Working on this past week:
- Practicing: upcoming concert music…upcoming concert music…bit more about that below…
- Listening: I’m obsessed with this harp arrangement of Britten’s setting of the Corpus Christi Carol. It’s a weird carol! Gorgeous, gorgeous setting by Britten. Part of a sort of melancholy winter playlist I’ve been collecting lately, with some lovely chamber music and a few new discoveries.
- Writing/recording: I’ve been on a mission to try to build some systems around my writing and arranging work. There are lots and lots of songs I’ve either chipped away at or worked out for a live gig, but that haven’t seen any final recording or publishing. It’s the kind of work I tend to think of as boring, but it’s fun to revisit some of this old work, and exciting to see a path to getting it out the door. More on that to come.
Since December, my practicing has been swampted by upcoming concert music–and even now there’s a ton of fun music coming up (Brahms piano quartet! several contemporary Latin American composers, Mendelssohn Hensel and Haydn and Dvořák quartets, two musicals, a bunch of orchestra stuff…love it!) But I need to find a new set of music that’s just for me; making practice time for myself feeds a lot of good things in my playing, even when it feels pushed aside by work urgencies.
Last year, I read Agnes Broomé’s translation of Collected Works, by Lydia Sandgren, and I still keep thinking about it. Brilliant, rich book.
There are some connections between all these things in thinking about art as artifact vs. art as experience–and what that means to me as a musician vs. as an audience member (or as a photographer). On the prowl for more good writing there.