Busy day! Not a lot on RPM, but enough: I retrieved the MiniDisc player from D, set up the MBox (which hadn’t worked since I reinstalled but neglected to install ProTools – this time round I found just a driver and skipped the ProTools) and recorded the field recordings I made in Zurich (street noises, trams) across into Logic, so I now have them in a usable format for my piece. They were less defined sounds than I’d hoped to capture, and the recording a little noisier (disc noise just as bad in places as I’d feared but it’s only in patches – where it sounds like a quiet coffee grinder – not all the way through) but they should be entirely usable, even though I may combine them with some other recordings or use some sort of processing on some of them to give a bit more shape to the whole. I also found, in addition to the Zurich and Brussels recordings I knew were there, an MD marked “Iraklio” – I’d completely forgotten I made any recordings on the MD in Greece. I thought I only had crappy ones taken with the audio function on my camera because we kept coming across things that required instant reaction (not possible with the MiniDisc) – a teachers’ strike, a children’s band playing enthusiastically but with a delightful disregard of pitch. Looking forward to seeing what’s on there tomorrow!

I hand-delivered the score of Carrion Comfort to Herne Hill (which is lovely, by the way, if you’re thinking of moving to South London) and did the first round of corrections on the parts on the train. Mostly they’re pretty OK, except that Finale’s done some weird thing where the spacing between staves is different on every part – it’s like Finale’s tried to make all the parts fit into one page exactly, so the trombone part has masses of space, while the viola part has markings colliding on every stave as the markings below the stave run into the markings above the stave of the next system! Aargh!

And tonight I trekked off to Nonclassical (trek being the operative word – really wish they’d find a venue that’s actually near a Tube station – then I wouldn’t have to leave quite so early to be sure of catching the last train, and would be more likely to go to more of them!) to hear Consortium 5, a recorder consort. Excellent music – I made some great notes on ideas for Ladders of Escape which I’m writing for the Pink Noise recorder quartet in Bristol. Loads of ideas! And I caved and bought their CD too. I am weak. But happy

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A big day today. And a bit messed up, as they have been lately. It started off with seeing the vicar next door strangling his rooster (Backstory: he bought 2 chickens and 2 roosters. Why, I don’t know – my theory is that he wanted to teach the kids about monogamy. Problem is, that doesn’t work for chickens, so the 2 roosters were apparently vying for territory and not just crowing in the morning, but having squawk-offs throughout the day and the noise was appalling – apparently most of the residents in our block have complained) and then watching his kids jump around like it was a holiday before plucking the carcass. I felt like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window! Really rather traumatising. Especially the bit where I saw the eldest girl come trotting back with the big tree-pruning shears… and felt I needed to stop watching at that point. Aaargh! The remaining rooster has been crowing mournfully at intervals for the rest of the day. May have to channel all this into a composition sometime.

Then there was a plumbing drama which I won’t go into but took the entire day to fix, nearly made me miss my physio appointment and had me very, very worried that we wouldn’t have a working shower in time for the concert (but our plumber came through just in time – legend!).

But with all the palaver we were a bit late for the concert. Did manage to hear the end of the first piece though, which was brilliant – for piano 6 hands by Kaja Bjorntvedt – and the concert overall was excellent and a really varied programme. Quite long, but most enjoyable. My piece went off pretty well – I was really pleased with how well it worked, actually, as I’ve been a little worried about the middle song of the three, in particular, basically since I wrote it, but Tamara and Luca did a beautiful job with conveying the style and shape of the work. Not a perfect performance, as Tamara – poor thing – woke up with laryngitis this morning and consequently there were a few little problems, but she and Luca did a great job under the circumstances and overall I’m really pleased with it.

AND I found a CD of songs for bass voice by Einojuhani Rautavaara at the interval CD table for only £2!!!! LOVE his stuff. More and more.

Now for the weekend. Words cannot express how happy I am to be able to write those words!

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Tonight I did something I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time but have been a little nervous to leap into, being, as I am, not a naturally cool, hip and groovy person but more of an uncertain, clumsy and not-very-fashion-conscious creature. Tonight I went to Nonclassical, the new music club night which has been around in London for quite some time. And am I glad I did? OMG AWESOME! Just amazing, inspiring, music-high incredibleness!

I went along because it was the launch night for Tansy Davies’ new CD Troubairitz and as she was my tutor at Durham I wanted to be there and say hi and revel in the awesomeness. And what a brilliant night! Unfortunately we couldn’t stay to the bitter end because that would have meant night bus home from Liverpool Street and messed up the whole of tomorrow, which, being a premiere day, is not advisable, but just loved what I heard. And of course I got the CD

A funny thing too: Saw Matthew Schlomowitz there! He was at the Sydney Con at the same time I was at Sydney Uni. Not sure if he’d remember me – probably not – and I didn’t get around to saying hello anyway because by the time I was sure it was him he was surrounded and being congratulated on the performance of his (most excellent) piece which was played in the first set of the evening. Really great to hear what he’s doing now though – looking forward to hearing more.

But I DEFINITELY want to go to Nonclassical again – exactly the sort of music I love and the vibe is so relaxed and awesome. Absolutely brilliant.

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Came out of my shell a little today – we had a friend for lunch & Djelibeybi made roast turkey with some of the trimmings (turkey was excess from Christmas that we’d had to freeze because we ended up with such a vast amount of meat!) and for afters I made ebelskivers with homemade passionfruit curd – VERY fine, if I do say so myself.

In the evening we ventured out to St John’s Smith Square for a concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of Australian composer Percy Grainger’s death. And what a great programme – marvellous Grainger and some great Grainger-inspired works by other composers too. A really excellent programme and topped off with an encore of an all-out Sousa version of Country Gardens. The only version I’ve been able to find online is this one from YouTube where they all sound quite bored. Consider this, but with enthusiasm and then with the brakes totally taken off, everyone playing with gusto and vibrancy and you’ll get about half an idea of how good this was.

Anyway, came back after the concert and I needed to put up another sound file on SoundCloud because I applied for a composition job for a film score today too, so I pulled out the laptop, attached my audio disk and started Pro Tools. Everything was going well until Pro Tools froze, as it does. After that it started glitching a bit, so I closed it down and reopened it. At which point it started giving me errors and wouldn’t play the file. So I rebooted the computer, at which point the system decided my disk could not be read and telling me I needed to initialise it. Which of course would wipe all the data. This is a big deal because this particular disk contains all my scores. Everything I’ve done for the past ten years. And with the recent apparent failure of my grand plan to back everything up online (where 90% of the files just vanished out of the folders they were in for no apparent reason) this disk now contains my most complete backup. Which I now can’t get at at all. Going to attempt to sleep on this problem…

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This week has been getting progressively worse and worse. Today I struggled in the morning, went out for a meeting which my meetee had forgotten all about, so I bought myself a muffin and came home. I did get to the post office in the afternoon to post a friend’s birthday & Christmas presents which I should have sent back in September. I think that’s a win even while being a massive fail. And then I came back, found something on the internet which made me massively angry and wrote a huge ranty blog post about it (not posted, unlikely to be, on reflection) which then made me late for the evening appointment for which TFL made me even later and the bus driver not knowing if he went anywhere near Putney Railway Station made me even later than that. Dinner was nice. Nice friends, nice food. Overly long walk at speed to pub not so nice resulting in achey unhappy ankle and achey unhappy insides. Gig was not to my taste and resulted in extreme boredom (but thought up some ways to improve the beginning of the violin piece).

But, like I say, I got to the post office.

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Today has been a day of pushing and prodding bits and pieces, slowly coercing the quintet’s parts to be respectable and intelligible. Some of it has been successful; some less so (most notably the issue of key signature – I habitually write without key signatures, using a mixture of sharps and flats as required, but this piece is particularly tricky to work out what key signature it should use because it’s continually contradicting itself), but progress has been made and I do believe that at this stage (2.30am) the score is essentially done and the parts are well on their way.

I also went and saw the dental hygienist (what an exciting life I lead) and was told that I have neither plaque nor calculus so yay for the new electric toothbrush. I got snowed on twice. Djeli’s Christmas present turned up, turned out to be larger than expected and has necessitated the participation of parents to hide it until I can get enough wrapping paper to cover the box. And I accompanied my mama to a lovely concert at Wigmore Hall of Debussy, Bax, Vaughan Williams, Puccini and Piazzolla chamber works – really gorgeous, just a shame my brain was whirring away desperately trying to work out the key signature issue so I didn’t really take in as much as I might have, but it made for a nice interlude in what otherwise would have been a dull and stressful evening.

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In spite of feeling like death, I staggered out with parents and Djelibeybi to see Ute Lemper at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. And gosh, was it worth it – she is AMAZING. Yes, her recordings are fabulous, but live she is a wonder to behold. Her Mack the Knife and Surabaya Johnny were a revelation. Still in a bit of a daze…

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Tonight was the second performance of my piece Deconstruct: Point, line, plane and how exciting it was! In spite of a few early wrong notes and the beginning and ending still a little fast, overall the ensemble did a great job – finally it came together! Woohoo!

The morning was pretty exciting too because I finally sent my new site, caitlinrowley.com, live. It’s rather later than the 30 September launch date I’d originally planned, and it’s not really 100% perfect, especially for rarer browsers, but with these sorts of projects sooner or later you get to a point where you just need to send it off into the world and tweak afterwards. So this is that point

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Tonight was the Philharmonia Orchestra’s memorial concert for Sir Charles Mackerras. I have to say, I’ve rarely been to such an awesome concert. To start with, it was HUGE. A massive programme – 2 intervals – and everything was just perfect. Add to musical perfection the vast numbers of Mackerras family who turned up – Djelibeybi’s sister worked out that there were representatives from every branch of the family there, which is really saying something, including several who had come over from Australia just for the concert. So lovely to see everyone. And great to see Alex (Briger) conduct in a concert hall again – I’ve only seen him once before (conducting Mahler, and actually making him plausible, which in my book is a vast achievement as usually I’m bored witless 5 minutes in) as mostly we see him conducting opera. And he did a fantastic job of Charlie’s Cunning Little Vixen suite, the final scene of the same opera and then an absolutely sparkling rendition of the overture to Pineapple Poll as an encore. A very fitting memorial. Charlie would have loved it.

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I’ve not been trying to do anything on the quintet the last few days – it was freaking me out a little and my brain was feeling fried with all the socialising I’ve had to do, so I just focused on enjoying my parents for a few days and the piece lie quietly. Yesterday, though, I sent the parental units off to the Isle of Wight for a few days, so today I really had no more excuses so I (eventually) made myself sit down and I seem to have come up with some notes – just a small figure, based on falling parallel 7ths, which I think must be in retaliation against all the counterpoint exercises I’ve done. Mr Fux would be aghast. It’s not much, but it feels like it could be a proper start. I do think I need to get away from the piano as soon as possible – it’s messing with my sound-world for this piece and the practicalities of working at the piano when there are people in the house (and a mother playing it every day) are… flawed, so I’m thinking I might take what I’ve got and go straight into Finale with it. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

And some news today – the London New Wind Festival are thinking of playing my piece Deconstruct: Point, line, plane again! And they want me to be on a composer panel before the performance, which should be… interesting. Haven’t done one of those before. As a musicologist, yes, but not as a composer. Eek!

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