No blogging for TWO MONTHS? What the hell?

We’ve moved, and holy hell, that takes a lot of time. 11,900 pounds of stuff, all loaded onto this truck.  If you have 6 tons of stuff, you have too much stuff.

The movers spent a full 11-hour day packing everything that we hadn’t packed ourselves. (We had them pack the furniture, and everything that seemed fragile — which, it turns out, is just about everything we own.)

The house really wasn’t livable that last night. It had gone from this…

To this:

Sad, really.

The drive to Cambridge — 2000 miles — was actually kind of fun, even with a cat in the car. Loki had a good time, and surprisingly, he seemed not to mind the air conditioned seats.  (Greatest car invention of the past 50 years?  I’m going to go with air conditioned seats.)

He spent most of the ride on AEJ’s lap, playing with his new toy, Yellow Fish.

Little guy loves this thing.

Loki made hotels kind of challenging. “Pet friendly” hotel usually means “animal urine in the carpet,” and that’s not our thing, so for the most part, we’d sneak him into regular rooms without declaring that we had a cat. He’s loud, but his meowing sounds like a weird alien baby, so nobody seemed to suspect that we had a feline with us. When we stopped in Columbus to visit my family, though, we made it “official” and paid the extra pet fee , since we wanted to be able to leave him for several hours without risk of him being discovered by housekeeping (or security — this cat throws a mean party). He was pretty excited to finally be in a room where he could explore the windows.

Or maybe he was just excited to be out of the car.

But eventually, back to the car we went.

When I was about ten years old, my grandfather, Harvey, taught me how to read music using a piece of music software called Music Construction Set. My grandfather was a musician — he played clarinet and flute — and he also owned a music store. He passed away about 15 years ago, but his store, Harvey’s House of Music, still exists in Mansfield, Ohio. Since it was on the drive anyway, we stopped to see the store, which I probably hadn’t seen for 15 years.

The place — the carpet, even the smell — is exactly the same as it was when I was little.

My grandfather had painted this music mural on the wall back in the early 1960’s. It’s totally groovy (although his pitch material is a bit minimalist).

The next day, we arrived at the new house in Cambridge. (Cambridge, for those who don’t know, is across the river from Boston. You could throw a rock from Boston and hit Harvard. Well, I couldn’t — I would say I throw like a girl, but that’s offensive to girls, who certainly throw better than I — but maybe you could throw a rock from Boston and hit Harvard. But you shouldn’t.) Anyway, we got there on Wednesday, but our stuff didn’t arrive until Friday. We needed somewhere to sit, so we went to Target and bought the only beanbag they had.

Needless to say, we were pretty excited when our real furniture arrived.

Loki, stop that.

This picture has nothing to do with anything else, but I like it. We just got these brass mini giraffes, who for a short time lived on our kitchen island. It’s like mini giraffes in a savanna.  AEJ has been obsessed with tiny giraffes since she saw that “Opulence, I Has It” DirecTV commercial.

Since this blog is presumably supposed to be somehow about writing music or some such thing, here’s a picture of the room that will become my studio — the day before the movers arrived.

But soon it was full of boxes.

And as we unpacked, we put all of the packing paper and empty boxes there.

We eventually got all of that cleaned out again, but soon more boxes arrived in the mail. I’d wanted to support my grandfather’s music store, so when we were there, I ordered some music.

Okay, quite a bit.

Alright, I bought almost all of it.

I grew up with these Schirmer Editions, and since I have a piano coming this week, I’m going to need some music, right? Who cares that I play piano like an ungifted 5-year-old.

Ah, the piano. So excited about this. I’m off to Interlochen in Michigan tomorrow, but while I’m away — after writing on a digital keyboard my whole life — my first real piano will be delivered.  Here’s my studio today.  The finished room will be completely over-the-top, complete with piano (a real piano!), leather lounge chair, dragon curtains (oh, I’m serious), and… booby lamp. Oh, it’s going to rock.

See you next week.

In less than three weeks, we’re moving (yet again – we seem to do this every three years), this time heading from Austin to Cambridge, MA.  AEJ, who has been responsible for all of the incredible design at our house in Austin, is deep into the design planning for our new place.

The thing that I’m most excited about after the move is that I’ll finally have a studio with enough space for a mid-sized grand piano.  That, to state the obvious, is a great big shiny black object.  Add to that the shiny black speakers that are in our current family room in Austin…

(here’s another angle…)

… and you have a lot of shiny black stuff. Since that’s going to feel pretty slick to begin with, AEJ suggested going over-the-top with it, and making it look like the kind of place where Elvis would go to write songs (were he ever actually capable of writing music, and, well, still alive).

To give you an idea of how my studios have changed over the years, here was my workspace in New York City:

This was the studio in Los Angeles (with completely wacked white balance — sorry about that):

And this was the studio here in Austin:

Things had already started moving in the right direction in the Austin studio, with heavy, red, velvet curtains, and a vintage 1970’s acrylic chandelier. It’s like ’70s bordello chic.  Let’s do more of that, only much less subtle.

I’m not going to give much away about her specific plans for the new studio, but I had to post a picture of just one of the lamps.

Are you seeing what’s happening with that lamp? I’ll zoom in for you. But if you’re viewing this at your office, you I suggest you stop scrolling, so you don’t get fired.

That’s right. Boobies. It’s a booby lamp. What says “serious composer” like a lamp with boobies on it? And let me just reiterate that this was my wife’s idea.

It may not be the most appropriate place to write middle school band music, but the new studio is going to rule.

Good friend Jonathan Newman has a new piece, “Vivid Geography,” and it’s beautiful.  It was commissioned by the same Japanese consortium that commissioned Kingfishers Catch Fire.  Newman’s piece is for women’s chorus and chamber orchestra, and man, it makes me wish I had the opportunity to write something for this same scoring. (Well, maybe minus the chorus. I love chorus, don’t get me wrong, but I think any time you add a chorus to a large ensemble piece, you reduce the number of potential performances by, like, 375%.)

A chamber orchestra with a full sax section is capable of some incredible colors – at least in Newman’s hands. My favorite thing about the piece is the harmonic and rhythmic language, which I can only describe as being the kind of sound that I’d like to hug. You can see the score and hear the recording here.