It’s been a while since I’ve written about any of our (seemingly endless) home renovations.  We did the family room (Elvis style!), the living room (which we’ve improved quite a bit since the original post; I need to take new pictures), the front door and foyer, and the multiple entries about our down-to-the-studs kitchen remodel (see the links on the left, “Design: Kitchen”).  What’s left to do?  Well, of course there are the two bathrooms, but we won’t get to those until summer.  The current project is our dining room.

Like every other room in this house, the dining room was pretty sad when we looked at the house while it was on the market. As AEJ describes it, it was “droopy.”

Wall-to-wall carpet. A tragic accordion door into the (gawd-awful) kitchen. Sad baseboards around the floor. Popcorn ceilings. And the chandelier. The sad, sad chandelier.

Step one: replace the chandelier. Assembly required, but after the 48″ black chandelier in the family room, this was a piece of cake.

Soon we had this:

We also wallpapered one large wall. You can see the pattern in this shot. (It’s tough to tell, but the wallpaper pattern is a little reflective. It’s sweet.)

Now we needed a dining table. It took something like 16 weeks, but we eventually received it. It’s tough to tell from this shot, but it’s a monster. It weighs over 400 pounds, and the delivery was scary. Turned out fine, though.

But there was the problem of the other wall. The huge, empty wall. What on earth could go there? It’d need to be big — and if you’re going to go big, you want something pretty spectacular. AEJ, of course, had an idea.

Butterflies.

She conceived of a huge art work — larger than 4′ x 6′ — made entirely of real tropical butterflies. She found a place that makes custom art with mounted butterflies inside of acrylic cases, and she gave them her plans for this piece. Assembling it took months, but last week, we received four huge boxes from Butterfly Utopia in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  Inside was AEJ’s custom-designed artwork.

Wait, did you think that was it? Oh, no, no, no. That’s one box of butterflies. There are EIGHT. Mounting it was a huge task (“That’s what SHE said – ZING!”), but we did manage to eventually get the whole thing on the wall.

She picked three different sizes and colors of butterfly. They look completely different depending on the angle, and the angle of the light source.

Some are translucent. Some look blue sometimes, and green other times.

There are 96 butterflies in this thing, each placed according to AEJ’s instructions. She wanted it to look like a flock of butterflies, flying from the lower left to the upper right corner.

In person, it’s jaw-dropping, with its scale (the larger butterflies are probably 6″ across), and the colors, and just the realization that these are all real preserved butterflies. (As a side note, Butterfly Utopia actually helps preserve rainforests, because the business of providing a habitat for these butterflies prevents farms from clearing the land for logging. None of the butterflies are endangered. Well, at least they weren’t before our project.)

Because it’s really not a re-design blog entry without the side-by-side before and after… Once more, the before:

And now:

I think AEJ has totally outdone herself on this one. Most important, Loki approves. (Hey, get that cat off the dining table!)

The United States Navy Band recently released a CD containing my Soprano Sax Concerto with Timothy Roberts playing the solo part, and Captain George Thompson conducting.  The recording is really fantastic, and I think it’s the best one out there right now.  And best of all — it’s free.  In case you didn’t get a copy of the physical CD — called Command Performance — during the Midwest Clinic, you can download — yes, download, not stream! — the full recording from this website.

My sincere thanks to Timothy Roberts for his artistry and dedication to the piece, the Navy Band’s enlisted conductor MUCS Michael J. Schmitz for his tremendous help during the rehearsals and throughout the recording process, and to the entire band for playing the piece so well.

And thank you to the government for making this recording public domain!

I’ve posted my newest piece, “Xerxes,” a concert march.  (The title is, as usual, courtesy of AEJ, who called it Xerxes within 30 seconds of hearing the piece the first time.  Xerxes, for those who haven’t seen “300,” was King of Persia from 485 BC until his assassination by stabbing in 465 BC.)  Midlothian High School, here in Texas, commissioned the piece.  I’d originally thought I’d write a march along the lines of the Ives Country Band March, but the more I worked on that idea, the more I felt like I was just trying to reinvent the Ives March, which is already a sort of reinvention of a march.  My version sounded like bad Ives, and although it’s a great, crazy piece, I wouldn’t describe the Ives as sounding “good” to begin with.

With that idea out the window, I talked with AEJ about other possibilities. So many concert marches blur together in my head, all of them in some peppy major key, falling into either the chipper patriotic American sound or the more prim British sound. (I’m a huge fan of William Walton’s music — his Partita for Orchestra (iTunes link) is one of my favorite pieces ever, and if you listen to it, you’ll hear where I first discovered the Vulgar Trombone Glissando ® — but his marches are pretty decidedly prim and recognizably British.) Since I don’t really do prim, or patriotic, I went with… angry. The plan was, “this is going to be a march about somebody who is bad news.” That gave me the idea for the tune in the A section. Somehow, the heavily Persian middle section (which my friend Michael Markowski described as sounding like a “topless Vegas Persian-themed classic MGM showgirls show”) just sort of happened, and I worked that material into the recap of the A section at the end to tie it all together with one big nasty pissed off Persian bow.

Structurally, even though I wanted the tone to be pretty different from a traditional march, I wanted the structure to be basically “correct,” so it’s in A-B-A form, with that B “trio-like” section in the subdominant.  It also stays in 4/4 the entire time — making it my only piece in the past 15+ years that has stayed entirely in 4/4.  That was a sort of fun limitation.

The premiere is in February.  I can’t wait to hear how it sounds with real players.  (The MIDI makes the piece sound even more like a video game than it will “for real.”  At least I hope so…)

Give it a look/listen.  It’s just a fairly straightforward concert march, only a little nastier.  I don’t expect it’ll be played at a lot of July 4th parades.  (Well, maybe somewhere like NYC.)