So I just finished my entry for ENO’s Mini Operas competition, and today I’ve just read Lauren Redhead’s exciting post on doing her Creative Pact early this year, so I’m asking the organisers if I can join her (Update: I can!!). While I didn’t get far with last year’s due to various things, the experience both years was fantastic and extremely useful. And while I’m all for sticking to September and working around whatever life throws at one, as in other years, the fact is that I’m starting a full-time degree 5 days after the start of the month. I have no idea what I’m going to be expected to do, or how much of it. I only have 1 year for the degree and haven’t done any full-time study since finishing my undergraduate degree 15 years ago and I suspect I’m going to need all my brain power just to keep myself on track with uni work the first couple of months.

In August, however, I have two pieces on the boil, exploring microtones and extended techniques for flute/recorders (blog post on these at caitlinrowley.com in a couple of days) and these pieces have been languishing for far too long and ideally I’d have one or both of them finished before starting the degree. So that’s my Pact:

By the end of August I will have finished at least one of these two pieces. I will have explored new tuning systems, working without relying on Finale to play me back everything I’ve written. I will have explored extended techniques and looked at ways to really integrate them into the music, so that they’re not merely special effects layered on top.

To this end, I expect to:

• do quite a bit of reading about microtonal music and tuning systems
• poke about into software for creating microtonal music to see how/whether that can help with this (or future projects)
• play the flute more often, experimenting with extended flute techniques
• nip down to Bristol to try out some sample moments on Pink Noise (if they’re available)
• do a lot more listening to atonal music in its many and varied forms and microtonal music

Off to do some planning now! Follow my progress here at http://minim-media.com/onething/tag/creativepact2012