Improv

Wow! What a day! I’ve made a huge start on my first RPM Challenge piece: First thing this morning I pulled down the recordings from Iraklio and Brussels into Logic, so all those field recordings are now on my hard disk. I also spent about an hour messing around with ideas on my flute and recording them (note: this is a big deal for me – I NEVER improvise!). A slight setback when the very best take for ideas AND execution AND tone ended up being lost when my laptop suddenly shut down without warning, but I managed two takes which are halfway decent and I’m cobbling them together to create overlapping parts. This afternoon I started sticking it all together in Logic: After exploring some other field recordings I had lying around, I’ve decided to stick with just the Zurich and Brussels recordings and the two flute takes – the more stuff I try to work with, the slower I’m going to be and the point of this whole exercise is speed.

Anyway, I now have 4:28 of music!!! It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever done. It’s a little morbid and ambly. But the point is that I’ve actually created nearly 4 1/2 minutes of music in a single day! Hoping I can finish it tonight or tomorrow (although I just remembered that I have to get the parts done for Carrion Comfort, so it won’t be tonight).

I published a blog post on perfectionism and what I’m hoping to get out of this challenge: it’s up on caitlinrowley.com if you want to read it. And – relating to that – over the course of the afternoon I identified a reason why it takes me so long to write stuff. I keep going back to listen to the whole thing from the beginning! I kept catching myself doing this, even when it wasn’t really necessary. I feel like what I’m writing is losing touch with what I’ve written before, so I go back and listen from the beginning – and of course, as the piece gets longer this takes longer each time, so now I’m trying to watch out for this and when I go to do it, I think: do I really need to do this? Or should I just press on a bit longer?

1am update: Parts are prepped and ready for a print-out proof tomorrow… just as soon as I nip out to the shops to buy some more black ink. Also got a bit caught up in the moment when I ought to have been heading for bed and finally fixed up the time signatures for Egg the Ninth – I KNEW 9/8 wasn’t right. But 6/8 wasn’t either – turns out it needed to be 6/8 interspersed with occasional 9/8 bars. FUN!

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Recorders and recording

Busy day! Not a lot on RPM, but enough: I retrieved the MiniDisc player from D, set up the MBox (which hadn’t worked since I reinstalled but neglected to install ProTools – this time round I found just a driver and skipped the ProTools) and recorded the field recordings I made in Zurich (street noises, trams) across into Logic, so I now have them in a usable format for my piece. They were less defined sounds than I’d hoped to capture, and the recording a little noisier (disc noise just as bad in places as I’d feared but it’s only in patches – where it sounds like a quiet coffee grinder – not all the way through) but they should be entirely usable, even though I may combine them with some other recordings or use some sort of processing on some of them to give a bit more shape to the whole. I also found, in addition to the Zurich and Brussels recordings I knew were there, an MD marked “Iraklio” – I’d completely forgotten I made any recordings on the MD in Greece. I thought I only had crappy ones taken with the audio function on my camera because we kept coming across things that required instant reaction (not possible with the MiniDisc) – a teachers’ strike, a children’s band playing enthusiastically but with a delightful disregard of pitch. Looking forward to seeing what’s on there tomorrow!

I hand-delivered the score of Carrion Comfort to Herne Hill (which is lovely, by the way, if you’re thinking of moving to South London) and did the first round of corrections on the parts on the train. Mostly they’re pretty OK, except that Finale’s done some weird thing where the spacing between staves is different on every part – it’s like Finale’s tried to make all the parts fit into one page exactly, so the trombone part has masses of space, while the viola part has markings colliding on every stave as the markings below the stave run into the markings above the stave of the next system! Aargh!

And tonight I trekked off to Nonclassical (trek being the operative word – really wish they’d find a venue that’s actually near a Tube station – then I wouldn’t have to leave quite so early to be sure of catching the last train, and would be more likely to go to more of them!) to hear Consortium 5, a recorder consort. Excellent music – I made some great notes on ideas for Ladders of Escape which I’m writing for the Pink Noise recorder quartet in Bristol. Loads of ideas! And I caved and bought their CD too. I am weak. But happy

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Small beginnings, major triumph and Matilda

Today’s is a portmanteau post. I will start with the major triumph which is that Carrion Comfort has, at long, long, long, long last, gone to the printers. Yup, it’s done. I have had to make a couple of compromises because of the amateur nature of the ensemble it’s destined for, but the original timpani part at least will go into the final post-(hopeful)-workshop score. I felt it would just confuse when sending the score to a group I know doesn’t have timpani.

And tonight we went to see Tim Minchin’s musical version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda. It was supposed to be D’s Christmas present, but he didn’t like it pretty much at all, while Djeli and I agreed that we can squish up our list of “Best Theatrical Performances Ever” to make room for another one. Amazing stuff, great voices, the kids in the cast were simply astonishing. It was funny and heartbreaking and the staging was superb. I could find nothing wrong with it all. Get a ticket. That’s all there is to be said. How could you miss a bunch of extraordinarily talented kids singing a song called “Revolting Children” and loving every minute of it?

Today has also, of course, been the first day of the RPM Challenge. Obviously most of my time has been taken up with getting Carrion Comfort out of the house, but I was able to spend some time thinking about RPM, I pulled out Egg the Ninth and tinkered around with the time signatures which need changing (I think it should be in a mix of 6/8 and 9/8, not just one or the other). I also came up with an idea for an improv piece – create a tape part using the field recordings of trams and some other street sounds in Zurich several years ago, then improvise a flute part over the top. I’ve got some ideas I’ve been thinking about for the various flute pieces I have to write in the next few months and I might use this as an opportunity to mess about with them and see what happens.

I can’t believe how excited I am about RPM now. It’s like getting rid of Carrion Comfort (which had become a bit of an albatross around my neck) has been such a relief, I just want to work on something that’s about as different as it can be – which is what RPM represents. I’ve started re-reading Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music too – just seemed like the right time to revisit this one. So many ideas floating around! Hope I can get down to some real work tomorrow!

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I must be mad

Today I think I’ve broken all procrastination records, but in the last 10 minutes I think I’ve surpassed myself – crazy exhausted from germ, battling to get Carrion Comfort off to the printers so it’ll get to London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra by their deadline, unable to focus… and I’ve just let myself be talked into signing up for the RPM Challenge – record an album (10 songs or 35 minutes of music) in a month. And a small month at that, being February. Never thought I’d be so happy to see a leap year.

But anyway, I’ve loved the Creative Pact challenges I’ve done the past couple of years, even if I kind of failed at 2011′s – they’re always great, and some of my Twitter friends are doing it too, so it’ll be fun. And who knows, either I’ll get a ton of stuff done and experiment like crazy, or I’ll become the procrastination queen of the world and somebody will give me a prize.

I’ll blog it here because, while it’s not a required part of the project, I keep track of myself better when blogging, and it’s good to take note of failures as well as successes.

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Achievement and a New World Order

It’s been a big day today. Today I finally finished a task that’s been on my to-do list for about a decade: I have joined PRS for Music! Well, obviously when it went on my to-do list I was in Australia so the task then was actually “Join APRA” but it’s effectively the same thing. I filled out the form online yesterday and paid the fee over the internet, then this morning I printed it out, signed it and made a copy of my passport and then – yes – I PUT IT IN THE POST. YAY! There aren’t words for the triumph I feel over this. I did actually print out the forms about 5 years ago, but there was some confusion over whether I should join as just me or as my and Djeli’s limited company, and then there was confusion about what the status of the company was re: VAT and I just never got it all sorted out. But it is now. Which means I can start receiving a pittance for every performance! True, they won’t actually pay me till it hits £30, but still – prospect of payment! WOOOT!

The thing that set this amazing productivity off was that yesterday I went to the Barbican to a thingy organised by Sound and Music called “Counting In”. It was a panel session on composer careers and was extremely interesting and inspiring. So not only did I join PRS for Music today, but I have decided that a New World Order is in… order. Again. I know I keep doing this but one day it’s going to stick. One of the things really brought home to me yesterday is that I HAVE to get my health sorted out. Quite possibly this is even more important than actually writing music – I have so many ideas and so many things I want to do, but this permanent state of crippledom, criminally low energy, tendency to catch every bug going and my weight spiralling out of control making everything worse has to stop. It really does. My brain is sluggish and tired ALL the time and I never have enough energy, either physical or mental, to just get on and do the stuff I need to – stuff like laying out scores to send to potential performers, having a go at writing a piece in super-quick time for an imminent deadline, actually getting a blog post written for caitlinrowley.com every week as opposed to every now and then. Not to mention having the energy to travel and do fun stuff with Djelibeybi too.

As always, the heart of this New World Order has to be getting my eating right. If I’m not eating right, I don’t stand a chance, but I can’t go back on the deprivation diet as it was originally – that might have resulted in 14 kilos of weight loss in 6 months and huge energy gains, but it was unsustainable simply because it made me miserable, so I need to devote a little time this week to going through my nutritionist’s initial prescription and working out a more even balance. And I need to finish reading the book on stress eating so I can better understand what I’m doing. As a first step I’m going to try to not eat anything once dinner is done. Water is OK. Even a cup of tea is OK. But no actual food – it shouldn’t be necessary and mostly I eat then just because I’m too tired to do anything useful. So instead I should have some water and just head to bed.

So I’ll start small. And hopefully build on that to make a healthy, unstoppable me. Havi Brooks has a great weekly “Very Personal Ads” ritual on her blog, and I think that’s what this is for me this week:

WANTED: Willpower and strength to follow this through and mend my body so it can support all the things my mind wants to do.

Oh and I’ve finished the dynamics for Carrion Comfort and done a first draft for laying out the score. Can’t believe how much work has gone into this darned piece. So many instruments! So many dynamics! It kind of feels like I’ve overdone the dynamics and it should all be a lot simpler, but I’m not sure. I feel as if all the mezzo-fortes and mezzo-pianos are just imposters and should be deleted, but I’m certain I put them there for a reason – will review again later…

Tagged with: completion, composition, editing, gtd, health, ideas, mentalhealth, music | Add a comment

Australia Day

I frickin’ HATE Australia Day. It usen’t to bother me – it just seemed a bit pointless. Now it actively offends because the whole thing has become so American. I have no problem with Americans being American about American celebrations. But for a day which is supposed to commemorate the founding of our laid-back nation, the current trend for flag-waving just nauseates me. Not to mention that for a small but significant proportion of the population it’s Invasion Day. The current patriotic overkill just seems to rub that fact in just a little bit more. And maybe squeezes lemon juice in the wound too. So I don’t like it. And I don’t celebrate it. I do my very best to ignore it, which seems pretty much impossible, with the result that I am always in a filthy temper on Australia Day. And today seems to be no exception.

However, I have turned it to my advantage and drafted up a blog post on whether I’m an Australian composer or not (jury’s out on the verdict of that one) which has made me feel a bit better. I also battled my way through some more work on Carrion Comfort and came to the conclusion that I don’t have the foggiest what key it’s in. My harmonic skills are not advanced enough to wade through the chromaticism and come up with a definite answer. It definitely starts in G minor, with moments of G major, but after that, who knows? It may possibly end in C-sharp minor, but I really wouldn’t swear to it on a Bible, so I am taking the wuss’s way out and declaring it to be atonal, which means ditching all key signatures and relying on accidentals. I hope the amateur players won’t be too put off by that. I am converting all sharps to flats, in an effort to make it easier to read. Really wish I didn’t have to do that. F-flat is not the same as E-natural in my book – conceptually it’s a completely different animal, but there you have it. It’ll be easier to read. I do wonder sometimes whether my loose interchanging of sharps and flats when I’m writing a piece isn’t influenced by being a flautist – B-flat or A-sharp, it’s the same fingering regardless, so it’s more about what goes on in the head than what goes on with the fingers. Maybe for string or keyboard instruments it’s not so easy to change mental gears like that. Or maybe I’m just weird.

I’ve also made a bit of progress on the fanfare. It had got a bit stuck, so I’ve tried a different approach and started a new section, using the same material, hugely slowed down and separated out and with a fair bit of whitespace too. I’ll review it tomorrow and see what I think.

I doubt Carrion Comfort will go to the printers tomorrow. Or at least not tomorrow during the day. I’ve achieved too little on it today. So the absolute deadline is for it to be waiting in their inbox at 8am Monday morning, so as to have a hope of being able to pick it up, bind it and send it on Monday afternoon. CAN’T miss that deadline.

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Bread and timpani

I’ve been battling with the percussion parts on Carrion Comfort for a good couple of months now. First I didn’t know what percussion was available, and then I had to face the fact that very few of the instruments on the list matched up with the soundworld I had in my head and I’ve been wrestling with this disconnect ever since. Finally I decided to just write for the sounds in my head (mostly timpani, which aren’t on the list) and then see if I can convert those to something similar which IS on the list. So now, after much procrastination since making that decision, I have a timpani part, and I think I’m pretty pleased with it. It’s shaping and drawing together the rest of the music in the way I imagined it would (or in Finale it is anyway ) but now there’s a big challenge: how will it work for three tom-toms (high, medium, low) instead of neatly tuned timpani? Will the smaller drums have the resonance I’m after? If not, what’s best to do. These are questions I need to answer in the coming week.

In the meantime, however, I was too late to go out to the bakery yesterday and so decided to take the plunge and use up some of the assorted bread flour which has been lurking in the cupboard for far too long. Also to try out the River Cottage Bread Handbook which I bought on a cranky-day a few months ago. Well, gentle reader, if I may say so, it was frickin’ fantastic. Absolutely and by a country mile the best bread I’ve ever cooked. I ended up using 1/3 wholegrain spelt flour, 1/3 normal strong white flour and 1/3 wholemeal strong flour and it’s turned out brilliantly. The recipe freaked me out a bit because unlike every other bread recipe I’ve ever seen, this one has no sugar in it – just flour, yeast, salt, water and a tiny bit of oil – but it rose perfectly, and the quantity was great too. The recipe made three medium-sized loaves, which is perfect for storing spares in the freezer and hopefully will get me through the next week. I can probably make time to bake bread once a week, at least while I’m freelance, but more often than that would be a stretch. Guess I should be glad that D’s really only eating white bread at the moment, although he did taste it when it was fresh out of the oven and pronounced it ‘orgasmic’, which I was rather pleased with.

My only criticism of it is that between the wholegrain spelt and the wholemeal flour, it’s REALLY fibre-packed. I’m glad the white flour was there because I think 70% wholemeal would have been too much. I’m going to test out an assortment of flours and combinations over the next few batches. Ideally I’d like to make a good mixed-wholegrain loaf. I love spotty bread. The other thing is that – probably due to the oven in this flat being rubbish – setting the oven temperature to 250C was a little high and the first loaf browned VERY quickly. I liked how the recipe gave 3 different temperatures to turn down to after the first 10 minutes, depending on how quickly it was browning, but I did dial it down a little for the next two, which made a big difference but they still turned out great.

And it worked well as Vegemite toast this morning, and even better as a slim cheese sandwich for lunch today. Mmmmm. Bread…

Today’s very own achievement was not so grand, but worthwhile. It’s been bugging me for ages that since I moved the featured piece on the caitlinrowley.com homepage into the central section and started using the SoundCloud widget, the blog post has been bumped way down the page and is almost guaranteed to be below the fold on all but the largest (or portrait-oriented) screens. It’s also been bugging me why I’m not getting new signups for that website’s email list, and I came to the conclusion that having the Twitter, etc. links in the same space was distracting, so I’ve moved the social media links to the bottom of the page, cleared them out of the email list box, changed the heading and intro line, and moved the blog post to the right column, under the (shortened) email box. So now at least headlines should be visible above the fold and I think the whole page looks more interesting and magaziney. Now to wait and see what happens with the stats…

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Exploring where I want to go

Today was the Trinity Laban Invitation Day. The idea behind it is to give those who have received an invitation the chance to find out a little more about studying at Trinity so they can decide between the various institutions who have offered them a place. In my case, as I only applied for Trinity and have no real doubts about the course, I mostly went along just to get a bit of a taster of what I can look forward to.

And it was a great day. We spent an hour in a composer workshop on writing for ethnic flutes, got to have a good chat with a couple of students over lunch, did a quick tour of the (gorgeous) campus and then had a meeting with the Head of the Composition Department, Dominic Murcott, who answered our questions and showed us some videos of interesting work by past students.

All great stuff and I can’t WAIT to get started. But the big issue of the day is the confirmation that we need to choose our own composition tutor. For me, this is incredibly difficult. In Australia, it probably would have been pretty easy because I’m so familiar with the work and history of so many composers, not just from concertgoing, but from my work at the Australian Music Centre. But here, I’m all at sea. Unlike, I suppose, many prospective students, I didn’t choose Trinity on the basis of a specific person teaching there, but instead on the approach of the college as a whole and the general broad stylistic bent of the teachers as a group.

So I don’t know who I want to study with. Dominic made some suggestions, based on my (rather vague) stated goal of finding someone to push me to try stuff I haven’t done before, but what it’s done is to make me really think about where I want to go with my composition. Sure I want to try new stuff, but I need to consider what sort of new stuff I want to try. Thoughts… thoughts…

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Thoughts

I’ve been neglecting this blog a bit over the past few months, I know. And then last week I went and posted my new year goals list here which feels a little like I’ve sullied the purity of this space, but if I’m honest, pretty much nobody reads this blog and while it’s been useful – and continues to be from time to time – I’m not managing to keep up the daily posts.

Mind you, my creative activity has increased vastly since the time when I set up One Creative Thing. So much so that I no longer have the time or energy to blog about all that creative activity, so I guess that’s a good thing!

What I’m leading towards is that I’m thinking that I might change the focus of this blog a bit. Not quite sure where it’ll go – it’ll still be about regular creative activity, but I’ve been wanting to post about general creativity topics for a while now, and frankly it was getting a bit dull just writing endless lists of what I’d been doing – posting my soul on caitlinrowley.com on a regular basis has shown me that it’s more interesting for other people to read about the thoughts that go into a creative activity rather than just knowing about the activity itself. Otherwise, it should just be a blog of lists, bare-bones. Maybe it could be a bit of both. I’m not sure yet.

Today I’m recovering from the first cold of 2012. This one’s hit me hard & I’ve been in bed for a week now. Not a great start to the year, but I’ve done some thinking in that time, and especially following on from doing the 2012 list, I’m thinking of consolidating my sideline blogs. There’s this one, plus Minimania, which was my Vox blog and now languishes at Typepad, plus a couple of neglected Tumblogs too, and it occurred to me that if I broaden the scope of this blog, then maybe I can consolidate the ex-Vox content (which currently is really only updated with the annual goals lists, birthday & Christmas lists for relatives in far-flung places and the occasional personal post) with what’s here and ditch the nasty TypePad experience altogether. Maybe this space can build more on the work in progress posts on caitlinrowley.com, giving a day-to-day account of what I feel is right (or not) with the work as I’m doing it. Given that I’m going to be starting a Masters degree later this year, and that I want to start doing more active listening, more scheduled composition sessions, that could be a good thing.

Will it still be One Creative Thing? I’m not sure. Guess I’ll have to see where these thoughts take me.

(Oh, and today Djeli and I attempted to make “Princesses” – chocolate meringues – out of my new-for-Christmas French baking book. They were a bit of a disaster, but I think I know where we went wrong, so I’ll be having another go soon. Also designed and ordered proper business cards for Raspberry Blue. And read a lot)

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2012: the year of attainable goals?

Well, that’s what I’m hoping. I’m quite pleased with this year’s list. I think that pretty much everything on it actually is attainable over the course of the year, unlike last year’s which was much too ambitious. A lot of what’s on it is stuff that is already in progress, about to be in progress or has a firmish deadline at least, so much of it doesn’t have to be started from scratch but is more about tying up loose ends left over from 2011.

September looms large this year – I am determined to be healthier and more organised before I start my Masters to give me the best possible chance to do well at it – this involves getting a healthy balance between freelance work, composition and rest time really working so I can clear old projects, bring in some money but keep my mental & physical health intact. I am most emphatically planning to not injure myself in any way more serious than perhaps a papercut.

2012 is, most significantly, all about new beginnings and new directions. There’s a lot of change going to be happening – going back to uni, (hopefully) buying our first house & moving out of London, developing my freelance business to be (again, hopefully) able to at least cover my basic expenses.

So without further ado, here is The 2012 List.

Music

• 3 performances in 2012 – one more than I set myself for 2011, getting ambitious here
• Complete all piece requests from 2011 before start of uni term in September – alto flute piece for Carla Rees (due spring), flute piece for Nicole Camacho, recorder quartet for Pink Noise, Pieces of Eight arrangement for Shana Norton
• New score downloads implemented for caitlinrowley.com
• Blog at least once a month on caitlinrowley.com
• Work out how, and apply for funding with Pink Noise to (hopefully) achieve first paid commission.
• Keep up flute practice
• Start a Masters degree!
• Finish Carrion Comfort for LCCO deadline
• Write at least 1 piece for a call for scores & send it in
• Take 2 pieces along to LCF WiP/WiT sessions for feedback
• Schedule in (and DO) one listening session a week. Take notes to make sure I’m getting the most out of it
• Get back to counterpoint/harmony study – schedule as part of weekly plan. NEED to make some progress on this before September.
• Put at least 2 pieces up on SoundCloud in MIDI versions
• Finish laying out 2×4 & send to Christopher D. Lewis

Home & Travel

• Move out of London
• Set up my own study before the summer
• Try at least 5 recipes from “I Know How to Cook”: 6-Jan-2012: Coq au vin
• Try at least 3 recipes from new French baking cookbook: 6-Jan-2012: Galette des rois, incl. crème frangipane; 8-Jan-2012: Princesses (chocolate meringues) – not actually a success, but definitely tried. Will try again. 15-Jan-2012: Chaussons au pommes – YUM!
• Travel: EuroDisney, Spain, Australia, weekend trip somewhere?
• Work on creating a good, reliable multigrain loaf, in case of (suspected) bakery dearth in Gravesend: 13-Jan-2012: An excellent start – not fully multigrain because I was just using up leftover flour, but it worked really well. 19-Jan-2012: Tried the same recipe, this time with all wholemeal flour. Worked very well, in spite of forgetting about it a couple of times, leading to overly long rising times. Feeling quite confident about getting this recipe working well.

Health

• Limit sugar & dairy intake.
• Keep up with vitamin supplements to help keep food & energy on track.
• Get back to the morning squirrel-walks once calf is better
• Semi-regular massages to keep stress and tension headaches under control – no more waiting till the pain’s so bad I can’t function
• Work my way up to being able to do a 4-mile walk without pain
• Develop regular schedule so can have relaxation time in the evenings and proper weekends and reduce stress of neglecting one or the other. Key components: Freelance work, composing, listening, training, writing
• Weight: *sigh* Shall we say 76kg by the start of the uni term? Surely that’s doable? *gives self a stern look and a threat to not injure any more parts*

Business

• Schedule training to keep my skills current & keep me employable by others – do some every week. Key areas: JavaScript, design, marketing
• Design business cards & get them made 8-Jan-2012: Order sent! And I just scraped in to get a 15% discount from MOO too!
• Write beginner social media guide to sell on raspberryblue.com
• Start blogging on Raspberry Blue (not going to make this any set schedule – minimum 3 posts in the year though)
• Schedule talk at LCF Open House on some webby topic – social media as a tool for composition perhaps? Or maybe something on how to use the web to promote your composition?

Other stuff

• New laptop. This year for sure. D to get old one.
• Knit something that isn’t a scarf Send both parents’ birthday and Christmas presents ON TIME
• Call parents once a month: January – done.

Tagged with: baking, completion, composition, cooking, creativity, dayjob, health, learning, massage, mentalhealth, music, organisation, relaxing, self-promotion, study, tools, travel, walking, web, writing | 3 comments