Bryan’s Blog

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Live music is all around us. Local bars have nights devoted to it, bands and artists arrive in town for special concerts, local schools produce it. Live music is a wonderful thing. Support it and you may find yourself walking happier throughout your day. There’s something about live music you just can’t get in a recording. Embrace it.

Form letters have a purpose. When you need to send the same information to many people, most will reach for the form letter and let a word processing program complete fields based on a database. Many won’t bother with the database and a good, neutral greeting will be used instead. Sometimes form letters are acceptable. Most of the time they’re not.

In a world where it has become increasingly easy to send mundane and inconsequential items through email, shouldn’t your organization try to rise above the clutter by sending purposeful correspondence? Say you have a new opening in your firm. You conduct the typical job interview process. Say there are 200+ applicants. Will you custom-tailor a response for each individual? Probably not. The majority of the 200 applicants will be fairly served with your form letter.

Once you get to the final interviews, say your top three, however, the game changes. Now you’re not serving your self image by sending a form letter, especially through email. In this instance, you could take the time to call those interviewers, or barring that at least generate a custom, thoughtful message detailing what happened. How long would it take for those two letters? (Remember: the third interviewee was hired so no “thanks anyway” is necessary!) Perhaps half an hour?

What does it say about your brand, your image and your company when you don’t take that half hour? Is it what you want to say? What will those two recipients say to their friends, family and colleagues? Is it what you want them saying? The time to decide is now—before you send those letters.

Seth Godin writes today and asks “Is it worthy?”

I have nothing else to say on this that he doesn’t say. All I know is that he has hit the nail on the head several times these past few weeks and really has had me thinking about my life and how I lead it, my business and how I run it.

I could write a detailed post on etiquette (which is coming) or something else design or music related. Instead, I present to you a LOL that had me laughing out loud, instantly and at length.

Seeking music and design? Read this blog. Hiatus to end. (Thanks Seth Grodin!)

I frequently read LOLcats and can highly recommend it to anyone and everyone. This one really caught my eye today (and yes I’m a little behind).

It’s exactly for that reason I put my toothbrush into my linen closet and no longer leave it on the counter. Paranoid? Probably justified.
I also particularly liked this one.

Am I the only suburbanite who thinks the whole concept is incredibly funny and horribly wrong all at the same time?

One of my favorite artists has continuously been moby, since I first heard him. He is now giving away his music for certain uses, free. (thanks to swissmiss for the link) It’s a great idea, and one that I hope more artists will embrace. Art is about sharing and receiving comments and creating ideas. The trend of locking away ideas and art and creativity saddens me, so I’m glad to see someone letting it free.

In an interesting twist, Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima hired 10,000 anonymous artists to recreate a small portion of the US$100 bill. The artists were each paid one US penny. Called Ten Thousand Cents (found via swissmiss), the project took advantage of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. None of the artists knew what they were helping to recreate and some decided to forego the replication and insert their own interesting designs.

The project is definitely worth a look, if nothing else than to see the flash file on the home page that draws each section simultaneously. There is also a section within the site that displays certain pieces, large-scale, as they are drawn.

The Ministry of Type has a small article about the new currency being deployed in the United Kingdom. (Found by way of Andy Rutledge.)

I don’t have much to say about it, aside from the fact that the coinage was developed through an open contest that received 4000 entries from 500 people. The winner? A 26-year-old graphic designer named Matthew Dent. (There’s a Times Online article about the competition available, too.) If that isn’t inspiration, I don’t know what is. The coins are beautiful to see and the shapes themselves make me wish I lived in Britain so I could spend these post-haste. Instead I live in a country that honestly believes one and two-dollar bills are acceptable. (Though I suppose we haven’t printed two-dollar bills in a number of years.)

The end of the linked article also has a link to a quip comparing the new coinage to the US reconfiguration of the five-dollar bill. It’s as obvious as the bureaucratic conglomeration it represents. Sad.

If you’re shopping early for my birthday, the Royal Mint offers some nice commemorative packages in affordable (and not so affordable) price ranges.

Yesterday, the University where I work sponsored a performance, through the New Music Ensemble, of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. It is a fairly complicated piece of music written and premiered at a PoW camp in Germany (Messiaen was conscripted for the French). Messiaen wrote for violin, cello, clarinet and piano. The piece includes bird songs and is perhaps his first work to do so extensively. There are eight movements, five with the full ensemble, one with clarinet only, one as a cello/piano duet and the eighth is a violin/piano duet. Ying-Wei Sung played violin, Kathryn Lent played cello, Andrew Sprung played clarinet and Karl Larson played the piano.

One of the musicologists here, Dr. Robert Fallon, gave a presentation on the piece before the performance. He presented interesting information regarding the creation of the piece and some of Messiaen’s life in the PoW camp (even at one point alluding to Hogan’s Heroes).

No offense meant to my colleague, but the real highlight was the performance itself. I have heard much music during my tenure here, but the performers today created one of the best performances I have ever heard. It seemed as though the architect designed the space for this quartet. Given that the performance took place in the atrium of a library, with all the typical library activities continuing around it, I never felt distracted from the performance. From the beginning, the performers captured my attention and would not let it go, and I am thankful they did.

A particularly touching moment happened during the fifth movement. That movement is the cello/piano duet, and I felt that the two performers captured the essence of the music. The cellist played with assurance and a gentleness and yet intense passion I feel is necessary for that movement. The movement haunted me and I believe will stay with me forever. The artistry shown in that movement surpasses nearly every duet performance I have heard at this University. Either of those performers, if they choose to continue with their art, will become successful chamber musicians. Given their relative youth, there is much more excitement possible from them.

Sprung navigated the clarinet solo with just the right touch. It never felt hurried or slowed. I never felt uncomfortable when I shouldn’t (there are three notes that are particularly chilling where the clarinetist plays from the softest volume to the loudest that, I feel, are meant to be uncomfortable).

The only movement that felt weak to me was the eighth. Even being weak, it still was of a high calibre and did not detract from the performance. I felt that it could have moved a little more slowly and still been effective, and perhaps been more so. I’m not sure the technical faculties of the violinist would have allowed the slower tempo, but musically I feel she could have accomplished it.

Overall, I felt satisfied with this performance. I felt fulfilled and happy to have taken the time in the middle of the day to leave campus and hear it. I hope the performers feel the same and will continue their progress and sharing of their art. Performers and performances like these are what make being a composer such a worthwhile life.

UPDATE: Coincidentally, today happens to be Good People Day, at least as promoted by Gary Vaynerchuk. Check out his video rant about why we need to praise people. What apropos timing!