Addictive Riddle: In which my scanner earns its keep

Now begins the tedium.

Of course, from the get-go, I’ve been waiting for the boring part to start, and – now that it has – it’s everything I dreamed it would be. Last Tuesday after turning pages for David’s rehearsal of Brother with John Kelly, David gave me the first seven files in his filing cabinets – files for the first six works in his catalog (Fantasy Pieces has two folders – one for the piece itself, one for the 1996 CRI “Gay American Composers” release). Yesterday, I finally began the scanning process. From 2pm to 1am, I managed to get through the three biggest folders. Thankfully, I was able to keep myself entertained during the process: I scanned the files onto my laptop while watching the bulk of Season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer via Hulu on my desktop. (I watched it periodically throughout high school and was turned onto during the last season, and I recently remembered it as being fun. It’s one of those good shows to have on in the background while you’re working, too.)

The next step with these files is to enter all of the performance dates into our timeline. How fun is that going to be!

Also yesterday, VCCA sent me their list of David’s residency dates, which went directly into the timeline. There was one glaring oddity – another double-booking, this one in January 1995 between VCCA and Yaddo. I still haven’t resolved the 1975 Yaddo-MacDowell double-booking, but I suspect that I mistakenly wrote down 1975 rather than 1976 for the MacDowell visit. Simple to resolve, but that means that I actually have to pick up the phone…

Kaity also checked out Elliot Forbes’ A History of Music at Harvard from the NYU library, and we’ll be incorporating that information (which seems to be particularly detailed) into our timelines, etc. She and I will be meeting soon to compare notes and come up with a schedule for a few secondary interviews.