This time I will be my briefest ever. Not much to tell. The last two weeks have mostly consisted of me sitting at my computer preparing and editing the players’ parts for the upcoming ballet, Raffaella, A Fairytale Ballet. The string parts were done and sent to the orchestra a couple of weeks ago, and by the end of this week, so will be the eight woodwind parts and two keyboards. After that, only a few days should take care of the brass and percussion, who do not play as much and have simpler parts. Pictured below is the “study” score I made for our conductor, who is spending hours leaning the music at his desk before he must conduct it. This is legal size, but the notes are still too small to use with an orchestra, so the final score will be 11 X 17 and over 400 pages long.

The computer automatically extracts and spits out the individual parts from the full score, but then the layout must be tidied up manually, including a rest on each lower right page, so they are free to turn the page there. After every time they have not played in a while, to help them keep their place, one must put in “cues,” showing someone else’s part in very small notes.

Each player has a part for each of the fifteen movements, and the pages must all be numbered and put into a big booklet of all the movements. We are talking 42 players in the pit. The keyboard 1 part came out to 78 pages by itself!  So we are talking about around a thousand pages that must be hand edited by yours truly. I guess that’s why they say composing is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

I did take time to do an interview for the ballet PR last week and may have another one coming up next week, and they released another promo video featuring an interview they videotaped with me a few months ago. You can see some of these and buy tickets at the ballet web site HERE. They also have some of the PR on a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61556003920808

Otherwise, it’s pretty much nose to the grindstone with editing sheet music. But since I last wrote, I took a two-day trip to Denver, where I had agreed months ago to give two talks on music at a conference, and the people there were so appreciative that it was well worth doing.  I was also asked to speak on music in the San Francisco Bay area and at an event in Nashville, both in July, and I agreed, though part of me doesn’t want to take the time away from composing. But I do enjoy it, and the out of town talks pay pretty well, plus travel expenses.

Crystal is learning her part for a new show at the TN Performing Arts Center called “The Answer” in which she won a lead role. It runs in mid June, and they will also be rehearsing and recording the music for an album in a studio soon. She has also been working hard to up her game for an upcoming classic musical audition (not allowed to say which one), and her school and full-time teaching duties will be done in two more days!

Maybe you can relate to the fact that after fourteen years in our house, things are needing to be replaced. This time it’s our “new” (now not so new) wall oven. We have an insurance policy on repairing all our appliances, so a guy came to check it out. He could not find the control panel part it needs online, and so he turned it over to their “research department” to try and find one. They have until June 10 (2½ weeks from now) to locate one, during which time we have no oven. If they do not find the part, we get a new oven. I’m rooting for that to happen. Who knows what other appliance will go out next? 

A while back my friend and master sculptor Deron Martell graced me with this bronze cast of my right (composing) hand. Beethoven, of course, gets a bust of his whole head, but I’m perfectly happy to commemorate my hand! I do use my hand with a pencil, rather than fingers on a computer keyboard to compose the music on paper, and I only put it into the computer after a decent amount has been done the old fashioned way first.