Heard this via Luc Houtkamp today. It's hard to picture the British royal family making a record, let alone one like this! The woman that you see on the front cover is Beatrix, now queen of The Netherlands....

We gave the Dutch premiere of Stockhausen's Mikrophonie II at the Koncon tonight. Two versions: the first a "modern," digital version, followed by a "lost" work of Louis Andriessen, then a "classic" analog version of Mikrophonie II. Got it? "Modern," then "Lost," and finally "Analog."

Sweet dreams, ya'll....

I love this. He just takes charge and sells the damn record:

It was nice to see these issues raised by a prominent medical journal. This from the current issue of The Lancet, a UK medical journal, on some of the problems surrounding international aid agencies and NGO's:


"Politicians and the media make easy targets for criticism. But there is another group involved in disaster relief, which has largely escaped public scrutiny—the aid sector, now undoubtedly an industry in its own right. Aid agencies and humanitarian organisations do exceptional work in difficult circumstances. But some large charities could make their good work even better. The Lancet has been observing aid agencies and NGOs for several years and has also spoken with staff members working for major charities. Several themes have emerged from these conversations. Large aid agencies and humanitarian organisations are often highly competitive with each other. Polluted by the internal power politics and the unsavoury characteristics seen in many big corporations, large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts. Media coverage as an end in itself is too often an aim of their activities. Marketing and branding have too high a profile. Perhaps worst of all, relief efforts in the field are sometimes competitive with little collaboration between agencies, including smaller, grass-roots charities that may have have better networks in affected counties and so are well placed to immediately implement emergency relief.
Given the ongoing crisis in Haiti, it may seem unpalatable to scrutinise and criticise the motives and activities of humanitarian organisations. But just like any other industry, the aid industry must be examined, not just financially as is current practice, but also in how it operates from headquarter level to field level. It seems increasingly obvious that many aid agencies sometimes act according to their own best interests rather than in the interests of individuals whom they claim to help. Although many aid agencies do important work, humanitarianism is no longer the ethos for many organisations within the aid industry. For the people of Haiti and those living in parallel situations of destruction, humanitarianism remains the most crucial motivation and means for intervention."


Read The Road To Hell by Michael Maren for one man's rather shocking experiences working for Save The Children and USAID in Somalia.

Den Haag: cloudy and 4 degrees. Colder temps into the weekend.

G's parents are coming for a visit tomorrow, just a quick weekend trip, but I have rehearsals for a Sunday concert. New pieces by my friends Teodora and Tomo at the Nutshuis, here in Den Haag.

I'm nearly finished with Safety In Numbers, the piece for rock trio and soundtrack, written for my friend Paige for her April concert in Portland. This is the second piece in a row that I've written with an accompanying soundtrack, and it's got me thinking about the process of composing at the piano versus composing in a multitrack recording environment. I love pairing the two approaches, each of which feel so different in practice. Making the music, you feel as though you "stairstep" through the work, switching your focus from soundtrack to ensemble and back, as each layer begins to compliment and interact with the other. In terms of the stamina required to finish any piece, I've found that using electronics (in some form) in tandem with the ensemble makes it much easier for me to maintain focus and vitality, as you can never be sure how something you make in one layer (electronic or ensemble) will affect the other layers until you drop it in. So often this makes for refreshing "happy accidents" which take you totally by surprise and take the music in new directions. In the past, when composing solely for electronics or solely for ensemble, I have found it much easier to lose focus and freshness. Actually, I would say that this "happy accident" feeling is the same for me when I am composing solely for electronics. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that when you work with electronics, you're dealing with the sound material in real time, as it stands at the moment, and you can hear the results of your changes right away. At least that's part of it. The same thing can happen when writing for acoustic ensembles, of course. Maybe it's more to do with the fact that for me, "electronics" most often means using samples and field recordings, which put the whole work into a very unique space where anything can happen. This may be to do with the fact that field recordings paired with acoustic music have the strongest possible evocations for me, and I simply love playing with the relationship of the "real world" sounds to the traditional instruments.

So the question is: How to create these differing layers when composing an acoustic piece, with no electronics?

I'm at school waiting for a rehearsal to start at 5:00. They've been sprucing up the building all day, putting in hired cocktail tables, smart coat check racks, catering facilities, etc. I just heard someone say that queen Beatrix is coming for some function this evening! I had no idea....

Maybe she'll stop into our little rehearsal?

It rained this afternoon. I realized that I haven't had to deal with rain for over a month; usually an impossibility in Den Haag during the winter.

(Okay, I wasn't here for three weeks of that time, but it wasn't raining here then either)

I had meeting of "Master Circle" this morning, then met G briefly for lunch and a drink, then headed over to Luc and Adri's to discuss upcoming POW Ensemble business. Everything is well-and-truly underway in the new year....

Master Circle: a bi-weekly meeting of all the composition master students to get together and discuss their research projects and become distracted by (often quite tangential) minutiae.

Georgie just made a tasty supper, I'm drinkin a glass of rioja, and now we're about to plop down and enjoy The Life Aquatic. I just had a memory of seeing this with my sister when it first came out. That was a perfect night out at the cinema: the right companion for the picture, for sure! We laughed our asses off....

I shipped a box of about 40 of my favorite DVDs back here from Montana, and they arrived on Thursday. So many films to catch up with!

Ah, soon to be election time in old Britain! Just found these from here.

Just back from the Montana holiday-homecoming, and it's SNOWING here in Den Haag!! I've never seen snow like this here: big, slow-falling flakes that are already collecting. Someone up there is providing a helluva nice "gentle transition" back from the kickass alpine climate of my home state to what is (normally) a mizzley drizzley, cold-ass foggy winter mess here on the North Sea. We're back! The flight went pretty quickly. Here are the stats.

In-flight movies:
Up, with voices of E. Asner and C. Plummer. It was pretty good, but Pixar is slipping. That's a fact, folks, okay?
Inglourious Basterds, with B. Pitt and D. Kruger. Not sure on this one, especially as I missed the last fifteen minutes because we were landing. A string of mildly suspenseful scenes, presented one after another with a "daughter's revenge" theme lightly threaded through...

Meal:
BBQ chicken. Not too bad.
Heineken.

Seating:
43J (aisle), with the seat next to me (the window seat) occupied by my wife, just forward of the WC. This is as good as it gets.

Flight time:
8:00, and the GPS tracker was werkin' fine....

This time we had great views of the northern lights as we passed over Greenland, well north of Nuuk. This is officially the farthest north I have ever been. For some reason our flightpath was quite a bit further north than the usual route on this flight, so that we had amazing night views of Reykjavik and Keflavik to the south, and many surrounding, small Icelandic towns. Wish it had been daylight.

Snow stopped.

I'm back in Bozeman, Montana. The flight back seemed really long this time, but, despite 24 hours of travel, strange "baggage-collection assistants" and F-ING RUDE Northwest employees at Washington Dulles, swollen feet (gettin' old) and airport shuttles packed with seemingly healthy people in wheelchairs, I finally made it back to little Bozeman airport late Thursday night. The long-haul flight was on KLM in a brand-spankin' new airbus A330.

In-flight movies:
State Of Play, with R. Crowe and H. Mirren. It was good.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age, with C. Blanchett. Not so good.

Meal:
Indonesian chicken. Not too bad.
Heineken.

Seating:
Window, with the seat next to me empty, just forward of the WC. This is as good as it gets.

Flight time:
8:45, and the GPS tracker was broken.

It was a clear afternoon when we left Schiphol and I had FANTASTIC views all the way across the Channel, England (I could see the whole of Norfolk; Holkham beach and the Holkham estate; The Wash and the Peak District) and Wales (I could see the whole country! In it's entirety!), the Irish Sea and Ireland proper during the first 90 minutes of the flight, until we left Ireland behind and headed out over open water. Our path took us way south of Greenland, then down the coast of Newfoundland, Maine, and down past New York and Philadelphia into Washington D.C. I had perfect views of New York as we passed; Manhattan, Staten Island, Statue of Liberty, Long Island stretching away to the horizon). I wish G could have been there to see it, especially the views of Norfolk. You really could see the whole county in it's entirety -- quite amazing....

I'm up early working on Leningrad Dutch music. We have 26 seats (out of 50 available) reserved for the gig on the 28th.

Next project: I’ve got to finish Safety In Numbers, which I’m writing for an old friend from Portland, Oregon. Paige McKinney is an up-and-coming dancer and choreographer from Portland (via Alaska, originally), whom I knew from my few years living in Portland. Back in 2003, we collaborated on a short piece entitled Place, which was actually the first *serious* piece which I composed using multitracking. She contacted me during the summer about revisiting Place, as well as possibly doing something new, and I jumped at the chance to have another go at writing music for dance. The idea with Safety In Numbers is that the group, a rock trio, are passing through the various stages of crowd formation, when individuals (previously unknown to each other -- strangers) gradually shed their inhibition, their fear of the other, their fear of being touched, and become a single organism, a single entity with a common purpose. Hopefully I’ll finish the piece this month in Montana and record it with musicians here in Den Haag after I return in January.

It’s been cold in Montana for the last couple of weeks, and I am glad that there should be a good amount of snow on the ground for our visit. It’s Georgie’s first Montana Christmas, so I really want it to be a proper one, with the cozy holiday atmosphere that only a snowy landscape can provide....

Two more days!

Enjoyed looking through these Portraits Of Power, by Platon.

It's been a busy last two weeks, with the premiere of Rivers Of Europe, my new piece for piano and soundtrack, and a couple of concerts with the POW Ensemble. You can see photos of my POW gig from last week here. There are also some videos to be found here.

Rivers sounded fantastic at the KORZO theatre, here in Den Haag. My friend Teodora Stepančić really killed it, and it had a good response from the composer-y crowd. She's playing the piece again at the KoMA '06 festival in her hometown of Belgrade, on December 22nd.

I'm getting ready for the last POW gig of the season, this one featuring laptopper extraordinaire, Ángel Faraldo. We've got four laptop players with the renowned recorder player, Erik Bosgraaf. We had a long rehearsal yesterday and should be ready to go this afternoon. I had some technical difficulties which took nearly two stressful hours to sort out, so I was very happy to finally get my software up and running and to actually be able to make the rehearsal....

Four days until I leave for Montana!

This is turning into a "killing time at KonCon" blog. It's 5:17 p.m. and I'm waiting for G. We're heading to Rotterdam tonight to check out ASKO|Schönberg performing
Repons....can't wait! This piece is so rarely done, and it's my favorite Boulez. Funny: dad just sent an article about it from the Wall Street Journal a couple of months ago; an article lamenting that the piece was so rarely done. I'm smuggling the camera in to take some pre-show photos of the setup....

We were in Germany from Friday night to Sunday noon with Georgie's parents, who just left for Norfolk this morning. It was a fun trip, except for some car trouble (that would take too long to describe) that we had on the way there. Went to Düsseldorf and Kevelaer, stayed the nights in tiny Twisteden. Georgie and I have now *officially* been all over the Niederrhein area, from north to south.

She's here! More later......

It's Georgie's birthday today! We're going out tonight for a real Indonesian rijsttafel, the first time we've tried it despite having lived here for 2.5 years. Georgie's parents arrived last night for a five-day visit, and we're taking them to Germany for a weekend trip tomorrow afternoon, back Sunday. Some of the German Christmas markets start this weekend, so I'll be checking out the glühwein, of course....

I'm at school, having just eaten some kind of lunch-like material in the canteen, preparing to continue work this afternoon. Went into the Stockhausen studio early this morning for a couple of hours and captured some great sounds on the Syntons there. These modular synths really are amazing: the possibilities are literally infinite. You sit in front of these black boxes with a pile of banana plugs in front of you and just start making connections. Two hours in a near-hypnotic state, collecting sounds for my POW Ensemble project.

I'm nearly finished sketching out my songs for this POW project, the performance of which is coming up next week. I've got five loosely-structured song atmospheres to serve as seeds for improvisation, with flexible texts for the vocalist Han Buhrs to mess around with. The songs will be interspersed with two longer improvisations in the middle of the piece, so we should come in around 50 minutes on the performance. The texts are mostly taken from a idiomatic Japanese-English dictionary I've got (I've just taken the English bits) called the "Dictionary for Unexpected Situations." There is a loose storyline for the whole piece that Han will tell in his *excellent* radio voice between numbers. I can't wait to see what these guys do with it. We have one day of rehearsal, next Saturday the 28th, with the gig on the 29th.

Three weeks until I go back to Montana! I can't wait....

Christmas book wish list:

Novels:

Fortress Besieged - Qian Zhongshu
Disgrace - JM Coetzee
The Tin Drum - Günter Grass
The Way To Paradise - Mario Vargas Llosa
The Yacoubian Building - Alaa Al-Aswaany


Other:

The Crusades: A History - Jonathan Riley-Smith
OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism - ed. Eugene Ostashevsky
Het Apollonische Uurwerk - Andriessen / Schönberger


Den Haag central library (amazingly) doesn't have The Tin Drum or any translated Vargas Llosa. No Qian Zhongshu, and I really want to own the Andriessen, not just check it out....

What do you want for Christmas?

Just got back from meeting one of G's colleagues for a drink. There's nothing like a quiet beer at 5:00 on a Friday, sitting in a cozy Dutch cafe, and outside the gathering dark....I love Dutch cafes, as they are the most scrummily warm and cozy in the world.

Last night we went up to Amsterdam for a premiere of Martijn Padding's "Eight Metal Strings," a concerto for mandolin. It was fantastic! Martijn is the coordinator of our composition department, and one of my favorite Dutch composers. This may sound strange, but listening to Martijn's music makes me think that he'd be a good father. Playful, cheeky, vaguely menacing at times (like the best fairy tales). I've never heard his music sound brooding or truly violent. There was another piece on the program by Kate Moore, an aussie who graduated from here a few years ago and is now back in Sydney doing her phD. It was a good piece. Meditative, strikingly beautiful at times with a quiet power under the surface which gave you the sense that it was a picture of something really elemental, tectonic forces in a frame. We got back to Den Haag really late.

Before the concert, we had gone to eat at a randomly-picked Spanish restaurant in the red light district. The food was pretty good, but there was an American couple sitting behind us who just left after taking a few bites of their paella. They told the waiter that they wanted the bill (they had had their food for literally two minutes) and he asked what was wrong. "We're all set," the man quacked. Possibly not understanding that in American this means that you're finished and you'd like to leave as soon as possible, he asked again, was there something wrong? "We're all set" the man said again. "It's just....tasteless" offered his wife. "The vegetables are just....blah. I dunno...." Now, I love my country, I really do. There are fantastic things about the states that you can only find there; wonderful, cheeky, unique, visionary, violent music and history and trash and film and art and all the rest of the glorious American mess. I'm not one of those expats who says that they'll never go back, feeling not-so-subtly superior to their countrymen who know nothing of the ways of the world and must be enlightened. But: this sort of thing really pisses me off. Even if you don't like the food, why complain to the poor student worker from Spain or South America, who's just trying to make it to the end of his shift? And do you really expect an authentic paella in Amsterdam's red light? Our food was nice, and I managed to drink a half-carafe of wine all by myself before the concert, so I was primed and ready to go....

It's flipping 16C outside! It's crazy how warm that feels after a couple of weeks of 7 or 8. Tomorrow is supposed to be rain and cold again. I've got master circle in the morning at the conservatorium and then have to pick up a rental van to carry the gear for Gilius's piano installations to Den Bosch on Sunday. I am on my way to becoming the official driver of the new music scene here in Den Haag. None of the musicians I know here can drive.

Good morning. It's Remembrance Day today. I just saw Georgie off, and I'm going to finish this wake-up post, slurp the last of my coffee and then get to work on these songs for the POW Ensemble concert at LOOS, coming up in three weeks, here in Den Haag. I'm so excited to be working with a vocalist on this project! In this case it's Han Buhrs, lending his distinctive basso profundo to my song collection, Pocket Dictionary for Unexpected Situations. I can't think of anything more useless than a dictionary (of any size) for unexpected situations.


Everything that’s extreme is difficult. The middle parts are done more easily. The very center requires no effort at all. The center is equal to equilibrium. There’s no fight in it.

It is healthy for a person to know only that which he is supposed to. I can offer the following incident as an example: one person knew a little more, and another a bit less than they were supposed to know. And what happened? The one that knew a bit less got rich, and the one that knew a little more lived his whole life with simply adequate means.

Any old wisdom is good if somebody has understood it. A wisdom that hasn’t been understood may get covered in dust.

There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily. He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He had no nose either. He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, he had no spine, and he had no innards at all. He didn’t have anything. So we don’t even know who we’re talking about. It’s better that we don’t talk about him any more.

- Daniil Kharms | January 7, 1937

thanks to Teodora Stepančić...

Since the accession of Bulgaria to the EU in 2007, the Cyrillic alphabet is now the 3rd official script of the EU, after the Latin and Greek alphabets.

Cyrillic |səˈrilik|
adjective
denoting the alphabet used by many Slavic peoples, chiefly those with a historical allegiance to the Orthodox Church. Ultimately derived from Greek uncials, it is now used for Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Ukrainian, and some other Slavic languages.

Alphabet. What a fantastic word...

alphabet |ˈalfəˌbet; -bit|
noun
a set of letters or symbols in a fixed order, used to represent the basic sounds of a language; in particular, the set of letters from A to Z.
• the basic elements in a system which combine to form complex entities

ORIGIN early 16th cent.: from late Latin alphabetum, from Greek alpha, bēta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.

The alphabet has its roots in Phoenician writing of the 2nd millennium bc, from which the modern Hebrew and Arabic systems are ultimately derived. The Greek alphabet, which emerged in 1000–900 bc, developed two branches, Cyrillic (which became the script of Russian) and Etruscan (from which derives the Roman alphabet used in the West).

It's been about a year-and-a-half since I've posted here. I tried to keep a blog at my website, but I'm using iWeb, which (unless you have a .mac account) requires you to republish and upload the entire site with each little change, blog entries included. It takes about 2 hours to upload my (now 300MB) site through my crappy KPN internet connection, so you can see why my blogging has tapered off over the last year....

Anyway, I've missed doing it so here I am again. It's good to be back home with LiveJournal. I will continue to post some blogs at my site, naturally, but will keep the more frequent blogging here. It's just so much more convenient.

You can check in at www.chadlangford.com for details on what's been happening since my last LiveJournal post of July, 2008, but here are the highlights:

1. Georgina and I got married this last summer, then camped in France for a few weeks.
2. Last June I finally made it into the masters program at the Royal Conservatory, after inadvertently earning a second bachelor's degree in composition. I study with Gilius van Bergeijk and Yannis Kyriakides.
3. I've had some great performances over the last year in festivals and workshops around Holland and Europe.

Upcoming gigs in Den Haag:
29 November - POW Ensemble meets Chad Langford, Studio LOOS Den Haag 16:00 7 euros

30 November - Teodora Stepančić premieres my piece Rivers Of Europe for piano and soundtrack, Korzo Theater Den Haag 19:30 gratis

2 December - Den Haag All Stars premiere a new program, Studio LOOS Den Haag 20:00 gratis | I play bass on this concert

6 December - POW Ensemble meets Ángel Faraldo, Studio LOOS Den Haag 16:00 7 euros | I play laptop on this concert

7 December - Den Haag All Stars play new work by Ofir Klemperer and Renato Ferreira, Het Nuthuis 19:30 gratis | I play bass on this concert

22 December - Teodora Stepančić performs Rivers Of Europe at the KoMA '6 festival in Belgrade, Serbia.

28 December - Fundraiser for HMDSS with LENINGRAD DUTCH (me and Billie), Chris Cunningham, and Jake Fleming, The Shed Bozeman MT (USA) 19:30 $15 suggested donation | This is the first gig that Billie and I will perform as Leningrad Dutch! We're excited! Plus, I haven't even seen Billie in over two years!