Well, whattaya know? I did it.

Here is the mp3 of the underscoring of the Epilogue. I already hear some changes I should make, but I think I will refrain.

Traveling as we were today to Greensboro, I didn’t get a lot done. I thought I would at least sketch out the music for the Epilogue, but with Grayson’s iPod playing, I couldn’t hear what I was writing, not even through my headphones.

So I settled for marking my score for slide transitions. Not a lot, but it needed to be done. Perhaps Ginny’s iPod will be quieter on the way home tomorrow and I can get the Epilogue started.

I looked at the string quartet again, but didn’t really do anything with it.

I didn’t get a lot done today: we went to the Apple Store to shop for speakers for Grayson, part of his Christmas. I did go through the music earlier and write the times from the sound files for major sections of the score. Should be a little help Tuesday in working through the whole thing.

Oh, and I rewrote the measure in the opening number where we couldn’t get the pickup note to the 6/8 time, starting the 6/8 a measure earlier and giving us a pulse to get us into it.

At some point, I need to go through and mark the score for where the slideshow gets clicked.

And at some point, I have to write the underscoring for the Epilogue.

Tonight we met again, Marc, Mary Frances, and I, to go over the music. It was most helpful.

We decided that I needed to write at least some music to play under the Epilogue, while we did a choral reading of it. This was after deciding that the Epilogue was pretty necessary to complete the work. I guess I can do that in the van on the way to Greensboro this weekend.

I sent out a memo to the whole octet, outlining the notes and decisions about each piece that they need to be aware of before we meet next Tuesday.

I sent out email invitations to the Newnan Crossing staff, media specialists, and GHP folk. I got an email from an elementary music teacher whose media specialist had shown her the invite, asking if she could forward it to all the other music teachers. Sure, I said.

Have I mentioned that the dance studio has no chairs?

Tonight we had half the octet meet to go over the music for A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. Ginny, Malcolm, Marc, and I met to learn parts and try out our solos.

I had set up my computer, iPod, boombox, speakers, and keyboard in the dining room. We sat around the table and went from piece to piece, stopping to pluck out parts and get a little surer.

We weren’t bad. It will be interesting to put the whole group together next week to see what it sounds like. Marc and I are both strong basses, while Malcolm is a light tenor, so we’ll have to pull back and give Matthew some room to balance us out when he joins us.

The music stands up very well. I have fears that it’s going to sound crummy with people singing words: I try to plan it so that it will all work right, but the truth is that I only hear the piano/orchestra/”choral ahs” when I’m working on it. That’s a lot different than humans trying to articulate the lyrics.

In 2. Blake’s Wonderful Car Delivers Us Wonderfully Well, for example, I think the first section could be sung straight through, but it’s very rushed with no room for a real breath. And so we divided it up between two alternating groups. It will sound fine that way, and I probably should have realized that to begin with.

One cool tool we used tonight was a little program called djay. I blogged about it before, saying that I would probably forget that I had it when I needed it, but I did remember it. It’s actually a double DJ turntable thingie which hooks into your iTunes collection. You can drag files to the two turntables and do your mixin’ thang in all kinds of interesting ways.

I however only needed it to do one thing: slow down the complicated passages without changing the pitch. We tackled both the end of Sun & Moon Circus and the storm sequence of Tale of the Tailor that way, and it was a great help.

Tomorrow is a workday, and I think I’m going to be at loose ends most of the day. I have to print out a new score for me and one for the techie, even though no one’s volunteered to be my tech person yet, and I think I will also go through my score, listening to the sound files and marking times. That will make it a lot easier to find the sections we need to go back to tomorrow night and next week.

I actually wrote music today. As promised, I wrote a small prelude to go with the opening title slides of the lyrics slideshow for First Look. It’s not the best, and I’m not sure it matches the slides in a way that is most appropriate, but it’s pretty. It starts out with a deconstructed version of the Blake theme (from 1. William Blake’s Inn), then seques into the B theme from 10. Milky Way, which repeats in a different key, then subsides into chords, ending with a solo flute rendering of the Blake theme.

I would like to go see the Metropolitan Opera’s Magic Flute tomorrow in Lawrenceville, which is the closest movie theatre broadcasting the performance in high definition. The production is designed/directed by Julie Taymor, so there would be lots to marvel at and steal from.