Cody Russell

Piano quintet

I’m playing the Dvorak piano quintet with some people for this week and next week, and then we’re performing it on Sunday at the end of next week over at SMU. It’s really fun.

Mahler recording

I found a recording of Mahler Symphony No. 1, recorded by Berlin Philharmonic with Claudio Abbado. It’s really good, I think, and it cost me only about $5. Not bad! =)

Back from Philly!

And my trip rocked. It was quite surprising that I actually got on the plane so easily going there and returning, since I was flying stand-by. But I had no problems, really. We just barely made it on the plane returning, but we made it.

I had a great time! Mr. Iizuka, who is making my new viola, had several instruments for me to play on. I found one, and absolutely fell in love with it. And it just happened to be for sale! Unfortunately, it was not Mr. Iizuka’s viola to sell, it was Emanuel Vardi’s viola to sell, and I cannot afford what he is asking for it. Mr. Iizuka made it for him back in 1982, and now he is selling it. I came home and found a CD I have of Emanuel Vardi playing the Bliss sonata, opened up the booklet inside and I see the exact viola that I played on! It was absolutely the perfect instrument for me! 16.75 inches, sloped shoulders in the d’amore style that only Mr. Iizuka does. In fact, Mr. Vardi’s viola is the very first of that style I think he said. It was so easy to play on, and had the most wonderful sound. Unfortunately, Mr. Vardi is asking >$30,000 for the instrument. So, I asked Mr. Iizuka to make me one just like it! He begins work on my new instrument “imminently”. I’m not sure how long from now that will be, but I am patient.

Quartet readings

Today was very, very cool.. I got some people together to read through some quartets for fun. A cellist from my school, a violin student from TCU, and a violinist from Fort Worth Symphony all got together today to read through a bunch of music. We read through Brahms c minor quartet, Beethoven Op. 59/3, Grieg, and Mendelssohn Op. 44/1. We skipped the second movement of the Mendelssohn just because it is long and we were getting tired, but otherwise we read the entire quartets of the others. Naturally, the Beethoven was my favorite of them, and the Grieg was my least favorite of them.

Out of town

I’m going to Philadelphia for a couple days, so I guess Ludwig van won’t have any sort of notation working for a few days longer than I said.

New rendering, screenshots

Okay, I still don’t have notation rendering yet but it should be working, at least in a simple form, in a few days. Some of the new rendering structures are working already. Here you can see four rendered measures, each in their own part. I just finished adding time signatures this morning also, so here is a screenshot in 3/4 time and here is a screenshot in cut time.

New code

I started work on the actual notation part of Ludwig van finally. This is where it gets really difficult, I think. I spent some time thinking about how to organize it best, and I think I’ve come up with a good solution. I started writing the code today. I’ll probably probe Sopwith, msw, and Federico for suggestions once I get this code working somewhat, and see how wrong I was and what I can do to correct it.

I feel like what I’m doing right now is really good, though, and it’s really important to me that I write code before I get feedback. I really wasted a lot of time (like, months) just thinking about how to do things without actually sitting down and writing code. At the time this seemed like a good idea; I thought by the time I wrote the code it would be that much better of code. However, I’m discovering on my own now that things don’t work that way. Thinking through your design is one thing, and it’s good, but you can’t envision the entire thing and work out the bugs on your own unless you’re like Nikola Tesla, and I don’t think anyone is. Writing working code is the only way to really be productive. If you have to write code, get it wrong, then re-write it to get something better then do it. That’s just fine, I think, and you really learn a lot from doing that

Cleveland Orchestra

I just heard Cleveland Orchestra perform tonight.

Oh my God.

Yeah, this was probably the best orchestra concert I’ve ever heard in my life.

Program consisted of Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4.

New screenshot

Here is my latest screenshot of Ludwig van.

Ludwig van

I’ve been making a lot of commits the past few days. A couple commits yesterday added the “pos” attribute to both <group> and <instrument> tags. They’re used to sort the instruments in the correct order on the score.

Gnome stuff

Some really rude kid came on #gnome last night bitching about a webpage that lists dependencies and saying how unprofessional we are to let this get by incorrect. And I’m all, “Yeah, we’re unprofessional. Duh!” I went ahead and fixed the webpage once I realized I have access to fix it, though.

As much commercializing as free software is having, I think people are forgetting that it is still free software and that a lot of us who write it are full-time students working jobs not relating to computers, and we’re writing this code in our spare time. Maintaining webpages about the software isn’t our duty to the people who use the software! I don’t have any obligation to these people. I’m involved in writing stuff because it’s code that I think I will actually use. I write code for me!

Practice

I got a lot of good practice time in today. I haven’t had a lesson in a really long time, but I’m still managing to learn a lot on my own. I learned the third page of my Wienawski caprice and started a little on the fourth page. I’ll start working on the Peabody orchestra audition excerpts soon. Apparently there are also orchestra auditions for Annapolis Symphony and Maryland Symphony coming up soon, and I might take those auditions if I can.

Tripping some more

My teacher and a group of people are going to go canoeing down the Brazos river sometime near the beginning of June. The canoes will be split into pairs of people thusly: she and her husband, two of her high school students, one of which is an Eagle Scout so he can be our Fearless Leader, Josh and Glori, and then Short Megan and me.

While I think this is going to be incredibly fun, I also think it sounds like a recipe for disaster and so I definitely need to bring my camera along to get whatever misfortune befalls Josh and Glori, or whatever mischief Short Megan gets into, on film.

Ludwig van

Another large commit today. I moved a huge amount of code out of LudwigInstrumentList into a new LudwigInstrument object, and lots of other various changes. Introduced the new <profile> XML tag into the instrument loader. The idea of the <profile> tag is to let you specify attributes about instruments for various levels of difficult, or profiles, that you want to write your music in. You could have a “Junior High” profile, which might discourage the use of treble clef in viola parts and limit the ranges of brass instruments, and then have a “Professional” profile that does not introduce any such limitations. Also, LudwigInstrumentAddDialog now installs its flagged instruments into LudwigDocument when you hit “OK”. LudwigDocument has a new “instrument_added” signal, which will be connected to by LudwigView. This is what I’m about to go hack on right now.

Quartet readings

I think on Monday I’m getting together with Amirosh and Amela, from school, and Heather, from Fort Worth Symphony, to read some Beethoven quartets. This is assuming that Amela can get off work to do it. I’m looking forward to it, though, and I know Amirosh and Heather are too. Also, I saw Ian, a cellist who used to go to our school, today and he wants to try to get some people together to read some chamber music for fun. If we could find one more violist we would try a Brahms sextet. It seems so strange to me that we’re having trouble finding a violist here. That’s never been a problem in the past.

My old quartet

I talked to Gabriel tonight, and we’re going to try to get together for lunch sometime next week after I get back from my Baltimore/Philadelphia trip. I want to find out what school Lauren is going to next year also. I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but I found out that I won some sort of award from SMU for playing in this quartet. I find this humorous, because my own university would never give me an award for doing anything, I think, but I get this award from a school I’ve never been enrolled in. =)

Memento

Gerry is in town, and we went to see Memento. Good movie. Unexpected ending. Awesome opening shot. Very well made, I think.

Tripping

It looks like I’m probably going next week to Philadelphia and then probably out to Baltimore to find an apartment. Yea, finally!