Saturday Summary, February 5, 2011

Every Saturday, The Creative will feature a brief post about my current creative efforts and how they are progressing. If this doesn't interest you, read no further -- not only will I not be offended, I'll never know. The usual creativity-centric posts will return on Sunday.

Ice storms can be wonderful things for a Creative, at least assuming your power doesn't go out and interrupt your work.  Fortunately for me, ours stayed on, and with four consecutive days with school canceled, it was a pretty good creative time for me.

Music -- Despite having an awful migraine for the whole of one day this week, I managed to get a fair bit of composing done.  I started and finished a handbell arrangement of Breath on Me, Breath of God, which marked my first handbell composition in several months.  The really weird thing was how hard it was to get back into it.  Deep down I knew what I was doing, but on the surface, I had forgotten a lot of the mechanics of it -- what order I do things in, how I format things, even some of my keyboard shortcuts and tricks to make the scores look right.  It was a little frustrating, but hopefully now that I'm back at it, composing more (and I've got quite a list of pieces to tackle in the coming months) shouldn't be a problem.

I also worked a bit more on a piano arrangement of the hymntune FOREST GREEN.  I took a bit of a break from writing a piece a week and playing it in church, and instead opted last week to play all classical  for Sunday service -- a little Chopin, Schumann, and Beethoven (oh, all right, so it's all Romantic ... what can I say, I like it better).  Hopefully this arrangement will be done some time early next week, and then I'll turn my attention to other handbell projects that need to get done.

Here's where I stand on the year:

• Handbell pieces -- 20  19
• Piano pieces -- 20  17
• Choral pieces -10
• String pieces -- 4
• Band pieces -- 2
• Other instrumental pieces -- 4
• GRAND TOTAL FOR 2011 -- 60  56

Yes, I am a bit behind, but I tend to build momentum as the months progress, so I'm still planning on hitting that 60-piece mark by December.

Writing -- I thought a fair bit about my book series, and about what I want to do with my writing, but in terms of anything concrete, there was nothing.  Again. 

Publishing -- It was a fairly active week from a publishing standpoint.  I had several rejections (one of them from Shawnee very encouraging, which may sound weird when talking about a rejection, but it's true nonetheless), a little general correspondence (including sending off corrections for my Advent Triptych to Beckenhorst), and one acceptance: the aforementioned Breath on Me, Breath of God.  I'm pleased about the acceptance: it was one of the pieces Doug Wagner had asked me to write for Lorenz for 2012.  It's a weird sort of pressure writing a piece like that -- one that a publisher has asked you to write specifically for them.  I always worry that it's not going to be what they want and it will let them down.  When I write a piece normally, I don't have to worry, because if one publisher rejects it, there's nothing on the line -- I just send it on.  Now, I just have one more piece due to Doug by July, and it's a doozy, so it likely won't be done for a couple of weeks, if not more.


All in all, staying shut-up in the house for over 90 straight hours does have its advantages, even if it does cause a mild level of stir-craziness.  I know we'll have to make these days up later in the school year, but at least for now, I'm going to enjoy the time we had off and enjoy the fact that, despite it all, it was still a successful creative time. 

Starting tomorrow, The Creative will feature a series of posts on the life cycle of a piece of music, from conception through birth and on beyond.  See you then!