HUGELY productive day. I may have to make a list to save babbling too much:

• Posted the new follow-up blog post I wrote yesterday online and told Twitter about it. I think I’ve decided to try to post once a week to caitlinrowley.com, with an occasional extra post. 2 a week seems like it could get a bit much when I’m working, but 1 should be fine
• Installed Google Analytics on caitlinrowley.com so I can hopefully properly track traffic and get a better idea of what approaches work and where the traffic’s coming from
• Drafted a new blog post for a new series of posts on caitlinrowley.com (part of a plan to have some backup, non-time-specific posts for when things get busy so I can continue the plan I just mentioned to post every week)
• Made Nigel Slater turkey cakes for dinner
• Caught up a bit with the laundry
• Finished reading Art + Money – some good ideas in there. I’m looking forward to listening to the interviews that go with it. Final issues with getting extended content still not sorted, but I’m giving it a few days – plenty to be working on till then
• Did some thinking about the opera and researched books on poetry-writing – it looks like books on lyric-writing are pretty much all geared towards the pop market, which is less useful to me. Might try to get hold of the new Sondheim book and a general book on writing poetry and then see how I go. I also wrote to my Da (who’s a fabulous poet) for suggestions.
• Started the violin piece! This has been kicking about in my head for a considerable period of time now, so I bullied myself into getting something down on paper, and no sooner had I started than it all flowed like water and the whole thing was mapped out in less time than it took Djelibeybi to go to the gym. Next stage is to condense it (I’ve worked it as three separate lines, with a goal of mooshing them together then cleaning up – there’ll probably be a post on this at caitlinrowley.com soonish), make sure the double- and triple-stops are playable and that it all hangs together. Could be finished by early next week though! Woot! (Mustn’t get too cocky)
• Did a little research on Twitter – after reading Art + Money (which is primarily focused on visual art) I thought that the equivalent of an online gallery for composers is audio-sharing sites, so I put the question out to my tribe on Twitter who have basically responded that SoundCloud’s the way to go. It doesn’t have a huge classical community yet, but it sounds like a good place to start, so I’m going to try to work up some of the MIDI performances I have in Pro Tools, make them sound a little more human, and post them up there and see what happens. I have to say: I love my tweeps. They were so helpful with this, and it was lovely to have people saying “add me when you do!” and “make sure you tell us here when you set it up!”. Awesome, awesome people.

Tagged with: blogging, composition, cooking, friends, ideas, learning, music, publishing, reading, research, study, tools, web | Add a comment

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.

Tagged with: dayjob, learning, mentalhealth, organisation, thinking, web | Add a comment

Quietish day at home. Djelibeybi assembled the hutch to go over his desk in the revamped study, so we’ve started painting it now – hopefully we’ll be able to put it in place by the end of tomorrow. We watched the very interesting global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, then followed it up with… (isn’t it obvious?)… Zack and Miri Make A Porno. And I’ve done a bunch more work on the LCF secret site, which is now very nearly ready for launch to members, which may sound low-key but is actually very exciting. There you have it.

Tagged with: film, friends, relaxing, web | Add a comment

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…

Tagged with: code, composition, cooking, listening, music, reading, self-promotion, thinking, tools, web | Add a comment

I spent pretty much the whole of today messing about with Drupal and pulling together the quote for the website I’m suggesting it for. Learnt quite a lot. Not least that 4 pages is stupidly long for a quote. Fortunately I managed to cull it a bit and get it down to 3 – two pages of itemised options, as the client requested, plus one explaining things like what Drupal is, about standards-compliant code and why I’m qualified to do the job. Plus: I did get to watch another four episodes of Dollhouse while I tinkered. And I made moussaka for dinner. And went for a walk (in the afternoon). No music whatsoever though

Tagged with: cooking, dayjob, learning, research, tools, video, walking, web | Add a comment

Always a good feeling, that. I still didn’t get everything done I wanted to do, but I sure made a hefty start, most noticeably spending most of the day test-driving Drupal modules in preparation for a quote I need to send out tomorrow for a rather complex site for a non-profit organisation. I’m really rather impressed with Drupal, I must say. Today I’ve played with user permissions, an email-list module, search, adding images to user profiles, installing a security upgrade, implemented rich text editing (rather than plain-vanilla HTML) and a bunch of other stuff – and I haven’t once had to touch any code to do it. Obviously theme-creation is a completely different kettle of fish and I haven’t even looked at that yet – saving that for tomorrow. But so far, very impressed with what it can do pretty much straight out of the box.

And in the lulls while I waited for files to upload and delete as I performed the security upgrade? Well, I arranged the first four movements of Pieces of Eight for string quartet, which I’m thinking will be my submission to Sequenza 21′s current call for scores (I’ve abandoned the cello tango I was writing for this as too complex for the time I have – I still want to write it, but it will probably take several goes to get to a point where I’ll be happy with it). I was tossing up between arranging it for string quartet or piano and percussion but the quartet won out in the end – limited time and I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted the percussion to do but I didn’t want it to be just a bong or bang here and there.

I also sent off a bunch of emails that have been lingering and sorted out a survey for the composers from Durham – we’re setting up a Facebook group and wanted to give ourselves some semblance of authority, so we’re voting on a name… results by the end of the weekend, I hope.

Oh! And my next round of Amazon-junkie-goodies arrived! Alex Ross’s new book, Listen to This, and the next book in my pre-opera reading round, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. I’ve rethought that idea about keeping the subject of the opera under my hat – in the light of it probably taking me several years to actually produce any part of it, it seems a bit lame, so here’s the announcement: It’s to be (loosely) based on Tey’s novel (yes, I’ve read it before) which focuses on the revisionist history of Richard III (the one that says he wasn’t a deformed tyrant who murdered the princes in the Tower). As an opera plot, I think it’s up there with the best of them: murder, slander, rumour, illegitimacy, deceit, pretenders to the throne – it’s got the lot!

Tagged with: composition, dayjob, experimenting, gtd, learning, music, reading, research, shopping, study, tools, web | Add a comment

Didn’t achieve much today – went for a 20-minute walk to buy groceries in the morning, which totally wiped me out and was only solved by a 3-hour totally-zonked-out nap, after which I still felt a bit woozy, but nevertheless I succeeded in finishing Lego Harry Potter on the Wii (first round – now for the Free Play mode). Wow. Huge achievements.

In the evening, though, I managed to install and start looking at the Drupal content management system, which I need to explore for a website I’ve been asked to quote on. First impressions: Daunting but flexible. Probably worth the effort to get to know it a bit. We’ll see how that goes.

Tagged with: dayjob, learning, research, web | Add a comment

Today I made my first-ever Christmas pudding. I feel simultaneously elated with the joy of creation, yet curiously let down by the fact that I can’t just serve it up – it has to just sit quietly till the 25th and then be steamed for another 3 hours before we’ll discover if it’s actually any good. It does seem to smell pretty good, though, from what I can tell with my nose all stuffed up. And the little bit of mix I tasted gave me hope that perhaps this will be a recipe I might be able to tolerate (my general attitude towards Christmas pudding is “ew yuk, take the horrid thing away!”). For those who are interested, I’m doing the Nigella Lawson Ultimate Christmas Pudding from her Nigella Christmas book. I was supposed to do our family’s traditional pud recipe, but there was confusion because the recipe we were supplied with called for “a packet” of cinnamon. I’m pretty sure I know what sort of packet this would be in Australia, but spices don’t come like that here and I’d hate to guess at the spice quantity and then mess the whole thing up. Nigella, on the whole, seemed safer. I shall take a peek under the lid tomorrow to see what it looks like and find out whether the whole thing’s been a disaster.

Still tearing my hair out over the Remembrances score I was supposed to send off earlier this week – it’s been dogged with annoying problems – everything looked fine, then I discovered the voice part was entirely in the tenor clef. After much poking at Finale I got this fixed, re-exported, re-trimmed, re-imported into InDesign… to discover that when I fixed the clef, the vocal line had dropped an octave. So now I’m re-re-trimming and hope to have it finished tonight.

Quintet is not happy. I think I may need to add something in the middle. This makes me also not happy.

I introduced my parents to my trifle though, which seemed to go down quite well – brioche slices, a touch of Napoleon brandy, fresh raspberries, custard, whipped cream, slivered almonds.

Oh, and posted a new blog post too. The Digital Dimension: 1. Programme notes, which then received a response post from Killing Classical Music, from whence the incentive to write the original post came. All very incestuous!

Tagged with: baking, blogging, composition, cooking, copying, music, publishing, web, writing | Add a comment

Tonight was the second performance of my piece Deconstruct: Point, line, plane and how exciting it was! In spite of a few early wrong notes and the beginning and ending still a little fast, overall the ensemble did a great job – finally it came together! Woohoo!

The morning was pretty exciting too because I finally sent my new site, caitlinrowley.com, live. It’s rather later than the 30 September launch date I’d originally planned, and it’s not really 100% perfect, especially for rarer browsers, but with these sorts of projects sooner or later you get to a point where you just need to send it off into the world and tweak afterwards. So this is that point

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

Back on the quintet today. I’ve deleted a chunk off the end of the piece and put it to one side for use later on – I was just feeling that it was coming in too soon and I needed to stretch out what I had a bit more before this particular bit recurred. Haven’t quite found what I want to do in the space now, but I feel it’s edging its way, crab-like, towards a new jumping off point. Just wish it would get a move on – I’m off to Portugal for a week on Tuesday!

Also finally got back to the new website and I’m very excited to report that I’ve now fixed it up for IE7 and 8. Firefox 2 is looking pretty broken, but FF2 makes up only 0.3% of the site’s visitors so for the moment (as in “launching by Friday”) I’m going to ignore it. I’ll come back to it later – apparently there’s a hack you can do to make FF2 recognise HTML5, but it sounds a little fiddly, so low priority it is. Opera likewise makes up a mere 1.2% of the minim-media.com populace and Opera 10 is certainly pretty much in need of no tweaks at all, so again I’m going to ignore that for the launch and focus on the one remaining browser that is both significant in usage and crap at rendering. And I don’t think anyone who works at all on websites will be in any doubt as to which one that is – yup, our old friend IE6. It’s pretty gebrochen – indeed unusable at present – so it unfortunately has to be a pretty high priority, but hopefully a touch of zoom: 1 here, a little position: relative there and a few numerical adjustments and it’ll come back into the fold.

I think I’ve basically decided to not apply for the London Sinfonietta’s fabulous-sounding Writing the Future programme – everything’s getting too squashed, I need to provide a live recording, and don’t have one for anything I’ve written in the past decade and there have been some issues with getting a reference (mostly because there’s really only one person who could write it, and she’s snowed under [although very generously willing to do her best]) so it’s feeling like really it would be best to just set it to one side, ask the London Sinfonietta to put me on their mailing list and hope they’ll do another one I can apply for next year. Disappointing, but I think there are enough opportunities coming up through the Composers Forum to keep me well and truly occupied – including a four-session workshop on writing for percussion in January! Can’t wait!

And I discovered a fabulous recording of chamber music by the Russian composer Taneyev. It’s on Spotify or check out the details on Amazon. The piano quintet’s scherzo is particularly awesome – very cheeky!

Tagged with: code, composition, programming, thinking, web | Add a comment