“Portraits” Completed, and More Thoughts on Musescore

I mentioned recently that I was working on digitizing my compositions from back in my music student days. Well, I finished another piece earlier, and decided to upload it tonight: Portraits for Two Bass Clarinets (1995) by Gord Sellar (Complete score in PDF format) There’s a recording of the premiere performance of the piece (and, I think, maybe the only performance so far) over on my Music page. The score here has minor corrections–but only minor ones, including some dynamics sketched in that should have been in the original, but somehow got left out–and there are a few small errors …

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Articles on Korean SF in _list Magazine

This entry is part 61 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

For those interested in South Korean SF, but unable to read it themselves (like me) you will be interested in the little treasure trove of articles I’ve just run across on the subject. They were published as part of the Summer 2013 issue of the magazine _List, which appears to be published by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. There are four articles in all: “Chronicling Korean Science Fiction” by Cho Sung-myeon, which discusses the history of Korean SF. This is a great piece with a lot more history than I ever found available anywhere else. Plenty of figures in Korean …

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Another Update, Another Theme Borked

Well, I updated WordPress. Like clockwork, another stylesheet bit the dust: fonts were all whacked out, menus not working properly, and who knows what else. It was a bit disappointing, but it seems inevitable these days, and at least replacement templates that (mostly) work straight out of the box are common enough. I’ve settled for what you see now, for the moment. (That is, if you’re reading on the page itself.) It has most of what I want, except for a nicely navigable menu at the header. (There’s supposed to be one, but it’s not showing up, and the submenus …

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Brief Note-(ation)

UPDATE (28 Feb 2014): Digitization completed. The file is available here, along with my comments on the software and more. UPDATE (27 Feb. 2014):  Well, I’ve finished the first movement, (sparse) dynamics and all. Here it is!  When I’ve finished all three movements, I’ll update again, combine the PDFs into a single file, and add it to the page where the audio is posted. The second and third are much shorter and simpler than the first, but it may take a little while for me to get around to it. (And not that I expect it’ll ever get performed, remixed, …

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The Really Intractable Thing: North Korea, Climate Change, and Why We’re Failing

Over at The Week, a depressing piece on the horrors up North, titled “North Korea isn’t Nazi Germany — in some ways, it’s worse”: Unless North Korea invades or bombs another country, or China gives up its patronage of the Hermit Kingdom, it’s hard to see much concrete coming out of the report. Paul Whitefield at the Los Angeles Times remembers the post-Holocaust slogan, “Never Again,” then throws up his hands in resignation: So what should the world do? What can the world do? Must we accept that in North Korea, basic freedoms — even such a simple thing as the right not …

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