About the Composer

I hope this information will be obsolete within a few days, but having done the research, I’d like to help out any other Mac/Sibelius users out there.

If you’re upgrading to Leopard and still using Sibelius 4, you’ll need to get a compatibility patch from Sibelius. Unless, that is, you don’t need to be able to, uh, open and save files.

If you’re upgrading to Leopard and using Sibelius 5, and prefer not to have it crash upon startup, you’ll need this compatibility patch. Also, Sibelius has a suggestion for you if you’re experiencing screen redraw weirdness.

If you encounter strange screen redrawing behaviour during mouse input on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, e.g. when moving the shadow note over the staff, choose Sibelius > Preferences, go to the Textures page, and switch on Alternative texture drawing.

But the big one, that’s making me think twice about rushing to get Sibelius 5, is that none of the Sibelius Sounds installers work. More on that here.

I’m confident that Sibelius will sort all of these things out very quickly, though. They’re good.

Saw this on the wall in a corridor in a San Francisco elementary school and had to share. I grew up in Maryland (even though I usually tell people D.C.), so it caught my eye.

No diseases? The “free religion” part I get. That was big stuff in the 1630’s. But, no diseases?

Oh, and what was I doing in a San Francisco elementary school? Philo starts kindergarten next year, so it’s time to start the process of choosing which schools to put on our magic list of seven. The system here is absolutely bananas. I’ll tell you about it sometime.

Thanks to a big improvement in the latest version of Wordpress, I’ve switched this site from being organized around “categories” to being organized around “tags”. It’s hard to explain what the difference is. Suffice it to say that, in my case, the word “monkeys” could never be justified as a category, but it seems just fine as a tag.

The best way to understand it is to see it. Meet my tag cloud.

Every post can have any number of tags associated with it. The tag cloud shows how frequently or infrequently I’ve used each tag. It’s a startlingly real picture of my world.

As for the old categories, many of them have been converted to tags. Others are just gone now. (Sorry, yeah, no more “category shmategory”.) I’ve replaced the sidebar list of categories with just the most frequently used tags.

Happy tag browsing!

My clarinet/piano piece American Standard will be performed in London next week…

Peter Furniss (clarinet) and David Leiher Jones (piano) will be holding a recital to celebrate the recent Clarinet Classics CD release, Time Pieces, 60 years of American music for clarinet and piano. The recital will take place on Wednesday, 24th October at 7:30pm. The Warehouse, 13 Theed Street, London, SE1 8ST.

Sculptor Georgianna Krieger (ahem, my wife) is among the many San Francisco artists presenting their work throughout October as part of ArtSpan’s annual San Francisco Open Studios. The city is divided into four sections and artists in each section are open over four weekends in October.

Georgianna’s work is on display this weekend, Saturday and Sunday 11am-6pm at Fort Mason Building C, room 375.

Here’s more information, including a downloadable map to artist exhibits.

It will be worth your while to see writer/performer Amanda Moody’s latest music theater piece D’Arc, Woman on Fire, music by Jay Cloidt, at Footloose & Shotwell Studios.

D’Arc offers a surreal inquiry into the costs of dreams, lived and unlived. Weaving the threads of the Dark Ages with our own dark times, D’Arc depicts a present-day intercession by Saint Joan of Arc. We meet Joanne. Home alone, she fixates on letters from her daughter who vanished while working abroad in a war-torn region. Raging against loss, Joanne begins to receive bizarre visions through the cold flame of her television set. It is Saint Joan, burning through the TV twilight to answer her grief. Relating tales of her own battles and trials, Joan teases and admonishes Joanne, disrupts her obsessions and challenges her to listen anew to the call of her own life.

Jay Cloidt’s haunting music drives this D’Arc night of the soul. Integrating Moody’s mercurial vocalizations with acoustic and processed cello, the composition features original songs, underscoring, and sound design. His composition spans 14th century hymns, post-Romanticism, aggressive electronic music and heart-thumping gospel to evoke the strange dream of Joanne and Joan’s collision-course.

I haven’t seen it yet, but I can vouch for Amanda as a really interesting dramatic writer, and a powerful performer.

It had been years since I’ve looked at it, but I’ve had the vocal score of Sweeney Todd out for the past couple of weeks, having just seen the revival currently on at American Conservatory Theatre (extended for still one more week).

Years ago I used to spend hours with this score, so it’s kind of like an old friend. Right now I don’t really have time to play with it, so it’s just sitting there staring at me all day. Funny thing though: since I’ve had it out, I’ve completed two Eros at Breakfast songs, and I’m now closing in on a third. Normally I’m a hopeless slowpoke. I think on some level I know the score is watching me, and I don’t want to let it down.

Let’s call it “The Sweeney Effect”

Throughout the year I’ve been occasionally posting recordings of songs from my earlier musical The Ghost of Wu. Today’s installment is the song “You Must Learn”, in which an ambitious mother lectures her naïve daughter, a concubine, in the ways of the Emperor’s court.

This song is probably the most Sondheim-derivative thing I’ve ever written. When I was a student, all of my music was completely derivative, and over the years I learned how to avoid that to some degree. This is a rare case where I was not only being openly derivative, but I actually knew what I was doing. If you know your Sondheim, you will surely recognize the influence.

(download)
4′12″

The lyrics are mine too, by the way. You can follow them and the score if you’d like on this dedicated page.

By the way, there’s a running index of all the songs I’ve posted so far on this page.

Sometime last year I struck up an email correspondence via this blog with poet/librettist Karren Alenier, whose opera with composer William Banfield Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On was premiered in 2005 in New York by Encompass New Opera Theatre. Karren has written a very entertaining book about what it takes to see an opera project through from concept to production.

As someone with a new opera idea in the pipeline, I’m keenly interested this topic and Karren was kind enough to let me read an advance copy of the book. I’m not a critic, so I’m unable to offer an in-depth review, but I thought I should at least call readers’ attention to it.

The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas uses Karren’s own project as a frame of reference throughout, but she also wisely sought input from other professionals in the field, including the likes of Placido Domingo, Mark Adamo, Libby Larsen and Ned Rorem. Every aspect of making a new opera is discussed: collaboration, finding an audience, finding a commission, working with singers, working with directors, critics and more.

As far as my own project is concerned (it’s a secret), reading this book has given me a good picture of the various ways to pursue it, and what to expect if and when I do. My favorite chapter title: “Hubris, Vanity, Rejection”.

What’s really fun about this book is the structure. Karren’s own opera is a result of many years studying the work of Gertrude Stein, and the book is organized in what might be described as a “cubist” way. In a sense, it’s really two books in one: one is about her own background leading up to the creation of her opera and its production, and the other is a more general look at the world of American opera. But, the two books are presented simultaneously in layers.

Any composer or writer who is not already intimate with the vagaries of the American opera world would surely learn something from this book, but also the tone of the book is light and sharp, and so I imagine it would be enjoyable for anyone who is peripherally interested in the topic. The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas is not yet in stores, but it’s available now from the publisher’s web site.