Month: February 2024

Working on this past week:

• Practicing: still swamped with upcoming concert music, noodling a little with the Bach 6
• Listening: I’ve been on an algorithmically-assisted hunt for new-to-me baroque music, or new-to-me recordings of old favorites, seeded by some old-to-me recordings of old favorites
• Writing/recording: zeroed in this week on building structure for an old mockup I did of a sort of hybrid rhythmic cello ensemble thing. Fun to develop it further.

On a long kick of reading/watching stories about stories. I think it started last year when I watched White Noise and The Fabelmans back to back. (That was a weird pairing, to be honest.) Recently caught up to The Starless Sea. (Loved it.) And…can I claim Only Murders season 3? (No, maybe not. Funny stuff, though…)

Speaking of long quests, I’m on a glacially slow hunt for the perfect A string for my cello. Larsens are fine but die a shrieking death after 6mos. Versum Solo only lasted 3mos and was a little too bright for me (though people said nice things about my tone, maybe I should sell a kidney and revisit…). Rondo didn’t work for my instrument (though I love that D string). Kaplan was like 97% what I want for tone and playability and lasted a year. Trying a Pirastro next. I’ll report back in like 100 years.

Revisiting Imogen Cunningham. And…from Mark Anthony Fox, is this not the most perfect photograph ever made of a cup of coffee? (Swipe to the 3rd photo–though the portrait is also amazing.)

There’s a pair of doves nesting on our kitchen window sill, so we’re trying not to scare them off (though they don’t seem all that bothered by us).

Working on this past week:

• Practicing: upcoming concert music…upcoming concert music…bit more about that below…
• Listening: I’m obsessed with this harp arrangement of Britten’s setting of the Corpus Christi Carol. It’s a weird carol! Gorgeous, gorgeous setting by Britten. Part of a sort of melancholy winter playlist I’ve been collecting lately, with some lovely chamber music and a few new discoveries.
• Writing/recording: I’ve been on a mission to try to build some systems around my writing and arranging work. There are lots and lots of songs I’ve either chipped away at or worked out for a live gig, but that haven’t seen any final recording or publishing. It’s the kind of work I tend to think of as boring, but it’s fun to revisit some of this old work, and exciting to see a path to getting it out the door. More on that to come.

Since December, my practicing has been swampted by upcoming concert music–and even now there’s a ton of fun music coming up (Brahms piano quartet! several contemporary Latin American composers, Mendelssohn Hensel and Haydn and Dvořák quartets, two musicals, a bunch of orchestra stuff…love it!) But I need to find a new set of music that’s just for me; making practice time for myself feeds a lot of good things in my playing, even when it feels pushed aside by work urgencies.

Last year, I read Agnes Broomé’s translation of Collected Works, by Lydia Sandgren, and I still keep thinking about it. Brilliant, rich book.

There are some connections between all these things in thinking about art as artifact vs. art as experience–and what that means to me as a musician vs. as an audience member (or as a photographer). On the prowl for more good writing there.