Yes, I have not blogged since November.  Sue me.

This past Friday night, I was hosting the meeting of interviewers for music and visual arts for Saturday’s statewide GHP interviews.  Two of my favorite people in the world, David and Maila Springfield, walked in, and the first thing Maila does, after hugging me with delight, is hand me a CD.

This was pretty momentous.  The CD contained her performance of her world premiere performance of Six Preludes (no fugues), which of course were written for her.  I got through the meeting somehow, then got into my car and popped the CD in.

The first thing you notice is that it’s a live performance and nothing at all like the computer version we’ve all come to know and love.  And the second thing you notice, after repeated listenings, is that even with the inevitable mistakes of a live performance, this music is pretty damn fine.

If you’re all very good, I may upload my favorites of Maila’s interpretations alongside the computerized versions just so you can hear how astounding a gifted human musician is.

But today, I need to talk about my Lichtenbergian goals for 2012.

We had our Annual Meeting back on December 16, and my life was just too crazy to think about writing about it.  (I actually had completely forgotten about it until this weekend.)  Every now and then I’ll think, “I should blog about that,” but I don’t.  Most of what goes on in my life these days is work related, or extremely personal, and of course I have never blogged about those kinds of things.

So: Lichtenbergian goals.

I think that of my 2011 goals I achieved one: finish the cello sonata.  That was kind of cheating, since I had started it in 2010 and it was due in the spring of 2011 anyway.  The only saving grace, Lichtenbergianism-speaking-wise, is that I didn’t finish it until the fall.

I knew my record would be pretty shoddy.  After all, since April my life has been swamped by GHP, and I was lucky to finish the cello sonata at all.  So I was sanguine about having to face my fellow Lichtenbergians and admit to cras melior est for everything I had claimed to be interested in finishing.  And I knew that my life in 2012 was not going to be any calmer.  For a while it looked as if I might be ramping up a production of William Blake’s Inn for international consumption, but that fell through, and whatever else I had on my mind, GHP would continue to be a Red Queen experience for at least another six months.

So I had decided that I was going to lowball my goals for 2012 just out of self defense.  And “lowball” is being generous.

My 2012 Lichtenbergian goals:

• Finish a set of piano pieces called Five Easier Pieces as both a companion and an apology for Six Preludes
• Do something about the westpoint in the labyrinth (I believe those are the actual words reported to me by Jeff Bishop when in fact I could not remember what my second goal was.)

That’s it.

In my defense, I completely forgot about the percussion piece that I was asked to write for this summer (along with the other composers on the GHP staff), so if we like, we can count that as a third goal.  But otherwise, that’s it.

Going to be an easy year, yes sir.