In the way of clarifying (post-dated post)

[ I composed this post on 23 Jan 2017, but the blogger app on my phone is – oh, let’s do be polite – buggy, so it hung out in cyberlimbo all this while.  Posting it today, because I find it an interesting snapshot at this remove, four months later and the second, third & fourth movements of the Op.136 now in the can. ]

Gentle Reader, my conscious is mildly pricked at the thought that, in my post of 21 January the discussion of daily (or, more accurately daily-ish) work habits gave more of a “heroic” cast to my work than is really justifiable.  Because the recently completed Symphony is not simply a result of “a little work each day.”  Well, that was quite possibly true of the first movement;  but an honest review of the remainder (and simple majority) of the score shows that I wrote almost 85% of the Larghetto second movement while I was out of the office on PTO the week after Christmas, and that the lion’s share of the heavy lifting on the Vivo assai third movement, I performed over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend.

Nevertheless, a combination of putting the time off from the full-time job to good musical account, and having good compositional work habits around the ‘inconvenience’ of the gainful employment situations, is what made possible the completion of theSymphony in good order.

What now?  The composer is ready (and indeed keen) to apply these methods to completion of the current large-scale works-in-progress, the Clarinet Sonata and (yes, really) White Nights.  I am inclined to begin with the Sonata, since prospects for its performance are more apparently immediate.

It is that time of year, when I need to have some music in the folders of my handbell choir (rehearsal to resume this Sunday), and I do have an arrangement in mind, which will occupy me somewhat this week;  but I believe I can also begin getting my mind back inside the second movement of the Cl Sonata.