Whee!

Having a GREAT day today. Tired but happy – got a heap of things done. And worthwhile stuff too. While I’ve been enjoying the business-building stuff I’ve been focused on for the past couple of weeks, it’s been great to have a day that’s been predominantly about creating and promoting my music. Really refreshing.

Well, Monday is blog day on caitlinrowley.com, and as yesterday we had a friend over for lunch and then I totally zonked out because I was so exhausted after the week so I didn’t get my usual Sunday blog-writing moment and had to do it today. I wasn’t ready to write more about the violin piece (more on that in a second) partly because the piece wasn’t really ready, and partly because it’s a post I’m going to want to do a chunk of thinking and probably some analysing for, which is going to take more than just a morning. So I decided it was time to launch a new series of blog posts I’ve been thinking about for a couple of weeks. After reading an article about tools by Havi Brooks I’ve been thinking a bit about the tools I use for composing and I thought that in the context of trying to write more about my process, it might be interesting to also talk about the awesome stuff that constitutes the tools I use – not necessarily (or just) things like my computer, pencils and so on, but also the things that inspire me and the stuff that gets used while I’m working through my thoughts.

So I leapt in. I’ve started with Elaine Gould’s notation reference, Behind Bars, which I’m actually finding quite inspiring and exciting, in spite of the fact that it sounds dull. Every time I look something up in it, I stumble across something else that makes me go “ooh! maybe I could use that” so I spent about an hour just writing about that book this morning. And hey, presto: blog post. And I’ve already had a little positive feedback on it, so hopefully people will get something out of it.

I also continued on with The Great Backup Project – I installed a plugin both here and on caitlinrowley.com to back up both these blogs to our new S3 space, so if they accidentally get wiped, there’ll be a recent backup to restore rather than having to remember to do it by hand. I’ve had Time Machine running perfectly all day now – the only downside is that if I’m not at my desk then I’m not being backed up, but so long as I remember to return the laptop to the desk overnight, it’ll switch itself on and hopefully run a backup first thing. Not perfect, but a darn sight better than the nothing I’ve been relying on for too long. I’ll look into ways I might be able to access the new drive wirelessly sometime soon…

And the violin piece! I finally tweaked myself to a standstill, then gave myself a talking to, PDFed it up and sent it off to a couple of violin-playing friends from Durham. And got an answer within an hour from one of them saying she had “great fun” playing it and yes everything’s perfectly playable and indeed mostly very comfortable under the hand. She suggested a couple of open-string tweaks, which was great because, yes, that was the sound I had in mind, but I’d completely forgotten to put the symbols in, and one cautionary accidental, which is now in place. So I’m down to the final layout, choosing fonts and just the last publicationy bits and pieces – a brief note for the front, design a cover and it should be winging its way to New York by the end of the week. It actually has a title too: Diabolus. I didn’t want to do some reference to 1-minute/60-seconds whatever, and the whole thing is built on the interval of the tritone (the diabolus in musica) and by the end the time signature changes had become pretty dizzying, so I think this name will stick.

Tagged with: blogging, completion, composition, fonts, music, organisation, publishing, tools | Add a comment

Backup extravaganza

So, after the disaster the other week with my last scores backup (still waiting to get the final files list from the restoration guys for the second disk so I can give the go-ahead for the retrieval of both disks but the file list from the scores disk looks pretty healthy), I’ve decided to just throw myself at this backup concept and get things working properly for once in my life. It was on last year’s new year’s creative goals list so I guess this year isn’t too far off the mark to be actually sorting it out.

But it wasn’t really straightforward. First I wanted to make sure the laptop was as clean as could be, so ran Verify Disk (no problems) and the Repair Permissions (a bit messy). Plugged in the new drive, which was happily recognised straight away, set it to be the backup drive and set the first run going. 2 hours later it had obviously got stuck at 5GB. So I tried again… same thing. Ran Verify Disk on the new disk to discover it had a minor header error, so I ran Repair Disk, then erased the whole thing, reformatted, partitioned the new drive (because a 250GB hard disk definitely doesn’t need 2TB of backup space, I think)… whereupon the computer promptly crashed. Rebooted, reverified all disks, repaired permissions everywhere and finally got the backup running and working. PHEW! Who’d have guessed it would be so complicated?

Feeling a lot happier now it’s in place though. Once I get the other drive back though, I’ll probably completely reformat this new drive and the 1GB and the old one too and work out a new arrangement, but for now at least stuff’s being backed up against the increasingly frequent problems I’ve been having with this laptop. Glad a new computer’s only a couple of months away…

And I baked a cake.

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Getting myself in a muddle & out of it again

Lately I’ve been trying to post a little earlier in the day to save the situation I’ve often ended up in, which is getting to 2am and suddenly realising I need to go to bed but not having posted so I either have to post when I just want to sleep (and back-date the post so it appears on the right day) or post several days in a blob later on (and back-date all the posts). But it’s getting me in a bit of a muddle because often I do some of my most creative stuff at night and given that this is a day-by-day blog, it feels sort of weird to be saying “yesterday I did this”. If you feel it’s weird too, please let me know in the comments!

But weird or not, I’m taking it on. And starting with…

Yesterday I ended up having a bit of an SEO binge. I explored a few tools, found a couple that might be useful and updated/added/corrected some stuff on caitlinrowley.com to improve its ranking on Google. It’s going to take a little while to seep into the system, of course, but I’m confident I can improve it. What I’m aiming for is to make caitlinrowley.com the top-ranking site on Google for a search on my name. At moment minim-media.com is, which is fine because that was my principal site but now that I’m thinking of closing that one down, I’d like to have caitlinrowley.com up there before I do. It was lots of fun and felt like a big achievement when it was done. Now I just need to make myself not check my stats more than once a day to see what’s going on because there’s no point – Google Analytics only updates once a day. There’s no new data there. No, really…

Today I was stuck at home waiting for someone from DHL to come and take our poorly Roomba away to be fixed again. I’ve been feeling like everything’s a little fragmented in terms of the business development stuff, and lacking a little in direction, so I ended up spending about 3 hours going through various bits and pieces, thinking thoughts and working through worksheets and planning plans, all of which was great, and my ideas have taken another step along the path towards the business being whatever it turns out to be (I blogged about this over at Minimania, so I won’t repeat it here. Is it possible to be a blog-writing addict?), but rather exhausting.

Eventually the Roombaman came and took our digital pet away, whereupon I bolted out to the post office and stood in line for half an hour to send some stuff to Australia. The walk and the wait were great, actually. Really cleared away some cobwebs and made some stuff fall into place. And what I realised was that Raspberry Blue was heading towards the exact same problem that Minim Music & New Media has/had, which is that it didn’t have a clear focus. Splitting the site between the web dev/SEO stuff and the music publishing stuff is detrimental to the development of the business. Not because I can’t do both – I most emphatically can and still think I will – but because the presence of the music stuff undermines my authority as someone who lives and breathes the web. Most people, I suspect, really only have one clear obsessive focus so I think potential clients may find it hard to put their trust in someone who is obviously doing two (apparently) unrelated things at once. So I’ve trimmed out the music stuff and instantly the site feels stronger and more authoritative. I feel less confused about it too and more confident about the prospect of sending people to it. I think the music stuff might need to have a separate site. Whether it needs its own domain name is another point, but I think I’ll focus on the web thing first because that’s what’s going to contribute most to my possibly not needing a dayjob again. Copying is unlikely to develop into anything more than pocket money, I feel.

So big, big thoughts drifting about and more plans being made and I feel like things are coming together enough to tentatively say that the Raspberry Blue site will be live before I have my root canal done on the 24th of March. I think it’s well doable. Let’s hope I’m right…

Oh, and I’ve listened through to the violin piece with the changes I made yesterday and yes, I think it’s essentially finished. I have, however, in the course of tweaking it towards its final form, done a lot of octave switches and added in some extra double-stops, so I need to do a careful check to make sure the double and triple stops actually are really playable and that I don’t have to tweak them back in some way. Also need to work out how to make Finale play back some of the minutiae of the notation so I can produce a relatively real-sounding MIDI version without needing to approach ProTools. PT, frankly, has me a bit scared after having apparently caused the collapse of my backup drive, and I don’t have any drives any more that don’t have stuff on them already! Seriously contemplating switching to Logic.

Tagged with: blogging, completion, composition, copying, dayjob, ideas, music, organisation, play, publishing, research, thinking, tools, web, writing | Add a comment

Oh dear Essex

Well, I didn’t make it to Essex. In waiting for the hot water to come back on this morning so I could be clean for Essex, I got rather engrossed in some other stuff and by the time I came to there wasn’t really enough time to get there. *sigh*

But on the flip side, useful stuff has been achieved. I think the violin piece *gasp!* may be finished. But it’s been so antsy recently that I’ll have to let it lie overnight, I think, and work out tomorrow whether it’s really done. So many of the recent tweaks have been so minute that it barely seems worthwhile, and I still don’t think the first couple of bars are as good as the rest, but I’m beginning to feel that I need to move on to something else. I feel like I’m treading water from a compositional standpoint. Waiting for the violin piece to work out its niggles, waiting for TVU to get back to me to tell me when my next lesson is, waiting for someone to get back to me on a potentially very exciting project, waiting to hear about the progress of another project that’s stalled. I kind of feel like I’m stuck in a dead end. But I’ve decided enough’s enough. Task of the day was to see what composition opps are available and see if anything appeals. I think I don’t really want to write for strings because the last two pieces I’ve done have been a string quintet and a solo violin piece, and there’s the Yorkshire Late Starters Strings competition coming up later in the year, which I’m planning to write for (string orchestra). So what I’ve ended up with is:

• New York Virtuoso Singers Choral Composition Competition for choral scores (due 8 April)
• 3rd International Chamber Music Composition Contest in Seinäjoki, Finland for 7-instrument ensemble (end of March – this would be a huge challenge, I suspect, but could be really interesting)
• Left Coast Chamber Ensemble 2011 Composition Contest (due 13 April – really like the sound of this one – 1-7 instruments, including voice and can use tape too)
• A French composition contest for percussion ensembles (due end of March, but the entry fee is a whopping €50 per score. I think that might put it out of the running, which is a real shame)
• Counterpoint International Competition 2011 has a deadline that’s only two weeks away – eek! – but possibly I could rework something? But I think I really would like to create something new at the moment. Not entirely out of the running, but I think it’s on the edge
• University of Aberdeen Music Prize – Call For Scores for trumpet and string quartet – now that’s a bit different, eh? Not due till the end of May, so tons of time
• and finally, the Delta Omicron French Horn competition for French horn and piano, due at the end of March

So there’s loads of options out there. Now I just have to choose which one to play with…

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Rollercoaster day

Gosh. What a day! The whole dead-disk issue from yesterday isn’t really resolved – it’s looking like I’m going to have to take it to Essex tomorrow and pay a little technical chappie a whole lot of cash to retrieve the data, but he says I was right to not try tinkering with it myself and that I’ve given the data the best possible chance of survival, which is the main thing. So tonight I have to clean off my other disk, back that up somehow and then take both those disks plus the other one that died about a year ago to Essex in the morning.

Today though I am basking in the wonder that is Google Analytics. I started to implement this ages back but something went a little pear shaped and I never got around to putting the code in half the pages of my site. Now I’ve implemented it everywhere – here, caitlinrowley.com, minim-media.com and the Satie site at minim-media.com/satie and my golly gosh what a useful thing! Seeing some fascinating stats and it’s really giving me a clear idea of what’s working and what isn’t. What really isn’t is minim-media, which doesn’t hugely surprise me – it’s always been a bit of a mish-mash of a site, and now that the other sites are working it’s kind of lacking in purpose, not to mention updates.  At some point when raspberryblue.com is up and running, I’ll clear all the data off it and point users to RB for web and publishing stuff and CR for music stuff and be done with it. Looking forward to that day, but there’s a ton of other work to do first.

The Satie site is particularly interesting – very high bounce rate (that’s where someone comes on your site, just looks at the page they’re on then goes away again) BUT often combined with a long average visit time – e.g. my essay Satie and Minimalism: Parallels and Points of Contact has had the most hits, has a whopping bounce rate of 87.5% but the average visit time is nearly 5 1/2 minutes – quite enough for people to read the full article. What seems to be happening is that people are finding the article via Google, reading the whole of it then going away again. Hopefully contented. And that’s interesting in terms of the (incredibly ancient – I think I redesigned this for MiniMax Festival in 2002) site design – when you get to the bottom there’s no links to anywhere – you have to scroll back up to the top for suggestions of other destinations – in particular, but it’s also making me think what I can do with this site to make it more useful to visitors. From a usability point of view, it’s pretty sucky – dense text, bibliography isn’t split into data types, that sort of thing – and there’s also limited ways of obtaining data – you come, you read an essay (or two, if you’re a masochist), you go away again. But I think the information there must be useful because I regularly get emails asking about it or asking for an elaboration on something, usually from students. It was also at one point linked from a joint website of Ivy League colleges in the States as a key resource on Satie, so it must have something going for it – why not push the boundaries? So I’m thinking, once all the other website projects are done, that I might totally revamp it. Put the whole thing in Drupal, start up a forum for discussion of Satie’s work, a blog section for intermittent updates on my research (which is always, always ongoing) and random Satie snippets that come my way so it looks a little alive – I’m sure that latest news dated 2006 on the homepage isn’t doing anyone any favours!

Ideas, ideas, ideas – but it’s really wonderful to see how people are using my sites. I put another new blog post up on caitlinrowley.com today on the process I’ve used to construct my new unaccompanied violin piece, which has had some great responses – as did the last post, which people really seemed to identify with.

Which ties in to an ebook I read yesterday – one on networking which I downloaded from the ‘Library’ at thelaunchcoach.com (you have to sign up to get it but you also get another 3 interesting ebooks). I’m really liking this new breed of online-business sites – there’s a real freshness and a respect for ethics out there at the moment, which is just fantastic – it’s all about giving value and being helpful and building your business through actually being nice to people. That’s just awesome. Anyway, I was reading this ebook and today I found myself, while going about things the way I do normally, being hyper-aware of the connections I was making – I was running several conversations at once with a bunch of people I really respect and they weren’t just twitter-fluff conversations either. I was bold and when people said they liked my blog I asked them to let me know if there was anything they want me to write about. One friend has even asked me for composition lessons as a result of it! We’ll see what happens there

I’ve sent off a ton of emails – a couple of them reminders, some signing up for stuff, others on project work, and it all feels like stuff is gradually pulling together to make things work. I can’t believe how many opportunities are turning up right now. And I just want to grab hold of every one of them!

And I started the day by writing another 2 blog posts for raspberryblue.com. I now have 3 posts and I want to launch with 4 or 5 in place, so I’m pretty happy with that. Yay!

I’ve also finally got my act together and exported MIDI files (transposed down a perfect fourth – that’s what I get for trying to sing soprano songs) for the Remembrances of Half-Forgotten Dead People – I want to have a recording of this up on SoundCloud before the end of the week to go with the one-week-to-go announcement of the concert – I want to have both the sound file and the score available to download as a package on BandCamp so that people can check it out and go “hey, that girl’s got a weird basso profundo voice but I kinda like the song – maybe I’ll go to the concert and see what it’s like with a real singer”, so exporting the MIDI is phase one. Hopefully I can get the sounds for that sorted out tomorrow and try to record it when I get back from Essex. It’s really bugging me not having a proper microphone – it’s annoying for these sorts of things, and it’s a bit annoying because I’m thinking of trying out maybe some podcasty stuff as a way of exposing a bit of my composition process to the world. Maybe it should go on my birthday list

Tagged with: blogging, composition, experimenting, friends, music, organisation, research, thinking, tools, web | Add a comment

Busy busy bee

It’s been a big day today. But for all that, I’ve only really achieved three things, but two of them are whoppers so that’s OK:

1. I have achieved, after many hours of sorting, Inbox Zero once again (or near enough – Mac Mail won’t remove the Notes from my inbox and they’re things I need to keep on my iPod Touch, but apart from that it’s empty). Feels soooooo good! Only problem now is that I need to try to achieve the same thing in Evernote, which isn’t so hard but more than a little annoying.
2. I have ditched NetNewsWire as my RSS feed reader because the interface was messy and it was stopping me from actually reading stuff. I tested out Reeder, which I’ve heard good things about, and while the overall concept was nice, the lack of text contrast was killing my eyes, so I ditched that one. Nice Mac-like interface though. If they fix the contrast issue or introduce user-definable colours, I could well give it another go. Anyway, I’ve ended up with an open-source reader which I’d never heard of, Vienna, which has the rather nice attributes of being skinnable with CSS themes (so no contrast problems), a nice clean interface, and integrated with Evernote so I can send articles I want to read later straight into EN without needing to launch them in a browser first. Quite pleased with it so far. I do, however, think that I need to review the feeds I’m following and do a bit of culling – there’s a lot there I don’t necessarily want to read all the time and perhaps there’s a better approach for these than RSS. Also, as I’m working on businessy stuff, I suspect my focus will change to a certain extent. Wonder if there’s a way to archive a group of feeds so they don’t show up as readable but can be resuscitated at a moment’s notice – that would be very cool for people like me who go through phases of what they want to read.
3. I have spent a fairly large chunk of time uploading stuff to SoundCloud. So far I have 3 pieces up there. I’d like to add one more before I launch, just to give a bit of an overview. Not entirely sure what to choose though. It’s been a good experience so far though – I like that they limit you by duration not by filesize, so I can upload a big fat file which they then compress for me and all that costs me is the time to upload it, it doesn’t reduce the amount of music I can put online. Easy interface to use and mostly good options to fill in. I like that you can include a ‘Buy’ link – might use that when the scores are online. The only thing that’s a little annoying is that you have to choose just one Genre option, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to search by Genre – it seems like you can type anything at all into the Genre box, so the chances of small variants between similar terms (classical vs classicalmusic vs classical music, for example) are extremely high. i’m guessing that’s not much of a drama for most pop genres but for the classically-derived new music world it becomes a barrier to finding new content because everyone thinks of their music with different terminology – new music, contemporary classical, nonpop, art music, serious music – it’s a long list. plus all the typographical variants that can happen – it makes it hard to hunt down music that might be of interest. But time will tell – looking forward to seeing what the response is!

Tagged with: completion, gtd, music, organisation, publishing, reading, self-promotion, tools, web | Add a comment

Preparing to leap…

If you’ve been reading this blog over the past few days, then you’ll know that I’m contemplating some pretty big life changes – getting my own business off the ground, putting composition centre-stage in my life, working seriously at getting my music heard and audience-building, that sort of thing.

I’ve had some pretty intense ideas over the past few days – one of them just yesterday, which I think might actually bring in some real cash but I don’t want to announce it yet – going to run it by someone whose opinion I value and who falls neatly within my target market – and while it’s been great to feel the ideas flowing, and even better to find myself still composing in the midst of it, I’ve also been starting to feel a little overwhelmed.

So today I’ve put in a major chunk of work on ditching the overwhelm. I had a good long think about the way I work best and realised that I’ve always been happiest in my work when I’m not just beavering away at one thing all the time – my brain likes to hop about. So then I figured that instead of just trying to think of ways to bring in money, I should sit down and work out what sort of things I actually pretty much always enjoy doing. There was a bit of a list, but most things were pretty synonymous with the following key points:

• Composition (well, duh!)
• Publishing and its attendant elements – writing and editing, music copying, layout, picking out fonts
• Helping people do stuff better (so long as I don’t need to speak to them on the phone)

And after that it all became pretty clear that I should probably focus the bulk of my business-building efforts in the direction of publication – I should write my book on how to build a website that actually works, I should publish music and possibly recordings, I should try to get some copying work and get some clients to pay me to design some stuff (I do have a degree in that after all). Because the third point really can tie in very well with the second point if I do it right. And I think that if I can make a living doing a combination of these three things, then I could be very happy indeed.

Which was a comforting thought, except then the fear set in: How the hell do I start building a publishing company? I mean, I have no plans to be Faber or Penguin, but even once you have content, how do you get heard?? Here I found some of the lessons from the e-book I bought the other day useful – just some bits and pieces about being noticed online. Of course I know a fair bit about using social networks, but I tend to keep quiet rather than shouting and I’ve generally restricted myself to the more general or larger ones – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Delicious.

So I figured that if I was to conquer the fear and do anything at all about getting this off the ground, the first step was to work out exactly what I was going to try to do, and for each of those goals, to write down as many actions as I could think of that would need to happen in order to reach the primary goal of having something for sale (actually selling something is part 2 – first up one needs to have something to sell and something with which to sell it). This resulted in 3 full A4 pages of to-do list. Um. Yes. Quite.

Seeing everything I need to work on down in black and white (well, black and yellow) actually was a bit of a kick in the derrière, to the extent that this evening I have written 3 emails, created a Twitter account for our company, Raspberry Blue (@azurefruit – yes, a little lateral thinking had to come into play as raspberryblue is taken and even though it hasn’t been posted to in a year, alas, it is not available. Go on, follow us!), created a SoundCloud account to post my music to, and discovered that I actually did open a Bandcamp account a few months ago, so I’ve tweaked the profile details there and basically it’s all ready to start receiving content (really quite excited to see what happens with this particular part of the plan – more on this later).

There’s still an absolute Everest of tasks to do – including building a whole website for Raspberry Blue, creating yet another blog and writing some starter-content for it, writing the book, working on laying out my scores, making semi-proper recordings of my songs, where possible, designing business cards, designing flyers, getting the laser printer fixed… on and on and on – but it feels fantastic to know that I’ve taken some real steps today, and now that those steps have been taken I’m significantly more confident about where my feet need to go tomorrow. It’s the big breath before the leap.

Tagged with: blogging, copying, dayjob, design, editing, fonts, gtd, ideas, learning, mentalhealth, music, organisation, publishing, self-promotion, thinking, tools, web, writing | Add a comment

Meh

Feels like a wasted weekend, even though I know it isn’t. Today I finished the London Composers Forum secret project site – all that time with Drupal the other week has really paid off and I’m pretty pleased with the functionality I’ve been able to provide – secure logins, simple document workflow, inline images in rich text, document submission and storage – fun stuff!

But yet again, no music at all, which is getting a bit frustrating.

Also on the plus side, more painting today means that the new furniture should be able to be launched into place tomorrow, which will allow – AT LAST – the piano to return to its home in the study so I can actually use it.

So tomorrow I think I need to implement a new plan of attack – start organising my days better and make sure I’m getting stuff done. Think I need to sort myself out a bit. I suspect this weekend has been somewhat hijacked by the sudden appearance of what would pretty much be my perfect dayjob on the horizon. Which wouldn’t be a problem, if choosing to go for it didn’t mean abandoning the dream of not having a dayjob at all. Really not sure what to do. Going to think about it a bit more.

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Additional

Ended up reviewing tags across this whole site. I’ve recently (since Creative Pact) starting adding project tags to posts, which is increasingly ending up as composition tags (yay!) which has led to me thinking I might post links to individual pieces’ posts – don’t know whether anyone would find it interesting to follow through the lifespan of a piece from first idea or doodle through to multiple performances and worldwide fame (ahem!) but it might provide insights. And possibly to me too – it might help me identify stumbling blocks and grooves. So I’ve been through and tagged every post here that is marked as relating to “composition”. Mostly they were straightforward, but I suspect I need to check some stuff – some of the very earliest posts talk about “the psalm” but as I did settings of both Psalm 1 and Psalm 47 (which I’d forgotten) around then, I’ll need to look up and see which one they should be. Suspect Psalm 1… let’s see if I’m right.

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New year, new leaf? Trying …

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.

Tagged with: baking, composition, listening, music, organisation, tidying, tools | Add a comment