I’m writing this on Saturday because, seriously, who blogs at an after-party?? And blogging on 2 vodka, lime & tonics is not a sensible thing. So it’s a little late, but in the interests of coherence.

It was kind of a short working day yesterday, mainly so we didn’t wear ourselves out for the performance. All the making was finished on Thursday, so on Friday morning we musicians helped to put away all the detritus from the making and dismantled the tables so we could use the whole studio space, while the dancers warmed up. As the dancers were going to start with rehearsing Hug, we took our Sudophones and Merztins and made our way onto the actually-not-terribly-comfortable beanbag cushions outside the studio to work on Stealth. Neil contributed an excellent suggestion, which was to take advantage of the impression that a short loud sound sounds like a quiet sound so we shaped the piece so that the first sounds in the opening were shorter, but more open, gradually growing longer and playing more with the muting as they lengthen. I think this worked better in the larger space, ultimately, because the shorter, louder sounds carried better than the longer quieter ones.

We also finessed the ending and how we would use the space. We decided to be seated in the audience, on the ends of rows, so that it would feel like more of an intervention, as it did in the pub. We came up with a plan to all stand up at the point of “coming out of the closet”, then make our way to the stage for the end of the piece. Our videographer (VERY collaborative this session!) suggested that it might work better if we stood up individually rather than all together, so we ran with that, but with moving towards the stage at about the same time. And for the ending, we improved this by all improvising together once on the stage, with the bird whistles from the Merztins carrying on while the Sudophones started their wail upwards, dropping out to leave the Sudotins, which then dropped out one by one until it was just me holding the last wailing note.

I think that getting Stealth to work better has reinforced what I was thinking when the stuff I worked on on Wednesday didn’t really come off – Stealth really is all about gestures: start quiet and with wide spaces, build the improvisation, stand up and let the improv rip, end with group wails. The only part of that that’s to do with actual specific sounds is the ending, which uses an easy-to-get sound-feature of the Sudophones, unlike the sounds I was tinkering with before which required very specific hand positions and lightness of touch.

After that was sorted and the dancers had done with Hug, we ran through Still, the camera piece, until lunch, refining our moves, and specifically working on who was switching cameras on and off when. I volunteered to turn on the first camera because originally, Eleanore was doing that then moving across in the pitch dark to turn on camera no. 2, so this was an improvement. Plus it made me feel more useful! We also did a final run-through without the sound, which I captured on video (below) which was quite amusing as everyone tried to simulate the electronic rumbles and pings and the instrumentalists tried to replicate their instruments’ sounds!

(also, I very carefully plugged my camera into the wall on Thursday night so it would have a full battery for Friday – and then left it there. So Friday’s photos and vid are a bit lo-fi due to having had to resort to snapping with the iPad!)

After lunch we had a short session talking about the week and where we raised any questions we had, which didn’t go on for terribly long, after which there was mending and stretching and tuba-polishing and chat.

At about 3, we sauntered off to check out some of the performances happening for other projects. It was like a mini Edinburgh Fringe out there! I saw a couple of dance performances, a project to do with role-reversal, in which the musicians danced and the dancers played instruments, and a 40-minute musical on the songs of Robbie Williams. Crazy!

We had a rehearsal in the hall at 5, where we set up the cameras, ironed out tech problems and got to run all the pieces once, which was very enlightening. “Dark” really was very dark indeed! After the rehearsal, John told me that Marie was going to switch off my camera so I wouldn’t have to come back on in the dark, which was probably sensible, but being unrehearsed it meant that that camera went off a good 5 minutes before it should have, so the end of the piece changed in the final performance, but I still think it worked well.

And I think the final performance went off really well! We all found seats on the ends of rows and started in with Stealth before the lights went down, while people were still talking, which was actually great. Theo actually came over to talk to me just after I’d started and I had to shoo him back to his seat! Heh Nobody fell down the stairs or tripped over a cable, and while there were some giggles when the first flashes went off for Still, they stopped pretty quickly. Hug also went down well, and I think John was right to have the order as it was – it was a lighter ending, which made the Death and the Maiden project which followed a bit less of a contrast than it might have been.

The rest of the concert was fabulous – Death and the Maiden (what I saw of it) and the WWI poetry piece were both great and the AfroBeat band were simply fantastic! I had no idea Cassie had such an amazing voice! And Alex too! A really great set to end on, then all the composers went off to the bar to chat and listen to the Brazilian band project, which started a little loungey, but pretty quickly was turning out some great sounds.

Really excited about what I might find at Trinity next week – I’m looking forward to seeing what else has been going on after my taster at Laban yesterday!

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First day back at college today and it’s been very full-on, but in a good way. Lovely to see all my friends and get back into the swing of classes. Deadlines are looming and while it’s been nice just working on composing, it’s actually really nice to be back at college and feel all the activity humming along.

The day started (9.30am!!) with Fourth Plinth, which we are rehearsing and then performing next week (Thursday 17th at ICA, 6.30pm – come along!) so things really need to hum along with this. I did a bunch of work on the train writing up my ideas and thinking about how to approach it, and between that and something Dominic raised in class – that pretty much everyone is doing improv pieces, but really only a couple of people in the group actually consider themselves confident improvisers – I’ve pretty much decided to go with a graphic score, with indications of pitch sets to use for each section. This will give me control over levels of consonance/dissonance (which I’m thinking will be useful for expressing the different phases of the Trafalgar Square area) while also taking some of the pressure off the players to come up with something that works. I’ll probably use lines for melodic material/feel/pace indication but colour blocks to indicate intensity/aggression levels. Nothing complex that they need to memorise & I’ve given in and just accepted that music stands will be required. It’s a shame, but there’s too much content in the concert to expect people to memorise something that (hopefully) will work better with a bit more structure. Did I say? The piece is called Lines of Sight. I’m also working with another student on the programme, which is looking fun and hopefully not too taxing with two of us on it.

The big news of the day was that in the hour between finishing up with Fourth Plinth and trotting off to see Jamie in Marketing about the branding requirements for the Fourth Plinth programmes, I think I finished the short-score for Fear of Falling. I need it to sit for a bit, and I don’t think it’s really perfect, but it IS an ending, and that’s half the battle!

I’ve also done a bit more on the Ansel Adams piece tonight. The lack of rhythmic interest is really bugging me in the second section. I’ve done some reading of Wallace-Berry-the-Impenetrable (Structural Functions in Music) which has proved useful. Berry’s a funny one. His text is so dense as to be near-incomprehensible, but every time I look at this book when I’m having a problem, I come away with something useful – even if I didn’t really get what he was saying. Weird, huh? In today’s case, he’s sent me off to consider a) altering the metre in the second section (probably from 3/4 to 4/4) b) slightly increasing the tempo, not just shrinking the note-values and c) maybe hunting down some evocative poetry about flowing water to transcribe some speech rhythms and then layer those. I think layering of rhythms is going to be key in this section. I mean, in a running river, it’s not just one big block of water, is it? it’s all sorts of little drops encountering different levels of resistance, their paths all slightly different and shaped by whether they’re at the edge, pushing against the banks, in the middle of a clear run of water, or in the middle of a rapid where a clear run might suddenly be interrupted by rocks and the flow diverted. Feeling a lot better about this, although there’s still clearly a ton of work to do.

So the big things this week are to: Complete Lines of Sight and send it to the performers, draft my Twombly project proposal to send to my supervisor (proposal’s due in next Thursday, the same day as the Fourth Plinth performace) and defeat the Ansel Adams 2nd section.

Guess all that means I should head to bed! G’night!

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Happy New Year! Djelibeybi decided to take the day off today, so we trotted off to Whitstable and had a lovely afternoon strolling along the beach, admiring the view and the lovely houses. Photos will be on Flickr as soon as I can find the cable to attach the camera to my computer…

I did get some composing done before we went out but not a lot – a few more notes for the Rothko quartet. It was nice to get back to it after a bit of a break. I’m still really pleased with what I’ve got for this one, which is a bit of a relief. Tomorrow I need to launch myself into the 2 big pieces in a major way, but as college is finally open again tomorrow, I’ll be heading in with my laptop so I don’t have the distractions of home!

The triumph of the day though was a lot more prosaic, but as it involved ticking something off my to-do list which has been lurking and making me feel guilty for A YEAR, I’m just hugely excited about it. It also helped that it made me realise I’m a lot better off than I thought Yup – I made 2 phone calls to Australia, updated my address details and finally got online access to the last two of my three superannuation funds. And the joy is that, thanks (HUGE thanks) to the Australian government’s compulsory superannuation scheme which came in just before I got my first permanent full-time job, I actually have a decent amount of money growing itself for my retirement. Huzzah! I’ve been reading Ramit Sethi’s book I Will Teach You To Be Rich, which may have an offputting title but is actually a really good read and about as inspirational as personal finance writing can get. He neatly freaked me out with the following table (p. 239 in my Kindle edition):

I also started hunting for a new accountant as ours, while a nice guy and pretty good, just doesn’t get the concept of a business which draws its income from creative work and property investment and normal contracting (actually, I think he doesn’t entirely get the contracting thing either) and both Djeli and I feel we really need someone who can advise us on ways we could be saving money or spending it more effectively.

Oh, and I posted my annual creative goals post too.

So, a productive day, even if not an especially musical one. I can recommend both the Sethi book and Whitstable

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Just a quick post today because I have to rush off and meet Djelibeybi at the pub for dinner, but I have some small triumphant news! The first movement of Ladders of Escape has an ending! I suspect it’s not 100% finished – for one thing I sort of forgot about the multiphonics I used at the beginning of the movement, so they don’t appear in the second half, so I need to go back over and find spots for them. I also need to double-check ranges against notes and make sure everything’s playable and so on, but at the very least it’s fully sketched out so I’ve met that small challenge I set myself. Next I’ll need to think up something to do with the second movement, I guess, but that’s for tomorrow!

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I’m feeling almost crestfallen. RPM Challenge is over, the album is done (huzzah for all of us!) and while I’ve got a ton of work to push on with, I’m feeling kind of sad. I’ve absolutely loved these weeks of working with my friends, both old, new and somewhere in between. It’s been lovely to write for specific people and try to make something that fits with what I know about them and their art, and  mostly I think I’ve succeeded OK. Several people have said how much they enjoy their pieces, and that’s what really matters.

I know I’ve learnt an incredible lot this month. Just look at all the new things I’ve tried: improvisation, extended techniques (blowing into the flute, multiphonics, flutter-tonguing, finger vibrato on the recorder), I’ve used trills for the first time (I think) ever, pushed the range of dynamics I usually use, used quarter-tones, written for guitar, created a graphic score (that I actually intended to make, as opposed to Carrion Comfort, which was an accidental graphic score), set a poem that rhymes, written for a solo brass instrument – and got up the courage to ask for muting (and very glad I did). I suspect I’ll be experiencing the aftershocks of this project for weeks and possibly months to come.

And I can’t say how much I think it’s done for my brain, to have to work so quickly, come up with ideas and just work with them. Twice I started with ideas I initially thought were rubbish and was either able to salvage them, or discovered that they worked, but not until I got them onto the instrument for which they were intended.

Of course, until now, too, I could count the usable recordings I had of my music (meaning well-performed, well-recorded, and that I have permission to do anything with) on one hand. Now I need both hands and a foot! This means so, SO much to me. It’s one thing to write music, but quite another to have someone bring it to life for you, and let you hear it. The performers have all been amazing, and I hope I get to write for them again in the future.

But enough burbling. I’m sure I’ll write a blog post over at caitlinrowley.com sometime soon about specific lessons learned, but here is for the present, so I should run through today.

Of course the big news today was receiving the last 2 tracks. Jennifer Mackerras’ Triptych for One is in three movements, and she sent me an assortment of takes so I had a lot of fun wading through them and working out which takes to use of which movement. And they came together quite well in Logic too – a bit of crossfading helped the transitions and a little DeNoiser helped with background hiss on the first two movements. This one’s an odd piece. It still takes me by surprise. I think it only revels itself properly after a few listens. Maybe the movements should have been a little longer, perhaps. I might explore that idea in another piece. I love the multiphonics on the treble recorder – they have so much character! Definitely going to have to use those in the piece I’m writing for Jen’s recorder quartet, Pink Noise.

The other piece which went up today was Francis Western-Smith’s Egg the Eleventh. I’m delighted that the whole corrupted fugue thing worked with this one. It could have gone so very wrong, but I like the crunchiness of the harmonies and to me (I don’t know about anyone else) it’s channelling a lot of Satie, especially at the end. Or possibly I’m just thinking that because the style of this piece is a complete throwback to my uni days and the first few piano eggs I wrote, The Four-Egg Omelette. I always loved those pieces – they’re still some of my favourites – and it’s nice to know that I haven’t moved impossibly far away from that style.

I decided on the track order too today, which is mostly based on the order the pieces were completed in, but I switched I Want It To Kill Them and Triptych for One around, so the recorder piece comes directly after the slide-guitar-and-crunchy-tape one, which seems an odd positioning, but it actually seems to work. Once I had the pieces in order, I discovered that the reverb I’d added to Nest and Solitary Fanfare was a little excessive – the rest of the album, while the spaciousness of the recordings varies, sounds like it was recorded in small rooms, while those two tracks seemed to have moved into a concert hall and it just sounded odd. So I dialled it back on both of them & “rehoused” them in a room rather than a hall, albeit one with a bit of space to it. I think this improves those tracks within the set. Hopefully the performers agree…

I still haven’t got to the lever harp piece for Shana, but I will. It’s on my list for this month (although probably later this month as I have the brass quintet and a piece for Carla Rees and her quarter-tone alto flute to complete ASAP). And it’s the only piece I didn’t get to write. I’m glad that I thought to finish off the Pieces of Eight arrangement for her while I was concussed though – it fits well with the other tiny pieces, and it meant that nobody missed out entirely. Every performer got something to play that was made especially for them. Even with the concussion, so I’m feeling rather pleased with myself.

Tomorrow, then, is CD-burning-and-posting time. I guess I don’t really have to, but it’s just going to really symbolise the end of a project that started out on a whim, ended up bigger than Ben Hur and which I think I have to add to my list of most-amazing-musical-experiences-of-my-life-so-far. So it’ll be sent. And then I’ll look at posting the whole thing to BandCamp. It’s going to be a bit of a package – all the album tracks, plus all the scores, plus this diary. I saw that Chrissie Caulfield included her RPM diary in the download and I think it’s a great idea because it gives a real picture of how the work was created, for those who are interested. Hopefully someone will be…

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Yup, having settled on “Lucky Dip” as a name, and not having heard back from the owners of the Flickr image I wanted to use, I decided to draw my own, using the photo as a rough model. I drew the blackboard outline, a little bit of shadow on the back legs, the fringed border and the board itself in charcoal on half a sheet of A2 paper (I’ve been caught out by A2 paper before – far too big to fit on the scanner!), then pulled the scanned image (after cleaning up in Photoshop) over to the iPad to add colour and text. The final layout I did in Photoshop, after sending the coloured image back to the computer again.

I may tweak it later but as a first draft, I’m pretty pleased and I’ve put it up as the album image on SoundCloud.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve done any drawing, and longer still since I did any with actual paper rather than just the iPad, so this was a really fun project. The whole album’s feeling really real too now – there’s only one more track to come in, with two possible replacement tracks. Guess I should think about what order I want them all to go in too. At the moment they’re just in the order the recordings came in, but I’m thinking that shuffling them around might be more effective.

Today I received Kim Hickey’s recording of her piece, Flit, for flute. I am just amazed at all the great performances I’ve been getting for these pieces – so little time to prepare them and yet everyone’s done a really good job of capturing their piece and getting it recorded. I haven’t had to put on a stern face & tell anybody to try harder, nothing’s turned up sounding like it was recorded underwater in a bathtub in 1902. A couple of pieces have needed a touch of reverb to really bring out the tone of the instrument, and Kim’s recording needed a tiny bit of hiss reduced, but that’s been it, which has been both wondrous and a great relief because I’m no skilled recording engineer.

But I digress, here’s Kim’s piece:

I also posted an update of Alun’s tango – the original for some reason came through very very soft, so he’s adjusted his recording slightly and sent me a slightly louder one, which really makes a difference. It’s still fairly quiet, but there’s a bunch of tiny details in there which eluded me in the previous version.

Sam also sent me copies of some of his rejected takes for I Want It To Kill People. I found it absolutely fascinating to listen to the various approaches. They’re all good, but somehow the final take he settled on just interacts with the tape part a little more effectively than the other versions of the graphic score. What was particularly interesting was to hear the take on which he improvised, without the graphic score – that’s a really interesting piece. It’s not the piece that I Want It To Kill People became, but something else. It’s more enmeshed in the tape part – he’s taken some of the gritty sounds and used them as inspiration for the guitar part – whereas my vision of the piece was that the guitar was this soft and lovely thing with depths of aggression, Sam’s version is more like watching the soft and lovely guitar be corrupted by the aggressive tape part. Really fascinating. He’s also sent me just the guitar recording from the final version and I really think I will have a go at tweaking the tape part – there’s a blob of notes about a third of the way into the piece that really feel like a stumbling block, so I’m going to see if I can make them less intrusive.

So that’s RPM for today. No, the harp piece hasn’t happened yet. Yes, I’m hoping to get to it tomorrow. Today was full of client work and physiotherapist and – at the end – half of a wonderful concert by Joby Burgess at Wigmore Hall and a lovely chat with @stevegisby and his girlfriend. I managed to get there for the end of it (thank you, Central Line – not!) and got to hear Gabriel Prokofiev’s ‘Fanta’ from Import/Export and Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, movements II and III played on a MIDI xylophone, which was interesting, although I think I prefer the electric guitar version I have on CD in Sydney. Very much enjoyed the Prokofiev piece though – inventive, fun and very much a serious piece of music, in spite of the amusement factor of being played on glass bottles of Fanta. I did wonder, though, how long it’ll still be able to be played for – what happens when they no longer manufacture glass bottles of drink??? I guess it’s just a piece that embraces its own ephemerality.

I seem to have come out of the day with a Proper Job too. And the best sort of proper job – mobile web dev, working from home, for about a week, for a client who used to be a colleague when I was at LBi and who has now set up her own UX business for financial services companies. Really looking forward to this one.

One day to go. One recording to come in. This time tomorrow night, RPM 2012 will be complete!

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A quick post from me – I’ll be back on RPM work tomorrow – but today’s seen another two recordings come in, incredibly different from each other, and I’m really very excited by them.

Finally we get hear Sam’s slide guitar + tape piece, I Want It To Kill People (for the story behind the title, pop over to the SoundCloud page!). I really love what he’s done with it – he’s managed to take my rather brutal tape part and convey what I was hoping for – the idea of something soft and gentle that has great depths of aggression. I’m not so pleased with my own work on the tape part. I think I may go back over this once the project is done and pull back at least the volume in a couple of places, possibly the grittiness too – the solo instrument really needs more room to speak. But while I think *I* could have done better on this one, I’m pleased with the piece as a whole – it was a big experiment for me and I’m really enjoying what Sam’s done with it.

The second piece is Alun’s A Tiny Tango for 6-string bass guitar. I was very worried about this one – I am a complete guitar novice, and writing something for solo guitar which has a couple of different levels of stuff going on did feel rather ambitious and I half-expected Alun to send it back with red corrections all over it! However, he’s been able to play the whole thing, which I’m amazed by, and I’m delighted with the result. I particularly like the percussive sounds + harmonics section about 2/3 of the way through.

And Alun has very kindly offered to write some performance notes – and tablature! – to help guide other bassists through its “Twister-like bits” (Alun’s phrase ), which will be brilliant – and hopefully I can learn from them too.

And now to bed – tomorrow I’ll be hard at work on a piece for lever harp!

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Well, it’s insane o’clock so I must be quick because I have a huge day tomorrow – a lovely friend who I’ve never met (!) is coming to stay for a few days, so I need to up and about fairly early. And in the evening we’re off to the London Composers Forum workshop on writing for guitar, so I’m going to want my wits about me.

But the important stuff: the bass guitar piece is finished and sent. I’m expecting it to be returned with red markings all over it because I really don’t have a clue about writing for guitar (hence workshop attendance!) so I’ve been flying blind a bit. But I’ve tried to set it up so the most prominent possible-issues should be able to be relatively easily resolved. We will see what Alun says is playable and what not. Here’s hoping it’s not the entire piece that isn’t!

And I’ve written a trombone piece for Rob. I do feel a little bit like I’m cheating on this one because it uses the opening of the piece I’m writing for brass quintet at the moment (due to be premiered in April), but it goes in its own direction, so I hope that’s OK. I may actually steal some of it back for the quintet! I’m exploring tone colour in this one, mostly, and have chucked a couple of mute directions in there because I’ve never worked with brass mutes before and I think it might work well and give it a more defined shape than it has on its own. So the form of it is done, and I think it just needs to be slept on, followed by some minor tweaking. I’m hoping to send it off tomorrow, but I suspect that may be a little ambitious, and Friday is more likely.

Which leaves… one. The last one is for Shana’s lever harp, and today she sent me part two of her amazingly useful Tiny Treatise on writing for lever harp. This one details how to set the harp up to use the octatonic scale. How much fun will that be?! I’m not entirely sure when I’m going to get to write this one, I have to confess – it’s going to be a real push to get it done before the end of the month, but after the concussion, the harp piece sort of by default ended up on the end because while I couldn’t really compose during that week, I was able to lay out – and what I laid out was the pedal harp arrangement of my Pieces of Eight, so Shana has that and is planning to record it. If I get the lever harp piece finished, then Pieces of Eight can be a bonus track, otherwise at least I have my ten tracks, even if one of them isn’t strictly new. And I’ll be doing the lever harp piece regardless because, seriously, who could resist an opportunity to write octatonic music for harp?

So close!

In other news, I am now finally a full writer member of PRS for Music. Am I a real composer now?

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Going back a step to very, very late last night, I am delighted to say that SAM’S SLIDE GUITAR PIECE IS FINISHED! It was starting to look like it would be one of the earliest ones I started on and that he wouldn’t actually get it by the deadline. But no. ‘Tis done and sent so now we’ll see what he makes of it when he gets time to look at it later this week…

Today I have gone in a completely different direction and written the outline of a tango for 6-string bass guitar. My challenge now is to mash the multiple lines of ideas I have for it together, and enliven those parts which I feel are a little on the dull side. There are bits I like very much but others which are a bit boring. Interestingly, this has gone in the opposite direction from what my pieces usually do – start out interesting and need perking up towards the end. This one is significantly more interesting at the end than it is at the beginning, so now I need to find a way to brighten the beginning without it then not relating to the stuff at the end which emerged out of the stuff at the beginning. PHEW. So far it’s got some nice syncopation happening, some harmonics and a whiff of percussive effects.

I am, though – and I freely confess this – somewhat clueless about guitars in general, so I’m flying a little blind here. I know from Alun’s recordings that he’s capable of some amazing feats where it sounds like he’s playing 2 lines at once, without overdubbing, but I don’t understand enough about the instrument to be able to confidently write out what I want. So I’m going to be rather dependent on him to help me out with that. But that in itself will be a pretty new experience for me – I’ve rarely been able to work with a performer to develop a piece, so it’s going to be grand to see where it ends up.

I do find it somewhat ironic though, that my self-imposed deadline (so that all the performers have time to learn their pieces and record them for the RPM Challenge deadline of 29 February) is tomorrow/Thursday morning, when on Thursday night I’ll be starting the London Composers Forum’s Writing for Guitar workshop, which will hopefully teach me how to do what I’m trying to do right now. Looking forward to a few “oh THAT’s what I needed to do” moments.

In other stuff, I have renewed my CV. The employment monster loometh, but I’m actually not as bummed about it as I would have been a couple of months back and I have much higher hopes, after this month, of being able to maintain a decent amount of compositional activity after-hours than I usually do. And I’m rather looking forward to being out of the house for a while and working with other developers. Hoping for a nice juicy mobile project. Cross fingers pls?

And my Da is OK! His tests went off just fine and they couldn’t see anything untoward. Huzzah!

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And another one! Yesterday I was really struggling. I knew Jen was going to be in London with her recorder today and I really wanted to have something for her to play. I wrote something, but I really thought it wasn’t terribly good. I was trying to get the sound of the recorder into my head – so very different than a flute or clarinet or anything I usually write for (coming to the conclusion that writing for recorder is more like writing for really flexible brass than orchestral woodwinds) – but it didn’t seem to be sticking and everything felt wrong and blech. Then I woke up this morning and was completely convinced it was rubbish and I’d have to start again, but as I’d put so many extended techniques into it – flutter-tonguing, multiphonics, singing into the recorder, quarter tones – I figured I might as well see what she made of it and hear what these effects really sounded like.

Well, knock me down with a feather. She started to play, and it all coalesced! We needed to do some tweaking on the third of the group (she gets a tiny triptych) but the first two are pretty much as they were when I first wrote them last night. And while it’s an odd piece, it grew on us as she played through it more and now I think I’m rather fond of it. And that’s number 5!

Right now I’m waiting for Windows to fire up so I can scan the multiphonics fingering page out of Walter van Hauwe’s The Modern Recorder Player (Vol. III) to send to Jen with the score. This has been a really useful book, for the multiphonics in particular – lovely strong, clear sounds. It’s a real joy to use them. There’s loads of composer-friendly info in there, and while it’s aimed at performers who want to play these effects, it’s also really useful for working out what’s possible for writing them. The other resource I found really helpful for getting me started was Australian composer & recorder-player Ben Thorn’s quick introduction on the Orpheus Music site.

I sent a quick update out to the performers today. Seeing as people seem to be enjoying their pieces, even when they’re bewildered by them, I’m going to compile them all into a single volume and send out a hard-copy to the performers to thank them for their hard work. After all, I just have to write the stuff (and, obviously, choose the fonts. Very important, that) – they’re the ones who need to play it and get it to a decent-enough standard to go out into the world with their name on it! So I thought it would be a nice thing to get them properly printed and bound up, all as a group.

And now it’s half-past twelve and I’m not quite ready for sleep. My Da’s gone into hospital in Australia tonight for ‘tests’. God knows what they’ll find. Hopefully something easily fixable, but sleep’s a tricky thing under these circumstances, so it’s back to  more work on the slide guitar piece. Graphic score, I will subdue you!

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