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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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.

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Yes, really

Well, I thought I was coming out of the cloud last time, but well, not so much. For a while there was getting a bit more done – and especially getting a bunch of listening done, but as time went on and the teeth were still problematic and the back seemed to actually get a bit worse, the cumulus descended and I got a bit lost. Feeling like I’m on the up just a little now though (or should that be down – the cloud goes up. Hum. Think my metaphor’s a bit mixed here!) and starting to be able to think properly. Last week my dentist put in the proper filling and said that the mini-crown is optional because the tooth still has its structural integrity (thank you, o marvellous Italian-South African root canal specialist!) and that if I want it we’ll look at doing it in 6 months. I think I probably will do it – it will provide more solidity and protection – but we’ll do the x-rays then to see if the root canal’s worked to clear the infection fully and then see what else should be done. And then about 2 days after that, the back started improving again. Can you say “psychosymptomatic”? My bite’s still a bit out, and bending down’s still pretty painful, but it feels good to at least have the start of some closure on the whole hideous episode.

So I’ve not been doing much lately. I have started a new knitting project to teach myself short-row bust darts, which is coming along well – the first actual garment (as opposed to accessories) I’ve knitted since I was about 13! Feels like a big step. I’m pleased with it so far but trying to maintain an experimental approach and accept that things may go wrong (I may have picked the wrong size – it’s hard to tell when you’re as big in front as I am what size you should be making to fit across the bust as well as on the shoulders – or the short-rows may go horribly wrong) and the whole thing may need to be unravelled, but for now it’s a nice gentle knit which is coming along well and is helping to restore some calm to my frazzled brain.

I’ve also been studying for the Life in the UK test which we’re taking next Friday. Gosh it’s dull. And I am absolutely no good at remembering either statistics or random dates or numbers (and why does it even matter that I should know how many constituencies there are??). Anyway, just going to revise and cram and do practice tests now ad nauseum for the next week.

Today I made crumpets.

And the great news is that this time they’ve actually come out properly crumpetty. Unlike the last two times when they lacked holes and ended up heavy and a bit blech. These are light and tasty. And the butter pools correctly. They have the Djelibeybi seal of approval. I also made them in the shape of space shuttles and Gromit.

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An end?

Yes, I know I keep saying that the violin piece is done, but there always seems to be more checking to do. Today I experimented a bit with some of the ideas my tutor suggested for it – I think the pizzicato I’m not so keen on, but I LOVE the harmonics idea – he totally understood immediately just by listening to the piece that there are moments of complete stillness in there and harmonics will convey that just perfectly. I think he’s also right about it not using the whole range. I may not be 100% comfortable with the higher reaches of the violin’s range, but it’s characteristic and I think the piece will be better for even just a touch of stratosphere here and there. And I’ve included his idea for double-stopping the open E string with a stopped E (same pitch) too. Just here and there for extra colour and emphasis. Really quite pleased with it now. As in, more than before. But of course it has to settle overnight too.

Also did some drawing. Well, not real drawing, pattern-making really. I did a couple just over a week ago and I’ve had this one in my head ever since but just hadn’t got around to doing it. Oddly enough it looks kind of like a tsunami, but the idea was definitely pre-Japan-earthquake. Heigh ho.

And I made an apple crumble. But I didn’t get around to writing my blog post for caitlinrowley.com because I want this week’s to be on the violin piece, but obviously that kind of needs to be finished itself before I can really write about it. Suspect the blog post may be a bit late this week…

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Pie

Wasn’t feeling so great today. Didn’t really get much done. However, I did make a chicken and leek pie.

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Backup extravaganza

So, after the disaster the other week with my last scores backup (still waiting to get the final files list from the restoration guys for the second disk so I can give the go-ahead for the retrieval of both disks but the file list from the scores disk looks pretty healthy), I’ve decided to just throw myself at this backup concept and get things working properly for once in my life. It was on last year’s new year’s creative goals list so I guess this year isn’t too far off the mark to be actually sorting it out.

But it wasn’t really straightforward. First I wanted to make sure the laptop was as clean as could be, so ran Verify Disk (no problems) and the Repair Permissions (a bit messy). Plugged in the new drive, which was happily recognised straight away, set it to be the backup drive and set the first run going. 2 hours later it had obviously got stuck at 5GB. So I tried again… same thing. Ran Verify Disk on the new disk to discover it had a minor header error, so I ran Repair Disk, then erased the whole thing, reformatted, partitioned the new drive (because a 250GB hard disk definitely doesn’t need 2TB of backup space, I think)… whereupon the computer promptly crashed. Rebooted, reverified all disks, repaired permissions everywhere and finally got the backup running and working. PHEW! Who’d have guessed it would be so complicated?

Feeling a lot happier now it’s in place though. Once I get the other drive back though, I’ll probably completely reformat this new drive and the 1GB and the old one too and work out a new arrangement, but for now at least stuff’s being backed up against the increasingly frequent problems I’ve been having with this laptop. Glad a new computer’s only a couple of months away…

And I baked a cake.

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A small improvement

OK, so I’m still labouring under a black cloud – it’s been a pretty crappy day – but I’ve managed to pull off some small achievements – went for a walk and managed to get to Boots in time to buy essentials for Edinburgh (most notably mouthwash – the abscess on my tooth is playing up again – really need to go back to the dentist and get myself referred for that root canal she threatened me with last time. Oddly, am resisting this. How strange). I walked back via the station and picked up my tickets for tomorrow and felt a little better for the exercise. I had a brilliant idea for solving the train-snack issue which Tesco had been unable to provide a non-sugar-or-preservatives-overload answer to – and ended up making a pair of little apple crumbles, one for tonight (YUM!) and one for tomorrow. I finished packing the dishwasher and have actually run it twice AND done two loads of laundry. My bag is about half-packed. And I’ve ruled up the remaining pages needed for me to work on the orchestral arrangement on the train tomorrow – straight lines plus moving train is never a happy combination. Something has to give and it’s usually the straight line.

Oh, and I finished reading The Betrayal of Richard III and have greedily started in on The Daughter of Time again. Betrayal was a really excellent book – easy to read, enough detail to give the author’s arguments weight; not so much as to bog one down. I particularly liked that the final, tiny, chapter was devoted to possible answers to the Princes whereabouts if they weren’t actually murdered at all (which, given the lack of evidence for the murder ever having taken place at all, seems likely) – really quite fascinating. I think I’d recommend it to pretty much anyone as a first step to finding out more about the whole issue – short, detailed, easy to read. And this edition is annotated to bring certain facts up to date with current discoveries without interfering with V.B. Lamb’s excellent writing style. I think this book could be very useful in pulling together the synopsis for the opera, but I’m also looking forward to reading a more detailed volume too. Guess I should order that…

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New year, new leaf? Trying …

Yet again this year I posted a rather ambitious list of creative goals for the new year. I’ve stopped doing “resolutions” – they always fail – so instead I prefer to focus on small-scale victories and try to gently guide myself to achieve them. So today I did a little guiding. Two of the big ones, which will be ongoing and probably affect a fair chunk of other stuff are helping Djelibeybi to sort out the study and to listen to one new or revisited work or album a month. These are the two I’ve started tackling today. I’m really happy with the start I’ve made too – the study thing does to a certain measure also include the bedroom – over the weekend we moved my white cabinet/bookshelf into the study to be a support for the printer, which gives a hole in the room’s furniture and a pile of books on the floor that formerly lived on top of the cabinet. So today I cleared off the top of the chest of drawers, got everything off the desk, cleaned them both, took my lamp out of the box it’s been languishing in since we moved in May, shredded some stuff, recycled a huge load of paper, sorted out what needed to be filed or scanned or otherwise processed in some way, fetched my desk chair out of the cupboard where it was stashed after the Christmas invasion and basically made everything nice and ready to be worked at. It’s still not 100% ready, but it’s a great deal closer to it than it has been for months. Still a lot of junk to be dealt with but now that it’s off the desk I’m hoping it can stay off.

For the listening I’ve been sampling a few random things the past couple of days in my listening for the new pieces I’m working on. Today was Ute Lemper – City of Strangers (which I didn’t even know I had) and the Michael Nyman Songbook, then (accidentally) moving on to Michael Torke’s Yellow Pages album from ever so long ago. And now I’m listening to a composer called Philipp Blume whose site I was directed to from a tweet by Lauren Redhead – not the sort of thing I normally gravitate to but I’m really rather enjoying it. I should start keeping that listening diary I said I would but I don’t really want to start a new book and not entirely sure how else to do it. Hmm. Also feel a bit of a prat writing sort-of reviews – I shouldn’t, really, because the aim of the exercise is to get more comfortable with really thinking about music and being able to talk about – and to listen more closely – but nevertheless, there it is. Will work on that.

I also made a chunky start on reworking Deconstruct: Point, line plane for chamber orchestra for the London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra’s call for scores which is due at the end of the month. Reasonably happy with the translations of the woodwind parts, but the piano bit isn’t working at all and I found myself getting in a muddle in Finale because of only being able to see half the staves at any given time, so instead I went out and got some proper orchestral-sized manuscript – going to have a go at doing this the old-fashioned way, then I’ll transcribe it into Finale. I think this should work well – while I don’t usually work with paper and pencil when I’m actually composing because I’m rubbish at working out what’s in my head if I can’t hear it as I write it down, it actually works well for me when I’m doing orchestration because I AM good at hearing tone colours in my head and imagining combinations of them. Seeing as the notes are done (although I may expand some bits later) this should be fine – looking forward to really getting started on this tomorrow.

And I made some biscuits. Nice to have a little something with one’s cup of tea.

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Ongoing quintet saga

Still exhausted, but at least today I managed to choof everyone out of the house and get some solid work done. I haven’t finished yet (taking a 1am break as I type this) but the score I think is essentially done in Finale and I’ve adapted the second cello part for the double bass. The parts still need work. Potentially a LOT of work. Which really has to be done tonight. The good news is that in the few days since I finished the piece, I’ve come to really really love it. I think it might be one of my favourites (shh! don’t tell the other pieces!). And now I’m really looking forward to Durham and the chance to see what it sounds like for real. Just hoping that the interlocking rhythms won’t be too hard for the performers – once it’s all sent off I might have a think about possible alternatives if it proves just too difficult.

Oh, and I baked a mushroom pie for dinner, which seemed to go down well with the ravening hordes.

OK. Time to put the nose back to the grindstone. Wishing I’d bought those chocolate teacakes at M&S now…

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