Just a bit of music news – They say the new Symphony No. 3 album will be available for PRE-ORDERS on Amazon in January! I’ll post here with a link when it happens and, no doubt, shamelessly beg everyone to place a pre-order! Why are pre-orders better than regular ones? Because all the pre-orders flood into Billboard Magazine at once on the official release date, and if a good number of pre-orders have accumulated, the album stands a chance of making its debut on the charts for that week. Sadly, or gladly for me, this is because it doesn’t take very many sales to make the top ten in classical music — maybe 100 albums that week, according to a Washington Post article I saw, but I think that might go as low as 20! But that means your order can tip the scales! Thanks in advance!

With my gratitude, there will be bonus incentives for pre-orders, whether you order a download MP3 or a physical CD on Amazon. However, I have no idea yet what to offer. If you have any suggestions about what kind of bonuses you or others might like, please comment below or write me.

The Billboard charts bring little, if any, fame or money in classical music, mind you, but it is one of the very few ways to get more people curious enough to listen to the music. My goal is simply to share uplifting music in more people’s lives, so as to try and leave this world a little more beautiful than I found it. I have much more to compose, to feel I’ve quite done that. In classical music, we composers don’t have all the promotions that pop stars have, like “merch” or impressing people theatrically with a music video.

We continue to enjoy our daily deer visits – they are already munching down on the acorns now falling from the two big oaks in our front yard. As for this regular visitor on the left, relaxing every afternoon in the shade of the tree out back, I imagine if he could talk he would quote President Harry Truman: “The buck stops here.” Yuck-yuck. Another regular client is one or both of the “Bambi twins,” who come to drink out of our fountain. They are getting bigger but still have their spots. This morning two big bucks were drinking out of it together.

Crystal and I have both been hunkering down with work since I last wrote. We even labored on Labor Day, at least during the day, but that evening we were treated to this crab boil feast at some friends’ house. The rest of the “normal” days (if there ever are any normal ones), Crystal has taught her pre-K through 8^th grade kids music and theater class by day, and then about three nights a week driven after school to the theater to rehearse Guys and Dolls, which runs in November. I will post the details and ticket link nearer to then.

In the service of art (that’s a little facetious), I have completely dismantled and cleaned my horribly overgrown home composing studio (that’s true) here at the Hilltop. I painfully but ruthlessly threw away things that I had hoarded for years – old concert programs that were meaningful to me, and still are but don’t need to be kept, countless now-worthless little gizmos like adapters and little cords for long-lost devices, old nasty ballpoint pens, cheap souvenirs from vacations, instruction manuals for obsolete software, and mountains of dust. I put in a new white computer table that rises and lowers by motor with the touch of a button, so I can stand or sit when I work! And now I have four screens, the biggest three of which act like one continuous screen. Love it.

The result has been not only the creation of much more usable space but nothing less than a psychological catharsis, a sweeping away of the cobwebs of my mind and a lifting of the weight of past struggles for improvement. As each memento went into the trash, I had a moment of nostalgia about it and then let it go! Now I do feel once more lightened and renewed and somehow at the beginning of some kind of fresh phase as an artist, also signaled by the completion of two milestone projects, a big ballet and a big symphony. Notice in this photo, near the ceiling, is my model train that can go all around the room! There is a lot of equipment below the white table and to the left, including an external audio interface, a couple of multi-terabyte external hard drives, two studio headphone sets to go with the studio monitor speakers, a camera for online meetings and podcasts, and a pair of Shure PG58 microphones. Mostly, it’s all clean and tidy — I wonder how long it will stay that way.

Back to the upcoming recording, there have been a couple of the usual kinds of flies in the ointment, as they say. I had to reformat the 203-page score of my symphony file with larger and darker notes, because when it was printed it was too faded and tiny looking for the conductor to read! I had some expert coaching by phone from a professional music editor on how to fix the problem in my Sibelius Notation program. Strangely, I’ve never had this problem before. Then it took an entire, stressful day to make the changes and another $312 (ouch) to reprint and bind two big scores, but to my relief these reprints look great. There were also some travel arrangements to make for the trip to Bulgaria, including my hotel. The currency in Bulgaria is called the lev, not the Euro, though they belong to the EU.

Then, when the orchestra section leaders received and saw their sections’ parts, they all did a double take and said, “Whoa, this symphony is going to be harder to play than we thought! Our booked session time is not going to be enough to play it well.” So they asked for an additional fee that assures every musician must come to the first session having already practiced a lot and able to play their part without mistakes. Many of their parts are around thirty pages long. I personally think they could have done it fine, because they are all monster sight-readers, but I was eager to pay this fee, because indeed it will make the sessions feel much smoother and have a more relaxed vibe and a better performance on the album. These are already top Eastern European professionals, many of them trained in rigorous Russian conservatories. They are all cream-of-the-crop players from thirteen professional orchestras in the region. As a side job for some extra income, they have been hand selected to come together in Sofia’s fabulous orchestral studio (Bulgarian National Radio Studio 1) to record albums and movie sound tracks, even some lately for Hollywood in the U.S.

I leave for Sofia a week from tomorrow (the 19^th), so, two weeks from now, when I hope to be back and to write here, I will give a report on the trip and the recording sessions with some photos to share. Please wish me safe travels, and I will wish you well in whatever plans you have in the next two weeks, too!