So no, still no musical activity, although I’m starting to think about it more. I have a sort of vague idea about where to start on the recorder quartet, now I just need to force myself to sit down and work on it.

But the house is progressing! This weekend I finally moved on from the endless sweep-and-vacuum routine I’ve been in for about the past two weeks and moved on to MOPPING. Yes, mopping. I went out and bought a £2 old-fashioned rope mop and after a last sweep-and-vacuum I started mopping the top floor.

I think from these photos it should be clear that I have not over-exaggerated the extent of the dust (and remember, this is after about 4 rounds of sweeping and vacuuming already!):

Observe, in particular, in the first picture, the colour of the mop (the mop was brand new out of the packet when I started mopping that room) and the colour of the water in the bucket (it was that colour basically after two dips of the mop!).

It’s great that the floor looks so dark after mopping, actually – it’s confirmed for both of us that we want to seriously consider dark floors throughout the house – it really does make the room feel much wider than the pale floor. The ceiling feels a little lower though, than with the light colour, so I don’t think I’ll be painting the skirting boards dark now but I really think it’ll look great when it’s a dark grey.

Unfortunately it’s also highlighted just how careless previous painters have been, especially in Djelibeybi’s study – blops all over the place, so I think I’m going to have to get in there with paint stripper or something before the Great Limewash Experiment commences.

Speaking of which, the course I was going to do filled up faster than anticipated so I’ve had to scrap that plan. To be honest, I’m not that sorry – I’ve been absolutely exhausted with everything I’ve been trying to fit in the past couple of weeks – work at the house, client work, preparing my renewed portfolio so I can apply for a real contract soon, not to mention dealing with having to get the half-crown installed on my tooth that was root-canalled over a year ago. So not having to go to Chichester, with all the attendant finding accommodation and working out travel, has actually been quite welcome.

Instead, today I made use of the Amazon gift voucher my lovely mama gave me for my birthday and bought two books which I think will help me with the Great Limewashing Experiment:

They both include recipes for natural paints, but while the first one looks immensely practical, including tips on what might have caused various problems, the second one looks like it might have some more creative ideas and just generally looked interesting.

So the plan now is: washing and scrubbing for the moment, then steam-cleaning (probably not till Djeli’s done whatever needs to happen with the ceilings – either patching or replacing). I’ll see how much of the paint splotches come off with the steaming and if need be then I’ll move on to paint-removing. Once that’s done and I feel the floors are as clean as can be, I’ll start the limewashing. Have to get onto the intense cleaning pretty quickly though – each thin coat of limewash needs to dry for about 24 hours, and if the employment monster takes me, the time to get 3 or 4 coats done (or preferably 5) before we move on 8 June is going to be very tight indeed!

I’m still plotting a day for people to come and join in the cleanup fun – unfortunately it seems the new weekend I’d planned (2 June) is the Jubilee weekend when some people will be joining in the festivities (and I’m hoping to be one of them ) and others will have fled in terror. So I need a new plan and I’m not sure what it will be.

But first for more cleaning!

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Yup, the second commission piece has been finished and sent. And no, it’s not Sam’s slide guitar piece (have a feeling that one’s going to creep on at a snail’s pace until the last minute, then be such a horrible travesty that I’ll need to promise to write him something nice later this year to compensate!), it’s the song for bass-baritone for Charles Turner which I started having a bash at the other night at 2 in the morning with not-terribly-satisfactory results.

Well, today I sat down with the version that was ‘merely embarrassing’ and tinkered about with it and began to see how it might be resuscitated into something that was actually halfway decent. Mostly this involved messing about with the rhythm, stretching things, inserting pauses, corrupting the basic structure of the poem a little so it was a bit less tum-ti-tum (I have a longstanding issue with rhymed poetry that I’ve been struggling to get over for aaages). It was still lacking a certain something though, and occasional notes were a little hard to pitch without an additional reference point, so I was thinking about a piano accompaniment (Charles has a tame pianist and his request was for an ‘unaccompanied or lightly accompanied’ song) and how to keep that supportive and interesting but unobtrusive. And while I was doing this, I remembered talking to Stuart Russell on the weekend about Howard Skempton’s piano pieces. Many of these are extremely slim in texture and very beautiful. Often just held chords. So I nicked Skempton’s idea and created an accompaniment out of a series of pianissimo 2-note chords. Each chord is held up until the point of changing to the next chord, which with the longer phrases will probably mean that some of these will die away before the next chord is reached. Which then gave me another idea: What about sympathetic resonance?

So I waved at Twitter and Twitter waved back (thanks, Jenni!) with marvellous info about sympathetic resonance. It’s hard to tell if it will actually work with what I’ve written – there’s a lot of open 5ths or 3rds in the piano part which aren’t actually doubling the note being sung, but it may, so I’ve put it into the score and we’ll see what happens with the recording. Unfortunately I don’t have a real piano, only a digital one, which suits most purposes but, alas, not arcane acoustic effects.

Oh, and the text? That’s by Robert Herrick, the 17th century English poet. It’s a tiny poem called ‘To FORTUNE’:

Tumble me down, and I will sit
Upon my ruins, smiling yet ;
Tear me to tatters, yet I’ll be
Patient in my necessity.
Laugh at my scraps of clothes, and shun
Me, as a fear’d infection ;
Yet, scare-crow-like, I’ll walk as one
Neglecting thy derision.

So that’s the big news of the day. I haven’t got back to Sam’s piece at all today, although last night I bought the AC-7 Core app for my iPad, which is supposed to let me control Logic as if from a mixer board, using the touchscreen.I thought this might help with getting smoother changes in volume and other automation data but of course as I’ve spent all day in Finale and at the piano prodding at ‘real notes’ it hasn’t had a play yet. Tomorrow… tomorrow.

So what’s next? I’m not sure. Shana’s going to send me part two of her lovely miniature treatise on writing for the lever harp, which will contain the mysteries of how to use the octatonic scale on it, which should be fun, so I should try to start thinking octatonically again for that – it’s been a while! I’m also thinking I should maybe build on the brief foray into miniature pianism from today and tackle the piano piece. Hmm. Or I could just see what I feel like in the morning…

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Yet another day of not really being able to work on RPM. SO frustrated! I just want to work! But, alas, the headache has been awful today. I think it’s starting to subside, and I’ve been able to focus for longer today – more like 2 hours than 1 at a stretch – but it’s been really uncomfortable. I felt this morning that I’d really done all the plain thinking I should do for RPM – any more and I’d start to over-theorise and the whole thing would be a disaster.

So instead I tinkered a little with Mixtikl for iPad, which looks interesting but I think not for the slide guitar piece as I’m imagining it, plus in my weakened mental condition I couldn’t work out how to export the sound I recorded. Will try again when sane.

And after that I figured that, no, brain wasn’t ready for making actual notes today, so instead I tackled a layout project that’s been lying around for far too long. The American harpist Shana Norton asked me to do a harp arrangement of Pieces of Eight late last year, and I did actually do it pretty quickly, but the pedalling bugged me and then I started to procrastinate, trying to think of things I might have missed that would improve the pedalling, instead of doing the sensible thing of sending it off to her and saying “I’m a twit! Help me!”. With the end result that the arrangement was done, but it never got laid out. So today I finished the layout, which was about the level of thought I was capable of – ooh! that doesn’t line up! And now it’s been sent off to her for harp-assessment, so we’ll see what happens.

Overall, in spite of injury, I’m seeing huge progress in the way I’m working and thinking about my work from starting the RPM Project. It’s only been about a week, but I’m finding I’m actively looking for musical ways to fill in my time now, rather than procrastinating as much as I usually do. I just hope this brain-fail clears up quick-smart before I lose all that momentum…

10.20pm update: I managed to get the iPad connected to Logic pretty easily (using Network MIDI this time, instead of Pd & Soundflower) and have been messing about with some sounds in there and layering effects to give the sort of gritty, violent feel I’m after for the slide guitar piece. Almost scaring myself with the brutality of it. I’m thinking of using another of the recordings from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project, and am hoping I can head out to a building site or similar next week with my little microphone and do some recording there of clangy and bangy sounds to go with it. SO good to actually get some work done at last, but now I really need to put it aside and rest. G’night!

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RPM is progressing in leaps and bounds this weekend! The commission project is now fully subscribed – AND there’s even a small waiting list too in case anyone pulls out! Never expected that!

Today was a snow day. Djeli and I slowly crept into Ealing to do some shopping but decided that things were just too slippery to risk going to Ikea to look at kitchen stuff, so instead we came home and watched Les Aventures d’Adele Blanc-Sec, which was good fun.

I started making a proper multigrain loaf, which started well but alas seems to have fallen at the final proving hurdle – or rather failed to rise very much. I’ve bunged it in the oven anyway, because hey, I’d only throw it out so might as well see if it turns out edible rather than assuming it won’t. (Confirmed: It is brick-bread. I don’t think any part of it is salvageable. Will have to try again later in the week)

And while waiting for the bread to rise the first time, I wrote a piece for oboe! This is the first of my RPM Project commissions and it’s called ‘Nest’. It’s mostly made up of a combination of grace-noted chirps and little snippets of melody, with the occasional trill for good measure. Hoping it’ll be more “twit! twit!” than twee. Time will tell. At any rate, it’s something like what I had in my head, if not quite so graceful, and the whole thing was done in about an hour. I’m finishing off the layout now then will send it off to its performer tomorrow. Next up is either a piece for flute, piccolo or alto flute (I haven’t decided which yet) or a piece for assorted keyboard instruments. I’ll see where inspiration strikes in the morning … and also what the light’s like – we had a fuse blow tonight that took out half the lights in the house. It’s going to require Djelibeybi to get down on hands and knees with little bits of fuse wire which he can’t find tonight because the lights are out so I will be artificial-light free tomorrow. May have to go out…

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I’ve completed my first RPM Challenge track! It’s the flute improv/field-recording collage piece and it’s called Watching the streets of Zurich and Brussels. I’m mildly happy with it. It’s very serene but not, I suspect, hugely interesting for multiple listens. The ghastly word “pleasant” is springing to mind. But it’s done and I think it’s kind of OK. And it’s tackled a few things that needed tackling:

1. Improv. I hate improvising. I have no confidence at it and never do it
2. Getting something down that’s actually a reasonable length for a proper piece of music – this one’s 6’16″ in length – about twice the length of most of my notated music. Good to be thinking in longer spans, actually, and working more broadly – thinking it might be a good exercise to work with this sort of collagey stuff every now and then to think more in terms of chunks of ideas instead of single notes.
3. Identified and started to tackle my issue of continually going back and listening from the start.
4. Quarter-tones: I’ve got a piece booked in to write for Carla Rees and her quarter-tone alto flute. I was a bit lost at the prospect of thinking about quarter-tones. Focusing on using them in the improv has helped quite a lot with this, I think

The other exciting thing is that today I decided to take RPM up a notch and make it more about the composition, so I launched a commission project: I’ll write pieces of less than a minute in duration for up to 9 people. For any instrument they want – all they have to do is to commit to sending me a recording of it before the end of the month. Want to be a part of it? As of now (7pm) there’s only 3 slots left! Find out more and sign up here.

1am update: Wow – I can’t believe how popular this commissioning project has been! There’s only one place left! And I seem to have reached the maximum number of guitar pieces I can take on – with electric, slide and bass guitar pieces, it’s going to be a challenge!

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Wow! What a day! I’ve made a huge start on my first RPM Challenge piece: First thing this morning I pulled down the recordings from Iraklio and Brussels into Logic, so all those field recordings are now on my hard disk. I also spent about an hour messing around with ideas on my flute and recording them (note: this is a big deal for me – I NEVER improvise!). A slight setback when the very best take for ideas AND execution AND tone ended up being lost when my laptop suddenly shut down without warning, but I managed two takes which are halfway decent and I’m cobbling them together to create overlapping parts. This afternoon I started sticking it all together in Logic: After exploring some other field recordings I had lying around, I’ve decided to stick with just the Zurich and Brussels recordings and the two flute takes – the more stuff I try to work with, the slower I’m going to be and the point of this whole exercise is speed.

Anyway, I now have 4:28 of music!!! It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever done. It’s a little morbid and ambly. But the point is that I’ve actually created nearly 4 1/2 minutes of music in a single day! Hoping I can finish it tonight or tomorrow (although I just remembered that I have to get the parts done for Carrion Comfort, so it won’t be tonight).

I published a blog post on perfectionism and what I’m hoping to get out of this challenge: it’s up on caitlinrowley.com if you want to read it. And – relating to that – over the course of the afternoon I identified a reason why it takes me so long to write stuff. I keep going back to listen to the whole thing from the beginning! I kept catching myself doing this, even when it wasn’t really necessary. I feel like what I’m writing is losing touch with what I’ve written before, so I go back and listen from the beginning – and of course, as the piece gets longer this takes longer each time, so now I’m trying to watch out for this and when I go to do it, I think: do I really need to do this? Or should I just press on a bit longer?

1am update: Parts are prepped and ready for a print-out proof tomorrow… just as soon as I nip out to the shops to buy some more black ink. Also got a bit caught up in the moment when I ought to have been heading for bed and finally fixed up the time signatures for Egg the Ninth – I KNEW 9/8 wasn’t right. But 6/8 wasn’t either – turns out it needed to be 6/8 interspersed with occasional 9/8 bars. FUN!

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Busy day! Not a lot on RPM, but enough: I retrieved the MiniDisc player from D, set up the MBox (which hadn’t worked since I reinstalled but neglected to install ProTools – this time round I found just a driver and skipped the ProTools) and recorded the field recordings I made in Zurich (street noises, trams) across into Logic, so I now have them in a usable format for my piece. They were less defined sounds than I’d hoped to capture, and the recording a little noisier (disc noise just as bad in places as I’d feared but it’s only in patches – where it sounds like a quiet coffee grinder – not all the way through) but they should be entirely usable, even though I may combine them with some other recordings or use some sort of processing on some of them to give a bit more shape to the whole. I also found, in addition to the Zurich and Brussels recordings I knew were there, an MD marked “Iraklio” – I’d completely forgotten I made any recordings on the MD in Greece. I thought I only had crappy ones taken with the audio function on my camera because we kept coming across things that required instant reaction (not possible with the MiniDisc) – a teachers’ strike, a children’s band playing enthusiastically but with a delightful disregard of pitch. Looking forward to seeing what’s on there tomorrow!

I hand-delivered the score of Carrion Comfort to Herne Hill (which is lovely, by the way, if you’re thinking of moving to South London) and did the first round of corrections on the parts on the train. Mostly they’re pretty OK, except that Finale’s done some weird thing where the spacing between staves is different on every part – it’s like Finale’s tried to make all the parts fit into one page exactly, so the trombone part has masses of space, while the viola part has markings colliding on every stave as the markings below the stave run into the markings above the stave of the next system! Aargh!

And tonight I trekked off to Nonclassical (trek being the operative word – really wish they’d find a venue that’s actually near a Tube station – then I wouldn’t have to leave quite so early to be sure of catching the last train, and would be more likely to go to more of them!) to hear Consortium 5, a recorder consort. Excellent music – I made some great notes on ideas for Ladders of Escape which I’m writing for the Pink Noise recorder quartet in Bristol. Loads of ideas! And I caved and bought their CD too. I am weak. But happy

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Today’s is a portmanteau post. I will start with the major triumph which is that Carrion Comfort has, at long, long, long, long last, gone to the printers. Yup, it’s done. I have had to make a couple of compromises because of the amateur nature of the ensemble it’s destined for, but the original timpani part at least will go into the final post-(hopeful)-workshop score. I felt it would just confuse when sending the score to a group I know doesn’t have timpani.

And tonight we went to see Tim Minchin’s musical version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda. It was supposed to be D’s Christmas present, but he didn’t like it pretty much at all, while Djeli and I agreed that we can squish up our list of “Best Theatrical Performances Ever” to make room for another one. Amazing stuff, great voices, the kids in the cast were simply astonishing. It was funny and heartbreaking and the staging was superb. I could find nothing wrong with it all. Get a ticket. That’s all there is to be said. How could you miss a bunch of extraordinarily talented kids singing a song called “Revolting Children” and loving every minute of it?

Today has also, of course, been the first day of the RPM Challenge. Obviously most of my time has been taken up with getting Carrion Comfort out of the house, but I was able to spend some time thinking about RPM, I pulled out Egg the Ninth and tinkered around with the time signatures which need changing (I think it should be in a mix of 6/8 and 9/8, not just one or the other). I also came up with an idea for an improv piece – create a tape part using the field recordings of trams and some other street sounds in Zurich several years ago, then improvise a flute part over the top. I’ve got some ideas I’ve been thinking about for the various flute pieces I have to write in the next few months and I might use this as an opportunity to mess about with them and see what happens.

I can’t believe how excited I am about RPM now. It’s like getting rid of Carrion Comfort (which had become a bit of an albatross around my neck) has been such a relief, I just want to work on something that’s about as different as it can be – which is what RPM represents. I’ve started re-reading Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music too – just seemed like the right time to revisit this one. So many ideas floating around! Hope I can get down to some real work tomorrow!

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It’s been a big day today. Today I finally finished a task that’s been on my to-do list for about a decade: I have joined PRS for Music! Well, obviously when it went on my to-do list I was in Australia so the task then was actually “Join APRA” but it’s effectively the same thing. I filled out the form online yesterday and paid the fee over the internet, then this morning I printed it out, signed it and made a copy of my passport and then – yes – I PUT IT IN THE POST. YAY! There aren’t words for the triumph I feel over this. I did actually print out the forms about 5 years ago, but there was some confusion over whether I should join as just me or as my and Djeli’s limited company, and then there was confusion about what the status of the company was re: VAT and I just never got it all sorted out. But it is now. Which means I can start receiving a pittance for every performance! True, they won’t actually pay me till it hits £30, but still – prospect of payment! WOOOT!

The thing that set this amazing productivity off was that yesterday I went to the Barbican to a thingy organised by Sound and Music called “Counting In”. It was a panel session on composer careers and was extremely interesting and inspiring. So not only did I join PRS for Music today, but I have decided that a New World Order is in… order. Again. I know I keep doing this but one day it’s going to stick. One of the things really brought home to me yesterday is that I HAVE to get my health sorted out. Quite possibly this is even more important than actually writing music – I have so many ideas and so many things I want to do, but this permanent state of crippledom, criminally low energy, tendency to catch every bug going and my weight spiralling out of control making everything worse has to stop. It really does. My brain is sluggish and tired ALL the time and I never have enough energy, either physical or mental, to just get on and do the stuff I need to – stuff like laying out scores to send to potential performers, having a go at writing a piece in super-quick time for an imminent deadline, actually getting a blog post written for caitlinrowley.com every week as opposed to every now and then. Not to mention having the energy to travel and do fun stuff with Djelibeybi too.

As always, the heart of this New World Order has to be getting my eating right. If I’m not eating right, I don’t stand a chance, but I can’t go back on the deprivation diet as it was originally – that might have resulted in 14 kilos of weight loss in 6 months and huge energy gains, but it was unsustainable simply because it made me miserable, so I need to devote a little time this week to going through my nutritionist’s initial prescription and working out a more even balance. And I need to finish reading the book on stress eating so I can better understand what I’m doing. As a first step I’m going to try to not eat anything once dinner is done. Water is OK. Even a cup of tea is OK. But no actual food – it shouldn’t be necessary and mostly I eat then just because I’m too tired to do anything useful. So instead I should have some water and just head to bed.

So I’ll start small. And hopefully build on that to make a healthy, unstoppable me. Havi Brooks has a great weekly “Very Personal Ads” ritual on her blog, and I think that’s what this is for me this week:

WANTED: Willpower and strength to follow this through and mend my body so it can support all the things my mind wants to do.

Oh and I’ve finished the dynamics for Carrion Comfort and done a first draft for laying out the score. Can’t believe how much work has gone into this darned piece. So many instruments! So many dynamics! It kind of feels like I’ve overdone the dynamics and it should all be a lot simpler, but I’m not sure. I feel as if all the mezzo-fortes and mezzo-pianos are just imposters and should be deleted, but I’m certain I put them there for a reason – will review again later…

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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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