What it looks like inside a CHRYSALIS

When Lilacs Last

One spring my mother and I collected
long twigs and put them in an empty tin can
to make a tree on which to hang Easter eggs—
real ones, which had been emptied of life
and dyed bright chemical colors (yellow, orange
and lime-green).

We put water in the can to weigh it down,
and after a few weeks buds pushed out
on the branches: soon leaves unfurled.
It was a paschal mystery, Aaron's staff in the ark
of the covenant that was our front porch.

Lilacs bloomed.

After a while the tin rusted,
the water turned blood-red, the green leaves
withered and we solemnly placed the dead
branches by the edge of the road.

I am telling you this story because
it is autumn as I write this and I cannot
tell if your eyes (into which I only
occasionally look) are old or new.
I think they are in that narrow place;
the moment just before everything
changes, and the very fact that we exist
at all seems a miracle beyond reckoning,
far lovelier than a lilac gently resting
against an empty green eggshell.

Please don't imagine yourself anywhere
that isn't fragile or barely real, don't
ever think for a moment that you are too
young or too old to be alive. I am not sure
if this life is impossibly beautiful because
it happened or impossibly tragic for the same reason,
but I do know it is impossible, and I don't think
I should have to choose.

It begins...

Updates on CHRYSALIS

I typically don't do this, but since my latest musical project is SO DAMN COOL I've decided you should all know about it. Also, I have no idea what I'm doing and I need help/suggestions.

For those of you who haven't seen my Kickstarter campaign to raise a whopping $300 to pay for materials, check it out. I made a creeptastic video which you should watch just to entertain yourself even if you don't want to donate. But actually, I kind of need the money to pay for the project, so also donate please. Kickstarter is all-or-nothing, so I either get $0 or $300. Also, if you donate you get special prizes (read: creepy prizes).

Seriously, if these weirdos can raise $12,000 and they don't even know how to pronounce the word "Chrysalis," surely my friends can support my relatively inexpensive dreams. Guys?

Okay, but my point here is not to complain about money! I really want to give you some updates about the piece because I am srsly SO EXCITE. For those of you who haven't read about the project, here's an abstract of the concept in a nutshell:

Chrysalis explores the boundaries of mediated transmission. Music, like other forms of art, is mediated by the medium itself and its environment, in this case by time, space, and memory. Gauze shrouds surrounding the singers evoke moth cocoons and are lit from the inside. Alternation between aleatoric and fully determined music highlights the uncertainty of live performance. The piece moves from ambiguous vowel sounds in the first movement to a description of a real-life out-of-body experience by soprano, Justine Aronson. The third movement is a veiled re-interpretation of Thomas Campion's early 17th century lute song, Author of Light.

I have been wanting to do more with "installation" style projects, and this is my first stab at combining more visual components into a piece. I'm ridiculously fortunate to have the amazing Justine Aronson flying in from Brooklyn to premiere this with Patrick Bonczyk, an incredible countertenor and intellectual extraordinaire (he basically comes up with all the concepts for my pieces these days).

I've been obsessed with moths since I was a small child. At summer camp I cried for hours when some mean boys pulled the wings off a majestic Polyphemus. I wrote several moth-inspired pieces in high school, but none that really dug more deeply into the mystical metaphor of transformation bound up in the narratology of moths. So this is where we are.

This week I purchased dimmer switches and blue light bulbs which will be controlled by the singers inside their cocoons. I think I decided that I want each singer in a separate "chrysalis" to further separate them from each other. If the audience should feel mediated, shouldn't the singers too? I also ordered tiny LED lights from China that hopefully will arrive in time for the performance. These will be worn by the singers during the second movement of the piece.

Composing for the cocoon.

Of course there's music too! The piece is essentially done, and I'm really happy with some of the musical things happening in it. The first movement has no lyrics, and is almost entirely aleatoric for the singers. It's meant to evoke a kind of pupal musical state—amorphous, undefined musical shapes. The music snakes around through different tonal centers through a special kind of suspended transformation that I started using this summer when working on Helios, (a choral setting of an ancient Greek magical spell) for the Oregon Bach Festival. Basically the transformations happen by voicing a major or minor chord in second inversion, and then moving the fifth and root of the chord (the lower two notes) around by half-step, which usually creates another triad or some kind of quartal/quintal sonority. It's a really neat sound, and destroys any sense of key center.

The second movement has lyrics by Justine Aronson herself. Earlier this year she described an experience she had during acupuncture where she saw three dots in her mind's eye which she understood to be herself and the universe (seriously, is everyone this cool? I have the best friends). I had her describe the experience in some detail and used the dialogue as lyrics for the second movement, titled "I was three dots that were the universe." In the second movement, the roles are reversed—the piano is almost entirely aleatoric, and the singers are singing predetermined music. This "liminal" stage transitions into the entirely notated third movement, which is based on the Campion lute song, Author of Light. This was the most fun to write, weaving fragments of Campion's mysterious music into the harmonic framework I had set up in the first two movements. Most of the piece is based on whole-step diads and first-inversion chords with an added 4th in an inner voice. The lute song has an amazing section where the voice ascends up a chromatic scale (kind of crazy for the 17th century), which worked perfectly for the harmonic transformations from the first movement, bringing everything together at the close of the piece!

I am legitimately excited about this, and really looking forward to what I'll learn from having to work with materials (and not just musical abstractions) in a concert piece. I also love how working on a project like this makes me see the world in new and exciting ways. For example, a breathless moment of immortal understanding I had with a caterpillar last week, and this amazing sculpture at ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, MI. The jury is still out on how exactly to construct the chrysalides (who knew that was the plural of chrysalis?). I am hedging between trying to make them look haphazard and organic like real cocoons, which would probably require some wire or something, or having them be more idealized cubical-type structures which serve to evoke a sense of separation but not necessarily be analogous to anything in the natural world. I would love thoughts on what would be most effective... and like, if anyone knows how to build things. I guess I have to buy lumber and fabric for these things like next weekend. And, like a staple gun?

EDIT: Apparently no one can find the two places in this blog that link to the Kickstarter page (namely, clicking on the video, and the word "Kistarter campaign" highlighted in red text). So, here is a direct link:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/57535000/chrysalis-0

Autumn Poem for 2013

There are still quiet places, mostly dark
cool places, such as the blue light
that floods hillsides before dawn—
there is no reason in particular
this should remind me of the last
days of summer with whipping, hawkish air
that tears (or) old scarves, burnishes
leaves (or) cheeks with the scent of rain
falling on chrysanthemums, cavernous husks
of yellow light (slender stalks
of pure grain) flooding hillsides at dusk,

And in the stone corner of my basement, where
on a damp patch of carpet a cricket sings
a lament over the shut eyes of her lover
and I can see the tiny violins that are
her brittle legs, which rend her black shawl—
this music is a quiet place, in the dwelling
of dead insects whose skeletons understand
what it means to fall, there is no reason
in particular that stones, flooding
the hillsides after life should be quiet,
nor gourds be ghoulish only in October,

Yet there are still quiet places—
one of them is autumn.

Get With the Times

As the academic year once again gets underway, I think it's time to settle an old pet peeve of mine. If you will ever teach an academic course that involves writing, I invite you to consider what I have to say when making policies.

We've all heard the jokes about Comic Sans and its evil stepsister, Papyrus. We've all laughed because we're snobby enough to know that typefaces evoke moods—they have character (no pun intended) just like the content that they express. We know secrets of nuance that vapid secretaries could never understand. We want our typefaces to look and feel as beautiful as the ideas we're expressing with them. But lurking in the margins of our academic sensibilities is a sinister malady. An evil so commonplace that we have grown to love it and nurture it. A malignancy hidden in plain sight.

Times New Roman is not a good font. It's one of the worst fonts you can use. And I'm going to tell you why.

Right now, you're probably saying "BUT WAIT MY TEACHER SAID TO ALWAYS——" and that's fine. You shouldn't have been thinking in all caps, but otherwise you're right: most teachers claim to prefer TNR. I've tried my best not to oblige them. I hope some of those teachers are reading this right now.

Translation:
"i can haz human sacrifice?"

Let's start with some brief history of type to help contextualize what happened about 20 years ago and why TNR has become the "old" standby of academia. If we go way way back to the ancient world, we find pre-paper societies that used orthographies that play to the strengths of available materials. The wedge-like pictograms of cuneiform script occurred because people were writing in soft clay tablets. Later, in the Roman world, majuscules with straight, square forms were developed to be easier to carve into solid granite. In the middle ages, the popularity of parchment paper and ink allowed more flowing scripts to appear, which were mixed with pre-existing Roman stone writing to produce the many varied letterforms of modern Roman type. For 500 years, the printing press reigned supreme as the preferred method of mass produced text documents. Professional printers took great pride their art, and they knew that in order for their books to be legible and beautiful, they would have to draw on the millennia of development of hand-drawn scripts over the course of civilization. Gutenberg used the elegant calligraphic styles of his native Germany. In France, Claude Garamond designed exquisite typefaces of Roman design that are still in use today.

Ironically, she chose Impact.

The modern age of industry attempted to remove some of the vestiges of the quill and the chisel by creating "sans-serif" faces like Helvetica, but those are harder to read for long paragraphs because many of the letters look too similar to each other. For this reason, we won't discuss sans-serif fonts in the context of academic writing. Sorry, hipster Ariel. 

In the 20th century, technology developed to allow people to essentially "print" documents at home. The problem with the typewriter was that the mechanisms required that all the letters be of equal width. This is what today we call a "monospaced" typeface. Everyone knows that a lower-case "i" shouldn't take up the same amount of room as an upper-case "M," but in a monospaced universe, they do. This makes reading difficult and it distorts letterforms. It also wastes paper by making text take up a huge amount of space. Any freshman knows that if you change your font to 12pt Courier, it can go from two pages to three without writing any more words!

To prevent students from taking advantage of the wonders of post-industrial typography, many professors now require that papers be written in the most readily available proportional serif font, Times New Roman. Why is TNR so ubiquitous? Well, it's due in large part to Microsoft corporation, which, as you may have guessed, is not run by typographers. The great thing about the computer age is that the need for movable type has essentially vanished. Sophisticated software and advanced laser printing now allow anyone to create beautifully engraved pages of text at home without melting down any lead or rolling out ink onto giant sheets of lambskin. The sad part is that we're still using fonts that were packaged with computer systems before software engineers had worked out all the kinks or converted better typefaces to digital fonts.

The one on the far left is William Starling Burgess,
designer of Times New Roman.

Now don't get me wrong, TNR was a bad font even before it was digitized. It is itself a product of the industrial age—it was designed ostensibly from scratch in the 1930s by an advertising designer, who probably plagiarized the work from a yacht designer who made some sketches about 30 years before. Not a good start. The letterforms suffer from numerous internal inconsistencies and an overall unaesthetic design. The New York Times, for which it was created, no longer uses it. And neither should you. When the personal computer had its debut in the late 1980s, sophisticated font-handling on computers hadn't been developed. Most machines came pre-installed with only a few of the most common fonts, among them TNR. Over the years, technology caught up, but the standard didn't change. Nowadays most theses and dissertations are required to be in TNR even though better fonts are available on most machines. Thankfully, book and journal publishers have largely abandoned it for better typography, but it persists as the omnipresent standard for homemade documents among academics.

Take a look at the following comparison. All the examples are 12pt.

Notice in some of the examples the elegant combination of the three letters "ffi" in the word "coffin." This is called a ligature. It's a way to avoid ugly collisions when letters are spaced tightly against each other. Default Times New Roman on your word processor employs no ligatures, so letters sometimes clash, creating an unorganized appearance on the page. The designers of the Macintosh, who historically gush about typography, tried to help by including a variant of the font, simply called "Times" that fixes some of these problems. As you can see, they included an "fi" ligature, but not "ffi," so the other "f" in "coffin" is left looking forlorn and emaciated.

Notice also how TNR's generally poor letter-spacing takes up more room than most other Roman fonts. Only Palatino and Georgia are wider (they both also appeared in the computer age and have little or no historical precedent). Palatino achieves more consistency than TNR by making all the letters slightly wider and by using more regular stroke widths. The problem of ligatures is also avoided in Palatino by creating letterforms that naturally avoid collision. By far the most economical, legible, and aesthetically pleasing of the Roman fonts are those designed by Adobe Labs after centuries-old designs taken from original movable type. Garamond, my personal favorite, is over 400 years old. Note how the advanced kerning in Garamond Premiere Pro nestles the lower-case "e" in "Burgess" into the nook of the lower-case "g" that precedes it.

There is a lot more to hate about TNR—it's a "transitional" serif font, meaning that it's a deformed runt-hybrid of "oldstyle" serifs (graceful, delicate fonts that mimic the smooth globules of ink on a real printed page) and "modern" serifs (high contrast letters that fully embrace the sharp-edges of precision machinery). I won't list all the reasons I loathe it here, but take a look for yourself. Type a sentence in MSWord at 48pt in Times, Garamond, and a few others. Print it out and look carefully. Ask yourself which one you really prefer.

The current sophistication of computer typography is a tremendous achievement. I know most people don't want to spend $299 for Garamond Premiere Pro, and I'm not asking anyone to do that. But if you're a professional academic who writes articles, you should think about it. It's more legible, has significantly better historical precedent, and can actually be beautiful. It was designed by a man who devoted his life to typography, not some hack advertising agent or software engineer trying to meet a deadline. If you're a student, try using Palatino or default Garamond that come preinstalled on Windows and Mac. Don't use Times New Roman. It was created by a plagiarist after all. It's bad karma.

EDIT: Some of you have asked for recommendations for other alternatives. In my quest to find free useful fonts, I came across an open source historical Garamond project, which is causing me to poop myself right now. CHECK IT OUT!!!  http://www.georgduffner.at/ebgaramond/

Also, pretty much anything from The League of Movable Type is a solid choice, and all are free to download. http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/

Falling in Love in Under Ten Minutes

0:00

The warmth of your arm
on my arm (not quite touching
but the air between almost
in the gap between us and you
shake my hand and your name)
is everything I remember suddenly.

0:01

O Maria, familiar lady, what
if any shroud can make me invisible?

0:02

The stalwart concord
of the lines on your brow,
the rough fringe of your fingers
when they grasp sonorous threads.

0:03

Tonight I listened to Josquin,
his Marian shroud made me visible.

0:04

A fly that walks on flatness
then suddenly flies not falling but is
taken up into and out of across the
medium between our bodies
and how can it be? that between us
such a thing can move from two to three
dimensions: it is polyphony

0:05

and can my body existing outside itself
in the air beneath my breath ever reach you?
If the gap is shrouded is there serenity
in that I suddenly must only
remember your face?

0:06

Daniel was the king of lions
and his coat in under ten minutes
covered all the mouths of my heart.

0:07

Subito Catholicam, you faltering
faithful unnamable familiarity, you
startling old-friend strangeness, are
you Mary and even if so, why do I KNow
your AGeless GhoSt?

0:08

In my knowledge your eyes
must be sacristies filled
with more holy water than could
ever wean my heart's lion.

0:09

And now I remembering know
that it will be enough to hide
under a shroud for five days
and peering through worn wholes
of grace tirelessly imagine
your face in any light.