artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)
In late spring 2021, as various UK covid protections were easing, a friend of mine travelled to a funeral. This was before most people were vaccinated. Several members of her travelling party came back with COVID. She did not.

the entire rest of this post is about masks, mostly elastomeric )
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1) What is the oldest thing you own?

Probably my father's violin -- ah, but I don't own that, it's just on loan. The beat-up old upright piano I was given in ~2014 is probably the oldest thing, then. (I have a serpent, but it's a 1992 reproduction so not really that old at all in musical instrument terms.) If we were going to discount musical instruments then I suppose it would be my desk, which I inherited from a moving-away vicar (also in 2014); it's maybe 1960s? A beautiful, and very large, "partner desk" which I sometimes manage to find the surface of.

2) What is the oldest home you've lived in?

Ooh, I'd probably have to do a bit of research to figure that one out. It will probably be one of the houses I've lived in in Leytonstone -- both are Victorian buildings. It looks like probably the one on Wallwood Road is slightly older than the current one, by maybe a decade? The house in Bath is rather older, being roughly Georgian, but I'm not sure if "stayed for four months, then visited a lot" counts as living there for the purpose of this question.

3) What is the oldest book you've read?

This is a rather complex question but undoubtedly one of the books of the Bible (...most of which I can only say I have read in translation, I'm slow enough at Hebrew and apply myself so seldom to it that I haven't made my way through the entire book of Psalms, and my Greek is basically non-existent. I've had all of Esther read *to* me and followed along, and so on, but that's not really the same.)

4) What is the oldest electronic device that you still use?

The timer for the boiler in this house. I think it may be 1980s or 1990s in origin. It's the sort that allows you to set two time slots, and the hot water and heating can each either be off, "once" (i.e. from the start of the first slot to the end of the second), or "twice" (on for the duration of each slot, but off in between). This is colloquially referred to as a "thermostat" although it is no such thing; and such a thing wouldn't be particularly useful in this house, which is warm in one quarter (the bathroom, and the room occupied by a housemate) and cool to cold in the rest. Sometimes, I dislike renting.

I had a 1980s electronic metronome for a while too but I'm not sure where it went, and I certainly don't still use it.

5) What is the oldest work of art/architecture that you've seen?

In person? Avebury or Stonehenge; I understand they're roughly the same age. I'm not entirely sure these are art *or* architecture, but perhaps, like more recent religious buildings such as cathedrals, they could be both.

But I've also seen pictures of e.g. cave paintings and the like, which I take to be much older. The internet is a wondrous thing.

Questions by Florianschild.
artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)
I won a composing competition which means I can now, I think, describe myself as an "award-winning" composer. (And I should send them some words about my piece, but what they've written there is actually a very good description, I think.)

Meanwhile, my viva voce (thesis defense thingy) is in a week. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)
1) What did you plant?

I sowed plenty! Leeks and tomatoes and squashes (several kinds), beans, peas, carrots, beetroot, spinach, chard, parsnips, courgettes, celery, celeriac, fennel, dill, thyme, watermelon, cucamelon, nasturtiums, marigolds, poppies, potatoes...

Some of these were sown in spring rather than summer, of course. And we're pretty firmly into autumn now by any measure, here.

2) What was your favorite summer food?

Probably the strawberries. Blueberries and black raspberries were quite good, too. And the purple beans, of course.

3) What song will remind you of this summer?

Probably my setting of "The Sick Rose" for SSSAAATTTBBB. When I composed it I wasn't thinking of contagion, but it works very well for that concept.

4) What was your favorite body of water to be in?

... the bath? I wasn't in any other bodies of water, sorry.

5) What's been your favorite outfit?

For allotment visits, lightweight trousers with pocketses, a vest or t-shirt, and a linen button-up shirt worn as a cardigan to prevent sunburn. Tilley hat.

For other warm days, my go-to clothing has usually been some or other floaty lightweight cotton dress.

The Friday Five questions with other answers linked to in comments
artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)
I've submitted my thesis (consisting of portfolio and commentary). My viva will be, it looks like, around the middle of October.

I'm currently enjoying Sleeptember: lots of allotment, lots of cycling, and... actually probably not as much sleep as I should be getting, but there is a sublime restfulness in this in-between state of not yet cramming for my viva, but not being sufficiently "finished" with the PhD to start too much else.

I have some other news to share, but I'm not allowed to share it yet! (It's good news.) Watch this space...
artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)
I've just written a hymn tune, without having words first. I was writing my to-do list for next week, wrote down "compose a hymn tune" and it just came to me. After a week or two of not being able ot concentrate much on composing this is something of a relief!

It's 76 76 D (matches Jerusalem the Golden) but with a bit of a twist in the last line, so that the emphasis is on a different syllable. It's in triple time, with an anacrusis at the beginning of each line of text.

Here is the pulse with the accented syllables in allcaps:

one TWO three four five SIX sev
one TWO three four five SIX
one TWO three four five SIX sev
one TWO three four five SIX
one TWO three four five SIX sev
one TWO three four five SIX
one TWO Three four five SIX sev
one two THREE four five SIX

Does anyone have a text I could use for it? Or want to write one? It's in a major key and is a hopeful, comforting little thing.

In general, I prefer to work with Creative Commons licensed texts.

(I could alter the last line so it fits an ordinary 76 76 D tune a bit better, of course. But I like it as it is.)
artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)
I'm still entirely well, in fact... but I haven't been getting a huge amount of musical work done, what with one thing and another.

I've been singing Compline three nights a week. This week I'm handing off one of those slots each week to someone else, which will help a bit. I've also been pretty busy sowing seeds, both for the allotment, and for the Soup Garden at church (where we are growing vegetables for the soup kitchen. The soup kitchen itself is still running, but on a take-away only basis.)

My concentration hasn't been great. I think it's mostly because, having been banished from running "non-essential" errands and from rehearsals and from my weekly strength training session and so on, I'm not really getting enough exercise. But from next week, I'm planning on going for a walk early each morning with Spouse, which should help.
artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)
I will be livestreaming sung Compline again tonight at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZLJSPuHl-U

For Reasons (the church YouTube account is very new yet) we can't manage to embed the thing, so you might have to watch it on YouTube itself.

The text will be Common Worship Compline in Traditional Language, available at http://www.oremus.org/~ss/commonworship/word/nighttrad.html

Check http://artsyhonker.net/virtual-compline/ for more details. I'll update the page every time there's another one.
artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)
This week I have been mostly making a spreadsheet in order to make a diagram of one of the elements of one of my pieces.

Now that the data entry is done is not a great time to find out that the spreadsheet thing in Open Office appears not to let me specify the numbers that actually appear along the x axis of the graph. I'm... not best pleased about this. (Though writing this I might have figured it out. We'll see.)

I also sent off a competition entry, and have some new pieces to be getting on with, as well as one or two older ones to wrap up.
artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)
This morning I worked on the Mag for the Derby competition some more; I think it might be pretty much done now. There is still quite a lot to fill out in the Nunc but that's a much shorter text with a more obvious treatment.

I also spent most of an hour trying to get something working with the backend stuff for Cecilia's List. Sigh. I was successful, in the end, but these things are always frustrating.

I got some comments back from my first PhD proofreader and they were encouraging and helpful, which is always great.

I got a rejection for a competition, but I'm not too worried about it; the piece was really a bit shorter than they wanted anyway. Meanwhile I have another performance, of sorts: the Constellation Club Chamber Choir will be sing my "Sweet Spirit, Comfort Me" on Thursday 5th March. It isn't open to the public, but I'm hoping there will be a recording.
artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)
Yesterday was a bit of a slog, and I'm quite tired as a result today and didn't work as effectively as I'd like. But I'm still plodding through and got a few dissertation things done (including catching up with my supervisor a bit) and also some composing things done.

If you're in Providence, Rhode Island, it looks like Collegium Ancora will be singing my setting of Shakespeare's Sonnet 27 this Sunday at Grace Church. (I found out because someone left a blog comment looking for my birth year. I guess I need to put something in my standard sheet music blurb about letting me know about performances...)
artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)
Today I've been working on PhD things, mostly. I'm at that stage where everything that's left is sortof difficult and fiddly: like, yes, I could describe this piece to you, but you're my examiner and you have the score so what are we both doing? You can see perfectly well that there are triplet crotchets in bar whatever.

However, I have a telephone meeting with my supervisor tomorrow, and I want to have all my ducks in a row. So there it is.

I did also get some Patreon rewards sent out; the rest will go out tomorrow, because I didn't have the right kind of envelope for the scores (there are... a lot. I got rather behind.) And I worked on a set of canticles for a competition. I imagine there will be quite a few entries for this competition given that the spec is similar to one that had a deadline in the autumn, for which the winner has now been announced; but the point of competitions isn't really to win them, anyway.

That said (and it isn't really a competition as such), if you're in London on 19th March then do come along to JAM's Music Of Our Time concert, which will include the world première of one of my pieces, The Hand That Made Us Is Divine.
artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)

So, would anyone here be interested in:

  • buying one or two of the "how to market yourself and make money as a freelance artist/musician/creative" books available
  • working through it on a week-to-week basis in a closed DW community, doing the exercises and having some accountability over completing various steps?

I am really really not a marketing expert. I would like to get better at this part of freelancing (After The PhD, obviously), and I think that a lot of the courses that are out there are mostly selling bespoke peer support groups, and I don't fit into any of those either so I may as well roll my own group.

Thoughts?

(I might crosspost this to [community profile] crowdfunding or something)

artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)
artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)
Toward the middle of last week, I finally finished a draft of a sekr1t commission, due date this Sunday. But the middle section wasn't quite right; no matter what I did with the accompaniment it ended up aimless and confusing in a way that isn't much fun for singers or listeners (given the context of the commission).

I have been attacking it every which way and getting more and more frustrated with myself. But last night as I was in the garden, hunting for snails, I realised that all I had to do was change the key of about sixteen bars and it would fall into place. The problem wasn't that what I had written was bad, though in some ways that section remains unremarkable and I might yet mess with it to make it more lyrically interesting; the problem was that within the overall form, it needed to not be in the same key as the next bit.

I think I've just about got it sorted now, which is a relief, and I'm sure will also be a relief for the singers -- except, of course, they won't have seen the bum version, and so any weaknesses in this new improved version will stand out more.
artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)
I like the look and sound of this piano album kickstarter by Kimiko Ishizaka, who also recorded the Goldberg Variations as part of the Open Bach project.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kimikoishizaka/new-me/

I am particularly intrigued by the inclusion of the handwritten manuscripts in the pledge rewards; I've long thought about doing something similar. I don't have anything like Kimiko's fame/reach, so it will be interesting to see how it turns out; I really hope it goes well.
artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)

I'm off to Aberdeen -- I forgot, when I booked it, that this was a Bank Holiday weekend. I have a PhD supervision on Tuesday, and it's the one where I turn up with a small forest worth of scores and we decide which ones are dissertation-quality.

After that? I write the dissertation. I have already done some of the work for that -- the three pieces that were in my MPhil upgrade portfolio may as well go into the final, and I gave a presentation on my Stations of the Cross back in March which has a lot of material in it. But those scores by themselves don't add up to the hour I would need, so we'll have to choose some others, and I'll need to write about those too. If we don't have enough that are appropriate for the dissertation, then I get to write some more music before I start writing the dissertation.

I feel as if I'm hideously behind on everything else. I've had some healthcrap issues recently, which are still under investigation; so far we know that I'm deficient in folate, but not, unfortunately, why I'm deficient in folate. And I've been very, very tired.

Things I'd like to get caught up on this month: -Patreon rewards -a certain commission -two other (smaller) commissions -some kind of plan for the summer which balances competitions, other composing projects, and dissertation writing.

artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)

I enjoy some of the blog posts from Farnam Street but I was rather disappointed to see a blog post on "active mindset" entitled Yes, It’s All Your Fault: Active vs. Passive Mindsets.

The broader point, I think, stands: a failure to take responsibility for mishaps and circumstances, a failure to examine whether things could have been different, can lead to feeling out of control and helpless. The unspoken instruction is to take responsibility for your part in things, to cultivate an active mindset in the language you use about your day-to-day life, in order to learn from your mistakes, and presumably experience feelings of control and efficacy.

But, well. It really isn't my fault that my parents split up when I was very young, and that has had repercussions throughout my life. It really isn't my fault that the current political situation in the country in which I live is, er, a trashfire. Nor is it, in any sense, my "fault" that I was born into a situation where I received a good primary and secondary education, such that going to university was not thought of as unusual, despite this not being the case for millions of other people; it is not my "fault" that I am white and therefore have many privileges, or that I grew up with shoes that fit.

There are (at least) two ways that assuming bad things are your fault can go wrong, and neither of them are very helpful. One is where we try to take responsibility for things that are simply due to bad circumstances by chance. Taking responsibility for a train being late or missing is reasonable; blaming oneself for being late when a bad storm takes out the entire transport network for an entire day is less so. There are usually efficiency tradeoffs to be made when planning journeys: should I go up to Aberdeen a day early, spend money on an extra night in a hotel, in order to ensure that train problems won't interfere with my studies? This is the option I usually take; but it looks very different if I have to miss some paid work in order to do it. The longer the journey, the more things can go wrong and the more likely I will want some downtime to recover at the other end.

The second failure mode, and I think the more dangerous of the two I discuss here, is assuming the actions of bad actors to be your fault. This is very common with victims of domestic abuse, who may come to believe that their abuser is only lashing out at them because of their own inadequacies or failure to perform certain actions; that if they just try hard enough to be a better spouse or child or partner, the abuse will stop. In fact what will stop the abuse is leaving.

Similarly, believing that all or most the good things that happen to you are your own doing can also cause problems. I live in a major city and I don't get huge amounts of street harassment, despite walking around on my own a lot. Is this because I'm doing something right in the way I walk? Or is it because I'm six feet tall and people think twice about giving me any trouble? The latter seems more likely -- and this is nothing that I have chosen. Similarly, I don't often run up against anti-migrant prejudice, despite being a migrant. This isn't because I have integrated particularly well into British society: rather, it is because I already speak English very fluently (I did not choose my first tongue), and probably also because I am white. Let's be honest, here: the playing field isn't level. That's wrong, and it also isn't entirely my fault, but pretending that I have the same resources as a homeless woman of colour who isn't fluent in English is simply preposterous; such pretense would definitely make me part of the problem.

And just as it is dangerous to discount the actions of bad actors in your own misfortune, it is ungrateful to look at your own success without acknowledging the help you may have received along the way. I am a musician not just because of innate talent (I come from a family with musicians on both sides), and not just because of my own hard work, but also because of the patience of many, many teachers and mentors over the years, not to mention the support of friends and family at various times.

Rather than basking in success as if it's only your own doing, or beating yourself up verbally because a train was late or you made a mistake, I would suggest that a healthy active mindset would mean asking yourself: Is there anything I would do differently next time?

This lets you learn from your mistakes, get better at navigating random things that just go wrong, and increase your skill at dealing with bad actors. And it doesn't leave you thinking you're doing something right when you just chanced to be in the right place at the right time, or judging people less fortunate than yourself for not attaining the success that you have.

artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)

Long time no post. I've been meaning to post here more, and not quite managing.

I'm back in London this week, after nearly three weeks in Aberdeen during which I heard the Chapel Choir sing my Stations of the Cross, and visited with my parents who had come over to hear it, and then stayed on to give a presentation.

Now I'm pretty tired, and my next PhD-related thing is in early May: the meeting where I'll sit down with my supervisor and a pile of scores and we'll decide which ones belong in the portfolio and which ones don't. After that, I'll know whether I get to spend this summer frantically writing more music, or frantically writing a dissertation -- or maybe both...

In the meantime, I am trying to step back a bit, and spend some time sorting out various things at home: the garden has had the lion's share of attention this week, and there is some tidying to do inside.

I don't post to the Book of Face much, but I'm very aware that "it's where people are" these days. As far as I'm concerned that's part of the problem: the more you use it, the more money Facebook gets from their advertisers, and that means that you, the user, are the product. I've never much liked that. But what with not spending much time on Twitter these days (having largely moved to Mastodon, where I am [personal profile] artsyhonker@mastodon.art and also [personal profile] artsyhonker@smusi.ch) I am missing a lot of the people I used to share a running daily commentary with.

I think I might try posting here, and then linking to the posts from there.

Hmm.

Feb. 2nd, 2019 09:56 pm
artsyhonker: a girl with glasses and purple shoulder-length hair (Default)

"A text in Latin shall be used", I read, of a choral composition competition.

It turns out they are a bit more picky than that:

Only texts by the following Latin Authors will be accepted: Ovidio (Publius Ovidius Naso), Orazio (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Virgilio (Publius Vergilius Maro), Catullo (Gaius Valerius Catullus), Marziale (Marcus Valerius Martialis), Lucrezio (Titus Lucretius Carus).

Being more a Christian sacred composer than anything else, and lacking a Classics background, I'm utterly unfamiliar with most of these. I understand Catullus is rather rude.

I suspect the pronunciation varies considerably from church Latin, too, though probably not so much that I can't set it well.

I feel a bit like this is a veiled attempt to filter out people who aren't posh enough, or haven't had the "right" educational background. I dislike those kinds of barriers to participation.

So: does anyone have any suggestions for me from those authors? Any passages you'd particularly like to hear me set to music?

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