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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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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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!

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Happy New Year! Djelibeybi decided to take the day off today, so we trotted off to Whitstable and had a lovely afternoon strolling along the beach, admiring the view and the lovely houses. Photos will be on Flickr as soon as I can find the cable to attach the camera to my computer…

I did get some composing done before we went out but not a lot – a few more notes for the Rothko quartet. It was nice to get back to it after a bit of a break. I’m still really pleased with what I’ve got for this one, which is a bit of a relief. Tomorrow I need to launch myself into the 2 big pieces in a major way, but as college is finally open again tomorrow, I’ll be heading in with my laptop so I don’t have the distractions of home!

The triumph of the day though was a lot more prosaic, but as it involved ticking something off my to-do list which has been lurking and making me feel guilty for A YEAR, I’m just hugely excited about it. It also helped that it made me realise I’m a lot better off than I thought Yup – I made 2 phone calls to Australia, updated my address details and finally got online access to the last two of my three superannuation funds. And the joy is that, thanks (HUGE thanks) to the Australian government’s compulsory superannuation scheme which came in just before I got my first permanent full-time job, I actually have a decent amount of money growing itself for my retirement. Huzzah! I’ve been reading Ramit Sethi’s book I Will Teach You To Be Rich, which may have an offputting title but is actually a really good read and about as inspirational as personal finance writing can get. He neatly freaked me out with the following table (p. 239 in my Kindle edition):

I also started hunting for a new accountant as ours, while a nice guy and pretty good, just doesn’t get the concept of a business which draws its income from creative work and property investment and normal contracting (actually, I think he doesn’t entirely get the contracting thing either) and both Djeli and I feel we really need someone who can advise us on ways we could be saving money or spending it more effectively.

Oh, and I posted my annual creative goals post too.

So, a productive day, even if not an especially musical one. I can recommend both the Sethi book and Whitstable

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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!

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Woke up with a cold today, so I’ve spent most of the day updating my finances and watching Glee. I did, however, manage to do a little composing, with the result that the Ansel Adams piece is now past the three minute mark! One-third done! Hurrah!

Given that it’s New Year’s Eve, I’ve also posted my annual review of the past year on this site. Hoping tomorrow will be more musically productive.

Happy New Year!

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Kind of a messed up day today. My plan had been: Sleep in, compose, wrap some presents, trim tree. Instead, after a much-interrupted sleep-in, we discovered that while we’d thought we were travelling to Christmas on Monday, we were actually expected today, so we’ve kind of had to drop everything, compress 2 1/2 days of prep into 1 so we can travel tomorrow. Eep! Good thing I finished my Christmas shopping yesterday, although it seems that Djeli hasn’t got me anything yet, so we may be going on a little shopping jaunt to Brighton on Monday. Ah well. That should be fun! Any recommendations for nice shops to visit there will be most gratefully received

Today Sound Collective launched their charity album of experimental music, No Room? which I have duly purchased and am looking forward to listening to it properly… probably when Christmas is over! I don’t have anything on this one (too busy!) but several of my amazingly talented friends do – get yours here! All the proceeds go to the Crisis at Christmas charity, so you get some really interesting sounds AND a warm fuzzy glow too

Alas, I very much doubt I’ll get any composing or research done today – it’s now 9.30 and I still need to find the ebelskiver pan, the ebelskiver cookbook, hang out another load of washing, wrap all the presents, write all the cards to go with the presents and bag up little parcels of ingredients for the jerk ham, gingerbread and smoked salmon ebelskivers I’ll be making when we arrive at our Christmas destination – at this rate I’ll be lucky to get some sleep!

I am planning on blocking out a little space of time each day while I’m away though, to try to get some stuff done, however little. Really can’t afford to take four whole days off!

At any rate, while I hope to still be blogging over Christmas, I’m hoping you’ll all be having such a fabulous time that you won’t have time to read it! So, while I still have your attention, I shall wish you a very Merry Christmas – I hope it’s as stuffed full of festivity as a turkey is of stuffing! Merry Christmas!

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A great productive day today. After last night’s last-minute start to the Ansel Adams piece (I updated the blog at 12.30am to report it at 30 seconds long. It’s now a full minute!), I’ve been on the trail of this piece with a vengeance today. All of a sudden everything became clear – which images to use, how to work with them, what I wanted the overall concept of the piece to be. I opened up Procreate on the iPad for the first time since I downloaded it on special months ago, looked at a rough tutorial for it (ooh! it does proper pencil sketching! MUST try this out soon!) and drew up a plan. Interestingly, colour doesn’t feature in this plan. Of course it’ll affect the final piece, but I’ve got kind of a monochrome thing going on, which plays well with the whole black-and-white photography thing. The lines/shading on the plan don’t really reflect musical movement, but rather indicate which images will be the basis for which part. Each of the three blocks is planned to be about 3 minutes long, giving a total length of around 9 minutes, which gives a bit of leeway in both directions for the specification of 8-10 minutes.

So what I am planning for this piece? Well, rather than focus on one image, or one set of images around a single focus, it’s going to kind of encapsulate the exhibition. Yes, I know that sounds excruciatingly ambitious. The title of the exhibition is “Photography from the Mountains to the Sea” and the piece is going to follow a similar progression: From still waters, through moving water (rivers, etc.) through to waterfalls. These are the images I’m using for the sections (Apologies for using links instead of embedding these, but I don’t want to get in copyright trouble over this and there are quite a few of them! I’ve tried to link to official-ish sources, but if you Google the name there are often larger versions of the images elsewhere):

Still waters

• Grass, Water and Sun, Alaska. 1948
• Submerged Trees, Slide Lake, Teton Area. About 1965

Rivers
I’m not 100% settled on these ones, but these images will give an idea of what I’m thinking of:

• Fern Spring, Dusk, Yosemite Valley, California. About 1962
• Shrub and Rapids, Merced River. 1968
• Cascade, Happy Isles, Yosemite Valley. About 1940

Waterfalls

• Upper Yosemite Fall, Yosemite Valley. About 1946
• Base of Upper Yosemite Fall, Yosemite National Park. About 1950

The images in sections 1 & 3 were some of my favourites in the whole exhibition. The section 1 images in particular had me absolutely spellbound.

I’m still working out what to do with instrumentation and how to make the best use of the crazy ensemble. What we have to work with is:

2 flutes (with doublings)
1 clarinet (with doublings)
2 saxes (with doublings)
1 keyboard (piano/harpsichord/organ sounds or can programme it to use samples)
1 harp
3 violins
1 cello
1 jazz drumkit (bass drum, snare drum, 2x tom toms, 2x cymbals, hihat)
1 voice – SAT or B, no text allowed
1 acoustic guitar

We have to use everything in the ensemble, so no rejecting the guitar on the grounds that it’s similar to the harp, or chucking the saxes because it’s too wind-heavy. It’s very low on bass instruments, so I’m thinking one of the saxes may need to be a baritone, and the clarinet may need to be swapped for a bass clarinet instead.

I’ve had two main ideas for using the ensemble, both of which involve dividing up the instruments into opposing groups.

Idea 1 is winds vs strings vs percussion, where “winds” includes the voice, “strings” only the violins and cello, and “percussion” is keyboard, harp, guitar and drumkit, each one taking a section of the piece. After thinking on this for a little though, I think this will be too restrictive and clear-cut. I want to blur things a little too, so…

Idea 2 is to use one principal percussion instrument per section: maybe guitar, then keyboard, then harp, with the drumkit throughout, with melodic interest focused on flutes/clarinet/saxes for part 1, strings and voice for part 2 and a mixture (perhaps making use of some of the doubling options to give a more expanded sound) for part 3.

Today was also the last day the college library was open so I trekked in to stock up, expecting loads of other students to have done the same, but the place was a ghost town! I had to distract the cafe lass from her iPhone to get a cappuccino and it seemed like this was the most interesting thing she’d had happen all day! Ran into a couple of friends, but apart from them, it was pretty much silent as the grave.

I’ve brought back the score to Elliott Carter’s Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux for flute and clarinet, which inspired the opening texture of the Ansel Adams piece, so I wanted to have a more thorough listen to it than I got at the London Sinfonietta’s New Music Show 3 the other week. Also Stephen Montague’s Snowscape, which he recommended I look at as an example of a piece that is quite loose in interpretation that might be useful for Fear of Falling. Also a couple of books on art and music which I hadn’t seen there before, the Alfred Blatter book on orchestration (recommended for our Orchestration – Large class but not required, which is why I haven’t yet invested in it), and there were a new batch of ex-library CDs on sale and I accidentally came away with the complete (or near-complete) orchestral works of Honegger, and song cycles by Vaughan Williams and Holst. Whoops.

Got a bit more research done on the Twombly project too. Still thinking about whether to stick with the mushrooms or try to work from paintings I don’t have access too. Um.

Oh! And did some thinking/talking about the Rude Health concerts with a couple of friends and we went and checked out the Peacock Room together, which is where they’ll be held. There’s a tiny organ in there! Super-excited about that. Might have to make use of it…

Tagged with: art, composition, drawing, library, organisation, photography, reading, research, thinking | 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!

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Lots and lots and lots of thinking going on. The experience of starting a Masters is turning out to be very different from either starting my BMus or my Graduate Diploma in Design. The main difference is the questions it’s raising about how I define myself and what I do, what I want to achieve, who I want to be at the end of it.

I absolutely never expected such big questions to be raised so soon into the degree, and I suspect that when I get time there’ll be a blog post or seven in there, but for now I’m just mulling over things and thinking about what I want to do. In a way the huge workload is good – plenty of work means plenty of learning, but until I get into the swing of things, I’m a bit concerned about how I can manage to compose as well as getting all the prescribed work done!

I’m doing OK though this week. VERY glad I started the reading I knew I’d have to do early though! And I basically ordered the CDs for the Adler Study of Orchestration book as soon as I walked out of the class – literally, went to the library, pulled out my iPad and bolted to Amazon! – with 5 chapters to read this week and having done 2 of them and knowing how long it took to get through 1 chapter with examples, it’s going to kill me if I have to do that in the library every week. Not to mention the pain of the train fares to go in on my days off if I can’t get it all done on the days I’m there. But I’m getting through this week’s work at least and am pretty confident I’ll have everything done on time.

The listening tasks I’m actually finding very difficult. Not because the listening itself is hard, or assessing what I’m listening to, but simply mentally justifying sitting in a beanbag listening to beautiful music and calling it work. I know this is something I need to do. I know that doing it while not doing anything else is the best way to do it, but still it feels unbelievably decadent and my guilt chip kicks in. So I need to push myself on that. I’ve managed to do listening sessions with two of the pieces off the Simply Terrifyingly Enormous Listening List.

Yesterday I spent some quality time with Beethoven’s 3rd symphony (he gets a C – the first two movements rated a C+ to a B but the Finale was really far too long and brought the whole score down).

Today I had an interesting encounter with Robert Schumann and his Piano Concerto. I pulled out the CD of it I had – it’s one of those ones that come with BBC Music Magazine – usually decent performances – and listened through with the score and by golly was I bored. From about 10 minutes in I just wanted the whole thing to stop. Awful. And I thought to myself, “well, this has been put on this list for a reason. I’m really not seeing why at all, so maybe I need to find an alternate performance of it”. Then I remembered that I’d bought the Martha Argerich Concertos set (I highly recommend – she is AMAZING) and lo and behold, it was in there too. So I put Martha on (with Rostropovich, in case you’re wondering which one) and WOW! It was like a completely different piece! I still don’t think it’ll go onto high rotation, because it’s got that German Romantic thing going on which I just don’t generally relate to but I can totally see that it’s really very lovely and I’d not avoid listening to it again. Martha rescued it from the obscurity of a D- rating and brought it up to a C

We have to rate each piece we listen to: A down to F for a true stinker. I was a bit sceptical at first but it’s actually a useful exercise, because rating the piece means you don’t just think “do I like this?” but “do I like it and is it actually any good?”.

Other stuff on my listening list for this week is Brahms’ 4th symphony, which I don’t think I’ve ever heard. I do rather enjoy his 1st but the 4th I don’t have a recording of and can’t think of any time I’d have heard it, so that’ll be all new. The other one is Shostakovich’s 5th, which it surprised me to find that I don’t seem to have a recording of, but I’m sure I’ve heard sometime. And, hell, it’s Shostakovich. I love it already.

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