Tuesday, February 28
10 pm I am at the television station, in the edit room waiting for a tape to copy & writing this entry on a stray piece of paper. Still learning the digital machines & putting the television taping of Visions together. At this rate, it will be summer before it can be broadcasted on air. Meanwhile, I am alone in my little monastery, my small edit room, listening to Visions and watching Laura & Myra on the monitors.
As I sit here with Visions, I am thinking back to the premiere of Visions I, II, and VII at Wells College. Carolyn and Ian and I went to the performance together. It was Ian’s first concert and he was still in his little portable basket. The performance was breathtaking & Carolyn cried. Ian slept. We were in the last row of the auditorium, & what impressed me most was the silence, the deep silence of the audience as they listened. A nice ovation afterwards, and the stars were very bright on the way home.
Earlier tonight I watched some of the Intermissions television shows I made years ago, to choose some for WSKG PBS TV to audition. They are very innovative & center on the music & life of a living composer, so members of the WSKG staff have expressed an interest in seeing them. They need to be put into digital format first. I produced most of these shortly after my singer Louise McConnell died, in her memory. Scores, recordings we had made, old photographs, voice clips from television shows made about us twenty five years earlier ... I had forgotten about the old photographs and voice clips, and when they came on the monitors my heart almost stopped. Some of the photographs were from our concert days in New York City - Carolyn looked about seven or eight years old, and Elisabeth and Ian were only a twinkle. Unable to watch more, I took the tape out of the machine & decided to copy them all. WSKG themselves can choose which Intermissions they might use.
As I watch Myra and Laura onscreen, I again think to myself how very fortunate I am, to have such fine musicians perform and record my music. Just now two images are overlapped onscreen, in a swipe fade, & Laura stands to the left of the screen listening to Myra’s solo harp passage. Myra looks like a cherub with her harp, and Laura, the flutist, looks like a beautiful medieval maiden.
The next digital editing task to learn will be the transitions between pieces & the titles.
Thursday, March 3
Midnight. We had another quintet rehearsal tonight, from eight until ten thirty p.m.. They finally read through the first movement for the first time. The rehearsals are held in a very small room at Sera’s house, so small I can’t even fit in it while they are playing. I stood in the doorway & conducted over the soprano violinist’s head. There are many small sections, with slight tempo changes & the players were getting quite lost. Once they know the piece better, these tempo and meter changes will not be a problem.
In the car, on the way home after the rehearsal, I said to Bob: “ Well, if they get lost in the concert, people will just say: “Another crazy modern composer”. Your instruments will sound beautiful in any case.” He laughed & assured me that they would know the piece by Sunday.
We decided to have the next quintet rehearsal at Bob’s house in the country. His living room is immense and the musicians will have an easier time hearing themselves and each other.
The announcement in the Strad Magazine was quite good & included a photograph. I must contact WSKG about the radio interview. More stacks of torn pieces of paper and yellow post-it notes have accumulated all over the house, piles everywhere. M. has requested that I clear a bit of space near the computer. Chores, websites to contact, musicians, radio stations, scores piled up to work on, to finish or revise or send out. CDs of Early Songs & Visions. And the half finished pages on the music rack await me. I have not written a note of music in days.
Monday, March 7
4:30 p.m.
Still sick & feverish. Cancelled my television editing session for tonight. An E-mail from WSKG television, they are airing the documentary with the Vision “Cathedrals of Light” next Monday night. Also an off-air viewing this week in Binghamton. Meanwhile, I am wondering if I will feel well enough to go to the quintet rehearsal tomorrow night.
Not able to do any more work on the second movement of the new piece for choir and orchestra. Arranged with Paul to televise the concert & open rehearsal on Sunday. A newspaper interview & more stacks of torn notes to myself, tasks to do. All this outer activity seems so far from the silence of writing music. And yet mysteriously connected. The artist struggles to master the body & its outer life - and the inner world. Mastering the body, as every artist knows, includes perfecting technique - the instrument, the brush, the paint, the potter’s wheel. And the mind. As in the dancer, the athlete - the body is the instrument for every art form; in this sense we are all artists, the body is the vehicle for the soul.
I just cleared my mind of all thought & looked within for a few moments. Countless musical notes appeared all around me, attached to their fragile stems & lined up on fragile staffs. When I am less sick, I will write much music. Until then - patience & some rest.
Tuesday, March 8
3:45 a.m. We are having Arctic weather, it is supposed to go down to - degrees below zero tonight. Today the rehearsal was at Bob’s house. Some snow, a light dusting on the small fir trees Bob planted last year, snow carried over the fields & hills like a fast-moving fog. Occasionally vast walls of translucent white curled by the wind, in magical, changing shapes & twirls, writhing & powerful. Bob & Deena’s living room is easily the size of the downstairs of our house. One wall is entirely tall windows, & as the quintet rehearsed I sat at the large wooden table & sometimes watched the musicians, sometimes watched the fields & hills & the battle raging above them. The mysterious & whimsical sections of the Dance of Movement III. made quite a contrast with the scene outside. Later, bent against the wind on the way to Sera’s car, I imagined myself on Hoth or on an Alaskan ice floe - when only a few moments earlier I had been in Bob’s very large & comfortable living room with its heated stone floors & oak trim & occasional thin, oriental rugs. And music, music I had written, hung in the air.
Today they thoroughly rehearsed Movement III, the Dance. First the opening little drums. Later, the loud drums, in the two lowest instruments, building in the final pages. I was entranced as they worked their way through the score, the intensity of those rhythmic motives, the drums unstoppable, driving, as the other melodies & countersubjects tried to catch them, find them & hover over them, like the wind & snow over the fields and hills. In those final pages of score, the musicians’ technical struggle for perfection, pushing the instruments to their full capacity of sound & volume & speed, the battle with the instruments, the score, the body, the self...
I thought of my friend Cricket. I met her as a freshman in college, she was from Tahiti. I loved her simplicity, her smile. She was a singer, & one day she said that her favorite concerts were piano concertos - she loved to watch the piano battle the orchestra, the pianist so small & so alone. Today, I understood her words for the first time.
Dinner with Bob a few hours after the rehearsal. He continues his private studies of Stradavari’s instruments. He said that he & others have found that the geometric designs of the instruments of the old masters were not geometrically perfect, exact. As an example, the air resonance usually falls within a half inch of the third open string. (Well, I think that is what he said.) In his mind, these small imprecisions of design were not accidental, the old masters were perfectly capable of geometric precision. He has formed some theories, & will apply these new, personal discoveries to his own instruments in the future.
Bob attends all the rehearsals. As I listen to the musicians’ rhythms, tempi & phrasing & analyze the notes that I have written - Bob listens to the sounds & timbres of his instruments just as intently, so that he can improve them in the future.
Now to battle the snow & again clear the sidewalks.
A Composer's Journal Entries February 28-March8, 2005
Moderator: figaro