minimania

List time

It seems like no time at all since I was doing my Christmas list, and I still haven't finished playing with all my toys, so this list is actually proving a little tricky to compile. Also, because of having received two marvellous cookbooks for Christmas which I'm nowhere near done with exploring, it just seems greedy to include my usual parade of food-related reading matter, so I've cut that down drastically from the 6-8 volumes on my wish list too.

If you're feeling creative and want to deviate from the list, Djelibeybi has access to all the CDs, books, DVDs, etc. we have around. Current interests are including: complete obsession with composition, getting very into more experimental/improv/electroacoustic stuff, trying to play the flute a bit more and experiment with some improvisation there, bread-baking, house-which-is-not-yet-ours-but-hopefully-will-be-soon.

As always, this list isn't a hint. It's for people who were going to get me a pressie anyway but don't know where to start. I hope it helps!

I don't think I can be bothered to put these in any sort of order, so they're just going to be random.

Zoom H1 digital recorder. Tiny, light, surreptitious. I tried to make a workable field recording setup out of my iPod Touch and 2 lovely mics, but have been entirely unable to without buying adaptor cables that are almost as much as just getting one of these, and it seems that the adaptors may introduce noise into the recording anyway, so I've given up and after some research, the H1 seems to be the answer.

Short & Sweet by Dan Lepard. Dan Lepard is one of the gurus of bread-baking and while I don't think I'm quite ready for his (sourdough-intense) bread-baking book, this one does have some fabulous-looking bread recipes, an introduction to his bread preparation techniques and some amazing-sounding other cakes and biscuits and things. Chocolate custard muffins, anyone?

The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together by Twyla Tharp. I absolutely loved Tharp's The Creative Habit. It was a real inspiration to me and really helped me get back into serious composing. This one, on collaboration, I think would be very helpful - I'm coming across more situations and having more ideas requiring collaboration, and it looks like this could be a useful read.

A proper paella pan would still be nice. They say the carbon steel ones are the best.

Either TransAmerica or TransEuropa. We used to play TransAmerica in our lunchtimes at LBi and it's a great game for 2 or more people. Quick and fun. TransEuropa seems to be a new version - same rules, different continent, so either would be fun.

Prokofiev Violin Sonatas, Gidon Kremer & Martha Argerich. I bought their complete Beethoven sonatas last year and it is just wonderful, so I'd love to hear what they've done with these.

Marc Johns: Fuck Art, Let's Be Hedge Fund Managers print. I LOVE this post-it-note artwork. So much that I actually wrote to him and asked him to make it a print. And he wrote back (about a year ago now) and told me that, lo, there it is in the store. I think this would be great on my studio wall, don't you?

The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn. This one was recommended by @pkpiano - I've read three of his previous recommendations (Art & Fear, The War of Art and Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit) all of which have been fantastic and have shot straight to the top of my best-creativity-books-ever list, so I'm very interested to see what this one's like too.

Roussel's Joueurs de flute. I love this set of pieces. I played a couple of them during my brief stint of flute lessons at the Sydney Conservatorium and have always wanted my own copy. I don't mind which edition, but do check to make sure it includes all four - some publishers sell them as individual pieces...

 

Resuscitation

This blog has been pretty much inactive for quite a long time now, and as I'm starting a new personal project that isn't really appropriate to talk about anywhere else, I guess this is the place. I never meant for this blog to turn into a dumping ground. I almost wish I'd just left it as my Vox blog and not updated it, but heigh ho. It's as good a place as any. The only other alternatives are to put it on my Tumblr, which doesn't really have an identity yet and I need to work out how I'm going to use it - probably as an aggregator for my assorted creative stuff ultimately - or start up yet another brand new blog, which seems silly.

So here I am. With what will probably be, for most of you, a very uninteresting project. I will start with a story.

Four years ago I started seeing a nutritionist. I was vastly overweight (clinically obese), always exhausted, with a wide variety of health problems, and I was sick of it. My main goal wasn't actually weight loss, but to regain my lost energy and try to get back into composing.

My nutritionist put me on what I've always thought of as the 'deprivation diet'. I know that's not a helpful way to think about it, but that's what it was to me:

• no wheat
• no dairy
• no red meat
• no salt
• no sugar
• no coffee
• no tea
• no alcohol
• no yeast

I think that was most of it. There were probably a couple of other forbiddens in there, but these were the biggies. My favourite things in the world are fresh bread, fresh cheese, fresh coffee, so just from that you can see that this diet was never going to make me happy.

Well, the results - physically - were spectacular. For the first time since I could remember, I could go out in the afternoon and straight on to a dinner engagement (admittedly where I couldn't really eat anything) without needing a nap first. I had way more energy than ever before, I shed weight by the truckload - 14kg in 6 months and looked and felt fantastic. Apart from the raging depression which set in after about a month and never really went away the whole time I was on it and for quite a while afterwards.

And, for the most part, I managed to keep the weight off too. Until I put my foot down wrong in a patch of wobbly paving in Brick Lane on my way to work one day in November 2009, which resulted in a sprained ankle and bruised bone which took a year and a half to heal, and was swiftly followed by another sprained ankle (the other one) and just as that was starting to heal, a snapped calf muscle. So, basically, for the past two years I have been unable to exercise. And as one of my many and varied health problems is that I have PCOS and insulin resistance, this means that the weight has just piled back on.

I am now back where I started four years ago. But the thought of taking on the deprivation diet again, in spite of the excellent physical results, is just too much for me. For weeks I've been trying to work out a way to balance what I learned from that diet with the food I enjoy and have been failing parlously. Then this week a couple of friends on Twitter somehow started talking about Weight Watchers. They had good things to say about the system and I recalled a school friend in Australia also had great success with them and has kept the weight off for several years now.

So last night I signed up. I went along to my first meeting and signed myself up for a month. The system seems pretty flexible, if maths-heavy: they have a system of points based on the nutritional value of the food and how much of its own calories the body burns while processing it. Sort of more intelligent calorie-counting (and a very canny move on WW's part - proprietary calculations!). The good thing about it is that no food is forbidden. You have your allocation of daily points, then there's a weekly allocation too which helps if you go out for dinner. Beyond that, if you want a Mars bar, you need to cut back somewhere else. And unlike many diet plans, it doesn't simply revolve around prepackaged food. They have a calculator so you can put in the ingredients in your home-cooked food (this morning I put in my bread recipe, told it it makes 36 generous slices and now I know what they reckon my bread is worth) which pretty much allows you to calculate anything you make.

So I'm signed up. I'll test it out for a month or two and see what happens. Mostly I liked the idea of checking in every week. Accountability has always been a big thing for me - it's why I put so much of my life online - if people are (or may be) looking, then I'm more likely to push on properly. My first goal (assigned by my meeting leader, which happily more-or-less coincides with the goal I've set myself for the year) is to get down to 76.9kg, 5% less than my current horrific weight of 82.2kg.

Today, of course, is day 1. Obviously there's going to be a lot I need to work out, and I don't fully expect to manage to keep entirely within my 26-point allocation each day this week. Today I'm mainly focusing on seeing what the point value of a relatively normal day is, which is proving an interesting exercise. My normal-ish breakfast of homemade bread toast with Vegemite, a cup of coffee and some fruit comes in at 5 points, which is at the upper end of the breakfast points in WW's sample menus (3-6 points, mostly), which is comforting, because I do love my breakfast. The only tweaks I've made are to use a bit less butter than I would normally and to have one slice of bread instead of my usual two (but, being honest with myself, the second slice was almost always more out of habit and yum than really being hungry for it).

So far, while I'm liking the sound of it, I'm thinking that a large part of its success is likely to come because of "oh feck it, I can't be bothered working out the points in this yummy thing, I'll have a carrot", but hey, that's no bad thing.

But only time will tell how it works for me. One of the issues with PCOS, if you're not familiar with it, is a really slow metabolism - they say that if a woman with PCOS eats exactly the same thing for 5 days as a normal woman, then she will have actually eaten food for 6 days. Which is the problem for me with many diets - they prescribe too much food as a base and I actually put on weight while doing the diet. From reading the WW forums though, there seem to be many women with PCOS doing the programme and slowly achieving success with it (weight loss is hard with this condition and the slightest slip-up piles it back on again. Ironically, the more weight you do lose the less the symptoms affect you) and someone said that she finds that if she sticks to her daily points allocation and doesn't use her weekly points, then she loses weight; if she uses her weekly points, she doesn't, so I'm taking that as something to aim for.

So we'll see how it goes. I don't know whether anyone's still reading this blog, or if you're interested at all, but I just wanted to track this journey somehow and see what positives I can pull out of the experience.

10 good things about 2011

Well, having made my 2012 goals list and joyfully bid farewell to the horrors of 2011, today I found an email from someone talking about the 10 best things of their 2011. Given how mostly awful 2011 was for me - back pain, depression, 9-month gum infection that nobody could find the cause of, a second sprained ankle and a busted calf muscle just for starters - I thought I should really try to think about the good things that happened in 2011, because there were good things, and it's not right that they be obscured by a bunch of mostly medical crap. So it's time for a list-post. I'll start with the kind of obvious but still amazing:

1. I was accepted into Trinity Laban's Master of Music programme in Composition, to start in September 2012. I've been wanting to do an MMus ever since graduating from my BMus - for 15 years, so yes, this is an amazing thing.

2. I'd never have applied for the MMus if I hadn't done the CoMA Midwinter Composers Masterclass in Durham in January. I got the first real feedback on my music I'd had since I left uni, met some amazing people and got some real encouragement, including specific encouragement from both our tutor Tansy Davies and other students to apply for a Masters degree, that my music was good enough to do so (I hadn't thought I was anywhere near good enough). That masterclass was one of the most important things I've ever done for my work.

3. We decided to buy a house. Admittedly, since then there's been a vast amount of stress, dealing with the stupid bank who have been causing all sorts of delays and not giving us an answer about the mortgage, but the decision itself was a huge step - to move out of London, deciding where we wanted to be, making plans.

4. Wrote (or at least mostly wrote) my first real orchestral piece. This has taken most of the year, but I've learned so, so much by following the process through and while it's still got some way to go, I'm pretty pleased with how it's turned out so far.

5. Did a semester's worth of private composition lessons. This is obviously tied up with no. 4, but it was a great experience, exposed me to some wonderful music I'd never have found otherwise and got me used to actually talking about my work and getting a little bit brave about sharing it.

6. Spent 2 weeks at the Edinburgh Festival followed by a weekend with Djeli on the Isle of Arran. I really, really needed that break and saw some amazing shows and stunning scenery. And even though the Festival was somewhat marred by a rather extreme bout of stress-induced insanity on my part, followed by the second sprained ankle, the insanity did lead to some excellent talks with Djeli, and I'd really needed to get away - just so insanely stressed by an assortment of stuff...

7. Met up with an old friend. We met first through the internet & have been corresponding for over a decade. We met once in York in 1998, but hadn't managed to meet up again since I moved over here 6 years ago. Very slack, I know, but it was great to finally do it - and great, too, that we're moving into the same area as him, so hopefully we'll see a lot more of each other from now on.

8. Started sharing my work-in-progress on my blog. This was a super-scary, but very useful for thinking through the piece and for my confidence. I didn't get as much feedback as I'd hoped to, but people seemed to read the posts at least and I've learned a lot from doing it anyway.

9. Saw the Barbary apes on the Rock of Gibraltar. I've been wanting to do that since about the age of eight.

10. Made big progress with my business. It's still got a long way to go, but I think I've found a focus now, I've launched the website for it, got a few clients and am gradually finding a way to balance the paying work with composition and training. This was a big feature in the year, and a bit of a struggle to get to where I am now, so mostly it didn't feel like a good thing, but in hindsight it really is.

So there you have it. I made it to ten. And, looking over them, some of those are pretty big deals, really. Food for thought...

'Tis the season... again

Well, this is an interesting blog, isn't it. It seems to have turned into semi-annual postings of lists of stuff. So sorry. There's more interesting reading over at http://caitlinrowley.com. Should consolidate some of these blogs...

To the issue at hand... Given the general quietness of this site, if you're reading this, chances are pretty good that you've been sent here. And if you've been sent here it means you're considering whether I'm worthy of a Christmas present. And if you're considering that, you probably know me quite well and know that I am both scraping by on a dab of freelance work and in the process of buying a rather large and very dilapidated Georgian townhouse. Given these things, it's going to be a pretty frugal few months here Chez Minim so this year's list has a bit of a sensible edge to it. So sorry. I'll see if I can put something in here to mitigate the sense...

As always, this list is here as a convenience, not a hint. It's long because that way I can offer a lot of options for differing budgetry and postal requirements. Plus it means that even if everyone uses the list, there'll still be an element of surprise as to what will turn up. As always, please DO TELL JOHN if you're going to get something from this list so as to avoid double-ups. If you don't have his email, ask me :-)

Maybe I should do this room by room... Let's start with the...

Kitchen (of course)

The Art of French Baking, by Ginette Mathiot. Newly out, and it looks WONDEFUL. Thank you, Tchatchke!

1080 Recipes or The Book of Tapas, both by Simone Ortega. Not sure which one I'd prefer but I've been enjoying cooking paella since we got back from Spain and I'd like to try some other Spanish food.

The Silver Spoon, classic Italian cookbook

I Know How to Cook, by Ginette Mathiot - classic French cookbook. From my Da - lovely!

(All five of these are Phaidon cookbooks, in the same series as the superb Greek cookbook, Vefa's Kitchen, which I love to bits and use regularly)

Paella pan. Not sure which one's the best, so I've not linked one, but they say that carbon steel makes the best paella pans. All I know is that cooking it in a saucepan tends to end up as tasty sludge.

Nice new well-padded oven gloves because ours have been leaking stuffing for a couple of years now. Preferably glove-style and not joined together (those long teatowel-style with pockets on the end freak me out). Please, no blue. Other colours are fine, especially if they're red/orange/purple/green, etc.

British Baking by Oliver Peyton

Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days

Some nice modern salt & pepper grinders (note: grinders, not shakers, pls!).

Some decent speakers so I can pipe music in from the server. The BeoSound 8 is really rather nice. And it comes with red speaker panels too! Yeah, I know. Cloud-cuckoo-land.

Also probably cloud-cuckoo-land and would probably need some consultation would be a benchtop-sized slab of marble - John wants a place to put hot pots and I want a place for rolling out pastry, so marble would suit both our needs.

Lounge room

Chuck Season 4. Of course. From the fabulous champagnesnob. Also of course :-)

True Blood Season 4 (if it's out, which it probably won't be)

Lego Pirates of the Caribbean for Wii. I love the other Lego games for the Wii, especially Indiana Jones and Harry Potter, and this one's likely to be a whole heap of fun. Note that Wii games, like DVDs need to be bought in the UK because of being region-encoded. Thank you, Djelibeybi :-)

Pelagia and the Black Monk, by Boris Akunin. The first in the series was great - I've been wanting to read the others for a while now. From D - very much looking forward to reading it.

Transamerica
A fantastic board game for two players or more - used to play this at lunchtimes at LBi and it's awesome. Yes, still (4th list around for this one).

Bedroom

Three big Georgian windows for the front of the house so we don't have to live with the horrible airless ones for any time at all? That'd be really nice. If you're Croesus.

Studio

A problem is that we're running out of space for physical books & CDs. Most books I buy nowadays are eBooks, but it's almost impossible to give someone an eBook or digital audio downloads because of the stupid way that these systems are set up so far so vouchers are still vastly welcome for the following places:

• Amazon.co.uk
• http://passionato.com/ (not sure if they do vouchers but if you ask maybe they will)
• http://deutschegrammophon.com
• iTunes voucher (in ££s) could be useful too for magazine subscriptions/apps (I won't buy music from iTunes because the quality is too low and it hurts my ears) so the house doesn't get cluttered up with paper!

Should we actually get the house (and we're not sure when we'll know this, so these would have to be last-minute purchases, most likely, because while they'd still be interesting, they'd not be much use if we don't get it and end up in something Victorian instead...) we're going to need some references for Georgian and Regency style, so we can do the place up in a sympathetic manner. These two look good:

• The Georgian Group Book of The Georgian House by Steve Parissien
• Regency Style by Steve Parissien ('our' house was built in the 1830s so comes at the end of the Regency section of the Georgian Period)

Prokofiev Violin Sonatas, Gidon Kremer & Martha Argerich. I bought their complete Beethoven sonatas a couple of months back and it is just wonderful

Martha Argerich: The Collection 3 (Chamber Ensembles). I have to confess I have become a complete Martha Argerich addict. She is amazing. I have volume 2 of The Collection (Concertos) as downloads, which is superb - this one looks like a really interesting collection of pieces.

I would still like a complete Beethoven piano sonatas recording. Alas, La Argerich seems to have never recorded them all. I have liked very much what I've heard of the John O'Conor Beethoven recordings (very light touch - barely Germanic at all!) on Telarc, but am open to suggestions. Please, no thumpers, I beg you. Can't stand it when pianists play Beethoven as if the stronger they make the chord, the more important the music seems. Thank you, Mama, and yes, every bit as fabulous as I thought they'd be

Minimal Piano Collection Vol X1-XX. This (still) sounds like fun :-)

Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel/Why Patterns?
Started listening to Feldman's work before last Christmas, but it's really distracting on Spotify, even with a Premium subscription so I haven't been able to pursue it properly.

Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer. Yes, I know it sounds dull. I've been trying to justify buying it for a few months now and while I think it'd be useful, I have trouble because I don't know when I'll get time to implement A/B testing on my site and see how it can push my fame and fortune forward. But perhaps if you get me this book the time would magically appear. It's supposed to be fantastic

Flute Project - album of short pieces for flute. Includes one by Arvo Part!

Still interested in something from the Music Minus One range - it gets really boring just playing all on your own. Would be nice to mess about with something with an accompaniment for once... There's a selection of them on Amazon.

Should you happen to win EuroMillions, I would love a Paetzold recorder plus a year's worth of recorder lessons to start to learn how to play it properly. What an amazing instrument! See them here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFw8cjxH5HU

Garden

Yup, we'll have a garden. And that goes whether or not we get this house - wherever we are next is going to have some sort of garden which means... veg!

The Kitchen Gardener: Grow Your Own Fruit and Veg by Alan Titchmarsh. Lovely Da at work again - now I can't wait to start growing...

Something on companion planting or similar might be useful too. Organic Gardening: The Natural No-Dig Way by Charles Dowding seems to be getting excellent reviews, but I'm open to anything that will keep bugs at bay without having to spray chemicals all over everything.

The garden is long and flat. If we get the house, it would be perfect for boules! or possibly croquet!

2011's getting-older moment

I can't believe it! Christmas just finished and yet I suddenly realised that there's only a couple of weeks till my birthday. Which of course calls for (yet-another) list.

This year's focus is a hard-edged one - no fluffy distractions for Minim this year - I'm all about the composing and building up my business to get it to a point where I can support myself doing stuff I enjoy and over which I have some control, rather than working for other people to other people's timetables (9am starts are banned when they don't involve just getting up and starting work in your pyjamas).

Usual disclaimer: If you're not expecting to see this, don't worry - I'm not hinting for presents, this is solely for the convenience of people who were going to get me something anyway but who don't know what I'd like. This is what I'd like :-)

Starting with a bang:

Rode M3 microphone. I think this one looks a good one - it's not too pricey, is getting good reviews and is apparently a good all-round mic. The purpose of this is because my tiny Sony stereo mic, while it produces pretty good sound, is unusable with Pro Tools without hacking it through the MiniDisc recorder on mute which involves lots of cables and confusion and generally doing things three times over to get the sound into the programme. Recording my songs would be much easier with a proper mic I could just plug straight into the Mbox, and apparently it's also good for field recording. Thanks, Mutti!

Logic Studio. This is ludicrously expensive. Which is why I haven't invested in it before now. The price on Amazon fluctuates up and down around the £300 mark, so if you're keen for this one (ha! it's alright. I know when I'm dreaming), you might want to watch it for a few days? Seems to be at a high point at the moment (£365) The price made a sudden dip just before my birthday, so I snagged it as it was too good a bargain to waste and I was pretty sure (I checked with Djeli too) that nobody was buying it for me. And SO glad I did!

Writing Poems by Peter Sansom. If I'm to write the libretto for my opera, I have to face the fact that at some point I will need to write real live actual poetry. I have a book by Ted Hughes, but it's not really grabbing me. This one looks better and looks like it focuses on a certain amount of analysis too. If you find anything else that looks like it might help me limp my way to an interesting libretto, that would be grand. Not interested in learning how to write stuff that rhymes though - too difficult to set to music. It boxes everything in. Thanks, Buffygirl!

Minimal Piano Collection Vol X1-XX. This sounds like fun :-)

Vienna Symphonic Library
Well, one can dream! If you win the lottery, though, even a lowly Special Edition package would be brilliant :-)

iPad 2!
It's available on the 25th of March. Whee! This is cloud-cuckoo-land stuff. It's on here because I want it, but unless you win lotto I will probably be aghast if you buy it for me. Just sayin'. If you DO happen to win lotto, I'll take the 32GB 3G version please :-) With our iPad 1 taking off to Scotland without me for 3 weeks and the deep unliklihood of EuroMillions wins before The Day, I have reserved one for pickup on the 30th. There always needs to be a birthday present for oneself, yes?

Marc Johns: Fuck Art, Let's Be Hedge Fund Managers print
I LOVE this post-it-note artwork. So much that I actually wrote to him and asked him to make it a print. And today he wrote back and told me that, lo, there it is in the store.

Chuck Season 2
Cos Season 1 just isn't enough Chuck. Thanks, Buffygirl!

Structural Functions in Music by Wallace Berry
An amazing book. Very dense and difficult to read, but so much to be learnt from it. But in order to wade my way through it, I need to own it. Found it first in Ealing library (which, knowing Ealing Library, means it will never be found there again if I go in looking for it) and even 3 renewals weren't enough to get through a single chapter. Nobody got this for me, and there was a secondhand one on Amazon for something like £2, so it's now off the list :-)

Barnbrook Bible: The Graphic Design of Jonathan Barnbrook
Amazing, amazing work. Really inspiring

Twyla Tharp: The Collaborative Habit
Her other book, The Creative Habit, has been a very important one for me and this one on creative collaboration looks really interesting and useful.

The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn
This one was recommended by @pkpiano - I've read three of his previous recommendations (Art & Fear, The War of Art and Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit) all of which have been fantastic and have shot straight to the top of my best-creativity-books-ever list, so I'm very interested to see what this one's like too.

Nigel Slater's Tender, Vol. 2
This is the one about fruit - looks fantastic! Awww, thanks, Djelibeybi!

Nico Muhly's Mothertongue & I Drink The Air Before Me
Yeah, Mothertongue has been on the list for about 3 4 years now and everyone's studiously ignored it. Please don't ignore it. I still want it! Again, if you get the CD + download option direct from Bedroom Community, these come with a bonus track (FLAC format please).

Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel/Why Patterns?
Started listening to Feldman's work before Christmas, but it's really distracting on Spotify, even with a Premium subscription - really needs to be a CD, I feel

Arrested Development
I never saw enough of this when it was on TV and always wanted to except that Channel 7 kept moving its timeslot. Now the whole thing is available in one box. And on sale :-) If you don't know it, it's very cool, very quirky. And it has Jason Bateman. Again, Amazon had a sudden massive discount on this (£19.95 down from £50) so I snapped it up (several months after the birthday though - I'm just keeping the list tidy)

Transamerica
A fantastic board game for two players or more - used to play this at lunchtimes at LBi and it's awesome.

File-keeping footstool
Had my eye on this for a while but keep putting off buying it, largely because until the bookcase situation was sorted out in the study, but it would be very helpful - easy access to my files, plus allow me to put my ankle up (or just stretch the legs - not just for the injured period!) while I'm sitting in my chair. Note that it may be cheaper in-store than online. Not sure if there are colour options - if so, black to match the chair would be nice, or just the neutral colour that's online would be fine.

Plus of course, the ever-welcome Amazon vouchers. I will not think you are cheap or lazy, I will just be delighted.

And a new addition:

Nomad Brush
This is a brush-stylus for the iPadPod and it actually seems to behave like a real brush! Sounds like it's a heap of fun to use. They're on back-order now because they've received so many rave reviews (the video on the site doesn't look like much, but read the reviews in the news section and have a look at the review & video at iPadCreative.com ) but I don't mind waiting :-)

NMC Digital Subscription
NMC are a fantastic label who release all sorts of groovy stuff - Howard Skempton, John White, etc. Lots of fabulous new music, mostly British. They're now doing a digital subscription model where for £80 they send you every release for the whole year (usually about 12 CDs) in digital format.

Heavy thinking

I've just spent three hours thinking about my business, working through worksheets and planning stuff. And the conclusion I'm coming to is that the more I think about what I want my business to be, the more it seems to wriggle and transform under my gaze. Possibly this means that I didn't spend enough time thinking about it in the first place, but I think all the reading I've done about online business strategies and marketing and options open to me in the past few weeks has had an impact too. What started out as a simple "I'll build websites for small businesses that will really help them to get more business!" has transitioned through consulting work and come out the other side as "what if I could set up an online training course for designers and DIY web nerds to show them how they can build websites for small businesses that will really help them to get more business?".

I think I like where it's going. I'm not sure how it might gain traction in the marketplace, but I think I like it. And the best bit about this transformative stuff is it's moved from high-input, medium financial gain work through to low-input, potentially high financial gain work. From needing to be on the ground and building stuff, to prepare-once, run many times (with necessary updates, of course) and just check in regularly to answer questions and make sure everything's going OK. All of which then leaves more time for composition.

One of the things I'm working on now is to work out how much of my day is really composition-related. Obviously at the moment it's a bit low because I'm caught up in getting the business stuff going and there's a bunch of other stuff going on that makes me feel like I'm treading water, but I think it's important that I know a) how much time I actually spend composing b) whether that's better in a block or scattered throughout the day (scattered seems best, although haphazard) and b) how much sitting-and-thinking or sitting-and-reading or sitting-and-listening time do I also need to feed into my composition. This is the woolly bit. And at the moment I'm not really getting any of that and I think I need to start to schedule it because this is ALWAYS WHAT HAPPENS! The woolly stuff doesn't feel productive, so I skip it, but I need the woolly stuff to allow my brain to do the processing and make the connections it needs to actually produce good music.

Thinking of following Havi Brooks' lead and keeping a Big Book of Me to try to work this out. So I can write stuff down as it occurs to me and analyse at leisure.

Why are there not 72 hours in every day?

Inside the Actor's Studio Thingie

New year, new meme - just found that I was tagged in a friend's Facebook meme, but I have a bit of a horror of Facebook notes, so I'm going to put it here instead.

Inside the Actor's Studio Thingie

James Lipton (whoever he may be) asks these 10 questions to every guest at the end of "Inside the Actor's Studio".

1. What is your favorite word?
   ferret. I don't really know why. I just like it
   
   
2. What is your least favorite word?
   When people pronounce 'congratulations' with a d instead of a t. and when they shorten it to 'congrats' but with a d.
   
   
3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
   Talent, passion, commitment
   
   
4. What turns you off?
   Love of money for its own sake. Missing genes for politeness and consideration.
   
   
5. What is your favorite curse word?
   Smeg! or possibly Dangnabbit.
   
   
6. What sound or noise do you love?
   The milky sound of heels walking on a concrete pavement.
   
   
7. What sound or noise do you hate?
   Relaxation 'music'. It makes me want to break speakers
   
   
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
   Writer
   
   
9. What profession would you not like to do?
   Anything medical or related to social work or the looking after of other people's small children. I am not a people person.
   
   
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
    "Come on in! We've got you a beautiful studio set up over here, with a view over the garden. You don't need to talk to anyone if you don't want to, but if you do, all your friends are just hanging out over there. Also, we have the players of the Berlin Phil on tap, so just yell if you need any of them"

So that's the end. If you've read this far, please consider yourself tagged!

New year, new leaf - 2011 edition

Yup. New Year. Review of last year's goals and working out what this one's will be. I'll be the first to admit that last year's goals were for the most part either too ambitious (e.g. walking the Thames Valley path - I'm only just able to contemplate the prospect of walking for enjoyment again on level paving, still a long way off a tramp through fields to the source of our Great River) or too trivial (baking pumpkin scones) or there just wasn't enough time. I am proud, however, that I managed to tick off just about everything on my music list and made a concerted effort (even if a failed one) at most of the things on the health list. Travel was largely scuppered by the whole crippled thing, but even then there were some exciting trips that hadn't been on the list - most notably Florida to see the space shuttle launch and spending a week in Lisbon with my parents.

And there've been other achievements too - 3 performances of my music, I joined the London Composers Forum, wrote two major works (well, major in the context of my largely miniature-based compositional output), spoke on a composer panel and made great leaps ahead in my understanding of musical theory.

But enough of the past. It's time to think of the future. 2011, here I come!

Music

• Try to keep up at least 5 pomodoros a week of musical activity (preferably composition, but I'm not going to be too hard on myself here. If I'm working, I'll be satisfied if I just get in a little listening or counterpoint study) Totally creamed this one! masses of work done this year, even if not too many pieces were completed. Also did a ton of listening and some study too.
• Orchestral arrangement of Deconstruct: Point, line, plane for the LCCO's orchestral workshop, due at the end of January  Meh. Alas no. This didn't happen. I did try but the piece didn't want to go there
• In 2010 my music was performed on 3 separate occasions. I'm setting myself a goal of getting 2 performances this year as a minimum. 1st performance confirmed already! Remembrances of Half-Forgotten Dead People will be premiered on 4 March - 15-odd years after it was written. Ha! December update: Overachieved on this one - yay! apart from the Remembrances performance, I also heard my Pieces of Eight performed at an LCF lunchtime concert, and the wonderful Midnight Llama played my graphic score Carrion Comfort in Colchester too.
• Get all scores for CD ready and sent off to my lovely and patient partner-in-crime. Ugh. Fail. But we did at least talk about doing it so the project itself isn't totally dead in the water.
• Implement new score dissemination scheme on caitlinrowley.com. Half-done. This turned out to be a bigger project than anticipated, involving recreating the site as a purely WordPress site, which has meant reworking the templates, messing about with custom post types and custom taxonomies and also means sorting out user signup which then needs to be linked to MailChimp. So this one is ongoing and will hopefully be ready to go sometime in 2012 (note lack of specific timeline :-) )
• Take at least one piece along to an LCF WiP/WiT session for feedback Done! I took Carrion Comfort along to the second-last one of the year and, of course, it was fabulously useful and helped me over a bit of an obstacle.
• Write a new piece specifically for a call for scores Done! Diabolus for unaccompanied violin, written for Conway Kuo's 15 Minutes of Fame call for scores
• Send off a score to at least one call for scores Done! See previous :-)
• Practice the flute no less than once a week. Hmm. Well, this was largely scuppered by root canal work that left the left side of my face mostly numb for about 9 months. But I've done a ton of practice since, and even had 2 flute lessons, which were a huge help, so while I haven't specifically achieved this, I do feel I've at least tried and got into the spirit of it a bit.
• Continue on with harmony/counterpoint/ear training work - not going to specify a pace for this, i just want to keep plugging away at it. Uh. Not really. Instead I did 6 months of private composition lessons, which were incredibly helpful but I haven't really touched my counterpoint etc exercises this year much at all.
• Listen to 1 new or revisited work or album a month. I'm thinking of keeping a listening diary as a way of practising what I'm learning with the harmony/ear training stuff and improving critical faculty etc. January: Doing well! Pulled out the Dawn Upshaw Sondheim album that I don't think I ever listened to in the first place, revisited Carl Vine's early symphonies, discovered the music of a new composer, Philipp Blume thanks to a Twitter-friend. February: Joined SoundCloud and listened to a lot of random stuff on there. March: Gordon Crosse's Thel, Nicholas Maw's Life Studies (both from my composition tutor). Also more random music by people I follow on SoundCloud and Twitter, plus have been starting to delve more properly into the NMC Songbook (WONDERFUL album). Listening diary not really happening yet. December: So this wasn't really as structured as I'd hoped, but I think I basically kept up with the quota, and I started keeping a bit of a listening diary on my iPad and also occasionally blogging about stuff I heard. SoundCloud has been incredibly useful and I've heard a lot of new stuff via Twitter and, yes, it's all been interesting and helpful.
  
• Blog on a musical topic at least once a month March update: So far (till this week when I got hijacked by finishing a piece) I've been blogging every week on caitlinrowley.com on musical topics. Hoping I can continue. December: I've managed to keep up the once-a-week blog post for most of the year, barring a couple of hiatuses (hiatii??)
• Buy a new piano pedal so I can play John Field's Nocturnes. DONE!

Other creative activity

• Try at least two recipes out of my new Hummingbird Bakery cookbook. Yup - peanut butter & chocolate chip cookies, also the pecan & white chocolate cookies - both excellent!
• Try at least one new bread recipe out of The Bread Bible. Hmm. I don't think I actually did this, but I can't quite remember. I know I've made both the Pain de Mie and near-perfected the crumpets, but I can't remember if I made the crumpets first last year or this year. This one's a maybe...
• Have a go at a felting project (suspect this may be the French Press Slippers which my sister-in-common-law very kindly gave me both pattern and yarn for for Christmas!). In progress. Nearly finished the knitting. Hoping I can at least have them sewn up and ready to felt by New Year. Must buy a tennis ball for the agitation...
• Knit gloves to go with green Strangling Vine scarf. Nope. Keep putting this off because I hate converting skeins into centre-pull balls - it's tedious and it can be hard to get Djeli to sit still that long but if I use a chair I invariably get in a muddle.
• Draw more - again, I'm not going to set a schedule but I've done barely any drawing this year and I'd really like to get back into it. Well, I did do a bit, pretty much all on iPad, but there were a couple of Mr Pickleberry cards over the year and I didn't think twice about drawing the cards for the crackers this Christmas, so while I haven't done as much as I wanted, I think I can count this as a win.
• Sort out the collage box - this item was pretty much a total fail last year, but at least I don't think I've really added to it - I've been focusing more on taking photos and using those on the iPad, but I need to cull/scan/use what's in there - I need to reduce the pile one way or another so it fits tidily back into its box again. Ugh. Fail.
• Bring photos up to date on Flickr. Unfortunately this means going back to last Christmas on the Isle of Man and even the Christmas before in Denmark. SO need to sort myself out. Fail
• Finish writing web book. Kind of changed tack on this and most of the content will probably end up as blog posts on raspberryblue.com
• For the third year in a row I'm going to put my hopeful foot forward and say I'll try to do the Drawing London on Location course at Central St Martin's. If anyone's interested in doing this with me, just yell! Nope. Still interested. Unlikely to happen in 2012 with the whole going-back-to-uni thing though.
• Determine jumpers to recycle into yarn and unravel & ball up at least one of them. Nope.

Home and health

• Yeah, fix this dratted ankle. What did you think would be first??! Well, the ankle is greatly improved - physio says it's fine so I just need to continue to strengthen it, so I guess it's fixed. Now to fix the second sprained ankle from August and finish fixing the busted calf muscle from November...
• Finish sorting out the house so we can find stuff (where are my art supplies???) February: Art supplies found! December: Mostly I think this is under control now, or as much as it can be in this house...
• Help Djelibeybi get the study sorted so we can both work there Sorted! MUCH better now. Just need to finish putting stuff into shelves but it's essentially done (March). December: In spite of sorting it out, it's very much Djeli's study, while I mostly work on a tiny table in the bedroom or from the bed. Again. With my piano in the other room... Still, we did get it sorted and things are definitely working better than before we did it.
• January = detox (after I get back from Durham on the 8th - no point trying to detox when I don't have control over what I can eat...) Uh... whoops?
• Get back to healthy eating again - cut out sugar, dairy, bread where possible. I think I've kind of found a middle path with this, which definitely is making me feel healthier. No cheese is a key, I think. Also no refined sugar unless I've baked it myself, which cuts back on a lot. I've become a bit of a fruit fiend. Totally addicted to pineapple and dried mango. I've also discovered I can eat clementines, which is lovely (oranges make me feel queasy)
• Urgh. Weight again. Um... I'd like to be no more than 75kg by the end of the year. In theory that one should be easy, so let's hope it is. The no-exercise thing has been a killer, so hoping I can sort that very soon. FAIL. Can I make this text bigger? Although, it has to be said, not entirely my fault (see above re: second sprained ankle and busted calf muscle, also add in back pain problems which have persisted for most of the year)
• Join gym for 3 months and see what it can do for me, even if all I'm doing is very slow treadmill work. Nope. But I did start my own exercise schedule involving counting squirrels while walking in local parks, which was both enjoyable and quite effective - bought a Nike+ for my iPod, which has been great. Djeli even said that he burned more calories doing a 3-mile squirrel-walk with me than when he worked out at the gym. So I don't feel bad about not having joined.
• Do a London walk with Djeli. Thames Valley may still be a little ambitious, but I should be able to do a reasonable-length London city walk very soon. Nope.
• Practice visualisation relaxation technique. Kind of tried, didn't really work. Probably need to try harder.
• Work on non-dayjob income-generating services. Well, this has sort of been a success, although I'm not bringing in as much income as I really should be. But my freelance business is up and running and I've got quite a bit of work done this year and starting to get into a proper routine with it, which is grand.
• Decluttering: This year I think I'll aim for a sock darn-or-cull blitz. Also 2 books read and disposed of. Oh gosh. Why do I keep putting this into these lists?
• Clean up my desk once every month (I'll aim for every couple of weeks, but suspect that's a little too ambitious. Once a month should be doable). Yeah, I think I mostly kept to this. Or at least very nearly. It's tidyish now, so I'm considering this a win.
• Be more selfish. I think I've done quite well on this one this year, but things also got rather out of control when I wasn't concentrating on this, so I think it needs to be upfront and prioritised. I need sleep. I need me-time. WIN. Although I couldn't have achieved such a level of selfishness as to sign myself up for a Masters degree which will probably take two years if I hadn't had Djeli's support, so karma++ to him.
• Work out what I'm going to do about the vast towers of cooking magazines and recipe cards, even if I don't actually do it. The important thing is coming up with a plan before we need to move it all again. Not really. I did try - started scanning the wretched things, but it wasn't a huge success. I think for the issues of Jamie magazine I want to keep, I'll just re-buy them in the app once reviews report it working properly. It's well set up and easily searchable and they'll still feel like proper magazines. Really don't know what to do with the rest though. Might have to take the old-fashioned approach and just cut out individual recipes we want to keep and stick them in a book or something :-(

Travel

• Last year's travel list still stands, but this year I'm going to prioritise a couple of things:
  • Attend a summer festival OR
  • Attend a composition summer school - Dartington would be nice, but I'm open to whatever may present itself
  • Given that our house will have an additional resident from about March in the form of Djelibeybi's eldest son, the mighty Zombieninja Davidbowie, I'm thinking prioritising the running-away-for-a-weekend's-quiet-composition-on-my-own might also be a good thing
  • Fail. Nearly all travel was cancelled this year, mostly because of the back problems and endless root canal issues. But I did do the CoMA Midwinter Composers Masterclass in Durham, which was fantastic, spent a whole TWO WEEKS at the Edinburgh Festival, which was fabulous in spite of brain meltdown while we were there, and got to go to the Isle of Arran at the end of it. And we went to Spain for the first time and saw the Barbary apes on the Rock of Gibraltar which I've been wanting to see since I was about eight.

Other stuff

• Time to buy a new laptop. Nope. But I did buy myself an iPad, which has been one of the best things I've ever bought.
• I think this year should be the year I finally take the plunge and get Logic Studio. Done! And what a great decision - this has meant much more realistic audio files up on SoundCloud and on my site, which I'm sure have contributed to the number of requests for pieces I've had this year. Well worth the investment.
• Be a better friend, daughter & fiancée. I've let a few people down this year from when I've been overwhelmed. I don't want that to happen again, even in spite of the "Be more selfish" item. Total fail at this. Largely due to physical and mental health issues. But that's no excuse. Will try harder.
• Back computer up regularly. Yeah, this one didn't happen even once last year (although I did implement a score backup system), but y'know - hope springs eternal? Got a system working for this at last *preen*

Music and silence

After Gorecki’s death a few weeks back, one obituary in The Guardian gave a wonderful quote:

If you can live without music for two or three days, then don’t write – it might be better to spend the time with a girl or with a beer.

This was the answer he would give students who would ask him how to write music or what to write. And an excellent response it is – fun and to the point. But lately I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I actually think that my response would be different. My response would be "If you can live without silence for two or three days, then don’t write". I frequently go without listening to music for days at a time, not because I don’t want to listen to music but because I’ve not got enough silence in my life and if there’s more sound piling up on top of the sound that’s already causing chaos in my head – even if it’s music, and even if it’s music I’ve chosen – then I pretty quickly feel like I’m going insane. Without regular, large doses of silence, my brain frazzles and I can no longer find myself in my own head.

And I know I’m not the only one. Back in 1958, the wonderful Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks wrote,

It is apparent that leisure and silence are absolute prerequisites for composers if they are to engage fully the many forms of awareness involved in creative activity. This leisure and silence have become the greatest luxuries in the modern world, and composers less than any other group in art or science are able to command it.

True leisure and silence have become incredibly rare, and even more so in the half-century since PG-H wrote those words. Of course a love of music and a need of music are of vital importance to anyone who would compose music – but I would venture to say that a love of, a need and respect for silence comes even before that.

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If you would like to find out more about Peggy Glanville-Hicks, read my article, Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A lifetime’s search for leisure and silence at minim-media.com

Reposted from caitlinrowley.com

Sincerity and integrity in 140 characters

I wrote the following post some time ago (last year, in fact) and it's been languishing over at minim-media.com, partly because I was raaather het-up when I wrote it and wanted to let it settle and partly because I wasn't sure it was quite appropriate for minim-media. It's even less appropriate for caitlinrowley.com where that blog has moved to, so I'm shunting it over here because, while I'm not so angry any more, it's still an issue I feel quite strongly about.

 

This week I've been thinking quite a bit about online behaviour and how it differs from the outside world, and today the idea of online sincerity came up too. In particular I found an article on autofollowing and auto-direct-messaging people who follow you on Twitter, and I was really quite shocked by it. Now, I know that many people (the author of the article I read among them) take the view that if somebody follows you, it's only polite to follow them back, and in the real world this reciprocity makes sense – if someone invites you to dinner, then it's polite to have them over for a meal at your place sometime too; if someone at work helps you out on something, then it's good policy to lend them a hand when they need it. In the real world, these little courtesies are part of the glue which keeps society from falling apart.

Online, though, is not the real world. It's something else, something "other", something all to itself, and the concepts of autofollowing and auto-DM seem to me to go directly against the principle of reciprocity that exists in the real world because it lacks personal connection and the building of a true relationship.

Autofollowing, for anyone who isn't familiar with it, is a system whereby if someone opts to "follow" your feed on Twitter, you automatically follow their feed. The thing is, some people have thousands of people following every little 140-character post. I have a paltry 257 followers as of today, but I'm following a mere 167. And not all of those 167 are following me – and I'm glad of it.

As with drawing traffic to your site, the numbers don't matter – what matters is the quality of the traffic that is generated. For a website, that's "are they likely to buy something or become a customer in the future?" or "Are they reading what I'm posting? Are they joining in discussion?"; for a Twitter feed, that's "are they actually interested in me?". The article I read stated their belief that it made good business sense to autofollow on Twitter because you don't know when the follower might be your next big-business lead – which is a point which has a certain validity – and that if they've shown they're interested in reading what you have to say, then it's polite to show an interest in what they have to say.

So you have 2,000 keen and eager followers. And you autofollow. That means you have 2,000 + however many other feeds you're following because you're interested in them but they're not following you (for whatever reason). That's a vast amount of feeds and there is no way in the world that anybody can meaningfully follow 2,000+ feeds – there's just too much information. Mix in the fact that the majority of those 2,000+ feeds are going to be generated by total strangers and consist of them telling you about the special cheese sandwich they had for lunch or that they're going for a run now, and I trust you'll start to see where I'm going with this.

Reciprocity in the real world is about respect and building up selected existing relationships. Automatic reciprocation without any sort of filtering seems to me to be shallow and insincere and – more importantly – disrespectful. If you're following more people than you can reasonably keep a track of, then far from showing an interest in what you're saying, you're not respecting what they have to say because you're not actually paying attention.

I don't have a problem at all with businesses and individuals using Twitter for their own marketing-driven purposes. That's just fine. People can opt to follow or not follow and it's down to them which they choose – nobody's forcing you to read someone's advertising tweet – and a lot of business people, especially the more savvy ones, are producing interesting feeds and encouraging big audiences. I think this is brilliant – it helps them by increasing profile and audiences, and helps the followers by providing information they're interested in. But it seems that some businesses are not just interested in reputation and audience-building. They want direct contact with their followers. And this is where auto-direct-messaging comes in.

I read about auto-DM and what instantly flashed into my mind was "twitter-spam".

One of the great things about Twitter is that – in theory – where there is a 2-way connection between users, there can be conversation. Someone asks something, and the other person replies. Where there's a 1-way connection, there is information output, and in theory, the first will only happen when there is genuine interest on both sides, which is based on an interest in each other's tweets. What happens when someone auto-dms all 4,000 of their followers? It's not really inviting conversation – it can't be. How can anyone process 4,000 simultaneous conversations? Which means that all it does is reach into our personal space and give us a message that we may or may not be interested in receiving – something that could be done just as easily in a standard tweet without invading my personal space.

DMs are about personal conversations that I want to keep private or that I feel are getting a bit long and want to take out of the main thread so people don't get bored. DMs for that reason are, for me, high-priority messages. It doesn't matter so much if I miss a tweet in the main timeline of Twitter feeds. It does if I miss a friend asking a particular question of me, and me alone. So what auto-DM does is put a spam message in the middle of my private conversation. It's like having an ad start to play when you're on the phone to a friend.

So I don't auto-follow. I assess each and every one of the follow messages I receive, to see whether I'm interested in following that person's feed. Sometimes I am. Sometimes I'm not. But just because I'm not interested in that feed, doesn't mean I don't think that person sounds like a nice chap – just that I'm not seeing much in their feed that directly interests me, and that I have better things to do than find out what they had for lunch.

So in short, if I don't have time to read every tweet I get – or even every other tweet I get; if I don't know anything at all about the person who I'm following – how then does that benefit either them or me? Perhaps they'd get a small furry glow from being followed by me, but there'd be no replies to their posts, no meaningful exchange – no follow-up, which ultimately means that there's no real connection, just words. And lip-service makes no-one happy. Better, surely, to be honest with your followers – track only those who offer feeds that genuinely interest you, and use a Twitter programme which allows you to see @ replies from people you're not following to make sure you don't miss any responses to things you've tweeted from your audience. Now that shows real integrity and respect.

I'm sure others will disagree with me - if you have an alterative point of view, I'd like to hear it. No flame wars though, please :-)