This week Hilltop was quite buzzing, as usual. Crystal made Scottish shortbread and Cajun Gumbo by night, while teaching her full teaching load by day. We started seeing foxes this week around Hilltop, a rare sight here, and — speaking of buzzing — a pack of bees have taken over our bird bath for their water source, though their nest is somewhere else.  No rain for days and temps in the 90’s F, so I haven’t had to mow the lawn, a nice reprieve.

I taught my very first weekly, online music class right from my home studio and am happy to say the dreaded technology went well. The seventeen high-school students from all over the country (and one in Ireland) were delightful in their comments in the chat window.

My new talent agency finally posted my promotional materials on their web site Price Agency Kurek page, which can also be reached by clicking on their logo at the bottom of any of the pages here on my own site. Looks great, but I’ll still keep this one, too.

A big box of 50 author copies of my new book came in the mail yesterday, which was fun to open and the gratifying result of much work. Several are ready to go out to family and friends in envelopes I prepared during the week.

I made further progress composing my symphony and am in negotiations for recording it, and also did a Karaoke arrangement and recording for Crystal to use at a memorial service where she will sing next month. The song was beautiful, on the great poem “High Flight” (“O I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,” etc.), recorded by John Denver.

We had at least four meetups with friends throughout the week and enjoyed catching up. Renaissance man and good friend, Deron Martel, came over to Hilltop and took a rubber casting of my right hand in order to make a mold for a sculpture of it in bronze, holding a pencil (something like this Escher print), quite a keepsake for a composer!

I think of this week as a bit crazy but as part of the creative lifestyle of an artist. In short, to be an artist, it is necessary to live and think of your whole life as a work of art, in which composing (in my case) is just one activity among many, even though the main one.

This week I leave you with a short composition from my album The Sea Knows for solo harp, called Moon Canticle, because it was inspired by the idea of moon-rays streaming down in a dark, enchanted forest. So there are a lot of descending lines, like moonbeams.  The exquisite, virtuoso playing here is by the world-renown Argentinian harpist Soledad Yaya, recorded on site in Sao Paulo, Brazil by me personally, where she now plays professionally and lives with her equally gifted husband, Peter Pas, principal viola soloist of the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra.  So, here is “Moon Canticle”: