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!