Ready for Tomorrow

All-day breakfast, and other interminable meals ....

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

The world moves on a woman’s hips

The world moves and it swivels and bops

The world moves on a woman’s hips

The world moves and it bounces and hops

— The Talking Heads, “The Great Curve”

Our dress rehearsal today was excellent. Highly gratifying both in the wonderful talent of the players, and in the composer’s having effectively “written into” their abilities. And now, to Show Up.

Decimetring Along

 That old playground rhyme notwithstanding, I don’t recall even a single time that any of my teachers gave me a dirty look.

Quite possibly a failing of my own.

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

I thought, “Robert Fripp’s a good guitarist. Maybe we could do something.”

— Andy Summers of The Police

The duration of Music for the Un-Hip Hop is about six minutes and a half, so that is my goal for A Dance Floor for the Introverted. I have composed just a shade above two minutes thus far. At present the Fantasia on a Theme by Rahsaan Roland Kirk is at just about five minutes. I think I want to make it an eight-minute piece. We shall see. Good progress on both pieces today, and now they’ll rest for a couple of days.

Inching Along

Hearing that song from 1981 set me to thinking that the utter lack of imagination in the saxophone playing does not at all suggest a man at work.
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

What was once regarded as roaring, blaring dissonance coupled with incoherent rhythmic and formal patterns has become accepted today as one of the great musical creations of the age.
—David Hall, from notes to the 1951 LP of the BSO playing Le sacre du printemps under Pierre Monteux’s direction.

It occurs to me, as I have begun composing the Opus 178 № 2, A Dance Floor for the Introverted, that I have unwittingly sidled into a kind of landmark. As I used routinely to do before my stroke, I am at work on more than one piece simultaneously. Both the Dance Floor and the Op. 197 Fantasia are at about the one-minute mark, as I have tweaked the latter and expanded it slightly.