Top to bottom: Julian Fong, Ting Chin, Miriam Blatt, Milton Wong, Joe Neeman. Photo by Olivier Hubert

Franz Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, D. 956, is one of the most sublime pieces of chamber music ever written – especially if you’re a cellist. It’s one of the few string quintets that feature two cello parts, and it doesn’t matter which of the two cello parts you play, they’re both great. Recently five friends and I have performed the piece at two separate house concerts (along with other chamber pieces performed by other musicians), and we get to play it one more time at 3pm on Sunday, April 10th at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Pleasant Hill.

The picture above was taken at the first house concert, but the recording for that concert didn’t turn out well. The recording for the second house concert turned out better, so here it is. The acoustics in the church for the last concert will be even better so if you’re available, come check us out! There are also some wind quintets on the program that should be interesting.

String Quintet in C Major, D. 596, by Franz Schubert

• Allegro ma non troppo
• Adagio
• Scherzo
• Allegretto

Performers: Joe Neeman, violin 1; Milton Wong, violin 2; Miriam Blatt, viola; Brady Anderson, cello 1; Julian Fong, cello 2.

Rock Band 3 interested me because of the new “Pro Mode” feature. For instrumentals, rather than playing a cut down instrument with five buttons, players now have the option to play the real thing, or at least something a lot closer to the real notes. This requires a MIDI capable device which in the case of the guitar or keyboard could be considered a bona fide genuine musical instrument. The guitar is already on order and won’t show up until March, but I already have a MIDI keyboard. So I plugged it in expecting to kick ass and was instantly, crushingly humiliated. A virtual audience threw beer bottles and kicked me off the stage in the midst of playing “Roxanne”. I barely managed Devo, and “Whip It” involves a grand total of seven keys, dammit.

The problem is, my brain is wired to read music notation. Very hard wired. To the detriment of many other things.

And Pro Mode does not involve reading music. It involves reacting to upwardly scrolling columns of beads. This is the normal modus operandi of these musical rhythm games, but Pro Mode more than doubles the stakes (twelve columns instead of five buttons, mapping to a keyboard octave), and throws in whole scale remappings to other parts of the keyboard for good measure. As a generous gesture, it color codes these bars. However, even this generosity does not create anything close to resembling to music notation. In fifty years, as music education dies a slow agonizing death in elementary schools, it may perhaps supplant music notation and mnemonics such as Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge may be perceived as an utterly quaint historic custom. But this is not the musical notation that I can read today better than I can recognize my neighbor’s faces.

I struggled with this for a few days and got somewhat better. Then I went after a Trophy: playing 200 consecutive notes on Pro Keyboard mode in Sister Christian. I tried for two hours, clawing my way to 170 before screwing up, and gave it up. My brain waggles fingers in reaction to a restricted set of stimuli involving black beans sitting on horizontal lines on a page and that wasn’t about to readily change. So I did what any sane musician would do: I went away, found a recording, transcribed the keyboard part of Sister Christian to manuscript paper, came back, and kicked its ass.

And now you know why this page of music is floating around my living room. You may call it a cheat code if you will. It is certainly an arcane scribbling that, when correctly followed, allows one to beat an arbitrary task set in a video game. The fact that there is some higher merit attributed to this piece of paper is perhaps just a stubborn fiction that I will cling to in the name of my art.

• Piece animation has been added. This may require a fairly modern browser.
• The game log can now be viewed as a compact paragraph instead of a table.
• Problems with ill-behaved themes (including the 2010 default WordPress theme) leading to badly spaced boards have been addressed.
• Boards and pieces are now separately themed, and can be chosen independently of each other. A few new themes have been added.
• A problem with FEN strings specifying Black’s turn has been fixed.
• An issue with numeric annotation glyphs has been fixed.
• Various other user interface fixes and tweaks.

As usual, here is the Chess By Blog blurb page. You can download the release directly from the wordpress server: chess-by-blog.1.1.5.zip, or first take a look at the Chess by Blog page on wordpress.org.

Please post any questions or issues in the comments. If you are having issues, please be sure to post what browser and what version you are using. Happy chess playing!

This release also moves the config page from the Tools menu to the Settings menu, since this is where most plugin users expect it nowadays.

As usual, here is the Chess By Blog blurb page. You can download the release directly from the wordpress server: chess-by-blog.1.1.4.zip, or first take a look at the Chess by Blog page on wordpress.org.

Please post any questions or issues in the comments. If you are having issues, please be sure to post what browser and what version you are using. Happy chess playing!

The PGN button has also been altered slightly to try to improve functionality when using Internet Explorer. It seems marginally better, but not all the way there yet. (I hate working with IE.)

As usual, here is the Chess By Blog blurb page. You can download the release directly from the wordpress server: chess-by-blog.1.1.3.zip, or first take a look at the Chess by Blog page on wordpress.org.

Please post any questions or issues in the comments. Happy chess playing!

Beyond that, Susan has been very sick. I’ll avoid duplicating effort and instead point you at the page we wrote for our wedding web site. I can only hope she’s on the mend now that the pancreas is out and she’s off immunosuppression.

Nonetheless, the wedding is definitely still on, in large part due to the heroic efforts of the future in-laws. Caterer, cake maker, florist, DJ have all been committed to, with two months to spare, and invitations were all sent out yesterday. Yes, life continues here even when I’m not posting about it.

I was supposed to start on Monday the 18th, but INS saw fit to deny my entry into the country, mainly because I’d chosen to believe something I’d read on the Internet instead of following the advice of the immigration lawyers. Then on the second day of work, I went to my first beer bash, and had a beer and probably a slice of Zachary’s pizza. At the time I wasn’t consciously aware that the drinking age in the States was higher than in British Columbia. So second day on the job, and already getting Pixar into legal trouble. You can see the seeds of a pattern of behaviour that perhaps hasn’t changed all that much over the ten years.

Anyways, thanks to all of my co-workers in the RenderMan group, past and present, for being supportive, helpful, and generally cool enough to make the last ten years go by in a blink, even through offices in six separate buildings and three zip codes.

I’ve decided to keep the new cello! You can click on the picture for a bigger view of it.

The cello that I had been playing for the last decade has been in the family almost as long as I’ve been alive. Roz played it before me, and when I graduated to a full size cello, we alternated with it. When I moved up from playing piano in the intermediate division of youth orchestra to playing cello in the senior division, alternation wasn’t going to work since Roz was principal cellist in the senior division; we needed two cellos. So our family bought a new, surprisingly good sounding Chinese made cello. We ended up alternating on that new cello, and whenever we needed to play simultaneously for orchestra I used the old one.

When I moved to California I inherited the old cello. I’ve known for years that it wasn’t a very good instrument, but since I wasn’t playing much it didn’t matter. Lately that’s changed. A few months ago I ended up at a CMNC workshop where they had too many pianos and was forced to play cello for two days. It was there that Burke, the chamber coach for one of the days, said that I was better than the instrument I was playing. Now, Burke is a cellist, and our regular trio group knows him well – we’d signed up for one of his own workshops during the summer to work on the first Rachmaninoff piano trio. (I was playing piano. It’s not a well known piece, incidentally. It ends with a funeral march. Actually, the entire piece is an elegy. Despite that, it’s actually quite a fun piece for all three instruments.) So I value his opinion and took him seriously when he expressed some wonder at the weight of the cello I was playing – cheap cellos have thick wood, which make them heavy.

What set me to serious consideration of a new instrument was orchestra. I ended up being the only cellist for the Christmas concert in December, and was thus the de facto soloist on Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasy on Christmas Carols. It starts off with an extended cello solo and has other exposed cello bits within, and I’m afraid that I didn’t sound very good. Fifty percent of that was my own playing, but the other half I will blame solely on the instrument. The cello has never sounded good on the low strings, and wolfs like mad in fourth position on both the C and G strings; of course, the Williams piece starts off right there. On top of that, it’s definitely not a cello that projects well in a hall. Or in a closet, for that matter. On the recording, you can barely hear me play. Which is probably just as well.

Cellos are like cars: you don’t typically buy them online. Actually, instrument dealers tend to be more trusting than car dealerships: they typically let you take the instrument out for extended trials. On the other hand, I did more or less buy my car online, so why not my cello? And given the limited money I was willing to spend, that put me squarely in the category of “student”, workshop made cellos, so there didn’t seem to much point in going to a shop like Ifshin and comparing a limited selection of mass made instruments. I looked online and took a chance on Linda West’s online storefront based out of Santa Barbara. I kept an eye on a particular model made by Calin Wultur (a workshop in Romania) that she had nice things to say about, and after Pixar paid our film bonus I ordered the instrument online just before the New Year. Linda and I had a interesting e-mail exchange about cases, strings and cello setup, and a few nervous days later the instrument showed up.

So I’ve had it for almost two weeks now and I’m happy with it. For one thing, it’s a very nice instrument to look at. The back is a single solid piece of bird’s eye maple, which I understand to be a rare set up. The sound on the lower two strings is gorgeous, much more richer and powerful than the old cello. The D blends well with the G. I think the A is a bit thin, slightly nasal, but I suspect changing the string will help with that. Admittedly, I’m sure a lot of the difference between the old and new instruments is the setup – for one thing, the old cello has never had a bridge properly cut for it, so the strings were much too high above the fingerboard (making it much harder to play in upper positions). For another, the new cello has much nicer fittings: carbon fiber end pin, ebony wooden tail piece, and Linda also chose a Belgian style bridge and strings that match the instrument well. I think I disagree with her on the Jarger Forte that’s on the A, but the Belcanto C and G definitely sound great. There are some minor fit and finish issues, and I’m a little sad that the finish on one of the cornices got rubbed off during transit (it’s got Montagnana dimensions, so it’s wide, and barely fits in the case), but I definitely feel that this instrument is better than I play and is something that I can grow into for the next few years.

I ordered a new bow too. Arcos Brasil, silver. I wasn’t sure about the bow at first. Back then, Roz and I both had Dörfler bows, except hers was twice the cost of mine. However, I never noticed a difference in tone when I played with her bow, perhaps a slight difference in ease of spiccato. So I was very surprised to notice a significant difference in tone with the new bow. Even taking into account that I just had my old one rehaired, and the rosins were different, the new bow just makes the new cello sound just a bit better.

Here are some quick recordings I made this afternoon of the first 90 seconds or so of the Brahms E minor cello sonata – my favourite piece for trying out cellos. This is the old cello; compare it to the new one, with everything else more or less constant. Sorry about the very poor intonation; I haven’t practiced this piece in a while, and, well, my intonation sucks. The accompanist (me) wasn’t drunk, but if you know the piano part, you can hopefully excuse how hard it is to keep in time while playing by yourself on the off beats. My playing and recording set up doesn’t do justice to the differences between the two instruments, but you should be able to hear the completely different resonances between the two, particularly on the lower strings.

Susan has been sick the last few months, and is still sick. She’s had to go to the hospital twice. We were lucky to have her discharged just prior to Christmas, and her parents flew out to help make it more festive here, but it seems like it will still be a long way to full recovery for her.

During her second extended hospitalization Kaylee decided to take after her mother and have a solid week of being sick as well. She took to waking her dad three or four times a night to be let out into the backyard to do her business. As a result her dad did not sleep particularly well, especially after spending evenings at the hospital. At least she recovered, albeit immediately after being taken to the vet.

Before and during all this going down, I’ve found myself playing a lot more cello. Two days at the CMNC workshop when they had too many pianos, and two quarters as the principal (and sometimes, only) cellist with orchestra. The first quarter concert was a treat: a performance of Mozart’s Requiem in Berkeley with full choir, including the Vilnius Pro Musica group from Lithuania. We’ve never sounded so good. The second quarter concert featured yours truly as a soloist on Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasy on Christmas Carols. That experience, along with Burke’s assertion during the chamber music workshop that my current cello is a piece of crap, convinced me I needed a new cello. So I ordered one – it’s on trial and I will post more about it if I decide to keep it.

Our wedding website is up: ffwed.com. Currently more of interest to guests, but we’ll have photos there after the big day.

Happy New Year to all. I’ll try to keep my New Year’s resolution to boost this blog’s interestingness.

• Some compatibility issues related to user logins under WordPress 2.7 have been fixed (I think this only affected the playability of live boards).
• A single blog post containing multiple live boards should now work correctly – moves are posted to the post under the correct board, and multiple players should no longer interfere with each other.
• A new PGN button has been added. This opens a new browser window with the PGN content of the board, this can then be saved to the local drive. This feature is somewhat experimental and I would be interested in any comments (note that due to browser security, there isn’t much I can do from JavaScript to make this prettier).
• Live boards can now automatically refresh themselves on a regular interval, to reflect moves made by the opponent. This interval can be configured in the plugin control page (under Tools in WordPress 2.7).

As usual, here is the Chess By Blog blurb page. You can download the release directly from the wordpress server: chess-by-blog.1.1.2.zip, or first take a look at the Chess by Blog page on wordpress.org.

By the way, since a lot of my users seem to be overseas, I’m still looking for volunteers to help with internationalization – this would amount to translating the strings that are in the user interface. If you’re interested, please drop me a line.

Please post any questions or issues in the comments. Happy chess playing!