At last! Some momentum! This week being the first I've had entirely to myself since Christmas, I've really set to and started to apply myself to my work, and how wonderful it is to be working again, unfettered by anything other than door-to-door researchers and salesmen. I'm making very good progress on the psalm, which I think is likely to be finished this week, although I'm thinking of adding an organ part underneath it, but the vocal parts should be done at any rate. I've also started to think again about the set of Walt Whitman songs I started before I went to Australia and to start contemplating an accompaniment for the second one which till now has been merely a lonely tune. And this week I'm determined to iron out a couple of runkles in old pieces and get them all fixed up, and finish off the Satie arrangement which just lacks a part for live snare drum and a little finessing of the tape part then it can be laid out.

And all this in spite of a sudden overwhelming obsession with genealogy. I've been digging about in records of various sorts and disproving all sorts of family myths, which has been a bit shocking I think for my poor mama, but I'm determined to get to the bottom of it and find out where her family comes from. However, I'm not going near the family legend of my great-grandfather saving a maharajah from a rampaging tiger, or the one about him fixing the organ in malta by removing birds' nests and then accidentally agreeing to marry the local dignitary's daughter and the army having to spirit him out of the country so he wouldn't be assassinated for trying to back out of it. Those ones I think we need to keep!

For now, I'm putting the idea of a day-job on hold for a few weeks. Now that djelibeybi has a new job, things aren't looking quite so critical, and i think I can afford to at least take a month to really forge ahead. After that, I think I've decided to try a little freelance work rather than taking on a big bloaty permanent job that will have me tied down every day for goodness knows how long. But I think short-term contracts for a while will be good - ease me into it, hopefully help me to maintain a little compositional momentum, and if I need some extra time to work on something, I can just not take on any work for a week or two, or however long I need. It's not really a practical long-term plan, but I think it will suit my needs quite well for the moment. So if you're reading this and need any website coding done, get in touch!

In the past couple of weeks I've also been very pleased to have finally finished updating the design of this site. And no sooner had I done it than djeli's cousin impressed upon me the big fun that is PHP, and then I had to go and improve it right away, didn't I? :-) And he's right - huge fun to be had with PHP and I definitely want to play with this a bit more. I also think it might be exactly what I need to implement the tricky bit of my online Vexations project, which I also hope to get a move on with in the next few weeks. I guess AJAX will have to wait a little!

Labels: choral music, composition, family, php, vocal music, website

# posted by minim @ 11:59 AM 0 Comments