Well, all sorts of work avalanche would be more accurate! All of a sudden I find myself with two client website projects to work on (one due in a week’s time. No, I’m not stressed. No, not at all. Who me?), one website for Djeli’s super-secret project which he wants done by the end of the weekend but hasn’t yet written the text for, shiny new step-motherhood to deal with, an orchestral work to keep working on, actual homework this time for my composition lessons, not to mention all the training stuff that’s underway – BUSY! But great-busy. Really enjoying all of it and finding it easier to keep focused because I *am* enjoying all of it, even if a couple of deadlines are a little more deadliney than is strictly comfortable.

I’ve been doing the Authority Rules conference run by Copyblogger over the past couple of weeks, and it’s been fantastic. Actually way more interesting and useful than I ever thought it would be, and SO worth the money. It’s particularly interesting because it’s making me think in new ways about all my endeavours. One of the things they’ve been talking about is about finding your ‘right people’ and putting up  a ‘red velvet rope’ so that only your right people are the ones you work with – because they’re the sort of clients who bring out the best work in you and who you’re happiest and most fired-up to work with. And it makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of the trouble I had with thinking about running my own business before was because I was thinking generically “helping small businesses make websites that actually work for them” whereas the people I relate to best, enjoy working with the most and probably can help the most effectively are creative types. And that makes such a huge difference. So the projects I have now are for a violinist here in the UK and a Pilates studio in Australia, and it’s great. I’m really enjoying working on these, and I can’t wait for them to see a big difference once their new sites are launched.

Carrion Comfort is slowly slinking forwards. It really made such a huge difference to ditch the vocal part for a trumpet – it was what it really wanted. Now I’ve been cleaning some things up and I think I have the beginning of the next bit, but it’s been feeling structurally stalled a little bit. In today’s lesson my tutor has suggested I take my initial theme, pull it out of the piece and just mess about with it seeing how many different permutations I can come up with and then seeing if any of them might be useful in the piece, but without pressure to produce something that will be, or expectation of same. I’m liking this idea and looking forward to being able to do something on that over the weekend. He played me part of the second movement of Andrzej Panufnik’s Violin Concerto [sorry - it'll start playing at you as soon as you click that link] as an example of what can be done with a simple interval (it’s basically just constructed out of thirds!). Absolutely gorgeous. I’d love to hear the whole of it, but alas, the excerpt linked to there is the only thing I can find online without buying an entire CD or signing up to emusic’s subscription plan. Which I may do anyway but good golly it’s been frustrating! And all the more so as there ARE recordings. Menuhin recorded it in the 70s, and EMI seems to have a fairly current recording on their books, but it’s nowhere to be found in the online music stores! Even iTunes, which I consider a last resort because I object to DRM on principle, had a bunch of other Panufnik stuff but the only Violin Concerto bit was the third movement! Ack! Hmm. Well, grateful for small mercies. It’s still beautiful, even in just that snippet.

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Super-productive today. As with a lot of my days recently, I’ve been largely focused on self-promotion stuff rather than strict creativity per se, but it does exercise my creative brain in that I have to think up new ways to do things.

The last few days I’ve been working on getting a proper mailing list established for caitlinrowley.com using MailChimp. I have to say, that I am absolutely delighted with MailChimp. Great-looking product, easy to use, very generous with their free account (2000 subscribers! 12,000 emails a month!) and the whole thing seems to be completely customisable, assuming you’re willing to put in a bit of coding work. I had some difficulties and emailed their tech support without much hope of anything coming of it (because tech supports in general are pretty useless for anything other than pre-scripted issues) and WOW WOW WOW! Not only did I get a reply within 2 hours, but the guy had actually read my email (SO rare) and had multiple solutions for me, even though it’s not an off-the-shelf problem. SO impressed. And when you set up a campaign they give you a PDF download to make your own papercraft chimp. Now that’s got to be a winner.

Anyway, so the list is set up now. Today I also posted a new blog post and have linked via the signup form to the score of the piece – it’s a temporary measure because getting it working properly is going to take a little time, but it’s better than the SoundCloud option I’ve been trying out which turned out to just be incredibly clunky and uncomfortable (and some regular internet users said they couldn’t even see the link to download. Fail).

So super-excited about all that. Hoping I should get some subscribers soon. It’ll be interesting to see if and how well it works…

Oh, and the on-again-off-again film project is on again. Got a call on Monday about that one. And I went to see a potential client about a website project yesterday… and came away with another film score project (and a website one) – woot!

Tagged with: blogging, code, completion, composition, dayjob, experimenting, learning, music, programming, publishing, self-promotion, tools, web | Add a comment

Well, this month really isn’t getting any better. And today definitely contributed to the downhill slide into dismal oblivion with the news that my very first composition teacher, Eric Gross, has died. Prof Gross was really a lovely man and a very fine composer, although I didn’t really get either of these things when I first started learning with him and for a long time I thought that he was just the wrong teacher for me.

But today I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that experience and I suspect that a large part of the blame lies with me. If I had been less timid and a bit more confident in my own abilities, if I had asked more questions in particular, what might that first year have been like? At the time I thought his music was terribly modern inaccessible. Now, after 20 years’ worth of listening and studying and writing and thinking, I find this is most definitely not the case and I wonder what I could have learned from him were he my teacher now instead of then.

So I’ve written a blog post about it which will go up on caitlinrowley.com tomorrow afternoon.

Rest in peace, Eric. I’m looking forward to exploring your music properly and learning as much as I can from it that I wasn’t ready to learn from you 20 years ago.

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Yes, I know things have been a bit quiet round here, but it’s not like it’s been uneventful. There’s been the back-pain drama, there’s been the dental drama (round 2 of drilling and filling today so back on the painkillers again), there was a birthday, which resulted in lovely presents from lovely people, including: 1 proper real-live microphone, Nigel Slater’s fruit cookbook, a book on libretto-writing, one on poetry-writing, 2 seasons of Chuck. Plus of course the presents I bought myself: the iPad (which you know about and seems to become more useful and awesome with every passing day) and Logic Studio, which arrived on the birthday day but took us a couple of days to install due to my having dropped my laptop several months back, meaning that DVDs go into it but can’t really be relied on to come out again… Still working on how to get the software instruments that come with Logic up and running…

So there’s been a lot of playing about with toys. Mostly the ones I bought myself though as I need to get a cable for the mic, I’m finishing up other books before I start the libretto ones and my back has hurt too much to do much cooking (barring a culinary experiment which resulted in an apple-enhanced caramel cake which went down quite well).

So I’ll just slide over the missed days and focus on today. Obviously, I went to the dentist. He says that this should be the last of the deep drilling (thank heavens). Been pretty uncomfy though, but yay for painkillers! And also yay for spectacularly beautiful summer’s day even though it’s only spring! It was so lovely, I decided to walk home instead of catching the bus (which was taking too long and I was also getting bored), so I walked back through the sunshine and the intermittent smell of jasmine, listening to the birds going twit in the hedges and chatting with a friend in Australia via IM. Rather lovely, actually.

Once home I actually didn’t immediately have a nap, as I’d expected. Instead I did some work on my new piece. It’s been a little stuck lately but I managed to prod it forward a little and flesh out some of the earlier parts too.

Then there was tinkering about with Logic Studio. I’m really enjoying using this. Fascinating to discover that the interface basically hasn’t changed since I was using microLogic at uni – 15 years ago! so it’s mostly familiar, and the bits that are less familiar – the audio-editing side of things, isn’t that dissimilar from Pro Tools, so I seem to be picking things up pretty quickly. And I can’t begin to express how much easier and more comfortable it is to work in it, not needing to be tethered to a hardware box at all times. I don’t have to think twice about opening it up for a small sound-file-trimming job. And I’ve discovered some cool stuff – beat mapping to make a MIDI file sound more like it was played by a human than a robot to start with! I borrowed a book from the TVU library yesterday and started working my way through it this afternoon. Finding out some interesting snippets, but I’m hoping I can get away with just borrowing the book and not having to buy it. Would rather spend my birthday Amazon voucher on the Advanced volume

And then when the sun was setting, I got all inspired to grab the iPad and try a little bit of drawing. It’s not great, but it was fun to do and an interesting exercise, messing round with silhouettes and trying to get the sunset colours to blend a bit

Tagged with: art, composition, drawing, EDM, experimenting, learning, music, photography, play, study, tools, walking | Add a comment

Well, not seriously. I didn’t really expect to just be able to walk in to the Apple Store at Shepherd’s Bush and walk out with an iPad 2. And look! I was right! But I did achieve my officially-stated goal of inspecting the covers. They’re very cute. Such a shame they didn’t make one that covers the back too. I mean, it’d be less sleek, but a whole lot more effective if you drop the thing. And of course there are no third-party covers out pretty much at all at the moment that one can inspect for feel, style and weight, so I guess I’ll have to go with an Apple cover, even if only for the interim. I was going to get an orange one but in RL the orange is a little yellowy and not really that grand. The red leather is gorgeous but way too expensive. The green is practically fluoro. So I’m thinking I might go for the low-key pale grey. Keep it nice and neutral. And maybe get a nice bright neoprene pouch for it to travel in. Summat like that. But of course first I have to get my paws on an actual iPad all of my own. Apple’s now opened up instore reservations from the website for next-day pickup, which I made an attempt with, but the wretched system let me get all the way through before telling me there weren’t any slots! VERY annoying.

I shall cease to talk about that experience any more. It was very frustrating. I shall probably be similarly frustrated every evening for several weeks to come.

Apart from that, not too much to report. I watched the last bit of the summary videos for the end of the first week of my JavaScript refresher course. So far I seem to understand everything. There’s been one or two newish concepts (or rather, concepts that I knew existed but didn’t know quite how they fitted in) but mostly – understandably – the first week’s been mostly about basic principles. I’m pleased to say that I got through the week’s coding challenge first time, and worked it out in just a few minutes. Huzzah! Not as dim as I felt I was!

I also finally sat down and went through the new orchestral song thingy trying to pick out themes. There really aren’t that many to speak of, which is a little disturbing. The piece itself seems to have stalled somewhat following its superhero start, which is disappointing. I should push myself more with it. The plan is to send it off to my tutor on Wednesday so he can see what I’ve been up to and prepare stuff accordingly if need be. Um.

And had a bit of a panicky doubting think about jobs and what I should be doing about them. Conclusion: I have no idea. I’m a total mess and don’t know what I should be doing. I’m enjoying the composition teaching, but that’s not really a money-making option (not enough private students and academia is out because a. I don’t have any contacts and b. I don’t have even a Masters degree). I like building websites but I don’t really like dealing with clients. Or people in general. I like publishing and so on but ditto. Which kind of seems to wipe out the work-for-myself option because there’s no getting away from clients when you’re freelance. I’m beginning to think that, in spite of all the conceptual journey I’ve been on over the past couple of months, I’m kind of back where I started: short term web contracts, while trying to bring in a little money from this and that on the side. Which is a little depressing. But I think it’s more practical. I got so caught up in the sideline stuff of getting my own business running that the music kind of got shunted to one side. And when I de-shunted it because it became clear that I might need to have to find a job sooner than expected and I didn’t want to waste composition time, then the business stuff ended up shunted. Maybe I can’t actually do both. How depressing. I want to be superwoman! (I’d prefer Batgirl because the outfit’s cuter, but still…) Anyway, thoughts still bubbling away, ideas about priorities and how do I deal with them. Still no solution on the if-I-get-a-real-job-how-do-I-keep-the-music-going-while-not-letting-down-either-my-employer-or-myself issue. Perhaps there never will be. If you have any suggestions, please comment away!

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It feels somewhat miraculous to have achieved a second composition lesson, given the stops and starts there’ve been. But yes, it happened this evening. And it was good. Simon brought along the scores of Paganini’s Caprices and Bach’s Partita and we looked at violin writing and what else might be done with the (ostensibly completed) Diabolus. Still some good ideas coming through – some of which I think I might touch on in the blog post when I (hopefully) get around to writing it on Sunday. In particular I liked his idea of making a bunch of versions and sending a different one to various violinists I might know, asking them each to make a recording, then listening to them all and seeing what works. Might actually follow through on this – might be a really good way to see how various things sound rather than just guessing what sounds right. Guess I’ll need to make a list of violinists now…

The rest of the day was pretty tame, but quite nice. A troubled night due to the troublesome dentals (6 days to root canal) and woke up with a crashing headache – haven’t had one of those in months, so I didn’t push myself too much but mostly tinkered around with fixing up my GTD implementation – my to-do lists in Remember the Milk had become insanely unweildy and totally unusable, so I deleted everything except my Tickler list and am starting again with a new approach. Ended up shunting about 15 projects into Someday/Maybe which had crept into Current, but just weren’t being dealt with and weren’t about to be. Someday/Maybe now lives in Evernote, which I think will help keep RTM much cleaner and entirely about the “what am I doing now” rather than the “hmm, what to play with next?”. I also went to Ryman’s and bought a stack of manila folders because my filing system’s no longer a system and needs help. Feels really, REALLY good to be getting organised again and feeling more confident that I know what needs to be done and what should be done nowish.

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Today I finally managed to get to a Composition Workshop class at TVU. I felt a bit nervous going in – after all, semester’s been running for about 5 weeks now so it felt a bit weird to just be sauntering in so late in the term, but I needn’t have worried. It was an interesting session – I can tell I’m going to learn all sorts of unexpected stuff in this class. Today’s 2 hour lecture-demonstration was on creating a dubstep remix of Pierre Schaefer’s 1948 musique concrète work Études aux chemins fers with particular focus on the artifacts of time-stretching, so it was all about pulling the base sound around and listening to the weird and fabulous effects created as Logic attempts to fill in the gaps created by the stretching with granular synthesis. Way cool. Not that I actually know what dubstep is. Guess I should go and look that up, huh?

Made a little progress on the new piece. Another 10 seconds. And I seem to have found a text too. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Carrion Comfort:

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

It’s raaather longer than I had been thinking. Indeed the whole piece seems to be thinking of itself on a somewhat epic scale, but anyway, I’ll see how it goes. If it’s coming along well but is incomplete, it may be appropriate anyway for Manchester. I can write to them a little closer to the date and see if that would be acceptable.

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BIG day today. In spite of being a quiet day after the pressure of yesterday, I have posted the sound file for Diabolus to SoundCloud today:

Diabolus for unaccompanied violin by caitlinrowley

I’ve been getting some nice comments about it too, which is comforting. People seem to think it’s worthy of getting a real live, performance. Ooh I feel all glowy.

Did some listening & score reading in the afternoon – Nicholas Maw’s Life Studies, which my tutor suggested, which led to some reading about Maw which led to listening to Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw, which is the piece that inspired me to write a 12-tone work for my HSC. Gosh it sounds pretty tame now, compared to other 2nd Viennese School stuff. I enjoyed it though. Also gave Gordon Crosse’s Thel another run through. Then changed tack entirely and listened through to Tansy Davies’ new CD Troubairitz because it’s, well, new. And awesome. Did a little drawing too, which always seems to consolidate thought.

I’ve also come up with a shiny new plan for The Next Piece. Tansy posted an amazing-looking opportunity to the ChaCoCo group on Facebook today – a residency opp with Manchester Camerata, which looks to be right up my alley, but requires 2 works to be submitted: 1 for up to 6 players (which I can do easily) plus one for 9+ players or chamber orchestra (which I don’t have). It hath a deadline of 18 April. Then I found an opp for songs for voice & chamber orchestra due in September, so I figure if I write a song (or start writing a set of songs) for voice and chamber orchestra, then I can hopefully kill two birds with one stone. Hey, presto! PLAN!

And after the plan was made I sat down and accidentally wrote almost a minute of said piece, which Djelibeybi seems to think is a promising beginning, as do I. Guess I need to settle on a text now. The Blake I was investigating as a possibility I think won’t really fit. Maybe Manley Hopkins? The sister-in-common-law has suggested I investigate Cavafy. He seems to be (just) dead enough to avoid copyright problems (although translations may be difficult and I don’t speak Greek) and sounds interesting. Considering…

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Yes! It’s finished! Diabolus is all done and sent off to Conway Kuo. Hope he likes it. I like it. I guess that’s the first step

And I have a student card! And library access! And BOOKS and SCORES! WOOT!

I also have peach nectar, which should make anyone happy.

And Nonclassical tweeted a link to this blog for my post about Tansy’s CD launch, which was a trifle surreal, considering pretty much nobody reads this. Seems it came up on a Google search. Guess I’m doing something right then…

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Today was my second lesson as a composition teacher. It seemed to go pretty well. Student seemed quite pleased. Let’s hope I can build on this

Plus I’ve been tweaking the layout of the score for Diabolus, which is due tomorrow (email deadline, thank heavens). No more note tweaks now, just moving things about and trying to make a custom… thingy… to indicate that a note starts out with vibrato but ends up with no vibrato. Not as easy as it would seem in Finale.

Still no student card though. I had the day ALL PLANNED. I was going to go out to my lesson, then come back and head straight to TVU. However, as soon as I left my student’s house I was attacked by a cloud of building dust which zoomed straight into my left eye, and didn’t all remove itself until about 6pm. I figured one red weepy eye was not a good look for a student card photo, so that’s back on the list for tomorrow.

Had a bit of a listen to some Barber songs tonight too. Thinking about Dover Beach as a possible model for instrumentation (tenor + string quartet) for the new piece. Also thinking about whether it might be possible to use some of The Compleat Angler for the text. Gosh I love that book. Yes, it’s all about fish, but the prose is just so beautiful. I’ve wanted to use it for something for ages. Maybe I could pick just one fish. Maybe I could have minimal text and use the voice as an instrument. Once I have my student card I will see if TVU has a copy in the library – mine’s in storage in Sydney, so that’s not much use

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