Managed to slink in about 7 minutes’ composing today which felt like a massive achievement! Woohoo! Only a couple of seconds added to the Ansel Adams piece, but progress is progress! AND we got to Sussex! Woohoo! Let Christmas commence!
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Well, that’s what I’m hoping. I’m quite pleased with this year’s list. I think that pretty much everything on it actually is attainable over the course of the year, unlike last year’s which was much too ambitious. A lot of what’s on it is stuff that is already in progress, about to be in progress or has a firmish deadline at least, so much of it doesn’t have to be started from scratch but is more about tying up loose ends left over from 2011.
September looms large this year – I am determined to be healthier and more organised before I start my Masters to give me the best possible chance to do well at it – this involves getting a healthy balance between freelance work, composition and rest time really working so I can clear old projects, bring in some money but keep my mental & physical health intact. I am most emphatically planning to not injure myself in any way more serious than perhaps a papercut.
2012 is, most significantly, all about new beginnings and new directions. There’s a lot of change going to be happening – going back to uni, (hopefully) buying our first house & moving out of London, developing my freelance business to be (again, hopefully) able to at least cover my basic expenses.
So without further ado, here is The 2012 List.
All fails 
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After a lovely day in Bath, this evening kind of fell apart and everything just became horrible again. However, I did have a couple of breakthroughs nevertheless:
1. Dodged a too-much-work bullet by managing to send off a substitute piece which actually doesn’t need any work done to it for it to be performer-ready, so hopefully that will be appropriate for the concert for which Shimmer (9 mins) was too long
2. Wrote a few more notes
3. In listening through to the piece again, I’m really starting to understand what my tutor’s been saying about adding in harmony. I do want it to be texturally light, but there’s just too many bare octaves. The doublings are good, it’s just that there needs to be a little body in there too. Not entirely sure how I’ll tackle this as harmony is SO not my strong suit. It’s good to have taken a step back from the piece though and to hear it with fresh ears so that I understand – I’m listening to it and hearing what’s really there, rather than my idea of what’s really there.
Tomorrow is my last day before I go to Spain for a brief holiday, so I’m hoping I can get some real work done on it. I also need to think about what I’ll be able to do while in Spain. I think taking the laptop is overkill, so I might review the apps I have and check out the App Store for new alternatives and just see how I can approach what’s there. The latest part of the piece is increasingly melodic/contrapuntal (as opposed to using brief fragments in various permutations, which is what the opening is) so maybe I can do something with that.
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Today was my first composition lesson… as teacher! I’ve contemplated what it would be like to teach composition many a time, but it’s not the sort of thing you just set yourself up as. Anyway, following my last blog post, a friend asked me if I ever taught, so now we’ve set up a thing where I’m actually teaching! And today was the first lesson. Mostly introductory stuff of course – talking about where he’s up to and what he wants to get out of the experience, but it was interesting (for me anyway!). Raised much food for thought and now I need to work out how to approach the whole enterprise.
Then in the afternoon I went to Kent for a briefing and location tour for a commission project I may be submitting a proposal for with a friend. It didn’t start too well – the sandwich I bought at Gloucester Rd turned out to be frozen in the middle and when I got to St Pancras to catch the train it turned out that the ticket I’d bought was only valid for the slow trains… which left from Charing Cross. By that time there was absolutely no chance of getting to Charing Cross in time to get to Gravesend for 4pm, so I ended up have to pay another £10.10 just to get on the train. The tour was pretty interesting, and I ended up meeting an Australian artist and we got chatting and ended up catching the train back to London together.
But the trip back was not without incident - seemed to run over something in a tunnel just before Stratford International, then half the lights went out and there was a bit of a bang. We slowed right down and crept into Stratford and then the train just sat there. Then there was another noise, which kind of sounded a bit like they were uncoupling or re-coupling a train carriage. Anyway, we sat there for about three minutes and eventually they started to make an announcement, which got as far as “there has been an electrical incident. The driver is…” when there was a large bang and a flash from towards the front of the train. My new friend and I looked at each other and took a snap decision to bail – turned out the train was suffering from minor explosions going off along the top of it – she saw another one flash just after we left the train. Fortunately, though, it was Stratford which meant it was easy enough to get on the tube and get home, but still… explosions! Not every day you experience that!
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This morning I was in Edinburgh. Then I sat on a train for several hours and then I was in London in the afternoon. Then I sat on another couple of trains and went to Surrey.
For tonight was the first of the London Composers Forum percussion workshops – every year they do a set of workshops for composers to learn about an instrument or some aspect of composing (last year’s, which I missed, was on the organ) which they then follow up with a project to write for that instrument. Anyway, this year’s is percussion, so three of us went along to our tame percussionist’s house where we were regaled with tea and chocolate biscuits and taught the basics of how to play the djembe and a little bit of African drumming. And there was some score-reading too: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which is always a hoot. It was a little random, but all in all, a good first session – very much looking forward to next week’s. Oh, and some sleep.
Got a fair bit of work done on the train back from Edinburgh at least – all the notes for the string quartet Pieces of Eight are now in Finale, so I just need to finish the layout, and I did a bunch more work on the orchestral arrangement too, although that’s not really feeling like it’s coming together yet.
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Bad head day today. Not sure why – intermittent panic attacks, excessive need for sleep, inability to actually get anything useful done. I have half-packed the dishwasher, failed to launder clothes to take to Edinburgh tomorrow, failed to go out and do essential shopping (although if I pull myself together in the next half-hour I may still be able to do this), failed to do anything musical at all even though I really really need to get back to both the orchestral arrangement of Deconstruct: Point, line, plane and the string quartet version of Pieces of Eight. Hoping I may be able to report better news later in the evening, but right now it’s not seeming likely. I even managed to put off to extinction working on the last counterpoint exercise of the chapter which would mean I could get on with the next chapter in the book, but I guess that one’s going to have to wait till next week now – the only thing I actually DID achieve today was to book train tickets to take me to Edinburgh to spend the weekend with Djelibeybi seeing his new investment property.
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HAPPY NEW YEAR! I know I’ve been a bit quiet over Christmas – and it’s certainly not that I haven’t been creative! I’ve baked (cakes & biscuits), cooked (smoked salmon ebelskivers!), I’ve knitted (finished my mother’s chenille scarf!), I’ve been to the movies (Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows, Pt 1) and the panto (Peter Pan, with The Hoff as Captain Hook!) and agreed with Djelibeybi on a new layout for the study that hopefully will work for both of us. In fact I was so busy being creative and looking after guests that I didn’t have time to get anywhere near the computer! Now things are calming down a little though, so back to it…
Today I went to Sussex with my parents to visit the village of Warbleton, where my mother’s ancestors came from. We were hoping to find some of them in the churchyard, but unfortunately, being New Year’s Day, the trains were running to a Sunday timetable, somebody somewhere gave us some wrong information and it ended up taking us FOUR AND A HALF HOURS to get there. When I say that it took a mere two and a half to get home again, I think you’ll see what I mean. At any rate, it was a gloomy day to start with and by the time we got there it was 3pm so we repaired to the local pub for a lovely lunch of sandwiches and salad, but by the time we were done the light was mostly gone. And when we realised there were no ancestors to be found my mama suddenly realised that they were chapel people. I think I saw another graveyard with a building that could have been a chapel beside it, but I think we’ll have to go back in the summer to be sure! Lovely village though, and in spite of the travel dramas, a nice way to spend my last day with the parents.
Lovely too, to come home to hot takeaway pizza and Mary Poppins and I made lemon-curd-filled ebelskivers for pudding – most excellent!
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And so I’m back on the Eurostar today. With a couple of quiet hours, it seemed a good chance to take stock of what needs to be done in the next couple of days to get this site online, so I’ve started pulling out chunks of code that will become PHP includes, stole the code for the contact form from Minim Media and have built a new page for social media links. So I think that, barring the video page which may be scrapped, pretty much all the content is in place now – huzzah!
Looking ahead, tomorrow I think I need to focus on getting the PHP bits and pieces working – the includes, forms, highlighting menu items, etc. I think that’s the biggest thing. Plus, to go with that, I need to determine how I’m going to identify the various pages as belonging to a particular section. I guess I could just include a variable in each page – it would be nice and clear, but I’ve also been considering whether it might not be easier just to divide up the content into folders and identify the section by folder name from the URL. The problem with this may be one of longevity. There was an article on URL-naming that was referenced from our course materials for the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices course I took earlier this year which I think I may need to re-read – its premise was that addresses of pages should relate directly to what they are about and not reference filetypes, technical approaches or current-but-possibly-unsustainable filing systems. The idea is to end up with a URL that can be used for that content forever – if the page’s focus changes, then it needs a new URL which reflects that. I like the idea of this, that the address for something is permanent because there is no need for it to change – it means that other sites can link with confidence, and archives can be maintained without the need for ever renewing links. So I’ll be re-reading that, I think, and I’ll see what is feasible to implement right now.
And now, back hooooooommme! And then tonight, the concert. Eeek!
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Today was our last day in Paris and this evening has been – understandably – a little fraught, with the packing and calculations of how long it will take to get to Gare du Nord tomorrow and so on. I’m also feeling rather frazzled at the prospect of tomorrow as a whole – getting the flat all cleaned and tidied and parents out to get to the Eurostar, then getting us all home from St Pancras, and then finally the most stressful thing of all – getting us out of the house again to go to the premiere of my new piece Deconstruct: Point, line, plane. I don’t know that any of my other premieres have ever had me so worried as this one. I know I’ve built this piece exactly how I wanted it to be. I’m confident that it can work, but the criticism I received about it when it was still in its embryonic state just makes me doubt just a little bit, even while I know that it didn’t want to be anything other than what it is. And then there’s the question if whether the performers have just decided to change it… And if they have, is it still under my name or have they correctly listed it as an arrangement. I tell you, the sooner Wednesday rocks up, the happier I’ll be!
But we’ve had a lovely last day in Paris. Ran some errands, and my Da finally took me to Shakespeare and Company – and what a gorgeous bookshop it is!!! Most of the books upstairs aren’t for selling – they’re for sitting about and reading! And they’ve got a piano up there, waiting to be played, so we were all happy – the Da nosing around the poetry section, me reading snippets of Julia Child on French bread, the mama playing Debussy on the piano (and drawing quite a happy crowd: Mama: ‘It’s just you there, isn’t it?’ Me: ‘No, but they’re not listening, they’re all reading books, aren’t you?’ Small throng: *assorted giggles*).
And then we visited Notre Dame. And for the first time I noticed the lovely chapel and column paintings – don’t know how I missed them before – so clean and clear. Really gorgeous.
I should stop procrastinating with photos and ‘fess up though that I’ve done precious little Creative Pact work today – I really think I’m reaching the end of what I can do on the iPad for this project. It’s been great and really useful, and I’m VERY glad I didn’t bring the laptop (especially now I’m on the verge of having to lug lots of lovely foodie shopping back to Blighty) but I really need to be working in PHP now, which means I need my books and a server and an Internet connection I don’t need to reset every 30 seconds. Um… On second thoughts, I guess that’s not so much an iPad limitation as a limitation of circumstances, due to not having packed the PHP book and only having rubbish Internet. But still, feeling a little hamstrung and like I’m treading water. I have managed to achieve a tiny bit, but it was only setting up template pages for the contact page (will contain a PHP form) and a page to hold the Tate’s video interview with me, which I can’t tell if I can embed because Vimeo just tells me it’s Flash, which obv won’t work on the iPad – going to have to wait till I get home to see if that should even have a separate page at all or just a link to Vimeo (suspect the latter, which means I’ll need to work out the best styling for putting about a paragraph of text into the right column and making it all look nice). So not a complete fail there, but a bit wussy, really. Still, planning in being at home and working in it for pretty much the whole of Wednesday and Thursday, so I think I’m still in with a chance to get it ready to fly on the 30th…
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Yes, more content: today I tackled the overall music page that all the individual content pages will be linked from. It seems a bit out of date (using what was on Minim Media) but that content’s in now and hopefully I’ll be able to update before it goes live.
Today was spent mostly up The Butte – we went up to hear Mass sung by the Carmelite nuns at Sacré-Coeur (gorgeous – I highly recommend it), then on the way down we found that the vineyard (the only vineyard within Paris and reputedly the source of the worst wine in France) was actually open! In all the years we’ve been coming here and staying in Montmatre, it has NEVER been open to the public. So we finally got to go in and have a wander round. Lovely!
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