This entry comes, yet again, while straining to meet a deadline in my “small business” (very small, meaning just me) as a freelance classical composer. I am working almost non-stop to edit the players’ parts for my new symphony to be recorded Sept. 7 and 8. But I’m confident that with some more elbow grease it should all get done, as I’m presently almost done with the third movement of four. On the heels of having this same experience with my ballet, it feels like I’m out of the frying pan and into the fire, as the saying goes.

The score for this symphony is only two-thirds as long as the ballet. But the 92-piece orchestra is more than twice the size of the ballet pit orchestra, and a thousand pages of players’ parts have to be printed and bound. At least with classical music, I wonder how many people listen to it without thinking much about the fact that behind it are so many pages of sheet music that performers had to read from.

This past fortnight also saw the momentous and long-awaited conclusion of the business end of the project. I just made the last payments, totaling $35,000., in my production costs. Some of that went to the orchestra (musicians, recording engineers, and staff), and some of it went to Parma Recordings for editing, mixing, and mastering the raw audio files that will be coming from the recording sessions, also for the CD art work and booklet, advertising campaigns, and other expenses. The fantastic art director who designed the covers and booklets for both The Sea Knows and Symphony No. 2: Tales from the Realm of Faerie wrote to me yesterday that he’s already working on concepts for the new album art. I cannot wait to see them.

Gone, even in popular music styles, are the days when a record company would front all of these production costs and then recoup them from the first sales profits. That is because too many of their albums were failing to break even, and the companies were risking and losing too much money, as the world became more crowded with so many wannabe’s and consumer music choices. Nowadays, the “artist” must pay the overhead costs up front.

In classical music, though, the recording costs are so high and the sales so low that to my knowledge no classical album has ever broken even! Orchestras have always depended upon philanthropy to make them. The financial reward of doing them comes rather because an orchestra with recordings seems to have more prestige, and that can translate into more donors giving more toward their annual operating budget.

Plane tickets and hotel reservations remain to be secured for the recording sessions, as soon as we know whether Crystal’s schedule will allow her to come to Europe, too. In the photos below, the control booth that I’ll be in is shown on the left photo, and you can see a window on the right side of the booth that looks down into the studio with the orchestra musicians, shown in the photo on the right.

A bit scary, but also exciting. However, as it will be my second album recorded here with this same friendly team of professionals and these great musicians, I’d say it’s much more exciting than scary. I also have my same great conductor and friend, Robin Fountain. But the scary part is more in the music itself, when they play it – Will it sound good? Even when I know the orchestration is going to work, I imagine, like Charlie Brown, that I’ll either be “the hero or the goat.”

Well, that was a lot of business stuff, wasn’t it? But I hope it was interesting. On to other news, Crystal had a very fun “sis-cation” (vacation with her half-sister) in the Denver/Aspen area and has been grabbing the last opportunities of summer break to have tea with friends before school resumes, plus prepping for two upcoming show auditions. In fact, her school year has already resumed these last two days in the form of teacher prep days, only for the teachers, not yet the students.

Back home, our poor garden has suffered from both of us being too busy to do much with it, but at least our cat is still alive and loved, and there still might be some time to trim some bushes before winter. There appears to be a rabbit living in a plastic corrugated pipe (I see him go in there) that lies on the ground to channel the water from the roof downspout out into the yard, but the gutters are so full of leaves that when it rains nothing comes down the downspout to drown the rabbit, anyway, so God bless him.

Finally, I must report on two other critters here at the hilltop. We are suddenly beset by hummingbirds! So I filled our neglected hummingbird feeder with their nectar and hung it out for them, right outside the kitchen window, and they are now all over it. Secondly, the deer population has grown into nothing less than a herd, and the males are now big bucks with big antlers!  I got a fuzzy, zoomed-in photo of one of the latter (R), and of a doe drinking from our fountain (L). We also have two tiny spotted fawns, inseparable and always out exploring without their mama in sight. I call them the Bambi Twins. And now, having come near to my thousand words, I will bid you goodbye!