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.

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HUGELY productive day. I may have to make a list to save babbling too much:

• Posted the new follow-up blog post I wrote yesterday online and told Twitter about it. I think I’ve decided to try to post once a week to caitlinrowley.com, with an occasional extra post. 2 a week seems like it could get a bit much when I’m working, but 1 should be fine
• Installed Google Analytics on caitlinrowley.com so I can hopefully properly track traffic and get a better idea of what approaches work and where the traffic’s coming from
• Drafted a new blog post for a new series of posts on caitlinrowley.com (part of a plan to have some backup, non-time-specific posts for when things get busy so I can continue the plan I just mentioned to post every week)
• Made Nigel Slater turkey cakes for dinner
• Caught up a bit with the laundry
• Finished reading Art + Money – some good ideas in there. I’m looking forward to listening to the interviews that go with it. Final issues with getting extended content still not sorted, but I’m giving it a few days – plenty to be working on till then
• Did some thinking about the opera and researched books on poetry-writing – it looks like books on lyric-writing are pretty much all geared towards the pop market, which is less useful to me. Might try to get hold of the new Sondheim book and a general book on writing poetry and then see how I go. I also wrote to my Da (who’s a fabulous poet) for suggestions.
• Started the violin piece! This has been kicking about in my head for a considerable period of time now, so I bullied myself into getting something down on paper, and no sooner had I started than it all flowed like water and the whole thing was mapped out in less time than it took Djelibeybi to go to the gym. Next stage is to condense it (I’ve worked it as three separate lines, with a goal of mooshing them together then cleaning up – there’ll probably be a post on this at caitlinrowley.com soonish), make sure the double- and triple-stops are playable and that it all hangs together. Could be finished by early next week though! Woot! (Mustn’t get too cocky)
• Did a little research on Twitter – after reading Art + Money (which is primarily focused on visual art) I thought that the equivalent of an online gallery for composers is audio-sharing sites, so I put the question out to my tribe on Twitter who have basically responded that SoundCloud’s the way to go. It doesn’t have a huge classical community yet, but it sounds like a good place to start, so I’m going to try to work up some of the MIDI performances I have in Pro Tools, make them sound a little more human, and post them up there and see what happens. I have to say: I love my tweeps. They were so helpful with this, and it was lovely to have people saying “add me when you do!” and “make sure you tell us here when you set it up!”. Awesome, awesome people.

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Today I made a pretty momentous decision: I’m not going to apply for the job at the Tate. Instead, I’m going to carry on focusing on my music and really put some effort into exploring alternative revenue ideas, audience-building for my music, that sort of thing. To that end, today I was a bit daring and bought two e-book packages from Chris Guillebeau who writes the Art of Non-conformity blog – Working for Yourself and Art + Money. Obviously I know a fair bit about business on the internet, but my knowledge is a bit scattered, picked up from here and there and not learned in a straightforward way, so there are bound to be gaps. Mr Guillebeau has been making his living from mostly small-scale internet projects for the past 10 years, so I figured I could learn something from him, and Art + Money contains sections on things like audience-building which, I must confess, is something that’s kind of eluded me a bit. Had a couple of small problems with downloading the packages, but these are mostly resolved and as Chris answers all his email himself, I have no doubt that any lingering issues will be quickly sorted.

I started reading Working for Yourself on the train to Surrey for tonight’s percussion workshop and it’s looking pretty good and sparking some ideas, so I’ll see where I go with it. Percussion workshop was, as always, good (although I’m beginning to wonder whether I’m developing an allergy to Surrey – I always seem to come away feeling coldy. It’s cleared itself up within a day each of the previous times, so hopefully this one will too). Tonight we did drumkit! So we each got to have a play on a proper drumkit. Lots of fun but gee-whiz you have to be co-ordinated. When it comes right though, it’s grand. Next week’s the last one, which is a shame, but I think it’s been worthwhile to do, even if the travel has cost me a fortune (£14 each time!). Note to self, though: Do not miss the 6 o’clock train because the 6.30 is packed and makes you late as well.

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I am now officially an employee of the University of Dundee. No, I haven’t moved to Scotland, and no, I haven’t abandoned my plan to take the next 3 months off – it’s very much a part-time, work-from-home deal – proofreading work. It’s sure not going to make me rich but, hey, it may just pay for the books I keep buying for the Richard III opera research!

Speaking of which, I was at the library today so I thought I’d see what they had on the shelf. Really disheartening, actually. Quite a decent number of books on the shelf, so far as I could see, and every single one of them described our hapless Plantagenet as a monster. Not a single revisionist version in there. Guess that means the world is crying out for some art to try to redress the balance.

The more I think about this project, the more I think the courtroom drama format is a good one – it will allow for both sides of the story to be told in a semi-dramatic situation (you can’t just set the reign of Richard III as a story because when you look at the facts it was peaceful and happy and therefore not hugely dramatic in spite of its interesting beginning, punchy end and spicy moments of treason – good judgment, fairness and the love of the people are just hard to convey), will work well for semi-staged productions (which I think is unfortunately something very important to consider today as a fully fledged performance is unlikely ever to happen) and, as I thought last night, it might very well then turn out to be something that could work as a performance in schools (if it’s not too long), which could be very interesting… just thoughts, but still… makes it all the more important to get the history right and make the characters believable (and to ensure the vocal writing means that the words can be understood).

In the realm of shorter-term projects, I’ve had a bit of an idea of how to tackle the one-minute unaccompanied violin piece I’m planning to write for the 15 Minutes of Fame project. The thing with unaccompanied is that, if you’re not careful, one could end up with just a tune and be a bit boring. The best unaccompanied pieces for single-line instrument tend to whisk about between registers to give the impression of multiple lines at once, so I’m thinking of actually writing it as 3 separate lines, and then working to fuse them together somehow. Should be a fun challenge.

And I started exploring the weird and wonderful world of Béla Bartók, which I have somehow missed on my musical adventures so far. Not sure how that happened, but a composer-collective friend said I should have a listen to B’s unaccompanied violin sonata, an, well… it pleaseth me muchly

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Today I did something a little different – I took myself off to the Royal Academy of Music for a free seminar/workshop/presentation thingy by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. For those of you who don’t know of Max, he’s the Master of the Queen’s Music, which is the composer-version of Poet Laureate, and a very prolific and fabulously interesting composer.

Well, I have to say, that was certainly 3 hours VERY well spent. The talk had been billed as him talking about creating opera, with specific reference to the new opera he’s just finished writing, so I’d thought it could be useful as preparation for the Richard III opera, but it turned out to not really be about that at all. He did talk about a couple of his operas and some music theatre stuff, but mostly it was about the way he uses drama and theatricality as a structural force in all his music, even the concert music that has no obvious connection with the theatre at all. Really fascinating. I took a ton of notes.

He talked a bit about his very first opera, Taverner, on the life of the 16th-century composer John Taverner (as opposed to the composer John Tavener who’s around today), and specifically about how he wrote it simply because he wanted to. He never expected anyone to ever perform it (although they eventually did), and so he just basically let rip and did the whole thing the way he wanted to do it, with no reference to what anyone else might think. This led to what I think was the most inspiring quote of the morning:

If you’re going to do anything, go for it – for God’s sake, go for it! – you’ll get there… if you’re any good. And if you believe you’re any good, you probably are.

Amazing stuff. Really confidence-building. As anyone who’s followed my journey online over the past few years knows, I’ve had (possibly more than) my fair share of self-doubt, but the one thing I’ve never doubted is that I’m good at what I do. So let’s hope Max is right and that that means I probably am!

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Ended up reviewing tags across this whole site. I’ve recently (since Creative Pact) starting adding project tags to posts, which is increasingly ending up as composition tags (yay!) which has led to me thinking I might post links to individual pieces’ posts – don’t know whether anyone would find it interesting to follow through the lifespan of a piece from first idea or doodle through to multiple performances and worldwide fame (ahem!) but it might provide insights. And possibly to me too – it might help me identify stumbling blocks and grooves. So I’ve been through and tagged every post here that is marked as relating to “composition”. Mostly they were straightforward, but I suspect I need to check some stuff – some of the very earliest posts talk about “the psalm” but as I did settings of both Psalm 1 and Psalm 47 (which I’d forgotten) around then, I’ll need to look up and see which one they should be. Suspect Psalm 1… let’s see if I’m right.

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First real day of real life after Durham. It’s been quiet, but productive. I’ve worked through a bunch of stuff off my to-do list – sent a ton of emails, updated my website with the recording of the string quintet and generally sorted things out a bit. I also made a start on all three pieces I’ve been thinking of starting over the past couple of weeks – the orchestral arrangement of Deconstruct: Point, line, plane for the London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra call for scores; a solo cello tango I’m thinking of submitting to the Sequenza 21 call for scores; and finally took the first tentative steps towards my first opera. I’ve known what I wanted it to be about for some time (keeping it secret for now!) but I wasn’t sure how to begin. After talking to one of the composers at Durham I got all fired up and a bit of an idea on how to approach it, so now I’ve asked a friend who has a strong interest in the subject area to recommend some books, which she has, and I’m thinking of characters and possible arias and how to structure the whole thing. Very exciting!

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Contrary to my expectations I’m really enjoying this non-standard notation composition challenge – it’s fascinating to see what everyone (principally standard-notation users who are a bit freaked by the letting go aspect of the challenge) is coming up with – the sounds they’re using, which elements they’re letting go and which they’re retaining control of. It’s really inspiring me to be a bit more daring. I think I’ve done pretty well with the start of the piece but I think I want to let go a little more at the end, to really push myself to see how far I can stretch out of my comfort zone. And there’s not much time in which to do it – scores have to be finished for rehearsal tomorrow, for performance tomorrow night!

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I have to say, having been without feedback of pretty much any sort on my music for about a decade, it’s just fantastic to finally be getting some constructive criticism – it makes such a HUGE difference. Tonight I steeled myself to go forth and actively seek criticism. As you may recall, I joined the London Composers Forum about a month ago and had a marvellous, inspirational time at the first meeting I attended. Tonight they held a ‘WiP/WiT’ (work in progress/work in transition) session. The idea is that you toddle along, bringing with you something you’re working on that you’d like some comments on, or you just come along, listen and join in the conversation. So I recorded a version of the quintet out of Finale (which, most unco-operatively has decided to ignore all dynamics in the score and just play everything forte, with occasional random blasts of fortissimo for no reason) and printed out a small clutch of scores to accompany it and toddled off to the meeting.

Well, it was just grand. There weren’t too many of us – just 7 – but in the course of the evening we heard and discussed a piece for bass clarinet and piano, an orchestral work, a solo cello piece and of course my quintet. The good news is that everyone was really very enthusiastic about it. Nobody thought it needed major changes (I cannot say how much of a PHEW moment that was) but some excellent ideas were contributed for small tweaks and the part I’m really having some trouble with, which is integrating the fast dancelike figures with the slow descending motif from the opening while not bringing the whole thing screeching to a halt or just continuing on blandly and being dull. Some great suggestions and I’ve already started putting some of them in place (started this on the train – I was so fired up to get back to it!).

The Forum are really a brilliant group – so friendly yet giving serious critique, all of it constructive – everyone got some great advice about their piece, whether technical about instruments or in terms of general composition techniques that might help. Words cannot express how delighted I am to have found them. If you’re a composer in London or nearby (one of our composers last night came from Brighton), you really should get in touch with them and come along to something! Their website is: http://www.forumcomposers.org.uk/

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I’ve been in Lisbon, in Portugal for the past week, hence the quietness over here. I’ve not had a holiday like that in a very, very long time. In fact, I think I could go so far as to say that I’ve not relaxed that much in over a decade. But now I’m back. Away from the gentle Portuguese winter sun, back to snow on the ground and sub-zero temperatures. That was a bit of a shock to the system!

I took yesterday off, just a sort of recovery moment. I went and had a massage, did quite a lot of sleeping, finished knitting a hot water bottle cover I started before I left, and started on a new scarf (in crazy-coloured cotton chenille yarn) for my mama.

And today I’m working on getting my brain back into composition mode. I’ve read a little more of The Rest Is Noise and just wrote a blog post, A new approach for composers, on caitlinrowley.com about a new site I’ve found called Meet The Composer Studio – there’s some great content over there – have a wander round the videos provided by each of the six composers, and don’t miss Glenn Kotche’s Monkey Chant – brilliant! For comparison you can also creep off and listen to the original Ramayana Monkey Chant over on Ubuweb. Now I guess I should go and actually look at the quintet and see if I can do anything with it!

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