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 [...] » Read more

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 [...] » Read more

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 [...] » Read more

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 [...] » Read more

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 [...] » Read more

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 [...] » Read more

I haven’t done any simple link propagation in a while, but I spotted The Shape of Song in a comment on Slashdot, and felt it well worthy of breaking the rule. This guy draws translucent arches connecting identical (similar?) passages in music; it seems to be done using analysis on MIDI files using Java. [...] » Read more

Courtesy of Brian (who officially started work with us last week after some ridiculous limbo involving a hiring freeze), Saturday was a more interesting night than usual. Vladimir Feltsman played Rachmaninoff’s Third piano concerto with the symphony. Sadly, I didn’t like his performance. Feltsman is one of those narcissitic players who doesn’t seem [...] » Read more

Contrary to prior statements, I actually sat through an entire piano recital at Benaroya today and kept mostly rapt attention. Probably because Arcadi Volodos was that good - and he couldn’t have put together a better program as far as my tastes are concerned. (Well, okay, since I’m me, I have to nitpick. [...] » Read more

I paid the latest credit card bill for one card twice, and for the other card, three times. Some weird mental blip related to online bill payment. Yeah, it’s been that kind of month. And absolutely no progress on the lending front yet. I started this process over a month ago with Wells Fargo, [...] » Read more