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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I made this!

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

Sudophones & Merztins: Little tins of amazing noise

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

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

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

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Normally this post would be all SQUEEE! SHINY! but somehow I can’t get myself terribly worked up about this new laptop. Yes, I’m wildly excited at the prospect of actually being able to be productive again, but I’m just not excited about it. I do hope it’s not just that I’m getting old. I’m pretty sure it’s not. I think there’s a few things going on here:

1. While the Macbook Pros are gorgeous, they’re all identical. There’s no personality expressed in choosing a Mac. You pick your size and there it is, the same as everyone else’s. Previously there was at least a little difference in whether you got a Macbook or MBP (and before that even more when you got to pick what colour iBook you wanted!), but now they’re all the same: 13-inch, 15-inch, 17-inch, Retina display, Macbook Air. You pick what fits the budget and the job and along comes your mass-produced friend. Until I turned to Mac, all my computers had a name (Edward, Edward II, Edward III, etc.). The Mac has never had a name. While I love the OS, and the machine has seen me through some pretty hefty work moments, I’ve never been fond enough of it to give it a name. And the new one, I fear, is just Nameless II. When I had my Vaio, nobody else I knew had one. It was pretty and slightly purple, but also a little unique. Now, though, my laptop looks like all my friends’ laptops. There’s also that aspect of ‘I never had a chance to choose anything else’ – because I want the Apple OS, I have to get a cookie-cutter Mac (unless I live with the potential unreliability of a Hackintosh. One day!). My decision was made purely on the intersection of what I could afford and how long I might be able to make it last, within boundaries of what the minimum was I’d need to run my software. No emotion involved.

2. The OS (Mountain Lion) basically looks the same as Snow Leopard which I’ve been running on the old machine. Yes, it does all sorts of funky things which Snow Leopard didn’t, but it looks the same.

3. I’m finding the screen colours are a bit muted. I’ve run calibration and it’s improved it a bit, but still not as contrasty as the old machine. Will try running it again, this time with Advanced Options switched on and see if I can perk it up a bit.

4. Really not enjoying the lack of trackpad button so far. Especially after the issues I’ve been having with the old machine, it feels like I’m breaking it when I have to click with the whole trackpad (and what’s with not letting me tap to click on the login screen?????)

5. One thing which I personally feel is a design flaw – the indentation in the front where you flip up the lid has really sharp points – which lie right under where my hand wants to be to use the trackpad. Quite ouchy.

6. I have quite small hands and I always really liked the keyboard on my old MBP. The keys on the new one though are quite far apart and I’m hoping this won’t cause a problem.

7. It actually seems to be slightly bigger than the old laptop, which is a direction I never want to go in, being short, not particularly strong and with long-term shoulder tension problems. If the 13-inch came with a quad-core processor, I’d probably have got that, purely for the portability (Macbook Air’s a bit useless – it’s not light enough to really make a difference given the huge trade-off in processing power, no DVD drive, and lame hard drive capacity)

Obviously 4, 5, 6 and the whole backwards-scrolling thing they have going on in Mountain Lion, are things to do with getting used to the new machine. I’ll give it a few weeks. The backwards scrolling can be switched off, I believe, to have it be normal, and if I really can’t handle the trackpad and keyboard stuff, then I can always get an external mouse and keyboard, at least for when I’m at home. But I’ll try to get used to them. Hoping that, if I can’t get too excited about this computer on a SQUEE! SHINY! level, I can at least get excited about the work I’ll be able to focus on now I don’t need to faff around with a broken trackpad!

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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

Tagged with: artist date, blogging, completion, composition, gtd, learning, organisation, reading, tools | Add a comment

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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UPDATE: OMGOMGOMG! I FIXED IT! I DON’T NEED TO REINSTALL! IT’S SAVING AGAIN! HURRAH!!!!

The sad tale below has been totally wiped clean – found something where someone else had trouble saving their desktop background, so I deleted my com.apple.Desktop.plist file, which fixed that. Then realised the saving problem was actually to do with my administrator accounts, so I found something about resetting those – and hey presto!!! AND it’s running faster too! BONUS!

– Part One below –

Today, I am sad to say, has been a totally wasted day. I may have a little wail here: you have been warned.

I actually set an alarm and woke myself at a semi-respectable hour today because I wanted to get loads done to make up the last couple of lazy days. Djeli had suggested that we go to a liquidation auction in Knightsbridge today to see if we could get me a replacement Mac cheaply, but after a bit of a chat, and having found the Snow Leopard upgrade discs a few days ago, we decided that instead I should have a go at reinstalling my current ailing machine.

So far, so funky. I set a backup running and went into the shower. When I checked back, I discovered it had run out of room, so I dug my larger backup disk out of a box (yes, I know it should have been in use already) and set it running again. Then spent the next four hours doing this and that: writing Christmas cards, making lists of software I’d need to install and things I absolutely mustn’t forget to do before starting the reinstall like I forgot to do That Time, wrapping Christmas presents, pulling the Christmas tree out of its box and working out a way to display it so it’s neither in the way nor invisible (we only have a 2-ft tree, which was fine in our first tiny house in the UK but looks a bit lost in a soon-to-be 5-bedroom terrace house!). I went out and bought a broom, even, and swept all the vast amount of dust off the landings and the stairs.

When, finally, the backup finished – about half past 6 – I figured I should double-check which apps I’d bought via the Mac App Store, so I could be sure which other apps I really needed to make sure I knew where the install files were for. So I opened up the App Store. There are my apps, mostly saying “Installed”, a couple saying “Upgrade” BUT two of the apps I use most frequently, Pages and Numbers, are sitting there smugly without any kind of install button saying “Requires OS X v10.7″.

My laptop is old. This is why it has problems, which is why I need to reinstall it. It does not have the grunt to run either Lion or Mountain Lion, so it cannot install v10.7 at all. But it seems that Apple doesn’t care about this and want me to upgrade anyway. While I dislike having to continually upgrade stuff, I probably wouldn’t hesitate – if I could do it! But I can’t, and it’s starting to look like there is no way I can reinstall my computer to have it shiny-clean and hopefully working properly and keep access to Pages, Numbers and most likely iHomework which I use to track my college work and which has recently been bugging me to install a Lion-only update. AAAAARGH!

Now I know there are bound to be a few bright sparks out there (you know who you are!) who will leap in here with a knowing wink and proclaiming the virtues of a) Windows b) Linux or c) OpenOffice or similar. I appreciate your efforts, but a) I like OS X – it runs all my software (unlike Linux) and is polite to me (unlike Windows) and b) I’m really rather fond of Pages too – it keeps itself nice and simple with no stupid complicated hidden settings that you need to switch off to prevent it from making you throw the whole machine out the window in frustration (I think we all know which popular office suite I’m thinking of here). Thank you. I am considering every alternative, I assure you!

SO. No real work has been achieved today and it’s now half past 8, so it seems unlikely although I shall try to bottle up my wail and do something useful shortly.

WAH!

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I haven’t got nearly as much done as I hoped today but for a while there it was looking like I wouldn’t get anything done, so something is better than nothing, I guess. Again, it was a problem of studio access as Djeli was working from home all day so needed the space as his office. I ended up trying to use the iPad piano (I have Pianist Pro) once back at the temporary accommodation because I really need to be not so dependent on having solitary access to one particular room. Ordinarily I’d just pack up the laptop and move, but I’m working so much at the piano on these two pieces that that just doesn’t work.

Using the iPad wasn’t hugely successful – the keyboard is rather limited and both pieces seem to be doing a bit of a line in registral contrasts, which makes it difficult. But it was enough to play through approximately what I had and I’ve been able to get down some shiny new notes for both which I’ll test out properly tomorrow on the real piano.

I think I’m quite pleased with the direction Ladders is heading in and am hopeful of finishing the first movement by the end of the weekend. However, Lilies is starting to feel lost and worked-over and I’m wondering whether the concept for this piece mightn’t work better with a more conventional approach, possibly as a group piece. It seems the more I work on the actual notes, the less it seems to fit my thinking for what that piece should be and the disjunct is really starting to disturb me. My original concept for Carla’s piece had been renovation-inspired and was to do with interior design but when I came up with that one I was in a bit of a bad emotional place and didn’t want to end up having the piece coloured by the issues we were experiencing with the house. Now I’m wondering whether I should have stuck with it.

I will forge ahead with the concept for Lilies though – at least until it becomes entirely clear that doing so is no longer useful. It’s part of my Creative Pact, after all, and any work I do on it will extend my understanding of both what I want the piece to be and how to deal with quarter-tones, both of which will be helpful.

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Day 1 of my 2012 Creative Pact! True I have spent more of today scrubbing four layers of paint off a layer of tar than I would ideally have chosen to, but there has nevertheless been progress.

First up, the first work-in-progress blog post for the two pieces I’m working on – Lilies on the Silver Sea and Ladders of Escape – has gone up on caitlinrowley.com. If you’re going to follow these posts, you should probably read it so you’ve got a bit of context… go on. I’ll wait!

Today I’ve been largely thinking and setting things up. I’m hoping to be able to do a little work on both pieces each day because I also want to get used to not just working on one piece at a time – my degree starts in a month and I’m going to need to be able to multitask if I’m to get the most out of the experience. Today I kind of failed at that though – the only thing that got done on Ladders was to pull out the Miro exhibition catalogue and have a quick look at the essays and identify the one I’m going to read first (it’s the one on his Catalan peasants). So it’s been mostly about Lilies.

The thing with Lilies is the quarter-tones. Obviously, I need to (and want to) use quarter-tones because the request was for a piece for quarter-tone alto flute, and what’s the point in writing something for quarter-tone alto flute if it doesn’t use quarter-tones?? So I need to get my head aroundhow to use them. To not just bung them in as weird sounds but to really make them a part of the piece.

To that end today I’ve been exploring scales a bit and thinking about the possibilities of quarter-tones to stretch or compress intervals. I started out thinking that I should just define a scale including quarter-tones and then (more or less) stick to that, but that’s beginning to feel a little rigid. Plus there’s the question, then of if I have a G-quarter-tone-sharp but no G or G-sharp to give it a context, what sort of effect will it have? Will it have any effect?

The next thought I had was that the piece has a watery theme and I was thinking about ripples on water and waves and how they’re never entirely evenly spaced and maybe the quarter-tones can be like the variations between waves – sometimes it’ll be a G, sometimes a G-quarter-tone-sharp. I think this approach appeals more – it feels more appropriate for the piece I want to write but I think I still want to explore the scale thing a bit further and build a base scale that I can push and pull with the quarter-tones as it feels appropriate.

Lauren Redhead has come up with a great idea with her Creative Pact post today, which is that she’s working from a Spotify playlist for the listening diary portion of her challenge. This is such a great idea that I’m nicking it and starting to compile a Spotify playlist of my own – of music relating to these two pieces I’m working on. The first thing in there is Charles Ives’ Three Quarter-tone Pieces. I was unaware of these before I did a Google search for quarter-tone music this afternoon, but they’re brilliant. He’s written them for two pianos, one tuned a quarter-tone lower than the other, which gives a whole new perspective, I think, on approaching the idea of using quarter-tones because he has two separate instruments, two separate players, two separate tunings going on. The practical effect is of intermingling the quarter-tones with the ‘normal’ notes, but the concept is an interesting one, and one which I want to think more about. I don’t know whether it’ll be useful in writing for a single-line instrument but I want to consider it some more.

Additionally, I’ve also created a Delicious stack to collate links to things I’m reading or planning to read (or YouTube videos I’m planning to watch) as I go along, both for my own convenience and in case anybody else feels like browsing it. (Let me know if the link doesn’t work – Delicious is saying it’s a private stack but it’s not giving me any way to make it public!) (Oh and I just discovered that Delicious are discontinuing stacks… any… minute… now. Argh. Will update in a future post when I work out what on earth is going on)

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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…

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Yup, having settled on “Lucky Dip” as a name, and not having heard back from the owners of the Flickr image I wanted to use, I decided to draw my own, using the photo as a rough model. I drew the blackboard outline, a little bit of shadow on the back legs, the fringed border and the board itself in charcoal on half a sheet of A2 paper (I’ve been caught out by A2 paper before – far too big to fit on the scanner!), then pulled the scanned image (after cleaning up in Photoshop) over to the iPad to add colour and text. The final layout I did in Photoshop, after sending the coloured image back to the computer again.

I may tweak it later but as a first draft, I’m pretty pleased and I’ve put it up as the album image on SoundCloud.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve done any drawing, and longer still since I did any with actual paper rather than just the iPad, so this was a really fun project. The whole album’s feeling really real too now – there’s only one more track to come in, with two possible replacement tracks. Guess I should think about what order I want them all to go in too. At the moment they’re just in the order the recordings came in, but I’m thinking that shuffling them around might be more effective.

Today I received Kim Hickey’s recording of her piece, Flit, for flute. I am just amazed at all the great performances I’ve been getting for these pieces – so little time to prepare them and yet everyone’s done a really good job of capturing their piece and getting it recorded. I haven’t had to put on a stern face & tell anybody to try harder, nothing’s turned up sounding like it was recorded underwater in a bathtub in 1902. A couple of pieces have needed a touch of reverb to really bring out the tone of the instrument, and Kim’s recording needed a tiny bit of hiss reduced, but that’s been it, which has been both wondrous and a great relief because I’m no skilled recording engineer.

But I digress, here’s Kim’s piece:

I also posted an update of Alun’s tango – the original for some reason came through very very soft, so he’s adjusted his recording slightly and sent me a slightly louder one, which really makes a difference. It’s still fairly quiet, but there’s a bunch of tiny details in there which eluded me in the previous version.

Sam also sent me copies of some of his rejected takes for I Want It To Kill People. I found it absolutely fascinating to listen to the various approaches. They’re all good, but somehow the final take he settled on just interacts with the tape part a little more effectively than the other versions of the graphic score. What was particularly interesting was to hear the take on which he improvised, without the graphic score – that’s a really interesting piece. It’s not the piece that I Want It To Kill People became, but something else. It’s more enmeshed in the tape part – he’s taken some of the gritty sounds and used them as inspiration for the guitar part – whereas my vision of the piece was that the guitar was this soft and lovely thing with depths of aggression, Sam’s version is more like watching the soft and lovely guitar be corrupted by the aggressive tape part. Really fascinating. He’s also sent me just the guitar recording from the final version and I really think I will have a go at tweaking the tape part – there’s a blob of notes about a third of the way into the piece that really feel like a stumbling block, so I’m going to see if I can make them less intrusive.

So that’s RPM for today. No, the harp piece hasn’t happened yet. Yes, I’m hoping to get to it tomorrow. Today was full of client work and physiotherapist and – at the end – half of a wonderful concert by Joby Burgess at Wigmore Hall and a lovely chat with @stevegisby and his girlfriend. I managed to get there for the end of it (thank you, Central Line – not!) and got to hear Gabriel Prokofiev’s ‘Fanta’ from Import/Export and Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, movements II and III played on a MIDI xylophone, which was interesting, although I think I prefer the electric guitar version I have on CD in Sydney. Very much enjoyed the Prokofiev piece though – inventive, fun and very much a serious piece of music, in spite of the amusement factor of being played on glass bottles of Fanta. I did wonder, though, how long it’ll still be able to be played for – what happens when they no longer manufacture glass bottles of drink??? I guess it’s just a piece that embraces its own ephemerality.

I seem to have come out of the day with a Proper Job too. And the best sort of proper job – mobile web dev, working from home, for about a week, for a client who used to be a colleague when I was at LBi and who has now set up her own UX business for financial services companies. Really looking forward to this one.

One day to go. One recording to come in. This time tomorrow night, RPM 2012 will be complete!

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