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 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