|| default || § ¶Chocolate Box!
Big sucess! Last night and tonight. And it certainly is wonderful hearing the music on those new speakers at ODC. One more performance to go.
Update: Sunday's final performance was also quite successful.
|| default || § ¶Sorry, I've Been Busy
As you can tell, not much happening on this blog lately. Frankly, I've been just too busy. I'm turning out radio programs as fast as I can, trying to stay a couple of weeks ahead of myself. Then my day job has picked up to a feverous pitch as we put the finishing touches on a new software release. And, not to forget Chocolate Box. The dress rehearsal is in a couple of hours and as usual things are a bit dicey, but I think it's all going to work out for this weekend's performances.Finally, I'm still issuing one picture a day to my photo blog. Today's is Joseph Brodsky's grave in the San Michele cemetery in Venice. (Many years ago I had tea with Brodsky, in a London apartment. Coming across his grave quite by accident stopped me in my tracks.)
Needless to say, life's pretty full at the moment. So stay tuned.
By the way, you can hear last week's Music from Other Minds program streamed from my website. Just click on the little speaker widget at http://rchrd.com/mfom/ Last week's program featured Tim Brady's Symphony #1: Playing Guitar. This week's program has music by Michael Byron and Christian Wolff, and the stream will be available sometime after Friday's broadcast.
|| default || § ¶The Picture They Didn't Use
So the local Piedmont/Montclair (Oakland) newspaper was going to run a short item next week on my collaboration with choreographer Kate Mitchell on Chocolate Box, the performance being next week at ODC in San Francisco. So they asked for a picture in my "studio". Well, here it is. Nevertheless, the paper decided it couldn't run the article because they've cut back on reporters. Go figure.But there's the picture anyway. Reason 3.0 is up on the screen, with the layout for the third tableau for Chocolate Box, the most complex part of the soundtrack.
Monday is the first sound check at the ODC theater. This should be very interesting. Last year I managed to blow out one of their speakers with Threads. Lets hope they got that working so I can try again!
UPDATE: They DID do an article. And they used another picture. But no one interviewed me for it. All the info came from the press release. So that's how local newspapers work, I guess. Here's the article. Pretty strange.
|| default || § ¶76 Images on Photo Blog
More images uploaded. Now we're up to 76. Still going strong. One a day. Take a look.
|| default || § ¶What if you gave a concert ....
... and (almost) no one showed
up? Well, that was the case last night in Berkeley. The San Francisco
Conservatory of Music's first BluePrint concert
of the season was at the Northbrae Community Church in North Berkeley,
and was a repeat of Friday night's concert which was at the
Conservatory's Hellman Hall in San Francisco. But for whatever reasons,
only 24 people (by my count) were in the audience. Which was really too
bad because it was a good concert.
This year's BluePrint series is their fourth and is subtitled Schoenberg: Insights on Expressionism,
and claims to focus on the thread of expressionism beginning with the
so-called Second Viennese School that circled around Arnold Schoenberg,
Anton Webern, and Alban Berg during the first decades of the 20th
century. This weekend's program featured Schoenberg's Kammersymphonie from 1906, along with the works of two of his post-WWII students John Cage (Third Construction, 1941) and Leon Kirchner (Trio II, 1993), and two much younger composers Laura Schwendinger (Lady Lazarus, 2005) and Olga Neuwirth (Spleen, 1994). And, except for the Cage, the emphasis was surely on expressionism.
|| default || § ¶61 Images, Still Going Strong
Just uploaded the 61st image to my photo blog. Still many many more to go.
Managing at least one image a day.
|| default || § ¶Oh, to be in London this Weekend!
What an incredible weekend
of concerts in London devoted to the music of Iannis
Xenakis. Oh, to be back in London! If only this could be done here in San Francisco!
|| default || § ¶Andy Takes On the Iraq War
Andy Rooney had some strong words to say about the war in Iraq on Sunday's 60 Minutes . Click on the image on the left to see the clip. Bravo Andy! and Bravo to CBS for not censoring it!
|| default || § ¶Chocolate Box -- Almost Done!
It's almost done. Just a few tweaks left and I'll have completed the soundtrack for Kate Mitchell's latest piece, Chocolate Box, to be premiered over three nights at the ODC Theater in San Francisco on the weekend of October 28th. This 50-minute piece is in four tableaux, depicting chocolate's textures, patterns, and colors, revealed through dance and design. The sound design includes about 25 minutes of my own music composed specifically for Kate's choreography, working as we did last year for THREADS, as well as recordings of music from 17c Spain and 20c Cuba. Needless to say, it's been a wonderful challenge to come up with chocolate music whatever than might be. But there are some surprises. And, as with THREADS, I've put the entire thing together using Reason 3.0 and Logic Express. I'll have more to say when we get to the dress rehearsals in a few weeks. But what I've seen so far of Kate's choreography is amazing. And so are these dancers. Stay tuned.