We spent last weekend in Southern California, sweltering through a heat wave at Disneyland, being tourists in Hollywood, and attending the world premiere of Wall-E at the Greek Theatre. Getting to go was Susan’s privilege as a lead on the film and I got to tag along and pretend to be famous. Although not your A-list Hollywood event, there was still a red carpet scrum which we were mostly tangential to. Susan claims her foot is visible somewhere in a publicity photo next to some Disney Channel starlet, while I as usual am the invisible, not even implied presence. We did play spot the celebrity and at the after party, we hovered for a moment, one mere foot away from Sigourney Weaver (she’s the voice of the ship’s computer in Wall-E) - alas we were too awestruck to introduce ourselves.

That wasn’t the first time I’ve seen the film; that would be the end of last month at the Wall-E wrap party. A lovely event, made more so by an especially touching thanks from the director to the crew. As for the movie itself, I’ve sat through it three times now and it holds up well. It is truly unlike anything we’ve ever done and works brilliantly.

In other news, CSUEB orchestra is done for the school year. This term our cello section was reduced to three (yours truly as principal this time around), but we padded out the rest of the strings with more professionals and we sounded excellent at the concert. We have come a long way since last September. The program this term was the Marriage of Figaro Overture, Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, KV. 488. The last was weird: the first concerto I ever played with orchestra back when I was ten. Two decades later and I’m on the other side of the piano playing cello. No real regrets, just a small irony. Cello’s not in storage for the summer. I’ve been dragooned into playing the bass part for some Slayer noodling at work. An honest to goodness bass amp has been ordered and is on its way. More on this furious acoustic metal assault soon.

So there’s that orchestra thing I do, every Wednesday I lug my cello to Cal State East Bay in Hayward, dump fourteen quarters into a parking meter, and practice for a couple of hours. Our spring end of quarter concert is coming up next Wednesday, March 5th. We’re playing Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn, and Gluck’s Overture to Iphigénie en Aulide. 7:30 in the Music Building Recital Hall. Request your ticket online!.

A few comments about orchestra these last two months. Everyone else in the cello section who was around last quarter is gone. I was the sole cellist for the first three practices, then a ringer from the SF symphony and a high school student showed up. Ringer is gone, but I think he’ll be back for the concert. Meanwhile, it’s been me and the student, who is now the principal of the section. Roz probably thinks I’m annoyed at this, but she showed up and, while sight reading, played the music on the spot better than I after having practiced for three weeks, so .. yeah, she deserves to be there, I don’t.

Susan told me that I’m a cocky cellist based on the amount of practicing I’ve been doing (i.e: none). While I’m probably over confident in some areas, piano probably among them, I don’t think that’s true of cello. I feel like I’m slogging uphill, every step of the way. The Brahms Variations with its five flats in some sections proves that I’m still intonation challenged when it comes to any flats. G flat? Forget it. F sharp? Sure, no problem. Yes, I know it’s the same note, but put the G flat next to an A flat and suddenly I’m the guy playing sour notes in the lower strings. The one area I’ve realised some progress on: while I rarely pencil in bowings (there’s that cockiness again..), that’s partially because I can actually come up with sensible bowings on the spot, or at least remember them from week to week. I’m not at the level of deciding how to bow a phrase based on musical merits - don’t ask me how to bow the Bach Suites, please - but at least I understand that bar beginnings and sforzandos should be down bows, certain staccato phrases are probably easier up bow, and that the string sections should be more or less consistent.

Somewhere I picked up the habit of pencilling stars into my music. I wonder who I got THAT from, and how many stars of hers I ignored over the years.

I’ve been neglecting blog lately. Fifty hour work weeks, chamber music activities for the last three weekends (playing piano, not cello, even though two weekends were devoted to cello sonatas), plus family in town and the last thing I’ve been wanting to do is bang out a screed on the keyboard. Nonetheless here’s one to round out the second month of the year.

A bit late, since the official notice went out when I was in London (more on that later when I get film processed), but if you’re free this Thursday evening:

Now excuse me while I scramble to rent a tux.

It’s one of those times in my life where I have too much going on. Came down with a cold, but mostly recovered in time to spend last week in Vancouver with family; Dad included, first time in seven years. Dad gave me a Leica M6 camera and lens, and I’m now faced with the daunting proposition of learning to shoot film after using point-and-shoot digital exclusively. I have a chamber music workshop this upcoming weekend, playing piano both days: two Brahms piano quartets to prepare. We’ve been training Kaylee, working with a dog trainer every Saturday for an hour and working on her D-O-W-Ns during the rest of the week. And then there’s a silly Lego minifig customization project I’ve been working on, involving everything from Krylon Fusion paint, boiling Sculpey, drawing in Illustrator, and printing water slide decals.

The biggest time commitment that I signed up for: I’m again a cellist in a real de facto orchestra! Classical this time, not punk rock. I auditioned for the orchestra at California State University two weeks ago, which meant buying new strings, actually practicing the cello, and dusting off the default audition piece: Prelude from Bach’s D Minor Suite No. 2. Amusingly, I recognized the sight reading immediately: the 3rd movement from Beethoven’s Fifth. Honestly hadn’t played it, but I knew very well how it was supposed to sound.

I got in, which may have had something to do with the orchestra being hard up for strings. I discovered just how hard up last night at first rehearsal: strings consisting of one first and two second violins, three violas, and three cellos. Fortunately we have a full wind and brass section, and they are very good. They consist mostly of students - as I understand it, due to budget cutbacks CSUEB had terminated their orchestra program a few years ago, resulting in the mass departure of the string students. The winds and brass programs remained intact though. As for us strings, currently it’s a mix of community members and students, and I anticipate any expansion will have to come from the community in the next few weeks.

Oddity I can’t get over: people think I have a nice cello. I don’t, really; it’s a crappy “Stradivarius copy” with wooden tone - although it’s much improved with a new set of Pirastro Obligatos - but some of the other musicians play school rental instruments. Not trying to sound like a snob, but I’m surprised that at the university level, people still play rentals. I guess I was spoiled while I was at the Academy. (Or just spoiled in general.)

We plowed through Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night Dream overture and made a hash of it, but started hitting our stride with Beethoven’s first symphony. As we played it, I started grinning as I found and reactivated long-unused neurons that had actually played the fairly challenging cello part over fifteen years ago while in the Delta Youth Orchestra. Rounding out our current repertoire is some interminable Bach, and Copland’s Quiet City (cello solo, treble clef - gack). Quite ambitious! Our first concert is the first week of December. Before then, I have some cello calluses to develop, and some major intonation issues involving C sharps on the G string to work out. Should be fun.

Practiced a bit of cello tonight. I hauled it out and blew the rosin dust off it a couple of weeks ago, in part because I signed up for the June chamber music workshop at CMNC; in part wanting to honour the memory of Mstislav Rostropovich, who passed away recently. I’ve never met or seen him in concert, but my cello teacher Eugene studied with Mstislav; for how long, I don’t know, but Eugene always referred to him fondly as “Slava”, and Rostropovich had evidently left a lasting impression on Eugene. In particular, stressing the importance of the quality of tone, and so Eugene in turn tried to impart this to his students. Hence in my lessons, it was always about being grounded, sinking (but not digging!) into the strings with the bow with the weight of the arm, sometimes with a demonstration involving the weight of another arm on top of your own as you bowed and listening to how the instrument somehow got richer in tone - but not harsh. Then there was the near avoidance of playing near the fingerboard - softer meant slower bow, not light fluffy bow. Vibrato was slow and controlled, never spastic; always to enhance the tone, not as an end to itself. And heaven forbid you play an open string just for convenience’s sake - it’s always about the tone! I don’t know how much of this came from Rostropovich as opposed to Eugene’s other teachers, but still like to think that no matter how far removed Mstislav had a direct influence on how I approach the cello as an instrument.

Which isn’t to say that he’d like to consider me part of his legacy. Far from it. It’s been years since I had cello lessons, and in retrospect I wish I’d studied with Eugene a lot longer. Cello’s very hard for me to pick up after an extended absence. With piano, after an hour or two of practice I feel comfortably competent; cello is battling uphill all the way just to chase that elusive quality of tone when playing a single note. I still have problems even with just the basics: for example, I’m not confident about how I hold the bow, because nowadays after half an hour, my bow hand is cramped and aching. My left hand at least still has permanent calluses, but because I have fat finger pads and a tin ear, at least where the cello is concerned, my intonation is shockingly bad. I’ve never learned the theory of bowing and thus have to rely on markings such as Pierre Fournier’s edition of the Bach suites, which Eugene would be upset at: open strings everywhere, and harmonics for convenience. (I still have some lingering suspicions about Eugene’s bowings though; they’re remarkably similar to Fournier’s..)

The June workshop is two days. I was planning to play cello the first day, and piano the second day with my trio group (we’re still playing together regularly!). Alas I screwed up my schedule and the Ratatouille wrap party’s the first day, so no cello and.. no compelling reason to force me to practice. I should try to keep at it though. My trio is preparing the second movement of the Schubert E flat piano trio; tonight I tried the cello part for the first time and sight read it well enough. So there’s some sort of core competency there, even if I can’t figure out when the E flats are really closer to Es.

I keep getting asked about the Punk Rock Orchestra. Short answer: there isn’t a functional PRO at this time, or if there is one, I’m not a member of it. Soon after I joined, there was a management crisis and several last minute rehearsal cancellations, leading to disgruntled musicians. Our last practice was in May, with a new conductor. Attendance was bad: I was the only cellist who bothered showed up. A month later, an e-mail went out that we lost our practice space, and since then I haven’t heard any updates. It’s a pity: I was looking forward to scrubbing out the bass line for “Schwartzenegger Über Alles” (arrangement of a Dead Kennedys song), perhaps for a performance timed for the fall gubernatorial election. And now I have a tube of purple hair gel that I don’t know what to do with.

In the mean time, I substituted another, less punkish musical endeavour: I signed up for a workshop put together by the Chamber Musicians of Northern California, held yesterday at UC Hayward. The last one I attended was in February, 2001, so it’s been a while. This time I was in for piano for one of the two workshop days. When they told me I was going to be in a trio and asked about music choices, I immediately went for the first Brahms piano trio in B major, Opus 8. This was just before I left for Vancouver for Canadian Thanksgiving, so I got back late the Tuesday evening after, I had twelve days left to learn it.

I picked the Brahms mainly because I happened to have the music, and because I’ve tinkered with the first page and liked what I heard. Otherwise, I didn’t know then what I was getting into. I grew up not liking Brahms, but the last piano concerto I did was his first one in D minor, and I had great success with it. (Too bad I never got to play it with orchestra - financial cutback victim - that’s another story.) After having lived with it for two weeks, I’m happy I learned the piece. It’s a fairly difficult piano part, but proved to be tractable in the two weeks. As a piece of music it’s a very interesting mix of early Schumann-esque Brahms and late period Brahms. Even though it’s Opus 8, the commonly performed version is the one he revised much later in life at the insistence of Clara Schumann. The original version still survives and it’s interesting to compare the two, to see where the youthful overexuberance was trimmed away, leaving behind a mature and better work.

The workshop was yesterday, and I was partnered with a good violinist and an even better cellist, who did a great job of sight reading the difficult cello part. I was fortunate: like most things in life, chamber music is best when it’s a partnership of equals. CMNC workshops have a system of self ranking, meant to ensure that you play with people of equal calibre. The first workshop I went to, I self ranked as “advanced”, and ended up unhappy at playing the Schumann piano quintet with musicians who were struggling through the string parts. So this time around, I signed up as “professional”. I apologise for this insult to friends who actually make a living at piano playing, but the general CMNC rule seems to be inflated self rankings.

Still it’s obviously been a while since I played chamber music: the coaches pointed out the problems I was having with ensemble balance. I was told to leave the lid at full stick, so I’d like to blame that, but the fact remains that the Brahms trio is densely written in the piano part and easily overpowers the lower violin registers. Something to work on for the next workshop - maybe I’ll go for the “Dumky” Dvorak trio and go through another two weeks of forearm pain all over again.

I’ve had a radio-less stretch of a few months, ever since it got stolen from my car, so listening to FM on the way home from Vegas was refreshing. During the trip, the heavy metalish remake of “Land of Confusion” by the band Disturbed came on. I find it quite an improvement on the original - replacing a synth loop with nice crunchy guitars is always a good thing. Leon probably disagrees, but then he’s the only Genesis-Phil Collins fan I’ve ever met in my life, so we’ll let that slide.

As a child of the 80’s, with cable (MTV!) for one glorious year, I still remember the Spitting Image puppets in the original video by Genesis. Disturbed’s new video, done by Todd McFarlane (of Spawn infamy), is even better, or at least cheesier and more over the top.

Sensory nadir of the trip: somewhere about a 100 miles north of Bakersfield on I-5, a overwhelming stench reminiscent of rotting fish hit my nose a split second before Susan’s. Then it got eye-wateringly, gaggingly worse. As we looked out the right window, we saw the cause: cows. Not just a few cows. Thousands of cows. A vast sea of cows. Bovines every few feet as far as the eye could see. I wish I’d taken a picture, but I was more focused on speeding through the noxious vapor zone as quickly as possible. The first thing we had to do when we got home was figure out whose cows they were. Turns out that’s the feedlot of Harris Ranch. What’s frightening: there’s a restaurant right there. Now, I enjoy meat, and generally don’t worry about the fact that I’m eating something that was once a living, breathing animal - but I’d completely lose my appetite anywhere close to that putrid environment. This isn’t even taking into account being just down the road from where dinner got slaughtered (do diners get to pick out their cows ala Cantonese seafood dinner?).

To our horror, our roomate’s actually eaten there. He claims the restaurant is just fine. Me, well, I think I’ll drive Highway 101 to LA in the future.

Still sick today - gotten worse in the last couple of days. Susan has been running a fever for a week now. It’s been very nasty, although Patient Zero (the woman on the tour group who gave us this cold) was hospitalized for pneumonia, so I suppose it could be worse.

I stayed at home today. Staving off boredom, I realised it’s been a while since I posted any music. So I tried out a new toy: a Fishman C-100 cello pickup. It’s the little copper thing wedged on the side of the bridge in the picture, plus the metal cylinder stuck to the tailpiece. I purchased it in anticipation of live performances with the Punk Rock Orchestra. That hasn’t happened yet, for various reasons I won’t get into here, so it’s been sitting idle until today.

I tried out my latest cello arrangement: Paranoid, by Black Sabbath, using the pickup plugged into a M-Audio MobilePre USB preamp (also a mostly unused toy), connected to my Powerbook, running GarageBand. Yep, it’s still the same clunky version of GarageBand that I tried last time, but GarageBand managed to behave reasonably today.

Result: Paranoid arranged for three cellos (MP3 file, 2.8 MB). The cello tracks have simulated amps (”English Channel” seemed appropriate). I cheated outrageously with the intonation and timing (GarageBand’s “make it sound nice” features), and the drum track was knocked out in about five minutes, but I think it’s listenable.

I’ve now been to two practices with the Punk Rock Orchestra, and there’s already political trouble brewing. In honour of the atmosphere after Sunday’s practice, this excerpt from the latest bit of music I arranged seems exceedingly appropriate.

Speaking of music, someone at work has a iTunes share entitled “Destruction Music”. Naturally, this piqued my interest. It features the alphabetically induced conjunction of Johnny Cash’s greatest hits, immediately followed by the Katamari Damacy sound track. It is quite the auditory revelation: the brooding dark baritone of the Man in Black at the end of his career (”Hurt”), versus the pastel tones of Japanese hip-pop chanting: “nananana katamari!”

Happy birthday, Dorritta!

So that piece of music that no one commented on is an excerpt from Nothing Else Matters, by Metallica, arranged for two cellos. A favour for my friend Greg, who is getting wedded this fall. He thought it’d be cool to have Metallica on cellos as incidental music at his wedding. Since I play cello, and know the words to Enter Sandman better than the words to the Canadian national anthem, I had to concur. When he brought up the topic and mentioned he had a coworker who also played cello, I thought I’d take a whack at it.

The first thing to do was to convince ourselves this particular bit of music could be adapted for two cellos, and that also with rusty cello skills I’d at least be capable of making it sound presentable. Hence, piece of software number one: GarageBand. A little bit of history with it: when I first heard saw Steve Jobs doing the keynote presenting GarageBand, I was excited and immediately bought the iLife upgrade, and along with it a M-Audio Keystation 49e keyboard. My enthusiasm waned quickly when I actually got my hands on the software. GarageBand’s default software instruments aren’t that interesting (at least for a classically trained musician like myself), and the loops seem suited mainly for assembling really bad techno - which is just about all I’ve done with it so far - example noodling (MP3, 1.4 MB). Beyond a certain number of software instruments (I think it caps at around 7 on my G4 laptop) playback was impossible, and GarageBand’s method of dealing with this - baking out the track to a iTunes file and reading it back in as a loop - seemed seriously clunky. However, on this project, GarageBand did serve a useful purpose: it allowed me to easily record a first cello part while playing a metronome beat, and then I could play that recording back while recording the second cello. I recorded a little over a minute with the laptop, sent it off to Greg, and got an enthusiastic response. Audition successful!

Greg mentioned he had a coworker who also played cello, and that he might pay his coworker’s cello teacher to do the arrangement. I figured if I was going to play a part I might as well do the arrangement myself, and so volunteered to tackle the arrangement. One rainy weekend in February I dug up unused manuscript paper dating back to my counterpoint classes, and set to work. Greg provided Apocalyptica’s rendition of Nothing Else Matters, I looked at some guitar tablature online, but ultimately it was back to the source: Metallica’s Black Album studio recording. Back in the day I guess people used tape players for this sort of thing; nowadays we have iPods (which, by the way, has a terrible interface for scrubbing - click, click, rotate wheel, wait too long and you have to click, click again, otherwise you’re fiddling with the volume) and iTunes, although ultimately I settled for some generic media software that shipped with my ATI graphics card. It had the most useful property of skipping back about 2 seconds with a single keypress, which proved most useful for figuring out exactly what note was being played.

Pen and paper quickly got old. Susan pointed out that we have these wonderful things called computers, so I went looking for music notation software. I had a vague requirement that it run on my Mac, so after some googling I found Nightingale X. This was my first experience with this sort of software, and it was like night and day compared to manual transcription, especially when I realised the MIDI keyboard which hitherto had been gathering dust in the corner of my office could be used to enter notes. Playback proved especially helpful since I was transposing as well, and writing one part in tenor clef, which I find highly error prone.

Yes, I’ve been living in a cave when it comes to audio software, but what do you expect? I’m a computer graphics guy.

By the end of the weekend, I transcribed a little under half of the piece. If you were to look in on my spare bedroom/office then, you’d have seen: a G4 laptop with music notation on the screen, a PC desktop showing ATI software playing a Metallica MP3 on its monitor, an iPod playing the same file on a loop, and a 49 key MIDI keyboard, all competing for space with me, a cello and a music stand. It was quite fun.

At this point, I’d learned enough to realise the shortcomings of Nightingale. To be fair, the pros: I found its single note keyboard entry to be quite efficient, particularly since it used sensible keyboard shortcuts (Q for quarter notes, E for eighth notes). It also has a (what I think is a) singular approach entering notes in the middle of bars, allowing the dynamic expansion of a measure to accomodate an arbitrary number of notes, while marking the bar as being rhythmically incorrect. And best of all, it allows for a flexible page layout on the screen, so for example five pages can be up at once and you can see the music flow across them easily. As I found later, these pros proved to be sorely missed. Now the cons: Nightingale is barely Carbonized and as a result is prone to crashing, and for some reason consumes all CPU cycles even when idling. It seems to be fairly picky about layout, and I had to spend more time thinking about note spacing and how tight the bars needed to be. Trumping all these cons: it was also the only thing I found that had a 30 day trial without any limitations.

Due to its lack of integration with OSX, Nightingale has some quirks when it comes to its PDF output - decent output requires saving to PostScript, then converting to PDF from the command line. Also, I ended up purchasing the Sonata font from Adobe - separate purchases for both Windows and Macintosh! - in order to get the best output. This might have been a mistake in retrospect, but in the end I had printable output to show for it.

Meanwhile, it was time to look for replacement music notation software. I concluded that Nightingale X was a little too unstable and didn’t look like it was being actively worked on enough to justify its price tag. I tried NoteAbility Pro briefly, and was very quickly discouraged - and I really wanted to like it since it’s a projected associated with my Alma Mater. However a look at the interface and you can see where I’m coming from.

In the end, after trying some evaluations, I settled on Finale Allegro. Despite some initial misgivings (especially after shelling out a couple of hundred bucks) it’s proven capable of handling everything I throw at it, as long as I’m willing to scratch enough to find the functionality buried beneath the surface. The dual computer licensing proved attractive as well. After a few more weekends I finished the arrangement. Since I can’t be bothered to figure out ASCAP print licenses, here’s a sample of the final result which I will claim under fair usage (click the image for a legible view). It’s the guitar solo, played by James and not Kirk. If you’re familiar with the music you’ll note that it’s been transcribed down to D minor, somewhat following Apocalyptica’s lead - it makes a couple of harmonics much easier to play. Yes, this is pretty high on the fingerboard for a cello, so if I end up doing Cello 1, it’ll be fun to see whether I manage to pull it off.

Oddity: Finale comes with some limited OCR functionality, so on a whim I converted Nightingale’s PDF output to monochrome TIFF files and fed them into Finale. Notes actually came out - not accurate to avoid having to start from scratch, but certainly an impressive result. Imagine: TIFF files as a common music software interchange format.

To wrap up this blurb, here’s another music notation sample, much more complete this time - well, at least an entire movement: Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F major, 1st movement (PDF, 412 KB). As an exercise in learning Allegro I picked something fairly random that I had the music to, wasn’t available online, and was interesting from a notation perspective. Unfortunately the music I picked had nine parts, which wasn’t ideal for an introductory project; and Finale definitely has problems scaling to projects of this (medium!) magnitude. In any event, the result looks pretty good, and is quite suitable for following along to your favorite recording.

By the way, most people have heard the G Major Brandenburg - that’s No. 4. Royal Conservatory of Toronto History 3 students from my era should be familiar with the F Major though.

If you don’t have a favorite recording, fear not! Finale Allegro has an interesting playback feature, taking advantage of both SoundFonts and something they advertise as “Human Playback”. Here’s the result of its music interpretation (MP3, 5.08 MB). It’s not bad - for a computer. The default SoundFont, while far better than your standard MIDI fare, are badly balanced between instruments (e.g. the trumpet is mostly inaudible), but at least Finale does a commendable job of interpreting markings and even trills, although it doesn’t handle figured bass - that’s a little too much to be asking of it, I suppose.

More comments about Finale to follow. Anyone have music they want transcribed?