Yup, having settled on “Lucky Dip” as a name, and not having heard back from the owners of the Flickr image I wanted to use, I decided to draw my own, using the photo as a rough model. I drew the blackboard outline, a little bit of shadow on the back legs, the fringed border and the board itself in charcoal on half a sheet of A2 paper (I’ve been caught out by A2 paper before – far too big to fit on the scanner!), then pulled the scanned image (after cleaning up in Photoshop) over to the iPad to add colour and text. The final layout I did in Photoshop, after sending the coloured image back to the computer again.

I may tweak it later but as a first draft, I’m pretty pleased and I’ve put it up as the album image on SoundCloud.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve done any drawing, and longer still since I did any with actual paper rather than just the iPad, so this was a really fun project. The whole album’s feeling really real too now – there’s only one more track to come in, with two possible replacement tracks. Guess I should think about what order I want them all to go in too. At the moment they’re just in the order the recordings came in, but I’m thinking that shuffling them around might be more effective.

Today I received Kim Hickey’s recording of her piece, Flit, for flute. I am just amazed at all the great performances I’ve been getting for these pieces – so little time to prepare them and yet everyone’s done a really good job of capturing their piece and getting it recorded. I haven’t had to put on a stern face & tell anybody to try harder, nothing’s turned up sounding like it was recorded underwater in a bathtub in 1902. A couple of pieces have needed a touch of reverb to really bring out the tone of the instrument, and Kim’s recording needed a tiny bit of hiss reduced, but that’s been it, which has been both wondrous and a great relief because I’m no skilled recording engineer.

But I digress, here’s Kim’s piece:

I also posted an update of Alun’s tango – the original for some reason came through very very soft, so he’s adjusted his recording slightly and sent me a slightly louder one, which really makes a difference. It’s still fairly quiet, but there’s a bunch of tiny details in there which eluded me in the previous version.

Sam also sent me copies of some of his rejected takes for I Want It To Kill People. I found it absolutely fascinating to listen to the various approaches. They’re all good, but somehow the final take he settled on just interacts with the tape part a little more effectively than the other versions of the graphic score. What was particularly interesting was to hear the take on which he improvised, without the graphic score – that’s a really interesting piece. It’s not the piece that I Want It To Kill People became, but something else. It’s more enmeshed in the tape part – he’s taken some of the gritty sounds and used them as inspiration for the guitar part – whereas my vision of the piece was that the guitar was this soft and lovely thing with depths of aggression, Sam’s version is more like watching the soft and lovely guitar be corrupted by the aggressive tape part. Really fascinating. He’s also sent me just the guitar recording from the final version and I really think I will have a go at tweaking the tape part – there’s a blob of notes about a third of the way into the piece that really feel like a stumbling block, so I’m going to see if I can make them less intrusive.

So that’s RPM for today. No, the harp piece hasn’t happened yet. Yes, I’m hoping to get to it tomorrow. Today was full of client work and physiotherapist and – at the end – half of a wonderful concert by Joby Burgess at Wigmore Hall and a lovely chat with @stevegisby and his girlfriend. I managed to get there for the end of it (thank you, Central Line – not!) and got to hear Gabriel Prokofiev’s ‘Fanta’ from Import/Export and Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, movements II and III played on a MIDI xylophone, which was interesting, although I think I prefer the electric guitar version I have on CD in Sydney. Very much enjoyed the Prokofiev piece though – inventive, fun and very much a serious piece of music, in spite of the amusement factor of being played on glass bottles of Fanta. I did wonder, though, how long it’ll still be able to be played for – what happens when they no longer manufacture glass bottles of drink??? I guess it’s just a piece that embraces its own ephemerality.

I seem to have come out of the day with a Proper Job too. And the best sort of proper job – mobile web dev, working from home, for about a week, for a client who used to be a colleague when I was at LBi and who has now set up her own UX business for financial services companies. Really looking forward to this one.

One day to go. One recording to come in. This time tomorrow night, RPM 2012 will be complete!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A quick post from me – I’ll be back on RPM work tomorrow – but today’s seen another two recordings come in, incredibly different from each other, and I’m really very excited by them.

Finally we get hear Sam’s slide guitar + tape piece, I Want It To Kill People (for the story behind the title, pop over to the SoundCloud page!). I really love what he’s done with it – he’s managed to take my rather brutal tape part and convey what I was hoping for – the idea of something soft and gentle that has great depths of aggression. I’m not so pleased with my own work on the tape part. I think I may go back over this once the project is done and pull back at least the volume in a couple of places, possibly the grittiness too – the solo instrument really needs more room to speak. But while I think *I* could have done better on this one, I’m pleased with the piece as a whole – it was a big experiment for me and I’m really enjoying what Sam’s done with it.

The second piece is Alun’s A Tiny Tango for 6-string bass guitar. I was very worried about this one – I am a complete guitar novice, and writing something for solo guitar which has a couple of different levels of stuff going on did feel rather ambitious and I half-expected Alun to send it back with red corrections all over it! However, he’s been able to play the whole thing, which I’m amazed by, and I’m delighted with the result. I particularly like the percussive sounds + harmonics section about 2/3 of the way through.

And Alun has very kindly offered to write some performance notes – and tablature! – to help guide other bassists through its “Twister-like bits” (Alun’s phrase ), which will be brilliant – and hopefully I can learn from them too.

And now to bed – tomorrow I’ll be hard at work on a piece for lever harp!

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Well, this is all very stop-start. And time is pressing on. I’m getting a bit worried about my own personal deadline, to tell the truth. My plan was to have all pieces written and sent out before my friend arrives next Thursday, so all the performers would have a full week or more with their pieces, and I’d be able to have a lovely chilled time with my friend. And if I could get back the week I spent concussed, I’d be calm. As it is I’m a little stressed, but I’m just going to go full speed ahead, and see what happens.

This evening I’ve been back at work on Sam’s graphic score for the slide guitar piece. I think I’m sensing a pattern here – the last piece I wrote for real instruments + tape took me forever to do the score too and I think it’s because I really don’t like transcribing random sounds and hoping I note them in the right place and that others can interpret my squiggles for what they are. Yes, procrastination has been hard at work here.

However, this evening I’ve finally got a rough first draft down of the tape part. I’ve tried to keep it pretty simple, noting mostly where notable things happen. I think I’ll need to put in time markings too, to give some context, then I need to work on the guitar bit, which I kind of have in my head but just need to get down on paper/iPad. This initial version I’ve done on iPad because rubbing out is easy when I get it wrong I need to work out a neater way of dealing with the audible text moments though, in particular. But just so you can see that this piece isn’t actually a myth, here’s the work-in-progress snap:

There’s a chance I may need to cut it up a bit and spread it out some more, but I just needed to get something down. Mostly spreading it out would allow for more detail in the guitar part, so I need to think a bit about how much detail I want to put in there. This is mostly new territory for me, both technically and stylistically. I guess that’s why it’s taking so long.

The other exciting development today is that Jenni sent me her preliminary recordings of her oboe piece, Nest! SO exciting to hear the piece taking shape. I don’t think I’ve ever had real performer feedback on a piece while it’s still so fresh from the writing, so this is fantastic.

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Yesterday was notable for getting very little done on RPM. I started trying to write a piece for piano, then when that proved too much for me, switched to trombone which was equally difficult. All of which eventually culminated in me taking myself off to the Emergency Room at Hammersmith Hospital where the doctor said that, yes, I had managed to properly concuss myself but that it wasn’t serious. I will be without my brain for a couple of days apparently. Talk about appalling timing! I don’t HAVE a couple of days to spare right now! End of the month, sure! But now? Aaargh!

Anyway, there’s nothing much to be done about it, so I’ve been trying to do some thinking and listening and get things sorted in my head for when I’m capable of stringing notes together again. I’ve come up with an idea for the slide guitar piece which is a bit of a variation on the one I didn’t tell you anything about a couple of days ago. I think this may work, assuming I can battle Logic to do what I want. The inspiration for this one is one of Josh Davis’ Praystation machines. That is all I will say

I sent off the first email to my lovely commissioners, just to wave and send contact details and let them know what’s on the final list of instruments, really. Now I need to work out whether there’s an easy way I can set up for them to send over their recordings. Will investigate whether I can do this via Dropbox or Box.net first, then might have to resort to FTP. Wonder if I can do a website form that will FTP a file to a designated spot. That would be nice & easy. Hmm.

In other news, I spent about half an hour today switching over my comments system here and on caitlinrowley.com to use Disqus instead of Intense Debate. Intense Debate’s been bugging me because the layout onscreen is pretty messy, although the options are quite good, and to clear out the spam folder I need to deactivate the plugin, which is just plain stupid. My friend Jen has Disqus on her Tumblr blog and in using it this morning I was impressed how tidy the experience was, so I’ve shifted. And hopefully it will make commenting a more joyful experience. In doing so I discovered that at the moment I seem to working to a ratio of 30 minutes work to 3 hours napping. Productivity joy.

Hoping I’ll be able to start thinking more in terms of notes tomorrow…

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Today has been filled with dramatic events but, alas, not really a lot of work.

The first dramatic event was that I found out that Carrion Comfort has been chosen as one of 10 (out of 16) pieces to be workshopped by London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra on my birthday, 31 March. I can’t wait to hear what the orchestra makes of it – hope it’s not too hard…

Secondly, I made some little tweaks to Nest and sent it off to the performer. She had a question about trills which resulted in needing to clarify the notation a little, so I did that in the evening. Hopefully it’s at its last version now. I’ve laid it out ready for binding as I’m thinking of offering the participants of my little commission project the option to receive a bound copy of all the scores created. That might be fun.

Thirdly, I managed to concuss myself. Fortunately just a little bit – hit my head rather hard on the badly designed cupboard that juts out with a sharp corner directly above the dishwasher – but it effectively wiped out the afternoon for real work as I felt quite woozy and couldn’t make my eyes focus properly for more than about 5 seconds at a time. Seems to be mostly better now. Just feeling a little fragile.

So, counter to the plan, I wasn’t able to start on either the piano/organ or harp piece this afternoon. But I didn’t want to waste time either, so I did a bunch of listening and came up with a plan for the slide guitar piece. I won’t reveal it here because I’m running it past the performer to see if he’s cool with the concept but it was good to be devoting some time to thinking about that one as I suspect I may get totally caught up in the intricacies of writing for slide guitar if I try to write a fully-notated piece, but doing something that’s 100% graphic score seems a bit of a cop-out.

I also found, and attempted to apply for a job at Collaborative Arts Network, except that when I clicked through to apply it said the job wasn’t available, even though the deadline was 14 February, and I completely failed to find current contact details for them anywhere on the web – the best I could do was an email address, which bounced. Apart from that I found the Director on LinkedIn. He may be my only chance! Of course, it’s entirely possible that they just found someone they already knew, but it does seem odd, so I feel I should pursue it.

Lights are still out across half the flat – D went to Robert Dyas today but didn’t understand that Djeli wanted him to buy fuse wire as opposed to just fuses, so I have to go out tomorrow to get the right stuff and take the fuses back. Hopefully tomorrow evening there will be light.

Oh, and yesterday’s bread which had seemed such a disaster turned out to be nothing of the sort. True, it’s not as light and airy as one had hoped, but it’s still perfectly edible and delicious. Looking forward to having another go with this flour (Dove’s Farm Malthouse)… when it’s not snowing!

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After a lovely day in Bath, this evening kind of fell apart and everything just became horrible again. However, I did have a couple of breakthroughs nevertheless:

1. Dodged a too-much-work bullet by managing to send off a substitute piece which actually doesn’t need any work done to it for it to be performer-ready, so hopefully that will be appropriate for the concert for which Shimmer (9 mins) was too long

2. Wrote a few more notes

3. In listening through to the piece again, I’m really starting to understand what my tutor’s been saying about adding in harmony. I do want it to be texturally light, but there’s just too many bare octaves. The doublings are good, it’s just that there needs to be a little body in there too. Not entirely sure how I’ll tackle this as harmony is SO not my strong suit. It’s good to have taken a step back from the piece though and to hear it with fresh ears so that I understand – I’m listening to it and hearing what’s really there, rather than my idea of what’s really there.

Tomorrow is my last day before I go to Spain for a brief holiday, so I’m hoping I can get some real work done on it. I also need to think about what I’ll be able to do while in Spain. I think taking the laptop is overkill, so I might review the apps I have and check out the App Store for new alternatives and just see how I can approach what’s there. The latest part of the piece is increasingly melodic/contrapuntal (as opposed to using brief fragments in various permutations, which is what the opening is) so maybe I can do something with that.

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Feeling the insanity coming flooding back this morning until I quelled it with Terry Fox’s wonderful The Labyrinth Scored for the Purrs of 11 Cats – it’s just amazing what 46 minutes of purring on repeat will do for your mental health.

It evidently did me some good though because after a couple of rounds of Labyrinth and finally getting the house to myself, I’ve been able to have another listen to the piece. And I ADDED A NOTE. How sad that this seems like progress. I think I’m stopping there though because my brain feels like it’s on the brink of overwhelm and Finale is driving me insane because it’s stuttering on every other note, so I think the time really has come to do the full system reinstall I’ve been threatening for a month. I am therefore now in the middle of manic backups and thinking about how best to organise my system when I redo it. Now that I’ve upgraded to Parallels 6, I’m going to see if I can ditch Bootcamp, for a start. I pretty much never use it, and hopefully the improvements to Parallels will mean I can run some of my PC games inside a virtual machine, which should free up some disk space. Looking forward to a shiny new system!

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Well, I’ve been away from here a while, but I really do need to get back into the swing of some creative work, so today I’ve signed myself up for Creative Pact 2011. Last year I used Creative Pact to get most of the work done on my site caitlinrowley.com, which was a fantastic experience and really helped me plough through a bunch of stuff that needed to be done to help promote my music.

This year I’m working towards finishing off the orchestral piece I’ve been working on for about the past 6 months, Carrion Comfort. It’s been a slow process and I’ve been working on documenting it too over on the other site – have a look at the posts if you’re interested (you can also sign up to the mailing list if you want to get them right into your inbox) – and here I’m planning to track what I’m working on and documenting the documenting of the whole process, seeing as how I’ve committed to making the development of the work somewhat public already.

I’ve been going through a bit of a rough mental patch lately, though, and haven’t even been able to make myself listen to any music at all, far less my own, so I’m starting slowly with getting back into this. Today I listened to the work I had already done on this piece. I was happy to find that I feel that it’s all hanging together pretty well, although I think I need to do some more work on the orchestration – it feels… patchy. Might have to dig out some orchestral recordings, do a bit of reading and a bit of experimenting to sort that out. I guess it’s not hugely surprising, given that this is the first real orchestral piece I’ve written – it’s all a bit trial and error…

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I spent most of this morning manically studying for my Life in the UK test (Friday morning – it loometh!) which in itself is not in the least bit creative. Quite the opposite, in fact, as it’s all kind of rote-learning stuff. Except that I’m absolute rubbish at rote learning and always have been. I still don’t know my times tables – have to add up smaller multiples in my head. So instead I’ve been forced to be super creative in how I look at the tedious statistics and dates and come up with things like:

7 out of 10 people who say they have a religion are Christian (in the UK, obv): If I take 7 away from 10, I get 3, which is of course the Holy Trinity

646 constituencies: All politicians are liars. Lying is bad. 666 is the number of the beast but there have to be a couple of politicians who at least are trying, so I’ll take a couple off the middle of the pack.

Insane, eh? But somehow it seems to be working, to some extent at least. I think the process of inventing the mnemonic is making it stick as much as the mnemonic itself. Certainly in the case of the constituencies… I’d have been stuffed if I thought politicians actually had our best interests at heart!

So that saw me through most of the day, including all the way to Euston and back, seeing Djelibeybi off again – this time to Manchester. He’s home tomorrow, but it was nice to get out and see something of the world, even if it was just an assortment of grotty tube stations.

This evening has been a riot of learning. I started out doing some listening when I got in (Arvo Pärt’s Tabula rasa and Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica) because I suddenly realised that I’ve got another composition lesson in 2 days’ time and I haven’t done any work at all – got a bit too comfy with the whole 3-weeks-between-lessons schedule and now need to pull myself together. Tabula rasa provided some rather nice minor revelations, especially structurally – hoping to pick up the score for that before Composer Workshop tomorrow, but the RVW left me a little unsettled. I’ve always liked that piece, but I guess I never really listened closely to it before and structurally it leaves me feeling rather adrift. Possibly the recording I was listening to, possibly seeing the score might make some sense of it, but at any rate, stuff was learned, I think.

Then after that I had booked myself in to sit in on a couple of live sessions from the Authority Rules conference I’ve signed up for. Djeli and I have a bit project going with a friend of ours that is going to require some proper promotion in a few months’ time so this conference on content marketing turned up at pretty much just the right time. The first of today’s sessions was on online lead generation and it was pretty interesting – some stuff I already knew, but also some I needed to be reminded of, some new takes on old concepts and so on. It was a good session and well worthwhile. But it was totally blown out of the water by the second session, which was on Search Engine Optimisation. Now, I do know a bit about SEO – I kind of have to because of my dayjob. I know quite a bit about how Google assesses the content in a page to determine if it’s a good fit for a given search query and I try to apply what I know in my sites (not so much in this one – mostly because I’m lazy, but also because I have more important and generally useful sites, I think, to focus on). What I hadn’t really considered in much detail at all though was the idea of SEO strategy, of developing content and working various channels to get stuff out there and actually circulating, as a way of building audience. That’s a very simplistic way of putting it, but safe to say, it was a bit of a revelation to me, the detail it went into and I have come away with all sorts of ideas and plans from both sessions. And a very tired brain that felt like Swiss cheese.

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