Joseph Zitt

The Moses project is on. I’ll be performing it with the Toms River Multigenerational Orchestra on Sunday, April 1. It will be a private performance, at a residential care facility somewhere in Jackson, NJ, and I won’t be able to invite people to the gig. But I hope to get a useful recording of the performance, and to be able to post it online.

It looked for quite a while as if the performance wouldn’t happen, but things came together a few days ago. This means that I’ve had to cram on creating a vocal score from which I could perform and in rehearsing my part. I’ll only have one rehearsal with the orchestra, just before the concert, so I’ll have to know it well before we do it.

The early parts of the piece are actually the most difficult to perform. As I worked on it, I got more used to how my vocal rhythms and breath patters were falling in reading the text, so I gave myself a lot more space. In the first few pages of the score, however, the text comes much more rapidly, and I have to nail the rhythms much more exactly to avoid getting out of sync with the strings. I suppose that it makes sense, dramatically, since the early part deals with Moses’s surprise and fear upon seeing and hearing the burning bush. As it moves on, it gets more thoughtful and deals with more expansive visions.

This will be another of my whirlwind vacations in which I’ll probably have little time to relax. I fly out on a red-eye on Wednesday, arriving in New Jersey on Thursday morning. On Friday, I’ll be helping my mother prepare for Passover. On Saturday, I may be dragged to a bar mitzvah at my mother’s synagogue. The performance is on Sunday. On Monday, we go to Philadelphia (about two hours away) for the first seder, which will be at the home of one of my aunts there. On Tuesday, we head back and have the second seder at either my mother’s or my brother’s house. And I head back to California on Wednesday morning.

On top of the rushing around, I’m going to be massively jet-lagged. Since I work an evening shift on the other side of the continent, I regularly go to sleep at just about the time that people on the east coast are waking up. I expect that my family will be expecting me to snap instantly to their sleep cycles and to complain if I don’t.

I also have a few things that I want to get done when I’m out there. I have a large amount of CDs (roughly 700, I think) that I want to pack up to sell off. A friend from college works at the Princeton Record Exchange, and it would make sense to arrange to get the CDs to them. A lot of them are pretty obscure, and that’s the one store in the state that might make sense of them and give me a fair sale price.

I also want to go through the books in my mother’s garage. I haven’t touched or thought about most of them in almost five years, so I figure that I might as well get rid of them. I figure that I’ll donate the Judaica that I don’t hold onto to my mother’s synagogue library. Many of the others are music books, and there must be something appropriate to do with them, though I don’t know what. And I have a lot of computer junk in there that I should just throw out or appropriately recycle. I don’t know if I’m going to have any time to look at any of this, though.

It also looks like the only window of time that I’ll have to get together with anyone is on Saturday late afternoon and evening, and we’ll have to get together in Toms River. If anyone’s up for coming down and getting together then, let me know! (And take the Parkway, not Route 9, unless you’re very confident and relaxed…)

When I get back to Berkeley, I’m going to want to get rolling on several projects again. The Ocean of Ghosts album has been on hold for several months, and I want to look into how to get that moving.

The book of “The Rounds” has also been on hold; I had been waiting for a friend to edit it, but that person seems to have dropped off the grid, so I’m going to proceed with whatever I have when I return. Chelsey shot photos for the book several weeks ago, and I’m hoping to see them and start making some selections when I return.

I’ve also started poking at another writing project, which will probably turn into another small book. It’s been hovering in my head for years, but aspects of the form, voice, and organization have clicked into place recently. But there’s no deadline, and I’ll let this take as long as it needs.

Work is continuing as it has. Our annual inventory is coming up while I’m away. I had hoped to get my entire section perfectly organized before it, but we’ve been short-handed at work, and I’ve had less time to work on it than I’d hoped. For most of the CDs that are organized by composer, I try to sort them by the major work on the CD, then by the primary performer of the work, then by the date of the recording, then by the label. (Chopin is the exception: since most discs have a smattering from amother the many mazurkas, etudes, impromptus, nocturnes, and the like, I just gave up and, except for the Cello Concerto, sort the rest by performer regardless of the main work.) Most other sections are content to hav e works by a single artist together without further organization, but I get kind of compulsive on these things.

(I had a maddening conversation with an innocent and well-meaning coworker last week. She needed an inventory code to log a returned CD, and asked me to look it up. After failed attempts to pronounce “Rachmaninoff”, she spelled it out, then said that the album was of “Symphony number 1.” She seemed baffled when I told her that I needed more information to determine which recording it was — after all, it’s not as if anyone needs to know who performed a given disc of, say, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Well, there have been tribute versions of it, but they have different names.)

I’ve been listening to my usual array of music, both for enjoyment and to glean ideas for more music. Right now I’m listening to a wonderful bootleg of the Cecil Taylor Unit from 1978. I thought it might give me ideas for a piece that I’m sketching, though it’s mostly pointing out things that I don’t want the piece to do, which is useful.

I’ve seen a couple of movies recently. The high point was Miss Potter, and utterly charming depiction of the life of the author of Peter Rabbit. The utter nadir was the execrable and inexcusable Borat, which took schtick that had been worn out by Yakov Smirnoff and Candid Camera years before and filtered it through the sensibility of a nine-year-old boy who had just discovered that he could get a rise out of people by talking obsessively about feces and genitalia at dinner. The combination of ambush interviews and doo-doo humor should an utter lack of compassion or consciousness on the part of anyone involved. That anyone actually liked it is, to say the least, dismaying.

And it’s time for me to wrap this up and get to sleep. It’s going to be a busy week, what with trying to get everything together for the trip. And I’m eagerly awaiting Sunday’s season finale of the new Battlestar Galactica, though if as good as the previews suggest, I may be staggering around for a couple of days trying to sort out what the frak I had seen.