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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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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A bit of a messed-up day again today – remnant flu meant I spent the morning struggling to breathe and had to cancel my lesson with my student, which was annoying, but gradually it passed and I was able to head down to TVU for my own lesson in the evening, albeit I didn’t recover soon enough to go and get my student card (again).

Well, the lesson was great. Just what I wanted – we had a bit of a chat, he asked about my Remembrances performance, we did some score reading (Gordon Crosse’s Thel and Nicholas Maw Life Studies I) and talked about ways of using some of the techniques in the scores in other works. He played a piece of his which specifically used techniques from Thel, which was very interesting. Then we looked at Diabolus and he made some excellent suggestions which I’ll definitely play with, and talked about what I should work on next. And kind of came to a conclusion, too! Or at least, I know which opportunity I’m working towards, exact instrumentation yet to be decided. I think I’d like to play around with the kind of space Maw achieves in the opening of Life Studies I – it’s just immense! SO wonderful. Anyway, ideas are percolating…

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I am now officially an employee of the University of Dundee. No, I haven’t moved to Scotland, and no, I haven’t abandoned my plan to take the next 3 months off – it’s very much a part-time, work-from-home deal – proofreading work. It’s sure not going to make me rich but, hey, it may just pay for the books I keep buying for the Richard III opera research!

Speaking of which, I was at the library today so I thought I’d see what they had on the shelf. Really disheartening, actually. Quite a decent number of books on the shelf, so far as I could see, and every single one of them described our hapless Plantagenet as a monster. Not a single revisionist version in there. Guess that means the world is crying out for some art to try to redress the balance.

The more I think about this project, the more I think the courtroom drama format is a good one – it will allow for both sides of the story to be told in a semi-dramatic situation (you can’t just set the reign of Richard III as a story because when you look at the facts it was peaceful and happy and therefore not hugely dramatic in spite of its interesting beginning, punchy end and spicy moments of treason – good judgment, fairness and the love of the people are just hard to convey), will work well for semi-staged productions (which I think is unfortunately something very important to consider today as a fully fledged performance is unlikely ever to happen) and, as I thought last night, it might very well then turn out to be something that could work as a performance in schools (if it’s not too long), which could be very interesting… just thoughts, but still… makes it all the more important to get the history right and make the characters believable (and to ensure the vocal writing means that the words can be understood).

In the realm of shorter-term projects, I’ve had a bit of an idea of how to tackle the one-minute unaccompanied violin piece I’m planning to write for the 15 Minutes of Fame project. The thing with unaccompanied is that, if you’re not careful, one could end up with just a tune and be a bit boring. The best unaccompanied pieces for single-line instrument tend to whisk about between registers to give the impression of multiple lines at once, so I’m thinking of actually writing it as 3 separate lines, and then working to fuse them together somehow. Should be a fun challenge.

And I started exploring the weird and wonderful world of Béla Bartók, which I have somehow missed on my musical adventures so far. Not sure how that happened, but a composer-collective friend said I should have a listen to B’s unaccompanied violin sonata, an, well… it pleaseth me muchly

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I’ve been a little poorly today – not much, just a bit coldy and urk, but enough to make even small achievements feel big. And it’s been a pretty good day. I actually got some stuff done I’ve been putting off for a bit, so that’s got to be good, right?

First up, I finally read Chris Guillebeau’s A Brief Guide to World Domination which has been on my to-read list for some time. It’s pretty good, but I don’t think it’s really told me anything I didn’t already know, being fairly well-read in the matter of world domination (isn’t everyone?). I’d still quite like to read his book, though. I think I’ve got to a point though where I need to stop faffing about and just be brave and DO stuff. If I want to get alternate revenue streams up and running, then I need to write stuff and send it off – finish my book (for small businesses, on how to build a website that actually works rather than one that just looks pretty), submit some articles, see what I can find out about writing music to order. That sort of stuff.

I also rang Thames Valley University. Again. To try to find out some last-minute information about their individual composition tuition which I’m hoping to do this semester. Their form is ambiguous (and so keenly designed that it’s practically illegible – lime green on lighter lime green? Even 20/20 vision doesn’t help with that one, dears!) and their documentation confusing – the individual tuition is listed in a brochure called “Junior College” which is a programme for kids. Because it’s for kids, the composition tutors are all either BMus(Hons) (like me) or MA, unlike the music-school-proper which has fully fledged composers, which is what I need if I’m to learn anything that will be of use to me in applying for an MMus. But the person I need to speak to never answers her phone, and never calls me back, which is a little on the frustrating side. I’d give up if I weren’t so damn keen about doing it. I’ve sent her an email too, so hoping she at least responds to that before the week is out so I still have time to apply if appropriate. AARGH! Think I need to set up a contingency plan in case I get no response at all or find out it’s only the recent grads who are teaching individuals. Not sure what that might be.

And I’ve got a site for the London Composers Forum up and running – it’s for a super-secret project, so I can’t link to it (and no point anyway as it’s all behind a login) but it’s been great to be using Drupal for a proper site so soon after messing with it. And I’m quite pleased with it – it’s doing everything I want it to do and it’s taken minimal effort to get it to do so. Yay me

And last but definitely not least, I tried a new recipe tonight. I had decided to make the Greek salmon kebabs and was facing an inadvertently small quantity of fish and yet more tedious salad, so I perused the interwebs and found this recipe for garlicky bulgur wheat. I just so happened to have bulgur wheat in the cupboard after the Nigel Slater beetroot lamb burger thingies (MOST excellent), so I gave it a go – and, you know what?, it turned out really really nice! I mixed it in with the salad and it went very well indeed. I am looking forward to attacking the remnants with some leftover chicken for lunch tomorrow.

So not really any music (although I did listen to Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and the Maya Beiser album World to Come which never ceases to be amazing) although I’m still mulling over ideas for the short solo violin piece I’m thinking of writing for an upcoming Fifteen Minutes of Fame call for scores. I need to start somewhere with composing for a single string instrument if I’m ever to get this cello tango written, and this seems as good a place as any, but I’m still at a bit of a loss as to how to tackle it. Guess I should do a bunch of listening…

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This evening was the second of the London Composers Forum percussion workshops so I trekked out to deepest darkest Surrey for the evening. This evening we looked at snare drum basics – we were taught how to hold drumsticks properly (actually harder than it sounds) and do (very slow) one-stroke rolls, two-stroke rolls and paradiddles. Our tutor is very keen to demonstrate the difference between drummer thinking and other musicians’ thinking and so we did an exercise where he conducted, starting off in strict time and then introducing rubato – amazing how difficult it became to keep track of what was needed without the phrasing of a melody (or even an inner part) to guide. And of course with drums, there’s no fudging the timing like there is with a sustained note – it’s either on the beat, or it’s not. Very interesting. Tonight’s score-reading was Bartók, which was great. For some reason, I’ve never got around to listening to any of his music before – evidently, on tonight’s showing, he’s well worth listening to – going to make an effort there.

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Today I did something a little different – I took myself off to the Royal Academy of Music for a free seminar/workshop/presentation thingy by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. For those of you who don’t know of Max, he’s the Master of the Queen’s Music, which is the composer-version of Poet Laureate, and a very prolific and fabulously interesting composer.

Well, I have to say, that was certainly 3 hours VERY well spent. The talk had been billed as him talking about creating opera, with specific reference to the new opera he’s just finished writing, so I’d thought it could be useful as preparation for the Richard III opera, but it turned out to not really be about that at all. He did talk about a couple of his operas and some music theatre stuff, but mostly it was about the way he uses drama and theatricality as a structural force in all his music, even the concert music that has no obvious connection with the theatre at all. Really fascinating. I took a ton of notes.

He talked a bit about his very first opera, Taverner, on the life of the 16th-century composer John Taverner (as opposed to the composer John Tavener who’s around today), and specifically about how he wrote it simply because he wanted to. He never expected anyone to ever perform it (although they eventually did), and so he just basically let rip and did the whole thing the way he wanted to do it, with no reference to what anyone else might think. This led to what I think was the most inspiring quote of the morning:

If you’re going to do anything, go for it – for God’s sake, go for it! – you’ll get there… if you’re any good. And if you believe you’re any good, you probably are.

Amazing stuff. Really confidence-building. As anyone who’s followed my journey online over the past few years knows, I’ve had (possibly more than) my fair share of self-doubt, but the one thing I’ve never doubted is that I’m good at what I do. So let’s hope Max is right and that that means I probably am!

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SUPER-frustrating day today. My phone decided yesterday that it would send every SMS out 3 times. This morning it upped the ante to 7 times so I sighed and sat down to see if I could do something about it. First step: clear off the disk and install the operating system upgrades that have been languishing for a week or so. Result? 14 copies of a single test SMS. In the end, after much inconclusive research, I backed up (as much as I could – seems Android doesn’t seem to have a proper backup system and all the ones in the app store seem flawed) and did a factory reset. Fortunately this seems to have fixed the problem, but I’m still reinstalling and tweaking settings and making sure everything’s set up the way I like it. Pluses: Android Market keeps track of what you’ve bought with your Google account and lets you just reinstall with no fuss. Quite nice having a clean disk again. Minuses: Helluva pallaver. Android Market doesn’t seem to keep track of the free apps you had, so I’m just trying to remember what those were and taking the attitude that if I can’t remember it, I probably wasn’t using it that much. The whole process has taken most of the day, with a despairing nap and quick round of Sim City on the iPad in between. No music achieved at all, which makes me tetchy and sad, given yesterday’s hard work setting up the desk. I did, however, listen in to Deutschlandradio’s Philipp Blume profile – some lovely music there. Damn shame mein Deutsch ist so schlecht I couldn’t understand anything that was being said so I am none the wiser as to which pieces I was listening to. Heigh ho. New music FTW at any rate.

Tomorrow I’m planning on going to the Gaugin exhibition at the Tate Modern – been feeling like I’m gradually sinking into a dark grey hole over the last couple of days – I guess with Durham having been so fun and intellectually stimulating and hanging out with wonderful new friends, being at home on my own with a huge and depressing to-do list and feeling a little lost with one of the pieces I’m working on, is just making me sad. So I think I need to take myself out and see something marvellous to shake my brain up and show it it CAN be perky even without the stimulus of Durham and lovely friends. I have also, tonight, ordered a bunch of books from Amazon – first-reading stuff for the opera! I’ve not really ordered from Amazon Marketplace sellers till recently, and never books, so I’m a little nervous, but hey! one of them was only going to be available second-hand anyway and at £0.01 (plus postage), who’s complaining?!

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Yet again this year I posted a rather ambitious list of creative goals for the new year. I’ve stopped doing “resolutions” – they always fail – so instead I prefer to focus on small-scale victories and try to gently guide myself to achieve them. So today I did a little guiding. Two of the big ones, which will be ongoing and probably affect a fair chunk of other stuff are helping Djelibeybi to sort out the study and to listen to one new or revisited work or album a month. These are the two I’ve started tackling today. I’m really happy with the start I’ve made too – the study thing does to a certain measure also include the bedroom – over the weekend we moved my white cabinet/bookshelf into the study to be a support for the printer, which gives a hole in the room’s furniture and a pile of books on the floor that formerly lived on top of the cabinet. So today I cleared off the top of the chest of drawers, got everything off the desk, cleaned them both, took my lamp out of the box it’s been languishing in since we moved in May, shredded some stuff, recycled a huge load of paper, sorted out what needed to be filed or scanned or otherwise processed in some way, fetched my desk chair out of the cupboard where it was stashed after the Christmas invasion and basically made everything nice and ready to be worked at. It’s still not 100% ready, but it’s a great deal closer to it than it has been for months. Still a lot of junk to be dealt with but now that it’s off the desk I’m hoping it can stay off.

For the listening I’ve been sampling a few random things the past couple of days in my listening for the new pieces I’m working on. Today was Ute Lemper – City of Strangers (which I didn’t even know I had) and the Michael Nyman Songbook, then (accidentally) moving on to Michael Torke’s Yellow Pages album from ever so long ago. And now I’m listening to a composer called Philipp Blume whose site I was directed to from a tweet by Lauren Redhead – not the sort of thing I normally gravitate to but I’m really rather enjoying it. I should start keeping that listening diary I said I would but I don’t really want to start a new book and not entirely sure how else to do it. Hmm. Also feel a bit of a prat writing sort-of reviews – I shouldn’t, really, because the aim of the exercise is to get more comfortable with really thinking about music and being able to talk about – and to listen more closely – but nevertheless, there it is. Will work on that.

I also made a chunky start on reworking Deconstruct: Point, line plane for chamber orchestra for the London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra’s call for scores which is due at the end of the month. Reasonably happy with the translations of the woodwind parts, but the piano bit isn’t working at all and I found myself getting in a muddle in Finale because of only being able to see half the staves at any given time, so instead I went out and got some proper orchestral-sized manuscript – going to have a go at doing this the old-fashioned way, then I’ll transcribe it into Finale. I think this should work well – while I don’t usually work with paper and pencil when I’m actually composing because I’m rubbish at working out what’s in my head if I can’t hear it as I write it down, it actually works well for me when I’m doing orchestration because I AM good at hearing tone colours in my head and imagining combinations of them. Seeing as the notes are done (although I may expand some bits later) this should be fine – looking forward to really getting started on this tomorrow.

And I made some biscuits. Nice to have a little something with one’s cup of tea.

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Contrary to my expectations I’m really enjoying this non-standard notation composition challenge – it’s fascinating to see what everyone (principally standard-notation users who are a bit freaked by the letting go aspect of the challenge) is coming up with – the sounds they’re using, which elements they’re letting go and which they’re retaining control of. It’s really inspiring me to be a bit more daring. I think I’ve done pretty well with the start of the piece but I think I want to let go a little more at the end, to really push myself to see how far I can stretch out of my comfort zone. And there’s not much time in which to do it – scores have to be finished for rehearsal tomorrow, for performance tomorrow night!

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