This afternoon, I finished work on the redesign of Darien Shulman’s website, darienshulman.com, which has been in the works for a few months. The design process for this site was rather different from that of other sites I’ve designed, and was informed by the ways that Chet Biscardi and I work together on updates for his site. When Chet needs updates done to his site, we go through the changes together – Chet at his computer, me at my laptop on the other side of the room. It makes for greater accuracy in whatever edits are made, and is generally a lot more fun (though also incredibly draining since we tend to work for 6 or so hours in a row!). So, once I reached a certain point in the design process, Darien and I began sitting down in the same room and working through details. I think it’s a really great way to work, and makes for an incredibly personalized site, which is something that I really aim for, and that I think sets me apart from many web designers out there.

After we launched Darien’s site and worked out the remaining kinks, I went on to create three (count ‘em, three!) new arrangements of at least a moment: for flute and piano; alto flute and piano; and alto flute and harp. This, hot on the heels of the paraphrase of "One Train May Hide Another", Best at dawn, for Marc Peloquin (which still requires some minor revisions in the score layout).

I strongly doubt that I’ll be doing an arrangement for flute and harp, however nicely that might round out the set. The flute version requires that I transpose the entire score up a minor third (as opposed to the alto flute versions, which merely (yet annoyingly) require that the alto flute line be transposed up a fourth), and, as fun as it was making sure of the harp pedalings for the original song cycle, I don’t feel much in the mood to tackle such a problem again – especially in a setting not involving actual composing, but just score editing. However, if anyone out there in Interwebs-land finds themselves hankerin’ for such a work to perform or record, I could be convinced to make the effort.

Regardless, if anyone is looking for a new piece for flute or alto flute: I’ve got three!

I’ve been expecting to title the piece “Best at dawn”, which is a reference to the first song in the Koch cycle. However, I ended up arranging only the third song instead of the entire cycle, as I’d originally planned; so now, the reference isn’t quite as appropriate. At least in my mind.

I’ve spent some time today reading through “One Train May Hide Another”, searching for a phrase that I think suits the piece well. I’d like to avoid using the title of the song/poem to minimize confusion between the song and the piano piece, since confusion there will be aplenty once I’ve finished the version(s) for alto flute. (At the very least, I’m arranging it for alto flute & harp and alto flute & piano, though I’m also considering an additional arrangement/transposition for “regular” flute and piano. (I suspect that a transposition for flute and harp might be too much of a headache in terms of harp pedaling!))

Maybe I’m being silly by wanting to keep the poetic reference specific to the song that spawned this paraphrase.

The thing that made me reconsider my choice of title was a realization I had while sitting down to write the program note – certain musical and formal elements achieve greater prominence in the solo piano setting: the train-like nature of the piece, with different sections strung along like train cars; the bookended beginning and end of the piece, similar to the engine at either end of a train; and the pedal point/ostinato sounding reminiscent of a railroad crossing bell.

Of course, regardless of the title, the program note will obviously refer to the original song/poem, as well as these elements, so my bases are quite amply covered. We are not inside a bottle (vacuum), thank goodness! And it’s not as though the listener will be missing anything earth-shattering if they don’t know all these niggling (for niggling they are!) details.

Best at dawn it is, then!

Now, I don’t mean to imply that such a thing should be done in the concert realm.  Concert music as we know it is very controlled in the ways that works should be performed: if the score says X, do X.  But I’ve definitely been marked by my experience.

That being said: often, particularly in vocal music, a performer will accidentally play/sing what is technically a wrong note – viz, it is not written in the score.  I’ve often rewritten passages in my songs to integrate a particularly felicitous “mistake” in performance or rehearsal.  Maybe a soprano, in rehearsals, doesn’t realize she’s singing something slightly off from how it was notated; I hear it, love it, and point out to the soprano what she’s been singing wrong, but instruct her not to change a thing – her error is more elegant and beautiful than what I had originally written.

I had a similar thing happen during the rehearsal process for the re-launch of the Tobenski-Algera Concerts last month.  Tim Kiah, the composer of one of the songs on the program, attended a rehearsal during the week before the concert, and Marc and I ran through his song so that he could offer observations, criticisms, and corrections.  After a few instructions on phrasing, he mentioned that I was singing the final phrase wrong: rather than singing X note, I was singing Y, something I’d not noticed myself since what I had been singing was in perfect keeping with similar motives that had come before.  His instruction, though, was to keep doing what I was doing: sing it “wrong”, because he was going to integrate that change into the score because he liked it better.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard a performance or rehearsal of a work of mine, noticed a “wrong note”, and decided to keep it.  Or the number of times a performer has asked for a slight revision to ease a particularly difficult passage.  Invariably, the change is so minor to the overall effect of the score, yet so major because it allows the performer more ease in performance, that not to make the change would be pure folly.  And honestly, had they made the change without my knowledge, I’d be none the wiser, so imperceptible are most of these shifts.

And then there are those composers whose work I’ve performed who wouldn’t accept suggestions of this kind: they had written it <em>this</em> way, so I should work harder to do exactly what was on the page.  There’s something here that’s more than a little off-putting.  Chances are that I’m being poorly paid (if I’m being paid at all) to put in a lot of rehearsal time for a single performance of a work.  And chances are that all I’m asking for is an entrance to be doubled in the accompaniment, or that the vocal line be in some way supported.  I (or anyone else who might perform the work) am doing this composer a favor.  So why is he looking down his nose at me for trying to perform his piece well?  I’m not stupid for not being able to find my pitch – there’s a good reason for it.  And I’m less likely to want to perform works by this composer again because of this experience.

I see this form of revision as good faith toward my performers.  If there’s something I can do to make their lives easier, I’m happy to (within reason, of course) in hopes that they will appreciate my efforts on their behalf and a) perform my music well, and b) perform my music <em>again</em>.

One of my favorite musical Hobby-Horses – one that I can ride for hours on end — is engraving: That is, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, the art of putting the notes on the page so as to make the score legible and attractive – a far more important aspect of composing than most people, many composers included — mostly young, but surprisingly often not —, realize.

A brief history of my own engraving abilities, practices, and standards: I started my compositional life using a scaled-down version of Finale called Notepad, which allowed me to put on paper what was in my head. The results, although essentially accurate, were unattractive at best. It seemed to me, still about 5 years away from my first composition lesson, that the important thing was to get the notes out, and that the score was good so long as the individual notes were legible and not literally piled on top of one another (a frequent issue with Notepad, and later, albeit to a lesser degree, Finale itself). My earliest scores were a bit of a wreck – the notes were crammed together on the staff with no regard for proportional spacing, and elements of the score often collided. The scores were legible, but barely.

In college, my engraving improved (though I was still completely unaware that such a term existed, let alone that there were standards to such a thing). Since my works were being performed with some regularity, I found that I had to put more work into making the score readable, which wasn’t exactly the most pleasing realization at the time, as I much preferred sitting down at the piano and hammering out something new than sitting in front of the computer, clicking away entering notes and dragging things around to create more space and take up more paper. At a certain point, though, one of my composition teachers started getting frustrated with the legibility of my scores, and would spend more and more of our lesson time marking up the score with a red pen, pointing out the problems with the engraving. I seriously resisted most of his suggestions – they weren’t musical criticisms, and therefore weren’t worth much of my attentions. (Ah, youth!)

The idea of attractive engraving as a desirable thing started to leak into my brain toward the end of my undergrad career. I was recommended a book written by a friend of one of my professors, which purported to set down exact rules and procedures for staff sizes, positioning of articulations (down to the pixel!), etc. I realize in retrospect that this is all pure foolishness. This made a science of engraving, when it is in reality an art.

When I was invited to study privately in NYC, my new teacher, who had spent much of his youth as a Broadway copyist and an engraver for Ned Rorem and Virgil Thomson, among others, made a number of immediate, sweeping changes. I was forced to buy Sibelius. Having been a Finale Man for eight years, I hated the idea of switching software (the Finale/Sibelius debate is nearly as heated as the PC/Mac silliness, both sides being completely entrenched and unbudgeable). And we spent a sizable portion of our lesson time discussing engraving practices: how to avoid collisions, proper spacing, the general rule for how many measures should be in a system, etc.

In time, I came to love Sibelius. Rather quickly, actually. I can’t imagine myself going back.

And in time, I came to be quite proficient at professional-level engraving. I now do some freelance engraving work from time to time. And I’ve integrated the engraving process into my compositional process. As I input a score into Sibelius, even if I’m still composing it, I do a significant level of tidying up and formatting as I go. It saves time later, and really helps me to see the score for what it is, and helps me to assess where I am and where I want to go with the piece.

I end up seeing a lot of scores by young composers, now, and the quality of engraving I see varies rather widely. Some scores are super clear and very attractive; others have clearly received little attention in the way of formatting or “beautifying”.

I understand the mindset of those young composers who don’t put the time into their engraving – “The music should speak for itself.” I agree – the music should speak for itself. But it can’t unless it is properly engraved. Reading a score that hasn’t been given attention to visual detail is like listening to someone speak with a very heavy accent. Or reading horrible handwriting. The content may be there, but it’s so much work to figure it out.

Even looking through a stack of well-engraved scores is a frankly tiring endeavor. That, plus the additional effort required to decipher any number of poorly-engraved scores, is absolutely exhausting!  It’s all too easy to dismiss a poorly-engraved score out of hand.

So what can composers do to make their scores clearer and more attractive? Think about the performer – consider what you can do to make the performer’s life easier.

A few points to consider:

1) Are the beats clear? Can the performer easily make out the basic division of beats in each measure? (I.e., does a 4/4 bar look like two sets of two quarter notes? Do your 3/4 bars look like 3/4 bars, and not 6/8 bars, and vice versa? Are the rhythms – especially complicated rhythms – notated in a way that facilitates counting them out?)

2) Do the notes have enough room to breathe? (Are there too many or too few bars per system so that the system feels cramped or empty? Are lyrics spaced so that they are easy to read?)

3) Are the staves and notes a reasonable size? Too many composers leave their software at the default size settings so that everything seems far too large, which gives it the sense of being “easy” – music for beginners: the notes are large and safe.

4) Are your articulations and markings placed clearly and correctly? (Expressive instructions are italicized, instructions for playing techniques are non-italicized, articulations generally go on the side of the notehead rather than the stem….etc)

5) Are you consistent with your accidentals, and are your intervals properly spelled? Nothing is more maddening than constant switching between sharps and flats. There are occasions when sharps and flats may peacefully co-exist in the same measure, but generally one should stick with one or the other for as long as possible. And few things are more confusing in the moment than augmented or diminished intervals. These should be respelled – especially for vocalists – to be as immediately-readable as possible.

The general idea is to consider how you would like the score to look if you hadn’t seen it before and had to perform it with virtually no rehearsal time. That doesn’t mean dumb down your music. It means make your hard music as easy to learn (and perform) as possible.

Look at professionally published scores, and see how they’re formatted. And – most importantly – ask your performers if there’s anything that they found particularly difficult, or if a particular element of your notation was confusing. Then change it!

For my hobby-horse, if you recollect a little, is no way a vicious beast; he has scarce one hair or lineament of the ass about him—’Tis the sporting little filly-folly which carries you out for the present hour—a maggot, a butterfly, a picture, a fiddlestick—an uncle Toby’s siege—or an any thing, which a man makes a shift to get a-stride on, to canter it away from the cares and solicitudes of life—’Tis as useful a beast as is in the whole creation—nor do I really see how the world could do without it—

I must say that I’m very pleased with how the concert turned out.  I think that Marc and I gave a very good performance of all of the works on the program; and the audience was sizable and enthusiastic.  Since I was the one performing, I can’t very well review the program, though I can say that I’m very, very happy with the turnout and the performance.

There are two things that I’m, unfortunately, not happy with.

1) The quality of the audio recording that we got isn’t very good.  Normally, we hire a friend, Robert Bullington, to record our concerts, and his recording philosophy for concert music is to make it sounds as if the listener were in the front row.  Hence, his recording company is called Front Row Seat Productions.  I’m consistently thrilled with the quality of Robert’s recordings.  He will absolutely be recording our next program.

This time, we decided to go with the in-house recording service in order to scale back on costs, which was a mistake.  The sound tech did a fantastic job of miking me and Marc for the room, but I think that she didn’t process the mix at all before burning it to CD.  Consequrently, the piano (which, it turns out was rather out of tune – something we didn’t notice at the time since we were in performance mode) sounds tinny, distant, and far too quiet; and I sound like I’m swallowing the microphone, which has absolutely no reverb, so every tiny flaw is made screamingly present.  Although I promised the recording to all of the composers on the program, I’m frankly too embarrassed to send it to them.  Instead, Marc and I will re-record the entire program in March.

2) Someone (or, rather, several someones) who sat near the video camera talked regularly throughout the concert.  Now, I don’t mind that people chit-chat while I perform – it’s a cabaret theatre, and there’s drinking going on.  But I should hope that the people sitting right in front of a big piece of recording equipment could manage to keep their voices low enough to avoid being overheard.  I got an email from the booking manager at The Duplex a few days after the concert letting me know what had happened with the video.  The video engineer has apparently taken bits of the audio recording and synched it up with the video.  I’m picking up the DVD this evening, when I’ll be able to judge the overall quality for myself.  But I’m not optimistic since the audio recording that I sincerely don’t like is being used for some – if not all – of the video.  My hope, after hearing the audio recording, was that we could pull the audio track from the DVD and use that as the recording, but no such luck.

Now I have to figure out where, when, and how to go about doing the re-recording next month.  Bah.

We still love the space – everyone raved about the atmosphere and how wonderful it was! – but we’ll probably avoid the in-house audio service next time.  It’s ideal for recordings of poppier things, but alas, not for recording what we do.  Live and learn!

One reason for my lack of significant output turned out to be a little surprising – I didn’t have a teacher anymore! I’ve always been quite a self-starter, so I was a little surprised to realize that one reason why I wasn’t churning out music was that no one was looking over my shoulder, and I didn’t have to have a certain amount written each week for someone else to look at. I’ve temporarily changed that state of affairs – this past weekend, I started private study with Chester Biscardi, a web client and good friend (also the Director of the Music Program at Sarah Lawrence College). We’ve decided to use the orchestra piece I started in Ucross as a jumping-off point. I’m glad to be finishing the work finally, and to be working with Chet because he’s a fantastic composer – and by all reports a great teacher, as well!

While working on the orchestra piece (still as yet untitled!), I’ll also be working on a paraphrase of at least a moment for solo piano. Marc Peloquin and I have been putting together the next Tobenski-Algera Concert lately, and, while I didn’t plan on having one of my own works on the progrm for once, Marc insisted that I write a new piece for him to help balance the program. So, rather than wrack my brains for new material under such a tight deadline (the concert is March 9!), I’ve decided to rework the Koch cycle – shorten it considerably, and fold the vocal line into the piano. I consider it a “paraphrase” – a la DDT’s Acrostic Paraphrase, but I’m making the work shorter rather than three times the original length! I’ve made the bulk of the cuts already, so my next task is to start folding the vocal line into the piano part. I’ve been aching for a premiere of the cycle, so this performance will be a bit of a palliative.

In keeping with the arrangement kick…. Last year, I showed Chet the finished score of at least a moment – or, rather, emailed him the PDF of the score with MP3s of the MIDI playback from Sibelius. Since I loathe the voice sample used in Sibelius’s Kontakt Player, I always use flute instead. After listening to the MP3s and looking at the score, Chet made the comment that the vocal line stands so well on its own that I could easily pull out the text and use it as a flute piece. So, I shall! The only decision that remains to be made before I jump in with the Delete button is whether to transpose it or not. As it stands, the piece goes a minor third too low for a standard flute (the piece bottoms out at A3), though it’s ideal for an alto flute. So I have to decide whether to leave it as is and say it’s for alto flute, or bump it up a minor third. Or I could do a version of both!

Further on the compositional horizon – past the completion of several other works that have been in my compositional queue for far too long (completing the piccolo trumpet & string quartet piece for David Glukh; writing a duo for violin & piano for Roger Zahab) – I’ve been thinking quite a lot on a musical subject that I’ve frequently been told I should pursue: opera. Probably the main impetus for my starting to think seriously in this vein (I’ve frequently, and idly, thought about writing opera throughout the years, and have several ideas for larger-scale projects that I won’t tackle for a little while) is the fact that I’ve been lucky enough to go to the Met several times in the past few months: I saw Janacek’s From the House of the Dead (liked the music, hated the production) and Strauss’s Elektra (wonderful) and Ariadne auf Naxos (absolutely divine). I’ve started grabbing recordings of operas where I can find them and putting them on my iPod to listen to at work. (Recently heard Der Rosenkavalier for the first time and was absolutely transported!)

So I’ve been thinking about how I would go about writing an opera – what a good starting point would be. I may start with an existing short play, since that would probably be the simplest in terms of getting started and working on my own. I’ve definitely got my eyes peeled for a potential librettist, though. There are a few ideas bouncing around in my skull at the moment that have got me excited (not so much plot ideas, as structure and general concept), and I’d like to pitch them to a librettist. That is, if I can find one! I suspect that I could make one of my large-scale ideas happen fairly easily (and, frankly, I need to do it quickly if it’s going to happen!), but I’d like to have a chamber opera or two under my belt first. More details as things progress.

This sudden burst of compositional thought and action ties in closely with the second reason for my dearth of output last year. I spent all but a month and a half of 2009 unemployed (2009 didn’t manage to be the Year of Buying DVDs – instead it was the Year of Falling Behind on Rent!), which left me with a lot of free time. By all rights, I should have been churning out new works right and left! The problem, though, was that I had too much free time, and I fell into a horrible habit of intense procrastination. I would wake up late every day (between 10:30 and noon), putter around the apartment for a while, then settle in front of the computer for the rest of the day – frittering away the hours with blogs, silly internet videos, and watching movies and TV shows on Netflix. Needless to say, there was a bit of honest-to-goodness depression involved here, which also stemmed from the fact of my unemployment. I found that when I don’t have a draw on my time, my time tends to become somewhat valueless, and therefore meaningless. A day job – the eternal enemy – is actually a necessity at the moment. And for more than just paying the bills!

I recently started a new day job – some temp work, which allows me the flexibility to function as a musician – and the result is that I can now both pay the bills and feel as though I want to write again!

Now that I’ve discovered two creative danger zones for me, I can address the issues and fix them.

Hopefully 2010 will be a Year of Writing a Lot of Music. 2009 was a let-down in a lot of ways. Compositionally, I wrote far too little. Financially, I was always anxious and falling behind. Economically in general, things just sucked. And politically, the year was a little disappointing – although some good things were accomplished, those accomplishments went largely unnoticed amid the noise of Balloon Boy; the hyped-up, insane expectations of The First 100 Days; the utter absurdity of The Second 100 Days (as though we hadn’t head enough talking heads talking about other talking heads’ evaluations of etc); etc. But with the success of the first new T-A Concert, and the start of a new day job, I’m feeling energized and positive about this year.

Unlike my previous web projects, I didn’t do the design elements on this site – my role was largely implementation. Katie Mancine, a very talented graphic designer, created all of the images, as well as mockups of the layout, and I turned those elements into a living, breathing website. This is, by far, my most complicated project to date – it’s a series of 6 interlinked blogs along with 12 “Pages” of static content, all running under a Wordpress Multi-User installation. I really had to learn on my feet with this one – while my own website blog is powered by Wordpress, I’d never had to work with the Multi-User platform, which necessitated a lot of fast research. And I had to learn some pretty crazy and complicated bits of coding in order to make the site seem as simple as possible.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the novel progresses, and watching the subsidiary blogs (a series of music videos, a collection of recipes, and musings of three characters from the novel – all written by other writers) grow.

I’m really, really happy with the song selections that we’ve made, and I very much look forward to presenting them next week. A few extra weeks of rehearsal would be nice. Even one more week would go a long way. But I also think that the concert would be good if we performed tomorrow.

In the past year, I’ve picked up a hobby horse that I absolutely love to ride: supporting the vocal line in a song or aria. I’ve hounded certain composers whose work I’ve performed about giving the singer more guideposts along the way – it’s something that I aim for in my own work, and is very important to making the singer’s job a little less aggravating. I think we often write harder music than is absolutely necessary so that we look smart to other composers. (“My music hard, and that makes me smart.”) It was certainly drilled into my brain by a number of past teachers that I had to write music that was super-smart, which clearly meant “not attractive” and “difficult”. I was even told that certain pieces of mine, typically the more well-received of my works, were “too beautiful” – which means exactly what? (I think that it means absolutely nothing.) One trap that we song composers fall into when we lose our bearings and stumble off into SmartyPants Land is to make our vocal lines extremely difficult. I don’t mind super-hard vocal lines, myself, so long as they’re supported in the piano, or whatever instrument(s) I happen to be singing with. A well-placed note that gives me my starting pitches – or that shows me that I’m on the right track – can go a really long way toward making me comfortable. It always feels nice to know that I’m not completely on my own – I question myself a lot less.

Accuracy is clearly something that is desired by both composer and performer. But if, after weeks of rehearals and private drilling of parts, I still can’t find my pitches, I have little choice but to approximate in performance. It’s not ideal, obviously. And something I maybe shouldn’t really admit to. But I also believe in being honest with composers or performers I work with. I’ve told performers on a number of occasions to approximate certain passages because, honestly, who but me is going to know the difference? I’d rather that they sing the pitches that I’d spent hours/days/weeks working on, but if it comes down to the singer sounding timid and unsure of themselves, or sounding as though they know what they’re doing even if they don’t really, I choose the latter any day. I’ve also had to tell some composers that unless they gave me more support in the piano part, I’ll probably end up singing pitches that are quite inaccurate, but I’ll sing them as though they’re right.

I’ve mentioned that I strive to support my singers as much as possible, but I know that I sometimes fall short. I definitely do in two of the songs from echoes, which I’ll surely be revising a bit after this performance. My supportive sins aren’t major, but I’ve found myself floundering in the middle section of “conspiracy”, and in the opening of “people shouting”. A few well-placed supportive notes would go entirely unnoticed by listeners, but would have made the songs simpler to rehearse! How bizarre to be having problems singing my own songs! Fortunately, the unsupported sections are short, and the vast majority of the cycle feels great.

I do want to single out one cycle in particular from this concert for the composer’s excellent work in supporting the vocalist at every turn in a way that is comforting to the singer and very elegant. Zachary Wadsworth’s Three Lullabies is really well-written, and I’ve felt super comfortable with it in rehearsals. At first glance, it’s a little intimidating (some harmonic nebulousness that seems prohibitive, and some seeming rhythmic scariness in the second song). However, his songs have given me the least worries, and have felt really relaxed from the beginning. At every entrance, and during tricky phrases, Zach gives little nudges in the right direction. He never outright doubles the vocal line, but selects important pitches (and sometimes rhythms) throughout many of the phrases and echoes them in the piano part. Unsupported, X or Y pitch may be difficult to grab out of thin air, but he always finds an elegant way to make his singer feel at home, even with tricky, chromatic passages.

There are some moments in the program where I’d like a bit more support from the piano part, or a little clearer engraving (another hobby horse, one I’ll surely address here soon), but I like to think of myself as a smart singer – I can figure it out (I have figured it out, but we’re all prone to slip-ups). I feel as though all that remains to be done now is to pound about 5 or 6 entraces into my brain. Beyond that, the program is performance-ready!

So everybody make your reservations now!

Dennis Tobenski: echoes, six songs on poetry by Mark Statman (NY premiere)
Jeff Algera: “Twenty” and “Former Soldier”, on poems by Oscar Wilde (world premiere)

Ricky Ian Gordon: “As Planned”, “Adolescent’s Song”, “Proof of Gold”, and “A Contemporary”

Aaron Alon: “All Rights Reserved” (NY premiere)
Tim Kiah: “La Nuit”
George Lam: Fog Argument, two songs on poetry by Mark Doty (NY premiere)
Justin Merritt: “Dissonance” & “May Evening in Central Park”
Keane H. Southard: selections from Three Songs of Dylan Thomas (NY premiere)
Zachary Wadsworth: Three Lullabies (NYC premiere)

We had 25 scores to choose from, and all of the entries were of a very high caliber. Paring the submissions down to a 90-minute program was no easy task, but I look forward to preparing and performing all of the works that we’ve selected. And learning 90 minutes of music in 23 days will be no easy task!

Yesterday, the T-A Concerts’ call for scores for our Spring 2010 series closed, and the responses were uniformly amazing! We had 42 composers from around the world send in 76 scores – a far greater number of both composers and scores than we anticipated!

Tomorrow, Jeff Algera and I will start making our programming decisions for the art song program, New American Art Song. Our work is definitely cut out for us – every entry has been really great, and we’re going to be hard pressed to pare down the 25 submissions for the art song concert into a 90-minute concert!

Three works we know for certain already – I’ll be singing:

I’ve got my work cut out for me – learning all new works for a 90-minute concert in less than a month!