Well, I don’t know what else it can possibly be. I’ve been SO productive since yesterday’s relaxation session with my physiotherapist. In spite of nasty cold, sore throat, no voice, generally feeling crappy and done in, and in spite of computer being tediously slow, I’ve just been powering through my to-do list and generally Getting Things Done.

• Quintet is now at 2’30″ or thereabouts and has decided to “head for home”, which means working out how to reuse the slow intro and other opening material and is basically (or should be) an easy run down to the end now. Obviously there’s a lot of tweaking still to be done, niceties of notation to sort out and so on, but it’s looking like it’ll be at least 3’30″ when it’s done, and possibly the 4′ I wanted it to be (it has to be under 5′ – the trick is to keep it shortish so as to maximise rehearsal time, but have it long enough to do something interesting).
• Wrote a blog post which will appear on caitlinrowley.com later this week. It’s the first time I’ve tried scheduling future publishing, but it’s something I want to get into the habit of – if I’m to have regular visitors on my site, then I need to be posting (interesting) content regularly. Not sure I’ve quite got the “interesting” down, but I think my online writing is quietly improving.
• Started the rather tedious layout process for a set of songs I wrote about 14 years ago, Remembrances of Half-Forgotten Dead People. They were laid out when I first wrote them, but a. the originals weren’t PDFed and have been lost apart from one hard copy in Australia which my mother scanned for me and b. the layout is seriously dated. very word-processory because that was all I had at the time. So it needs to be updated a bit, notes revised and so on so I can print, bind and send it off to the singer who’s considering performing them in March.
• Set up a new notebook on Evernote to hold bits and pieces for a CD of my piano music which I’m hoping to get off the ground with a friend of mine in Australia. The first step is to get him scores, so I’ve been trawling round to (again) see what’s in a fit state to be played. Finished tweaking Egg the Tenth for this, so I guess that’s ready to go onto caitlinrowley.com too. There’s still quite a bit of work to be done to some of them – lacking dynamics and so on – but it’s not a mammoth task. I just need to keep plugging away at it.
• Cleaned about 700 emails out of my inbox. Because they were depressing me and making me worried. There’s still too much stuff in there – mostly notes I sent myself on my last day of work, which is a bit horrible – but 200-odd is MUCH better than 900-odd.
• Caught up a tiny bit with some of the reading and thinking for the Creative Pathfinder course I signed up for. It’s pretty good content – but there’s just so much of it!!! I’m working through Week 3 at the moment… but my inbox is up to Week 14…

It’s just as well the quintet’s making nice progress again, though – had an email today from the Masterclass organisers with the schedule for the course and notes about what to bring: so far it’s looking like I either need to change the way I write in a hurry or invest in a tiny printer to take with me – no printers available. Otherwise I can see myself spending evenings when I should be at t’ pub frantically copying out parts by hand for the composer’s ensemble – seems we have to write a piece for the ensemble during the few days we have there. Oh, and there aren’t many pianos, so we’re encouraged to bring a little keyboard if we need one. iPad Pianist Pro app FTW! Might try to devote some time to ideas-generation before I go to see if I can get a head-start on what to write for the ensemble… Because I don’t have enough to do!

Tagged with: blogging, composition, copying, creativity, design, gtd, health, learning, mentalhealth, music, reading, self-promotion, writing | Add a comment

I’ve been in Lisbon, in Portugal for the past week, hence the quietness over here. I’ve not had a holiday like that in a very, very long time. In fact, I think I could go so far as to say that I’ve not relaxed that much in over a decade. But now I’m back. Away from the gentle Portuguese winter sun, back to snow on the ground and sub-zero temperatures. That was a bit of a shock to the system!

I took yesterday off, just a sort of recovery moment. I went and had a massage, did quite a lot of sleeping, finished knitting a hot water bottle cover I started before I left, and started on a new scarf (in crazy-coloured cotton chenille yarn) for my mama.

And today I’m working on getting my brain back into composition mode. I’ve read a little more of The Rest Is Noise and just wrote a blog post, A new approach for composers, on caitlinrowley.com about a new site I’ve found called Meet The Composer Studio – there’s some great content over there – have a wander round the videos provided by each of the six composers, and don’t miss Glenn Kotche’s Monkey Chant – brilliant! For comparison you can also creep off and listen to the original Ramayana Monkey Chant over on Ubuweb. Now I guess I should go and actually look at the quintet and see if I can do anything with it!

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Wrote some notes today. Not terribly many, but I did feel it was important to push myself through the barrier I’d ended up at. Still think I need to go through the score and pull out the main themes. Don’t know why I’m getting so much resistance to this, but I really should make myself do that tomorrow.

At any rate, I’d done a bit of thinking and ended up with a new blog post over on caitlinrowley.com, considering the vague vs the specific in tempo markings.

In other news, Gorecki died this morning. His Symphony No. 3 had a huge impact on me when I first heard it at uni, before the whole Dawn Upshaw recording took off like a rocket (see? sometimes I am ahead of the cool curve!). I remember being just astounded at the audacity of the man, to write something so incredibly simple and just pile it up and keep piling it up, even after you thought your heart would burst with the beauty of it. An amazing work. Of course, his other work contains some fabulous stuff too. Watching the tribute tweets, someone recommended this recording of some of his lesser known works, Henryk Gorecki: Life Journey, by Chamber Domaine, and it’s fantastic. I’ve added it to my Christmas list. So, rest in peace, Henryk Gorecki, you made my life a more beautiful place – thank you.

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Well not quite. Today marked the one-year anniversary of my accident, so I’ve been doing some thinking and basically come to the conclusion that it’s been a positive experience. And I’ve had a great day working that out. I started out by writing a blog post about the good stuff that’s happened because of the ankle injury, some of which is pretty huge and even, dare I say it, life-changing. I made a Facebook page for my composition because I’m about to have to make one, I think, for the London New Wind Festival so wanted to know what went into it (answer: not much) and see if I can make it work for me. I bopped (on one leg) around the house a little to the Blues Brothers soundtrack which I haven’t listened to in ages, then made myself a cheese sandwich and finally took myself off to the V&A to make a start on the Diaghilev & the Ballets Russes exhibition there.

And ‘make a start’ was the right term! VERY glad I had already decided to sign up as a member. I suspected it would be big and I wouldn’t get round it in one go. What I hadn’t suspected was that it would be VAST and that I wouldn’t get past the first room of the first section in today’s attempt. I seriously think, with the dodgy ankle, that it could take me eight trips to see the whole thing! So it looks like membership has been a sensible way to go.

Then on the way home, I pulled out the score of the first-ending version of the quintet and did a bit of analysis. Harmonically it’s a bit messier than I can fathom with any degree of musicological confidence but the conclusion I’ve come to is that the nice tail I thought I’d have to cut should actually be able to work. It all depends on what surrounds it and what it goes on to. The figuration comes from earlier parts and the melody there, which I’d thought just wasn’t going to work, also has its roots elsewhere in the piece. What’s new is that the harmony is straight major harmony whereas everything else has had a hearty dose of other-key dissonance. But it’s comforting. Now I just need to get in there and make it work!

Tagged with: artist date, blogging, composition, exhibition, listening, mentalhealth, music, research, study, thinking | Add a comment

Which is to say, I made a start on research for the new piece. Started the day by listening (not terribly successfully) to Schubert’s string quintet on Spotify (thinking I’ll ditch my premium subscription again – I really don’t use it when I’m not working because I prefer to listen to old-school actual-disc CDs) on my iPod Touch while reading a little more of Hallelujah Junction. Then moved on to getting back to my harmony & counterpoint studies over my morning coffee – I had thought to just re-read the first counterpoint chapter then do the exercises, but I’ve had to take a step back to go over seventh chords again, just to get my mind in the space once more. I had to go out to Foyle’s in the afternoon to get birthday presents for my Da, so I nipped into HMV (well, as much as one can nip with a hobbly ankle) where I discovered that this piece seems to want to be faintly Germanic – I came out with Mendelssohn and Brahms string quintets plus a disc of Martinu and Schulhoff string sextets. I’ve written more about this over at caitlinrowley.com. Listening to the Mendelssohn now – absolute heaven. Still have trouble grasping the solid fact that I’m actually a Mendelssohn fan…

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I knitted. I listened to Fauré. I napped. I greeted our landlord and handed him some boxes of stuff he was taking away. I greeted the man bringing home our Roomba. I napped. I made dinner. I read about 3 pertinent lines in my PHP book. I caught up with some blog-posting.

Most of all though, I procrastinated. Big-time. And it felt good

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Actually managed 7 days in a row on my Creative Pact, so I’m feeling unreasonably pleased with myself.

I also managed to sort out the domain-name-buying issue by using a different card (still don’t know what happened with the first attempt) and pointed to to my hosting space today. So this evening, I had my first stab at HTML5, putting together a placeholder page for the site so it looks a bit more proper as the work is being done rather than advertising the services of my hosting provider It’s simple, and possibly I’ve done something semantically wobbly, but it does validate, and that makes me a happy camper.

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Just because I don’t have enough to do, I’m taking on the Creative Pact challenge. Yup, that’s it. Not content with the 50 + tasks on my to-do list, I’m deciding to go forth and take up a new challenge. Except that actually it’s an old challenge combined with a new challenge. And it’s something that’s been on my to-do list for rather longer than it ought. 3 years at least, in fact. So I figure the time has come to do something about it.

So what is this thing, I hear you clamour? Well, you’ll be amazed to hear that it’s a website. Wow. That shook you, didn’t it? But not just any website. It’s bugged me for a while (see the thing about 3 years) that my minim-media.com site is such a mish-mash of stuff – music, publication, webstuff, writing, blog, photography – most of which don’t really belong on a business site, and mostly they just serve to take focus away from the music stuff, so I’m rethinking it all and want to build a site that’s music-focused (but not exclusively) and which will be a better forum for random me-stuff too: sort of a digital exploration of caitlin-the-composer covering all the various bits that actually go into my music. The new challenge is that I want to use this project to learn more about HTML5 and CSS3.

So my Creative Pact is that I’ll do a bit of work every day for the month of September (advance warning now that I’ll be in Paris for a week later in the month, so posting may not happen every day but I’ll try to at least do the work every day) with the goal of sending the site live on 30 September. That’s the plan.

Because work on this may cover a number of categories and overlap with some other stuff (design, art, music, etc.) I’ll tag each post on here that’s related to the pact with creativepact2010 so they can be easily perused as a group (because no doubt I’ll still be baking and walking and composing in between, so it could get muddled otherwise).

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I’d actually forgotten about this poor little blog. There’s just been so much going on over the past month – work, the piece for London New Wind Festival (stress and heartbreak over that one – more on that later, I suspect), my healing ankle (good news on that one, at least!), a week off frantically working on the piece, then frantically trying to get the house in order & achieve other chores before zooming off to Edinburgh to sample the Festival for a few brief days and go to a meeting in Dundee. And of course, while in Scotland I accidentally relaxed, and within 4 hours had the flu. Which I still have, a week and a half later.

So now I am at home, bored, frustrated and wanting to get things done but lacking the actual physical strength to do it. Every nap is plagued with hideous nightmares (this afternoon I was being chased at vast speed by an aggressive eagle, last night I woke whimpering at 3am thinking my legs were wound around with hundreds of red and black centipedes) which usually indicates that my creative brain is running and ready to go… except that I don’t have the strength to actually do very much.

So it’s been a tad on the frustrating side, really. And we’re nearing the end of August now. The piece is due in final form, with parts, on 1 September; on 21 September my parents arrive for 3 months and we all go to Paris for a week, which I’m quite looking forward to – when my brain lets go of the panic of all the pages and pages of things that need to be done before then – everything ranging from doing some handwashing (working out the best way to do handwashing in our new flat) to getting the landlord to take away the horrible lumpy bed in what will be the parents’ room to harassing Djelibeybi to organise a passport for Number One Son who is supposed to be coming to live with us next year. Not to mention getting back to my harmony studies, the Satie/Dada article, the web book, reworking my website and actually doing something about the many, many incomplete projects that are lying about the place…

Now I’m going to stop thinking about it and maybe go and do a little gentle baking, if the germ will let me stay standing for that long.

Tagged with: baking, blogging, health, mentalhealth, music, organisation, relaxing, travel | Add a comment

A little while back I promised I would write some longer articles on general creativity topics. Today I posted the first of these, entitled For the tweetless masses which is me (of course) talking about how supportive and encouraging I’ve found the music community on Twitter. Hope it’s helpful or interesting to someone. I’ll work out where I’m going to list these articles on this site sometime soon…

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