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'If you get
a chance, keep up with McGuinness's diary - it is as full of insight as it is
contrarianism' Metro
Thursday 22 July 2010
I finally sent off the notes to Jordi
Savall today, so I have time again to do things like cut the grass and
prepare properly for next week's concerts.
Yesterday I fitted in some viol-based
research at Edinburgh University in between a very enjoyable return visit
to the Signet Library to
think further about a concert there in May, and picking up my
newly-serviced Dahon from biketrax
(hooray).
I'm trying not to be too distracted by
the wild raspberries growing outside my study window, one advantage of
keeping a relatively untidy garden.
Sunday 18 July 2010
Back at my desk with screens
full of email to deal with - this
is just what I need.
Saturday 17 July 2010
on the CalMac ferry in the sun
The valiant crew here have just managed to get 10 extra vehicles onto the
ship, to cheers and general approval. It's a bit of a squeeze because the
fleet are a ship down, and the timetable is slightly altered as a result.
As The Ileach pointed out today, CalMac's
online booking system can't cope with such a delicate situation and is
showing all Islay sailings as unavailable, which is not exactly helping
the island economy at what passes for high tourist season.
I'll
have to get out of the Islay habit of raising an index finger (at least)
in greeting to all motorists on the road. It's polite to acknowledge your
fellow human beings even when encased in a motor vehicle: in
Alexander-speak it helps you direct your attention to the means-whereby rather
than end-gaining, and perhaps it has good road safety outcomes too.
Imagine if waving a hello to the drivers of all oncoming traffic was a
legal requirement: come to think of it, it's not really practical in the
city, is it?
Some
listening has caught my attention over the last few days, including Van
Dyke Parks's first two albums. Song Cycle I knew already but hadn't heard
for a while, and Discover America was new to me. Hearing either of them is
like stumbling across an alternative universe. You feel that they need
your full attention, but also that they may not necessarily always repay you
with anything enlightening. The other thing to catch my ear was Matemaatikon
Lentonäytös by Pekka Pohjola, where what could have been a
rather turgid and unpolished piece of prog is transformed by the late
Pierre Moerlen's inspired drumming and a typically searing Mike Oldfield
guitar part (it's not even a 'solo'). I bought that record in Italy
in 1984!
Friday
16 July 2010
Islay
Holiday
drawing to a close here. This photo should sum up Scottish holidays.
I’ve
been swimming in Loch Indaal a lot too.
Also
special mentions to the brewery, an
taigh osda, and the
community garden (which is about 20 times bigger than it looks in the
photos). The Road to Sanaig now has a café/gallery
at the end of it, which was a bit of surprise. It has really comfy sofas
though.
I
only brought a couple of books with me: I’ve never been completely
convinced by Dan Clowes’s work in the past, but his new one Wilson
is quite superb. The Best
American Comics 2009, on the other hand, was a bit disappointing on
the whole: too many aimless improvisations to really grab me. But standout
exceptions were the peerless Chris Ware (of course), Adrian Tomine and R.
Crumb, and I also enjoyed the work of Kevin
Huizenga, Laura
Park, Jillian and
Mariko Tamaki, and Dan Zettwoch.
Check them out.
I
got up yesterday to the news that Charles
Mackerras had died. I’ve got lots of happy memories of working with
him, both playing in the SCO and producing at the BBC. The world of
conducting is largely filled with charlatans and chancers, but he was
undoubtedly the real thing: a first-class musician with integrity and
technique.
He
also had unexpected reserves of energy and enthusiasm. In his last few
years if I was producing a broadcast he would get me to surreptitiously
record the rehearsals (against union rules) and print a CD to hand him at
the end, so that he could listen to it all in more detail in his hotel
room later – “I really can’t hear a thing, you know!”.
His growing deafness didn’t seem to stop him being able to get
exactly what he wanted out of the players.
After
an explosive performance of the Glagolitic Mass at the Edinburgh Festival
in 2003 I went back to congratulate him and tell him I’d enjoyed the
bits that weren’t in my score: with typical rigour, he'd restored some
cuts made before the first performance for want of a set of pedal
timpani. He took me over to his score and proceeded to stand there
in his vest, still adrenalised from the performance, enthusing about
Janacek’s writing and showing me all the missing bits that he’d
reinstated, rather than engaging with the long queue of people outside his
dressing room who wanted to tell him how great he was.
He
was always open to finding out more about music: one of the first times I
played for him in the SCO was in a performance of Handel’s Jephtha in
the mid-1990s. I noticed that one of the arias in Chrysander’s edition
didn’t have the usual ‘Da Capo’ printed at the end, and showed Sir C
in the tea-break. He went off that night, did some homework, and the next
day the da capo was cut.
Thanks
to John Purser for passing Jordi Savall my way. He called a couple of
times while I was in the garden and as a result I am writing some notes
for his next Celtic
Viol CD. Unfortunately I have to write them very very soon.
On
another subject altogether, check out my pal Gordon’s latest work here.
And on the Today
programme too.
Friday 2 July 2010
I finally pressed 'submit' this morning
on a big grant application that's been taking up my attention one way and
another for six months and more. Scoring off four letters from the
worklist on my desk represents the lifting of a very large weight of
responsibility.
 But
... our new CD Late Night Sessions is now available to pre-order right here!
Order lots and lots and we'll send them out the week before it's
officially released. What's more, if you buy them from us, all the
proceeds will go towards funding our Revenge of the Folksingers project at
Aldeburgh this December, when we'll be playing and recording with Suzie
LeBlanc, Martin
Carthy, Alasdair Roberts
and Olivia Chaney. So
eventually you get two records for the price of one, sort of.
Wednesday 30 June 2010
I'm not even going to begin to explain
why someone rang me first thing this morning to check if I might be
available to produce a session involving Napalm
Death. Suffice to say that I am totally gutted I'm not free that day.
It certainly puts thinking about an 18th-century ballad opera into
perspective.
Sunday 27 June 2010
Look at what can now be bought at a very
reasonable price in a local food
emporium of great taste. It also provided an excellent response to
Shirley's rehearsal question on Friday 'I don't suppose anyone's got any
chocolate'. Well, yes
...
Saturday
26 June 2010
on the train home from York
On Saturdays it’s sometimes only a few quid more to travel first
class, so here I am in a comfy seat, and a nice man has just brought me a
hot mushroom sandwich and a cup of tea. Real crockery and metal cutlery
too.
God
bless folding bikes and cycle-friendly
cities. I set off on my bike on Thursday morning for a gig 200 miles
away, and I’ve had a great time cycling round
York
for the first time in 23 years. The cycle lanes work – cars don’t park
in them, unlike in Glasgow where they are a complete waste of time and money – motorists don’t
harass you, and I felt over-safety-conscious in my helmet and cycling
gloves. On the way south I also managed to stop off in
Edinburgh to dash into Jenners food hall for Brodies
tea and chocolates. And with my one free hour in
York
I bought only a pair of jeans in the Sarah
Coggles sale: it’s a shop which has been the downfall of my credit
card statement in the past.
I’ve
been there to enjoy the company of Shirley
and Kate,
and to have the great privilege of playing the arrangements that Dolly
Collins wrote for Shirley’s singing. Much as we tried, we couldn’t persuade Shirley to sing in the
show, although after a glass of wine she did delight us with unexpected
bursts of song once or twice.
Thursday
night’s dinner with singing legends outside Lowther’s, King’s Staith,
York
On
the face of it Dolly’s arrangements are very simple, but they're
exquisitely judged, and the simplicity allows the songs to be very telling
and powerful. I’d love to
edit the Shirley & Dolly Collins Songbook, not just so that other
people could sing and play the songs, but to inspire musicians to come up
with their own arrangements that are as sensitive and appropriate for
traditional material. There’s a great research project in there –
would anyone like to fund it, I wonder …
I’ve
been enjoying the cheery hospitality chez
Pamela, who also generously
stepped out of the audience to join us in a few songs. This morning she
told me that playing in front of Shirley was really nerve-wracking, like
playing for the queen. Connie managed to get all of us singing in the
dressing-room in the interval, and doing the actions to the Ghanaian
equivalent of Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.
Playing
at the NCEM is total luxury: I can’t think of another venue in the world
where I could say ‘I’d like to play chamber organ, harpsichord, and
fortepiano’ and get the response ‘OK, what pitch and temperaments
would you like?’ When I was a student I would occasionally drop in here
when it was still a dark old medieval
church, with its box pews.
Is
anyone else finding the keyboard on their iPhone less responsive since
upgrading to iOS4?
later
Somehow I forgot to mention that by the side of the bath at Pamela's
was one of Matt
Bellamy's megaphones.
Sunday 20 June 2010
My twitter for non-tweeps is now here.
For Father's Day, Susie took me on our
bikes for a glorious afternoon of work avoidance at the Glasgow
Mela (where we bumped into Simon
Thoumire) and the Gibson
Street Gala.
the
relaxed audience at the Mela main stage - my future place of work is in
the background
Gibson St
where we parked our bikes
concerts
in back courts! note the 'Save Otago Lane' banner sticking out of a bin
Broken Boats (I think) on the acoustic stage behind Westbank Quadrant
looking
from outside the Tchai-Ovna tea tent (and the impromptu bric-a-brac stall
in the washhouse) past the hookahs to the acoustic stage - yes, this is
happening in a Glasgow tenement back court
Wouldn't you like to live in Glasgow
now? Why not!?
Saturday 19 June 2010
I'm sitting up late tonight (probably as
a result of the killer Enric
Rovira hot chocolate I had earlier) putting together a folder of
notation for Friday's gig
in York with Shirley Collins and Catherine Bott. I'm still very excited
about it.
I took a break from academic
form-filling today: this evening I was lying in the hammock and watching
all the birds around me in the garden: dunnocks hopping under me, chattery
families of great, coal and blue tits taking their turns on the fatballs
in the tree above me, sparrows swooping in for raids on the seed feeder a
few yards away, and a pair of pigeons hanging around to pick up what the
sparrows would drop or throw away in disgust.
This week's irritating technical hassles
have included ... Mozy refusing to
backup my email but crashing instead every time (after going round the
houses with their tech support, I'm now trying a previous version of the
software, which used to work fine); discovering that our broadband
internet which falls off and has to be rebooted three or four times a week
is probably OK: it's the router that crashes for no reason; and the
kitchen computer giving up completely and refusing to load Windows at
all.
While getting help with one of these
today, I got a firsthand account of the Israeli raid on the Gaza flotilla
from one of those captured by the Israeli soldiers. Besides confiscating
the aid, the Israeli soldiers also took his iPhone ... I'm not sure if
they've been trying to use
his credit cards though.
Wednesday 16 June 2010
I'm up to the neck in funding
application forms here (well, just one enormous online form actually,
which is about a couple of weeks' work to complete). Meanwhile, Sean
Rafferty on Radio 3
played a track from our new album last night - where did he get that from
then!?
I grew up listening to this
and this a lot (no,
really, a LOT), so I was eagerly awaiting the reissues last week with
remixes, old mixes, lost early versions and other bits and pieces. Quite
amazing that Mr Oldfield recorded all this stuff mostly on his own,
experimenting with texture by trial and error, aged 20-21. It feels like I
know every note on both records: they were playing constantly here for
days again last week and I never get tired of them.
But despite the fact that I even had the
release date in my diary so that I could get my hands on copies as soon as
possible, I haven't parted with a penny of my hard-earned cash yet. Why
not? Because Mercury/UMG put the whole lot up on spotify on the day of
release. How spectacularly stupid is that? Two lavish reissues I would
happily shell out full price for, and I haven't, because I can listen to
them all I want for free.
It was the West
End Festival parade in Kelvingrove Park last Sunday afternoon, which
gave me an excuse to go on the dodgems. Special congratulations to the
Glasgow University Centre for
Molecular Parasitology, who had a huge
purple parasite in the procession in amongst the samba bands and belly
dancers, and gave out leaflets about parasitic diseases. Awesome.
Sunday 13 June 2010
I was interested to hear this
programme on 'Chinese' musical clichés this morning: any radio
programme that brings in discussion of encoded meaning in music is right
up my street. But my favourite bit of Chinese/Western crossover music is
probably this
remarkable one from 1981. When the massed synths and the Peking
Conservatoire Symphony Orchestra finally play together after alternating
throughout (at 3'48 in the clip, but I think the original was about 18
minutes long) it's genuinely moving. I'll even forgive the equal
temperament.
Speaking of genuinely moving music, in
the post yesterday came an envelope of songs from Shirley Collins,
including hers and Dolly's amazing version of Death and the Lady, which is
simple and profound. Even though on
the record Alan Lumsden jumped the gun on the sackbut a few times (sightreading?),
it's still powerful enough to be track 1.
Friday 11 June 2010
Almost a day off today. I managed to fit
in a trip to the bank, doing some accounts from the tour, and taking my
bag to the cobblers to get it re-sewn, but spent the first part of the day
in Girvan, the first
time I've been there for 20 years and more. It was sad to see the swimming
pool boarded up (shut 2009) and the beach pavilion now just an ugly block
of brick, and the helter skelter that was there when I was a kid is long
gone - but there were some welcome surprises, like a really great
gelateria in amongst the boarded-up shops.
Tonight I went along to join the 30 or
so people crammed into a sweaty Oxfam record shop on Byres Road to hear Trembling
Bells. It was really my kind of gig: 5 minutes' bike ride away, free,
and finished by 7.30. They were great too - I left with a copy of the new
LP under my arm.
Alex Neilson is of course a devotee of Shirley
Collins, and I'm very excited indeed to be sharing a stage with her
and Kate
Bott in a couple of weeks' time.
If anyone can get me a copy of this
poster, I'd like one ...
Thursday 10 June 2010
Back home: I've been far too busy to
post anything here for ages, which is a bit ironic given that it's meant
to be a Concerto Caledonia blog. When the band are actually working I'm
too busy to write anything, hence the twitter
feed. DG and Suzie both made it safely to Heathrow this morning (by
different routes) and are about to board the same plane to Halifax.
Anyway, here's a selection of pictures
from the week and a bit since the previous post.
Monday 31st: back here getting getting
to grips with a lot of tunes by Robert Mackintosh
Wednesday 2nd: we moved the rehearsal to my
future place of work for a change
of scene ...
... and proximity to good ice cream.
Thursday 3rd: CDs arrived!
and after 5 hours of driving behind a
caravan (Loch Lomond, 25mph) and a horse truck, we just happened to be in exactly the
right place to recreate the inside cover photo with some hairy guy
and had a great gig at Dornie Hall (thanks Lynne)
and a night in Norman's amazing B&B.
Friday 4th: after another 4hrs driving, we arrived at
Ardkinglas
to find a pixie called Suzie waiting in the window.
Somehow before the day was out we fitted
in a rehearsal, a fiddle workshop, a gig, and Olga's Russian banquet which
prompted Greg to tell his stories of playing in the Rostov
String Quartet. We finally all sloped off to bed weak from laughing.
Or was it the wodka?
Saturday 5th: The sun continued to
shine, and Steve Portnoi arrived with
his carload of digital equipment. Audio manufacturers can have a puerile sense of
humour.
We started recording with David
Sumsion's wonderful
Muir Wood square piano, which never seems to go out of tune.
Sunday 6th:
my new camping stove gets pressed into service at lunchtime
the view from behind the harpsichord
the balcony was a haven of
rest ... and midgies
Monday 7th: dance band front view
looking from the control room across to the
studio: unconventional sightlines.
Steve got his camera out in the lunch
break.
Tuesday 8th: haven't reached total
exhaustion yet
Monday 31 May 2010
flying home from CDG
On the way home again, after an enjoyable couple of days being very
well looked after. Everyone at the festival, hotel and theatre was
unfailingly helpful and patient, so that all we had to do was try and play
a good gig. Catherine Motuz
joined us on her way to London to play at the Globe, and took up duties as
honorary roadie and multilingual CD sales operative: as a result we sold
lots of CDs to our happy audience.
Even my fortepiano neurosis was much
less than usual: Alison's verdict about the concert was that there were
unusually high levels of "goodwill and listening" on stage.
I'm trying to work out if it's possible
to get a fortepiano fitted with a buzzer so that we can play this
as an encore.
As I was getting up this morning, I was
listening to the beginning of yesterday's Airborne
Event. Down at breakfast I found out that musicians in the surrounding
rooms had been convinced that someone was practising lots of diminished
chords on the piano: in fact it was Satie's Vexations.
Sunday 30 May 2010
Hotel Chenal, Beauvais
Things are going very well so far: a friendly hotel, a friendly and
generous festival, and a very friendly restaurant
for a great meal last night. Even the wee meringues were killer, and the
waiting staff were amazed that Greg could still stand after his French
coffee, which was built on a base layer of at least four measures of
sweetened Calvados. We emerged onto the town square under a firework
display to watch the crowds dancing to a succession of folk-rock bands.
pre-dinner
hotel room rehearsal
pre-dinner
beer - Alison isn't really under the table
a couple
of guys we met and got away from again quickly
Friday 28 May 2010
Three interesting pieces on music in the
Grauniad today: Robert Thicknesse trying
a bit too hard but making some good points about opera, Robin Denselow
on what
happens to music when immigration is a political issue, and a piece on
the effects of careless
or wilful mastering.
later
The fiddle team have arrived.
Thursday 27 May 2010
Exhausted from the 'last day before
project starts' flurry of incoming emails and resulting tweaks to the
schedule. Roy brought my newly-serviced harpsichord back this morning, and
it sounds much more like itself. Tonight, once I'd picked up DG from the
airport, we had a fascinating score-reading session on Mackintosh's
bowings and speeds, in the street outside Alison's flat while she was at
the shops. I'm sure this sort of conversation happens all the time on
pavements around North Kelvinside.
I retrieved my copy of the Jilted John
LP: the song about taking up mouse-breeding as a teenager really does
begin with the line 'One fine day I went to the doctor's to get some
anti-acne cream'. It's brilliant. I'd also forgotten that The Paperboy
Song includes the line 'I got up at half past six/and had two Weetabix'. I
nearly wept with joy. But maybe I'm just tired.
The floor around me is strewn with books
on harmony and counterpoint, which I won't be looking at for a couple of
weeks. I'm getting better at spotting which texts are aimed at
understanding real music and its techniques, and which simply aim to
provide useless names for things, which can be memorised and trotted out
by students in a series of exams in order to get their course
credits.
P.S. Slovenia
for Eurovision. Just the right kind of appalling.
Wednesday 26 May 2010
As you might have seen on
our homepage, we now have a Concerto
Caledonia twitter feed - follow us and we might (might) keep you
updated with photos and news from the adventures of the next couple of
weeks.
I can't work out why John
Shuttleworth makes me laugh quite so much. I don't think it's just
because I played to death my copy of Jilted
John's fantastic but commercially unsuccessful LP
(complete with board game) when it came out in 1978.
Tuesday 25 May 2010
Last-minute preparations of various
kinds are underway here while the sun shines outside.
Just a week after hearing it on Irene
Trudel's show on WFMU, this long-deleted LP arrived in the mail
today. I'd assumed that William Bolcom's beautiful rag Graceful
Ghost dated from the 30s, but it was written in 1970 - proof that you
don't have to be at the cutting-edge of music if you're honest about what
you like. Still, it was from the days when 32 minutes of music counted as
a full-length album. Now it's 62. They don't make album covers like this
anymore either.
A new source of trombone-related musical
insight: Catherine Motuz
has resumed blogging.
Sunday
23 May 2010
Air Canada cancelled DG's
return flight from our upcoming gigs, without even notifying us. Thanks
guys. Time and money wasted.
Meanwhile, I'll also be
disappointed to miss this
on Tuesday.
Music Theory vol. 46. From
Kostka & Payne Tonal Harmony (1995): 'The fundamental sonority
of tonal harmony is the triad ...'. Not in the music I listen to it
isn't.
Saturday 22 May 2010
Summer has arrived, for the
time being at least: it’s genuinely hot and after a visit to the farmers
market and cutting the grass I feel that I’ve done quite enough for the
day.
Last night I met Sushil and
Alison at the Banana Leaf for
giant dosas, idlys, a spectacular vada curry, a few other things from the
menu that we couldn’t resist, all washed down with Coke (which I never
drink and which left all of us a bit wired), and then Sushil drove us to
Edinburgh to join the healthy crowd of people of exceptional taste who’d
gathered to hear
Fred Frith
and his guitar. Alfonso joined us, Robert
McFall and Su-a Lee were there, even Noel
O’Regan sneaked in before the end. There were a few other
Edinburgh
University
staff kicking around, including Simon
Frith of course: I don’t think either of them qualify as ‘brother
of the more famous …’, although when were nattering outside in the
interval I’m sure Fred transformed into a ‘wee brother’.
I discovered a new genre of
band watching The
Geordie Approach play: if you remember the shoegazing
bands who were around when Sushil
and cohorts were in their baggy phase, then I reckon the new thing in
the improvised music world is going to be ‘pedalgaze’, as by about 5
minutes into their set all three guys were just staring at their effects
pedals with a look of intense concentration. It was a beautiful summer’s
evening so Sushil and I joined Alison and Alfonso outside for some light
relief, and then Fred joined us too and we stood around making each other
laugh in the summer air while I tried to resist asking him too many fanboy
questions. Sushil was tempted to
reach for his camping stove, but we decided that his cold needed the
benefit of some sleep and we headed west along the M8: the stove came out
at Harthill for roadside chai instead. Katherine would have been 40
yesterday. I think she’d have enjoyed the evening’s entertainment.
Wednesday
19 May 2010
I've
been reading this.
And getting my fingers around the eccentricities of Mackintosh's piano
writing.
Tuesday
18 May 2010
Roy
O'Neil came and took my harpsichord away for a long-overdue service
tonight.
This
wee video is a touching demonstration of why the world needs music nerds.
Meanwhile, fire
melodica, anyone?
Monday
17 May 2010
I've
finally made it to the end of scanning the Mackintosh parts and making
them into PDFs to send to everyone. I'm working from a really dirty set of
photocopies that I've had for years, and it's tempting to spend a very
long time in Photoshop making them pristine. This temptation must be
resisted if I'm going to get any other work done at all.
I
forgot to mention that when Greg and I emerged from the baths onto Byres
Road on Friday afternoon, a long succession of people accosted us with
'Are you the Real
Radio Renegade?' Once we'd worked out what this was all about and were
able to say 'No' with conviction, one said to me 'But you look like a
renegade'. I was wearing a bright yellow cycling jacket ... !?
later
Nearly-summer evening in the garden.
Saturday
15 May 2010
OK,
I'm giving you nearly a week's warning. Fred
Frith is playing a solo
set in Edinburgh next Friday, and you don't even have to buy a ticket
first to get in. You'd better have a very good reason for not being there.
Writing
schedules, scanning, practising. Occasionally lying in a hammock in the
garden.
later
I made it round Waitrose tonight without hating humanity too much by
the time I was finished.
Anyway,
another reason to come and hear Fred on Friday is this.
And while you're at it, this
from his ex-bandmate Joey Baron is pretty remarkable too. Have you ever
heard a drum kit sound so beautiful? I went to see him play with Masada in the Queens Hall
in 1998 and he got more dynamic range than I
think I've ever heard anyone get from any acoustic instrument. He was also
very particular about tuning: eventually the rest of the band got tired of
waiting for him to finish tuning the drums, and they just came on and
started the set. Apart from a small amp for the bass, they played without
a PA too. The standard of the musicianship was quite dizzying: I remember
staggering out into the close at the back of the hall afterwards, as
though I'd been hit very hard on the head with pure music.
In
case your knowledge of music history has this particular lacuna,
some years ago Joey Baron and Fred Frith were both in this
band, who could play spectacularly beautifully, but often chose not to.
I love the bit where John Zorn carefully puts his part back on the music
stand after knocking it off mid-scream, and the way Bill Frisell stops
perfectly mid-phrase at the end.
Friday
14 May 2010
By
9.30 this morning I was inhaling the seaweedy aroma of a very still Loch
Fyne, before heading to Ardkinglas
to remind myself of how nice David and Angela's Muir
Wood square piano is. I recorded a bit over my shoulder with the H4,
and it sounds surprisingly good, apart from me laughing at all the bum
notes. And you'd never guess it hadn't been tuned for months: most
fortepianos only stay in tune for minutes at a time.
Back
in town, a brief visit to the university library, and then an afternoon at
the baths with Greg, where I finally jumped into the cold plunge for the
first time, instead of gingerly walking in as usual. Mackintosh plan is
now nearly ready to roll.
Thursday
13 May 2010
Still
in management mode here, but today I should also get down to making some
repertoire decisions about which Mackintosh tunes we might play and record
in a couple of weeks' time. DG has sent me his wish list, so if I collate
that with mine, we might have a record's worth of tunes.
You
can Mark Steel entertaining the Pickie Centre here:
despite him saying 'the Orkneys' to the audience at one point to hear the
ensuing hiss (it's Orkney or the Orkney Isles), the press billings for the
programme mentioned 'the Orkneys', and the Radio 4 announcer even
introduced it as being from 'the island of Orkney'. Did the producer not
listen to her own programme before writing the presentation notes? England
is just a county isn't it?
Now
that the election is over, I finally figured out why Labour were using the
phrase 'hard-working families' throughout the campaign, which given the
ever-increasing number of people living on their own, seemed a bit
counterproductive to me. Jack Straw let the cat out of the bag this
morning by mentioning 'C2s' in the same breath: it's NewLabourspeak for
'the working class'. Someone told them they never live on their own, don't
you know.
later
New Flipron
video - yay! I want to be able to play like Joe.
Mackintosh
repertoire is cooking up nicely: it is indeed a record's worth of tunes -
whew. And Allan Wright came over for a lunchtime curry in his splendid
rusty Jag and together we plotted the downfall of music theory as we know
it.
Monday
10 May 2010
I only
just heard the news about Morris
Pert: shame I never got to meet him.
Alison
came over this afternoon so that we could send out everyone's CD session
fee cheques, start managing the detail of our May/June concerts, and stare
unblinkingly at the budgets, juggling numbers here and there until they
start to make sense. I now have a very long worklist to get through, but
my underlying stress level is probably better.
On
Saturday I was hugely cheered up by 5 hours spent gardening, while
listening to the concerts from Basel and Hatchlands. All very useful
indeed.
late
update
At our concerts in Dornie and Ardkinglas (3, 4 June) we will joined by
none other than Suzie LeBlanc.
Woohoo!
Friday
7 May 2010
OK, I
won't write anything about the election here, other than to say that to salvage
some degree of relief or cheeriness I am clinging to the thought that
without an outright majority, the glossy rubber twins Cameron and Osborne won't get to do
just anything they want.
For
reasons I won't explain I've been reading books on harmony here today, and
I came across the term 'tonicisation' (or tonicization
if you're on the other side of the pond) which was new to me. Well, I may
just be in a bad mood about the election but I call bullshit on that one.
Modulation I can deal with (that's changing key, folks), but tonicisation ...
do come off it. I've been blessed with
a largely practical musical education from the experience of music, rather than a
theoretical one, and the use of terms like that encourages me to remain a musician and not a music
theorist.
Every
harpsichord should have an attendant case of beer (thanks Scott).
We
finally
signed off the CD booklet and notes tonight, after representatives of
another organisation took exception to some of what I'd written, and (very
politely) demanded changes. I thought it was quite mild compared to what
I could have written: see if you
can guess what got changed when you buy your copy.
Here is
a little more trouble -
Thursday
6 May 2010
Election
Day: I've already voted by post. If you want a neat illustration of what a
disaster it will be if the Tories get in, yesterday I drove past one of these
posters, which is hideous enough in itself. But it was on a huge
billboard in Govan, famously the home of that fictional pillar of the
benefits system, Rab
C Nesbitt. It's a bit like putting up a billboard in Cheltenham that
says 'Let's Ban High Culture and Horse Racing for Posh Twats'. Clueless.
Budget-
and repertoire-wrangling, and CD booklet proofing here.
Wednesday
5 May 2010
At the
eye clinic this morning, the consultant greeted me with 'wow, you have
superhuman vision'. Really? Apparently I'm 6/3, which is 20/10
in old money. But only if I put specs on. I can't see a thing at the
moment as both my pupils are dilated so I woan't be abel to spit spuuling
mistokes.
Celebrated
nationalist and all-round treasure Alasdair
Gray has come out for the LibDems,
complete with photo opportunity in Oran Mor. Somewhere I have another
photo of AG and Sushil standing in front of a Vote Green poster but that
was happy serendipity. Did I mention that there's an election
on here?
Pedestrians'
rights - hooray.
Tuesday
4 May 2010
I
really enjoyed hearing Charlemagne Palestine's Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone
on WFMU this morning - you can hear a 15' excerpt here,
but you'll have to imagine the teddy bears. Even mid-drone I still find
myself absent-mindedly humming Schetky's Canzonets from last week: this is
a good sign.
I
spent half an hour yesterday setting up a twitter account, not with the
intention of tweeting my every passing thought (or possibly any thoughts
whatsoever, it's difficult enough to find the time to get any work done as
it is), but to keep up with the election coverage, especially from @MTuckerNo10.
Monday
3 May 2010
It's
taken me four and a half days to clear the backlog of email from being
away for six. And that's with having my phone and laptop with me to deal
with the quick urgent ones while I was away.
Meanwhile
I've also done the first round of editing on the Edinburgh live CD
booklet, which looks great and has a selection of my rehearsal photos in
it, some of which will be familiar to readers of this diary. I've been
reorganising this room, so that I can keep the harpsichord beside me and
gradually work my way through some Mackintosh and the various keyboard MSS
from Boughton which now reside in scans on my laptop. It would be nice to
set aside a few days to do just that, but magically free days aren't going
to come along now for a very long time. On Saturday I realised that I was
getting very stressed because having the harpsichord in its usual place
meant that I had to engage in some climbing to get either to the sofa or
to my guitar on the wall. So now it's in front of all the bookshelves, and
I have to take a very circuitous route to get to them, but I have easy
access to floor, sofa and guitar so that's OK.
We got
a no from a different funding body for our Revenge of the Folksingers
project, so at some point this week I will slave over a hot spreadsheet
and make some awkward decisions as to what shape it will take. Most
artistic decisions (as opposed to ideas) are financially driven, of
course.
Thanks
to the nice freecycler who has offered to bring over his old hifi amp,
after our kitchen one blew up unexpectedly on Saturday night.
Incidentally, if you listen to the Glee
soundtrack albums from another room, you can clearly hear which solo
voices have been processed to death with Autotune - some of the ensemble
harmonies sounds suspiciously like equal temperament too ...
Thursday 28 April 2010
Home
again, dealing with the mail backlog, putting away lots of things, wav
files included. Among the mail was my postal vote form, with its
needlessly difficult instructions, even including a typo to trap the
unwary: 'both the voting sheet'? Even following the instructions
carefully, I managed to obscure the return address with envelope A and had
to open the whole thing up again.
UK
readers might like to try this rather neat online
gadget that tries to find the best fit between your opinions on
various issues and those of the parties, and gives you other helpful
information too ...
Wednesday
27 April 2010
on the train home from
Euston
Somehow in the last 24 hours I made it to Surrey, rehearsed an entire
programme with Kathy,
watched Stevie Wonder
on the telly, slept like a log, and then we went to Hatchlands
and played a concert at 12 today which was really good fun. The Longman
& Broderip piano no.34 from about 1795 is reputed (by the late Robbins
Landon who it’s difficult to argue with) to have been owned by Haydn,
and I can see why he liked it if it was his. It’s had a spring mechanism
added to the dampers in Vienna
at some point, which makes them a bit more efficient than those on most
British pianos, and for some reason playing it made me think of Hobnobs:
kind of crunchy and enjoyable with a bit of give. David Hunt did a
fantastic job of the restoration.
By
today we were also quite enthusiastic about Schetky’s Six Canzonets,
which is very useful – we managed to make a quick reference demo using
Haydn’s piano and my H4 too. And
I may just have located an unexpected Dulcitone.
one
of Chopin's pianos respectfully pressed into service as a microphone stand
one
of the many nice Broadwoods lurking in corners
It
will be good to have travelled all the way home from
Basel
by train, even if the journey gets more unpleasant the closer you get to Britain. That the tax system makes it so much more expensive to travel by train
than air is really indefensible. Also,
heading north by so many degrees of latitude at this time of year is like
watching the seasons go backwards from summer to early spring: the trees
get barer and barer and the grass less green …
Tuesday 26 April 2010
on the TGV Basel-Paris
I’m just about awake after a very busy couple of days. Catherine’s
poster and tireless promotion paid off which a friendly audience at
PianoFort’ino. The piano
(by Caspar Schmidt, Prague 1830) was quite amazing, and the Turkish
effects are all on the 6th pedal: drum, bells and snare effect
with a pretty much random selection of them sounding when you press it
down. When I tried out in Schetky’s variations on the strathspey The
Indian Queen, none of the three of us could stop laughing for some time
and we decided on the spot that we would try and record something (even if
we weren’t sure what) the following day.
BRS
again, this time with a huge plate of antipasti between us, and Clare
McIntyre joined us for a single dessert with 4 spoons – eating out in
Basel
is a bit expensive, after all.
Yesterday,
Catherine was producer for the day, cycling off to pick up a hired Schoeps
ORTF pair to be placed in a strategic position. Recording old pianos
is always problematic as even when they will stay in tune for longer than
15 minutes, they make so many unexpected extraneous noises, especially if
as in this case there is a bassoon stop, two moderators, an harp stop, a
damper pedal and a Turkish band to accommodate and regulate. I was
convinced that one particular buzz was the audio signal breaking up, but
it really was acoustic.
So
we all worked very hard indeed and earned our dinner. Courtesy of
Catherine’s kitchen, we’ve eaten very well indeed for the last few
days, possibly also because my only culinary contribution has been the
baked bananas with Lindt 70% we had last night.
Saturday 24 April 2010
Basel, bei Catherine Motuz
The journey turned out to be trouble-free after all: I particularly
enjoyed the way you have a choice of three countries to enter when you get
off the plane in
Basel. Arriving on time meant that after
the brief journey by bus and tram into town with Catherine, there was time
both to eat, and to enjoy the essential combination of Beer, dangling your
feet above the Rhine, and Sunset (henceforward abbreviated to BRS) before
going to the Predigerkirche for a concert of 17th-century Italian music
given by various classes from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis including no
less than 11 trombones. Any concert that includes the Monteverdi Sonata on
Sancta Maria is fine by me, and any concert that features that many
wind/brass players actually playing together and in (meantone) tune rather
than trying to blast each other out as might be the case on this side of
the
English Channel, is good too. What a great noise. We stayed up late with Bruce
Dickey who’d been conducting, and sampled some of Catherine’s
precious 30
year old Highland Park after liberating it from ‘sa propre petite
guillotine’ in its wooden coffin.
This
morning it was just a short bike ride to the early music geek heaven that
is the Schola, where we
met Alison who’d come over from two weeks of Feldenkrais
in
Bern. We had a choice of several fortepianos surrounding the quiet courtyard
– what a blissful place this must be to be a student. After an essential afternoon nap it was back to the Schola by
ferry, for a bit more fortepiano-neurosis-alleviating practice for me,
then to the river for BRS before Alex
Potter supplied us with his excellent asparagus risotto.
the
ferry coming to get us
halfway
up the stairs on the other side
the
BRS view
Friday 23 April 2010
in the air, leaving
Heathrow Terminal 5
It’s been a trouble-free journey so far, going according to plan,
which usually makes me nervous that it will all unravel soon …
Soon
after posting Wednesday’s diary entry I began to feel very ill indeed
– perhaps picking up a quick lunch from a well-known
UK
bakery chain to eat in the park
wasn’t such a bright idea after all. But by yesterday morning my
digestion was recovering and I got through a lot of tasks: packing,
submitting another funding application that Chrissy had prepared, writing
to our board, and unravelling the intricacies of secretary hand at scottishhandwriting.com.
Have a go at the tutotial: it’s great.
The keyboard part of the Crokat MS is in secretary hand rather than
italic, so I’ve now got a far better chance of deciphering the titles.
In
Heathrow I watched some of Philip Tagg’s milksap
montage, and his other pieces on the ‘musemes’ in Abba’s
Fernando: I don’t think I’d ever noticed the Also Sprach Zarathustra
reference in the intro before.
Wednesday
21 April 2010
I was
off on my bike to the other-worldly surroundings of the Arlington
Baths this morning with Bill Lloyd. The pool is quite beautiful in the
sunshine, the water is bracingly cool, and the Turkish suite with its
coloured glass lights in the ceiling dome is pretty much as it was in
1875. The Victorian showers that spray you from all sides are great too.
Last time I was in there about 10 years ago, there was still one of those
wooden steam baths that you sit inside on an adjustable stool that screws
up and down, with your head sticking out a hole in the top. It was
fantastic ... but health & safety inspectors removed it soon after to
stop people cooking themselves.
Which
reminds me, can anyone explain why the Gents toilets in the Citizens
Theatre smell exactly like Carlisle
Turkish Baths did two decades ago? Uncanny that I can remember that
precise smell after so long. And no, it wasn't what you'd expect a gents
toilet to smell of.
On my
way home today there was time for a haircut, lunch in the park, and
dropping into the university for some fortepiano practice, and a seminar
looking at a fragment of a 14th century Gradual with a funny
painting in it.
And
some good news, the PRS Foundation has given us a grant towards our
Revenge of the Folksingers project in December! We've still more money to
find, but it's a great start. Whew.
Monday
19 April 2010
A day
of writing and practice ahead, with an excursion at some point into the
bright, cold weather to stop me becoming completely sedentary.
Sunday
mornings at home are becoming increasingly associated with Dan Bodah's
Airborne Event on WFMU: pretty much every week he comes up with at least
one 'whoa, what's that?' moment, which has me scrabbling around on eBay
for obscure old LPs. Yesterday's
show featured some wonderful Sacred Harp singing and all sorts of
things loosely based on it. The opening song 'Wondrous Love' is one that
Edmund Brownless had us singing at Boxwood
a couple of years ago, and the Word
of Mouth Chorus makes a glorious noise. If you need some musical
accompaniment for a long day, you could do worse than work your way
through Dan's archives.
As
broadband access (that's high speed internet in UK-speak) becomes taken
for granted, or in Gordon Brown's words 'the
electricity of the digital age', the focus and the data gradually move
away from hard drives and into the cloud. Not having a tech support
department to do the maintenance for me, I spent lots of the weekend
defragging hard drives and organising online and physical backups of my
two computers: after some investigation I settled on Mozy for the online
bit, and an old, more reliable version of Novosoft's Handy Backup. I've
already got into the habit of keeping most work-in-progress online (Google
Docs or Dropbox) so that I can access it on my phone or laptop. But if net
access collapses unexpectedly as air travel just has, what happens
then?
later
Practising piano music properly is really tiring. Or maybe it's just
Haydn, because he never does what you think he's going to, so you have to
be on total mental alert at all times. Starting from feeling pretty
refreshed, I managed only about 90 minutes' total of serious practice time
today (mostly in short chunks) before I was completely exhausted and had
to find something less demanding to do.
After
a final harmonium overdub yesterday, I made a rough mix of a set of dance
band tunes, featuring Pamela, Bill and Alison, but it needs further tweaks
before anyone hears it. I'll live with it for a while and make a list of
improvements.
Saturday
17 April 2010
Just
back from a very windy bike ride. Now, what's wrong with this picture?
Yup,
no vapour trails. There's been an uncannily clear sky here for several
days now, considering we live 10 miles from a busy airport. I'm trying not
to think utopian thoughts about most of us having to do without flying for
an extended period of time ...
Today
as a break from learning notes and dealing with various bits of admin, I
struck a blow against the Apple 'just chuck it and replace it with the new
version' culture, and fitted a new battery to my ageing iPod mini for the
second time. I guess that with the iPhone the process is more complicated
...
I've
posted some new (and some old) bits of music here,
for those of you who can still remember what myspace is.
Wednesday
14 April 2010
I
have lots of notes to learn, or re-learn, as there are two fortepiano
programmes to master in the next week and a bit, and in the second one the
whole thing is written-out piano parts by Haydn and Schetky, rather than
my usual diet of improvisation. Yike. I'm also preparing a load of extra
Schetky material in case a recording opportunity presents itself. But the
slog has meant that I've been able to reacquaint myself with Haydn's
Canzonettas. The Mermaid's Song is one of my favourite songs ever, utterly
charming and clever with a barely-concealed erotic undertow (meant for
Haydn himself?) in the words by Anne Hunter. I had a look on Spotify and
found what looked like a promising recording with Anne Sofie von Otter,
and ... it was spectacularly wrong, made me feel quite queasy. I can count
myself fortunate indeed that I've been able to play it with Catherine Bott
(many times) and Katharine Fuge (in a week or so).
There's
been lots of media coverage of the Conservatives' pathetic attempts to
persuade the general public to 'join' the government. Hmm, well I got a
letter this morning from the city council here saying that they're going
to implement my suggestion for where to put some double yellow line
parking restrictions. My own little bit of local government, and no Tories
were involved whatsoever (but a helpful LibDem was).
My
good deed for the day was saving our dishwasher from landfill, finally
restoring it to its full glory today after about three months waiting for
someone else not to order the part, taking it to bits myself, identifying
the broken bit, finding somewhere where I could order the right part, and
figuring out how to put it back together. For the want of a tiny
piece of plain moulded plastic the dishwasher was nearly lost.
A
sunny day - I took the second part of the afternoon off and cycled to the
baths for a swim and a cold plunge, to make up for not jumping in the sea
last week.
Monday
12 April 2010
Spring
has sprung, and just over a week after coming off the steroids, I have a
red eye again, so it was back to the familiar welcome of the eye hospital
yesterday morning. There weren't many people about, but doctors and nurses
alike warned me not to say the Q-word ("quiet") or it would be
my fault if they had a very busy day indeed.
I've
spent 12 of the last 24 hours rebuilding my desktop computer which had
become painfully slow: replacing it with another one of a similar
spec seemed a bit pointless. So I'm only now starting to deal with the
backlog of urgent emails, the strange postal packages that have arrived,
and the other bits of organisation that need to be done. I've also been
reading this
(don't be put off by the hideous cover).
You might
want to join me in having a share in this piece of land (click on the
picture on the right). The peaceful village of Harmondsworth, where most
of our records were lovingly mastered, will be surrounded on three sides
by Heathrow airport's perimeter fence if the third runway is built.
This
needs more views. Is the brother really Babylon? Alasdair tells me that
Gordeanna McCulloch suggests the real title is Babe Alone, and I'd think
twice before disagreeing with Gordeanna about anything. Any linguists
out there who can help? Monday
5 April 2010
Isle
of Lismore
Among my holiday reading is this
which includes the play version of The
Fall of Kelvin Walker, Kelvin being in Alasdair Gray’s words ‘a
Scotsman on the make’ in London
in the 1960s. Gray notes that the play
would have had the opportunity for a West End
run if he had agreed to change the
ending, so that instead of Kelvin’s father dragging him home or planning
Scottish independence with him, Kelvin married into the English
aristocracy. Oddly enough, in the CD notes I was writing last week, the
two featured Scotsmen on the make in London (countertenor John Abell in
the 1680s and publisher/composer James Oswald in the 1740s) both married
into the aristocracy to cement their fortunes.
Friday
2 April 2010
Lots
of things started moving very quickly this week. On Wednesday I finished
writing the CD booklet notes, and then when I wasn't at the university
yesterday I was checking the almost-final master (the final one arrived at
10pm), booking travel for DG's next visit, and discussing possible
repertoire with Suzie in case she can join us for some concerts. All very
promising indeed.
This
morning I took my mobile recording kit over to Alison's for four hours of
treble and bass viol overdubs: a DIY consort.
|
concerto caledonia
