It turns out that when I am immersed in composing I’m not very adept at much else.
Yesterday I showed up inadvertently for my meeting a half hour late.
I had the time wrong. I plopped down and attempted to pull up my google calendar which refused to load wanting only verification of my log on but refusing to allow me on. I remained off balance for the rest of the meeting.
I just wrote an entire post describing the meeting but when asked my wife agreed it was probably inappropriate so I deleted it.
The negative energy from the church meeting stayed with me for hours yesterday only ebbing mysteriously while I sat in my Mom’s shrink’s waiting room.
I did figure out out how to outfox my browser into letting me onto google calendar.
And I did get quite a bit of composing done. At this point “Dead Man’s Pants” is around 300 measures long and consists of 4 sections: “Dead Man’s Pants theme,” “Tiny Lies,” “Small Rain Trio,” and “You must be the animal.”
This piece is in extremely rough draft form. Much of yesterday was spent writing string parts to go with “Tiny Lies” which is actually a banjo song. I plan to sing that. The vocal line on “You must be the animal” is extremely disjunct and has a very wide range. I can’t really sing it. Not sure either of my other two singers will be able to do it. Maybe I’ll just omit the singing on it.
Today I am playing piano for the June Birthday Party for my Mom’s rest home.
I played one of these earlier this year and was surprised that there was so much interested in “secular” music in such a religious context. I alternated hymns and pop tunes (mostly from the 40s and 50s). Most of my requests seemed to be for the pop tunes.
Today I will do the same thing but will take more pop tunes to play so I can play things people will enjoy.
I know that money is on my mind these days.
I am underpaid at church with no real prospect of improvement there. I find it discouraging to think about working out creative solutions to the music program because every idea relies on me doing more work and no real mention of remuneration commiserate with this increased load.
So my solution is to volunteer my time playing music for my Mom’s rest home.
Brilliant, eh?