A Quantum Diaries Survivor

I stumbled today into two old booklets advertising a concert. One in Conegliano, on Friday, March 13th 1981; the other in Udine on Wednesday, May 28th, 1980. These were times when I toured north-eastern Italy with the orchestra of the Venice Conservatory, directed by m. Fabio Pirona. I was a teenager, but I could already play the recorder (straight flute) rather well.

I remember that already back then I did not really think that a career in music would suit my taste nor my talents -my interest was not focused on Physics yet but I had a pretty good idea I liked science already- but I nevertheless enjoyed playing the part of the musician. Probably this has been some sort of constant in my life: I have been an amateur musician, an amateur astronomer, an amateur chessplayer, an amateur reporter and photographer, but then I decided to become a professional physicist. In other words I seem to have applied to arts, sports, and intellectual activities what is commonplace to do with sentimental relationships: women and men flirt with the most attractive counterparts, but end up marrying the one which promises more stability.

So what were we playing back then, in Conegliano and Udine (but also in Venice, Mirano, and other places I can’t even recall) ? The offer was a trio of concerts by Johann Sebastian Bach: the Brandemburg Concerts number V, IV, and III. I was the second flutist in the fourth concert, as you can see in the scans I paste below.

Above, the front page of the booklet of Concert season in Conegliano, 1981

…and the page with the three concerts, and a few signatures from my colleagues.

The one above is instead the leaflet advertising the concert in Udine…

…and the back, with the program of the afternoon.

I have warm memories of those concerts. In the one in Conegliano, we performed excellently the fourth concert (I remember I was really pleased of the outcome and by my own performance) until -at the very end of the third movement- my instrument had become soaked with condensed breath, and it literally dripped. The condensed moisture flowed down the hole at the end and, what’s worse, down the hole on the back, which is closed by the left thumb to play bass tones and only closed halfways -by using the fingernail- to play high pitches. And one of those high pitches was needed towards the end of the Presto, when in the culmination of a forte I had to play a high mi. The thumb was unable to close the hole the way it should have, and my instrument let out a broken note which was probably heard even by the ticket seller outside the hall. That evening was spent on a pleasant restaurant on the hills of Conegliano, with the whole orchestra having fun of me -but it was cheerful and I did not resent it.

In the concert in Udine another incident happened. I was rather tense (I think it was the first time we performed the concert outside the walls of our Conservatory) and when the fifth concert was over, the solists came backstage, and I went on stage with my buddy Francesco and the first violin Andrea. As we were about to sit down, I realized I had left my scoresheet backstage! A better player would have acted nonchalantly and played by heart, but I was too nervous -so I rushed back and grabbed it, re-entering on stage with the eyes of the public on me but, what’s worse, those of my director following me like a missile approaches a plane to be taken down.

Ah, memories… I wish I had a recording of those concerts! I remember the one in Conegliano was indeed recorded, and I was promised a copy of the tape which never came.

Just a note to post here the permanent link to the proceedings of a conference I attended in Corfu (Greece) three years ago. This is a long (32 pages) report on “High- Physics: from the Tevatron to the LHC“, now published in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series [Tommaso Dorigo 2006 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 53 163-194]. I think I did post a draft of the paper on this blog a couple of years ago, but then I forgot to post the final version as well.

The paper is a bit dated in some parts, where the most recent (back then) results from the Tevatron are discussed; however, some parts -especially a discussion of the usefulness of Tevatron data for LHC physics- are still readable IMHO. Also worth noting is the fact that the acknowledgments section mentions the late Riqie Arneberg, a friend who passed away last fall, who had accepted the offer I had made to all readers of this blog to proofread the manuscript, and contributed in several places to the clarity of the text.

The publisher has now made available online all its 100 open access volumes through the JPCS home page. Of course I salute this contribution to the free diffusion of science with enthusiasm.

“Mozart is free to create things others cannot imagine,
because he is bound by principles others cannot see.”

Margaret Boden

(and thanks to Tony for mentioning it.)

For a change (or is it) let me write about personal issues, i.e., about what I have been doing this week. I have been in the US for four days only, but it looks like a long time already… And I need a post of the kind “dear diary” to sort things out.

I arrived to O’Hare last Thursday at noon after a uneventful flight - the same route through Munich I’ve flown three dozen times in the last few years. This time I found some company in a colleague who was going to attend the workshop Peter mentioned the other day - we met on the lounge in Venice and traveled together.

Thursday was spent cursing myself for missing a toll on I-88 while driving out of the airport towards Fermilab. It so upsets me to have to lose time for silly things! I soon learned I could pay over the internet the .80$ toll charge, but once I went through the instructions I realized the procedure only works for US residents. I then proceeded to pretend I lived here, but got stuck at the last page of the web interface because my credit cards have an italian billing address and got refused. I then tried my american VISA debit card, and that one got refused too. At that point, after almost 40 minutes wrestling with the site and at the peak of frustration, I found out that my US account was blocked for inactivity - and 6 dollars a month had been charged by the kind people at CHASE because of that. I then proceeded to call the tollway office, but they told me I could not pay with a card, and I would have to send in the credit card information. However, sending a simple letter may become a difficult task if you have no stamps and you work day shifts from 8AM to 4PM every day.

On Friday I took service as a Scientific Coordinator in the CDF control room. The accelerator works 24/7 and each experiment has to provide three shift crews a day to attend data taking and care for our detector. I arrived impeccably on time, at 7.55, only to find frowned people staring at me, and I soon realized that on the first day of shift the incoming SciCo has to be there one hour earlier, to overlap with the one that did the owl shift and refresh his or her training.

Disappointing people is not an activity I particularly enjoy, but I soon forgot the incident as I started to sort out what I did not remember about the procedures I had to refresh. However, my attention was distracted by repeated attempts at finding out whether Mia, who had taken the written test for admission to PhD courses in Padova that same day, had done a good exam or not. I would only hear from her on Monday (! students have lost all their respect to their mentors, apparently), and fortunately she did pass the exam! So if all goes well at the oral test, I will enjoy her company doing research together in CMS for the next three years!

Friday evening was spent in a very uncommon way. I visited a person I had never met before, and with whom I had only played a game or two in an internet Bridge site. This lady was the late Riqie Arneberg’s best friend, and I intended to meet her to hear Riqie’s story from her. We spent a lovely evening together, and we remembered Riqie. I think Riqie would be jealous if she knew - I know our mail and blog comment exchanges and our bridge games made her very happy, and I had promised her I would visit her next time I’d come to the US. Sadly, I could only fulfil virtually that promise, by spending the evening with the last person who saw her alive.

Oh, and I finally saw a few pictures of Riqie. What an interesting person she must have been. She had a tragic life, and she died quite young, but you could see the wit in her eyes from afar. I will collect in another post a few things she wrote in my blog, and if I find it in the wayback machine I will dig out her own blog, which she discontinued about a year ago due to a hacker attack.

Saturday was uneventful, but yesterday I had another very nice evening. I drove to north Chicago, picked up Vincent and Jadwiga - two dear friends of mine, an elderly couple who lives in a very nice apartment overlooking the lake on the north lakefront. I’ve talked about them elsewhere. We had a dinner in Evanston and then attended a chamber music concert by the Chicago Chamber Musicians. Here is the program:

• Richard Strauss, Till Eulenspiegel, Op. 28 (arr. Hasenohrl):
  • Larry Combs, clarinet
  • Gail Williams, horn
  • Jasmine Lin, violin
  • Peter Lloyd, double bass
• Franz Schubert, Fantasy for Violin and Piano in C major, Op. 159 (D.934):
  • Joseph Genualdi, violin
  • Alan Chow, piano
• Dana Wilson, Shallow Streams, Deep Rivers - world premiere
  • Gail Williams, horn
  • Joseph Genualdi, violin
  • Alan Chow, piano
• Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, n.1 (Razumovsky):
  • Jasmine Lin, violin
  • Joseph Genualdi, violin
  • Rami Solomonow, viola
  • Katinka Kleijn, cello

I especially enjoyed the new piece by Dana Wilson (who presented the piece himself). What a great composition! The three instruments fought at the beginning, retaining their own personality, to later merge perfectly into a single deeper stream of music. A very melodic piece, surprisingly balanced despite the presence of the horn.

And today was a really positive day for me. Because of the news about Mia which I already mentioned, and because I got good news about a friend of mine who is being treated with liver cancer and who feared his liver was not going to allow more radiation therapy. Instead, his doctor confirmed his bilirubin is within limits, which allows him to be treated with a third injection of radioactive microspheres in the liver artery, and there are good chances that the tumor will recede.

Life goes on. When one touches with one’s hand the fragility of human life, things get back in their place and the view is restored to a more meaningful perspective - we do not care too much any longer about the insolence of office or other silly incidents. I myself have recently been diagnosed with a relapsing carcinoma, but it does not seem a life-threatening condition - I hope. As soon as I get back to Italy I will be summoned to remove it surgically. After which, I will shrug my shoulders again and pretend to forget about my own vulnerability - something human beings have learned to do a bit too well. 

We all lose when an artist of the caliber of Mstislav Rostropovich passes away. He was 80, and played the Cello like nobody. The Cello is a wonderful instrument, one that very few artists get to master to perfection. But Rostropovich was not only a Cello player: he was a composer and a director of Orchestra. And an opposer of the regime, who fled Russia in 1974.

I am testing a new webcam these days…

Just for fun, I tried to record myself while I play a tough part of the third movement of Beethoven's "Appassionata" on the piano. The recording is not of very good quality, and I make several mistakes - oh well, did not have the time to try it on and on until I got it played decently.

If you want to have a look, and to see just how much I suck, it is in

http://www.pd.infn.it/~dorigo/beethoven.avi

Be careful though, it is a 26Mb file…

Lately I have started a fight with my own fingers in order to manage to play (I do not mean play well: just play!) the third movement of Beethoven's Appassionata, a Sonata for piano which is absolutely a masterpiece but which presents some non trivial challenges to the occasional piano player.

Typically I come home at 7PM, have dinner with my family, and then will spend 15 to 20 minutes on some part of the third movement. It is tough… Of course, to achieve a good mastering of such a difficult piece I would need at least two hours of study per day - for several weeks. And I doubt I could get anywhere near to being happy of my reproduction of the music, in any case.

But I try… And I have fun in the meantime. My family maybe less so, although I often revert to using the earphones - that benefit of an electronic piano cannot be overstated.

Today, I just threw my hands up after trying to get to a decent level of play of a particular segment of the third movement: it is a "stretto", like a canone where the two hands play the same theme with very little offset. Here is the music sheet of the part I am talking about:

It may seem easy, but it is presently giving me a hard time. Of course, once one learns the key-to-finger map in one's brain, one can move on and the thing will play itself… Not yet.

Last Saturday I got a digital metronome. You can see it in the attached picture.

Although I bought it myself, it is a gift from my father for my 40th birthday. My father is terminally ill and cannot move from his home, so he asked me to buy myself a gift on his behalf.

I have never owned a metronome, despite my long career as a musician in my youth. This one is really fancy, since it has a large analogic dial where you can set the speed of the rythm. It gives a choice of two different tones, and they are both warm, not the usual “beeps” of electronic gizmos.

I am now following much more closely the required rythm of Beethoven’s “patetica”. Thanks dad!