hrj | Entries tagged with music

I think I may have to come up with an official dream-symbolism correspondence for the motif of flutes for sale. ( And then there are the squirrels. )

About the same time I was dreaming about gouts of fire falling from the sky, a gasoline tank truck exploded about 2 miles from my house, destroying two sections of the "Macarthur Maze" freeway intersection. (No deaths reported.) It's quite possible that the sound woke me up, but I'm so used to waking up randomly at that time of the morning that it would never occur to me to look for a cause.

The Consonance songbooks were ready and waiting for pickup yesterday after work, so although I still have to deliver them at the pre-con committee dinner tonight, I've checked them entirely off of Thing To Worry About. I don't know whether I'm going to volunteer to do it again next year. It's a little tiny project, but my big weakness in getting my own personal projects done is to evaluate every tiny little project I take on only in isolation. This year, which I'd been proclaiming "the year of Me" is turning out more like "the year of trying to clear the decks for the year of Me".

And speaking of tiny little projects, I have a rant coming on. ( Rant about Random Internet Request for Research )

In anticipation of Consonance, last weekend I broke out in the mother of all cold sores smack dab in the middle of my lower lip, which looked like it was going to put the kibosh on any flute playing, but now it looks like it should be healed enough to manage. I don't know if I'm going to bother bringing other instruments, though (i.e., the harp). Over the years there's been a steady increase in the cost-benefit ratio given that I'm hauling the thing around all weekend, dealing with places to stash it if I don't take a hotel room, feeling tethered to a single room when the open filking eventually starts, and all for maybe playing one song over the whole weekend -- or maybe two if I'm feeling especially pushy. It would be different if I were writing anything new. (But then, I'd be more likely to be writing anything new if I felt people were interested in hearing it. As it is, pretty much the only requests I get are the "party trick" variety -- i.e., "Hey play something on that big-ol-weird instrument there.")

Memo to self: Must make reservations for ski trip. Lots of new snow. Don't wait too long.

Finished the Consonance songbook at entirely too late last night (although the lateness was due to my procrastination, not due to any enormous amount of work involved). It seems like every time I pull out my music notation program, I have to re-learn all the tricks from scratch. And just when I get proficient again, the project's done. This time, much work was eliminated by receiving some of the original tunes as midi files, which can be fed into the notation program as a starting point. Just finished the proofreading over my lunch hour and have a number of minor corrections, plus a long list of "can I tweak this spacing just a little?" notes. Fortunately, among the tricks I re-learned are all the space-tweaking ones. My own deficiencies aside, I'm quite fond of my current notation program (Smart Score by Musitek). I contains pretty much all the features that I swore over not having back when BL and I were doing songbooks at Wail Songs. (My favorite being "link lyrics syllable-by-syllable to the notes so that when you move or copy the notes around, the lyrics follow".) The feature that really sold me, but that I haven't used much at all is "OCR for music". One of these days, I'll scan in the printouts from all those old in-progress music book projects just to have them in a more accessible format. (Somewhere I have archive disks of the files -- and even still the program they were created in. But I have very little faith in being able to run a 15 year old DOS program even under the most creative emulation programs available. And simply scanning in the printouts will probably be less work than pulling up the old files and converting them into midis for export.) I rather doubt that either of the other-people's-songbooks that we were working on B.G.S. (before grad school) will ever get resurrected, but there are a few projects of my own that are one of the main reasons I invested in the current software.

( for the curious )

I confess: I am one of those people whose musical tastes petrifed at some point in my early 20s. I'd never been a really big buyer of popular music albums -- I own a few dozen LPs, my cassette collection is primarily filk, and I somehow entirely skipped the stage of owning a dedicated CD player. Then I got an iPod back about four years ago and, combined with access to cheap used CDs at Rasputins and the like, I started seriously building my collection in a systematic way for the first time in my life. And what I'm hunting down and buying is the music of my youth. Not all of it is stuff I actually preferred in my youth, but it's the music that stuck in my brain as part of the soundtrack of my life. And it's pretty much all '60s, '70s, and just barely a smidge of '80s, with a solid underlayer of classical and renaissance.

It isn't that I don't think there's any newer music that's good. Part of it is that there was a period in my life when I listed to radio stations playing contemporary styles a lot, and then I shifted my listening habits. 95% of my radio listening for the last decade and more has been NPR (we'll get back to this point), I work in environments that don't include background music as a rule, and the couple of friends who were likely to drag me off to concerts of groups I wasn't familiar with yet moved off to other parts of the country. So newer music didn't work its way into my consciousness as the soundtrack for anything. And, after all, there's so much catching up to do on the artists I already know I like.

All of this is leading up to NPR, Terry Gross, Fresh Air and why it's so odd that I'm Googling for album listings and pencilling a note on my calendar for a date in late April. You see, on Monday's show, she was interviewing this guy from a band called "The Decemberists" and for the first time in ages I have this urge to go buy albums from a band I'd never heard of a week ago and think seriously about going to hear them when they're in SF. Maybe it was the mention that a reviewer had called them "hyper-literate" and accused them of only wanting English majors for fans. Maybe it was the serious discussion of getting the grammar right when writing pastiches of traditional murder ballads. Maybe it was the concept of a "progressive rock" band singing intelligible, literate songs about fairy wives. This isn't a review: fergoodnessakes I haven't listed to more than a few snippets of any given song. But my faith is renewed that maybe there have been some bands recording in the last two decades that are worth checking out after all.

I've been joking that I'm being a real social butterfly this holiday weekend. ( lots of details )

Sunday (somewhat belatedly)

( Read more... )

Saturday

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This is going to be mostly a con report for the Consonance filk music convention. ( Read more... )

(The usual rule about not using real names is suspended for this post.)

This past Saturday, my friend Cynthia McQuillin died. She was a singer and songwriter, a writer of fiction, and any number of other things. To say that she had spent much of her life in indifferent health would be a gross understatement. For the last half dozen years or more, she has worked through cycles of respiratory crises (bronchitis, pneumonia, asthma, you name it). Each time, against all rational expectation, she would fight her way back, not simply to ordinary activity, but to being able to sing, perform, and even record again. Nearly ten months ago she entered the cycle again and this time never quite made it back to the surface.

I confess my first reaction to the news was to make it All About Me. I was a bad person for having visited her only once during her recent stay in nursing homes. I'd meant to make it a more regular thing, but ... well, never mind the excuses. In the way of fannish friendships, I'm used to seeing people when I see them and assuming they're going on with their lives when I don't. For quite some time I hadn't realized she hadn't bounced back, because I wasn't expecting to bump into her (in real or virtual life) during that time anyway.

I first met Cynthia back when I entered the filk music community. She was a Big Name Filker already (although it was always hard to convince her of that). Among the usual assortment of amateur guitar strummers, she was a seriously professional musician. She had quite a reputation -- back in the good old days of Off Centaur (this was back before the bad old days of Off Centaur, followed by the seriously obnoxious days of Firebird) -- for being able to crank out a song on any topic requested in the time it took most people to tune their guitars. A lot of her music was flavored by a bit of a Latin beat -- a bit odd for someone named McQuillin unless you know that her father had been a professional bandleader in that musical genre.

I think I first really started getting to know her on an individual basis when I pitched in with the crew helping her move from San Jose to South San Francisco. I was also in on her move from South San Francisco to Berkeley where she was renting rooms from Rachel Holmen. Things get very intertwined: I bought my first computer from Rachel Holmen, and later she was my boss when I was working part-time at Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine -- and Cynthia was then living in Marion's basement (along with her partner Jane) and cooking for the MZB household. We saw a lot more of each other then -- not only in passing when I was there working, but we got more in the habit of socializing. There was a short-lived writers group. There were any number of house filks. There was the occasional Austen tea party.

One of the most striking things about Cynthia was how strongly she worked at encouraging other people's creativity. I'd like to think that she was simply so comfortable in her own talent that she never saw a need to suck up attention for herself, but I'm afraid there was always a streak of unfortunate self-deprecation -- she turned the focus to other people from not entirely believing that she deserved it herself. This, despite constant sales of her albums, awards for her music, and the inspiration of a number of filk community phenomena. For my part, I always deeply appreciated that when she wanted to include songs of mine on her projects, they were different songs than the two or three that seem to be all the rest of the world thinks I've written.

The news of her death was hardly unexpected -- from what I hear, her doctors had moved her into the "borrowed time" category years ago. But if I had a wish, it would not be that she would have continued on in crisis-cycle mode, but that she could go back and re-live the life she ought to have had in the first place.

For me, this 12th Night was exactly what a 12th night should be. Good hanging outage; good shopping; and the Duchesses' Ball did what it was designed to do: give the event a heart and center for the evening after the courts were over. (I never did get around to attending any courts.) On the shopping front, Pastiche had a 2nd hand copy of the 2nd NESAT proceedings which I spent entirely too much money on. (Either you know what NESAT is and envy me, or you have no idea what NESAT is and wouldn't understand.)

I really liked the format of the Ball: dance sets with a variety of short performance pieces as intermissions. My fingers are still a bit sore since I haven't been practicing on the harp enough to keep my calluses up, but I had a blast playing with the pick-up band. There's another un-resolution for 2006: play more music. I hope that something functionally equivalent to the Ball continues in future years. And -- without intending to find any fault at all with this year's Ball -- I think it would be cool if each year there was a different group sponsoring it and a slightly different flavor to the event. Something to keep it fresh and prevent it from becoming one of those fossilized traditions that everyone starts taking for granted.

I freaked out my co-workers by telling them all about ending the evening drinking at a keg party that got shut down by hotel security. It was almost too bad I had to spoil the effect by giving them more details. (A: I was drinking cidar, not beer. B: we were shut down for talking too loudly, not for any sort of bad behavior. C: although I did strip down to my underwear in the hallway because I was too hot, it was my 14th century underwear, which is still pretty darn covered up.) It was rather fun getting tipsy with thread_walker's crowd. I do so love to explode people's preconceptions about me.

I sat down and talked finances regarding the house with the parents yesterday and we agreed on a figure. (The discussion was complicated by the differences between the underlying logical structure of what we're doing, the actual financial movements, the way the mortgage company views the transaction, and the way the IRS will view the transaction. It's not that we're doing anything shady or underhanded! It's just that it made it more complicated to identify what each number meant when we were talking about them.) In the end, I'll be getting a smaller loan than I'd ball-parked to the mortgage company, and some of the loan will be paying off my existing student loan (which makes my monthly-payment situation much better). I'm getting a very good deal on this house and I know it.

Last night was the jr high winter concert at my nephew's school and we all turned out for it. He hadn't quite communicated to us that he was one of the improvisational soloists in a jazz piece. Cool stuff. I have to say, though, that it must take a very special sort of musician to spend their life teaching beginning instrumental music. My mother's comment (who has been one of those beginning instrumental music teachers), paraphrased, was, "A major third in tune is such a beautiful thing to hear ...." (implication: too bad we didn't hear more of them) The school gym was packed to overflowing with audience -- it's nice to see a school with a well-supported music program!