As D. points out, today is the last day in January, and there won’t be another one until next year. Well, rabbit rabbit everyone.

I’m sorry updates have been so unsubstantial. Recently my duties as a school-child have been taking up whole days, weeks even. That, and I’m currently in rehearsals for about eight different things, working three jobs, co-producing a concert, writing a piano concerto… I don’t even want to list it all because it will only make me feel feckless. The more things I have going on, the less time I have to write about them (ah, that explains why my blog entries last semester were so dull!).

I think it says something, therefore, that the reason I feel called upon to write is that I taught my Mom to read this, so she is expecting new material. She has become very technologically adept, and can be spotted now and then listening to recorded books on her tiny, tiny iPod.

I am about to step out the door for the first rehearsal of Play it by Ear. Then tomorrow is the first rehearsal of a little piece I wrote for Cameron Arens called Speed Trials. I haven’t rehearsed a new piece since Shy and Mighty got underway last Spring. First rehearsals can be terrifying, but I’m excited about these because they are with groups of friends.

Everyone should come hear New Music New Haven next Thursday, to hear Play it by Ear and a couple of other new pieces by my school chums. I’ll also be playing in Alvin Lucier’s Fideliotrio, in which the cello and viola slide very, very slowly between G sharp and B flat over the course of 12 minutes— twice. (And I play only the A between them.) I guarantee that if you listen closely you will be completely riveted, or else fall asleep, which might not be totally beside the point.

If you are craving scones, I’m not sure why you came to my website. But this is a good recipe.

In celebration of having nothing better to do today, I converted my iTunes library and Last.fm profile to a composer-centric cataloguing system (rather than the performer-centric one I’d used up until now). I’ve gradually come to the realization that the iTunes ecosystem just isn’t designed to support track info for “classical music”, where the “artist” and “composer” are different people. Even though iTunes does support the “composer” tag, it’s only useful for organization within iTunes, because no other programs recognize it.

In my re-organization, the name of the person or group most associated with the creation of the track goes into the “artist” field. For example, “Jean Sibelius” for Finlandia, not “Berlin Philharmonic”. For album-centric music, the primary creator can be the performer, not the composer: “Bill Evans” is the artist for a My Funny Valentine, even though Rodgers and Hart wrote the original song. Despite requiring me to make these judgement calls, I think the new way is more intuitive. Also, my Last.fm profile will now tell me more about my listening habits; instead of an incomprehensible list of performers and disembodied tracks, I’ll see a nice, clean stack of composers and pieces. My performer tags are now in the “comments” slot, and don’t get uploaded. A new year, a new profile.

Oh! This also gives me the opportunity to recommend one of my favorite sites: Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes. Applescripts are tiny programs designed to automate repetitive tasks; this is how I was able to re-tag 9,000 tracks without going through each one by hand (I don’t have that much free time). So, for instance, one Applescript switched my artists to the “comments” field, then my composers to “artist”, and another one reformatted the composers to “First name Last name”. You can find a script to do pretty much anything you’d ever want, and they’re accessible from a menu right in iTunes— a huge timesaver for anyone with a big library.

I love Radiohead for many reasons. One of them is this video. The song they’re playing (The Smiths’s Headmaster Ritual) is one of my favorites, and you can tell it’s one of theirs as well; I imagine them as timid English schoolboys in 1985, clustering around the hi-fi, listening to Meat is Murder and thinking “That’s what I want to be doing with my life”.

Besides being really touching, it’s also just a great performance. There’s a “cover band” stigma in the rock world: the act of interpretation garners little respect, while much more value is placed on originality (exactly the reverse of the current classical-music paradigm). I think in the future we’ll see a gradual increase of rock musicians recreating the canon, with the original recording acting as the authoritative version instead of a musical score. More performances like this one wouldn’t be bad.

In the past few months, I’ve finished three or four new pieces, and I had to think up names for all of them. I used not to put any effort into titles (here’s an example). At some point during college, I had a two-part epiphany. Part one was: would I want to read a book called Bildungsroman, Op. 4? (OK, actually that sounds interesting, but not terribly evocative). Part two was: I suddenly realized that many composers give their really great pieces really bad titles. Bad titles, especially ones that sound vaguely new-age, make my spine crawl. And I can’t understand why composers, all in all a pretty smart bunch, are allowed to get away with them.

On a related note, the pluralized-abstract-noun + number thing is just not working anymore. That’s a major cop-out. My friend Alex (who has some great titles, by the way) once made a list of all the plural-noun titles he could think of off the top of his head, and there were something like 400 of them.

I find Sufjan Stevens’s paragraph-long song titles a bit self-conscious, though I like the general language of them.

Here are some titles I love: Before and After Science. Hallelujah Junction. It Takes Twelve to Tango. All the pieces on Lost and Safe. Schumann’s Kinderszenen, which are incredibly abstract musically, yet have perfect titles. Most of the songs on Mr. Bungle’s California. The Boards of Canada have a lot of very similar titles, but I think they are pretty ideal. Here is Julius Eastman CD that costs $54 and is full of really memorable titles (I especially like If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?).

So how do I think up titles? I like phrases and combinations of words that are easy to pronounce, and feel like something I would say in conversation. There’s something prepossessing about a title that’s in regular, everyday English, rather than one that forces you to step back and regard it as Art.

Naming a piece is like how I imagine naming a fictional character would be; you can decide to make it really significant and symbolic, or you can just choose something that sounds more or less suitable. I keep a list of phrases I think would make good titles, some of which are preposterous and will probably never find a complementary piece (example: Everything Seems Edible). I play around with different variations on a title as I’m working on a piece. Usually the most streamlined version ends up working best, and it’s often the one I thought of first.

All this goes to show that titles are less meaningful than you think (and than program notes would have you believe). People often ask me what Shy and Mighty means. The answer is "not much". It’s just the first thing that popped into my head.