I’m still exploring the new box set I bought last week – well, with 22 CDs, odds are I’ll be exploring it for a good long while to come! – and today I listened again to the disc of Poulenc and Britten songs (composers accompanying), and had my first listen to the Khachaturian disc (composer conducting), which has the Violin Concerto on it. I heard this piece on the radio the other day and was so taken by it that I had to switch it over from clock-radio to real radio to read the track info – so I was very glad to find I already had a recording of it. I’ve also been reacquainting myself with Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird which I have loved ever since I first heard it sung by Gerald English at a composer conference in Melbourne back when I was at uni. It’s a really intriguing work, and relevant to me especially now because of the Whitman songs being similarly fragmentary and miniature.

I’ve also listened to an incredible piano piece – most definitely NOT miniature – by Carolyn Yarnell, called The Same Sky – you can hear it from a link in about the 6th paragraph down in Kyle Gann’s post ‘Aiming My File Cabinets into the Right Student’s Ears’. I’d link to it directly, except that Gann’s post also includes a chunk of very beautiful and daunting-looking score, which is worth seeing. And also because if you don’t know Gann’s work, you should get to his site and have a listen. I highly recommend, in particular, Custer and Sitting Bull, which truly shows how beautiful and emotive microtonal music can be.

And to celebrate djeli’s safe arrival home from the snow, I cooked another new recipe from my big Greek cookbook – ‘Drunken Pork’ – fantastically delicious and easy. Will have to pull this one out for guests sometime, I think!

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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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