I won’t dwell on this morning because it was uniformly awful – sleep deprivation, dental pain, an aggressive phone call, all followed by a dark cloud.

But this evening was great! I had my first lesson at TVU – a 45-minute which somehow lasted for an hour and a half. My tutor is great – really easy to talk to and interesting. And he seemed to like my music and gave me some really interesting feedback – some very interesting ideas not just fluffy cheerfulness. It does seem, though, that TVU is a little uncertain as to what this course actually is… well, I guess we’ll work it out as we go along. Sounds like the weekly 2-hour Composition Workshop that TVU runs for their degree students may be included in the parcel though, and quite probably access to the library too. Woot! All in all, a joyous start and I’m really looking forward to carrying on. Huzzah!

Oh, and the violin piece continues to quietly improve. I think it’s nearly there… just a leeeetle more tweaking…

Tagged with: composition, learning, music | Add a comment

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

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.

Tagged with: blogging, composition, cooking, friends, ideas, learning, music, publishing, reading, research, study, tools, web | Add a comment

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.

Tagged with: experimenting, ideas, learning, music, study, tools | Add a comment

Feels like a wasted weekend, even though I know it isn’t. Today I finished the London Composers Forum secret project site – all that time with Drupal the other week has really paid off and I’m pretty pleased with the functionality I’ve been able to provide – secure logins, simple document workflow, inline images in rich text, document submission and storage – fun stuff!

But yet again, no music at all, which is getting a bit frustrating.

Also on the plus side, more painting today means that the new furniture should be able to be launched into place tomorrow, which will allow – AT LAST – the piano to return to its home in the study so I can actually use it.

So tomorrow I think I need to implement a new plan of attack – start organising my days better and make sure I’m getting stuff done. Think I need to sort myself out a bit. I suspect this weekend has been somewhat hijacked by the sudden appearance of what would pretty much be my perfect dayjob on the horizon. Which wouldn’t be a problem, if choosing to go for it didn’t mean abandoning the dream of not having a dayjob at all. Really not sure what to do. Going to think about it a bit more.

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Today’s been a bit of a washout (again) as far as real work is concerned – been too worried about the cyclone in Queensland to really focus properly. Not that I have friends or relations there or anything, but it’s more that friends of mine do – my cousin’s wife is a Townsville girl, to start with. But basically I’ve found sustained thought a little tricky today. I’m sure tomorrow will be better.

I did, however, achieve a couple of small but significant steps: I managed to get in touch with the person running the course at TVU, which ended up with me getting the answers I wanted to hear and finally submitting my application, so YAY! Hopefully next week I’ll have the trial lesson and we’ll see how that goes. I can’t wait, but at the same time I’m a bit nervous – I’m doing this because I want to push myself to learn more, to think outside the box I sometimes feel my musical brain has got a little stuck in, and while that’s exciting, it’s also a little bit scary.

I also (and this is much less impressive) finally called the bank. I’ve been trying to work out the details of my current account for a form I have to fill in and ended up horrifically confused, because the bank assigns so many account and customer numbers it’s hard to know which one is the right one, and on top of that, the account number sometimes appears with an additional digit at the start and sometimes not, and on top of THAT, it seems they changed the sort code for my account when Alliance + Leicester became Santander. Add in my pathological dislike of telephones and horror of automated phone systems, and you get some serious procrastination going on. But that’s over: I bit the bullet this afternoon and rang them up, negotiated my way through the mire of stupid options to find a real person who gave me the info I needed. Which is a HUGE relief. Words cannot express. Now I can proceed with the form and some other stuff that goes with it which will actually bring real live money into said current accout. Whee!

And I stewed some apples. With a little dark muscovado sugar, vanilla extract and cinnamon.

Tagged with: completion, composition, cooking, gtd, learning, music | Add a comment

This evening was the second of the London Composers Forum percussion workshops so I trekked out to deepest darkest Surrey for the evening. This evening we looked at snare drum basics – we were taught how to hold drumsticks properly (actually harder than it sounds) and do (very slow) one-stroke rolls, two-stroke rolls and paradiddles. Our tutor is very keen to demonstrate the difference between drummer thinking and other musicians’ thinking and so we did an exercise where he conducted, starting off in strict time and then introducing rubato – amazing how difficult it became to keep track of what was needed without the phrasing of a melody (or even an inner part) to guide. And of course with drums, there’s no fudging the timing like there is with a sustained note – it’s either on the beat, or it’s not. Very interesting. Tonight’s score-reading was Bartók, which was great. For some reason, I’ve never got around to listening to any of his music before – evidently, on tonight’s showing, he’s well worth listening to – going to make an effort there.

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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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This morning I was in Edinburgh. Then I sat on a train for several hours and then I was in London in the afternoon. Then I sat on another couple of trains and went to Surrey.

For tonight was the first of the London Composers Forum percussion workshops – every year they do a set of workshops for composers to learn about an instrument or some aspect of composing (last year’s, which I missed, was on the organ) which they then follow up with a project to write for that instrument. Anyway, this year’s is percussion, so three of us went along to our tame percussionist’s house where we were regaled with tea and chocolate biscuits and taught the basics of how to play the djembe and a little bit of African drumming. And there was some score-reading too: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which is always a hoot. It was a little random, but all in all, a good first session – very much looking forward to next week’s. Oh, and some sleep.

Got a fair bit of work done on the train back from Edinburgh at least – all the notes for the string quartet Pieces of Eight are now in Finale, so I just need to finish the layout, and I did a bunch more work on the orchestral arrangement too, although that’s not really feeling like it’s coming together yet.

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I spent pretty much the whole of today messing about with Drupal and pulling together the quote for the website I’m suggesting it for. Learnt quite a lot. Not least that 4 pages is stupidly long for a quote. Fortunately I managed to cull it a bit and get it down to 3 – two pages of itemised options, as the client requested, plus one explaining things like what Drupal is, about standards-compliant code and why I’m qualified to do the job. Plus: I did get to watch another four episodes of Dollhouse while I tinkered. And I made moussaka for dinner. And went for a walk (in the afternoon). No music whatsoever though

Tagged with: cooking, dayjob, learning, research, tools, video, walking, web | Add a comment