Not-so-masterful webmastering

This post has nothing to do with concerts or community or climate. Nothing to do with music at all. It’s a technical note about website structure. But as with so many endeavors, the core activity of this project—playing with and for people while encouraging climate conversation—represents a small fraction of the overall time and effort. Dealing with the site is one of many background activities that feel very foreground when I have to engage with it, so I’m documenting it here.

The Concerts area has become the heart of the website, containing not just the project map and info about upcoming performances, but also the ever-growing archive of past concert write-ups. Until yesterday, all the write-ups were part of one long webpage. As I noted before, as it gets larger, it takes longer to load, and this can make links to anchor tags (such as a direct link to a particular concert write-up) problematic. This is because lots of web layout is defined by widths, with height being a consequence of (say) how much text is in a given element. 

[You’re only halfway through this post. Really, no reason to read this if you’re not interested in webby stuff.]

Browsers can figure out the space needed for text almost instantly. However, when an image’s display is defined by width, the browser doesn’t know the image height until it’s had time to look it over, and thus doesn’t know how much vertical space to allot for it. This is why pages with lots of images may “chatter” up and down as the content fills in. 

It’s possible to define image height and avoid this problem, but it’s relatively complicated to do this in a way that doesn’t risk distorting the image proportions—not impossible, but fussy and involved, and time-consuming if there are lots of images of different aspect ratios. Even if I were to upgrade my web code to be super slick about image layout, though, the page would still be very long, unwieldy both to load and to edit. This was true already with only 20-some concert write-ups on the page; with hundreds, it would be a nightmare. 

So I made each concert write-up into its own separate page. This involved a bunch of routine slicing and dicing, but I also had to go into the JavaScript script that my former student Blaine Billingsley kindly wrote for the cool clickable map, so that the “more info” link for a given town would go to the new individual concert write-up page, instead of to the location of that write-up within the one ginormous Concerts page as before. Still really basic stuff! But not my home base, so it required me putting on my thinking cap. 

Even little things are not so little, everything takes time.

Cambridge write-up

I finally posted the Cambridge write-up. The performance was back in June, a full eight months and nineteen concerts ago. I’d misplaced some of the photos I was planning to use, and by the time I found them the concert was already long past and there no longer seemed any particular urgency about putting it online. I do feel a great sense of relief now, though.

It’s a picturesque write-up because the concert was in the Bryan Memorial Gallery—our first art gallery concert—and I included several gorgeous paintings from the exhibits.

The building is charming, with a clerestory that brings in lots of light. It falls indirectly on most of the gallery, but it was right above the piano. I didn’t say anything about this in the write-up, but it was warm and sometimes blinding! Immediately after I posted the video clips, someone commented “you look like you needed sunglasses”.

Also didn’t make the write-up: A bunch of us went looking for dinner afterwards and found Moog’s Joint in neighboring Johnson. The name is fairly unusual, and the place features live music, so I had to ask owner Tom Moog if he was any relation to Robert, inventor of the compact modular synthesizer (mentioned in this post). 

He’s not. Nice place though.

Charlotte write-up

Posted the Charlotte write-up yesterday. Backlog is down to four now.

Scarlatti K.24 is fiendishly difficult, with lots of rapid repeated notes, sixteenth-note double thirds, and wide, lightning-fast hand crossings. Fortunately I had three weeks to learn it, but it was still a bit messy: I should have played it slower. Though my tempo of about 120-132 puts me near the bottom of the range—apparently virtuoso pianists use this as a technical showpiece, judging from the performances on YouTube. This rendition by Veronika Kuzmina Raibaut is jaw-droppingly fast but still clean, crisp, and expressive. It’s an amazing feat, even though a bit aggressive and much faster than I’d play it if I could, which I can’t. 

But I was pleased with my intro, which uses several different motifs from the sonata and has a nice flow, I think.

Tech note: when I set up the website, I did not anticipate how bulky the Concerts page would become, with all the photos embedded in the write-ups. Already with only 8% of all concerts posted, the page takes a good moment to load even with a pretty fast internet connection. And this means that links meant to go directly to a particular point on the page (like the one at the top of this post) may not work right, as the user’s browser tries to guess how far down the page the anchor point will be before all the content above has filled in. I’ll fix this by modifying the site structure so that instead of (eventually) 252 concerts on this one ginormous page, there will be 252 separate pages in the Concerts area. This won’t affect the user experience, except that you won’t be able to browse write-ups by scrolling. Instead, I’ll add a text list of towns to the main Concerts page, so you can find towns alphabetically as well as geographically.

Sharon write-up

The Sharon write-up is posted. I’ll expand the “about the piano” section when I get some additional information.

Our most common venue categories are churches, Granges, and schools. As I explain in the write-up, the Seven Stars Arts Center has been all three, giving it a special place in the project. It was also an automotive shop at one point, making this our first garage concert. 

I posted lots of clips, including the impromptu singalong tribute to Pete Sutherland, who was in hospice at the time. It was unprepared, so a bit bumpy, but as I wrote Pete’s music is pretty robust, and the audience’s engagement and appreciation were too great not to share. We miss you, Pete!

Transcendent translations

This post is even more tangential to the Play Every Town project than the last: at least that one was about a keyboard. But it continues the English in translation theme, and anyway this is my blog.

I’ve long been fascinated with outlandish (heh) examples of international English. So much that I wrote a piece setting five choice examples. Here’s the video of the premiere, along with the program notes. 

Lingua Franca (watch on YouTube)

Longfellow’s romantic notion that music is the “universal language of mankind” is not supported by modern scholarship, which suggests that English is today the world’s most widely understood language. Non-native speakers outnumber native almost 3 to 1, so in a sense, those who fancy themselves English’s experts are only conservators of a minority dialect. This idea delights me. These five settings of unedited texts from around the world are an appreciation of the range of global English expression. 

The choppy phrasing and curt punctuation of Rice Noodle inspired the musical setting, which is severe, even authoritarian. Chopstick Wrapper must be seen to be fully appreciated: at the end of the middle section, the performers team up to play the double bass together, bows crossing as they play a certain well-known (lingua franca) children’s piano piece. The music of the outer sections is not authentically Chinese but rather Chinese Restaurant. 

The poetry of Electric Blanket is transcribed word for word from actual consumer packaging, as are the lyrics of all the movements except for “Elevator Music”. Elevator Music takes its text from a sign in a Belgrade hotel; the enigmatic phrase “…alphabetically by national order” led me to imagine elevator traffic as a metaphor for the political ups and downs of the Serbian capital, which has been fought over in more than 100 wars and razed to the ground 44 times. The coda is a mad collage of national anthems representing just a few of the controlling or intervening powers of the past two centuries. 

The set concludes with Ice Tray, a jazzy Joycean rhapsody on the material properties and proper handling of a plastic freezer gadget.

Lingua Franca is dedicated to the memory of my father, an inveterate punster, and to Karel Husa, prince among composers and creator of some choice ESL phrases himself.

 

Bodhisattva Borden

Yesterday’s post brings to mind this story from the start of my teaching career. As a fledgling prof at Centre College of Kentucky, I took it on myself to establish a small electronic music studio. The central instrument was the Korg M1 music station, a 1990s 61-key workhorse and contender for all-time best-selling synthesizer. 

I was trying to learn the instrument enough to teach an introductory class. In those pre-Google days, the most useful tech support resource was the printed manual. Maybe there was a relevant internet forum, but I didn’t know about it. And the M1 manual had issues. 

When I found myself properly stuck I reached out to David Borden, a pioneering composer of minimalist synthesizer music and founder of the first all-synth performance ensemble. David directed the digital music studio at Cornell, where I had done my graduate work. I told him of my frustrations with the sketchy M1 documentation.* Familiar with mass-market synths of all kinds from their very inception—David was “Chief Idiot” in the idiot-proofing of the landmark Moog synthesizer—he gave me privileged information about how synth manuals are created and translated.

Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 12:23:07 -0400

To: FEURZEIG@centre.edu
From: ...@cornell.edu (David Borden)
Subject: Re: Free advice Part II

Hi Dave--

About the manuals; not many people know this, but they're (ALL of them) written in Tibet, and are used there as extended Zen Koans for the most spiritually advanced students.  Then after the students are through with them and have added ideas of their own, they are translated into English and are auctioned off to various synthesizer manufacturers around the world.  The Synth model doesn't matter.  The various companies then sort of tailor the whole thing to their model names, but basically, they're all the same kind of thing.

I think of this every time I deal with an incomprehensible manual, and my heart is made light. 

*A more frank assessment is conveyed by David’s email summary: “Sounds like the Korg is driving you out of your fucking mind.”

 

Music, the universal language

Last summer the AP picked up a story on this project. In the process of archiving it for the Press page I went online to look it up. Since it was a wire story, there were multiple hits, most with identical or very similar copy. But one was strikingly distinct. The link is now dead (I wouldn’t post it anyway, because the site looked questionable, maybe malicious). But the text below, verbatim, was, I swear, posted at bkfse [dot] com.

It stands out even among all the algorithmically translated text we see today. I believe it involves not just funky text-to-text translation choices but also some mishearings, as if there was a text-to-speech stage in the process. And abbreviations are liberally applied or expanded, lending a delightful strong chemistry emphasis. “Carbon” becomes c (lowercase) while “at” becomes astatine, the rarest naturally occurring element. (It means “unstable” in Greek, so I am “a professor unstable the University of Vermont”—so much for tenure.) More specifically, I am a “euphony prof…beryllium traveling” to “rise consciousness astir clime alteration”. My favorite bit, though, is the copyright notice, which I guess I’m about to violate.

BURLINGTON, Vt (AP) — A pianist who wants to rise consciousness astir clime alteration is going to execute 251 times — successful each and each municipality successful Vermont.

David Feurzeig, a euphony prof astatine the University of Vermont, precocious gave up hose question to trim his c footprint. And he’ll beryllium traveling for his “Play Every Town Vermont” concerts successful an electrical vehicle.

“There’s a batch of resonance that radical person with this thought from different musicians, from audiences. People truly recognize viscerally that we’re successful a crisis,” helium told Vermont Public Radio.

He said the performance programs alteration from classical to jazz, and volition see his ain compositions. He said he’s enlisting section pupil musicians from each municipality and metropolis to articulation him.

It’s going to instrumentality respective years to implicit the tour. He plans to wrapper up his effort successful 2026.

(Copyright (c) 2022 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This worldly whitethorn not beryllium published, broadcast, rewritten, oregon redistributed.)

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Newark write-up

The Newark write-up is posted.

The concert was facilitated by Jericho Bicknell, among others. She also sang. I got to write the lovely map-photo caption “Jericho has just filled in Newark.” Maybe I can find someone named Newark to fill in Jericho on March 4.

I also got to talk about our first electronic keyboard concert. As I describe more fully there, it was a little unsettling adjusting to the unweighted action, but the wonderful venue and audience soon put me at ease.

The weather, though pleasant, was more persistently unsettling. As I wrote:

The afternoon was both delightfully and disturbingly warm. It was the warmest November day ever recorded in Vermont, reaching 76º in Burlington. Yet with El Niño coming and greenhouse emissions continuing to increase, it is a virtual certainty it will not be the last record-breaking monthly high we experience over the course of this project.

My sweet aspiration that I would work through my complete backlog of concert write-ups during the midwinter concert hiatus did not pan out. I’m now in the middle of a second, slightly smaller gap before the Charlotte concert, so maybe I’ll get closer to caught up before I get farther behind.