Today was day one of the big tuba tour, with a lecture presented to Michael Dessen’s composition class at UCI.  All in all it went very well.  I thought we would struggle to fill an hour (as happened in our initial Composition Focus presentation at UCSD), but we easily filled our alloted time to the point where Michael had to cut off the Q/A.  The students (7 in all) were very attentive, very enthusiastic, and very receptive to our idea of collaborative composition.

Michael made us think about the notion of the catalog a little more than we had previously.  He primarily asked us to focus on the problem of notation because of our largely phenomenological approach.  In order for the catalog to be useful to composers, it should present a certain level of notational standardization, but often such rigid systems disagree with or run counter to the phenomenological understandings of the players.  In a way, it sort of sums up the central issue of the catalog: we are presenting the results of a collaborative process, imploring whoever reads it to engage in something similar, and yet the information contained within is automatically divorced from our personal experience through the act of publishing (or, at least, printing it out).  We want composers to talk to performers, but we’re giving them examples of techniques.  We want performers to experiment and discover things on their own, but we’re giving them a list of things to work on.  It’s going to be an interesting struggle, but I think we have a good idea of how to push through.

Up next: Wednesday, 2/11 at UCR; Tuesday, 2/17 at Stanford; Thursday, 2/19 at Berkeley.