Monday 29 June 2009

Back at my desk again: I tried to have an afternoon nap today, but clearly I'm the wrong kind of tired. This morning, at Josh Dickson's invitation, I went along to the RSAMD for a meeting of the Scottish music piano department, with no real idea what I was going to. It turned out to be a lot of fun, with all of us playing tunes, and a chance to meet Mary McCarthy and James Ross for the first time.  In various different capacities, Eddie McGuire and Hamish Napier were there too - I'd just had an email from Hamish trumping me, as when I'd been on the Isle of Man, he was on St Kilda! Upstaging bugger: I nearly didn't recognise him with his new jazz beard. Eddie introduced me to Chuang Cheng-Ying too ... a bit of a social whirl for someone in sleep deficit. 

Sunday 28 June 2009
Ronaldsway airport, Isle of Man (which is definitely NOT like this)
I'm on my way home from the last three days spent in the idyllic surroundings of Port Erin in the sunshine. Once I'd settled into my hotel room on Friday afternoon, the first priority after getting the wifi working was to get in the sea: the water's edge was just two minutes away.

There was just time for a quick dip before being whisked off with three carloads of people to Swiss Cottage for some really excellent fish in the company of, amongst others, Stephen Coombs and the deeply splendid Stephen Johnson and his wife Kate, neither of whom I've seen for years. This was a very good way to spend an evening when I should really have been playing a gig, and it was all going very well until I got back to my room and completely failed to get to sleep. At all. Usually I can sleep through most disturbances, but a combination of the noise outside (till about 3.30am) and the stifling heat in the room even with the windows open (which made the noise worse) defeated me completely.

So all my plans for useful work to be done on Saturday were shot to bits, as I was incapable of much other than lying around. But I did manage a walk to Bradda Head, where I climbed the tower and saw the rust-red streak of a linnet sweeping over the gorse. With some sea air in my lungs I finally dropped off for a nap at about 4.30pm.

The kind receptionist at the hotel lent me her office fan, which made my room instantly more habitable, and gave me a night's sleep: second time lucky. 

So this morning, after real Manx kippers for breakfast, I had a free run to get lots of practice done in time for a 3pm concert, and I even managed a pre-concert paddle in the sea, and a post-concert swim with intrepid BBC sound engineer Tom Parnell. In the end, I was too tired in the concert to successfully negotiate the Rameau Gavotte, but there were other bits that as Wallace would say, went as well as could be expected. It'll be on Radio 3 some weekend in September.

Not having done a live solo recital for broadcast before, it's rather unnerving, when concentrating on the audience in the room, to suddenly remember that there will also be a listening audience at a later date, who might not be breathing sunny sea air, or might be less forgiving of the odd bum note. Still, apart from the lack of sleep, it's been a great few days.

Les Pratt's dog Gus sheltering from the sun behind the BBC truck

name in lights, almost

the Erin Arts Centre artists' toilet has this 'seat of music' on the wall

I've got the same fellow passengers on the plane as on the way here, a stereotypically pissed bunch of Glaswegians who've been taking part in the Tin Bath championship at Castletown. They're very good-humoured but bloody noisy - they all sing the Dambusters theme as we take off ...

Thursday 25 June 2009

It's that time of year I think. Lisa's ill so our Friday night gig is cancelled; I seem to remember this time last year doing lots of preparation for a gig that didn't happen either. Still, I have Sunday's solo recital to work on, so there's no shortage of practice to be done. 

I've always had a hunch that there was something pipe-like about Alexander Reinagle's harpsichord variations on The East Neuk of Fife - it's only this week, hearing Bonnie Rideout's amazing new fiddle pibroch recording, that I've taken it more seriously, as harpsichord-pibroch-lite, perhaps. There's a tendency with these sort of keyboard arrangements of fiddle tunes, to play them with a rather condescending smile on your face as though they're not really intended as serious music, but this may not be a fair assessment. Then a pile of photocopies dropped through the door this afternoon from the NLS, including a really interesting keyboard version of Jackie Latin, that I found there a few weeks ago.

Yesterday I recorded myself playing Sunday's recital programme, which is always a useful discipline. Listening back is revealing, but rarely cheering, as you go through various stages ranging from 'well, that's just a bit rubbish', through 'oh, I thought I could play that one' to 'I hate my playing'. Self-doubt is part of the process, as they say. But what's particularly revealing is the truth of my perpetual rehearsal moan (borrowed from a comment by Robert Fripp) that musicians shouldn't get excited - not when they're playing anyway - because their excitement rarely if ever translates into audience excitement. The places on the recording where I got the wrong kind of energy and adrenalin pumping, are a breathless, scrappy mess. But at least my wrist doesn't hurt in the Rameau any more.

Monday 22 June 2009

My currently sedentary lifestyle was broken helpfully today by a couple of lunchtime meetings (and a curry) in town, which also served as an excuse for half an hour's cycling. I'll return to practising in a moment: fortunately my two most technically demanding concerts of the summer are both taking place this coming weekend, so from next week I won't be spending quite so much time trying to play unfeasible numbers of notes without injury. I've never been able to play the final double of Rameau's famous Gavotte without my left wrist painfully tightening up, so I've been trying a number of mental and physical exercises while playing, to see if they help. What helps most, of course, is being in the right state of mind and body to play, before I even sit down.

These arrived in the mail today, an eBay purchase prompted by cycling past the huge metal gates that now cordon off where Paddy's Market was until very recently. About 20 years ago I bought a similar pair for 50p in Paddy's, and got married wearing them. I since lent them to someone (can't remember who) and never got them back; I also once lent them to Andrew Parrott to conduct in, but he definitely returned them. On eBay they cost more than 50p. 

My continuing musical education this weekend via spotify included Kraftwerk, Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis (which gave the scrambled eggs on toast I'd made the kids for lunch on Saturday an added dignity) and Kid Koala. All most worthwhile. But once mobile devices start streaming music reliably, will anyone ever pay for recorded music again? Why bother even to download anything when you can stream it whenever you want anyway?

Thursday 18 June 2009

I'm still dividing my time between practising and organising. I've been re-visiting the François Couperin Passacaille in B minor, a piece I first played as a student, and what's really striking is that if you follow his instructions on how to sit at the harpsichord, it leads you to play it in a certain way; or rather, it makes certain other ways of playing it impossible. In his L'art de Toucher le Claveçin, he asks that the player turns his body a little to the right: this is so that he can 'look at the company in which he finds himself' if not playing from a book. And you must have an air of ease - if you find yourself making faces while you play, you can put a mirror on the music desk to remedy that. All of this stops you from assuming 'tortured artist' poses like Romantic virtuosi, or even like Couperin's contemporary Italian violinists. It also stops you from investing the music with the wrong kind of meaning: it's tempting to play the Passacaille as a vast architectural exercise in tension and its release (and, coincidentally, crowd-pleasing), but in fact it's a lot more subtle than that. 

Tuesday 16 June 2009

I've established myself a practice discipline which seems to be going well, or would be if there were several more hours available in every day. I need to get my harpsichord playing back up to solo recital (and broadcast) standard, and it's only now I've started working hard on it that I've realised that I chose some pretty difficult pieces to play in a couple of weeks' time. That's what comes of picking a programme off the top of my head when away on holiday, without actually looking at the scores. But I also fitted in 10 miles of cycling today in order to have lunch in town with Chrissy Pritchard, who's currently doing this (although we didn't talk about that at all), managed a quick chat with James Gilchrist before his mobile phone reception went, and had a much longer video call with Suzie in Montréal, programme planning for August. She did nearly all of the work, and the best bit was where she sang adlibs over the Kurt Weill tango song playing at this end. There's still something oddly exciting about transatlantic improvisation.

With the help of Spotify I've been filling gaps in my musical education - today's gap to be filled was Brian Eno's Ambient series. I only heard Discreet Music at the time ... 

Friday 12 June 2009

Somehow I've got myself into the position where I'm putting together eight separate concert programmes (ten really, but three of them are much the same), besides dealing with admin and lesser matters for three others. And I've got some practising to do as well. Alison came round this morning and by lunchtime we had a pretty good version of one programme for November, which at breakfast had been a blank page. Add to this my email inbox filling up every time I turn my back, and I've become rather busy. My other concern is that I've got just too much music to hold in my head at one time: if I listen to anything new, something vital will fall out the other end of my brain. Which isn't good news for my new-found Spotify habit. I listened to some Janis Joplin on my iPod this afternoon when I was out, to get my subconscious preparing for a gig with Lisa in a couple of weeks, and I completely forgot to pick up the shopping I'd gone out for. 

I couldn't go and hear Iva Bittová playing in London on Wednesday night, but fortunately Clare could, and she sent me this 5 word review: "wonderful, quirky, moving, beautiful, bonkers", which explains perfectly why I would have liked to have been there.

Random miscellanea: CBC are going to record two of the three concerts I'm playing in Canada in August (I think I get recorded more often there than here these days), and our car battery died yesterday so the nice people at the Honda garage put a new one in for me first thing this morning. 

Wednesday 10 June 2009

I'm digitising large piles of performance material, as it's much easier to email someone a part that I've got on a hard drive, rather than climbing up to the attic and going through boxes of paper before a trip to the photocopier up at the Spar shop and putting it in the post. Scanning, correcting and cleaning it all up takes time of course, but it's quite satisfying to take an eraser to accretions of pencilled-in markings - begone!

At the weekend I recorded a quick demo of a 17th century song (now on my myspace) but I hadn't taken into account that my guitar wouldn't be in tune with a fake harpsichord in meantone. After a false start where the two were hideously out, I figured out how to bend the Cs and Fs up on the guitar so they would near enough match. Another skill learnt. I wonder how useful that one is.

Dunnock frenzy in the garden continues. 

Tuesday 9 June 2009

Just cycled back from lunch with Steve Portnoi to talk about possible recording projects, and once again I'm surrounded by preparations for our Edinburgh concerts. In amongst all the scanning, notation, typing and paper, I must remember to do some practice this week, as in a fortnight's time I have to be fighting fit as a performing musician again for the summer. But the planning and preparation of four different programmes is quite a big job. 

Meanwhile, for entertainment I've started using spotify which is rather good from a user's point of view. Whether any music providers ever get an income from it remains to be seen of course. I read one of those 'don't make copies of this CD' messages in detail the other day, and was surprised at how strongly it stressed that copying is 'hurting the artists who created the disc'. Well, yes and no. As a rule, artists have never earned much, if any, money from the sale of recordings unless they're the ones actually doing the selling; the money generally goes to the running of, and the shareholders in, the company. Not that that necessarily makes record companies evil: recordings are useful to artists in many other ways, and they make other income streams possible. But record companies trying to suggest that there's a direct connection between purchasing a CD and money going to the artist, is at best dodgy if not a downright lie.

Anthony Browne is the new Children's Laureate - great! A really intelligent and quirky illustrator who's not afraid of technique, or of silly gags. As part of my screensaver I have a page from the original 1977 version of his A Walk in the Park: I think he has a bit of a downer on that one now, and it's destined to remain out of print, but that's a shame, as it has a particularly cheering kind of 70s charm.

Last night I was out at a kind of mini school reunion: three of us from Hillhead Primary's class 1a of '71 (me, Bambi Chen, and Graeme Dempsey visiting from Vancouver with partner Jeffrey) revisited some old haunts before repairing to the University Cafe for ice cream: what a good idea.

Jeffrey about to sample the legendary ice-cream for the first time - 
they had those dishes in the 70s too

Earlier on I was watching a pair of dunnocks exhibiting rather peculiar behaviour out in the back garden - but now I know that was going on was cloacal pecking ... 

Thursday 4 June 2009

I've spent most of the last couple of days stuck at my desk making an arrangement of Pietro Urbani's 1799 setting of 'The Ever-Memorable Battle of Bannockburn' for our final Edinburgh concert. It only survives in a reduction for fortepiano and violin (and voices) so I've been expanding it for string quartet and fortepiano. There are 17 pages of it, so it's taken a while, and I've been putting in some judicious cuts as I go. It's not a musical masterpiece but it is a very interesting curiosity: the aria at the beginning is Scots Wha Hae, there's a long musical depiction of the rout of the English, and the final chorus asks first for Bruce's freedom on Scotia's sons, then that we might be 'still more happy' as Britons, guarded both by freedom and the sea. So Bannockburn's not just been used as an excuse for English-bashing.

Having a series celebrating the history of Scottish music isn't an excuse for excluding English musicians either. At lunchtime I spoke to Martin Carthy, who's going to come and sing in our first concert. Isn't that fantastic? 

Tuesday 2 June 2009

It's been very hot for the last few days, so the wildlife around here has been showing itself in different ways. Dunnocks on the ground, and lots of chattery coal tits in the trees ...

a fox having a snooze at the bottom of the garden ...

and some picturesque flies in the house.

While I've been preparing our Edinburgh concerts, I reckoned that it was high time I learnt how to read lute tablature fluently. Either I could do this the boring way, sitting at a desk working out what each note is, or I could do it the far more sensible and fun way, which is with instrument in hand, playing the music. So I tuned my Westbury's 3rd string down a semitone, and have been having great fun getting to grips with Rowallan, Wemyss and Jane Pickering, even if it still sounds pretty dreadful. Tonight I practised out in the garden.

Friday 29 May 2009

I've been buried in admin for most of this week, most of it resulting from our AGM on Monday. But over the last day or two I've been able to start work on the details of programming our four Edinburgh Festival concerts in August. With classical or baroque music, concert programming can be very straightforward: you have a pretty good idea what the pieces sound like, and how to go about building a balanced and varied show out of them. But the material in our first couple of concerts isn't like that - it takes a lot of imagination to guess what it might sound like - so the process is much slower and more tiring ... 

Sunday 25 May 2009

I don't normally have much sympathy for Tory MPs, but if you want an enlightening perspective on the expenses row that's been dominating the headlines here for the last fortnight, you could do worse than read Nadine Dorries's blog, which has been taken down on the request of lawyers for the Daily Telegraph. You can still find it here. 

Last night I couldn't stop playing the 7-bar version of Adew Dundee that's in the Skene MS of about 1620. To be honest I think whoever wrote it down probably just made a mistake in one bar, got the rhythm wrong, and then copied the mistake each time that phrase appears, as by the time it gets to the variation, it's in neat 8 bar phrases again. But once you start playing it with a bit missing it's quite addictive, a bit like Quebecois fiddlers playing crooked tunes with odd beats added here and there: the version of Pigeon on the Gate that DG plays on Suzie's Tout Passe CD is a case in point. When we rehearsed it I got very excited when I realised that the two-chord bassline could slip in and out of sync with the tune. I was still just as excited listening to the playback at the session a few days later. 

Friday 23 May 2009
on the Edinburgh-Glasgow train
Another library day, after spending a lot of this week preparing for the company AGM. In today's lunch break between the rooftop Centre for Research Collections at Edinburgh University and the NLS, I stolled across the Meadows in the sunshine to go shopping for a cycling jacket.  It's bright yellow and rather ugly, but in Glasgow if you want pedestrians or motorists to have any chance of noticing your existence, you have to be beyond obvious. Wearing otherwise sensible clothing isn't really an option if you want to stay unhurt.

In the NLS I got a three-year ticket which is great, even if now I'm a 'customer' rather than a reader. I looked down at just the wrong moment getting my photo taken, so rather than a full-on mug shot, my customer card is a moody portrait of male pattern baldness.

Monday 18 May 2009
Luton Airport
I made it to Cambridge in the end, for a very sociable meal, a trip to the pub, and some flying of remote control helicopters, then this morning I was on the 0730 X5 bus to Bedford. It’s the first time I’ve ever got a wifi signal on a bus. Matthew from the Edinburgh Festival met me at Bedford bus station and we drove to Boughton House to be the guests of the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch for a music symposium based around the contents of the remarkable Montagu Music Collection which currently resides there.

And what a collection. Besides the unrivalled bounty of English opera scores, and a very wide-ranging set of printed material, there’s the Scottish music collection of the antiquary Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, who published an edition of the Earl of Kellie’s music in the 1840s. So passing through my white-gloved hands this morning amongst other things were … Mrs Crockat’s music book of 1709 (which Grove’s Dictionary lists as ‘lost’), Anne Armstrong’s keyboard book from around the same time, and the engraver’s MS for the Scots Musical Museum volume 6, presumably in Stephen Clarke’s hand, which includes the following comment after song 509 As I Went O'er the Highland Hills: ‘these words are very very bad’! Burns had been dead for some years, and therefore wasn't in a position to improve them. I also had a peek at John Brysson’s placebook, which appears to have been a source MS book for many and various Edinburgh publications, and most exciting of all for me, a unique MS copy of two of the four parts of Kellie’s quartet in C minor, which (mirabile dictu) is a far more reliable source than the Kilravock MS on which I based my edition for our Fiddler Tam CD. So … I can now tell where I guessed wrongly about what the notes should have been in those places where they were clearly incorrect in the other source. I found three wrong notes in our recorded version before it was time to stop for lunch.

Richard also took some of us out in his Land Rover to see the new underground inverted-pyramid amphitheatre in the grounds, which Matthew and I couldn’t resist climbing down into to test the acoustics.  And it was great to finally meet Patrick and Rachel Cadell: about 6 years ago when I really wanted to see that Kellie MS they emailed me their draft catalogue of the collection.  A very enjoyable day that I hope will bear fruit in due course.  

Sunday 17 May 2009
on a stationary train at Stansted Airport
Unusually, my Easyjet flight south was 80' late, so I've missed two Cambridge trains and I'm sitting on a third, which doesn't leave for another half an hour. But I've been putting the time to good use reading my pristine new copy of Musica Scotica volume 5, Kenneth Elliott's 17th-century Scots songbook, which he's compiled by matching lyrics to old tunes from various sources. Even if I don't necessarily agree with him that the contents all work as 'continuo songs' (whatever that means), they are quite riveting: it's a wonderful collection, and I hope it gets picked up by a wide variety of performers.

Friday 15 May 2009

After a summery week when I've been moving the contents of my desk outside to work in the shade of a tree in the garden, today was wet, cold and miserable, so it's as well I was in Edinburgh for a Distil-related meeting with Simon T and Dave F. We successfully made some group decisions before Simon and I dropped into the RSA show at the National Gallery, and I managed (just) not to buy anything. After picking up my next few weeks' reading at the university library, I ate my lunchtime sandwich in front of Allan Ramsay's monument at Greyfriars Kirk and then found a wonderfully quirky keyboard manuscript in the NLS: I look forward to the photocopies of that one dropping through the letterbox soon.

I was back at the eye hospital yet again yesterday to be sentenced to another seven weeks of steroids: three months is a record for me I think. The experience was made less grim by the ophthalmologist telling me about her harmonium at home, and how she grew up with a harpsichord as part of her dad's keyboard collection ...

The black plastic on the turntable at the moment is an eBay-sourced copy of Dave Swarbrick's Smiddyburn album, which I loved when it came out and still sounds great. Beryl Marriott's piano playing on I have a Wife of my Ain and Lady Mary Haye's Scotch Measure is pretty much unsurpassed I think: I still get dizzy trying to work out what she's doing. 

Tuesday 12 May 2009

Well, I got home from yesterday's 13 hour trip, turned my computer on and there was a bang and a flash of white from the power supply. So ... this week will be a bit more complicated than I had envisaged.  Or so I thought until the wonderful proprietor of Mercury Computers up the road fitted a new PSU while I waited, checked everything was fine, and I was back home within the hour. It's a bit louder than the old one, but I'm not complaining - I think I was very lucky that nothing else got fried. But I guess this why I stubbornly work on PCs, rather than Macs like every other musician I know.  When they inevitably go wrong, there's bound to be some guy in a backstreet who can fix it for fifty quid, rather than having to rely on the nearest outpost of the Apple Megacorp.

I think I'm trying to read too many books at once at the moment. I've just started George Emmerson's immensely readable Social History of Scottish Dance, just finished Stuart Sutherland's Irrationality, I've been dipping into Clare Nelson's PhD thesis about creating a notion of Britishness, I'm nearly done with Scott McCloud's dazzling Understanding Comics, and I've just got the end of volume 3 of the exquisitely wonderful The Complete Peanuts by Charles Schulz: I'm only at the end of 1956 and am probably now irretrievably hooked. I should clear a bookshelf for the entire collection really ...

Monday 11 May 2009
flying out of Brussels airport
Greg and I have been in Belgium for the day playing at Scotland House, the Brussels home of the Scottish Government as part of a preview of the Edinburgh International Festival, along with Alyth McCormack and Brian McAlpine. Everyone was very nice to us, and there was a taxi waiting as soon as we stopped playing to get us home again for bedtime. 

Andrew (how did he get there?) and Greg survey the rather nice food in the dressing room

I think our original plan to get the Eurostar and the sleeper home for breakfast was ruled out on grounds of cost (shame) so a plane to Edinburgh and driving back home from there it is.  

There was a long line of goody-bags on a table near the exit on our way out: while not nearly shameless enough to nick one, and not having enough time to peek inside and see what the freebies were, instead I picked up a souvenir pen, so that when I got home to Glasgow I could show everyone where I'd been.

We had just enough free time when we arrived for a walk around the Parc Leopold and a quick sampling of cafe culture, with some excellent green tea and chocolate in my case. I was determined not to spend the entire day in taxis, airports and a conference centre.

These signs at the airport had us completely confused until our taxi driver explained to us that they're telling you not to spend too long saying farewell to your loved ones, and hogging the few parking spaces on offer. I don't think he felt he knew us well enough to comply with its instructions.

matching socks and bag

Saturday 2 May 2009
on the second of tonight’s four trains
I'm speeding north from Leeds to Edinburgh after a most entertaining day in Saltaire, which began with a visit to Pam and Phil Fluke’s astonishing reed organ museum.  In my experience when I've found large fully-developed harmoniums with lots of stops and devices, they're about 95% reliable if they’ve been professionally looked after – they will still have a legion of quirks and idiosyncrasies to be overcome before you can just play some music. But with the best of Pam and Phil’s instruments, you can just sit down and make music right away. Between Pam's research and Phil's technical skill, they just know what to do to bring them back to life. Fantastic. And the range of amazing and bizarre instruments that they have at the Victoria Halls is just too big to list here: the combined piano and reed organ designed for accompanying silent movies was pretty astonishing, and the Mustel harmonium-celestes were really beautiful too.  As for this enharmonic 53-note to the octave scientific demonstration instrument, what would Harry Partch have made of it?

I could have stayed for a long time making friends with various examples from their collection, but there was a concert to be played across the road.

There’s nothing like being well prepared ... and we were nothing like well-prepared – that’s not really true, but we were still rehearsing a song in the church hall downstairs with about 10 minutes to go. 

Excellent fun in the concert with lots of risks taken, some of which came off very well. But I got the 'irretrievable train wreck' prize for playing the last piece at double speed and then not being able to work out why I couldn’t make it fit. It’s always best at a point like that to own up. Fortunately I think enough things had gone well for us to get away with it.

Hearing Olivia sing Monteverdi and Purcell accompanied by an Indian harmonium and make it utterly convincing, was a great illustration of how 17^th and 18^th century music can (and did) travel well outside its original context, like the Purcell songs that wriggled their way in amongst the fiddle tunes in James Oswald’s Caledonian Pocket Companion. Her subtle remoulding of the accompaniments to fit one-handed keyboard playing with a drone gave me plenty to think about too.  

Anyway, I think the concert may have been more than the sum of its parts, or something. I'm left with the impression of having been on stage with, and in the company of, three very impressive people, in a welcoming and supportive environment. Which is a nice place for a musician to have been. And now I'm on a train listening to Fred Frith's To Sail, To Sail, which probably isn't a record anyone would want to listen to very often, but as a celebration of a worthwhile musical experience it's absolutely perfect.

wet floop at Waverley

Friday 1 May
on the second of today’s five trains
Back at the eye hospital again yesterday, boring boring boring. Anyway, thanks to the bizarre pricing policy on the railways, my cheapest option today is to travel first class. I don’t think the people selling advertising space at CBS have really thought their practice through: here in the 8-seat first class compartment on the way to Edinburgh is an ad asking ‘Did you use loan sharks at Christmas?’ If the answer is yes, why the hell are you in first class? Because it’s cheaper I suppose …

nearly midnight, Shipley
In my hotel room at last after a full and entertaining day. I had lunch on the city wall in York, after a bit of walking around, visiting places that I used to cycle and walk round every day, and seeing how much they had changed, or not.

When I lived here this really was a huge ironmongers shop, rather than a Loch Fyne Oyster Bar.

Being a bit more historically conscious now than I was then, it’s fascinating to be surrounded by such a mixture of modern and medieval buildings. In Glasgow a 14^th century building would be a museum; here it’s just as likely to be an estate agents.

I managed not to spend too much money in Sarah Coggles and also bought a fantastic old school leather satchel from a pile of stock outside an antique shop, before walking out to Pamela’s to wait for Rachel Podger  and Olivia Chaney.  Leaving Simon to put two lots of kids to bed, we went off to rehearse in the music department at the university, with me playing the very harpsichord I used to practise on when it was new twenty-something years ago ... 

... and some melodica as well: I imagine the sight of Rachel and me trying to master one of Olivia’s tunes together while reading my illegible notebook scrawl, and then trying to miss out beats in the right verses, all the while playing in two different keys, must have been pretty funny.

Wednesday 29 April 2009

My adversary iritis came back with a vengeance yesterday: three hours in hospital and now a very red sore eye with an artificially dilated pupil, bleah. Still, I got some useful editing work done on the Bowie (this is not a dilated pupil reference) MS from 1705, including the excellently bizarre Scots Chaconne, which DG has pronounced 'whacked' and 'brilliant'. One for our Edinburgh concerts in August I think: at least one of these has already sold out.  Meanwhile I'm staggering around with dark glasses on bumping into things. 

Monday 27 April 2009

Hooray - skins got a BAFTA! We weren't even watching the show last night, as when we saw Bryan a couple of  weeks ago he said 'oh come on, we're up against Coronation Street, we're not the kind of show that wins awards'. So I've only just watched his acceptance speech on iPlayer, grinning (me, not him, though he looked pretty pleased). Nice to see Harry Enfield finally get his first BAFTA on the same night, as the first time I met Bryan, the two of them were in Edinburgh doing their show Dusty and Dick's Lucky Escape from the Germans ...

When not grinning, I'm tidying up and working things out for a couple of gigs, one in November, one in a couple of weeks. That melodica improv is from Thursday is now up on myspace if you're curious. 

Sunday 26 April 2009

At long last I've produced my first academic output for many years, presenting a paper in the safe welcoming environment of yesterday's Musica Scotica conference. A very useful exercise indeed. I particularly enjoyed watching many people simultaneously pick up their pens and write down my assertion that 18/19th century song collections are cultural statements by outsiders (even including Robert Burns), whereas the fiddle music collections are personal statements by insiders. I'd only thought of it a few days ago.

It was also very enjoyable having most of my assumptions about the bagpipe traditions of Scotland quietly demolished by Hugh Cheape. I certainly hadn't realised that there was such a strong tradition of playing the Union pipes in the north-east of Scotland. 

later
Back from the south side and the very civilised launch party for Alasdair Roberts's excellent new album Spoils - any launch party featuring Rikke's home baking is worth travelling some distance for.  Ali gave me a vinyl copy too - I'd recommend that you buy it even if Alison and I weren't playing on it. 

And I managed to remix that melodica improvisation in a spare half hour this morning.

Saturday 25 April 2009
RSAMD Opera School
In 45 minutes at lunchtime on Thursday I managed to record an improvisation for melodica and delays: perhaps listening to Robert Fripp's Exposure in the car rubbed off on me. If I can do another mix that's not almost mono like the first one, I'll post it up on myspace - instant music.  

Then yesterday's afternoon work avoidance strategy was to climb a ladder with a pair of loppers and chop down the canopy of a conifer that was keeping lots of light out of one corner of the garden. This must be what it's like to be a writer, constantly finding new methods of procrastination as deadlines approach. Still, I got my paper written in the end.

Thursday 23 April 2009

This was the scene in here later on Monday afternoon, committing some Mackintosh and Gow to hard disk.

Thanks to unaccustomed amounts of sunshine, I mixed and edited the results on headphones in the garden yesterday - I don't think I've ever done a mix outdoors before. 

I was in Edinburgh for David Johnson's funeral on Tuesday, a gathering which included academics, musicians, composers and eccentrics, and some who were like David a combination of all of these. We are undoubtedly poorer without him.

I've got Malachy's baroque bass here for company, which is en route to Dublin. I like the way that musicians' instruments often travel independently of their players: I suppose this will happen more as airlines' baggage charges continue to increase. 

But now back to the business of PowerPoint slides and academic argument. I've been half-listening to a load of old records (yes, vinyl records) to speed me along with writing, and this morning's first pick from the rack was the 1978 recording of Haydn's Missa Sancti Nicolai. What's striking about the standard white L'Oiseau-Lyre 'Florilegium series' cover, is that there's no mention of the soloists or even of the conductor on the front. It's sold on the basis that it's the Christ Church choir and the Academy of Ancient Music, and on the very strong brand identity of Oiseau-Lyre itself under Peter Wadland. That described a certain sonic signature; the names of the soloists, or the fact that it's Simon Preston standing up the front waving his arms, were quite secondary. That still seems like a radical idea, now that conductors and soloists are back at the forefront of the marketing of period-instrument performance. You'd have to ask people who were present at the sessions whether the implication that the music-making was more collective in nature was actually true!

Monday 20 April 2009

This week I have to distil some of my reading from the last few months into a coherent and comprehensible argument for a paper I'm to give next weekend, and later today Greg and Alison are going to drop in to record the music examples. This means that I also have to resist the temptation to spend the day in the garden, as I spent the weekend. A bad workman may blame his tools, but a bad garden workman like me is definitely much improved by the addition of some good tools, and my new toy of a seriously enormous hedge trimmer went from being slightly terrifying to rather addictive very quickly.

Ongoing diary planning continues. I made the mistake last night of booking flights directly on Air Canada's website to save a few quid: as has happened with me before, this ended in a phone call to the web support team to painstakingly replicate the site crashing, before doing all the business over the phone anyway ... 

Friday 17 April 2009

I'm back in the eye casualty waiting room at our local hospital with a red eye ... again. One of the side benefits of keeping an online diary like this is that I can search it and easily trace my iritis history, which should impress the ophthalmologist. 

I've got some library work done this week, examining Henry Farmer's copy of the Glen Collection of Scottish Dance Music in Glasgow on Wednesday, and then yesterday I delivered the rest of the family to the dentist on the other side of Edinburgh and cycled from there to the National Library of Scotland, to poke around their manuscript collection. I spent most of the evening back home juggling travel plans for various upcoming bits and pieces. For example, it might just be possible (might) to play an early evening gig in Brussels and then get the train home to Glasgow in time for breakfast. Wouldn't that be neat?

There's been lots of publicity here surrounding the visit of Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra to the UK, all of it breathless. Here in Scotland there's already an official Sistema-approved project on the go. I'm not going to snipe from the sidelines about genuinely exciting music-making by lots of young people who otherwise have a very hard life - that's wonderful. But I have to allow myself a bit of unease at the idea of orchestral music as a force for social good. Being part of a large body of people making music can change your life for the better, no doubt about it. But an orchestra is also rigid, hierarchical, and a hideously antiquated social model: ask anyone who plays in one for a living. So for a project whose aims are unashamedly social rather than artistic, from the outside it seems an odd choice of vehicle. But as a way out of poverty and crime, it's got to be better than boxing, hasn't it? 

Here in Scotland we've never quite progressed past our early 18th-century attitude towards classical music as something from outside imposed upon us by others, rather than something that we can inhabit and transform. I've got Matthew Gelbart's book here in the waiting room, and I'm reminded by him that what the Germans did instead was to take the science of classical music, inhabit it with aspects of their native traditions, and then through the action of individual 'geniuses' make it into something that was supposedly universal: think of the end of Beethoven's Choral symphony and the fall of the Berlin Wall. We now know that classical music isn't really a universal language (pop music and its visuals come closer), but it's clearly still got enough power for El Sistema to be able to pick it up and use it. 

Still, for those of us from a culture that's only been synthesised very marginally into the classical music tradition, getting involved in it wholeheartedly can lead to something of a cultural identity crisis further down the line. None of the coverage I've seen of the project has picked up this potential for cultural disconnection, which to me seems strange. I remember when they advertised for teaching staff for the Scottish project a year or so ago, I wasn't the only one who read the ad and thought 'Why does it have to be classical music?'  And while I can understand the reasons why, I am surprised that there hasn't been any debate about the cultural implications as well as the social ones. Or maybe I've just not been looking hard enough.

Monday 13 April 2009

I've spent the morning with Susie in the garden rehabilitating a 1978 Raleigh Honey that we found in the depths of the cellar nearly 10 years ago when we moved house. And it's great: apart from the occasional clunk from the bottom bracket, it works exactly as it should.

We're back from a week on the Isle of Lismore: despite the island only having a population of 180, I had three recommendations from different people of three other people to visit, and that's not including Mairi Campbell whose family are from the island. Is that unusual? Or would any group of 180 people in Scotland yield similar connections? Not that I did any visiting, as I'm even more anti-social on holiday than I am at home.

my Thermos flask sheltering from the wind at the bottom of a 13th-century staircase at Achanduin Castle - cycling there was very hard work 

at Point

some admirably musicologically-correct 1920s stained glass in the tiny St Moluag's Cathedral

John Purser rang midway through the week to pass on the sad news of David Johnson's death. As I wrote in the notes to Fiddler Tam, any of us working on 18th century Scottish music owe David a huge amount. When the second edition of his Music and Society in Lowland Scotland was published in 2003, he expressed surprise that thirty years on, it was still the standard text on the subject. This shows how far ahead of everyone else he was in his interest and his application, but it also shows, rather more sadly, how few people since have taken up the subject with anything like his rigour and enthusiasm. 

Thursday 2 April 2009

Can't let the week go past without a brief mention of Maurice Jarre. His music was a major part of my musical development, as my gran's favourite tune on the piano was Lara's Theme from Doctor Zhivago ('Somewhere My Love'), which she played in the style of Liberace. Not to mention his son Jean-Michel's first albums coming out when I was about 10. I met Jarre senior at the Flanders Film Festival in 2003 with Tommy Pearson, where Jarre was being given the Lifetime Achievement Award, and he gave us a long interview for the BBC programme we were making, remembering enormous amounts of detail from work he'd done many decades previously. The award was presented by Jeanne Moreau, who was 75 at the time: she stood on stage, looked him right in the eye and told him in front of a couple of thousand people how wonderful he was, in French, for about five minutes. Tommy and I were sitting in front of him and could just about tell how exciting this must have been ... every red-blooded male in the room was simultaneously mesmerised and extremely jealous.

Next Thursday, Stu Brown is doing his Raymond Scott Project thing at the Panopticon in Glasgow - entry is by donation. It's a real treat to hear the RSQ tunes played live with great panache, and the surroundings couldn't be better - be there if you can, 7pm. (Sadly, I can't, but I did hear them last time.)

©2009 David McGuinness
all opinions are those of the author - you don't have to share them