It turns out that Scott Weiss from Lamar University — who organized the Lone Star Polka consortium — will be at the TMEA convention next week. This is good, as it gives me a little extra motivation to have a good amount to show him next week. I’m just a few bars from finishing the orchestration of the first third of the piece, and hopefully I’ll get through that today. The middle third is scored a lot more lightly, and it’s slow, so that should go quickly. The transition to the big coda at the end is going to be difficult to orchestrate. I’m dying to put in a contrabass clarinet solo, but I don’t think many programs have access to them. It’ll probably have to be a contrabassoon solo, or maybe I’ll just cue it in the contrabassoon.

I also need to figure out a good place to cue the accordion part. I initially intended to just have a synth play the part if there was no accordion player, but that might be lame given how much accordion there is in the piece. (It starts with an accordion solo.) The accordion part is all just melodic — no chord buttons or anything — so I could cue it in another solo instrument. Or, ideally, if they can get hold of an accordion, the bands playing the piece could assign the part to a pianist, as it’s solely a keyboard part. I wonder how hard it is to physically play an accordion. Hmm…

When I was running last night, some truly random things played on my Shuffle. It really is a lot of fun to have iTunes randomly fill the Shuffle with a GB of tracks taken from my whole library, and then have the Shuffle play them in random order. I eliminated all of the classical tracks from the potential list (I don’t want to jog to Arvo Part), but it still leaves about 4000 tracks, 210-or-so of which fit on the Shuffle at any given time. Some things work great while exercising — Prodigy or Tool or even some of the up-tempo Earth, Wind & Fire — but some of my library doesn’t work during exercise at all. I mean, I love old Sesame Street songs as much as the next guy, but it’s hard to really get pumped up by the disco version of “Has Anybody Seen My Dog?”

Fine, I admit it. My iTunes library contains nearly 70 Sesame Street tracks, complete with LP scratches and wow-and-flutter from overly-played cassettes from my youth. I’m not ashamed. I mean, I’m pretty sure that the first song I ever heard in 7/4 was “The Two ‘G’ Sounds.” So we have Sesame Street to blame for my obsession with odd meters.