Morning stroll

In just a few minutes I have to head off to an orchestra rehearsal, but before I go I thought I'd post a few pictures from my morning walk during my warm-up practice breaks.

The weather here lately has been oddly springlike. Yesterday evening as I walked home from school it was in the upper 50s, and so far the warm snap has been predicted to last through this coming Tuesday. Of course this means that what little ice had built up already--around our campus pond for instance--has been slowly melting away...

The patterns it makes are still lovely though...as you can see in this iphoto-enhanced image of one of the cracks...

The sunrise was typically pretty...

...I indulged my inner 5th grader for a while by playing with shadows...

...and entertained fantasies of becoming a real photographer by attempting a few woodland still lifes...

And now I must be off to rehearsal. It's a little bit of a drag to have to spend such a nice Saturday morning inside, but there are certainly worse things than being able to play Mahler 3 with a fine orchestra...so who's complaining?!

Arrive Early

It's interesting that often times the most glorious part of a sunrise comes well before it actually passes over the horizon...

The sky will be aflame with deep reds and purples a good half hour before the rise, and then slowly fade through a series of oranges as daylight approaches. As you watch you are almost unaware of the transformation until suddenly you awake from your reverie and realize...

...Oh...everything has turned yellow...

...and then you see the sun...

High notes

I had no time to linger at sunrise this morning...though it was spectacular...

Professor Geyer's excerpt class was scheduled to begin at 7:45 and as I had been assigned to play (or attempt to play) the 2nd trumpet part to Mahler's 6th symphony, I had to arrive at Regenstein early enough to get in a reasonable warm up.

For me, the challenge of this piece has been to manage a seemingly endless string of enormous melodic leaps that have for the most part left me exhausted and unable to produce a sound after just 10 or 15 minutes of work. The range covered in the 2nd trumpet part runs from way down in the basement below middle C all the way up to what I consider to be the stratosphere, thought I'm sure someone like Maynard Ferguson would disagree with my terminology here. The highest note in my part was a concert C#, which is probably right in the happy middle of MF's comfortable range. Unfortunately he's no longer around and would thus be unable to debate me on such trivialities.

ANYWAY. I played ok. Didn't get the dang C#, missed one mute change and one quick transposition switch (Mahler seems to take a perverse amount of pleasure in confusing trumpeters by changing their transposition from F trumpet to B flat trumpet every few bars and notating that switch as inconspicuously as possible), but still mostly kept up with the other guys around me who all sounded like they could play it in their sleep.

Sigh...

Back to slowly but surely I guess.

A Story

Today I stopped to watch a regiment of tentacled lake goblins march back into their aqueous lair...

They must have had a long and exhausting night of mischievous rollicking, for not a one turned from its tired path to face me as I observed their slithery slog into the depths...

I looked around and saw more bands of the creatures tramping away further up the beach, and shivered with delight to have been allowed to witness such a rare pilgrimage...

A few paused for one final peek at the horizon. I glanced down at my watch...7:18...somewhere behind those clouds, the sun was coming up.


I could almost hear them sigh as the last of their heads bobbed beneath the gentle surf and disappeared...

Happy New Year!

I was elated when the weather forecast for today promised clear sunny skies. Yes, without a layer of blanketing clouds morning temperatures were...a little brisk (wind chills in the single digits)...but of course the upside was that I'd be able to catch my first sunrise of 2012.

I arrived at the lake shore just in time to watch the sun peak out over a thin band of clouds in the east...

...and glint optimistically atop dark waves of slush as they rolled languidly onto an icy shore...

I can't wait for the pancakes to get here!!!

Ithaca Ice: 2

Here are som'more icy waterfall pictures...taken as I made my way to the bus stop after my morning practice session at Cornell. This is the waterfall that flows over the Bebe Lake Dam and on down Fall Creek Gorge to Ithaca Falls (the waterfall in yesterday's post). And it's the same one that featured so prominently in my summer posts about the local flooding...

I wonder how many more icicles this log will be able to handle...

Ithaca Ice

While lately I've found myself cursing the chill of the Ithaca winter (even though up to just a few of days ago our temperatures have been in the high 40s), I was reminded today of one reason to celebrate the months-long deep freeze ahead: amazing ice formations!

Rob and I visited Ithaca Falls this afternoon and were dazzled not only by its usual imposing stature...

...but also by the intricate wintry wonderland it had constructed for itself within the surrounding gorge. The closer we got to the fall's base, the more striking the ice sculptures became. From delicately frosted leaves...

...to fresh dandelion buds--as green as summer on their leeward side...

...but heavily laden with a thick icy armor on the other. Built up from the windy spray of the falls not far away, this dandelion was cemented so firmly that when I reached out and grabbed its base, it was solid and unbending as stone.

Even the rocks underfoot were coated with crystals...

The formations all pointed in a single direction--straight toward the aerosol jets that were still in the process of building them--and had an almost organic look, like a carpet of icy moss thriving among flat beds of broken shale.

I was entranced and got a little carried away with my nose-to-the-ground explorations. Several minutes passed before I realized that Rob, who had suggested the outing in the first place, was about to turn into an ice sculpture himself! So we hurried back to the car to bask in the warmth of its heaters and finish up with our list of errands.

It has been a good day.

Lots o' Ink

This afternoon I finished a drawing I'd been working on for the past couple of weeks. It's loosely based around a scene from The Name of the Wind and related in spirit to Des Fischer's Liebesglück--a beautiful song by Franz Schubert I'd heard performed on a couple of recitals this past school year. In sum, I was inspired by the thought of going out over a still body of water on a clear night, seeing the stars reflected on its surface below, and being able to feel for a moment as if I were floating above the universe--suspended between two limitless fields of starlight...

I did it in sharpie and pencil on white paper...yes, that's right...everything that's black I had to painstakingly color in with marker, trying desperately to avoid blotting out the symmetrically reflected stars or cross over any of the other myriad tiny white lines...and it took me FOREVER!

***And for the astronomy buffs who occasionally read my posts: no, I did not try to duplicate the night sky as seen from planet earth. And rather than apologize for my laziness, I'll explain instead that the two characters depicted are from another planet--from a totally different galaxy in fact (an irregular one too judging by the looks of things)--where miraculously another species has evolved to appear and behave in an amazingly humanlike manner...an idea that's not really so far fetched coming from someone raised on Star Trek.