Sarah Grace - and a bit about my music

Via my old 'friend' Jurgen Wolff (in the mostly Internet sense - though I have actually met him), I came across a blog written by Sarah Grace.

Sarah writes longish posts (although I guess I should check out the length of some of mine) and talks a lot about the joys and woes of being a writer. She's also a Christian, and discusses that in some of her posts too.

The post that Jurgen pointed me to was 10 lessons I've learned from both running and writing.
A neat post, full of good comparisons.

I began writing another piano piece during the Easter break. I'd begun two other pieces, one of which was going well and then fizzed; the second seemed a great idea when I improvised round the piano with the main idea in it, but somehow there seemed to be too many options when I came to write it, and at the moment it's just sitting going nowhere, with only a page of music.

The one that's nearly finished, however, took off from the start. I'd had this idea of naming the pieces with some reference to a famous composer: the first is called Someone's Knocking - is it Beethoven? The title only arrived after the piece was part way done. The second started out with Bach in mind from the beginning, and is called, Bach does the Housework.

The most recent one, however, missed out on having a composer in the title. I was working through it, going fairly well, and suddenly had a kind of moment when I thought, this has something to do with a cornet/trumpet player. Opted in the end for the cornet player, and so it's called, The Cornet Player goes on Holiday. Having that in mind gave me a real impetus to keep moving on it. I wanted to write something that was lighter in tone rather than heavy, and the holiday element kept me focused.

I'm not a composer who's good on structure, as I think I've mentioned before, and I'm better composing a piece that's four to six pages long than a symphony. (Much better, in fact - there ain't no Crowl symphonies.) With music I find that I just have to sit down and start and see what happens. The structure usually sorts itself out in the end, but composing is a bit of a journey for me. (Like writing, really, though I tend to see the overall structure of written things better than composed ones.) If the journey goes well, I'll finish a piece easily. If it doesn't seem to get out of the gates of the town, then it may stay there for a very long time.