If you can, this Sunday 13 April at 12:30pm CST, be sure to tune in to Wisconsin Public Radio’s NPR News and Classical station to listen to Clocks in Motion perform on Lori Skelton’s Sunday Afternoon Live from the Chazen.  They will be performing my Percussion Duo, among works by other composers.

They say brevity is the soul of wit, and the wit of this writer is currently and definitely of the soul that favors the brief sojourn into ephemera.  However, the airwaves of this WPR broadcast this Sunday will definitely not be of that variety, perhaps infinitely traveling onwards and outwards to forever (or, at least to Vega, in any case).

During a marvelous conversation of the Skype variety with Karl Haro von Mogel and Ariela Haro von Mogel this morning over a project that I cannot reveal too many details about, the topic of Twitter came up.  For years now ever since Twitter started, I slowly came from thinking, “I don’t understand the point,” to “Oh, yes, I supposed I get it now,” about Twitter.  When they asked me if I had a Twitter account I told them no, but that their asking was perhaps the final nudge to push me over the edge to join the Twitterverse.

So here it is.  My first tweet ever.  It’s a bit exciting!

Have you ever thought what it's like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension? #williamhartnell

— Thomas C. Lang (@ThomasCLang1) April 5, 2014

Beware of sandbags that might fall in these early days of learning the ropes, but I believe you can “follow” me at (or is it @) ThomasCLang1 where I shall compose “tweets.”

I wish I didn’t have to have the 1 in my name that begins with “at,” but what can you do when you wait ’til mid morning to discover that other birds outsmarted me, and I have to pick from the bits of worm strewn about after the smorgasbord.

Lastly, I think I’m beginning to understand the reason for hashtags, as it feels different this time.

On Thursday 27 March, I happily enjoyed attending a performance of You, a work for five dancers by Minneapolis choreographer Morgan Thorson that also featured Jessica Cressey, Genevieve Muench, Morgan Thorson, and Max Wirsing; dramaturg Maren Ward; and lighting designer Lenore Doxsee.  This performance also marked the first performance of any work at Bedlam Theatre’s new location in Lowertown.  A fantastic new space, indeed!

Before I get too far ahead of myself, of all the art forms, dance is the one that I tend to know least about.  In my 32 years, I’ve not gone to very many dance events.  In fact, I can count with the fingers on one hand how many dance events I’ve gone to: a student dance recital called Dancescape in Winona, MN, a performance of The Nutcracker by Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, and a performance by UW student dancers at the Overture Center for the Arts in Madison, WI.  Oh, and during my undergraduate days I took a 100 level dance appreciation course.  So, not very much at all.

But, I must say that I rather did enjoy this performance of You.  Although this isn’t quite high praise considering the history of my dance viewing, this performance of You was by far the most poignant and engaging and captivating of all dance events I’ve attended thus far.  So much so, in fact, that this performance of You has awakened within me a desire to attend more dance events.  And that all previous dance events I’ve attended just haven’t been been very… um… well… they haven’t been very good at all.  (The Joffrey excepting, of course.  But ballet is so stuffy and dusty, and it takes itself far too seriously.)

I went into You in the best way possible: I didn’t know anything about what I was about to see.  Indeed, I didn’t even know the title of the piece until I googled more information about it just a couple minutes ago.  My initial reactions were that this piece was a vibrant celebration of us, without even knowing that the piece was called You.  The first opening section was merely the dancers, one-by-one, emerging into the space with wide strides, smiling, making direct eye contact with the audience, wearing a kind of ensemble of running or biking clothes of bold colors, all to an energetic tune from the 1980s, and all five of them continued in this way all together, bouncing their way through the space and through each other en masse.  The direct acknowledgement of the dancers of the the audience was immediately inviting, breaking down those awful barriers of audience v. performers in an instant.

This led way to an immaculately timed slowing of the dancers’ pace, the 1980s energy a memory, all five of the troupe very nearly staying within each other’s steps as their steps decreased in stride and increased in time between steps, until they all stopped, stood tall with their weight upon their bones, closed their eyes, practiced mindfulness of breath a la Buddhist philosophy, until–out of somewhere–one of the dancers began to dance wildly yet joyfully as if in a club all by herself, improvising to a music not heard, but yet familiar to us all, silently vibrating walls and ceilings throughout the space.

As it began with the one dancer, then formed to a group of five, within this moment of the one dancing wildly all to herself while the others continued with their meditation, we’re reminded of the one once again, and this seems to be the heart of the entire piece: the group and the one and the one and the group and the group learning from the one and the one learning from the group.  Throughout the work, dancers would split off into groups of two, the fifth disappearing, and the pairs either trying to outwit each other in a kind of pleasant sibling rivalry with their mutual imitation or happily dancing together in marvelously timed parallelism.

When I started contemplating what I saw after the performance, I couldn’t help but think that–unless I’m missing something–dance, by its very nature, has quite a challenge to communicate exactly what it is that it’s communicating.  Music, for example, tends to have a kind of immediate intelligibility, especially if we adore what we’re listening to.  Theatre also tends to have a kind of literal nature about it, due to the fact that great swaths of theatre are spoken in a language we know.  Visual art as well, at least for me, tends to invite immediate reactions, whether it’s paintings of bored people holding baskets of fruit or an image of a red square.  There’s something deeply personal about how these examples compel the eye to move with the lines.  (Then there’s the whole realm of interpretation where the literal meaning of the words of a play, for example, open up different reactions within different people, and some see what others don’t while others see what some don’t.  And naturally, I could be totally wrong on all points above, in which case, maybe you should stop listening to me.)

Dance, however, even though it exists in a medium of movement that is familiar to us all, always felt like it had to work extra hard in order to communicate its story.  But, this performance of You opened my eyes to the fact that good dance, indeed great dance (not the stuff I had seen previously), does indeed communicate things just as well as the other arts.

So, bring on the dance!  I’m coming!

If you are in the Menomonie, WI area this Saturday 29 March (and this includes all of you, my Twin Cities friends; just a little over an hour’s drive east), I hope you can join Jerry Hui (baritone) and Phillip Dorn (piano) for a performance of music the heart remembers in an evening of romance and heartache spanning centuries of poets’ and composers’ wallowing in sheer, unrestrained love of love.

The performance is at 7:00pm on 29 March at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Menomonie, WI.

The concert will feature Schumann’s Dicterliebe with words by Heiner, Wolf’s Eichendorff Lieder with poetry by, erm, Eichendorf, my very own Time Sonnets with poetry by Shakespeare (I think his first name was Fred), and Jerry Hui’s Chamber Music with words by  Joyce.

It should be a fantastic evening of blissful miscontent, as we all know that allowing melancholy to consume us is a smorgasbord for our vibrance, indeed, through and through, to be sure!

So, just some musings on a spectacular show in town and what it made me think about.

Last night I attended a performance of Samantha Johns and George McConnell’s Britney Spears’s Crossroads at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis.  If you could imagine, if you please: a row of men and women wearing blonde wigs and dressed in button down shirts (most of the shirts a light blue, but there was a red one in there somewhere) and short, black biker shorts, stiffly marching from out of the proscenium with overly fake and giant smiles down towards stage right and off out of view from the audience, every four beats stopping in their steps, jerking their heads from facing forwards to their right, back forwards, back to right, and then continuing on, a procession of self-aware ridiculousness.

This is a show to see, mark my words.

Before I continue on too much more, I only just learned about five minutes ago when I googled a bit using keywords like “britney” and “spears” and “crossroads” that there apparently was a film (well, movie) starring Britney Spears called Crossroads.  Obviously, I’ve never seen it as I’ve only just discovered that someone bothered to create such an ill concept, and I shudder to think what the movie is actually about and what horrors must exist within such a malformed idea of project.  I have a feeling, though, that I need look no farther than Britney Spears’s Crossroads to get an idea of someone’s idea of what those horrors might be.

Britney Spears recently came up in conversation last week when I was in Interlochen having breakfast with percussion ensemble Clocks in Motion.  There were some young children at the table.  (10, 8, and 6 years old?  Not sure.  I’m terribly good at incorrectly guessing ages.)  I honestly cannot for the life of me remember why Britney Spears came up in conversation.  Nonetheless, she did, but to my sheer joy and amazement, the younglings had no idea who Britney Spears was, to which I remarked, “I’m rather overjoyed to hear that the younger generation has some sense of good taste, enough so so that Britney Spears is fading from memory.”  (Or something like that.  I paraphrase.)

Since I know so little about Britney Spears as it is (I can’t at the moment think of a single song she performed) I viewed and enjoyed this play from a slightly more objective perspective than most others might, unless you, too, are fortunate enough to have selective memory when it comes to certain proceedings such as this.  I easily gathered, however, that this was a play about Britney Spears’s obsession with herself.  I can only guess that the movie, Crossroads, was a terrible mess of scenes of Britney Spears apparently acting in ways that represents a kind of unconscious parody of herself.  This play feels like it could be a parody of that parody, poking fun in an obvious way that she’s presumably a terrible actor who likes the sound of her voice but isn’t intelligent enough to realize that she’s a terrible actor who likes the sound of her voice and so therefore unconsciously and inadvertently creates a parody of herself.

This play is wonderfully rough around the edges, unafraid to revel in its frayed seams, yet it is also careful and detailed and clearly thought out.  It uses repetition in a way that makes things become nonsensical after repeated repetitions, like when you repeat a word like repetition over and over and over again until repetition itself loses meaning after repeated repetitions of repetitive recursion.  Imagine, if you please: a toaster on a stool, one of the Britneys taking and inserting a piece of bread to make toast, the toaster toasts, ejects the toast, and the Britney who’s toasting says nothing except call for help.  Two other Britneys get into an argument over why the one isn’t helping, until a fourth grabs the toast, and a fifth just says, “Hey, it’s just toast.”  Then, repeat the whole scene, each successive repetition becoming slightly more hilarious because of just how ridiculous the scene is.

It’s difficult to pull off ridiculous scene after ridiculous scene, but this play pulls it off simply because it always returns to what this play is about: Britney Spears’s self-obsession with herself and her inability to realize her inner turmoil, a mass of Britneys in her head, all interacting with herself in a kind of psychosis of multiple personalities.  I enjoy this play not only because seeing a stage full of men and women dressed up as Britney Spears is just so utterly hilarious, but also because it’s so clearly a window into the sad and damaged mind of someone who we are fast forgetting, presented in a way that is at once manic yet controlled, carefully flitting between loud and quiet, fast and slow, ridiculous and serious, all in a row of repetition that illuminates something new on a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh parody of itself.

It’s 7 March 2014…

I mentioned yesterday while writing about my experiences in Michigan in Interlochen and Lansing that not only is there a quaintness about the state, there is also a grittiness about the state.  Lots of my third day of this trip was spent in Detroit, and Detroit is certainly grittiness incarnate.

Perhaps out of naivety, I didn’t want to believe a city that was such a proud symbol of human innovation could have fallen to such a painful and necessary reminder of what happens when we choose not to invest in our own best interests.  How we spend our money is a direct confirmation of whether the values we say we believe in are actually the values we live.  We’re all guilty (and don’t deny it) of allowing our actions reveal the hollowness of some of our words.

Even despite all the terrible things people say about the city (and despite some of the terrible things I’ll say about the city), I still highly recommend a visit.  It is a sad and dangerous and crumbling city, but it is also a vibrant city, a colorful city, and a city worth our attention.

On the drive into Detroit on Woodward from White Lake, I eventually came across the various “certain mile” roads.  The certain mile most infamous is 8 (as in 8 Mile Road), and the road still continues to remain a major marker for the racial divides that persist in the area.  The movie 8 Mile will now have a somewhat more resonant meaning than previously.

As I drove farther and farther into the city, I uncontrollably became more and more uncomfortable and felt more and more unsafe.  This is true.  This is a part of the world that I never knew before.  A part of the world that went wrong.  Right inside our country’s borders, even though Canada’s quaint city of Windsor is right across the way, here is a place that makes me feel more unsafe than I’ve ever felt before.  So, I retreated into something that was familiar: the museum. Specifically, the Detroit Institute of Art.

A fantastic collection, to be sure.  There was a a Japanese samurai exhibit at the time, and I admired the delicate work of ink on canvas, scrolls, ceremonial armor, and screens.  Subtly colorful cranes, painstakingly crafted swords, delicate ceramics for solemn tea ceremonies.

I also took time to admire the van Goghs, Picassos, Mattisses, and Warhols.  And, naturally, the Detroit Industry Murals by Diego Rivera.  I’ve seen photos of the work, but to see it in person was a wonderful experience.  A celebration of what created Detroit.  A colorful celebration.  A vibrant celebration.  A celebration through a lens.  A celebration seen through someone else’s eyes.  Workers working hard, toiling away at machines.  Goddess-like individuals, reclining, staring down into where the real works happens.

The workers working… were they happy?  Sad?  Complacent?  Proud?  Angry?  Were they celebrating serving the machine?  Were they there by choice?  Did they have somewhere else to go?  Or was this their lot?

The workers in the mural were a nice reminder that it was time to venture out into real Detroit to see the city through my lens and not someone else’s, as illuminating, helpful, and necessary as that can be.

After a quick lunch of Coney dogs (I highly recommend American Coney Island and Lafayette Coney Island, both right next to each other on Lafayette in downtown), I made a trip to the old Michigan Central Station.  Ever since Huffington Post wrote an article on the haunting images of Detroit’s crumbling infrastructure, I became fascinated.  Michigan Central Station epitomizes Detroit’s sad story, and it’s in an area of town where I felt moderately safe (but, do keep your guard up, and don’t stand idle taking pictures too long).

As I observed the structure and took my pictures, I couldn’t help but remember the workers in the Rivera murals.  Were the people who built the station like the people in the murals?  Did they build it happily?  How much did they get paid?  Did they have other options for work?  Did they feel a sense of pride when they finished the building?  What would they think of it now, seeing it in severe disuse and fraying at the seams, surrounded by fences and barbed wire as if the whole site became stuck in a nightmare out of the Great War?

So, what to do next?  What can we do with these old buildings that once stood as proud monuments to human achievement?  Well, I do what I do best: retreat back into art.  So, it’s time for a different kind of art.  Not the kind in smooth, polished buildings of marble, the kind of art for certain people, the kind of art that you have to pay to be able to see.  But rather a kind of art for the people and by the people.

It’s a curious street, Heidelburg.  Out of the ashes springs something new and different.  One house on Heidelburg literally did breathe new life out of new ashes, having been a victim in a string of senseless arson attacks on the street, but having been re-envisioned with a new installation of art.  Out of the rubble came new, truthful beauty.  The image to the right is not of the most recent arson attack, but it does display a house that someone did burn to the ground and that the artist re-purposed into a new vision.

While I still absolutely admire the art in the DIA, I absolutely adore the work of Tyree Guyton’s Heidelburg Project.  The murals of the workers in the DIA are one lens of truth, but I couldn’t help but feel that Rivera’s lens cheated truth a bit, as much as what he painted must have been the truth as he saw it.  The art of the Heidelburg street, however, captures the grittiness of Detroit, unapologetic about the truth of what the city is and what the city was; celebrates the vibrant good of humanity, a crystal mirror about what the people of Detroit are and what the people of Detroit were; and painfully reminds us of certain inherent evils within humanity, uncensored about what actions we take and what actions we have taken.

As I drove out of Detroit, as I passed by 7 mile and 8 mile and onwards, as I passed by cinders upon cinders of houses, as I passed by the horrors and beauty to see, as I passed by a city of truth, a city that reveals that humans can create good and evil in very short amounts of time, as I passed by all this, I remembered that we have an awful lot of work to do.  But, these are just my words, and my actions reveal the hollowness of these words.  I wrote a blog post about this, to be sure.  Someone might read this, of course.  And someone else might become inspired to take action.  But what else can we do?  What sum of money can save a city of such decay?  $850,000,000?  What actions are required?  What can we do?

I just don’t know.  But I do implore you to visit this city.  It is a beautiful, sad city.  It is a city that tells the truth as it is.  It is a city that provides windows into another world, and it is a city that displays mirrors into our own selves.  No lenses except yours.

But do be careful.  Watch your back.

But do open your eyes.  Watch your lens.

It’s 6 March 2014…

The last time I was in Michigan, I was perhaps twelve or ten… somewhere along those lines, but definitely not along those points.  When we’re twelve or ten, we obviously appreciate things differently than when we’re thirty-two or forty-eight… somewhere along those points, but definitely not along those angles.  At my age now, whenever I visit different states, I always start to notice how they label their roads and how they move their traffic about.  I specifically become interested in what the signs they use to label their state highways look like.  Minnesota, for example, uses a kind of blue police badge, while Wisconsin uses a white rectangle with a white triangle superimposed over it, and Michigan uses a diamond that sometimes has the letter M above the road’s number.  Some state’s are more interesting than others.  Washington, for example, uses a profile of Washington.  I’ll still remain partial to the blue police badge, probably because it’s one word away from blue police box.

However, then I start to notice things that irritate me about how another state does things.  For example, something I’ve found irritating about Wisconsin is that they label county highways with letters, which sometimes results in hilarious combinations like ZZ.  I also get irritated with how they mount their traffic lights parallel rather than perpendicular to the ground (i.e. traffic lights aren’t arranged nicely with red on top, yellow in the middle, and green on the bottom, but instead–if I’m remembering–red is on the left, yellow in the middle, green on the right).  What I’ve noticed about Michigan is that they prefer to mount their traffic lights on wires.  So, an intersection has a cross of wires, which results in traffic lights being placed on the hypotenuse.  What I find irritating about this, is that you can’t use the lights as a gauge for where to stop, because lights closer to the right side of the road are closer to where you stop, whereas lights closer to the middle of the road are farther away from where you stop.

However, if there’s something about Michigan that I adore (and really, the only thing about Michigan that I don’t adore are the traffic lights on wires, if that’ something to adore or not), it’s the fine Interlochen Center for the Arts.  Fellow UW alum and instructor at the center, Matthew Schlomer, hosted breakfast for Clocks in Motion and me at his home, and then he graced me with a wonderful tour of the campus.

Although technically a high school, this was a college campus.  An art gallery and a concert hall and a dance studio, practice rooms with plenty of windows to let in sunlight, a creative writing center, an entire hallway chronicling all that has happened and is happening on campus.  And I apologize for all that I am forgetting to mention.  But, a gem of Michigan through and through, to be sure.  And all in a stunningly gorgeous setting among evergreens that I’m sure in the summer must saturate the air with their bracing aroma.  I suddenly thought I was standing in northern Minnesota, surrounded by so many evergreens.  Absolutely exquisite.

Michigan further fascinates in Lansing.  If there’s something else I like to notice about visiting other states beyond lights on wires and rectangles with superimposed triangles, it’s the state’s capitol building.  For as long as I can remember (well, since I first visited a state capitol that wasn’t Minnesota’s, but instead was Utah’s, many, many years ago), government buildings (particularly the capitols) have fascinated me.  They were always the same but a little bit different.  While Michigan’s capitol building is on the smaller side than I’m used to, it’s still worth a visit.  It has all the basics, as these buildings should: an office for the governor (and the less said about him the better, if I may be so boldly obvious), a place for the senate and the house, and a place for the supreme court (although they’ve long since left the capitol building and are now currently housed in the Michigan Hall of Justice).  For whatever reason, I hold high esteem for the offices of certain governments around the world (the United States’ included), and I feel a kind of pride for certain governments ever more so when I’m in buildings that epitomize the work government can do (when they put their minds to it, as much as I want to punch politicians in the nose more often than not).

But, beyond the crossed wires of intersections and how people in Michigan drive way too fast for my liking, there’s lots to love in this state.  There’s a grittiness to the proceedings in certain areas (and no doubt I’ll be mentioning more of that grittiness in tomorrow’s post when I write about what I saw today in Detroit), but there’s also a northern quaintness to the state that I wasn’t expecting for whatever reason.  I always associate rows and rows of evergreens with northern Minnesota and western Montana, but even this far “south” in Michigan they continue to enliven the countryside in numbers that impress.

Lastly, if at thirty-two I concern myself with differences in road signs and whether they’ve got rows and rows of evergreens or not (when at twelve I didn’t), what, then, at fifty-two will I concern myself with?

It’s 5 March 2014…

Sometimes plans don’t go according to plan.  Sometimes that plan B that we plan for comes in handy.  Right outside Wausau, WI, I discovered that for some reason my iPhone was no longer charging.  Now, iPhones are cool.  They’re really, really cool.  But, their batteries aren’t.  Constantly charging them.  All the time.  Charging.  Constantly.  The time.  Always.  (Wait… I think I mixed up the order of that sentence.  I’m not used to doing things in the right order.)

But, something else that isn’t cool are the cords we used to charge these phones that are cool.  I’ve already had to replace the regular USB charger once because the first one somehow frayed right at one end.  But now the charger I use in my car is on the blink.  And it happened to go on the blink when I was right outside Wausau, WI.

So imagine my disappointment when, as it does, the phone’s indicator that indicates the indication of how charged the phone is (on an indicator scale that uses percentages to indicate the indication) indicated 50% charged, then 40%, then 30%, then all the way to nothing just as I entered the Michigan border.  Quite literally.  I had the phone all ready to take the picture of the usual “Welcome to Our State” sign, knowing that the phone was to die at any moment (Some state’s signs are better than others, incidentally.  I’m partial to Minnesota’s, naturally, but Wisconsin’s is quite wonderful as well.  Michigan’s was kind of, “Meh.”) when the phone died completely.

So, my plan to document my trip to Michigan in not only words but images as well immediately fell through.  It fell through and into a kind of well of despair of webs of death of doom.  Never would I reach into this well of despair of webs of death of doom, because I had a plan B.

And that plan B?  Well, plan B was to not worry about plan B because plan A would work as it should.  And who uses plan Bs anyway?  Sadly, naturally, I was relying solely on my iPhone to give me all the images I needed.  I didn’t bother to bring my old other camera from ages past (well, sevenish years past, but an eternity[not and age] in tech years, nonetheless) because iPhones are cool.  Their batteries and chargers are not.  In fact, they’re so uncool that if the uncoolest thing in the entire universe was put next to an iPhone battery and charger, it would be easier to just get a mirror.

Somewhere around somewhere in Michigan’s upper peninsula, I discovered that after I turned my car off, the phone started charging again.  (Bizarre, no?)  So naturally I was overjoyed that the compendium of the trip’s images could continue, yet slightly annoyed that I still missed taking a picture of the “Welcome to Our State” sign (even though I thought Minnesota and Wisconsin have better ones).

But, alas, this overjoy was short lived.  Just as I was able to snap some bad pictures of the Mackinac Bridge, I saw that the phone stopped charging.  I later thought that perhaps the phone only charged when I had the car turned off.  Alas, no.  I tested this hypothesis, and it didn’t pass the facts.  I ultimately discovered that if I allowed the phone’s battery to die, turned the car off, and plugged the phone back in, that it would charge to the point that it would turn on.  But, even with the car turned off, the phone refused to charge beyond 4% or 5%.  How maddening.

(It’s at this point that I’m starting to worry that this is a really boring blog post.  Seriously.  I feel like I’m getting bored.  I’m not bored, however.  Not yet.  I just feel like I’m getting bored.  Please tell me if you’re getting bored, and tell me if this blog post might actually end up being a tad on the uncool side.)

So, not very many pictures to share on this first day of this trip.  And generally, apart from the iPhone’s charger mishap, a relatively uneventful travel to Interlochen.  I could go on about how I had to buy a map of Michigan because my phone was no longer able to tell me how to get to Interlochen.  I could go on about how when I got to Interlochen I couldn’t find my hotel.  I could go on about how I followed signs for Interlochen Center for the Arts, but couldn’t find it and stopped by this ice cream and coffee shop and ran into two wonderful people who were also going to the exact same performance and so therefore I could follow them to the dance building where Clocks in Motion were to perform my Percussion Duo.  I could go on about how I eventually did find the hotel, and the person who checked me in asked me about the weather, and I wanted to remark that how we experience weather is relative (it felt quite warm in Interlochen even though all the natives seemed to think otherwise) but didn’t want to go into details and just said, “Oh it’s still pretty cold,” even though it wasn’t.

But, going on about these things doesn’t interest me.

What does interest me, however, is that Clocks in Motion’s Sean Kleve and Jennifer Hedstrom once again delivered a bloody brilliant performance of the duo.  What also interests me is that in addition to Sean and Jennifer, Clocks in Motion’s other performers continue to deliver impressive programs that delight, challenge, and fascinate the ears, from Marc Mellits’s mesmeric Gravity, Paul Lansky’s cyclical Threads, to John Luther Adams’s primordial Drums of Winter.

What also interests me is that I’m excited to announce that Sean, Jennifer, and I planted seeds for our next collaboration.  We’re still figuring out details, but we’re envisioning that I’ll write some sort of music with a bit of stuff with some things added on the side.  We did plan things in much more detail (over beers, cheese, crackers, and cookies [yes, cookies]), but I don’t want to spoil the future too much for now.

Tune in tomorrow night when I report on how Day 2 of my excursion went.

I’m sending a reminder that tomorrow night (i.e. 5 March) Clocks in Motion are performing at the Interlochen Center for the Arts at 8pm in the H. Lewis Dance building.  I’m terribly excited to listen to another performance of my Percussion Duo on a concert that will also feature Marc Mellits’s Gravity, Paul Lansky’s Threads, and John Luther Adams’s Drums of Winter from Earth and the Great Weather.

Also on this trip, following the concert, I’m going to explore the city of Detroit, and my plan as it stands will either be to write a post on each of the days of my trip or to write one, massive post when I’ve returned.

As a foreword, I’ve long wanted to visit this city, as it has always fascinated me: from its rich history in various industries from salt to bricks to rail to–naturally–automobiles to its patronage towards the arts with the ever sublime Detroit Institute of Art and the ever prodigious Motown record label who gifted us those brilliant sounds.

But, the sadness of this city, its fall, fascinates, too: from the unfortunate Pruitt-Igoe housing project, the rise and fall of its automobile industry, to its recent bankruptcy.  Swaths of once vibrant areas abandoned, huge sections of this city now urban prairies, crumbling brick.

Most of the reactions I receive when I tell people I’m going on vacation to Detroit are usually: “You’re going where?  Why would you ever want to go there?  Be careful!  Don’t get killed!”

While there are undeniable facts that Detroit is a dangerous city, this is a city of America, a city of the Earth, an invention of us.  This is where real people are, where real history has happened, and it deserves our attention and respect.

I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer a trip to Detroit over a cruise through the Bahamas any day.  I don’t want to live the human experience through the tint of a rose glass.  There is beauty in the world and there is ugly in the world, with lots of colors in between.  Give me more than rose.  Give me grey and white, too.

Indeed, show me your tired, your poor, your masses seeking freedom, to remind me that we’ve all got lots of work to do.

So, I can’t remember when I started doing this as it’s become a kind of tradition whose beginnings time forgot, but whenever I sense I’m coming close to writing a double bar to something I’m working on, be it a single movement, a single song, or an entire piece, I always make sure there’s an unopened bottle of wine somewhere in the house.

The past few days I could sense that a day was rapidly approaching, so I made sure to have an unopened bottle of wine (preferably one of the drier reds) handy.

Today, then, is the day where I wrote a double bar, this time on my setting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet XII, the first song in a set of two, the other a setting of Sonnet LX.  I still need to set LX, but in the end, both will make up a trifle called Time Sonnets.

I’ve come up with a novel perhaps contrived idea for how to set Sonnet LX, but I won’t reveal the idea just quite yet.  All I will say is that it is perhaps more contrived than novel.  And it is so contrived that I shall be able to write it all out in an afternoon.

(For those of you who know me, you know that I work very, very, very slowly a la Ravel.  [I always add the a la Ravel.]  So, to finish something in an afternoon is very rare indeed.)

What comes of this unopened bottle of wine, however?  Well, after I write the double bar, I bask in the usual glowing feeling I feel whenever I finish something.  It’s a kind of glow that lasts for a couple hours.  A subtle kind of subdued euphoria.  A euphoria of small portions that dishes itself out slowly over the course of the evening.

(I tend to write my double bars in the evening or late at night.)

After I bask in this smallest of glows, I take the bottle, slowly and mechanically turn the corkscrew into the cork, forcefully yet gently pull the cork out, listen to the slightly toned pop of the cork as it comes out, sniff the cork, admire its bouquet (I don’t really know how to admire bouquets), and pour a modestly sized glass of wine, as if ever there were a perfectly sized modest size that the Council of Measurably Modest Sizes, who naturally measure up modest sizes, declare that this modestly sized glass of wine is the modestly sized size of all modest sizes that future modestly sized modest sizes must live up to.  In a modest kind of way, naturally.

It’s that kind of modest size.

And I drink the glass of wine.

But for the first time I write about drinking it.

(And it occurs to me that if we were to be pedantic, technically we should say, “I drink the wine in the glass,” not, “I drink the glass of wine.”  Sounds like we’re somehow drinking glass, which I suppose could be possible yet deadly and torturous at the right temperatures.)

And so here’s to years and years more of simple, modest pleasures that provide life with those little gems (and tangents difficult to control) and sparkling moments that give us all a much deserved pause to appreciate small beauties and ordinary yet miraculous times.