I did take a few photos of the scene, but they don't work the way my perceptual apparatus did during that one moment in time:

The day after the snow fell earlier this month, the sun was out. The bitter cold kept the snow in a light, crystalline state. I snapped a few pictures of the sunlight refracting off the snow:

Several of our rooms at the CMC are without heat, it seems, including our main office area. Douglas has been complaining to Facilities for the past week, and now it has become an extreme problem. I closed the CMC today. Like I said, lucky timing on the sabbatical!

Jill's in Florida, hopefully coming home tomorrow (travel, snow!), because she is planning to leave for Seattle the day after to help with wedding plans.

I've been working like a maniac on my book-project. The text is nearly 100% finished (including editing), and I've begun to assemble the sound algorithms. I think -- I hope -- it will come together well. Much to do!

Yikes, it's been almost two weeks since I've written here. This has been an intense time of work. I also agreed to do too many presentations, four in the last two weeks alone. On the other hand, doing presentations is part of my job. But I also need to finish my sabbatical projects. The good news: I finished last night entering all the music into a notation program for a Gagaku-instruments (biwa, koto and sho) and computer piece I agreed to write. Yay! I hope it's good -- I honestly don't know. It will be performed at the end of March. Now I can return to work on my book-project/app. I was calling it the "book thing", but I think I'm leaning towards "book app". I'm not sure what it is.

It's been a really intense month weather-wise, too. Like writing in this blog, I've been delinquent in getting photos posted of the snow we have received. I took the pictures! I shoveled the snow! Here are two links:

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I shot a number of videos of the snow falling. Maybe I'll post them at some point. I plan to use parts of them in my "book app".

Tomorrow Mara Helmuth was nice enough (a lot of niceness out here) to invite both John and I over for an "RTcmix mini-festival" at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Doug Scott will be flying in from California, and several other RTcmix-types will be joining us via Skype. It will be interesting to go back. I taught at CCM for a year in the 1990's. I've returned to visit and present work several times since then, and each time I expect things will be exactly like they were when I left. They aren't.

I was having that strange disconnect between expectation and reality driving to and from IU today. The journey on SR 46 was very pleasant, even after the insane winter here. Something about the light, the 'feeling' of the place, is unique for me. I cruised along, and I could see the outline of a Brown County hill, and suddenly I was in High School again. I knew that hill. I knew the trace of the land. But then I noticed there was a new housing development on the side of the hill. Wrong! Things have changed, and I am certain that my hazy/nostalgic memory has shifted, but it seems so immutable.

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It is all a memory for me, that feeling of "being" when you first learn of cancer. I am now caught up with mundane living, working on projects, thinking about post-sabbatical Columbia, planning things... and this sort-of scares me. All the visits with Dr. Pearse have been good lately. The awareness of mortality has faded, and I see the years stretching out ahead. What could ever change?

That's the frightening thing. I figure a time like this is exactly when my myeloma might return. I ascribe to it a sinister intelligence, waiting until I have been lulled into a sense of complacency before it strikes! Bwah ha ha! Seriously, when I think about it, I know I'm living on borrowed time. But we all are, aren't we? Just thinking about it isn't the same is knowing about it, like I did when the heavy drugs were going through my body. I guess that's the way we live.

Life does go on. Jill and I are planning a bathroom renovation at our apartment. Wedding plans for Lian and Itay are proceeding. Daniel is doing well at Columbia; a play he has produced is going up next week. I've done more presentations with Dave Sulzer:

CURIOSITY3: Sound in Art and Science
ArtLab: Music + the Mind

Ancient Soundscapes Reborn

As I seem to do every year, I snapped photos of the first crocuses when they appeared a few weeks back:

I've been working like a dog on the book-app. I'm about 2/3 through, with most of the programming finished. I can see the end. I do need to take a break to get more prepared for my Bowling Green residency, but it looks like I'll finish it in time to enjoy a bit of my sabbatical this summer. Big plans for the summer, though! Lian! Itay!

Speaking of the kids, both are still doing well. Jill and I saw a wonderful play Daniel produced earlier this past week, and Lian has gotten an excellent performance review for the year at Amazon. Lucky, lucky Brad. My parents had a flood in the basement from the freakish weather we are now seeing, but that's on-track to being fixed without too much damage.

We celebrated Daniel's twentieth birthday just before I left (April 18). No more teenagers in the Garton-Lipoti house! He's still very much enjoying Columbia. Life is good, for today.

Tom Beverly and Jason Charney are the two graduate TAs assigned to help me here in Bowling Green. They're both terrific guys and good composers (check out their work on the links here!). In one of my class presentations earlier this week, I mentioned how much I enjoyed music from different cultural traditions. Tom invited me to the BGSU "World Music Night". He was a member of the BGSU Balinese Gamelan orchestra.

A few minutes after I arrived in the concert hall, the 20-or-so members of the orchestra filed out onto the stage. They were dressed in traditional (or so I assumed) Balinese outfits, and put on an excellent performance. If you haven't had a chance to see live gamelan music, it is a beautiful affair -- gorgeous instruments and remarkable, hypnotic music. It was obvious that the director of the ensemble was totally "into" the gamelan. They were very well-rehearsed, and his body-language spoke of a deep engagement with the music. It was still a little strange in a way, though, hearing 'traditional' gamelan music in northwest Ohio.

After the gamelan, a group of 6-7 people appeared on stage for the "Afro-Caribbean" part of the "World Music Night". Again it was a group of people totally immersed in learning and doing this music. And again, people decidedly from the Buckeye State. My cultural cognitive-dissonance increased dramatically when the group began with a traditional African vocal performance. The main soloist was absolutely stunning. If I closed my eyes, I could hear and imagine an African woman, steeped in her own cultural heritage. When I looked at the stage, I saw middle-class white Americans, all very much like me.

Is there something wrong with this? I don't think so. Don Cupitt argues that we need to dismiss all 'identity politics' in favor of a unifying culture. Diamond celebrates the diversity of different traditions, and looks to lessons we may learn from maintaining many of them. I saw in the performances last night a compromise of sorts. We can hopefully nurture a globalized perspective, one that will allow us to co-habit the Earth as mindful citizens of the world. At the same time, we can celebrate diversity, a celebration predicated upon learning and doing and maintaining that diversity, recognizing that it is essential that we try to keep these precious aspects of humanity alive.

However, I can't help but think that perhaps something is lost in this approach, although that probably makes me guilty of a fake "authenticism" that I also don't like. At the same time, I can point to experiences I've had that highlights this discomfiture. For example, when Jill and I were active in the Princeton Unitarian Universalist church, every so often the music director would include an African-American spiritual song in the order of worship. He would then try, as enthusiastically as he could, to get the congregation to participate in a 'joyful' rendering of the music. It never quite worked, and always seemed a little embarrassing to me. Who were we, privileged members of (Princeton) society, pretending to be members of a class that has endured the horrors of slavery? I would console myself by thinking that the symbolic gesture was important. "It's the thought that counts."

In an essential way, though, I also realized that the people performing at the "World Music Night" were like me. This was, and is, my culture. I create imitation cultures. Even the pieces I'm doing at the BGSU studios are simulations, artifical versions of natural environments (check the last four minutes of this earlier piece I did for an example -- those bugs are all synthetic!). Much of my music is done by recreating in code the music I hear in different folk traditions (this piece, Almost Real is a good example). There's a famous quote from some famous person saying that great composers steal, or something like that. I don't steal, I simulate!

BGSU-KEAR Residency

I also returned in time to see the first Sound Arts MFA show at Columbia. Historic! Our two inaugural students, Carla Cisno and Nolan Lem, put together some amazing pieces. Carla's was a gentle and beautiful video projection from a wave-tank she had assembled. It was driven by an oscillator at about 40-50 Hz, and the particular materials she had chosen lent a beautiful coloring (refraction, I imagine) to the image. She also managed to choose a semi-chaotic driving frequency that allowed the image to subtly shift over time. Excellent. Nolan's installation was a set of open tables acting as frames for several hundred suspended dice attached to rotating camshaft-like assemblies. The dice then bounced on various pieces/kinds of wood below, creating a changing pattern of clicks and clacks. Nolan had also programmedn rate modulations of the cams, so it each time I visited it the pattern of sound had altered. Again, excellent. I experienced strange pop culture references from Nolan's piece; the "tumblin' dice", the foosball-like tables. I told him he should try to sell it to a wealthy casino as a lobby installation.

Our apartment bathroom renovation is nearly complete. I met with the CMC TAs and am starting to get back involved in Things Columbia. It appears that our composition faculty search has ended with an outstanding outcome. I still have several chapters and a LOT of 'cleaning up' to do on my book, but it looks like I will get it completed without difficulty in the next month. Springtime really advanced here while I was away. The dogwoods are blooming, and the tulips that managed to avoid deer-damage are gorgeous in our yard. I love this time of year. And I'm still feeling good, too.

And then, out of the blue, I got an e-mail from Jason Freeman, alerting me to another turbulence.org commission he had received. Turbulence has sponsored a number of interesting net-based works, and Jason has done several for them. The surprise for me in this one, Grow Old, was the nice 'shout out' he did for me. Unexpected! Nice! And as counterpoint to Jason's kind remarks, I got an e-mail from someone who has really been enjoying some of the music and texts I have put on-line. I hope both Jason and the e-mail friend appreciate how much this makes me happy.

That meant that I had dinner alone here at home, sometimes an enjoyable thing. Tonight I read much from Jared Diamond's new book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?. I'm about 3/4 through it, and although it is not quite as gripping (if that's even the appropriate adjective) as his earlier books like Gun, Germs and Steel or Collapse, it still gets me to thinkin'. That's a good thing.

In the current chapter, Diamond is speculating about the use/function and evolution of religion from traditional to modern societies. In the section I read during dinner, he discusses the use of religious rituals to offset "the unknown" and the anxieties associated with it. Where are the prey located today, allowing us to hunt and not starve? The !Kung Bushmen throw sacred disks to make that determination. What do we do when our oncologist tells us that no other treatment is now effective against a cancer? We pray.

Diamond sees the persistence of these rituals because of the persistence in our lives of "the unknown" (by the way, the scare-quotes here are mine, paraphrasing Diamond's argument to a great extent). I see another reason for the persistence of religious rituals, rooted in my involvement in the Unitarian-Universalist church as well as my vocation as a composer/musician. I think I can outline this rationale best with a story: When Lian was born, I came home the following morning -- the winter solstice! -- and constructed a little religious ritual of my own. Before Lian was born, I thought it would be fun if we had some sort of 'ancient monument' on our Roosevelt property. I noted out where the sun rose and set on both the winter and summer solstices. I set stones to mark these locations in our back yard. Just for fun, I brought the stones from the Annandale-on-Hudson area. I was teaching classes at Bard College at the time in addition to my Columbia job. I figured it would be a real mystery if the solstice-marking rocks came from far away. Hey! Stonehenge in our back yard! Think of the rise in property value!

When I came home from the hospital the night after Lian arrived, I went out in back and stood on the center stone of our mini-henge and threw some random spices in the air. What spices? I don't know. Did I chant anything sacred or silly? No. I just thought about life, and the holiness attached to things like the birth of your daughter.

Thinking back on this, it occurs to me that religion is now changing into art. These rituals, I do them because they are fun. They give me aesthetic pleasure. They mark a sense of "who we are" or "who I am" not in a transcendental, religious way, but in a personal, artistic-statement way.

Lian called Thursday evening. She's now officially (officially?) Jewish! I guess this is one potential outcome of a good Unitarian upbringing. It will make things much easier for her and Itay with family stuff. What a sweetie! Mazel Tov!

I finished my book-thing. I'm having a few people test it to be sure it runs properly; so far so good. Now I have to figure out what I should try to do with it. Try, yes...

This is a not-good change: I got word Tuesday morning that Jim Randall died. I've mentioned Jim a few times in this blog, but 'mentioning' doesn't at all do justice to the massive effect that man has had on my life and my thinking. I said a few blog-posts above this one that next to my father, Paul Lansky was one of the biggest influences on my life. Jim is next in line. I often tell people that he was the most intelligent person I have ever met. That is still true.

That fact alone should give some pause to those advocating carry-concealed, carry-everywhere, stand-your-ground, unlimited magazine capacity, but it won't. The horror of Sandy Hook didn't, or Virginia Tech, or Isla Vista, or Columbine, or... This is the same dysfunctional cognitive mechanism that allows people to deny 99.9% of climate-change science, and (to cut both ways on the political spectrum) allows people to deny the efficacy of vaccines against terrible diseases. Or to be blind to the economic disparities now defining our society. The wants and desires of the upper 0.1%-wealthy should NOT take precedence over the rest of America. It's wrong. All these things are wrong.

The fireflies have appeared, our summer flowers are in full bloom -- primroses, tiger lilies, roses -- summer is icumen in. I'm finishing the final edits and bug-fixes on my book-thing, and plan to submit it (oh I hate that I have to do this to distribute my work!) to the various App Stores by the end of the month.

We leave a week from Friday for our daughter's wedding. Oh my! I submitted my book-thing to the Apple app store. Now I get to wait to see if it gets approved, oh joy. Then the vast multitude who will find it interesting will be able to download it. I'm also just about ready to send it to Amazon for inclusion in their app store. The Amazon process (so far) is much, much simpler and saner.

Jill and I went over to Etra Park last night to watch the fireworks display, postponed from July 3 because of inclement weather (hurricane Arthur passed by NJ out to sea on July 4). Here are a few photos I snapped:

       

Take Lian's conversion to Judaism, for example. I don't think it grows from some deeply-rooted religious calling, or from a desire to fill a spiritual void. Instead, she is embarking on another adventure. We raised her and Daniel to be intrigued by many aspects of life and to wander where their curiosity will take them. Lian is pursuing that curiosity (plus it surely helps with future family-situations). Daniel's work in his lab is amazing. He's seeing academia, but a much different slice than I have inhabited. Different? No question. "Better"? Well, I would say so -- when I was their age, I was pretty much 'out there' (and not in a good way). But it all led to my current musical career, hmmmm.

I was thinking about these things tonight at dinner. Jill was meeting her friend and former work-colleague Betty for dinner, so I was reading while eating pizza. I'm almost finished with a book, The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt by David Giffels. It's a set of essays from the Midwest, specifically Akron, Ohio. They resonate well with me. At first I enjoyed his breezy style, in a "this guy is a good writer" (but not great) way, but also thinking "hey, I like this better than great writing". Toonight I realized that he's really an excellent ("great") essayist. He had written about his work as a reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal, especially when life was unravelling for the big 'Rust Belt' communities:

The newspaper conducted focus groups, and night after night I listened to tale after tale of a profound anxiety—of debt and uncertainty and diminished expectations. There was hope too, but of a ragged and stubborn sort. I wrote about people in bankruptcy and people who’d lost once-secure manufacturing jobs and people who worried they’d never be able to retire and people burdened with student-loan debt. I stood in a garage with a mother holding back tears as her just-graduated son backed a loaded-down midsize economy car out of the driveway and onto the street where he’d grown up, a street called Bittersweet Lane. This was the last of her three children, her last child to leave, on his way to New York City to test his possibility.

I've really been enjoying getting to know Itay's family a little more. We spent a fair amount of time with Ofer and Eti (Itay's parents) after the "aufruf" ceremony last weekend. Soon his brother and sister with their respective families were added, and the resulting family dynamic was heartening to someone hoping the best for his daughter's future.

There was a time in my life when I didn't think I'd live long enough to see this. And here we are! I hope the world is good for them. I really do.