December 17, 2019, Tuesday

Pattie and I have been planning this adventure for almost a year now. We’ve spent the past few months reorganizing the house so that we can rent it for the coming eight months. We’ve spent the past weeks making the final arrangements, cleaning out my office a bit so that Jose Martinez can come in and wow everyone with the great stuff he’s doing, and his much more aware approach to teaching, especially electronic music.

We’ve had some great events recently–a wonderful surprise 70th birthday party for Martha in NY which brought together lots of family, and Christine/Stephen’s wedding last weekend, which together more family.

And waking today at 3:30am to begin this trip left only one more box to walk up to the attic, then into the car and off to RDU. Right now, am happy to have made our connection in DFW, and am on our flight to Cabo San Lucas. The next nine days will undoubtedly feel like a vacation, more than the beginning of the year’s writing and exploration/travel, and that’s a good thing. The past semester’s months have been draining, and this will be welcome.

The final week in Gvl has been very nice, with opportunities to visit with good friends, and to meet with those I’ll be writing for over the coming months. One real delight has been several discussions (Pattie, Martha, Chris G., Todd, James F) about Jane Hirshfield’s Let Them Not Say . It’s been fascinating to hear varying perspectives on this, some really very varying from my own and, consequently, broadening my take on this poem. A few directions make sense right now…speech, discrete voices, physical separation of the choir…but it’s still early on that one.

First project will be Jim Brasfield’s Celan, for which i’ve got multiple soprano lines and harmonic frameworks written. I still think i want to use this in different versions in contrast to Palladium and Renaissance. Perhaps Celan (1), Palladium, Celan (2), Renaissance, Celan (3).

But before digging in too deeply, Cabo, and especially some nice dives in San Lucas and Pulmo. So very excited for these first days.