The Fredösphere

I have a job.  I am going to write some music for the Maundy Thursday service at my church.  It will be an extended work -- 15 or 20 minutes long.  It has been quite a while that I have needed to put together something that long.

I would like to have it done by mid-January, since there will be drama or dance involved and my collaborators will need time to work with the score.  So, counting from last week, I have 8 weeks to write about 18 minutes.  For me, that's a terribly tight schedule.  I usually enjoy the leisurely pace of an amateur.

The deadline means I must manufacture 2.25 minutes of music per week.  That reminds me:  creating any work of art is exactly like laying pipe.  And when I'm done, I will create a nice graph to evaluate the work's greatness.  "If the music's score for perfection is plotted along the horizontal of a graph, and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the music yields the measure of its greatness."  Thank you, Mr. J. Evans Pritchard, for your excellent essay that explains this principle to us.