A seemingly perfect day in the Berkeley Hills, looking towards Mt. Diablo, and everywhere, beginning with merriment with Harriet and teaching interval numbers, qualities, number inversions, and bass cleff in Theory off of the markalburgermusichistory.blogspot.com site.
Then it's off to Cal to try to track down full score of Igor Stravinsky's Abraham and Isaac, which the U.C. Davis computer had cited as extant there last week, but first via the East Bay Municipal Water District Lands (with their ungainly acronym of EBMUD, including San Pablo and Briones Reservoirs) to pick up a still-10-buck one-year trail permit, not held since 2004 (not as good access as the free Marin MMWD lands, but infinitely better than the closed Peninsular district),
jumping over the hills on Grizzly Peak Boulevard, the views to San Francisco and the Golden Gate.
Park near palatial housing near International House and foot it down Bancroft to the new Music Library
(adjacent to the Music Building and Sather Tower). After some wandering through the labyrinths of genre (how one yearns for alphabetical by composer and then by title....), find the score, pay mildly ruinous rates for yet another speciality copy card and copies, and begin making the way home -- back up Claremont Canyon, down on Fish Ranch Road (love that name, imagine cowboys riding carp), merging with 24, Pleasant Hill / Taylor Boulevards, 680, Suisun Valley / Waterman Roads, I-80 -- rather a circuituous trafic-riven route today.
Finish orchestration of Israel in Trouble: II. Esau was a cunning hunter -- total of 19 pages in the selection (a contemporary continuo of bassoon, tuba, guitar, piano, cello, bass + plus horn and trombone obligati),
plus one page beginning instumentation of Abraham and Isaac (the dark Call, with hocketing hushed vocal triplets outlining F# "do-sol, te-fa, sol" then echoes in "sol" duplets), against pedal octave lowest A's (O.K., melody could be re-interpreted as "la-mi, sol-re, mi") and rich Britten/WarRequiemesque romantic appoggiatura chords.
Also design with Harriet, flyer for September 2008, which will additionally be posted at markalburgerevents.blogspot.com.
