Today I
was voted vice-president of the Charles Ives Society. My term officially begins
July 1. This is the highest peak to which I have ever acceded in electoral
politics, and the highest I ever expect to attain. I harbor no presidential
aspirations. Aside from state funerals, ship christenings, and the like, I imagine
my role as vice-president being to shoot my mouth off in wild public
misstatements from which the new president, scholar Gayle Sherwood Magee, will
be forced to tactfully distance herself. No other candidate, I’m sure you’ll agree, could have been nearly so well-suited for such a job as myself. Seriously, though, it was a tremendous kick spending the day among the most august of the Ives experts and getting an inside look at the progress of upcoming editions, attempted landmark preservations, and so forth. The spirit of the late Wiley Hitchcock was among us – even though I’d never been in the group myself before, I could feel how anomalous his absence seemed.
Tomorrow
evening (Saturday) maestro James Bagwell will direct the Dessoff Choirs in my Transcendental
Sonnets at
Merkin Hall in New York City at 8 PM, along with works by Harold Farberman and Lukas Foss.
Harold and I will indulge in some pre-concert fisticuffs with an interviewer at
7:30.
Next
weekend, March 13 and 14, I will be at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio,
for a microtonal conference in honor of Ben Johnston and Owen Jorgensen, where,
at 5 PM on Saturday, I’ll deliver a keynote address about Ben.Â
