Prairie, July 2020

Early evening in the prairie, 7/13/20. 

Lupines in the foreground, Scarlet gilia, Gaillardia, Clarkia... This area was restored in 2014-15.  It takes awhile to catch on.

Published

Today I found out that my composition for choir, "Canntaireachd," will be published by Pavane Music Publishing, a real publishing company in the LA area specializing in choral music.  I don't have a release date, and during this pandemic adventure they are in a kind of suspended animation, waiting for a time when people will again sing in choirs. Though I am officially an old guy, and have worked as a composer for four decades, I have never had a piece published.  Flying Fish supposedly "published" my music on their records, but you couldn't buy a score anywhere.  People who commissioned my work liked it, but they had no idea how to reach publishers.  This will be actual music that people can buy, and their choir can sing it, assuming we get past this odd time of pandemic and choirs again gather to sing.

I had written this piece for the male vocal ensemble Chanticleer in 1990.  They didn't commission it, but a guy I went to college with was in the group, and they came through UCSD as I was finishing up my Masters degree.  I met them for lunch there in San Diego, and I pitched an idea of a piece for them based on sung dance music from Scotland.  This is what you do if you're a composer.  They encouraged me and the director said they would absolutely look at what I sent them, and I sent them my finished piece in the fall of 1990.  I tried to write something that would be a showpiece, and I sent it off sure that they would love it.

It's hard to explain this, but I am definitely an "outsider" in the world of composers.  I never fit in with the academic scene, and I would never be hip enough, or live in NYC, to reach that artsy world.  I have had no luck whatsoever in reaching anyone who would publish my music.  I thought maybe one of my liturgies would be published, but... no one would even ever look at them.  Without a mentor promoting my music to a publisher in the academic world, nothing would ever happen there.  I never have had any success with my music unless I can get it directly to audiences or to artists.  So, I was hopeful that "Canntaireachd" would open a door for me with Chanticleer.

But I heard nothing for 13 years.  I wondered if I had made some horrible error, but when the WSU Madrigal Singers performed it, it completely rocked.  It was a mystery.  Then, out of the blue in 2003, it turned out that Chanticleer was performing it all over the world.  Audiences loved it, but they wouldn't commission anything ("we haven't seen enough of your work..."), didn't put it on a record.  I got nothing.  Not a penny.  There is some weird story there, but I have no idea...  So, the music just sat there in my files. 

Then, I happened to get interviewed a month ago for a piece in an online music magazine about what musicians are doing during the quarantine, and my project, as a traditional fiddle player (who can read, but still...) to memorize the Bach solo violin "Chaconne" intrigued the editor (I'm getting that done!  I have the first 2/3 and chunks of the last third...).  The writer decided to look at my still-at-the-moment not-entirely-slick website, and because she is in a choir, decided to listen to the posted live performance of "Canntaireachd."  She loved it and wondered where she could get a copy of the score for her choir.  I laughed and said that I was a completely unpublished composer.  It made my day how stunned she was at that, and she put me in touch with Pavane Music Publishing, and today they agreed to publish this piece.  Just like that.  

Rescue plants

Sugar bowls (Clematis hirsutissima), blooming in the prairie this afternoon.

Three years ago, late in the morning, I got a phone call from my friend Diane, who was walking out on the gravel roads near her home, and though the fields all around were full of wheat and there were no other native plants there, alongside the road was a mature Sugar bowls plant in bloom.  A road crew had just applied gravel to the road and graders were spreading it out, ripping up all vegetation on the sides of the road.  She asked if I wanted to come out and try to save it.  OF COURSE!  Though normally, it is extremely bad form to dig up a mature native plant like this, this plant was getting dug up, one way or the other.  Either left to compost in the drainage ditch, or maybe... it could be dug up and survive in my prairie.  It came out in two chunks, a big one and a smaller one, and both lived, but there had been no blooms.  Until this week.  This is a beautiful plant with an enchanting bloom, which is an unusual clematis in that it doesn't produce vines.

Finishing my guitar

It took me 20 years!  When I really finished this guitar in 2001, I made a conscious decision to see where wear actually occurred before I installed a pick guard.  I had a nice piece of Indian rosewood to use--I can't abide those clear plastic things--but I wanted to make it as small as I could, so it didn't act as a mute.  I was pleased to see that I had never hit the top with a pick scrape, but just my right hand fingers brushing against the top did start abrading it a little.  Here is the guitar, photographed a few years ago.  You can see the abrasion in the pick guard area, especially if you click on the photo.   

I started by making the rosewood pick guard, then I masked off the area and spent a long time carefully scraping until I got down to wood and got a perfectly flat surface.  I was surprised at how much work it was getting the finish to match (I'm using Tru-Oil, a hand-rubbed oil finish). 

I strung it up this afternoon, and it sounds like its old self! 

Summer in the prairie

Silky lupine and Clarkia bloom a few weeks ago...

Oh, there is evil out there.  Medusahead grass, for one, and Prickly lettuce, which I will soon spray, but there is beauty, too!  Both Sugar bowl clematis (Clematis hirsutissima) I moved last year are alive and kicking (though not blooming this year), and I have been tickled to see that a bunch of Oregon checkermallow I planted... four years ago?... have survived and bloomed for the first time.

But this next thing is the treasure.  I didn't plant it.  Did birds plant this?  I have no idea.  But, under the Ponderosa pine in the far southeast corner of the property, as I was mowing (sort of a last-ditch effort on the Medusahead, which won't work, but might slow it down for a week or two until I spray it)... I came upon two blooming Fool's onions (Triteleia hyacinthina).

I love the free gifts from the goddess...

New Prairie in Bloom

Clarkia blooming today...

In the southern part of the prairie, plants that I have planted using the "divot" method are starting to come up.  Clarkia is such a spectacular little annual flower, and while this year has not been great for a lot of flowers here--larkspur, for example was oddly absent--clarkia seems to be coming on for a fine show.  I don't understand the cycles, but several plants go in these waves, and then come back.  Scarlet gilia has done it. 

Lately my work has been mowing.  Large areas which have native grass and a fair number of perennials (which of course can be mowed) also have a lot of cheatgrass, the annual-grass scourge of Western ranchers.  I mowed earlier, and this seemed to take out about half of the cheatgrass and properly encourage other species, but I've had to go back out and get the second generation.  Apparently some researcher at WSU has come up with a fungus that attacks cheatgrass, and I look forward to it.  In the meantime, mowing is this option I've got, and it is pretty effective, if you keep going after it. 

Gaillardia is making a comeback.  Many of the divots I planted with local seed from Thorn Creek are in their second year and producing blooms.  I had many clumps from a population down the river, but one by one they have been consumed by voles/pocket gophers, so they must be tasty.  Then I was trying the rake planting method that simply does not work with Gaillardia, and I have nearly lost my original population.  I will be scouring the areas that they were thriving in years past for any sprouts to nurture this year...

You can see in the background, though, that I had to surgically mow through here for the evil cheatgrass... sigh...

May

Here is the "standard view" of the north part of the prairie today.  Arrowleaf balsamroot and geraniums are visible, and several of the shrubs are getting big.  I've had to mow in the foreground for cheatgrass.  There is a fair amount of native grass and various perennial plants and flowers there, but mowing doesn't hurt them and does knock the cheatgrass back.

So many of these plants take a long time before they bloom.  This balsamroot (below) took eight years before it bloomed for the first time last year.

In 2011, a Palouse garden tour included our property, and a person on the tour who lived near Kamiak Butte told me that she had camas on her property, and that I could collect seed.  So, that seed was planted in 2012.  The first camas from that seed bloomed this year, six years later!