It is Friday morning. I am sat at the computer keyboard wondering what to write about this week.  Rehearsal was so busy for all of us yesterday that there was not much time for musing.

I could follow up last week’s article about whether melody or harmony come first to a composer (in the case of the definitive opening chords of Regina Coeli it is definitely the harmony, but later on the sublime solos must have surely started with the melody).

I could say something about the wonderful concert of vocal and orchestral music by Tallis, Purcell, Byrd, Gibbons and their contemporaries we heard last week courtesy of the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and Choir.

Or perhaps I should re-inforce Roger’s point last night about how much just a few minutes of preparation during the week pays enormous dividends in confidence and poise at the subsequent rehearsal.

“Help!” comes a call from the kitchen, completely breaking any nascent chain of thought that might have been brewing in my befuddled brain. .  “We can’t get into the laundry!  The door from the outside is locked on the inside and the door from the kitchen won’t open!”

Half an hour later, back at the keyboard, having avoided breaking into the laundry by remembering that there is an outdoor door key hidden for just such an emergency, and having disassembled and re-assembled the recalcitrant door handle mechanism, I am left musing whether the great creative geniuses (and that is the correct spelling according to yesterday’s SMH crossword puzzle) had to deal with these mundane situations, and if so how they dealt with them.  Can you imagine, for example, Mozart  helping Constanze with the washing up, or Beethoven clearing a blocked drain?  And yet I suppose that all these people had to cope with the everyday business of life just as we all do.

It’s a sobering, and perhaps a somewhat comforting, thought.