Along with Thanksgiving Day and the chill in the air have come our usual fall flights of geese across our Hilltop skies. Of course they are in the shape of the letter V, squawking loudly as they passed over. As the seasons keep turning at Hilltop, so does the wheel of life. Long-anticipated events finally move from the back burner to the front, and one must feed the wolf at the door. One must grease the loudest squeaking wheel and strike while the iron is hot. Sorry, I love pithy sayings.

This diary entry finds me trying to juggle four projects all needing attention at once:

• continuing work on the final movement of my new Symphony No. 3;
• a production meeting yesterday with the directors, and holding auditions this coming weekend for, my musical, Dear Miss Barrett, which begins rehearsals in January and performs in March;
• and a today a production meeting with the choreographer and impresario for my new ballet, Raffaella, which is already gearing up to make a promo video in January and to premiere with dancers and orchestra in June.
• travelling to Buffalo, NY for one of several performances being given of my Concertino for Celesta and Orchestra by the Buffalo Philharmonic in mid-December;
• A fifth ball in the air I’m helping to juggle is Crystal’s ordinary needs (like meals) as she is in tech week for White Christmas, which opens tomorrow night, with any remaining tickets on sale HERE .

Auditions to sing and act in Dear Miss Barrett, with a list of roles, are HERE. They will take place at the theater this coming weekend! Actors, please come! Sunday and Monday nights, Dec. 3 and 4, with call-backs on the 6^th.

We had, as hoped, an almost perfectly peaceful Thanksgiving, just the two of us, with our feet up in front of a blazing fire in the “li-bry,” (as Crystal calls it, British style), which is the room most people would call a den, but ours has a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with books. There was just one little scare on Thanksgiving. A little after noon, just when the turkey was cooking happily in our oven, which is electric, the power to the house went out! I called the electric company, and it only took about an hour for the power to come back on, whew! So, the bird was able to finish cooking and came out great. I was thinking I might have to finish cooking it in our charcoal kettle grill, but gladly did not have to.

Through it all, if rather more like the tortoise than the hare, I have kept on working each day on the last movement of my new Symphony No. 3 and am now seven minutes (almost half-way) into what will be the longest of the four movements of my biggest and longest work, to date. The music itself rather weighs on me, as art can do upon the artist; you somehow wonder if you are adequate to the responsibility of its seriousness. As always, the muses keep surprising me. The next phrase of music always seems to just appear in my head and take the music where I did not expect it go! I do not mean to imply that I’m not in control, since I can always (and sometimes do) choose not to use what the muses put into my head. Sorry, muses. But actually, they usually they do win. It seems the deepest feelings in my soul have a mind of their own, and after many years I have learned it’s best to try to keep out of their way, if that makes any sense.

There was some surprising news about the ballet since I last wrote. It turns out that our choreographer (whom I introduced in my November 3^rd diary entry) realized he was double booked for work on a movie and had to withdraw, and so we now have a wonderful new choreographer contracted, named Claire Kretzschmar. Here are some details about her:

Claire Kretzschmar is a choreographer (seen teaching a routine in the black and white photo), a dancer, teacher, podcast host and former soloist with New York City Ballet (NYCB). After attending the School of American Ballet in New York City, she joined the NYCB in 2010, rising to become a soloist dancer in 2018. As a choreographer, she has choreographed for the New York Choreographic Institute, the Vineyard Arts Project, and several others. She is the recipient of the 2017 Janice Levin Award and the 2015 Martin E. Segal Award for rising artists. Here is another photo of her, from her dancing days with the NYCB (in Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker).

The time to be finishing up this ballet music grows short, since it is set to premiere with dancers and orchestra in June of 2024 (performance details to come). I met by phone with our impresario and new choreographer Claire this morning and went through a big chunk of the story, including some of her new revisions to it, and how it will fit to my already-composed pieces, and to review which alterations I need to make to the music and some new pieces I still need to compose.

I can seldom predict what will be in my next Hilltop Diary, two weeks hence. May your own small surprises in the next fortnight be pleasant ones! The season of Advent begins in a few days and, for us, precedes any Christmas craziness. However you go about it, religious or not, I like the idea of setting aside some days of quiet reflection and self-examination before any big celebration. It helps me not to get flustered or forget what’s really important when the craziness begins.