Today’s is a portmanteau post. I will start with the major triumph which is that Carrion Comfort has, at long, long, long, long last, gone to the printers. Yup, it’s done. I have had to make a couple of compromises because of the amateur nature of the ensemble it’s destined for, but the original timpani part at least will go into the final post-(hopeful)-workshop score. I felt it would just confuse when sending the score to a group I know doesn’t have timpani.

And tonight we went to see Tim Minchin’s musical version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda. It was supposed to be D’s Christmas present, but he didn’t like it pretty much at all, while Djeli and I agreed that we can squish up our list of “Best Theatrical Performances Ever” to make room for another one. Amazing stuff, great voices, the kids in the cast were simply astonishing. It was funny and heartbreaking and the staging was superb. I could find nothing wrong with it all. Get a ticket. That’s all there is to be said. How could you miss a bunch of extraordinarily talented kids singing a song called “Revolting Children” and loving every minute of it?

Today has also, of course, been the first day of the RPM Challenge. Obviously most of my time has been taken up with getting Carrion Comfort out of the house, but I was able to spend some time thinking about RPM, I pulled out Egg the Ninth and tinkered around with the time signatures which need changing (I think it should be in a mix of 6/8 and 9/8, not just one or the other). I also came up with an idea for an improv piece – create a tape part using the field recordings of trams and some other street sounds in Zurich several years ago, then improvise a flute part over the top. I’ve got some ideas I’ve been thinking about for the various flute pieces I have to write in the next few months and I might use this as an opportunity to mess about with them and see what happens.

I can’t believe how excited I am about RPM now. It’s like getting rid of Carrion Comfort (which had become a bit of an albatross around my neck) has been such a relief, I just want to work on something that’s about as different as it can be – which is what RPM represents. I’ve started re-reading Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music too – just seemed like the right time to revisit this one. So many ideas floating around! Hope I can get down to some real work tomorrow!

Tagged with: completion, composition, events, ideas, music, theatre | Add a comment

Today I think I’ve broken all procrastination records, but in the last 10 minutes I think I’ve surpassed myself – crazy exhausted from germ, battling to get Carrion Comfort off to the printers so it’ll get to London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra by their deadline, unable to focus… and I’ve just let myself be talked into signing up for the RPM Challenge – record an album (10 songs or 35 minutes of music) in a month. And a small month at that, being February. Never thought I’d be so happy to see a leap year.

But anyway, I’ve loved the Creative Pact challenges I’ve done the past couple of years, even if I kind of failed at 2011′s – they’re always great, and some of my Twitter friends are doing it too, so it’ll be fun. And who knows, either I’ll get a ton of stuff done and experiment like crazy, or I’ll become the procrastination queen of the world and somebody will give me a prize.

I’ll blog it here because, while it’s not a required part of the project, I keep track of myself better when blogging, and it’s good to take note of failures as well as successes.

Tagged with: composition, events, experimenting, incentives, music, recording | Add a comment

Today was the Trinity Laban Invitation Day. The idea behind it is to give those who have received an invitation the chance to find out a little more about studying at Trinity so they can decide between the various institutions who have offered them a place. In my case, as I only applied for Trinity and have no real doubts about the course, I mostly went along just to get a bit of a taster of what I can look forward to.

And it was a great day. We spent an hour in a composer workshop on writing for ethnic flutes, got to have a good chat with a couple of students over lunch, did a quick tour of the (gorgeous) campus and then had a meeting with the Head of the Composition Department, Dominic Murcott, who answered our questions and showed us some videos of interesting work by past students.

All great stuff and I can’t WAIT to get started. But the big issue of the day is the confirmation that we need to choose our own composition tutor. For me, this is incredibly difficult. In Australia, it probably would have been pretty easy because I’m so familiar with the work and history of so many composers, not just from concertgoing, but from my work at the Australian Music Centre. But here, I’m all at sea. Unlike, I suppose, many prospective students, I didn’t choose Trinity on the basis of a specific person teaching there, but instead on the approach of the college as a whole and the general broad stylistic bent of the teachers as a group.

So I don’t know who I want to study with. Dominic made some suggestions, based on my (rather vague) stated goal of finding someone to push me to try stuff I haven’t done before, but what it’s done is to make me really think about where I want to go with my composition. Sure I want to try new stuff, but I need to consider what sort of new stuff I want to try. Thoughts… thoughts…

Tagged with: composition, events, learning, music, research, study, thinking | Add a comment

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.

Tagged with: composition, events, ideas, learning, music, organisation, shopping, web | Add a comment

I spent most of this morning manically studying for my Life in the UK test (Friday morning – it loometh!) which in itself is not in the least bit creative. Quite the opposite, in fact, as it’s all kind of rote-learning stuff. Except that I’m absolute rubbish at rote learning and always have been. I still don’t know my times tables – have to add up smaller multiples in my head. So instead I’ve been forced to be super creative in how I look at the tedious statistics and dates and come up with things like:

7 out of 10 people who say they have a religion are Christian (in the UK, obv): If I take 7 away from 10, I get 3, which is of course the Holy Trinity

646 constituencies: All politicians are liars. Lying is bad. 666 is the number of the beast but there have to be a couple of politicians who at least are trying, so I’ll take a couple off the middle of the pack.

Insane, eh? But somehow it seems to be working, to some extent at least. I think the process of inventing the mnemonic is making it stick as much as the mnemonic itself. Certainly in the case of the constituencies… I’d have been stuffed if I thought politicians actually had our best interests at heart!

So that saw me through most of the day, including all the way to Euston and back, seeing Djelibeybi off again – this time to Manchester. He’s home tomorrow, but it was nice to get out and see something of the world, even if it was just an assortment of grotty tube stations.

This evening has been a riot of learning. I started out doing some listening when I got in (Arvo Pärt’s Tabula rasa and Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica) because I suddenly realised that I’ve got another composition lesson in 2 days’ time and I haven’t done any work at all – got a bit too comfy with the whole 3-weeks-between-lessons schedule and now need to pull myself together. Tabula rasa provided some rather nice minor revelations, especially structurally – hoping to pick up the score for that before Composer Workshop tomorrow, but the RVW left me a little unsettled. I’ve always liked that piece, but I guess I never really listened closely to it before and structurally it leaves me feeling rather adrift. Possibly the recording I was listening to, possibly seeing the score might make some sense of it, but at any rate, stuff was learned, I think.

Then after that I had booked myself in to sit in on a couple of live sessions from the Authority Rules conference I’ve signed up for. Djeli and I have a bit project going with a friend of ours that is going to require some proper promotion in a few months’ time so this conference on content marketing turned up at pretty much just the right time. The first of today’s sessions was on online lead generation and it was pretty interesting – some stuff I already knew, but also some I needed to be reminded of, some new takes on old concepts and so on. It was a good session and well worthwhile. But it was totally blown out of the water by the second session, which was on Search Engine Optimisation. Now, I do know a bit about SEO – I kind of have to because of my dayjob. I know quite a bit about how Google assesses the content in a page to determine if it’s a good fit for a given search query and I try to apply what I know in my sites (not so much in this one – mostly because I’m lazy, but also because I have more important and generally useful sites, I think, to focus on). What I hadn’t really considered in much detail at all though was the idea of SEO strategy, of developing content and working various channels to get stuff out there and actually circulating, as a way of building audience. That’s a very simplistic way of putting it, but safe to say, it was a bit of a revelation to me, the detail it went into and I have come away with all sorts of ideas and plans from both sessions. And a very tired brain that felt like Swiss cheese.

Tagged with: events, ideas, learning, listening, music, self-promotion, study, tools, web | Add a comment

Today was the State of the Browser one-day conference organised by London Web Standards. Which meant I had to wake up at stupid o’clock in order to be in North Greenwich somewhere in the vicinity of 9am, which was painful, but it was a good day – some interesting stuff out there, but unfortunately the chap who was going to talk on IE9 couldn’t come as his wife had been in a car crash the day before. Which was, of course, entirely understandable (I believe she’s fine though, if you were concerned) but I was a little astounded that Microsoft couldn’t manage to provide anybody else at all to talk about their latest and much-hyped browser to the people who have to develop for it. Who knows why? But bizarre. Apparently the guy who was supposed to speak is going to record the speech once everything settles down and it’ll be distributed to the attendees online, which is cool.

Anyway, the summary basically is: all browser manufacturers are doing cool stuff with HTML 5. They are not all doing the same cool stuff. Which was all kind of a given, but it was still quite nice to see the sort of cool stuff that’s being played with.

The breakout sessions were good – I went along to one on Jetpack, a new streamlined way of creating Add-Ons for Firefox 4 using only HTML, CSS and JavaScript, then one on “Performance Optimisation for HTML 5 apps” which wasn’t actually about HTML 5, it was about JavaScript. Still interesting and useful, though I was a little out of my depth in places.

There was a lot of JS being bandied about and I think the time has come to do a bit of refresher work on mine – I first learnt JavaScript from tutorials on the net way back in 2000, when it was an entirely different beast. Gluing on DOM manipulation and vague half-understood concepts of Object-Oriented Programming has not helped my confidence in my JS skills. I can write JavaScript, I’m just not really writing MODERN JavaScript.

I can read (eventually) what’s going on in a script, but I lack the skills to mostly be able to say “Oh, this and then that and … ah. This” – it’s more “um… I think this… then that? Maybe… ooh – what’s that???”. I can get there in the end, but it requires so much looking up and testing and re-testing to do the simplest thing that it’s just not the best use of my time for the client.

So I think some sort of brief refresher might be a good place to start. SitePoint is doing online training courses now and have a special deal for a 3-week JS course + a 3-week PHP course (which would also be very useful and hopefully consolidate the bits and pieces I’ve kind of picked up by poking at it in the past) plus 3 e-books on PHP/SQL sites and cloud hosting, all for less than the two courses would cost on their own.

Special’s only for a couple of days, so I’ll sleep on it and see how I feel about it in the morning. Feels like a lot to take on, when I’ve got so much to do anyway, but I’m beginning to feel like I need to do something just so I don’t flounder so much. Feel so old! And that wasn’t helped by the leader of the 2nd breakout session saying “Who remembers Netscape 4?” and me being the only person to raise a hand, while thinking to myself “I remember Netscape 3. And IE 2. Good grief. How did I ever get so old??” Things like this shouldn’t happen shortly before birthdays.

Had a great conversation over lunch too with Jamie Knight (and Lion) – really lovely to just be able to chat so freely with someone. Normally I find talking to strangers quite hard work – either it’s hard to find common ground, or I can’t think of anything to say or I end up feeling deeply inadequate, especially if the conversation takes a turn into unfamiliar waters. Of course, it can be rewarding too, but it’s just wonderful when the chat just flows along. Kinda made my day

Anyway, I ended up not staying till the end. By the early end of the second breakout session my brain felt extremely full, so I figured I wouldn’t hang around for the 45-odd minutes till the Q&A session started, but head home to a quiet cup on tea and a contemplate while my brain was still capable. Mmmm tea.

Tagged with: code, conversation, dayjob, events, learning, programming, social life, study, thinking, tools, web | Add a comment

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!

Tagged with: composition, concert, events, music, shopping | Add a comment

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.

Tagged with: concert, events, ideas, music | Add a comment

Today was my first composition lesson… as teacher! I’ve contemplated what it would be like to teach composition many a time, but it’s not the sort of thing you just set yourself up as. Anyway, following my last blog post, a friend asked me if I ever taught, so now we’ve set up a thing where I’m actually teaching! And today was the first lesson. Mostly introductory stuff of course – talking about where he’s up to and what he wants to get out of the experience, but it was interesting (for me anyway!). Raised much food for thought and now I need to work out how to approach the whole enterprise.

Then in the afternoon I went to Kent for a briefing and location tour for a commission project I may be submitting a proposal for with a friend. It didn’t start too well – the sandwich I bought at Gloucester Rd turned out to be frozen in the middle and when I got to St Pancras to catch the train it turned out that the ticket I’d bought was only valid for the slow trains… which left from Charing Cross. By that time there was absolutely no chance of getting to Charing Cross in time to get to Gravesend for 4pm, so I ended up have to pay another £10.10 just to get on the train. The tour was pretty interesting, and I ended up meeting an Australian artist and we got chatting and ended up catching the train back to London together.

But the trip back was not without incident -  seemed to run over something in a tunnel just before Stratford International, then half the lights went out and there was a bit of a bang. We slowed right down and crept into Stratford and then the train just sat there. Then there was another noise, which kind of sounded a bit like they were uncoupling or re-coupling a train carriage. Anyway, we sat there for about three minutes and eventually they started to make an announcement, which got as far as “there has been an electrical incident. The driver is…” when there was a large bang and a flash from towards the front of the train. My new friend and I looked at each other and took a snap decision to bail – turned out the train was suffering from minor explosions going off along the top of it – she saw another one flash just after we left the train. Fortunately, though, it was Stratford which meant it was easy enough to get on the tube and get home, but still… explosions! Not every day you experience that!

Tagged with: composition, events, friends, music, teaching, travel | Add a comment

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…

Tagged with: composition, concert, cooking, events, friends, music, social life, tools | Add a comment