Mostly, I will freely admit, they’re trash. But I quite like them. They’re rather simplistic. The first three books are really rather repetitive and there’s a lot of talking. They can mostly be summed up as:

Edward: Bella, I love you, but I’m no good for you
Bella: Edward, I don’t care – make me a vampire!

What I wasn’t expecting though – based on the film – is that both characters actually have some personality. Bella is sarcastic and Edward spends the whole of the first book laughing. I don’t think he ever actually *says* anything, he always *chuckles* it. The writing’s really not great, but at least they feel more like people than the cardboard cut-outs in the movie.

Anyway, tonight we watched New Moon and I was spellbound – I don’t think I have ever seen anything that bad that looked that good. It’s like the DoP was the only person on the project who actually knew what they were doing. The acting is poor, the music haphazard and often inappropriate for the scene it’s applied to, the direction bad and the writing abysmal. I was tempted to turn the sound off and just watch the beautiful scenery (which in this one didn’t include Robert Pattinson – evidently the makeup department were having a bad day and weren’t really paying attention to the bit of the brief which says “take good looking man and turn him into an Adonis” and instead interpreted it as “take good looking man and make him look grey, over-made-up and unappealing”. Possibly that was supposed to indicate his inner turmoil, but if so, it really didn’t work).

I’ll admit, it’d be hard book to turn into a screenplay – so much of what goes on is in Bella’s head, or what she’s feeling, but the salient features of the books are passion and obsession, both of which are lacking entirely in the film series so far. The device of the undeliverable letters to Alice was a good one, but didn’t make up for the spectacularly stilted early scenes of the film. Verdict: outrageously bad. But I’ll keep on going. Here’s hoping someone learns how to act in Eclipse – I don’t hold out any hope for the script as it’s by the same person… At least it’s the same guy behind the camera though!

So today I’ve finally got back to tweaking the orchestration of the piece. Overall, I think I’m happier with it than I’d thought I was. I think it’s got a bit of punch to it and I’m hoping the orchestra will enjoy it. Yes, it’s pretty conservative, and doesn’t really explore any new territory, but for me the new territory in this piece was always going to be the challenge of dealing not just with an orchestra but working out what to do with multiple instruments – the whole double winds thing which I just totally sidestepped when writing Carrion Comfort. There’s definitely more finessing that needs to happen, ranges to be checked, transitions smoothed and so on, but I’m pretty pleased with it. Even the ending’s holding up OK. So it’s not groundbreaking, but it’s still a step forward.

Being poorly, I didn’t really manage to spend much time on it today though – my energy levels have just been insanely low. I did a little work before I left home, nothing on the train (my train-time has been extraordinarily unproductive in recent weeks) then when I got to college there was only half an hour until the gig I wanted to see (improvising early music & jazz which turned out to be Robert & Laura & Ailsha (??sp?)’s project and deeply enjoyable – harpsichord & viols & crumhorns & recorders meet cello & harp & jazz bass!). I spent the afternoon working in the library, then teaing in the cafe, then off to Edward’s (and Francesca’s & Claire’s) improvisation extravaganza in the Mackerras Room, which was really good too – an assortment of improvisations, ranging from conducted group improv (Ed conducting) through smaller group improvisations where the performers asked the audience for words to work to (most notably “sunlight lizard turnip”), improvised poetry which 2 singers and 2 pianists turned into an improvised song as it was being written, a few pages of Cornelius Cardew’s graphic score Treatise,  through to more traditional improvisation (in the sense that some people just got up and played their instruments). Much food for thought there. I really wish I had another week to work on everything though – so much of this week has been wasted being ill! and I’m starting to finally get some real ideas flowing, but it’s back to chaos next week – and even more so than usual as next week are the Runswick Prize recording sessions, with Fear of Falling due in at the end of the week and the New Music Recording sessions the week after. I can’t believe the year’s going so fast! And there’s SO much I still want to write.

In the end I talked myself down from the ledge that was the prospect of the Greenwich International String Quartet Competition. I really, really wanted to put something into it, but there just isn’t the time, and having lost nearly a week to this germ, I’m not in a good position. So when I stepped back and considered that by the time the score for the SQ competition is due next week, I need to have Fear of Falling ready to hand in, the harp piece laid out and probably 3 Cy Twombly pieces complete when I only have half of one that I’m not terribly pleased with done – not to mention the Fourth Plinth written work done and submitted – it seemed like mental suicide and really not that important. On the one hand, I want to go in for as much of that ilk as possible this year, while I’m actually eligible (there’s a bunch of competitions which will accept you without considering your age if you’re a student), but on the other, I’m already writing a string quartet and I didn’t want to turn in a rubbish piece because I’d had to rush it.

I read a fascinating article on the train on the way into college today while I was busily not working on my piece. It’s an article on composer-scheduling by Brandon Nelson, a US composer who I’ve recently started following on Twitter, entitled Time Management and the “Part-Time” Composer. His workload puts mine to shame – working, studying nursing, composing AND he has a family of small children! How he doesn’t explode is beyond me, but it reminded me that I hadn’t been back over the time I have available to study since the Time Management lady did a schedule for me at the beginning of the academic year, so this evening while waiting for my bean bolognaise sauce to cook, I pulled out my coloured pencils and started blocking out things. My class schedule has changed a lot since then – Research Methods, Fourth Plinth and Orchestration – Medium have all finished, Orchestration – Large has only one official class left and the Personal Project seminars have come to an end. Also, I’ve only got about a month left of my lessons with Stephen. I’ve also started my weekly Sight Singing class, booked in to play viol trios once a week and have irregular viol consort sessions to fit in too I think it’s a good thing to be reconsidering my study time at this point. I was working so well over Christmas until this damned Finale bug got in the way, and since term started up again I’ve been really disorganised. Last week’s debacle with the no-sleep night to get the Runswick Prize piece in is something I really don’t want to revisit. I’m not 19 any more! It took me four days to recover! And then I got the flu! So no more of that. I need to be super-organised. I also need to make sure I’m making time for Djelibeybi and a little work on the house/in the garden and I need to get back to exercising and eating properly too, so while staying at college till 7 in the evening does tend to result in more composing, it’s appalling on the dietary front, so I need to go back to leaving earlier most nights and having dinner at home.

And I need to be good about sticking to my schedule too. There’s so much I want to do this year, and the only way I’ll get through it all is if I’m super-disciplined, both in terms of the hours I’m working and the hours I’m resting. Speaking of which, I should have gone to bed 15 minutes ago… G’night!

I feel like I’m kind of in a transitional period, compositionally speaking, which isn’t surprising, given the vast number of new experiences I’ve had in the past few months and the wide array of stuff I’ve been trying. This is a good thing, I know it is, but given that I have this one week to work in, but am sick as a dog thanks to a germ I picked up from the dancers last week at Laban, I feel like I’m losing time to consolidate stuff, and going back to Fear of Falling feels like a backwards step because already, by dint of writing that piece and all the work I’ve done on Still River Air (the Ansel Adams piece) and my CoLab project since I started it, it feels like a piece from another time.

I’ve also been doing quite a lot of listening the past couple of days, going back over some pieces of Australian music I want to play to the postgrads in my listening session on Tuesday, and it feels like something I really want to explore more. I feel more connected to this music than I have ever done before, and listening to it is making me realise how much of my own style is informed by this stuff. I’ve also been reading the interviews in Andy Ford’s Composer to Composer, which I haven’t done in many years, and there are certain resonances that really strike me, that I want to explore further. It seems the more I study at a European institution, the more of an Australian composer I feel I am becoming.

Already I’m doubting my decision to stay here. Maybe a year or two after I’ve finished the degree will be enough, then back to Aus and launch into a doctorate. Right at this moment though, I’m feeling sick and full of germ and lacking in energy and imagination and wondering why I ever thought I could be a composer at all. I’m worried about Still River Air (still don’t like that title) and what problems may arise with it because I had to rush the score and parts production due to the massive tech problems I had to deal with. I’m trying not to worry too much – 1. there may not be any, or nothing major; 2. if there are, I’m sure I won’t be the only one!

Tomorrow the forms are due in for the string quartet competition, which I had intended to write something for, but I just don’t know that I’ll have the time, now I’ve lost four days, effectively, to being poorly. Might put it in anyway, but a bit disturbed that I need to provide a title. Also that there’ll only be a week to write it in, when I should be working on Fear of Falling and my Cy Twombly pieces.

Finances are also becoming a huge issue – turned out that Djeli had miscalculated how much we owe HMRC, and there’s another £3,000 to pay, and still no job on his horizon. D’s part-time job is about to evaporate too, as the store he works at is closing down.

I’ve been listening a lot to Peter Sculthorpe’s string quartets this week. Not sure why I settled on those – I’ve actually never really listened to them before – but I’m finding them really comforting and I’m struck by how right their delicate textures seem. I never realised before how slim a lot of Peter’s work is, something which I aspire to in my own music. I’ve been wondering what it would be like to go back and study with him again maybe. I wonder what I would learn this time round.

Anyway, nobody said any of this would be easy – going back to school as a mature-age student, studying full-time on another contractor’s dubious income – and it sure isn’t! I’m just trying to keep focused on what I have to do and not get distracted by money, illness, feelings of worthlessness that tend to crop up whenever anything’s not going quite right! And now that I’ve quietly vented, I’m going to put my headphones back on and see if I can finish off with the time signature changes in Fear of Falling…

It was kind of a short working day yesterday, mainly so we didn’t wear ourselves out for the performance. All the making was finished on Thursday, so on Friday morning we musicians helped to put away all the detritus from the making and dismantled the tables so we could use the whole studio space, while the dancers warmed up. As the dancers were going to start with rehearsing Hug, we took our Sudophones and Merztins and made our way onto the actually-not-terribly-comfortable beanbag cushions outside the studio to work on Stealth. Neil contributed an excellent suggestion, which was to take advantage of the impression that a short loud sound sounds like a quiet sound so we shaped the piece so that the first sounds in the opening were shorter, but more open, gradually growing longer and playing more with the muting as they lengthen. I think this worked better in the larger space, ultimately, because the shorter, louder sounds carried better than the longer quieter ones.

We also finessed the ending and how we would use the space. We decided to be seated in the audience, on the ends of rows, so that it would feel like more of an intervention, as it did in the pub. We came up with a plan to all stand up at the point of “coming out of the closet”, then make our way to the stage for the end of the piece. Our videographer (VERY collaborative this session!) suggested that it might work better if we stood up individually rather than all together, so we ran with that, but with moving towards the stage at about the same time. And for the ending, we improved this by all improvising together once on the stage, with the bird whistles from the Merztins carrying on while the Sudophones started their wail upwards, dropping out to leave the Sudotins, which then dropped out one by one until it was just me holding the last wailing note.

I think that getting Stealth to work better has reinforced what I was thinking when the stuff I worked on on Wednesday didn’t really come off – Stealth really is all about gestures: start quiet and with wide spaces, build the improvisation, stand up and let the improv rip, end with group wails. The only part of that that’s to do with actual specific sounds is the ending, which uses an easy-to-get sound-feature of the Sudophones, unlike the sounds I was tinkering with before which required very specific hand positions and lightness of touch.

After that was sorted and the dancers had done with Hug, we ran through Still, the camera piece, until lunch, refining our moves, and specifically working on who was switching cameras on and off when. I volunteered to turn on the first camera because originally, Eleanore was doing that then moving across in the pitch dark to turn on camera no. 2, so this was an improvement. Plus it made me feel more useful! We also did a final run-through without the sound, which I captured on video (below) which was quite amusing as everyone tried to simulate the electronic rumbles and pings and the instrumentalists tried to replicate their instruments’ sounds!

(also, I very carefully plugged my camera into the wall on Thursday night so it would have a full battery for Friday – and then left it there. So Friday’s photos and vid are a bit lo-fi due to having had to resort to snapping with the iPad!)

After lunch we had a short session talking about the week and where we raised any questions we had, which didn’t go on for terribly long, after which there was mending and stretching and tuba-polishing and chat.

At about 3, we sauntered off to check out some of the performances happening for other projects. It was like a mini Edinburgh Fringe out there! I saw a couple of dance performances, a project to do with role-reversal, in which the musicians danced and the dancers played instruments, and a 40-minute musical on the songs of Robbie Williams. Crazy!

We had a rehearsal in the hall at 5, where we set up the cameras, ironed out tech problems and got to run all the pieces once, which was very enlightening. “Dark” really was very dark indeed! After the rehearsal, John told me that Marie was going to switch off my camera so I wouldn’t have to come back on in the dark, which was probably sensible, but being unrehearsed it meant that that camera went off a good 5 minutes before it should have, so the end of the piece changed in the final performance, but I still think it worked well.

And I think the final performance went off really well! We all found seats on the ends of rows and started in with Stealth before the lights went down, while people were still talking, which was actually great. Theo actually came over to talk to me just after I’d started and I had to shoo him back to his seat! Heh Nobody fell down the stairs or tripped over a cable, and while there were some giggles when the first flashes went off for Still, they stopped pretty quickly. Hug also went down well, and I think John was right to have the order as it was – it was a lighter ending, which made the Death and the Maiden project which followed a bit less of a contrast than it might have been.

The rest of the concert was fabulous – Death and the Maiden (what I saw of it) and the WWI poetry piece were both great and the AfroBeat band were simply fantastic! I had no idea Cassie had such an amazing voice! And Alex too! A really great set to end on, then all the composers went off to the bar to chat and listen to the Brazilian band project, which started a little loungey, but pretty quickly was turning out some great sounds.

Really excited about what I might find at Trinity next week – I’m looking forward to seeing what else has been going on after my taster at Laban yesterday!

This morning we finished making the camera-instruments, assembling our timers, the flash component (made safe by John) and the switch and pot control into the camera body. Fiddly work, but very satisfying and the cameras closed up perfectly once everything was in place and wires wiggled so as to be as low-lying as possible.

The afternoon was spent rehearsing the performance and I spent quite a bit of time working with Marie, who was organising the dancers and providing them with feedback due to being poorly and unable to dance herself. This was very satisfying, between discussing things with musicians, suggesting and discussing ideas with Marie, working out cues for musicians and dancers alike. It was a very productive afternoon, one of the best we’ve had, I think.

While the dancers were rehearsing Hug after this, I co-opted the musicians to try out some ideas I’d been playing with for the sudophones. Well, that was a bit of a bust, alas. And not helped by everyone being tired! So that idea’s gone in the bin, but we’re considering performing Stealth in the concert instead. Not entirely sure how that would work, but it might. At any rate, it was useful to work on the failed piece and while I’d hoped for input from the performers to try to make more of it, it still helped in that I think I’m beginning to see how working with unusual instruments such as these, for non-specialist performers, requires a different way of thinking from how I usually approach writi music. My ideas were too precise to work, I think, even though I’d tried to take into account the temperamental nature of the instruments and that they don’t all respond the same way – it seems to me that writing for stuff like this, you actually need to compose gestures rather than sounds. Compose the gesture and the sound will follow, but if you try to duplicate particular sounds, even allowing for variation, it all comes apart.

The main piece is coming in at about 17 minutes and I think John’s and my estimates were about right – it really couldn’t be any shorter – it needs that length to work through all the material, both audio and visual.

Last day tomorrow!

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!

This has been a little vague to start with – because we’re still working on the instruments, we can’t tell exactly what the electronic sound part of the performance will be like, but we had John’s single assembled camera to work with and John, Neil and I used some of the disposable cameras to simulate the effect of the flashes on the stage.

We worked with the lights out in the studio to try to give more of a feel for what it’ll feel like onstage, although as the studio has a glass wall and mirrors all around and the stage will probably be pitch black it’s not quite the same!

We’ve decided that the instrumentalists will be onstage with the dancers and that they’ll be playing improvised sounds that relate to the electronic sounds, which start very low, below the threshold of hearing, gradually rise, then when the flash of the camera goes off, they jump up in pitch and continue to rise beyond the threshold of hearing. It’s great that we have a variety of instruments – tuba, clarinet, oboe and piano because it gives us a really good range to work with.

I’m not really sure yet what my role is or should be in the final performance. I had thought about bringing my flute on the first day, but it had sounded like instruments wouldn’t be needed. Today I was giving a little feedback on what the performers were doing but as John has such strong ideas for the piece, I feel a little redundant. Hoping this will become clearer as the week goes on.

The dancers started developing their own version of John’s Hug piece today. It’s coming along nicely and may end up being a part of our performance on Friday. We even took this out into the (very slippery!) foyer of Laban, which is a very interesting acoustic space for this type of thing – I was fascinated to hear how the asymmetrical architecture changed the sound as the dancers moved around the space.

Natalia and Stefania in our first public performance!

We also played with another of John’s instruments – another one made from a tin can, like the Sudophones, but this one is light-responsive and percussive. I don’t know what it’s called. It has a light-sensor on a long cable and responds to light by making the can rattle rather than by creating electronic sounds. Its battery is attached to a Matchbox car so it can move with the tin and it has a lovely enormous ostrich plume attached, which shakes in response to the can’s movement – a beautiful visual effect. I wanted to try it out on the slippery slope of the Laban foyer when we went out to perform Hug, but the one we had with us got knocked and I think John wanted to check it over before it was used again, so I didn’t get to do that.

I’m actually quite liking being at Laban for this though. At first I felt a bit exiled, being so far from Trinity (10 minutes walk for a dancer but 20 minutes’ trek for an injured composer!) but the benefit of being in new surroundings is that it’s making me not just fall into old habits – at lunchtime I can’t just go off and sit with my friends like I usually do, can’t just go to the library, so it’s always about the project and keeping me focused. I think that’s a good thing.

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!

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!

Top all that off with drinks at the ICA bar afterwards with the whole class, getting rather drunk on red wine and all of us singing along at the tops of our voices to Andreas’ accompaniment on the piano accordion (everything from “Toreador” to “I Will Survive” and beyond!) and it rather made the prospect of a normal day today seem extremely tame, so I was glad to be heading into college for a meeting in spite of dire snow warnings and general chilliness.

I didn’t get as much done today as I’d hoped – which now makes it, I think, 3 days since I last worked on the Ansel Adams piece – but progress happened – we now have a plan and a poster for Rude Health (did the poster this evening in 3 variants – just waiting for the votes to come in as to which we use), I found a great Elliott Carter quote which I’m going to use in the tape part for my Rude Health piece (and recorded myself saying it several times), did a little viol practice and recorded myself playing an assortment of peculiar sounds on the viol, of which I’m sure my teacher would not approve

Given the weather, it seems I’m to be trapped at home for the duration of the weekend, which is a shame – really would have preferred to go into college because I generally get more done there – but I have my plan: Tape part for the Rude Health piece to be finished tomorrow, graphic score on Sunday, more work done on Ansel Adams at some point because I need to have the piece finished and first draft orchestration done by the end of next weekend, according to my plan. Time is getting scarily tight on this one!