levork.org

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?

This was going to be the first part of a longish explanation of my recent musical dabblings that I alluded to earlier, but then I got sidetracked for the last couple of evenings with an experiment which involved recording myself playing on my (recently tuned!) piano, and then got further frustrated with the difficulty of notating the piece I was playing.

So instead, you can listen to me play Chopin. I decided I wasn’t going to completely embarrass myself by attempting to record the Barcarolle without a lot more practice, so here’s the F# Major Prelude, Op. 28 No. 13 (MP3 file, 2.7 MB) instead. It’s short, and it’s kind of like the Barcarolle if you squint, and it illustrates all sorts of fun pedalling and voicing issues typical of Chopin. I think I even managed to get this into an enclosure in the RSS 2.0 feed. (Sorry, no luck for RSS 1.0 readers. I can’t grok this.)

As for the setup, this was recorded in my basement, using the internal microphone of my Macintosh G4 laptop running Sound Recorder, exported to a WAV file using QuickTime Player, trimmed down on my Windows machine using WavePad, and converted to a MP3 file on my Linux box using LAME. Three operating systems, three computers. Sadly, this was the easiest way for me to get things done. You can see why I’m getting a little frustrated with computers and audio software in general.

Another reason I picked this prelude is because it’s short, but packed with enough complicated notation to stress music notation software, which is what I’ve been spending a lot of free time playing with lately. So far attempts to fully represent this piece have been failing in various ways. More on this topic in the future.

Drop me a line if you’d like to see this sort of thing continue. I need all the incentive I can get to practice!

Wednesday I went to the opera to watch Manon Lescaut. Does Puccini ever put anything to music which doesn’t involve the miserable demise of the heroine? Dying of thirst (Manon – in the middle of Louisiana?!), or of consumption (La Bohème), or jumping off a tall building (Tosca), or self inflicted stabbing (Madame Butterfly), or poison (Suor Angelica – in one act!). Oh wait, I did see La Fanciulla del West last season, and technically I suppose one could count Turandot, even though who knows what Puccini intended for the ending there since he didn’t finish it himself. Anyways, Wednesday’s performance was extremely well done. In the middle of a somewhat numbing work week I was definitely in the mood for emotionally overwrought melodrama, and Carol Vaness in the lead role delivered that in spades in an amazing performance, vocally and dramatically. Jay Hunter Morris was somewhat less convincing, but then he has a pretty thin role to play (duped boy to duplicitous girl) so I can’t blame him there. And this time around, they didn’t try anything new fangled with the costumes or scenery that I could complain about.

Rosalind bought a new computer, and gave her old one to Mom. I brought it back home with me temporarily to upgrade it, so I paid the Microsoft tax for XP, and installed RAM and a new CPU. It was pretty much a no brainer to pay $46 for a new Duron 1.6 GHZ processor (Slot A motherboard) to give it a speed boost so her bridge games can go that much faster (and presumably smarter). I know this is old hat, but the price of hardware is just ridiculously cheap. Back in the day I paid Mom paid a horrendous amount of money for a pokey 386SX with 2 MB of RAM, and now look at what you can get for pennies

Friday was my sixth anniversary at Pixar. I can’t decide whether this means I qualify as a curmudgeon yet, or whether I can’t compete with others who have been there much longer than I have.

We finally got a new beta release out the door, and thinking that testing the speedups might be fun, I hacked on l2rib over the weekend, and have decided the result is worthy of being called a 1.0 release. This may seem ridiculous but Lego – yes, those not-even-close-to-resembling-skin-shaded ABS plastic Phong shaded bricks – Lego can bring a renderer to its knees provided you throw enough bricks at it. RenderMan implementors take note: LDraw and l2rib provide very useful data sets of quite arbitrary complexity. Ever think you could skip implementing all those silly quadrics with those crazy sweep angles that noone gets right on the first try? Think again: l2rib gives it to you in spades, becase Lego likes half spheres, conic sections, and cylinders upon cylinders like you wouldn’t believe. Oh, and for those people who need to generate images for SIGGRAPH right about now: if you have absolutely no talent at lighting (like me), keep in mind that a hemispherical occlusion light requires no brains and is thus well worth the rendering time.

I’m feeling a bit like a peevish chuff at work, frustrated at technical issues beyond my control, annoyed at a certain lack of respect I feel I deserve. Oh, and this happened again. So I’m actually looking forward to leaving it all behind and going on vacation for the next week with Susan on Hilton Head Island, SC. I can’t say I’m looking forward to melting in hot humid weather, but I’ll be more than compensated with southern food, antebellum architecture (if you were there when I saw Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil you’ll know what I mean), and I’ve been told that looking for gators on closed golf courses is a source of amusement.

As I’m taking some effort to load music onto the iPod for the trip, and because I haven’t commented on music in ages, here’s a sample of recent acquisitions for listening on the plane:

• Verdi: Rigoletto – Sutherland, Pavarotti, et al. – any impression you form of Luciano Pavarotti from the Three Tenors dreck of the 90s will change after listening to him in his prime, swaggering through this role. Just listen to the preview of track three, Disc one (“Questa o quella..”) on Amazon. He’s here along with Joan Sutherland, who is slightly past her prime, but still has her amazing voice. And it’s just a good opera to boot; the ensembles are great, and as for the plot, there’s a lecher, a hunchback, and people get murdered, what more do you need? Seattle Opera is putting this on next season, I can’t wait.
• Get Away From Me, Nellie McKay – because damn it, I wake up in the morning with her music stuck in my head, it’s that catchy. I can sort of see how the “Doris Day meets Eminem” comparison got started, although I think the album is just amusingly fluffy and yet disarming at the same time. And she sings everything and plays all the keyboards and she’s nineteen.
• Chrono Trigger: Original Sound Version, Yasunori Mitsuda – yes, it’s music produced by the sound chip of a 16 bit game console, not even reorchestrated. Yep, I’m a geek, but it’s the best RPG ever made, dammit.
• Happenstance, Rachael Yamigata – not sure what to think of this. iTunes lured me in with one really good track, and it’s easy to compare her to a scaled back Tori Amos (which is both good and bad), but her voice does this throaty thing which is kind of annoying at times, and it’s really chick music that apparently I’m not supposed to be listening to.
• St. Anger, Metallica – \m/  enough said

Reading: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (which judging by the first chapter looks suitably breezy despite being some post apocalyptic Orwellian fable) has been acquired for the beach, along with a new translation of Beowulf, so I get to practice my Icelandic: Hwæt we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum Þeodcyninga Þrym
gefrunon, hu ða æÞelingas ellen fremedon. Gesundheit.

On a final note, it’s sometimes amusing what people do with the images deep linked off my site.

Random musings.

Ariadne Auf Naxos was on Wednesday, and I’ve decided post modern librettos in opera just really aren’t my thing. Give me a good burning, suicide by jumping, or end of the world any day instead.

Leon has apparently given up on the New York Rangers for good. I can’t blame him: they’ve got the highest payroll in the National Hockey League but look destined to miss the playoffs for a seventh year in a row. Ok, it’s just a friend giving up on a sports team, but he’s been a NYR fan forever – even his high school yearbook entry mentions them. (Sorry Leon, but you can’t erase that, nor can you touch my blog.)

Mark invited to me to join orkut, a Friendster clone. And much like the latter I find it mildly amusing for about a week, and give up; mainly because none of my closest friends will have anything to do with this, and it’s depressing to see my social contact circle enumerated on the spokes of a very sparse wheel.

Ever since I saw the full page ad in last Sunday’s NY Times put in by these morons congratulating Bush on the Federal Marriage Amendment (you can see their ad here), I’ve been irked. I’ve been meaning to write about gay marriage here, but instead I read today’s Times and found an article by Jonathan Rauch in the Magazine which hit exactly all the points I’ve had floating about my head in far better prose than I could ever come up with:

In endorsing the passage of a constitutional amendment that would restrict marriage to the union of men and women, President Bush established himself as the country’s most prominent advocate of same-sex marriage.

So I guess they weren’t such morons after all. Go read the article for yourself.

The Mars Rovers Opportunity and Spirit apparently have blogs.

Spent part of the day coding on l2rib, modifications will go up tomorrow after some testing. A change: coding on non work for the first time in forever.

On Tuesday morning, Brian showed me a New York Times article about Saturday’s premiere performance of Parsifal at the new opera house. This was a fortunate reminder since only then did I feel a sense of urgency about my season tickets which hadn’t arrived. When I called up Seattle Opera, I found out that my first ticket was actually for that evening’s show, that they had probably been sent to my old address, but I could pick up reprints at the box office.

So not having mentally prepared myself for a four hour assault of Wagner (with two half hour intermissions), at 6:30 I found myself inside the new hall waiting for the curtain to rise. Overall it was quite the experience. The acoustics in the hall are very, very good, much better than the interim converted hockey arena they were using last year, and seems quite comparable to Benaroya Hall. From where I was sitting, the music and singing always sounded rich and almost felt tangible at times.

Music wise: the opera orchestra bills itself as one of the best Wagner orchestras in the world, and for once I couldn’t complain, not even about the brass section. And this year around I was smart enough to make sure I had tickets for the primary cast, and it was immediately apparent what the difference was – all the singers were well and equally matched, unlike some of last year’s secondary casts where it was sometimes painfully obvious that some of the singers were much weaker. Christopher Ventris’ Parsifal in particular was amazing: you could watch and believe him transition over the evening from village fool to wise Grail Knight.

As for the opera itself: it’s obviously very long, not very rich on the spectacle moments, and not at all that interesting plot wise. It also didn’t have any recognizable musical moments for me, unlike say the Ring cycle, or Tristan und Isolde. I tried to listen for leitmotifs but gave up; Wagner never stops long enough for you to collect your thoughts. I did manage to stay absorbed and awake for the entire thing, although it was difficult especially when the subtitle projection machinery broke down twice during two crucial moments. And the last half hour was rather tortuous – I had to physically restrain myself from fidgeting too much. So: I’m still undecided about Wagner. I definitely still want to see the full Ring cycle, and I think Nietzsche was being pretty harsh about the entire “Wagner is a disease” thing, but Parsifal was a pretty difficult opera to start with.

I had taken Wednesday to Friday off in anticipation of the Summer Sanitarium 2003 tour on Thursday. Greg and his two friends Mark and Darren showed up on Wednesday evening, and after a late dinner of hamburgers I got absolutely smashed on home made margaritas. Thursday morning I endured the worst hangover I’ve ever had in my life. It was all I could do keep from throwing up until Darren forced me to take a Gravol; washed down with an Advil, I was in passable shape within half an hour. Pharmaceuticals are so cool. After killing time downtown we ended up at Seahawk Stadium at 8 pm (skipping all the opening acts). We were lucky timing wise; got there just in time to catch Metallica’s traditional Ecstacy of Gold opening. From then it was almost old school Metallica all the way – the set opened with Battery, Master of Puppets, Harvester of Sorrow, and Sanitarium. Two songs from the new album were played: Frantic and St. Anger. The only other song later than the black album was Fuel. Nothing was cut short, and the new bassist Robert Trujillo acquitted himself very well – not just musically, but physically: at times, hopping about the stage like a possessed crab, dressed in blue denim overalls, tossing his long black hair back and forth and overall looking very much like the badass metal bassist he ought to be.

Metallica ended their two hour set with lots of pyrotechnics, One, and finally closed with Enter Sandman. No matter what you might think of them from the Napster debacle, or the latest chord transition trademark hoax, they are consummate live musicians, yet also take the time to appear gracious to their fans. James Hetfield took a moment to introduce everyone during an early break, and after the show all four came out and thanked the crowd profusely for showing up and supporting them over the last twenty years.

So that was the spectrum of music this week. If anyone else in Seattle can claim to also be in the intersection of that Venn diagram, I’d certainly like to meet you.

Falling repeatedly into a gravel pit is a really good way of clearing the mind and digging oneself out of a weekend funk. Spent an hour at the gym today bouldering after over a month of not touching rock. I found myself struggling at first with V0 routes such as the one labeled “Really Big Holds”, but it got much better after a while. Unfortunately I am still in search of new climbing partners, since one no longer wishes to climb and the other is on doctor’s orders not to.

Work has been quite hairy, as is usually the case around release time. For some reason bugs that have been sitting there happily minding their own business for a year just love to pop out the day you try to ship. But we finally did get a new major release into beta testing. And the other story out of work is that we have finally decided to let a certain person go. Although I never specifically asked for his head (and I am quite proud that I never did this, even though I’m less happy about the fact that I couldn’t help being obvious about disliking working with him) it was nevertheless getting pretty clear to all in the office that this person was just not working out after a year. I could force myself to tolerate the personality conflicts, but the sheer level of utter incompetence was making us look very bad, particular given the position he was in.

So there will soon be another opening, and in a total coincidence a cousin sent in his resume this week – a younger cousin I haven’t seen since I left NFLD at the age of four. This prompted a conversation with Rosalind about the importance of family and a reminder about Father’s day, which contributed to the mild funk this weekend. The other contributing factor was some friends bailing out at the last minute for the second time on weekend plans. I need more reliable friends.

Shifting gears: can someone explain to me why female cellists are so damned cute? Really, this isn’t a fetish, it’s just a repeated observation including another made while on the 5 line today. (Unfortunately, she got off the bus before I collected my wits enough to make conversation. It’s just as well, at best I would have just managed to commiserate about cellos and public transit.) As it turns out, I will be playing chamber music on Thursday for the first time in over a year – signed up for a class. Too bad I’ll likely be stuck on the cello, but maybe I can find another cellist to play Schubert’s cello quintet with.

Another cello related story missed during the blackout period last year: one weekend I took the ferry out to Bainbridge Island last year on a sightseeing whim. On the trip out, a woman – older, with a preschool aged daughter in tow, but attractive: yet more proof for my observation – took a cello out of a case and began to play, oblivious to the passengers around her. She was obviously practicing, but it was just as obvious she was an excellent player as she ripped through the Bach suites and some concertos I could and couldn’t place. We got off on Bainbridge and decided to take the same ferry back immediately. And on the way back we realised the cellist hasn’t disembarked, and was still practicing. And when we got off in Seattle, she still stayed behind – it seemed she was going to ride back and forth all day, practicing.

I’ve seen this woman twice since then (it’s hard to miss her, hauling her cello and her daughter around downtown), but I’ve never had the nerve to talk to her. Later in the year, I felt a lot of sympathy for her since the housing situation had by then deteriorated to the point where I couldn’t practice at home. I guess she just had the same problem.