November 2 - Apocalypse Three-Step

Publish new version of Antigone this morning, with some corrected tempo markings and the transpositions used in the 2002 and 2008 San Francisco Cabaret Opera productions, then burn off to rehearsal of all three shows, back at Chamber Arts, via 5-Star in Vallejo ($2.55/gal.), Cummings Skyway, 680, and twin-bore Caldecott in the gloom, which breaks mid-rehearsal, as William leads the cast through their paces in The Spring Is Wound.



Home somewhat late, yet somehow there's time to orchestrate 11 pages of Moses and Aaron:

XIX. Procession - "Let Us Pass" (Balaam's Ass)

September 18 - Lucky Day

Quiz 5 in Theory with lots of chords, then lots of time in the lab, recording IV. The Covenant / V. The Slave Girl and 10 The Birth / The Banishment from Abraham and Isaac,


plus III.-VIII. of Quartet for the Beginning of Time: Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel.



Home with Harriet in the evening, and later 12 more pages (28 total) of XI. The Sacrifice from A & I orchestrated.

September 6 - It Is Finished, and Begun

Opera Arias and Duets and Mark Alburger's Mice Suites opens at San Francisco Community Music Center tonight, and a good time, apparently, is had by all, with fabulous singing in both halves of the show and many familiar faces from Diablo Valley College.



Before, record all the rest of Wayne Wong (George) and Erin Lahm (Slim/Whit, with Maria Mikheyenko as Lennie, above) in this short version of Mice and Men, up in the same classroom at SFCMC, with the weather not quite as hot (for SF) as yesterday.



Before this and after all, climb up the sunshine mountains of orchestration, finishing VIII. On His Way, from Israel in Trouble, Op. 54, with a cliffhanger, clawhammer conclusion, and beginning to conceive the instrumentation of the comedic/parody-rape/mass-murder penultimate movement of same (i.e. talk about objectionable settings and stories -- the defoliation of Jacob's only daughter Dinah, in the sexual kitchen with uncircumcised Canaanites, who are revenge-vendetta x'd by her brothers while recovering from ritual surgery...): musically based on Act III, Scene 3 (the out-of-tune piano bar scene) of Alban Berg's Wozzeck, via a consciousness including The Piano Lesson from Meredith Willson's The Music Man, J.S. Bach's Fugue in C Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, and a hint of the American folk song I've Been Workin' on the Railroad.