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I seem to get better at Max logarithmically, in the sense that 2 hours of work back to back is worth a lot more than two separate hours, and 2 8-hour days is a lot better than 16 hours spread out over a month, and not just because I get more time in a smaller space, but because things tend to build on one another, and short stretches of time just don't lead to the big breakthroughs. not that I'm having any super breakthroughs, but I am making a lot more sense of some of the things that I want to make sense of. There's still (and likely always will be) lots of random jitter objects that I'll never be able to use well, because there are just so many damn jitter objects, and let's face it, I'm got a lot more experience with objects related to audio than I do video. anyway, lots f fun to make good progress.

Unique, New York-only highlights from the month there include: Metamkine, which was one of the coolest audio/visual experiences of my life; the Moving Sounds festival, with really cool performances of pieces by Beat Furrer and Bernhard Lang, among others; lots of interesting movies, including Jodorowski's Holy Mountain, which I've wanted to see for a long time; and giant helpings of delicious food, the most surprising of which was probably this amazing sandwich placed called Xie Xie that had four unique and staggeringly-good options including a sandwich with a smoked egg salad that I didn't even understand but really liked. We also got to go to a pulp book convention, which was particularly cool in the sense that these old editions of mystery, sci-fi, and other weird fiction had really distinctive covers that aren't as prevalent today for some reason. There were lots of other great things that I did during the month, many of which wouldn't be easy to do in most cities. That's the fun thing about NYC, to be able to do stuff that simply can't be done most everywhere else, like eating distinctive chinese food at 3 AM. There was still so much more I wanted to do while i was there, but I think that will always be the case when visiting New York.

Of course, NYC is also kind of tiring, and there are times when you just want to sit and do nothing, at least I do, and that's not as easy there. And there were still lots of other people I either didn't get to see or didn't spend much time with, and that's too bad too. I guess part of what I'm experiencing now that I'm back is this weird mixture of wishing I had more time there plus this strong happiness to be home, not there at all, because the mundane stuff is easier here than it is there. And I need some time for the mundane for a while, for reading and relaxing and getting real work done.

Now I begin the second stage of my sabbatical, working on stuff back at home. It'll take me a little time to figure out exactly how I'm going to schedule this, and I have the feeling it'll be a little tricky getting this together, just in terms of navigating spaces that I want to do different kinds of things. Part of this is that I think I'm going to need to spend more days on campus than I'd like, a realization that I'm not thrilled about, but since that's where my studio is, that's where I'm going to have to work sometimes. In any case, I'm not going to worry about it too much until next Monday, after I return from the SCI conference this weekend in Iowa.

I was able to make some changes to the first part of the piece we worked through yesterday, and this is something that I am pretty sure will work well. Essentially, it's one of the things we read through on Tuesday, edited slightly to include a couple of new ideas and things that came from other sketches, plus the whole thing has been doubled to be about 4 minutes long. That's a good length for a teaser,, which is the whole premise anyway - this was never supposed to be a concert version of the piece, so this is probably about perfect. It's also a somewhat incomplete thought.
My current thinking is that this will probably be one section of the larger whole, kind of like a "movement", though of course not in the traditional sense of movements. I'm considering an idea in which I use field recordings as buffers between segments, or even across segments. However (if?) I do end up using the field recordings, I need to find some way to use them in some role other than as accompaniment - one of the thoughts was to find ways to blend those sounds with my saxophone samples somehow, so that they're essentially composite recordings, kind of like the way I combine multiple samples of the same pitch to make a composite sound. In any case, I'll have to spend some time with the recordings to figure it all out. I'll also have to spend some more time listening to music by Luc Ferrari - I love the way he uses field recordings and combines them with live players.

Worked with the Ancians this week, first with some of the sketches that I'd put together and then also just recording some samples to use as part of the electronic part that I'll assemble later. Later in the week, I tried to jam a few of my sketches together and found that they didn't mesh as well as I'd hoped. In the process, I was reminded that, yet again, I am not capable of just magically making things work together formally. Same old story. Anyway, today when we read through my edited version that didn't work, I figured out at least what some of the changes should be for the final product. So this afternoon I'm making the revised version of a single movement, and that will be what we present tomorrow as the work in progress for their concert in Ely.

spent a couple more hours yesterday on the piano and came up with a few more sketches that I'll finish fleshing out today. Because a lot of the ideas I've come up with thus far are based around gestures with ascending or descending fifths, I tried to avoid them and came up with a somewhat strange melodic shape. It's a bit freer than a lot of the stuff I do harmonically, and I'm not entirely sure it coheres, but I'm going to finish fleshing it out today and see what happens with it. I think it probably needs a bit more color - multiphonics or something to cloud the harmonic texture a bit - but we'll see what I'm able to come up with.
One issue at the moment is that I don't have a good way of getting this music to them to play it, since I'm using hand-written scores instead of notation software. I don't have a scanner. I suppose I'm going to end up driving into town with my sketches to a photocopier, unless I can find one somewhere nearby that I can use. Considering that there's only like 1 store in this whole area out here, I don't know that that's going to happen.
I've decided to sit up in the front room today and get a fire going in the woodstove. I don't love the front room - sometimes it seems a little dark and clammy - but it's great up there when there's a fire in the stove. I have a lot I need to get done today, so I'm hopeful the space will work for me!

I've been working on fleshing out my sketches for the past few days, and it's starting to add up. The model I'm working on now is to have multiple variations for each idea. Partially, the thought here is that some of these ideas may ultimately develop into one another, though I'm also thinking just of trying several approaches to the same general concept. In any case, I want to try to get a bunch more of these things, and of course I need to make them clean enough that people can read off of them.

At this point in my life, I've been to a ton of concerts, obviously, and I'd have a hard time guessing how many times I've heard pieces with multiple movements, and yet I still feel strange during the break between movements, when the performers on stage readjust their music and noticeably move their chairs, fix their hair, or whatever. Occasionally they retune, which always throws me. I swear it seems some performers are dragging this out intentionally, though I know in most cases it's just a standard pause. I don't know why, but I'm still not a fan of this whole process. Considering that I'm nearing 37 years old, and that I've been dealing with this structure as a performer and concert-goer for 25 years or so, I think it's unlikely at this point that I'll ever get completely behind it as a composer. And how many times have I been to a concert when people clap at the wrong time? Just last week, people clapped after a first movement at a concert I attended, but the printed program didn't include the movements, and so the audience didn't know better and when it happened the performers politely nodded while continuing to adjust their music, and then everyone realized that it was a movement break and not a piece break and stopped their applause kind of abruptly, slightly ashamedly until they all looked at the program and realized that in fact it didn't indicate the multiple movements and so it wasn't really their fault. After the second movement, there was no applause because everyone made mental corrections to the program, and really, at this point, given the ill-placed applause from earlier, the audience wasn't going to clap again until the performers gave that knowing post-piece smile with a slightly more pronounced lip-upturn to indicate that this time, in fact, the piece was finished, and don't we all feel silly for how this turned out applause-wise. After the piece, the concert's artistic director came out and apologized for not putting the movements in the program, telling a little story about how she was surprised backstage to hear us applauding inappropriately because she knows us to be a sophisticated audience, but then she saw that it was her fault because it wasn't indicated on the program. Smiles all around, as the audience was reassured in their sophistication, ha ha.

This got me thinking about other rituals surrounding performance applause and the role of sophistication in how audiences behave. The post-performance bow/ leave-the-stage/ return-to-bow-again saga is an odd one, as sophisticated crowds usually know to keep going long enough to call the person back at least once, though it's always fascinating to observe the performers and audience navigate the pace of the onstage/ offstage movements in conjunction with the size of the applause to determine how many bows the performers get. Sometimes the performers nearly rush off-stage after their first bow, so as to ensure plenty of time for a second and possibly third turn on stage. Other times, performers take too long with their first bow and lose their chance at even a second one, though some audience members might feel that protocol demands they keep applauding even as at the same time other audience members stop applauding, some of them unsophisticated ones who don't know the ritual but also sophisticated ones who feel that since the performers milked their first bow it's not their responsibility to keep applauding through a second, and then there'll be this little moment of uncertainty as to whether or not the applause will sustain. It's amazing how quickly an applause can end in these situations, even in big spaces with a large house, which is one of the reasons it's difficult for the performer to gauge when to come back for that extra bow. There's only one thing more painful than applause dying abruptly while watching a performer stand visibly off-stage waiting to return for another bow, and that's when that performer decides to come out just as it ends and the audience has to noticeably restart their applause. Especially when I'm that performer.

The location of the stage door is actually quite important in this whole process. In some cases the stage door is so far from the front of the stage that performers have no chance to make it all the way back on their return trip, so they stop by the door and bow there. I always appreciate it when performers do that, because it alleviates the pressure from the audience members who feel the need to continue applauding until the performer has made it offstage, as protocol indicates we should. It also helps if this stage door is on the side rather than the back, because it seems less obvious that the performer is shortchanging the return trip if they're nearer the front of the stage. Of course there's also the applause as the performers come out before their performance, and sophisticated audiences continue to applaud until the performers make it to their positions on stage and bow, but again the size of the stage sometimes messes this up, as does the audience level of sophistication or in some cases just their dedication to that sophistication since, let's face it, there's lots of applauding at concerts as it is. I guess in that sense it's probably nice that we don't have to applaud after the ends of movements since there's already so much other applauding going on.

At jazz concerts this sophistication means we have to applaud at the end of solos, though not necessarily as the players come out on stage, depending on the venue and how they approach the process. Not much feels sillier than giving a few half-hearted claps after a tune's fourth solo in a mostly empty room, especially if that room's a nightclub or a restaurant where some of the people aren't even paying close attention anyway and just start applauding because they heard someone else in the room applaud. I imagine it's almost more demeaning for a performer to get a thin smattering of applause than nothing at all, since they know that sophisticated audiences may be applauding in these cases only out a sense of duty, an obligatory indication that speaks to the personal sophistication of the applauder and also recognizes responsibilities to the sophistication of the performer who expects to hear this applause.

The same kind of in-piece applause occurs sometimes in opera, when singers finish rousing arias and the audience starts applauding even though there's no break in the piece. On the one hand, this seems more genuine because it doesn't always happen, though of course this depends on the specific opera and the venue and the sophistication of the audience. Certain arias, the Nessun Dormas of the world, will almost always get applause whether or not the performance was particularly special, and thus we're getting back to the sophistication rituals that dull the significance of the applause. My favorite memory of odd audience applause occurred at the Met in the late 90s when the audience started applauding the set change. The stage was spectacular, so it made sense, and I like that we applauded a group of creative artists who probably don't get a whole lot of public appreciation. Maybe this happens all the time, I'm not (sophisticated) enough of an opera-goer to know. One nice thing about opera applause, though, is that since the music is continuous, and because the post-performance bowing ritual is even more regimented, with the performers taking their bows sequentially in groups of increasing importance to the performance, you don't really have to be sophisticated to applaud correctly, as long as you wait to hear someone else applaud before you start.

All of this stuff about movements and rituals and sophistication grew out of my thinking about form for my sax quartet, which continues to be painful. I was able to come to some decisions yesterday, but it was a painful experience to get there. And really, the biggest decisions I was able to make were that I needed to try some new things and get some more contrast in there, which is why I started thinking of movements. There's some nice stuff in what I've created so far, but I need to get some space from it and do some completely different things. All of the material I have so far is way too similar in tone and shape. My plan over the next couple of days is to get on a piano and try to write purely gestural ideas, and mostly quicker, denser ones. My current thinking is that I need to get back to what I'd planned to do in the first place, which was to think of several contrasting sections, hence all of the thinking about movements. Although there's a similarity to the days here in the Boundary Waters, I'd like to try to portray a richer landscape than I have been able to thus far. It's been too one-dimensional.

I have the feeling that twenty years from now, I'll still think that it will be easy to take my sketches and just magically come up with a successful form whenever I want to. I have no idea why I always think this will be easy, because it's never easy. I know this intellectually, but I still find it difficult emotionally when I struggle to create a form. The silly thing is that I know I don't need a finished form right now, because the point of next week is to workshop the piece in progress rather than to rehearse a finished piece, but I still want to flesh out these sketches more than they are currently, which to some extent means I have to know where they're going a bit. Otherwise they're just very short little ideas that just sit there. In any case, I have a lot more work to do to get this together, though I still have 5 more days to try to get some larger, coherent ideas to work with.

I think my new plan is to just come up with 15 sketches of between 2-5 minutes that the Ancians can play through next week, so I need to retrack a bit and just try to make that happen. If one of things things becomes longer and starts to assume a different form, that will be welcomed, but I'm going to try not to worry about it.

It's really raining hard today, and this is now the second week in a row that it's rained hard on Tuesday, preventing me from playing soccer in town. I guess this is not destined to be a soccer summer. They also have farmer's markets on Tuesday nights, and this is at least the third Tuesday I can remember in the five we've been here that's been wet, even though it hasn't been super rainy in general on other days of the week.

I've been working on sketch ideas the last couple of days, but I'm starting to imagine some formal structures as well. I know these won't actually hold up because they never do, but at least some of the segments feel like they're starting to link up in some way. I got about 5 sketch ideas done yesterday, which was about the target for the day. I've now got about 12 different sketches to work with, which I'm taking in to work on the piano at VCC, though of course I only like about half of them so I'll probably just explore those. I'll ultimately want to get more than that, but I've got another day or two to generate some more sketches. Of course I'll have to tune everything up an 1/8th tone to use the pianos in there since they're extremely sharp, which is really weird, but thanks to VCC for letting me use their practice rooms! very nice those people....

I listened to Slow Six this morning, their album Nor'easter, which is really lovely. The key for me with this is the depth of the levels of texture. Obviously, since this is a recording and not a live performance, there are some production elements at work, including the wide panning of guitar harmonics. But the key for me is the layering provides lots of things for the ear to listen for. This is something I try to do in a different way, since Chris' music is generally faster and rhythmic, but the notion of providing layers is an important one for my work too. Once I start really focusing in on a few different sketches, I'll have to see how that can translate. Since I've got four players and electronics, there should be lots of options for layering.

The last couple of days have been pretty productive, in the manner of trying lots of ideas that don't work. But that's okay, because I always have periods of trying lots of ideas that don't work. And one of the things I explored this morning was actually okay. Basically my goal for the next 2-3 days is to try as many different things as possible, so that I have a lot of different things that we can explore once the Ancians are up here. And in typical fashion, I'm going to try to just put completely surprising things together to see what results. For me, the randomness of the selection process, once I've cleaned the sounds I'm working with, is a very important part of the process. In a sense (essence?), what I'm doing is a form of lateral thinking, in that I'm putting sounds together than I wouldn't normally put together, and in doing so I generate material I wouldn't otherwise generate. I've learned over the years that I can't shortchange this part of the process, because I need to start from lots of ideas. I expect this to be even more true in this case, both because I have the opportunity to workshop the piece a bit more than I usually do, and also because this piece is supposed to be longer (at least that's what I said in the grant application, although since it wasn't funded at the number I originally indicated, I suppose I could probably cut down on the length of the piece now too, though really that isn't something I expect to do unless it just makes more sense for the piece).

I spent this morning looking through the Londeix saxophone book, trying to get a better sense of how some of the kinds of sounds I've been hearing will translate into notation. It's interesting to me how the relationship with the instruments actually works, in the sense that I've been singing lots of ideas and sections to myself over the past couple of weeks and trying to get a sense of what I want this music to sound like, but I haven't been paying any attention to the practicality of it. At the same time, the practicality of what the sounds actually will be when played by instruments will in turn shape the direction of the final product, in the sense that once I start actually putting these things out there they will change and become something other than what I was originally hearing, but in a good way. I'm not sure these ideas are really making sense as I write them, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that I see the process of composing in this manner as coming from two directions - from the direction of inner-ear ideas, which need to be translated into practical notation, and also from the direction of actual sounds produced by instruments, which need to be shaped into what I actually want them to sound like. I've been working mostly with inner-ear ideas thus far, but now I have some samples from Matt to play with, so I'll begin exploring from that second direction as well. I also plan to spend some time on the piano either this afternoon or tomorrow (or both), depending on how things go in the next couple of hours (it's noon now). I still need to do some dull, cleaning work, but I think I'll put that off until some time when I'm tired.

Last night a tree fell on our car, a large one (the tree). Fortunately for our car, it struck Peter's car first. Of course this was not fortunate for Peter's car, which was crushed. I would guess that the tree, a birch, weighed 1000-1500 pounds, although I really don't know how much trees weigh. It was certainly very tall and wide. Angling back to its original standing location, the tree at point of impact had probably traveled 30 feet. The entirety of that force was absorbed by the roof of Peter's Volvo, and then in turn the doors, all of which changed shape dramatically. There was lots of shattered glass. Were the Volvo not there, our little blue car would have absorbed this weight on its hood and that would probably have been its end. Instead, there's a healthy dent in the front quarter panel and some puncture wounds in the hood. It still runs fine, unlike Peter's car, which will be towed to the junk yard.

We learned about this a few minutes after heading outside to help Liz with her car, the back window of which was pulverized by a fallen branch from a different tree. We were in the process of helping her clean up the glass and find some plastic to cover the missing window when Peter informed us of what had happened to our cars 100 feet away. Liz drove to Minneapolis today at 6 AM so that she could fly to Bulgaria, so it was likely a noisy 5 hour drive with that visqueen flapping all the way. Hopefully it stayed on, because it's rained a bit more today.

An odd thing about all of this is that we couldn't find any other trees or branches that fell down anywhere else on the ten acres of property. It was a weird storm and seemed ripe for tornados, but it didn't seem to do much more than just enough to damage our cars. There's probably another branch or two that broke off somewhere back in the trees, but none of the other roadways or walkways had even a small branch on them.

Another other odd thing about it is that we would have been parking our car where Liz had her car parked except that last week we discovered that the woodchucks had become fond of our blue car and were climbing up underneath it. At one point I counted four woodchucks that disappeared under our car. The next time I went to drive it, I opened the hood first and found a woodchuck sitting on the engine. It crawled down but found some hiding place on an axle and sat there stubbornly, cowering. Ultimately, we had to douse it with water to chase it away. It hadn't damaged anything of note up there, but it had started to chew on the insulation and a little of the rubber, so we started parking it in a different lot over by Peter's car. In the end, it seems that our car would have been hit by something no matter what.

Today Ellie and I went to Grand Marais and took the day off of work - first day with no work of any sort in the three weeks we've been here. It was kind of amazing for us to get away for a bit, not that I haven't been really enjoying the time here (outside of the ear blockage episode), but it was still really quite nice to just get up, leave, and not think about work for a long time. It was also interesting to be over on Lake Superior, because the community over there is so different, even though it's also a BWCAW community. The difference, though probably starts from the fact that that community is also a harbor/shoreline community, while Ely is an interior/rural community. Grand Marais feels more like a Cape or a Door County town, while Ely feels more like a mountain town that doesn't happen to have any nearby mountains. I imagine another factor is that Ely is not someplace that gets passed through, because it's the end of the road, almost literally, whereas Grand Marais is directly on the route between Minneapolis and Ontario. My thought is that this may be why there seemed to be more interesting restaurants in Grand Marais even though the population is less than half the size of Ely. I imagine a lot of the people who eat in Grand Marais are only there while driving along the highway, something that seems like it would almost never happen in Ely. (Of course I'm not counting the people who use Ely as the entrance point into the BWCAW as people who are passing through, although they may only be in Ely for a night on either end of their trip.) So anyway, we took the opportunity to eat lake fish - whitefish and herring from Lake Superior at a fish market, plus a trout salad and chowder for lunch. We also got some smoked fish and whitefish spread to bring back to the Ely place with us. Yum.

Tomorrow is our second day off, as part of our weekend of relaxation, and we're going to two or three musuems in Ely. Monday I get back to work on the field recording stuff, which I started listening to and evaluating/editing earlier this week. So far nothing too exciting has jumped out, though there is also lots of cool stuff that I knew I captured that sounds pretty good upon hearing it again.

I kayaked a couple of days ago with Peter, the guy who lives here at Tofte Lake Center and kind of helps out with the place. We went to Lake One, which funnily enough is the name of the lake (there are also Lakes Two, Three and Four), and paddled around for a few hours. I was hoping to catch some interesting sounds, though the only thing I ended up with was some moving water. It's a pretty lake, though, and I'm glad to have explored a different space. From the perspective of finding more mental footage for my project, that was a very good experience.

Yesterday was session three with the kids at the Ely Public Library, and we had kind of a tough time getting all of the computers to work right. I think by the end we were making progress, but I would have liked it if everything would have been settled 45 minutes earlier so we could have had a decent closing discussion in terms of what they should be working on over the next week, etc. It's a simple enough concept that I'm sure they can make some progress anyway, but it would have been nice to have a little more opportunity to discuss everything.

Today I'm going to sift through and edit some of the field recording sounds I've made so far. I expect this to be somewhat of a painful process, though I'll probably do what I normally do and grab hold of certain things and focus on them for no particular reason even though there's lots of other stuff out there that I won't have even explored yet.

I went into town today to work on the piano again. The piano there is slightly sharp of the piano in my office, which is a little weird. I can't say which one is 'right', although it doesn't really matter to me as long as the final tape portion of this piece (the piano 'clouds', I'm currently calling them) are in tune in the end. I would guess that the piano in my office is in better tune than this one, since the piano in my office is probably worth about 5 times what this one is worth, but I don't really know. I'll have to check when I finalize the electronic part. In any case, it was a bit of a mind fuck when I tried to play this new piano opposite the electronic part. It's off by 30 cents or so, which is plenty far for it to be quite strange. This is made still weirder by the fact that much of the electronic part I'm working on has little shiftings in the tuning.

It's fascinating to me how this piece has finally come together. As with window, the bass clarinet piece I finished earlier this year, I kept trying to make the piece shorter and kept needing to get longer. I kept stripping material away, and yet the final product was longer than it had been before I started removing things. One common link between these pieces, though, is that I figured out some of the key moments, including the end, well before I finished the piece, so a lot of what I was doing was getting the right material to lead to that ending so that it would be most effective, and I kept needing more space to make these moments effective. In this piece, I had to finally add a bunch of near silence, plus I had to take two separate piano lines and run them concurrently, which makes the part a bit harder but still not difficult for anything resembling a decent pianist (i.e. people better than me). The spot where these two lines converge is much more awkward than it is difficult, and in the end my score will leave lots of it to interpretation anyway. In any case, I'm happy with the way it turned out.

Interestingly, this is the first piece since 2001 that I've written without a specific performer slated to play it, either that I asked to see if they were interested in me writing something for them or vice versa. I guess one of the differences between now and then is that I feel more confident that I can find somebody who will be interested in performing it - it will be easy to program at my own university in any case, though I'll send it to a few pianists I know to see if any of them would be interested in premiering it first. But the reason I wrote it was different - I just sat down at the piano one day and played a part of this piece and immediately wanted to finish it. It's taken me much longer to finish it than I expected, since I started this in December of last year, and I've finished two other pieces in the interim, but I've wanted to complete this before moving on to the sax quartet, which will begin in earnest later this week. of course I've started with a lot of the field recordings for that piece, but haven't done much in the way of notes yet. will be a hectic few weeks before the quartet comes up here in late July!

I'm starting to wonder if my ears were actually completely silent before this trip. I barely hear any hiss anymore, but it's not nothing. My mother-in-law (who's a nurse), thought that perhaps the hiss I was experiencing for the first few days after the wax blockage was removed was due to some swelling of the inner ear, which kind of makes sense, since the hiss has diminished through the week, which would correspond with a reduction in swelling. If this theory is correct, it's possible the swelling could diminish further, although it's now been a week since the blockage was removed. And as I said, I'm not sure that I'm not back to normal, but my normal is a bit different than it was 10 days ago because my left ear is now hearing better. I'm dealing with 2 issues now: 1) an increased sensitivity to the high end, partially just because I've been hearing hiss up there for a week and, even though it's been getting gradually quieter all week, I'm looking for it, so I hear it everywhere. I think there's a decent chance that I'm now hearing stuff inside my head that I wouldn't have heard a week ago; 2) my left ear, because it was slowly stopping up with wax, lost a little of the high end over the past however many months, and even though it was incremental and I didn't really notice it, my hearing in that ear is now slightly better than it was before, and so I think I'm suddenly just hearing stuff I wouldn't have heard last week anyway, and so that feels weird, and it's kind of marrying with whatever internal hiss and other sounds I might otherwise have noticed. At this point, this isn't a problem, it's just an interesting realization. I'm thinking about this less and less each day, although I'm always going to stress about my ears, as many of my friends can attest, so this probably gives me a new thing to obsess about. As long as music sounds great when I listen to it with great equipment (it does - I'm listening to Jose Gonzalez now with my sennheiser 650s), and as long as I can do my work without problems, this won't be a problem. I'm still planning to go see an ENT when I get home, but I think it will be largely an information session as much as anything else. I'm also kind of glad I went through this, because although my life would change dramatically if I lost hearing in one of my ears, I'm glad I got to consider these ideas in a real way without it actually happening.

I made a fire last night and sat outside with my recorder to see what I could record. Of course, since I had my recorder out, there were no good loon calls, although I did see something pretty funny. There was a loon out on the water, just sitting there, when all of a sudden it jumped and flapped around confusedly. In it's place, another loon popped up from the water. They squaked at each other for a moment, flapping their wings in the water, and then the second one, the interloper, started tearing-ass across the water away from the first loon. The first loon kind of followed for a moment and then stopped, more or less where it had been in the first place, while the second loon raced away like a speed boat. I eventually lost sight of the second loon when some trees interfered with my vision of that section of the lake, but I saw it travel at least a couple hundred feet from where it started. I have a audio recording of that exchange somewhere, although it probably just sounds like some confusing activity out on the lake. I also got some other decent bird and night sounds, although it really died once the sun went completely down. In any case, that's a nice way to try to get field recordings - sit by the fire with a beer and wait!

The hissing in my ears has mellowed a bit, which is nice. I'm to the point now where I've started wondering if what I'm hearing now is real or imagined. I think it's real, but I also know that almost everyone hears something because there's always a little noise (no pure silence), and for the most part we always just ignore it. But at this point I still think there's a little more self-generated noise than is normal. It's really hard not to think about it, though, and there's still no question that I haven't completely gotten used to how my ears feel post the wax blockage trauma from last weekend. I'm much closer to normalcy, but it's not all the way back to feeling normal. But I'm trying not to think about it. It would be great if I were just playing soccer all day, because nothing makes me completely ignore everything else like playing soccer. Badminton maybe, or tennis. But really, it's those all-engrossing sports that do it to me, more than anything else. Soccer would probably be the best because it's non-stop, whereas the others have little pauses, though usually I'm pretty focused during those pauses, so it wouldn't matter.

today I'm thinking of trying to get into town to work on a piano someplace. I figure it's likely that there's a piano at the CC that I could probably work on. I'll need to ask someone there for help at some point. It's possible Cecilia at the NLAA could find me a piano someplace as well. I suppose I could spend the day working on the harmonic stuff at home, and maybe that's a better place to start, though I also know I need some other new foreground material, so I don't think it's a problem to go there first.

session 2 with the kids yesterday was a lot of fun. I introduced them to the recorders, and they recorded sounds around the library. It was great to see how much they seemed to enjoy the process. Hearing the sounds back in their headphones was a real joy, it seemed, but it was also nice to see how they adjusted how they did the recordings to get better sound. They moved the recorders around a bit and made adjustments in the mic gain to get the best possible sound. It was great to realize at that moment that this project will mostly work. Next week we'll start putting these sounds together, so hopefully they'll bring in some interesting stuff to start assembling.

(later in the day)
I was able to get into Vermillion CC to work on a piano (the second time now that I've used a piano at another college while visiting the area - thanks for the support!). They're uprights, but they're in tune and they're in a couple of nice soundproof practice pods. At one point when I was in there, someone was singing in the next pod and the sound barely crept into mine, so the isolation will be very good. Using the logic I concocted yesterday (i.e. avoid bad, obvious developmental techniques), I was able to work in a few new directions that suit the piece and the way I want it to progress, so that was good. I tried 3-4 different versions, including a couple of pretty substantially different ideas, and I think I was able to come up with some stuff I can work with over the next few days. Unfortunately, the place closed at 4:30, and it's not open again until next Monday, but at least I got in while I could.

I've gotten some pretty good work done over the past couple of days, though I can't solve the formal issues with the piano piece yet. I've abandoned the first impulse I had, which was good, because that impulse involved lots of loud sounds that don't make sense. In some ways, those ideas were kind of like the bad ideas I had 10 years ago with my solo piano piece, green is passing, that I finally abandoned when I reworked it for Dante a few years ago. So it's nice that I decided to avoid those ideas. But I still don't have it. I know about how long it has to be and even what material is needs to use, but it's still not coming together. I want to try shifting around the harmonic texture a bit more, because until now I've held that the same, and to some extent if that's the same the whole thing is going to feel somewhat similar no matter what I do with the surface material.

I have day 2 with the students today at the library, learning how to use the portable recorders. Should be a fun day. I did a little makeup session for day 1 on Monday so that we could get a couple more kids into the class.

I continue to be left with a weird feeling in my ears after the trip to the ER yesterday to remove the giant wax blockage. Everything is a little swishier, which is one of two weirdnesses I can identify. This tells me that my left ear blockage, which had to have developed over the last couple of years, had been killing the top end more than I realized. Since it was incremental, I never realized what was going on. Even though I think it was only a 5-10% difference, and although I have an increased range in my left ear, it's still strange today because my ears don't feel like they did last week. Likewise, I have a little hiss in my ear that wasn't there before. I don't know if it was some of the trauma that my ear took from having all that wax or what happened. In any case, I'm hopeful that it will go away. It's very quiet, but it's annoying. The really strange part is that when I block up my ears, it mostly goes away, which doesn't really make sense if it's self-generated hiss. But the hiss follows me, so it can't be purely external hiss. In any case, I'm still quite confused by the experience over the last two days, and it seems it will take me a while to get over it.

yesterday I went swimming after a lovely kayak, and immediately upon climbing out of the water, I discovered my left ear virtually completely blocked. annoying. it somehow seemed to get more plugged over the course of sleeping, and then was very slowly getting better, but so slowly that it didn't seem to be helping much, so I tried some sort of water syringe irrigation technique that didn't do anything. After being substantially annoyed and confused for a few more hours, I went to the ER, where the doctor cleaned out my ear with a pretty substantial water syringe and pulled chunks of nasty stuff out of there. Now my hearing in my left ear seems slightly crisper than it did before, which is a little confusing. In fact, for the next 30 minutes or so I was a bit confused; I'm sure the doctor thought I was nuts because I kept talking about how sibilant and crisp everything felt. I don't think he has too many patients who are aware of what exactly their ears are doing and what they're hearing in terms of frequency ranges.

anyway, now I'm just left with the standard little weird things that I occasionally hear that make me wonder if my hearing is dissolving or not. I'd love to do the Cage experiment where he went into the anechoic chamber to find out exactly what my nervous system and my blood movement sounded like, so then I could tell if I were ever hearing that stuff or not.

in music news, craig sent me a few classic titles for my sax duo, and I got the one I wanted, "the well of echoes." now that score is done and the electronic part is uploaded, so I just need to finalize and upload that score and then I'll be on to the piano piece again. I may start overlapping work on the sax quartet with the piano piece, though I need to really start in on the field recordings pretty soon to get going on that one.