Shameless self promotion

Two troubled young musicians travel to the Queen Charlotte Islands to perform for a murdered spruce tree – and to be transformed.

Blending fact and fiction, music, magic, and myth, Acky-Made (The Fugue Code) weaves a unique story about environmental responsibility.

“Brilliantly theatrical...****”
- Eye Weekly

“A must-see...superb...****”
- Edmonton Journal

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Yes - publicity is already starting to go out. I've got schedules for Ottawa and Calgary festivals and they're quite good! Things are happening.

By the way, that design on the hand is an early attempt at a SHOW LOGO!

One or two

I've got a sinus infection. It's being dealt with. Antibiotics are expensive. I'm sort of half-sick right now: I had a day that was alternately productive and delusional, with bouts of me telling fever-created apparitions to screw off. When I'm feverish I don't want anyone anywhere near me, even if that anyone is imaginary.

It's been a scattered while. I've been writing a bassoon and piano piece for a friend, which has been hard to engage with until recently because so much of my mind is on the Old Growth script. [WARNING, music geek talk ahead:] My musical mind is still fixated on a really simple number series (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 basically) that I keep using to make rhythms and pitch series in *everything*. I started thinking about that stuff when I was writing little flute pieces for Aura in the fall, trying to get a feel for what the Old Growthmusic might sound like. How do I write music that sounds like a tree? I got fixated on how to put the two main principles of spruce tree structure (symmetry and recursion) into music in a way that was audible and sounded good. 20 tiny flute pieces and an orchestral overture, I've still got the same melodic and harmonic material bouncing around my head. Turns out when you start on a note and then go up (or down) by intervals of 1 semitone, then 2, then 3 and so on, the result 1) is bluesy, 2) implies some neat and chord progressions, and 3) has the same bleedin harmonic progression that I've put in every piece I've written since I was 20 (two chords alternating, neapolitan minor to tonic major (or I- to flatI+, if you will) (i.e. C#- to C+)). Love it! So does John Adams.

So the bassoon piece suffered/benefitted from the distraction of a MAJOR script in major development, and the bouncing around of earworms. I was actually going to make the piece abour earworms but when I worked on that idea my earworms got way worse.

I'm putting together a cohesive draft of the script! I'm calling it Draft Two, because that makes me feel better. Draft One was in pieces, Draft Two is a putting together of pieces while editing them. The result is going to be a two-hour show, and then the cutting begins. It has a LOT of sections, which is cool, I like the structure, but man, some of them better overlap or something. But it's going well - writing falls out of me, I feel very confident writing in my characters' voices. Soon I'm going to send it out to a crack team of everypersons and theatre gurus alike, whose pairs of eyes will scan for believability and whose guts will react. One of them will hopefully be T.J. Dawe. He still owes me some noseflutes.

not a webmaster so much at all, really

I'm working on my website. (www.AlexEddington.com) Which is the only kind of work I do where adding 12 words of information takes an hour. Which is because of all the cross-referencing, of course. Which is my fault, really, because when I set up the site a year ago I wanted it to be thorough. I just added information about two recent achievements (winning an orchestral composition competition / being selected to participate in a composer workshop this spring) and it took me WAY long to enter these things on the several appropriate pages. For the one viewer a month who will view them. The good news is, it will all be there when the site makes the top 100 visited sites. It'll be Google, CNN, and ME, buddy!

I'm working on an Acky-Made manifesto, an "Old Growth" logo and story description and character description and tour info and links. I'm thorough.

I need to blog more frequently! Since I last wrote, I've been to Ottawa and back. The rehearsals there were really productive, even though Aura is insane with the final term of her Master's degree. Most of my time there was spent in dramaturgy. Alison and I charted out the "Envirologues" that sit at the core of the developing "Old Growth" script. Each of the 8 of these monologues has a different realm of magic associated with it (coins, sponge balls, rubber bands, gum, water, light...!). We talked a lot about hard-to-talk-about things, and a pen broke itself while I held firmly on to it. the The Environment makes me edgy.

I've been reading a lot about green economics - and making some serious realisations about the non-green economy that our lives are lived in. The hardest thing I've had to write about so far is economics, because of how fundamental the questions are that I have to ask of myself and the world around me. But this is the goal for the Environmental argument of "Old Growth": to go as far as possible, to take the widest possible view, to admit to truth of the truth. The further I go, the further there is to go. It's not a lonely time to be an environmentalist, but it *is* lonely to question my daily life. When I saw that brilliant little short film "The Story of Stuff", I felt like I'd found a friend in Annie Leonard. I couldn't say what she says any better than that.

Writing's going well. The E-logues are all sketched, as is the first bulky version of the story of how Alex and Aura came to be standing in front of a murdered golden Sitka spruce tree on the Queen Charlotte Islands. Yessir. I'm starting to put those and other threads together into a whole: a complexity of pieces that tells a fairly straightforward pair of stories, with lots of business and a strong environmental message at its core. Yes m'am, a script is coming.

We've booked rehearsal space too, eh? Over 100 hours, in Ottawa. Can't wait.

Stay sprucey!