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Halloween improv will go down in history, and of course we had to record the one that had the worst scream. I can scream better than that.

Lo, there was fire, and Rach, and Scarlatti reading (yes, it is boring to play play but it is still fun to read, because you can tell it fits when you're right), and getting Andrew's quartet movement unstuck, and butchering my initials (and others'), and complete and utter self-denial eating NO candy (but a LOT of sugarless popsicles and mints), and improvising on Halloween, and leafing (login to dotphoto.com with user rionsanura and pass ailurian and go to here), and lying on the roof talking like we haven't in forever, and it could have been for forever anyway.

My hair is kinky now. It will stay long maybe after the recital. Possibly it will get to where I can sit on it, and then it will be time for a crewcut. It was so much easier, but this way there's stuff to play with.

Paper and Ling homework to do before Friday, but it looks like not much homwork over the actual weekend.

I have Debussy cello sonata. And some other stuff, that I will hear now.

Fairly uncomfortable

We were in my old house in Santa Monica, me and mama and David and Rainey and Reggie and Travis and Andrew, except it was the fiftieth floor or something of some huge apartment building. There were some rooms that weren't in my house, though, and David and I were planning the castle except I was singing, and then we were dancing, and then he was Alan but he still looked like David, so I could refuse him better, and he completely understood and made a reasoned retreat and acknowledged that he was my favorite uncle. I went through the door and met everybody else and we were trying to do something (not an improv meeting, because there were no instrument), but we kept having to move, calmly or not, because we couldn't be by a window when King Kong walked by. Rainey was the only one who never got grabbed through a window; even when they were shut it wasn't safe, because his fingers could easily break the glass, so we kept trying to find rooms that were in the middle of the house where he couldn't see us, but once he got small enough to walk in the French doors and we had to trap him into going out again. I coughed too hard once and it was over, and the lightning outside made me feel better, even if I can't breathe through my nose. Which means I slept with my mouth open, which means I have a sore throat.

(no subject)

Striding barefoot and sans umbrella in the rain among the gaggles of cringing humanity, I was upright. I could see the metal sky and how it imposed its appearance on the low ground, but without the featureless peace (for the ground is always moving when the sky is playing on it, and its inhabitants were not made to live in the sky), and the grass in its unnatural glowing green competed with both of them.

Theory today was a blast. We are the inheritors of a dying art; Lavenda gave us the same speech that Avalon was so passionate about. Concerts used to be walked out of if old pieces were played, and new music was the only popular music. Things have changed, and there are now TVs and games and passive alternatives to the experience one must participate in at a concert. We can either die with the music and starve, or get out and make people aware. I am proud to be part of a group that is doing its best to further this principle, one it was founded on.

And then there's Stephan's point of view; music has always been dying, and it goes in cycles. No one knew anything about music in the Baroque, and then suddenly it was the classical period, and Haydn invented the symphony and there was a middle class to go to (and pay for) his concerts not sponsored by the nobility. The pendulum appears to be swinging the other way, now. Art has always struggled for quality among popularity, and rarely has the genius been recognized in his own century.

I'm going to be an American nobility, and found a festival orchestra and chorus to congregate every other week at the castle to play new music and old, and culture will not die. Stephan is going to give up on America and its oblivious mentality, and move to Europe or South America and succeed there without having to make his own audience. I am not a quitter like that, no matter now much I love Europe. I'm going there, but I'm also going to make these fools open their eyes and cease to be fools, right here. I just have to find the right way to do it, in a place where Reggie likes the weather. I may also need some help.