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 19th 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.