notes from the kelp

…listen
…about the music

Off to America.

This will be my exact view in six hours, as I embark once again for meetings in New York on another early morning journey to SeaTac International Airport. As you, my devoted (or soon to be once you’ve perused this nifty site) kelphisto blogerati know from my many airborne photos of this archipelago, I often fly off the island, rather than ferry. In fact, in my less than two years living in this paradise, I’ve logged so much music-related travel that my flapping abilities have earned me a whopping four, count’ em four free flights on the puddle jumper. I am a frequent and happy flier who’s grown accustomed to flinging herself through the air in something about as sturdy as a porta potty (though smells considerably better).

But as winter approaches, modes of transport shift and I choose to book a van that takes me and a handful of other bleary-eyed travelers on the 6am combo boat-and-drive down to the tarmac. The surf ‘n turf special, as I like to call it. The potential for high winds or dense fog make an on-time departure and a stress-free morning a little less of a sure thing, and when you’re trying to get somewhere, you really need to get to that somewhere when you need to and not some other time. Coordination of flights is tricky and modern travel being what it is (and largely what it isn’t), missing a connection can wipe out the whole day or evening. So the sure thing is the ferry, except for the rare day when neither a plane nor a boat of any size can make it out. We had a day like that last year and it was the only time I truly felt the impact of the remoteness I’ve chosen as home. I loved it.

Returning is another matter, and unless the weather is inclement, I fly back to the island, since my appearance at home is not especially time sensitive. And, I’ll get my fix of aerial photography. Perhaps I’ll have some new shots to offer you on Sunday. I take requests!

…listen
…about the music

Something in seven and other numbers as well.

Well, fellow West coast bloggerista Lisa Hirsch has snagged me. A meme of seven! The game: post the rules of this meme, answer them (no one added “honestly,” but I’m going for that), then tag other unsuspecting bloggers.

Why we all participate in these things is known only to Ph.D archaeological sociologists who will no doubt preserve this sorry evidence for alien visitors making a quick restroom stop on Earth while on their way to another, considerably more fascinating orbiting marble. My choices of accompanying photo and music clip, by the way, look and sound deceptive as to what they really are: not a choral work, but a flute quartet. Much of which contains 7/4 meters.

The rules (with my parenthetical commentary):
1. Link to your tagger and list these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog – some random, some weird (wait! aren’t those the same thing? And besides, everything about me is weird).
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blog (this is excellent for driving traffic to their sites, so do your pals a favor by participating).
4. Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. If you don’t have 7 blog friends, or if someone else already took dibs, then tag some unsuspecting strangers (no guarantee that this won’t get you in trouble with stalker laws, but hey, have fun).

The facts:

1. I used to breed pythons as a hobby in the 1980’s, and was a member in good standing of the Southern California Herpetology Society.

2. I am an absolutely dreadful parallel parker.

3. I used to be a decent juggler and could pass balls with a partner. No snickering.

4. I studied flute for a year when I was a composition major at Manhattan School of Music, but gave it up because I often frightened my teacher when I’d begin to pass out due to the combination of very poor breath control and very low blood pressure.

5. I love to vacuum, especially when I’m in the midst of composing a new piece. It allows my mind to wander, plus I can see my progress and feel infinitely more effective than when I’m struggling with writer’s block.

6. I was an incredibly shy, geeky and un-hip child. I loved Lost in Space while all the cool kids dug Star Trek, and I watched The Partridge Family when everyone else in elementary school was into the Brady Bunch. I am still extremely geeky, and have only acquired a patina-like illusion of hipness. I am no longer shy.

7. I love Scrabble and Boggle and can clean anyone’s clock at Monopoly. My father was a highly regarded commercial real estate attorney and I come by this expertise genetically.

Here are the bloggers I am tagging to seriously annoy them:
Patty Mitchell; John Clare; Paul Bailey; ACB; Dick Strawser; David Ocker; and Roger Bourland.

…listen
…about the music

Elegy.

I’m posting watery photos from my life in Malibu and Santa Barbara, to psychically douse the flames that are currently ravaging southern California. The first photo is from my old place at the beach in the Paradise Cove mobile home park, as condolence to the hundreds of people who lost their mobile homes in Sylmar this morning.
Douse the flames.
The second photo was taken from the stern of my sailboat in Santa Barbara a couple of years ago, looking directly into the hills of Montecito, where two of my friends are still waiting to hear whether the home they extensively remodeled with their own hands, sweat and love is still standing among the couple of hundred that are not.
Douse the flames.

And the third photo is an offering of hope. A rainbow over the sea: something in the distance that can’t quite be grasped, yet signifies beauty and calm. Like joy in the midst of grief, we can’t touch it, but we try to remember that it’s there, waiting for us.
Douse the flames. Drench the psyche with hope.

Seattle, with Puget Sound islands in the background…

Clouds and reflective, open sea…

Neighboring San Juans beyond San Juan…

The village of Friday Harbor, complete with ferry!

…listen
…about the music

Many moods.

I just returned from a very contrasting part of the country to mine: Fort Wayne, Indiana, where a concert including several of my electroacoustic pieces was held at the amazing Sweetwater Sound theater. It was inspiring to hear music that I’ve slaved over in my studio played back on a state-of-the-art sound system. And… sound really wonderful (phew!). It was validating, in fact. Because composers who work with electronics are also recording engineers who, once the music is written, must address many technicalities to make that music sound as it should. I have my colleague Michael Rhoades to thank for it all: this was an invaluable and delightful experience.

Getting to the Midwest from my house takes three planes and twelve hours door to door. It takes fourteen hours each way for all my New York City trips, another of which looms in a week– not before lecturing to the composition students at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle: a five hour trek door to door. But for all the moving around the country that I’m doing so frequently these days, not once have I wished that my home were in a more conveniently located spot on the globe. Not once. It’s such a complete pleasure to return to the rural peace of this island, whether by plane as photo-documented yesterday in four representative steps above, or by ferry. In fact, the only part of the journey from the SeaTac airport to my front steps that I do not especially care for, is a stretch of I-5 somewhere between the end of the Seattle skyline and the start of the agricultural views 40 minutes north. Even then, above a less than inspiring city outskirt, the sky is often riveting in its expanse, as clouds and weather trot across the atmosphere.

Today would have been my father’s 80th birthday. He passed away at the unripe age of 69 from the effects of dementia and a host of other things that tagged along for the ride. A native New Yorker and avowed “city person,” he was known to stand amidst beautiful country landscapes declaring “if you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen ’em all.” He was funny and I adored him. And although he could never picture himself living as I have for many years– with toes dirtied by seaweed rather than by soot– each time he visited me he seemed to understand. Were he here now, I do believe he would deeply grasp why I live the way I do. If only he were just fourteen hours away. I love you, Daddy.

…listen
…about the music

Yes, we did.

After eight painful and shameful years living in a nation held hostage by greed and lies, a lot of us experienced one gigantic, collective exhale last night. We watched as the U.S. pendulum began a swing back toward sanity, in an historic election many of us had been afraid to believe wouldn’t be stolen in its final hours.

I was in tears at several moments during the evening. First, when CNN declared that Barack Obama was President Elect. Capital letters emblazoned across the TV screen were the indication to my psyche that yes, this was real. I wept. And I wept again when I saw the stunningly huge, entranced crowd standing in Chicago, as I listened intently to this inspiring man’s moving speech.

Mr. Obama will probably not be able to solve all the problems this nation faces, but I am extremely grateful that he’s willing to sacrifice so much to try. I have no doubt that there will be a significant improvement not only in the direction of the U.S. government, but in the morale of its citizens who have been promised a President who will actually listen to them. And I can only guess that we’ve suddenly gained a few brownie points overseas, as the world watches us attempt to redeem ourselves.

The cargo containers pictured above struck me as an abstract flag, woven of commerce and transportation and draped across the Seattle shoreline. I took it coming back from a trip last month, and it seems appropriate today.

As I type this to you at 3:30 Wednesday morning, what began as the soothing sound of moderate rain has quickly ramped up to quite a riot of sonic pounding on my metal roof. Curious, I opened the door in my studio and was astonished to witness a remarkable hail storm of ice pellets the size of frozen peas. Millions of them, pouring down, bouncing, landing, joyously, insistently, looking as though someone made a middle of the night gravel delivery atop the grass. It’s not particularly cold; just 42 degrees. Barefoot, I stepped outside and delighted in standing there with the hail pouring down on me. Pummeling me, in fact. A cheap thrill. I even wondered if my car might get dented. I cupped my hands and collected these rounded icy gems, rolling them over my fingers. Wonderful. Now back at my desk, miniature snowballs slowly melt on my hair.

Even the atmosphere is celebrating the outcome of the election. Hail to the new chief! Hail to the change in America!

…listen
…about the music

From my deep, dark woods.

Suddenly, with the click of a nationally choreographed clock reset, it’s darker earlier. Which I, Vampire Composer of the Kelp, love. I’m like a mushroom: keep me in the dark and throw wet leaves on top of me in the drizzly rain, and I’m happy.

Most nights, I work until about 5 a.m. Sometimes as late as 7 a.m. Occasionally I pack things in at a “normal” time, maybe 1 a.m. or so, but it’s rare these days with so much on my plate. That’s the thing: to be lucky to love working so much that I don’t want to stop. How many people are fortunate enough to say that? Not enough.

Here in the land of higher latitudes, there’s a phenomenon to which I’ve had to adjust each summer: the lack of my beloved darkness. By the time Solstice rolls around, we don’t reach the Nirvana of a full, sometimes moonless blackout until nearly 11 p.m. And much to my protestations, as I compose in the sacred solitude of hours without ringing phones, incoming emails or doorstep deliveries, the first glint of sunlight begins around 3:30 a.m. and steals my nighttime. With the sun, so begins the happy, chattering ruckus of the birds, and the shift in the earth rhythms around me as everything awakens. Stop, thief! Don’t take my precious darkness away! I’ve still got tons of work to do! I silently curse the intruding light. For me, sunrise is a signal to my body that it’s finally time to go to bed. And when I’m in the thick of my writing at 4 in the morning, I am not ready to obey.

I realize that I am a mutant of our species. I have no difficulty falling asleep while watching a beautiful sunrise. Light can pour on top of me across my bed, nestled under a window that faces east, and it doesn’t bother me at all. I am impervious to light. But I am happily pervious to dark. I love setting my clocks back. I must have been a mushroom in a former life.

…listen
…about the music

Hunting for change.

…If you are a salmon.

And, scary if you are a Southern Resident killer whale looking for a salmon these days, because there aren’t enough in our waters right now to feed the pod populations. I am hopeful that, as with the possibility of desperately needed change offered by next week’s U.S. Presidential election, a terrible situation can right itself over time if we each become keenly aware of our ability to impact everyone’s lives.

Happy Hallowe’en! And if someone comes to your door in an Orca costume, give them a fish.

…listen
…about the music

Delineated, in all directions.

Ten days is a long time to be away from my desk. Largely because I really enjoy sitting here. My studio could be titled, “Mission: Control Freak.” Absolute Nirvana for a creative, geeky gal like me for whom simultaneous multitasking engaging all corners of the brain is an Olympic event. The space in which I spend the bulk of my hours is a personal tidepool filled with artifacts that will define my little existence long after I no longer exist, if only for the short period of time before none of the stuff in this room exists, either.

Against the wall on the left, a fine upright piano laden with too many score pads, mechanical pencils and, most importantly, erasers. The place of bad starts to many pieces and initial sketches of a few decent ones. To the right of that, facing the center wall, is the belly of the beast: my digital workstation, replete with three large LCD monitors offering 57 glorious inches of visual real estate, fully consumed with arrays of slick-looking software windows vying for my attention, all hovering over an 88-note keyboard controller, which hovers over the Big Powerful Computer and some outboard rack gear. The place of utter sonic manipulation, when the humans and cats in my life refuse to allow me to manipulate them. And to the right of all that lies my sizable desk, snugly tucked under a picture window and by a glass door overlooking the woods and the deer and the birds and the water that glistens through the trees as the sun sparkles. This is the place where I sit as I type these blogellas to you and where I sit as I size and upload the photos I want to share here and where I sit when I scratch my head and wonder just which snippet of my music might accompany my thoughts and images. It’s the place where the bulk of my administrative, left-brain tasks are fulfilled: email correspondence, score copying and printing, order fulfillment, web presence updating, internet shopping and as much idle web surfing and time wasting as possible. In fact, the tighter the deadline, the more finely honed my expert procrastination techniques become. Brilliant.

The fourth wall, to the right of all the aforementioned, simply backs my various guitars and hand drums, which in turn are backed by a large and magnificent oil painting that spans the length of the room, a gift to me from a very close family member who is the talented and deeply loved artist. Its intense, jeweled blues, teals and greens abstractly depict a natural world not unlike the one a few inches away on the other side of the glass door. I am surrounded by visual peace.

Were I living on the island from which I just returned, I would decline to describe the general contents of my studio for fear that I might be rapidly relieved of them by a less than devoted but remarkably attentive blog reader. Not that anything I’ve mentioned is worth terribly much nor would be particularly useful to normal, non-music scribbling humans. But here on this bridgeless island, the prospect of such unplanned charity is somewhat laughable since you really can’t fit much on a 6-seat airplane, and the long wait in the ferry line usually leads to an embarrassingly deflating moment when the sheriff calmly walks up to the suspect’s car, knocks on the window, and invites them to, uh, step outside the vehicle. It’s happened here. And it’s hilarious. Some folks really earn their Darwin Award.

Direction and delineation. Facing north, I begin new pieces. Facing east, I bring them to life via technology. Facing south, I get them out into the world. And facing west, I breathe and meditate for a moment as I take in the stunning colors and shapes of the painting, and by doing so, allow my spirit to turn once again to the right and begin my own creative process all over again. I’m in my swivel chair. Swiveling. And I’m happy to be home.

…listen
…about the music

Falling in you.

It’s Fall here. Leaves are Fall-ing: the process of being in their annual autumnal tumble. While my house and neighborhood are blanketed by spindly-leaved evergreens that belie the season, the middle of Friday Harbor boasts lots of great deciduous trees that decidedly boast lots of great colors. Even the pumpkins look like they could have Fall-en off a tree.

I am heading off this morning to two other places resting on similar latitudes that also enjoy the fall colors: Minneapolis, and New York City. If you happen to be in the Mini Apple, come over to the University of Minnesota’s Ted Mann Concert Hall on Wednesday the 15th at 7:30pm, and you can hear lots of beautiful shiny instruments played no doubt by beautiful shiny musicians, as the U of M Symphonic Wind Band makes sense out of my piece, Homecoming. There’s a fun story behind this commission, and if you click the link you’ll find a recent article about it, among other things.

And if you happen to be in the Big Apple, well, probably my best performance there will be that of dodging cab drivers, crosstown buses and Jersey drivers, and living to tell the tale. I’m going to make like an evergreen and not Fall, and with luck, not be felled, either.

I’ll be back late next week with more photos that will probably not be orange, more music that will probably sound very different from this accompanying clip, and more commentary that will probably include words not contained in this post nor possibly, any of my others. Stay tuned!
And stay upright and on top of things.

…listen
…about the music

A cormorant guards the ferry.

Nope, not whales this time. Chamber music. Imagine that! Above is one of the many views from the ferry landing on Orcas Island, to the northeast of San Juan Island by about 35 peaceful minutes over the water. I had ventured over to moderate a pre-concert conversation with the delightful Seattle Chamber Players on Sunday. You can get the gist of what we talked about from a little article I wrote in the local paper last week. The audience was great, and wonderfully open to having lots of notes flung at them that were composed by composers in possession of a pulse. We smell better than the dead ones, at least, and return emails a lot more promptly. I’m hopeful that more contemporary music will find its way to these islands over time. Art is about the living, not just about the history that preceded us!

It’s also about sanity, and maintaining it. As I glided effortlessly across the archipelago I was reminded once again of the stark contrast between my former concert commutes and my current one, as I described earlier this summer in this blog post. The sentiment does not change, and I don’t think I’ll ever take the beauty of this life for granted, any more than I could possibly ignore the beauty of a chamber quartet in the throes of musical passion. Whether a watery passage on the ferry, or a lyrical passage in a piece of music, it’s wonderful to have one’s senses awash with the flow of joy.

…listen
…about the music

Music for two big things.

I thought I had a lot going on, and knew how to dress well to fit my surroundings, but I’m nothing compared to this creature. When it comes to balancing acts, I think this harbor seal wins, flippers down.

…listen
…about the music

An old cheesy cue, but I still like the music.

The view across this archipelago just after dawn, courtesy of my seat on Kenmore Airlines last week. You get a lot for your flying dollars here: not just a lap belt, but a second, full harness belt to sling across your chest should you have any doubts as to how the flight will turn out. I think I may have used it the very first time I flew this route, not wanting to tempt fate. Now, almost 30 flights later, my formerly white knuckles have long since returned to their natural calm pink. Rather than mull over what a sudden water landing might feel like (uh, very cold, in a 52 degree ocean), I mull over the impossible power of glaciers grinding across this area 15,000 years ago, and how the serendipity of gravity created such grace.

Still half asleep when I pointed my camera into the little plexiglass window, I was enamored of the softness of the smoky pastel tableau. As always, I had to remind myself why I was leaving for a few days. And as always, I immediately thought ahead to the beauty of this palette, seen later in the afternoon with the plane’s nose pointed north, not south. Going away is filled with the promise of invigoration from the outside world. Coming home is filled with that from within.