Call for Scores

A Concert Series featuring contemporary San Francisco Bay Area composers
is being planned. It is intended to provide exposure for the significant
compositional work going on in the area. Vocal and instrumental works
and a limited amount of electronic and tape assisted music will be
included.
It will be performed by the Worn Chamber Ensemble in San Francisco
halls and other Bay Area venues.

First SCORE CALL is for a concert in early
December 2003 for one or more works requiring
no more than 15 minutes total performance time.
Instrumentation will be one or more of the
following: fl/picc, cl/bass cl,bsn/contr. bsn, tpt,
perc(1), kbd ( pno & syn ), mezzo soprano, vla,
vc, cb. Additional instruments at composers expense.
Vocal works should be free of copyright issues.
Postmark deadline extended to April 30, 2003.
Please submit scores, tape(s), CD(s), resume
with S.A.S.E. for return of materials to

Robert Arnold Hall
16162 Lilac Lane
Los Gatos Ca 95032
408-358-2283
rahcomp@attbi.com
http://www.Music-Hall.net.

FYI. Actually, FMyI.

to do

  • Research women composers for Women’s Philharmonic
    Not started
    Due in one week
  • Write symphony
    First thirty seconds written
    Due on March 14th
  • Women’s Phil database of doom
    oh my god. i am not thinking about this right now.
  • Move mp3s to xkey.com so as to set up a replacement page for now defunct mp3.com page
    I’m going to go do this right now
  • Email professer at east coast school about studying there
    I need to do this asap, but i think i should fix my mp3 page first
  • Set up biodiesel domain
  • Find cheep computers and software for Christi’s non profit
  • Halt impending middle eastern war and replace US with a Socialist Soviet Republic

busy busy busy

Re-use / Re-cycle

Re – use and re- cycling are not free. I re – user beer bottles and put more beer in them. This process uses a lot of hot water and can also involve bleach or iodine. Yet, it still seems to be more energy efficient than buying new bottles every time. Also, although glass is infinitely recyclable, it must be melted down and otherwise use a lot of energy every time. Noone suggests that we should just give up recycling and use new materials for glass and paper every time to to save energy. No one suggests that we give up on re-usable, re-cyclable glass to use plastic bottles and thorw them into landfills when we’re done with them.
Why, then, do some folks alledge that disposable diapers are better than washable? Babies using disposable diapers send one ton of waste to the landfill every year. This goes in a santiary landfill (unlike construction waste, which there is more of every year, but it can be dumped more haphazardly). True, it takes energy and water to wash diapers, but it also takes energy, water and petroleum and lots of space to use disposable diapers. Perhaps it would be better to think of washable diapers as recyclable diapers. Nobody suggests we should use virgin paper pulp instead of recycling paper (since recycling takes energy and water), so think of diapers the same way.
Some folks add the energy needed to transport diapers to and from a diaper service. As if disposables floated home under their own power and then floated on, similarly, to the landfill. Some folkd point ot the existence of “biodegradable” diapers. Papaer also biodegrades, btw, but we still recycle. But paper does not biodegrade in a santiary landfill. Nothing biodegrades in a sanitary landfill. It makes a lousy compost heap. And even if it did biodegrade, so what? You can take the output of your composting toilet and spread it around your rose garden, but you can’t do the same with landfill stuff, since it’s full of all sorts of pollutants. throwing something into a landfill is throwing it away and any usefulness and value it might have had away for the next several generations, perhaps forever. Biodegradable diapers would stills end one ton of waste to a landfill.
Oxygen bleach kills germs. If you soak something in oxygen bleach, it keels germs just like chlorine bleach, but unlike the latter, it “biodegrades” into oxygen and water, because oxygen bleach is just hydrogem peroxide. Therefore, you have a method of killing diaper germs that is not polluting. I just thought I’d share..

Food

food is good. Food is love. Food is making us fat. Food is dead. Food has poison in it. Food has been industrialized. Food is processed. Food is unprocessed. You should eat more meat. You should eat less meat. You should eat not meat. Dairy. Grains. Vegetables.
Food is a demon that haunts us. Our relationship to food has gotten to be tremendously complex. Is it because of poor body image, industrialization? I’m hardly unbiased here as someone who strives to eat mostly vegan food.
I avoid animal products because of industrialization. Modern animal husbandry is terribly wasteful and polluting, unhealthy for people and animals. But I tell people that I’m vegan because I love food. You can eat tons of vegan food and still be hungry. I get to eat more than everyone else.
People should love food. It gives us nutrients and comfort. We often eat comunally, so it nourishes us socially in addition to physically. The family dinner is a tradition in our culture. My favorite thing is when Christi makes her shepherd’s pie and we sit down with firends and housemates to eat it. I love shepherd’s pie. I also love the way it is a special occasion that brings people together to share food.
but what about body image, industrialization, vitamins, etc? My theory is that it is perfectly ok to have a no list. (obviously, since i try to be vegan), but you should also have a yes list. What are your favorite foods? Why do you like them? What are your favorite recipies (or restaurants)? Also, I heard a nutritionist on KPFA saying that everyone should take a good multivitamin. That way if your diet is a little unbalanced, you’re still ok. Since this was KPFA, I know that he wasn’t a tool of the vitamin industry.
Time for lunch…

Lou Harrison died last night. He was a wonderful world music and percussion composer. He had a tremendous impact on classical music. He was also, a warm, talkative and friendly person. This is very sad. I’m glad I got to meet him as the OM 8 driver last year. He talked about local architecture and the SF World’s Fair, for which the Palace of Fine Arts was built and how he first heard Eastern music there and it made him want to compose. He also spoke some Esperanto with me. He claimed to hardly remember it and then rapid-fired off several sentences. My old housemate was his sign language teacher. It used to be very exciting when he would call. World-famous composer calling for my housemate! Anyway, it’s very sad and a big loss for music. He never stopped composing.

turned in my mills application today. There was a box full of protfolios in the musc department office. it was a big box and it was full. there are something like 50 people applying for teh grad program. This is not a good year to apply. But it’s ok. If I don’t get in to a school this year, U of Washington is starting a very interesting looking program in the fall 2004.
Mitch gve me some printer advice. He told me to reinstall the printer driver and then run some callibrating utilities. this helped a lot. but my printer still sucks. more score is all pixelated and not beautiful, as it should be. i think this might be a pdf problem tho. anyway, they won’t pick it on printing looks alone, although it’s not terrible and i’m going to turn it in this way, it is not wonderful enough to display. no collector will say “This is the first copy ever of Aelita with rehersal letters drawn in by hand! I must have it to display upon my wall.”

Synthesizer Madness

All of the synthesizer people went insane today. I got ranty email from all sorts of insane people. Crazy all-customer list rants. Random spite. Weird people. Everyone is very eager to helpfully point out everyone else’s flaws and perhaps spit on their ancestor’s tombs as well. Crazy people. I’m not opening any more email. Nobody sends nice email. Until the internet decides to play nicely, I’m staying in my corner of the sandbox.
Now I’m paranoid that somebody will stumble across my blog and get upset and send me flamey, ranting email. I wasn’t talking about you, hypothetical reader! I hate peole who always think that I’m talking about them!
I failed to get my Mills application in the mail before the last pikcup. Were I applying for studio arts, I would be automatically disqualified from applying. Hopefully the music people are more lax about timing (they usually are (bad joke goes here)). I’ll drop it off on Monday morning.
One time, when I was an undergrad, a concert started five minutes late. The head of the department was angry about the timing. It was record-breaking. He didn’t show up until ten minutes ater the scheduled start time. It was the earliest a concert had started in anyone’s memory. Maybe I’m just repeating old rumors. Grad school is insane. I dodn’t know whether it’s better to be ranted at over email or in person.
I got email asking if Christi and/or I wanted to be composers for somebody’s “Composer Spotlight.” Since the composer immediately previous would be Trimpin, I feel a bit underqualified. Maybe they normally have um… emerging artists.
I have a score prepared to submit to Bowling Green’s call for scores. I hate my printer. I ran the utility to do seomthing about the double-printing it was doing. Everything had two images. It makes things fuzzy. anyway, I ran a utility to fix this. Everything lines up perfectly . . . on the left hand side of the page. It’s wonderful on the far left. The right side is worse than before, but the left side is photo quality. Although it’s grossly unfair, and I’ve just been complaining about people unfairly targetting each other for rants, I beleive my printer problems to be Mitch’s fault.
First of all, Mitch owns a t-shirt with the name of the company that makes the printer written across the back. Secondly, Mitch said their printers were ok. There’s no thirdly, but it’s clear already that Mitch must steal me a printer from his work. They’re a printer company. they must have tons of decent printers lying around.
Were I not a highly conscious environmentalist, I would have thrown my printer into the bay by now. The stupid printer was only five dollars more than the print cartridges. This is obscenely wrong. I am not just going to go buy a new printer. I’m going to rant at Mitch instead. No, I’m going to print extremely ugly and somewhat hard to read documents, in at least 12-point font. Maybe 13 point.
I need to print my Bowling Green score. (I also need a title for it, sicne the working title “Trainwreck after one minute, thirty seconds” is probably not the best.) I think I will end up at kinkos or something. It needs to be in the mail monday. On mondays unlike saturdays, you can mail things until midnight and get a postmark on them with that same day. Saturdays, things shut down at 5:00.
Will anyone read through all these paragraphs of rantage? I feel grossly unhappy. I think I will mope all day tomorrow.
Last thought: I have a small flag that flew about the space shuttle Discovery in the first flight after the Challenger disaster. I got it for an essay I wrote on why the US should have a strong space program. Anyway, I remember sitting in my fourth grade classroom and hearing a school-wide announcement that the Challenger had blown up. Sister Magdelena told us to pray for the crew and their families. We turned on the TV in the classroom and watched replays of it blowing up.
This is not why I’m bummed. Maybe I caught depression from Christi or something. She sneezed on me the other day.
Mitch should fix my printer.