I will not write another catchy tune for a long time. Theatre Hopkins’ Arabian Nights is up, and reviewed very nicely by a Baltimore radio station, and the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival’s Twelfth Night is going up on Friday. This is definitely the summer of straight plays, and when actors sing in straight plays, they need catchy tunes. People don’t usually ask me for catchy songs with memorable tunes, but now people have my ‘Come Away, Death’ 12-bar blues stuck in their heads all day, and I wake up singing the fart song from Arabian Nights at 3 AM. I’m proud of the work I’ve done on these two plays, but now it’s time to write something that just isn’t catchy. No clean four-bar phrases, no regular chord changes, and Nothing Catchy for at least a month. Until then I think I’ll dive back into chamber music with an expansion on the piece I wrote for SONAR last February. That was a five-minute piece for Pierrot quintet, loosely referencing the Goldberg Variations. I’m planning to expand it with a section based on a Machaut Rondeau treatment I did for another piece a few years ago, and some fiddling around with the Epitaph of Seikilos, which is the earliest piece of written music we have. Maybe, maybe when all that is done I’ll write another song with verses and a chorus, maybe……