April 4 - Head Over Heels

Great to hear from Crystal yesterday, and also to learn that we've been awarded a $4,000 grant (two $2,000 grants, actually -- respectively from Zellerbach and Hewlett) for The Playboy of the Western World, on the August Oakland Metro show, along with Stephen Clark's Dionysius....

Not much time to make up the roster for Halfway Mark, before heading to Berkeley's Caffe Venezia (which has the Venetian feel of an indoor-outdoor cafe, complete with laundry strung on a line high above from one balcony to another -- good place to do opera someday....) for a way-after-the-fact Cats, Dogs, and Divas cast party w/ Harriet, Suzanna, Maggie, Cynthia, and Janet.

April 3 - Enlightenment

Spent the morning preparing full scores for the parts of Halfway Mark conducted by John Kendall Bailey, who arrived afternoon so that we could all have a good time catching up.

Shortly after that, for the first time ever, established wireless access to the Internet from home. Wow! So much that I've been missing...

Somewhere in there, designed a poster for Easter Hangover, based on what I perceived to be a Rio crucifix, with a strange Warhol spin. Harriet and I got to thinking of Salvador Dali, and headed off to the local Borders to buy a volume. Alas, none, astoundingly, in the hinterlands, but at least found out they now carry the New York Times, then found plenty Surrealist offerings online at Wikipedia, etc, including welcomed downloadable images. Also found time for cake and ice cream and merriment and newbie Internet surfing...

April 2 - Joyful Noise

The Halfway Mark show is on April 20, but I turned 50 today, a birth date that I usually note is one day late...

Nice to hear from Bette and George and Sorrel. Harriet and I will celebrate tomorrow.

Worked on the May 2007 issue of 21st-Century Music -- two pages from completion, then off to SF to rehearse Lisa Prosek's Belfagor. Turns out her dates conflict w/ SFCCO schedule, so will bequeath the baton to Marty Stoddard in a few weeks.

Douglas Mandell shows me how to hook the laptop up to the speakers in Goat Hall, so we'll have better sound for the next HM rehearsal....

April 1 - Faces the Music

No fools at Goat Hall, but another decent Halfway Mark vocal rehearsal, now roughly in program order.

Goat Hall Board Meeting after, then home, producing cover art for One-Hour Color Processing, A Windblown Rock in San Rafael, 

L.A. Stories, 

Deathsongs, 

Everything is Relativity, 

Symphonies of the Air, 

Out on the Porch, 

Camino Real, 

The Pied Piper of Hamelin, 

Waiting for Godot, and  

The Ring of Harriet...

March 31 - Listen! Pan Wakes...

Happy to have Harriet back, but had to blitz to school anyway to record Janet Lohr -- last of our six ladies -- in Cats, Dogs, and Divas.  Like Cynthia and Suzanna, she got it all down in one three-hour session. Still need to have Sarah, Sandy, and Maggie back for a round two, then will mix with advises from Doug Michael, and perhaps Tim White and others.

At home in evening, learned how to put cover art in iTunes, for albums Early Oboe / Early Voice, 

Instruments of Deconstruction, 

Contrary Comotion,

Desert Muse, 

Bass and Range, 

Lost in Place, 

Mice and Men, 

Three Wired Systrums, 

Henry Miller in Brooklyn, 

Antigone, 

The Bald Soprano, and

Cats, Dogs, and Divas.

March 30 - Echoes of Time

Learned how to do photos in Microsoft Word, now that I have a computer that can handle such items, so was able to provide a front cover and interior distorted photos of George Crumb,

plus some similar of Erling and

moi, for back issue printing of 21st-Century Music, June 2005. Sent that off to press, in Marin, as well as Act I of Waiting for Godot...

Harriet's on the road and it will be good to have her back in town tomorrow...

Also recorded Mice and Men, Act II k "Glad to meet you."...

March 29 - Elephants, Dogs, Cats, Horses...

Recorded Mice and Men, Act II j ("It's brighter than a bitch") -- last week's recording of I'm lookin' for Curley turned out to be h rather than j....

Also did a new version of Lifespan with animal samples added to Voice I and II, assigned to specific notes on the Halion synthesizer, for intriguing zoological madness...