About the Composer

Here’s a pathetic case of inertia combined with bad planning.

I managed to live in Budapest for three years without ever visiting the Bartók Museum, which is housed in the composer’s final residence before leaving Hungary for the U.S. When I was back in 2005 for the Letter To Hungary performance, there simply wasn’t time. This time it was an important agenda item, but I still managed to put it off until the second-to-last day.

Well, lunch with an old, long-lost friend got away from me that day and I got to the gate of the house at exactly 5:00. Guess what time the museum closes.

Not that I can report first-hand, but many of the rooms in the house are restored to the way Bartók left them, including his study, where he wrote the last two string quartets, Mikrokosmos and 27 Choruses, as well as many other favorites. I’d still love to get in there sometime.

As if this weren’t bad enough, I also found out that Kodály’s apartment, coincindentally in the neighborhood where I was staying, had also been turned into a museum in 1990 (exactly when I was living in Budapest). No one told me at the time. Didn’t manage to get there either.

How lame. Szégyelem magam!

Over the weekend we rode out the rest of the Budapest heat wave in an idyllic town (village? jury’s out.) in Slovenia, where my old friend, conductor Steven Loy has lived for the past ten years. It’s a heavenly place, particularly after two 100-degree weeks in one of Budapest’s more polluted and noisy districts.

Not only that, but Steven and Slovene composer Urška Pompe have a delightful daughter just about Philo’s age, and it was great to see them become friends.

This town we were in is about forty minutes north of the capital city Ljubljana at the edge of the mountains and near much natural splendor, such as Lake Bled.

Ljubljana itself is a very charming city I would like to see more of. I had an unexpected opportunity to walk around for about two hours…

…because we stayed an extra day so that I could go see Steven conduct a concert of new music presented by the new music ensemble MD7. This is an interesting ensemble indeed, founded by Slovene composer Pavel Mihelčič. They only play music written expressly for them, and the instrumentation is as follows: flute, clarinet, trombone, percussion, piano, viola, cello. It’s actually a pretty good combination. A little weird, but not bad. I wonder about the trombone, but it worked well in the pieces on this concert. Highlights were “Pas de Sept - Hommage à Stravinsky” by Belarus composer Dmitri Lybin and particularly for me, “The Team from the Flower Shop” by Slovene composer David Beovič.

Here’s a lovely excerpt from today’s weather forecast for Budapest:

Today: Abundant sunshine. High 103F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph.
Tomorrow: Generally sunny. High 103F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph.
Saturday: Sunny. Highs 99 to 103F and lows in the upper 60s.

So, basically, it’s hot. Too hot to enjoy anything. Right now it’s unbearable in the shade, and torture in the sun. Most people here seem to be taking it in their stride, but I live in San Francisco, where I’m very happy because it rarely goes above 75 degrees.

We’re going to Slovenia for a few days to visit this guy. It’s also hot there, but there’s more natural splendor.

We were supposed to go yesterday, but we missed the train. It’s so embarrassing I thought it would be a good thing to blog about. I’m hard-wired to think like a 25-year-old when I’m here, I guess, so I thought it would be nothing to take a bus and two Metro lines. The combination of traveling with a 4-year-old and the Hadean weather made that a really stupid idea.

They have taxis here.

Fortunately, Budapest has a number of places like this, where we spent yesterday afternoon, after the whole, you know, “train” thing.

It’s been a while since I’ve had anything to blog about, so I thought I’d just check in, in case anyone’s still reading this.

Later today I’m shlepping my family to Budapest for three weeks of fun, cake and eccentric conveyances. Someone recently asked if this trip has anything to do with my turning 40. I hadn’t made the connection, but since then my explanation as to why we’re going has been “mid-life crisis”. I can’t afford a motorcycle. And they scare me.

As of yesterday, a new draft of the libretto for Eros at Breakfast is complete. As lyricist, I’ve been the one holding it up. Contact me privately if you’re a theater person and would like to read it. It’s been interesting: I’ve discovered that one of the nice things about doing my own lyrics is that a big part of the composing takes place at the same time. I get rhythms in my head, and can sort of already hear the music in most cases. So I hope that will mean that the composing part will go quickly. (Yeah, right.)

The new CD containing my clarinet/piano piece American Standard has been out in the U.K. for a while and is inching toward release in the U.S. Amazon says it will by July 24th. Meanwhile, it’s now showing up (at a better price) for order direct from the distributor Qualiton. Also, I’m trying something new and have made the score and part of the piece available through the nifty distribution service from Subito Music.

Maybe I’ll do some blogging from Budapest. We’ll see.