En Charette, 13 Years Since

 Pitches idea for a new sitcom: “The Tightrope-Walking Dead”

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

Angry at a bad review, Norman Mailer punched Gore Vidal at a party. On the floor, Gore said “Once again, words fail Norman Mailer.”

9 August 2012: Official start to work on a new piece for 17 winds & harp.

Thus on Twitter I declared the beginning of the Opus 107, In the Artist’s Studio (there’s a wide world in there.) In fact, I had started work the day before. It’s a piece I set to writing, purely for the joy of it, when I was full of elation for what a successful piece Out in the Sun had proven. That piece had begun life as a four-ish-minute exposition which I wrote simply because I liked the thought of the instrumentation. This again was exactly the case with the new piece. It was obliquely inspired by Hindemith’s Op. 49 Konzertmusik for Piano, Two Harps and Brass. I just felt that I wanted to compose a piece for harp with a passel of winds.13 years on, I can report that the piece has never yet been performed, but of course that is the risk of writing a piece of such peculiar, nay unique, scoring for which there was never any actual call. Bother all that, I’m mighty pleased to have composed it.