Music@Menlo, week 1

So I've been busy at the first week of the Menlo chamber music festival: mostly at two concerts I was assigned to review. I hadn't been terrifically thrilled at the idea of a concert with two cantatas and two concertos, but it turned out to be excellent stuff, especially the Cello Concerto by C.P.E. Bach, one of my favorite 18C composers. I managed to get in print one of my odder theories - at any rate I've never seen anyone else propose this, though it seems obvious to me - that when what was called the "Sturm und Drang" style of nervous drama spread around Germanic music in the early 1770s, the composers were just imitating what C.P.E. Bach had been doing for the previous 20 years.

On the other hand, I was looking forward to the concert of music for winds, but it turned out rather disappointing, mostly because the pieces by Haydn and Beethoven were bottom-drawer stuff, not very good. They were, however, performed excellently, so there's that.

Besides the Prelude concerts featuring two performances of the rare Beethoven quartet for piano and strings, described in the reviews, I got to two more Prelude concerts featuring two performances of the Mendelssohn Op. 13 quartet by a group called the Abeo Quartet. Op. 13 is one of my favorite quartets, a big and hefty work, and it really felt like having been on a long journey with these performers by the time it was done. Thrilling to get it twice.

Two small boys were sitting in front of me for that and a Brahms Viola Sonata, neither of them very beginner-friendly works. But they didn't squirm too badly.

Also a couple of master-classes for the student and young professional performers, concentrating on putting the work across to an audience. One of the instructors said he didn't like shoulder rests for violins because of the angle it makes you sit at, or something. As if in sympathy, the second violinist's shoulder rest fell off onto the floor with a clang as she lowered the instrument after the slow movement of the Mendelssohn.

But the highlight of the week was a two-hour (plus intermission) lecture on the Haydn quartets by violinist Aaron Boyd, whose combination of erudition, wit, and fluency would make for a winning show even if I hadn't already been in the market for a good overview of this repertoire. Haydn wrote 68 quartets and Boyd couldn't cover them all, but about half got a treatment and all the sets they were published in got generally described. Except for the introduction and coda, Boyd sat with three colleagues from the festival's main artists - violinist James Thompson, violist Paul Neubauer, and cellist David Finckel - and about half of the time was spent playing excerpts from the quartets, plus examples showing Haydn's influence not just on Mozart and Beethoven, but Bartok and Schoenberg. The emphasis was on the audacious originality and imagination that went into Haydn's quartets, ideas that sometimes became so standard they're hard to recognize for what they are. For instance, Haydn apparently invented what Boyd called "beginning before the beginning," that is setting a repeating accompaniment running for a bar or two before bringing in the theme. You hear that at the start of Mozart's K.550 G-minor symphony and Beethoven's Ninth, he pointed out; he did not point out that it's the same thing as "vamping till ready" and so standard in pop music that you'd hardly think anyone had to invent it. I wish I'd taken notes of which of the quartets played I was already familiar with, but it was a thoroughly enlightening and enjoyable evening.

story of a disaster narrowly averted

out of the land of the dex

In addition to attending several Menlo festival events and writing two reviews for publication (I'll summarize that when the week's over), I've been busy with the same task that's been massively occupying me for most of the last four weeks, which is indexing an upcoming book for the Mythopoeic Press. It's a collection of essays which I'd describe as focusing on the aesthetic expression of Tolkien's moral principles in The Lord of the Rings. I'd already critiqued an earlier version, and as I'd indexed a book by the editor long ago, someone prevailed upon the authors to hire me for their index.

I see an indexing job as taking 5 steps.

1. Get familiar with the text. I'd already read this book twice, but I read through each essay again to grasp it as an individual whole before proceeding to:

2. Marking up the proofs. I need a printout of the final paginated copy for this, and I mark it with a felt-tip pen (not yellow: yellow is too light, but not a dark one either: pink is good) with occasional pencil annotations.

3. Transcribing the markups into an Excel spreadsheet. Four columns: heading, subheading if any, beginning page, ending page if different. Alphabetize it, and:

4. Rework the spreadsheet into index form.

5. Cleanup. Mostly done in conjunction with step 4. Look for inconsistencies and problems; word search of the PDFs of the proofs (need that too) for every entry to confirm I didn't miss anything important.

The major work of indexing comes in steps 2-3. An index is not a concordance: I only index names if there's enough material on them to make it worthwhile for the reader to look up the entry from the index, right? Index concepts, too, especially important ones described in consistent language. And always divide lengthy entries into subheadings. A long string of page references is useless to a reader. This time I placed a maximum of 5 references before requiring subheadings.

There's much consideration of phrasing and separation of entries in step 3, but throughout steps 4-5 also, I'm always reconsidering and editing and clarifying. Many indexes are terrible, but I'm determined to create a good one.

UK political neepery

So it's Sunak and Truss. About what I expected.

If it were up to the MPs, or the general voters, the choice would surely be Sunak, who seems slightly less batty. But it's up to the party activists, who probably prefer Truss for the same reason. It's not looking well for the Tories. Remember when they picked IDS? And that was when they were out of office.

kitten on the keys

My review of last night's Menlo concert included the words "one of the". After Tybalt finished rolling around on my desk for a while, it read "on+++---+-e of th++*-+-*e".

eight-step procedure

1. Cat jumps up on desk.

2. Pick up cat, place back on floor.

3. Cat jumps up on desk.

4. Pick up cat, place back on floor.

5. Cat jumps up on desk.

6. Pick up cat, place back on floor.

7. Cat jumps up on desk.

8. Pick up cat, get up from chair, carry cat out of room, place in hallway. Close and latch door.

intractable problem, tiny solution

My now only newish mobile phone said, in its instructions, that to add your own ringtone, put the file in this particular folder on the phone, from which a settings command will allow you to transfer and designate it.

This requires plugging the phone by its USB port into a computer, and that's where the problem came in. When I did so, the phone wouldn't appear on the computer's device list. I'd had occasional problems on my computer in the past, so I tried it on two other Windows computers. Same result.

Finally decided to do something about this. I tried my all-purpose commercial computer gurus. They said there's probably an enabling or setup command somewhere on the phone, but they didn't know my model and didn't have time right then to search for it.

Tried the phone's help number. Out of our area of expertise, they said, and nothing in their manuals helped. Try one of our retail stores.

Retail store guy didn't know anything either. Even after I explained how I'd verified the problem he suspected that it was a problem of the computer, not the phone. I took leave to doubt this. Learned eventually this wasn't a real vendor retail store but a licensed one, so they're not even employees of the vendor. This was news to me; it was a dedicated outlet when I was last there, before the pandemic. Directed me to the nearest real store.

At the real store, they were busy but the person who took down my name for the customer waitlist, upon asking what I was there for and learning the answer decided to skip the waiting process and help me right away herself. After a little fumbling, located a command buried deep in settings called "USB storage." This was disabled; she enabled it. "That will probably work," she said, though lacking a computer on which it could be checked.

Took it home and it was. Now I have a ringtone I can remember is mine.

found and bought

I've purchased two small mechanical devices that require the insertion of a battery (not included) to work.

One is a travel alarm, to replace my old faithful which disappeared some time ago, probably left behind in a hotel room. One wants to ensure it works properly. Insert battery, set time, set alarm to go off two minutes in the future, and wait. OK, it works.

The other is a stud-finder. It would be helpful, once I reinstall my hanging shelves, for them not to be knocked down again next time a cat jumps on them. I once had a mechanical (no battery) version of a stud-finder, but I could never figure out how it worked. This one has clear instructions and there's even a demo video on the manufacturer's web site. But that doesn't help. If I am to believe its readings, the studs keep moving around inside my walls. Sometimes they're 20 inches wide. Then they disappear entirely.

Then I've found a box of my mother's old theater programs, mostly 1940s-60s. Most of these can just be dumped: obscure local companies and college productions, touring ensembles. I'm keeping the program from an early touring production of Fiddler on the Roof because it has an article by Sheldon Harnick about how he wrote the lyrics.

And into the box for sale to the used bookstore are a few curious items that, probably, nobody younger than myself will recall from when they were current. Prestige motion pictures, the kind that also had ushers and intermissions, used to come also with program books, as you'd get in the stage theater. But they were large format, at least 11 inches high, and at least partially in color. Souvenir books, really. The expected contents: articles about the movie and its topic, bios of the principal actors and production personnel, stills from the movie and production shots. There were four of these, two of Lawrence Olivier Shakespeare films from the 40s, Henry V and Hamlet, and two from big David Lean films from the 60s, Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia.

Those final two were about the last of their kind. I didn't see the movies in the theater, I would probably have been too young not to squirm, but I do remember my parents bringing home the program books and my looking through them. So yeah, I remember these. I wonder if I'll have to explain what they are to the bookstore buyers. I'm sure they've heard of the movies, but the idea of a program book for a movie is so alien now that they may wonder: what are these booklets, what are they for?

the least important part

When I posted about this in an article comment section I got a sarcastic reply about how important this must be, but there's no requirement that comments be on important topics. Therefore this is an unimportant post.

But it seems to me an indication of something - maybe the unreality for us old folks of the whole idea of years beginning with "2" - that people are having trouble either remembering what year it is now, or that a December-January timeline is going to have two different years attached to it.

At the hearing yesterday, chairman Thompson made one of his imposing references to the committee's topic, phrasing it as "the events of January 6, 2020." Oops.

Then I saw an article with a reference to the "tweet Donald Trump sent after midnight on December 19, 2021." Oops.

That this is later referred to as "last December" demonstrates the author's further detachment from mundane considerations of time.

crown of ignition

A few years ago I broke a tooth - a lower molar. My dentist said it probably needed a crown, but I could survive without one, and he didn't seem inclined to take it further than that, so we let it be.

My new dentist, though, was not, and insisted on scheduling an appointment ASAP, even though I'm going out of town in two weeks. The lab will just have to make the permanent crown faster!

I went in this morning for the first and grizzlier of the appointments. This was my first dental operation ever without the benefit of either nitrous or some pill likewise designed to calm and relax, and it may have been the absence of that, rather than increased age alone, that caused me to feel completely wiped out after two hours of being orally mauled. (My last operation in the chair was a root canal under nitrous five years ago, after which I hopped out of the chair feeling just fine.)

On the other hand, this dentist has two innovations for the patient's use that I haven't seen before and which were quite successful. First, industrial-style sunglasses (the kind that cover the sides of the frames). Previously I spent most of the time in the chair with my eyes shut so as to not get anything in them. Second, a plastic device to bite down on to ease the strain of keeping one's mouth wide open. This also saves wear and tear on the dentist who doesn't have to keep telling the patient to open.

At least that part's over, leaving but a searing memory, and a bill (my new insurance, the one which forced me to change dentists in the first place, is limited in how much of this it covers).