Having been laid low with the flu for the past four days, today I have been merely full of a raging cold, which is a definite improvement, I must say, although still not terribly helpful on the productivity front. Yesterday I managed – finally! after, what? three? four weeks? – to finish adjusting Fear of Falling to add in all the time signatures. I can’t believe how much time I’ve lost to this wretched bug – and when I tried to document it, of course I couldn’t replicate it exactly in either Finale 2010 or 2012. Still, I’ve still been able to reproduce errors and if they can correct those then maybe whatever caused the major problems I was having before will be fixed in the process. Gah!

So today I’ve finally got back to tweaking the orchestration of the piece. Overall, I think I’m happier with it than I’d thought I was. I think it’s got a bit of punch to it and I’m hoping the orchestra will enjoy it. Yes, it’s pretty conservative, and doesn’t really explore any new territory, but for me the new territory in this piece was always going to be the challenge of dealing not just with an orchestra but working out what to do with multiple instruments – the whole double winds thing which I just totally sidestepped when writing Carrion Comfort. There’s definitely more finessing that needs to happen, ranges to be checked, transitions smoothed and so on, but I’m pretty pleased with it. Even the ending’s holding up OK. So it’s not groundbreaking, but it’s still a step forward.

Being poorly, I didn’t really manage to spend much time on it today though – my energy levels have just been insanely low. I did a little work before I left home, nothing on the train (my train-time has been extraordinarily unproductive in recent weeks) then when I got to college there was only half an hour until the gig I wanted to see (improvising early music & jazz which turned out to be Robert & Laura & Ailsha (??sp?)’s project and deeply enjoyable – harpsichord & viols & crumhorns & recorders meet cello & harp & jazz bass!). I spent the afternoon working in the library, then teaing in the cafe, then off to Edward’s (and Francesca’s & Claire’s) improvisation extravaganza in the Mackerras Room, which was really good too – an assortment of improvisations, ranging from conducted group improv (Ed conducting) through smaller group improvisations where the performers asked the audience for words to work to (most notably “sunlight lizard turnip”), improvised poetry which 2 singers and 2 pianists turned into an improvised song as it was being written, a few pages of Cornelius Cardew’s graphic score Treatise,  through to more traditional improvisation (in the sense that some people just got up and played their instruments). Much food for thought there. I really wish I had another week to work on everything though – so much of this week has been wasted being ill! and I’m starting to finally get some real ideas flowing, but it’s back to chaos next week – and even more so than usual as next week are the Runswick Prize recording sessions, with Fear of Falling due in at the end of the week and the New Music Recording sessions the week after. I can’t believe the year’s going so fast! And there’s SO much I still want to write.

In the end I talked myself down from the ledge that was the prospect of the Greenwich International String Quartet Competition. I really, really wanted to put something into it, but there just isn’t the time, and having lost nearly a week to this germ, I’m not in a good position. So when I stepped back and considered that by the time the score for the SQ competition is due next week, I need to have Fear of Falling ready to hand in, the harp piece laid out and probably 3 Cy Twombly pieces complete when I only have half of one that I’m not terribly pleased with done – not to mention the Fourth Plinth written work done and submitted – it seemed like mental suicide and really not that important. On the one hand, I want to go in for as much of that ilk as possible this year, while I’m actually eligible (there’s a bunch of competitions which will accept you without considering your age if you’re a student), but on the other, I’m already writing a string quartet and I didn’t want to turn in a rubbish piece because I’d had to rush it.

I read a fascinating article on the train on the way into college today while I was busily not working on my piece. It’s an article on composer-scheduling by Brandon Nelson, a US composer who I’ve recently started following on Twitter, entitled Time Management and the “Part-Time” Composer. His workload puts mine to shame – working, studying nursing, composing AND he has a family of small children! How he doesn’t explode is beyond me, but it reminded me that I hadn’t been back over the time I have available to study since the Time Management lady did a schedule for me at the beginning of the academic year, so this evening while waiting for my bean bolognaise sauce to cook, I pulled out my coloured pencils and started blocking out things. My class schedule has changed a lot since then – Research Methods, Fourth Plinth and Orchestration – Medium have all finished, Orchestration – Large has only one official class left and the Personal Project seminars have come to an end. Also, I’ve only got about a month left of my lessons with Stephen. I’ve also started my weekly Sight Singing class, booked in to play viol trios once a week and have irregular viol consort sessions to fit in too I think it’s a good thing to be reconsidering my study time at this point. I was working so well over Christmas until this damned Finale bug got in the way, and since term started up again I’ve been really disorganised. Last week’s debacle with the no-sleep night to get the Runswick Prize piece in is something I really don’t want to revisit. I’m not 19 any more! It took me four days to recover! And then I got the flu! So no more of that. I need to be super-organised. I also need to make sure I’m making time for Djelibeybi and a little work on the house/in the garden and I need to get back to exercising and eating properly too, so while staying at college till 7 in the evening does tend to result in more composing, it’s appalling on the dietary front, so I need to go back to leaving earlier most nights and having dinner at home.

And I need to be good about sticking to my schedule too. There’s so much I want to do this year, and the only way I’ll get through it all is if I’m super-disciplined, both in terms of the hours I’m working and the hours I’m resting. Speaking of which, I should have gone to bed 15 minutes ago… G’night!

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This week is turning into one of those WHY???? weeks where nothing goes right. I’m trying not to whinge too much because I’ve given up whingeing for Lent, which is why I’m here rather than doing an aaaargh on Twitter, because nobody reads this blog when there isn’t a specific project on, but I need to try to get some stuff straight in my head.

I feel like I’m kind of in a transitional period, compositionally speaking, which isn’t surprising, given the vast number of new experiences I’ve had in the past few months and the wide array of stuff I’ve been trying. This is a good thing, I know it is, but given that I have this one week to work in, but am sick as a dog thanks to a germ I picked up from the dancers last week at Laban, I feel like I’m losing time to consolidate stuff, and going back to Fear of Falling feels like a backwards step because already, by dint of writing that piece and all the work I’ve done on Still River Air (the Ansel Adams piece) and my CoLab project since I started it, it feels like a piece from another time.

I’ve also been doing quite a lot of listening the past couple of days, going back over some pieces of Australian music I want to play to the postgrads in my listening session on Tuesday, and it feels like something I really want to explore more. I feel more connected to this music than I have ever done before, and listening to it is making me realise how much of my own style is informed by this stuff. I’ve also been reading the interviews in Andy Ford’s Composer to Composer, which I haven’t done in many years, and there are certain resonances that really strike me, that I want to explore further. It seems the more I study at a European institution, the more of an Australian composer I feel I am becoming.

Already I’m doubting my decision to stay here. Maybe a year or two after I’ve finished the degree will be enough, then back to Aus and launch into a doctorate. Right at this moment though, I’m feeling sick and full of germ and lacking in energy and imagination and wondering why I ever thought I could be a composer at all. I’m worried about Still River Air (still don’t like that title) and what problems may arise with it because I had to rush the score and parts production due to the massive tech problems I had to deal with. I’m trying not to worry too much – 1. there may not be any, or nothing major; 2. if there are, I’m sure I won’t be the only one!

Tomorrow the forms are due in for the string quartet competition, which I had intended to write something for, but I just don’t know that I’ll have the time, now I’ve lost four days, effectively, to being poorly. Might put it in anyway, but a bit disturbed that I need to provide a title. Also that there’ll only be a week to write it in, when I should be working on Fear of Falling and my Cy Twombly pieces.

Finances are also becoming a huge issue – turned out that Djeli had miscalculated how much we owe HMRC, and there’s another £3,000 to pay, and still no job on his horizon. D’s part-time job is about to evaporate too, as the store he works at is closing down.

I’ve been listening a lot to Peter Sculthorpe’s string quartets this week. Not sure why I settled on those – I’ve actually never really listened to them before – but I’m finding them really comforting and I’m struck by how right their delicate textures seem. I never realised before how slim a lot of Peter’s work is, something which I aspire to in my own music. I’ve been wondering what it would be like to go back and study with him again maybe. I wonder what I would learn this time round.

Anyway, nobody said any of this would be easy – going back to school as a mature-age student, studying full-time on another contractor’s dubious income – and it sure isn’t! I’m just trying to keep focused on what I have to do and not get distracted by money, illness, feelings of worthlessness that tend to crop up whenever anything’s not going quite right! And now that I’ve quietly vented, I’m going to put my headphones back on and see if I can finish off with the time signature changes in Fear of Falling…

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I’m writing this on Saturday because, seriously, who blogs at an after-party?? And blogging on 2 vodka, lime & tonics is not a sensible thing. So it’s a little late, but in the interests of coherence.

It was kind of a short working day yesterday, mainly so we didn’t wear ourselves out for the performance. All the making was finished on Thursday, so on Friday morning we musicians helped to put away all the detritus from the making and dismantled the tables so we could use the whole studio space, while the dancers warmed up. As the dancers were going to start with rehearsing Hug, we took our Sudophones and Merztins and made our way onto the actually-not-terribly-comfortable beanbag cushions outside the studio to work on Stealth. Neil contributed an excellent suggestion, which was to take advantage of the impression that a short loud sound sounds like a quiet sound so we shaped the piece so that the first sounds in the opening were shorter, but more open, gradually growing longer and playing more with the muting as they lengthen. I think this worked better in the larger space, ultimately, because the shorter, louder sounds carried better than the longer quieter ones.

We also finessed the ending and how we would use the space. We decided to be seated in the audience, on the ends of rows, so that it would feel like more of an intervention, as it did in the pub. We came up with a plan to all stand up at the point of “coming out of the closet”, then make our way to the stage for the end of the piece. Our videographer (VERY collaborative this session!) suggested that it might work better if we stood up individually rather than all together, so we ran with that, but with moving towards the stage at about the same time. And for the ending, we improved this by all improvising together once on the stage, with the bird whistles from the Merztins carrying on while the Sudophones started their wail upwards, dropping out to leave the Sudotins, which then dropped out one by one until it was just me holding the last wailing note.

I think that getting Stealth to work better has reinforced what I was thinking when the stuff I worked on on Wednesday didn’t really come off – Stealth really is all about gestures: start quiet and with wide spaces, build the improvisation, stand up and let the improv rip, end with group wails. The only part of that that’s to do with actual specific sounds is the ending, which uses an easy-to-get sound-feature of the Sudophones, unlike the sounds I was tinkering with before which required very specific hand positions and lightness of touch.

After that was sorted and the dancers had done with Hug, we ran through Still, the camera piece, until lunch, refining our moves, and specifically working on who was switching cameras on and off when. I volunteered to turn on the first camera because originally, Eleanore was doing that then moving across in the pitch dark to turn on camera no. 2, so this was an improvement. Plus it made me feel more useful! We also did a final run-through without the sound, which I captured on video (below) which was quite amusing as everyone tried to simulate the electronic rumbles and pings and the instrumentalists tried to replicate their instruments’ sounds!

(also, I very carefully plugged my camera into the wall on Thursday night so it would have a full battery for Friday – and then left it there. So Friday’s photos and vid are a bit lo-fi due to having had to resort to snapping with the iPad!)

After lunch we had a short session talking about the week and where we raised any questions we had, which didn’t go on for terribly long, after which there was mending and stretching and tuba-polishing and chat.

At about 3, we sauntered off to check out some of the performances happening for other projects. It was like a mini Edinburgh Fringe out there! I saw a couple of dance performances, a project to do with role-reversal, in which the musicians danced and the dancers played instruments, and a 40-minute musical on the songs of Robbie Williams. Crazy!

We had a rehearsal in the hall at 5, where we set up the cameras, ironed out tech problems and got to run all the pieces once, which was very enlightening. “Dark” really was very dark indeed! After the rehearsal, John told me that Marie was going to switch off my camera so I wouldn’t have to come back on in the dark, which was probably sensible, but being unrehearsed it meant that that camera went off a good 5 minutes before it should have, so the end of the piece changed in the final performance, but I still think it worked well.

And I think the final performance went off really well! We all found seats on the ends of rows and started in with Stealth before the lights went down, while people were still talking, which was actually great. Theo actually came over to talk to me just after I’d started and I had to shoo him back to his seat! Heh Nobody fell down the stairs or tripped over a cable, and while there were some giggles when the first flashes went off for Still, they stopped pretty quickly. Hug also went down well, and I think John was right to have the order as it was – it was a lighter ending, which made the Death and the Maiden project which followed a bit less of a contrast than it might have been.

The rest of the concert was fabulous – Death and the Maiden (what I saw of it) and the WWI poetry piece were both great and the AfroBeat band were simply fantastic! I had no idea Cassie had such an amazing voice! And Alex too! A really great set to end on, then all the composers went off to the bar to chat and listen to the Brazilian band project, which started a little loungey, but pretty quickly was turning out some great sounds.

Really excited about what I might find at Trinity next week – I’m looking forward to seeing what else has been going on after my taster at Laban yesterday!

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The performance is really starting to take shape now and I seem to be carving out a role for myself but it really is carving – definitely not something I’ve just stepped into, but I’m glad I decided to not bring my flute. It might have been easier if I had, but I think this experience is actually more valuable for me as a composer, even if it’s a bit uncomfortable at times.

This morning we finished making the camera-instruments, assembling our timers, the flash component (made safe by John) and the switch and pot control into the camera body. Fiddly work, but very satisfying and the cameras closed up perfectly once everything was in place and wires wiggled so as to be as low-lying as possible.

The afternoon was spent rehearsing the performance and I spent quite a bit of time working with Marie, who was organising the dancers and providing them with feedback due to being poorly and unable to dance herself. This was very satisfying, between discussing things with musicians, suggesting and discussing ideas with Marie, working out cues for musicians and dancers alike. It was a very productive afternoon, one of the best we’ve had, I think.

While the dancers were rehearsing Hug after this, I co-opted the musicians to try out some ideas I’d been playing with for the sudophones. Well, that was a bit of a bust, alas. And not helped by everyone being tired! So that idea’s gone in the bin, but we’re considering performing Stealth in the concert instead. Not entirely sure how that would work, but it might. At any rate, it was useful to work on the failed piece and while I’d hoped for input from the performers to try to make more of it, it still helped in that I think I’m beginning to see how working with unusual instruments such as these, for non-specialist performers, requires a different way of thinking from how I usually approach writi music. My ideas were too precise to work, I think, even though I’d tried to take into account the temperamental nature of the instruments and that they don’t all respond the same way – it seems to me that writing for stuff like this, you actually need to compose gestures rather than sounds. Compose the gesture and the sound will follow, but if you try to duplicate particular sounds, even allowing for variation, it all comes apart.

The main piece is coming in at about 17 minutes and I think John’s and my estimates were about right – it really couldn’t be any shorter – it needs that length to work through all the material, both audio and visual.

Last day tomorrow!

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Today we skipped the making part of the day, which was kind of a shame – I’m really enjoying it and it’s the part where at the moment I feel I’m really most involved – but we did a bunch of other stuff and it was nice to mix things up. My big disappointment with the making is that we haven’t been able to make the synthesiser components ourselves. I get that there’s not much time and the really collaborative aspect of the week is creating the final work, but I really wanted to build one. Guess I’ll just have to find a book and do it myself at home some day

Instead, we started the day with working out some of the logistics of the flash piece – how many cameras will make noise? where will all the cameras be positioned on the stage? Do we want to be in complete darkness all the way through or have a low wash of light? That sort of thing. The dancers raised useful points about cables trailing across the stage for the sound-generating cameras, and came up with a good solution, to have the sound generating cameras at the edges of the stage, two at the front, two at the back, so that their cables can go straight offstage and not get in the way of the dance space at all. We also had a brief discussion about costuming. We’re discussing black vs grey and the possibility of leaving as much skin showing as possible to reflect the flash-light. Thank heavens I won’t be onstage!

We split into groups mid-morning to do some composing with the Sudophones and Merztins today, with the aim of performing them at The Duke pub over the road from Laban and in the Laban garden. I really enjoyed this activity as I felt it was something I could be really useful in and I was hugely pleased with the result of our work.

My group – consisting of Liz, Katie, Bianca and me – decided to prepare a piece for the pub. I suggested that, given that we weren’t going to be asking permission to perform it, that we work on the concept of a ‘stealth piece’ – one that started surreptitiously, then ‘came out’, as it were, to be super-noisy at the end. There had been some talk about whether we’d be kicked out of the pub if we performed without permission, so this seemed a good way to tackle that issue and to hopefully be able to at least get most of the way through it!

We started with our Sudophones upside-down to mute the sound, then we’d each gently take our tin, start the sound and tip the tin a little to let the sound out, then close it again and let go to stop the sound. We did this slightly randomly to start, with gaps between the sounds, then moved into a section where we were all making muted/unmuted sounds. Next was the ‘out of the closet’ section, where we boldly grasped our tins and turned them open-end up, continuing to improvise at full volume, then gradually moving into sustained ascending tones, which on multiple Sudophones sounds like they’re all trying to get into tune with each other but not quite succeeding.

And it went really well! We did the other two groups’ pieces out in the garden on our way to the pub, which was gosh-darned chilly but a lot of fun, then went over to The Duke en masse. We herded in, the barman pushed some tables together for us and we all ordered our drinks and eventually clustered round the table chatting. The chat was going pretty well, so we decided to just start our piece and see if the stealth effect really worked – and it did! Notwithstanding a Little Moment when Katie couldn’t get a sound out of her Sudophone and it turned out she’d forgotten to reconnect the battery but we just carried on with our stealth mode and gradually the group realised we’d started and our videographer (Cheng) hurriedly switched my camera on.

I upped the stealth factor (I like to think) by continuing to sip my tea through the first part, and it all went down a treat! Really worked well in the context and we got a round of applause from some random guys in the corner. It turned out the director of Laban was also there having lunch – he was a bit surprised by the sound but pretty quickly worked out that we must be a CoLab project. Heh. And the barman brought us a free plate of goats’ cheese risotto! I call that a win!

We spent some good time on the main work in the afternoon, putting together the acoustic instrument parts and I think it’s coming together well. My role is becoming a little more defined now, as I’m working with the instrumentalists to help mould the sounds they’re making to work within the context of the sounds from the cameras.

However, we musicians are also staging a small rebellion. Because the dancers have their own piece, Hug, the performers are feeling a bit under-utilised, and because I’m not in anything on stage at all, I kind of wanted to develop something extra. So we’ve suggested to John that we put together a new Sudophone piece, possibly to play while the audience are filing into the auditorium, and he seems to like the idea – and may even want to play in it himself!

So I spent some time with the Sudophones after the other students had gone this evening and have gathered some sounds which I think might work well, which I’ll suggest tomorrow. I don’t think I want to fully compose the piece, more bring along a concept and see where it goes when we start playing it, because if I just write it and they play it, then it’s not much of a collaboration!

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So we’ve now had 2 days on our project and it’s proving delightfully varied. This morning we did some more making, getting our timer circuits ready to go into the cameras, and in the afternoon we started to work on ideas for our performance at the end of the week.

This has been a little vague to start with – because we’re still working on the instruments, we can’t tell exactly what the electronic sound part of the performance will be like, but we had John’s single assembled camera to work with and John, Neil and I used some of the disposable cameras to simulate the effect of the flashes on the stage.

We worked with the lights out in the studio to try to give more of a feel for what it’ll feel like onstage, although as the studio has a glass wall and mirrors all around and the stage will probably be pitch black it’s not quite the same!

We’ve decided that the instrumentalists will be onstage with the dancers and that they’ll be playing improvised sounds that relate to the electronic sounds, which start very low, below the threshold of hearing, gradually rise, then when the flash of the camera goes off, they jump up in pitch and continue to rise beyond the threshold of hearing. It’s great that we have a variety of instruments – tuba, clarinet, oboe and piano because it gives us a really good range to work with.

I’m not really sure yet what my role is or should be in the final performance. I had thought about bringing my flute on the first day, but it had sounded like instruments wouldn’t be needed. Today I was giving a little feedback on what the performers were doing but as John has such strong ideas for the piece, I feel a little redundant. Hoping this will become clearer as the week goes on.

The dancers started developing their own version of John’s Hug piece today. It’s coming along nicely and may end up being a part of our performance on Friday. We even took this out into the (very slippery!) foyer of Laban, which is a very interesting acoustic space for this type of thing – I was fascinated to hear how the asymmetrical architecture changed the sound as the dancers moved around the space.

Natalia and Stefania in our first public performance!

We also played with another of John’s instruments – another one made from a tin can, like the Sudophones, but this one is light-responsive and percussive. I don’t know what it’s called. It has a light-sensor on a long cable and responds to light by making the can rattle rather than by creating electronic sounds. Its battery is attached to a Matchbox car so it can move with the tin and it has a lovely enormous ostrich plume attached, which shakes in response to the can’s movement – a beautiful visual effect. I wanted to try it out on the slippery slope of the Laban foyer when we went out to perform Hug, but the one we had with us got knocked and I think John wanted to check it over before it was used again, so I didn’t get to do that.

I’m actually quite liking being at Laban for this though. At first I felt a bit exiled, being so far from Trinity (10 minutes walk for a dancer but 20 minutes’ trek for an injured composer!) but the benefit of being in new surroundings is that it’s making me not just fall into old habits – at lunchtime I can’t just go off and sit with my friends like I usually do, can’t just go to the library, so it’s always about the project and keeping me focused. I think that’s a good thing.

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Finally we’ve got to CoLab – I can’t believe my year at Trinity Laban is going so fast – it’s just zooming by and I wish it wasn’t! I don’t want to leave! But like it or not, this week is CoLab. I had been a bit nervous at the prospect of an entire week of collaboration – it sounded exciting but also a wee bit terrifying for an unsociable composer but so far I’m loving it!

My project is Dirty Electronics with John Richards, which is happening in Studio 7 at Laban. I’ve only been to Laban once before, for Registration, so it’s all shiny and new and trying to find where the lifts are…

Today was quite gentle. We started with a sort of introductory chat session and did some demonstrations to show what we do – the dancers improvised in groups, the performers each played something, and Clemmie (our oboist) agreed to sight-read my piece Nest which I felt was more in the spirit of the thing than just playing one of my deeply inadequate recordings, then we were sent off for a coffee break (very welcome as I hadn’t managed to get any on the way in!) while John and Neil (a PhD student who works with John) set up the tables and soldering irons and prepared to induct us into the crazy world of electronics.

I’m really enjoying what John calls the “making”. He showed us what we’re going to be building, which is an electronic instrument in a disposable camera – the flash works by storing up electricity and we’re going to build a timer to adjust when the flash goes off, and there’ll also be a synthesiser component which makes sound in relation to the flash going off (I don’t entirely understand how it works but they’re related).

Hard at work making the timer circuits: Neil, Natalia, Stefania, Eleanora

So today we started work on the timer components. We were each given a wafer of circuitboard and John walked us through what went where and taught us how to solder. It’s actually not that hard to put this stuff together! The hard part is evidently in designing the circuit, knowing what parts to use and how to put it all together. By the end of the making part of the day we had assembled our timer circuits!

I made this!

In the afternoon, John introduced us to some of his other instruments – the Sudophone and its variant, the Merztin. These are instruments made out of baked bean tins and bolts (and screws for the Merztin) and have an electronic component and a small speaker inside. John demonstrated how they work by having us all hold hands. He held the Sudophone while I held the bolt, but it wouldn’t make a sound until we all held hands around the circle. The idea is that you make a circuit with your body, so if you only have one hand on the instrument, it doesn’t make a noise, but once you touch it with your other hand, you complete the circuit and get the sound. Very cool!

Sudophones & Merztins: Little tins of amazing noise

The other instrument he showed us is a cardboard speaker with a static-making component inside it. Very noisy! He told us about a work he created, called Hug, which uses this instrument and the goal is to mute it with the body. The dancers may work on this later in the week.

We also started work on some sounds for the acoustic musicians to use in the performance. We’re working on a premise of replicating the electronic sound (to a certain extent). This consists of an ascending tone, in two parts – the first part starts below the threshold of hearing and moves upwards until the flash goes off, when it leaps up and continues to ascend to above the threshold of hearing. I joined Gaspar at the piano for this part, messing around with playing on the treble strings, treble clusters and trying some percussive sounds on the piano too.

And we got an early mark! Which has been most welcome as I need to finish prepping my Runswick Prize piece tonight!

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Well, yesterday we got the news we’d been dreading – that Djeli’s employer didn’t have the money for his project so weren’t renewing his contract. This is not ideal! D hasn’t been able to make his part-time job into a full-time one like he’d hoped, and I barely have time to breathe, far less fit in work, which makes all of us dependent on poor Djeli. We reviewed our finances this morning, which was a bit painful, but necessary, and came up with a plan.

For me the really big thing is to ensure I can keep getting my work done. Critical to this is that I rarely seem able to get anything done with Djeli in the house. It’s very distracting. I feel (pointlessly) guilty for not having done any housework (no time!) and then I faff about and get nothing done. Today I came into college but hadn’t realised that on Saturdays the place is crawling with the miniature people and parents of Junior Trinity. It was chaos! The library’s open till 3, but we’re not supposed to plug our laptops in in the library, but mine won’t run more than about 30 seconds without juice, so I need to be in the cafe. Obviously, this needs some thinking about.

I hid in the library while the cafe was at its loudest & most chaotic and pulled together a plan to make sure I really truly know when everything’s due in and what steps need to be followed to get everything done, which was a very scary experience, but good to have done it. After that I put in an hour on Ansel Adams, the went and borrowed a tenor viol and did some practice. The violing is really coming along nicely (although my not-used-to-frets fingers are quite numb now – sure they’ll be nicely calloused soon ) and today I even got up to the fourth piece in the beginner’s viol solos book our teacher left with the viols for us. I’m still having trouble getting my feet to the right height to both support the viol and not hit my left knee with the bowing when playing on the top G string (trickier than it sounds) – will have to try the box file next time. Today I made a pile of laptop, iPad and a couple of library books. Anyway, I felt much better after the violing, and have come to the conclusion that the weird ensemble is throwing me off with the Ansel Adams – still not happy with the second section, but it really needs to be finished by the end of this weekend in some form – so I’m putting the short score to one side and will work directly in full score for a bit to see if that helps me work it out a bit more easily. I did another half hour on it after the viol moment, laying out the staves and starting to move the first section into its relevant parts, which feels like useful work.

And now they’re about to shut college up for the day, so I should away home and start work on the Personal Project proposal and picking out texts to use in my Rude Health piece. Simply a massive to-do list for the weekend and nothing that can be delayed!!!

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Apologies for the tedious title. Think I may scrap titles altogether when I redesign the site and just make ‘em dates! No brain left though after a simply massive day with which to think of funky titles for a blog nobody reads!

I had my second viol consort session today. To start with I couldn’t remember anything at all, which was frustrating, but by the end I was coming along MUCH better, and am now resolved – and can’t wait – to start doing a little solo practice. Also, one of the treble viol beginners asked me to play some duets with her REALLY looking forward to that. It’s so nice playing in a group! Unfortunately we haven’t yet had funding confirmed for these sessions, so we’re just getting an occasional one to keep us moving forward for now.

I got some really good work done on Ansel Adams – after the previous post here today, I think I may have broken through the barrier, at least a little bit. Will listen again tomorrow and see.

And the other big triumph was that I took in the graphic score I made last night for Lines of Sight to run it by my performers and see if it totally freaked them out. It didn’t and actually came together really well. Some tweaks I need to make, and we’ve got a proper rehearsal for it on Friday morning prior to our big on-site rehearsal on Monday. I was supposed to re-do the score tonight, but have just been too done in and couldn’t make my brain work.

Had a listen through to Fear of Falling again after letting it lie for a couple of days. I think the ending still needs work, alas – it feels like it could do with an extra 10 or 15 seconds. Also, possibly something more interesting at the end, but it’ll do for now. Orchestration classes for both pieces tomorrow – eep! Must get to bed!

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First day back at college today and it’s been very full-on, but in a good way. Lovely to see all my friends and get back into the swing of classes. Deadlines are looming and while it’s been nice just working on composing, it’s actually really nice to be back at college and feel all the activity humming along.

The day started (9.30am!!) with Fourth Plinth, which we are rehearsing and then performing next week (Thursday 17th at ICA, 6.30pm – come along!) so things really need to hum along with this. I did a bunch of work on the train writing up my ideas and thinking about how to approach it, and between that and something Dominic raised in class – that pretty much everyone is doing improv pieces, but really only a couple of people in the group actually consider themselves confident improvisers – I’ve pretty much decided to go with a graphic score, with indications of pitch sets to use for each section. This will give me control over levels of consonance/dissonance (which I’m thinking will be useful for expressing the different phases of the Trafalgar Square area) while also taking some of the pressure off the players to come up with something that works. I’ll probably use lines for melodic material/feel/pace indication but colour blocks to indicate intensity/aggression levels. Nothing complex that they need to memorise & I’ve given in and just accepted that music stands will be required. It’s a shame, but there’s too much content in the concert to expect people to memorise something that (hopefully) will work better with a bit more structure. Did I say? The piece is called Lines of Sight. I’m also working with another student on the programme, which is looking fun and hopefully not too taxing with two of us on it.

The big news of the day was that in the hour between finishing up with Fourth Plinth and trotting off to see Jamie in Marketing about the branding requirements for the Fourth Plinth programmes, I think I finished the short-score for Fear of Falling. I need it to sit for a bit, and I don’t think it’s really perfect, but it IS an ending, and that’s half the battle!

I’ve also done a bit more on the Ansel Adams piece tonight. The lack of rhythmic interest is really bugging me in the second section. I’ve done some reading of Wallace-Berry-the-Impenetrable (Structural Functions in Music) which has proved useful. Berry’s a funny one. His text is so dense as to be near-incomprehensible, but every time I look at this book when I’m having a problem, I come away with something useful – even if I didn’t really get what he was saying. Weird, huh? In today’s case, he’s sent me off to consider a) altering the metre in the second section (probably from 3/4 to 4/4) b) slightly increasing the tempo, not just shrinking the note-values and c) maybe hunting down some evocative poetry about flowing water to transcribe some speech rhythms and then layer those. I think layering of rhythms is going to be key in this section. I mean, in a running river, it’s not just one big block of water, is it? it’s all sorts of little drops encountering different levels of resistance, their paths all slightly different and shaped by whether they’re at the edge, pushing against the banks, in the middle of a clear run of water, or in the middle of a rapid where a clear run might suddenly be interrupted by rocks and the flow diverted. Feeling a lot better about this, although there’s still clearly a ton of work to do.

So the big things this week are to: Complete Lines of Sight and send it to the performers, draft my Twombly project proposal to send to my supervisor (proposal’s due in next Thursday, the same day as the Fourth Plinth performace) and defeat the Ansel Adams 2nd section.

Guess all that means I should head to bed! G’night!

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