We Three Kings sounded great in rehearsal with the Parliament Choir last night, and it seems as if they are really enjoying it. It is meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek at times, while still being as faithful as possible to the words. I would hope that people might go away from it with their view of the carol changed, possibly for the better. The orchestration is going along well, and should be ready in time for the players to run it on Sunday.
Meanwhile at home, kitty the scarred cat is healing nicely, and normal service has been resumed. Without going into too much anatomical detail, let us just say that wounds are healing and that he is very much back to his perky self. Little does he know that he needs to go back to the vet for a follow up visit tomorrow morning, but I doubt this will be anything but routine.
I taught a couple of classes at King’s, London yesterday, my first time there, and bumped into both of my former students who are currently studying there. It was very enjoyable, a reasonably relaxed romp through some aural tests and listening, but it was fun to talk about music to people who are more or less at the beginning of their journey as musicians. I hope that I might be asked back at some point.
After the rigours of the past two weeks, the 6 o’clock starts and the 10 o’clock returns home, which have been hard on everybody chez Nick, cats and humans included, today is that most blessed of things, a day off, and I plan to spend it as far away from the computer as possible, although, as you can tell from this blog post, that’s not going particularly well at the moment. I might do a dab of writing later on, but that will depend very much on where the day goes, for the next hours are in the hand of my other half, as a gesture of thanks for her perseverance during those long sequences of days when I am a figure returning at the dead of night and leaving with the dawn.
The freelance life has its rhythms, of course, something Mozart failed to realise, and this is just a busy past of the year, good for the bank balance after the leaner autumn months, but still tough work for all that. I was talking to one of my former students yesterday, doing that middle aged thing of talking rather patronisingly to younger people, and said that, in the end, it is about earning enough to enable you to do what you want to do. I am fortunate in that what I want to do also happens to earn me enough, and the busy periods are an inevitable consequence of that.
So I need to get We Three Kings and a-while a-wandering finished by Sunday. Even with a day off today I think that is a reasonable target.
Nicholas O'Neill 