Category Archives: Music

Notes

Not dead.

Concert was brilliant. The church was standing room only, and the overflow of people was directed to the church hall where there was a closed-circuit AV broadcast of the concert on a 20-inch monitor. That hall was filled to twice legal capacity (shh). And they had to turn people away because there was no more room anywhere. Thanks to Tal and Lu for coming out, and to Jeff and Paze and Devon for making the attempt!

So yes; I’d say it was a success. I even ran into an old high school friend whom I haven’t seen in about fifteen years, and it was terrific to see him.

I am completely wiped. I was tired going into the last few days, but now I’m utterly exhausted.

Also, Yule gift exchange party thing yesterday afternoon. Liam was awesome. Had a lovely relaxing chat and drank tea from real china cups with saucers and ate delicious cheese.

More later when I have time and a functioning brain.

Quiet

I’ve been getting things done: Christmas shopping (finished!), reloading programs as I need them, designing a new website, sleeping. Plus I haven’t been very talkative in general, so that translates to not much journaling in any form.

In other news, we have had two roasts and a lasagne in the past seven days. Apparently the comfort food season is upon us.

We had an exhausting but encouraging Messiah rehearsal last night, our first with the choir and soloists. By the end of it I was so weary that I couldn’t translate the music I was reading into actual movement. We’re playing the Skaters’ Waltz again to accompany the freewill offering, which means I have to (a) remember the bassline because I’m actually playing an octave lower than the bass music is written, and (b) remember the triangle parts. The carols and the Messiah sound excellent, however, and I’m looking forward to Saturday night. The only hitch is that I have to be there for six in the evening, which is usually when we’re finishing up the boy’s bath. We’re going to try to get him down a bit early so the neighbours who will be staying the evening don’t have to try to put him to bed, but I don’t know if it’s going to work. It depends on what his day has been like. If it goes badly I may have to leave HRH at home.

Also, due to rearranged seating to fit the orchestra into a small space, I am sitting directly in front of the conductor, which is very odd.

Remember: This Saturday night at 7:30, The Messiah at Cedar Park United church, corner Lakeview and St John’s Blvd in Pointe-Claire (one block south of autoroute 20)! Admission is free; a freewill offering will be taken halfway through the concert for various charities.

HRH’s work appointment was cancelled today, so we’ll be going to get our tree once Liam wakes up from his nap instead of doing it on Sunday as was our original plan. There’s something mildly disturbing about shopping for Christmas trees in temperatures that are ten degrees above the seasonal average.

This Morning’s Miracle

I didn’t lose the music on my hard drive! Or apparently not; when I try to look in the file manually nothing appears, but the player just searched for and found all the media files that were there before, and is playing them. I’m not examining the teeth of this pony too closely; I’m just enjoying the songs.

Today I have been sorting through old CD-ROMs, installing yet more programs as I encounter a need for them, and tweaking yet more things. I have to get used to new versions of certain programs, too, which is taking time.

Concert Reminder!

Here’s your cheerful reminder about the upcoming Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra Christmas concert:

The Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra
with the Cedar Park Church Choir and friends
present
Selections from Handel’s The Messiah
and seasonal carols
Saturday December 16 2006
at 19h30
Cedar Park United Church
204 Lakeview Ave, Pointe-Claire, QC
(corner St-John’s Blvd and Lakeview)
A freewill offering will be taken
Donations will support the work of St. Columba House
and the Montreal City Mission

Everyone is welcome to come enjoy some holiday cheer, good music, and to sing along with the carols!

Thoughts on a Grey Day

It has taken me over an hour to realise that I have been working with no music on. All that time instead, I had the new Loreena McKennitt album running through my brain. Actually setting it to play in the real world frees my brain RAM up to do other things, like, oh, work properly.

Coming to the end of the time I have in which to touch it up, I find that ESTC is much better than I remember it, and yet still so very far from being the very serious spiritual self-examination I originally envisioned it being. In actual execution it became a more practical collection of information and exercises designed to sort out how one feels about various aspects of pregnancy within a Pagan spiritual context, and while it’s very good, it’s not what I wanted it to be. Apples and oranges, really, and I’m very proud of what it is, but I do feel a bit wistful about the book that never was. Silly Imp would likely tell me that the book-that-isn’t is still in me to write after a few more years of thought and introspection, and she’s probably right.

Things are being cancelled left, right, and centre today thanks to the dreadful weather. Both HRH and Liam are home, which is doing nothing for the absolute silence and solitary feeling I need to work. I love them both, but Liam is crazy due to those lower canines, and I pick up on that as well as the frustration HRH feels when he deals with Liam in a mood like this. Plus with my office right next to the living room, well, it feels like we’re all in the same room a lot of the time. It’s days like this when I wish I had a writing haven at the bottom of the garden, something like a one-room tiny cottage with excellent insulation and an electric kettle with which to boil water for tea. (And an awesome sound system. It could double as a cello practice studio.)

It being December first, I opened this year’s new Christmas CD and put it on. Sarah McLachlan’s Wintersong: very pleasant. Lots of piano.

Break’s over.

I Aten’t Dead

Tired, tired, tired. Working lots. I also played six hours of cello on Wednesday, what with two rehearsals for different groups. By eight o’clock I was brain-dead, which led to me either completely being in the cello zone, or not able to play three notes after one another. (Guess which mindset I was in when we were playing the cello-only parts of the Messiah. As long as everyone else was playing, though, I was fine. I intend to go through a couple of pieces and write the bowing in for every single note, because it was what tripped me up the most Wednesday night.)

The novella’s rolling along, and it’s about seventy-five percent complete at 52K. (Of course, a third of what’s currently there will end up being thrown out, but them’s the breaks in a first draft.) Touch-ups in ESTC have slowed as I have reached the point where I have to really think out what changes/updates I want to make, if any at all, and decide if they’d be any better than what’s already there. Overall, I’m surprised at how minor the changes I’ve made have been, but there has been lots of thought behind each of those changes.

Liam and I took the bus to the shops today for various things, and he was very good. (It helped that the weather was ridiculously warm, around fourteen degrees above the seasonal average. Of course, we’re about to pay for it with freezing rain and snow and plummeting temps.) His lower canines are now making him crazy. New words: “broom”, “angel”, he’s been saying “Santa” as of yesterday (here we go!), and why do I keep forgetting to record that he says “turtle” and has been doing it for over a month? New foods today: the lettuce, raw green pepper, and black olives from my sandwich were all hits, and he ate more of the breaded chicken nugget at dinner than I expected him to. He and his broom are inseparable. (Well, the broom probably doesn’t care much, but he does.) I gave him his first haircut last night — cut off those long curls at the back of his head. He looks tidier, but I loved those curls. Oddly, now the rest of his hair looks longer.

Adding ribbon loops and making labels for the herbal sachets I’ve made for a local Yule craft fair is on tonight’s and tomorrow’s list of things to do. And I keep feeling that there’s something else I’m forgetting, although my brain is fairly certain that there isn’t.

Novella Update

My plans for the evening were derailed, and I wasn’t happy about it. So I wrote instead.

Total word count, Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro: 31,629
Total words today: 3,013

And I did another 1,193 last night after Liam went to bed, too. (There, posterity, are you satisfied?)

I’ve been messing about with creating alternate meditations and rituals for two chapters of ESTC. I’m still not wholly certain about them at the moment, but I only started them today so they need time to evolve properly. It remains to be seen if they’ll create the effect I’m still trying to capture. I moved more things around to smooth out the final chapter too, but the eighth chapter is still defying me, possibly because birth is an incredibly spiritual thing to begin with, and to capture it in words is remarkably difficult without sounding either twee or dim.

It’s good to have two so very different projects on the go at once. When I get stuck or bored with one of them, I switch to the other and still get work done. (And don’t kid yourself — this is work. It’s what I do for a living. Some stuff I am fortunate enough to sell as partials, other stuff I need to write out before I can send it out on a quest for a home.)

An Ancient Muse, the new Loreena McKennitt album, is excellent. So is Fragile Things, the latest short fiction collection from Neil Gaiman that I started reading the other day. And in fact, I’m headed for bed to read more of it before I turn out the light.