I should be quick tonight as it’s nearly 5am. Whoops. The evening just got away from me, mostly in writing – I’ve been working on two related blog posts on ways ensembles and composers can add value to their work using digital options. The first one, on programme notes I’m hoping will be up tomorrow (um… today, I guess) – just need to review it and make sure I haven’t said anything totally mad.

I bought a pudding basin. And suet. Friday is Christmas pudding day. Yes, I know it’s very late. Nigella seems to think it’ll all be OK.

Worked on the quintet for about 3 minutes. Was hard to work on this earlier today as the lady upstairs decided it was easy-listening day. From about 3 in the afternoon till 8pm. But I didn’t want to go to bed without having put down at least a couple of notes.

Score for Remembrances is… done. Well, sort of. Looking great, flicked through… then realised that every single vocal stave is using the tenor clef instead of treble. So now I have to go back to Finale, change the clefs, re-export all 7 pages, open them in Photoshop, trim them and reimport them back into InDesign. Not Happy.

Heigh ho.

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Well, I don’t know what else it can possibly be. I’ve been SO productive since yesterday’s relaxation session with my physiotherapist. In spite of nasty cold, sore throat, no voice, generally feeling crappy and done in, and in spite of computer being tediously slow, I’ve just been powering through my to-do list and generally Getting Things Done.

• Quintet is now at 2’30″ or thereabouts and has decided to “head for home”, which means working out how to reuse the slow intro and other opening material and is basically (or should be) an easy run down to the end now. Obviously there’s a lot of tweaking still to be done, niceties of notation to sort out and so on, but it’s looking like it’ll be at least 3’30″ when it’s done, and possibly the 4′ I wanted it to be (it has to be under 5′ – the trick is to keep it shortish so as to maximise rehearsal time, but have it long enough to do something interesting).
• Wrote a blog post which will appear on caitlinrowley.com later this week. It’s the first time I’ve tried scheduling future publishing, but it’s something I want to get into the habit of – if I’m to have regular visitors on my site, then I need to be posting (interesting) content regularly. Not sure I’ve quite got the “interesting” down, but I think my online writing is quietly improving.
• Started the rather tedious layout process for a set of songs I wrote about 14 years ago, Remembrances of Half-Forgotten Dead People. They were laid out when I first wrote them, but a. the originals weren’t PDFed and have been lost apart from one hard copy in Australia which my mother scanned for me and b. the layout is seriously dated. very word-processory because that was all I had at the time. So it needs to be updated a bit, notes revised and so on so I can print, bind and send it off to the singer who’s considering performing them in March.
• Set up a new notebook on Evernote to hold bits and pieces for a CD of my piano music which I’m hoping to get off the ground with a friend of mine in Australia. The first step is to get him scores, so I’ve been trawling round to (again) see what’s in a fit state to be played. Finished tweaking Egg the Tenth for this, so I guess that’s ready to go onto caitlinrowley.com too. There’s still quite a bit of work to be done to some of them – lacking dynamics and so on – but it’s not a mammoth task. I just need to keep plugging away at it.
• Cleaned about 700 emails out of my inbox. Because they were depressing me and making me worried. There’s still too much stuff in there – mostly notes I sent myself on my last day of work, which is a bit horrible – but 200-odd is MUCH better than 900-odd.
• Caught up a tiny bit with some of the reading and thinking for the Creative Pathfinder course I signed up for. It’s pretty good content – but there’s just so much of it!!! I’m working through Week 3 at the moment… but my inbox is up to Week 14…

It’s just as well the quintet’s making nice progress again, though – had an email today from the Masterclass organisers with the schedule for the course and notes about what to bring: so far it’s looking like I either need to change the way I write in a hurry or invest in a tiny printer to take with me – no printers available. Otherwise I can see myself spending evenings when I should be at t’ pub frantically copying out parts by hand for the composer’s ensemble – seems we have to write a piece for the ensemble during the few days we have there. Oh, and there aren’t many pianos, so we’re encouraged to bring a little keyboard if we need one. iPad Pianist Pro app FTW! Might try to devote some time to ideas-generation before I go to see if I can get a head-start on what to write for the ensemble… Because I don’t have enough to do!

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Which is to say, I made a start on research for the new piece. Started the day by listening (not terribly successfully) to Schubert’s string quintet on Spotify (thinking I’ll ditch my premium subscription again – I really don’t use it when I’m not working because I prefer to listen to old-school actual-disc CDs) on my iPod Touch while reading a little more of Hallelujah Junction. Then moved on to getting back to my harmony & counterpoint studies over my morning coffee – I had thought to just re-read the first counterpoint chapter then do the exercises, but I’ve had to take a step back to go over seventh chords again, just to get my mind in the space once more. I had to go out to Foyle’s in the afternoon to get birthday presents for my Da, so I nipped into HMV (well, as much as one can nip with a hobbly ankle) where I discovered that this piece seems to want to be faintly Germanic – I came out with Mendelssohn and Brahms string quintets plus a disc of Martinu and Schulhoff string sextets. I’ve written more about this over at caitlinrowley.com. Listening to the Mendelssohn now – absolute heaven. Still have trouble grasping the solid fact that I’m actually a Mendelssohn fan…

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Phew! For a little bit there I didn’t think I was going to get to any of my Creative Pact work done at all today, but lo, a little bit of quiet time became available and I’ve actually managed to knock over the two hardest content pages – ‘hardest’ because one needed to be rewritten and the other needed to be written from scratch. So now that’s the biography and the credo written, so I’m feeling a bit calmer now. Mostly from here the content’s going to be cut’n'paste from Minim Media, so it should be relatively easy to deal with. Might have a stab at the first of the composition pages before I turn in tonight, just to see how it goes.

I always find writing a new credo a bit of a challenge. On the one hand, I think it’s a useful thing to have in a site (although none of my previous attempts have ever actually made it online) because it can help to explain some of the peculiarities of a composer’s style or approach which may not be immediately apparent from short soundbites on a website. On the other hand though, writing these things makes me feel a bit of a self-absorbed prat. But I think the usefulness (especially considering recent misunderstandings) is going to outweigh the feelings of pratfulness (?) and this one will actually make it to the site.

I did have a question of semantics raised during today’s writing, which was the issue of how to code up titles. There doesn’t really seem (still) to be an adequate way of doing this in HTML 5, and I guess that, while common, it’s a bit more of a specialist need than the spec is likely to handle, so from what I can see, the best that can be done is still <span class=”title”>. At least it’ll be an improvement on what’s in the site now, which is plain ol’ unsemantic <em>s but it rankles my cataloguer’s soul. It feels like there should be a tag for something so common. Will have to learn to cope, I guess

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A productive day! I’ve started reading and making notes on Walt Whitman’s essays, via my iPod Touch. I typed up and did a rough edit of an article I’m working on. Spent 25 minutes on the 2nd Whitman song in which I managed to iron out all its rhythmic niggles. Balanced my petty cash. And right now I’m installing the Pro Tools Snow Leopard upgrade so the MBox will be installed so I can set up Hyperscribe to allow me to improvise directly from the piano into Finale. Not bad!

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I decided on the way home this evening, after contemplating and discarding a number of approaches (including a new, anonymous blog, which then raised the question of how do you promote an anonymous blog?) that I’m going to start creating the occasional longer post for this blog, addressing various topics to do with creativity, productivity and related topics. I’m hopefully going to post the first one on the weekend, but for now, I’ve written a letter to explain what on Earth I’m thinking…

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… and wrote a blog post about it on the train.

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It’s been a couple of weeks, almost, since I last did my pages regularly, and I’ve missed them. They really help me to think straight and work out what I need to do, so I think this is a step in the right direction again.

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It’s still horribly random and disconnected, but it’s gradually taking shape. The first edit should help a LOT.

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very profitably, actually. My book has progressed by about another 4-5 pages and I’ve managed to cut down my read/review list by about 30 items too, thanks to the Bristol to Paddington train being delayed by two hours. Then this evening I’ve been trying out a bunch of utilities for my Mac, including the amazing Quicksilver, WideMail, iTool, MailTags and Disk Inventory X. I’ll definitely be keeping Quicksilver; the others are on probation but I think there’s a fair chance that MailTags will be useful enough to actually pay for…

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