It was a howling wild day, I remember, a hundred by the anenometer. The wind was tearing up the dead pines and sweeping them...away.Not really. But metaphorically after Samuel Beckett's Hamm, it's pretty blowsy.
Or shall we say blustery? Which brings to mind the I-680 corridor on the east side of the Sulfur Springs Mountains, one of the most consistently windy spots in the region, a scenic corridor through which we pass most Mondays through Fridays, which includes
one heckofa Long Barn, or shed, or whatever, with the snaking lines of ravine vegetation behind, and a precipitous, upward-sloping-until-it's-dangerous Chinese Wall;
the relatively calmer, more tree-bespeckled Eden;
part of the Hovel Hills;
Horse Farm;
Stone Wind Canyon (neither of which can be seen, as the stone is across the freeway and the wind... well, you know, the wind... everywhere and nowhere);
the eroded cliffs south of The Quarry, south of Trash Valley.
Dictation is Claudio Monteverdi's Tu se' morta from L'Orfeo, just the bass line and chords
just the first system, which in the short run we could analyze as G: i V ii VI i bVII.
Fine pieces from Sarah and John, then home to record 12 Preludes and Fugues ("Topical"):
4b. Death Is the Rain (Fugue)
5a. Empedocles Was Wrong (Prelude)
and
6a. The Examined Life (Prelude).
So more than half of the piece is recorded by now, finally. Will take a break and come back later, as press release for SFCCO needs to be written and Board Meeting attended...
Nice get-together -- Erling, Michael Cooke, David Graves. We decide on three concerts for next year, and guaranteed instrumentation of woodwind quintet and string quintet.
Press release to be completed tomorrow.
