I’m not a person of faith, but do feel that as a democratic republic, people in the US should be free to practice or not practice a religion without fear of discrimination, violence, etc. For many years, American Jews, Quakers, Mormons and others had suffered discrimination in the US, and for the most part, such discrimination is a thing of the past, with infrequent instances of outright discrimination and prejudice against these minorities. Muslims aren’t there yet. Just as American Jews and Catholics were often inappropriately viewed as having foreign allegiances (to Israel and the Vatican respectively), since 9/11, Muslims in this country are too often stereotyped as being secret terrorists, a veritable “fifth column” waiting for orders to act against this country. In this regard we’re no better than Israel, where Israelis of Arab descent (20% of Israel’s population) are frequently discriminated against and viewed as working against Israel itself, even though the great majority of Israeli Arabs are peaceful and by any account loyal Israelis. We’re also no better than a number of predominantly Muslim nations that viewed their Jewish population with suspicion and in many cases drove out their Jews after both the 1948 and 1967 wars with Israel.

So for many years, American Muslims have been considered suspicious, and despite even George W. Bush’s instructions to behave otherwise, a great number of American Christians and Jews continued to hold unpleasant, even paranoid, opinions regarding their Muslim neighbors and friends. What’s particularly bizarre, at least to me, is that many Christians who decades ago would have been likely to hold frankly antisemitic views now are very supportive of Jews and Israel in part because of their rage against Muslims. Perhaps a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” attitude is driving this, but regardless, many Christians, particularly Evangelicals, are not exactly BFFs with the Islamic community in this country. Many seem to actually hate Muslims, regard any and all of them with suspicion, and at the drop of the hat will espouse all sorts of anti-Muslim rhetoric and hysteria.

In other words, the Muslims have become the new Jews.

What’s particularly appalling to me is that some of my coreligionists think nothing of branding all Muslims as terrorists, as wanting to live under strict Sharia law, etc. To them, anything bad that a single Muslim does reflects poorly on the entire population of US Muslims. Concern about Israel is also frequently brought up, as if to justify their Muslim derangement syndrome. That is, since many Muslims express criticisms of Israel, clearly they must be capable of terrorism within the US, and anything a Muslim does that is not proper or legal justifies whatever harsh collective action Israel does against the Palestinians.

The Ft. Hood killings is a perfect example of how the right-wing media has taken something an individual Muslim does as the starting point for anti-Muslim invectives and a campaign against Islam. Just a month ago, several Republican congresspeople held a press conference to warn against an “infiltration” of the Federal government by Muslim interns under the “control” of the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR). This was nonsense, trumped up by that bastion of truth, World Net Daily. But that pales in comparison with the prejudice being espoused since the Ft. Hood murders. Because the shooter was a Muslim, and (oh horrors!!!) a Palestinian, Fox News, Michelle Malkin (blecch), Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Debbie Schlussel and others from the right-wing hate-sphere just had to opine that this meant Muslims in the military should be viewed with extreme suspicion.

To put it into context, in the run up to the Holocaust, a Polish Jew acting alone assassinated Ernst vom Rath, the German Secretary of Legation. The Nazis immediately used vom Rath’s murder to justify Kristallnacht and the indiscriminate murders of many German Jews along with mass vandalism of their businesses and property. In the US during WWII, Americans of Japanese descent were rounded up and sent to internment camps. In both cases, there was collective suspicion, prejudice, punishment and (in the case of German Jews) mass murder.

I’m not saying that the current anti-Muslim hysteria being whipped up by the right-wing media is going to lead to a Kristallnacht of sorts against Muslims in the US. But I have absolutely no doubt that some law-abiding Muslims who are good citizens of this country will be discriminated against, and even hurt or murdered, as a result of the utter crap and ignorance being broadcast 24/7 against all US Muslims, all because of the act of a single Muslim soldier and physician. Why his religion has anything to do with this is totally beyond me. But it’s given racists like Debbie Schlussel the ammunition to continue her spewing of hate. Why am I singling out Ms. Schlussel over Michelle Malkin and many others? Perhaps its because as an American Jew, she should be more than understanding of where such invective can lead. If she doesn’t, then clearly she is no better than the folks in Nazi Germany who used any excuse to spout antisemitic commentary and whip up violence against Jews.

When Timothy McVeigh, a Christian who was previously in the US military, committed a horrible act of terrorism against the US, no one suggested that Christians in the US military should be viewed suspiciously. Indeed, a Bush-era report on hate groups and violence in the US that appropriately concluded that some White veterans might be capable of similar acts of terrorism was widely condemned by the Republicans in Washington. But let a single Muslim, one who might have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, commit a deranged act of murder, and it’s no longer a workplace killing but an act of “Islamic terrorism.” As if any religion endorses terror.

So I would appreciate it greatly if the media at large and the blogosphere got rid of its Muslim derangement syndrome once and for all. The specific religion of a crime perpetrator is irrelevant unless it has some clear bearing on the incident, as when a Catholic priest is guilty of sexual abuse within the church. The fact that Dr. Nidal Hasan is a Muslim and has Palestinian ancestry has as much to do with his contemptible act against his colleagues at Ft. Hood as his being a doctor, his eye color or whether he was right- or left-handed. No one seems to make much of the fact that the person who assassinated Dr. George Tiller was a fundamentalist Christian, so why does Dr. Nidal’s religion have anything to do with his irrational decision to commit mass murder?

The hypocrisy and prejudice is enough to make me want to scream.

All the way back in April, I took a look at the explosion of twitter applications for OS X, after realizing that my then client of choice, twhirl, was essentially end-of-lifed after being acquired by Seesmic. After much exploration, I found EventBox, which was in beta and combined twitter with RSS feeds, Facebook and a bunch of other services. Unlike many of the other social networking clients out there, EventBox had a very Mac-like UI, and while short on some features, did a lot of things really well.

So I paid my $15 and used EventBox to manage my Facebook and Twitter feeds, and after NetNewsWire acquired ads, migrated my RSS feeds to Google Reader, which was supported by EventBox. So with one app, I could manage several things all at once. EventBox had a small development team that was pretty responsive, and while not associated with a large, trendy fan base like Seesmic Desktop, was a cool app nonetheless. Recently, EventBox development forked into a separate beta called Multibox, that had a lot of future features intended for EventBox. It lacked some functionality, though, like smart folders and even Facebook integration, so I kept using my EventBox beta, which served my purposes and held the promise of a lot of new functionality and even an iPhone app. I was a happy, nerdy social networker

Well, all that’s down the toilet.

Several weeks ago, EventBox was acquired by RealMac Software. I thought “Great-now they’ll have resources to bring new functionality to EventBox in a more rapid timeframe.” Boy, was I misguided. First, they renamed the app “Socialite” (note to RealMac Software: if you’re trying to build awareness of a new application whose user base is still pretty small compared with the big apps like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop, don’t change the name).

Then they released a beta today that broke most of everything.

First I noticed that my Google Reader items, after being marked as Read, reverted to Unread after the service was refreshed. Then I quit Socialite to see if that would help, only to find that after restarting, the main window was not there unless I went into the menu bar and selected it. The Preferences item was grayed out, and a host of bugs ensued. I took the advice of RealMac and rebuilt the various services like Twitter and Facebook, and at least the prefs and window behaved as normal. But then I found that threads were no longer functional, whereas they had worked fine in previous EventBox betas. And Facebook keeps trying to update and fails. And yes, the Google Reader unread items bug is still present.

Realizing that one of my most-used applications no longer works, I went back and tried Seesmic Desktop, and while the interface is, to put it mildly, suboptimal, it works. Even better, it has a lot of functionality that isn’t found in Socialite/EventBox, and probably never will. Seesmic Desktop doesn’t do RSS, but I went back to NetNewsWire, and that works fine as always. I just have to ignore the ads, which is no big deal.

Back to Socialite. It’s a shame that RealMac killed it with this beta. I’m willing to wait it out and see if things improve, but I’d like to see new features, not bug fixes just to get me back to where I was before today. True, I could revert to the last beta of EventBox, but why bother when I have stability and added functionality, albeit with two applications rather than one?

In terms of social networking apps, I use Echofon (neé Twitterfon-what’s with all these social networking applications changing names all of a sudden? Geez…) on my iPhone, but could be convinced to use TweetDeck if I also cared to use it on my MacBook Pro, which I don’t, mainly because its layout is even worse than Seesmic’s. I’d be interested in seeing Seesmic’s forthcoming iPhone app, especially if it enabled syncing. EventBox was planning an iPhone app in the future, but that effort seems kinda dead for the foreseeable future. Which is a shame.

I’d love to have a single application that did twitter/FB/RSS and synced with my iPhone. But that isn’t the case so far. I paid for Twitterfon (now Echofon) and am pretty happy with that. I paid for EventBox (now Socialite) and am no longer happy with that. Seesmic is free, at least for now, and I can put up with the bad UI given that it works pretty well.

So this has been counterintuitive. I thought that a larger company acquiring a small application development team would be a recipe for success from a user perspective. It isn’t, at least in this case. I remember many, many years ago when Symantec acquired the makers of MacTools Pro. MTP was a really great system repair utility, perhaps the best ever. Symantec killed it after buying it. Norton Utilities for the Mac never approached the usability and versatility of MTP. In the case of RealMac buying the manufacturer of EventBox, it’s even worse, since the damned software doesn’t work. And who charges for a beta anyway? Paying for it sorta made sense at the time because it sounded like a 1.0 release was really on the horizon, and I could save a little money over the price when the official release came out. In retrospect, that was stupid. And it’s insane that the original developers (The Cosmic Machine) and now RealMac charged and continue to charge. I’d like a refund, although I doubt that will ever be in the cards. I’ll probably never ever pay for a beta, even as much as I like to support small software developers.

Sigh…back to checking my RSS feeds, Facebook and Twitter feeds. It’s an experience.

Since June, I’ve been composing a piece for two female voices, flute, bass clarinet, marimba, electric bass, violin, cello and piano. The piece is titled torture memos (a survivor from guantánamo) and is one of three works I’ve written with a political/social action title (the others being darfur pogrommen and zichron (in memory of bisan, maye, aya and nur abu al-aish)). As mentioned in an earlier post, I had considered setting poetry by torture victims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo, but the source poems didn’t grab me. Besides, I’m not sure the music would have done the poems justice.

So tonight I managed to put the final edits into the piece, so it’s completed. A few comments:

• The piece is a bit of a departure from my recent music. At the same time, it’s also an evolution and natural progression. In other words, it still sounds like me, but it’s not a rehash of a lot of earlier works. So I suspect people will either love it or really hate it; there’s no middle ground. If you’re disappointed, no worries.
• Don’t expect doom and gloom despite the title. This isn’t “program music.” In most ways, the title has nothing to do with the music.
• While the wind and vocal parts are far easier than some I’ve written, in that there are rests and intentional spots to breathe, in some areas the performers are on their own; when they need to grab a breath, they can, since many of the parts are doubled.
• No matter what I did, Finale 2010’s playback put in some unwritten and unwanted accents in some of the repeated eighth note sections. I gave up trying to solve this problem, since it seems unsolvable. It might be related to the ambience plugin, but without adding in resonance the audio file sounds worse than with ambience + accents, so I’m learning to live with it. Same thing happened in the final measures of ushabti, and it still drives me crazy.
• The audio level is higher than it should be-the entire piece is actually p throughout, so feel free to listen at a low volume

The duration clocks in at just over 40 minutes. The audio file, such as it is, is here. The score (bass clarinet is written as it sounds) is here.

I’ve been very concerned, as have many, by the forceful, venal and often racist attacks on our president. Recently, I’ve been reading Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency by James Bamford on my iPhone, and it’s interesting to notice how much opposition, even at the level of a potential military coup, there was to Kennedy’s early administration. He was felt to be too soft on Cuba, decided against invading the island after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and engendered a lot of crazy opposition from the John Birch Society and others. Obama has the birthers and the teabaggers, but that might pale against the forces that were arrayed against JFK from the outset.

The scary thing is that we know what happened to JFK. And Rabin. As much as I wish Obama would do more to make good on his promised changes for the country, he is my president. Our president. The fact that folks on the right are cheering against this country because they so desperately want Obama to fail is mind-boggling to me. The atmosphere is toxic, and can turn deadly very quickly. We have talks about secession-serious discussions even-and some bring guns to town hall meetings and presidential visits.

This is why I feel eerily reminiscent of the early 60’s. I was born in 1961, two weeks before JFK was inaugurated. But I think I’m living it over again as I read more about the fervent rumor mongering and name calling the right did against another president who had a great vision for the US.

Looking back at the past year and a half, it’s actually been the most productive musical year I’ve ever had. By my count, I’ve composed six pieces, and another is on its way. That’s amazing, at least in my opinion. For the most part, I had tended to compose one piece of music per year. Maybe two on occasion, but usually just one. Sometimes it took me even longer to finish a piece; three years wasn’t uncommon. In terms of people actually hearing my music, I’ve had one piece premiered, only a few months after it was written. And a few weeks after that concert premiere, it was heard on the radio on WPRB-FM. That’s never happened to me before.

Similarly, Steve Layton released his beautifully crafted realization of my piano work textbook, and it was heard on the first Music from Other Minds broadcast of the 2009-2010 season, with the opening selected as the show’s theme music for this year.

So why have I been so productive composition-wise since April of 2008? Probably because I spend 1-2 weeks each month in the Bay Area for work, and when I’m in my hotel room at night can work on new pieces. Having the time to write has been extremely fleeting since I started composing music several decades ago. In order to compose, I had to compromise, and that usually meant giving up sleep, time with my family, etc. Since I’m home only half the time, I have no more time to give up for my music except when I’m out on the West Coast, so that’s worked pretty well. That doesn’t make the notes come any easier-if anything, it’s really hard to motivate oneself to write music when you’re sleep deprived, off by three time zones, and have to sit in a really uncomfortable position to get access to a portable keyboard and laptop because hotel rooms rarely have desks that can accommodate 88-keys.

So on to the new piece-it’s been a real slog, since it’s based largely on some improvisations I did over the past year and required me to notate them while scoring the output for a chamber ensemble. But this past week was the charm; I got past the drudgery and things started to come together. I was up until almost 1:30 AM last night getting a lot of the piece done. It’s not there yet, but it’s 21+ minutes and counting, not that that matters. If anything, that’s a pretty short work for me. The piece is scored for two female voices (soprano/mezzo), flute, bass clarinet, electric bass, marimba, violin, cello and piano. It’s an unusual ensemble, but was dictated by both my preference for some of the instruments along with the range requirements of the piece.

What’s it called? torture memos (a survivor from guantánamo). I wanted to write a piece that called attention to the crimes against humanity committed by the Bush/Cheney administration, and initially thought to set some poetry of US torture victims to music. However, the existing poetry by Guantánamo inmates that I found just wasn’t to my taste. So I thought that, rather than set words by the victims to music, it would be more fitting for the music to be the main focus. That doesn’t mean that the music is doom and gloom–I’m not Shostakovich, of course. To some extent, the music doesn’t seem to even have anything to do with the subject. And that’s the point; I don’t compose “program music.” But I do want the music to at least provoke some thought, even if only through a title.

I’m next out this way in late October, so hopefully I’ll have even more progress at that point to report. But in any case, this has been a very busy musical year, and with luck, it will continue. That’s great news if you like my music. If you hate it, then this has been the 18 months from hell. Sorry about that.

But if you aren’t freaked out by new music, here’s an eight-minute excerpt from the current draft of torture memos. Remember, it’s still a work in progress, but this is a good chunk of what I was working on last night. This part was a pleasure to write. Whether it’s a pleasure to listen to is beyond my pay grade.

My usual 7:45 AM flight to San Francisco got cancelled so I have some time on my hands here at Philadelphia International and figured I should do a quick update of some sundry items:

• I went to a Sharing Ramadan event at the Foundation for Islamic Education in Villanova, PA last night to break the fast with a lot of wonderful folks of all different backgrounds and faiths. I was very struck by how diverse the local Muslim population is and how accepting they are. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, white or of color, etc. Everyone shares with everyone else and there is a genuine community. There are so many similarities with Judaism, but at the same time I don’t know that every synagogue is really that welcoming or open to people of different backgrounds. There are indeed Jews of color, but they are often marginalized or dismissed (or worse, mistaken for the “hired help.”). The other thing that delighted me was how much the Muslims I spoke with truly want dialogue and friendship with those of other faiths. We need this, and badly.
• Still working on the torture memos piece very slowly. It’s coming along, though. I am also thinking of trying to put together a piece for harpsichord as well as another piano piece. Now, all I need are the ideas.
• I was really happy to have had two radio premieres in two weeks. I guess that’s not too bad for a gynecologist.
• Speaking of gynecology, I’ll be at the next AAGL meeting in Orlando. We have three abstracts being presented there. Also not too bad for a gynecologist.
• I think Twitter is starting to replace blogging, but slowly
• Great, the flight I got booked on leaving over six hours after the flight I was supposed to take is oversold. Should I take a voucher to wait some more for a flight that gets me in to SFO six hours later than I will now? Uh, I don’t think so…

Last week I polluted the West Coast airwaves with textbook on KALW-FM. This week, it’s Princeton’s radio station WPRB-FM, where Marvin Rosen hosts Classical Discoveries, and will be programming a 24-hour new music marathon starting tonight at 7 PM EST. Marvin is going to program the radio premiere of bs piece as performed on 8/6 by Bill Solomon and Mike Lunoe at the Hartt School of Music. The broadcast should be sometime between 11 am and noon tomorrow (Weds, 9/9) and there’s a live audio stream at http://www.wprb.com. Enjoy!