I’m about half done with the orchestration on “Lone Star Polka.” I cut a big chunk out last night, and now I can’t tell if I made it a little too short. The piece was in a big A-B-A form — actually, sonata form, according to Newman — but now that I’ve cut so much from the end, the last “A” section is more of a coda. I’ve listened to it so many times both ways that it’s become the equivalent of repeating a word over and over again — it ends up sounding like gibberish both ways.

The “A” section has two main tunes — an A and a B, we’ll call them. In the original version, the recap at the end presented the mini A-B-A one last time. (He was right. It really was Sonata Form.) In the edit, B is gone, so now it’s basically just A-A!!!! (That’s me shouting “A” one last time.) The new version has a lot more joementum, but I’m hoping it’s not too abrupt.

PalmOne is now selling the GSM Treo 650. Cingular has a good price, but you have to sign a 2-year contract, and Cingular’s data plans are way overpriced. They’re so expensive – starting at $40/month – that I’d lose the benefit of their cheaper phone in less than a year. I’m considering buying the full-priced, unlocked phone, just to stick with T-Mobile because they’re cheap, but I’m torn. Thoughts? Any Cingular users out there who love their service? I sure wish Verizon would start carrying good phones…

Yesterday, I got a recording of the Eastman Wind Ensemble’s performance of “Redline Tango” from last week. Man. I expected them to sound good, but wow. Saying they’re a hell of an ensemble is quite an understatement.

That’s all for now. I need to head to the park for my run before I end up just crashing on the sofa in front of the TV.

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.

I did a fair amount of orchestrating this morning. At least it seemed like a fair amount, based on how long it took, but when I just figured out what I’d actually done, it was only about 10 measures. It’s dense and kind of complicated — it’s where the polka finally overtakes the calypso (don’t ask) — so there’s a lot going on, but it doesn’t take much musical time. By the time I was finished, it was lunch time.

Now that I’m a “full-time” composer, I’m trying to figure out my best work schedule. The way it’s turning out, Mondays are my “administrative day.” I did some orchestrating this morning because I wanted to get through that tricky bit, but in general, I spend most of Monday answering music-related e-mails that have built up over the weekend (it’s not like there are loads of them) and sending out CDs and scores to people who have requested them. Today I sent a score to the father of a baritone sax player in Mesa, Arizona. The high school band there — at Dobson High School — is working on Redline Tango, and this parent thought it was important for his son to be able to study the full score. Pretty amazing.

After swinging by the post office, I sent out an e-mail about my trip next week, trying to figure out my full itinerary for my trip to Grapevine High School in Texas. I’m flying there on Sunday to work with the band, and they’re playing Redline Tango on Monday night. On Wednesday of next week, I fly from Dallas to San Antonio for the Texas Music Educators Association conference, where one of the Texas All-State Bands will perform Redline Tango on Saturday, February 12. That means I need to make a bunch of copies of the Redline Tango study score and burn a stack of CDs to bring along. I’ll probably make those copies tonight, and try to burn a few CDs as well.

Before I do that, though, I’m heading to Central Park for a run. I had a little health scare last week, and my doctor told me that I’m stressed. Running seems to make me feel a lot better, and it’s fun to get out there and listen to the new Shuffle.

If I can get enough work done over the next few hours, AEJ and I will try to fit in a few more episodes of season 2 of “24.” We watched the first 4 episodes of season 2 last night, and so far, season 2 may be even better than season 1…

Apparently, “administrative day” also consists of writing completely inane blog entries.