Vanity, vanity
Hellhound update: they are holding at better* but they are still far from, uh, normal, and that’s on both the pills and the invalid food. So I’m not feeling exactly chirpy and carefree. They did manage to drag me all over the landscape this morning in standard hellhound fashion, however, which is a positive sign.
And I have an appointment with the dentist tomorrow. Sigh.
Meanwhile . . . if you can’t leave the house because you are chained to your hellhounds, you might as well play the piano**. And I had a short week this week–my lesson was today instead of Friday. I hate short piano weeks: six days between piano lessons is about three and a quarter hours in real time. But I’ve finally got frelling Finale not only loaded and running but Computer Men finally found my old music files.*** Computer Men had tried to be clever and look for them in terms of a bulge of memory use since they weren’t turning up where they thought they should be, and I was trying to explain that they would be using up .000000000000002% of available memory and wouldn’t create a bulge unless you have an electron microscope and the virtual equivalent of pointy-ended tweezers, but in terms of blood-stained hours of input I wanted those files.†
And I have also, this week, unexpectedly jerked myself up one of those developmental stages in software parley. As I was saying to Oisin today, I knew Finale would make me crazy; I have based a career on not tackling large ugly speckly green tentacled software with attitude. I did it once with Word†† and that was enough.††† But you can’t learn just enough of Finale to slap in a few spots on some parallel horizontal lines with mysterious squiggles on the left margins, you have to learn great thumping‡ swathes of the thing to use it at all. And for the first time this (short) week I have begun to feel that it and I might eventually come to a rapprochement–a working partnership–for the first time I was, in tiny little slivers of time, using it the way I’ve hoped to use it–getting the notes down and playing them back to see how it sounds, instead of being hysterically fixated on getting the notes down at all, where I want them, in the order and time that I want them, failing to do so and eventually, through attrition, forgetting what I was trying to do in the first place. Sigh. I’ve known it was going to be one vicious ratbag of a learning curve, but I’m good at obstinacy, I ring change patterns on handbells. And this composing thing has really got its teeth into me, speaking of rats and tentacles. So I knew there would be lots of headaches and screaming, learning to use composing software, but I’d decided, before I wheedled poor Peter into buying it for me, that it was going to be worth it ‡‡. Eventually.
And then I was seriously demoralised when the not-old laptop met an early demise and there was a Finale hiatus and when I was at long last reunited with my software it was way too much like learning to use the wretched thing all over again from the beginning. And I was so excited‡‡‡, when bits of it were beginning to make sense§ that I got the whole first verse of Lyke Wake put in, and the rest of Gypsy Rover, thus giving me the opportunity to twiddle the ending of Gypsy a little, despite having only three and a quarter real-time hours to do it in this week.
So I went in this afternoon kind of geared up and bouncy–which, after what the rest of the week has been like, you will understand, I could use. Which is my only excuse for blogging about the following at all, and I’ve been trying to tell myself all afternoon that I should just shut up§§ and practise British restraint and humility and lack of pretension etc. BAG THAT.
Right. So we went through what I’d brought, and Oisin had some useful things to say§§§, and he also played what I’d written¤ so I could hear how it sounded played by a human being. ¤¤ And I found all of this rather exhilarating, because, you know, it’s working. I’m using my composing software to compose. And my teacher likes what I’m writing and calls it interesting, and wants copies. So as I was unplugging my laptop and stuffing manuscript pages back into my increasingly battered notebook I burst out, I wish there was a way to earn money doing this, because it’s probably the only way I could claw loose more time to spend on it.
Ah, mm, hmm, said Oisin–and I said, embarrassed, no, no, don’t worry, that was a joke. And he said, well, actually, it’s not impossible. You’re producing interesting stuff. But you need a body of work first.
Eeeeeep.
* * *
* Which includes not getting me up in the night/what passes for night in this household, which some people would call morning
** When you’re not working on your next great novel.
*** Thank you, Terpsichore, or Euterpe^, or whoever.
^ Okay, you Microsoft sheepwits+, explain to me why you got one Muse into your dictionary but not another one?
+ Sorry, B_twin_1
† And guess where they finally found them! In the old Finale files in my defunct laptop’s hard drive! Fancy!
†† And have been trying to ignore, to the best of my ability, the mostly-irritating changes in subsequent versions
††† Let me show you my scars. They’re sort of round and crosshatchy looking, like the dead people in The Man Trap^ after the salt creature kills them.
^ Star Trek: the original, and second-silliest+
+ Star Trek TNG is silliest.
‡ green, spotty, tentacled, etc
‡‡ And lots of husband and hellhounds hiding under the furniture and wincing
‡‡‡ And so badly needed distraction from hellhounds and prospective root canals
§ And may I say this is entirely down to Oisin? If I were trying to figure the sucker out on my own, hellhounds and husband would have dug a bunker in the back garden by now.
§§ And then I spent two hours this evening change-ringing on handbells and crawled away from that experience feeling dumber than paint, which is fairly standard for my handbell experiences, and goes to prove that obstinacy can be a euphemism for masochism.
§§§ As he always does. Sometimes it’s stuff that I don’t know or don’t know how to think about^ but sometimes it’s . . . embarrassing. Last week when I’d brought another line or two of my first stab at Lyke Wake he said mildly, and your word for the week is rhythm, which he wrote in the corner of my manuscript page. It wasn’t till I got home again and was looking at it that I realised the entire page and a half was relentlessly in crotchets^^ with the very occasional minim^^^. Oops. This week when I proudly pointed out a few modest sprays of quavers^^^^ and even a semibreve^^^^^ or two, he said, well, you might have wanted the piece to sound like the ruling Russian junta’s answer to Shostakovich, but it’s my job to help you find out if what you’ve written is what you want.
^ Yet
^^ Quarter notes
^^^ Half note
^^^^ Eighth notes
^^^^^ Whole note
¤ Which is how I found out that I’d inadvertently written one bar that’s more or less impossible to play. I had no idea. I’m so used to having to play everything one figured-out chord at a time, because I’m such a dismal pianist, it hadn’t occurred to me it might be hard for someone who can play.
¤¤ There must be a way to de-plonk the left hand in Finale. A blog reader recently emailed me–apologies, if you read this, that I haven’t answered you yet–that the basic playback in Finale or any composing software isn’t set up to sound great; if you want to make beautiful noise you have to get into the MIDI file thing and all, and that learning curve is going to be like climbing a glass mountain in cashmere socks. Also I don’t want to get into glorious electronic reproduction: I want a good fairy to wave a magic wand and make me a pianist.
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