Did something stupid, which is nothing new, but dumb enough to take note for posterity. I was digitizing some old cassettes, as I’ve done in the past, when I let one tape play repeatedly overnight, recording itself for about 9 hours. I suspect but cannot be sure that this sort of thing is what contributed to my old PC’s ruination, and that filling all that RAM with WAV file content did something to physically screw up the memory. That is just a theory but it makes sense to me. This also submits the rinky-dink USB cassette player to unnecessary wear and tear as it played continuously for all those hours.
A mistake yesterday was in sleeping 12 or 13 hours and neglecting to eat much of anything the entire day before. I guess that’s two mistakes. Does anyone really learn from things like this? I remember all the mistakes I made at the college radio station, and how seriously I took them at the time because I was considering a career in radio. I’m also thinking about those radio days again because this matter of digitizing what’s left of my old cassettes comes with the possibility of finding certain of the broadcasts I did that were, well, memorable. I’ve been building my radio stuff around here again but it’s slow going and tedious, as I knew it would be.
I made a surprising find among those old tapes. In college I placed an ad in EAR Magazine inviting composers to send me copies of their piano music for me to possibly perform at what I think I called a “well known conservatory”. Much of what I got was crap but there were minor gems in there. But one set of pieces in particular stuck in my mind for being laughably bad, and physically impossible for human hands to play. The scores of the pieces were sent along with a cassette of a MIDI rendering, and at the time I don’t think I found the sound of MIDI to just be goofy as hell.
Listening to the stuff again, 28 years later, I ask myself why I was not a little more sympathetic toward this. It sounds a little more ambitious and thick than I remembered it, but it’s when I look at and try to play through the scores that I remember the misgivings. If a passage should be in E Major, and if a triad should be thus notated E/G#/B, it is instead written as E/A-Flat/C-Flat or a F-Flat/G#/B. It’s confusing as hell to read and I guess this is on account of whatever notation software he used at the time not knowing what keys he was in. High notes are written at 12 or 13 lines above the staff, not with the usual 8va or 15va hook. I would basically have to renotate this entire thing to make anything of it, and for whatever else I might make of its sound I don’t know if it’s anything I could realistically have taken on.
But then I feel a slight hint of regret that I do not seem ever to have communicated with the composer. There seems to be a Keith Jarrett influence, suggesting that he improvised this and used MIDI to plug it into notation software note by note. The output suggests he had limited knowledge of musical notation. I find someone out there on that Internet thing who is probably the composer, as he had a distinctive enough name. But I find nothing to suggest he has ever put his compositions online. It would be interesting to connect with him all these years on but that would just amount to an intrusion, I think, since I would have no intention of doing anything with this music. I doubt if my constructive feedback, which would amount to me suggesting he renotate it in the proper enharmonics, would go far with him this many years on.
Then again what do I know? I still feel a bit curatorial about this little project, even these years later. I doubt if dashed hopes still linger among those whose submissions I ignored, but then again I still maintain animus toward one individual who ignored my requests to help pay for the studio time and recording materials I procured to make professional quality recordings of his craptastic little pieces. They really were garbage, and today I cannot remember what correspondence between the composer and I led me to think I should commit to recording them, but there had to have been an implication that he would compensate or at least partially reimburse me for the expenses. I remember sending at least a few letters to him with regard to this but he never responded.
It was a few years ago, then, that I was reminded of this encounter when I saw a book that was authored by someone with the same name as this individual. It was not the same person but it was enough to make me look him up and find that this composer is out there on Facebook, commenting ad infinitum in classical music groups and making himself out to be a neglected composer whose fame will come. Basically he is a classical music crank, the likes of which I have encountered mercifully little but memorably in their paucity. There was a guy who tried to con me into recording some piece of music he wrote, and as part of his pitch he suggested that he was president of some music foundation which included on its board of directors a certain very well-known composer of the day. I contacted that composer by mail and received a phone call within days from him, informing me that he had nothing to do with that foundation and that I should avoid it.
There is more to that story but it escapes me now. Fresh out of the conservatory I was never afraid of or intimidated about contacting famous or high-profile musicians like that. Most memorably I have a personal letter from Vladimir Horowitz to me to show for it.
Another classical music con that has lingered in my memory since the early 1990s involves a violinist I knew who told me that if I wanted to pad my performance resumé with performances that never happened he would back me up as a reference, saying that we performed the complete Beethoven sonata for violin and piano, or whatever repertoire I wanted. He said his resumé was not filled with such phantom concerts but that there were a number of references to concerts supposedly played years ago at performance venues that either never existed or had closed. Word would get around whenever a library closed somewhere in the country. It was common practice, among this violinist’s peers at least, to update their resumés with performances that supposedly happened at that now-defunct venue. This was the early 1990s, when I guess these bogus references were harder for prospective concert organizers to verify or corroborate.
But the heart of the con was in the violinist himself backing me up as a reference for these phantom events. I have looked up that individual and find he is principle violinist in a relatively minor regional orchestra. Good for him, I guess, but I gotta ask if any of those phantom performances still linger on his credentials. At the end of the discussion it does, of course, come down to whether or not the guy can play, and he certainly could as best I can recall.
OK, time to move on with this day.
