Spent today re-cataloguing my songs and poems. Years ago, when I started cataloguing my work, perhaps in 2002, I filed Songs (song lyrics) and Poems separately with unique codes. This is largely fine, I file music, the actual notes, separately too. The problem is that recently I've been singing poems, beginning with the music on ArtsLab, and therefore Tree of Keys. Some poems, like I, Spider, were also songs. This led to a bit of duplication, but it was also a bit irrational; why is a poem different from song lyrics?
Yesterday I decided to merge song lyrics and poems and elimination the few duplicates. This could have been a huge task, I have 1200 or so poems, and 500 or so songs, and all are in text files named with their title and unique number, plus my website lists them all too, each with a unique web page. And there is a separate written index to keep track of everything, with additional information.
In the end, the brilliant Irfanview was used to mass rename the files. I had to be sure that I had them all, and in the exact order, and could then mass rename and renumber them all correctly. I applied the same principle to renaming the web pages. For the index, I copied it into a spreadsheet, then exported it again in text format, and also used the CONCATENATE function to automatically create the HTML for the web links. Over all, the job took only a couple of hours.
After that, my task of the day was to write the music for the Garden of Love song. This was difficult. I wanted a simple, piano arrangement, something gentle and soulful, but the words are so powerful that I felt that something more was and is needed. I began in a key of D-minor, and moved up a little for the brighter parts. Generally, the music was difficult to fit into the rather loosely structured lyrics.
