notes from the kelp

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…about the music

Music for insects on the go.

Since returning from my most recent trip to New York, I’ve had a productive month of composing and living on this gorgeous floating rock that holds many more animals than people. I’ve been mesmerized watching spring become a verb through the actions of each tree, bird, and newborn lamb or foal surrounding me, and that vision inspired my muses as I wrote the electroacoustic band piece for which I had my first, really fun rehearsal today. I can’t wait to see these kids again; they’re a delight. And even more of a delight than they were just yesterday before they heard the piece, since they like the music I wrote them and called it “awesome.” High, high praise from a 13 year old, and I’m grateful.

In the early morning, I leave once again for a place that holds many more people than animals. And, far more composers than here, too: southern California. I’ve got a very full, word-and-idea-and composer-intensive week ahead, beginning with two ASCAP Composer Career Workshops: one in San Diego, and the next in Hollywood. I’ll be joined by three distinguished colleagues, and we’ll share whatever we’ve learned about this wacky music life with our peers, who, just like us, are trying to learn more about this wacky music life. Then I’ll speak on a panel for the ASCAP I Create Music EXPO about this wacky music life and lot of ways to make it even more rewarding if you think outside the taco shell. Somewhere in there I’ll do a few mentoring sessions at the EXPO with composers seeking further info about this wacky music life (hey, ya want wacky, I’m your gal), and finally, because apparently I just will not have talked enough, I’ll moderate a Los Angeles Composers Salon, featuring even more composers, most if not all of whom are a tad wacky.

This will be “old home week” for me, as I’m immersed in a happy world of colleagues who are every bit as passionate about what they do as I am. Many of them became good friends during the years that L.A., not some funny little island, was my address. While I don’t miss much about that city in terms of daily life, I always love being amidst large groups of my amiable composer pals. They are every bit as inspiring as the springtime. And, nearly as wacky as I. Thank goodness.

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Older, in a suite way.

I think I love pelicans and herons so much because in flight, they look like ancient pterodactyls. And, after a phone interview I gave to a very pleasant college student yesterday, I suspect my affinity toward them must be because they feel like immediate family. The composition student asked excellent questions for his report, and wisely focused on things like “what advice to you have for getting started as a professional composer,” and, “what would you do differently if you were beginning your career now?”. To the latter query, I’d say, “arrange to be born twenty years later.” Because as I answered the former, I suddenly realized that virtually none of the tools on which I currently rely for my work and which I ardently teach students and peers to use, existed in 1983 when I left Manhattan School of Music for the great big composing world out there. None.

Well, almost none: the year before, I had received a new invention of something called a Telephone Answering Machine as a gift from a boyfriend (he must have liked me at least enough to want to leave messages for future date plans). It was new technology, and of course one had to offer instructions on the outgoing message as to just what the heck the unsuspecting caller should do upon hearing the mysterious beep. Twenty eight years later, I remain amused by people’s messages with the same, plodding instructions. C’mon, folks, I think we know how to work it now.

So, geez, as I talked to this budding 19 year old composer, did I feel old all of a sudden. I immediately realized that my start in the music business would have been about a hundred times faster, had I had the computer and internet connection he and his classmates take for granted. My first computer, an adorable Macintosh SE/30, followed me home in 1989. It was nearly as good looking as that boyfriend. Soon after, I set up my first real project studio, having had the semblance of one, sans computer but mit Yamaha DX7 and four-track cassette tape, since 1984. Life was good. Intricate home recording via MIDI was the new frontier, and I was an avid cowgirl.

But despite the fact that we now cannot imagine a moment of our lives without them, the inter-tubes did not enter our daily existence until the mid-nineties. And that newest frontier changed everything. With social networking, endless personal web presences and tons of opportunities to instantly become a known quantity by participating in the online communities of our choice, building a career from scratch became a lot more possible. I’m proof: I shifted mine across the deep abyss from film and TV scoring to concert music in 1999, and my ability to successfully do so as a complete unknown in that part of the music world, was almost entirely because of those intertubes.

But I emphasize almost. Because the most important part of the music business, and probably of any business, is building relationships. Whether one does that in person or in pixels, without them, we’re down the tubes, and soon to be extinct ancient history. Squawk!

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…about the music

Please hum.

Yes, it’s me with the birds again. In a moment of harmonic stultification this afternoon, when I realized that my ears were so overloaded with chords and notes and rhythms that they could no longer hear straight, I grabbed a popsicle and sat on the waterside deck in the sunshine for a little break. But an amateur, shutter-addicted, photog’s work is never done, and surrounded by so many lovely things buzzing and flying around me, from flower-drugged bumble bees to cutely-mugged chickadees, once the popsicle was out of my hands, my camera was back in them.

It was a welcome contrast, from the thick sounds of the electroacoustic band piece I’m finishing up in my headphones, to those of bird calls and wings flapping around my head. I steadied the camera on my knees and laid in waiting, motionless, on my visual hunt for a hummer in process. And, I captured him.

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Things are going swimmingly.

I often say that composing is a faith-based activity. I can go for quite a while under deadline without managing to come up with anything. I don’t mean anything I like. I mean, anything at all. I am the Queen of the Procrasti Nation, and being pretty busy, there’s plenty to procrastinate with. But despite the impending, career-denting doom that could occur, I never fret (well, okay, I fret, but I don’t take it that seriously). Why? Because after 32 years of composing music under the stress of deadlines, I’ve never failed to meet my delivery date with something I’m not embarrassed by (hmm… it’s possible that my standards are far too low). Once you’ve done this sort of thing that many times, you just have faith that you can, and will, do it again (in other words, this is not a technique I recommend to someone with their very first pro gig). Now watch; having had the hubris to type this, something will screw up next week that will have me in a real bind.

So here I am, nearing my deadline, and just about done with a really fun electroacoustic wind band piece for the American Composers Forum’s BandQuest series that’s funded by the NEA, and I appear to have my ducks in a row. And like the guys in the photos above right outside my studio, sometimes that can be in some rather creative positions.

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Lights… roll film… action!

It takes a woman with a very boring life to not only post photos of hail in its gerund form, but to even shoot them in the first place. Nonetheless, I share my ditzy joy with you: yesterday morning’s very intense and long hail storm that left almost an inch of the stuff glistening everywhere for half the day. It was dramatic! It looked like a blizzard coming down… a very LOUD blizzard.

HEAR the repetitive thudding on the metal roof! SEE the powerful flow of pea-sized ice pellets pouring down! SENSE the chill in the otherwise springtime air! WATCH as my property turns into an early April winter wonderland!
Wait… there’s something not right about that…

Oh, and EXPERIENCE the edge-of-their-chair excitement of Moses and Smudge through it all:

All hail the unflappable kitties! Who needs lithium, when you can just glance at these guys?

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From above, looking below.

Ok, an electronic wink goes to the first person who “gets” the title of this post.

And it’s quite accurate. I was seeking ways to procrastinate from composing, and it was so warm and sunny that I had to step outside this afternoon. Having recently outgrown the space of my studio at my wooded home a very short walk from the sand, when looking for larger business quarters for Shapiro Note Alignment Industries, Ltd., a few months ago (aka, SNAIL, since that’s about the pace I feel like I’m writing sometimes), I opted for a waterfront location for my commute to work. And indeed I procured one, in the form of a fabulous rental that’s only yards from the edge of a dramatic inlet that morphs daily from lapping saltwater, to a sprawling mud flat, and back. More pix of this soon; I’ve been taking plenty. So “stepping outside” in this case means walking two feet from my workstation onto the seaside deck. Ahhhhhh.

But back to the birds. I grabbed my Larger, Better Camera and positioned it to focus on the hummingbird feeder I just put out yesterday after spotting spring’s first fluttering diabetic-in-training. I waited patiently for an especially cute newcomer to return (just look at those tiny feet in the photo below!), and glanced up just as a Great Blue Heron was coming in for a landing, alighting directly in front of me. What a lovely surprise visit.

Working next to the water means having a lot of company throughout the day. Apart from the occasional deer, fox, or neighbor’s goofy Labrador, it’s an endless parade of avian beauty: seafarers like herons, ducks, geese and gulls, seed-farers like chickadees, nuthatches, finches and flickers, and most strikingly, the see-everything bald eagles who circle gracefully above my head every day (possibly sizing me up to see if I’m a candidate for lunch). It’s so distracting, it’s amazing I can get any work done at all. Ahhhhhh.

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Through the archipelago.

It’s been great being back at home for a while on this rock, composing in my self-contained, hermetic phase, and yet remaining remarkably plugged in to the world when necessary, via Skype video. I’ve done a board committee meeting that was held in NY as well as given three interviews this week, all from my desk. No one would have known whether or not I had pants on. And I’m not tellin’.

The snapshots above really epitomize what’s insanely great about my commute when one makes it via water as opposed to air. And especially, on the occasional day when one’s vehicle is the very first car that boards and gets the über-view to end all über-views as we glide through the archipelago. Much of the time I’m on the Tonka toy planes that zip me from Seattle to San Juan Island in about 35 minutes, unless we first get an extra crash landing test stop at Eastsound on Orcas to drop someone off. When it’s windy in the San Juans, it’s really blowing coming up the sound between the imposing lumps that flank it, and this ersatz wind tunnel can make for quite an unexpected… uh… thrill?… for no extra charge!… as the plane and its passengers are jostled about in directions that you’d prefer to think that a small piece of metal in mid-flight would not head. I’m writing this as the spring season becomes especially mild, to thwart anyone from ever wanting to fly here. I want this place all to myself and I’m willing to use scare tactics to achieve personal nirvana.

I particularly love this place during the eight months when almost no one is here. An island of 55 square miles that hosts less than 7,000 human beings during those “off-season” months means that very few cars prowl the roads. And those of us driving have the affable tendency to glance into passing windshields, due to the likelihood that we’ll recognize the person driving by. A “two-fingers raised off the steering wheel” acknowledgment is the norm. Can you imagine that in Los Angeles? Only with one finger, usually located in the middle of the hand, and not because they want you to call them later.

Winters at the beach are magic. Drama. Clarity. Inspiration. It was just like this during my 14 years in Malibu: most of the year, it’s as gorgeous as all the other times of year, and yet you have miles of beach all to yourself because people are too busy, or think it’s too cold, or whatever. So those of us living in these amazing places are the great beneficiaries of having gazillions of square miles of some of planet Earth’s most beautiful scenery, all to ourselves. I remember walking for long stretches on the beach at Paradise Cove on a January day with temps in the 70’s, not seeing a soul. I seriously wondered whether some disaster had struck southern California, and no one had informed me. And I just kept walking.

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A vista, plus one you can hear.

Driving on the south end of this island mid-morning today, I was stunned (as always) by the immense view from the coastline on which my tires, myself and my latte were planted, looking out to Canada’s Vancouver Island directly across the Haro Strait. I liked the unwitting visual symmetry of the space above the horizon until the clouds became dark, and the space between the sea and the bluff on which I stood. The foggy March haze draped itself around the mountains so beautifully. I’d like to go through life draped like that myself. Forget about fabric clothing altogether, and just adorn myself with cloudwear.

I know. You can’t really see all that in this little photo. Trust me: those mountains are really big when you’re standing there. About three times as high, at least. Really.

Turning my head 90 degrees to the left, I could see another, more distant mountain range: the Cascades, making a dramatic backdrop behind several of the San Juans. But of course, in my little snapshot, that backdrop doesn’t look nearly as dramatic as it is in person. You’ll just have to trust me again. Drama baby, drama.

But I can at least give you an inkling of all that craggy, snow-capped drama, taken on another, sunnier day from almost the same spot, but with a 300 zoom lens attached. I liked the dance between the edges of the driftwood and those of the peaks. Voila, drama!

So I’m off on the morning ferry to Seattle, where I’ll be at this wonderful concert on Friday night hearing the fabulous Karen Bentley Pollick do some amazing things with my violin and electronics piece, Vista, as well as with quite a number of other beautiful new works composed by visibly living and breathing composers. Like the mountains, they too tend to look much smaller in photos than they are in person. About three times as high, at least. Really.

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A bit foggy across from the Olympic mountains, indeed.

We all know the dance: See email inbox fill up. Answer many emails. Momentarily enjoy much emptier inbox. Go to bed. Awake to completely re-filled inbox of responses to your responses. Repeat. Yessiree, for those of us who do much of our biz digitally, this is the two-step that keeps us and our typing fingers in tip-top shape. Email is great, but, it’s a bottomless pit of back and forth from which few escape. Yet I have recently discovered a guilty pleasure (or, a key to my sanity) that helps me cope: my iPhone, bedside.

No, I am not using the “vibrate” setting for personal use. Nope. But in the morning, when my eyes peel themselves one-third open and my foggy mind begins to churn with the never-ending to-do list of life, I blindly paw for my phone, tap a few times, retrieve my mail while safely ensconced under my warm comforter, and can instantly see the lay of the land for the coming hours. Who has emailed? What do they need? What fire needs to be put out? What is just fine and can wait? Well, it usually turns out, much of it. And being able to glance at what awaits my work day long before I intend to start it, allows me to happily place the iPhone back on the nightstand, turn over, and catch some more zzzz’s. This is one of the best uses for a digital tool I can dream of. The gift of more sleep!

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…about the music

Upward.

Photo: courtesy of Charles, who emailed this lovely vision from our driveway on the island as I gazed at yellow snow, rather than yellow flowers, in NYC. Much as I love my home town, I think I prefer the color on the flowers. I have no idea what those purple-blue blooms are, but they’re fabulous.

I post this from a most civilized space (Vino Volo) in a most civilized airport (SeaTac) as I wait for the van to take me to Boeing Field, where I’ll hop on a flying Volkswagen that will plop me down in a less civilized, if yet more beautiful, part of the western U.S. a hundred miles north of here. And apart from a brief trip in mid March to go to the rehearsal and performance of Vista in Seattle by my talented friend, violinist Karen Bentley, for the first time in the better part of a year, my calendar is clear of travel for a few weeks, unless some utterly compelling opportunity is suddenly dropped on my doorstep that would cause me to leave it. So this normally peripatetic (rhymes with pathetic) composer gets to stay home and actually compose without interruption for a while. Hooray! Because there are a lot of notes waiting to escape.

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…about the music

Delicate. Balance.

What is it about me and snowstorms this month? I’d take my ice-magnet abilities personally if only I didn’t know that most others in the U.S. feel about the same. My first full day in Columbus: a snowstorm that closed schools for a day. My first full day in New York City: a snowstorm that closed schools for a day. If I’d just stay home in that fabulous 50-plus degree island weather, maybe the rest of the country would get a chance to thaw out.

NYC has been really enjoyable this week, either despite or because of trudging through deep gutter puddles of questionable contents in my sturdy $25 knee-high snow-boots to good meetings, fun with friends, and some great live performances. Friday night I was at Carnegie for the Tibet House benefit, which ranged from peaceable singing monks to petulant spitting, mic-stand throwing rock stars: OMG! Patti Smith and Iggy Pop! I was in heaven and instantly reliving my high school years. They, however, are very much in the present with incredibly powerful voices and of course, presences. What a blast. There were quite a lot of other terrific artists in between those extremes, including artistic artistic artistic artistic artistic artistic artistic artistic director director director Philip Glass and my pal, uber-violist/composer Martha Mooke, and the three intermission-less hours flew by (almost as fast as Iggy’s hurled mic stand, which missed the 9′ Steinway by inches).

Last night I went for gorgeous young people in tutus and tights, and snagged a $20 seat at New York City Ballet for the classic Balanchine triptych: Jewels. I had seen this production growing up in the 70’s and it was quite nostalgic to sit up VERY high in the sold-out house (Row N, which stands for Nosebleed section) just as I used to as a teenager who scraped together her babysitting money to spend hours in this theater for countless ballets and opera. Not much has changed since I was 16: I still wear long straight brown hair and the same size clothes, and the State Theater still wears its same 60’s decor. On all counts, I’m so glad.

More professional meetings and more hangs with good friends this coming week, and then back to rural life on the 7th. I’m lucky to have such a demographically bifurcated life.

But if we get a snowstorm in the San Juans, someone’s gonna pay.

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Homecoming.

I returned from The Land of Cold People (see prior post) with a big smile. I could not have been treated more wonderfully by such a talented group of faculty and students. I gave a ton of lectures and private lessons and was rewarded with, among other things, a very, very beautifully performed evening of my music– concert, and jazz. It’s inspiring to be immersed for a few days into a new tribe of music makers, and I came home happy and appreciative.

And, happy and appreciative to defrost: like much of the country that week (except for the San Juan Islands where it remained a glorious, sunny 50-ish degrees), I was caught in one of the blizzards that swept through. The first full day I was at Capital University, they had to close the campus by 1pm. Although one of the three business/entrepreneurship classes I was to speak to was canceled, I told the 30 or so music students at my morning lecture that I’d be happy to pinch hit with my new-found free time, and hang with them to talk further at a local coffee shop. I thought maybe 3 people might show, just for the warm java. But fully half or more of the class was there, waiting for me as I walked in. Great students, eager to talk and question.

So I’ve caught up a bit on things here in the studio this week, only to turn on my heels again on Tuesday for an extended trip to my home town of Manhattan. Three board and committee meetings, plus my mother’s publicly unmentionable Importantly Numbered Birthday (the kind that ends with a zero or a 5). Stunningly beautiful, elegant, and wrinkle-free, without a grey hair on her perfectly coiffed head, she still lives in the same great apartment in which I grew up. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in the city: once you find good real estate, you hang onto it with your soot-lined claws. So coming over to visit her, decades later, is still truly going HOME. The only thing missing is my father, who I adored, and who left the planet way too early eleven years ago. As I was growing up, when he came home from work he used to ring to doorbell in a particularly quick, quirky way as he unlocked the door with his house key(s) [plural; hey, it’s New York]. He was the only person to ever ring our doorbell that way. Now when I show up, I ring it that way, too. Freaks my mother out just a tad. Hi, Daddy.

So I think a lot these days about what home is, because it turns out that by the time you’re my age, it’s a lot of things. It’s the place(s) you grew up. It’s the memory of the many places you lived before you moved all your stuff into the place you currently live. It’s the place you imagine you might live some day. And it’s also a 22-inch roll-on suitcase, paired with a laptop, an iPhone and an invincible wireless connection to the globe 24/7. I have learned that as long as I am doing work I love, and hanging with people that I really enjoy, I am home. I need very little to live well other than that, plus a sturdy TravelPro that will fit in the overhead compartment of life.