Saturday, November 19, 2011

November 19 - On Attendant


The sun comes up, apparently rotates around to the back of the house by noon, as it does every day, seen clearly or not -- with therefore this giant-yet-small earth full of people / mountains / deserts / ocean spinning madly, without any of us being particularly aware of it, seemingly forever.

Finish re-reading Casebook on "Waiting for Godot" (1967), by Ruby Cohn (who lived in Oakland, taught at U.C. Davis, and just passed away last month.  Interesting that, as in so many other arenas, the best writing that she collected was towards the work's premiere -- sort of like the day, which begins sunny and devolves into gloom and rain.  Push on, nevertheless, with daily update of 21st-Century Music (including finally putting up the Joowan Kim article at http://21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com/2011/11/greatly-integrated-mark-alburger.html) and  pdf of Mary Variations: XIII. Toying with Mary, coming to turns with subdivided tuplets in Finale (producing pdf's for now, if far from simply hitting "print"... every one, since Encore went south, has been produced by converting old file to .xml, uploading in new program, and tweaking in various ways), which works, as is typical with the format, quite well, once the steep learning curve has been accomplished.  Also compose page 53 and 7 of The Cop and the Anthem and Psalm 80.


Afternoon and evening are given over to lunch/dinner/movies with Harriet, plus work on the New Years show (plus general email catch-up, receiving the original City of St. Francis midi's), and re-reading / re-perusals of Beckett's Endgame (1957),


Happy Days (1961), and


First Love and Other Shorts (1970, 1957-1974).


Rather late, play through the piano-vocal of Igor Stravinsky's wonderful, late


Requiem Canticles (1966), then, in googling, intrigued to find out about the composer's use of


inverted-retrograde (as opposed to the standard retrograde-inversion) -- which has always floated around there as a concept...