On the music front, however, all is quiet. Barely even listening to anything, although a lovely friend gave me Gidon Kremer & Martha Argerich’s recording of the complete Prokofiev violin sonatas for my birthday (yes, I had a birthday) and I accidentally bought myself a CD of Rautavaara orchestral works from the Oxfam Sound and Vision shop (mantra: “It’s all for a good cause”). I desperately need to get back in touch with Trinity Laban and book in a couple of trial composition lessons so I can work out who to study with – don’t want to end up with just a random teacher, but my brain’s so out of the loop with dayjob stuff I’m having trouble thinking about it. I don’t mean to be ungrateful – it’s fantastic that my business has taken off in the past couple of months, but it does rather do my head in for composing. Really need to find a way to force myself back into it. Might try to plan something over the weekend.

Oh, and today I made a batch of brownies for D who is moving out to his student accommodation tomorrow. I used the Hummingbird Bakery’s recipe and I think I do very much prefer it to the Nigella, which is amazing but rather too rich. The Hummingbird one is rich and fudgy but somehow less overwhelming. Possibly because it’s thinner so there’s a better crust-to-goop ratio…

So, yesterday. I was feeling kind of floundering, not knowing which piece to work on next after finishing Charles’ bass-baritone song. So I looked at my list and realised I needed to spend some more time getting to grips with what Alun’s bass guitar can do, so I bought myself his album If (after checking with him which of the many I should start with) and listened to it on my marathon accidentally-4km walk to and from Waitrose. Not ideal listening conditions, I’ll grant you, but it was a fair start. What I discovered was that it’s not about what Alun’s bass guitar can do, it’s about what it *can’t* do which – it seems – is very little. I had no idea a bass guitar was capable of so much! So now my challenge there is that much bigger and I really need to do some heavy-duty thinking and tinkering very soon. Have a listen for yourself:

I did spend a significant amount of time doing battle with technology yesterday, though, which eventually resulted in a happy conclusion: I can once again doodle about on my (digital) piano and have Finale record my meanderings so I don’t need to panic about not having enough fingers to hold down notes AND write down what they are. It may seem a small thing, but oh no it’s not.

Today I wrote a flute piece. Start to finish. And sent it off to Kim. The flute piece was a bit of an accident – I had decided I was going to do Jen’s piece for singing recorder player. Fished out my copy of Walter van Hauwe’s book on extended recorder techniques (Volume III of The Modern Recorder Player if you really want to know the gory details), then pulled out my flute and wrote a flute piece. Whoops. But huzzah too, because that’s No. 3 done and I hadn’t even planned any of it.

The no-planning led to a momentary crisis of what to call it, but once I realised that it’s stylistically similar to Nest which I wrote for Jenni Pinnock back at the start of the project (for oboe, with option on flute and piccolo and possibly clarinet although the range might not be great for that) and so Kim’s piece has become Flit. I’m thinking I may do a third piece to go with them once all this is over and have them as an actual whole thing for flute (or flute + piccolo) or oboe.

And this evening I’ve been back at Sam’s slide guitar piece. The tyrannosaurus timpani sounds were really bugging me. The pitch was OK but the textures far too thick and it was all getting a bit overwhelming, so I deleted that whole track and am much happier with it now. I got the AC-7 control surface app (iPAD) hooked up to Logic which has made recording automation data MUCH easier and I think there probably won’t be any more major changes to the tape part after this. Possibly some more small volume tweaks, to allow a bit more space for the guitar, but nothing big.

I also took the first steps towards getting the graphic score done for the slide guitar. I’m a bit at sixes and sevens with this. Not quite sure how to approach it although I have a visualisation in my head. I’m starting by mapping it out on the iPad, but may end up doing it by hand, or a combination of the two. I kind of want to use coloured pencil for it. I love coloured pencil – the tones are so vibrant and the transitions can be so subtle – but I know that if I sit down with pen & pencils it could take days, so I’m hoping to convince my brain that it would be just as happy with SketchBook Pro.

So this one’s definitely “the iPad piece” for the project! It was a bit inadvertent but it was something that had been at the back of my mind that I wanted to use the iPad for something in this, so it’s great to be able to use different aspects of it in the one piece – from putting in the first track using Pianist Pro over wireless MIDI, to controlling Logic with it and creating the score. Great fun.

Oh! And I had a most delightful email this morning from Charles about his song in which he remarked that “the whole thing is very well made” along with other lovely comments about it. Super-chuffed that he likes it so much and hoping I can keep up the standard!

(And amongst all this, I made 2 loaves of some of the best bread I’ve ever made.)

The first dramatic event was that I found out that Carrion Comfort has been chosen as one of 10 (out of 16) pieces to be workshopped by London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra on my birthday, 31 March. I can’t wait to hear what the orchestra makes of it – hope it’s not too hard…

Secondly, I made some little tweaks to Nest and sent it off to the performer. She had a question about trills which resulted in needing to clarify the notation a little, so I did that in the evening. Hopefully it’s at its last version now. I’ve laid it out ready for binding as I’m thinking of offering the participants of my little commission project the option to receive a bound copy of all the scores created. That might be fun.

Thirdly, I managed to concuss myself. Fortunately just a little bit – hit my head rather hard on the badly designed cupboard that juts out with a sharp corner directly above the dishwasher – but it effectively wiped out the afternoon for real work as I felt quite woozy and couldn’t make my eyes focus properly for more than about 5 seconds at a time. Seems to be mostly better now. Just feeling a little fragile.

So, counter to the plan, I wasn’t able to start on either the piano/organ or harp piece this afternoon. But I didn’t want to waste time either, so I did a bunch of listening and came up with a plan for the slide guitar piece. I won’t reveal it here because I’m running it past the performer to see if he’s cool with the concept but it was good to be devoting some time to thinking about that one as I suspect I may get totally caught up in the intricacies of writing for slide guitar if I try to write a fully-notated piece, but doing something that’s 100% graphic score seems a bit of a cop-out.

I also found, and attempted to apply for a job at Collaborative Arts Network, except that when I clicked through to apply it said the job wasn’t available, even though the deadline was 14 February, and I completely failed to find current contact details for them anywhere on the web – the best I could do was an email address, which bounced. Apart from that I found the Director on LinkedIn. He may be my only chance! Of course, it’s entirely possible that they just found someone they already knew, but it does seem odd, so I feel I should pursue it.

Lights are still out across half the flat – D went to Robert Dyas today but didn’t understand that Djeli wanted him to buy fuse wire as opposed to just fuses, so I have to go out tomorrow to get the right stuff and take the fuses back. Hopefully tomorrow evening there will be light.

Oh, and yesterday’s bread which had seemed such a disaster turned out to be nothing of the sort. True, it’s not as light and airy as one had hoped, but it’s still perfectly edible and delicious. Looking forward to having another go with this flour (Dove’s Farm Malthouse)… when it’s not snowing!

Today was a snow day. Djeli and I slowly crept into Ealing to do some shopping but decided that things were just too slippery to risk going to Ikea to look at kitchen stuff, so instead we came home and watched Les Aventures d’Adele Blanc-Sec, which was good fun.

I started making a proper multigrain loaf, which started well but alas seems to have fallen at the final proving hurdle – or rather failed to rise very much. I’ve bunged it in the oven anyway, because hey, I’d only throw it out so might as well see if it turns out edible rather than assuming it won’t. (Confirmed: It is brick-bread. I don’t think any part of it is salvageable. Will have to try again later in the week)

And while waiting for the bread to rise the first time, I wrote a piece for oboe! This is the first of my RPM Project commissions and it’s called ‘Nest’. It’s mostly made up of a combination of grace-noted chirps and little snippets of melody, with the occasional trill for good measure. Hoping it’ll be more “twit! twit!” than twee. Time will tell. At any rate, it’s something like what I had in my head, if not quite so graceful, and the whole thing was done in about an hour. I’m finishing off the layout now then will send it off to its performer tomorrow. Next up is either a piece for flute, piccolo or alto flute (I haven’t decided which yet) or a piece for assorted keyboard instruments. I’ll see where inspiration strikes in the morning … and also what the light’s like – we had a fuse blow tonight that took out half the lights in the house. It’s going to require Djelibeybi to get down on hands and knees with little bits of fuse wire which he can’t find tonight because the lights are out so I will be artificial-light free tomorrow. May have to go out…

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…

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)

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 1. Three Whitman songs performed in Limerick in April
• 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 January – check, February – check
• 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 YESSSSSSS!
• 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. Have also done the Venison-roast lamb but I can’t remember the date.
• 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. 15-Feb-2012: I’m calling it – today’s bread was pretty darned spectacular and I’ve been eating only my own bread for a full month now and not had to throw a single loaf out. I’d say this one’s achieved!

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* 15-Feb-2012: Made a start on this at least & joined Weight Watchers tonight after good reports from friends. Hoping it will give me the kick up the too-sizeable behind that I need to achieve this. 1-May-2012: Have actually gone backwards on this – need to pull myself together…
  

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. February – done, March – done, April – done.

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.

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…