notes from the kelp

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Strong winter fire star.

This morning was pretty great for February: almost 50 degrees. Yes, Fahrenheit. I had to spell check that last word because I can never remember the first “h.”
So as the sun blazed into my windows and the birds chirped with glee as they pecked at bowls of seed I’d put out, I prepared the materials for my upcoming residency at Capital University in frigid Columbus, Ohio, where it is in the mid-20’s.

Mid-20’s. Just like most of the other cities I’ve been trotting around to for my work this winter: Chicago, New York, Minneapolis. What is wrong with me?? Why am I not smart enough to figure out a schedule that would have me in the south of the U.S. between November and March? If I were really clever, I could refuse commissions and conferences in any clime above Latitude 32 during winter. But I won’t, because I love this music life way too much. It’s worth freezing my backside off for, any day.

They are very, very lovely people in Columbus, truly. But they are a cold people. And I am about to be a cold person. If you, too, would like to join me and The Lovely and Talented Cold People, click here and read about the NOW New Music Festival and how you can shiver right along side of some really great musicians and one very appreciative, if frosty, composer.

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Occasionally explosive.

The last of the three articles I wrote this month for NewMusicBox posted this week. So many words have been erupting from me lately, in addition to all the usual musical notes, that I’m starting to wonder what’s in the water I’m drinking. Oh, wait, that was vodka… now I get it… Anyway, feel free to have a gander at
The Economy of Exposure. Disappointingly, no trench coats are involved.

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Up, down, and all around.

More travel. More landings. All directions, literally and figuratively. Mostly quite good, and that which is not quite good is still quite compelling. Interpret as you will. I am looking in all directions. Inward is always the best, even if not always the most reliable.

My outward self, meanwhile, has not only been writing music like a good little composer, but also writing words about outward things regarding artists’ experiences in the world, now that the new digital paradigm is reality. For all that I have failed to blog on this page this month, I have made up for in two recent essays for the wonderful online magazine NewMusicBox. Whether you are a musician or not, you may enjoy the reads: As Important as the Printing Press: Net Neutrality and Artists’ Freedom, and What I Learned About My Tiny Business From Paramount Pictures. NewMusicBox will be publishing another, possibly more significant, and hopefully even more controversial piece (ooh!) this coming week. Stay tuned: I’ll post the link here.

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Interpettzo.

Ok, snapped with my iPhone in low light, but still, Smudge and Moses, butt to butt, seem to appropriately represent “out with the old and in with the new.” Like a gravity-defying circus act atop my heated kitchen floor, they remind me that cuteness can still survive in a topsy-turvy world.

Here’s to a new decade, filled with soft fur and the ability to blissfully ignore any rind shavings and vegetable trimmings that may unexpectedly fall on your head from life’s countertop!

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Finding out. And in.

Everyone has their own reaction to the end of the year. Inescapable holidays. Unstoppable chronology. Opportunities gained, and others lost. Family, friends, loneliness, or just peaceful solitude taken at home, while the rest of society swirls in a mad dash of annual tradition. I start and stop with Thanksgiving; beyond that, no other holiday captures my time or heart. I count myself among many who view Christmas with a cynic’s raised eyebrow (I’d say jaundiced eye, but mine remain brown and my besotted liver still functions remarkably well, thank you very… hic!… much). Some people truly adore their families and anticipate the yearly holiday gatherings with delight. For others, the odd discomfort of being artificially thrown into a food-infused petri dish with people simply due to a shared a strand or two of DNA, speaks only to the absurdity of social expectations.

While I have little emotion for what December represents, I do love January. I love the new year. I have a birthday soon after. I love getting older, racking up more experience, filling my life with more emotions and people and musical discoveries and mistakes and joys. It’s all real and it’s all vibrant and passionate. Each New Year’s is my time to hope and envision and dream and plan. And and and. There is always more that tugs and invites.

I hate tax time because I resent having to look backward. Even in a year that’s gone reasonably well, my gaze turns to flaws and errors and misjudgments and disappointments. You’d think the start of another year would create the same uneasiness in me, but instead, it’s always been filled with light and happy anticipation. I guess I’m blessed with either good brain chemistry, or the daftness of being the local village idiot. Either way, it’s rather pleasant.

I see this time of year as a series of paths and windows. Directional choices made and yet to be determined, and views to external and interior landscapes defined by my heart and its frailties. This is what has meaning to me. To the rest of the commercialized, media-driven fakery, the President and CEO of Notes From the Kelp, Inc. says: Bah! Humblog!

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Jam. No peanut butter.

I admit that I have a tougher time making time for certain things when my time is being spent in places other than the place I spend most of my time when I’m home: my studio. For as much as I get done in several realms at once, there is always much more that I want to do that just follows me around from city to city, waiting patiently for my attention like a deranged stalker, while my internal taskmistress takes care of nagging me mercilessly. In general, we all agree, there is never enough time. Even though we are the ones supposedly in charge of making time for what we need and want to do.

So from time to time there forms a logjam of many diverse things needing to be done, and of course one triages activity choices and responses based on urgency and abject fear that were one not to accomplish Said Seemingly Important Task within an imaginary, self-deluded time period, well then, the Earth would cease to spin on its axis and, most importantly… we would not be loved. Perish the thought.

So here I sit in Manhattan, on an island merely half the size of the one on which my studio sits, and having taken momentary refuge from the cold and wind, I am attempting to pry apart an impressively expanding logjam of work-and-life-related things. And one of those things is right here in Kelpville, where my heart is, despite my body being elsewhere. I offer this friendly note to tell you that my hands are itching to hold a camera in front of a scene containing no buildings, cars, traffic lights or cement. And when they do later this month, you’ll be the first to know. All in due time. Minneapolis, and then Chicago, await!

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Rain croak.

The embossed lettering atop my trash can instructs, “para que no entren los animales… lock the darn lid.” (my translation). Sure, the clever handles prevent raccoons and deer from enjoying the leftovers, but there is no stopping the renegade Pacific Tree frogs, who don’t read Spanish.

My studio window is wide open on this quiet, mild, grey Sunday, and I’m surrounded by the delightful and insistent commentary of many little frogs as I type this. They love this weather. Or maybe they despise it, and are whining. I can’t tell because I haven’t signed up for the Berlitz course in Amphibianese. Against a hazy, shifting ceiling, the grass and the trees are green, and remain so throughout the winter. Even in winter, it rarely looks bleak here because of two things: the perpetual verdant landscape, and the fact that ninety percent of the time, even our grey weather offers fluffy, three-dimensional clouds in varying hues, giving visual depth and movement to the sky. It really is quite poetic. The frogs provide the text. I keep my window open, to steal the music.

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Moving. Always.

Yes, home again. After 17 days on the road. In the air, in hotels, in meetings, in rehearsals, in concert halls, in lecture halls, in receptions, in universities, in homes and apartments, in museums, in trains and cars and ferries and buses and taxicabs, in restaurants and bars and coffee houses and clubs, in elevators and up and down stairs and escalators and sidewalks and sometimes wondering where the heck I was going but all-times having a great time getting there and back.

Next week I begin another trip. Five cities. Six planes. Eighteen days.
I will be looking up at trees for partridges.

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Places of life and longing.

Above, the view from a friend’s house on the north end of San Juan Island, looking straight out to the Southern Gulf Islands of British Columbia and straight in to the universe. As I relaxed in one of those chairs, I was convinced that were this my home I would get absolutely no work done whatsoever.

Below, the full, intoxicatingly scented bloom of the island’s biggest lavender farm. Yes, it smells like it looks: instant calm. The web hasn’t figured out how to download that to your desktop yet. You’ll like it when I can put a little button on this blog screen that invites you to “click here” to experience the e-romatic wonder of this place. Now that’s how to reach an audience! Or, depending on what odors one offers, how to instantly repel them.



And here, one of my frequent visitors (or, music critics). He and his big ears keep coming back, as if to check to see if I’ll ever get it right. I mean, seriously: just look at the utter exasperation on his face.

Orange, purple, green, brown and all the other parts of the spectrum make up one beautiful aspect of my life. It’s pretty fascinating to embrace a bifurcated existence: one that’s remote and rural, and another that takes me from city after city– every month. Writing music, then talking about it in all those places. And, back again. I thrive on this balance, and post these snapshots not only to share the scenes with you, but to remind me what awaits in 17 days when I return from the five-state journey my 22″ roll-on and I start in the morning (uh, I think that might be the states of: confusion [where am I right now?], momentary panic [where did I place my boarding pass?], general bliss [what friendly people!] , illusion [surely they get what I’m talking about…uh… no?] and calm [yes, I’d love another glass, thank you]). I’ll try to post something here from the road while I’m traveling. No matter what state I happen to be in.

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Below.

More photos of my favorite thing.
All taken in the same place, at the same time.
Absolutely zero retouching or effects.
When real life looks like a Photoshop filter, things are good.

I like how the green of the sea echoes the green of the trees in my previous post.
Living green. Up, and down.

Plenty is swirling around the Shapiro waters these days, and it’s a fun place to swim (no kick boards, though– I gotta use my arms and work!). A few readers have commented and, nearly complained, that I rarely write very much here about what fills my days apart from finding new and improved ways to photograph kelp and spiders. It’s true: for three and two-thirds years of continuous blogosity, I’ve chosen the purposeful tack of showing visitors what I do (via the music clips that underscore all these little snapshots), rather than telling them. I’ve always figured that if anyone is that interested in the newsy stuff, they’ll pop over to Alex World for their fix. But once in a while I suppose a summary is appropriate, so here’s another snapshot– not of the nature that’s surrounding me on this island, but the nature of what’s surrounding my life this month.

Yesterday I taped another virtual reality show for Music Academy Onlive, whose terrific Dave Schwartz (aka Benton Wunderlich) has hosted me on three of his other Second Life shows in the past. This latest one was courtesy of a grant from Meet the Composer, and I think I may be their first virtual project (Meet the e-Composer? There are plenty of days when I feel rather disembodied, doing business in four continents in an afternoon without ever hearing anyone’s voice, much less feeling their handshake, so the role of virtual composer seems fitting. So long as I am not paid in virtual moolah). Thanks to this nifty project, there are brand spanking new videos of six more of my pieces, plus the hour-long interview we shot in which I talked about my music and even more about my views of what it is– and is not– to create a viable career aligning little black dots. All of this will be posted on my website and my [oh-geez-finally-to-be-created] YouTube channel soon. You can point and laugh at my avatar’s Restless Leg Syndrome. I just couldn’t control that wild gal.

Two of those voice-less continents have been using up some of their hard drive space for my notes: in Germany, the fearless pianist Susanne Kessel has just recorded my new solo piece Slowly, searching, and I’m told the CD it will spin on, Kreisleriana 2010, will come out on Obst Records in January. And in the other hemispheric direction, Australian resident and flutist extraordinaire Peter Sheridan’s new CD, Below: Music for Low Flutes was released last month on Move Records, titled after the piece Peter commissioned from me for the project (a clip of which you can hear, above). Peter’s been touring with Below extensively, and it’s also starting to get a lot of radio play which makes Peter, me, and a bunch of Pacific Humpback whales (you’ll have to read about it ), smile.

In between a trip to the east coast next week and some time in Minneapolis speaking at the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, I’m looking forward to being in Chicago in a couple of weeks for the premiere of my latest large chamber work: Archipelago, for string quartet, double bass, and woodwind quintet. The marvelous and intrepid Fifth House Ensemble is either humoring me with kind delusions, or, the piece is actually going rather well in rehearsals. I’m hoping it’s the latter, if only because, as my good friends will tell you, I enjoy being in a constant state of delusion.

But before that event, I have another premiere of sorts: this Sunday, November 1st, for the first time since I was a teenager, I’m acting in a public reading of a wonderful play by actor/playwright Michael Herber, who lives here on San Juan Island. He’s written a deeply touching story about Vietnam veterans suffering from post traumatic stress disorder and plagued by survivor’s guilt, and I play the role of the narrator, covering everything from hilarity to utter anguish. Charles, who did a great job starring in a monologue earlier this year at the Playwright’s Festival, plays one of the lead vets. I have yet to make it to my final line without tearing up.

Water, water, everywhere.

And yes, there is a weekly stream of board meetings, panel meetings, committee meetings (someone slap me please before I say yes to one more thing), filling orders for my publishing company’s distributors (thank you!), and, golly, people, things and activities that are very enjoyable and have nothing directly to do with my music work whatsoever. Although, any composer will tell you that it’s all inseparable, and everything we do and all that we are is what gets poured out into our new pieces. Music is my life’s reflecting pond, and all I can do is just hope that the water beneath the surface is deep enough so that when I fall in, I don’t bonk my head too hard.

The view from my studio door…



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Strangely beautiful.

After spending the better part of the week in Philadelphia to give a workshop, I was happy as always to return to the woods. The weather was still warm enough, but a front was moving in the afternoon I puddle-jumped back to the island, and I was reminded why just about this time of year is when I start to favor the ferries when possible. The clouds were far beneath us and the sky was beautiful, yet filled with forceful, intermittent, invisible chop that attacked from seemingly nowhere.

I awakened the next morning to the familiar sound of the ferry’s insistent horn as it chugged blindly through the San Juan Channel. The fog that rolled in with the rain was thick and completely obscured the rising sun. When I lived on my sailboat in the Santa Barbara harbor, our slip was right next to the end of the breakwater and might as well have been inside of the fog horn. Fog horns, while somewhat romantic from afar, are more than somewhat annoying when they continuously bleat their warning only a few yards from one’s ears. I much prefer the romance of the vessels that glide on the water and sing, slightly off key, to each other.

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Fruits of a water crossing.

A few days ago, we got a last minute call from a pal to join him with a few other island friends on his 46′ sailing ketch…



… to go apple picking.

Now, most folks don’t take a sailboat to an orchard, but this ain’t most places. By noon we were underway the very short distance to Shaw Island, a place of serenity, fruit, and remarkably clear water.



After anchoring in a little bay, we loaded the rowboat with empty bins and, thinking ahead, a large hand truck (not standard equipment on either a sailboat nor a dinghy), and oared to shore over lovely clear jellies floating atop the eel grass.



The Shaw Invasion had begun (the jellyfish were shaking in fear, I’m certain). Climbing up from the beach, we walked down a rural path about a hundred yards until we found ourselves in the middle of an apple orchard, and wasted no time determining which of the bright red orbs were worth plundering.



The answer turned out to be, “quite a lot of them.”

Hauling our winnings back to shore, we realized that we could add more than enough fiber to the diet of a small nation with the number of apples we had in tow.



It took a few strong shoves to get the overladen rowing dingy out to sea again, there were so many pounds of fruit.



At this point in the story I should be showing you a beautiful photo from my kitchen of the incredible delicacies I created from this windfall. Instead, I admit that since returning to shore that afternoon, life was too busy for me to learn how to cook or bake (someday, someday!), and instead I’ve enjoyed the apples one raw bite at a time. This was my very first time apple picking, in fact: growing up in Manhattan, I used to think that they came prepackaged under a cellophane window on styrofoam in polite groups of six. I had never before seen apples in their natural habitat. The whole Newton/gravity thing finally came alive for this aged school girl when she saw what happens when you shake a ripe tree. Apple-ied physics!