Saturday, 18 January I’ve been so absorbed for the past few days that I forgot to submit my bimonthly article to New Zealand Musician Magazine. Hopefully they won’t notice and let it slide until Monday. But I’m always forgetting little deadlines and such when I’m this committed to a big one. It’s only about quarter…
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Friday, 17 January Checking in exactly the same time as yesterday at 9:42 p.m. Scored another song in one day: Leo Sayer’s “More Than I Can Say.” I asked for this song especially from the Music Director, and was pleased to get it for two reasons: first, when I listened to it while vetting the…
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Thursday, 16 January 9:42 p.m. after a long day. It’s good to get back to this journal after a few days off, somewhat enforced. After leaving Collingwood, I dropped in on a composer friend of mine who lived not too far from there, around the Tasman Bay area where the weather was a bit nicer.…
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Thursday, 9 January It’s 4:20 a.m. as I start this journal entry. Usually around this time of the morning, I like to be starting my workday. But in fact I’ve just finished up a song. It’s all due to the previously mentioned logistics forced upon my schedule by vacationing in this place. This morning, I…
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Tuesday, 7 January, Part 2 After re-scoring the Keating yesterday, I sent the whole thing along with the Tubular Bells score to my MD, and got a good response back. That’s what matters, really. A thumbs-up at this point in my career is more about the relief of saving me from rewrites than it is…
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Tuesday, 7 January, Part 1 I’ve been slack about my journal for the past two days, and finally catching up today. Well, I did finish the Ronan Keating song “When You Say Nothing At All” in one day on Sunday the 5th, but strangely it was a lot more of an effort than the awesome…
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Saturday, 4 January 2013 A very exciting day. It’s hard to complain about a day that starts good, flows well, and ends great. Today I decided to orchestrate Tubular Bells, and I made it all the way through 128 bars and 3.5 minutes. I was helped enormously in this by the semi-orchestral nature of the…
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Friday, 3 January 2013 – Collingwood, New Zealand Day 1 of work on the Mission Estate orchestration job. It’s good to be back to it again, though the circumstances are a little strange. It’s 4:50pm as I start this journal entry, leaning back from my little workdesk in a little cabin on the South Island…
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By early 1970, director Ken Russell had everything going for him. His third commercial feature film, “Women In Love,” was nominated for 6 Oscars, including a nod to him as Best Director, and scored Glenda Jackson her first Oscar for Best Actress. Meanwhile, “Song of Summer,” his biopic of the last years of composer Frederick…
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It’s all about perspective. The true telling of a life story is always from the outside looking in, even for an autobiography. The person telling his life story is the prime source for memories of what was once a different human being, seeing things through a telescope smudged with age and out-of-focus through distance. In…
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