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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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It was looking like today would go the way of yesterday, but no! I managed to cram in 1 pomodoro’s worth of work on the Ansel Adams piece, which resulted in another 45 seconds of music sketched out – it’s rampaging along to the 2-minute mark now. Really happy with it, although I think I probably need to go over what I have and thicken up some textures a little, and tie sections together, but it’s making good progress. Also did a tiny bit of Twombly study on the train.

And of course Tate WOULD be having a sale when I got there to buy a Christmas present for Djeli’s nephew. Sods. Apparently it’ll go on for a month, so I just need to cross fingers that the books I want will still be there after Christmas because in my family we have a pact that we buy NOTHING for ourselves in the month before Christmas. Of course, I’ve already broken that with buying the big Twombly book, and truth be told I broke it again yesterday because they had a copy of the Tate’s introductory book on Abstract Expressionism for about £4 instead of about £8, and it’s going to be helpful both for the Twombly project and the string quartet, so I did cave on that, but I was super-strong and didn’t get either the book on De Stijl (£12.50 instead of £25) or the book on Modernism. Or any of the other yummy things I didn’t dare look at closely. Will be back there next week for sure!

Christmas shopping is now done, though, thank heavens.

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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…

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Hmm. Need to pull my socks up again – I’m slipping! No composing done today. This morning I accidentally slept in because the heater got left on overnight and so I was all sluggish from the heat in the morning. Then I realised I had to touch up the paint on the bedroom floor where it got scratched up when we moved the bed and Djeli assembled his chest of drawers, so I didn’t really start to think about my own work until about 1pm.

I did, however, get some study done for the Cy Twombly project – reading a book called Visible Deeds of Music at the moment, which has a very interesting first chapter mostly focusing on how art and music have been considered, in terms of what they are, should be and how they interact, over the course of history. Tomorrow’s the last day the college library is open until the New Year, so I’ve been focusing on the Twombly project to try to determine what I might want to borrow to look at over Christmas. I don’t know that I’ve really come up with an answer to that, but I’m going to go in anyway, wander the shelves and see what appeals. I should probably try to bring back some scores too – perhaps of some of the stuff on the Orchestration – Medium listening list.

Due to ongoing headache though, I didn’t really get much done today. Painting, reading, made soup, deleted my Instagram account now it’s gone all Facebook on us (but ooh I hope this resuscitates Flickr a bit – I so miss the old gang there!), listened to some Fauré piano music (very restorative for the soul) and wussed out of going to birthday drinks for a college friend because by the time I should have been getting ready not only was the headache much worse but my vision was going all fuzzy and everything spinning gently. The problem improved with the application of cheese and since eating the soup, I’m feeling quite a bit better, so I guess it’s a combination of stress, tiredness and not eating well. Shame. I really wanted to go!

I have at last made up a Finale file for the Ansel Adams piece, which I really need to get started on. It doesn’t have any notes in it yet, but at least it exists. Yes, that’s lame, but there it is… [update: as of half past midnight, it's now 30 seconds long. Yay for beginnings!]

I also started thinking about this year and working on a ‘creative goals for 2013′ post. Going to refine this over the next few days before I post it. I seem to have failed at about 90% of my goals for this year, but most of the ones I failed at were overtaken by other stuff, so I don’t mind all that much.

Anyway, to bed now. Hoping tomorrow will be more productive.

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Hugely productive day today. I’ve spent the entire day at the Tate Library at Tate Britain doing research for my Cy Twombly project. Gosh I love research. I’ve so missed it – must try to keep it up after the degree is over. I’ve been gathering some useful general info on Twombly and having a look at his other works on paper to start building some ideas for how to approach my project and how to document it.

First thing I have discovered: Index cards are really annoying for anything other than short-term 100% text-based projects. I am ditching them in favour of a not-quite-A4 plain paper Moleskine – this will ensure I can carry around all my notes, make extra notes in margins and scribble/draw/paste stuff to generate ideas, all in the one place. I’d hoped to get a hard-cover one, but it seems Moley don’t make ‘em in the extra-large size *sigh*

Second thing I have discovered: Found a fascinating and massive book called Writings on Cy Twombly, which starts with early reviews of his work and goes through to long-form essars looking at his themes and processes, by way of anecdotes and poems and all sorts of things. It is massive – 300 pages and about 50cm tall, on nice-quality heavy paper with large margins. You know the sort of thing. Classic art book. I got through about 50 pages today, so that would work out as 6 trips to Tate to read the whole thing. Did some sums, looked it up on Amazon, and it is cheaper to buy this massive art book than to take the 6 train trips needed to read it at the library. Again. Madness.

Third thing I have discovered: Tate Britain do an excellent mocha in their vestibule cafe.

I’ve gathered a lot of info and am starting to build an impression of Twombly as a person and as an artist, but it’s kind of hard to express that yet here. Suffice to say: it took the whole day but was very useful.

Once the library kicked me out I went to see the Turner Prize exhibition. And OMG. Go and Google “Paul Noble artist” if you don’t already know his work. Gorgeous and fascinating.

After that I did a little Christmas shopping then went out to Stratford and had Brazilian barbecue for dinner with Djelibeybi. Very civilised. AND I got dried pears from Waitrose

On my train trips I’ve aso been starting to read Tony Buzan’s The Mind Map Book. Buzan apparently created the concept of the Mind Map, and as I found it just sitting on the shelf in the college library, I figured the start of a major research & composition project was as good a time as any to research some study skills. It’s very interesting! I like how he explores a little of how the brain works by way of introduction and talks about how standard note-taking bores our brains into forgetting the very thing we’re trying to remember. I’ll be interested to start applying some of his ideas to this project. For the moment, it’s sort of hard to apply because textual research kind of requires that you keep track of exact quotes, so there’s a lot of copying out rather than idea-generation. Still. All useful info and I’m sure it’ll come in handy soon.

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Coming to the end of a rather tiring but extremely productive day in at college. Guess I really need to pull myself together and do this more often rather than languishing at home being cold, eating too much and not getting enough done. A lesson learned. I hope

Had to skedaddle in in a hurry because the rehearsal I thought was at 3 had been moved forward to 11 (my fault – forgot to check my college email yesterday evening). This was with the quartet who will be playing my Rothko quartet when it is finally finished. Fantastic to hear them play together – they’re really good, and in particular it was great to hear their specific sound. The two violins, in particular, were a bit of a revelation because their tones are quite different – the 1st violin (James) has a classic violiny tone – really clear and bright – while the 2nd violin (Jaya) has a much mellower sound – almost violay on the lower strings. They really play beautifully together and it was great to hear the type of discussion in their rehearsal. We didn’t play through my piece as this was more of a sit-in session for me to be able to meet them and have a listen, but I am assured that there is nothing unplayable in the first 2 minutes of the quartet. I also asked them if there was anything in particular they were keen to work on as a group and they’re interested in improving their ensemble playing and intonation so I think that should work quite well in this piece. They’re really friendly and very enthusiastic and their Haydn is lovely Think this is going to be great.

I retreated to the college cafe with cappuccino and croissants after the rehearsal, colonised the only powerpoint and set to work. With the result that Fear of Falling is now 2 and a half minutes long – past the halfway point! I’m really super-pleased with how it’s coming together and feeling more confident about the short-scoring each time I come back to it.

I also did some more reading and thinking for the Personal Project. Still on the Morton Feldman. Some interesting ideas in there about “surface” and “content” and on process and systems. Need to think more about these. I also had another look at the Twombly mushrooms on the Tate website and am starting to think about how I might approach this. I think the big challenge is to determine a way to approach his gestural scribbles. They’re such a defining feature of his work, it seems irresponsible to embark on a project like this without considering what the equivalent would be, in a way that works for my style. Might try to get to the Tate Reading Room tomorrow to do some reading up on this so that I know what I’m dealing with.

I’ve also been considering what instrumentation to use. My original idea for the project was piano pieces – but that was when I was thinking of a series of pictures, each with its own piece, probably exploring a different technique, and the idea was to publish the pictures with the score opposite, as per Erik Satie’s Sports et divertissements. However, now that the project’s changed and I may not be able to publish the images with the scores (need to chase that up with Tate and get quotes on including the images in my [unpublished] assignment submission and in a [to be sold] print publication should I be pleased with the final result) and it’s more about the response to the artworks in general than specifically matching up one piece with a particular work, the scope has changed and piano feels (a) a little dull and (b) a little restrictive. While I have access to performers, I feel I should be using them.

The other side to this is that if I’m pleased with how the pieces work out, I’d really like to work with Tate to put on a performance in the gallery alongside the artworks. I need to get in touch with them to discover what the logistics of this might be – whether it’s feasible to stage one or more concerts with live musicians, or if a recorded-music on headphones approach might be more feasible, or if this isn’t even something they’d consider. If a live performance is a possibility, then I suspect that piano would be a logistical nightmare. All things considered, I think I may be leaning towards a wind quintet lineup, not necessarily using all instruments in each piece (so could vary between full quintet, solo bassoon, trio for flute, oboe and horn, etc.) and am considering the possibility of wind quintet + 1 percussionist.

Plus I’ve had a lovely succession of friends while I’ve been camped out here in the cafe – lovely chats to brighten my working day! MUST do this more!

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Today has been hijacked by the weather. It’s been unbelievably cold at home. Even with three layers and the heating on, I’ve been freezing all day and consequently found myself entirely unable to settle at the computer to get any composing done. Instead I faffed about, tidied my desk and the studio in general a bit, did some laundry. Eventually I caved in favour of hot soup and decided to have a go at making naan bread in the frying pan… which was when I discovered that in actual fact the heaters weren’t on because we’d run out of gas so no heating and no hot water. Cue much more faffing about and the need to go outside multiple times in order to top up the gas supply (fortunately we now have a thingy which means we can top up online so don’t need to go to the shop on top of everything else!).

So finally, I’d managed to at least take the chill off the air, started working on the string quartet (which I made some big progress on last night after I’d posted)… Then Djeli called and I realised I should be leaving the house for D’s graduation gig in Camden. Eep!

I did some more reading on the train for my Personal Project – feeling a need to prioritise this this week because the college library is closed from the end of next week until after New Year, and the Tate Library is also closed between Christmas and New Year, so I feel I need to get a large chunk of research and decision-making done by the end of next week. Now that I feel I’ve nearly settled on using Cy Twombly’s Natural History mushroom pieces (they’re lithographs/collages rather than paintings) I’m looking at doing some research specifically into Twombly and these works, plus I’m also reading about Morton Feldman and his connection with the abstract expressionists – even though his work seems to relate more to colour-field painters’ work, such as Rothko, I feel there could well be something of use in there.

I’m pleased with how the string quartet is progressing though – I think moving that section on to be the second section works much better, and the harmony is expanding somewhat into the gap. My challenge at the moment is to balance duration with harmonic change with making sure neither the players nor the audience are bored, picking up threads of the future material while maintaining a certain level of textural weightiness… challenging but fun!

Oh, and I also squeezed in some listening! Rautavaara’s Manhatten Trilogy & Symphony No. 3. The more I listen to Rautavaara, the more I absolutely adore his music. Lush but not heavy. Nothing Germanic about it. Really some glorious ideas in there. Mmmmmmm

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It seems I’ve been more exhausted than I thought. Today was really the first day since Thursday when I’ve actually felt up to doing any serious work. So I spent the day at a friend’s chatting, doing Christmas baking and making origami snowflakes. As you do

At any rate, it was a lovely, relaxing day – and relaxing in a restorative sense, rather than in  an “I’m so zonked out I can’t move” sense. I think it was really good for me. I was still knackered when I got home, though, but managed to take the Ansel Adams exhibition catalogue to bed with me for a bit of a read and flip through.

I think those photos are actually having more of an effect on me in the catalogue than in the exhibition, which is odd, but I think it’s to do with only having one or two in your field of vision at any one time, rather than being aware of so many landscapes all at once – it gives me a chance to really focus on a single image, and there really are some stunners there.

This particular piece is probably the one I’m having the most trouble starting too, probably because most of the others I’ve had some ideas about, but this one all I have is a mood and a single opening texture, which isn’t really enough to build a whole piece on. I’ve started reading the introductory essays in the book, some of which have been helpful.

Among the elements I’m starting to catch hold of are Ansel Adams’ ideas about narrative in photography. From the catalogue’s Foreword:

“Adams closely associated water with his desire to create visual narrative through careful image framing, in large measure because he considered the flow of water and narrative to be equivalent.

How did he express this equivalency? Some artists develop a one-note orientation; others work with a loosely related succession of styles and themes or pursue different directions and media more randomly. Still others take a cyclical or serial approach, culling and weaving permutations of materials, forms, or concepts from an expanding central vocabulary that affords opportunities to modify, refine and extend. Adams gravitated to the latter, demonstrating a compositional flair and an orchestration of repetition, variation and seriality that suited his desire to plumb the depths of possibilities represented by motifs such as water. Often, artists who return to subjects again and again engage in repetition as acceptance of the challenge to reach resolution, even perfection, because repetition provides a context and boundaries for experimentation and exploration.” (Dan L. Monroe, The Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Director and CEO, and Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, The James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Chief Curator, Foreword to Ansel Adams: At the water’s edge, published by the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, in 2012.)

I think these ideas set the scene for a piece using repetition and slight variation to develop its material. I had also been thinking about repetition because of the large number of photos depicting reflections. While the photographs that speak to me most clearly tend to be the more close-up, almost abstract images, I kind of want to attempt a portrayal of the exhibition as a whole, or a section of the exhibition if this is not possible, simply because it seems very narrow to base the piece on a single image which would most likely not be one of the images Adams is best known for.

The exhibition was divided up into types of water: waterfalls, the sea, geysers, snow and ice, etc. so I guess my next step here is to consider these groupings and what I might be able to do with them. Really need to get cracking and make a start on this piece because it’s the longest one of everything I need to write this Christmas (8-10 minutes! eek!) and also the one I have fewest ideas for, so I need to settle on a starting point soon!

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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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