Part of the reason I started this journal was for the purpose of improving my writing. Most of the skills I exercise these days are my business writing and producing technical/instruction documents. I'm sure they're the finest, most fascinating items ever to be produced in the genre, but they bore me.

I'd like to keep the woolgathering interesting enough to read later.

CDs listened to:

• Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band: XXL (A little bit academic and pat in the arrangements and the playing, but a really good band.)
  
• Steven Stucky: Nell'ombra, nella luce (Among other works. Good stuff! Another relatively new-to-me CD. The Cassatt Quartet on this disk is just superb. I need to find more from them and see if it holds up. I picked up Stucky's name from a review in the NY Times online. Not too easy to peg Stucky's style, since it shifts from work to work on this disk.)
• Bela Bartok: Bluebeard's Castle (A Deutsche Grammophon disk, but I can't remember the singer or conductor. Over the years, I've grown to like this opera, but I still don't think you can call me an opera fan. there's real sense of structure to the work that gives the single act a dramatic coherence.)
  
• Belly: Star (A nice, old pop nugget from the days when alternative pop still had a feeling of fitting in with the broader pop music and wasn't trying so hard to be obscure-sounding. Tanya Donnelly never had the strongest voice, but the sound of the band is just right for her.)
• Bela Bartok: Piano Concerto No. 2 (Sviatoslav Richter on the piano. It's like a Bartok festival today! I bought this disk for the Stravinsky "Movements for Piano and Orchestra," recorded for the old USSR Melodiya label. And yet the pleasant surprise is the "Kammermusik No.2" by Paul Hindemith, a composer I don't usually enjoy much. It's always fun to listen to Richter hammer that piano.)
  
• Ted Leo & The Pharmacists: Shake the Sheets (I think I've mentioned this disk last week. I have a rule that I listen to a new CD four times before I decide how much I like it. This was the fourth time and I really enjoyed it.)
• Ludwig von Beethoven: The Symphonies, disk 3 (von Karajan from the 1960s. This is the one with Nos. 5 & 6. Karajan is the only really big-time conductor who seems to take Beethoven at the specified tempos, but his later performances are noticeably slower. I swear, these guys love to make themselves a show by slowing Beethoven down and emphasizing the pomposity and wordiness of the works. The real tempos make the same works seem light and brief--even nimble.)