The Year of Living Musically
I’ll be out of town for the next week, off in New Jersey for the Moses performance and the beginning of Passover. While I’ll have my laptop with me, I’m not sure about connectivity with it. The best ways to reach me, if needed, will be by my cell phone or my gmail address (my first name dot my last name at gmail dot com).
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.
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The regulars didn’t show up to the store tonight. Tracksuit Guy, Mr Duffle, Opera Man, Crutch Lady and the rest all took the night off. It was St. Patrick’s Day, and all the amateur drinkers and those deranged by apparently unaccustomed partying showed up in force. The expert denizens knew to keep a low profile and wait for the frenzied to stumble back to their suburbs and their SUVs.
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Most of the time, my stuffed Linux penguin, Tux, gazes benevolently out of my window onto the busy intersection below it. He’s usually happy to stay there, but apparently Wanderlust got the better of him this evening.
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The Dancing Man came sailing up the escalator in our closing hour. The sounds of a Yemenite singer, mixed with disco beats, greeted him as we tried out Madonna’s new live album on the overhead system.
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If I’ve fallen unusually silent of late, blame it on the Moses project. The composing’s been eating up most of my available time and brainwidth, and I’ve been falling behind on email and other such necessities.
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The music that blasts from the children’s shop next door to and below ours often gets stuck in my head, bursting back into my consciousness when least welcome. Today, it was playing the original “Someday My Prince Will Come,” Adriana Caselotti’s implausible vibrato slicing through the grinding groan of frustrated traffic and the half-conversations of crowded, isolated people, only some of whom had telephones. On Saturday, it was the impossibly cheerful music of an imagined old world, a sort of Chipmunk Klezmer of the Damned.
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As usual, work on creative stuff has gotten stuck in a sargasso of technical crud, but I’ve dug my way out, and the accelerated composing of “Moses” continues.
I’ve been asked to compose a piece for narrator and string orchestra related to Passover, for a performance in New Jersey just before the holiday. The music is still coming together, but here’s the text as it now stands:
On Wednesday, 24 January 2007, The “Wednesdays at Grace” performance series presents:
D’MAMAH (דממה)
(Hebrew for “Still,” as in “a still, small voice”)
Performing “Badbury Rings,” “Banquet of Heaven,”
“Te lucis ante terminum,” and other works and improvisations
7 pm
Berkeley, CA 94709
Open to the public without charge
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