A couple of weeks back Amazon sent me a parcel containing the most recent order from my summer bonus gift certificate from last year. Boy have I had a lot of mileage from that one - and still not finished!. Said parcel contained a book which I read avidly while at uni and haven't dipped into since, even though it should have joined the collection on my bookshelf a good long while ago: Steve Reich's Writings on Music. So I've been gradually reading my way through its various essays (and some in there that are new in this edition, or at least I don't remember them being in the University of Sydney's rather well-thumbed copy) and of course have now embarked upon a Reich binge, loading my phone's MP3 player up with The Desert Music and contemplating taking a step backwards and consciously writing a minimalist piece. I'm not terribly happy with the two pieces I'm working on at the moment - a new psalm (no. 47) which is just being incredibly hard work to progress and another Walt Whitman song which is just feeling a bit lost. The psalm I think will pull itself together eventually, but the Whitman song I think I might have to start again from scratch, so the prospect of trying something in a different style, that will take me away from these difficulties is really rather tempting. Now I just have to find the time to do it. I accidentally got myself employed in mid-August and between the 10-hour days and the 3-hour daily commute I've kind of been left with no time at all. I had a stab at taking the laptop into work and working on stuff on the tube and in my lunch-hour, but it's really too heavy for daily lugging, even though it is still pretty much the lightest laptop I could find for the specs. So I'm back to attempting to scribble things on bits of paper and hope that my interval-guesstimates aren't too far off. Aural was never my strong suit... Still, lots of Steve Reich to keep me happy even if my own work is being contrary, and come mid-October I'll be off work again, probably till January, so hoping to make some real progress then.

Labels: composition, listening, reading, Steve Reich, strategy

# posted by minim @ 8:54 AM 0 Comments

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

I'm about to go through another hiatus - we have to go to Australia for six weeks. Which in and of itself wouldn't be so bad, except that I'm having all four of my wisdom teeth removed while I'm there, which is miserable to contemplate and painful on the wallet. I'm taking the laptop (of course) but I'm not expecting to get any proper work done while I'm there - too much being on show and not enough silent time being on my own and tinkering with stuff, but I have grand plans nevertheless.

The first project is to redesign minim-media.com - this is long, long overdue, as I'm sure you can tell :-) It's time to ditch the "my-first-Dreamweaver-site" look and work up something a little sleeker, more modern, more standards-compliant.

The second project is to split out my personal composition bits and pieces (and this blog) into a separate site with its own domain name. I feel that minim-media has been suffering from crossed purposes in that it's trying to be my business site and my composition-promotion site all at once and I don't think it's managing it very well, so I'm going to split out the composition stuff and the articles and so on into a separate site, and leave minim-media as business-only. You'll still be able to order scores and things through minim, but hopefully this way will make things feel a little more flexible for anyone who just wants to ask about the music rather than buying it. One always hopes, of course, to make one's fortune selling scores and recordings online, but a more realistic approach is that if people are interested in playing my music, then i'm more interested in helping them to play it than in taking their money, so a different approach is needed from my side.

The third project is one I'm especially excited about. When I left Australia, I thought I'd be away for six months, so I recorded a small amount of my vinyl collection to minidisc and ripped a few essential CDs at the last minute which then turned out to be very poor quality rips and some of them (the pop music ones in particular) are so poor quality as to be virtually unlistenable. So while I am recuperating from having my teeth ripped from my skull, I plan to sit quietly in my parents' loungeroom surrounded by boxes and boxes of CDs, ripping them one by one to an external hard drive. I've been doing a little bit of research, and an open-source programme called Max seems to be getting the best reviews for sound quality. I'm currently running tests on an assortment of formats to see what gives me the best balance of sound quality and filesize. Unfortunately, there's the added ookness of whatever format I use needing to work in SonicStage, Sony's version of iTunes, because that's the only programme I can use to haul music across to my minidisc player. I've set up my old laptop (an ancient Sony Vaio) as a music server and will be entirely cleaning off and reinstalling the OS, so everything should be shiny and new. I can't wait to have my CD collection back at my fingertips - I've missed it so! At one point last year I even came close to rebuying bits of it. Right now I'm keenly looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with Veljo Tormis, Arvo Pärt, Peggy Glanville-Hicks and Elena Kats-Chernin for starters. It's going to be great.

I've already embarked on a related project, with the help of djelibeybi who is somewhat of a whizz with database applications - I'm moving my recordings database out of Paradox and into OpenOffice Base. I've heard mixed things about Base, but I'm keen to be able to dump my ancient copy of the WordPerfect suite because it's just too old and installs all sorts of rubbish on my hard disk that I then can't remove. Also, obviously, it's Windows-only and I'm barely using Windows at all any more and am keen to keep it that way. OpenOffice is proving very nice so far, and as my database requirements, all things considered, are pretty straightforward once the links between tables are sorted, I'm hoping it'll be OK. At the moment my challenge is working out how to design forms for it. Hoping to sort this one out today.

The composition is going well though. We went to the Sounds Expo music technology exhibition at Kensington Olympia the other day, which taught me some stuff and planted some ideas, and I started playing around a little with the musique concrète tutorial in the current issue of computer music magazine, which has now nicely set me back on the path to working on the Satie arrangement for America which has been a long time brewing but which finally seems to be pulling itself into shape. I'm hoping to have the first draft ready by the end of this week so it can stew over the next six weeks and be ready for some sort of preliminary airing when we get back from Australia. I'm just loving playing with Pro Tools again and everything's starting to come back to me a bit, although there's still a lot I need to learn how to do. Still, there's time enough to do that...

Labels: composition, travel, website

# posted by minim @ 9:56 AM 0 Comments

At last, and after much tribulation, my new computer is pretty much set up. There've been many diversions and problems along the way - getting hold of Windows, trying to back things up, trying to sort out Parallels - but at last it seems I'm just about there. Pro Tools is working, Boot Camp is working, Windows is working. Parallels is working. OpenOffice is working. In short, pretty much everything is working - except Finale which doesn't want to play back without glitching in any variant of Windows I am running here. Which is a trifle annoying because I wanted to play about with Garritan Personal Orchestra, which comes with Finale, but which isn't supported for Mac in this version. But at least it works Macside, so it may end up being easiest to just ditch it for Windows and wait till I upgrade again to get GPO.

But I'm loving the Mac. And I'm loving the Mac OS. And Parallels is just amazing - being able to run Windows and have it integrated into the Mac OS is just incredible. And the Windows programmes I'm using within it all appear in the Mac Dock

So I hereby shamelessly declare myself a convert. From being a DOS girl, then a Windows girl, then a Microsoft-hating Windows girl, I am now a Mac girl, albeit one who revels in OS X's Unix roots and has made all the possible tweaks to get it to behave a bit more like Windows (right-clicks, scroll bar arrows top & bottom to start with).

I'm absolutely loving my freedom too. I started out really well and finished two pieces in January - the two-part inventions are all done now and just need laying out, and I wrote a song to a short poem by Walt Whitman which I think will be the first of a small group - perhaps about four. I haven't been doing quite so well in February, mostly because of hassles with finding and then sorting out the computer, but I spent a little time this afternoon hunting down other WW fragments to go with the first song, so hopefully everything will be back on track shortly.

Labels: composition, computers, finale, os x

# posted by minim @ 10:28 PM 0 Comments

I am currently looking forward to an improvement in my quality of life. Next week I take delivery of a brand new computer. And not only a brand-new computer, but two brand-new operating systems. For I am shortly to be the owner of an Intel-based MacBook Pro, which will be running both Mac OS (Tiger) and Windows XP. I'll also be getting ProTools, which I'm sure will provide me with hours and hours of amusement... erm... solid work being done. Sorry. Slight slip there :-)

It's been amazingly stressful, working out the upgrade. ProTools is notoriously fussy and there are a bunch of sites listing all the tweaks you need to make to Windows in order just to get it to run. It's fussy about chipsets. It's fussy about the operating system. It's fussy about everything with the result that the makers' website lists only 6 Windows laptops that they recommend to run it (3 from Dell and 3 from HP if you're curious). They do test out specific chipsets and whatnot, so in theory you can find your own system that should work, but in practice, the Windows forum on their site is full of people saying "Why won't this work?" whereas the Mac forum is full of people saying "How do I get this cool effect?"

So I started off looking at the recommended machines, quickly ruled out HP as ludicrously expensive, then discovered that Carillon (who make their living producing systems for musicians and custom-tweak the OS before you even take delivery of it) produce a laptop which was about the same price as the Dell. So then it was Dell vs Carillon - which boiled down to "off-the-shelf generic machine possibly leading to problems setting up" vs "more expensive system but they'll ensure it works". Just as the Carillon was inching ahead (that "more expensive" bit was hard to overcome!), a friend emailed me saying he had just bought an Intel Mac and Windows XP ran lightning fast on it and why didn't I come on in, the water was fine. So I went and had a look at the Macs and... it all went from there. It was a bitter struggle, but in the end the MacBook Pro won, and it should be arriving early next week. I'll be running ProTools under the Mac OS, and pretty much everything else (to start with, anyway) under Windows XP - going to be quite the experiment!

Needless to say, my old laptop has been driving me nuts the past week - with the prospect of a new speedy machine on the way, the slowness has been unbearable, not to mention the crashing-five-times-a-day routine. I am looking forward to retiring it to the position of MP3-minder, beside the stereo.

But nevertheless, I have managed to get work done. The Satie arrangement is proceeding quite well, but a little bit stalled as I need ProTools to work on a tape part for it. I have also nearly finished a new song, to words by Walt Whitman, for tenor and piano, which I think will be part of a set of either four or six similar songs. It's been marvellous to be writing vocal music again. I really enjoy it. I think I might mostly work on songs for the next little bit.

Labels: arrangement, composition, computers, laptop, mac, macbook pro, song, tools of the trade, vocal music

# posted by minim @ 6:31 PM 0 Comments

No, not steak knives. But two more musical examples on the scores and recordings page - one for Egg the First (listed under The Four-Egg Omelette) and one for Egg the Sixth.

Now off to write something new!

Labels: classical music, composition, listen, music, musical examples, sound examples

# posted by minim @ 2:55 PM 0 Comments

To start off the changes I promised for this site, I've just recreated the sound file player - the source files of which have mysteriously disappeared from my computer - and have just posted the first sound file to go up on the list of scores for quite a while! This example is for (en)twine, my piece for harp which was written in 2004 - it's taken quite a while to get here, but at last it's done. The example is MIDI-generated, I'm afraid, but if I can ever get hold of a tame harpist to record it, it will be upgraded :-)

Labels: composition, flash, harp, MIDI, music, sound examples

# posted by minim @ 8:56 PM 0 Comments

It's been a while, eh? The past few months have really been just incredibly busy - and as a result, I've had pretty much nothing to say here, but all this will change in the very near future, because the result of all the busy-ness is that I have liberated myself from my day-job and will be working full-time on my composition for the next six months! Very excited about this, as I'm sure you can imagine. So much to do. First up is to really get to work on an arrangement of a Satie song that has been lurking for a while now, then maybe a choral piece. I've just about finished my set of two-part inventions too. I'll also be redesigning this site so it doesn't look quite so "my first Dreamweaver site" and bringing it up to date with all the latest usability and accessibility guidelines. I'm also hoping to establish a new site which will separate out my composition activity from the more businessy side of things. Then there's my article on Satie and Dada to finish researching and actually write and a ton of other stuff to be done too - busy busy busy!

Hope you had a very Merry Christmas and that 2007's looking as exciting for you as it is for me! :-D

Labels: change, composition, Dada, life, music, musicology, Satie, website

# posted by minim @ 11:52 AM 0 Comments