Category Archives: Music

Link Salada

Because I prefer tea to tossed greens, thanks.

Man who cut pages from rare books gets 2 years in jail: “[A] Harvard-educated historian pleaded guilty to 14 charges involving the theft of illustrations from rare books. He admitted using a blade to cut out 150 pages, including plates and maps, from books in the British Library in London and from the Bodleian Library in Oxford. “As an author, you cannot have been unaware of the damage you were causing,” said Judge Peter Ader as he passed sentence […]. “You have a deep love of books, perhaps so deep that it goes to excess.”

Listening to Schroeder: ‘Peanuts’ Scholars Find Messages in Cartoon’s Scores. “When Schroeder pounded on his piano, his eyes clenched in a trance, the notes floating above his head were no random ink spots dropped into the key of G. Schulz carefully chose each snatch of music he drew and transcribed the notes from the score. More than an illustration, the music was a soundtrack to the strip, introducing the characters’ state of emotion, prompting one of them to ask a question or punctuating an interaction.”


The Society of Animation Studies has created the Emru Townsend Award. “Society for Animation Studies members may now apply for grant awards in the assistance of research and travel for those intending to present at this year’s annual conference.” (Via Tamu at fps.)

Misled

You know your mind is really trying to distract you when it comes up with the idea of transcribing Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” for the cello. Leonard’s slightly menacing version, of course; none of these cheerful boppy covers.

    My mind: No, really! It would be *awesome*!

    Me: Not today, it wouldn’t.

    My mind: But but but — it would be cool! It would sound great on the cello!

    Me: Transcribing it would take forever. I have no reason to do it, and it would sound odd as a solo piece. And I’d need at least a bass to back me up. Possibly also a piano. Not that I have anywhere to play it.

    My mind: You know people who play both!

    Me: SHUT UP. I’m working.

ETA @ 4:00: The interview’s as done as it’s going to get today; I’ll proof the first draft tomorrow during the boy’s nap before sending it off. I am going to metaphorically plug my fingers in my ears to ignore the weird Leonard Cohen thing, and cast on the blanket instead. I should keep working on Bodhifox’s hat but the needles and yarn are both smaller/finer and my hands feel clunky today because of the cold. The slippers have a pattern repeat and so would take too much attention. Also, well, shiny new project. So sue me.

Hangs Head And Is Listless

I bought a plastic? resin? metal? circular needle this morning for my next knitting project. The shop did actually have wooden ones in the size and length I needed, but the tips were uber-dull and I knew they’d be more hassle than they were worth. Anyway, so I now have a 29″ size 10 circular needle, which means the missing one with wooden tips that I’ve been searching for since last week should show up any minute now.

I also bought a bronzey-brown (the colour’s called ‘Toast’) and a blue (‘Admiral’, of all things) yarn for the lap blanket that will be my mindless garter-stitch project. I only picked up half of what I’ll need, though, because it’s acrylic (I cry a little, here) and I may end up hating it. I’ve used some of my craft-stash acrylic for practise and it has been awful. But it was acrylic or nothing since the cats have taken to chewing on wool-content yarn, cotton just felt wrong, and soy was ye-gods expensive for the amount I’d need. This is just a silly lap throw that will be on my office chair, not art. Also, as much as I love shopping at the yarn stores, they sell expensive yarn and I don’t have a lot of money right now, so acrylic it is. (Sob. Even though it is very soft acrylic.)

I’m halfway done those interview questions. I started knitting my slippers yesterday, and may well cast on the lap blanket this afternoon when I can no longer stand the interview. I expected the boy to be home with me today but he ended up going off to the caregiver’s after all, so I do have the time to work. Yesterday was not a great day, which is why the interview didn’t get done and was rescheduled to today, pushing Orchestrated off to next week. That’s okay; I felt no desire to work on it anyway. The beginning of the week was fantastic, but I suspect that driving to get the proofs and the freelance project done (and the unexpected mess of the ms. for review that led to many more hours invested in handling it than I expected) burned me out a bit, leaving me listless yesterday. My back hurts, which does not held the sitting-at-the-computer-working thing much.

We had our first orchestra rehearsal of the year last night, where we met our new guest conductor. She is, in fact, a cellist, and I’m really kind of excited about that because it means she’ll actually work with our section instead of pretty much ignoring us, even though I suspect it also means she’ll be extra-picky about our sound. That’s both intimidating and motivating. She asked the celli to play measures 241 and 242 in the first movement of Beethoven’s fourth symphony, then told the rest of the strings to “play it just like that.” It was really, really nice to hear on the first day back after the holiday break, especially because we were sight-reading it. It almost offset the oh-my-gods-you-can’t-be-serious treble clef cello line in the Carillon of the Bizet suite. (Last time we played this was my first year with the orchestra; I seem to remember the principal playing a solo there. This time, I’m going to do my damndest to play it, and I can lean on my teacher for help.)

Back to the interview.

Self-Enabling

Most of you know I’m interested in odd kinds of instruments. When I say odd, I don’t mean out of the ordinary; I mean things you can’t get easily and are stupidly expensive, and even if you could get one you’d have a hell of a time trying to find a local teacher for it. Like a harpsichord. Like a viol (AKA viola de gamba).

Like this seven-course Renaissance lute.

Repeat after me: Autumn has no time. Autumn has no money. Autumn should stop subscribing to Craigslist RSS feeds.

Sunday

I originally titled this post my usual Weekend Roundup before I realised that I’d already covered Saturday on, well, Saturday. I so rarely journal on weekends. Anywhats!

Sunday was… interesting. I want to say fun but there was Tired and Lingering Illness involved, which is never fun. I woke up with the boy around six-thirty and he tried to snuggle in bed with us but kept waking himself up by coughing or trying to pet the cat, so around seven HRH got up and took him off to do morning stuff. I rolled over and got another two hours of sleep, which I desperately needed to help kick the stupid flu. When I woke up again at nine I thought that I’d have a leisurely morning with a cup of tea and maybe knitting in the sun, but around nine-forty-five I walked into my office to get something and saw a stack of books with a sticky note on top, which reminded me that the boy and I were due to pick Paze and Devon up and go to register for the new monthly children’s Pagan playgroup that’s just starting up. Ack! So I called Paze to push our meeting time back, packed up the box of books I was donating to the resource centre, and threw the boy into his snowsuit. The info session was fabulous; not only did the kids have a fun time exploring the room, meeting other children, dancing, drawing, and playing with various things like masks and the drum, but I discovered that one of the educators running the group is a wonderful woman I know from some of my workshops a few years ago. It was marvelous to see her, and to know that she and her equally delightful co-educator were handling the group in every way I could have thought fun and appropriate. Even better, while parents will attend the first session along with the kids to help ease them into the routine, we get to drop them off for subsequent sessions, which means Paze and I get a child-free coffee date once a month!

The major drawback to the morning out was that I took my glasses off to wash my face before I left and forgot to put them back on. I only noticed when I was halfway to Paze’s house, after my right eye had felt like it was working harder than the left. I’m still not used to wearing glasses full-time. (I thought I’d been wearing them for about nine months and was at a loss to explain the not-used-to-it-yet-ness, but a quick search of my archives reveals that I didn’t get them till the end of August, so it’s only been four months. Okay. That’s not so bad.)

Sunday afternoon I went through the Nigella Bites cookbook that Aurora lent to me, and we made tiny pork meatballs and tomato sauce from it for supper. In return I gave her a pile of beginner flute books on permanent loan to help fuel her newly rediscovered passion for her flute after taking several years off. I am thoroughly enjoying being a music-enabler for people. I stopped by my luthier this weekend to drop off the last trial 7/8 (you know, the one I got in early December that was due back the 26th, but they were closed for two weeks? Yeah, that one.) and it turned out that they had a new 7/8 that had arrived, so we just switched the cellos in the case, scratched out the old serial number and entered the new one on the trial contract, and I went back home with another cello. (I’d kind of been looking forward to having only one instrument case in my office, but hey, I take the 7/8s when I can get them because they’re hard to find.) I took it out as soon as we got home and it’s just lovely: a deep chestnutty-red colour (none of the orange stuff I dislike!) with two little knots on the front that look like dimples. It’s certainly my second favourite-looking instrument so far in this epic search, the first being the chocolate-amber one that was bought out from under me back in May. I played the first section of the Lee sonata, and from what I can hear from behind it the sound is nice, too — much more focused than the last 7/8, and certainly well-balanced across all four strings. We’ll see what happens when I bring it to my next lesson and my teacher plays it for me so I can hear what it sounds like from in front of the instrument instead of behind it.

Once the boy was in bed HRH and I headed out to the initial session of the first RPG I’ve been involved with in two moves. (I can’t remember what that translates to in years. Long enough that I have no idea where my dice went.) I baked focaccia, which vanished awfully quickly (note to self: next time do a double batch), and brought my knitting, which turned out to be a brilliant move on my part. I got a good quarter of Bodhifox‘s hat done, finishing the bronze portion and switching to the blue. (I may have done about five rows too many of the bronze; we’ll see. It won’t matter in the long run, but at the moment I am critical of the decision to do a full four inches instead of three and a half.) It was great, because I got work done and could focus on what was going on in everyone else’s turn in a way that I hadn’t expected, and didn’t get bored or drift off to sleep (not from the lack of interest in the story, but from Teh Tired and Sique). Knitting keeps one part of my brain busy as well as my fingers, so my mind doesn’t wander from what’s going on. It’s really interesting. The only drawback is that I’m mildly concerned that I may distract other players, although Karine did make a successful roll to save against Fascinating Shiny Things when the flashing needles began to relax her overmuch. Too bad I didn’t get to the row where I needed to start decreasing, because she wanted to know how that would happen.

(I suspect I will be knitting many scarves. Or maybe I’ll find the yarn for my lap blanket before the next month’s session and work on that, because it will be straight stockinette and easy to do while being engaged in other things. Yes, the lap blanket it shall be.)

It felt really, really good to be sitting in the room with close friends, working through a story together, even if my rolls did suck. I need to get myself back into rolling-multiple-consecutive-sixes-on-my-Force-die fighting trim. Also, steampunkian horror with an awesome soundtrack! What’s not to love?

I am cautiously optimistic about the day. I feel not quite at one hundred percent, but pretty close. I’m still cold, but that’s not unusual at the tail end of any illness of mine. My chest doesn’t hurt when I breathe any more, which is very welcome indeed. So I’m going to close a few tabs in my browser and make myself another pot of tea, go curl up in the living room in the sun, and finished the freelance assignment that’s due today. Tomorrow I finish and hand in the proofs of the book, and then the next two days are scheduled to work on Orchestrated. As a test run my cello lessons have been switched to alternate Friday nights and Saturday mornings, so I have all day on Thursday to work for now.

I think that’s it. Have an excellent day, Gentle Readers.

Forty-Three Months Old

This is going to be a short one because Christmas happened, so there was lots of other stuff journaled about the boy to refer to if you want update-type stuff.

Poor kid, he was sick on Christmas Day, then sick with bad colds not once but twice in the next ten days. It made for a very tense holiday period because we couldn’t toss him out in the snow the way we wanted to. So there was a lot of book-reading and movie-watching instead. This is the month that will be remembered as the month the boy officially entered the world of Harry Potter. Sure, he’s kind of known about it before, but this month he watched the first two films (Harry Potter and the Hogwarts Express, and Harry Potter and the Flying Car. What, you know them by different names?) and really got into them. He can name all the houses and identify that he’s a Gryffindor (“That’s the house I live in!”). The basilisk in Chamber of Secrets makes him a bit anxious, but he’s pretty brave about it. Of course, being brave means watching the snake from behind a chair or casually from around the corner in th hall, but he does it. The other day he requested a lightning-shaped scar drawn on his forehead, which e wouldn’t allow to be washed off for three days. He then dashed around with a rolled-up piece of paper in the shape of a wand, pointing it at things and saying ‘magic words’ that resembled people’s names from the Potterverse. This exchange occurred in my office:

    SPARKY: [points his wand at the computer monitor] Dumble-a-dumbledore! [makes a static/lightning strike sound]

    MAMA: Wow. What was that?

    SPARKY: That was my magic wand! Look, all the letters are gone from there!

    MAMA: Uh-oh!

    SPARKY: Yeah!

    MAMA: Well, can you put them back now?

    SPARKY: [earnestly] No! They’re all in the wand! And I don’t know how to get them out!

(I see through you, small child. I know you’re trying to get me to stop working to play with you. )

We’re currently reading the Magic Tree House series of books, and he’s really getting into them. (I, on the other hand, am going crazy with all the sentence fragments, and am calling a halt to the month-long odyssey at the end of this story arc.) He’s getting better at reading, too. He can somewhat reliably read ‘cat,’ ‘dog,’ ‘in,’ ‘out,’ ‘wow,’ ‘mouse,’ ‘book,’ ‘train,’ ‘Canada’ (you had to know that one would be among the first words read), ‘home,’ and others I’m forgetting. I think we’ll try the Nate the Great series next. I tried reading him the first Time Warp Trio but his sense of humour isn’t quite there yet.

We are encountering the three-year-old push for independence and control of his environment. There’s a lot of “no” and “after I finish this” and “no, you do it,” which are fine in some contexts and just sheer frustration in most others. We know he’s being better-behaved at school than he is at home, and it’s somewhat frustrating to hear people say, “But he’s such a thoughtful, well-behaved, polite child!” Yes, we know that, and it would be nice if he demonstrated some of that at home these days. I know he’s working things out, and pushing to ascertain boundaries, and testing structures to make sure they’re consistent, but wow, it gets old fast.

He has joined the first-ever local pagan three-to-nine-year-old kids’ circle, and had a blast at the first introductory session with masks and the drum and snacks. I’m so excited about this, because he’ll hear about elements and deities and seasons and cultural celebration from someone who isn’t me, so he’s more likely to listen. (It’s just the nature of things, and I understand that.) And at school they’re doing a month-long unit on sound and music, so he comes home with all sorts of little tidbits of information there too.

The other day he picked up two bits of thread from his snowsuit and twiddled them together in his fingers. “I’m knitting!” he told HRH when he glanced in the rearview mirror. HRH told me this story when they got home and I couldn’t help but think of Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Cafe story about Sam and his hockey team knitting. He’s bright, he’s eager to learn, and I’m sure it won’t take long before he’s wrapping string around sticks and somehow managing a rough approximation of a knitted object.

Other Liam-themed posts this past month:

– Mama is cool because she has awesome movie music
– Liam rediscovers The Philosopher’s Stone
– poor Liam is sick on Christmas Day