I got back from Durham yesterday and today was feeling a touch of withdrawal symptoms – home seems so empty and grey. It’s lovely to see Djelibeybi again of course, but no parents, no lovely new composer-friends, I just needed a little direction. So Djeli and I took ourselves off to the last day of the Diaghilev exhibition at the V&A. They really put together a great exhibition – as they so often do. We went to an exhibition of Ballets Russes costumes and so on in Canberra a number of years ago, so there was some stuff I’d already seen, but I was pretty impressed that most of the exhibition consisted of things I’d never seen before, including the Managers costumes from Erik Satie & Picasso’s Parade and footage of Nijinska’s choreography for Stravinsky’s Les Noces. An excellent antidote for the post-composition-indulgence blues.

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Well, I don’t know what else it can possibly be. I’ve been SO productive since yesterday’s relaxation session with my physiotherapist. In spite of nasty cold, sore throat, no voice, generally feeling crappy and done in, and in spite of computer being tediously slow, I’ve just been powering through my to-do list and generally Getting Things Done.

• Quintet is now at 2’30″ or thereabouts and has decided to “head for home”, which means working out how to reuse the slow intro and other opening material and is basically (or should be) an easy run down to the end now. Obviously there’s a lot of tweaking still to be done, niceties of notation to sort out and so on, but it’s looking like it’ll be at least 3’30″ when it’s done, and possibly the 4′ I wanted it to be (it has to be under 5′ – the trick is to keep it shortish so as to maximise rehearsal time, but have it long enough to do something interesting).
• Wrote a blog post which will appear on caitlinrowley.com later this week. It’s the first time I’ve tried scheduling future publishing, but it’s something I want to get into the habit of – if I’m to have regular visitors on my site, then I need to be posting (interesting) content regularly. Not sure I’ve quite got the “interesting” down, but I think my online writing is quietly improving.
• Started the rather tedious layout process for a set of songs I wrote about 14 years ago, Remembrances of Half-Forgotten Dead People. They were laid out when I first wrote them, but a. the originals weren’t PDFed and have been lost apart from one hard copy in Australia which my mother scanned for me and b. the layout is seriously dated. very word-processory because that was all I had at the time. So it needs to be updated a bit, notes revised and so on so I can print, bind and send it off to the singer who’s considering performing them in March.
• Set up a new notebook on Evernote to hold bits and pieces for a CD of my piano music which I’m hoping to get off the ground with a friend of mine in Australia. The first step is to get him scores, so I’ve been trawling round to (again) see what’s in a fit state to be played. Finished tweaking Egg the Tenth for this, so I guess that’s ready to go onto caitlinrowley.com too. There’s still quite a bit of work to be done to some of them – lacking dynamics and so on – but it’s not a mammoth task. I just need to keep plugging away at it.
• Cleaned about 700 emails out of my inbox. Because they were depressing me and making me worried. There’s still too much stuff in there – mostly notes I sent myself on my last day of work, which is a bit horrible – but 200-odd is MUCH better than 900-odd.
• Caught up a tiny bit with some of the reading and thinking for the Creative Pathfinder course I signed up for. It’s pretty good content – but there’s just so much of it!!! I’m working through Week 3 at the moment… but my inbox is up to Week 14…

It’s just as well the quintet’s making nice progress again, though – had an email today from the Masterclass organisers with the schedule for the course and notes about what to bring: so far it’s looking like I either need to change the way I write in a hurry or invest in a tiny printer to take with me – no printers available. Otherwise I can see myself spending evenings when I should be at t’ pub frantically copying out parts by hand for the composer’s ensemble – seems we have to write a piece for the ensemble during the few days we have there. Oh, and there aren’t many pianos, so we’re encouraged to bring a little keyboard if we need one. iPad Pianist Pro app FTW! Might try to devote some time to ideas-generation before I go to see if I can get a head-start on what to write for the ensemble… Because I don’t have enough to do!

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Rather poorly today. Seems that Djelibeybi has given me his germ and so yesterday and today I’ve been doing battle with inflamed sinuses, earache and general urkness.

So I slept most of this morning and had some very bizarre dreams – very sci-fi/fantasy really. Dramatic but not nasty. This afternoon I was booked in to go to a session with my physio on relaxation – I’m a very stressy person and she thought it might help. And it seemed a useful session. I certainly relaxed *during* the session and will give it a go again over the next few days too, so I hope that’s a good start.

Afterwards I found my mother drifting about the Pitshanger Lane shops, so I treated us to treats from the bakery (I had a raspberry muffin, she had an apricot tart thingy) and we finally found reasonably priced Pedro Ximenes sherry at the cheese and wine shop. Whereupon my brain froze up and I got millilitres mixed with centilitres and brought home 2 bottles when I only needed 175ml it turned out. Um. Not very bright sometimes. But at least the Christmas pudding is finally under way (I have to nip out and buy currants tomorrow morning) with the sultanas (blech!) and prunes busily soaking up sherry.

Haven’t really felt up to doing anything on the quintet today – too achey and miserable. Hoping tomorrow will be better.

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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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SO proud of myself. I have done barely anything today. This morning I did do a quick edit on the recording from Friday night’s concert, so that’s ready for archiving now. Then there was a lot of dozing, napping and quiet silly conversation. And then I somehow mustered some energy and went out to buy the camera connection kit for the iPad and made dinner and a chocolate ripple cake. Um. On second thoughts, I guess I actually did do stuff. Whoops.

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Didn’t do terribly much today – a little fluting here (Bach and Telemann), a little library trip there, a bit of a wander round in the fog with my mama, an agonising trip to the physio. Quiet, but I think that’s what’s needed today. After the composer forum, my brain seems to be teetering on the brink of an idea for the quintet and I didn’t want to rush it and spoil everything, so it’s had a bit of a mental health day. Tomorrow I’ll get back to the writing and see what happens. Cross fingers, Hold thumbs and send notes to the man upstairs please that it takes off again!

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Today I took a step forward in my quest to get my music heard and create more opportunities for creating new work which will be heard. Today I went along to the London Composers Forum Open House meetup. I have to say, I kept my expectations low. I was half expecting to find half a dozen amateur anoraks, but what I found was what I hadn’t dared even hope to find – a group of welcoming, friendly non-anorak people, all of them interested in learning and creating and giving the group’s compositions the best chance in life they can get. Wow. It was awesome.

This particular meeting had three presentations – the first was on how one composer has drawn inspiration from historico-cultural sources (if that’s actually a term) and the methods he’s used to incorporate these ideas in his music; the second was on concerto grosso form in preparation for a Forum opportunity, which I found very interesting as an orchestration analysis and which lead to some rather heated debate on the difference between concerto grosso and concerto for orchestra.; and finally a session based on one of the members’ PhD thesis on “The Drummer as Composer”, which was a very interesting introduction and I hope he’ll continue with the second part of it at the next Open House. And in between there was various discussion about projects that are on the boil and upcoming and concerts being organised. Apparently they’re thinking of getting all members to send in a list of the pieces they have languishing in drawers awaiting performance and getting those poor dusty pieces out into the world – what a fantastic plan!

So I’m VERY glad I went along at last. Kicking myself I didn’t do so earlier, when I knew they were having a workshop on writing for the organ coming up (now sadly passed – and I can’t believe that was nearly a year ago!) but revelling in the fact that I’ll now have the chance to attend the (hands-on!) percussion workshop which is coming up.

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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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