Hilltop Diary, March 26, 2025

June is bustin’ out all over at the Hilltop – in March! We have an invasion of daffodils! Here (below) are a few of them in our front yard. There are still plenty of hyacinths in bloom, too, both purple and pink. But there was a cold snap a few days ago. Begone, coldness! This photo makes me think of William Wordsworth’s lovely daffodil poem. Here is the first stanza:

I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils; / Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

We did some feasting on Irish food on St. Patrick’s Day and the rest of that week – Dublin Coddle with my homemade banger sausages, then Corned Beef ‘n Cabbage, plus Irish Soda Bread. Guiness. Because corned beef packages were on sale the day after St. P’s, I picked up an extra one and froze it for some future time.

Other than that, there is not much to tell on the Hilltop home front. Mainly, I’ve been composing many hours a day, but yesterday I did also find time to pick up a new (used) car, shown here, to replace my near-dead one. It’s a burgundy-colored Honda CR-V, which I discovered stands for “Comfortable Recreational Vehicle.” Who knew! It’s bigger than a baby compact hatchback and a little shorter in length by eight inches than a full-size SUV. I’m one of those people who hates to make car payments and would rather save up and pay cash for a used one in like-new condition, like this one – so that’s what I did.

For the second time, I used CarMax and was again happy with them. They give you a complete history of the used car so that you know exactly what you are buying. This one’s plush on the inside and loaded with Bluetooth, hands-free phone, backup camera, and more techy stuff than I will ever be likely to use in my luddite dotage. I haven’t used cruise control for years, anyway, because there is so much stop and go traffic on our Nashville highways now that it’s not worth the trouble.

There have been a couple of professional disappointments since I last wrote here, but these happen on a somewhat regular basis in my line of work, so I will humbly share these new ones. First, I mentioned last time that my third symphony had been offered a slot on an orchestra concert in Cologne, Germany, but since then it got cancelled, who knows why! Too bad, but I roll with the punches and trust it just wasn’t meant to be, and there will be other performances.

Second, I THOUGHT the planned version of an album of my ballet music Raffaella had fallen through! Oh no! But now it appears a gracious donor may rescue the day, we’ll soon see. The musicians union didn’t like the contract that all the parties, including the orchestra members themselves, had gladly agreed to, go figure. At least, I thought, the YouTube of the full ballet is online , and anyone can simply put that on HERE and just listen to the music without watching the video – for example, while riding in your car. So at least the video could also function as an audio album. However, we shall see if our possible donor will step in to the rescue of the album. UPDATE: Our donor has most kindly agreed, and so the ballet album is a go!

It is true that these kinds of disappointments can turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Moreover, while I have always had to do a certain amount of promoting of my music after it has been written, I don’t lose any sleep over that and regard my main job as the composer to be actually composing the music. That is, after all, the thing I wake up in the morning wanting to do for several hours most days, and it’s what I really most enjoy. I tell myself that Beethoven could have been more of a careerist and done a lot more promotion and been more famous in his lifetime, had he only written six symphonies instead of nine, but then we wouldn’t have his last three symphonies now. Freude!

On a positive note, my record company informed me a few days ago that my new album of Symphony No. 3: English has won a Silver Medal in the “Global Music Awards,” a competition I imagine very few have ever heard of (including me, I confess), into which they had kindly entered my album. My main feeling of gratitude is to Parma Recordings for choosing it to represent their label. We’ll routinely enter the album into the Grammys in the fall, of course, but with few expectations. The famous American composer Charles Ives was grossly neglected for most of his career but finally received the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1947, a few years before his death, and he is famous for his response, “Prizes are for boys, and I’m all grown up.” Even so, as a graduate student I was happy to win a national “Charles Ives Scholarship” (I really wasn’t yet all grown up).

Thanks to the “Shades of Classics” radio program on CKUW Radio in Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada) for playing the Symphony No. 3: English album on March 9^th and 16^th.

Coming soon! I’m coming down the home stretch now on the final measures of movement one of my new Symphony No. 4: Scenes from an Enchanted Lake! (I had first composed movement two.) Look for the movement one audio mockup here in my next diary entry. Two movements done means half of the whole long symphony will soon be done. I’m really happy with this one, because it feels and sounds perhaps the most natural one so far. I close today’s entry with an epilogue from my program note: