Ongoing quintet saga

Still exhausted, but at least today I managed to choof everyone out of the house and get some solid work done. I haven’t finished yet (taking a 1am break as I type this) but the score I think is essentially done in Finale and I’ve adapted the second cello part for the double bass. The parts still need work. Potentially a LOT of work. Which really has to be done tonight. The good news is that in the few days since I finished the piece, I’ve come to really really love it. I think it might be one of my favourites (shh! don’t tell the other pieces!). And now I’m really looking forward to Durham and the chance to see what it sounds like for real. Just hoping that the interlocking rhythms won’t be too hard for the performers – once it’s all sent off I might have a think about possible alternatives if it proves just too difficult.

Oh, and I baked a mushroom pie for dinner, which seemed to go down well with the ravening hordes.

OK. Time to put the nose back to the grindstone. Wishing I’d bought those chocolate teacakes at M&S now…

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The magic of beetroot

Totally messed-up day. Didn’t even get to look at the score of the quintet, far less finish it off like I’d hoped to today. Grr. Frustrating! But less of that and more of what I did achieve.

What I achieved was a whole lot of cooking. Thanks to the magic of beetroot and some new recipes, I provided a very pink dinner. First up were Nigel Slater’s lamb and beetroot patties, served up with tzatziki, which were fiddly but delicious. I’d definitely make them again, but probably not as a last-minute dinner. And I also made Nigella Lawson’s beetroot and cranberry cake from Nigella Christmas, which turned out well, and was nice and a bit different, but not hugely memorable, as far as I’m concerned – but that could just be that I’m not wild about any sort of fruit in cake even if it is cranberries. And not being a fan of the carrot cake either, perhaps that’s what did for me. It was a very pretty coloured mixture though! Cooked it wasn’t so pink, but still quite pretty.

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Pudding day!

Today I made my first-ever Christmas pudding. I feel simultaneously elated with the joy of creation, yet curiously let down by the fact that I can’t just serve it up – it has to just sit quietly till the 25th and then be steamed for another 3 hours before we’ll discover if it’s actually any good. It does seem to smell pretty good, though, from what I can tell with my nose all stuffed up. And the little bit of mix I tasted gave me hope that perhaps this will be a recipe I might be able to tolerate (my general attitude towards Christmas pudding is “ew yuk, take the horrid thing away!”). For those who are interested, I’m doing the Nigella Lawson Ultimate Christmas Pudding from her Nigella Christmas book. I was supposed to do our family’s traditional pud recipe, but there was confusion because the recipe we were supplied with called for “a packet” of cinnamon. I’m pretty sure I know what sort of packet this would be in Australia, but spices don’t come like that here and I’d hate to guess at the spice quantity and then mess the whole thing up. Nigella, on the whole, seemed safer. I shall take a peek under the lid tomorrow to see what it looks like and find out whether the whole thing’s been a disaster.

Still tearing my hair out over the Remembrances score I was supposed to send off earlier this week – it’s been dogged with annoying problems – everything looked fine, then I discovered the voice part was entirely in the tenor clef. After much poking at Finale I got this fixed, re-exported, re-trimmed, re-imported into InDesign… to discover that when I fixed the clef, the vocal line had dropped an octave. So now I’m re-re-trimming and hope to have it finished tonight.

Quintet is not happy. I think I may need to add something in the middle. This makes me also not happy.

I introduced my parents to my trifle though, which seemed to go down quite well – brioche slices, a touch of Napoleon brandy, fresh raspberries, custard, whipped cream, slivered almonds.

Oh, and posted a new blog post too. The Digital Dimension: 1. Programme notes, which then received a response post from Killing Classical Music, from whence the incentive to write the original post came. All very incestuous!

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Struggling

I’ve been in a pretty bad head-place since getting back from Portugal. Not entirely sure if it’s a case of the post-holiday glums or just the dismal snow-ridden weather and being cooped up after all the exercise, fresh air and intermittent sunshine of Lisbon. Possibly I need to tidy up and do some house-brightening. Maybe invest in some daylight bulbs to dispel a little of the gloom occasioned by the appalling lighting setup in this flat. What I wouldn’t give to be able to repaint and move all the lights into the middle of the room and get rid of the landlord’s heavy, big, dark furniture. Feeling a desperate need for COLOUR.

At any rate, today was a bit of a struggle. I had a physio appointment in the morning. She has given me a red theraband which which to work on my resistance exercises, which hopefully will make actually doing them a little easier. The pavements out there are pretty treacherous though – ice all over the place once you’re off the main roads – so after that I just went to the local shops to get some stuff for dinner, and also took advantage of the chance to pick up BBC Music Magazine and Classic FM magazine for their Christmas music cover CDs – both very good this year, although I think (as often happens) the BBC one is the more interesting, so if you’re contemplating them, that’s my recommendation Also treated myself to the Christmas issue of Jamie magazine, which has some yummy-sounding ideas in it.

This afternoon has been primarily spent battling the glums and not really prevailing. We pulled out the Christmas decorations and dressed the (tiny) tree, which was nice, but I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to fill the wide windowsills and our empty walls. Might need to sort out some of our posters which are languishing about the place and get them framed quickly. Our last house was tiny, so the only decoration needed to make the whole place seem Christmassy was the tree, a few wooden stockings along the mantlepiece and my marvellous Nisse in the bookcase.

But now, alas, we have huge spaces to fill, and even the addition of the new crazy robin isn’t enough to fill the void. Or perhaps to overcome the clutter that we haven’t yet found anywhere to store. Maybe bright coloured boxes for the clutter might help???

But I did finally do something constructive:

1. I made raspberry muffins

2. I worked a tiny bit on the quintet until Finale crashed (after a save, thank heavens). I am delighted to be able to report that I’m still working on the additions I made just before we left for Portugal. I haven’t (yet) had to delete all that like I was doing on daily basis before. I think this is progress.

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Slob slob slob

SO proud of myself. I have done barely anything today. This morning I did do a quick edit on the recording from Friday night’s concert, so that’s ready for archiving now. Then there was a lot of dozing, napping and quiet silly conversation. And then I somehow mustered some energy and went out to buy the camera connection kit for the iPad and made dinner and a chocolate ripple cake. Um. On second thoughts, I guess I actually did do stuff. Whoops.

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Forward momentum

At last! After a couple of weeks of the quintet being stalled, I’ve finally pushed it forward a bit. I made myself sit down and review the themes and figures that have been used for the earlier parts and realised that a bunch of related figures might actually work all piled up on top of one another – and lo! they do! Not entirely sure where it’s heading for next. Hoping that will come clear tomorrow. May have to be a little disciplined and go all pomodoro on it for a bit in order to keep it moving forward.

I’ve also put in a big push today to get my to-do lists in order. I’ve ticked off about 8 things from my list and done a bit of clean-up. I’d been hearing about this iPhonePod app called Epic Win – a to-do list masquerading as a role-playing game. You complete chores to earn points. Very cool concept, so I’m giving it a go – not for my overall lists because they’re too complex and I need to be able to categorise them in more detail than Epic Win allows, but I’ve moved all the regular but dull and not critical tasks out of  Remember The Milk and into Epic Win to (a) encourage me to actually do them (stuff like reconciling accounts and downloading bank statements) and (b) stop them cluttering up my other lists so much that I can’t see what I’m doing. Crossing fingers it works well. I’d really like to be able to just have one manageable to-do list but it doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon. Got to just keep plugging away at it, I guess.

And now it’s time to bake

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More quintet

Back to the quintet again after a few days of hijacked priorities. I’ve ripped off the tail of it (unfortunately a bit I really liked but it was meandering and not really contributing anything but confusion) and reworked and it feels quite a bit tighter now. Might try to find a home in another piece for the detached tail sometime.

I baked too – a new recipe from my most recent cookbook acquisition, The National Trust Teatime Baking Cookbook – Cornish Fairings. They’re kind of like a light gingerbread, slightly chewy in the middle. The closest commercial biscuit I can think of in flavour is those Swedish Ginger Thins you get from Ikea. Really a first-rate recipe – easy, very tasty, and made a good quantity. Definitely a keeper.

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Baked brownies

Low-achievement day today – I went to the dentist for a check-up and to see what’s going on with this tiny abcess I’ve had on my gum, coming and going in the same spot for about a year and a half. Last time she gave me antibiotics which didn’t really do anything, and this time *sigh* she did a full-mouth x-ray and discovered that a filling my Australian dentist did was drilled too close to the nerve, so it’s irritating the nerve which is causing the abcess. So I need root canal. *waaah!* On the plus side, there’s nothing actually wrong with my teeth, which is kind of comforting. Anyway, the whole experience kind of put me in a little grey hole. So I baked brownies for a lovely friend who my parents are meeting up with while they’re away. Hope they turned out OK. This oven’s really quite insane…

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Another reading day

But also a knitting day, a baking day, a piano-and-flute-playing day, a listening day and a composing day. Quite a productive day, I guess! My great-aunt’s scarf is about 6 rows off being finished. I am determined to complete it tonight – it looks lovely but I’m SO BORED of it. Really just excruciatingly dull. I have a re-moralising hat at the ready as my next knitting project. I baked a new recipe – oat biscuits from Tessa Kiros’s Apples for Jam – very easy, very tasty and while not strictly healthy, there’s a much more sensible fibre/sugar/fat ratio than other biscuits. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.

For most of the day though, I’ve been reading and listening. I started out while the mother was practicing in my study by occupying the loungeroom, putting on the Bax Symphony No. 4 and indulging in more of The Rest Is Noise. Then I got a little distracted after which I moved into the study and put on Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass while alternately doing a little knitting and reading some more of the Morton Feldman writings. I was going to dive in to John Cage’s Silence while listening to Strauss’s Salome, but I started taking notes on the Feldman and that ended up taking the whole of the chunk of the opera I was able to listen to before Spotify went mad and then my iPod decided it had had enough and it was time for a nap. I was most delightfully surprised by the Strauss. My mother so dislikes him that I’ve sort of grown up with this ingrained “Strauss bad – Debussy good” approach, but I really liked it – really meaty harmonies. Would be pretty impressive live, I’d imagine. I’d settle for a recording without buffering gaps though…

In the late afternoon I emerged from my burrow to find that parents had vanished, so I took advantage of the silence and did some composing. Nothing fabulous, and nothing string-quintetty, but the notes I had from earlier were so determined to be a piano piece that I figured it would be a good thing to at least start seeing what sort of piano piece they wanted to be. Any composing is definitely better than no composing!

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Mostly sleeping

I don’t seem to have achieved a huge amount today. Between sleeping badly, getting up late, clonking myself on the head with the kitchen cupboard which resulted in intense wooziness, then accompanying my Da to the dentist and a long and lovely walk home, followed by a much needed nap, there wasn’t a lot of time left, but the walk was indeed lovely – the heavens decided to wait to open until we’d decided to hop on the bus for the last bit, the ankle stood up pretty well to it, I did 20 minutes on the Wii Fit in the morning (just the balance games – trying to do a little bit each day to see if it helps to strengthen the ankle), made my Da a chocolate ripple cake and have nearly finished (I’m pretty sure this time) the scarf for my Great-Aunt which now flows down off my lap and keeps my ankles warm while I’m knitting it.

And I’ve had a fresh stab at trying to generate some ideas for this quintet. Not terribly successful, although the opening idea might end up in it, but it’s more of a texture than a melodic germ. I know it’ll come eventually, but it’s just taking its own sweet time which always freaks me out a little. Contemplating heading into town and picking up the score of the Martinu Sextet that I didn’t bring home the other day – possibly a little score-reading will spark some ideas???? Sort of feel I’m clutching at straws though… Must remain calm…

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