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David
McGuinness's diary Monday 25 August 2003 I'm just writing this to avoid having to deal with the mountain of paper on my desk, which I've been ignoring for a week or two on the pretext of having a lot of music to learn. I must get rid of it all tonight so that I can get some work done in the rest of the week. Saturday night was great fun - we got to do our completely tasteless version of 'The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen' as an encore, complete with operatic cadenzas, and tacky spoken intro over 'magical' harp chords. Who needs culture when you can get a cheap laugh? Well, with Lisa singing it's a very expensive-sounding and well-executed cheap laugh. I hope she doesn't mind me revealing (singers' tips no. 258) that if you find yourself forgetting the words, the thing to do is point at the audience and smile, and they'll be so distracted that they won't notice that you're singing a load of mince. Friday 22 August 2003 Well, the Handel was great, if utterly exhausting.
It was certainly a beneficial experience to be challenged by someone who does
what I do much better! Today's rehearsal for tomorrow's concert didn't quite go according to plan, as Paul had driven as far as Perth before he realised he'd left his fiddle at home in Aberdeenshire. So we got to hear him diddle the tunes instead - OK, mumble them. So now I'm assembling all my mini cue cards, and two set lists to tape to the floor - on stationery from a glamorous-sounding hotel of course, to make it look a bit rock 'n' roll (ho ho). I've got a couple of bits of instrument maintenance to do as well - a melodica note to tune and a bit of harmonium tweakage. I'd better go and do it. Wednesday 20 August 2003 The Edinburgh Festival continues apace. It's the performance of Poro tonight, so I've had a long-awaited morning off and a trip to the gym in preparation for the gruelling mental strain ahead. Rehearsals have been both inspiring and frustrating: inspiring because Emmanuelle Haïm's command of the piece is absolutely stunning, but frustrating because she doesn't always manage to communicate it clearly and in simple terms to the rest of us mortals. So the general rehearsal yesterday was pretty chaotic, with a lot of sore necks afterwards from the stress (mine included). I wonder how tonight will go. But there have been some great moments along the way. Saturday morning's recitative rehearsal was over-running badly, so at the scheduled finish time, some of the players had to leave to get to their next rehearsal. Then the organ was taken away, leaving me with just a harpsichord. Next, that went too, so Emmanuelle and I shared the other one. And then there were no keyboard instruments at all, and we all sat around Yair Avador's lute instead. A kind of farewell symphony. I've managed to hear a few things: the SCO's Brahms Symphonies with Mackerras were fantastic, and much better than their rather drab-sounding CDs of the same, recorded in the same hall a few years ago. Sir Charles was going to come to the Poro run on his day off yesterday, but as he said, 'Much as I'm devoted to Handel, to Emmanuelle and to you, I think I need my day off'. I was suitably flattered. On Monday night there were some great unintentionally amusing moments in the Paragon Ensemble concert of new Japanese music. At one point it took four and a half minutes to set out the chairs for six players. This involved several people coming and going on the stage, setting and re-setting chairs, tripping over music stands, even pushing one another out of the way - it was like watching Laurel and Hardy at work. And then the musicians finally came on and shifted all the chairs again themselves anyway. Stagecraft is not dead, it's just not feeling very well. You might think that all of this high art induces noble thoughts in its participants, but of course that's not the case at all. I've now been introduced to various unbroadcastable lyrics to fit the themes in Brahms's symphonies, and I've learnt from a colleague that the infallible way to distinguish between sacred and secular music, is that if you can sing the phrase 'stick it up your [rhymes with 'lighter']' to it, it's sacred music. Thursday 14 August 2003 We've started SCO rehearsals for Handel's opera Poro with Emmanuelle Haïm. When I mentioned to Radio 3 presenter Donald Macleod that I'd be working with her, his response was 'oh she's wonderful, music oozes from her every pore'. Well, I'd modify that slightly, music actually gushes uncontrollably from her in all directions. After three hours of high-octane continuo rehearsal last night, in which she flew around, singing all the parts, cracking jokes, mimicking us and generally being a one-woman firework display, I was so adrenalised that I couldn't really sleep much. It's great fun though; being around someone who's that intelligent is always rewarding. I could do with the sleep right now: yesterday I rather carelessly put my hand through a window trying to open it, and was very lucky to escape with only a couple of cuts on the back of a finger and a grazed arm. On train journeys I've been listening back to the tapes of last week's rehearsal (or was it the week before), making notes and writing down sketchy versions of what I'm playing. The plan is to have a little set of index-card sized summaries of each piece to leave around the stage, on instruments or on the floor, rather than a great big folder that gets in the way. An idea shamelessly nicked from Ronn MacFarlane in the Chris Norman Ensemble gigs last year. Speaking of which, I'm going to sit in on harmonium and melodica in some of Chris's Scottish gigs next month - a BBC session for Celtic Connections on Tuesday 16th, and then the Edinburgh Folk Club the following night. Three visits to the US coming up in the next few months too. I sent off the corrections for the Spring Any Day Now booklet at about 2am yesterday morning. Perhaps that's why I could do with some sleep. BBC2 again - one of the candidates in Restoration is the Britannia Music Hall, an amazing piece of theatre history that large chunks of the Glaswegian population walk past regularly without even knowing it's there. Two jokes. - From Kevin McCrae (SCO cello section): A man goes into a bar with a steering wheel down his trousers. Barman: 'How did that get there?' Man: 'I don't know, but it's driving me nuts'. - From my daughter (of her own invention): 'What do you call a jellyfish that's not a jellyfish? A duck.' Not sure I understand that one, but it made me laugh. Sunday 10 August 2003 I had my hearing tested on Thursday. I'd figured that given the abuse my ears have had over the years, it would be interesting to see if they've suffered. I've also been meaning to buy some earplugs for use in noisy environments like sitting in the middle of symphony orchestras (I'm not joking). Anyway, my hearing turns out to be very good indeed, which is just as well given that it's how I earn my living. Despite what anyone will tell you, a good musician is the one who can listen, not necessarily the one who can play. On Friday I went to Grangemouth to check out a harmonium that's for sale. It was small (ideal), a little beaten up, and most of it worked. Unfortunately, as I'd feared, its pitch was around 450Hz, so it's not much use as a performing instrument. Hey ho. This is the case with most American organs and harmoniums in Britain as prior to the 1920s that's where pitch was, and they're very stable instruments. While I was driving across the country in the intense heat, David G left a frantic message on my phone, just as he was leaving Halifax for a flight. Apparently Spring Any Day Now goes off for manufacturing on Monday, so I've just got tonight to check out the booklet copy for errors (assuming they actually send me the thing as promised - they haven't so far). And now the Edinburgh Festival has started, which allows for lots of encounters with interesting musicians. Last night was rounded off with Charles Mackerras enthusiastically showing me in his score the bits of Janacek's Glagolitic Mass that have been restored after the composer cut them for the first performances. He made the cuts because a) what he originally wrote was just too difficult for the players and the chorus, and b) he couldn't get a set of pedal timpani. Earlier on, Garry Walker was telling me what fun it is to call up György Kurtag for advice, as he sings and plays piano down the phone with great commitment, and Thomas Trotter warned me that Strauss's Festliches Präludium (in which I get my shot of the Usher Hall organ in a couple of months) is loud but crap. Funnily enough, the organ solo in the Glagolitic Mass could easily be a track by King Crimson - a huge bass riff with upper parts in different metres over the top. I bumped into May Halyburton backstage, who said 'do you know exactly a year ago [a year ago yesterday actually] we were on the big wheel at Chicago's Navy Pier?' In fact I've been bumping into friends all day and just about managing to say hello as we rush past one another - I could have quite a fun social life if ever had the time. Meanwhile, BBC2 has been showing lots of Laurel & Hardy two-reelers for the summer holidays - bliss. Tuesday 5 August 2003 Well, summer has finally arrived, it's actually hot, and I'm dividing my time between the following outdoor activities: phone calls to various promoters and arts organisations trying to plug the gaps in our schedule for next month, looking at lots of 18th century Scottish basslines with a view to actually writing the paper I said I would by the end of this month, getting the various songs and tunes for the forthcoming Edinburgh concert into my head and fingers, and riding scooters around the perimeter of the next door playing fields with my son. Saturday 2 August 2003 Wendy and Lisa were round on Thursday (no, not that Wendy and Lisa) to start looking at the songs for our Edinburgh concert (sold out, judging from the EIF website). We'd decided that we're going to wing it rather than working from printed or written-down arrangements, and it's going great, but the main problem is that by the end of the day we've played so many songs that I can't even remember the tunes, let alone what I was playing. All I have is a bit of paper with a list of titles, the instrument I played in each song, and what key they were in. So I think there may be a DAT machine or two running in tomorrow's rehearsal as an aide-memoire for my addled memoire. There are various bits of diary shuffling going on at the moment, to see whether we can fit in an extra ConCal date or two in September - I'll update the concerts page when it starts to take shape. Meanwhile, some good news on the publishing front: the Mercat Press (I hope you have more luck accessing their website than I did) have re-issued David Johnson's Music and Society in Lowland Scotland in the Eighteenth Century. If you're interested in the music, there's now no excuse for not having this book, which after 30 years is still the first port of call for loads of basic information. Ring BookSource on 08702 402 182 or +44 141 558 1366 if Mercat's website lets you down, as it did me. My reading of American comic-books (OK, graphic novels, sequential art, whatever) on holiday a couple of weeks ago led me via 'No More Shaves' to the wonderful world of the Duplex Planet, which I've been hearing about for years and am only now discovering in all its glory. It leaves you looking forward to growing old. Saturday 26 July 2003 I'm sitting in the garden enjoying the evening sunshine, listening on headphones to last night's work. I was down at Finesplice yesterday to listen as Ben Turner mastered Spring Any Day Now for its imminent release. It's a very enjoyable process, as Ben's ears are attuned to all sorts of things that I'd never notice, and the end result of all his subtle and not-so-subtle tweaks of level, EQ and compression is always that everything sounds much more exciting than it did before. So by 1 a.m. or so, I was thinking how much I like this record. One of many things I haven't yet got around to doing in the last few months, is writing a paper on cello parts in 18th century Scottish music. We know that fiddle and cello alone was a common combination to play for dancing, but we don't really know what the cellists played. I think there are a few clues in the some of the surviving printed basslines of the period, but I need some more hands-on experience and I've been looking to talk to some cellists who've had a go. Now it just so happens that Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas (who've been working for a while on that very combination) are over from the USA playing a concert tomorrow in Edinburgh, but I can't go because I'm in a rehearsal. Anyway, I only mention all this because I looked up from my sandwich on the plane from London this morning, and who should be walking past in the aisle stretching his legs but Alasdair. So we had a chance to catch up and compare current enthusiasms at baggage reclaim, and I got to meet Natalie after all - still haven't heard her play though ... I haven't had time for diary entries for a while, as I've had a couple of weeks' holiday, and then last week was spent frantically catching up with all the things that urgently needed to be done: writing funding applications to trusts for the March tour, learning tunes for next month's Edinburgh Festival gig with Lisa Milne, Paul Anderson and Wendy Stewart, and preparing for last week's board meeting, which left me feeling more optimistic than I'd been previously. As Richard Chester put it, 'for a company with no money, we're doing an awful lot'. In the Edinburgh concert I'm going to play fortepiano and harmonium, so as of today Paul Moore's wonderful harmonium has taken up temporary residence in my study. Don't think I'll be able to keep my hands off it for long. Thursday 3 July 2003 The new CD Spring Any Day Now will (barring last minute interventions of chaos, always a possibility) have its American release on 16 or 23 September, depending on EMI's schedules. Meanwhile, I'm told Paddy McAloon will be the guest on Radio 3's Mixing It this Sunday - the programme should be available on the website at www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 if you miss it. Speaking of Radio 3, Gillian Reynolds in the Daily Telegraph gave my psalm programme a very nice review, concluding 'it's a shame only a few thousand people will have heard it.' I appreciate the sentiment, but I've never been one to put (total) faith in listening figures, or in bums on seats. The financial rewards of popularity are better of course. Thursday 26 June 2003 Just back from a week at the St Magnus Festival in Orkney. One of the highlights for me was Yuri Torchinsky and his wife Dina giving a devastating performance of the first Schnittke violin sonata, in the old schoolroom on the island of Wyre (pop. 15). Another was going for a post-midnight pint in Kirkwall's Bothy Bar, with Jennifer and Hazel Wrigley and some friends playing in the corner. Also, Peter Maxwell Davies's manager Judy Arnold was telling me about when his group the Fires of London started, and people wanted to know what category it fitted into: 'do you eat it with a fork or a spoon?' Great name for an album: 'Fork or Spoon'. I just made it back to Glasgow in time for a final eight bars of Saint-Saëns. The first of the eight contained a moment of confusion - did the conductor (no names) skip a beat? Somehow all of the orchestra managed to miss out a note of The Big Tune. The short rehearsal was an almost total waste of time, with the exasperated leader taking over the reins at one point, to insist in vain that some useful work got done. Anyway, I've opened some of my mail since I got back. The most urgent message was that the SAC have turned down our application to tour with Chris Norman in September, which is a shame, but will give me the chance to focus more clearly on next year's activity. As Alison pointed out to me a while back, rushing from one place to another is my default state, so a bit of proper thinking and planning wouldn't go amiss. Meanwhile, if we can get it mastered in time, Spring Any Day Now may (may!) be released in North America on September 16. My walkman has been resounding to the newly re-released Joy of a Toy by Kevin Ayers (which I listened to in my youth when it was first re-released!), with its great David Bedford arrangements and a brief appearance by Syd Barrett - joy indeed. Also to the new King Crimson album, The Power to Believe: if there's a better track than Dangerous Curves for walking in the rain I have yet to hear it, and it's proof that middle-aged men with guitars can do more than just crappy AOR 'dad rock', to borrow a term from the New Collins Dictionary. There's thrilling delicacy and violence in the old Fripp yet. Thursday 19 June 2003 Only time now for the briefest of progress reports: here goes. The Red Red Rose CD booklet notes are now written, second edit suggestions written up. I'm putting together the repertoire for our Lochaber concert, and still awaiting bureaucratic decisions before we'll know about any other gigs in September. The Earl of Kellie recording dates for November and March are all now in the diary, and Katherine is fixing the orchestral sessions, after a long phone call yesterday where we discussed the delicate politics of which violinist might sit where. Have I ever mentioned how little I enjoy dealing with orchestras? Having said that, I've accepted another delightfully silly engagement from the RSNO, playing the organ in Richard Strauss's Festliche Praeludium in the opening concerts of next season. So I'll get my hands on the Usher Hall organ, make a very loud noise on it, and wait for the orchestra to join in. Of course I haven't played that sort of organ in public for about 10 years, and come to think of it, when I was an organist I never touched the Romantic repertoire anyway, so it will be a complete ground-up learning process, but what the hell, the notes aren't hard, and I suspect it will be fun. And the prospect of a small challenge serves to alleviate the administrative tedium of the last week or so: rehearsal schedules, funding applications, diary shuffling and so on. Saturday 14 June 2003 Another 8 bars tonight, in the Usher Hall. Really enjoyed it. Speaking of musical economy, on Friday I had a rare experience worth recounting. When you work in the subsidised arts, there is a never-ending stream of people, usually salaried arts professionals rather than artists or patrons, who will provide you with advice and suggestions on things that you could be doing. 'Why don't you do X?' 'We could fund a project along the lines of Y.' 'Wouldn't it be great if Z?' It goes without saying that none of these people will ever have to do any of the actual work involved in the making of X, Y or Z, so their suggestions are easy to make and relatively meaningless. Talk is cheap, after all, and it's one thing to have an idea, quite another to make it happen. But on Friday I had a meeting with Cathy Hirschmann of the organisation Arts and Business which as its name suggests, brings together arts people and business people. And I was describing the various things I do, and one particular project which I felt was overdue. 'No', she said, 'you don't need to do that. You haven't got the time.' It's the most perceptive and cheering thing anyone's said to me about my work for as long as I can remember. If I had any undying devotion to spare (which I haven't), I would have pledged it to her there and then. Saturday 7 June 2003 When not playing 8 bars of Saint-Saëns (in Dundee last night) I've spent the last week and a half mired in Edit Hell. It's not that bad really, just a lot of time spent in a room on my own staring at a monitor. It's OK in short bursts, but it would drive me completely nuts if I did it all the time. The final edit of 'Spring Any Day Now' is now ready for mastering, I've just got the running order to tweak, and today in the garden I figured out a neat running order for 'The Red Red Rose' when I wasn't chopping firewood. I've also finished my BBC programme about metrical psalms, which goes out on 22 June on Radio 3 at 2240 BST - if you listen closely you can hear me singing, speaking, laughing (in the background of some of the interviews) and playing harmonium and melodica. Tuesday 27 May 2003 I realised a long-standing musical ambition today - well, I went to the rehearsal for it anyway. Saint-Saëns' 3rd symphony is one of those great tacky pieces of music that's so corny it's brilliant, and I've always wanted to play not the organ part (although that would be fun too), but the second piano part. The second player only joins in for a grand total of 8 bars, but they're the best 8 bars in the piece, playing really fast quiet arpeggios under the big glorious tune that comes after the deafening organ chord near the end. The first performance is next Friday in Dundee. Edit notes are coming in steadily from DG, so I foresee a weekend of slaving over a hot computer doing the final edits of the duo CD. DG tells me that the record company people like it a lot - that's a relief. Monday 26 May 2003 A day off ! Gardening ! I'm just back from Inverness, where I joined a Free Church singing psalms on Sunday morning, which was unexpectedly moving. Besides the modern versions of the psalms, they were still singing the 17th century words and music unaccompanied, and it sounded fresh and vital rather than archaic. We're moving towards the final stages - I hope - of the next two albums. By the end of the week I expect to have the first edit of the Delphian CD, and Mr Greenberg's editing notes for our duo album. So I'd better get writing some liner notes. I've already taken some photos for the covers. I still don't know whether our September tour will go ahead in its full form, as the Scottish Arts Council won't be meeting to consider International Working applications until 1 July. These are applications for the year April 2003 - March 2004. Can you spot the flaw in this system ? To be fair, they're very apologetic and doing all they can to help, but ... I Trawl the Megahertz comes out on EMI next week - there's a nice screensaver and audio available at www.prefabsprout.com . It was sheer joy to see Alf Poier performing in the Eurovision Song Contest for Austria, and do credibly in the points too. Of course the British entry was embarrassing garbage, plus, if you have a singer who is somewhat lacking in talent and experience, and a potentially dodgy monitoring situation, it's a good idea to have more than just a bassline for her to pitch the first verse from. Duh! Last week I had the pleasure of meeting (and paying homage to) sound engineer Dave Dade, who as well as being Beard of the Year 2001, and doing the sound at Live Aid for Radio 1, engineered many of the classic John Peel sessions in the late 1970s, and in many cases got a better sound in no time flat in the BBC's trusty Maida Vale studios, than the bands did on their records with a huge budget, the most expensive knob-twiddlers, and the Town House or the Manor or wherever. He was recording a jazz gig in Glasgow for Radio 3 and it sounded fantastic. Thursday 22 May 2003
Meanwhile, we nearly have dates in the diary for recording the orchestral part of our Earl of Kellie record. Nearly! Monday 12 May 2003 I've just got back home from a fun few days in London working on a movie soundtrack at the kind invitation of Custer LaRue (seen here pretending to think very hard about something, I can't remember what). We were recording some songs which appear in the film before the scenes are shot, so that the actors have playback to work to. One of the more bizarre moments of the trip was being called upon to sing The Trail of the Lonesome Pine at the fortepiano to the assembled company, because Custer grew up near the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, but nonetheless was the only person in the room who had never heard the song. Still, working on a Hollywood movie means that you get to be an 'overground' person in London, with cars coming to pick you up and move you around, rather than just taking the tube like a starving musician as usual. The picture below shows composer Mychael Danna sitting at Finchcocks's wonderful 1801 Broadwood piano, in the rather incongruous surroundings of Sony Studio 1. It was nice to be sat there working with the cutting-edge musical technology ... of 200 years ago. And it was a good learning experience to have to play an English fortepiano properly. They're wild, untamed beasts compared to their well-behaved Viennese counterparts, so you have to be very careful with the pedalling or you just get musical mush. I think I got the hang of it eventually, if my desire to take the piano home at the end of the session was anything to go by ...
Tuesday 6 May 2003 Right now I've just got too many things to organise at once. I've got the session tapes from the Kellie Castle recordings to listen to, David G rang tonight so that we could decide what to do next with the first edit of our CD, and the Delphian CD edit is still chuntering away. Meanwhile, I've still to fix up the recording of some metrical psalms for a Radio 3 project this month, and I'm now trying to find a fortepiano for a film session in London this Sunday with the wonderful Custer LaRue (I'm also looking out for possible music for the session, but that's another story). Grant applications were last week, meeting with our accountant this. Writing CD booklet notes has gone on the back burner for a while. Oh yes, and our car packed up and is now in the garage for a week. Why am I writing diary entries when I should be doing something about all this ? Saturday 26 April 2003 Dipping my toe back into the diary. Well, the first edit of the duo CD with Mr Greenberg is finally done - it looks like we might call it 'Spring Any Day Now' after the Fred Frith tune. Marquis Classics even like the photo I sent them of a rather bent daffodil in my kitchen, which could end up being the cover image. We'd recorded well over 80 minutes of music, and after a bit of ruthless pruning I've got it down to about 66 of really good stuff. The out-takes and also-rans will have to wait until the 20th anniversary re-issue ... I've also been looking at grant applications, as by some miracle the Chris Norman Ensemble are going to be in Scotland at the same time as we'd planned a week's work here. The possibility of a double-bill tour suddenly presented itself, so the detailed probabilities and improbabilities of that are going to concern me for the next few days. Chris has also asked me over to the US to play with them a few more times in the coming season, which will be a treat. © 2003 David
McGuinness |
concerto caledonia
Emmanuelle is a superb recitative continuo player (an
under-appreciated skill), but then she does it for Simon Rattle and Claudio
Abbado, and I suspect they can spot a good musician when they hear one. I think
I learnt quite a bit over the last few days.
And she's also the only conductor who's ever stolen a few bites from my apple in
the interval.
I
spent yesterday in sessions for a BBC programme about metrical psalms,
specifically Psalm 23 'The Lord's my Shepherd'. This was a chance to play
and sing through some of the hundreds of tunes and versions that have appeared
since a committee of The Church of Scotland settled on the words in 1650. We
were recording in Kelvinside Hillhead Church, but as you can see below, I
borrowed a trusty harmonium rather than use its immense Willis organ. The photos
of our tea break show tenor Paul Rendall who was on his day off from Scottish
Opera's production of The Magic Flute set on the moon, Greg Lawson and
cellist Mark Summers with his feet up - note the melodica lying on the floor.
Yup, the combination of free-reeds and gut strings strikes again, it sounds
great.
Whether
our impromptu Cajun version of the tune 'Martyrdom' makes it into the final
programme I doubt, but the four of us gave some spirited vocal renditions of
some of the silly practice verses that were written to psalm tunes in the 19th
century: Tony Kime, who was recording us from his truck outside, pointed out
that our appalling diction made the line 'and hear with reverence due' sound
like 'And here, with Reverend Stu ...'. 
