unless he visits the dugout, and that is something that any umpire worth his salt does not ever want to do. He cannot have anything to do with the players. He cannot fool with them or kid with them, even though he may be a man who in his heart likes a little horseplay coming down the street, he will cross over or turn around and walk the other way, so it will not look to passersby that anything is up between them. In strange towns, when the visiting players all buddy up in a hotel lobby and go out together for a meal in a friendly restaurant, he finds a room in a boarding house and east his evening pork chop in a diner all alone. Oh, it's a lonesome thing, being an umpire. There are men who won't talk to you for the rest of your life. Some will even stoop to vengeance. But that is not your lookout, my boy. Nobody is twisting Masterson's arm, saying, 'Mike, it's a dog's life, but you are stuck with it.' No it's just this, Gil: somebody in this world has got to run the game. Otherwise, you see, it wouldn't be baseball, it would be chaos. We would be right back where were in the Ice Ages."

10 days stolen from real life, and given to Laura and me in vacation form. We covered a lot of ground, exploring the Osa and Nicoya penninsulas, a bit of Guanacaste, and spending two extraordinarily pleasant days in the central valley: Alajuela, Puerto Jimenez, La Leona, Parque Nacional Corcovado, Playa Sámara, Liberia, Parque Nacional Rincón de le Vieja, and San José.

LINK to Flickr set.

Once more through a year of books. Links go to the excellent social bookmarking (ha!) site LibraryThing.

Tom Wolfe: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange
Jonathan Lethem: You Don't Love Me Yet
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (reread)
Michael Lewis: Moneyball
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (reread)
Chris Anderson: The Long Tail
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkabahn (reread)
Sarah Vowell: The Partly Cloudy Patriot
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (reread)
Vladimir Nabokov: Despair
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (reread)
Chuck Palahniuk: Rant - An Oral History of Buster Casey
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood prince (reread)
Gunter Grass: The Tin Drum\
Phillip Roth: Great American Novel
Chuck Klosterman: Killing Yourself to Live
Bill Bryson: I'm a Stranger Here Myself
Eduardo Galeano: Football in Sun and Shadow
Neal Stephensen: Snow Crash
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Chuck Klosterman: Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs
Jonathan Ames: Wake Up, Sir!
Henri Cole: Blackbird and Wolf
Trish Harnetiaux: Straight on Until Morning
Hauki Murakami: Norwegian Wood
Chris Ware: Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
Bob Klapisch and John Harper: The Worst Team Money Could Buy: The collapse of the New York Mets
Susan Steinberg: Hydroplane
Deborah Eisenberg: All Around Atlantis
Jonathan Dee: Palladio
Susan Steinberg: The End of Free Love
Bill Green et al: I'm a Lebowski, You're a Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski, and What Have You
Douglas Adams: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (reread)
Richard Yates: Revolutionary Road
Douglas Adams: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (reread)
E. L. Doctorow: The Book of Daniel

As in past years, here is my year in cities for 2007

New York, NY *
San Jose, Costa Rica *
La Fortuna, Costa Rica
Santa Elena, Costa Rica
Playa Hermosa, Costa Rica
Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica
Geneseo, NY *
Northport, NY *
Framingham, MA
Galway, Ireland
Doolin, Ireland
Dingle, Ireland
Kilkenny, Ireland
Dublin, Ireland
Guiseley, UK
York, UK
Taos, NM
Peterborough, NH
West Hartford, CT
Lincoln, NH

One or more nights spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited on non-consecutive days and deserve special recognition. Thanks for having me, cities!

This was a good year, though not uninterrupted by the Spring 2007 teaching semester.

Washing Machine, 3 mins. ∙ piano 6-hands (for student performers); Commissioned by Concordia Conservatory (January)

Pollinated! The Musical, 20 mins. ∙ a children's musical; Book by Nanette DeWester (July)

Thursday Night Live, 25 mins. ∙ a children's musical; Book by Nanette DeWester (July)

Le Tombeau de Couperin (Arrangement) (2007) 18 mins. ∙ vln. and pno.; Published by Schott Music (VLB126, Winter 2008) (August)

Sic Semper Nobis (2007) 8 mins. ∙ Orchestra (August-November)

A Thousand Tender Passages, 7 mins. ∙ SATB chorus and piano; A setting of letters by George Washington (October-November)

Microwave Popcorn, 5 mins. ∙ piano 6-hands (for student performers); Commissioned by Concordia Conservatory (December)

Spring Morning, 3 mins. ∙ S., vln., vcl., & pno. (for student performers) Setting of a poem by A. A. Milne; Commissioned by Concordia Conservatory (December)

Complete list of works on the music page

Come on, get Scrap Happy! 100 MP3s from me to you for 2008. Longtime favorites, recent discoveries, oddball inclusions, and shuffle nirvana. To achieve enlightenment:
1) click the LINK
2) ignore Homer Simpson-esque flashing lights
3) enter code into special box to right of MegaUpload logo (reddish letters)
4) click "download."
5) wait 45 seconds, twittering
6) click "Free download."

File saves as "2008 Scrap Happy.zip" (390MB). Smiles in the New Year,

LINK

In his article on experimental vertical farming, WIRED's Brandon Keim quotes Columbia University professor Dickson Despommier at length about technique. Despommier is a good spokesperson, tossing around exciting ideas, and questioning some basic assumptions about agriculture. But then he throws music into the culture clash. The connection between Debussy and arable land, you ask?

The entire agricultural revolution that got us to this point -- it's always been horizontal farming; always been the good earth, the wonderful crops, the wonderful process. Look at Currier and Ives prints, the pastoral painters, the wonderful melodies by Debussy ... we've been brainwashed from that point to now! But there's a subset of people who don't think this is crazy at all, based on the alarming disappearance of topsoil. The craziness aspect is proposed by people who don't want to change.

Mauricio encounters Stockhausen (1928-2007) in Leeds, UK. LINK

I presented some of my songs for children one evening while in residence at the MacDowell colony, and for one of the songs, I read aloud a verse and a chorus before playing it at the piano. Trish reacted noticeably right away, upset, I learned later, by the idea of lyrics being heard alone. She was assuaged moments later when I put the lyrics back into their rightful musical dimension. In the introductory note to his 1978 memoir The Street Where I Live, lyricist Alan Jay Lerner cautioned against this sort of stripping of lyrics from their music:

Lyrics, no less than music, are written to be heard. A lyric without its musical clothes is a scrawny creature and should never be allowed to parade naked across the printed page. Nevertheless, for purposes of reference, that is precisely what I am heartlessly allowing mine to do.

Should the reader be interested in reading any of the lyrics discussed in the following pages, he will find them shivering in toto at the end of the book.