voting conundrum

Should I register to vote in California? That way I can vote in the primaries here. Or for that matter vote in the presidential election here instead of in Texas, where I feel that my vote for anyone other than a Republican is somewhat of a waste. I have to decide soon. I've never voted in a primary before. Can one vote in a primary for a particular political party if one is registered as an independent? I'm pretty sure you don't have to be a legal resident of a state (I still have a Texas driver's license) to vote in it, you just have to live there. Or I could vote absentee in Texas. That's what I did last election. Urgh I don't know.

fortunately/unfortunately

So, I am back in LA, and Friday my hard drive crashed :( :( :( Fortunately I was able to take it to the Mac store and have a brand new hard drive installed the next day. Unfortunately, I lost all the data that was on it. Fortunately, I have most of it backed up, since I backed up my hard drive about six months ago. Unfortunately, I do not have anything from the past six months backed up. Fortunately, everything was for free. Now I am just refilling my iTunes library, and it's taking a little bit. Plus I lost all my bookmarks for Firefox, since I had to start over with my computer.

Meanwhile January is looking rather intense for me. I have three concerts for three different organizations in the last two weeks of the month. I'm excited about the music, but will I have REEDS??? Most concerning since it is a big mix of oboe and English horn. I finally got a gouger, though, and that should help, at least for the oboe reeds. It's from Innoledy, and to my surprise it arrived in a container with a pattern on it that much resembles Burberry plaid . . . I was most certainly expecting plain silver, not a designer gouger! It's a really cool machine, and quite easy to use. First rehearsal yesterday for (English horn on) Vaughn Williams "London" Symphony didn't go as well as I would have liked. It would be nice if I could actually play in tune. I probably shouldn't have used such an old reed, but it was the most comfortable, so I did. Oh well, hopefully I'll have it ironed out by next rehearsal.

The other stress, of course, is summer music festival tapes and auditions. I hate making tapes.

Well, my iTunes library has for the most part been reconstituted, but alas none of my playlists were recreated, so it's all just one massive lump of songs. And some of the music I added for recent auditions is gone. My wonderful CSO audition playlist is gone :( Oh well. Better get back to adding documents.

to clap or not to clap

Another article discussing appropriate audience behavior at classical music concerts. It brings up some good points.

Mercury Baroque

On Friday afternoon, I had the privilege of meeting my old boss, Lydia, for lunch. I interned for her in public relations in the summer of 2001 at the Houston Symphony. Lydia now does PR independently, and one of her clients is Mercury Baroque, Houston's first (I think) period instrument baroque orchestra. Luckily enough that day some members of the group were promoting a concert this weekend on the local public radio station, KUHF. Jonathan Godfrey and Oleg Sulyga played violin, Barret Sills played cello, and Bill Averill played harpsichord for Dean Dalton's program, The Front Row. Mercury Baroque's music director, Antoine Plante, also answered questions about the music. The station has a really nice space for live radio performances, and it was fun to watch and listen to some Italian trio sonatas, one based on La Folia by Vivaldi and another by Tartini. The music will be performed as part of a program in the MFAH's exhibit on Pompeo Batoni. Thus the progam consists of music that the patrons of this 18th-century Italian artist probably listened to at that time. While it was great fun to observe a live radio broadcast, it would be even cooler to actually go to the performance tomorrow (Sunday) at 2 pm at the museum and hear the music among the paintings. It's gorgeous music played on authentic instruments by excellent musicians in a beautiful location, what more could you ask for? Oh yeah, and they're fun people, too.

nightmare on michigan ave

I had THE weirdest dream last night. I dreamt that my old teacher made poisoned cookies with his mom and handed them out to CSO musicians, and in so doing wiped out the rest of the oboe section and half the violas. Why he had it in for the violas I don't know. For some reason, the oboe section was large, like a string section, but it was more of an abstract idea, and I didn't know any of them. I did check to see if a few specific musicians were OK, and the ones I knew were fine. But people had actually died as a result of the cookies! I was very upset about this, and kept talking with various musicians trying to convince them he was innocent, but in the end they all convinced me that alas, it was true. I was so upset at this point that I woke up. In retrospect, it's hilarious, but I was really horrified in my dream!! When I was little I had this idea that if you told someone your bad dream it made it less likely to come true, and I still get relief from relating bad dreams, so I thought I'd post it here. Besides, it is rather amusing in its own ridiculous way. I mean, poisoned COOKIES??

Happy New Year!

May 2008 bring you great joy.

In Memoriam, 2007

The New York Times Magazine devotes the last issue of the year to people who have passed away during the previous twelve months. Usually they create one short article for the really important/famous people, and then a series of smaller articles for lesser-known but still influential people. I have my own, somewhat more personal list, that coincides a bit with theirs, but not completely.

Eleanore Schoenfeld
Tara Davis
Molly Ivins
Gian Carlo Menotti
Norman Herzberg
Kurt Vonnegut
Boris Yeltsin
Mstislav Rostropovich
Berverly Sills
Jerry Hadley
Michelangelo Antonioni
Ingmar Bergman
Merv Griffin
Luciano Pavarotti
Madeleine L'Engle
Eudice Shapiro
Benazir Bhutto
Clarence Ching

Seems like we lost a lot of good people in 2007.