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I think Lex almost proved something about twelve-tone by induction in Theory the other day. Perhaps I was just a little tired, and was filling in the gaps in his sentences with material from my other classes (as I did in the too-hot Scheuer room at a lecture the other night with Ross), but I think all he needed was a basis case and an explicit inductive step. Which are, granted, a lot to be missing, but had that idea gone further, that's the direction it seemed to have been headed. This is why I'm in Math 9 and CS 22 simultaneously, and even Medieval-Renaissance Music and our forays into Die Neue Wiener Schule's dodecaphonicism dovetail now and then, at the extreme poles of Western music.
These few days have been rather chill, but involve more small things
than seem to leave room for regular reading. I had a piano lesson
with Tony Wednesday, in which it was decided I'd work on Bach
chorales, three of Schönberg's Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke, and
eventually reducing string quartets at sight. That afternoon he
coached Midnight on the Schumann. Then African, during which my quads
could barely hold out for more than a minute of parallel-position deep
plié, doing pelvic contractions and wondering why I seem to be so out
of shape. Joel-O and I came home starved, and started gobbling the
Yesterday saw more unintelligible twelve-tone analysis -- Webern on crack if he too believes in Schönberg's philosophy that "twelve tone composition aims primarily at comprehensibility" -- but I like the music of it more I listen to it. To demonstrate some idea of the theory, Lex put a random row of Schönberg's on the board (above), and I think I annoyed everyone else in the class (in which I now seem to be the only girl) by immediately identifying it as the Basic Set from the Fourth String Quartet. Lex was impressed (with that and my knowledge of hexachordal combinatorality); I was quite pleased, even if it is one of only two rows I could identify (the other being Berg's Violin Concerto row, unique for its succession of major thirds). Claire was going to come over for dinner that night, and eventually did, but instead of the curry I'd planned (just about all that could be made with what was left -- we here in Third South are in desperate need of a car for grocery shopping trips!), we ended up with tortellini and leftover soup before hopping the shuttle to orchestra. The syncopation in the Saint-Saëns is going to drive Daniel or the winds crazy, I think. Oliver and I ran to Tarble in the break, speaking German (vielleicht kann ich so mein Deutsch nicht total vergessen). I came back and thought about brownies or something chocolate and vegan for the Lover of Raab, but we had no vanilla, and I had no time. I decided to attack the learning curve in the powerful math side of LaTeX while simultaneously using it to prepare the homework for Math 9 that was due the next day. This was interrupted for Dip, when I thought I was meeting Ross beforehand but ended up trudging alone past Crumhenge and under the SEPTA tracks, to the water where I heard squeals. Laurel, Alyssa, Ross, Roban, and I all submerged ourselves very quickly, and then repaired to the Barn for tea. And then more math. Which kept me up -- well, for a good long while, let's just say, listening to Schönberg's Das Klavierwerk, which, as a disc as a whole, is pretty cool, which is fortunate, because you can't tell where one Stück ends and another begins. And today was just a grey, low blood-sugar Friday, grey and glowing, with oppressively high barometric pressure in the air, or something that made everything seem as if it was upped a few atmospheres in some scientific testing jar. The air was stale and spring-like at the same time, and certainly the little purple crocuses poking out of the shortcut behind the Black Cultural Center and across the President's Lawn to campus didn't seem to understand the difference. (I hope they don't freeze when this thaw reverses.) Underhill's orange counter was welcoming, as was its new copier that doesn't destroy your copy cards, and new PCs (plus one nice G4); more Schönberg behind the desk (all four string quartets). Showered the Crum microörganisms off my body, and then stared at things for a while -- painted my nails alternating red and orange. Is this an aesthetic whim or a sign of my declining mind, I wondered aloud to the pleasantly-omnibarnpresent Alyssa? It was clattering windy, whipping the trees outside the apartment together clackingly, and a lit cigarette cherry across the pavement outside the Pointe. Rockwell Church ("jam correctly," Ross admonished at my departure) with Nadav, Jeanne, Anni, and kids, was nice, Joti mimicking Doppler effects on his guitar, and even Geneva didn't make me cry on this bloated grey day. But it did make my thoughts wander. |
february, 2002
Broccoli Raab pie Rebecca had made, only to
discover that Broccoli Raab is Bitter as Fuck, and abandoned it to the
least vegan meal we could think of -- omelets with goat cheese and
jarlsberg; milk; chocolate ice cream for dessert. Later that night as I
coöpted Joel into helping me drag couches to and fro -- the big ugly
one out of my room and into the dining room, where it is comfortably
sinkable; and the small pine-and-black-cushion IKEA loveseat into mine,
where it is put to much better use --, Rebecca happily speared the raab
piece by piece, relishing the vegan nastiness and requesting that the
event appear online. Your sui generis eating habits have been duly
posted, dear roommate.
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I'm still shaking. I'd been listening to my 1948 Bruno Walter Carnegie Hall recording of Mahler's (oh, but who else's?!) Das Lied von der Erde for the past few days, letting the sounds carve patterns in my ears before I heard Orchestra 2001 perform it this evening. The New York Phil is wonderful, as are the soloists, but that recording from over fifty years ago, which has been multiply remastered, is scratchy, and sounds like an old LP on a dusty grammophone. And recordings never do a piece justice. They opened with Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children, which was less ridiculous than I'd expected, and even powerful at moments -- at least, that was the adjective I used to myself at the time, which has since been dwarfed and drowned by the Mahler. In the latter, Suzanne DePlantis and Stuart Neill's voices were rich and well-trained, even though the tenor could have possibly used a little more facial expression when asserting Was geht mich denn der Frühling an! / Laßt mich betrunken sein!. But the last movement -- and the composer knew this -- when he showed Bruno Walter the score to the last movement of the (»Der Abschied« "The Farewell") piece, Mahler asked him, »Was glauben Sie? Ist das überhaupt zum Aushalten? Werden sich die Menschen danach nicht umbringen?« ("What do you think? Is this too much to bear? Won't people kill themselves afterwards?") --I wasn't dead, but I was shaking. I cried throughout the whole half hour of the last movement, reminiscient of certain instances of last fall almost, proving that what I'd alleged to my roommates about my current stability was, if not a bald-faced lie, at least not the full truth. Or proving that Mahler sits in the same place in my heart as was previously joint-occupied by another German. I hadn't seen this live, and with supertitles (projected, semi-coincidentally, by ex-Swattie Eric Haeker '00) -- which (as I was proud to be able to realize) were mostly poorly translated and too abbreviated (not his fault), but which served a purpose -- and it struck me full-on. All thoughts I'd had about the Schönberg-reduced score being inadequate for this quite-symphonic piece were mostly gone by the penultimate »Der Trunkene im Frühling« and had totally disappeared by the last movement. Unglaublich. Thought lightly scored, the texture was rich, every note placed linearly towards Mahler's 1911 death (five months after which this piece was premiered). It was as if Mahler had scored my last semester in Vienna. I came out, as I said, still shaking. Rachel postponed our rehearsal and asked if I was okay; I nodded wobbily, explained that the piece had been unconscionably beautiful, and went into the bathroom to finish sobbing and splash cold water on my face. I went downstairs, and re- ran into Eric, who was there "on a [supertitle] gig." He'd started a company with his crazy pothead Bach-meets-Xenakis mathematics of musical texture ideas, and is now hosting ice sculpting multimedia displays in the galleries of Philly, getting bigwigs to fund him to further this venture. I told him to hire me in a year and a half when I would be job-searching, to finish that viola piece he'd been writing when last I knew him, and reminded him that he still owed me dinner from almost two years ago. The past few days have been less traumatic than the past few hours (and I mean wonderfully traumatic with respect to the Mahler!), though they didn't seem so at the time. Saturday began with a PYO sectional at 8, and then going half an hour over with the Eroica. Maestro pointed me out in the middle of rehearsal, announcing loudly to the rest of the orchestra that I'm the only one who ever watches him, and I always have. "And she does it because she knows I love her." Oliver and I babbled about Vienna while we purchased bananas from WaWa and a baguette from LeBus for my apartment, catching the late train back. Mark (Angelillo) took Rebecca and me on a much-needed grocery shopping trip, and then from there to Delaware, where I found out the hard way that the only form of accepted ID in that state is a valid driver's license, and even though I had five forms of ID on me, all of which stated the same birthdate (over 21 years ago) and had the same picture on them, none of them was the only thing that they would accept. Bitches and hos. Mark let me punch him on the empty-handed way back, then shushing me and playing mellow Beck; I kicked the shit out of one of the peach dining-room walls and made a few scuff marks (which later came off). Be careful what you wish for, I guess -- I had been wanting to be carded ... still. Bitches and hos. I was furious, not to mention embarrassed. Joel-O and an '03 transfer Sarah cooked the best food I've had in a while, fresh that morning from the Italian Market in the city. Fresh pasta; succulent kalamata olives that I actually liked(!); ripe tomatoes; parmesan that tastes like its name ... such goodness. Gabe rounded out the dinner crowd to six, after which and coffee five of us went down to first north's "Chester Road Speakeasy" in honor of Mara's 22nd birthday. I had had intentions to work, but since I'd been up since 6:15 a.m. being productive, and since a glass or two of Beaujolais with dinner wasn't exactly propelling me headlong towards my desk, I attired myself in something like period garb, put my hair up, and joined the throng two floors down. Stupid things transpired. Got to sleep at a reasonable hour, missing a conversation due to my utter somnolence. Today began with banana french toast (bananas reclaimed from downstairs Rae, who'd strung them together as a skirt) à la Gravity's Rainbow, chapter one -- bananas both in the egg dipping mash, and then sliced between the resulting toast with butter and copious powdered sugar. Alyssa laughed at the mess I made with the sugar; Ross laughed at the source of the idea. Homework progressing. Made a lightswitch plate like Rebecca's, using liquid nails instead of the dried-up super glue in the closet. A wonderfully killing concert--
--god, diese Schönheit! Post-concert, the recording is not a quarter
as powerful as was the experience -- I can tell this will be
irreproducible, short of live. I'm not going to translate the lines
at top; they won't be done justice. And they're all
but empty without the music. Lorca (as used in Ancient Voices)
speaks to their effect:
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Rebecca told me to take off the purple knee-high stockings I had on for my interview, and she was right. I'll postpone the christening of those Japanese lacy presents from Alyssa until it's warmer, anyhow.
More teaball Earl Grey this morning as I finished typesetting my math
homework, house listening inspired by Ross's Phoenix
article, in which he mentions not the Sacrebleu which I
absorbed in intervals in Munich, but a new Dmitri from Paris album.
Wondering why, even though my discman has an AC adaptor going in to
the wall, it still wants me to put new IKEA double-A's in it. This
math homework could arguably be completed much faster away from a
computer, but I rather like it here, taking the learning curve of the
math environment of TeX slowly, and learning how to draw
boxes, correctly set tables, and use floor and sum notation, at the
same time writing Perl scripts either to be translated into the
pseudocode ("algorithmic language" -- mathematicians apparently
consider computer programs pseudolanguage; people like me who had
BASIC and up with their pablum consider the abstracted math type
pseudocode), or to do the prime factoring for me (in a problem to
prove that Euclid's method of finding the greatest common multiple of
two ridiculous numbers is, indeed, faster -- and they expected me to
really use a four-function calculator and not script it, ha). And
even if the damn thing won't print, even with lpd restarted,
it's beautifully set.
I had an interview that day, which is why I pulled out the Viennese skirt so classically brown wool and A-line that, but for the leather stripe down the front and back, my mom could have bought it in her day, and why Rebecca hooked me up with a white sweater, as all possible other tops were -- like most of my clothing at this point -- dirty. "Dressed for success," Joel-O put it, and I felt pretty good about it. That and the cute MaNGo jacket I wore into the city also meant I got more than my share of catcalls and honks, at which I was unpleasantly surprised. Forgotten that it comes with the territory, kinda. Got to the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at 34th and Walnut by way of a free train (possibly for the same reason as the honks I got, so I guess it has its perks, too), to find the big red-haired Reed graduate John Bell, followed by the prof Steven Bird, for whom he's working. The two of them explained what they needed an ling undergrad for, and I outlined my background in that and in CS -- this decision to minor in that department is the best decision I've made in a long time, I think -- and they said I'd be "a marvelous asset to our team" or some such phrase. Rock on; I'm so excited. Not only is this the first real job I'll have ever had, in that I'll be doing something about which I actually know something, but (and for precisely that reason, I guess) it sounds damn cool. As far as I understand it so far, I'll be transcribing linguistic data "which has never seen the light of day" from a Cameroon language, and preparing it and other organized data for CD-ROM publication, as well as working on web interfaces for the above in PHP and MySQL. Um, could you have found me a job that I'd like more at this point? (Answer: probably not.) And on the UPenn payscale, I'm no longer making McDonald's wages. So I came home elated, but exhausted (four hours' sleep the night before -- ah, LaTeX), and, after hitting Ben's photo gallery opening (which I very much liked, for reasons I couldn't articulate), slept for about an hour before the barn kitchen became Japanese-plus-house (?) with the frying of Moosewood tempura and the grooving to funky music, the occasion being that Ross's parents were in the area. I like them a lot, especially his dad, with whom I'd spoken a little French while we were chilling in Paris that day, and with whom I now spoke auf deutsch for a while, which was cool. About ten people were present for the dinner extravaganza, I think, including a post-photo Ben, probably tireder than I was; Gabe; Alyssa; the 'rents ... Carl Hoffman started a percussionistic chopsticks-on-china banging, which was cool, but the entire duration of which I was torn between enjoying it and thinking, if you chip my goddamn new china ... (new square blue plates at IKEA Thursday afternoon). Others washed dishes (I atoned by doing the load tonight) while Gabe kneaded my shoulder like bread dough, getting a knot out of my neck that I'd thought was a pinched nerve when I woke up Thursday with about half a normal range of motion in my head. I can still feel the effects of his fingers today -- I've never had a massage like that before, and the experience starts me thinking that I should perhaps start seeking out this kind of treatment more often, either from friends or even professionally. My entire left deltoid is painfully soft. Playing this morning was not therefore a challenge, per se, but it took a little thinking to keep that entire muscle slack while sawing away at Dvorák New World. I had designs of doing homework, but those faded with fatigue, and sugar-on-my lips cloves. This morning, PYO trooped in Verizon Hall (how I hate that a company gave its name to this acoustic marvel) in the interiorally gorgeous Kimmel Center, and played Dvorák's Ninth sitting interspersed with the Philly Orchestra, under Maestro Christoph Eschenbach. Since we're such a large group, we got split into two suborchestras, so I only got to play the first two movements, but just that was pretty awesome. Sat behind my new teacher, who poked my stand partner and told him to be nice to her student. Wish I could have heard (or played!) the concert tonight. Because Oliver, Lisa, and I missed our train back, we lunched at Samosa, and then caught the Market East 2:17 back. Naptime for too long, but I think I needed it. Michelle came over and made an coconut milk and lemongrass soup that I loved, which Rebecca and her grill pan quietly subverted with some eggplant and mushroom, and cinnamon mints afterwards. Went over to the faculty dance concert, which I didn't like, and which with the exception of Kemal's piece was dumb, and left with Claire in tow at intermission. Fed her noir litchee Chinese black tea and Swedish gingerbread, after which she rigged up a spice-drying rack from a flashlight-and-fire-escape-hunted stick and rehung our wire baskets. Made a stab at figuring out if I was dumb was it just the choreographers, came to a lovely stalemate and then washed dishes until the hot water ran out. Dmitri from Paris is now accompanying what will soon be homework, Claire on the loveseat translating Latin odes; me about to attack the CS before the night before it's due. Sacrebleu, wie die Zeit verfliegt!
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Met the freak wonder that is
bubble tea in a chinese bakery around the corner. Extant since
1983ish, and the recent rage in New York, this tea plus black tapioca
pearls has migrated down to mainstream Philly Chinatown. Oliver,
Lisa, and I each got one -- he drained his; she finished most of hers;
I was rather shocked with each bubble, and not entirely pleasantly so.
They were chewy and sat in your stomach like little organic marbles.
At least I had a fat orange straw to make me happy. Predicting
nightmares about tapioca pearls shooting up the oversize straw at me
when all I wanted was sweetened black tea with milk, I finally stopped
all intake of tea or bubbles on the train ride back but held onto the
cup for amusement value. Ben S., playing guitar and drinking a beer
on the front porch of the barn, made the shocked face I had and
proclaimed it freaky or funky or weird shit or some appropriate term
(which it indeed was -- all of the above). Joel-O's face contorted
similarly, woah!. Ross took to slurping five or so pearls at a
time shloop shloop shloop shloop shloop, black silhouettes
through the orange plastic straw purposely big enough to let them
pass, and then returning the cup and its dwindling contents to the
table. This started around 3 p.m. when I returned; at 3 a.m. when I
now am making my way back from Worth J and K, the bubbles are still
shloop being consumed shloop sporadically.