OK, so maybe that doesn’t seem so very creative, but anything that helps me get the work I need to done is a good thing. And then I wrote about it (tried to blog it but Blogger crashed. What a surprise) which is both creative and helpful to others who may be struggling.
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I had a relevation last night – after 2 years of quietly fretting, in dribs and drabs (NOT continuously) about the wide range in the first Whitman song, I suddenly realised I was dead wrong – I’ve written it in the tenor clef, so while the low C I knew was at the end was indeed a low C, the high A-flats were in fact not high A-flats at all, but middle-of-the-treble-stave A-flats. Which meant I had about a 6th’s worth of space to move upwards. Which I have now done. The winning key is F minor (as opposed to C minor), and the whole thing sits much better, and especially with the tessitura of the second two pieces. Once that was done though, the second song still felt a bit off. I think it’s because it doesn’t have an accompaniment rather than anything inherently wonky with it, so I tried inventing one, but nothing wants to stick to this melody, so I’ve now moved on to the approach of inserting a tiny piano solo before it. Just to create a little padding between the moderately lush (for me) movement of the first song and the brittle sparseness of the second. A piano equivalent to the second song, really, that will bridge the gap between keys and balance the two instruments. And it’s half-written already! All in all, I think I probably put in about 2 or 3 hours’ composition today – a huge leap forward from what I was achieving even a few months ago when it felt like things were starting to be on a roll. Feeling really good about this. And even more so about the fact that I didn’t write on Wednesday (very big day at work – I was completely exhausted when I got home) but made myself get back to it on Thursday, and have had no trouble carrying on every day since.
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Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, a disc of Poulenc & Britten songs, performed by the composers and some Reynaldo Hahn songs. Hunting for a clear way through the transposition mire for the Whitman set.
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I decided on the way home this evening, after contemplating and discarding a number of approaches (including a new, anonymous blog, which then raised the question of how do you promote an anonymous blog?) that I’m going to start creating the occasional longer post for this blog, addressing various topics to do with creativity, productivity and related topics. I’m hopefully going to post the first one on the weekend, but for now, I’ve written a letter to explain what on Earth I’m thinking…
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Began to pull together some ideas (again) about how I want to tackle my new website. I’ve started this a couple of times but this feels meatier and more like it has a chance of making it to the coding phase.
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Alas, yes. For many I suspect this wouldn’t count as creative activity, however it was all a learning experience, and quite aside from learning what I want in an accounting programme (multiple currency support, budgeting, loan tracking, import of bank statements and export of proper accountant reports), I learnt a lot about website design for software and the sorts of first impressions that totally put me off. Very valuable experience for the super-secret project, I suspect!
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Yesterday morning we took djeli’s lovely niece off to the airport at 5.30 in the morning (*ugh*) to see her off on the next leg of her gap year trip – 3 months in India. And now we have the house to ourselves for the foreseeable future – I think for the first time this year, which feels AMAZING. So we’re launching ourselves into a programme of sorting ourselves out.
Djeli has reclaimed his office, but this time has put his desk along the wall beside the window, instead of with his back to it and it looks a much more comfortable working space for him. The sofa-chair-bed is, for the first time in I can’t remember how long, folded up into its chair configuration and the room feels really welcoming now.
I’ve got my own desk back, which isn’t perfect, but at least the junk all over it will be all mine. I am rapidly accumulating a rather long list of things I want/need to buy to either make my working environment more comfortable or help me continue working on my own stuff when I’m out of the house (in particular when I have to take on another contract job in September): a lamp, a cushion because the chair I’m using is really too low, an iPod Touch so I can compose and catch up on my read/review file on the go, and so I’ll have (finally!) a numeric keypad to make using Finale easier, not to mention a control for our about-to-be-set-up music server. This is the cushion I want to get – it matches the gorgeous apron my mama bought me while she was here:
Oh, and a flute of course – I’ve had to give djeli’s sister back hers and now I’m missing it badly 
And then there’s the software upgrades – there’s always more software upgrades – Snow Leopard when it comes out, Pro Tools, because the version I have doesn’t seem to play nicely with Leopard, Finale because my version is 4 years old and frankly rather a crappy iteration.
And we have so many projects to work on! I don’t have time to get a job! This week I’m back on the film score, but still working on a couple of secret squirrels with more lining up. I think I need to review everything I’m trying to start and relegate some of them to the Someday/Maybe list!
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I read Stravinsky’s lecture series “The Poetics of Music” when I was at uni, but haven’t really re-read it since, so I’m revisiting it at the moment, with great enjoyment. It makes me so happy that my music-brain has decided to revive – a mere few months back I couldn’t have made sense of anything like this (or any other sensible book) – now I’m sailing through it, and also through the book of essays on Rothko’s work which my Da gave me while he was here, which is also fascinating.
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Djeli and I decided that we’d never manage to concentrate seriously enough on what needed to be done on our super-secret project at home, so we booked the meeting room at his coworking office space and battled through things for 3 hours, with great results – not only do we now have a clue about what we want to do (several clues, actually), but we both have action items AND deadlines. Huzzah!
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