I’ve been neglecting my harmony/counterpoint resuscitation programme for a while now – started out well, then life went insane, as it periodically seems to, and it all got a bit too hard. This coincided with the arrival of the Workbook to go with the Textbook and Anthology and CDs, which was rather frustrating but I just couldn’t get my head around counterpoint with all the stuff that was going on. Now that I’m not working, though, and the traipsing about the continent has paused for a little, I’ve been able to start thinking about it again. Yesterday I took a step backwards and started re-reading the chapter on triads and sevenths. I understood it first time round, but I wasn’t sure it had really stuck. Today I started doing the chapter’s exercises in the workbook and discovered that actually, a fair amount of it actually had. WIN! So I spent a largish chunk of the morning writing and analysing triads and I think I got at least most of them right (the only downside to doing all this solo is that there are no answers in the workbook, so if you think you got it right but you actually didn’t, there’s no-one to say otherwise because it doesn’t have the answers in it. I believe there’s a teacher’s edition of the workbook, but unless I run into serious issues, I think I’ll pass on that one – the whole exercise has already cost a small fortune!) – really quite satisfying. Tomorrow I hope to work through the seventh chord exercises so that next week I can move back on to species counterpoint. Yay!

I also picked up my flute for the first time in weeks. Yeah, that wasn’t so kind to the ego. But it had to be done. Hopefully tomorrow will be better… Humble apologies to Messrs Poulenc, Koehler, Sculthorpe and Enesco.

And finally, I got back to the website and did a pretty big chunk of work on it so it’s really looking like a proper site now – my photo’s in place on the bio page, the screensnap from the video on the credo page, there are pages for all the linked compositions, and all the ones that should have embedded audio files (still Flash, unfortunately, but at least it’ll get it online) or links to PDF downloads are now showing these up. I tidied the email form and the page of social networking contact links. I still need to finish testing in other browsers (IE6 is, of course, being particularly stubborn) but I think it’s nearing completion, which earns another Yay!

And I listened to both the Brahms and the Martinu/Schulhoff discs I bought yesterday. Both are lovely. I wasn’t really in the mood for Brahms but the Martinu was absolutely spot on and I think the Schulhoff will definitely repay further listenings.