Well, my exciting news of the moment is that I've gone part-time at my day-job. Which means more time for everything, and particularly for writing music. I've just finished writing a new piano piece - the first music I've written in over a year. It's called Egg the Fifth, and is related in mood & style to The Four-Egg Omelette which I wrote in 1994. I've just posted the score in the list of works for download for a short while. It's a trivial and fairly inconsequential piece, but considering how long I've been silent, you wouldn't expect a Missa Solemnis just yet (would you????).

Going part-time has also finally given me time to finish my tax (!) which has featured in these pages on a semi-regular basis for the past 3 years. I'm now all up to date & just need to find an arts-sympathetic accountant. Any recommendations welcome!

The Sydney Festival is, of course, only recently over and while I didn't get to very much, I did go to the premiere of Act I of Drew Crawford's Eugene and Roie, a new opera about Sir Eugene Goossens and Rosaleen Norton, 'The Witch of Kings Cross'. An unstaged production, this certainly looks like being a powerful piece of theatre once it's complete. Three cheers for Music Theatre Sydney for not only producing this first act, but for undertaking to see the project through to completion and final performance.

I also went along to Maya Beiser's concert of new music. This was a marvellous concert, including the old favourite (well, the new old favourite, I guess), Fratres by Arvo Pärt and some pieces I'd never heard before by familiar and unfamiliar composers. Particularly outstanding were David Lang's World to come (which I am enjoying more & more each time I listen to the CD), Louis Andriessen's La voce (a particularly fortuitous moment of which included the - apparently inadvertent - slamming of a door, just before Maya spoke the words rompe il silenzio which means "breaks the silence"!), and Mariel by Osvaldo Golijov. I indulged myself in a couple of CDs after the performance - World to come including the Lang and Golijov pieces, and a disc of music by Astor Piazzolla and Joaquin Nin (father of Anais Nin) - both of which I'm thoroughly enjoying and recommend - have a listen to some extracts by following the links.

I recently discovered, through the wonderful newmusicbox.org, a public domain copyright project called Creative Commons. This provides free licences (including a version in legalspeak) for creative folk who are posting their work online but wish to reserve some rights in the fruit of their labours rather than just allowing any old Joe to do whatever they want with it. What a great idea!

# posted by minim @ 2:20 PM 0 Comments