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…

Tagged with: completion, composition, friends, music, organisation, publishing, recording, self-promotion, tools | Add a comment

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!

Tagged with: completion, composition, experimenting, friends, learning, music | Add a comment

Another surprise piece – they’re just popping up like rabbits! Today’s offering is a piano piece for Francis Western-Smith. I think it will do well on the organ too, but it’ll need some work – as it stands I think some parts are out of range and others are just going to sound muddy, but it should work just fine on piano, so I’m sending it as is and will see if I can manage an organ arrangement in a couple of days.

If you know my piano eggs at all then the style of this piece will be familiar to you – it’s Egg the Eleventh, if you’re keeping score (only 2 more to go and I’ll have the Baker’s Dozen I’ve been planning for my CD-in-progress) – and this one is a naughty fugue. Not naughty in the show-your-knickers sense, but naughty in the sense that it started out being a fugue, and it is mostly a fugue, but I’ve rather taken liberties with it, so it’s by no means strict. It consists of flowing melodies with syncopated moments and I’m hoping Francis will be able to have some fun with it. We Shall See…

This is also exciting, because with Sam’s piece being now more than half-done, I am officially halfway through the project! Add in the improv piece I wrote for myself before I started this, and I’ve written 5 1/2 pieces this month – which is 1 1/2 more than I originally planned to write. And more pieces (indeed, more minutes of music too) than I wrote in the whole of last year. Go me!

Today, I have to say, has been MASSIVE. For a quiet rainy Saturday at home it’s really been very exciting. Because I had an email from a friend in Limerick saying that she has chosen my Three Whitman Songs for contralto and piano to be performed at a concert her ensemble is giving in April. This is super-exciting because I never expected those songs to be performed. They were written over a long period of time – The first two songs were the last thing I wrote before freezing up and not being able to write anything for a couple of years, and the third was the first thing I wrote during my recovery. Because of my low mood at the time, I couldn’t see the point of writing for any ordinary voice type. I wanted to hear what I’d written, so I wrote them for my voice, which is unusually low, so I never thought I’d find a proper singer with a similar range, but LO! There is one in Limerick! I can’t wait to hear what she does with the set because frankly I’ve made a bit of a hash of them, being an untrained singer and out of practice toboot.

The other exciting thing was that today was the day that the London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra was having their first read-through of the pieces for their workshop at the end of March – including my Carrion Comfort. And most unexpectedly, I started chatting with a new friend on Twitter and discovered that she’s in the orchestra! So she trundled off to rehearsal and was kind enough to give me some feedback afterwards, saying that it went well and sounded very solid. She was even kind enough (after asking if it was a new piece or if it had been played before and getting the answer that it’s shiny and new and my first real attempt at an orchestral work) to say that it didn’t sound like a first attempt. Well chuffed, I assure you. Can’t wait for the workshop. And it’s on my birthday too!

Tagged with: completion, composition, concert, events, friends, music | Add a comment

Can’t believe it. After weeks of quietude, suddenly my social life has taken off. Tansy’s launch on Thursday, my concert on Friday, friend for lunch tomorrow – and then the World’s Best Ex-Boss pings me this morning to say would we like to go to a movie! So we did. Sort of slobbed around the house a bit, then went into town for dinner (nothing flash, just Pizza Express, but it was nice – they do a great Sicilian still lemonade) and (eventually) met up with the WBEB. We went to see I Am Number 4, which I’d never heard of, and it turned out to be OK. Fun in a kind of “I left my brain at home, but that’s alright” way. It had a cute puppy in it. And of course it’s always lovely to see the WBEB.

Tagged with: cinema, friends, social life | Add a comment

Made some good progress on the Raspberry Blue website today. The site layout is starting to take shape and look all proper, not crappy and default any more. It’s really developing a certain style, I think. Simple but usable. The content still needs a lot of work and I need to learn how to handle the two separate blogs for the homepage, not to mention two separate RSS feeds/email signups… that for tomorrow maybe.

Apart from that I’ve written the blog post for tomorrow’s caitlinrowley.com update. That was a bit of a tough one actually – trying to summarise a bunch of disparate thoughts into a single, coherent, but ultimately speculative post. I’m not sure I’ve achieved it. And there’s a bunch of issues I’ve had to cut out to keep it to a reasonable size. But I guess I can use them later. Just hoping I get some responses to it – it’s a different approach I’m thinking of taking in my bid to help more people discover and understand my music and one I can’t find any mention of anyone else doing. Anyway, I can’t really talk too much about it today because it’s not live yet, so you can’t go and read it till 3pm UK time tomorrow

I also spent a couple of hours talking art and web dev with a friend in Scotland. That was enjoyable too. All very Sunday

Tagged with: blogging, code, conversation, friends, ideas, thinking, web, writing | Add a comment

Oh I’m SUCH a good girl! Got up at the crack of dawn this morning and went out to Cass Art at High Street Kensington today with the in-common-laws to buy the nephew-in-c-l an easel and I didn’t buy anything! Not even when sister-in-c-l tempted me greatly by saying “Oh look! They have a set of 10 gouaches and it’s only £14.95″. It was reduced from something like £35 and STILL I didn’t buy it. I am amazing.

Tagged with: friends, relaxing, shopping | Add a comment

That pretty much sums it up. Took the lovely sister-in-common-law and nephew-in-common-law to the British Museum where we visited a bunch of my favourite things: The massive Assyrian wingèd horse-man gatekeeper statues, the Easter Island head, the Tree of Life in the African section (the one made out of guns) and the fabulous knives near it. I think the only one of my favourites we didn’t visit was the Isle of Lewis chessmen, but that’s OK. I also found a new fave in the Egyptian section – a colossal scarab:

In the evening I introduced the nephew-in-common-law to ebelskivers with lemon curd and extra-thick double cream. They seemed to be well received. Then after his bedtime, his mama and I talked web stats and SEO into the wee hours of the morning which was great – it helped her see where she can improve some stuff and also helped to clarify my thoughts a bit about where I want my shiny new business to go. Thinking that ultimately I probably would prefer to ditch the code and act more as a consultant, teaching other devs and designers what they need to do to help their clients. It would help the clients and it would also help to spread the word about web standards and various best-practice … um… practices. Win-win really. I think that’s a little way off yet though.

Tagged with: conversation, cooking, exhibition, friends, ideas, teaching, thinking, web | Add a comment

Didn’t get so much done today – sister-in-common-law and her small son arrived to stay for a couple of days, which is lovely and I’m really looking forward to spending some time with them tomorrow at the British Museum. Today though was mostly taken up with pondering the notes I took in my first composition-teaching lesson yesterday. I’ve been through them and made some extra notes and had a really good think about how to approach the whole thing and I think I’ve come up with a vague sort of plan that might work. It’s going to be a bit random but hopefully fill in some holes. Got to run it past my student now. Hope he likes it!

Did a bit more work on the violin piece too. It’s getting tighter and tighter. I’ve sped it up a tiny bit, which pulls the duration in and gives it a bit more sparkle. Still having a little trouble with the opening 2 bars though. The rest of it I’m pretty happy with, but the opening’s a bit dirge-like and isn’t really gelling with the rest of the piece. Thinking about maybe removing most of the chordal stuff to keep the rhythm cleaner, and possibly whacking it up an octave too.

Made a little Greek feast for dinner which went down very well – chicken souvlaki with garlicky bulgur wheat (loving that recipe), salad and tzatziki.

Tagged with: composition, cooking, experimenting, friends, learning, music, teaching | Add a comment

Today was my first composition lesson… as teacher! I’ve contemplated what it would be like to teach composition many a time, but it’s not the sort of thing you just set yourself up as. Anyway, following my last blog post, a friend asked me if I ever taught, so now we’ve set up a thing where I’m actually teaching! And today was the first lesson. Mostly introductory stuff of course – talking about where he’s up to and what he wants to get out of the experience, but it was interesting (for me anyway!). Raised much food for thought and now I need to work out how to approach the whole enterprise.

Then in the afternoon I went to Kent for a briefing and location tour for a commission project I may be submitting a proposal for with a friend. It didn’t start too well – the sandwich I bought at Gloucester Rd turned out to be frozen in the middle and when I got to St Pancras to catch the train it turned out that the ticket I’d bought was only valid for the slow trains… which left from Charing Cross. By that time there was absolutely no chance of getting to Charing Cross in time to get to Gravesend for 4pm, so I ended up have to pay another £10.10 just to get on the train. The tour was pretty interesting, and I ended up meeting an Australian artist and we got chatting and ended up catching the train back to London together.

But the trip back was not without incident -  seemed to run over something in a tunnel just before Stratford International, then half the lights went out and there was a bit of a bang. We slowed right down and crept into Stratford and then the train just sat there. Then there was another noise, which kind of sounded a bit like they were uncoupling or re-coupling a train carriage. Anyway, we sat there for about three minutes and eventually they started to make an announcement, which got as far as “there has been an electrical incident. The driver is…” when there was a large bang and a flash from towards the front of the train. My new friend and I looked at each other and took a snap decision to bail – turned out the train was suffering from minor explosions going off along the top of it – she saw another one flash just after we left the train. Fortunately, though, it was Stratford which meant it was easy enough to get on the tube and get home, but still… explosions! Not every day you experience that!

Tagged with: composition, events, friends, music, teaching, travel | Add a comment

Gosh. What a day! The whole dead-disk issue from yesterday isn’t really resolved – it’s looking like I’m going to have to take it to Essex tomorrow and pay a little technical chappie a whole lot of cash to retrieve the data, but he says I was right to not try tinkering with it myself and that I’ve given the data the best possible chance of survival, which is the main thing. So tonight I have to clean off my other disk, back that up somehow and then take both those disks plus the other one that died about a year ago to Essex in the morning.

Today though I am basking in the wonder that is Google Analytics. I started to implement this ages back but something went a little pear shaped and I never got around to putting the code in half the pages of my site. Now I’ve implemented it everywhere – here, caitlinrowley.com, minim-media.com and the Satie site at minim-media.com/satie and my golly gosh what a useful thing! Seeing some fascinating stats and it’s really giving me a clear idea of what’s working and what isn’t. What really isn’t is minim-media, which doesn’t hugely surprise me – it’s always been a bit of a mish-mash of a site, and now that the other sites are working it’s kind of lacking in purpose, not to mention updates.  At some point when raspberryblue.com is up and running, I’ll clear all the data off it and point users to RB for web and publishing stuff and CR for music stuff and be done with it. Looking forward to that day, but there’s a ton of other work to do first.

The Satie site is particularly interesting – very high bounce rate (that’s where someone comes on your site, just looks at the page they’re on then goes away again) BUT often combined with a long average visit time – e.g. my essay Satie and Minimalism: Parallels and Points of Contact has had the most hits, has a whopping bounce rate of 87.5% but the average visit time is nearly 5 1/2 minutes – quite enough for people to read the full article. What seems to be happening is that people are finding the article via Google, reading the whole of it then going away again. Hopefully contented. And that’s interesting in terms of the (incredibly ancient – I think I redesigned this for MiniMax Festival in 2002) site design – when you get to the bottom there’s no links to anywhere – you have to scroll back up to the top for suggestions of other destinations – in particular, but it’s also making me think what I can do with this site to make it more useful to visitors. From a usability point of view, it’s pretty sucky – dense text, bibliography isn’t split into data types, that sort of thing – and there’s also limited ways of obtaining data – you come, you read an essay (or two, if you’re a masochist), you go away again. But I think the information there must be useful because I regularly get emails asking about it or asking for an elaboration on something, usually from students. It was also at one point linked from a joint website of Ivy League colleges in the States as a key resource on Satie, so it must have something going for it – why not push the boundaries? So I’m thinking, once all the other website projects are done, that I might totally revamp it. Put the whole thing in Drupal, start up a forum for discussion of Satie’s work, a blog section for intermittent updates on my research (which is always, always ongoing) and random Satie snippets that come my way so it looks a little alive – I’m sure that latest news dated 2006 on the homepage isn’t doing anyone any favours!

Ideas, ideas, ideas – but it’s really wonderful to see how people are using my sites. I put another new blog post up on caitlinrowley.com today on the process I’ve used to construct my new unaccompanied violin piece, which has had some great responses – as did the last post, which people really seemed to identify with.

Which ties in to an ebook I read yesterday – one on networking which I downloaded from the ‘Library’ at thelaunchcoach.com (you have to sign up to get it but you also get another 3 interesting ebooks). I’m really liking this new breed of online-business sites – there’s a real freshness and a respect for ethics out there at the moment, which is just fantastic – it’s all about giving value and being helpful and building your business through actually being nice to people. That’s just awesome. Anyway, I was reading this ebook and today I found myself, while going about things the way I do normally, being hyper-aware of the connections I was making – I was running several conversations at once with a bunch of people I really respect and they weren’t just twitter-fluff conversations either. I was bold and when people said they liked my blog I asked them to let me know if there was anything they want me to write about. One friend has even asked me for composition lessons as a result of it! We’ll see what happens there

I’ve sent off a ton of emails – a couple of them reminders, some signing up for stuff, others on project work, and it all feels like stuff is gradually pulling together to make things work. I can’t believe how many opportunities are turning up right now. And I just want to grab hold of every one of them!

And I started the day by writing another 2 blog posts for raspberryblue.com. I now have 3 posts and I want to launch with 4 or 5 in place, so I’m pretty happy with that. Yay!

I’ve also finally got my act together and exported MIDI files (transposed down a perfect fourth – that’s what I get for trying to sing soprano songs) for the Remembrances of Half-Forgotten Dead People – I want to have a recording of this up on SoundCloud before the end of the week to go with the one-week-to-go announcement of the concert – I want to have both the sound file and the score available to download as a package on BandCamp so that people can check it out and go “hey, that girl’s got a weird basso profundo voice but I kinda like the song – maybe I’ll go to the concert and see what it’s like with a real singer”, so exporting the MIDI is phase one. Hopefully I can get the sounds for that sorted out tomorrow and try to record it when I get back from Essex. It’s really bugging me not having a proper microphone – it’s annoying for these sorts of things, and it’s a bit annoying because I’m thinking of trying out maybe some podcasty stuff as a way of exposing a bit of my composition process to the world. Maybe it should go on my birthday list

Tagged with: blogging, composition, experimenting, friends, music, organisation, research, thinking, tools, web | Add a comment