Ah, poor Free Composition. Ignored for a month or more, no postings, attempts at postings, or even thoughts of postings. Nevertheless, I refuse to feel sorry for my blog, an inanimate thing that is incapable of receiving sympathy. Free Composition is my sketchpad, after all, its primary purpose to provide a venue for me to keep my writing chops in shape between assignments.
I had no need of a sketchpad over the past six weeks or so, given several large-scale assignments including a last-minute rush job for a major artist’s recital, the final concert of the California Symphony season, and most pressing, the entire season for the delightful New Hampshire Music Festival. That’s all finished and all paid for, even if the New Hampshire part isn’t quite yet in print. My little cottage industry as a professional writer on music earns me a tidy extra income, not anywhere near enough to live on, but not anything to sniff at, either.
So back to the sketchpad.
It occurs to me that during the school year/season I am a sponge in release mode, squeezing myself repeatedly and spewing out my stored contents. I teach. I write. I lecture. It’s all spewing in one form or another, sometimes a brew of stuff I’ve recently ingested, but mostly a mix of new info and long-standing knowledge, experience, and opinion. Now the school year is over and the season is winding down. I have one more week at the SF Symphony—mid-June—and then I put a “Closed” sign on my door for a while, until I venture out to New Hampshire to speak for a few of the festival concerts there.
Thus: summer, when I relax my grasp on my sponge and return it to absorb mode. Now I can pick up new ideas, soak up new information, learn new music, and in general recharge and refresh my spongey self. Summer is my time for reading and listening.
Reading: right now several music books are on the docket, including Michael Talbot’s fine Vivaldi biography in the Master Musicians series. I’ve used it any number of times for reference. Now it’s time to hunker down and really read the thing. Ditto bios on Robert Schumann and Giuseppe Verdi. I’m also into reading mode in fields other than music; after all, there’s more to me than just a guy full of notes and explanations of said notes. So I’m reading Michael Schmidt’s marvelous The Novel: A Biography, all 1200-ish pages of it, both for the pleasure of its fine prose and for the wonder-filled world that it covers. I’m dipping into some childhood books as a reminder of my youthful bookworm self: a few G. A. Henty jobs, just as stilted now as they seemed then, but in their own mushy way an awfully good way to absorb the lessons of history. (I might have been one of the few kids in the seventh grade for whom Shakespeare’s Henry V did not cover unknown territory; Henty had taught me all about Agincourt long before Shakespeare’s version flew onto my radar.) An old novel by Howard Pease, Thunderbolt House, about a family’s adventures in San Francisco immediately preceding, and during, the 1906 earthquake. It’s less compelling now than it was. And Pease’s habit of naming his characters after San Francisco streets might have prepared me for life here as an adult, but seems awfully twee and transparent now. Alicia Sansome, Dave Montgomery, Gideon Haight. Yecch. How fortunate he decided against naming somebody Mamie Great Highway or Geoffrey Sunset or, heaven forfend, Sally Sixth Avenue.
Listening: a bottomless to-do list awaits. My addiction to box sets continues apace; I have approximately 250 CDs in various matched sets sitting around untouched. And some of the other recently-purchased sets have seen little more attention than being copied to the server. And then there are some LPs that have floated into the house over the past year, not to mention a gut-busting box of 78 RPM discs that came my way—all first-class stuff in superb shape, but hardly trivial items given their weight and bulk. Nor are they really valid candidates just to sit down and absorb by listening; they need transcribing to digital and remastering. However, they promise to be worth the bother. I have completed the digitizing/remastering of an Eroica from Koussevitzky and the Bostonians (from the mid-1930s) that is altogether fascinating. That’s one thing about 78s: they impose a fairly stringent entrance requirement for enjoyment. But that’s good in its own way, given that there is nothing lightweight about deciding to absorb the Eroica off a set of six shellac 78s, each of the 12 sides played manually, one after another. Well, at least once and thereafter with digital ease.
As I write this, Serge Baudo and the London Philharmonic are soaring their way through the finale of the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony, with Jane Parker-Smith doing the honors on said organ, courtesy of the EMI “Eminence” label, one of the many box sets that I meticulously transferred to my server and have yet to examine with any rigor. I run no risk of running out, that’s for sure.