I’m feeling almost crestfallen. RPM Challenge is over, the album is done (huzzah for all of us!) and while I’ve got a ton of work to push on with, I’m feeling kind of sad. I’ve absolutely loved these weeks of working with my friends, both old, new and somewhere in between. It’s been lovely to write for specific people and try to make something that fits with what I know about them and their art, and  mostly I think I’ve succeeded OK. Several people have said how much they enjoy their pieces, and that’s what really matters.

I know I’ve learnt an incredible lot this month. Just look at all the new things I’ve tried: improvisation, extended techniques (blowing into the flute, multiphonics, flutter-tonguing, finger vibrato on the recorder), I’ve used trills for the first time (I think) ever, pushed the range of dynamics I usually use, used quarter-tones, written for guitar, created a graphic score (that I actually intended to make, as opposed to Carrion Comfort, which was an accidental graphic score), set a poem that rhymes, written for a solo brass instrument – and got up the courage to ask for muting (and very glad I did). I suspect I’ll be experiencing the aftershocks of this project for weeks and possibly months to come.

And I can’t say how much I think it’s done for my brain, to have to work so quickly, come up with ideas and just work with them. Twice I started with ideas I initially thought were rubbish and was either able to salvage them, or discovered that they worked, but not until I got them onto the instrument for which they were intended.

Of course, until now, too, I could count the usable recordings I had of my music (meaning well-performed, well-recorded, and that I have permission to do anything with) on one hand. Now I need both hands and a foot! This means so, SO much to me. It’s one thing to write music, but quite another to have someone bring it to life for you, and let you hear it. The performers have all been amazing, and I hope I get to write for them again in the future.

But enough burbling. I’m sure I’ll write a blog post over at caitlinrowley.com sometime soon about specific lessons learned, but here is for the present, so I should run through today.

Of course the big news today was receiving the last 2 tracks. Jennifer Mackerras’ Triptych for One is in three movements, and she sent me an assortment of takes so I had a lot of fun wading through them and working out which takes to use of which movement. And they came together quite well in Logic too – a bit of crossfading helped the transitions and a little DeNoiser helped with background hiss on the first two movements. This one’s an odd piece. It still takes me by surprise. I think it only revels itself properly after a few listens. Maybe the movements should have been a little longer, perhaps. I might explore that idea in another piece. I love the multiphonics on the treble recorder – they have so much character! Definitely going to have to use those in the piece I’m writing for Jen’s recorder quartet, Pink Noise.

The other piece which went up today was Francis Western-Smith’s Egg the Eleventh. I’m delighted that the whole corrupted fugue thing worked with this one. It could have gone so very wrong, but I like the crunchiness of the harmonies and to me (I don’t know about anyone else) it’s channelling a lot of Satie, especially at the end. Or possibly I’m just thinking that because the style of this piece is a complete throwback to my uni days and the first few piano eggs I wrote, The Four-Egg Omelette. I always loved those pieces – they’re still some of my favourites – and it’s nice to know that I haven’t moved impossibly far away from that style.

I decided on the track order too today, which is mostly based on the order the pieces were completed in, but I switched I Want It To Kill Them and Triptych for One around, so the recorder piece comes directly after the slide-guitar-and-crunchy-tape one, which seems an odd positioning, but it actually seems to work. Once I had the pieces in order, I discovered that the reverb I’d added to Nest and Solitary Fanfare was a little excessive – the rest of the album, while the spaciousness of the recordings varies, sounds like it was recorded in small rooms, while those two tracks seemed to have moved into a concert hall and it just sounded odd. So I dialled it back on both of them & “rehoused” them in a room rather than a hall, albeit one with a bit of space to it. I think this improves those tracks within the set. Hopefully the performers agree…

I still haven’t got to the lever harp piece for Shana, but I will. It’s on my list for this month (although probably later this month as I have the brass quintet and a piece for Carla Rees and her quarter-tone alto flute to complete ASAP). And it’s the only piece I didn’t get to write. I’m glad that I thought to finish off the Pieces of Eight arrangement for her while I was concussed though – it fits well with the other tiny pieces, and it meant that nobody missed out entirely. Every performer got something to play that was made especially for them. Even with the concussion, so I’m feeling rather pleased with myself.

Tomorrow, then, is CD-burning-and-posting time. I guess I don’t really have to, but it’s just going to really symbolise the end of a project that started out on a whim, ended up bigger than Ben Hur and which I think I have to add to my list of most-amazing-musical-experiences-of-my-life-so-far. So it’ll be sent. And then I’ll look at posting the whole thing to BandCamp. It’s going to be a bit of a package – all the album tracks, plus all the scores, plus this diary. I saw that Chrissie Caulfield included her RPM diary in the download and I think it’s a great idea because it gives a real picture of how the work was created, for those who are interested. Hopefully someone will be…

Tagged with: completion, composition, friends, music, organisation, publishing, recording, self-promotion, tools | Add a comment

Super-productive today. As with a lot of my days recently, I’ve been largely focused on self-promotion stuff rather than strict creativity per se, but it does exercise my creative brain in that I have to think up new ways to do things.

The last few days I’ve been working on getting a proper mailing list established for caitlinrowley.com using MailChimp. I have to say, that I am absolutely delighted with MailChimp. Great-looking product, easy to use, very generous with their free account (2000 subscribers! 12,000 emails a month!) and the whole thing seems to be completely customisable, assuming you’re willing to put in a bit of coding work. I had some difficulties and emailed their tech support without much hope of anything coming of it (because tech supports in general are pretty useless for anything other than pre-scripted issues) and WOW WOW WOW! Not only did I get a reply within 2 hours, but the guy had actually read my email (SO rare) and had multiple solutions for me, even though it’s not an off-the-shelf problem. SO impressed. And when you set up a campaign they give you a PDF download to make your own papercraft chimp. Now that’s got to be a winner.

Anyway, so the list is set up now. Today I also posted a new blog post and have linked via the signup form to the score of the piece – it’s a temporary measure because getting it working properly is going to take a little time, but it’s better than the SoundCloud option I’ve been trying out which turned out to just be incredibly clunky and uncomfortable (and some regular internet users said they couldn’t even see the link to download. Fail).

So super-excited about all that. Hoping I should get some subscribers soon. It’ll be interesting to see if and how well it works…

Oh, and the on-again-off-again film project is on again. Got a call on Monday about that one. And I went to see a potential client about a website project yesterday… and came away with another film score project (and a website one) – woot!

Tagged with: blogging, code, completion, composition, dayjob, experimenting, learning, music, programming, publishing, self-promotion, tools, web | Add a comment

BIG day today. In spite of being a quiet day after the pressure of yesterday, I have posted the sound file for Diabolus to SoundCloud today:

Diabolus for unaccompanied violin by caitlinrowley

I’ve been getting some nice comments about it too, which is comforting. People seem to think it’s worthy of getting a real live, performance. Ooh I feel all glowy.

Did some listening & score reading in the afternoon – Nicholas Maw’s Life Studies, which my tutor suggested, which led to some reading about Maw which led to listening to Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw, which is the piece that inspired me to write a 12-tone work for my HSC. Gosh it sounds pretty tame now, compared to other 2nd Viennese School stuff. I enjoyed it though. Also gave Gordon Crosse’s Thel another run through. Then changed tack entirely and listened through to Tansy Davies’ new CD Troubairitz because it’s, well, new. And awesome. Did a little drawing too, which always seems to consolidate thought.

I’ve also come up with a shiny new plan for The Next Piece. Tansy posted an amazing-looking opportunity to the ChaCoCo group on Facebook today – a residency opp with Manchester Camerata, which looks to be right up my alley, but requires 2 works to be submitted: 1 for up to 6 players (which I can do easily) plus one for 9+ players or chamber orchestra (which I don’t have). It hath a deadline of 18 April. Then I found an opp for songs for voice & chamber orchestra due in September, so I figure if I write a song (or start writing a set of songs) for voice and chamber orchestra, then I can hopefully kill two birds with one stone. Hey, presto! PLAN!

And after the plan was made I sat down and accidentally wrote almost a minute of said piece, which Djelibeybi seems to think is a promising beginning, as do I. Guess I need to settle on a text now. The Blake I was investigating as a possibility I think won’t really fit. Maybe Manley Hopkins? The sister-in-common-law has suggested I investigate Cavafy. He seems to be (just) dead enough to avoid copyright problems (although translations may be difficult and I don’t speak Greek) and sounds interesting. Considering…

Tagged with: composition, drawing, ideas, listening, music, organisation, publishing, reading, research, study, tools | Add a comment

Having a GREAT day today. Tired but happy – got a heap of things done. And worthwhile stuff too. While I’ve been enjoying the business-building stuff I’ve been focused on for the past couple of weeks, it’s been great to have a day that’s been predominantly about creating and promoting my music. Really refreshing.

Well, Monday is blog day on caitlinrowley.com, and as yesterday we had a friend over for lunch and then I totally zonked out because I was so exhausted after the week so I didn’t get my usual Sunday blog-writing moment and had to do it today. I wasn’t ready to write more about the violin piece (more on that in a second) partly because the piece wasn’t really ready, and partly because it’s a post I’m going to want to do a chunk of thinking and probably some analysing for, which is going to take more than just a morning. So I decided it was time to launch a new series of blog posts I’ve been thinking about for a couple of weeks. After reading an article about tools by Havi Brooks I’ve been thinking a bit about the tools I use for composing and I thought that in the context of trying to write more about my process, it might be interesting to also talk about the awesome stuff that constitutes the tools I use – not necessarily (or just) things like my computer, pencils and so on, but also the things that inspire me and the stuff that gets used while I’m working through my thoughts.

So I leapt in. I’ve started with Elaine Gould’s notation reference, Behind Bars, which I’m actually finding quite inspiring and exciting, in spite of the fact that it sounds dull. Every time I look something up in it, I stumble across something else that makes me go “ooh! maybe I could use that” so I spent about an hour just writing about that book this morning. And hey, presto: blog post. And I’ve already had a little positive feedback on it, so hopefully people will get something out of it.

I also continued on with The Great Backup Project – I installed a plugin both here and on caitlinrowley.com to back up both these blogs to our new S3 space, so if they accidentally get wiped, there’ll be a recent backup to restore rather than having to remember to do it by hand. I’ve had Time Machine running perfectly all day now – the only downside is that if I’m not at my desk then I’m not being backed up, but so long as I remember to return the laptop to the desk overnight, it’ll switch itself on and hopefully run a backup first thing. Not perfect, but a darn sight better than the nothing I’ve been relying on for too long. I’ll look into ways I might be able to access the new drive wirelessly sometime soon…

And the violin piece! I finally tweaked myself to a standstill, then gave myself a talking to, PDFed it up and sent it off to a couple of violin-playing friends from Durham. And got an answer within an hour from one of them saying she had “great fun” playing it and yes everything’s perfectly playable and indeed mostly very comfortable under the hand. She suggested a couple of open-string tweaks, which was great because, yes, that was the sound I had in mind, but I’d completely forgotten to put the symbols in, and one cautionary accidental, which is now in place. So I’m down to the final layout, choosing fonts and just the last publicationy bits and pieces – a brief note for the front, design a cover and it should be winging its way to New York by the end of the week. It actually has a title too: Diabolus. I didn’t want to do some reference to 1-minute/60-seconds whatever, and the whole thing is built on the interval of the tritone (the diabolus in musica) and by the end the time signature changes had become pretty dizzying, so I think this name will stick.

Tagged with: blogging, completion, composition, fonts, music, organisation, publishing, tools | Add a comment

Lately I’ve been trying to post a little earlier in the day to save the situation I’ve often ended up in, which is getting to 2am and suddenly realising I need to go to bed but not having posted so I either have to post when I just want to sleep (and back-date the post so it appears on the right day) or post several days in a blob later on (and back-date all the posts). But it’s getting me in a bit of a muddle because often I do some of my most creative stuff at night and given that this is a day-by-day blog, it feels sort of weird to be saying “yesterday I did this”. If you feel it’s weird too, please let me know in the comments!

But weird or not, I’m taking it on. And starting with…

Yesterday I ended up having a bit of an SEO binge. I explored a few tools, found a couple that might be useful and updated/added/corrected some stuff on caitlinrowley.com to improve its ranking on Google. It’s going to take a little while to seep into the system, of course, but I’m confident I can improve it. What I’m aiming for is to make caitlinrowley.com the top-ranking site on Google for a search on my name. At moment minim-media.com is, which is fine because that was my principal site but now that I’m thinking of closing that one down, I’d like to have caitlinrowley.com up there before I do. It was lots of fun and felt like a big achievement when it was done. Now I just need to make myself not check my stats more than once a day to see what’s going on because there’s no point – Google Analytics only updates once a day. There’s no new data there. No, really…

Today I was stuck at home waiting for someone from DHL to come and take our poorly Roomba away to be fixed again. I’ve been feeling like everything’s a little fragmented in terms of the business development stuff, and lacking a little in direction, so I ended up spending about 3 hours going through various bits and pieces, thinking thoughts and working through worksheets and planning plans, all of which was great, and my ideas have taken another step along the path towards the business being whatever it turns out to be (I blogged about this over at Minimania, so I won’t repeat it here. Is it possible to be a blog-writing addict?), but rather exhausting.

Eventually the Roombaman came and took our digital pet away, whereupon I bolted out to the post office and stood in line for half an hour to send some stuff to Australia. The walk and the wait were great, actually. Really cleared away some cobwebs and made some stuff fall into place. And what I realised was that Raspberry Blue was heading towards the exact same problem that Minim Music & New Media has/had, which is that it didn’t have a clear focus. Splitting the site between the web dev/SEO stuff and the music publishing stuff is detrimental to the development of the business. Not because I can’t do both – I most emphatically can and still think I will – but because the presence of the music stuff undermines my authority as someone who lives and breathes the web. Most people, I suspect, really only have one clear obsessive focus so I think potential clients may find it hard to put their trust in someone who is obviously doing two (apparently) unrelated things at once. So I’ve trimmed out the music stuff and instantly the site feels stronger and more authoritative. I feel less confused about it too and more confident about the prospect of sending people to it. I think the music stuff might need to have a separate site. Whether it needs its own domain name is another point, but I think I’ll focus on the web thing first because that’s what’s going to contribute most to my possibly not needing a dayjob again. Copying is unlikely to develop into anything more than pocket money, I feel.

So big, big thoughts drifting about and more plans being made and I feel like things are coming together enough to tentatively say that the Raspberry Blue site will be live before I have my root canal done on the 24th of March. I think it’s well doable. Let’s hope I’m right…

Oh, and I’ve listened through to the violin piece with the changes I made yesterday and yes, I think it’s essentially finished. I have, however, in the course of tweaking it towards its final form, done a lot of octave switches and added in some extra double-stops, so I need to do a careful check to make sure the double and triple stops actually are really playable and that I don’t have to tweak them back in some way. Also need to work out how to make Finale play back some of the minutiae of the notation so I can produce a relatively real-sounding MIDI version without needing to approach ProTools. PT, frankly, has me a bit scared after having apparently caused the collapse of my backup drive, and I don’t have any drives any more that don’t have stuff on them already! Seriously contemplating switching to Logic.

Tagged with: blogging, completion, composition, copying, dayjob, ideas, music, organisation, play, publishing, research, thinking, tools, web, writing | Add a comment

Well, today was noteworthy. Today was the first time in all our 14 years together that Djelibeybi actually a) remembered Valentine’s Day (albeit it’s on a Monday this year) and b) did something about it. Normally he just doesn’t remember it’s happening until the day, when I give him a present or make him a special dinner and he says “sorry” if I’m lucky. Last year he went off to a film shoot at 7am and I didn’t see him till midnight, without so much as a “love you” as he left. That one did not go down so well. But this year he really did very well indeed – he thought up something to do (go to Crouch End, peruse the shops and have lunch at the fabulous Monkey Nuts), booked the restaurant (!!!!) AND actually (eventually) remembered that we had something planned (although there were a lot of “what are we doing on Sunday again?” moments). And it was nice. It didn’t really start out too well – a little minor squabbling and grumpiness on both sides of the fence, but lunch sorted us out (I had the chicken schnitzel BLT topless burger [no bun, but on a bed of little gem lettuce instead] – fantastic) and then we had a lovely walk to Turnpike Lane (lovely in the sense of enjoyable and companionable sauntering and chatting, not lovely in the sense of scenic beauty. Hornsey doesn’t really do scenic beauty, I think) where we ventured into Sainsbury’s and ventured out again with the DVDs of the new Star Trek movie & Iron Man plus snacks, before heading home to a lovely quiet evening on the couch. It may not be everyone’s idea of romance, but it was actually really nice. And it meant a lot to me that he even thought of it.

And of course, in spite of it being pre-Valentine’s Day, I still did some work – namely deciding on and uploading the last file to go on SoundCloud, which is to be my warbly rendition of the Satie Chanson arrangement. Not great singing, but I think it provides an interesting foil to the other pieces that are on there – catharsis would be too much like the beginning of Deconstruct, I don’t have time to sort out the string quartet version of Pieces of Eight (it needs a lot of work to get the pizzicati in and separation between the movements – might need to pull it into Pro Tools ultimately to get it all working right), likewise a lot of the piano pieces, which end up sounding a bit mechanical from Finale but can be made a bit more human in Pro Tools with the simple drawing of a wobbly line for the attack of each note, I don’t really want one from the vault yet even though Nightride is basically ready to go (might put that up later in the week), so with the Satie song all ready for uploading, it’s the logical choice. So I think everything’s in place now, although I won’t announce it now (when most people are sleeping) but will wait till the morning…

Tagged with: completion, conversation, events, friends, music, publishing, relaxing, self-promotion, social life, tools, walking, web | Add a comment

It’s been a big day today. But for all that, I’ve only really achieved three things, but two of them are whoppers so that’s OK:

1. I have achieved, after many hours of sorting, Inbox Zero once again (or near enough – Mac Mail won’t remove the Notes from my inbox and they’re things I need to keep on my iPod Touch, but apart from that it’s empty). Feels soooooo good! Only problem now is that I need to try to achieve the same thing in Evernote, which isn’t so hard but more than a little annoying.
2. I have ditched NetNewsWire as my RSS feed reader because the interface was messy and it was stopping me from actually reading stuff. I tested out Reeder, which I’ve heard good things about, and while the overall concept was nice, the lack of text contrast was killing my eyes, so I ditched that one. Nice Mac-like interface though. If they fix the contrast issue or introduce user-definable colours, I could well give it another go. Anyway, I’ve ended up with an open-source reader which I’d never heard of, Vienna, which has the rather nice attributes of being skinnable with CSS themes (so no contrast problems), a nice clean interface, and integrated with Evernote so I can send articles I want to read later straight into EN without needing to launch them in a browser first. Quite pleased with it so far. I do, however, think that I need to review the feeds I’m following and do a bit of culling – there’s a lot there I don’t necessarily want to read all the time and perhaps there’s a better approach for these than RSS. Also, as I’m working on businessy stuff, I suspect my focus will change to a certain extent. Wonder if there’s a way to archive a group of feeds so they don’t show up as readable but can be resuscitated at a moment’s notice – that would be very cool for people like me who go through phases of what they want to read.
3. I have spent a fairly large chunk of time uploading stuff to SoundCloud. So far I have 3 pieces up there. I’d like to add one more before I launch, just to give a bit of an overview. Not entirely sure what to choose though. It’s been a good experience so far though – I like that they limit you by duration not by filesize, so I can upload a big fat file which they then compress for me and all that costs me is the time to upload it, it doesn’t reduce the amount of music I can put online. Easy interface to use and mostly good options to fill in. I like that you can include a ‘Buy’ link – might use that when the scores are online. The only thing that’s a little annoying is that you have to choose just one Genre option, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to search by Genre – it seems like you can type anything at all into the Genre box, so the chances of small variants between similar terms (classical vs classicalmusic vs classical music, for example) are extremely high. i’m guessing that’s not much of a drama for most pop genres but for the classically-derived new music world it becomes a barrier to finding new content because everyone thinks of their music with different terminology – new music, contemporary classical, nonpop, art music, serious music – it’s a long list. plus all the typographical variants that can happen – it makes it hard to hunt down music that might be of interest. But time will tell – looking forward to seeing what the response is!

Tagged with: completion, gtd, music, organisation, publishing, reading, self-promotion, tools, web | Add a comment

If you’ve been reading this blog over the past few days, then you’ll know that I’m contemplating some pretty big life changes – getting my own business off the ground, putting composition centre-stage in my life, working seriously at getting my music heard and audience-building, that sort of thing.

I’ve had some pretty intense ideas over the past few days – one of them just yesterday, which I think might actually bring in some real cash but I don’t want to announce it yet – going to run it by someone whose opinion I value and who falls neatly within my target market – and while it’s been great to feel the ideas flowing, and even better to find myself still composing in the midst of it, I’ve also been starting to feel a little overwhelmed.

So today I’ve put in a major chunk of work on ditching the overwhelm. I had a good long think about the way I work best and realised that I’ve always been happiest in my work when I’m not just beavering away at one thing all the time – my brain likes to hop about. So then I figured that instead of just trying to think of ways to bring in money, I should sit down and work out what sort of things I actually pretty much always enjoy doing. There was a bit of a list, but most things were pretty synonymous with the following key points:

• Composition (well, duh!)
• Publishing and its attendant elements – writing and editing, music copying, layout, picking out fonts
• Helping people do stuff better (so long as I don’t need to speak to them on the phone)

And after that it all became pretty clear that I should probably focus the bulk of my business-building efforts in the direction of publication – I should write my book on how to build a website that actually works, I should publish music and possibly recordings, I should try to get some copying work and get some clients to pay me to design some stuff (I do have a degree in that after all). Because the third point really can tie in very well with the second point if I do it right. And I think that if I can make a living doing a combination of these three things, then I could be very happy indeed.

Which was a comforting thought, except then the fear set in: How the hell do I start building a publishing company? I mean, I have no plans to be Faber or Penguin, but even once you have content, how do you get heard?? Here I found some of the lessons from the e-book I bought the other day useful – just some bits and pieces about being noticed online. Of course I know a fair bit about using social networks, but I tend to keep quiet rather than shouting and I’ve generally restricted myself to the more general or larger ones – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Delicious.

So I figured that if I was to conquer the fear and do anything at all about getting this off the ground, the first step was to work out exactly what I was going to try to do, and for each of those goals, to write down as many actions as I could think of that would need to happen in order to reach the primary goal of having something for sale (actually selling something is part 2 – first up one needs to have something to sell and something with which to sell it). This resulted in 3 full A4 pages of to-do list. Um. Yes. Quite.

Seeing everything I need to work on down in black and white (well, black and yellow) actually was a bit of a kick in the derrière, to the extent that this evening I have written 3 emails, created a Twitter account for our company, Raspberry Blue (@azurefruit – yes, a little lateral thinking had to come into play as raspberryblue is taken and even though it hasn’t been posted to in a year, alas, it is not available. Go on, follow us!), created a SoundCloud account to post my music to, and discovered that I actually did open a Bandcamp account a few months ago, so I’ve tweaked the profile details there and basically it’s all ready to start receiving content (really quite excited to see what happens with this particular part of the plan – more on this later).

There’s still an absolute Everest of tasks to do – including building a whole website for Raspberry Blue, creating yet another blog and writing some starter-content for it, writing the book, working on laying out my scores, making semi-proper recordings of my songs, where possible, designing business cards, designing flyers, getting the laser printer fixed… on and on and on – but it feels fantastic to know that I’ve taken some real steps today, and now that those steps have been taken I’m significantly more confident about where my feet need to go tomorrow. It’s the big breath before the leap.

Tagged with: blogging, copying, dayjob, design, editing, fonts, gtd, ideas, learning, mentalhealth, music, organisation, publishing, self-promotion, thinking, tools, web, writing | Add a comment

HUGELY productive day. I may have to make a list to save babbling too much:

• Posted the new follow-up blog post I wrote yesterday online and told Twitter about it. I think I’ve decided to try to post once a week to caitlinrowley.com, with an occasional extra post. 2 a week seems like it could get a bit much when I’m working, but 1 should be fine
• Installed Google Analytics on caitlinrowley.com so I can hopefully properly track traffic and get a better idea of what approaches work and where the traffic’s coming from
• Drafted a new blog post for a new series of posts on caitlinrowley.com (part of a plan to have some backup, non-time-specific posts for when things get busy so I can continue the plan I just mentioned to post every week)
• Made Nigel Slater turkey cakes for dinner
• Caught up a bit with the laundry
• Finished reading Art + Money – some good ideas in there. I’m looking forward to listening to the interviews that go with it. Final issues with getting extended content still not sorted, but I’m giving it a few days – plenty to be working on till then
• Did some thinking about the opera and researched books on poetry-writing – it looks like books on lyric-writing are pretty much all geared towards the pop market, which is less useful to me. Might try to get hold of the new Sondheim book and a general book on writing poetry and then see how I go. I also wrote to my Da (who’s a fabulous poet) for suggestions.
• Started the violin piece! This has been kicking about in my head for a considerable period of time now, so I bullied myself into getting something down on paper, and no sooner had I started than it all flowed like water and the whole thing was mapped out in less time than it took Djelibeybi to go to the gym. Next stage is to condense it (I’ve worked it as three separate lines, with a goal of mooshing them together then cleaning up – there’ll probably be a post on this at caitlinrowley.com soonish), make sure the double- and triple-stops are playable and that it all hangs together. Could be finished by early next week though! Woot! (Mustn’t get too cocky)
• Did a little research on Twitter – after reading Art + Money (which is primarily focused on visual art) I thought that the equivalent of an online gallery for composers is audio-sharing sites, so I put the question out to my tribe on Twitter who have basically responded that SoundCloud’s the way to go. It doesn’t have a huge classical community yet, but it sounds like a good place to start, so I’m going to try to work up some of the MIDI performances I have in Pro Tools, make them sound a little more human, and post them up there and see what happens. I have to say: I love my tweeps. They were so helpful with this, and it was lovely to have people saying “add me when you do!” and “make sure you tell us here when you set it up!”. Awesome, awesome people.

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Today I made my first-ever Christmas pudding. I feel simultaneously elated with the joy of creation, yet curiously let down by the fact that I can’t just serve it up – it has to just sit quietly till the 25th and then be steamed for another 3 hours before we’ll discover if it’s actually any good. It does seem to smell pretty good, though, from what I can tell with my nose all stuffed up. And the little bit of mix I tasted gave me hope that perhaps this will be a recipe I might be able to tolerate (my general attitude towards Christmas pudding is “ew yuk, take the horrid thing away!”). For those who are interested, I’m doing the Nigella Lawson Ultimate Christmas Pudding from her Nigella Christmas book. I was supposed to do our family’s traditional pud recipe, but there was confusion because the recipe we were supplied with called for “a packet” of cinnamon. I’m pretty sure I know what sort of packet this would be in Australia, but spices don’t come like that here and I’d hate to guess at the spice quantity and then mess the whole thing up. Nigella, on the whole, seemed safer. I shall take a peek under the lid tomorrow to see what it looks like and find out whether the whole thing’s been a disaster.

Still tearing my hair out over the Remembrances score I was supposed to send off earlier this week – it’s been dogged with annoying problems – everything looked fine, then I discovered the voice part was entirely in the tenor clef. After much poking at Finale I got this fixed, re-exported, re-trimmed, re-imported into InDesign… to discover that when I fixed the clef, the vocal line had dropped an octave. So now I’m re-re-trimming and hope to have it finished tonight.

Quintet is not happy. I think I may need to add something in the middle. This makes me also not happy.

I introduced my parents to my trifle though, which seemed to go down quite well – brioche slices, a touch of Napoleon brandy, fresh raspberries, custard, whipped cream, slivered almonds.

Oh, and posted a new blog post too. The Digital Dimension: 1. Programme notes, which then received a response post from Killing Classical Music, from whence the incentive to write the original post came. All very incestuous!

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