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Yesterday I dropped the ball. I only composed for about 3 minutes. Shame on me! BUt in these three minutes I made an important discovery. My basic bass move is sort of an and ONE (two) AND ONE two, which isn't that unusual but a little different that your typical ONE...

Today I cease to be 42 and am now 43. When I find out I've gotten by another year with all ten fingers and ten toes working I feel grateful. I've been through a few really really dangerous medical situations - most particularly a situation where I had massive internal...

I was looking over my last melodic passage and my handwriting was too sloppy to see what it was. So that was the end of that. But I went to the piano and got a new section and wrote it out almost in real time. Very fast, and it's totally legit. I figure one thing that...

I can tell my hunger for composing is growing. Here's my situation: I've been up for a few hours - I woke up really early this AM - and now I want to compose at the piano. But I can't! I have to avoid waking people up. This is leaving me in a state where I so clearly...

The idea of bringing Fire to Oratorio as a possibility is adding great clarity to the writing. It's doing two things. This first is that, if we are to do it in this concert if there is time, I have to get it done really soon. That is focussing for me. Second, now I...

I have successfully used the clock to send me to the piano bench for 30 minutes, composing or not, and it has helped. Now I"m finding that things a re different because I am getting into a grove of visiting the piano several times spontaneously. I don't know if this...

It's a good thin I got the piano tuned a few weeks ago because I'm on it a lot now playing LOUD stuff. Fire is the first big loud piece I have ever done. Maybe that is why I feel so flexible in it - I'm not locked into old patterns of thinking. The odd scale is...

I enjoyed my piece yesterday but didn't actually do anything (except write maybe one measure) By this I mean I was playing what I had written as best as my hands could and also played around with some of what is coming up next but I didn't actually focus on writing...

Today I realized that my semi-fugue imitation was full of problems. I think I weeded them out. I'm at a tricky spot again, I have a section that needs a faster pace of harmonic rhythm as far as I can feel. It is dangerous to let harmony lead melody. So the fact that I...

Hi all. I'm a pretty new blogger so I didn't realize that when I'm back here in the programmer / website developer part of the site I found I had a lot of comments that I didn't know were there, so sorry about late responses. It means a lot to me to see people are...

I've been hearing warnings from all over the place about the following trap. You think you have a talent that is more important than effort. More and more I hear this is not how things work. One thing I've heard a bunch of times is the 10,000 rule. IF you do something...

I looked at what had seemed, several hours ago, to be an effective new section of the piece simply is not. I'm looking for variety, yes, but this just sounds like an entirely different piece. THat's not good. All the more so in a short piece. It does have some...

I put in my 30 minutes. For this I tried a thought experiment. I pretended that I was fighting for scheduling a practice room and all I could get was this really good room for only 30 minutes. I had a maximum time limit. This helped me be more focussed and I got some...

Yesterday was quite a thing; it was a recording session for the choir. A six hour one! I was so exhausted buy hour 5 I didn't know if I was going to make it, but I did. And my body is moving much better than it used to. My new feature - if nothing is moving in the...

Thirty minutes a day is treating me just fine so far. Sometimes I end up blankly staring at the keys for 2 minutes because I feel all used up, but then I refuel and start again. I want to bump this up to more minutes, but for the time being 30 minutes it is. Today I...

Surely if I want to move forward as a composer I have to up the 20 minutes of composing a day, a lot. I get tired very quickly when writing - I need to build up endurance. I'm feeling very good about what I am getting but it's taking longer than it should in days, and...

I was able to finish that polyphonic section (many tunes at once) without disaster. It's sort of odd - the soprano and alto have one theme that gets imitated and the tenors and basses have a different theme that gets imitated. I hope that's OK. To me it sounds fine,...

When I compose, I'll work on some section for so long that I can get it in my head that it's time fora big change but actually it's not. The time I put in makes the section I wrote seem longer than it actually is. I can see why composers tend to measure things in 8 or...