welcome to my new website
Many thanks to Timo Andres for dragging me into the internet age and designing this new site.
Please look around and let me know what you think. I'll be writing here on the homepage about my year of vagabond composer life, first in the states and then in Berlin, so check back often.
July 15, 2009 Something round
A giant septic tank on wheels visited my studio this afternoon. I was not so into this disturbance, but then I saw that the truck’s hubcap created a nifty little photo-op:
July 13, 2009 still life with gift
My lunch today made me so happy I decided to document it.
Lunch arrives on my doorstep at 12:20 everyday in a personalized wicker basket. The soup today, an amazing cream of something with other yummy somethings in it, is warm and delicious. The chicken salad with walnuts and blueberries (at least I could identify these) elevates the genre to a new level of artistry and sophistication.
There’s no way to not be in a good mood after such a mid-day gift, especially when one’s lunch reading is also a gift, or, quite literally, The Gift by Lewis Hyde. Lewis was here last summer with me (he most graciously trounced me at ping-pong whenever we played), and I’ve heard so many artists rave about how meaningful his book can be, especially when one is stuck or confused (which would be me, like, basically all the time).
Thanks, Lewis and the Kitchen Crew, for a memorable meal.
July 11, 2009 The slow life, Part II
I tracked the progress of this slug across my porch today, my first full day at the MacDowell Colony.
July 10, 2009 Home Sweet home
I have fantasies about living a totally minimalist life, about occupying some Mies van der Rohe glass box with two or three elegant pieces of mid-century furniture, perhaps a solitary orchid placed just so next to a first edition of Ornament and Crime for dramatic effect.
Every time I move (which has been often in the last five years) I savor that moment when I’m standing in an empty apartment for the last time and I think to myself: Yes, this is the way to live. Next time. Next time, I SWEAR I will not get any stuff. I will be spare, austere even. And then I will entertain in my spotless spare space and impress everyone with the enviable austerity of my mammon-free life, and they will be SO jealous…
But the truth is that I like stuff. And I am a mess. And I make messes with all that stuff I like wherever I go.
Making messes is, for me, a way of claiming each new space I inhabit, of marking my territory like some wild boar peeing in the woods. In fact, here in my studio at MacDowel, I didn’t even bother starting with a clean slate. I made my mess, called it home, and got down to work.
(and by work I mean a long, leisurely nap)
July 9, 2009 dust to dust
I don’t know quite what to think of this motley collection of decomposing playthings at the Essex County Dump. I visited them twice while weekending with friends on Lake Champlain. Something about their happy-sad state left me in equal parts comforted and distressed.
In any case they were very photogenic.
Rest in peace, little friends.
July 6, 2009 Fun with plaster
The grand staircase at the Yaddo Mansion (and it is about as unnecessarily grand as staircases come) has some of the wackiest walls I’ve ever seen. Looking at them up close is a bit like falling into one of Van Gogh’s windswept wheat fields or Munch’s surly sunsets. The grooved surfaces pulse with a mesmerizing energy that can be both ravishing and disorienting, and I’ve spent sizable chunks of time and my camera’s memory card documenting them over the last few days.
Sometimes tightly coiled swirls, sometimes broad waves or jittery bounces, the forms are always changing, wildly different from one painterly moment to the next. I would love my music to have this kind of freedom, and I’ve been thinking about how to incorporate more of it—the sense of personal, joyful, spontaneous play—both in my process and my finished work.
This thinking led me, of all places, to Xenakis. I’ve been listening to the JACK Quartet’s Xenakis recording for a few months now, and it is one my favorite new things of 2009. There are passages, particularly in the first quartet, of psychedelic slip-sliding that are for me the aural equivalent of Yaddo’s swirling walls: fun, willful, disorienting, ravishing, and indelibly human.
July 5, 2009 Curvy things
I’ve been thinking a lot about organic, fluid lines lately.
Here are some sexy curves I found in the Yaddo Mansion's living room:
morning shadows on the rug
grapes and a guy on a chair
leaves in and through a window
light from a lampshade
july 3, 2009 Back to the future
Yaddo, like any respectable Victorian estate, is stuffed to the gills with mediocre paintings. Some of them are actually decent, a lot of them are painfully bad, and a few are genuinely, shockingly creepy.
Quite near the top of the creepy list is a portrait I recently found of me in my middle age:
I guess this is proof that time travel does, in fact, exist, and that at some point in the next ten or fifteen years I will travel back to the early 20th century to have my portrait painted by a now-forgotten artist.
Coincidentally (or is it?), I’m reading a novel by one of my fellow Yaddo-ians that features a time-traveling protagonist named Henry. Henry seems to be having a fine time with temporal discontinuity, so I’m very much looking forward to trying it out for myself.
June 29, 2009 not all domes are created equal
I made an impromptu stop at the Basketball Hall of Fame this morning, partly because I had to pee really badly and partly because I have a fetish-like obsession with domed buildings. For anyone who drives I-91, the Hall of Fame’s giant silver orb is truly hard to miss. It looks not unlike an alien spaceship crash-landed in a New England strip mall, or, the more I think about it, perhaps a human-made space pod set to launch at a moment’s notice into the far reaches of the galaxy, carrying within it the hallowed artifacts of America’s second (or is it third?) favorite pastime.
Once inside and freshly relieved, I determined that $16.99 was too much to pay to pay homage to a sport about which I am completely ignorant. I was, however, curious to see the interior of the giant silver orb, and so I took a quick peek.
As domed spaces go, this one was pretty underwhelming. Due to a moment of ornery camera antics, I wasn’t able to capture the room on film (it was hardly worth a picture, anyway), so I’ve decided to include here an interior shot of one of the MOST AWESOME domes on the planet instead (coincidentally, this domed building also strongly resembles a flying saucer when viewed from a distance).
This is the Pantheon in Rome. A few lucky guys get to dump oodles and oodles of rose petals down through the oculus each year on Pentecost Sunday. It’s a worth-the-plane-ticket-just-to-see event, especially if you, like me, have soft spots for both monumental curved surfaces and liturgical pageantry, not to mention expensive floral displays. (Pasadena’s Rose Parade, through which I’ve sat twice now, doesn’t even compare). Nothing conveys the massive scale of this space better than the long, slow flight of flowers floating from top to bottom.
Anyway, Pentecost at the Pantheon deserves an entry all to itself someday, but for now you can use this photo to help visualize the Basketball Hall of Fame, should you be so inclined. Just shrink the dome’s radius by 11 feet (thank you, wikipedia), replace the oculus with a suspended jumbotron scoreboard, the concentric rings of concrete coffering with black-and-white portraits of the hallowed Hall of Famers, and the ancient marbled walls with plexiglas cases displaying significant backboards (who knew?) from arenas of yore. Other than that, these two domes are practically interchangeable.
June 16, 2009 pilgrimage
With less than an hour in the Art Institute of Chicago last weekend my objective was clear and I had little time to spare. Breezing past Claude, Vincent, Georges and Pablo, I headed straight for an obscure gallery far off the beaten path to pay my respects to a little and little-known piece called Monkey Fur.
When I was a kid my family visited the Art Institute and discovered a genuinely creepy collage made by Arthur Dove in 1926. The work features some rusted chunks of metal and a sinuous strip of real Monkey skin and fur, and as we ogled it (with the same morbid curiosity that draws some of us to car accidents and reality television), my father launched into a seriocomic diatribe along the well-worn “I-can’t-believe-they-call-this-art” lines, and Monkey Fur instantly found its place in Norman family lore as an emblem for the decadence and uselessness of modern art. Now, every time one of us passes through Chicago, we dutifully make the pilgrimage to that remote corner of the museum to say hello to the piece of art we love to hate.
As I stood in front of Monkey Fur last week, my thoughts turned to all the visual artists I’ve met in the last few years. I wondered what it would be like to grow up with them as parents, to be in a family where the various merits of Monkey Fur might be vigorously debated over dinner, where its unflinching use of raw materials, its deft exploration of the line between figure and abstraction, and the economy with which it conveys a palpable yet amorphous sense of menace would be discussed and dissected, not dismissed.
But, in the end, I came back to the thought that I’m really lucky to have the family I have. My father many not be conversant in MFA artspeak, but he is a curious soul who, along with my mother, valued art enough to take my brother and I many times to the Institute and other museums.
More than a symbol of decadence and uselessness, Monkey Fur is for me an emblem of the legacy of broad cultural engagement that my father fostered in our family. I’m happy that this creepy little collage is one of the things that holds us together.
Happy Birthday, Dad.
June 14, 2009 Windy City
When the weather cooperates, Chicago can be just about as spectacular as cities get. Here’s a rundown of my recent 48 hours there:
Whirlwind jaunt through of the Art Institute’s new Modern Wing (see post below).
Dinner at Mado with artist friends Richard and Julia (whose works hang in the above-mentioned Institute). The food was local, organic, robust, and super tasty. The company, as always, was delightful.
Early morning bonding with the Bean (see June 12th post below).
Concert with the Chicago Youth Symphony playing Strauss (makes me feel old) and members of the CSO playing Turnage and Golijov (makes me feel young).
Panel discussion at the League of American Orchestras conference (makes me feel really young) about composers and community involvement.
Concert in Millennium Park featuring Shostakovich’s over-the-top oratorio The Song of the Forests (sample text: “Glory to Lenin’s Party! Glory to the People forever! Glory to our wise Party! Glory!”) with, as a supremely ironic backdrop, the glass and steel monuments to high capitalism that form the skyline in this most American of cities.
Reception on the 80th floor in one of those monuments to high capitalism (makes me glad they don’t get earthquakes in the Midwest).
Frog leg and celery soup with Ilana (props for sitting concertmaster in her very first week with the Grant Park Orchestra) and principal cellist Walter.
june 13, 2009 renzo vs. frank
A fight is brewing in Chicago’s front yard. Two important new buildings (upper and lower right in the photo below) face off on opposite sides of Millennium Park like prizefighters about to duke it out for the claim to lakeshore supremacy.
On one side of the ring is Frank Gehry’s outrageous Pritzker Pavilion, an outdoor amphitheatre that is all spiraling struts and billowing steel, puffed-up like a wild turkey on the prowl.
On the other is Renzo Piano’s exquisitely understated new Modern Wing at the Art Institute. It exudes a calm repose, hiding its bulk in a sheath of slender lines and perfectly considered proportions.
The aesthetic duel between them crystallizes in a single view when one stands at the back of the Modern Wing’s atrium and looks out across to the Gehry. The collision of formal languages is stunning: bold gesture versus subtle detail, fragmentation versus composure, showmanship versus craftsmanship.
While it is tempting to call the fight in favor of the cool cat and be done with it, and while I have long had some low-level discomfort with Gehry’s more-is-more approach (perhaps stemming from the fact that my music is way more Gehry-esque and less Renzo-nian than I would care to admit), I have to say that both buildings are successful in their own ways.
Gehry’s exuberant forms sometimes feel arbitrary and superficial to me, especially considering the spaces they are meant to contain, but the beauty and honesty of this design is that superficiality is precisely its point. The backdrop of a large outdoor stage really serves no function other than to draw attention to itself, and this the Gehry does with spectacular panache.
On the other hand, an art museum needs to be, when all is said and done, a good place to look at art. The Piano is precisely that. It elegantly pulls the spectator down the atrium, up the suspended stairs, and into the light-filled galleries. I can think of several museums (two Guggenheims come to mind) where the architecture competes with the art for attention, but here the respective roles of each are thoughtfully defined and tastefully executed.
So, in the end, I call a truce.
Both Renzo and Frank produced great architecture in keeping with the “form follows function” ethos of the Windy City. Chicago's native son Louis Sullivan, the great great granddaddy of contemporary American architecture, coined this usefully alliterative axiom more than a century ago. That its repercussions can still be felt in buildings as wildly incompatible as the Prtizker Pavilion and the Art Institute’s Modern Wing is a testament to the breadth and power of Sullivan’s modernist vision and to the city that gave it form.
Actually, I think the real prize here goes to the people of Chicago for fostering a rich, world class architectural tradition, for showing a no-nonsense knack in choosing, as they did at Millennium Park, the right architect for each job, and, most importantly, for actually getting these ambitious projects built (pay attention, Lower Manhattan).
June 12, 2009 bean time
If you ever find yourself awake in Chicago at 6 AM, go visit the Bean.
I had a revelatory fifteen minutes of alone time with Anish Kapoor’s big shiny blob of public art (officially titled Cloud Gate) a few days ago. This experience will definitely be logged, along with and just below my three minutes of early morning solitude inside the Pantheon, on my “life-altering moments with monumental curved surfaces” list.
Walking into the concave core of the Bean feels like entering some space-age womb designed by the love child of M. C. Escher and Georgia O’Keeffe. What could be better?
June 9, 2009 The Slow Life
I’ve been at Yaddo now for a week, and I am finally adjusted to the pace of things here.
A day at an artist colony can feel so much longer than a day in the real world. The distance between breakfast and dinner has a way of unfolding to reveal whole spans of time I never really noticed before. And simple tasks, like checking email or writing a few measures of music, have a way of expanding to fill these stretched-out days. Things move slowly; with less to do, less gets done.
I was trying to parse out the math of this today when, just before I came in to write this, I saw a turtle digging a nest in the road. She’s still out there, four hours later, doing the same thing. And I’m still in here, trying to wrap up these thoughts.
june 1, 2009 goodbye, new haven
Going...
going...
going...
gone.
