Time has flown by since I last wrote here two weeks ago. “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” That little saying was told to me in a very serious and thoughtful tone (which made it even funnier) by one of my mentors, the famous and then elderly conductor and composer Lucas Foss, as we went for a walk.

Most of this past fortnight has been spent sitting at a computer editing the pit orchestra transcriptions (from the original large orchestra scores) for my ballet. I’m happy to say that the pit score is now done, and I’m creating the woodwind, brass, and other non-string parts, which is the last thing to be done. The full 11 X 17 score in 14 movements came out to 414 pages, which will be something like a fat phone book when printed on heavy paper.

When I see it, I will wonder how I wrote all that music, not to mention a big new symphony, in the last two years. Could it have to do with no longer teaching?! Yes. I did compose a lot while teaching, but I think a lot of music was still backed up inside of me, waiting to get out. Still, many of the great composers were far more prolific than I. Mozart and Schubert, for example. Both died young, in their 30’s, yet each astonishingly produced an encyclopedic set of “complete works” up to five feet long, end to end, on the music library bookshelf.

Back at the Hilltop, this past week has seen two critters not seen here in a few years. I managed to get this photo of the first one, a lone turkey. We used to get flocks of them, but they came in the fall, not the spring. I used to take a bag of dried corn out back, and they’d see me from the distant hillside and come running and gobbling. They would gather all around me as I threw handfuls of corn out to them. The other critter we saw this week was a baby bunny, munching on the flowers on our clover. So I tried to quickly turn on my phone’s camera, but our cat, Oliver, was staring, intensely yellow-eyed, out of the window at the bunny, who saw him and scampered away before I could get a photo. But where there is one bunny, there must be more!

And this morning, I did catch a photo of the first chipmunk I’ve seen at the Hilltop this year. I love seeing them.

We’re also getting a plant that we haven’t seen in years and don’t remember planting — peonies. Who knew! (Photos below)

Also, as predicted, the cicadas are finally emerging here at the Hilltop. We had a few of them buzzing around our heads outdoors, but so far only a few. What is more striking is the loud, steady hum coming from the whole property, like thousands of tiny chirps going on. It almost feels like they are waiting to reach their full number before a signal is given and they all swarm and attack us like in a Hitchcock movie.

This week the production team did an upgrade to our ballet web site at www.raffaellaballet.org and some billboard ads on the streets of South Bend. All of these pros continue to do their work on the sets, costumes, PR, and all the rest. There are starting to be more notices and articles in dance magazines, like this one CLICK HERE. And here is a site where you can buy tickets and read more, the site of the venue, The Morris Center CLICK HERE. Next week I will be interviewed for another publication, and someone is working on a new promo video using previously recorded interviews with me.

In a few hours, however, I must take a couple of days to fly to Denver to give talks to the music teachers of the Archdiocese of Denver tomorrow. One talk is for their teachers’ personal development, called “Narrative and the Transcendentals in Music,” and the other is for their teaching development, called “Virtue Formation in the Music Classroom.” Both topics are derived from my book called The Sound of Beauty: A Classical Composer on Music in the Spiritual Life, which the archdiocese has adopted in their curriculum standards for teaching music.

I hope not to be too dry and academic sounding in these talks, and one way to do that is to play some short clips from various pieces of music as I go along. I was once told never to give a talk about music without playing some music – wise advice! The weather report says it will still be in the 50’s and low 60’s in Denver. Yikes. The coat comes back out of the closet for a couple of days! Wishing you well.