Bowed Piano

The Bowed Piano: Fishing for a New Sound

By Tom Huizenga

Morning Edition, February 5, 2008 - What happens when you take a perfectly good invention — one that's been around for several hundred years — and completely rethink it? That's what an enterprising musician and composer named Stephen Scott has done with the grand piano.

For the past 30 years, Scott has been exploring, obsessing over, and pushing the sound of the piano far beyond its traditional boundaries, creating a new kind of instrument he calls the bowed piano.

To get a sense of what the bowed piano is, imagine a grand piano with the lid lifted off. Ten musicians crowd around, leaning over the innards of the instrument, like a team of surgeons performing an operation.

Scott says you won't find any traditional-looking bows — like the ones violinists use — in his ensemble.

"The primary sound is produced by a bow of nylon fish-line, which is rosined, and that's just threaded under the piano string and across it. There's another kind of bow, which is a stick of wood which has horse hair affixed to it, and that's rubbed against the strings to produce a short, percussive sound."

The bowed-piano ensemble also uses guitar picks, Popsicle sticks, tongue depressors, and even rubber plumbing tape to expand the palette of sound colors for Scott's compositions.

Even as a kid, Scott always seemed to be searching for a sound. He played in high-school jazz bands, striving for his own unique approach. Then he studied music in Ghana alongside one of his idols, the minimalist American composer Steve Reich.

But Scott finally found his sound in a concert hall in 1976. He was amazed to see a pianist pull a single strand of fishing line through the strings of a piano, and by the time the concert was over, Scott had already envisioned a vast expansion of that idea. The following year, he formed his bowed-piano ensemble, and premiered his first composition.

Scott set up his first bowed-piano ensemble at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, where he still teaches. He has also created ensembles in Ireland and Estonia.

Scott's new composition, Pacific Crossroads for Bowed Piano and Orchestra, [received] its world premiere Feb. 7 at the American Composers Festival in Orange County, Calif.


To listen to this story (and more) Click Here.

To see video Click Here.

Space Settlement 2009 Calendar Art Contest

Gallery for Space Settlement 2009 Calendar Art Contest

This is the Grand Prize Winner. Click on photo to enlarge.

Click here to see the other winners.

by Raymond Cassel

Category: Martian Settlements

Description: Dear Dad, The sand storm has finally ended. Despite the lower gravity, the weight of drifting sand is still problematic on our more delicate structures. As you can see we are starting the clean up on the greenhouses. Talk to you soon.

Medium/Tools Used: Lightwave 6.5, Poser 5, and Photoshop CS3.

Live better with less

Big Idea

Live Better With Less

By Mark Matousek, May & June 2007

Our high-powered economy is based on growth, growth, growth. So why, asks author Bill McKibben, is all our stuff making us less and less happy?

Attention shopaholics and supersizers. Go nowhere near an important new book called Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books, 2007). You may never indulge the same way again.

Author Bill McKibben, the Harvard-trained economist and activist who’s forged a career reporting on such hot-button topics as overpopulation and global warming, wants to send a shock wave through our retail-addicted culture. “The idea that more is better, which has been orthodoxy for the past 50 years, no longer matches reality,” McKibben tells me from the rural Vermont home he shares with his wife, author Sue Halpern, and their 14-year-old daughter. “More stuff doesn’t make people happier.” In fact, once our basic needs are met, the very opposite seems to be true.

In the past decade the burgeoning field of happiness studies has overturned many of our basic assumptions about where satisfaction comes from, how long it lasts, and where we should focus our energy. The results of our choices are not as life-changing as we think they’ll be (the novelty passes; the credit card bills remain), and many of capitalism’s long-standing assumptions—that acquisitions improve our lives—turn out to be a load of hooey. Consider a have-versus-have-not example from a visit McKibben made to a factory in rural China, where he spoke with a worker named Liu-Xia. Making small talk, he asked Liu-Xia, 18, if she owned a stuffed animal: he’d noticed that many of the girls in the factory dorm had one on their beds. She began to cry. She couldn’t afford such an item, she said. Later, when McKibben brought her a stuffed dog, “the girl was as pleased as I’ve ever seen a person.” For McKibben the contrast was clear. His own daughter, he notes, has a roomful of Beanie Babies. How could a stuffed animal possibly have the same meaning for her? “In that world,” McKibben says, thinking of Liu-Xia, “possessions still deliver.”

Not so in the United States, where the Eisenhower-era ideal of bigger cars, faster foods, and automatic everything has been nearly as devastating to our nation’s psyche as rampant consumption has been to the earth. Once measured to have the happiest citizens in the developed world, the United States is now number 23, according to research compiled at the University of Leicester. Alcoholism, suicide, and depression rates have soared, with fewer than one in three Americans claiming to be “very happy.” Even more frightening is the trickle-down effect of this malaise on our kids. Studies suggest that today’s average American child reports suffering higher levels of anxiety than the average child under psychiatric care in the 1950s.

“All that material progress—and all the billions of barrels of oil and millions of acres of trees that it took to create it—seems not to have moved the satisfaction meter an inch,” says McKibben. “It’s as if we’ve done an experiment in whether consumption produces happiness and determined that it doesn’t.”

The reasons for this paradox are complex. In part, as with McKibben’s daughter, it’s because we all have more than enough stuffed animals in our lives. But McKibben sees a link between our isolated, overstuffed homes and a breakdown in community—the unseen emotional price of cheap goods and big lives. “Our global economy comes at the cost of local economy and human connection,” he says. The pursuit of mammon “has turned us ever more into individuals and ever less into members of a community, isolating us in a way that runs contrary to our most basic instincts.” We scrimp and save for the bigger house, only to find ourselves more cut off from friends and family.

Suburban sprawl has been an undeniable culprit in our widespread alienation. With population density plummeting, and houses getting bigger, the likelihood of bumping into neighbors drops enormously. “An awful lot of boomers began their adult lives doing extremely idealistic things,” he adds. “Many of these ideals fell away as we became immersed in consuming. Now we need to find our way back.”

There are straightforward ways of scaling down our lives. Consider the local farmers’ market, now the fastest-growing sector of our food economy. The average bite of food an American eats travels some 1,500 miles before it reaches our table. Yet it takes a tenth as much energy to grow foods locally, and shoppers are reported to have about ten times as many social interactions at their farmers’ market than in the aisles of, say, Wal-Mart.

To test his own theory, McKibben decided to see if he and his family could make it through a glacial Vermont winter subsisting exclusively on food produced near their home in the Champlain Valley. The author specializes in real-life experiments: he walked from Vermont to New York for his memoir, Wandering Home (Crown Journeys, 2005). The results of this “year of eating locally” are fascinating. The imperative of finding food nearby, while time-consuming, helped forge bonds with neighbors he’d never met and deepened his intimacy with the landscape. Newly connected to his home, McKibben emerges from his citrus-deprived winter a deeper and healthier man, having consumed not a single processed food. “The winter permanently altered the way I eat,” he says. “It left a good taste in my mouth. That good taste was satisfaction.”

Not all of us can afford to give up the bargain prices at superstores. McKibben-the-economist is sensitive to this, though he entreats us to view expenditures differently. While farmers’ market prices may be a bit higher, local foods are fresher (and tastier) and have less impact on the environment. The idea, he says, is not to forgo bulk-item bonanzas completely but to seek a balance between convenience and the economics of neighborliness. “Efficiency has been oversold as a virtue,” he says. “The ability to produce as fast and cheaply as possible has ruined countrysides and abused people and animals.” Study after study shows that our overreliance on processed foods is contributing to a ballooning national obesity problem.

So how did we get here? McKibben traces our troubles to 1712, with the invention of the first practical steam engine. Overnight the energy produced by burning coal could replace a team of 500 horses walking in a circle. “Suddenly 100 percent growth in the standard of living could be accomplished in a few decades, not a few millennia,” says McKibben. It also explains how human beings have used, shockingly, more raw materials since World War II than in all previous recorded history.

The toxic effects of this struck him hard during his China trip, where in Beijing the sky was so polluted “you could stare straight at the sun.” In an inefficiently energized world where getting rich means getting dirty, copycatting the American lifestyle could push our planet over the brink. At current rates there will be some 1.3 billion Chinese as rich and consumer-minded as our middle class by 2031. “But if the Chinese owned cars like we do, they would add 1.1 billion cars to the 800 million already on the road,” he says, not even mentioning India, Indonesia, and nations in Africa. “If the Chinese ate meat the way we do, they’d consume two thirds of the world’s grain harvest by themselves. The earth will never accommodate that.

“Of course the poor nations of the world need to develop. But if they do so using our model, the planet will break under the strain. We in the rich nations must change. We need to figure out a world that works for everyone.” Doing so just might make us happier.

Mark Matousek is a New York-based writer who’s never liked to shop. He wrote about Joan Didion in the March & April issue of AARP The Magazine.

The tip of the iceberg

The Saws
by Robert Pinsky February 11, 2008

The saying dead as a doornail is still dead as a doornail:
Whatever a doornail might be or was, long lost in the dark,








The dark, the dark—not always deepest before dawn, Pal.
Back then, passing a graveyard you might actually whistle:

No walk in the park, a black back street back in the day.
Zombie expressions, Buddy, as thin as a spare dime.

Generated by generations they still stagger the castle,
Wan, rife. Benighted or bedazed by the March of Time,

Time, time. The old saws hardly ever anymore called saws:
Kiss the cat and you kiss the fleas. And That’s the story of my life.

Steve Reich: 'Music for 18 (Cornfed) Musicians'

Steve Reich: 'Music for 18 (Cornfed) Musicians'

Weekend Edition Sunday, February 3, 2008 - Now more than three decades old, Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians has become an icon of 20th-century American music.

At almost an hour in length, the piece unfolds like a slowly shifting dream, with sections of repeated material ebbing and flowing around a cycle of 11 chords. It's scored for strings, percussion, woodwinds and voices, and takes tremendous concentration on the part of the 18 players. To this day, the work is mainly performed by the composer and his loyal group of musicians.

It took courage, then, for a group of players at a small Midwestern college (not known for its music department) to mount a performance of Music for 18 Musicians — not just for their own amusement, but to play at the high-profile Bang on a Can Festival in New York City.

Under the direction of Bill Ryan, the New Music Ensemble at Grand Valley State University — amid the cornfields of western Michigan — practiced the music for nearly a year. Ryan recalls a mixed response when he first announced the idea to his students.

"A few people couldn't wait until I finished my sentence before they wanted to sign up; they knew the piece. But a few didn't know who Steve Reich was." Rehearsals were tough going, initially, but Ryan says he saw a breakthrough eventually.

"We had been looking at the work for about six weeks, and there were moments in the rehearsal where I started to see the players come out of their own parts — relaxing, looking around, using their ears, listening to parts that were happening across the room. I knew then that our concert would be fine."

Ryan and five members of the ensemble flew to New York to watch Reich's ensemble perform the piece and strategize with them about how to play it.

All the hard work came to fruition last spring, with Ryan and his ensemble playing Music for 18 Musicians early in the morning at the Winter Garden Atrium.

"It was magical to see my ensemble in that environment," Ryan says. "Here we are, this group from the middle of the Midwest that no one had ever heard of, playing at this significant new-music event. It was just glorious to see the sun come up as we were finishing the piece."

Their performance charmed the critics. Alex Ross of The New Yorker wrote the group "succeeded in holding 400 listeners transfixed at 4 a.m."

Ryan and his New Music Ensemble have documented their long journey into Reich's Music for 18 Musicians with a new surround-sound recording of the piece.

To listen to this broadcast Click Here.

To see a video of a rehearsal of the New Music Ensemble Click Here.

Sand Hill Crane

From a friend:

These photos were taken in the Suntree area of Florida ~Viera~ south of Cocoa & Titusville.

A Sand Hill Crane couple recently had an exciting addition to their family. When they built their nest near the water's edge it immediately drew attention of passers by. Soon there were two eggs sitting on top of the nest and the mother on top of them.

The really curious passed by the site every morning and would stop their cars to get out and see if there were any new cranes yet. Many brought cameras of all shapes and sizes and would stand near the water for long periods of time hoping to catch a photo of the hatching.

Robert Grover, a dentist, didn't actually catch the birth but, he sure did capture some fabulous shots of the Momma, Papa and baby (the second egg never hatched). Then he put together a slide show with music that is just too good to not share it. (Click on Photo to start slide show).

TRANSPORTATION DISPUTES: 300+ DAYS AND HOLDING

TRANSPORTATION DISPUTES: 300+ DAYS AND HOLDING

By Neal Peirce
© 2008 Washington Post Writers Group

WASHINGTON -- Three hundred and how many more days until we get a new president?

Two gross missteps by the Bush administration, this time tripping up badly needed national transportation improvements, make the question acute.

After two years of intense work, a broad-based, bipartisan federal transportation commission mandated by Congress unveiled America’s first-ever, 50-year, balanced plan to repair and expand the highways, bridges, ports and rail systems the country needs to prosper internally and globally.

























But because the report, released last month, pointed mostly to public funding instead of responding directly to “consumer demand” (meaning private financing), Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters and the two other Bush administration appointees dissented, bemoaning the 12-member panel’s failure to “reach consensus.”

An industry analyst quoted by the National Corridors Initiative called their “consensus” remark “frankly pathetic,” noting that “a very bipartisan commission ... has called for a major overhaul of the transportation system, and for the money to do the job.”

Others observed that if the federal government had waited for private, toll-collecting investors to build a national superhighway network, rather than President Eisenhower’s call for system constructed with an overwhelming share of federal dollars, we’d have little more than a thin interstate patchwork today.

The transportation commissioners had the courage to say that upgrading and expanding U.S. transportation systems to world standards won’t come cheaply -- they estimated $225 billion annually for the next 50 years. And they saw past “roads only,” focusing on an expanded freight system as well as repairing our highways and bridges, and making transit and intercity passenger rail a new priority in an ever-more metropolitan nation.

While endorsing more private investment, the commission faced the necessity of a dramatic rise in the federal gas tax, to 40 cents a gallon, indexed to inflation. And it sought accountability by combining today’s 108 federal transportation funding lines (for transit, highways, railroads, etc.) into 10 goal-oriented programs such as “Congestion Relief,” “Energy Security” and “Saving Lives.” The system would be performance-driven, outcome-based, mode-neutral -- a far call from today’s morass of earmarked transportation projects and billions flowing to states for still more highways.

There are some weaknesses in the report, especially failure to deal with three major issues -- how transportation choices impact climate change, how they relate to land use, and considerations of equity for Americans ill-served by today’s system.

But by throwing light on how our federal transportation program is a fundamentally broken system of earmarks and untargeted grants, notes Brookings Institution transportation expert Robert Puentes, the report undergirds growing congressional consensus that a new approach is imperative and should be built into the 2009 transportation reauthorization.

Making another damaging move during the 300-plus days it has left, the Bush administration, in a surprise move, also appears ready to scuttle the long-awaited Metro rail connection from to Washington’s Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia.

Political and business leaders in Virginia were stunned when Peters and Federal Transit Administration chief James S. Simpson suddenly raised enough purported weaknesses in the project -- now on the brink of start-up construction -- to justify vetoing the long-expected and critically needed $900 million federal contribution.

Efforts to build the Dulles line date back to the 1960s. The service would ease congestion in Virginia’s biggest job corridor, with anticipated big spinoff benefits in clustered affordable housing, cutting serious air pollution levels, and providing an emergency evacuation route west from the capital.

In today’s world of major global citistates, jockeying for mobility and economic prowess, the Dulles rail extension should be a no-brainer -- notwithstanding its eventual $5 billion pricetag. As the Washington Post noted editorially, airports in Chicago, Hong Kong, London, Tokyo and Sydney are all rail connected; should America’s capital city settle for anything less?

John W. Warner, Virginia’s senior and now retiring U.S. Senator, a long-time supporter, was described as “livid” at the meeting where Peters and Simpson dropped their threatened veto bomb. The administration is now promising a “cooling off” period to reexamine the issue, but there’s little confidence it will change its mind. Assuming it doesn’t, Congress may have to override its veto of the Dulles line, for common sense and in honor of the highly respected Warner.

The threatened Dulles line veto is “classic federal hubris,” notes Thomas Downs, transportation expert and former Amtrak president. While the federal $900 million contribution is critical, it’s less than 20 percent of the line’s cost, he observed, asking: should federal bureaucrats “trump all local decision making? Is that what this Republican administration has come to?”

At the end of the day, [the transportation issue] shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Check most members of either party, and they want a strong, economically efficient transportation system. This country is behind, we have lots of catching-up to do. We can’t let ideology trip us up. That’s reality the next president -- he or she, Republican or Democrat -- will have to deal with.