Thursday, May 29, 2014

A Brief Note

Ha! Music pun! Anyway, this is just to let anyone still stopping by that there's more to come. I made a New Year's resolution to post 12 pieces this year -- to average one a month, not necessarily to post one a month. Still, it does seem that I'm a tiny bit behind schedule. I actually did finish one piano piece, but can't post it yet; I think I'll remain vague about why not (well, not so much vague as entirely non-responsive).

So, I have a plan, which may involve cheating. I'm close to finishing a thing I'm calling Three Sketches for String Quartet, and I might decide to count that as three (cheat #1), even though it's a single score, and each of the three is barely over a minute long (and there are currently four different versions of the third sketch, some of which I may split off into another work, or the first word of the title may change). But hey -- my resolution, my rules, right? Also, I have an old C Major march that I can put together fairly quickly (cheat #2, if that's even really cheating), and I'm nearly done with movements 3 & 4 of my String Quartet #3 (the opening movement is already posted as Little Fugue for String Quartet, and the remaining two are each about halfway done). So that's six of the twelve right there -- no problem.

Over Memorial Day weekend, I accidentally finished one of my four percussion pieces. Just have to listen some more and make any tweaks my ears tell me are needed, but it should be posted in the next few days. It's entirely percussion, with no piano, so one of the challenges is to not put too much in there -- in painting terms, I need to preserve some of the negative space. It also needs a better title, but hopefully it'll be up before the start of June. I also made progress on the Frankenstein thing, but that's a longer-term project.

Finally, I'm actually going to take a whole week-long vacation this year, tentatively scheduled for the second week of October. But no tourist-y stuff for me. Sure, I'll go to the Zwolle Tamale Festival (it rhymes, plus there's tamales!), and probably do some fishing on Toledo Bend, but it's mainly about getting away from the usual distractions, and I'm pretty sure that I'll be able to churn out a couple of new things in addition to finishing some current items. That should get me to at least ten or eleven before November, at which point I might be able to finish the Christmas piece that didn't make the deadline last year.

So that's the plan. All I have to do now is execute it.