Cello Lessons

Just for kicks, I googled “cello lessons livermore”. The first link that came up, underneath the paid business links, was Musika (musikalessons.com). My own web page is next, following Musika.

I’m not a web programming whiz, but it’s real obvious to me that the Musika page for cello lessons in Livermore is assembled on the fly by inserting “Livermore” and “Cello” into slots in a boilerplate text.

They claim to offer cello lessons “in your home.” Well, maybe there are teachers who do that. Probably not many. But here’s the funny bit: The web page lists two names in a box under the label “Livermore Cello Teachers.” The two names are “Kelly S.” and “Bo X.” There are no links to bios of these supposed teachers, just a listing of their first names and last initials.

So they’re telling you that this guy Bo will come into your home and teach your child, but they won’t tell you

Redundancy

I keep a spare bow in my cello case. And of course an extra set of strings. If something breaks just before a concert, I want to be prepared. If the cello itself breaks, of course, there wouldn’t be much I could do. Redundancy is only practical up to a certain point.

This morning when I turned on my external hard drives, preparing to work on a piece of music, Windows crapped out somehow. The file system on one of the partitions had gotten corrupted. So I poked around in the disk utilities area for a few minutes, and spotted a hint that I ought to run chkdsk. So I did.

Twenty minutes later, my drives are back on line, seemingly none the worse for wear. Not that I’ve checked every single file, you understand. But at least the directory structure has been restored.

If I’m serious about doing any sort of creative work with a computer, how much redundancy is practical? I back up my work files, of course, to separate physical devices. I don’t always do it after every work session, but I’m pretty good about it. I have three external drives, and I sometimes (when moved by some random impulse) make extra copies of the backups.

What I don’t have is a log that lists what is backed up where, and when the backups were done. Maintaining such a log would be a huge extra chore. I hate chores.

Then there are the program files and the sound library files. Many of the program files can’t be backed up, because they’re copy-protected installations. The library files are simply too big to make multiple copies of: The Spectrasonics Omnisphere library, for instance, is 42 gigabytes.

If I hired an IT professional to whip this system into shape, what would that person recommend? Creating and maintaining an entirely redundant second computer with its own storage devices? I can’t afford that. But I do think I need to get more serious about redundancy. I’m just not sure where to draw the line. Nor am I sure how much time I want to spend on a daily or weekly basis insuring the continued viability and integrity of my system.

Up to now I’ve been operating in a sort of semi-pro, stick-your-head-in-the-sand-and-hope-for-the-best manner. If I decide to get more serious about recording music, I probably need to get more serious about redundancy as well. But you can make yourself crazy with this stuff, because ultimately nothing is 100% reliable. You could maintain three identical hard drive arrays and then have them all crap out on the same day. It’s not likely … but a lightning-strike could toast everything. Where to draw the line?

Gifts

This could easily turn into one of those hackneyed “our time on Earth is limited; we have to make the most of it” sermonettes. I don’t want to go there. The thing I want to get at is a little different.

I’m still processing the unexpected death of Larry Granger. Larry was an inspiration to a lot of cellists in the East Bay, and certainly to me. In the past five years we got to be friends. He was a very outgoing, social person, and I’m sure he had scores of friends — maybe hundreds. In that respect we were opposites. But on two or three occasions I saw a side of him that perhaps not everybody saw.

I have the impression — I don’t remember the details of the conversation – that when he was young, he felt somewhat aimless and undirected. But at a certain point he made a decision: He was a good cellist, and he decided that if his life was going to amount to anything, he had better take the cello seriously. So he buckled down and started practicing hours every day.

He wasn’t at Juilliard, or even at a conservatory. He was at Cal State Hayward. But he had good mentors. From that launching platform he was able to move on to a career as a full-time professional, playing first with the Oakland Symphony and then with the San Francisco Symphony. He got to tour the world with the Symphony. He got to hang out with the most famous classical musicians of our generation, or at least watch them in rehearsal from onstage.

I think Larry had a sense of the gift that he had been given, to be able to play marvelous music with so many talented people. He never tired of passing that gift on to other musicians.

In other respects, he was just an ordinary guy. (Not that any of us is really “ordinary,” but you know what I mean.) I used to be amazed by the amount of stuff he carried around in the trunk of his car. Larry was chronically over-prepared. He would go to a casual chamber music session carrying cardboard boxes full of sheet music, just in case any of it were needed – and maybe two music stands rather than just one. From that and from a few conversations, I think he may have felt a little insecure; not about his playing, certainly, but perhaps about some other things.

But he had this one great gift. He was sensible enough to see how lucky he was to have it, and smart enough to see that he needed to take responsibility for the gift, to use it to its fullest.

How many of us take full responsibility for our gifts?

I’ve struggled with this for most of my life. I have too many gifts, for starters. And they’re forced to express themselves from underneath a thick blanket of depression, over-intellectualizing, and more than occasionally just being pissed off at the world. I wish I had been more like Larry. I wish I had had the sense, when I was 20 or 25, to say to myself, “I have this great gift. I’m a musician. I need to make the most of it, every day.”

Here’s a creativity mantra, in case anybody is in search of one: “If I were taking full responsibility today for my gifts, I’d….”

Larry Granger

I was shocked this afternoon (Monday, June 15th) to get a forwarded email saying Larry Granger had died. For a few minutes I was hoping the message might turn out to be a gruesome hoax, but a couple of phone calls to mutual friends confirmed it.

For those who didn’t have the privilege of knowing him, Larry was the unofficial “Mr. Cello” of the Livermore-Amador Valley. He grew up in Pleasanton and lived there most of his life. He played in the Oakland Symphony for a while. After the demise of that organization he jumped across the Bay and joined the SF Symphony, where he played for many years.

He was very active in community music, whenever his schedule permitted. He was a regular member of the Pleasanton Chamber Players, taught cello at Cal State East Bay, and loved playing as a soloist with various community orchestras. Last year he played the Elgar concerto with the Livermore-Amador Symphony. This fall he was scheduled to play the Saint-Saens with the Silicon Valley Symphony, a very good group that he got me involved in. He liked to call himself “a professional cellist, and an amateur soloist.” By playing concertos with local orchestras, he got to embrace the whole of the literature for the cello while sharing his love of the instrument with audiences around the Bay Area.

Larry will be sorely, sorely missed.

We didn’t know one another when we were students, though we both studied with the same teacher for a short period. When we met (in 2002), he encouraged me to get more involved in the local music scene. I was lucky enough to play chamber music with him on a number of occasions. He was the quintessential people person — always doing favors for other musicians, and not shy about asking them to do favors for him in return. Overall, though, I’m sure he gave far more than he ever received.

Before he played a concerto with a local orchestra, he liked to give it a “dry run” in front of a few listeners — an informal recital. Two months ago, as he was preparing the Kabalevsky concerto (I don’t even know who he performed it with), he phoned and asked if my living room would be available on a Monday afternoon for such a recital. Fortuitously, one of my students had just sprained a wrist, so I had a free block of time. Just as fortuitously, my piano had just been tuned.

I invited three of my students to be the audience. Larry and his wife Priscilla arrived with a younger cellist named Aaron Urton. Priscilla played the piano accompaniment while Larry and Aaron played the Vivaldi concerto for two cellos, and then Larry and Priscilla played the Kabalevsky. It was a fantastic treat for us all — and afterward, far from thinking he had done us a favor, Larry thanked me. “I owe you big-time for this,” he said.

No, you didn’t, Larry. We owed you big-time. We all did. Thanks, guy. Damn, what a loss.

Plugging In

This morning I hooked up the electric cello. Haven’t played it much for the past 18 months, since I quit the band I was in. It has a very nice sound — not as rich as a wooden cello, but pleasant. Having a high E string lets me play in the violin range with very little effort. (The inlaid position dots help too.)

Not sure what I’m going to do with it yet. Try to find another band? Maybe, maybe not. Band politics … don’t get me started. Nothing against the guys in the band I was in. They’re great guys, great musicians, and still my friends. I got tired of playing outdoor gigs at wineries, that’s all. I felt we ought to put together a concert, but the other guys favored a more casual, laid-back approach.

It’s a cool instrument visually. It has no body: It’s just a rosewood/ebony plank with a pair of aluminum struts for knee braces and a flying-V headstock with all five tuning gears on one side. At every gig, I can count on someone coming up to me and saying, “What is that?”

Maybe I’ll start telling them it’s a really confused oboe. But first I need some gigs. That’s a story for another time.

How You Play the Game

My mom is 87. For many years, playing bridge with her friends has been one of her chief social activities. But during the past couple of years, it’s started to get to be more of a struggle to get a game together. Too many of the regular players are either sick or (worse) inconveniently dead.

There’s a regular mah jongg game at the local senior center. I suggested to her that she might be interested in trying that. She’s never played mah jongg, but I figured, hey, it’s a rummy-type game, and she’s played plenty of rummy. What could be hard about learning mah jongg?

Surprise! This group plays American mah jongg. That’s bad news if you’re over 85, because the rules change every year. Literally. Each spring a group on the East Coast releases a “card” containing a new set of winning hands, and those are the hands you have to try for this year, until the next card comes out. What you learned last year is useless. Having to find new patterns on a new card is vaguely reminiscent of bingo, which may not be a coincidence, as the demographic is similar.

I’m sure this is all great fun if you’re into it, but it strikes me as asking a lot to expect someone to learn that much pattern recognition while also learning a set of rituals having to do with discarding, claiming discards, paying the winner, and so forth. Asian mah jongg is more stable — more like rummy. But beneath that broad umbrella there are a dozen or more variants, each with its own scoring systems, some with slightly different sets of tiles, and so forth.

It’s interesting — mildly inspiring, even — that humans come up with so many ways to play games. But there’s also something to be said for uniformity and predictability, especially as you get older.

Text(book)ing

Writing The Inform 7 Handbook was a lot of fun, and a good experience too. Now that it’s finished, I’m wondering what to do next.

I learned a lot about Inform by writing the book. If you want to learn more about a subject, write a book about it! I felt there was a genuine need for a different type of instructional material for Inform than is provided with the software, so I was giving back to a community that has done some nice things for me. Inform is new, so there’s not a lot of information available yet. It’s a fairly advanced type of programming environment, and it’s always nice to write about the latest and greatest. Plus, pretty much everything in the interactive fiction community is free, so I didn’t need to worry about selling a publisher on the book project; all I had to do was write it and upload it.

That’s a tough set of ingredients to pull together a second time.

For about five minutes I was contemplating writing an introductory book on a music programming language called Csound. In favor of the idea: Csound is

Typo, or Trying Too Hard?

I’m on an email list for supporters of gay marriage in California. They’re workin’ at it. (I’m sure the Mormons are beavering away on their side of the forest too, if you’ll forgive the expression.)

Today’s email led off with an amusing goof:

“Next week will mark the one-year anniversary of the first legally recognized marriages in California.”

Oops! Would this be a typo? Or do you suppose the writer was bending over backwards SOOOO energetically to make gay marriage look like any other marriage (which of course it is) that he or she deliberately suppressed the word “gay” in that sentence?

Feeling Good

People create stuff because they enjoy creating stuff. That’s a truism, so let’s be a little more specific. When an artist creates a new work of art, what’s going on is that the artist’s brain is producing some sort of chemical, or perhaps a pattern of synapses firing, that causes a feeling of pleasure.

This response is probably learned. Put a child in a family where being creative is rewarded, and the child will learn to produce an internal pleasurable stimulus in anticipation of a later external stimulus, such as praise.

Maybe some people have a greater natural capacity to give themselves this jolt of pleasure. We’ll leave that question for the neuroscientists to puzzle out.

I don’t think it matters much what creative medium is involved. Some people get enormous pleasure from

World-Building

Writing science fiction is enormously difficult. If you cut corners, it gets easier. Cutting corners is always a temptation, because (a) if you don’t, your whole story may collapse, and (b) your readers or viewers probably won’t notice or care.

Quick example: Last week I watched an episode of Dr. Who called “Daleks in New York.” It’s the 1930s, and the Daleks are doing something to the spire atop the Empire State Building in order to capture the energy of what is clearly described in the dialog as an impending “solar flare.” Solar flares can’t be predicted, and not much of their energy reaches the surface of the Earth (for which we can all be thankful), but never mind that. As the climax of the story nears, the “solar flare” has transmuted into a simple bolt of lightning emanating from a thunderstorm.

I’ll bet not one viewer in ten even noticed the switch.

A reader named Conrad Cook has been grilling me about my unflattering view of Riverworld, by Philip Jose Farmer. I was critical, among other things, of