Also kinda not. Started out well! I spent the morning intermittently napping and reading The Betrayal of Richard III, then around midday suddenly realised that the house was an absolute pigsty and Djeli was going to return with dear friends for dinner in a few short hours and that if I didn’t want to totally horrify them I was going to have to sort myself out and do a bunch of housework. So I cleaned the whole bathroom, cleared all the mouldering Christmas food out of the fridge that I’d hoped would vanish while I was in Durham but which didn’t, cleared away the junk in the living room, did 3 loads of laundry which I then hid away in the study and vacuumed. Then I went and did the grocery shopping so there’d be something to feed them.

After all that I was ready to collapse, but no, dinner had to be made then. I did, however, succumb to a between-courses nap before returning to the kitchen to make ebelskivers with lemon curd and cream, all of which seemed to go down well.

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First real day of real life after Durham. It’s been quiet, but productive. I’ve worked through a bunch of stuff off my to-do list – sent a ton of emails, updated my website with the recording of the string quintet and generally sorted things out a bit. I also made a start on all three pieces I’ve been thinking of starting over the past couple of weeks – the orchestral arrangement of Deconstruct: Point, line, plane for the London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra call for scores; a solo cello tango I’m thinking of submitting to the Sequenza 21 call for scores; and finally took the first tentative steps towards my first opera. I’ve known what I wanted it to be about for some time (keeping it secret for now!) but I wasn’t sure how to begin. After talking to one of the composers at Durham I got all fired up and a bit of an idea on how to approach it, so now I’ve asked a friend who has a strong interest in the subject area to recommend some books, which she has, and I’m thinking of characters and possible arias and how to structure the whole thing. Very exciting!

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Well, I don’t know what else it can possibly be. I’ve been SO productive since yesterday’s relaxation session with my physiotherapist. In spite of nasty cold, sore throat, no voice, generally feeling crappy and done in, and in spite of computer being tediously slow, I’ve just been powering through my to-do list and generally Getting Things Done.

• Quintet is now at 2’30″ or thereabouts and has decided to “head for home”, which means working out how to reuse the slow intro and other opening material and is basically (or should be) an easy run down to the end now. Obviously there’s a lot of tweaking still to be done, niceties of notation to sort out and so on, but it’s looking like it’ll be at least 3’30″ when it’s done, and possibly the 4′ I wanted it to be (it has to be under 5′ – the trick is to keep it shortish so as to maximise rehearsal time, but have it long enough to do something interesting).
• Wrote a blog post which will appear on caitlinrowley.com later this week. It’s the first time I’ve tried scheduling future publishing, but it’s something I want to get into the habit of – if I’m to have regular visitors on my site, then I need to be posting (interesting) content regularly. Not sure I’ve quite got the “interesting” down, but I think my online writing is quietly improving.
• Started the rather tedious layout process for a set of songs I wrote about 14 years ago, Remembrances of Half-Forgotten Dead People. They were laid out when I first wrote them, but a. the originals weren’t PDFed and have been lost apart from one hard copy in Australia which my mother scanned for me and b. the layout is seriously dated. very word-processory because that was all I had at the time. So it needs to be updated a bit, notes revised and so on so I can print, bind and send it off to the singer who’s considering performing them in March.
• Set up a new notebook on Evernote to hold bits and pieces for a CD of my piano music which I’m hoping to get off the ground with a friend of mine in Australia. The first step is to get him scores, so I’ve been trawling round to (again) see what’s in a fit state to be played. Finished tweaking Egg the Tenth for this, so I guess that’s ready to go onto caitlinrowley.com too. There’s still quite a bit of work to be done to some of them – lacking dynamics and so on – but it’s not a mammoth task. I just need to keep plugging away at it.
• Cleaned about 700 emails out of my inbox. Because they were depressing me and making me worried. There’s still too much stuff in there – mostly notes I sent myself on my last day of work, which is a bit horrible – but 200-odd is MUCH better than 900-odd.
• Caught up a tiny bit with some of the reading and thinking for the Creative Pathfinder course I signed up for. It’s pretty good content – but there’s just so much of it!!! I’m working through Week 3 at the moment… but my inbox is up to Week 14…

It’s just as well the quintet’s making nice progress again, though – had an email today from the Masterclass organisers with the schedule for the course and notes about what to bring: so far it’s looking like I either need to change the way I write in a hurry or invest in a tiny printer to take with me – no printers available. Otherwise I can see myself spending evenings when I should be at t’ pub frantically copying out parts by hand for the composer’s ensemble – seems we have to write a piece for the ensemble during the few days we have there. Oh, and there aren’t many pianos, so we’re encouraged to bring a little keyboard if we need one. iPad Pianist Pro app FTW! Might try to devote some time to ideas-generation before I go to see if I can get a head-start on what to write for the ensemble… Because I don’t have enough to do!

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A frustrating day today. The quintet has basically stalled. I thought yesterday’s late-night work might have put it on the right track, but while it feels a little more solid, it’s also a little less exciting. Today I spent some time listening over to both versions and tinkering and not really getting anywhere and I’m just not quite sure how to proceed now. I suspect my brain is a little frazzled – it’s been feeling a bit overwhelmed by a houseful of people for about a week now, so it was good to have a quiet day in spite of frazzleness. After the failed attempt at writing, I applied Nico Muhly to my ears (Mothertongue) and caught up on his (fabulous) blog while I listened, the combination of which made me somewhat less twitchy. I didn’t quite get out to the V&A, which was my original plan, but I did eventually pull on my furry bear-jacket and head out to the shops, where I treated myself to the latest issue of BBC Music Magazine and a little chocolate. Then more Muhly (Speaks Volumes) on my return, all of which helped improve the frazzle immensely. Hoping for a more sane day tomorrow…

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But also a knitting day, a baking day, a piano-and-flute-playing day, a listening day and a composing day. Quite a productive day, I guess! My great-aunt’s scarf is about 6 rows off being finished. I am determined to complete it tonight – it looks lovely but I’m SO BORED of it. Really just excruciatingly dull. I have a re-moralising hat at the ready as my next knitting project. I baked a new recipe – oat biscuits from Tessa Kiros’s Apples for Jam – very easy, very tasty and while not strictly healthy, there’s a much more sensible fibre/sugar/fat ratio than other biscuits. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.

For most of the day though, I’ve been reading and listening. I started out while the mother was practicing in my study by occupying the loungeroom, putting on the Bax Symphony No. 4 and indulging in more of The Rest Is Noise. Then I got a little distracted after which I moved into the study and put on Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass while alternately doing a little knitting and reading some more of the Morton Feldman writings. I was going to dive in to John Cage’s Silence while listening to Strauss’s Salome, but I started taking notes on the Feldman and that ended up taking the whole of the chunk of the opera I was able to listen to before Spotify went mad and then my iPod decided it had had enough and it was time for a nap. I was most delightfully surprised by the Strauss. My mother so dislikes him that I’ve sort of grown up with this ingrained “Strauss bad – Debussy good” approach, but I really liked it – really meaty harmonies. Would be pretty impressive live, I’d imagine. I’d settle for a recording without buffering gaps though…

In the late afternoon I emerged from my burrow to find that parents had vanished, so I took advantage of the silence and did some composing. Nothing fabulous, and nothing string-quintetty, but the notes I had from earlier were so determined to be a piano piece that I figured it would be a good thing to at least start seeing what sort of piano piece they wanted to be. Any composing is definitely better than no composing!

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I’ve been having trouble with this wretched quintet – I don’t really know where to start with it and my brain’s feeling rather fried from too much social interaction, so I figured I might throw some random stuff at it and see if anything sticks. I borrowed some books from Ealing Library on Wednesday, so I started reading one of those – a history of the string quartet in the morning, then went out to Victoria Library with parents in tow and borrowed a bunch of stuff from Westminster Music Library, so I started in on one of them – Give My Regards To Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman – on the way home and for a little after I got home. And then there was the obligatory next chapter of Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise which I’m having a lot of trouble keeping away from. I think it all did some good at any rate, because I started to form a nebulous sort of an idea which may or may not work as a way of generating base material, but I’m really at the point where any idea is a cause for celebration right now, so I’m chalking it up as a win.

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But with unfortunate, although at least conclusive results – the doodles I have don’t want to be a string quintet – I think they have aspirations of being a piano piece. So it’s back to the drawing board again.

I finished reading John Adams’ autobiography on Sunday so started in on Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise. Great stuff so far. It’s actually making me want to listen to Strauss… not Mahler though

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Didn’t get as much done today as yesterday – slept in far too late, which was a bit of a whoops – but my parents and I do seem to have settled into a quietly productive sort of a routine – for the mornings anyway, which is working quite well – for me at least, and I hope for them too. It goes something like this: Once I’ve woken up, I sit up in bed and do my morning pages, then I read a bit more of John Adams’ autobiography, Hallelujah Junction, which I’m absolutely loving. Then I drag my sorry carcass out of bed and greet the lovely parents and have breakfast. I then take my coffee back into the bedroom and start work on some of my theory study while the mama inhabits the study and plays the piano for a little. The afternoon is a little more freeform, but at some point I take over the study and do some listening and some work in there.

Today’s theory study was seventh chords exercises. I found these relatively challenging – it’s the diminished intervals I have to fully get my head around, but the exercises are being very useful – not just building a specified seventh chord on a tonic, but also on the third, fifth and seventh as given notes, which I’m finding VERY helpful for working out the intervals because it’s not as simple as just altering the notes above – you need to work out sometimes whether your actual tonic needs to be raised or lowered. Really makes one think, which is exactly what I needed. Think I’ve got them sorted in my brain now. More or less at least

Did some more work on the site too. Unfortunately, it seems that of the web-fonts-supporting major browsers, only Firefox and Safari understand the text-rendering property, which means that the kerning on the fancy font I’m using in a couple of places is all off in Chrome. I’ve yet to test it on IE in its many flavours. Not sure how/if to hack this one. For Chrome it should be relatively simple – there aren’t too many seriously problematic letters, so one could just surround the tricky sections in <span>s and apply letter-spacing, hopefully, but I’m not sure how IE will react. Yes, I still have to do proper testing in IE. Have been avoiding it. Need to stop that.

Also nearing the end of the scarf I’m knitting for my chilly and very frail great-aunt in Sydney. She’s 94 now and apparently they keep her nursing-home at an Arctic temperature at all times of the year, so I’m knitting her a nice lightweight scarf to keep her warm. I spent a lovely quiet half-hour with my Da this evening in the study, listening to the Mendelssohn string quintets and Schubert’s Moments musicaux, him reading his book and me working on the scarf – happiness! I have lent him Art & Fear which he seems to be finding interesting, as I thought he might.

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I’ve been neglecting my harmony/counterpoint resuscitation programme for a while now – started out well, then life went insane, as it periodically seems to, and it all got a bit too hard. This coincided with the arrival of the Workbook to go with the Textbook and Anthology and CDs, which was rather frustrating but I just couldn’t get my head around counterpoint with all the stuff that was going on. Now that I’m not working, though, and the traipsing about the continent has paused for a little, I’ve been able to start thinking about it again. Yesterday I took a step backwards and started re-reading the chapter on triads and sevenths. I understood it first time round, but I wasn’t sure it had really stuck. Today I started doing the chapter’s exercises in the workbook and discovered that actually, a fair amount of it actually had. WIN! So I spent a largish chunk of the morning writing and analysing triads and I think I got at least most of them right (the only downside to doing all this solo is that there are no answers in the workbook, so if you think you got it right but you actually didn’t, there’s no-one to say otherwise because it doesn’t have the answers in it. I believe there’s a teacher’s edition of the workbook, but unless I run into serious issues, I think I’ll pass on that one – the whole exercise has already cost a small fortune!) – really quite satisfying. Tomorrow I hope to work through the seventh chord exercises so that next week I can move back on to species counterpoint. Yay!

I also picked up my flute for the first time in weeks. Yeah, that wasn’t so kind to the ego. But it had to be done. Hopefully tomorrow will be better… Humble apologies to Messrs Poulenc, Koehler, Sculthorpe and Enesco.

And finally, I got back to the website and did a pretty big chunk of work on it so it’s really looking like a proper site now – my photo’s in place on the bio page, the screensnap from the video on the credo page, there are pages for all the linked compositions, and all the ones that should have embedded audio files (still Flash, unfortunately, but at least it’ll get it online) or links to PDF downloads are now showing these up. I tidied the email form and the page of social networking contact links. I still need to finish testing in other browsers (IE6 is, of course, being particularly stubborn) but I think it’s nearing completion, which earns another Yay!

And I listened to both the Brahms and the Martinu/Schulhoff discs I bought yesterday. Both are lovely. I wasn’t really in the mood for Brahms but the Martinu was absolutely spot on and I think the Schulhoff will definitely repay further listenings.

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Sort of a low-key day today. Played the piano a little (very badly), listened to some Shostakovich, baked cinnamon sugar biscuits which turned out rather well with the oven temperature lowered by 10 degrees, and started reading John Adams’ biography, Hallelujah Junction, which is starting out very readable and enjoyable.

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