§ || ¶Overload
Just too much going on all at once to keep up. For one thing, the radio program starts back up again this Friday after a month and a half of re-runs. So this weekend I was occupied with producing two programs, Feb 3rd and 10th. And they came out pretty well. Should be quite interesting.The other part of my mind has been preoccupied with trying to install three operating systems in a multi-boot configuration on a new laptop. And none of these OS's are MacOSX. It hasn't been an all-too-satisfying experience. Like being sent adrift in unfamiliar territory. I've been blogging about this experience elsewhere.
And, on top of all this, I've been trying to get a start on music for what could be a new dance piece. All I can say is that it will have something to do with alchemy and transformations. But no breakthroughs yet. January is always a hard time for creative work. Something about January that teases with the need for hibernation. My biological clock was set on the east coast, in the depths of winter, and during a world war. That must be the reason.
February comes in a few days. Our springtime.
The big thaw.
§ || ¶Other Minds has a Visitor
Last Friday we had a surprise visitor to the Other Minds office in San Francisco. Charlemagne Palestine, and his wife Aude Stoclet, were in the Bay Area for a brief visit before returning home to Brussles.
Charlemagne and I have intersected many times, going back to New York City in the mid 60's, and then again when he was at Mills College (Oakland) in the '70's. This was yet another but totally unexpected intersection.
(Oh, Charlemagne is the guy with the hat.)
§ || ¶Igor's Disk is Dead!
DAMN! Back in July 2004 (blog entry) I resurrected a neighbor's dead and forsaken iMac by replacing the disk and installing a Maxtor 30GB drive I bought from CompUSA.I've been running the iMac as Igor, the music server. It replaced the FM tuner in our sound system.
Well, over the past few days booting Igor had become problematic. It would only boot occasionally, seeming to get stuck in the middle with faint complaining sounds coming out of the disk. I tried various strategies, and disk utilities, reinstalling the OS... It seemed to help for awhile.
Today it wouldn't boot at all.
Just 18 months! Now its useless. So back to CompUSA, but this time I learned my lesson: Avoid Maxtor! They had a rebate sale on an 80GB Hitachi/IBM Deskstar drive. $30 after all the rebates and discounts! Since I use Igor just as an Internet Radio receiver, with few mp3 files to save, 80GB is more than I need.
So I installed it and Igor is back! Its third life. We'll see how long this one lasts.
Long live Igor.
§ || ¶Finally!
Back in '73, when I lived in London for a year, I found a copy of the score to Luciano Berio's string quartet #1, "Quartetto per Archi", in a used book store. Apparently it cost 1.20 pounds then. It's a work from 1956. Which makes it 50 years old this year.
Unfortunately, I never got to actually hear the piece. For years, whenever I was in a record store I'd browse thru the Berio section just to see if someone had finally recorded it. And for years I'd go away empty handed.
It turns out Berio wrote four string quartets. The Quartetto in my hands, from 1956, was, in fact, #1, but there was never a #2. The other quartets are titled Sincronie (1964), Notturno (1993), and Glosse (1997). And all four appear on a Montaigne/naive release that appeared in 2002 under the auspices of the BBC and the WDR, with the Arditti Quartet playing.
So today I finally got to sit down and listen to this piece of music I've been waiting 33 years to hear.
Now, over the years I'd occasionally open the score and try to figure out what it would sound like. And, altho I can read scores, I've never been very good at imagining music that I've never heard before just by reading the score. So this very complex looking work was always quite mysterious to me. I'd even once attempted to enter at least the first page of the score into Sibelius just to hear what it might sound like. That proved to be a very frustrating experience as you can tell it might be by just looking at the first page. I didn't succeed to get very far before giving up.
And it is a very complex piece. Very much in strict serial technique, where all the pitches, registers, effects, and durations are strictly controlled by very formal procedures. The result is a very fragmented and discontinuous effect. But very much 1956 Darmstadt.
So listening to it for the first time today I was mildly amused. It pretty much sounded something like what I had expected. But, naturally, not exactly. And I puzzled over the score. I swear the Arditti quartet didn't play all the notes in the score! I'll have to listen again more carefully.
The later quartets on the CD are very nice, and I was glad that Berio eventually abandoned the strict serialist style and adapted it for his own very creative ear. The Arditti's performances always seem a bit harsh and metallic, lacking a certain warmth of sound. Perhaps that's intentional in this music, I don't know. But I was greatly intrigued by Berio's third quartet attempt, the Notturno from 1993. It is full of little quiet sounds, like things creeping around at night.
I highly recommend this recording, especially if you revere Berio's music. It fills a big gap in my collection of Berio' recordings, and finally completes the circuit opened some 33 years ago when I curiously bought the score to the Quartetto, sound unheard.