The art of blogging has been almost given up and forgotten in the last months, during which I have done very little online – except checking my Facebook and Myspace and a discussion forum, but not contributing much. I read other people’s music blogs, though, when the subscribed ones drop their newest content in my reader.

Haven’t been painting or composing or writing much lately either. I studied painting once a week from February to May, but did nothing new that I want to show here or in an exhibition (we have an annual amateur salon on the local library but I wasn’t prepared to participate this summer), just still life exercises in acrylic on cheap paper, to learn more about light, balance and colours.

Musically, I am jumping between very different things. I have been learning some jazz standards on piano (I am not very good at playing and can’t improvise much), for example “Hallucinations” by Bud Powell. Then I have been playing the piano part to “Åkersbergavalsen” a lovely waltz written some years (or decades?) ago by Ove Gardemar. It was used when a song group led by Christina Nordstrand was entertaining old people at a hospital with spring and summer tunes. I have made and published (on SibeliusMusic) some revisions to my song “Elisabeth dansar” – a short, lyrical tune for children. Yesterday I started to put the music from Beethoven’s op. 131 into Sibelius notation, to see if I could learn something about string quartet writing by this exercise. (There seems to be a file of the LvB op131 in Finale notation available at Project Gutenberg but it is an experience to notate it from the pocket score, too) I often get ideas for new compositions and sound works, but nothing that seems important enough to start working on. You have to imagine at least some sort of listener for a piece, and if not, don’t waste your time. Being a composer is really frustrating most of the time, especially if you are not a performer yourself, and if you lack the social skills needed to build a network of contacts in the musical world…

Hope you are having a nice summer, readers!