Wow! What a day! I’ve made a huge start on my first RPM Challenge piece: First thing this morning I pulled down the recordings from Iraklio and Brussels into Logic, so all those field recordings are now on my hard disk. I also spent about an hour messing around with ideas on my flute and recording them (note: this is a big deal for me – I NEVER improvise!). A slight setback when the very best take for ideas AND execution AND tone ended up being lost when my laptop suddenly shut down without warning, but I managed two takes which are halfway decent and I’m cobbling them together to create overlapping parts. This afternoon I started sticking it all together in Logic: After exploring some other field recordings I had lying around, I’ve decided to stick with just the Zurich and Brussels recordings and the two flute takes – the more stuff I try to work with, the slower I’m going to be and the point of this whole exercise is speed.

Anyway, I now have 4:28 of music!!! It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever done. It’s a little morbid and ambly. But the point is that I’ve actually created nearly 4 1/2 minutes of music in a single day! Hoping I can finish it tonight or tomorrow (although I just remembered that I have to get the parts done for Carrion Comfort, so it won’t be tonight).

I published a blog post on perfectionism and what I’m hoping to get out of this challenge: it’s up on caitlinrowley.com if you want to read it. And – relating to that – over the course of the afternoon I identified a reason why it takes me so long to write stuff. I keep going back to listen to the whole thing from the beginning! I kept catching myself doing this, even when it wasn’t really necessary. I feel like what I’m writing is losing touch with what I’ve written before, so I go back and listen from the beginning – and of course, as the piece gets longer this takes longer each time, so now I’m trying to watch out for this and when I go to do it, I think: do I really need to do this? Or should I just press on a bit longer?

1am update: Parts are prepped and ready for a print-out proof tomorrow… just as soon as I nip out to the shops to buy some more black ink. Also got a bit caught up in the moment when I ought to have been heading for bed and finally fixed up the time signatures for Egg the Ninth – I KNEW 9/8 wasn’t right. But 6/8 wasn’t either – turns out it needed to be 6/8 interspersed with occasional 9/8 bars. FUN!