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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SUPER-frustrating day today. My phone decided yesterday that it would send every SMS out 3 times. This morning it upped the ante to 7 times so I sighed and sat down to see if I could do something about it. First step: clear off the disk and install the operating system upgrades that have been languishing for a week or so. Result? 14 copies of a single test SMS. In the end, after much inconclusive research, I backed up (as much as I could – seems Android doesn’t seem to have a proper backup system and all the ones in the app store seem flawed) and did a factory reset. Fortunately this seems to have fixed the problem, but I’m still reinstalling and tweaking settings and making sure everything’s set up the way I like it. Pluses: Android Market keeps track of what you’ve bought with your Google account and lets you just reinstall with no fuss. Quite nice having a clean disk again. Minuses: Helluva pallaver. Android Market doesn’t seem to keep track of the free apps you had, so I’m just trying to remember what those were and taking the attitude that if I can’t remember it, I probably wasn’t using it that much. The whole process has taken most of the day, with a despairing nap and quick round of Sim City on the iPad in between. No music achieved at all, which makes me tetchy and sad, given yesterday’s hard work setting up the desk. I did, however, listen in to Deutschlandradio’s Philipp Blume profile – some lovely music there. Damn shame mein Deutsch ist so schlecht I couldn’t understand anything that was being said so I am none the wiser as to which pieces I was listening to. Heigh ho. New music FTW at any rate.

Tomorrow I’m planning on going to the Gaugin exhibition at the Tate Modern – been feeling like I’m gradually sinking into a dark grey hole over the last couple of days – I guess with Durham having been so fun and intellectually stimulating and hanging out with wonderful new friends, being at home on my own with a huge and depressing to-do list and feeling a little lost with one of the pieces I’m working on, is just making me sad. So I think I need to take myself out and see something marvellous to shake my brain up and show it it CAN be perky even without the stimulus of Durham and lovely friends. I have also, tonight, ordered a bunch of books from Amazon – first-reading stuff for the opera! I’ve not really ordered from Amazon Marketplace sellers till recently, and never books, so I’m a little nervous, but hey! one of them was only going to be available second-hand anyway and at £0.01 (plus postage), who’s complaining?!

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Yet again this year I posted a rather ambitious list of creative goals for the new year. I’ve stopped doing “resolutions” – they always fail – so instead I prefer to focus on small-scale victories and try to gently guide myself to achieve them. So today I did a little guiding. Two of the big ones, which will be ongoing and probably affect a fair chunk of other stuff are helping Djelibeybi to sort out the study and to listen to one new or revisited work or album a month. These are the two I’ve started tackling today. I’m really happy with the start I’ve made too – the study thing does to a certain measure also include the bedroom – over the weekend we moved my white cabinet/bookshelf into the study to be a support for the printer, which gives a hole in the room’s furniture and a pile of books on the floor that formerly lived on top of the cabinet. So today I cleared off the top of the chest of drawers, got everything off the desk, cleaned them both, took my lamp out of the box it’s been languishing in since we moved in May, shredded some stuff, recycled a huge load of paper, sorted out what needed to be filed or scanned or otherwise processed in some way, fetched my desk chair out of the cupboard where it was stashed after the Christmas invasion and basically made everything nice and ready to be worked at. It’s still not 100% ready, but it’s a great deal closer to it than it has been for months. Still a lot of junk to be dealt with but now that it’s off the desk I’m hoping it can stay off.

For the listening I’ve been sampling a few random things the past couple of days in my listening for the new pieces I’m working on. Today was Ute Lemper – City of Strangers (which I didn’t even know I had) and the Michael Nyman Songbook, then (accidentally) moving on to Michael Torke’s Yellow Pages album from ever so long ago. And now I’m listening to a composer called Philipp Blume whose site I was directed to from a tweet by Lauren Redhead – not the sort of thing I normally gravitate to but I’m really rather enjoying it. I should start keeping that listening diary I said I would but I don’t really want to start a new book and not entirely sure how else to do it. Hmm. Also feel a bit of a prat writing sort-of reviews – I shouldn’t, really, because the aim of the exercise is to get more comfortable with really thinking about music and being able to talk about – and to listen more closely – but nevertheless, there it is. Will work on that.

I also made a chunky start on reworking Deconstruct: Point, line plane for chamber orchestra for the London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra’s call for scores which is due at the end of the month. Reasonably happy with the translations of the woodwind parts, but the piano bit isn’t working at all and I found myself getting in a muddle in Finale because of only being able to see half the staves at any given time, so instead I went out and got some proper orchestral-sized manuscript – going to have a go at doing this the old-fashioned way, then I’ll transcribe it into Finale. I think this should work well – while I don’t usually work with paper and pencil when I’m actually composing because I’m rubbish at working out what’s in my head if I can’t hear it as I write it down, it actually works well for me when I’m doing orchestration because I AM good at hearing tone colours in my head and imagining combinations of them. Seeing as the notes are done (although I may expand some bits later) this should be fine – looking forward to really getting started on this tomorrow.

And I made some biscuits. Nice to have a little something with one’s cup of tea.

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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 a pretty bad head-place since getting back from Portugal. Not entirely sure if it’s a case of the post-holiday glums or just the dismal snow-ridden weather and being cooped up after all the exercise, fresh air and intermittent sunshine of Lisbon. Possibly I need to tidy up and do some house-brightening. Maybe invest in some daylight bulbs to dispel a little of the gloom occasioned by the appalling lighting setup in this flat. What I wouldn’t give to be able to repaint and move all the lights into the middle of the room and get rid of the landlord’s heavy, big, dark furniture. Feeling a desperate need for COLOUR.

At any rate, today was a bit of a struggle. I had a physio appointment in the morning. She has given me a red theraband which which to work on my resistance exercises, which hopefully will make actually doing them a little easier. The pavements out there are pretty treacherous though – ice all over the place once you’re off the main roads – so after that I just went to the local shops to get some stuff for dinner, and also took advantage of the chance to pick up BBC Music Magazine and Classic FM magazine for their Christmas music cover CDs – both very good this year, although I think (as often happens) the BBC one is the more interesting, so if you’re contemplating them, that’s my recommendation Also treated myself to the Christmas issue of Jamie magazine, which has some yummy-sounding ideas in it.

This afternoon has been primarily spent battling the glums and not really prevailing. We pulled out the Christmas decorations and dressed the (tiny) tree, which was nice, but I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to fill the wide windowsills and our empty walls. Might need to sort out some of our posters which are languishing about the place and get them framed quickly. Our last house was tiny, so the only decoration needed to make the whole place seem Christmassy was the tree, a few wooden stockings along the mantlepiece and my marvellous Nisse in the bookcase.

But now, alas, we have huge spaces to fill, and even the addition of the new crazy robin isn’t enough to fill the void. Or perhaps to overcome the clutter that we haven’t yet found anywhere to store. Maybe bright coloured boxes for the clutter might help???

But I did finally do something constructive:

1. I made raspberry muffins

2. I worked a tiny bit on the quintet until Finale crashed (after a save, thank heavens). I am delighted to be able to report that I’m still working on the additions I made just before we left for Portugal. I haven’t (yet) had to delete all that like I was doing on daily basis before. I think this is progress.

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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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Wrote some notes today. Not terribly many, but I did feel it was important to push myself through the barrier I’d ended up at. Still think I need to go through the score and pull out the main themes. Don’t know why I’m getting so much resistance to this, but I really should make myself do that tomorrow.

At any rate, I’d done a bit of thinking and ended up with a new blog post over on caitlinrowley.com, considering the vague vs the specific in tempo markings.

In other news, Gorecki died this morning. His Symphony No. 3 had a huge impact on me when I first heard it at uni, before the whole Dawn Upshaw recording took off like a rocket (see? sometimes I am ahead of the cool curve!). I remember being just astounded at the audacity of the man, to write something so incredibly simple and just pile it up and keep piling it up, even after you thought your heart would burst with the beauty of it. An amazing work. Of course, his other work contains some fabulous stuff too. Watching the tribute tweets, someone recommended this recording of some of his lesser known works, Henryk Gorecki: Life Journey, by Chamber Domaine, and it’s fantastic. I’ve added it to my Christmas list. So, rest in peace, Henryk Gorecki, you made my life a more beautiful place – thank you.

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Well not quite. Today marked the one-year anniversary of my accident, so I’ve been doing some thinking and basically come to the conclusion that it’s been a positive experience. And I’ve had a great day working that out. I started out by writing a blog post about the good stuff that’s happened because of the ankle injury, some of which is pretty huge and even, dare I say it, life-changing. I made a Facebook page for my composition because I’m about to have to make one, I think, for the London New Wind Festival so wanted to know what went into it (answer: not much) and see if I can make it work for me. I bopped (on one leg) around the house a little to the Blues Brothers soundtrack which I haven’t listened to in ages, then made myself a cheese sandwich and finally took myself off to the V&A to make a start on the Diaghilev & the Ballets Russes exhibition there.

And ‘make a start’ was the right term! VERY glad I had already decided to sign up as a member. I suspected it would be big and I wouldn’t get round it in one go. What I hadn’t suspected was that it would be VAST and that I wouldn’t get past the first room of the first section in today’s attempt. I seriously think, with the dodgy ankle, that it could take me eight trips to see the whole thing! So it looks like membership has been a sensible way to go.

Then on the way home, I pulled out the score of the first-ending version of the quintet and did a bit of analysis. Harmonically it’s a bit messier than I can fathom with any degree of musicological confidence but the conclusion I’ve come to is that the nice tail I thought I’d have to cut should actually be able to work. It all depends on what surrounds it and what it goes on to. The figuration comes from earlier parts and the melody there, which I’d thought just wasn’t going to work, also has its roots elsewhere in the piece. What’s new is that the harmony is straight major harmony whereas everything else has had a hearty dose of other-key dissonance. But it’s comforting. Now I just need to get in there and make it work!

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A frustrating day today. The quintet has basically stalled. I thought yesterday’s late-night work might have put it on the right track, but while it feels a little more solid, it’s also a little less exciting. Today I spent some time listening over to both versions and tinkering and not really getting anywhere and I’m just not quite sure how to proceed now. I suspect my brain is a little frazzled – it’s been feeling a bit overwhelmed by a houseful of people for about a week now, so it was good to have a quiet day in spite of frazzleness. After the failed attempt at writing, I applied Nico Muhly to my ears (Mothertongue) and caught up on his (fabulous) blog while I listened, the combination of which made me somewhat less twitchy. I didn’t quite get out to the V&A, which was my original plan, but I did eventually pull on my furry bear-jacket and head out to the shops, where I treated myself to the latest issue of BBC Music Magazine and a little chocolate. Then more Muhly (Speaks Volumes) on my return, all of which helped improve the frazzle immensely. Hoping for a more sane day tomorrow…

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