notes from the kelp

…click to listen:

…about the music

On the edge.

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Well, to continue the theme of the previous post, here’s something else that was really fun, that I also did from the very same [occasionally aquarium-style] desk as I’ve been doing all those other really fun things: a video podcast that was streamed live on YouTube last weekend, and is now archived for all eternity, thus making me thankful that I didn’t say anything even more embarrassing than usual.

A handful of young and very articulate composers have been building a new corner of the ever-expanding infinity that is the new music world, and they began a podcast series a couple of years ago called SoundNotion. Each week they discuss the issues du jour for working composers and performers, often inviting a guest to join them. I was the lucky one who got to clog the bandwidth and fill up the screen last week for an episode titled Out There, and it’s definitely another clear example of all the live online interaction I’ve described earlier that has a profound effect on my work.

The hour and a quarter conversation covers two main categories that, like everything in the known universe, are interconnected: the powerful, career-building uses of interactive online media for artists, and, starting at the 42 minute mark, the powerful career-busting issues for artists of lack of self worth, and how outreach and education can make an enormous difference. Oh, and somewhere in there we talk about combing one’s hair right.

In this instance, you’ll understand when you see the visible in-focus screen presence of the others, and then my very, very fuzzy self as cave-cast webcast from San Juan Island, exactly why I’ve been active in the movement to bring high speed internet services to rural areas. Below, dear viewers, is the painful truth of what 1.5 Mbps (and much less) actually looks like. It’s much like a dog dancing on its hind legs: the fact that I can do this sort of thing at all, with both slow-speed hands tied behind my router, is amazing. That I happen to make a few good points here and there is almost ancillary to the fact that you can see and hear me at all. Then again, the older one gets, the more one benefits from smoothed-out edges.

I swear, I did not film the show through a roll of wax paper.

So, if you visit the SoundNotion webpage, you have your choice of watching me in all my supreme fuzziness, or of streaming the audio, or downloading one or both options for later consumption (I make a decent substitute for drive-time AM talk radio. Which is actually something I did during my activist years in Los Angeles in the 90’s, and yes, that’ll be another blog post sometime).

Or, you can watch in this convenient Tube of the You, below.

1

…click to listen:

…about the music

This stuff is deep.

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Readers of this humble bloglet know that I see a lot of awesome things from my desk. Each photo in this post is either of something in front of it, or… on top of it.

Chugging along past the grand Olympic mountains…

Not too long ago, an outside-the-taco-shell-thinking musical blogizen named Greg Sandow invited me to be a guest writer in his neck of the e-woods, and the result, in an essay titled E-ing There, was a vivid description of how I can stay tethered to this desk while also remaining tethered to the outside art world. One power outage, of course, and I’m livin’ large Mozart-style by candlelight, only able to share my music with those within a very limited radius.
I keep score paper and a candle on my piano for just those moments.
And I have my acoustic guitars.
And if it’s a clear night, I have a telescope to entertain my futile search for infinity.
(Which is often how things feel for a composer as s/he flails in the midst of all those little black dots on the music staff).

Happily, cameras don’t need electricity too often; a backup battery is always close at hand, and the relative simplicity of shooting photos, versus running my sometimes daunting, power-dependant high-tech/low-amperage digital recording setup, is welcome.
Besides: I love to capture the power generated by others:

It’s hard to think of this enormous creature as merely a juvenile Bald Eagle. Wow.

The mountains grazed by the morning light, or the soaring eagles, or the breaching orcas…

Wheee!

It’s these moments that boomerang back to me, in the form of all those little black dots that humans read on white pieces of paper and translate into sound.

Foxes are very poor sight-readers.

But the biggest, and most emotional boomerang effect of all, is the kind of thing that happened just last week. One of the commissioners of my oh-so-watery electroacoustic symphony for winds and percussion, IMMERSION, is Yale University. The piece is an anthem to the sea. It’s obvious to anyone looking at all the photos of weird squishy things on this blog, that I’m a wannabe marine biologist. Who, had I made the choice to actually become one, would have probably been a lousy scientist, because I’d always be creatively extrapolating on What Things Are in my quest for a really good story, rather than the [often more] boring truth.
See? It’s a damn good thing I became an artist. We don’t care about truth. Our job is to make everything up.

When the Yale Concert Band gave their premiere performance of IMMERSION last Friday night, conductor and all-around fearless leader Tom Duffy invited me to speak to the audience via Skype. If you click on the essay link above, you’ll see that this is not new territory for me, and it’s certainly something I love to do. Heck, I don’t even have to wear pants:

Mary Bauer conducts a 2012 rehearsal of PAPER CUT at Mount Mansfield Union High School in Jericho, Vermont, as I’m beamed in from my living room on the opposite coast.

After I finished my on-camera introduction of the music, this particular performance went a step further. With the good fortune of a three-hour time difference that had me in bright sunshine while the concert-goers in New Haven’s Woolsey Hall were steeped in evening’s darkness, I turned the concert into a live music video by pivoting my webcam to the sea in front of me. As the music of the first movement, DEPTH, began filling the hall, there on a large screen behind the band was the real-time sight of the waves rolling past my desk.

E-ing there.

These are the same waters that inspired the very music everyone was playing and hearing.
From my desk. To their music desks. Out to the audience. And finally, back to me.
Right where it all began.

A screenshot from my monitor, the lefthand part of which shows the Salish Sea as viewed by me, and by the audience on the east coast, from the perspective of a bassist’s music stand. Clearly, a geo-multimedia first!

The band was being conducted as a Skype session was being conducted. As the hair on the back of my neck was being conducted by the electricity of this powerful confluence. In the middle of nowhere, my music, the sea I love, and I, floated in the center of everywhere.

…click to listen:

…about the music

Don’t forget to tip your waiter!

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I looked up from my work to see a bright orange object flying through the air. Around here, I don’t usually see bright orange things in the sky. I think that’s more like what happens in Russia.

The bright orange object was treated to a dizzying aerial view of the coastline, gripped in the beak of a first-winter herring gull who was determined to outpace five other, older gulls chasing him.
Watching the sharp turns and swerves, I thought of the car chase scene from Bullitt.

Gull McQueen here got himself quite a feast: A Sunflower sea star.

A sunflower sea star has twenty four limbs.

Twenty three.

I’m really fond of these creatures. Almost every time we tugged a crab pot up over the edge of the sailboat hull last summer, instead of the Dungeness we desired, or along with them, would be one of these huge squishy guys:

Thanks to Dan for his professional hand modeling services.

Forget about the Circle of Life. Let’s talk about the Triangle of Lunch:

A friend eats a turkey lunch, and gives us some extra turkey parts.
We put the organ donor’s leg in the crab cage.

The crabs love a turkey lunch, too (although I think they’d appreciate a little deli mustard).
One or more sunflower seastars crawl in right along with the crabs, and often take over: if they’re not sucking down some clam innards (see first pic above), these guys also love a turkey lunch. Hold the rye, hold the mayo.
And they can, cos’ they have all those limbs to hold anything they want.

When we pull up the pot a day or so later, we throw the seastar back in the water.
We throw the female crabs back, too (how else would we have all these crabs to eat?).
We keep, cook and eat the male crabs who are large enough to be legal (they carry little I.D. cards to show the bouncer).

Voila: Our crab lunch, via everyone else’s turkey lunch.
The Triangle of Lunch is complete.
All for yum and yum, for all.
Even for those male crabs… for a while!

The Salish Sea version of a well catered party.

…click to listen:

…about the music

Blue Plate Special.

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Photo blog disclaimer!
Warning!
The following photos are lousy quality.
They ain’t nuttin’ compared to my recent pix of a a young gull attempting to swallow a large flounder, or these pix from 2011 of a seal devouring a cephalopod.

Nonetheless, I’m posting them for you, in all their blurriness.
Why?
Because, as you can see from this prior post, I’m a digestion junkie. I’m absolutely spellbound watching creatures eat their lunch.
Which, most of the time, consists of other creatures.

I’m going to bet that most people who read this blog do not live somewhere they see this sort of thing everyday. Therefore, just as I’ll always appreciate a blurry photo of metropolis wildlife like Donald Trump’s toupee, maybe urbanites will get a kick out of this.

All right folks, yes-sirree! It’s time to play another round of, “Name that Lunch!”:

A clue?

Notice how the entrée changed color.

Need one more clue?

In the second photo: not only does the photo suck, but so does the lens subject.

Give up?

The gull is eating a juvenile Pacific Red Octopus.

Captivating as it was to observe, this made me sad. I love octopi. Not to eat: to greatly admire, as fantastic, smart, delightful creatures.
But in this world, we’re all up for being on the menu. I witness this nearly every day, while I’m composing, and taking care of publishing stuff, and brushing out Bella’s long thick fur, and talking to someone on the phone, and… oh… wait! Look! Geez… [crunch]… [slurp]…

It’s far less heart-wrenching to watch the Canada geese.
They’re vegetarian.

Truth be told, my digestion fetishes go in both directions, like digestion itself.
Critters in, critters out.

For instance, walking around the rocks here I often spot small clumps of tiny, beautiful little shells. I always wondered what they were, and how they got there. Each smaller than my fingernail, they blend perfectly in the granite nooks, and would be easy to miss unless you were really looking for them.

One day, I glanced up from my desk at a lone gull on the rock in front of me, just in time to witness him…

…upchuck.
Kind of like a cat with a furball.

Gross as it sounds, I was riveted.
It was fascinating.
So much so, that I failed to grab my camera. Never before has a girl been so compelled by the reverse-digestion of a bird.

Not too long after the gull flew off (maybe to find some more food and begin this charming process all over again), I walked out to the spot and shot these photos of the fresh evidence.

Not one, but two clumps. A bonanza.
I am the Annie Leibovitz of bird puke.

Like many birds, mama gulls regurgitate food for their chicks. But the adults– quite the greedy scavengers– have to get rid of the stuff they scarf up that’s indigestible, and occasionally, just like us, it exits from the front rather than the rear.

It’s likely that the gull’s lunch of a fish, a crab, or a sea star, had consumed these tiny clam-like beings for its lunch (not realizing that this would be the last supper). Or maybe the gull just scooped up a quick snack of some kelp and seawater, and ended up swallowing lots of teeny tiny bivalve molluscs.
One way or another, out they go.

Gull forensics. My next profession!

If there’s every a “CSI: Intertidal,” I demand to be the composer on the gig.
Call my agent!

…click to listen:

…about the music

One cool cat.

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My life at home as a worker bee composer is pretty uneventful. There’s the sedentary aspect: sitting at my desk, managing my business, putting some music on the page, yada yada yada. Which is balanced by intense physical labor: pacing around the living room as I search for elusive ideas (funny; the little suckers aren’t under the sofa where I left them yesterday), and tamping down an already worn path that betrays my many treks to and from the kitchen for, well, anything. Because consuming anything is always easier than composing something.

As much as I travel throughout the year (I’m just shy of the 500,000 mile mark on my Delta account, and fully expect them to send me a gold watch), my absolute mostess very very favoritest thing is to hole up here in this cabin by the sea and do my work. Or not do my work and just fret about needing to do my work. It really matters not; the point is, I’m beyond thrilled just being here, and am becoming far more circum-spect about the circum-stances for which I’ll agree to flit away. I love my uneventful home life.

If you read the previous blog post or glanced at my Facebook page earlier this month, you know I have one more furry reason to be flit-resistant: Bella. She was an amazingly docile trooper on our flight/buses/ferry/car ride (did I mention spaceship? I think there was one of those, too) from Los Angeles to Friday Harbor, and is settling into island life nicely (Bella didn’t need the kitty prozac, but toward the end of the journey I was eying it with great interest). Her tolerance for living with someone from whom bizarre, semi-musical sounds erupt at random moments is admirable. Sweet natured as she is, after I finished a mix the other day (entailing playing back the same stubborn passages over and over and over again) I actually felt sorry for her that she didn’t get adopted by a librarian. So far I think her sole heartbreak has been the devastating discovery that not only do I own a vacuum cleaner, but that I occasionally plug it in and turn it on.
Poor kitty.

Nonetheless, there are perks to living here, in addition to the free-flowing high-end kibble and tons of petting. She and I enjoy a shared hobby of birdwatching: each morning I put seed out on the deck, and like clockwork, it’s time for her favorite channel, Cat TV, to begin its daily broadcast.

At the moment, red-winged blackbirds, cowbirds and starlings are our seasonal nest-aurant clientele. Apparently pleased by the menu, they all chirp hysterically on one side of the door. Bella chirps back on the other side, with that funny dry cackle that some cats have. Her huge tail swishes back and forth like a whip as she crouches low, pounce-ready. Were she on the deck with the birds, between the sound effects and the dance moves, she’d have zero chance of catching one of them.
But she doesn’t know that,
and the birds don’t see her behind the glass.
My blessed kingdom is at peace.

Having never before seen eagles, the look on Bella’s face when one flew by was priceless.

WTF??

And she probably thought the same of me, since every time I see one (which is roughly twenty times a day, because I’m smack dab in the center of their hilltop perches and rocky outcroppings), I’m in awe. Whether they’re taking off,

Or coming in for a landing,

my excitement just never lessens. They’re magnificent.

(Yes, this may be the only blog you read today that features both cute kitty pictures, AND Bald Eagles.)

So, with a new fuzzy companion underfoot, I continue to pace, and hem, and haw, and munch, and grab my camera at any opportunity, and even more than occasionally… actually get the work at hand, done.

The difference is that now, I am under 24/7 surveillance.

Bella is keeping me honest.
Bella knows all.
I’m so relieved cats can’t talk.
Pardon me while I head back to the fridge.

…click to listen:

…about the music

Homecoming.

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So many fun fun fun things have happened in the past few weeks, that I haven’t been in one place (or at least one place without a deadline cuddled up right next to me) long enough to post about them. Truly, the dilemma of living a published life (and most of us do, via Facebook, Twitter, blogs, websites, etc.), is the difficulty of reporting one’s compelling moments while simultaneously experiencing them.

So, I find myself alternating between the living of, and the posting of that which has been lived. I think if I were able to do both at once on any regular basis, it would mean my life was dull and without nearly as interesting material to offer up to others. I’m anti-spew; I can’t post little ditties just for the sake of posting. Enough people waste precious pixels on your retinas, and I don’t want to be one of them!

No, I post inanities about which I’m damned proud! Executive, high-level inanities. Inanities guaranteed to enrich a few valuable moments of your busy lives. Like gulls attempting to swallow flounders, and the heartbreakingly hollow promises of deluxe hotel shower caps, as seen in very recent and oh-so-pithy posts, below. If you keep scrolling backward through the annals of my past seven enpixelated years, you’ll be amazed by the high quality of utter inanity I serve up. Nothing but the finest, here in Kelpville.

Yada, yada, yada… ribbit.

2013 got off to a very ribbiting… uh, I mean, riveting start. Lots of music, and lots of professional events, but kicked off by a couple of glorious, stolen weeks in January (after an insane December working in NYC and Chicago), in which I welcomed in another completed solar rotation by strapping on some tight snorkel gear and becoming one with the fishes. No, not in the nippy Hudson River or Lake Michigan, but in the warm Hawaiian Pacific. Ahhhh….

I had a few days back on San Juan Island after the Big Island to shake the lava-sand from between my toes, and by the end of January all the fun-but-slightly nutty music stuff started up again. After three nearly-solid months of travel, I’m looking forward to this weekend, because as of March 2 I’ll be home for the entire month and then some, well into April. This quite possibly means more blog posts, since I will be more stationary and thus looking for more ways to procrastinate as I busily align more notes. Looking at my business trip calendar just these past 5 weeks, I will have physically been to Seattle twice; Bellingham, WA; Pullman WA; New York City twice, and, Los Angeles, (for one action-packed day you’re soon to read about).

In the same time frame, I’ve been to even more places virtually, thanks to the magic of Skype, Google Hangouts and Twitter, all of which have connected me to bands around the U.S. in order to coach rehearsals (via a process which I have coined Skypehearsals), and to talk to live audiences at recent premieres and performances of my music.

I DO love the physical trips because [despite my hermetic composerly nature on San Juan Island] I really DO love people. At least, in short, controllable doses. And I live a very lucky life that is filled with exceptionally wonderful people.

But there is a glee in the virtual life: I can be anywhere, at any time, and I don’t even need to wear pants.

Virtual music-making: Jerry Luckhardt guest conducting the symphonic band at Oregon State University, as I coach the rehearsal on San Juan Island (I think I was, indeed, wearing pants. I think.).

As a composer, I get to do Really Enjoyable Things, like be a guest lecturer at Western Washington University last month, and, a week later, be the belle of the ball at Washington State University’s marvelous Festival of Contemporary Art Music, where Dave Jarvis premiered (and, video’ed and recorded– wait ’til you see this!) the new electroacoustic piece we co-wrote, KETTLE BREW, and where an entire all-Shapiro note-fest extravagonzo occurred the following night, featuring four of my chamber works as well as my electroacoustic symphony for winds and percussion, IMMERSION.

Hearing one’s own music in the context of… one’s own music… is very, very cool. And if it’s a composer like me who writes in quite a number of different styles (no, I’m not schizophrenic… yes, you are… no, she’s not!), well then, I can take heart that the hapless audience members, sonically flogged by my many offerings, are likely to enjoy at least one of the pieces on the program. Really: it’s just like Pacific Northwest weather: if you don’t like it, just wait ten minutes and it’ll change.

Change, captured in my lens: the moon and drama from my desk after a storm one afternoon.

As thrilling as the physical world can be, there are also some tricky hidden challenges to online life: the dark underbelly of e-topia. I was reminded of this the day I arrived at WSU in Pullman, to coach a Skypehearsal with conductor Miller Asbill and the wind band of Brevard College, all of whom were brave enough to be preparing the premiere of my newest electroacoustic band piece, TIGHT SQUEEZE.

This fine use of modern technology was made oh-so-much more exciting by the fact that despite being at a major university, for some reason I was suddenly unable to connect to the internet. As a few music grad students observed over my shoulder, I frantically tried everything I could, to no avail. With just one minute before the downbeat three time zones over in North Carolina, I forewent the beautiful large screen and speakers I had planned to use, and instead, quickly logged into Skype on my iPhone and held the damn thing at the appropriate angle for the entire 50 minute session. Once I logged off, I turned to the students and told them they had just seen real-life composing in action: the ability to punt.

This small blip wasn’t nearly as nail-biting as the time a few months ago when I was slated to speak live from my home to an audience in Maine to introduce a piece of mine. Just eighteen minutes before my possibly pants-less self was to appear like The Great Oz on the big screen, the electricity went out.
Uh-oh.
I called a pal who lives about 14 minutes away in a different part of the island, to see if he had power. Yup, he did. I have never been more thankful for the paucity of police cars on little San Juan Island as when my laptop, webcam and I arrived rather breathless at his house in a record 11 and a half minutes. With just three minutes to set up, plug in, log on, and run a comb through my nerve-frazzled hair, no one in Maine was the wiser.

My headshot and my actual head, surrounded with the very friendly composition and percussion faculty of WSU: Ryan Hare, Scott Blasco, and David Jarvis.

So, after the festival, my corporeal self and I went straight from Pullman, WA to New York City (well, via Seattle, which is straight, but in the opposite direction of where I needed to go, thus being an example of, “one step backward, two steps fuggedabouttit.” About 53 hours in NY were filled with Other Enjoyable Things Composers Do, including three meetings for ASCAP and New Music USA. Somewhere in there, seated at a small desk in my even smaller Upper West Side hotel room, I got through the velvet ropes and the bouncer and found myself in a Google Hangout for the TIGHT SQUEEZE premiere, describing something to the audience about electroacoustic twelve-tone techno Latin bebop.

12, count ’em, 12 tones.

The next morning I flew back to San Juan Island, resumed a normal home life with my fabulous/amazing/incredible/awesome beau Dan, and nine days and a bunch of delivered music later got back in a car and onto a ferry to return to NYC for more meetings. But not before seeing Tower of Power funkify Jazz Alley at their last set of the run on Sunday night, and having a scenically spectacular dinner atop the pointy Space Needle on Monday’s super-clear, super-full moon night, and in between, visiting some longtime pals. Lemme tell ya, I know how to make a boomerang trip worthwhile!

The restaurant makes a full rotation every 48 minutes. I usually make one every 36 minutes, thus creating a psychedelic phase-shifting effect. Wheee!

Hours later at a bleary-but-happy 7 am, Dan drove/ferried back to the island as my 737 launched into the clouds headed east.

No matter how many times I fly by Mt. Rainier, I’m always ribbeted… um, riveted.

You’d think that tomorrow, as I pour myself into a cab at 5:30 a.m. to catch the early flight back to Seattle, I’d be done with the travel mischegas. But instead of doing the sensible thing and puddle-jumping my way back home, I’m turning on my heels and hopping on a flight an hour later to Los Angeles. For just one night.
And not for anything music-related.
Unless we count this as a “muse acquisition” business trip (I hope my CPA and the IRS are paying attention to my request, on behalf of United States artists, for this long-overlooked and important deduction category. In this case, it’s truly a CATegory).

Yup, here comes that “action-packed day” I promised at the start of this rambling post:

I’m adopting a gorgeous Maine Coon kitty named Bella, that my dear friend Paul’s elderly mother can no longer keep because she’s going into an assisted living building that, regrettably, does not allow pets. Dan and I are very excited to become parents in a manner that does not include saving for a college education (unless Bella is a real stand out in her class, in which case, we’ll spring for it).

My cat-chaperoning return on Saturday will take a whopping 13 hours, because the flight gets in to Seattle after the last puddle jumper has left for the island, thus necessitating an additional fun-filled 6 hours of two-buses-and-a-long-ferry travel with a cat who will be wondering what the hell is going on and why was her staff not consulted. Bella and I make landfall on the island after 11pm that night, having left L.A. around 10am. Happily, I have kitty prozac with me. And if she’s nice, I won’t consume all of it.

This little extra jaunt (heck, I was already at SeaTac, what’s one extra flight?) definitely qualifies me to become an official member of The Crazy Cat Lady Club.

So indeed: as advertised in this post’s title, the fur will be flying.
And after this weekend, I won’t be. At least, for a little while.
Purrrrrrrrrr.

13 hours on the road? Seriously??

…click to listen:

…about the music

Tight, indeed.

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A young gull landed on a rock in front of my desk window as I was finishing a new wind band work (it has since been premiered at Brevard College, and if you click the MP3 link above, you can hear the performance). A sizable flounder was, uh, floundering in his clamped beak. The rather goofy-looking bird was having a challenging time figuring out how to swallow his windfall. I said to the bird, “wow, tight squeeze!”, and immediately realized that all the notes that were cramming the score page in front of me, would soon be squeezing through the musicians’ instruments, as snugly as a fat flounder in a gull’s mouth.

I also realized that talking to birds is pointless; they make lousy conversationalists– especially when their mouth is full.

And so, just as I was wracking my feeble, note-drained skull as to what the title of this upbeat, electroacoustic twelve-tone techno Latin bebop piece should be (if you’re a bit musical, you’ll enjoy the program note and see why this is a little different than the average band number), the gull and his lunch saved the day. The dynamic duo also gave me a great way to procrastinate on finishing the conductor score for the next 25 minutes, because that’s exactly how long it took for the gull to accomplish the delicate fine dining procedure that I have carefully documented below.

The piece is now aptly titled TIGHT SQUEEZE. And I hereby present the following educational photo essay: “How to Swallow Something Larger Than Your Mouth.” I can only hope that my audiences will have an easier time digesting my music.

I’m not sure how this is going to work, but I’m determined.

Okay. I got this.

Uh oh… Crap.

I know, I know, don’t talk with your mouth full.

Ok, here we go!

A stylish flip of the tail fin, and down the hatch!

Um, sort of.

… Alka Seltzer, anyone??

…click to listen:

…about the music

Above, and below.

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Oh, and what a dive she took.
From the trees to the seas.

From the sensuous, smooth nudity of Sucia Island’s Pacific Madrone…

Yes, we’re all thinking the same thing.

…to the sensuous, smooth warmth of Hawai’i’s Pacific waters…

…your kelpy heroine has had the great happiness for a long time now, of surrounding herself with the earth’s beauty.
Above…

…and below.

Stay tuned for The Continuing Adventures of a Happy Composer, now in its seventh year online. I’ve returned from bringing in this year’s birthday as I brought in the last, Hawai’i 5-0 celebration, and a year later, I’m STILL not playing with a full deck (I guess that’ll be the next birthday). I’m looking forward to a 2013 filled with joy, music, silliness, nature, and of course, lots of photos!