minimania

Hurry up please, it's time

My parents have been gently harassing me since the end of August about Christmas presents, and now that the weather's getting nippy, I suddenly realised that it's starting to loom and I should really be compiling the Annual Christmas List (usual disclaimer: this isn't a hint, it's a resource for those who may need it). I've struggled a bit this year to find specific things, as most of the stuff I really want at the moment is equipment, which is always rather pricier than appropriate for this sort of list. If I think of additional bits and pieces I shall add them here, but of course random CDs, in particular, are always popular! As always, let Djelibeybi know if you're getting something off this list so he can co-ordinate to make sure there's no doubling-up - if you need his email, let me know...

Books & sheet music

• Alex Ross: Listen To This
  Absolutely loving Ross's The Rest Is Noise and this looks an interesting collection of essays... on pre-order discount at Amazon :-)
• Roussel's Jouers de flute sheet music - either from Amazon or Chappell of Bond Street on Wardour Street - not fussy which, but as well to check that the edition contains all four movements - some publishers sell them separately (The Schott edition certainly seems to contain all of them)
• The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau
  His website has some great stuff on it and the book looks rather intriguing
• 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 Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook thank you, Da!
  Well, there had to be cookbooks in here somewhere, didn't there? Bought this recently for a friend and now really, really want my own copy - some fantastic-sounding recipes in there!
• Rose Levy Beranbaum: The Pie and Pastry Bible
  I've been really enjoying Beranbaum's The Bread Bible and while I would still love The Cake Bible, at the moment I'm trying to cut down on the amount of cakes and similar things I'm eating. Pies, however, are mostly fruit, and it would be great to know how to make good ones...
• The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard by Leonard Bernstein and thank you Da again!
  Sounds very interesting. Was recommended by... someone. Can't remember who.
• 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.
• Erik Spiekermann: Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works
  Another one from an earlier list. Still want to read it...
• maybe something from the music minus one (or similar) flute series - these are ensemble/concerto pieces which come with a cd of the other parts so you have something to listen to during your 73 bars' rest.
• Nigel Slater's Tender, Vol. 2
  This is the one about fruit - looks fantastic!
• Structural Functions in Music by Wallace Berry
  Not light reading, this one, but so far it's an amazing book - really fascinating insights.

CDs

• New Nico Muhly CDs
  Lovely Decca have got together with Bedroom Community and released two new Nico Muhly CDs - one of his choral music called A Good Understanding (yet another thank you for my lovely Da :-) ) and the other of a ballet score called I Drink The Air Before Me. Either or both would be ecstatically received. If you buy I Drink The Air Before Me from the Bedroom Community site (linked) rather than Amazon, it comes with a digital version which includes bonus tracks not available otherwise - this would be preferable - the more Muhly there is, the happier I am! (FLAC format for the downloads please!)
• Nico Muhly's Mothertongue
  Yeah, this has been on the list for about 3 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, it comes with a bonus track (yes, FLAC format again please).
• Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel/Why Patterns?
  Started listening to Feldman's work lately, but it's really distracting on Spotify, even with a Premium subscription - really needs to be a CD, I feel
• Gorecki: Life Journey
  Gorgeous CD of some of his lesser-known works
• Taneyev: Chamber Music
  Accidentally found this while browsing a sale on Passionato then followed up on Spotify - a simply stunning album - absolutely gorgeous.

DVDs

• Iron Man
  Trashy, but fun. And Robert Downey Jr. Need I say more?
• 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.

Other stuff

• Piano stool this one's a yay for Djelibeybi!
  The Stagg adjustable keyboard benches at Rose Morris on Denmark Street (near Tottenham Court Rd or available online) look great - comfortable, adjustable for short people and space-saving. I think I'd probably prefer the slightly wider version (with or without the extra padding), just because it feels a little more stable if leaning left or right much - my playing isn't that extravagant but I do need to lean over and swivel a little to get at the laptop while doodling sometimes, so that would be best but frankly I wouldn't sneeze even at the little one - ten times better than using John's squeaky office chair!
• Music stand - thank you, mama for the early present! It's the most beautiful music stand in the world!!
• 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 is sorted out in the study there's not that much room to put it, 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.

Realms of fantasy

• Logic Studio
  Yes, again. Still wanting to get this. Still having a hard time squirreling away that much cash and justifying the purchase.
• Vienna Symphonic Library
  Well, one can dream! If you win the lottery, though, even a lowly Special Edition package would be brilliant :-)
• iPad
  Because it's driving me a bit nuts having a key compositional tool take itself off for random holidays in Scotland and Australia without me when I'm trying to write a piece! Plus I want to play around with ReBirth for iPad - looks awesome. I'm trying to be good and wait for the second-gen version to come out in the hopes that it might be a little lighter and possibly include a camera (although rumours seem to say front-facing video camera only, which doesn't interest me much) but it's difficult, so if you're feeling generous I would most definitely give a first-gen iPad a cosy home. But then again, I do have access to one already from time to time... if you have that sort of cash floating about, Logic Studio should probably be a higher priority...
• and, of course, world peace and a general restoration of reason for society at large and the UK's politicians in particular would really go down a treat.

Thoughts on a year of being crippled

A year ago today I was happily walking along Brick Lane chatting to a colleague when suddenly my ankle collapsed underneath me and I pitched face-first into the cobblestones. I wasn't wearing high heels and my laces were done up - the culprit was a little deviance in the paving. I put my foot in just the wrong place and kaboom. I was very lucky, really: sprained ankle, bruised bone, mild concussion, but my teeth weren't smashed in as they so easily could have been. But here I am, a year later, still hobbling about like an old lady. The damn ankle just isn't finishing off the healing process. I had an MRI scan on it a couple of weeks back and it didn't really find anything wrong, but nevertheless, every time I push it a little bit, it swells up and I can't walk without pain again.

This, obviously, is rather depressing.

But today - now that it's been a full year - today I want to think about other stuff. I want to go out and do something for me (don't know what yet, but as it's nearly lunchtime I guess I'd better decide fast) and I've done a bit of thinking. And the thinking I've done has led to this conclusion:

Buggering my ankle has actually been a good thing.

If I ignore the pain and inconvenience and the fact that I've not been able to wear even a reasonably handsome pair of shoes in a year, I've actually had a fantastic year. For the first time in about a decade my priorities are clear and I'm working towards those priorities.

It goes like this: If I hadn't messed up the ankle, I'd never have gone to my lovely physio, who then wouldn't have ordered me to start composing again as part of my treatment. The pressure of having to report having written something pushed me to apply the Pomodoro Technique to my composing, which then took off like a rocket. Since that point I've completed a cycle of Walt Whitman songs for contralto and piano which had been languishing unfinished for a couple of years, written another piano 'egg' and pushed myself to complete the largest piece I've yet written - Deconstruct: Point, line, plane for flexible-instrumentation quintet and piano. Djelibeybi says Deconstruct is the best piece I've written, so that in itself is a good thing because without all the other stuff that came before, I doubt I could have pushed myself to do it in the face of Uncle Charlie's death. And now I'm writing a string quintet and I'm booked in to go to my first-ever composition workshop thingy. And it feels like things are finally, finally, finally starting to take off a little.

And I've been rethinking what my goals are. A few months back, I was quite happy to keep the composition as a sideline. So long as it just kept simmering away and I was able to continue writing, I was happy to just carry on. I loved my dayjob and the balance seemed to be working really well. Since the end of that contract though, I've been able to spend much more time than I ever have since uni just working on music - writing, reading, researching, listening, working on harmony and counterpoint and I'm realising how much I missed it. Yes, I really do want to make a living from my composition. I'm not sure how I'm going to do it or how long it might take, but that's my ultimate goal. Now I just have to work out how to deal with the intervening period because unless a miracle commission drops in my lap in the next couple of months (go on! I dare you!) I'll be needing to find another job. Still thinking about that one. I think it'll probably be a case of going back to limiting the duration of contracts - nothing over 3 months again - so as to maintain a bit of momentum, but I'm still thinking about that one. Maybe a better idea will present itself sometime soon. I'm keeping my inner ear open :-)

But for now I'm just forging ahead. Having a few issues with the quintet at the moment, but it's just a temporary thing. It'll be back on track very soon. Deconstruct is getting its second performance next week, I'm applying for a composer programme the London Sinfonietta is running next year, which sounds very exciting, and I'm hatching some other plans too.

So for now, the verdict is 'hobbly - but happy'.

Wrestling with counterpoint

OK. Counterpoint is just freakishly, mind-bending hard sometimes. I've been working on setting a couple of examples today and I've spent 2 hours on it and still the second one won't come good. But working through it, I'm gradually getting a better understanding of it and where I went wrong with it in the past. The various available intervals for beginning and ending ("should be an octave or unison, but can be a 5th or a 3rd" kind of thing) freaked me out before - how could I tell which was the right interval??? And so I was kind of semi-paralysed from the start. Today I really started to understand that it's a *composition* exercise. And so it doesn't hugely matter which one you pick, so long as you carry on properly and treat it right. This may seem overly simplistic and perhaps I am just a little dense, but the counterpoint course I did at uni was condensed into half a term and there just wasn't time to really understand what it was we were doing so it's taken this long to work that one out.

The other small revelation has been that, well, sometimes the given cantus firmus is just rubbish. The second one I'm working on today has a great long string of descending notes at the end of it, which makes it really, really hard to do anything interesting in the other part while sticking to the rules - there's no scope for correctly resolving dissonances, so I'm having to stick to consonances and frankly it's dull and difficult. But it's a useful lesson to learn, I guess.

I am finding, at least, that as I'm working through these exercises, I'm gradually internalising the rules. I look at an interval of, say, a perfect 5th now and find myself checking how I'm approaching it and leaving it, making sure I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm also finding that, as I'm playing through my work at the piano, I really AM hearing where things have gone wrong - when I played through the first version of the second one, I could tell instantly that the opening was wrong - and sure enough, when I looked at it, I found that I was leaving the opening perfect 5th by similar motion, with a skip in the soprano line (rather than a step as it should be), so that had to change.

I'm still a fair way off resolving the second one, but as we're going out tonight to hear Stephen Sondheim talk about his work, I should really cook our early dinner and get ready so we're not late. Tomorrow I will recommence the battle with exercise 2... then move on to the one in the alto clef. Oh boy, that'll be fun!

Notes at last

With every new piece - and doubly so when the piece has a deadline - I go through a period of trauma when ideas are starting to bubble, but there's no notes to write down. The longer this goes on, the crankier I get. Finally, of course, notes appear and are captured on the stave, and then the real composition can begin, but it's a fairly fraught time when they're there but not there. Today I got notes for the quintet, ending a tense few days. It's not really been too long this time, but the deadline factor and the inevitable socialising of having parents in the house, which makes it hard for me to really focus, made it seem an absolute aeon. In truth, it's really only been since Sunday though...

On Sunday I went to the Tate Modern with the parents and Djelibeybi, where my Da pointed out a group of Cy Twombly paintings I'd not seen before that he didn't think much of but which totally blew me away. They're not much to describe: Oatmealy-coloured giant canvases with swirls of red paint that's been allowed to drip down the canvas. Strange how something so simple can be so powerful.

Standing in the middle of these three paintings, I could feel a warmth emanating from them. And the more I looked, the more I saw. Ultimately they came to resemble a thicket of fiery willows. On second viewing on Tuesday, the bright red made me think of thorns and blood and violence - while still with the exciting, secure warmth of the original viewing in place. They set off a chain of thought which ran through concepts of enclosure - groves, fences, hugs, safety, security, claustrophobia, containment, standing stones, panic, contentment. I don't think any painting has ever elicited a response in me of such total contrasts - certainly not simultaneously.

Gradually I thought my way through all these conflicting ideas to come up with a concept for the piece. It seemed to me that I was really facing two concepts - one where the enclosure was a secure one - warm and soft and safe; the other where it was a form of containment - hard and cold and unyielding, resistant to any attempt to breach it. I started thinking about how to approach this in music and thought a bit about whether maybe the piece should be in two movements - one expressing each approach, but basically felt that this seemed a bit 'wet' and also that the safe and secure piece would be likely to be both a little dull and also stylistically unmatched to the other movement. Last night, after thinking about all this on and off for most of the day, I came to a vague conclusion that the piece should perhaps be a single movement, approximately expressing movement from safety and security to entrapment and panic and how easily something benign can seem suffocating.

So today's notes are fairly tame and - at the moment - they seem almost characterless. When I put them down this morning, they just sort of fell into place but it all seemed a little directionless. This afternoon though, I started listening to The Viola In My Life by Morton Feldman, who was recommended to me by a friend on Twitter, and I'm beginning to think that the judicious use of whitespace in the opening could be very effective in this context.

Not entirely sure what the next step will be. I'm feeling a need to do a lot of reading and listening at the moment - I'm more than halfway through John Adams' autobiography Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, which is just awesome - I think it's one of the best composer biographies/autobiographies I've read because it focuses so much, not just on the music, but on the process of creating the music and the way his thinking changed as he composed each new piece. It's absolutely fascinating. I've also started reading Mark Rothko's The Artist's Reality which has been on my shelf for a while, and suddenly passionately wanting to start in on Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise too. Sadly there are not enough hours in the day...

[Reblogged from caitlinrowley.com]

Got to start somewhere

So here I am. And I guess I should actually write something and give TypePad a proper go, although I'm really not impressed with it at all - clunky user interface (the Dashboard is AWFUL) and hugely ugly default theme - very glad to have found a couple of Vox-remnant themes available because most of the others weren't at all appealing.

And you'll have noticed that I'm foresaking the lack of capital letters that somehow became 'a thing' for my Vox blog. Ultimately it became a pain to write like that and I don't really know how or why it started. Maybe I just felt kind of low-key when I started the Vox blog, and then felt compelled to carry on.

But I'm not going to harp on about the whole Vox thing. As I type, I'm downloading the whole of my site with SiteSucker, so I can preserve not just the content but the way the site looked. The only problem with that is it still won't capture my neighbourhood-only posts, and it won't capture the messages I've received from friends on Vox over the years because it doesn't seem capable of logging in unless the site can't be viewed without a login. *sigh*

So I shall focus on the now. And the now is pretty darned confusing and chaotic.

The good:

• I'm off work again, and the timing couldn't have been better with 1 week until my parents turn up to stay for 3 months
• Parents are coming!
• Finally getting the flat sorted out - we moved in here in May. It's now late September and we're still living in a box-fort. The landlord finally took away his excess crappy furniture (Resolution: I will never, ever, ever live in a furnished house again) so now we at last have space to consider what we're going to do about the bookshelf situation.
• I've got a new piece being performed on the 28th, and it's quite a substantial piece too - probably the meatiest thing I've written in a number of years
• Working on Creative Pact, which I'm loving - it's been really great to be finally - after 3-4 years on the to-do list - pulling caitlinrowley.com together. I've only completely missed 1 day so far and the whole site is gradually coming together. Really need to do some hefty work on that today, actually...
• My book is about 1/3 (re)written. This is one of the things I want to get finished while I'm off work
• I've got exciting plans for exploring alternative revenue streams - the book, articles, trying to get the music to pay even just a tiny bit in some way - exploring new models for publishing, trying to get a CD recording off the ground and so on
• I'm about to (print out the forms and) apply for a composer workshop happening in Durham in January, focused on amateur string orchestra/quartet writing. I've been feeling a real need to push forward in my music. I can sit in a room and write stuff till the cows come home, but until I confront the fact that I need some serious feedback and prodding, I'm not really going to be able to move forward. And until I move forward with my music, I won't even be able to contemplate applying for Master's programmes. As this is a big thing on my unwritten 15-year plan, and without it I'm unlikely to take the PhD step, which is also on the unwritten plan, I'm feeling good about taking this first tiny step. Now I just have to cross fingers I get in.
• Looking forward to doing some serious baking and hopefully mastering a couple of different types of bread.
• Learning HTML 5 as part of my Creative Pact.
• Finances are more or less under control and being kept up to date after several months of total chaos
• The ankle which I sprained and bruised the bone of way back in November is finally starting to improve. I can walk now! And I've finally got to a point where it doesn't take all my energy just to get around

The less good, because there's always a less good:

• Scared witless about the composer workshop thing - it's exciting, but it's been so long since I've had any real feedback about my work that I'm scared it'll get a verdict of 'waste of time'. Also worried that I won't be able to prioritise well enough to work consistently at it while my parents are here. That I'll get distracted and feel guilty for spending time on my own stuff rather than with them. It's happened before, but I'm trying to be determined that it won't happen this time.
• Flat is all full of dust and it seems that the vacuum cleaner here is the worst in the world - suction like an asthmatic mouse. It doesn't pick up the dust, it just pushes it around. And the Roomba is poorly (vacuum medic coming to take him away today to fix him). I'm beginning to think I should just go out and buy a baby Dyson to ensure we can get the place clean, but that sort of expense isn't perhaps an ideal way to start several months off work.
• Exhausted as. Really just want to sleep for a couple of weeks, not be rushing round like the mad thing I've been this week. Still not 100% over the flu I brought back from the Edinburgh Festival and just generally with the stress and the not-sleeping and the flu, hibernation seems the most appealing option, but unfortunately not a viable one.
• Feeling a certain reluctance to approach the piano and start a new piece. I suspect this is mostly due to the exhaustion but it's a nasty niggly feeling. I want to write, I just don't want to start anything and have to think in such depth about something just yet.

So that's how the land lies right now. My New Year's resolutions are somewhat in tatters, but overall I've got a good feeling about the next few months. You know how sometimes when crap happens, it feels like it's for a good reason? And that even though things are awful, you feel guarded, looked after, and like doors are about to open all over the place? Yeah. Like that. It feels like, in spite of how awful being sent away from my job was (cos I loved that job) the timing was perfect. And it feels like a huge opportunity to really make some progress. At last this year - which was a closed book to me at the end of last year - I just couldn't get a feeling at all for how it was going to be - is opening up and starting to maybe tentatively bloom... Guess that means I should stop procrastinating with blog posts and go and code something, or write some music, or maybe just dust a little :-)

sad

very disappointed to see that vox is closing down. it's been a great place to blog and i've met some great people here, some of whom have become very close friends, even! even more disappointed, though, i think, at the lack of options for moving content off vox. the only options seem to be shift it across to other managed blog services, and only one of those, typepad, seems to offer anything like full support for the content that's in here. there isn't even an option, it seems, to download your vox content as it appears on vox right now just as a huge clump of html pages and associated assets, which would have been nice. i personally don't mind too much starting over, or even just ditching this blog (i mean, hey, i'm running about 5 others, so it's probably time for a cull anyway!) but i'd like a way to archive my blog as it appeared here. but alas no, it seems that this is too much to ask. looks like typepad is the only option for preserving everything. that or a site crawler... may be exploring that one!

anyway, i'll work it out over the next couple of weeks. in the meantime, for those of you who are quicker off the mark than me at migrating your stuff away, or who may just be abandoning your blog, it's been a blast - it's been great knowing you and following your adventures and i hope we can meet up again elsewhere on the interwebs.

xoxo. min.

using the ipad as a compositional tool

finally writing the post i've been meaning to write for quite a while now. i have to confess, when the ipad was first announced, i was deeply underwhelmed. i couldn't see anything much to get excited about at all. the (doomed, as it turned out) microsoft courier, on the other hand, was - in its concept video form - a desirable work of genius and for the first time in my life i actually contemplated lining up for it when it was released (which, given my generally low opinion of all things microsoft, is pretty amazing). but alas, the courier was doomed to never get past the concept stage before microsoft scrapped the whole project.

so the ipad was the only contender left. but still it didn't entice. when we went to florida back in may, before the ipad was released here in the uk yet, we had a peek at it in an apple store in orlando, but i wasn't hugely taken still - it's very heavy for the size and i just couldn't see much of a use for it. after its uk release though, i got to have a bit of a play with pianist pro on my osteopath's one and it started to grow on me. and of course the more software is released for it, the more interesting it gets because people are starting to use the larger screen space in newer and more interesting ways. i don't think the device is particularly revolutionary in and of itself, and it's certainly not 'magical' (ugh! who on earth thought that was a good term to market something???), but it's a conduit for new ideas of ways to interact via touch and that IS exciting.

anyway, to cut a long story short, djeli wanted us to build an ipad app to help with a project he's working on, so eventually we took the plunge and invested in a 32GB 3G version. and now i'm finding it's becoming a fantastic part of my composition process, so it's this i'd really like to talk about.

so firstly i guess i should list the apps i'm using on it. that seems to be the clearest way to start:

* paintbook collage
* sketchbook pro
* notes+
* forscore

these are the main ones. i also have pianist pro which i'm hoping will be useful as a small piano substitute when travelling, although i haven't had a chance to try it out yet. and of course there's a bunch of other apps i'm using, but these are the main ones i'm using for composition. i also, of course, have a twitter app, email access, productivity apps, etc. most of which are great.

so, on to the process. i've always been quite a visual person, although it's taken me a while to recognise it. in days gone by, the composition process even used to annoy me a bit because i wanted to get on and design the cover. in recent years i've come to recognise this need as a valuable part of the process, and i no longer feel like that. in fact, i have no clue what i want the cover for my latest piece to look like, even though i've been working on the piece for weeks. guess i'll tackle that on monday when i need to print and bind it! because of this aspect, i've been finding that collage and drawing have become good ways for me to explore musical proto-ideas - often a piece will be associated in my mind with the work of a particular artist. for this piece it's been kandinsky. but i always found working on paper became too much about the physical gluing/layering/drawing and frustrations about whether i'd mess up a found piece by drawing something stupid over the top of it. with the ipad i don't need to worry. i pull in images from the internet, from scans, from photos taken with my phone (an android phone, btw, but i can still use bump to wirelessly transfer images to the ipad), draw inspiration from design blogs, photos - all sorts of things (flipboard is a great app for random visual inspiration), layer them, move them, resize them in paintbook collage. i can draw over the top of them, use the free photoshop mobile app to crop, etc. if need be, and if i need to draw something from scratch, i've got sketchbook pro from autodesk, which is an amazing digital drawing/painting app that will let me export to the photo library (among other options) and from there i can import it into paintbook collage.

paintbook collage will let me set an image as a background - either to display it on its own or draw over it - or import photo layers into a page. setting an image as a background also lets me import an image of a manuscript page saved down from finale, which means that once i'm at the point of having gathered a few themes and needing to write them down to see similarities and possible permutations, that can go into my sketchbook too.

i also do quite a bit of research by reading, and an important part of my daily creative routine is writing 'morning pages', a concept from julia cameron's book 'the artist's way', which i find helps significantly with clearing a lot of mental concerns and working my way through problems that otherwise tend to stress me out. for both of these i've been using notes+. i bought a pogo stylus for drawing on my ipod touch when we were in america, and it's fantastic. in particular, it makes writing on the ipad as easy as writing on a piece of paper, without the hassle of lugging around ever-expanding notebooks or losing scraps of information - everything's contained within the ipad, everything can be exported and backed up to pdf.

the final app in my process list is a music-specialist pdf reader called forscore. while other pdf readers could probably do something similar, forscore has some nice little additions such as an inbuilt metronome, it comes with a bunch of piano music built-in (which is quite nice for me as a not-very-accomplished pianist who left all her piano music in sydney when she moved to the uk for 6 months 5 years ago) and it allows for highlighting and annotations. so whereas previously at a certain point in a piece's development, i would print out the whole thing, play it back, scribble notes on it, put the annotated changes into finale, write a bit more then go over the whole thing again, now i just pdf the piece direct from finale, pull it over to the ipad, scribble there, and save a bunch of paper.

so, so far i'm very happy with the ipad. looking forward to seeing what apple does with it in future-generation devices. reducing the weight would be a plus...

birthday list

so here we are again. as at christmas, it seems that certain people are having difficulties with my impending birthday, so i've had to pull together a bit of a list. as per the usual, it's long to provide lots of choice and greater chance of surprises, and hopefully includes an assortment of different types of option for procurement both near and far. no hinting going on here, just providing a service.

cds

• nico muhly: mothertongue
• the nmc songbookthank you, mama :-)
  
• peggy glanville-hicks: the transposed heads (abc classics, although it looks like the sods have deleted it. grr)
• having a vague feeling beethoven piano sonatas might be nice. i did like the one disc of them by john o'conor i heard - seemed a bit more human and a bit less weightily germanic than other versions but i'm open to other interpretations.
• anything really that i don't know that you think my collection could do with that isn't mahler. djeli has access to everything so he can check if things need checking. note that standard repertoire is no longer the easy pick it used to be - there's a fair scattering of haydn, schubert, mozart and mendelssohn in there now, along with some others.

books & sheet music

• john adams: hallelujah junctionagain, thank you mama, also for actually reading this list - seems like not many people did. some of whom should have :-/
  
• erik spiekermann: stop stealing sheep and find out how type works
• alan titchmarsh: the kitchen gardener - yes, i know we're about to move away from having a proper garden, but i'd still like to know how to grow veg properly. our rhs book does have quite a bit of info, but it's more general than specific. this one's very specific
• the art of looking sideways - a bit scared to put this one on the list because it's enormous and i don't know that we'll have the shelf-space for it, but it looks a grand place to go when one lacketh in inspiration
• the shape of content by ben shahn, which was recommended by a twitter friend
• i'm quite interested too to read god explained in a taxi ride by paul arden. his it's not how good you are it's how good you want to be was really excellent and it looks an interesting book.
• a book of not-too-hard piano music. not simplified versions, but pieces which aren't too difficult. i have a few things i've downloaded from the internet but they're littered with copyist errors and very annoying to play from
• bach's two-part inventions - a proper edition (got these from the internet with errors and annoying page turns). i guess i should try the preludes and fugues - cashman says they're the way to go, but i'm a bit scared. i can do the first prelude but i don't seem to have enough fingers for the fugues...
• telemann fantasias for solo flute - i WILL be getting a flute in the next few weeks, come hell or high water, and the only thing i have to play is the koehler studies, which i love, but a bit of variation would be good. my edition of the fantasias went missing ages back in sydney, which is annoying because it was one of my favourites. bought these for myself after i did actually get the flute - YAY!
  
• maybe something from the music minus one (or similar) flute series - these are ensemble/concerto pieces which come with a cd of the other parts so you have something to listen to during your 73 bars' rest.
• something that might teach me something unexpected. very into this whole music-theory, re-taking-up the flute thing at the moment. should something totally random and interesting-looking raise its head, this would be cool

other stuff

things are a bit odd lately because we're expecting to move soon but really no clue where or what sort of house or even if furnished. hoping to be able to cull some stuff we've got now and not add too many things that are big and cumbersome to the moving load, so it's actually a bit hard to populate this list. as always the thing i want more than anything else in the world is what can't be given: a great big wodge of time, preferably an additional two empty days on the end of every week! that being impossible, there's also...

• settlers of catan - i've been wanting to play this for ages. everyone says it's brilliant. i don't know how much opportunity we'd have after robert & lis leave, but it would still go down well and hopefully we'll be able to cultivate some more game-playing friends.
• set of sennelier oil pastels - this has been lurking on a christmas list since 2006 because i can't justify buying them for myself. cass art usually has them on sale.
• i will probably be getting myself the canon g11 camera in the next few weeks (too expensive for anyone to give me, and we've worked out the company can pay, so this isn't on the list) although i do need to try to do some test shots with it before i actually buy it, but it's possible to get extras for it - telephoto adaptors and so on, which would of course be welcome - it's a wrench having to leave behind all the bits that go with my dsc-v1, but they don't go with anything else that's on the market! to the point though, this would probably have to be a last-minute thing though as i really should test the g11 before i fork over the cash for it - the g10 was definitely the best of the bunch when i ran the last set of tests, and the g11's supposed to be better, but i should ... y'know... check.
• i hear good things about the rotring artpen sketching pens. a fine or extra-fine one would be fun.
• another game, this one good for 2 players as well as more - transamerica - we play this one at work, but won't have a copy after 31 march, which will make the whole interface development team sad, me included :-)

and of course the usual assortment of far-too-expensive stuff - logic studio, vienna symphonic instruments, world peace - that crops up every year

going back to first principles

following on from my last post, in which i bought a music theory book to try to fill in some gaps in my musical understanding, this week i've been working through the early chapters. it felt somewhat insane for a practicing composer with an honours degree in music to be going back through all the basic 'this is a treble clef', 'the note names are ABCDEFG' stuff, but it's been surprisingly satisfying. and what's surprised me the most is how much of this basic stuff i just haven't thought about at all in years. obviously not so much clefs and which note name comes after which other! but certainly now i'm on to the scale chapters, i haven't thought about the order of sharps or flats, how a scale is constructed, the major tetrachord, whether a piece is in duple or triple time, simple or compound. i don't think i've actually thought about any of this since about year 7 non-elective music. even more surprising is how satisfying i'm finding going through it. no, there haven't been a bunch of major revelations (although, i'm embarrassed to say, there was one in chapter one - all these years i've been thinking about octave numbers all wrong!), but it's been really satisfying to be reviving this knowledge and setting it at the forefront of my mind again.

and i think it's been a good decision too, given my goals. the problem with something like harmony is that it can get pretty complex pretty quickly, and it's hard to know at what point i ceased to comprehend and why - was i sick one day and missed something when we were looking at voice leading? was i not paying attention to 7th chords? did my attention wander when the relative importance of scale degrees was being considered. it could have been any of these - or anything else. it might not have seemed important at the time, but later down the track it turned out to be critical. which is why i've gone back to first principles. i figure that if i look at *everything*, then i'm bound to go over whatever it was i missed first time round, and then maybe, just maybe things will make more sense. it's also been good for getting my mind back into the theory space. given that it's been so long since i've thought about any of this stuff, it's like doing a few gentle stretches before training for the marathon

Facing a fear

I've always been crap at harmony. I never really got it. I understood why it had to be studied ('you've got to know the rules to break the rules') but as I never really managed to grasp the rules it all felt a wee bit pointless.

At school I did AMEB musicianship and I managed to muddle through inversions labelled a, b and c. At uni it was all figured bass notation from the word go and to say I floundered is to put it mildly.

My first year at uni, while amazing in so many ways, was certainly no great triumph compositionally. I didn't really know what to do or what was expected of me. I'd applied for composition on a whim really - the application form asked whether I wanted to audition or submit scores or do both. I had some scores from the HSC I was quite pleased with, so I ticked both boxes and sent them off. My audition was a disaster but to my surprise I was accepted for composition so I figured I'd give it a go. But the combination of me being clueless and my 1st year teacher not exactly being sympathetic to the sort of music I liked (or indeed seeming to take any interest in me at all) wasn't an ideal one. I started writing a piece that was entirely theoretical because that's what I thought was wanted and chugged along at it for a good long while. Every week I'd go to my tutorial, every week my teacher would say 'any problems?' and I'd say 'no' because I was too timid to admit I hadn't a clue what I was doing. Behind the scenes I quietly determined to switch to musicology as soon as it was allowed (3rd year). I never had a tute with him that lasted more than about 7 minutes. Except for once.

One day I actually decided this was insane and I should ask him for help. I think I was having trouble modulating or something. So I asked the question. And he said 'oh you should just use a Neapolitan 6th'. I drew a blank but I continued my new line of actually asking questions and asked what that was. I recall him being angry but I suspect he was just startled with a touch of aghast. I was told at any rate, in no uncertain terms, that I should go and look it up and why didn't I know it already.

So I approached my harmony book for enlightenment, my pretty purple-covered harmony book that had held so much promise and excitement at the beginning of the year, but alas, like so much between those covers, I couldn't make head nor tail of it.

Somehow I got through that year, and fortunately I never had to do harmony again but it burnt me, that Neapolitan 6th. It left a scar that has always made me feel slightly inadequate (under, of course, the layers of total conviction of my own compositional genius :-) ). Time and time again I've approached the grape-covered Aldwell & Schachter. Time and time again I've been rebuffed with an endless landscape of marching verticals.

The Musician's Guide to Theory and Analysis

But not this time. I've given Aldwell & Schachter their marching orders and have gone and spent over £80 on Jane Piper Clendinning's The Musician's Guide to Theory and Analysis (book, 3 CDs and anthology of scores). It seems to cover a lot of what more traditional harmony tomes cover, but it's doing it gently I think, with CDs, putting concepts in context, handling counterpoint as well as the endless marching cadences. And it starts from a laughably basic 'this is a treble clef' and goes all the way through to 'this is total serialism' by way of Scott Joplin, Brahms, and The Beatles as well as the inevitable tritone. 

So I'm facing this fear in a practical way. The old way didn't work and just left me feeling more inadequate than ever, so I'm hoping a new approach will provide fresh insights. Who knows, maybe by the end of it I'll actually know what a Neapolitan 6th is!