Palouse River Music

Epilogue

2012-01-12T16:01:00.001-08:00

I rarely finish anything cleanly; there is always some sort of edit involved. On the gourd banjo I had to make a new nut, and tweak a few other things over the last month or so. After a few weeks of playing I started to crave some sort of position markers when I realized that flying up for what would be a 12th-fret or 17-fret note was never going to be anything other than a gamble if I didn't get a visual cue. So, I added little rosewood position dots today.

This is the current bridge design. There is a rosewood cap, with a break between the 4th and 5th strings, and a bone inlay for the 4th string. There is a bit of inspiration from the work of physicist Michael Kasha with guitar design in the difference in the two feet, the top one meant to spread the bass frequencies and the bottom one to focus the treble. I think the brace (see previous posts) acts like a fulcrum for the movement of the two different feet. I may separate out the foot of the 5th string from the bass foot and lighten the treble foot somewhat...we'll see...

This is such a lovely instrument to get to know. Much more of a voice comes out of this than any banjo I have heard. I'm starting to get comfortable with it.

Mission: Accomplished

2011-12-03T10:35:00.000-08:00

I have finished the gourd banjo. Well, not completely finished--I am going to replace the nut and make a new bridge, and possibly make other adjustments as I play it--but I strung it up last night and went down to the fabulous Green Frog here in Palouse to try it out at our local open mike, photographed above by my friend Jens Hegg. It is everything I needed--louder, more responsive, richer in tone. Among the experiments that worked really well was gluing on the head. I got a very thin goatskin head and working from instructions I found for reheading dumbeks (a Mediterranean drum with a glued head), I made a frame (a piece of plywood with a hole cut out in the middle for the gourd body to sit in, the edge padded with duct-taped foam) with screwed-in hooks so I could stretch the skin (which had been soaked in water) over the glued surface and anchor it down using cotton string going through the holes I punched along the edge of the skin. I did not crank it super-tight, but took the suggestion of my friend Paul Hill (who has put skin heads on two of my regular banjos) to just work it down tight enough to get the wrinkles out and assume that the skin would pull itself tight as it dried. Next time I do this I'll put "S" hooks in the holes in the skin, and attach them to the hooks using rubber bands. Anyway, by the time the skin started to dry and pull tight, the glue (Titebond II) had set, so nothing slipped. I did have to go around quite a bit and work wrinkles out of the side as the glue was drying, and I had the red surgical tubing you can see below that I sort-of wrapped around to pull things together. It came out perfect.

The instrument is so responsive now, it will take me a little while to figure out how to handle it. But before too long I will be going back to work, recording the new CD and plotting a course for this project.

Bracing a gourd banjo head

2011-11-25T01:45:00.000-08:00

The image above was taken earlier this week, showing a nearly-finished banjo spine. One idea I have had about this sort of banjo is that the head needs a brace, here seen just right of center, the ridge that connects to the rim section (and from there to the tailpiece/tuners). It extends under the head a portion of the way towards the neck, supporting the head, and stopping a bit before the bridge. Another view (the brace is on the left this time), showing how the spine fits into the gourd.

My first gourd banjo originally had no such brace, with the stick from the neck running underneath the head without touching it. This has been the standard system in banjos since the mid-19th century and I didn't consider other options when designing that instrument. But without adjustable head tension, humidity could lower the action until the instrument wouldn't play, and I noticed a more significant problem that has bothered me in banjos for decades, the "ring" of the head. In bluegrass music, this has become integrated into the sound of the music and the sound of a plastic head in a 20-pound Mastertone snaps more than it rings. Many clawhammer banjo players like to mute the back with a cloth, effectively cancelling the ringing of the diaphragm bell of a banjo head. On my gourd banjo with an actual skin head, the effect muddied the sound, which was sounding even muddier because I was tuning down to low G (now I'm up to A).

At this point, my brother-in-law Tom sent me a video of an akonting player. Since I didn't keep my finger on the academic musicology pulse, I had not been aware of Ulf Jagfors' introduction of Daniel Jatta and the music of the akonting to the West; this occurred after my article on Gottschalk had been published and I never had traveled in musicological circles anyway. I agree with what seems to be the consensus in the field that this music tradition is the closest thing to an African banjo ancestor, and obviously anyone interested in the gourd banjo had to sit up and take notice. Also, the music was wonderful. And there in plain sight was the original instrument design, found throughout the plucked lutes of West Africa, with the spine neck running right under the head, supporting it. Besides mitigating to some degree the movement of the bridge of the instrument in changing humidity, it also would serve to cancel the dreaded ring.

I resolved at that point to remove the first head from my gourd banjo, widen the opening while I was at it (trying to increase volume), and install a brace, running in this case from the rim on the neck side to the bridge, which on this banjo is in the center of the head. It was a piece of maple that I glued to the stick running underneath. I suppose I could have run it the entire length, but I wondered whether I would get the effect I wanted with the partial brace, and then I would have greater volume by leaving the rest of the head free to vibrate. Between this and tuning up to a low A, I ended up with a richer sound, with more clarity. The experiment was a success, but this instrument was still pretty quiet, unable to play with other instruments comfortably. I had to admit that the akonting obviously has plenty of volume and a lovely rich tone acoustically, and that I would need to redesign my banjo to take advantage of what I had learned--the primary agenda being to increase the size of the head, but also to make use of the partial brace.

In my new banjo, to increase downward pressure on the bridge (hopefully increasing volume and enriching the tone), I have moved the bridge towards the tailpiece, which been the standard configuration on banjos since the 19th century. In this case I think the American innovation makes sense, especially because I have increased the head size and I think the bridge would be most efficient on the stiffer surface nearer the rim. Because of the shift of the bridge location, I can run a shorter brace from the tailpiece end, and that way I hope to maximize the potential of the vibrating surface while still canceling the "ring."

Gourd banjo, part five

2011-11-08T11:04:00.001-08:00

I am at last focused on spending some time working on this instrument, so things should happen pretty fast. For me, anyway. I have just finished an arrangement of the Vivaldi D major lute concerto where I play the orchestra to Richard Kriehn's mandolin playing the lead, and I need this more powerful (I sure hope) instrument to be able to hold its own with other instruments.

First, I built a maple rim for the gourd, leaving two gaps for the spine to fit. I made six angled pieces like the one on the right, each piece was put on the gourd rim and marked from below, then cut out on the bandsaw (see my previous post) and sanded to an approximate finished shape on the belt sander. Because the gourd is so irregular, I made each piece, glued it on (with the masking tape clamp method you can see above), and then fitted the next piece to it. I had marked locations on the rim of the gourd for each piece, but I assumed (and this turned out to be the case) that once I started fitting them, the marks would change.

Next came fitting the spine. Cutting a precise fit into a gourd is very satisfying since the material is so easy to work. I got pretty close just marking things and cutting the basic shape with a coping saw, and it was easy to file a tighter fit. I have the square end at the tailpiece, and a small rounded heel for the neck.

I don't know of any African instruments that have a wooden rim like this, and I don't know if other modern makers use them, so I think of it as my idea. I did this on my first gourd banjo, though through several alterations not much of it remains. I think it significantly stiffens and strengthens the gourd, and I guess some part of me likes the idea of a "tone ring." Because I intend to glue the head (instead of attaching it with nails), I think that it will become very strong when reinforced with glued skin.

Now I can file the final maple rim shape and prepare the gourd for finishing, finish the tailpiece shape, create the rim sections in the spine, and make the head brace, which will be the subject of a future post.

The right tool for the job

2011-10-26T11:12:00.000-07:00

The first power tool I really learned to use was a bandsaw, since my first extended experience with power tools was when I learned to build stringed instruments in college. Maybe a Dremel tool was first, now that I think of it, but the fact is that bandsaws are essential to luthiery because they can make cuts like the ones above, where I started making the maple cap for the gourd banjo I'm working on.

This is a nice old cast iron bandsaw that my friend Wayne found in his barn and sold to me when he was cleaning out old stuff before he moved. I thought it was rusty and possibly hopeless, and it sat in my basement for five years until I needed to make a curved cut in rosewood for a guitar bridge, and I discovered that it was just very, very dirty, but the bearings were greased and the motor still worked great. Mechanically it looked a bit vintage but still it was a very solid tool. The blade was even sharp. But I recall that when I was cutting the little part, it seemed to heat up a lot and burned the wood. I finished that part by hand and (odd for me) put the experience out of my mind, until last month when I tried to cut out the banjo spine. The blade was really smoking and not really cutting at all, so I found other ways to make the spine and determined that I must get a new blade.

It was when I got on the Internet to find a new blade that I found out that the 78.5" length of the blade of this saw is associated with meat-cutting bandsaws. Oh, so that blade was sharp, it was just designed to cut frozen meat, not maple. The mechanism is precisely the same, however, and now that I have a sharp new wood-cutting bandsaw blade I can at last get some work done with this thing!

Fall

2011-10-13T13:44:00.000-07:00

Asters and gallardia in bloom...I have always been surprised how the prairie blooms well into the fall. Younger plants whose parents bloomed in July throw out some impressive color in Indian summer here.

Elsewhere in the prairie, I am planting many, many divots of (so far) lupine and sticky geranium. Many species yet to go. Mainly I am planting in the southeast part of the property. This is where a fire from the east burned about half of the entire property, back in 1997 or so. I somehow took this as the call to plant native grass all through the area, but I was overwhelmed by the weeds that exploded along with the grass. Over the last six years, I have been very aggressive about taking the invasive species out, and I was surprised this year as it became clear that I had cleared it pretty well, and grass I planted last year has started to fill in very nicely, after most of what I had put in the first time years ago had been lost along with the weeds. Time to start putting in prairie plants!

This is looking in a vaguely southwest direction...the dirt area in front of that ponderosa pine has received a lot of the seed varieties I have planted this year, including early spring flowers, like deliphinium and blue-eyed Mary that I wanted to try seeding in summer, soon after their seeds were mature in nature. This entire area (as well as the acre or so behind me and to either side of this image) will be getting more native grasses soon as well, but currently is getting hundreds of little divots with 2-3 seeds in each one. After the geraniums I will start in on Rocky Mountain sunflower. And paintbrush, and cinquefoil, and...

Gourd banjo, episode 3

2011-09-15T14:45:00.000-07:00

The ongoing epic tale of the making of a new gourd banjo design continues...

The image above is the banjo "spine" after the first hour or so of the table saw and radial arm saw, a few days ago. Today I removed material from the thick center section with the radial arm saw and a chisel and spent a few hours with my belt sander armed with 40(!) grit. I was taught to do this sort of thing with rasps and files, so the belt sander is a guilty pleasure. I know it's wrong, but I've decided that I'm not a real luthier, I'm a musician--I just want to get this instrument finished and in my hands! This machine is also the perfect tool for evening up the handsaw cut on the gourd, too. So, it seems that I am not above power-carving with the belt sander.

Stress is good?

2011-08-27T21:04:00.000-07:00

I know it doesn't make sense to say that stress is good, but it might help native plants grow a bit more like they do in nature. Earlier this year I wailed and moaned over the destruction wrought by the dreaded voles, tunneling and gobbling up many plants. They really did eat a lot of stuff.

But then I started to notice that some of the plants they ate came back later, and had spread out into much more natural-looking plantings. These gallardia whose dirges I had sung but a few months ago started coming up around the end of July. The voles had eaten the mother plant but spread roots and seeds around.

Same thing with this lupine. There was a plant, now gone, in the middle of these, but earlier this summer a bunch of small lupines sprouted up around the original vole excavation. The bloom is over, sorry...

So, I have these two pretty large "creeping" Oregon grape (Berberis repens) shrubs that I planted fifteen years ago. The joke is that these monsters had no intention of creeping anywhere; they were fat and happy right where they were. Here is one of them.

For several years I kept looking at these, thinking that they looked like mutants. Then, last year I got the idea that maybe they needed to be stressed, kind-of like what happened to the gallardia and lupines. So, well, I mowed one. Just to see what would happen. Ran the big ol' DR Field and Brush mower right into the thing. And now, a year later, it has begun to creep! The green around the base there are little runners shooting out.

That other monster, above, had better watch out--I finished mowing the epilobium cloud today...

The Pink Cloud

2011-08-20T14:54:00.000-07:00

Asters (Aster occidentalis) in the foreground, Tall willow herb (Epilobium brachycarpum) in the distance...that's the pink cloud.

I am facing a dilemma. The pink cloud of epilobium is even more substantial than last year's, on which I posted exactly one year ago today. Here is the standard view, taken today, of the northern part of the prairie--
Beneath this pink cloud is a good spread of Idaho fescue, quite a few geraniums, some lupine...all sorts of young prairie plants. I have been going through and digging out individual weeds (some sow thistle, China lettuce, mustard, a few salsify, but not too bad) and wondering whether this epilobium will put down too much seed or if this is the kind of biomass that is going to help create the mulch that makes a prairie. My dilemma is whether to mow it down before it goes to seed or to leave it. At the moment I am thinking I should mow. Even now I will still get some epilobium seed, but not the awesome onslaught I (or my neighbor Jerry) would get if I don't, and the clarkia has already gone to seed, so that seed will be planted anyway. At some point I need to let things go but I'm not sure this is the time; while perennials are still pretty young and small, mowing doesn't upset them too much at this point and it might even the playing field.

A new instrument, part 2

2011-08-14T20:52:00.001-07:00

I was a little stunned to look back and see that it was February 1, more than six months ago, when I posted the first bit of this story. Here's what happened: I decided that I needed to finish a room that I had been working on for four (!) years in this house (which I have been working on for 20 years). Get something done, and then I will start on the gourd banjo.

In the interim, I did work on some music of course, and I moved many yards of river rock by wheelbarrow, and I had a lot of prairie maintenance and seed collection in there. But I also finished this room, and it was an important one because it's for my wife, Dona, a sanctuary for her spirit and her stuff, away from the crazy lives of her boys ("I live with boys!," she says). Beginning with the stair railing in 2007, this has involved as much woodworking than the kitchen did. The newel post here at the bottom was original (though I added the maple cap and Dona's dad Frank turned the walnut finials), but I made the other 4 1/2 from a beam recycled from an old church in Pullman.

In 2008, I trimmed the stair landing and built some cabinetry. The white drawers and the trim above them come from an old bolt cabinet I found in the barn. The drawers, with the delicate calligraphy of Vo Lucas (who lived in this house from c. 1940-1980) labeling garden supplies, turn up in the kitchen, there's another bank in this room, and there are a couple drawers left over to use in the bedroom, when I at last finish that room.

The bookcase was built (also in 2008) out of a taller bookcase that came out of someone's office at the University of Idaho. I tried to get it upstairs but it wouldn't fit through the opening for the stairs, so I cut it in half and built it into the knee wall. Sealing and insulating that wall made a big difference in the coziness of this room.

The rest of the cabinetry along the knee wall, the window and skylight trim, baseboards and door trim took me the last year. So, I was really already seeing the light at the end of this particular tunnel when I realized I wanted to build an improved gourd banjo last winter.

It feels a lot better to take on building this new instrument, having reached an important milestone in the renovation of this home, finishing this special room for a remarkable woman.

2011-07-11T15:47:00.000-07:00

The "new" (now in its second year) prairie, shot today from the standard view I've used in several postings. The pink flower in the foreground is clarkia, the white flower is yarrow, and there are several other flowers in this image that may or may not be visible, including silky lupine, gallardia, and cinquefoil. Much of the green is epilobium (there is a post on this plant from last year), which will bloom with small pink flowers in the next few weeks. The image isn't all that different from what you could see last year, but there are many more plants out there. I have been intrigued by the vigorousness of plants like this clarkia in the foreground, that these plants in nature are usually much smaller than what shows up in my restoration project in the first few years of a new area. I suspect this has to do with having less competition, and that new areas have not built up much of a crust of mulch that is found in original undisturbed prairie. In older areas, as with the six-year-old area below, the plants begin to look more like what you'd see in native prairie. I still don't have all that much "crust" here either but there is more competition. I think the real crust takes a long time...I don't really have that anywhere on the property.

In this next image, in two-year-old prairie, you can see how a gallardia plant has grown quite large. Even though there are a lot of plants of various sorts here, you can also see dirt, which indicates that things have not really filled in yet, and so there is less competition. Idaho fescue is there, for example, but being planted just last fall it is only an inch tall or so. I think I just have to accept the process here, and appreciate that these large plants produce a lot of seeds that I can use throughout the project. Voles decimated about half of my gallardia last year (the image above would have had two of these big gallardias before the feast last year), so I am happy to harvest seeds from the six or seven large gallardias I have left in various spots.

The last image shows a new arrival this year. I got quite a few of these Phacelia heterophylla (the spiky white flower) to come up from seed--for awhile it was the "mystery plant" out there until it bloomed. Seeing it made me realize that there is also quite a lot of it down the gravel road from our house. There are several quite large ones (this may be the gallardia effect, as above) in the gravel amongst several aggressive nasty weeds that sprouted when the gravel road was widened and worked on. I think it's interesting to see a native competing successfully with several invasive non-native species.

2011-06-01T13:00:00.000-07:00

So here is a piece of music from Cassandra, just finished, hot off the press, the bits still shimmering on the hard drive. It is an instrumental, where action on stage is followed by the music. I realized, composing this music, that the action onstage was part of the composition, and I found myself reducing musical ideas to their essence, so they hold just the right balance. As a result, it seems to me essential that a listener knows what's going on here (directions are written in the score).

The piano part in the beginning accompanies Cassandra and her slave Partana in the temple after a ritual (long story, but...). Then Partana leaves, and the priest Pantos enters (he's the violin, essentially). Pantos watches her awhile and it's a little creepy. Partana returns unseen and hides, watching what unfolds. Pantos drugs a glass of wine and offers it to Cassandra, who drinks. That's when the drums come in and immediately the scene intensifies. Pantos goes off on the side and puts on a mask to look like Apollo, as Cassandra weakens and lays down on a bench. He comes over to her, and she tries to resist, but she is too drugged to stop him as he gets on top of her. Just then Partana bursts out of hiding and clobbers Pantos over the head. She helps Cassandra up and they exit.

2011-05-30T20:07:00.000-07:00

Camas (Camassia quamash) blooming in the prairie.

I am actually working on music, too, though I haven't had much to say about it. In fact, I have an instrumental section from the opera that is almost ready to be mixed, and I thought I'd post it, but the prairie is currently the hot story--things are blooming, what can I say? This is in the "new" prairie, and there are all sorts of things coming up. My camas appears to bloom a couple weeks behind the native patches around here, and I think I've figured out that the older the camas plant is, the earlier it blooms, so this one is about a week behind the patches I planted five years ago. Anyway, suddenly this year there seems to be a lot of camas, though most of it is young sprouting leaves, not yet blooming this year. I suspect that the half pound or however-much-it-was of camas seed (from Grassland West, from whom I got my native grass seed, as well as the iris seed) that I planted three years ago has at last come up, and I have had the pleasant realization that I may be done planting camas, since if all this stuff ends up blooming we will have an impressive drift.

Oh, and that Douglas brodiaea in the previous post...chomped by deer that night. One has to have a sense of humor about these things...

2011-05-28T13:03:00.000-07:00

Western groundsel (Senecio integerrimus), blooming in the prairie among Woods rose.

I have been able to start the groundsel from seed, but one plant that has been more difficult is Douglas' brodiaea, or wild hyacinth (Triteleia grandiflora). They are pretty persistent and fairly common around here, surviving even when every other native has been eliminated, but I have never gotten the seeds to produce plants. And that's when I can find seeds, as some animal finds them delectable and generally the seeds are gone before they are mature. Fortunately there has been quite a bit of it hanging on in the southern fence row, and over the years I have encouraged it to move north. It grows very slowly, putting out a green hair at first that gets thicker over the years until at last it puts up a spectacular flower. The deer chomp these too, but this year there are enough that some have escaped being chomped. Here is one in full bloom that I found today.

2011-05-26T21:52:00.000-07:00

The cage worked! Here is the blooming iris, in all its glory...

2011-05-18T12:38:00.000-07:00

Rocky Mountain iris (Iris missouriensis), about to bloom.

Between the deer, rabbits, and voles, I figured that I should take some action ahead of time to make sure some beast doesn't chomp this little jewel. Later I spent an hour under the pie cherry tree in bloom, dappled sunlight, filling walls-of-water for the newly-planted tomatoes, puffy clouds gliding by overhead. Spring, at last!

2011-05-07T20:55:00.000-07:00

I found two distinct kinds of successes out in the prairie this afternoon. The first was the sort I worked for, the triumphant return this Spring of a clump of red besseya and sedge that I carefully dug up out of a drainage ditch beside the road near Kamiak Butte almost exactly a year ago. I carefully nursed it along last year, and hoped it would come back this year...

The other kind of success is the unexpected gift, all the more mysterious because it was unanticipated. Here is a tiny blooming ball-headed waterleaf that just showed up all on its own and decided to put on a show in its first year. I almost stepped on it!

Postscript...The next morning I went to check on the red besseya and darned if some deer didn't chomp that lovely flower stalk off. Good think I took that photo yesterday! Oh well, the plant is fine anyway.

2011-04-17T20:43:00.000-07:00

Voles!!

This desolation was caused by voles, the little short-tailed field mice who eat plants, roots, and bulbs, and they apparently felt that they hit the jackpot when they got to this spot, which last year had 15 clumps of sisyrinchium, 5 or 6 fritillaria pudica, several delphinium, and a few other lovely native plants. These little buggers have been a significant scourge since late last summer, and it was pretty sad to see a spot that I had nursed along for almost ten years reduced to this.

Nevertheless, looking closely, I can see little green hairs that indicate baby sisyrinchium. I think the fritillaria and deliphinium are toast, but clearly vole attacks are one of the strategies Nature uses to spread sisyrinchium, which otherwise become crowded clumps of the beautiful little flowers. I discovered years ago that I could dig up one of my fat clumps and divide it, and even single plants would usually survive. They are accustomed to being ravaged by voles, I guess, and after an attack, several little bulbs escape and start new clumps. I have decided that I will leave this spot alone for now and see how/whether it recovers.

This is the current view of the new prairie, showing a lot of Idaho fescue coming up at the moment.
In the area between the young ponderosa pine in the center of the image and the fence, I have planted numerous clumps of sisyrinchium, divided from large clumps from elsewhere in the prairie. There is a small clump of prairie star amongst them, moved from a growing colony of it at the foot of the silver maple in the front yard (I have no idea how/why it started showing up there, but I intend to use the spot as my prairie star nursery). One triumph I spotted just north of that small ponderosa pine, is a red besseya (besseya rubra) just starting to bloom in a clump of sedge and maybe a couple of other things that are coming up; I dug this clump out of a drainage ditch last Spring. Here is an image of the new sisyrinchium coming up...

I have been writing a peculiar composition for the opera, an instrumental piece that accompanies action without singing. Yes, that makes it a mime, but no one should be wearing white makeup. If it stands apart from its support of the scene, as a piece on its own, I may post it on my website. I keep trying to find ways to make these pieces come together more quickly, but I accept now that there is no way to rush compositions, recording, or prairie restoration. Thank goodness there are no music-consuming voles in the studio!

2011-03-14T19:53:00.000-07:00

Cow parsnip (Heracleum maximum), just sprouted in the prairie, alongside a clump of Idaho fescue.

I was surprised and delighted to see this sign of spring today. Since my last post, an awesome and unusual late winter storm clobbered us. First the temperature dropped, as low as -15º, and then about a week later we were assaulted by fourteen inches of snow in 24 hours--it was wild! So, I didn't get the cabinet-making finished upstairs (I was stuck because I do final sanding out on the porch, and it has been too snowy, icy, wet, and miserable for the last month out there!), which means I didn't get anywhere on the new gourd banjo because I promised Dona I wouldn't start on it until I finished her room upstairs. I did get the perfect piece of maple to build the spine of that banjo from Paul Hill in Moscow--thanks! Anyway, just this last week I've at last gotten sanding done and am oiling a couple of cabinet doors. The project is back on track.

There is salt-and-pepper lomatium (lomatium gormanii) coming up and it's even blooming in a few south-facing sunny spots by the railroad tracks in Palouse, but elsewhere it looks like the unexpected winter weather over the last few weeks has delayed Spring a bit for the native prairie.

The bad weather has been good for playing, recording, and writing, though, and now I am getting the kinks out of my Irish fiddling, as I will be playing for several hours on Thursday, Saint Patrick's Day.

Things are stirring, at last...

A new instrument

2011-02-01T13:22:00.000-08:00

What is it?

The surface of a gourd, just arrived from my sister and brother-in-law. Tom grew it when they lived in North Hollywood. From this remarkable vessel I am about to build a musical instrument.

Essentially I am updating the design of my original gourd banjo, built in 1992. That design was directly inspired by the surviving instruments and documents of mid-19th-century African-American gourd banjos, though the ebony fingerboard and peghead veneers were added because I had carried that lovely figured piece of ebony around for about five years and decided I had to use it. The neck is actually pretty modern; I put a gentle arch into the fingerboard and the cross-section is what I am used to playing modern banjos and guitars. I originally had a smaller head on it with a peculiar system of wood screws into a maple rim, but a few years ago I enlarged the opening, removing all the maple but a tiny edge, added a "brace" to the neck under the head (there will be more on this feature in the future). I reattached the head using the traditional Mande method of little nails (I managed to crack the gourd in this process but it glued back together OK).

I realize I need a term for the continuation of the neck as it passes through the body to the tailpiece; this traditional African lute design has the neck all one piece going through the body. I think the Mandinka call this the penis of the instrument. I will go with "spine".

Anyway, as I have worked with this instrument on a variety of projects, I have wanted to address several design flaws I ran into with this first instrument I made. I would like it to be louder, for one thing, which with this one would be as simple as making a bigger sound hole, but I can't bring myself to mess with the lovely sound hole I carved. And I think the head should be larger, more like it is on the akonting (a West African plucked lute). One issue I had is what led me to a radical redesign of the instrument, that with friction tuning pegs and a animal skin head, keeping the instrument precisely in tune can be challenging. Now that I have started to bring this sound into my opera, not as a "banjo" but as a soulful vaguely-ethno-Mediterranean-sounding plucked lute, I have to be able to tune the thing quickly and accurately. That means mechanical tuners, but the instrument is so light that any more weight on the peghead would make it very awkward to hold. So, I'm moving the tuners to the tailpiece, a bit like the Steinberger guitar design.
Hmm, I don't know, maybe you can just make out the basic top and side views of the plan in that image (if you click on it, it gets twice as large). Anyway, making the plan was first. My next step is to locate the piece of wood to make the spine.

Mid-Winter

2011-01-21T12:18:00.001-08:00

View south from the back porch, late afternoon, 1/19/11

I have neglected this, alas. Of course, not much news is to be expected from the prairie in January. There are voles (little tunneling field mice that eat plants) everywhere out there, but our experience with our potatoes, where they were all over the place but only got 10% of the crop, gives me hope that they won't consume everything I've planted.

The main thing that has kept me from writing is that I have at last found a rhythm of work, and once I'm in that mode, it is difficult to pause for reflection. This laptop has the script and the Finale (music notation software) score of the current song open, and I go back and forth between the studio recording, writing any lyric changes in the score and script, writing out the parts for the music. At the moment I have 25 minutes of my djembe playing to sort through, just for one five-minute piece. I am constantly making up music in my head, but I have learned not to trust that what I imagine is as good as what I can make out of it in the real world. Especially with rhythm and percussion I need to hear the music in real time and space in my body to make any meaningful decisions. It is also very important for harmony vocal parts. Coming up with parts that "obey the rules" is easy, but why a particular part is right in a certain spot is far more mysterious--I have to hear it. So, I come up with several things in my imagination but I have to try them out to get the one that really works.

Framing these intense work sessions are 3-mile walks along the river road and cabinet-building upstairs. The collective feeling of progress is somehow like that pink-orange glow at the top of McKenzie Butte in the photo above.

2010-11-04T10:54:00.000-07:00

Indian paintbrush (Castilleja hispida, I think), left; Idaho fescue (Festuca idahoensis), right

Today I'm going to try an experiment to see if I can grow Indian paintbrush in the prairie. I collected this seed on nearby Kamiak Butte, where there are tons of a very beautiful Indian paintbrush, shades of orange that could restore your faith in that color as a decorating statement. The story on Indian paintbrush is that it is a semi-parasite on other plants (a couple of people mentioned that Idaho fescue was one of them), but I had never heard of anyone getting it to grow, so I had never tried it. But then Jacie Jensen at Thorn Creek Nursery told me that she had heard of success when the paintbrush seed is planted at the same time as Idaho fescue, that they need to sprout in the same season. So today I will mix these together in many little clumps throughout the prairie, mostly-sunny spots with a little shade from a nearby Ponderosa pine or shrub, which is where I see them growing up on Kamiak Butte.

2010-09-04T17:34:00.000-07:00

Here are all the seeds I have collected this year for planting in the prairie, from the "salt and pepper" lomatium back in May to the scarlet gilia last week. I have purchased a few packages of seeds from Thorn Creek Nursery in Moscow, ID (sticky geranium, tapertip penstemon, prairie smoke) and will order 20 lbs. of Idaho fescue from Grassland West, but everything you see here has come from our prairie and a few sites around Palouse (the salt-and-pepper lomatium actually grows in a little patch by the railroad in downtown Palouse). I'll wait until we've had some more rain, probably early October, before I start planting.

I am taking about five times as long to get this opera recorded and scored than I had in mind, but I did manage to get another song "in the can" this last week. My method, whether the project is music or rebuilding this house or prairie restoration, is to vastly underestimate the amount of time and work involved in doing anything; ignorance is the key. By underestimating the time and effort involved, I trick myself into getting all excited about seeing whatever it is take shape, and dive in: "Wow, I can get this done in a couple months!" Once I get into it I'm hooked and keep going until it's finished; somehow I've acquired the patience I never had in my 20s.

The wraparound porch on this house is a great example (of course, the nearly 25 years I have spent working off-and-on on my opera is another obvious one)...I thought it would be a perfect summer project back in 1993. That first summer I got it framed and a floor on it. Framing and sheathing the roof took me until November that year. I spent the next summer putting on the roof and making all the parts for the railings and painting them (it was amazing how long that took). I was able to install all those fabulous railing parts in the summer of 1995. I have to confess that the ceiling on the underside of the porch didn't go up until 2005. Welcome to my world. But I got it done, and it's a really nice porch.

2010-08-20T12:39:00.000-07:00

"New" prairie, 8/20/10

This is the west-northwest view I have posted three times previously. The clarkia has all gone to seed and the plants look like amber tumbleweeds without the thorns, and I have gone through the area in the foreground with the mower. There is plenty of Idaho fescue (the bluish-looking grass), and the shrubby-looking clumps are Epilobium brachycarpum--it's nice to have something still green in the landscape. In the image you can just barely see the subtle cloud of pink that represents the bloom of this native annual, which just started showing up in force a couple of years ago. It seems like such a blessing to get Nature to help out like this. There are about four elderberry plants in this part of the prairie (but they're invisible little sprouts from this vantage point), similarly showing up as a gift from the birds or the local deity or something. Individual plants, such as the elderberries, lupines, and geraniums, are marked with little pink flags, some of which you can see in the image above, so I don't inadvertently cut them down or anything. Anyway, the pink cloud is made of tiny (1/4" square) pink flowers like this...

As with the clarkia earlier this year, the lack of competition in this newly-planted area makes an annual like epilobium thicker than it is in a mature native prairie. In fact it is much more sparse throughout the rest of the property.

Making a Squash-stalk Clarinet

2010-08-19T10:58:00.001-07:00

It's harvest time, finally. We are just starting to get tomatoes, about a month late with the odd cool weather we had in late Spring, but now the garden is delivering. We have only one summer squash plant but it is huge! Do you have more squash than you know what to do with? Well, this won't help, really, but it will give you something else to do with it. Here I am using a stalk from a yellow "crookneck" squash, but it works with zucchini and maybe others, too. You can actually make a functional musical instrument from stuff you usually throw in the compost bin!

The first thing is to cut off the leaf, right at the point where the hollow stalk expands into the leaf--you want that end to be plugged. Then, holding the knife perpendicular to the stalk, scrape off the spines. The next part is really important: cut an inch-long slit about a half-inch away from the plugged end.

Now you have to get your clarinet to sound. The entire slit has to go in your mouth. It will take several minutes to warm up and loosen up the reeds (technically, I suppose this is an oboe more than a clarinet since the two sides of the slit are the two "reeds," but it sounds like a clarinet). Keep trying to blow through it. If the air blows through too easily, then press gently on the top of the reeds to push them together, and if it is too hard to blow air through the reeds, put the knife in the slit and wiggle it gently to loosen them up. Keep trying to get a sound by blowing--the moisture and warmth of your breath will loosen things up. You might get a squeak--that's a good sign...keep going. Then, once you get a sound, you can try cutting finger holes.

Have fun!!

2010-07-01T12:50:00.000-07:00

Prairie, 7/1/10

Silky lupine, scarlet gilia, yarrow, gallardia, clarkia, Wyeth buckwheat, Idaho fescue, maybe a grand collomia in there. The summer prairie is nearing its peak. This area was planted four years ago.

2010-06-23T09:41:00.000-07:00

Clarkia pulchella, blooming in the "new" prairie, 6/22/10

It is spectacular, but a bit deceiving. More significant for the long term are the small clumps of bluish-green Idaho fescue that you can see coming up in the foreground, along with sprouts of various other plants I put in last fall. Clarkia in the wild, and in the more-established parts of the prairie, are usually a few blooms on a little plant maybe eight inches tall. These shrub-sized monsters are the result of not much competition and a very wet Spring. There will be enough seed from these to seed the entire property and then some, and by next year they will be integrated into a more natural landscape. Having an annual plant like this to put in at this early stage is great, though, because it does help to keep out invasive non-native plants and it is a welcome bit of inspiration for the continuing work. Several species in the more established parts of the prairie are just beginning to bloom: lupine, scarlet gilia, yarrow, cinquefoil, and gallardia. When they reach their full glory I will post an image or two.

2010-06-21T19:43:00.000-07:00

Well, I've done it now. I made a video of myself playing Louis Moreau Gottschalk's "The Banjo" on the fretless gourd banjo and posted that on YouTube. Then I went to Wikipedia and edited the entry on Gottschalk's "The Banjo," and linked the video to it. Whoever had written the Wikipedia entry on Gottschalk's "Banjo" had cited my article (see below) but apparently not entirely understood it. YouTube seems to have messed with my crisp image somewhat, and the titles are fuzzy too, but...good enough, I say. I will probably record the version of the piece for the CD in the next few weeks, now that it's all sharp and under my fingers. When I play live, I treat it like banjo music and I feel free to mess with things a bit as the mood strikes me, but for these recordings I wanted to follow the piano music as closely as I can.

The article that I published in the early 90's on this explains a lot of what I'm doing here; essentially I back-engineered how the piece would have been played by using what I argue was a kind of piano "sound recording" of an actual (though unnamed) African-American banjo player in New Orleans, c. 1853. I am for the most part following what I outlined in the article, except that since then (I had to take a few years to build the banjo and then figure out how to play it) I came up with a different way to play an important part of the piece. I switch to an up-picking rolling style that sounds more like what the piano is doing, and I think it points out more of a connection to West African plucked lute styles, not unlike fast textures on the ngoni or kora. This switching back and forth between "downstroking," or "frailing," and up-picking is common in West African plucked lute playing, though is not a traditional part of surviving American banjo playing--in fact no other evidence of it survives. Though it really annoyed S. Frederick Starr, the author of the current authoritative biography of Gottschalk, I think the most powerful evidence that Gottschalk made this piece by transcribing the playing of some unnamed African-American banjo player is right here in this recording of the music. No way could he get that close to actual banjo music without sitting down with somebody and copying to the best of his ability everything the musician did. Was poet Gwendolyn Brooks justified in railing against Gottschalk's beginning the great American tradition of white musicians stealing the awesome musical genius of African-Americans (her poem is reprinted in my article)? I think so, that he should have given credit somehow, but still I'm glad he did what he did, or else this tradition would not have been preserved in any other documentary evidence.

2010-06-12T17:59:00.000-07:00

Prickly lettuce, mustard, stork's bill, salsify, and sow thistle dying in the prairie, 6/10/10

This is the dark side of making Palouse prairie.

At first glance, an expanse of green, but look closer and you'll see that the plants are curling up. Underneath them, Festuca idahoensis and Agripyron spicatum (the two main native grass species I have planted) are coming up very well, but the wet and warm Spring has unleashed a serious onslaught of weeds in the areas that I cleared and planted with grass. This image was shot from the same spot as the other shots of the new prairie, except that I pointed the camera south instead of west-northwest. This is the worst spot on the property for weeds, but it demonstrates why I have to make use of the dreaded 2-4-D, which kills broadleaf weeds but leaves the grass unscathed. After the grass is established, the weeds can't get in as easily. Elsewhere, I have only had to spray individual weed plants. But the fact is that anyone who thinks they could pull this stuff out by hand is nuts.

So all day long last Tuesday, all day long today, and probably several hours tomorrow (I have to wait for a day without rain and wind, rare this Spring), I have had to walk backwards with four gallons of evil on my back. Since these areas are the last on the property to be planted, I shouldn't have to confront such a nasty situation in the future. I look forward to the end of spraying herbicide, that's for sure.

2010-05-25T20:27:00.000-07:00

Camas (Camassia quamash) blooming in the prairie, 5/25/10.

I still don't have enough camas to eat, and it is my goal eventually to have an autumn meal of salmon dressed with lomatium sprigs and allium bulbs, with roasted camas. In the meantime, I am happy to celebrate its lovely bloom every May.

It has been a musical harvest lately, though, with Richard Kriehn's wonderful CD of mandolin music finished a couple of weeks ago and I will finish mixing Tiana Gregg's third (!) CD tomorrow.

As for planting, I am about to start making YouTube videos of some of my gourd banjo repertoire, the first step in putting that music in the world. Stay tuned.

2010-04-30T15:01:00.000-07:00

This is the same view of the newly-planted prairie that I first posted last November. The weather has been wet and today was the first day in awhile that I could get out here. Not much to see, I guess, since so much of the exciting stuff requires a much closer look. But annual plants are up and running. The light green stuff with thin leaves is mostly clarkia and Epilobium brachycarpum. I didn't plant the Epilobium, but it's a native annual that shows up here when the soil is disturbed. There is quite a lot of it in the southern part of the prairie. Like Spring whitlow grass (Draba verna, which some say is native and others not, but it's a sweet little plant anyway), it fills in a disturbed area, sheds its seeds and then goes away as other stuff fills in, but is always there waiting for a chance. The wider-bladed plants are mostly prickly lettuce and mustard, and I will soon be spot-spraying those little delights with 2-4-D.

Elsewhere in the prairie, there are more spectacular results these days. Native deliphinium is in bloom...
And I was thrilled to find a vigorous Shooting star (Dodecatheon conjugens) in the shade of a Ponderosa pine in the southwest part of the prairie. This little flower had been putting out leaves for two years before it suddenly bloomed last week.

2010-04-17T10:53:00.000-07:00

Sisyrinchium idahoense blooming in the prairie, 4/16/10. I think this may be a different variety than the usual one that grows here. All the books say that it varies from pink to purple to blue, and some of them are very pale, but this one's petals are pure white, a bit smaller, and about 2-3 weeks later than the more common variety. This particular one grew from seeds I collected several years ago from my friends Bill and Jessica Rivers who have a spectacular Palouse prairie remnant about two miles east of here, with several of these white sisyrinchiums amidst a carpet of the blue, purple, and pink ones. Here are some of the more common sisyrinchium that I photographed a couple of weeks ago in our prairie.

The warm Spring we have been enjoying (it got up to 80 degrees yesterday), with perfectly-timed rain storms every day or two, has seriously inspired plant life around here. Just a few weeks ago I went out to the spot where I had taken the photograph I posted from last fall and though you could see that things were happening if you looked close up, the far away view still looked pretty brown and bare, so I decided not to show that view again yet, but I should do that soon, since it is changing rapidly.

I have been hard at work finishing up some projects in the studio and working on Cassandra. It will be a long time before I can show this stuff to anyone, since I am writing out the score as I go and just recording basic vocals (mainly myself) with the finished instrumental tracks, so that I can get to the end and bring in singers to do the finished vocal parts. I was working on Act I, Scene 4 this last week though, and realized that the instrumental part in the ending of that song would be a nice little bit of the music to post.

3/16/11

I decided to pull it off my website. There will be Cassandra music soon enough...

2010-03-16T14:12:00.000-07:00

Buttercups (Ranunculus glaberrimus) blooming in the prairie, 3/16/10. In spite of our northern location and occasional cold weather (though not this winter so much), several native plants bloom here even in late winter.

You were just spared a diatribe about the current state of academic training for musicians, because I wanted to get past that frustration with a simple proposal for improving the situation. My fantasy is that we could create music workshops based loosely on training for creative writers, where musicians could be treated as artists and present their work to their peers. I have heard writers complain about writers' workshops, that their peers give inane and unnecessarily critical responses, that you can't teach writing anyway. All true, but that isn't the point. Education is about teaching and learning, sure, but for artists it is also about having a little institutional support while you find your voice and work it a bit. Currently, music programs don't allow this because the political structure is such that your peers don't matter; only the faculty's evaluation matters. A music student is NOT an artist in the current system. To empower the students as artists and give them a voice would ideally serve to open up the area of inquiry. Not just about unlistenable "new" music, but about songwriting, about music built out of vernacular traditions. Things the teachers might have to learn about. It is very hard, maybe even impossible, for the medieval power relationships in academic music departments to evolve beyond their dictatorial nature, but music departments aren't getting more relevant as time goes on, and the world no longer cares if you can properly resolve a German sixth chord. They do care if you have the funk, though. I just got a smile fantasizing a course called Getting the Funk 101--just the thing to replace 12-tone theory, which is an absolute waste of time. I had a writers-workshop structure built into a "music production" course I designed at WSU (end run around the deadly "composition" classes), to use this method for students to present their work in the recording studio to each other, but budget cuts several years ago utterly destroyed any hope of introducing new curriculum for the foreseeable future, and of course, now I am no longer teaching there. It's still a good idea though.

2010-03-08T21:31:00.000-08:00

I am unworthy. Two months and no posts.

It has been busy. I finished Tiana's first two CDs, and she came out and made another one in about two hours (!), which I told her I couldn't edit and mix until May or something, because I must get going on my own project. Still, you've got to be impressed with someone who is this prolific, and I can tell you, these are three CDs with really good songs and inspired performances. Richard Kriehn is almost done with his project, with one more track to go, a Brazilian mandolin tune.

I had wanted to show an early spring image of the prairie project, but the photo I took from the same angle as the one last fall still looked pretty similar. You have to look closer to see the excitement there, so that will have to wait a month or so.

Well, so how about this. Richard Kriehn and I decided to sit down and see what we could do with the traditional American fiddle tune, "St. Anne's Reel," for his CD. It ended up just being mandolin and banjo, but it got me to pull out the standard steel-stringed banjo, which I hadn't played seriously in awhile, having lost myself in the gourd banjo lately. My first versions were too close to the melody of the tune but what was needed was simpler and more rhythmic. I really like where it ended up, but after several days of playing pretty hard on those strings I had a seriously shredded fingernail.

Listen to "St. Anne's Reel"

My technique for recording the banjo is unusual--at least I haven't seen anyone else use it. I use a stereo pair of Neumann KM-84 small diaphragm condensor mics, one in front on the head of the banjo, and one coming in from behind (so the instrument has to be an open back banjo), with the two mics panned hard right and left. I also used it on the Paul Anders' banjo on the Steptoe recording of "Raleigh and Spencer" which you can hear on my website too.

2010-01-05T14:31:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I introduced my current recording project with Tiana Gregg, and how powerful her music is with just her voice and guitar. For contrast (but not much, really) I wanted to post an example where I did add a little bit of production.

One of the songs in which Tiana imagined some added parts is "Summer Dress." I had improvised a fiddle part to it one night at the Green Frog open mike that had stuck in our minds, and so it made sense to see what I could do with my vague memories of it. I also put in a piano part, and some secret sauce.

Listen to Tiana Gregg's "Summer Dress"

The trick for me here is to bring in a fiddler, pianist, and secret saucemeister for intensity but not diminish the clarity and beauty of the song, her voice and guitar. This isn't really a final mix, but you get the idea.

Tiana and I have been talking about the weirdness of pursuing our music dreams 'way out here in rural America, with the music industry going down in flames around us, so many voices in the media rendering our little efforts inconsequential. Some of our best efforts fading into a shadow world beyond obscurity, through peculiar fortune, daily life, and the occasional music business weasel. Sometimes you want to throw up your hands, but I think you have to honor whatever gift you have by giving it your best effort. Keep putting it in the world. Somebody may hear what we do. But that can't actually play too much of a role in whether we do this stuff or not.

2009-12-04T13:10:00.000-08:00

Tiana Gregg (on the right) with her business partner Paula Echanove has been running the Green Frog Café here in Palouse for years, and all the while Tiana has also been running an active music scene around the Green Frog. Not only that, but she also is a seriously great singer and songwriter. One afternoon last September she spent a few hours here recording 19 wonderful songs and she's coming over this Sunday to record a couple more. I just finished getting these basic tracks edited and cleaned up, and I am stunned by how good she is.

She intends to flesh some of these songs out with a little production, and that will of course be fun to do, but I am struck by the power of her music with nothing other than her voice and guitar, recorded live.

How about this one? Is this not an absolutely fabulous piece of music and poetry?

It is an interesting dilemma to have a track like this. I could hear all sorts of parts in it, a drum kit, electric guitar, piano, bass...but, isn't it more amazing with just her incredible voice and that quiet guitar back there? Sometimes good production is NOT doing things...

2009-11-29T21:17:00.000-08:00

I have completed the planting of the prairie for the season. I had planted virtually everything a month ago, but I got a bit of Gentiana affinis seeds that had been collected by my friend Nancy Hegg and put that in yesterday in my wettest spots. Altogether around thirty species have gone in and now I wait to see what will actually come up. The photo above was taken at the end of August, my intention being to show the clean slate with which I began, the result of a significant onslaught of Roundup. Hopefully next year I will be able to take photos from the same vantage point for comparison. It is already more green than this, even at the end of November. I am sure some of the sprouts are undesirable, but I was surprised that eight Rocky Mountain Iris seeds that I had planted last year came up in the middle of that barren view several weeks after I took this photo, and other natives take advantage of the fall growing season, including grasses and an intriguing biennial called scarlet gilia (gilia aggregata). One thing I love to see is a plant contributed by the birds and it appears that they have put in a blue elderberry in a perfect spot, as well as a couple of other shrubs I couldn't yet identify.

In the studio I have at last dusted off my opera and confronted the least-worked-out piece from the original effort. Back in the late 1980s when I started, I had sought to create a few songs that could live outside the opera, and the clumsiest one of these was a sort-of "love song" that hung on in the back of my mind until this month when I realized that my characters had a whole lot more to say than that; in fact, they don't actually get along all that well. A few lines, part of one verse, survive in the new song, but even the basic instrumental texture of the song was transformed once I put the new vocal parts to it. Such a relief to have gotten back into this project again. At this point it looks a lot like the prairie--barren with a lot of potential, but hopefully by next Spring...

2009-10-20T10:06:00.000-07:00

Actually, I am never there on Thursdays, but I thought I should post office hours.

The oddest thing about my departure from WSU was that the music department is apparently unaware that I am no longer employed by the university and so never asked for me to vacate my office. I had the good sense to get everything important out of there but decided to maintain my office as a kind of installation. I had shared the office for several years with Ron Pond, a genuine Umatilla/Palutspu shaman who taught Native American music at WSU, but they found some reason to get rid of him this last summer too--I have no idea what the reason was (there is some sort of gag order about it because it involves "legal issues"). We had thought of our shared office as a kind of ghetto for non-European music, and the quiet elimination of our positions speaks volumes about diversity in the university.

I just pulled out my materials on my musical Cassandra yesterday, the real work I need to do now. I am finally getting some projects out of the studio that have been an obstacle to that work, but I have really enjoyed producing CDs for other people here, too. I have been able to use these productions to explore textures I want to use in Cassandra, and working with other people has made me much faster at getting work done in the studio. I decided to post examples from productions I have done the last few years on my website (www.palouserivemusic.com) and thought I would comment on them here.

Steptoe, "Raleigh & Spencer" (traditional), from Doggone Sophisticated (2007)
Listen to "Raleigh & Spencer"

Steptoe (Von Walden, Tina Hilding, Paul Hill, Paul Anders) is a great bluegrass-esque band from Moscow, ID. The three tracks on their 2007 CD that we recorded here represents the least amount of production I've ever done as a producer, as they had very particular ideas of what they wanted and very high standards. It was exhiliarating to work with great musicians with great ideas and do my best to realize them, producing as a team, and I think they made a wonderful record here. They had an excellent sense of how to capture a "live" performance and also enhance the production artistically. The live rooms I've set up here with good mics and preamps are perfect for this music.

Shiloh Sharrard, "Santa Can't Stay" (Dwight Yoakam), from Don't Make Me Go to School (2007)
Listen to "Santa Can't Stay"

I first heard Shiloh when she was eleven, and she had a great country voice even then. Her 2007 CD, Don't Make Me Go to School, recorded when she was fifteen, was conceived by Shiloh as a concept album around her parent's divorce, and she chose an intriguing set of a few new country songs embedded in a foundation of the country classics of failed marriage, including "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" and "He Stopped Loving Her Today." She came in on one day and played all her guitar parts and sang all the songs on the next day. Maybe we did one or two things later, but the approach to this CD was that it would be based around what she does when she walks out on stage with her guitar, and Shiloh is an authentically great performer, so you should see her if you get a chance (her website is www.shilohsmusic.com). I decided that this should be an acoustic production, no drums, and feature the piano in the "band," since I was finding such elegant Floyd Cramer and Pig Robbins piano parts in all these old country songs. I took it upon myself to learn their parts where I could and inject them into these interpretations, though in this song I went with a fat boogie-woogie left hand groove that I came up with years ago. And then I had three great musicians to back her up: Shayne Watkins, who plays the fattest almost-electric-sounding acoustic guitar lead I've ever heard, Alane Watkins, who had a perfect complimentary harmony voice for Shiloh (and these two have performed a bunch with Shiloh and knew her stuff), and Richard Kriehn who plays fabulous fiddle lines and driving mandolin percussion on this track. On this Dwight Yoakam tune (which sounds so intriguing coming from a still-young-sounding voice, as do many of the tracks on this CD), I sought to create the most driving trainwreck of a groove I could using acoustic instruments.

Mike and Olivia Haberman, "September Song" (Mike Haberman), from as-yet-untitled-and-unreleased (2009)
Listen to "September Song"

Olivia and Mike Haberman are a daughter-dad team of singer-songwriters, based in Lewiston, ID. I worked on their CD this last summer and we're about to finish mixing the album as I'm writing this. Besides Mike and Olivia, we brought in Richard Kriehn who plays duet fiddle on this track, and I added piano and bass. Piano and guitar textures will be a central part of the sound of Cassandra and I came up with a simple part I liked around Mike's guitar part. Olivia is another unusual young talent in the area; she just started at the University of Idaho this fall.

By the way, all the links I use to the website access the broadband version of the mp3s. There is also a lower-fi version on the site. If you have trouble playing the whole file, you might try downloading the other version.

2009-08-27T09:16:00.000-07:00

This gate/arbor and fence for my wife's garden was the big house project this summer. The fence boards, gates, and roof of the arbor are recycled cedar siding that I had stored in the barn for 18 (!) years. I knew I would use it someday! It is a little hard to see the old-fashioned wire fence between the boards, but that fencing used to run down the east edge of the garden all the way to the barn, and Dona and I pulled it up and reused it here. Like all recycling projects, ignorance is your friend. If we had known what a pain it was to unbend all the nasty kinks in that fencing we probably wouldn't have done it, but it sure is nice now that it's done. Dona made the gravel paths and did all the brickwork. And is planting a thousand plants and flowers inside.

I almost titled this post, "What I Did with my Summer Vacation." School just started this week at WSU, and it is a little weird not to be going through the stress of getting the semester going. Not so weird that I miss it, however. While teaching world history (which was my odd WSU gig of the last 15 years besides teaching music--odd because my training is in music, of course) was a great education, I have neglected a lot of important music work over the last two decades because I had this great day job. That WSU ended the World Civilizations program because of a stupid turf battle (having nothing to do with budget cuts, in spite of what they say publicly) is tragic for the quality of undergraduate education, but they don't really care, and ultimately it was a good thing for me. I may go back to teach a course in world music for the Honors College at WSU, but that is on the back burner. Still, today is a day I would be running around on campus, teaching my two sections, and with my son in his first week of second grade, he isn't around either...it is a little unsettling. I feel like I'm playing hooky to work in the studio today, but really it is that I've called in "well" for the rest of my life.

2009-07-23T09:09:00.001-07:00

Thomas Arthur was visiting earlier this month and he took this photo about a mile east of here just before the Idaho border. His inspiration is infectious, and after a few days of hanging out with him, I found myself in the studio to start recording my gourd banjo, and came up with this version of "Cluck Old Hen".

I have a little AKG (C411) mic that is stuck with some odd black goop on the head of the banjo and I ran that into a simple ART tube preamp and set it up to give me just a little warm distortion at the high points. That signal is sent to an "acoustic" amplifier (I have a Centaur amp) to give it some volume. Then I put a ribbon mic near the amplifier and a large diaphragm condenser mic in front of the banjo itself to record the actual sound in stereo. I think I will try a Sennheiser 421 on the amplifier next time, but this gave me just the hint of an electric guitar sound.

The other parts I just played in. A shaker made out of a little can (with rice inside, I think--it was given to me by a student and I've never opened it up, but it has a wonderful sound), my djembe (made by Jim Trivelpiece, who took most of the photos on my recent CDs), piano, and the acoustic bass sound on my Kurzweil.

2009-06-11T10:28:00.000-07:00

Clarkia in bloom in the prairie, 6.13.09

I realize that I entirely missed the month of May. I intend to be a regular correspondent, but May began with the end of my regular job at WSU (involving much grading), and the first year ever that I had some time to maintain the prairie in what is really Spring here. Starting this blog was coincident with my finding out that my position (in which a musician teaches world history since 1500 to freshmen at a major university) would be ending this semester. The actual music part of my position went away several years ago (see my first post), and now I was going to return to being a full-time musician, though I still had to finish out my last semester. Then I had to hit the ground running, catching up with Spring unfolding in all its splendor on the Palouse.

Eighteen years ago when I moved to this house, I took on a wonderful place with a soul, but I also took on a house that needed rebuilding from the inside out. I also took on about three acres of a decrepit alfalfa pasture that still had hints of native Palouse prairie in the fencerows. A lone clarkia flower would manage to reseed itself for about five years in the eastern part of the pasture. Mainly it was a mediocre hay field with a lot of nasty, nasty weeds.

I had no idea what to do with this land other than that I wanted it to be "low maintenance," and had a vague paranoia about the use of herbicides and the "right way to do things." Fortunately I planted 20 ponderosa pine sprouts, since they have taken on some presence in all that time (well, except for the ones I mowed over the years...they were less than two feet tall for years before they finally took off). One spring (1994?), Thomas Arthur and I went out and tried to pull all the salsify plants. We made two huge piles of them and burned them. It seemed somehow to inspire the salsify population, as though the immolation of their brethren put the fire into the bellies of the rebels who remained, since they came back with a vengeance the next year. I found out that field bindweed plants have several stages of evolution of the mother plant. When left unmolested for five or so years, waves of increasingly more lush, tightly-knit bindweed emerges from the mouth of Mom, vegetally upchucking her spawn into ecstatic reproduction. It's a cross between Alien and the botanical Kama Sutra.

I had identified the worst weed-choked area in the center of the pasture finally to carefully spray a little Roundup (I still used the little spray bottles, pumping by hand) and armed with a little Idaho fescue seed from Grassland West (a great source), I thought I would see how some native plants would do in the midst of that chaos. I asked the person at Grassland West how I can recreate Palouse prairie; she said, "Wow, great idea! No one's ever done it. Let us know how it goes!" I planted a few camas plants, some native aster and gallardia seed I collected from east of here, down by the river. Some of the plants actually lived.

About this time my neighbor had a grass-burning exercise get out of hand and about half my pasture burned. I assumed this was a blessing in disguise (since the house and garden weren't threatened). The worst damage was from the fire trucks that apparently made sport of running over my ponderosa pine seedlings. The fire kills the weed seeds, right? And now I can plant a load of grass seed and it will take over, without using evil chemicals!

It is true that a lot of the Idaho fescue and bluebunch wheatgrass I planted did sprout enthusiastically. And so did every Siberian Death Weed known to agriculture. In intense profusion. I began to see that I was going to have to embrace better living through chemistry. Anyone who says this can be done organically has not done it. If you try to cultivate out the weeds, you stimulate the weed seeds in the soil!

So I had to overcome my fear of herbicides in order to create a place where I wouldn't have to use them. I learned about Weed-b-gone and graduated to 2-4-D and generic Roundup you get in 2.5 gallon containers of concentrate with "sticker" and "spreader." I began by recycling the little pump bottles, went through a couple one-gallon pump sprayers, and finally graduated to the four-gallon backpack weapon-of-mass-destruction. I have a lyric to a song I haven't yet written, a kind-of punk country groove..."Winnin' the West with a gallon of Death..." In fact, every serious prairie restoration has had to make serious use of herbicides, but I was a slow learner.

I started by trying things on little areas, tentatively applying these weapons in fear of ruining the land somehow. And then life intervened--a push to make the house livable, which meant building a kitchen, which in my case meant recycling fir flooring rescued from an old department store in Palouse, being demolished because of damage from the Flood of 1996. I caught the guy tearing down the building just as he was confronting about 5,000 square feet of fir floor with a front-end loader puffing diesel smoke. I asked him what he was going to do with it and he said "firewood." I begged him for a couple of hours with my crowbar and he gave me the afternoon. I've been trimming the house with it ever since. Then I got divorced. The prairie began to be consumed with waves of prickly lettuce, sow thistle, mustard, that ever-present field bindweed. One guy keeping up with the house project and the prairie project...it wasn't possible.

In the last four years or so (being blissfully remarried), I have been able to spend enough time on this land to keep up with the work. This is the first year that I haven't had to mow and spray 2-4-D. The perennial native grasses have come back strong, while mowing the annual grass knocked it back. And I have learned that when I approach a new area that I really need to nuke it, as they say. I started to do that in the last few years, and areas that begin with me taking out every evil weed with Roundup (or 2-4-D in areas where I have good grass and I'm not about to plant anything), multiple applications from April through July if I have to, the natives I plant in fall really take off and fill in. In those areas, I am able to maintain the area by pulling a few odd items by hand, and I don't have to spray. In those central areas where I started by tentatively using Roundup, evil things moved back in, settling among the native plants. Those areas are the hardest to maintain now.

I did have a few success stories from my earlier efforts. Inspired by my neighbor Jim Roberts, who knows all the plants by their proper Latin names, and grows them in a spectacularly subtle garden that he tends by hand, I tried to tend one spot along the south fencerow of the property. Jim had spotted swale desert parsley (one of the plethora of lomatiums that thrive in this area), Douglas hyacinth, native delphinium, and prairie star growing there and so I wanted to see if I could cultivate out evil stuff and entice these plants to spread north. They did! And the birds planted a nice big elderberry there. I did some careful early spring and late fall spraying in that area and succeeded in eliminating some nasty weeds, and now that area has moved north 20 feet in places.

So, I take some real satisfaction in tall prairie grass and drifts of clarkia coming back, tall lupines budding out with puffballs of yarrow flowers floating over a sea of waving fescue. It is another ongoing composition of Palouse River music, coming into harmony at last.

2009-04-16T09:36:00.000-07:00

In 1990 I wrote a piece for choir called Canntaireachd ("caunderakt").

Canntaireachd is a Scots Gaelic word for a system of remembering bagpipe music through sung syllables. This idea of using syllables to remember music is also found in very sophisticated systems of remembering drumming patterns, as in the classical music of India. I had always wanted to make a piece around that and the puirt-a-beul sung dance music of Scotland, which I heard in several different contexts when I was there in the late 70s. To me the most interesting interpretations I heard were produced by the Bothy Band, a legendary Irish group that was just breaking up when I came to Dublin.

Listen to Canntaireachd

Armed with Donal Lunny's dense harmonies, some old records of Scottish field recordings (the first part of the piece is based on my twisted transcription of an old Alan Lomax recording of the legendary singer Mary Morrison of Barra in the Hebrides), and memories of a bunch of performances, I sat down in 1990 for the first time with notation software and a little MIDI rig. The idea of being able to hear ideas instantly in real time as they were written and edited was a catharsis for me. Because the classical European tradition focuses on the understanding of music through the filter of notation, allowing the non-corporeal experience of music outside of time, I had always had such a difficult time getting my notated music to feel right to me when I finally experienced it in real time. This epistemological flaw in the Eurocentric musical system as taught academically is the elephant in the room in the discipline of music, as far as I'm concerned. When I made music through playing in real time, repeatedly going through things in performance to create, revise, and tune a composition (starting with the Ellipsis experiment of the 1980s) I could get closer to what I was trying to do, but the vast number of repetitions of ideas in this process was ultimately numbing to me. I could and did produce work through these methods but both seemed to me inadequate to represent what I could imagine.

With this new technology, I was able to create music notation that like canntaireachd or solkattu could be experienced in time; I could not only properly revise and edit my ideas based on how they actually felt in real time instead of how I thought that they would feel through symbols, but I could also create textures that could make a machine swing. What better way to test this than on a group of classically-trained singers, singing an unfamiliar language of dance music? Once the piece speeds up into the Brachan Lom part, I stay only tangentially connected to any actual traditional music and derived most of this part of the piece from playing the fiddle, ending up in a place that is as much South Africa as it is Scotland.

Working with digital audio editing in the modern computer-based recording environment has been the next quantum leap for me, where music can be preserved and altered and the experience in time can be worked as though it were sculpture in sound. I have found the visual representation of sound files in a digital editing environment to be a new form of notation, actually. Not that traditional European notation isn't useful--it is enormously useful in causing performances and capturing extremely complex performance information--but these new technologies have transformed the way a composer can create music to such a degree that it is clear to me that the tired systems of European harmonic analysis and counterpoint are hopelessly anachronistic as the sole foundation of professional music education. Musicians learn how music works in spite of that education, not because of it.

2009-03-24T09:06:00.000-07:00

An old student of mine recently emailed me, asking if I had a recording of the Wind Quintet that was performed by the Solstice Woodwind Quintet back in 2005 at the WSU New Music Festival. I had actually forgotten all about this piece. There was quite a bit of drama going on when I wrote it...one of the people in the Solstice Woodwind Quintet was trying to get me thrown out of the department because a student had told her that I had been critical of European classical music (see the first post, below), and after asking me to write them a piece it appeared that they now weren't going to play it. Once the department had actually decided to eliminate my position, however, the Quintet deigned to play my piece once in performance and the last time in my recording studio. As you might imagine, I was not terribly inspired to work on anything for these people, and I ended up taking the sketches I had created for three movements before all of this unfolded and put them together in one piece. Actually, it seemed to work quite nicely, its somewhat fragmentary state being for me deeply expressive of the context of its composition and performance. Click here to hear the piece.

A problem for me with "Art Music," or whatever you want to call this peculiar withering branch on the old tree of European classical music, is that composers in this tradition are left with spending hours and hours creating a piece of music that generally will be played badly once. I was lucky this time that the Solstice Woodwind Quintet at WSU actually did work this up and gave its best performance right here in my studio.

My wife remembered this piece and reminded me that the original idea for the piece was that it was a kind of soundtrack for a "Three Mile Idaho," a ritual walk we take east of here. I have written about this ritual on my friend Ashley Cooper's very cool blog (she has a bunch of really cool blogs), "Rituals for Healthy Living," the link is below (scroll down to January 2009), if you would like to read that...You will notice the same photo as above, taken by Thomas Arthur, looking east from our back porch.

http://healthylivingrituals.blogspot.com/

2009-03-07T13:07:00.000-08:00

I am going to begin posting music that I'm working on, or things from my past that may not be accessible otherwise...

Click here to hear my arrangement of Beethoven's "Sonatine in C for mandolin and piano." Richard Kriehn is the extraordinary mandolin player, and I'm playing the piano part on guitar, tuned in "DADGAD." I have been producing a CD for Richard here this winter, and this is the only track I'm playing on. You've got to hear this guy play his transcription of the "Fuga" from Bach's Gm violin suite, but for that you'll have buy his CD, or maybe he'll post it eventually on his MySpace music page.

I have flirted with playing classical European music like this off and on for years. My first album had this exact piece, except that I played the mandolin part on the banjo. I love the music, and it is so fun and challenging to work these things out, but I realize that this isn't my language, exactly. It is as though I have learned to pronounce the music, ABBA-like, through my peculiar voice. Richard, though, can really do this stuff as a classical player, but he also has a wonderful way with the language of American music. It is thrilling to work with him, honestly.

2009-02-19T13:56:00.000-08:00

I was recently sent this image of myself from late December of 1992, in Lucknow, India. I think my friend Paul Brians took this photo, and somehow it languished on a WSU image database for years until a friend happened to see it and sent it. "Is that you?!"

I heard the musician on the left for awhile before I found him. I kept hearing bits and echoes of soaring melodies fading into the hum of the streets. And suddenly there he was, walking through the streets of Lucknow selling bamboo flutes (whistles, really) by playing very lovely improvisations on bhajan (Hindu hymn) tunes. So I bought one and finagled a lesson on the spot. Our lesson immediately attracted the attention of kids in the area who began pressuring parents to buy flutes and for a few minutes this fellow did very good business, but it was clear that he feared attracting too much attention and soon made a quick exit. I have always been drawn to this sort of Indian music that thrives under the radar of "classical" music, which, while wonderful, is also burdened by the rigorous hierarchies of British India as well as its own aristocratic heritage. Competitions, grades, judges. But there are plenty of musicians like this fellow, who played soulfully and beautifully without those institutions, whose improvisations may or may not correspond with classical ragas, but follow the rules of a more human raga.

This photo also serves as a cautionary tale to me, growing my hair long again...In six months I will look as scruffy as I did in this photo, except with a lot more gray hair.

2009-02-07T15:07:00.000-08:00

This is a blog about a musician (me), putting music into the world after almost two decades in a kind of seclusion. This first post is about my history in getting to this point, so read on if that interests you. I made the decision to focus on music in my life while in college (though I had played piano since I was eight, composed music since then, and had picked up several instruments in high school), as I became obsessed with trying to bring out the music that consumed my insides. I wasn't very good at this, but I was persistent. My training was nearly useless, even though I was good at all that stuff. I had gotten a little record deal with Flying Fish in the 1980s, doing somewhat-peculiar projects (the 5-string banjo as a "serious" instrument; minimalist music for folk trio), but my real "voice" (in a metaphorical sense) took much longer to emerge. As a matter of fact, part of that was about a year resurrecting my actual voice with an incredibly-gifted voice teacher, Kim Scanlon. Bringing that out was transformative to me, and I should write about that at some point. At about age 30 I decided to go to graduate school in Music Composition at UCSD, while I started work on my opera and recognized that I needed an entirely different set of musical skills, and needed to begin serious study of a bunch of things in order to bring my music to life, even if this work was going to take a very long time. I had to play the guitar. I had to reinvent, design, and build the guitar. That sort of thing.

I had the idea to start this blog on January 1st, 2009, as it was just at the end of 2008 that I decided to change my path significantly. Since 1990 I had been teaching at Washington State University, working on my music mostly in seclusion and slowly (I have been rebuilding an old house during this period as well). While teaching has been very stimulating in many ways, working with college students is consuming too. I also realize that struggling with the anachronistic Eurocentric agenda of music in academia has taken a toll. Here's an example: a student who did not do well in my course reported to another faculty member that I had said in class that I didn't like European classical music. That wasn't true, actually, but it doesn't matter. The funny thing was that this faculty member stormed into the chair's office demanding that I be confronted with this. More disturbing was that the chair actually called me in and said this had been reported and what did I have to say about that. I said that I didn't suspend my first amendment rights when I enter the classroom, and that it was a sad thing that we were even having this meeting.

I wasn't tenured or anything; I had always been in the crosshairs whenever budget cuts were threatened. In fact, I think my MA in Music Composition from University of California, San Diego is not even officially a terminal degree. The way I had gotten a teaching job was serendipitous...I had finished the MA, and been accepted into the PhD program at UCSD, but I had enough of that pretentious crowd and I longed to return to making my music without those demons looking over my shoulder, and when my wife at the time was recruited by the WSU English Department, I saw it as deliverance back to the Pacific Northwest.

I didn't have a position at WSU, but a much-loved music professor had just died suddenly and they were desperate for someone to teach a music appreciation course. I was hired on the Friday before classes started in August, 1990. I had team-taught a World Music course at UCSD, and was stunned that WSU had no such course, and so, in addition to teaching the Dead White Guys course (for which I felt qualified, being a future dead white guy), I was able to design an entire curriculum in World Music. For eleven years there was a substantial budget to produce two "World Music" concerts every summer (between $3-4K each summer!) and since no one at WSU seemed all that interested in what I was doing, I brought whomever I was interested in. A kind of state-sponsored ethnomusicology education--it was wonderful, actually.

Eventually "diversity" fell off their radar screen, and my budget evaporated. I should say that I poured my heart and soul into designing a course that empowered every student to explore whatever music moved them, in a context of exploration of the soulful languages of music from throughout the world, and allowed them to add their own heritage or one they chose to borrow that semester. It was the only place in any academic community I have been in where musicians could study whatever they wanted to study, exploring a personal path into the musical knowledge they determined was most important. It is a sad comment on music in academia that to treat an 18-year-old musician as an artist is a revolutionary act. The World Music course I developed was the only critical-thinking student-centered musical undergraduate course I have ever heard of. I didn't see it in graduate school either, honestly. Anyway, the course was extremely popular and there was considerable pressure on me to expand past the 150 students I taught in two sections. Because I insisted on essay exams that I could read myself, along with research writing, I refused to be pressured into expanding into huge sections with mechanical right-answer exams. They were making a serious profit on the 300 students I taught each year. They stopped funding the World Music curriculum in 2004 in budget cuts. The dying gasp was just this year, when the administration eliminated the course from the catalog along with other courses that had not been taught for three years. Sigh...

This experience has made me powerfully aware of my own musical creative process, seen in a kind of relief against what seems to me to be a soulless landscape of the corpse of European music. I have been trained in this tradition, but always as an outsider acutely aware of the dwindling number of musicians working entirely within the European classical tradition in a climate of intense musical creativity outside that tradition. I have been equivalently "trained" in traditional Irish fiddling (on the whole, a much more delightful journey), and self-taught in the traditional American manner on the banjo, guitar, and so on. Preservation of European classical music is not threatened, of course, but as an outsider it was obvious that the music theory and history I was required to study explained virtually nothing of value in most of the music I was drawn to. Once, when I was given the 20th century music theory course at WSU, I was required to teach that stuff, and I also got in trouble for throwing out Stockhausen and replacing him with Robert Johnson--come on, people, who is really the more important 20th-century musician here?! European music theory works fine for Beethoven, of course (though not for explaining what I find miraculous about his music), and there is much to enjoy in the European classical tradition. And this approach to music guarantees mastery of notation (a problematic way to represent music, but very useful in crafting performances), and detailed thinking about very subtle aspects of music. This discipline of awareness is absolutely important, though I think I could better teach it in a recording studio than in analysis of the resolution of Neapolitan sixth chords. I learned more in the studio with Micheal O'Domhnaill than from all my teachers in my academic work. As much as Bach was inspiring, there were any number of vital threads of music that moved me that were entirely out of the scope of serious academic inquiry, much of it more closely related to American musical roots in the music of West Africa and the traditional folk music of Western Europe. It is still common for my classical colleagues to dismiss actual American music, "popular" music, as beneath them.

This blog is going to explore my musical work this year (and maybe later, who knows), as I emerge from my self-imposed musical exile. At age 50. Better late than never. Maybe. Anyway, I also want to capture my thinking about my experience training young musicians, since the system seems to be such a miserable failure, and the discipline appears to be hopelessly unable to reform itself. The reason this needs to be done is because generations of creative young musicians can get virtually nothing in support or useful training and education from undergraduate music programs. The investment needs to be spent in a far more productive way. What could be done to help musicians connect to a path with a heart? Maybe even a path with a soul.