My web site is drowning in unapproved comments. 3,309 as of this morning. I used to delete them by hand and also the ones that sneak in under the radar. But I have been busy and I’m losing interest in spending time deleting them 20 at a time.
I haven’t posted since Sunday morning. The harpsichord pieces went well, I think. Even though I forgot my tuner and was too lazy to walk home and get it, the harpsichord was pretty in tune. I was surprised when a colleague complimented my improvs at the coffee hour. This person has indicated that sometimes my playing is “more about itself” than the music. I have no idea what this means. I figure that I kind of look uncouth and tent to play gospel and blues piano the way I think it should be played. But who fucking knows? Anyway quite a surprise to get a compliment from this person on improv.
I have spent many hours since Sunday working on planning my choral music and picking hymns. This has included many interesting hours poking around on the web and finding music that others have put up for use. I can’t say enough nice things about IMSLP/Petrucci online music library and Choralwiki. These sites are amazing. One has to be discriminating but that isn’t that hard. Often the editions of music that people have done on their own on the Choralwiki exist in other editions that I can compare them to. That’s what I did with the recent Bach cantata movement I transcribed from the online Bachgesellschaft edition available at the Bach cantata site.
I also put several hours worth of work in Saturday on preparing scores for myself and my bass player for my Friday gig at LJ. This really paid off yesterday. The set list is shaping up. Nate the bass player played very well yesterday, not only reading well as I expected but also taking off from the page. I worked on a piano version of Naked Boy yesterday (3rd recent try) and it seemed to work pretty good. It was odd to hear Nathan’s Dad (who is also a local musician) compliment some of my songs (“I like that one.”). The local professional musicians who talk to me rarely comment on what I call my “bad paul simon songs.”
Anyway, I don’t have much time to tarry here this morning. I am meeting with the children’s choir director this afternoon. Spent a good deal of time trying to find anthems for us to do together with the Chamber choir. My goal is do good music. We’ll see how well I can achieve this with combined choirs and sans artistic control.
Recently, Geoff Ryman, a sci-fi writer, twittered that he was looking for a composer to write some excerpts of an opera one of his characters supposed writes based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. I was interested but decided not to respond until I had seen the book “The Child Garden.” I walked over to the library yesterday and checked out a copy. So far it’s pretty good. But I’m not ready to contact him to find out if someone has taken him up on it. I figure I have a pretty good chance of being chosen to work on it, since he’s not paying (sooprise sooprise). He wants the excerpts to be in Italian. I have never set an Italian text (that I can remember right now), but I think I could probably do so. We’ll see. That’s all the crapola I can think of this morning.