Back from the Pacific Northwest

I got back Sunday night from the Pacific Northwest. I know you are all anxious to hear about my exciting adventures. Of course, Christi already chronicled them, probably better than me, but here goes anyway.

February 12, 2002

Flew into Portland last night and drove up to Seattle this morning with Christi and her parents. We went to Pike’s Market. It’s a famer’s market, a fish market and a bunch of shops, bot no chain stores. It was nifty and interesting. Also, it goes on every day, which is very cool (and must compete with grocery stores quite a bit). Christi wanted to buy a hat for Owen, but didn’t. Poor owen will have to wait until we go back in april.
then we went to Jack Straw Productions, where we heard our pieces on the toy piano nonette. It sounds much better on the toy pianos than it did in MIDI realizations. the room is small and very live (that’s sound engineer jargon for “echo-y”) so the pieces really fill up the space, but apparently it sounds good in dead (that’s sound engineer jargon for “not echo-y”) rooms too. Joan Rabinowitz, who I met at a confrence last spring and who is the director of Jack Straw, took us on a tour of the building. they have two nice studios and two control rooms. One big and one small of each. They’ve got macintoshes running protools, but also have other tape technology, including analog reel-to-reel. Everything is labelled in Braille, because blind kids come in and do production work. Apparently they really dig the reel-to-reel machine. there’s also a small room of KRAB radio archives. (KRAB was a community radio station, but is no more.) There are many fewer tapees in the archive than KPFA, but the tapes are worse organized and may be in worse shape. they have no production facilities like Fantasy in Seattle, so no professional service can do tape baking for them. (Tape baking: sometims, when tapes get old, the glue that holds the magnetic material to the plastic strip corrodes and the magnetic material falls off, taking all of the sound recording with it. If the tape is heated (I think it’s 200 degrees F for ten hours, but I don’t really know), the glue can temporarily rebind long enough for the tape to be played once, so it can be backed up to something else.)
We checked into our hotel and then went back to Jack Straw (the name has nothing to do with British politicians, btw, the director is a pacifist) to hear Trimpin speak. (Trimpin is the guy who thought up and built the nine toy piano juke box.) Ellen Fullman was there. She was a featured composer at the Other Minds festival last year, and I the driver for that festival. she asked Christi and I why we were in town. christi said, “we came up for this.” Ellen replied, “You did not!” Ellen is also in the Klavier Nonette but hadn’t noticed Christi’s and my names on the list.
Trimpin talked about sonic sculptures and building controllers for them. Before computers, he used player-piano-roll sort of technology. Now, he custom builds processors to control celenoids. His stuff is made out of a lot of scrap-yard pieces. The toy pianos were all broken. many were purchased from ebay and the shipping costs often exceeded the price.
We listened to Ellen’s peice. (Janice Gitech, who was a presenter at the same confrence when I met Joan was also hanging around. It’s the old-girls-network or something). Ellen’s piece uses 64th notes. One piano will start a phrase and another will start the same phrase one 64th note later. It sounds like an auto harp, the notes are definitely sperated, but a 64th note is a very short duration. Her piece has a nice use of spaces and silences. It’s interesting nd beautiful. It’s also her first traditionally notated piece. We went out to dinner with her. Christi’s parents thought that we had just met her that evening. they also thought we had just met Joan. they were confused as to why people kept hugging us if we had just met them. Maybe they’re just friendly. anyway, there’s going to be a festival of Ellen’s work in holland. A whole festival of her and folks collaborating with her. It sounds very exciting.

Augusta Read Thomas (b. 1964)

Augusta Read Thomas (born in 1964 in New York) is a Professor on the composition faculty at Northwestern University, and is on the Board of Directors of the American Music Center. She previously taught at the Eastman School of Music, and she is currently Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (through May 2000).
Ms. Thomas’ chamber-opera LIGEIA won the prestigious International Orpheus Prize.

Melinda Wagner (b. 1965)

Melinda Wagner (c.1965), winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion, has graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania.

She is the recipient of numerous honors including a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a 1996 Howard Foundation Fellowship, three ASCAP Young Composer Awards, resident fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and an honorary degree from Hamilton College.

Chen Yi (b. 1953)

Chen Yi was born in 1953 in Guangzhou, China. She received degrees from the Central Conservatory in Beijing and from Columbia University, New York. She joined the faculty of the University of Missouri-Kansas City and served as composer for other entities including the vocal ensemble Chanticleer. Awards and fellowships are numerous.
She has been the Lorena Searcey Cravens/Millsap/Missouri Distinguished Professor in Composition at the Conservatory of the University of Missouri-Kansas City since 1998. Chen has served on the composition faculty of Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (96-98) and has been Composer-in-Residence with the Women’s Philharmonic, Chanticleer, and Aptos Creative Arts Center in San Francisco (93-96), supported by Meet The Composer’s New Residencies Program.

Fellowships have been received from Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and American Academy of Arts and Letters (Lieberson Award). Honors include the first prize from the Chinese National Composition Competition (Duo Ye for piano solo), the Lili Boulanger Award (National Women Composers Resource Center), the Sorel Medal (New York University), the Alpert Award (CalArts Institute), a Grammy Award, the Eddie Medora King Composition Prize (University of Texas), the 2001 ASCAP Concert Music Award, the 2002 Elise Stoeger Award from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Friendship Ambassador Award from the Snow Memorial Fund, the honorary doctorate from Lawrence University, WI, and the adventurous programming award from the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers (for Music From China in New York).

Libby Larsen (b. 1950)

She has created a catalogue of over 200 works spanning virtually every genre from intimate vocal and chamber music to massive orchestral and choral scores.
Libby Larsen has received numerous awards and accolades, including a 1994 Grammy as producer of the CD: The Art of Arleen Aug�r, which features Larsen’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. Her opera Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus was selected as one of the eight best classical music events of 1990 by USA Today. The first woman to serve as a resident composer with a major orchestra, she has held residencies with the California Institute of the Arts, the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, the Philadelphia School of the Arts, the Cincinnati Conservatory, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Charlotte Symphony, and the Colorado Symphony.
In 1973 she co-founded the Minnesota Composers Forum.
She has served as composer-in-residence with the Minnesota Orchestra and the Charlotte Symphony and is the newly appointed Composer-in Residence with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra.

Among her awards are the National Endowment for the Arts Composer Fellowships, the American Council on the Arts Young Artist Award, a Bush Artists Fellowship, commissions from Meet the Composer/Readers Digest Lila Wallace Foundation, and mant other commissions. She has been Composer in Residence with the Minnesota Orchestra (1983-87), a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota and California Institute of the Arts, as well as a guest lecturer at colleges and universities throughout the country, and is a Co-founder of the nationally acclaimed American Composers Forum.

Shulamit Ran (1949-)

confessed to being composer, teacher, wife, mother, and chocolate lover. Yet she also won a Pulitzer Prize and a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award for her Symphony. She has written in a number of genres, including opera.
Shulamit Ran won the Pulitzer Prize in Music for Symphony in 1991.
She served as Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1990-1997) and with the Lyric Opera of Chicago (1994-97). Her Symphony earned the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in Music and the 1992 Kennedy Center Friedheim Award; recent honors include a 1998 Koussevitsky Foundation Grant.
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Music/Composition/Composers/R/Ran,_Shulamit/

Tofu SoyRizo Scrambler

  • 1/2 onion (or two green onions) chopped
  • 4 cloves garlic, minced
  • spalsh of olive oil
  • 1 medium block o’ tofu, chopped or crumbled
  • 1/2 tsp turmeric
  • 1/8 tsp cumin
  • 2 Tbs Braggs sauce (or soy sauce)
  • 1/2 package soyrizo
  • Optional mushrooms, spinach, chard or other scambled egg-type items

Combine onions, garlic and oil and saue until the onions are translucent. Add everything else and saute until rizo is defrosted or tofu is lightly seared. (soy rizo is much easier to remove from the plastic when it is frozen…) Cook till moisture has gone away. 2 or more servings.
This is high in protein and is a complete protein group. Great for vegan-atkins weirdos or other folks looking for extra protein. Good for any meal, not just breakfast. Heck, I just had it for dinner and it was yummy.

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich b. 1939

Studied at Florida State and the Julliard School
She was elected to the Florida Artists Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in 1995, was named to to the first Composer’s Chair in the history of Carnegie Hall. � Musical America designated her the 1999 Composer of the Year.
Ellen Zwilich is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Music (the first woman ever to receive this coveted award), the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Chamber Music Prize, the Arturo Toscanini Music Critics Award, the Ernst von Dohnanyi Citation, and Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, four Grammy nominations, and, among other distinctions, she was designated Musical America’s Composer of the Year in 1999.
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Music/Composition/Composers/Z/Zwillich,_Ellen_Taaffe/