November 22 - Every Silver...

Finish the pdf's of Mary Variations, Op. 28, with XVI. Movie Mary, then move down 80

and

680

in reasonably fine weather to

Diablo Valley

College for the last day of content for the semester: a condensed verse of Sting's King of Pain for dictation and board harmony, with review for tomorrow's final quiz, plus more entrancing student compositional endeavors.

Thenceward

homebound,

with

evidently

more

errands

of the

season, composition of The Cop and the Anthem (page 56) and Psalm 81 (M2), and finishing a re-reading of

Samuel Beckett's The Lost Ones (1970).  Also listen to a fair amount of Edgar Varese...

Hyperprism
Octandre
Ionisation
Poeme Electronique

Anton Webern...

Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 10
Symphony
Concerto for Nine Instruments
Piano Variations
Cantata No. 1

Alban Berg...

Piano Sonata
Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6
Wozzeck
Violin Concerto

Joe "King" Oliver...

Dippermouth Blues
West End Blues

Heitor Villa Lobos...

Bachianas Brasileiras No. 2
Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5

Max Steiner...

Casablanca

Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton...

Grandpa's Spells
Blackbottom Stomp
Deadman Blues

and Cole Porter...

Kiss Me Kate

November 20 - How It Is, Maybe

Wake up to bright sunshine,

but it is not to be for long,

changing impressively,

minute-by-minute until grayness falls once more, appropriately re-perusing

Samuel Beckett's How It Is (1964), pdf'ing Mary Variations: XIV. Minimal Mary, and composing ensuing pages of The Cop and the Anthem and Psalm 80 (54 and 8, finishing latter).  After the daily update of 21st-Century Music, there's more New Years Concert/Party planning and email catch-ups to do, taking a break to play through the Edition Peters volume

John Cage - Works for Piano, Prepared Piano, and Toy Piano - Volume 4 (1933-1952).

A later break for supplies

(with the weather clearing up a bit,

again dramatically),

including video replentishment at the library,

yields

Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977),

Arsenic and Old Lace (Joseph Kesselring, 1939 / 1944), and  

The Lord of the Rings (Peter Brook, 1963, after the 1954 William Golding novel),

The Man Who Would Be King (Rudyard Kipling, 1888 / 1975),

M.A.S.H. (1970),

Patton (1970)

The Poseidon Adventure (1972),

The Prisoner of Second Avenue (Neil Simon, 1971 / 1975),

Rio Grande (1950),

The Road to Bali (1952),

The Road to Zanzibar (1941),

The Roaring Twenties (1939),

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949),

THX-1138 (1971), and

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1949) -- watching the first two with Harriet in the evening, and somehow finishing up a re-reading of

Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces (1957, 1958-1960).

Bette and George call late, and always good to hear from them, but this time sad news as well: Aunt Caroline Stuart (who lived in Swarthmore for many years) has died, all of 96 years old.  But, after several falls and realizing that life at this point would be in the confines of a nursing home (even after she could no longer drive, she souped up a golf cart to tool around her property) she basically took the situation into her own hands (pain was a definite factor), via fasting.  Our thoughts go out to family and friends.

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...