Whilst travelling on tour, there is often quite a lot of dead time during the days... waiting for the concert in the evening. When I was younger, I would use the time to visit galleries and friends and all of that sort of thing... but now that I'm older and more anti-social, I like to take the time out to just have long days by myself without the need to interact with other humans.

Of course, it does get weirdly lonely... and it is self-inflicted, but usually, I don't really want to talk to anyone other than my family anyway. If I have to talk to people, I don't mind... and I do enjoy it, but I do find it quite exhausting and tiring.

So, entire days to spend catching up with all manner of administrative tasks... like tax receipts, planning for the ensemble, writing and responding to emails... all the stuff that is quite tricky to deal with when you are two freelancer parents with kids.

Now that tax receipts are all done, I get to some of the more interesting things. In the coming months, our ensemble has a snowball of concerts and an education project. Four different concerts with different programming... even though we are trying to reuse past pieces and share some of the pieces that we are playing across the different concerts in order to not go completely insane with stress!

The education/outreach project is an interesting one... it is a sort of lecture/demonstration in a series... and others seem to have gone more along the academic route... but we are terrible academics, and we will be presenting more of a concert with chats about what Early Music is about and what it means to us.

That means that I sort of need to write up a bit of an overview and running order... it is a sort of general overview, and not an in-depth academic thing, so rough reminder notes and landmarks of when to play what is more than enough. That is possible when I'm talking about something that I know quite well and the audience is a lay audience.

Then... with that mostly out of the way or at least under development, I can start to focus on the things that are more interesting (to me at least...), and the ones with more of a definite deadline!

The first concert off the ranks of the snowball period is a solo violin concert... so, just me and my violin alone... not a long concert, at around 45 minutes... but doing these single person concerts can be quite daunting if you aren't quite prepared! Anyway, the whole thing is a mixed bag. You have much more freedom and leeway because you have no other performers on stage... but the downside, is that there are no other performers on stage to bounce and feed off!

... and that means that there is nothing to hide behind, and that the interpretation and presentation needs to be quite clear and engaging... otherwise, the concert will turn into a very long 45 minutes!

I will also need to prepare some little bits of patter to go along with the music, but I think I can do that next week. Just some short notes to highlight a few lines of interesting things before playing!

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