There’s a map for that

...or, How to schedule 252 concerts, Part N+2

In my last post I bemoaned the time spent on scheduling now that I no longer delegate it to assistants. 

This is a real issue, but my experience of the last few weeks was (I hope!) atypically heavy on logistics, because I’ve been working my way through a huge backlog old notes and stale email threads going back sometimes to the first summer of the project, i.e. two years ago. 

I’m about ¾ through that task and feeling good about being much better situated for future scheduling, because I finally figured out to go visual.

From the outset, I’ve been working from a master spreadsheet of all 252 towns (actually 251 when I started). I just copy-pasted the one on Wikipedia, which came with populations, and added columns for things like contacts, venue leads or likely possibilities, local performer-collaborators, attendance, donation beneficiary and amount, and of course concert date. I tried to take all incoming email invitations, tips from other pianists, scribbled notes from conversations after concerts or from pianos seen when peering church windows as I passed through villages, etc. and enter all that into the spreadsheet. I did tend to get behind, which is why so much of the past month was spent digging up information. But otherwise I thought it was working just fine.

When thinking about scheduling a concert, though, it was always a bit disruptive to have to switch to a map view to see where the town lies—location being important not just to avoid concerts too close together in both time and space, but also to facilitate scheduling of double-concert weekends, where we desire the two concerts to be relatively distant from our home base, not too far from each other (but not too close), with an overnight in between. (As I said we might here, Annelies* and I have indeed settled on a plan where we devote two weekends a month to this project, to keep roughly half our weekends free for Everything Else, which now includes trips down to Boston to visit our grandbaby. To keep on my 7-year desired pace, that means every other weekend needs to be a double-header.)

Yet somehow, even though a state/town map is prominently featured in both the Concerts page of the website and also, in physical form, at each concert, where the host gets to fill in the town being played…somehow I didn’t connect dots to realize I needed a scheduling map as well. A third map, one that shows not only the towns already played (like our giant physical poster) plus those coming up (like the map on the website) but also the towns where I have a lead or a conversation started.

But I got there eventually! and now I have a top-secret home map that shows everything: towns played (filled in with highlighter), and towns both scheduled (with little sticky notes and a date) and with scheduling conversations (with blank sticky notes). The image here shows the map after going through about 3/4 of my communications backlog. It’s a bit heartening, because while I’m now a bit under 1/4 through the project, the map indicates some sort of activity—past, scheduled, or in discussion—for about half of the 252 towns.

Now, whenever an invitation comes in, or whenever I’m considering a particular town, I can see at a glance where it is relative to us, and how close it is to other towns awaiting a date. So obvious! Not sure why it took me two years to figure it out.

*i.e. my life partner and also project partner. I hate saying “my wife” which to me has a patriarchal legacy connotation I can’t shake off. And “spouse” is just an ugly word. 

How to schedule 252 concerts, Part N+1

(Another logistical-technical and slightly complainy post. Probably boring, with apologies to my Dear Readers, as this blog serves as my personal record of project progress and reflections, as well as a place to share them publicly.)

One of the reasons I haven’t caught up on concert write-ups even after the end of my teaching year is that scheduling logistics has been taking up a huge amount of time.

Except for looking into very small towns where I anticipate it might be tricky to find a piano, I no longer do a lot of internet sleuthing and Google map searching to try to find venues. I rarely cold-call anyone anymore. Instead, invitations keep rolling in, and at the current pace of three concerts a month, I have more than a year’s worth of invited concerts to schedule.

About a year ago I decided to stop delegating searching and scheduling to my assistants. The problem was that I was never sufficiently disengaged from the discussion to make the time savings worth the complication in communication. I thought that by using a shared internet calendar, and marking blackout days in advance, it would be fine to have other people making booking decisions.  

But unlike a full-time touring musician, I’m trying to lead a more or less normie life, with a full-time day job, wanting to keep half my weekends free for non-concert activities (and not always able to plan months ahead exactly which weekends will be claimed for special family or other events). I would inevitably find myself back in the conversation soon enough, if not to confirm the place and date, then soon after to talk about finding a local collaborator. Which is also delegable, but it was hard for an intermediary to “feel out” the situation exactly how it would feel to me. Similarly for getting a sense of the piano being proposed—that’s hard for a non-pianist assistant to assess via emails or phone calls, or a quick phone video of someone playing all the keys from bottom to top.

By contrast, interns can assess the energy and enthusiasm of an inviting group—a very important factor in setting up a successful event—about as well as I can. But then there would often be a decision to make, whether to respond with an immediate yes or to politely express that we needed to consider the options in that town before settling on a venue…and again, that would involve a side conversation with me first. Again, it just felt like the time gained for me in not making the initial outreach or search was largely lost to the inefficiency of an added layer of communication.

But the grass is always greener! After spending most of my project time the last few weeks on scheduling and programming, I wonder if I should reconsider delegating more. 

Westford writeup

I posted the Westford writeup on Saturday. It’s my first writeup in over 8 months, and I was already behind before that; there are now 25 completed concerts still awaiting writeups.

The gap doesn’t require a ton of explanation beyond it being hard to keep everything going while doing my day job during the 9-month academic year, This project is a second full-time job (unpaid, just to be clear). But there are some more specific reasons too.

The video editing is a bit fussy, mostly because I’m still a total novice with the software (Apple’s Final Cut).

It’s also challenging for me to choose performance clips I want to upload. My concert playing is getting more professionally consistent, but there’s still a difference between what rocks live in person and something that’s clean and that I can comfortably live with being on the internet indefinitely. (The writeups are archival, so I don’t intend to take down less good performances as my playing evolves.) Something can both rock and be of “recording quality” too, obviously, but it’s common for something to be amazing in concert yet have real glitches that don’t stand up well on recording.

The selection and nice layout of images is also a sticking point. Not to get deep into the webby weeds, but basically html is not inherently well set up to format text and simultaneously manage both vertical and horizontal image layout. However, I have a CS student intern, Lindsay Hall, working with me on upgrading the website this summer, and hopefully she can set up some templates and techniques that will make graphics layout more efficient and elegant.

And all of this, especially the video and image editing, is painstaking, non-ergonomic work for me. And the worst is doing it all while sitting. Besides messing me up physically, both extended screen time and extended butt time make me stupider and less efficient. So I've been meaning to make a good, 2-display, standing setup in my home office. But that requires procuring furniture of the right shape and height, and which in turn requires decluttering and organizing the many piles of sheet music, programs, maps, etc. in the space, and then after that requires finding the right connectors and adapters to get the perfectly usable old monitors etc. lying around to talk to the computer. I’m well along in that sequence, but the reverse domino effect needed to get it all going was like procrastination crack.

And of course, just generally, the longer you let something go, the more daunting it seems and the more re-initiation energy it takes to get back to it.

Anyway it feels good to have popped out a new writeup after so long. And I hope that over the rest of the summer break, as I continue to do about 3 concerts a month but not extra, I’ll be able to implement all the website improvements Lindsay is cooking up and get mostly caught up on the writeups.

I also have a ton of blog posts in mind that I haven’t written, mostly for overarching reason no. 1 (too busy). What I think of as interesting ones, not just about my mundane logistical hassles like this post.

La Melanconia, or, My Project in 50 Words*

There is only one Play Every Town concert this April because I took on several non-PET engagements for a change. 

One was the performance of a piece I wrote for the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players’ annual premieres concert in Long Island and NYC. (Amtrak runs not one but two train lines between NW Vermont and NYC.) I called my piece Five Songs Without Words. But I included a short poetic epigraph before each “wordless” song…trying to have it both ways, I guess. The fourth song, “Malincolia”, is prefaced by an Italian Romantic pastoral, “La Melanconia”, in translation:

Melancholy, gentle Nymph,

I dedicate my life to you.

One who despises your pleasures

is not born to true pleasures.

I asked the gods for hills and springs;

they heard me at last; I will live satisfied,

never past that spring will my desires carry me, 

never beyond that mountain.   

I attached the text after I composed the music, and I chose it to fit the mood. But it’s also an on-the-nose description of my life arc: first finding my way to Vermont after almost five decades in flatter, drier, less glorious places; then my decision not to fly and to stick close to my new home, to these modest but awe-inspiring mountains and springs. 

As I’ve said here and at most of my concerts, staying close has been more of an enrichment than a privation. There’s no denying it comes with a humbling sense of contraction, a melancholic touch; yet within that there’s a new kind of contentment in accepting the boundaries of a smaller but richly varied world. (This happy/sad turning away from the greater world is the archetypical theme of the pastoral poetic tradition.)

The poet, Ippolito Pindemonte, captured all that in eight short lines. Pindemonte most likely means “mountain pine”, and the feast day of Saint Hippolytus, for whom he is presumably named, is August 13, my birthday.  

*46 in the original Italian

Climate chaos continued: Please don’t come to my concert

The upcoming Vershire performance is in the Town Center Building, and was initiated by (among others) the town clerk. It is truly a town concert. 

And the town has asked residents to stay home.

Vershire is on its third prolonged thaw-out of the year, and it’s still weeks before the traditional start of mud season. To make matters worse, the road foreman just quit because he was fed up with the constant complaints of townspeople who misdirected their frustration with the new climate at the road crew. To keep things from deteriorating further, and to avoid mishaps, the town has advised those on dirt roads to stay off them.*

I’ve already played on Vermont’s smokiest day ever and the warmest-ever day in November. Now we can add the muddiest March.

*Note to out-of-town fans: the main roads are fine. Please come!

A travelogue of picture-postcard charms

The drone of flying engines
Is a song so wild and blue
It scrambles time and seasons if it gets through to you
Then your life becomes a travelogue

Of picture post card charms
Oh Amelia, it was just a false alarm   

—Joni Mitchell, “Amelia” 

This project has given my wife and me the gift of sending us all over the state and getting to know its towns and villages—something we’d always meant to do, but never made the time for. In concerts and surrounding publicity, we emphasize the joy of experiencing Vermont’s surprising variety of landscapes and communities, and say that eschewing flying and staying close has been anything but a privation.

Yet even though we’re not scrambling from airport to hotel to venue like Joni Mitchell, we’re not exactly dawdling about. Fitting the concert journeys between the obligations of home, work, and pets waiting for our return; allowing time to set up and rehearse with local collaborators; practicing often to the last minute because of my commitment to playing concert-specific repertoire and a fresh Scarlatti and Scarlatti intro every time (what was I thinking?); then talking to the audience after, breaking down, and packing up—all this means that in 9 concert trips out of 10, there’s maybe 30-45 minutes left for anything else; a little bit more when we do back-to-back dates on successive dates with an overnight in between. 

My wife says we’ll need to do the tour all over again after it’s done, this time without any concerts. As it is, most of the time we have only have time to grab a photo or two of the venue and maybe walk the dog for a half-hour afterwards somewhere nearby. Even though we’re not going far, we’re acting like hurried tourists, and rushing to grap a few shots of the town to post in the concert write-ups can feel performative, inauthentic, Instagrammy. A travelogue of picture-postcard charms.

Partnerships and perfectionism

Just had a lovely concert (no. 49) in the Fairlee Town Hall. 

Including a collaboration with a town resident, which I thought of as an optional bonus feature when I started out, has become a vital component of each program for me. We haven’t had a concert without one since the early days of the project. 

I’ve also developed the habit of programming pieces relevant to key features of a town or key dates in its history. For instance, in Fairlee, I played Mendelssohn’s G minor “Venetian Gondola Song” because it spoke to the image of pleasure boats on Lake Morey painted on the Town Hall’s historic stage curtain. I also played Ernie Burnett’s “Steamboat Rag”, not so much because of the pleasure boating, but because the lake’s namesake, local resident Samuel Morey, built the first operating steamboat here* (yes, before Fulton’s Folly) and sailed it on the Connecticut River. And I played a variety of pieces from 1913 and 1914, the years the Town Hall was built and dedicated.

Such programming connects each concert to its town. But the most meaningful localization, maybe, and for me the most fun, are the resident collaborations. A couple of times it’s been with someone who lives nearby but works in the host town, and now and then a native son or daughter currently living elsewhere. But I’ve been strict that the connection has to be to the very town, not just the general vicinity.

In Fairlee, we had a couple of false starts in identifying a collaborator. But with less than two weeks to go, Deecie Denison (who also donated the Town Hall’s historic 1898 Chickering grand) connected me with a talented young songwriter, Robert McNelly, a high school senior who joined me on vocals and guitar for a couple of his own songs. I had already resigned myself to foregoing the collaboration part of the program, and I was delighted when Robert came through and kept us from breaking the streak. 

Then at the start of the concert, Kristin Post, the local emcee, introduced him as Robert McNelly, from Corinth. 

Not even an adjoining town, but one over. 

Of course I was still glad to play with him, and his songs were excellent, and he was a hit. Still, I thought to myself, rats, we didn’t quite check that box, oh well. 

Then I had the perhaps even more neurotic thought “but I don’t have to put that in the write-up, and no one else has to know...”**

—————————

*Actually I think Morey lived across the river in Orford NH at the time, but he later settled in Fairlee. And anyway the Connecticut runs between the towns so the boat voyage was just as much in Fairlee.***

**And you know what? I may have copped to it all here, in the blog, but I still might not put it in the “official” concert write-up. Instead I’ll probably finesse it: instead of saying “Fairlee” or “resident” in reference to Robert, I can use a non-specific term like “local”.

***But even that’s not so clear. The NH/VT border was long in dispute, and wasn’t settled until a 1933 US Supreme Court decision, which placed the border at the low-water mark of the Vermont side. In other words, virtually all of the river lies in New Hampshire (since 1933 anyway). Here’s a Seven Days article on the topic.