Each year the members of the Lichtenbergian Society have their Annual Meeting around the fire in the Labyrinth, and part of our ritual—which involves much toasting to all the things—is setting our creative goals for the coming year and evaluating the goals we set for this past year.

All in all, I didn’t do too badly with 2014’s goals.  Of course, with my permanent retirement, there’s no reason I shouldn’t have done more, but hey, it’s Lichtenbergianism.

Five Easier Pieces

Didn’t get to them.  I don’t think I even took a stab at them.  I certainly don’t have them.

song for John Tibbetts

This one I did.  It’s entitled “Your Beauty,” and can be found here.  I don’t know whether it actually works; the key to its effectiveness (if any) is in the live interpretation, and the computer doesn’t come close to being able to do that.   But I think it’s solid enough.

SUN TRUE FIRE

See, here’s the thing with SUN TRUE FIRE.  I was going to spend all of 2014 noodling with the text and experimenting with snippets by taking bits of other people’s music and seeing if I could replicate the effects that I admired: orchestration or harmony or counterpoint, etc.  I kind of started, but then Seven Dreams of Falling came my way.  As a Lichtenbergian, I was honor bound to postpone one work by creating another.  SUN TRUE FIRE isn’t dead; it is sleeping.

Waste books

Another success story.  I have used the Field Notes notebooks for every project, including morning pages (at which I have not been assiduous) and actual waste books (at which I have been slightly better).  Some, like the notebooks on Christmas Carol or “Your Beauty,” have only a few pages in them.  But I filled three notebooks with thoughts and designs and instructions and references for Burning Man, and as we keep 3 Old Men moving forward I expect to fill  more.  I love my notebooks.

Burning Man

Here’s the thing about Burning Man.  I planned for it, I got tickets for it, my application to be a theme camp was accepted, it was golden—and then we couldn’t go.  Undeterred, we pushed on to Alchemy and it was amazing.  Because we were so successful there, and because we intend to keep the band together for future regional burns, I’m counting this one as my most successful goal of the year.

Christmas Carol

The goal was to reconstruct the music for A Christmas Carol for Newnan Theatre Company’s revival of the show, the first in eleven years.  I did that.  I delivered a complete set of scores and parts, plus the script, back in August.  Due to the exigencies of community theatre, the production didn’t quite get the music back on its feet, but I got the job done.  We’ll see about next year.

Next up: 2015 goals!