I've added a new section to this site, Web notes, to hold snippets of code - mostly Flash ActionScript and JavaScript - that may be useful to other web coders out there. These snippets are for functions that have caused me difficulties of one sort or another, which I have been unable to easily source online or in books. The first one is a JPEG preloader for Flash which tests whether a JPEG has been fully loaded before moving on to another action, which cost me many hours of research and fiddling about while working on the Karala website recently. I'll be posting a link to this as soon as the client has signed off the work & the site's live...

# posted by minim @ 4:27 PM 0 Comments

My three-part vocal/choral piece Red drops, scarlet heat has now been published and is available from the scores page of this site. I've also updated the scores page to split works by category, which should make it easier to identify the pieces that you might be interested in, and have (finally!) added in a rudimentary ordering system. I set up an account with paymate.com.au a few weeks ago, so can now accept secure credit card payments over the internet. A shopping cart system will follow soon... I hope.

# posted by minim @ 2:57 PM 0 Comments

It's been quite a month, musically. I'm hard at work now on a new piece for solo harp, which is destined for the Harp Society of NSW's composition competition (if I get it finished in time) which seems to be coming together quite well. It's been a bit of a strange road getting to where it is now though - I had a couple of complementary themes which I started work on about a year and a half ago which I thought might work well for harp, but which on experimentation didn't gel at all. So I sort of let it all lie & started work on a short piano piece (another Egg essentially), which got itself into a position where it sort of started to join up with my pre-existing themes. At that point I suddenly realised that it wasn't very pianistic at all and indeed would work much better on the harp! Strange how these things progress by themselves when you're out of practice... Anyway, I'm hoping to be able to post an electronic rendering of the piece on the scores page soon.

Concertwise, there have been two very good ones. I mentioned in my last journal that I'd signed on for a series of SSO concerts. The Shostakovich/Kancheli concert turned out to be a complete revelation. Giya Kancheli's Styx in particular was just astounding (as a measure of how many people it affected, apparently they brought 400 copies of the recording into the country and every copy in Sydney seemed to have been sold by the end of the second concert. The assistant at the CD counter said she was amazed at how many people said they'd come for the Shostakovich & been completely blown away by the Kancheli - a triumph for modern music!) and I'm eagerly awaiting my CD copy (on order :-) The Steven Isserlis concert which followed hard on the heels of the Kancheli (the next week) included Carl Vine's new Cello Concerto, which seems to be worth further listening. Unfortunately it dosn't seem to be available on CD yet, so I guess we'll just have to wait until it is.

My golden boy of the moment though is Finnish composer, pianist & conductor Olli Mustonen. I was given a CD of his work for my birthday last year, but hadn't listened to it until this weekend. Now I 'm totally addicted. Really gorgeous string writing & well worth many visits (even in the same weekend). It's on the Ondine label if you're interested.

That's probably about it for the moment. I'm also working on a couple of other projects - a website (techie stuff only - no design) and some other inconsequential bits & pieces - and updating my recordings database - after a couple of double-up purchases at last year's 2MBS-FM Book and Record Bazaar (this year on the 16th-18th July), I'm determined to go into this year's sale armed with a complete list of every work I own on CD or LP. So everything has to be catalogued in the next two weeks. There - just confirmed for those of you who didn't already know that I am completely and utterly barking mad.

# posted by minim @ 4:30 AM 0 Comments