February 15 - What Did We Do Today?

What did we do yesterday?

What did we do yesterday?

Yes.

Why . . . (Angrily.) Nothing is certain when you're about.

In my opinion we were here.

(looking around) You recognize this place?

I didn't say that.

Well?

That makes no difference.

All the same . . . that tree . . .


bent from the mostly relentless wind . . . that Mt. Diablo dead ahead . . .


that Sulfur Springs Mountain and half Long Barn . . .


that Rohan . . .


that Hovel Hills flyby . . .


(back later - have to do the program for tomorrow's Horsewomen of the Apocalypse: The White Horse event)

O.K. back. Where was I? Oh, yes. Out.

Theory dictation is the ever-popular When I Am Laid in Earth from Henry Purcell's


Dido and Aeneas,


first phrase melodically, as Do Re Me Me Re Mi Fa Mi Re Do Ti Do Ti Sol Le Sol Fa Me Re Me,

with that classic (baroquic?) descending bassline of Do Do Ti Te La Le Sol Me Fa Sol Sol Do, which can be harmonized as G: i i V65 I2 (or V2 of IV) IV6 iv6 V i6 IV i64 V i, despite a bit to the contrary below...

Will we get around to harmonizing the preceeding recitative?


Probably not this semester (though a fragment will be on the quiz), due to Monday holiday. Not that we're complaining....

In the lab thereafter, recording Horn Concerto: III Allegro



(how trombonist Kevin Grant and company used to make a sing-along of this in the hallway), and the piano-accompaniment version of Violin Concerto: I Allegro aperto



the latter beginning a new album, Angles and Divots.


Return over the Benicia, with views of the Mothball Fleet,


detour on Abernathy, up Suisun Valley with a head-on view of Twin Sisters (now Siamese) in the dusk darkness,


to a Pants-With-Nobody-Inside-Em orchard.


Yes, again the best picture of a day's jaunt -- no doubt because stuck in traffic (so, stationary), cropped, and a pure subject with which to begin.

At home, Harriet and I design and print program for tomorrow's White Horse (8pm, St. Gregory's, De Haro Street, San Francisco).

February 13 - We're Getting On

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.