Miscellany

1) Flash Compline again tonight. Christ Church Greyfriars, 9.15pm. Details here. We arrive quietly, and depart in silence.

2) I have a very rudimentary page on Bandcamp now. It lacks a biography, pictures, that sort of thing. The one track there is one that you can also download for free from Soundcloud; I'm using it as a sort of test, to play around with things like artwork. So it's very un-pretty right now, but it's there. Advice, other than "do more stuff with it", would be welcome.

3) The Advent Psalms are going well but I am, obviously, not going to have the booklet done by the start of Advent. I will try to finish something by January, so that the next time Year B comes around I can just point at it. This may seem like a long way off but these lectionary cycles seem to go awfully fast if you ask me. If I do the same thing for Lent I will try and get it finished with more time to spare.

4) I've started using my Dreamwidth account as a sort of notes repository for creative projects. The idea is that I update the post for each project as I go along, so that my various notes are all in one place. I can make the entries private or restrict them to an access list of Dreamwidth/OpenID users if I need to put more sensitive information in them.

5) Everything Takes Longer.

Ssssssomething a little different

I'm trying to find more local teaching. Rather than having the same old boring poster for piano lessons I thought I'd advertise a bit differently...




I've chopped off the bottom line for security reasons as I don't want my telephone number all over the internet, but please leave a comment or contact me via twitter if you are interested in lessons!

The Week, er, Behind

On Monday I posted about all I have to do this week.

Things are some things that didn't get done. I still haven't rescheduled my dental appointment, and there are a few other phonecalls that have piled up, which isn't so good. I fought with the piece for the St Paul's competition but still I don't have a rough draft I'm happy with, so I'm having to consider whether I'll submit anything at all. I didn't get around to finding recordings for the choir at St Andrew's to listen to, and I didn't get to the recitals at Trinity that I wanted to attend.

There were some good things, though. The choir rehearsal at St Andrew's yesterday evening went well despite my rather shallow preparation and only having two people there. It's quite hard work to sing with so few people present and those who did turn up worked hard and did well.

Also yesterday I met with Rev Kathryn Robinson, the newly-appointed Performing Arts Adviser for the Barking Episcopal area. It was good to meet her and to talk about some of what I do, what's going on at St Andrew's, and some of the collaborations that might be possible.

The Brigantia Consort rehearsal on Thursday night felt efficient and useful, despite all of us being rather exhausted. We've managed to share out the writing of programme notes in a way that I think makes sense, we made some decisions about clothing (always difficult if you decide you don't want to just wear black), we narrowed down some of the repertoire for the concert on 11th July and oh, yeah, we rehearsed some music. I don't want to speak too soon -- it definitely needs more work -- but tuning between serpent and violin does seem to be improving.

At Quire on Wednesday night I did not completely disgrace myself at playing a rather tricky bassline on an instrument with a turning circle the size of an elephant, and as usual I enjoyed the rehearsal immensely.

Teaching on Monday and Tuesday went well. It was the first week of trying out some new timing for Tuesdays, which looks like it's going to work a lot better for my students as well as meaning I get home a good 45 minutes earlier. Hooray! The long-term viability of making the journey from Leytonstone to North London two days a week has been weighing on me recently; the later nights on Tuesday definitely weren't helping. I was still too tired to do as much psalmody-related reading as I would have liked, though.

Today has been a Day Off, except that writing this post probably counts as work, oops. Tomorrow will be mostly church and another attempt at some composing, and then a look at what lies ahead next week.