In anticipation of my third and last move this year, I was doing some thinking about my worldly possessions. I came to the conclusion that I own and love many vessels: bottles, flasks, beakers, boxes (wooden, metal, and paper), cups, satchels, etc. that serve no purpose other than to contain other objects and substances. Unfortunately none yet of the oceangoing variety.

I had a similar realization a few summers ago, when I had a job organizing the toolchests of the Yale recording studio: the majority of them were filled with things that served as attachments, that is, something you can use to attach one thing to another. Recording engineers are obsessed with finding clever and elegant ways to do this. The primary situation is mounting microphones, which sounds simple until you ask a recording engineer to do it.

Objects are more meaningful when we can sort and group them, and use them in conjunction with each other.

Image by the wonderful iconwerk.de via Flickr.

The rumors are true, I am become swine. Terrible timing; I had to pull out of a concert and a recording session with this lady, and also miss last night’s Metropolis Ensemble show at LPR and Julie Wolfe’s big piece tonight at Zankel. Thanks to Yale’s very cutting-edge new website, I was able to listen to the live stream of Thursday’s New Music New Haven concert from the comfort of my bed. The highlight was a big chunk of Chris Cerrone’s opera-in-progress, Invisible Cities— a piece I’ve watched grow and develop first hand, accompanying dozens of rehearsals over the past year. It was thrilling to hear it realized with a full orchestra.

The Food Issue of the New Yorker arrived a few days ago, and while my appetite is diminished, my capacity for reading about food (and watching Top Chef) is not. I’ve felt a secret kinship with Calvin Trillin ever since I learned we share the same favorite dish, spaghetti carbonara. This week he writes about poutine, a dish which has always struck me as ostentatiously vile (though I would probably try the foie-gras poutine). What made me smile, though, was the following anecdote:

Cautiously, I tasted the Afghan’s poutine, which was the basic fries-curds-and-gravy dish without embellishments. My response was similar to the response I’d had some years ago when the composer Ezra Laderman, despite knowing full well that few euphonious sounds had ever been coaxed out of a shofar, wrote a fanfare for shofars that I heard played at the dedication of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale: “surprisingly inoffensive.”

For the past week or so I’ve been blogging (professionally!) for the Metropolis Ensemble by way of introducing the four young(ish) composers on their upcoming concert, REVERB. Should be a pretty fresh show. I’m especially excited to see Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece X, because, seriously, can one person actually make all those noises?

Read the blog entries here.

Saw Colin Currie and St. Louis Symphony do Tan Dun’s Water Concerto at Carnegie tonight. Tan Dun’s not a composer I’ve paid much attention to, which I guess is strange, considering he represents pretty much the epitome of success in my profession.

The Concerto owes a big debt to Cage’s Water Walk— both are pieces that you really have to watch in order to experience, involving people looking quite serious while doing hilarious stuff. I also thought there was a bit of Harpo Marx in there, like one of those musical “interludes” in the movies that feel like they last for half an hour (come to think of it, this piece actually did last half an hour). The entire thing was organized like a Vaudeville— no innate logic other than a general progression of spectacle, and the more ridiculous, the better— but generally entertaining nonetheless. And there were some timbres in there I can truly say I’d never heard before. I’m trying really hard right now to convince myself I liked the piece. And yet…

I think what I’m trying to say is, I see almost no kinship between what I do and what Tan does, even though we’re in this miniscule world of “composers”. That can only be a good thing for both of us.