July 14 - Hot Time in the Old Town

Harriet heads up to Washington on a very warm Bastille Day (as Matthew Swartz reminds us in History), with music from F.J. Haydn's late works (including excerpts from Missa in tempore belli, Trumpet Concerto, and String Quartet No. 62 ["Emperor"] through Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 4; then John Cage's Music for Marcel Duchamp and the second half of the Beatles Eleanor Rigby, among other delights, for the Pianists.

Record


Esther Xerxes, Op. 78

Ouverture



(a generic Middle Eastern dance [16th-8th-16th-8th-8th] of an altered G.F. Handel's Xerxes: Ouverture -- synthetic scale of Lydian Harmonic Minor... Do-Re-Me-Fi-Sol-Le-Ti-Do)

in the lab, with Doug back on the coffee run; returning to orchestrate the first seven pages of Esther: I. "Bring Queen Vashti" -- making a bike-and-pool run in the Southwest Asian relative cool of the evening after the setting sun.

April 15 - The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Up and out early, speeding reasonably legally toward St. Mary's, for what has turned out to be the only teaching gig of the week, with music of Johann Sebastian Bach's Cothen and Leipzig periods,


then a walk on the Briones-to-Diablo Trail, Diablowise, from the Lafayette Ridge Staging Area,



past Spring Hill Elementary School on



Pleasant Hill Boulevard to the



Eucalyptus (and, temporarily, Horse) Trailhead, seemingly



straight up Acalanes Ridge,



past more eucalypti in a windbreak,



with views of Las Trampas,



Acalanes High (the Dons are down there somewhere)



Deer Hill Road,



Elizabeth Canyon Pass on



Lafayette Ridge, and



the Briones Highlands.



There's time to reach a saddle in a high bowl,



above



and below pre-recession housing.



The return is mostly the same, save for a variant stretch past a tree



swing



and colorful side ridges.



After scouting out another Acalanes trailhead on Monarch Ridge Boulevard,



with heroic vistas of Mt. Diablo and Walnut Creek,



it's lunch at China Garden (with its own Devil's view), serendipidously meeting up with Amy Brinkman, from Elephant Bar, then



finishing the orchestration of and recording



Solomon:



VII. This Woman follows at Diablo Valley College, before making the leap over the Bay to



Noh Space in San Francisco for a very fine Dioclesian/Diocletian rehearsal, including the latter's I. First Paragraph Music,



IV. What Shall I Do?



(with Alexandra Jerinic [Diocletian],



Kimberly Anderman [Drusilla],



and Maria Mikheyenko [Edward Gibbon]),



and VI. Country Dance, with its ups and



downs. Down home following, beginning the instrumental disposition of



Solomon: VIII. You Know (The Building of the Temple and Palace)

January 22 - Light Where All Else Is Darkness

Quiz 1 for the Spring 2009 Music Theoreticians, and everyone does well (a good sign, since experience suggests that those who fail the first quiz do not make it through the course), then off to Marin, via Emeryville's highrises, for papergrading at Celia's, postbox (with greetings), etc., and



home for orchestration of Babe Ruth: II. Moabitena, pages 9-10.