The weather has been very uncooperative the past 10 days, but there have been enough good days to lay and mortar the 34th course, which means we’re now in the final lap of the masonry for the Music Room. Here’s what it looks like from the driveway to the garage entry:
In the seminal essay The Prospects of Recording, Glenn Gould “explores the vast changes in musical ontology, phenomenology, production, and listening brought about by audio recording” (see Audio Culture, edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, pp 115-126). The Glenn Gould archives have Part A of that essay online, but it is the paragraphs that immediately follow that have me most excited. He says:
A lot of blocks went up this week, and the final features of the structure known as the Music Room are beginning to take shape.
We began with work on the outer wythe of the East wall, laying up the start of the upper pattern of accent blocks:
The outer wythe of the North wall may look like the straggler, but the many pallets of graded blocks tells the story: progress is going to be swift in the coming days:
In the past few weeks we’ve been making a lot of visible vertical progress, which has been exciting to watch. This week began with a major grouting effort that consumed all of Monday and half of Tuesday. And it was totally invisible. I forgot to ask just how deep the grout had to be poured into the cores of the outer wythe, but let’s put it this way: it was at least one bucket of grout going into each core of the South Wall. Here the buckets are being moved up to 18′ in preparation for the pouring:
