Well, that would be me. I have completely and utterly failed at Creative Pact 2011. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it – I really, really did, but the insanity was looming large, and then we went to Spain, and then there was a bit more insanity. I’m back to normal now and working on Carrion Comfort again, but it came too late, alas, to salvage my Creative Pact credibility.

However, progress has been made and I am well into the second half of the piece now. I’m encountering some issues though of not being entirely sure where I’m going. I can feel the length of the piece. I can feel how I want it to match up with the intensity map of the poem I painted some time ago:

So I can feel the bones of it, as it were, but I just can’t seem to push it forward. It feels like trying to speak without having language and being reduced to waving my hands in the air because the concept I want to express is completely abstract and I can’t even use simple gestures to explain it.

I suspect that part of the problem may be the scope of this piece. I’m just not used to dealing with something of this size. I’m not talking about duration – it’s still only a couple of minutes long – but about the complexity, textural depth, and the sheer number of tonal colours and elements I’m handling. I keep making attempts at working in piano score to try to keep away from all these bits which are confusing me, but I can’t seem to get it right.

(and just then, looking at the map, I had an idea of how it could end. With a bit of luck this might guide me through in the next few days).

So it’s lurking a little at the moment, but I keep coming back to it. I’m definitely doing better work when I’m at the V&A members’ room – must be being out of the house, I think – fresh atmosphere, the purposefulness of going to a specific place to work, plus the added incentive that I don’t take my power cord, so once the laptop battery dies, that’s it for the day…

As I’ve been working on this one piece for so long now too, I’m beginning to feel quite strongly that I need to work out how to actively work on two pieces at once. I can manage to compose one while planning another, but having notes on the go for two separate projects isn’t really something I’ve managed to do yet. Must practice, I guess.

Looking forward to making some progress tomorrow.

Oh! PS. I put in my application to study for an MMus at Trinity Laban yesterday! Trying not to get too excited – first there’s putting in my scores and support material, then there’s finding out if they even want me to audition. It’s got a way to go before it’s a done deal, but I’m just really glad I’ve done it. Yay me.

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After a lovely day in Bath, this evening kind of fell apart and everything just became horrible again. However, I did have a couple of breakthroughs nevertheless:

1. Dodged a too-much-work bullet by managing to send off a substitute piece which actually doesn’t need any work done to it for it to be performer-ready, so hopefully that will be appropriate for the concert for which Shimmer (9 mins) was too long

2. Wrote a few more notes

3. In listening through to the piece again, I’m really starting to understand what my tutor’s been saying about adding in harmony. I do want it to be texturally light, but there’s just too many bare octaves. The doublings are good, it’s just that there needs to be a little body in there too. Not entirely sure how I’ll tackle this as harmony is SO not my strong suit. It’s good to have taken a step back from the piece though and to hear it with fresh ears so that I understand – I’m listening to it and hearing what’s really there, rather than my idea of what’s really there.

Tomorrow is my last day before I go to Spain for a brief holiday, so I’m hoping I can get some real work done on it. I also need to think about what I’ll be able to do while in Spain. I think taking the laptop is overkill, so I might review the apps I have and check out the App Store for new alternatives and just see how I can approach what’s there. The latest part of the piece is increasingly melodic/contrapuntal (as opposed to using brief fragments in various permutations, which is what the opening is) so maybe I can do something with that.

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Feeling the insanity coming flooding back this morning until I quelled it with Terry Fox’s wonderful The Labyrinth Scored for the Purrs of 11 Cats – it’s just amazing what 46 minutes of purring on repeat will do for your mental health.

It evidently did me some good though because after a couple of rounds of Labyrinth and finally getting the house to myself, I’ve been able to have another listen to the piece. And I ADDED A NOTE. How sad that this seems like progress. I think I’m stopping there though because my brain feels like it’s on the brink of overwhelm and Finale is driving me insane because it’s stuttering on every other note, so I think the time really has come to do the full system reinstall I’ve been threatening for a month. I am therefore now in the middle of manic backups and thinking about how best to organise my system when I redo it. Now that I’ve upgraded to Parallels 6, I’m going to see if I can ditch Bootcamp, for a start. I pretty much never use it, and hopefully the improvements to Parallels will mean I can run some of my PC games inside a virtual machine, which should free up some disk space. Looking forward to a shiny new system!

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Well, I’ve been away from here a while, but I really do need to get back into the swing of some creative work, so today I’ve signed myself up for Creative Pact 2011. Last year I used Creative Pact to get most of the work done on my site caitlinrowley.com, which was a fantastic experience and really helped me plough through a bunch of stuff that needed to be done to help promote my music.

This year I’m working towards finishing off the orchestral piece I’ve been working on for about the past 6 months, Carrion Comfort. It’s been a slow process and I’ve been working on documenting it too over on the other site – have a look at the posts if you’re interested (you can also sign up to the mailing list if you want to get them right into your inbox) – and here I’m planning to track what I’m working on and documenting the documenting of the whole process, seeing as how I’ve committed to making the development of the work somewhat public already.

I’ve been going through a bit of a rough mental patch lately, though, and haven’t even been able to make myself listen to any music at all, far less my own, so I’m starting slowly with getting back into this. Today I listened to the work I had already done on this piece. I was happy to find that I feel that it’s all hanging together pretty well, although I think I need to do some more work on the orchestration – it feels… patchy. Might have to dig out some orchestral recordings, do a bit of reading and a bit of experimenting to sort that out. I guess it’s not hugely surprising, given that this is the first real orchestral piece I’ve written – it’s all a bit trial and error…

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Today I have sent the site preview to my client, negotiated a little, created my first 2 training videos and posted them to YouTube (think I’ll probably have to remake them due to screen furriness and general burbling – this video-making thing is hard! – it’s a usable start for this client at any rate, who doesn’t have time for me to train her one-to-one), did some fluting for only the second time since the root canal and took delivery of my very own copy of Structural Functions in Music (very excited about this). I am now repairing my disk permissions and – after a restart because Finale is choking on the sheer number of instruments in Carrion Comfort – am about to do some composition work for my lesson tomorrow.

Achievements? Tick

And just because it totally made my day, here’s my friend Omar from the Durham Midwinter Composers Masterclass proposing to his girl.

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Well, all sorts of work avalanche would be more accurate! All of a sudden I find myself with two client website projects to work on (one due in a week’s time. No, I’m not stressed. No, not at all. Who me?), one website for Djeli’s super-secret project which he wants done by the end of the weekend but hasn’t yet written the text for, shiny new step-motherhood to deal with, an orchestral work to keep working on, actual homework this time for my composition lessons, not to mention all the training stuff that’s underway – BUSY! But great-busy. Really enjoying all of it and finding it easier to keep focused because I *am* enjoying all of it, even if a couple of deadlines are a little more deadliney than is strictly comfortable.

I’ve been doing the Authority Rules conference run by Copyblogger over the past couple of weeks, and it’s been fantastic. Actually way more interesting and useful than I ever thought it would be, and SO worth the money. It’s particularly interesting because it’s making me think in new ways about all my endeavours. One of the things they’ve been talking about is about finding your ‘right people’ and putting up  a ‘red velvet rope’ so that only your right people are the ones you work with – because they’re the sort of clients who bring out the best work in you and who you’re happiest and most fired-up to work with. And it makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of the trouble I had with thinking about running my own business before was because I was thinking generically “helping small businesses make websites that actually work for them” whereas the people I relate to best, enjoy working with the most and probably can help the most effectively are creative types. And that makes such a huge difference. So the projects I have now are for a violinist here in the UK and a Pilates studio in Australia, and it’s great. I’m really enjoying working on these, and I can’t wait for them to see a big difference once their new sites are launched.

Carrion Comfort is slowly slinking forwards. It really made such a huge difference to ditch the vocal part for a trumpet – it was what it really wanted. Now I’ve been cleaning some things up and I think I have the beginning of the next bit, but it’s been feeling structurally stalled a little bit. In today’s lesson my tutor has suggested I take my initial theme, pull it out of the piece and just mess about with it seeing how many different permutations I can come up with and then seeing if any of them might be useful in the piece, but without pressure to produce something that will be, or expectation of same. I’m liking this idea and looking forward to being able to do something on that over the weekend. He played me part of the second movement of Andrzej Panufnik’s Violin Concerto [sorry - it'll start playing at you as soon as you click that link] as an example of what can be done with a simple interval (it’s basically just constructed out of thirds!). Absolutely gorgeous. I’d love to hear the whole of it, but alas, the excerpt linked to there is the only thing I can find online without buying an entire CD or signing up to emusic’s subscription plan. Which I may do anyway but good golly it’s been frustrating! And all the more so as there ARE recordings. Menuhin recorded it in the 70s, and EMI seems to have a fairly current recording on their books, but it’s nowhere to be found in the online music stores! Even iTunes, which I consider a last resort because I object to DRM on principle, had a bunch of other Panufnik stuff but the only Violin Concerto bit was the third movement! Ack! Hmm. Well, grateful for small mercies. It’s still beautiful, even in just that snippet.

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Super-productive today. As with a lot of my days recently, I’ve been largely focused on self-promotion stuff rather than strict creativity per se, but it does exercise my creative brain in that I have to think up new ways to do things.

The last few days I’ve been working on getting a proper mailing list established for caitlinrowley.com using MailChimp. I have to say, that I am absolutely delighted with MailChimp. Great-looking product, easy to use, very generous with their free account (2000 subscribers! 12,000 emails a month!) and the whole thing seems to be completely customisable, assuming you’re willing to put in a bit of coding work. I had some difficulties and emailed their tech support without much hope of anything coming of it (because tech supports in general are pretty useless for anything other than pre-scripted issues) and WOW WOW WOW! Not only did I get a reply within 2 hours, but the guy had actually read my email (SO rare) and had multiple solutions for me, even though it’s not an off-the-shelf problem. SO impressed. And when you set up a campaign they give you a PDF download to make your own papercraft chimp. Now that’s got to be a winner.

Anyway, so the list is set up now. Today I also posted a new blog post and have linked via the signup form to the score of the piece – it’s a temporary measure because getting it working properly is going to take a little time, but it’s better than the SoundCloud option I’ve been trying out which turned out to just be incredibly clunky and uncomfortable (and some regular internet users said they couldn’t even see the link to download. Fail).

So super-excited about all that. Hoping I should get some subscribers soon. It’ll be interesting to see if and how well it works…

Oh, and the on-again-off-again film project is on again. Got a call on Monday about that one. And I went to see a potential client about a website project yesterday… and came away with another film score project (and a website one) – woot!

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Well, this month really isn’t getting any better. And today definitely contributed to the downhill slide into dismal oblivion with the news that my very first composition teacher, Eric Gross, has died. Prof Gross was really a lovely man and a very fine composer, although I didn’t really get either of these things when I first started learning with him and for a long time I thought that he was just the wrong teacher for me.

But today I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that experience and I suspect that a large part of the blame lies with me. If I had been less timid and a bit more confident in my own abilities, if I had asked more questions in particular, what might that first year have been like? At the time I thought his music was terribly modern inaccessible. Now, after 20 years’ worth of listening and studying and writing and thinking, I find this is most definitely not the case and I wonder what I could have learned from him were he my teacher now instead of then.

So I’ve written a blog post about it which will go up on caitlinrowley.com tomorrow afternoon.

Rest in peace, Eric. I’m looking forward to exploring your music properly and learning as much as I can from it that I wasn’t ready to learn from you 20 years ago.

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Yes, I know things have been a bit quiet round here, but it’s not like it’s been uneventful. There’s been the back-pain drama, there’s been the dental drama (round 2 of drilling and filling today so back on the painkillers again), there was a birthday, which resulted in lovely presents from lovely people, including: 1 proper real-live microphone, Nigel Slater’s fruit cookbook, a book on libretto-writing, one on poetry-writing, 2 seasons of Chuck. Plus of course the presents I bought myself: the iPad (which you know about and seems to become more useful and awesome with every passing day) and Logic Studio, which arrived on the birthday day but took us a couple of days to install due to my having dropped my laptop several months back, meaning that DVDs go into it but can’t really be relied on to come out again… Still working on how to get the software instruments that come with Logic up and running…

So there’s been a lot of playing about with toys. Mostly the ones I bought myself though as I need to get a cable for the mic, I’m finishing up other books before I start the libretto ones and my back has hurt too much to do much cooking (barring a culinary experiment which resulted in an apple-enhanced caramel cake which went down quite well).

So I’ll just slide over the missed days and focus on today. Obviously, I went to the dentist. He says that this should be the last of the deep drilling (thank heavens). Been pretty uncomfy though, but yay for painkillers! And also yay for spectacularly beautiful summer’s day even though it’s only spring! It was so lovely, I decided to walk home instead of catching the bus (which was taking too long and I was also getting bored), so I walked back through the sunshine and the intermittent smell of jasmine, listening to the birds going twit in the hedges and chatting with a friend in Australia via IM. Rather lovely, actually.

Once home I actually didn’t immediately have a nap, as I’d expected. Instead I did some work on my new piece. It’s been a little stuck lately but I managed to prod it forward a little and flesh out some of the earlier parts too.

Then there was tinkering about with Logic Studio. I’m really enjoying using this. Fascinating to discover that the interface basically hasn’t changed since I was using microLogic at uni – 15 years ago! so it’s mostly familiar, and the bits that are less familiar – the audio-editing side of things, isn’t that dissimilar from Pro Tools, so I seem to be picking things up pretty quickly. And I can’t begin to express how much easier and more comfortable it is to work in it, not needing to be tethered to a hardware box at all times. I don’t have to think twice about opening it up for a small sound-file-trimming job. And I’ve discovered some cool stuff – beat mapping to make a MIDI file sound more like it was played by a human than a robot to start with! I borrowed a book from the TVU library yesterday and started working my way through it this afternoon. Finding out some interesting snippets, but I’m hoping I can get away with just borrowing the book and not having to buy it. Would rather spend my birthday Amazon voucher on the Advanced volume

And then when the sun was setting, I got all inspired to grab the iPad and try a little bit of drawing. It’s not great, but it was fun to do and an interesting exercise, messing round with silhouettes and trying to get the sunset colours to blend a bit

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Well, not seriously. I didn’t really expect to just be able to walk in to the Apple Store at Shepherd’s Bush and walk out with an iPad 2. And look! I was right! But I did achieve my officially-stated goal of inspecting the covers. They’re very cute. Such a shame they didn’t make one that covers the back too. I mean, it’d be less sleek, but a whole lot more effective if you drop the thing. And of course there are no third-party covers out pretty much at all at the moment that one can inspect for feel, style and weight, so I guess I’ll have to go with an Apple cover, even if only for the interim. I was going to get an orange one but in RL the orange is a little yellowy and not really that grand. The red leather is gorgeous but way too expensive. The green is practically fluoro. So I’m thinking I might go for the low-key pale grey. Keep it nice and neutral. And maybe get a nice bright neoprene pouch for it to travel in. Summat like that. But of course first I have to get my paws on an actual iPad all of my own. Apple’s now opened up instore reservations from the website for next-day pickup, which I made an attempt with, but the wretched system let me get all the way through before telling me there weren’t any slots! VERY annoying.

I shall cease to talk about that experience any more. It was very frustrating. I shall probably be similarly frustrated every evening for several weeks to come.

Apart from that, not too much to report. I watched the last bit of the summary videos for the end of the first week of my JavaScript refresher course. So far I seem to understand everything. There’s been one or two newish concepts (or rather, concepts that I knew existed but didn’t know quite how they fitted in) but mostly – understandably – the first week’s been mostly about basic principles. I’m pleased to say that I got through the week’s coding challenge first time, and worked it out in just a few minutes. Huzzah! Not as dim as I felt I was!

I also finally sat down and went through the new orchestral song thingy trying to pick out themes. There really aren’t that many to speak of, which is a little disturbing. The piece itself seems to have stalled somewhat following its superhero start, which is disappointing. I should push myself more with it. The plan is to send it off to my tutor on Wednesday so he can see what I’ve been up to and prepare stuff accordingly if need be. Um.

And had a bit of a panicky doubting think about jobs and what I should be doing about them. Conclusion: I have no idea. I’m a total mess and don’t know what I should be doing. I’m enjoying the composition teaching, but that’s not really a money-making option (not enough private students and academia is out because a. I don’t have any contacts and b. I don’t have even a Masters degree). I like building websites but I don’t really like dealing with clients. Or people in general. I like publishing and so on but ditto. Which kind of seems to wipe out the work-for-myself option because there’s no getting away from clients when you’re freelance. I’m beginning to think that, in spite of all the conceptual journey I’ve been on over the past couple of months, I’m kind of back where I started: short term web contracts, while trying to bring in a little money from this and that on the side. Which is a little depressing. But I think it’s more practical. I got so caught up in the sideline stuff of getting my own business running that the music kind of got shunted to one side. And when I de-shunted it because it became clear that I might need to have to find a job sooner than expected and I didn’t want to waste composition time, then the business stuff ended up shunted. Maybe I can’t actually do both. How depressing. I want to be superwoman! (I’d prefer Batgirl because the outfit’s cuter, but still…) Anyway, thoughts still bubbling away, ideas about priorities and how do I deal with them. Still no solution on the if-I-get-a-real-job-how-do-I-keep-the-music-going-while-not-letting-down-either-my-employer-or-myself issue. Perhaps there never will be. If you have any suggestions, please comment away!

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