A quickie:

I’m fighting like mad to finish huge chunks of the webinovel before time is up and the academic year resumes. I recall Hemmingway, right before the end and his destruction, working on “The Old Man and the Sea,” saying that he’d written ‘another beauty chapter.’ Well, I’m no Hemmingway, and I won’t go so far as to say what I’m writing is beautiful. (It’s sci-fi musicology with a big dose of porn. How literary can such a genre be?) At the same time, it feels good to write it and if I could type better, my words would be flying on to the page.

At the exact same time, I’ve undertaken a project with one of our graduate students. She’s performing in NY in August, and wanted to do something with romantic old records and Americana. How the hell could I resist that? I’ve written in these pages about compositional process (ie., music composition). Back in the day, I worked with pen and ink. Blah, blah, blah. This time, I’m miking up antique audio equipment, not only to capture the audio, but to capture as well the hums, the mechanical noise, and the crackle of the blank wax. When I say wax, I mean wax. I recorded for this piece the sound of the Edison Home at two minute pitch with the two minute reproducer traversing a blank I made myself out of beeswax and stearic. Not only does it sound good (quiet surface, good tone when recorded on), it smells good too.

The process of working with Kathleen is at the very beginning. She was here Friday with her husband. (I wrote about it as regards the reaction of the conservative cats.) I took notes on her requirements, did the recording chores on Sunday, and made a quick draft. Today, after the webinovel ‘beauty chapter,’ I made a much more satisfying draft. Until I get into the studio with Kathleen, I won’t really know how far off or on the mark I am. But this is the part I love the best: any composer should relish the immediacy of Dance. It keeps us strong, flexible and free. I say that as a person with a role in this enterprise of mostly sitting on my ass. So that accounts for why I’m off politics for the moment. What’s going on there, anyway? Murdoch/Cameron in deep shit? Whistleblowers killed? Debt ceiling talks broke down? Tell me the point of fretting over this stuff. I’ve got better things to do. Yea!