I’m working today, so of course I’ve become totally distracted by housey things. I guess that’s the beauty of working for yourself, eh? In particular, today I am contemplating colours. The whole house needs to be painted, inside and out, and the other day I received the Little Greene paint swatches which are just delicious so I’ve been thinking about what should go where and how to proceed.

Today I’ve read a couple of truly fascinating posts on the blog of Patrick Baty, an authority on architectural paint and colour. The first article, The Heirarchy of Colour in Eighteenth Century Decoration, yielded useful information about which bits to paint what colours – it seems that in the 18th century, the panelling and mouldings on the walls were an interpretation of classical columns (see the diagram in the article) so the wall paint should go all the way up to the top of the cornice – not to the bottom as we were thinking. I would imagine this would also have the effect of making the room seem taller.

The colours Baty shows in this article as “The Common Colours”, interestingly enough, reflect the colours I was thinking of – something like his Pearl Colour on the walls, and Lead Colour on the floors, with white ceilings. I found it interesting to discover that these Common Colours were the cheapest paint colours, and so would have most likely been used in modest homes such as ours. Also interesting to note is that Georgians usually painted the whole house the same colour – no different colours for different rooms, which is comforting for me because that was my original plan, but then I’d been a little concerned that it might feel a little overwhelming. Or boring. But hopefully this means it’ll be OK.

Of course, our house isn’t Eighteenth Century – from what we’ve been able to find out, it was probably built around 1850, officially early Victorian – so it’s Georgian outside, but really more Victorian inside, which kind of poses a conundrum about how to deal with the interiors. The one room (our bedroom) which seems to have original skirting boards and cornices also has picture rails which seem to be genuinely old picture rails, not modern ones that someone’s stuck on afterwards. The thing with this is that – as I understand it – picture rails were a Victorian invention and didn’t exist in the Georgian period. But as it’s there – and from our own experience as tenants, and bearing in mind that we will most likely need to rent the house out at some point, picture rails are fantastic because they allow for easy personalisation of a space without putting holes in the walls. But do we then paint them to match the walls (Georgian approach) or to match the ceiling (Victorian approach, I think)?

Of course, having then read Baty’s article on Lime Plaster and Subsequent Decoration and given the plaster disaster in Djeli’s study:

it would seem that after re-rendering – if we do it properly to allow the house to breathe – we may not be able to paint the walls properly for 2 years. But I guess that gives us LOTS of time to really think about what colours to use!

My first step before anything happens is to take casts of all these mouldings & cornices and so on, so that we have a record of what seems to be original so we can make the other rooms match that.

And then there’s the floors. We still seem to have the original boards, but they are FILTHY and bashed around, especially in the loungeroom where some moron decided to saw out a patch instead of just lifting them. It seems that in the Georgian period, where floors were made of cheaper woods such as pine, they would have been painted, possibly with a trompe l’oeil sort of pattern to make it look like it was actually a stone or marble floor. This is more faff than we’re prepared to go into, given the future carpeting – our original plan was to clean and paint the floorboards in the same colour as we’re planning to do the carpet. This will let us test out the colour and make the rooms feel cleaner and more finished until the carpet goes in – plus it will mean we can still have access to lift the floorboards as we build in various forms of cabling, including the home automation stuff that Djeli wants to play with.

However, we seem to have lucked out with the exterior colours. Our original plan was to make the outside of our house match that of our (joined) neighbour, which seems to be the right thing to do. And by a happy chance, the colour that the neighbour has fits with the recommendations in Baty’s Painting of Georgian Buildings post which says that rendered facades should use stone colours. Unfortunately the ironwork on the front of the house is painted black (should be some sort of grey – black came in much later, apparently) and the window frames are white (should be pale stone or off-white) but at least the overall colour will be correct, and it’s a colour we like, and the overall effect is very handsome, if not terribly historically accurate.

The one thing we haven’t really settled on yet is the colour for the front door. Baty’s table says the front door should use “Bronze Greens, Brunswick Greens, Invisible Greens, Red-Browns, Olive Browns”, which rather kills off both our ideas – Djeli had wanted black, and as I grew up in a house with a red door, I always feel a red-door house feels more like home but from this list, I’m thinking a nice green might work. Now to run it past Djeli… and get back to work!

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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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And with 2 days to go, we’re rampaging down the home stretch! Today’s inbox saw another three recordings – from Rob, Shana (who’s recorded the pedal harp arrangement of Pieces of Eight I sent her while I was concussed) and Jenni. Rob’s very kindly offered to do some re-recording, which has given me the opportunity to tweak a couple of things in the trombone score, but what’s he’s sent is great so I’m considering that one done, and we’ll just see if he has the time to do the update.

But Shana’s (Pieces of Eight) and Jenni’s (Nest) recordings are up on SoundCloud now, bringing the total tracks on the online album to 6.

Alun has also sent me an updated version of his track, which came out extremely soft this end. I haven’t had a chance to listen to this update yet because the employment monster demanded my attention with a possible short mobile web-dev contract I need to quote for, but will definitely look at it tomorrow.

And, alas, contrary to plans, I haven’t started on Shana’s proper piece for this project – just shattered today after 4 very fun but exhausting days with a friend here from France so I just did what I could and am hoping to get to that tomorrow. Suspect there’s no chance of it being included in my official RPM Challenge album though.

The album also, finally, has a title. At first I was going to call it Miscellany 2012, but that seemed kind of obvious and dull and like I hadn’t made an effort. I made a set for it on SoundCloud, waved it about on Facebook… and then promptly realised that a much more appropriate name (although probably still not that imaginative) would be Lucky Dip, after which I found that while I could change the title of the set I couldn’t change the URL so the address of the album didn’t match it’s title. A small detail but one that bugs me, so I’ve deleted that set, made another one and redistributed the new link. Aargh. Messy. But probably better to deal with the mess immediately rather than potentially let old & broken links float about the internet too much.

So Lucky Dip it is. I figured it was kind of appropriate because it was a lucky dip for me, finding out what instruments I’d be writing for, and of course a lucky dip for the performers with what piece they’d get (if any), and finally the pieces have all turned out so varied that I think it’s also a bit of a lucky dip for the listener too. And then I found this photo on Flickr and that pretty much sealed the deal. I’ve had to write to the photographer to ask for permission to crop it, tweak it and whack my name over the top, but I’m hoping they’ll agree. If not, I may use it for inspiration – maybe do a drawing of their photograph or something??

2 days. 3 pieces to come. So close to the finish line!

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I’ve been neglecting this blog a bit over the past few months, I know. And then last week I went and posted my new year goals list here which feels a little like I’ve sullied the purity of this space, but if I’m honest, pretty much nobody reads this blog and while it’s been useful – and continues to be from time to time – I’m not managing to keep up the daily posts.

Mind you, my creative activity has increased vastly since the time when I set up One Creative Thing. So much so that I no longer have the time or energy to blog about all that creative activity, so I guess that’s a good thing!

What I’m leading towards is that I’m thinking that I might change the focus of this blog a bit. Not quite sure where it’ll go – it’ll still be about regular creative activity, but I’ve been wanting to post about general creativity topics for a while now, and frankly it was getting a bit dull just writing endless lists of what I’d been doing – posting my soul on caitlinrowley.com on a regular basis has shown me that it’s more interesting for other people to read about the thoughts that go into a creative activity rather than just knowing about the activity itself. Otherwise, it should just be a blog of lists, bare-bones. Maybe it could be a bit of both. I’m not sure yet.

Today I’m recovering from the first cold of 2012. This one’s hit me hard & I’ve been in bed for a week now. Not a great start to the year, but I’ve done some thinking in that time, and especially following on from doing the 2012 list, I’m thinking of consolidating my sideline blogs. There’s this one, plus Minimania, which was my Vox blog and now languishes at Typepad, plus a couple of neglected Tumblogs too, and it occurred to me that if I broaden the scope of this blog, then maybe I can consolidate the ex-Vox content (which currently is really only updated with the annual goals lists, birthday & Christmas lists for relatives in far-flung places and the occasional personal post) with what’s here and ditch the nasty TypePad experience altogether. Maybe this space can build more on the work in progress posts on caitlinrowley.com, giving a day-to-day account of what I feel is right (or not) with the work as I’m doing it. Given that I’m going to be starting a Masters degree later this year, and that I want to start doing more active listening, more scheduled composition sessions, that could be a good thing.

Will it still be One Creative Thing? I’m not sure. Guess I’ll have to see where these thoughts take me.

(Oh, and today Djeli and I attempted to make “Princesses” – chocolate meringues – out of my new-for-Christmas French baking book. They were a bit of a disaster, but I think I know where we went wrong, so I’ll be having another go soon. Also designed and ordered proper business cards for Raspberry Blue. And read a lot)

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If you’ve been reading this blog over the past few days, then you’ll know that I’m contemplating some pretty big life changes – getting my own business off the ground, putting composition centre-stage in my life, working seriously at getting my music heard and audience-building, that sort of thing.

I’ve had some pretty intense ideas over the past few days – one of them just yesterday, which I think might actually bring in some real cash but I don’t want to announce it yet – going to run it by someone whose opinion I value and who falls neatly within my target market – and while it’s been great to feel the ideas flowing, and even better to find myself still composing in the midst of it, I’ve also been starting to feel a little overwhelmed.

So today I’ve put in a major chunk of work on ditching the overwhelm. I had a good long think about the way I work best and realised that I’ve always been happiest in my work when I’m not just beavering away at one thing all the time – my brain likes to hop about. So then I figured that instead of just trying to think of ways to bring in money, I should sit down and work out what sort of things I actually pretty much always enjoy doing. There was a bit of a list, but most things were pretty synonymous with the following key points:

• Composition (well, duh!)
• Publishing and its attendant elements – writing and editing, music copying, layout, picking out fonts
• Helping people do stuff better (so long as I don’t need to speak to them on the phone)

And after that it all became pretty clear that I should probably focus the bulk of my business-building efforts in the direction of publication – I should write my book on how to build a website that actually works, I should publish music and possibly recordings, I should try to get some copying work and get some clients to pay me to design some stuff (I do have a degree in that after all). Because the third point really can tie in very well with the second point if I do it right. And I think that if I can make a living doing a combination of these three things, then I could be very happy indeed.

Which was a comforting thought, except then the fear set in: How the hell do I start building a publishing company? I mean, I have no plans to be Faber or Penguin, but even once you have content, how do you get heard?? Here I found some of the lessons from the e-book I bought the other day useful – just some bits and pieces about being noticed online. Of course I know a fair bit about using social networks, but I tend to keep quiet rather than shouting and I’ve generally restricted myself to the more general or larger ones – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Delicious.

So I figured that if I was to conquer the fear and do anything at all about getting this off the ground, the first step was to work out exactly what I was going to try to do, and for each of those goals, to write down as many actions as I could think of that would need to happen in order to reach the primary goal of having something for sale (actually selling something is part 2 – first up one needs to have something to sell and something with which to sell it). This resulted in 3 full A4 pages of to-do list. Um. Yes. Quite.

Seeing everything I need to work on down in black and white (well, black and yellow) actually was a bit of a kick in the derrière, to the extent that this evening I have written 3 emails, created a Twitter account for our company, Raspberry Blue (@azurefruit – yes, a little lateral thinking had to come into play as raspberryblue is taken and even though it hasn’t been posted to in a year, alas, it is not available. Go on, follow us!), created a SoundCloud account to post my music to, and discovered that I actually did open a Bandcamp account a few months ago, so I’ve tweaked the profile details there and basically it’s all ready to start receiving content (really quite excited to see what happens with this particular part of the plan – more on this later).

There’s still an absolute Everest of tasks to do – including building a whole website for Raspberry Blue, creating yet another blog and writing some starter-content for it, writing the book, working on laying out my scores, making semi-proper recordings of my songs, where possible, designing business cards, designing flyers, getting the laser printer fixed… on and on and on – but it feels fantastic to know that I’ve taken some real steps today, and now that those steps have been taken I’m significantly more confident about where my feet need to go tomorrow. It’s the big breath before the leap.

Tagged with: blogging, copying, dayjob, design, editing, fonts, gtd, ideas, learning, mentalhealth, music, organisation, publishing, self-promotion, thinking, tools, web, writing | Add a comment

I got back from Durham yesterday and today was feeling a touch of withdrawal symptoms – home seems so empty and grey. It’s lovely to see Djelibeybi again of course, but no parents, no lovely new composer-friends, I just needed a little direction. So Djeli and I took ourselves off to the last day of the Diaghilev exhibition at the V&A. They really put together a great exhibition – as they so often do. We went to an exhibition of Ballets Russes costumes and so on in Canberra a number of years ago, so there was some stuff I’d already seen, but I was pretty impressed that most of the exhibition consisted of things I’d never seen before, including the Managers costumes from Erik Satie & Picasso’s Parade and footage of Nijinska’s choreography for Stravinsky’s Les Noces. An excellent antidote for the post-composition-indulgence blues.

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I should be quick tonight as it’s nearly 5am. Whoops. The evening just got away from me, mostly in writing – I’ve been working on two related blog posts on ways ensembles and composers can add value to their work using digital options. The first one, on programme notes I’m hoping will be up tomorrow (um… today, I guess) – just need to review it and make sure I haven’t said anything totally mad.

I bought a pudding basin. And suet. Friday is Christmas pudding day. Yes, I know it’s very late. Nigella seems to think it’ll all be OK.

Worked on the quintet for about 3 minutes. Was hard to work on this earlier today as the lady upstairs decided it was easy-listening day. From about 3 in the afternoon till 8pm. But I didn’t want to go to bed without having put down at least a couple of notes.

Score for Remembrances is… done. Well, sort of. Looking great, flicked through… then realised that every single vocal stave is using the tenor clef instead of treble. So now I have to go back to Finale, change the clefs, re-export all 7 pages, open them in Photoshop, trim them and reimport them back into InDesign. Not Happy.

Heigh ho.

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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!

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Finally got around to designing up some proper business cards and sent them off to MOO. I think this item has been on my to-do list for about a year and a half, so it feels fantastic to have finally got it done. I’ve used three black and white photographs for the backs of the card and the front (with my details) uses the caitlinrowley.com visual ID. And URL. Guess this means upping the priority on getting the wretched site working in all browsers by next Friday. Eeeeeek!

Tagged with: completion, design, gtd, self-promotion | Add a comment

Today was our last day in Paris and this evening has been – understandably – a little fraught, with the packing and calculations of how long it will take to get to Gare du Nord tomorrow and so on. I’m also feeling rather frazzled at the prospect of tomorrow as a whole – getting the flat all cleaned and tidied and parents out to get to the Eurostar, then getting us all home from St Pancras, and then finally the most stressful thing of all – getting us out of the house again to go to the premiere of my new piece Deconstruct: Point, line, plane. I don’t know that any of my other premieres have ever had me so worried as this one. I know I’ve built this piece exactly how I wanted it to be. I’m confident that it can work, but the criticism I received about it when it was still in its embryonic state just makes me doubt just a little bit, even while I know that it didn’t want to be anything other than what it is. And then there’s the question if whether the performers have just decided to change it… And if they have, is it still under my name or have they correctly listed it as an arrangement. I tell you, the sooner Wednesday rocks up, the happier I’ll be!

But we’ve had a lovely last day in Paris. Ran some errands, and my Da finally took me to Shakespeare and Company – and what a gorgeous bookshop it is!!! Most of the books upstairs aren’t for selling – they’re for sitting about and reading! And they’ve got a piano up there, waiting to be played, so we were all happy – the Da nosing around the poetry section, me reading snippets of Julia Child on French bread, the mama playing Debussy on the piano (and drawing quite a happy crowd: Mama: ‘It’s just you there, isn’t it?’ Me: ‘No, but they’re not listening, they’re all reading books, aren’t you?’ Small throng: *assorted giggles*).

And then we visited Notre Dame. And for the first time I noticed the lovely chapel and column paintings – don’t know how I missed them before – so clean and clear. Really gorgeous.

I should stop procrastinating with photos and ‘fess up though that I’ve done precious little Creative Pact work today – I really think I’m reaching the end of what I can do on the iPad for this project. It’s been great and really useful, and I’m VERY glad I didn’t bring the laptop (especially now I’m on the verge of having to lug lots of lovely foodie shopping back to Blighty) but I really need to be working in PHP now, which means I need my books and a server and an Internet connection I don’t need to reset every 30 seconds. Um… On second thoughts, I guess that’s not so much an iPad limitation as a limitation of circumstances, due to not having packed the PHP book and only having rubbish Internet. But still, feeling a little hamstrung and like I’m treading water. I have managed to achieve a tiny bit, but it was only setting up template pages for the contact page (will contain a PHP form) and a page to hold the Tate’s video interview with me, which I can’t tell if I can embed because Vimeo just tells me it’s Flash, which obv won’t work on the iPad – going to have to wait till I get home to see if that should even have a separate page at all or just a link to Vimeo (suspect the latter, which means I’ll need to work out the best styling for putting about a paragraph of text into the right column and making it all look nice). So not a complete fail there, but a bit wussy, really. Still, planning in being at home and working in it for pretty much the whole of Wednesday and Thursday, so I think I’m still in with a chance to get it ready to fly on the 30th…

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