Update from Dmo in VA

Diane will be back from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts soon, but I recently received an update from her about her activities:

"So far I've just been doing solo piano sketches-and I'll flush them out when I get home for the big band. I was just thrilled that I finally got through this book called "Music of the Heavens" by Bruce Stephenson-which explains Kepler-but mostly explains how he arrived at all of his equations etc. All of the astro stuff goes right over my head-but I get the concept. Luckily, Bruce has the music part in the book. I also found a very cool article http://sscm-jscm.press.illinois.edu/v11/no1/pesic.html

I've only read a few pages of the Harmonice Mundi-even the Introduction is tough to get thru-ha!
But I think this project will be going on for some time.

Right now, I'm taking snippets of one of the sketches as a basis for a Soundpainting piece-that I'm doing on Saturday night-I'm getting the other artists involved-it's gonna be totally weird-but I'm really diggin' the process of this. Actually-the "musical portion" of Johannes K is very simple-very basic stuff-but when I put it together and into the context of the planets and their orbits-that's when it gets interesting.

For the next couple of days-I'm going back to transcribing some of the birdsong improvs that I didn't get a chance to dig into yet. Along with the Soundpainting on Saturday night-I'm giving a half hour solo piano concert-with 2 birdsongs-Amy Beaches' A hermit Thrush at Eve-and 2 of my older compositions-Myrtle Ave and For My Mother.

There was a reading tonight-really wonderful writers-Peter Ramos-poet, read a new poem and works from his book "Please Do Not Feed The Ghost" http://www.buffalostate.edu/library/rooftop/members/ramos.htm
and Pamela Durban-poet/short stories and novelist-read parts of her short story "Soon" which is in a collection of American Short Stories 1997, and I guess the new collection-Best American Short Stories of the 20th cent-edited by John Updike-I found a link for you http://english.unc.edu/faculty/durbanp.html
When she finished reading-everyone sort of "gasped" -it really did take their breath away.

A visual artist remarked to me after the readings-that one of the best things about coming to an artist colony is to hear/see everyone's work-it is very cool.

Friday night is an open studio tour for the visual artist-Sat I do my thing-another composer here is going to do a short thing-then we're having a big party because so many of us are leaving-and I announced that if the writers would read their work at the party-I would play piano with them-they're all really psyched about that."