CCRMA; also other folks' pix
1) Computer music at Stanford; 2) Things people do with old pictures.
A few days ago I promised a report on this weekend's Newstage festival at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
I had a wonderful time. They're smart, thoughtful, deeply silly people, working on some very interesting stuff. They're celebrating twenty years at the Knoll, which is the magnificent building they inhabit; it was hit hard by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and for years the third floor was abandoned to barn owls. The barn owls still live there, but on the outside of the building, and the third floor is a wonderful, comfortable, acoustically terrific performance hall.
On another note entirely, the rain's stopped around here, and that means that it's now garage sale season. I try to avert my eyes, because I have plenty of stuff already, but I'm still regretting a dollar I didn't spend at a Midwestern estate sale a few years ago. It was a travel diary written in the eary sixties by a querulous middle-aged couple on a package tour of Europe. They didn't take pictures, but there were faded, greenish postcards interleaved with the handwritten pages. It felt strangely voyeuristic to read the entries, and that's partly why I didn't buy it. Now I'm wishing I had. I don't want that cranky couple's observations to go forgotten. I'm not sure what I'd have done with them, but there are plenty of examples.
Readers in the United States probably already know about the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, who write songs and build performances around sets of slides rescued from garage sales.
On a smaller, more intimate scale, John C. Ralston of Lawrence, Kansas undertook a three-month project based on a 1925 yearbook from Hamline University in Minnesota. Every day he'd focus on one of the graduates, taking an hour or so to draw a portrait based on the yearbook picture, then posting the portrait to a blog, listing the graduate's clubs and affiliations. Ralston's moody treatment of the graduates' old-young faces, along with their uncanny-valley names (Lilydaisy Wenzel, Haven Handscom, Olga Heggen) and their earnestly stated enthusiasms, make for a strange, evocative lineup. Hardly any of them smile (the aforementioned Olga, who's a sociology major -- pretty avant-garde for 1925, I'd guess -- is one of the rare exceptions. Ralston eventually moved the project from its original blog location to the photo hosting site Flickr; you can now see the entire graduating class as a set there.
