Cody Russell

Lesley’s new bow

Lesley got a new bow (apparently a few months ago, but I never noticed it until today) and it’s really, REALLY nice. It’s a Hill bow, which to me almost always means totally BADASS, and hers is apparently one of the better ones. And it’s in absolutely perfect condition. Lucky Lesley! Rock on. I’m jealous. =)

Steve Jarvi’s recital

I played in Steve’s conducting recital today, and it was really good. It was Elgar Elegie, Mozart Symphony No.29, and Copland “Appalacian Spring”. The Mozart didn’t go quite as well as I thought, but the other two were quite good. Actually, the Copland went very well and I found myself really enjoying the music a lot, which is unusual because I generally don’t get into Copland’s music.

Otello

Baltimore Opera is doing Otello right now and Paul Johnson gave me tickets to go to the dress rehearsal last night. I only stayed for the first two acts, but it was really good. I think the conductor was getting really pissed off at the audience in between the acts because they wouldn’t shut the hell up because they didn’t seem to understand that it was the dress rehearsal, not a concert.

Iizuka

My new viola is coming along nicely. I got an email from Hiroshi Iizuka a couple days ago saying that it is “finished in the white”, and that it will be ready sometime this summer. KICKASS!

This makes me a lot less jealous of Lesley’s beautiful new violin bow.

Johns Hopkins Tech Fellowship Application

Paul Johnson filed his statement for my application, so I am now officially finished with the application process. And just in time, too! It’s all due today.

This fellowship grant is so going to be mine. My project is cool, it’s useful to the school, I’m going to make it kick ass, and it’s just a badass project anyway. They’d better accept it! (I need the money!)

Master classes

We had two violists doing master classes this past week, and both on the same day. The first was Andrei so-and-so (I don’t have the sheet with me, and I can’t remember his last name). He’s the principal violist of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. I have a feeling his masterclass would have been incredible if it weren’t for the language barrier. His English consisted of “yes”, and “very good”. His Russian consisted of quite a bit more than that, but I think everyone else in the room’s Russian was about as good as his English. Except for the translator, possibly. She would listen to him talk and talk and talk about something one of the performers did, then she would translate something like, “He says you should play it louder.” or “He says you should play it faster.” So, that masterclass really sucked.

Then the next class, later that day, was this guy from the Metropolitan Opera. He was applying for the new head of chamber music position at Peabody. I really hate to say it, but his class was one of the worst things I’ve seen since I came to Peabody. His solo performance at the beginning was below the level we’re accustomed to seeing Ms. Chiang’s freshmen students perform. He played the first two movements of Schumann’s Märchenbilder, and even with the music right in front of him managed to come in totally wrong a few times. Then he played some sonata by someone we’ve never heard of, and it was an okayish piece and an okayish performance, then first movement of Brahms f minor sonata, which is a beautiful piece and an okayish performance. Then he taught a student string quartet, but had very little to say that was of any value at all to them. I didn’t stay for the second quartet, and almost nobody else did either. It was quite a disappointment, except for one thing: it made me think later on, “Maybe it’s not as hard to get a good orchestra job as I thought.” This was rather encouraging, and so I’ve been practicing harder.

CVS view for Nautilus

Wow!! Jens Finke is developing a CVS view for Nautilus, and it looks very cool! I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but of course never acted on my thoughts. It’s fantastic than Jens is working on one.

Check it out here!

Rebuilding from CVS..

The bootstrap process went just fine.. no problems there.

The next step says to sacrifice 5 sheep and pray to the God of CVS. However, I couldn’t find any sheep so I sacrificed five Baltimore city sewer rats instead. I think it’ll work just as well.

Now rebuild.sh is running.

GTK+ Documentation..

I’ve got something about ready to commit to CVS today. I had written a lot of a GtkTreeView tutorial already, but I wrote it in HTML and I wrote it sort of in the same way I wrote that old ETree tutorial, which was very different from the rest of GTK+’s documentation. Jonathan wanted it to go into GTK+’s reference docs, so I started rewriting it in SGML and in a different tone. I think I’m going to flesh it out a bit more later and expand it into multiple pages and stuff. Perhaps add a couple screenshots to it. We’ll see.

Breaking down doors looks like a lot of fun

Last night Cameron’s key ceased to work on the lock that tries to prevent people from getting into his apartment. Actually, it would be more correct to say that the lock ceased to work correctly with Cameron’s key, because there was nothing wrong with the key. It would turn in the lock, about 45 degrees I think, then stop and wouldn’t turn any further. Cameron had a gig today, and the landlords don’t have an emergence telephone number so Cameron had no choice but to break the door down. It looked like great fun, except it looked like it might have been a little rough on the shoulder. Cameron said it really wasn’t, though. The wood on the inside of the door was old and weak, and after about three whacks from Cameron’s charging body the door caved in and we gained entrance.

Bartók String Quartets

I’ve been listening to the Alban Berg Quartett’s recording of the Bartók quartets today. These are such fantastic pieces, and I’ve never played any of them. I may never get to either, but who knows.

There is so much good literature for string quartet and so little opportunity to ever work on any of it. I expected Peabody would be a great place for this, but it’s really not.

Campus mayhem

For some reason the idea of being able to run around my school campus in a Quake map has always been an extremely attractive idea to me. This was a big dream at UTA, but it was always a ridiculous one because the UTA campus is too big to make into a realistic game map, and the music department building would be too boring of a map.

The Peabody Institute happens to be a perfect campus to build into a game map because it is relatively small: it is about the size of one city block. In addition, it is fully enclosed so it would be easy to figure out where the end of the map is, as opposed to UTA where you have streets leaving the school. Peabody has several not-very-large buildings that each have 4-5 floors in them, and in the middle is a big plaza/courtyard area. Excellent sniping ground. Plus, you can go through the tunnel under the plaza to get to the far building. The Spiral Staircase would be especially nice looking, I think, but would really need a game like Quake3 that can do nice curves and stuff.

JHU Tech Fellowship

I submitted my proposal today, and hopefully PJ will followup soon and we can get this in. This is going to rock so hard.

Bach Partita

I’m supposed to play the first four movements in studio class after spring break, plus I’m also supposed to play the first four pages of Chaconne in my lesson on that day. Fear me!

Ugh!

Non-fresh Krispy Kreme Donuts make us PUKE!

Hey, I recognize that code!

So I got some email from some random guy in France last week. He says that he happens also to be writing some music scoring application for Gnome, and that we should combine our codebases and work on one project instead of two. This seemed reasonable, and so I answered a couple questions about Ludwig van that he asked, and I asked him to send me the code for his program, which is called Geddy. Someone tells me that there is a bass player named Geddy in a rock band or something, so I wonder if that was the origin of the name of this software. Who really cares? So I’m looking through the code and realizing, “This sort of sucks”. I couldn’t get it to build either. But not only did it suck, it looked really familiar. I had seen this code before somewhere. So then I notice that the fonts from Ludwig van are included here, and some of my old cut-and-pasted code from Ludwig van was in there also. I think there may be some other stuff of mine in there, but it doesn’t really matter because then I realized why the code was so familiar: it was basically an almost-exact copy of Elliott Lee’s old program, GEM (GNOME Electronic Musician). That’s right, code that everyone, including Elliott, had thought disappeared back in like 1999 or something suddenly reappears with all the functions renamed from gem_foo() to geddy_foo(), and with the AUTHORS file replaced with this French guy’s name and no other. So I mentioned it to Elliott this morning, and he was highly amused and nearly fell over laughing. Indeed, he had completely forgotten about GEM (and probably wishes he could again now).