I’ve been neglecting this blog a bit over the past few months, I know. And then last week I went and posted my new year goals list here which feels a little like I’ve sullied the purity of this space, but if I’m honest, pretty much nobody reads this blog and while it’s been useful – and continues to be from time to time – I’m not managing to keep up the daily posts.

Mind you, my creative activity has increased vastly since the time when I set up One Creative Thing. So much so that I no longer have the time or energy to blog about all that creative activity, so I guess that’s a good thing!

What I’m leading towards is that I’m thinking that I might change the focus of this blog a bit. Not quite sure where it’ll go – it’ll still be about regular creative activity, but I’ve been wanting to post about general creativity topics for a while now, and frankly it was getting a bit dull just writing endless lists of what I’d been doing – posting my soul on caitlinrowley.com on a regular basis has shown me that it’s more interesting for other people to read about the thoughts that go into a creative activity rather than just knowing about the activity itself. Otherwise, it should just be a blog of lists, bare-bones. Maybe it could be a bit of both. I’m not sure yet.

Today I’m recovering from the first cold of 2012. This one’s hit me hard & I’ve been in bed for a week now. Not a great start to the year, but I’ve done some thinking in that time, and especially following on from doing the 2012 list, I’m thinking of consolidating my sideline blogs. There’s this one, plus Minimania, which was my Vox blog and now languishes at Typepad, plus a couple of neglected Tumblogs too, and it occurred to me that if I broaden the scope of this blog, then maybe I can consolidate the ex-Vox content (which currently is really only updated with the annual goals lists, birthday & Christmas lists for relatives in far-flung places and the occasional personal post) with what’s here and ditch the nasty TypePad experience altogether. Maybe this space can build more on the work in progress posts on caitlinrowley.com, giving a day-to-day account of what I feel is right (or not) with the work as I’m doing it. Given that I’m going to be starting a Masters degree later this year, and that I want to start doing more active listening, more scheduled composition sessions, that could be a good thing.

Will it still be One Creative Thing? I’m not sure. Guess I’ll have to see where these thoughts take me.

(Oh, and today Djeli and I attempted to make “Princesses” – chocolate meringues – out of my new-for-Christmas French baking book. They were a bit of a disaster, but I think I know where we went wrong, so I’ll be having another go soon. Also designed and ordered proper business cards for Raspberry Blue. And read a lot)

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Today was the first day in weeks and weeks that I haven’t felt like I’ve been stuck at the bottom of a dark, dank well. The sun came out, after an horrendous day with the back yesterday today revealed a marked improvement, and I just felt more alert and healthier than I have in ages. Not sure if that’s a factor of the improved back, the sunshine, the fact that yesterday I embarked upon a new plan to delete cow-products from my diet, or just that I slept better than I have in ages (which could have been some of these combined), but it felt like at last I could see a little bit of daylight. It didn’t last the whole day and I felt entirely unequal to doing anything useful at all, but it’s a start.

Had another osteopath appointment this afternoon. I’m taking it as a good sign that I left his office in more pain than I went in. And that after a relatively mild (but still agonising) session. I’m hopeful that next week’s might be the last. Not sure whether it’ll be soon enough though to give me the all-clear to travel to Australia for my mother’s eye operation on 31 May, but we’ll see.

Nothing musical at all happened today. But I am about to listen to some Satie to redress the balance. Otherwise, did some knitting, listened to a webcast recording on content marketing, read some of Unstuck which continues interesting, although this chapter (on finding guides) I’m finding not quite so interesting as the previous chapter on nutrition and intolerances. I also read a bit more of Made to Stick which is also excellent. I’ve slowed down with this one recently, but very much still enjoying it and feel (or at least hope!) that my writing may be the better for reading it. At any rate, it makes me more aware of what’s going on in other people’s writing which is very interesting indeed!

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Feeling – if possible – even worse today than yesterday, so I’ve spent a lot of time in snooze-mode, which seems to be helping. Glad I started the antibiotics now. Not helped though by intense lower-back pain which I think has been caused by the landlord’s crapulous couch. Ow.

Day 2 of the JavaScript course today. Lots of reading. LOTS of reading. But it was really quite well done – digestible chunks. And I think I’m finally starting to see where Objects fit in. I understand why they’re a good thing, but I’ve never really got how they connect with other elements of the language and I think that’s starting to become clearer. Anyway, I guess I’ll find out when I start using them.

Amazon delivery arrived today: The ABRSM Grade 5 theory books, which I need for my teaching. Plus a book called Made to Stick, which sounds like it might be good for the eBook writing that I’ll get around to sometime.. very… soon.

Ploughing through my to-do list now, in spite of fuzzy, limited-capability brain. The new GTD system I’ve implemented seems to be working well. YAY. Next I have to find some time to revamp my paper files and do a TON of scanning. That will be less fun. Maybe in front of the TV sometime.

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Today I finally managed to get to a Composition Workshop class at TVU. I felt a bit nervous going in – after all, semester’s been running for about 5 weeks now so it felt a bit weird to just be sauntering in so late in the term, but I needn’t have worried. It was an interesting session – I can tell I’m going to learn all sorts of unexpected stuff in this class. Today’s 2 hour lecture-demonstration was on creating a dubstep remix of Pierre Schaefer’s 1948 musique concrète work Études aux chemins fers with particular focus on the artifacts of time-stretching, so it was all about pulling the base sound around and listening to the weird and fabulous effects created as Logic attempts to fill in the gaps created by the stretching with granular synthesis. Way cool. Not that I actually know what dubstep is. Guess I should go and look that up, huh?

Made a little progress on the new piece. Another 10 seconds. And I seem to have found a text too. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Carrion Comfort:

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

It’s raaather longer than I had been thinking. Indeed the whole piece seems to be thinking of itself on a somewhat epic scale, but anyway, I’ll see how it goes. If it’s coming along well but is incomplete, it may be appropriate anyway for Manchester. I can write to them a little closer to the date and see if that would be acceptable.

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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…

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Very tired today after the weekend. Not entirely sure why. Guess the nightmare didn’t help. Anyway, so I’ve had a quiet day today and yet achieved some stuff:

Most significantly, I’ve launched myself onto SoundCloud with four audio files to start with: Thickets, Deconstruct: Point, line, plane, Egg the Tenth and the Satie Chanson arrangement, neither of the last two ever having been online before. I’m pretty pleased with it. What I’m not so pleased with is the fact that I went back through a bunch of pieces looking for stuff to post and in the course of doing so listened to quite a lot of the stuff I’ve written in the last ten years, and am a little depressed to discover that much of it is rubbish. What I’ve written in the last couple of years I’m quite pleased with, but there’s a lot of dross in there that shouldn’t ever see the light of day. Trivial without really being amusing or unimaginative without being particularly satisfying, for the most part. Fortunately it seems that most of it hasn’t been listed on the website either, but I don’t think I’ll bother to salvage any of it. It is relegated to the folder marked “stuff I had to write to get as good as I’ve got, however good that may be”. Shame. And a little depressing. But it’s still quite a good thing to discover. And there were a number of things in there that I actually AM quite pleased with still and want to do something with.

I’ve also posted a new blog post, which I wrote the other day but kept back so as not to flood people’s twitter streams and so on Why I’m not applying for my dream job. I posted it with the WordPress scheduled posting option, which seems to have worked well. Now I’m testing out scheduling the tweet to announce it (3.30pm UK time so as to hopefully catch Americans at their desks too).

And I’ve done some more work on the 1-minute violin piece. It’s getting better. Tweaking away. I’m quite pleased with it, although I don’t think it’ll be a favourite piece when it’s done, but it’s all a bit of an experiment and it’s gradually growing into itself. Hoping I can finish it this week. The poetry book I ordered as the first step towards writing the libretto of the Richard III opera also turned up, so I’ve started reading that a bit. It does seem to be VERY much for children, but others have found it useful. Suspect I’ll need to follow it up with another volume though, thinking it might be Writing Poems by Peter Sansom, which is published by Bloodaxe, a poetry press my father has the highest regard for – sounds interesting. But first to read through the Ted Hughes I have.

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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!

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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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I’ve been a little poorly today – not much, just a bit coldy and urk, but enough to make even small achievements feel big. And it’s been a pretty good day. I actually got some stuff done I’ve been putting off for a bit, so that’s got to be good, right?

First up, I finally read Chris Guillebeau’s A Brief Guide to World Domination which has been on my to-read list for some time. It’s pretty good, but I don’t think it’s really told me anything I didn’t already know, being fairly well-read in the matter of world domination (isn’t everyone?). I’d still quite like to read his book, though. I think I’ve got to a point though where I need to stop faffing about and just be brave and DO stuff. If I want to get alternate revenue streams up and running, then I need to write stuff and send it off – finish my book (for small businesses, on how to build a website that actually works rather than one that just looks pretty), submit some articles, see what I can find out about writing music to order. That sort of stuff.

I also rang Thames Valley University. Again. To try to find out some last-minute information about their individual composition tuition which I’m hoping to do this semester. Their form is ambiguous (and so keenly designed that it’s practically illegible – lime green on lighter lime green? Even 20/20 vision doesn’t help with that one, dears!) and their documentation confusing – the individual tuition is listed in a brochure called “Junior College” which is a programme for kids. Because it’s for kids, the composition tutors are all either BMus(Hons) (like me) or MA, unlike the music-school-proper which has fully fledged composers, which is what I need if I’m to learn anything that will be of use to me in applying for an MMus. But the person I need to speak to never answers her phone, and never calls me back, which is a little on the frustrating side. I’d give up if I weren’t so damn keen about doing it. I’ve sent her an email too, so hoping she at least responds to that before the week is out so I still have time to apply if appropriate. AARGH! Think I need to set up a contingency plan in case I get no response at all or find out it’s only the recent grads who are teaching individuals. Not sure what that might be.

And I’ve got a site for the London Composers Forum up and running – it’s for a super-secret project, so I can’t link to it (and no point anyway as it’s all behind a login) but it’s been great to be using Drupal for a proper site so soon after messing with it. And I’m quite pleased with it – it’s doing everything I want it to do and it’s taken minimal effort to get it to do so. Yay me

And last but definitely not least, I tried a new recipe tonight. I had decided to make the Greek salmon kebabs and was facing an inadvertently small quantity of fish and yet more tedious salad, so I perused the interwebs and found this recipe for garlicky bulgur wheat. I just so happened to have bulgur wheat in the cupboard after the Nigel Slater beetroot lamb burger thingies (MOST excellent), so I gave it a go – and, you know what?, it turned out really really nice! I mixed it in with the salad and it went very well indeed. I am looking forward to attacking the remnants with some leftover chicken for lunch tomorrow.

So not really any music (although I did listen to Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and the Maya Beiser album World to Come which never ceases to be amazing) although I’m still mulling over ideas for the short solo violin piece I’m thinking of writing for an upcoming Fifteen Minutes of Fame call for scores. I need to start somewhere with composing for a single string instrument if I’m ever to get this cello tango written, and this seems as good a place as any, but I’m still at a bit of a loss as to how to tackle it. Guess I should do a bunch of listening…

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Always a good feeling, that. I still didn’t get everything done I wanted to do, but I sure made a hefty start, most noticeably spending most of the day test-driving Drupal modules in preparation for a quote I need to send out tomorrow for a rather complex site for a non-profit organisation. I’m really rather impressed with Drupal, I must say. Today I’ve played with user permissions, an email-list module, search, adding images to user profiles, installing a security upgrade, implemented rich text editing (rather than plain-vanilla HTML) and a bunch of other stuff – and I haven’t once had to touch any code to do it. Obviously theme-creation is a completely different kettle of fish and I haven’t even looked at that yet – saving that for tomorrow. But so far, very impressed with what it can do pretty much straight out of the box.

And in the lulls while I waited for files to upload and delete as I performed the security upgrade? Well, I arranged the first four movements of Pieces of Eight for string quartet, which I’m thinking will be my submission to Sequenza 21′s current call for scores (I’ve abandoned the cello tango I was writing for this as too complex for the time I have – I still want to write it, but it will probably take several goes to get to a point where I’ll be happy with it). I was tossing up between arranging it for string quartet or piano and percussion but the quartet won out in the end – limited time and I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted the percussion to do but I didn’t want it to be just a bong or bang here and there.

I also sent off a bunch of emails that have been lingering and sorted out a survey for the composers from Durham – we’re setting up a Facebook group and wanted to give ourselves some semblance of authority, so we’re voting on a name… results by the end of the weekend, I hope.

Oh! And my next round of Amazon-junkie-goodies arrived! Alex Ross’s new book, Listen to This, and the next book in my pre-opera reading round, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. I’ve rethought that idea about keeping the subject of the opera under my hat – in the light of it probably taking me several years to actually produce any part of it, it seems a bit lame, so here’s the announcement: It’s to be (loosely) based on Tey’s novel (yes, I’ve read it before) which focuses on the revisionist history of Richard III (the one that says he wasn’t a deformed tyrant who murdered the princes in the Tower). As an opera plot, I think it’s up there with the best of them: murder, slander, rumour, illegitimacy, deceit, pretenders to the throne – it’s got the lot!

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