Holy noodle, what a week!

I’ve got quite a bit done this week, which is my very first week of my very first (and potentially only) sabbatical.

I didn’t always think of it that way, though.  My first few days were quite frustrating with the feeling that I didn’t get enough done.  I put in between 4-5 hours per day because there were things coming up during the day or at night (meetings, get-togethers, shindigs in the last throes of summer).  I’ve spent all of my time on Movement IV of the Icelandic Folk Song Suite and was averaging about creating 15-20 seconds per day.

The very first thing that I set down was the woodwind run on the second statement of the theme.  This one:

When I told my father-in-law about the 15-20 seconds per day, he laughed and said “you’d better speed it up!” I laughed too because I was thinking the same thing.  It wasn’t moving fast enough.

Today, I buckled down and wrote hard from 10am-5:00pm (with half an hour to run errands and eat a snack) and was now up to 1:40 in the piece.  Today was my first day where I really put a big dent in the piece: I worked out a bunch of the runs and voicings on paper, figured out where most things are going to go, and put almost all of it into Finale.

Then I looked at what I had actually put into the computer and it was 12 reasonably-complete pages.  It wasn’t that I’d only written 1:40 of music, I had written over 130 measures of music in four days.  That’s a lot!

(…for me, anyway).

PS: Movement IV is flippin’ fast.

The adage remains true: When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

I’ll be busy most of Saturday, but I think that I’ll put some good time in on Sunday.  It’s really great to have the time to really work out the music the way that it needs to.  It gets performed in May, and will need some time for rehearsal, so there’s time to get it right.  I’ve got four months to the premiere (I’ll be gone almost all of November, but more on that later!) and it’s going to be awesome 🙂

-K