Well, it’s the final day of my advent project, officially, although I think that was really yesterday. I was feeling so burnt out this morning that I decided to take a bit of a break today and instead of panicking and exhausting myself over the two big pieces I haven’t finished yet, decided to focus on getting the house in order a bit in preparation for the coming term so that I can go back to work tomorrow like a little beaver without having to worry about wading through messes. I also did some listening, which I actually enjoyed today – Faure piano Nocturnes and John Adams’ Gnarly Buttons which I enjoyed more than at the London Sinfonietta performance I went to a little while back. So! Today I have…

• struck the Christmas decorations and put them all back in their boxes (and realised I’d totally forgotten about my gorgeous fat robin, who would have made a big difference to the festive feel somewhere) because it’s 12th night and to leave them up would mean bad luck for the whole year
• set up Roomba in the bedroom so I can start cleaning that without needing to clean it, if you get my drift, rather than him sitting in the doorway to the study gathering dust and getting in the way because there’s nowhere convenient up here to plug him in
• done gargantuan quantities of washing up
• changed the sheets and doona cover
• put up the remaining shelves in the large bookshelf (which hadn’t been done because I was waiting on a second round of those nubby things that go in the holes to support the shelves to arrive)
• set up reminders in rememberthemilk so that I don’t let my finances get so crazily out of date as before
• taught Djelibeybi the pomodoro technique (which he then didn’t use)
• started tidying the study – which is now a worse mess than ever before. Of course.
• uploaded a bunch of recent photos to Flickr
• and made my lunch for tomorrow (all bar cutting up an avocado, which as we all know, should be done at the last possible minute)

If you’re reading this, then I guess you’ve been following at least part of the past month. I do hope it hasn’t been too dull! Happy New Year to you all – see you in the new term!

Tagged with: christmas, listening, mentalhealth, organisation, tidying | Add a comment

Feeling kind of low today. I suddenly realised I’ve done basically no listening all holiday and I think that’s why I’m having so much trouble finishing Fear of Falling – I’m cannibalising my own brain. I need fresh ideas to enliven mine and push the piece home. Ansel Adams is also struggling. I’ve got a sort of a plan, but no direction. I really really like the opening but I don’t know what I think of the second bit. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I hate it. To a certain extent I feel I should push on with what I’ve got and see if I can make it work, if only because of the limited time available.

I’m also starting to feel a little burnt out, which is NOT GOOD as I’m about to dive into a new term, so I’ve been trying to be a bit gentle with myself today. I suspect this is a combination of frustration over the composing not going well, hyper-awareness that I haven’t finished everything I wanted to do these holidays (haven’t even started some of them!) and just general worry. Not to mention lingering last vestiges of cold and being generally coldy-tired all the time for the past week. I did a pomodoro’s worth of work on Fear of Falling and tidied some stuff up but didn’t really make any progress, and half a pomodoro on Ansel Adams (now nearly to 3’50″). I almost never only do a partial pomodoro, but I was feeling just mentally exhausted and it seemed better to stop, blog and head bedwards than to push myself too much.

I did do some listening – Schnittke’s Hymns and a Charlie Mingus album, both from the Orchestration – Medium listening list. I’m beginning to think that I lack the gene for jazz. It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just that mostly, unless it’s super-straightforward trad, I don’t really GET it. I know at least two people on Twitter who, should they read this, will be sitting up straight and shouting “WHAT???” at their computers about now – please don’t unfriend me! I’m trying to learn! The first few tracks of the Mingus were just way over my head but the rest of the album I quite enjoyed, even though mostly I didn’t have a clue what was going on. I get quite uncomfortable when I can’t feel the structure of a piece, and it was like that for me, in spite of appreciating the performers’ skill and the permutations that were happening. It was an interesting experience though.

I did some knitting while I listened too, because I didn’t want to get too het up about not falling asleep, or too manic about noting down every little thing I did or didn’t like. I just wanted to get some different sounds into my head (also with the aim of Fear of Falling not stopping me sleeping tonight like it did last night!)

I think the burnout-feeling is best tackled by focusing on what I *have* achieved and on how the other bits will fit in once term starts up again, so:

• Fear of Falling is very nearly complete. As we’re only supposed to have the short score done and a start to the orchestration, I’m not far off the mark. Maybe I should start the orchestration and leave the end alone for a few days. Needs to be completed by 4 February.
• Ansel Adams: I don’t actually know where I’m supposed to be at for the first week back, but I need to submit a form saying what doublings I want to use by Thursday, and the whole thing is due in on 1 February. I really need to complete mine a little earlier though because I don’t speak Sibelius and will need to hire someone to translate for me. This is all a bit scary. On the plus side, with the piece now at nearly 4 minutes, it’s effectively halfway through the duration it needs to be.
• String quartet: it’s progressed a bit, but this is a long-term project, as I told Stephen at my last lesson – I’m having to learn so much that I just can’t dash this one off
• Fourth Plinth: Still waiting to hear back from my performers, some of whom don’t seem to be checking their email over the holidays… but I have an idea. May be a graphic score of some sort to speed up the actual piece creation – due to be rehearsed 1 week after we get back, performed (I think) a couple of days after that. Need to spend some time with this tomorrow.
• Rude Health experimental piece: Oh God *cries* This may be a graphic score too, but I wanted to create a tape part for it as well. Being performed on 25 January (come along and see what happens!)
• Carol: not finished, but hasn’t got a set performance deadline like most of the others
• Twombly project: Feeling pretty confident about this. Hoping to run my ideas past my supervisor sometime late next week, then I need to focus on writing up the proposal…

So there it is, some good, some panic, some stuff that can safely be deferred a little. I should probably add that I also safely negotiated Christmas, painted the bedroom floor so it feels like a real room, started fixing up my finances which had got way out of control and so on. Didn’t succeed in finishing the two client projects I’ve had on the go and really really need to get done, but it’s been difficult to find time, brainspace and getting these together at a moment when the computer isn’t chucking a wobbly and making itself unusable has proven to be very difficult. Should try to tackle these tomorrow so they don’t lurk too much into the new term.

In cheerier news, Djelibeybi brought me home a present yesterday! We’ve been hunting high and low for my lovely Derwent Coloursoft pencils, but alas they seem to have vanished in an odd box somewhere and it’s been really frustrating me. He called me from Cass Art yesterday to say they had pencils on sale, but they didn’t have Coloursofts (I’d been thinking of getting just a set of 12 to tide me over). He said they had Inktense ones and I made a drooling noise but then pulled myself together and said that I’ve been trying to justify those for the past couple of years and continually failing, so no – and then he brought them home for me as a present! What a lovely lad! So I now have a gorgeous set which contains 22 Inktense pencils plus some Inktense colour blocks (basically, they’re like the lead part of the pencil but in a pastelly block) and bits and pieces like pencil sharpener, eraser, holders for the colour blocks and a sandpaper block for reshaping points. What joy! And the colours really are fabulous. I’ve been brightening up my mind-maps a bit with them

Tagged with: composition, drawing, knitting, listening, mentalhealth | 1 comment

Recently I read a new article by Chris Brogan entitled Bravery is Choice. In this article Chris makes the statement that:

The opposite of bravery isn’t fear. The opposite of bravery is surrender.

I think this is an apposite statement on which to focus as I begin to plan for 2013. This year, I feel, it’s not so appropriate to do a list of creative goals like I usually do because most of that stuff will be driven by my degree. Instead, what I really REALLY need to do this year, is plan for the future.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve come to realise that for me, web development is my surrender in this statement. It’s the easy path to fall back on because I know I can generally get a well-paid job doing it for a while. But every time I do that, I kill off a little more of my composing brain and it makes it harder and harder to get back into it.

But once I’ve finished my Masters in September, I need to find some sort of work and start bringing in some money. Djelibeybi has been amazing, supporting me these past few years, and especially through the degree, and now it’s time I contributed something more than I have been financially so that he has a chance to explore some stuff he really wants to do too.

The plan looks something like this:

MUSIC

Performances and composing goals are going to be taken care of by the degree – Trinity Laban doesn’t consider a piece written until it’s performed, and what I write will to a certain extent be determined by what competitions come up, what performance opportunities, what people I meet as the year goes on.

Once the degree is done, I want to start work on another project, to try to keep up the level of work I’ve reached during the degree. This may be something to do with learning Max/MSP or PD. I also want to find myself a piano teacher and make a concerted effort to really get to grips with functional harmony so I can be an effective teacher later on, should the opportunity arise. The really critical thing though, is to KEEP GOING with the composing, not collapse into a black hole like I did after my BMus.

HOME & TRAVEL

Renovation of the house just keeps plodding along. I personally am not currently looking much beyond getting the kitchen up and running. What needs to happen will happen in its own sweet time, as the whole bathroom nightmare has clearly demonstrated.

For travel, I can’t see much happening, really. Up until September I’ll have too much work for anything more than a weekend break, and my parents are coming in September then staying till early November. Maybe a Christmas holiday? Maybe (if money allows) a Christmas shopping trip to New York? That would be fun. Heh. EuroMillions gods? I’m ready for your call!

HEALTH

I’ve found it almost impossible to keep to my health goals in 2012, due to injuries, stress, lack of cooking facilities and time to exercise. However, I HAVE to get my weight under control and to do this I need to be brave and choose to exercise, make the effort to cook healthy food, and have healthy snacks around. This is non-negotiable, and I need to work out how to do this around everything else that’s going on – I can’t wait for a quiet patch because there’s never going to be one and my health is suffering because of the weight gain. Plus the added incentive of ‘I really don’t want to look like a blob when I get up to introduce my graduation concert!’ so:

• More water (I’ve bought a filter jug for my studio to help with this one)
• More wholegrains/fibre
• More fruit and veg
• Less bread/only homemade once we have a kitchen
• Less dairy
• Less sugar
• Actually do some exercise

BUSINESS

I need to get back to my business development activities while studying. Not so much in the next couple of months while there are classes, but I think that I need to make self-promotion a part of my composing time after classes stop at Easter. Firstly because it’s necessary if I’m to raise my profile and start to earn any money at all from composing; Secondly because it’ll help keep me sane over this 5-month period of intense composition.

I need to come up with a plan to bring in regular income – can I think of any way to use my composing? could I teach… something? can I think of anyone I could approach for a part-time role using my web skills that would also allow me to keep up my musical activity? Grants? Residencies? Can I create any opportunities that would help in this respect?

I really enjoy working freelance and would love to make that my part-time living, but I know I have a tendency to get distracted and not move on with things as fast as I should – I need to focus some attention on being more organised.

OTHER STUFF

New laptop: This was on last year’s list, but this year it’s become critical. This poor beastie – now 6 years old – is on the verge of giving up the ghost entirely. It’s limping along now – it won’t last me more than a couple of months, I’m guessing, so this has to happen as soon as we can find the money to make it happen.

Update: Someone retweeted an article from Forbes a few minutes ago, Ten Resolutions the Most Successful People Make and then Keep. It’s an interesting article, and not just applicable to business types. I think I may adopt no. 2 at least!

Tagged with: dayjob, health, home, mentalhealth, music, organisation | Add a comment

I probably shouldn’t write much now because it’s late and I’ve got a truckload of work to do on the merry morrow, but I’ve been meaning to update here for a week and just haven’t got to it till now.

The workload is proving as daunting as I thought it would – and I haven’t even started all my classes yet! Eeep! On the plus side, there’s no class I’m disliking yet – even Research Methods is interesting and enlightening, which it really wasn’t in my undergrad degree. It’s amazing me though how much things have changed since I did my BMus on the study materials front – back then, if I wanted to listen to something I didn’t own (which was most things) and it wasn’t on the radio, I had to go into the uni library and listen to it here. Now I scour Naxos Music Library (free through college) and Spotify (half-price Premium access via my National Union of Students card) and only the most obscure repertoire requires dealing with actual physical media. Back then, finding articles meant wading through issue after monthly issue of Music Index to see if anything was under the heading you were hunting for, and RILM was a directory of abstracts with no indication as to how we students, in Australia, could ever see the dissertations it referenced. Now, Music Index is nowhere to be seen – a quick search on JSTOR returns not only references but entire articles – and you can search the full text too, not just the categorisations they’ve been indexed under! RILM similarly contains full text of a bunch of things as well as the abstracts, and apparently we can ask for an inter-library loan for stuff that the library doesn’t hold.

I guess being in Europe is a help too – part of our Research Methods session this week (on using the reference resources, particularly the online ones) was talking about how to find things in various collections and libraries, which may be in other parts of the country or in other countries, and emphasising that we should call before we go. It probably seems a silly thing to people who’ve grown up here, but for an Australian it’s “OMG, you just call and then you get to see original manuscripts by people who’ve been dead for centuries??? OMGOMGOMG”

I am gradually whittling down a topic for Research Methods and reading the book recommended (but not required) for the course, The Craft of Research, is helping me so much. What a fabulous book! I highly recommend it if you’re researching anything in a systematic manner, and especially if you’re in the position of having to come up with essay topics of your own devising, at whatever level. The section on determining a topic to write about is unexpectedly brilliant.

My composing year is gaining shape too. My tutor seemed to like my one-note piece and has asked me to expand it into a 2-3 minute piece suitable to play in a concert for next week (I’m allowed to use another note or two, not just my D as in the first version). We talked about what I want to work on this year and have decided that in addition to the song cycle I’m planning and the harp project I’ve signed up for, I’m going to work on a 15-minute string quartet and seek out some other ensembles to write for too.

I’m having a little trouble mentally juggling the work too – There are so many bits that it’s hard to know where to start – between the slow bits of reading and listening and the urgent homework assignments and having to juggle things that need me to hear stuff (quite a lot, even some of the reading needs this) with when the builders are here or Djelibeybi’s doing something noisy on the house, as well as making sure I take some time off, but not so much that nothing gets done and still needing to finish off a couple of website projects I didn’t manage to finish before the start of term and so on, is rather doing my head in. I’ve booked an appointment with one of the Student Services people to talk about how best to manage my time so I don’t go completely mad or miss getting things done.

Tomorrow’s plan is to finish one of the websites, harmonise a bassline which I need to score for string orchestra later in the week (due Thursday) and do some reading and/or listening. Given that the last harmonisation took me 6 hours, I guess I should head to bed so I can make an early start tomorrow!

Tagged with: composition, learning, library, listening, mentalhealth, music, organisation, reading, research, study | Add a comment

Thinking about whether to start this up as a daily thing again. Might be good for tracking my progress and thinking with my Masters degree, but I don’t want it to get in the way. Obviously, between degree work and renovation, I think it’s pretty much a given that I’ll be doing something creative – or at least constructive! – every day. Going to think about this. Might be good for the first few weeks at least – I know there’ll be a lot to process because there already has been and classes haven’t even started yet!

Tomorrow is my first proper class, a postgrad seminar. Not sure what to expect for that one. I’ve ordered the book it’s been suggested we own, Audio Culture by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner. I borrowed it from the library last week and have read the first 5 readings in it – including passages by Varèse, Feldman, Russolo and Cowell – which are forming an interesting argument. Someone else has requested this copy though, so I figured I might as well buy it because it’s not a book to rush through. It’s more of the ‘read a bit, think a bit, re-read’ ilk.

Today – as so many days – hasn’t gone quite to plan. Instead of finishing two client sites, I have started a new blog. Unintentional, I promise! I kind of got to a point today where I realised that this temporary non-kitchen thing isn’t going away any time soon, and if I’m to cope, I need to view it as an adventure instead of an inconvenience. So I’ve started a blog, Cook Without A Kitchen, which I’m hoping will help me track successes and failures that might be helpful for others in a similar boat, and which I’m also hoping will encourage me to try a bunch of new recipes and really push the capabilities of the limited kit I’ve got.

However, Ladders of Escape is continuing to build itself into a fairly substantial piece. I’m now partway through the second movement and the whole thing runs for about 4 1/2 minutes as of this afternoon. I’m back working with my usual methods and it’s all moving a lot better. It’s interesting though that I can see correspondences between the first and second movements, even though they’ve been written in such different ways.

Tagged with: blogging, composition, creativity, mentalhealth, music, thinking, writing | Add a comment

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…

Tagged with: completion, composition, editing, gtd, health, ideas, mentalhealth, music | Add a comment

Well, that’s what I’m hoping. I’m quite pleased with this year’s list. I think that pretty much everything on it actually is attainable over the course of the year, unlike last year’s which was much too ambitious. A lot of what’s on it is stuff that is already in progress, about to be in progress or has a firmish deadline at least, so much of it doesn’t have to be started from scratch but is more about tying up loose ends left over from 2011.

September looms large this year – I am determined to be healthier and more organised before I start my Masters to give me the best possible chance to do well at it – this involves getting a healthy balance between freelance work, composition and rest time really working so I can clear old projects, bring in some money but keep my mental & physical health intact. I am most emphatically planning to not injure myself in any way more serious than perhaps a papercut.

2012 is, most significantly, all about new beginnings and new directions. There’s a lot of change going to be happening – going back to uni, (hopefully) buying our first house & moving out of London, developing my freelance business to be (again, hopefully) able to at least cover my basic expenses.

So without further ado, here is The 2012 List.

Music

• 3 performances in 2012 – one more than I set myself for 2011, getting ambitious here 1. Three Whitman songs performed in Limerick in April Alas, the brass quintet concert in which Knots and Mirrors was to be premiered had to be cancelled and while Carrion Comfort was shortlisted for LCCO’s end of year concert, it didn’t make it to the final selection, so there’s only been 1 performance this year. However, unlike previous years, I’ve also had 1 whole album of works performed live, and created a major work which was also recorded by live performers along with MIDI parts, so I’m calling this one a win.
  
• Complete all piece requests from 2011 before start of uni term in September – alto flute piece for Carla Rees (due spring), flute piece for Nicole Camacho, recorder quartet for Pink Noise, Pieces of Eight arrangement for Shana Norton. Uh. No. I did try. But no.
  
• New score downloads implemented for caitlinrowley.com. Nope.
• Blog at least once a month on caitlinrowley.com January – check, February – check… I’m pretty pleased with my blogging rate overall, even if it didn’t end up being an orderly schedule.
  
• Work out how, and apply for funding with Pink Noise to (hopefully) achieve first paid commission. Not yet. Still planning on doing this.
• Keep up flute practice Surprisingly, there’s been a fairly significant component of playing in the degree, so for the latter part of the year, this has definitely been met. I’ve even joined an improv group at college!
• Start a Masters degree!
• Finish Carrion Comfort for LCCO deadline YESSSSSSS!
• Write at least 1 piece for a call for scores & send it in Mini Opera!
• Take 2 pieces along to LCF WiP/WiT sessions for feedback. Nope
• Schedule in (and DO) one listening session a week. Take notes to make sure I’m getting the most out of it. Didn’t really succeed with this, but I did listen to a lot more new music this year (even before starting the degree) than I have been wont to, so I’m pleased with my progress on this.
• Get back to counterpoint/harmony study – schedule as part of weekly plan. NEED to make some progress on this before September. Fail.
• Put at least 2 pieces up on SoundCloud in MIDI versions. If I’m being specific, I failed at this – I don’t think I posted a single MIDI file to SoundCloud this year. However, as I’ve posted 11 live recordings over the course of Lucky Dip and the mini opera, I’m calling this a win.
• Finish laying out 2×4 & send to Christopher D. Lewis. Still on the to-do list

Home & Travel

• Move out of London
• Set up my own study before the summer
• Try at least 5 recipes from “I Know How to Cook”: 6-Jan-2012: Coq au vin. Have also done the Venison-roast lamb but I can’t remember the date.
• Try at least 3 recipes from new French baking cookbook: 6-Jan-2012: Galette des rois, incl. crème frangipane; 8-Jan-2012: Princesses (chocolate meringues) – not actually a success, but definitely tried. Will try again. 15-Jan-2012: Chaussons au pommes – YUM!
• Travel: EuroDisney, Spain, Australia, weekend trip somewhere?
• Work on creating a good, reliable multigrain loaf, in case of (suspected) bakery dearth in Gravesend: 13-Jan-2012: An excellent start – not fully multigrain because I was just using up leftover flour, but it worked really well. 19-Jan-2012: Tried the same recipe, this time with all wholemeal flour. Worked very well, in spite of forgetting about it a couple of times, leading to overly long rising times. Feeling quite confident about getting this recipe working well. 15-Feb-2012: I’m calling it – today’s bread was pretty darned spectacular and I’ve been eating only my own bread for a full month now and not had to throw a single loaf out. I’d say this one’s achieved!

Health

• Limit sugar & dairy intake.
• Keep up with vitamin supplements to help keep food & energy on track.
• Get back to the morning squirrel-walks once calf is better
• Semi-regular massages to keep stress and tension headaches under control – no more waiting till the pain’s so bad I can’t function
• Work my way up to being able to do a 4-mile walk without pain
• Develop regular schedule so can have relaxation time in the evenings and proper weekends and reduce stress of neglecting one or the other. Key components: Freelance work, composing, listening, training, writing
• Weight: *sigh* Shall we say 76kg by the start of the uni term? Surely that’s doable? *gives self a stern look and a threat to not injure any more parts* 15-Feb-2012: Made a start on this at least & joined Weight Watchers tonight after good reports from friends. Hoping it will give me the kick up the too-sizeable behind that I need to achieve this. 1-May-2012: Have actually gone backwards on this – need to pull myself together…

  All fails
  

Business

• Schedule training to keep my skills current & keep me employable by others – do some every week. Key areas: JavaScript, design, marketing Nope.
• Design business cards & get them made 8-Jan-2012: Order sent! And I just scraped in to get a 15% discount from MOO too!
• Write beginner social media guide to sell on raspberryblue.com Still in progress
• Start blogging on Raspberry Blue (not going to make this any set schedule – minimum 3 posts in the year though)
• Schedule talk at LCF Open House on some webby topic – social media as a tool for composition perhaps? Or maybe something on how to use the web to promote your composition? Nope – not yet. Maybe in 2014.

Other stuff

• New laptop. This year for sure. D to get old one. Fail. Still struggling along with the old one because the bank took 6 months to approve the mortgage and all possible new-computer funds went on rent
• Knit something that isn’t a scarf I started a glove!
• Send both parents’ birthday and Christmas presents ON TIME Did better than last year, but fell at the Christmas hurdle.
• Call parents once a month: January – done. February – done, March – done, April – done. Think I actually got through this, or very nearly. Calling it a win.
  

Tagged with: baking, completion, composition, cooking, creativity, dayjob, health, learning, massage, mentalhealth, music, organisation, relaxing, self-promotion, study, tools, travel, walking, web, writing | 3 comments

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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And again, it feels like I don’t have much to report on the creative front. I’ve spent most of the day installing and setting up stuff on my shiny-new-innards laptop. The good news is that the reinstall seems to have made a big difference to the general speed problems – even with all the Logic Studio instruments installed. It’s been really worthwhile. Finale is installed and all updated and is opening the files I reimported, and right now I’m re-downloading the installer for Garritan Personal Orchestra 4, without which I can’t play back my piece without buggering up all the settings by making them MIDI, so I’m trying to be patient but can’t wait to see if the reinstall has actually fixed the stuttering sound problem. Wish I’d realised I didn’t have the original GPO installer before dinnertime when our connection always goes slow though…

I’m still hoping I may get to a note or two tonight, but not really holding my breath.

I have, however, been doing a lot of thinking about the massive stress that’s been holding me back and messing up my head so badly over the past few weeks. Thinking of how to deal with it in general, and what I need to do or cancel doing in particular. I think I’ve decided to just put Australia plans on hold for the rest of the year – this has been about the 4th attempt I’ve made to get to Australia and every single time something has gone horribly wrong. This time my teeth are acting up again and I’m very worried the root canal work I had done in March (the slow recovery of which and attendant back pain cancelled the first and second planned Australia trip) may need to be re-excavated. Dentist’s appointment when I get back from Spain. So I’m thinking it will be better for my peace of mind if I just cancel the whole Aus 2011 idea, focus on getting better, both physically and mentally, over the next few months, maybe spend a little money on making my working and living spaces happier and more serene – buy & frame some pictures for the walls, get that Le Creuset frying pan I’ve been wanting for so long to help me cut down the amount of fat I need to cook with, maybe invest in a proper desk rather than what I have right now (a double-gateleg dining table, which is a bit awkward because of the legs getting in the way) – that sort of thing. I had a look at the idea of renting a small office or studio space for a few months this morning, but I think that won’t really work because unless I moved the piano and all my books & stereo into it, it wouldn’t really be productive, and moving that amount of stuff for the short term just isn’t really worthwhile. Heigh ho.

So plodding along. Making progress with getting the technology set up to do the work, but notes are in short supply right now.

Update: GPO is installed! And the file is making the right sounds now, and in spite of having been running hot most of the afternoon installing stuff… NO STUTTERING!

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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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