Progress and Resolutions...

It's always nice to find evidence that you're making progress. I'm sitting here late on a Thursday night, early on a Friday morning, too exhausted from work to do anything but sample a homebrew from last year to see if it's drinkable still (it is) and peruse old blogs and/or facebook...God save me from the black hole that is the latter. Anyway, I stumbled on this entry and it was kind of cool to read how frustrated I was back then with how much work I had to do just to stay afloat and how it was interfering with my perceived ability to work on my own music.

The blog was from October of 2009, days before I heard about the full time position at NY1 and I was going on about how I had made tons of contacts but I had no time because of the day job(s) to churn out new material to showcase for these contacts (Not that that's the only reason I'm writing, to impress potential clients, I'm just saying it's always good to have fresh music to show people...I'm not going to get away with showing stuff from grad school all the time for much longer).

Anyhow, nowadays, I've not only stabilized my job situation, but I've also learned, probably as a result of that stability, to manage my time so much better. I can actually sit down, like I did this morning, and write, even though I only had a few hours before I had to leave the house. In that way, I'm not waiting until I get two full days off to dive into a project. Just polishing off little bits of work per each sitting and not worrying about making great strides.

What I'm working on now is the notation of Collapsing Elbows for Tania, so that she can perform the piece and I can process the electronics when we perform the piece with Jahna's dancers in April. Back when I wrote the above mentioned blog entry I might have quailed at the thought of notating an entire eight-minute, unmetered improvisation (I honestly still quailed a little bit upon considering the task). However, this time, I took one look at the piece, split it up into manageable pieces and decided to just go section by section measure by measure. Such a practice even gives me built in stopping points so I can take much needed breaks during what has turned out to be some very tedious work. I remember what I played for the most part but the rhythms (being unchained to bar lines for the most part) are really difficult to parse out. And I'm met with decisions like how strictly should I stick to the original rhythms, should I even bother notating with bar lines, if I do notate it as such how do I decide where to draw the bar lines. Luckily, my graduate school thesis was on polyrhythm and the notation of thereof. So, I'm well-versed.

I must say it's coming along and I'm quite proud of my methods here. As I look into the new year and back at the old, I realize that I've really come a long way. Granted, I'm not where I wanted to be exactly, but I'm certainly not where I expected to be. I've managed to finish some works and totally change directions on others (I'm thinking of the piano pieces which are done and the orchestral minimalist piece that I decided to make into an electroacoustic piece, here, respectively).

I know I wrote about New Year's Resolutions the other day but while we're talking about music again in the new year, I think I'd like to lay down here what I wrote in my personal notes today:

Finish two chamber works
Start a new one
Submit electronic piece to a few competitions/festivals
Submit at least one other piece
Get electronic music gig rolling
Publish piano sketches

Beyond that, I think I wrote that I wanted to keep up yoga and take dance classes as well. So, I think that's pretty good for now. I'll think of tons more stuff that I want to do though, I'm sure. For now, I'm dead tired and I want to sleep for a very long time now. Good night.