Tag: The Hague

On November 18th, I went to Den Bosch to hear the world premiere of The Game of Life’s Wave Field Synthesis doo-dad. It has 192 speakers. Some of the pieces were quite interesting, but all tended to over-focus on how you can do really nifty panning with so many speakers.

On Monday, I played in the Composition department concert at the Korzo Theatre in Den Haag. I played jaw harp in a sort of piece by Jerimiah. It was an odd and long piece that ended with Jerimiah burning the hell out of his arm with dry ice. Jackass-esque. He had to go to the hospital to get bandaged up at the end. I don’t know about performances that involve the composer injuring him or herself. I also don’t know about that performance artist guy who had his friend shoot him in the arm. anyway, some of the pieces in the concert were nice. Many were boring, alas. Almost all were too long. 17 minutes seems to be the magic length for the composition department. You need 3 or 4 ideas to fill that length. Less than 6 ideas, though, unless they’re all closely related to each other. Most folks had too few ideas. Jerimiah had too many, but he was the only one to error in that direction. The concert lasted about 4 hours. It’s very nice that marijuana is legal here. I enjoyed the second half of the concert immensely.
On Wednesday, I went again to the Korzo to hear a concert that had been done also the previous night for the Gaudeamus Festival. Tom Thalim had a piece in it which I liked very much. Also enjoyed the piece of Barbara Ellison especially. (she was also the composer of one of the better Wavefront pieces on the Staurday previous). Overall, the quality of performance was quie high. It was a good concert.
On Thursday, a bunch of folks came over for Thanksgiving dinner. We had lots of food and fun. Also, we now have a an oven.
On Friday, the department of Sonology put on a little concert backstage at the Theatre at school. It was a short concert. Only 45 minutes. Hooray for short concerts. Also, the pieces presented were very good. Most especially impressive was the first one, which featured speakers having down overhead on hinged boards. Two guys with long polls set the speakers going in a pendulum motion. Audience members walked underneath the swinging speakers. the composer of the piece (I wish I remembered who that was) very wisely picked short sounds with high pitches for a lot of his material. This kind of sound is easier to localize and so the effects of the swinging were very apparent. It was quite nice.
On Saturday, Cola and I went to Amsterdam to hang out a bit. We took in the tulip Museum. The most interesting part was the section on the tulip market crash, when irrationally exuberant day traders bid tulip bulb prices up to astonishing heights. You could have a collection of castles for what one bulb went for. Then the market crashed and all the day traders were screwed. My dad told me about this when I was a little kid. I spent a lot of the dot com boom trying not to think about it, card houses or naked emperors, lest I be perceived as one of those who “just didn’t get it.” Aside from that, the museum was kind of boring and I don’t recommend it.
We also went to a store called “Female and Partners.” I have no idea why this place is world famous. Good Vibrations and Toys in Babeland put it to shame. I was disappointed. However, on the way back to the train station, I did find a really warm, nice jacket. It’s made of hemp and so has some silly features like a special pocket which can dispense rolling papers and a few hidden pockets. It’s got a faux fur lining and is water proof. My life is now that much better / warmer.
On Sunday, we went to Brussels. It’s a day trip to Belgium from here! We went to the Musical Instrument Museum there. The museum is one of the best I’ve been to. A very smart curator came up with the idea of giving people radio headphones. If you stand in front of a display case wearing the headphones, you hear typical pieces of music featuring the displayed instrument. Looking at instruments in glass cases is interesting, but it’s better to hear them too.
The museum has a complete set of Saxhorns. Adolphe Sax was the guy who standardized the tuba family. The actual horns made by Sax! I’d never seen them before. The also had Russian bassoons and something called a Monsterophecliede – a ophecliede with a dragon’s mouth. Think of a sort of bassoon-like instrument, but played with a tuba mouthpiece and instead of coming up like a stove pipe, it comes up like a monster.
Lurking hidden away in the basement, are 20th century inventions, like synthesizers and electric guitars. Also relegated to the forgotten floor are bells. Bells are great and deserved more space.
Anyway, the museum is great and should be seen. Don’t forget the basement.
We then wandered around town for a bit and saw the Hôtel de Ville, which is amazing. And then some overly hyped fountain called Manneken Pis. It’s a boy peeing. Across the street, Cola bought snails from a street vendor. We walked around a bit more and then came home.
Tags: The Hague, Celesteh

Hello all, I have some new phone numbers. +31(0)614132676 works right now. The other number, +31(0)708888187 will start working by the end of the week. My French number still works also: +33(0)667382191

If you are calling from within the Netherlands (or France, for the French number), you leave off the +31 (or +33 for France) and dial the 0 in the parenthesis. If you are calling from another country, like the USA, you dial 00 31, skip the zero, and dial the rest of the numbers. I pay roaming charges for the French phone, so I’d prefer if you call the Dutch numbers unless you’re in France, or if you know that I’m in France when you call.
Tags: The Hague, Celesteh

I would like to start by noting that I can’t connect to blogger for some reason from my school network lately, so I’m posting this via lynx in a shell account I have in the US.
Just wanted to post a note to folks I know in Real Life (TM). If you want to come visit me, my futon is your futon. I don’t live in Holland’s most exciting town, but I’m a short and cheap train ride away from some more exciting towns, like Amsterdam. Also, near to Belgium, a bit farther to Cologne. (the most exciting thing about going to Cologne, IMHO, is not Europe’s largest cathedral, but rather that the train passes through Gouda!! Home of cheese! (sort of))
Last year, about one person a month came through. It was nice to have people around. I got caught up in ‘merican stuff and went and did touristy things with them. Touristy things are fun, but I tend not to do them unless I have some sort of reason. However, yesterday I went to a couple museums in The Hague. They were a bit small, but not bad. I purchased a museum card which will gain me free entry into nearly every museum in the Netherlands. Huzzah.
Also, recently, I went to Cologne for the Computing Music festival. (Did I blog this already?) Twas fun. They had instrument-playing robots. The robots have a call for scores, so I will have to make a journey to Gent, Belgium to try out some robot stuff. I need to download some robot manuals to figure out what to do.
I’ve 60% decided that I should enlist Cola to retrieve Xena when she sees her parents. Xena would then fly direct from L.A. to Amsterdam. I need to confer with a vet to see what risks this entails for my poor dog. Also need to confer with the landlord.
If I sell my house in Berkeley, what will I do with all my stuff? I don’t think I should ship my grandmother’s piano to Europe . . .. I wish I could find a job as a composer that would pay to relocate me.
In other news: Nicole is going nuts from boredom and some mother fucking spammer keeps listing me as a return address, which means my inbox fills up with hundreds of bounce messages every day, which aren’t spam-filtered out because they’re not spam. augh. kill.
Tags: The Hague, Celesteh

The pump was stolen from my bike. It had this shiny black pump that was attached to one of the bars. I had taken the pump off after hearing that it would likely be stolen. Then I decided that it was not doing me any good hidden away and it might as well be put at risk because hidden or stolen, I still don’t have it on my bike. However, this logic failed to account for me being bummed at having lost a pretty good pump. Theft sucks. I wonder if there’s a way I could attach a new one and make it theft proof? I wonder how much the damn pump would cost to replace.
Tags: The Hague, Celesteh

I miss my dog. A lot. I want to get her in December and bring her here, but that requires some logistical work. For starters, if I bring the dog, that’s a commitment on my part to stay (at least) another year. How will I do that? Can I get a residency someplace? Should I do the MA program at the conservatory? Would they let me in?
Does The Netherlands quarantine pets? If so, can I just take her via France? (France does not quarantine.) Would it be easier on her to rent a car, drive to NYC and fly from there rather than flying from Los Angeles or San Francisco? (If I drive to the East Coast, can I get some gigs on the way?) How much would such a car trip cost?
Can I give her drugs that will make the flight less terrifying? What are the chances the drugs would harm her? What are the chances the trip would harm her? How loud is it in the cargo hold? How often do they forget to heat it? How often do dogs die in transit? Is there a way I can mess with her walking schedule (for example) to make the trip less traumatic? How many hours will she have to spend in a little box?
Will The Netherlands require her health certificate to be diplomatically certified? Can I use the same one that I will use to get her on the plane? (France needs a specific form which must be translated, and the airline needs to have one that’s 3 days old or less, so if I take her via NYC to France I need to first get a certificate from a west coast vet, get that translated, then go to NYC and get another certificate to fly.)
Do dogs need visas?
I didn’t take her last time because I thought the trip would be too traumatic and anyway, I was only going to be gone for a year. Having a dog in a big city can be something of a hassle. She needs to run and there’s not a good place in Paris (except the park where the Eifel Tower is has a lot of running dogs in the evening). On the other hand, there’s places here and I can take her just about everywhere with me: cafés, bookstores, etc, although maybe not to class. Maybe I can get a biiiiiig basket for the front of my bike and take her around with me on the bike, even though she’s a bit too large for the tram.
I think of her alone and terrified in the dark, loud cargo hold of the plane and it makes me sad. So I think about getting another dog here, maybe a small one that would fit in a duffel bag that I really could bring everywhere (even to class if s/he could stay quiet in a bag). A dog small enough to carry on a plane if I need to fly home at the end of the year. But I have a dog! (sorta) The best dog! I just don’t want her to get hurt or too scared. And I don’t want to go to all that trouble of cross country driving plus vet certificates, shipping case and blah blah blah just to have her here until June and then go back to the US.
I wish I could just buy a seat for her.Tags: The Hague, Celesteh

On Sunday afternoon, I played a couple of pieces at the <TAG> Gallerie in The Hague. I got this gig through a myspace connection. Myspace actually works for composers and musicians! You should sign up and post mp3s. It’s a way to get people to listen to your music and maybe go to your real website. Plus you can come up with a metric for judging your self-worth by the number of people who “friend” you. Since hardly anybody will ever de-friend you, your list of friends will keep growing. I have 300 “friends” including dead composers, fictional characters, porn stars, people I know in real life, and Luc, the guy who arranged the gig.
Anyway, the concert started with a trio of Han Buhrs, Guy Harries and Luc Houtkamp doing a sort of planned improv. Then Kader Abdolah talked for a while in Dutch about the history of music and text in Persia. Music was disallowed for a while, but the Qur’an is very rhythmic and so it was declaimed in a very musical manner, but not called music. Also, Dutch has many cognates with English, French and German, but I really need to take a class. Then I played Meditations pour les Femmes, then there was a break, then I played Faux-bourdon Bleu, then the previous trio came back but with the addition of Joseph Bowie on trombone. They did sort of improv cabaret stuff, which was fun.
During the whole thing there was a pair of stereo mics in the back for recording, next to a tripod-mounted video camera. Two people had handheld cameras and were also filming from either side. A guy was also taking pictures. Afterwards, two of the video cameras were used to interview everybody who had been on stage. Cola noted that it was the single most documented concert that she had ever been to.
The guy who interviewed me was surprised to hear that I was new in town, because he was hanging out in the studio of a radio station last week and they were playing a piece of mine Virtual Memory. That piece is truly irritating and terrible. He said that they stopped it before it was finished because it was too awful. The good news is I’ve been played on the radio in The Netherlands. The bad news is that it’s an irritating piece that will not bring me fame, fortune and women.
(You may wonder why I posted it to my web site if it is so fingernails-on-chalkboard. I did because to me it sounds very similar to some of the results of using Gendyn oscillators, which are Xenakis-designed algorithms for using stochastic noise to produce wave forms. They sound like data and Virtual Memory IS data, specifically the contents of my virtual memory buffer on OS 9.)
Anyway, I talked to the guy who (I think) was the DJ who played this harsh mp3 and I might be on the radio in person next month. The time for the show is very nocturnal for Europe, but it’s also webcast and is in the middle of the day for America.
My friend Polly was on the radio in California on KFJC and the next week, she was the most requested artist on the radio station. Which is awesome for her and is a testament to her music, but also shows the power of an interview. But, alas, I have no record out to promote, although I have one out of print and one never-in-print and enough cohesive material for one or two more. Maybe the album paradigm is dead and the future will all be mp3s on the web? On a theoretical level, I’m in favor of low-fi. I use the headphone outs on my computer instead of an expensive d->a converter. But there is noticeable quality loss for the mp3s, even at the relatively high compression rate that I use. (Can I be both lo-fi and rue a loss in richness?) (Obviously the album paradigm is dead, as I haven’t been approached by a record company.)Tags: The Hague, Celesteh

But it’s a good thing they’re different things, or nobody would let me sit anywhere. I have gone to every bank chain in the city, as far as I know. I have never encountered anybody who wanted my business less. What is causing this?
All of my American classmates have managed to open accounts, so it’s not anti-Americanism. Is it sexism? Is it homophobia? Do I not closely enough look like a student? Am I too butch for them? Not manly enough?
I ask for an account and they start looking for reasons to say no. Note that I don’t say that they’re listing requirements. They quite clearly want to refuse me. Given that I’ve gone to the same banks as my classmates, I can only assume that I’m experiencing discrimination. I was hoping that being the recipient of antigay slurs at the train station was an isolated event, but maybe not. Or maybe it’s something else.
I really miss France. Their bureaucracy is way easier and more logical than here. And when it wasn’t, one could always resort to yelling. I don’t think that will help here, but I’m about a millimeter away from it.
Tags: The Hague, Celesteh

The Queen

Yesterday, there was some big queen-related festival. I speak not of the makes of Bohemian Rhapsody, but rather the head of state of The Netherlands. It’s a constitutional monarchy, so she actually wields power.
The capital of the country is Amsterdam. It says so in the constitution. But The Hague is the seat of government. That means that all the government buildings and meetings are in The Hague. It’s where the queen lives and where parliament meets. It’s as if the constitution of the United States listed New York City as the country’s capital, but all the government stuff was still in DC. Except for the museums. Anyway.
So yesterday was a sort of State of the Union kind of thing, where there is a procession from the queen’s residence (a palace?) to the parliament and then she addresses them and lays out her legislative agenda. She rides in a royal carriage. There were bands (and sousaphones) galore, people in uniforms on horseback. A gold-festooned carriage. A festival-like atmosphere filled the city center. I did not have a school holiday, but many elementary schools clearly did.
I thought it would be remis of me (thinking only of you, dear readers) if I didn’t at least try to get a glimpse of the queen. Alas, I was standing in the crowd on the wrong side of the palace-y thing. I saw her carriage, but only from a rather far distance. I was on my way to see her get into the parliament, but it was jammed with people. I did, however, see an image of her doing a very queenly wave on a TV screen. Which is almost like being right there.

Royal Spatialization

There was a lot of music associated with the festivities. Including the aforementioned marching bands (and sousaphones!) but also calliopes. These were quite involved, featuring female figures on the front who actually beat bells. Inside, were pipes and percussion. Several years ago, I saw a MIDI controlled calliope for sale on EBay. Next time I see one, I will not hesitate. Anyway.
I was walking home from school in the evening and heard more band music. I love a march, so I walked over to the source to see what was going on. In the square in the center of town, there were a bunch of bleachers set up. All full of people. The described a large square area where the marching bands were performing field shows.
A field show is that thing that marching bands do where they go out on a field of some kind and march in patterns. In the US, this is most often done at (American) football games during the halftime break. It is also sometimes sighted at competitions. The competitive aspect is strong. I’ve never heard of people just doing it for fun without competition somehow involved. And yet, here in The Hague, bands are marching around, playing marches and settings of pop songs and making formations. There were a couple of high school bands, but the others were all adults. Gray haired trumpet players.
Perhaps in honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, one of the bands had pirate flags on it’s drums and did a show called legend of the seas. All in all, everybody looked like they were having more fun than I recall from my field show days. I got information about The Hague’s marching band Victory. They all had matching sousaphones, all in much better shape than mine. I’ve failed to locate a tuba shipping case and I could really do with a playable instrument.
A year or so ago, I did some marching with the Wesleyan Pep Band for a half time show put together by Neely Bruce. He, like Charles Ives, saw marching bands as a great way to do spatialization. I was reminded of this as the different instruments moved around and faced different parts of the Plein. People doing wavefront synthesis (a spatilization technique) talk about how everybody sitting in a different place will hear a different concert. This is true, but it’s also true for field shows. If the trombones are marching closer and closer to you and the saxophones are further away, you’re going to hear something different (obviously) then the people who have advancing saxes and retreating bones. The wave patterns you get from moving band instruments is way more complicated. Is anybody besides Neely working now to exploit this?
19th century technology still has something to say. yarr avast.Tags: The Hague, Celesteh