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David
McGuinness's diary Saturday 23 October 2004 Well, it was an enjoyable few days playing for Mackerras. As we left the Usher Hall stage on Thursday night (you can hear the concert on Radio 3 on Monday) I said to a few players 'that was good fun' and everyone responded the same way: 'yeah, he's great isn't he?'. Part of the reason that he's so popular with players (apart from basic things like knowing the music very well and being very clear to watch) is that he doesn't bring his ego onstage. All of his physical movements are devoted to getting the job done: he knows exactly what information the players need to get the results that he wants, and there's no irrelevant showmanship added for the benefit of the audience. Musicians appreciate this: the conductor's on their side too. If we ever got around the legal minefield that would be setting up a 'conductorwatch' website, I think his score would be unusually high. Friday night wasn't quite so much fun, as we were playing in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, one of the most energy-sapping, vile, ugly, unwelcoming public buildings constructed in the last 100 years. I had a bit of a problem onstage in that I knew how most of the music went by then, so I didn't have to read it all. What to look at instead? Sir C was being economical and probably wouldn't appreciate me staring at him when he wasn't doing much, and everyone else seemed to have their heads buried in the part in front of them. It feels good to give your eyes a rest by focusing in the distance on the hall's back wall, but that looks dreadful to the audience, as though you've got bored with what's happening on the stage and are looking for something else to catch your attention. Because of where I was sitting, between the wind and the cellos, no-one was really in my eyeline, so it felt a bit lonely - I wanted to make music with someone and nobody would play. Ah, blame it on the building. Incidentally, the reason that it's so easy to memorise Mozart quickly, is that the musical lines almost always follow their natural course. They do what you would expect in a very organic kind of way - the film composer Don Davis once told me that the same is true of John Williams and, believe it or not, Carl Stalling. Haydn's music is the opposite in that it continually upsets your expectations. Of the two, I much prefer playing Haydn, but it's much more difficult to bring off. In loose-tongued moments I've been known to suggest that any unmusical idiot can play Mozart, because all you have to do is follow his instructions - it's like walking down a hill, it just happens. Michael Macdonald brought my harmonium back this morning, with its bellows patched, and a bit squeaky until the leather wears in. Hooray. So I've had all the reeds out to soak them in meths while its lungs gradually come back to life. There's a fair bit of tweaking still to go, but I think it might sound rather good once it's all done ... Wednesday 20 October 2004 On Monday night Katherine and I drew up our first fixing list of the players we're going to ask to do the 2005/06 orchestral work. If even half of them can do it, it should be a really good band. One really encouraging thing is that almost all of the violinists are based in Scotland - it wasn't that long ago that finding even a halfway competent baroque violinist north of the border was a bit of a struggle. I'm playing in the SCO this week for Charles Mackerras which is always entertaining. My favourite moment in today's rehearsals was when he asked the cellos to play a certain phrase legato: 'I used to slur it, but I've repented of that now'. Yes, it's true, early music orthodoxy does impose moral imperatives. My brain is a bit addled as neither the organ part nor the vocal score the SCO provided me with includes the figures that Mozart wrote for the organist to play from. As a result I'm reading two parts at once, and trying to guess what the composer might have meant. I've arranged to borrow the BBC copy of the score in the morning, and I'll copy the figures in on tomorrow's train. Last night I installed my recent eBay purchase of a nice and ludicrously under-priced Yamaha CD player, and was gratified by the improved soundstage it produced (bored yet?). Then this morning I found myself in not-quite-convincing stereotypical jobbing male visitor mode, stripping speaker cable for Ursula Leveaux. I only drew blood once. Greg is playing in rehearsals with a bright blue carbon fibre bow - 'it's not a great bow but it works'. The thing is, it costs £25, which is less than a rehair for a real wooden one. So, a bit like the green plastic melodica, you're a lot more forgiving of its limitations. If you were playing something that cost a year's salary or more you'd want it to be pretty damn good in pretty much all respects. For £25, you'll settle for something that just does the job. Cheap instruments are definitely the way forward. I don't think I make a very good audient. Helen and I went to see Standing Wave at the tron theatre last night. Now I thought I was the perfect audient for a three-hander play about Delia Derbyshire: I know who she was, I'm interested in her work, I have some knowledge of the internal workings of the BBC, I worked in small-scale theatre for years, and I love electro-acoustic music. Perfect. But 30 seconds in, I wanted to leave. We lasted 25 minutes, just. The set design was great, but let's not talk about the rest of it as I've already used the phrase 'pretentious toss' here in the last week. So we headed prematurely for Tchai-Ovna to find avant-garde free jazz being played at point blank range (again, my idea of fun if it's good). We went home for an early night. Is there no escape from 'art'? Note the inverted commas. Sunday 17 October 2004 Went to the first night of the instal festival last night with Sushil K. Charlemagne Palestine was fantastic: at a Bösendorfer covered in soft toys he made fascinating resonances for 35 minutes and then sang/chanted a version of 'Loch Lomond' accompanying himself with his finger on the rim of a huge brandy glass. Great. Unfortunately, Baby Dee (who came across as a Broadway acid casualty) and Current 93 (unspeakably bad student poetry intoned over a grade 6 piano lesson) were both pretentious toss. When a performance poet delivers the line 'what monsters we have become' the only valid response is to shout 'I don't know, what monsters have we become? Shrek? Loch Ness?' We left and headed for Tchai-Ovna for a sublime pot of tea. Derek Bailey has cancelled tomorrow, so I think I'll give the second night a miss. And for a festival that was supposed to be radical and up-to-the-minute, I didn't see anything that couldn't have happened in 1967. But I did invent a theatre piece, based on my experience of the queue in the gents. You need 30 male volunteers who drink 4 pints of beer each. Then on stage you have 5 urinals, and the volunteers form an orderly queue to relieve themselves. The urinals are fitted with devices that use the liquid flow rate to modulate the output of some analogue synthesisers. The piece ends when the last man in the queue is finished and the music stops as a result. It's called 'Piece of Piss' and it's © D McGuinness 2004. If there are any gallery owners or theatre managers out there who'd like to stage it, get in touch. Thursday 14 October 2004 I'm just back from a brief visit to London, which included an enjoyable curry with Matt Wadsworth to plan our trip to New York in April. But we were both a bit sleepy, and concentrated mostly on the curry. Playing in a variety of venues throws up some interesting cultural differences. A while ago I received a 15 page contract from a venue we're scheduled to play in, and finally got around to perusing it properly on Tuesday. It expects us to provide printed publicity material in considerable quantities (thousands), which is not something we do unless we are promoting or co-promoting the gig ourselves. In this case, we've been booked for a fee, and it's the venue's responsibility to publicise the event - after all, they rather than we will be pocketing the box office take. So I heard back from the marketing manager today, who suggested that they would produce their own print, and deduct the costs of this from our fee. Well, I don't think so. It does feel like a waste of time and precious energy to formulate polite business-like replies to people like this, when really it would be simpler to call them up and tell them where to get off. Where will it end? "Sorry, we'll have to deduct our heating and lighting costs from your fee, and charge you with the supplying of the beer and ice-cream for the interval. Don't you normally bring your own for us to sell?" In today's mail, lots of brown envelopes, most of them from the Inland Revenue, a big box of books and some CDs. Enough to keep me busy for a while one way or another. The contents of one brown envelope in particular were quite cheering. On Saturday I was feeling decidedly cynical about the royal procession and opening of our new parliament building in Edinburgh, given that the first major project undertaken by the parliament (the building itself) is three years late and 11 times over budget. It's not an encouraging start. But my letter to the transport minister about my tiresome dealings with Caledonian Macbrayne in the summer has yielded a detailed, informative reply with several good positive pieces of news in it, including that from next Monday, the company will have a Customer Care Unit with four dedicated staff. The end result is that citizen McGuinness feels connected to the public servants he pays his taxes to fund, and feels that they're working for the public benefit. If only it happened more often. Thanks to Sara Greenberg for naming my newly-tuned Yamaha melodica 'Barney'. (it's purple) Sunday 10 October 2004 Well, the vibrandoneon turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. It makes a nice enough sound (as far as I could tell in the car park of Queen Street station), but it's not ergonomic by any means in that there's no obvious way of holding it, and it's not that well constructed for a small instrument costing over a thousand quid. There was glue leaking from the underside of the key fronts, and the woodwork just didn't quite seem finished. A couple of notes didn't speak, and if I selected both sets of reeds I ran out of puff in a few seconds. So on balance I don't think I'll be ordering one. Punk ethos remains intact. I'm making the most of not being a playing musician by doing as much listening as I can fit in. This week's gem is from the newly-released volume 6 of Andy Partridge's Fuzzy Warbles - one man in Swindon's home demos. The CD finishes with one of his seaside songs The End of the Pier, whose ridiculously catchy but convoluted chorus begins 'What the butler saw was heaven/Ice cream clam and legs eleven'. And this is a song that failed to reach the XTC quality threshold back in 1990. The man's a national treasure. Tuesday 5 October 2004 My vibradoneon appointment's been postponed until Saturday, and I'm feeling a bit under the weather (a cold lurking, I think) so I'm at my desk formulating my contribution to the 'joli bois' tech rider, and idly browsing eBay while listening to Fourtet, both of which are interesting in an unremarkable kind of way. I'm hoping to get to at least some of the Instal festival in a couple of weeks' time; the audience at avant-garde gigs is always a nice place to be. Nicer than on stage I think, I don't think I'd like to be Charlemagne Palestine. I asked James Crabb about vibrandoneons earlier today and he said 'oh, Greg asked me about those recently'. Now what were the chances of that? I've spent some of the evening tackling an Scottish Arts Council application form, which is a deeply dispiriting thing to do. One of several phrases which nearly made me give up was the following:
There follow some boxes to fill in for the number of attendances. Now I think that there's a big difference between attending something, and benefiting from it. I don't really care if hardly anyone comes to a gig or buys a record, but I really care whether those that do benefit from the experience. But in the bureaucratic world of public funding, it's bums on seats that count. That's 'public impact'. Not from where I'm sitting it's not. What's cheered me up is listening to Goldie Lookin Chain - childish but hilarious. Saturday 2 October 2004 It's been nice not being a playing musician for a while. A chance to listen and think for a bit. After a bit of eBay bidding, I got a Yamaha melodica in the post the other day: it's not bad, has a very powerful lower register, but still doesn't quite have the character of my trusty cheap Angel L-37 for playing melodies. It did spur me onto further research though: just to be confusing, Yamaha call them 'pianica', and this led me to discover that Suzuki have a whole range, called 'melodion'. I also came across the delights of the Hohner Claviola. But the prize for classy mouth-blown free-reed instrument definitely goes to the Vibradoneon. By some miracle, the Scottish distributor has one in stock, so I'm going to see it on Monday. The beautiful construction and gold-plated crook does rather work against the punk ethos of playing a cheap plastic kids' toy though. It's going to have to sound and feel very good indeed to persuade me to part with €1900 when I've just bought a melodica for about thirty quid ... The Red Red Rose has possibly been delayed again, by a corrupt hard drive. More news when I get it. Another thing that came in the post last week was the soundtrack CD of Vanity Fair, featuring yours truly on 1801 Broadwood piano and big black Steinway. Quite fun. But the most surreal moment in the sessions was definitely sitting at the Broadwood singing 'The Trail of the Lonesome Pine' with Mira Nair, Mychael Danna and the assembled company joining in the chorus. Custer LaRue grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and she was the only one there who didn't know the song. I'm very amused that Decca have released a CD of me playing the piano, accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra. OK, so they weren't in the room at the time, but ... Now I'm listening to the long-awaited Smile album from Brian Wilson. It's a strange experience, having got to know the various snippets of material from bootlegs and other albums, because I keep hearing the lush original versions in my head rather than the newly-recorded ones. But it's very good to get a kind of 'closure' (to use an appropriately Californian term) for what's been one of music's great myths for the last 37 years. About 10 years ago I had a 'Smile' T-shirt, with the front and back of the original unreleased album cover on it. Thursday 16 September 2004 The Celtic Connections interview is here (click on 'LISTEN AGAIN') and will be until next Tuesday - I show up about 90 minutes in, and it includes sneak previews of a track from our new album and one from Chris Norman's new one too. Producer Sandy's choice of dub reggae melodica genius Augustus Pablo to introduce me was inspired. This morning brought a productive meeting about the 2005/6 season, in which we will now be giving performances of the Bach St John Passion (with Mark Padmore) and Handel's Messiah. After a very bad experience with a conductor back in May 2002 I'd decided that even playing in those pieces was now a thing of the past for me, so I took the scores up to the attic and I left them there. It's not that I don't love the music, it's just that the process of putting it together was deeply unpleasant. But looking at it from a different perspective, here I can take the responsibility to ensure that the mistakes of the past are repeated as little as possible. What it is that I hated about playing those pieces? Well, it turns out with the benefit of hindsight that all of them were 19th/20th century cultural accretions. For a start, there is the irrelevance of much of the conductor's presence in the actual performance (although he could be very useful in rehearsal) - so we won't have a conductor. I hated the false distinction between chorus and soloists - so we'll have the soloists singing in the choruses. I hated the ritual of the calls for applause at the end, everyone taking their turn for their little moment of glory - so we won't do that, we'll all acknowledge the applause together and then get off. Ah, that's better. Now how does the music go again? This afternoon I did the final proof-reading of my paper on 18th century basslines in Scots fiddle tunes. And now to accounts ... Sunday 12
September 2004 Autumn has arrived, fresh breezes bringing a kind of elemental excitement. Or as my daughter Susie said yesterday sitting on top of the fence: ‘it’s a great day for wind’. And it’s time to tidy up as
many small jobs as possible before heading into the new season proper. So the
last couple of days have involved such chores as backing up DATs to hard disk,
and clearing the surface layer of paper from my desk, some of which I say to my
shame has been there for 15 months. The impetus for desk tidying comes from
yesterday’s purchase of a sleek new 17” TFT monitor which is just the thing
to make a tired old computer feel like a shiny new piece of turbo-charged kit.
This has cleared vast areas of desk space and unearthed previously unheard-of
layers of detritus. Today’s purchase was a new
suitcase to replace the almost indestructible ‘Big Red’, which Continental
Airlines dropped from a great height coming back from Canada a month or so ago.
To their credit and mine, they sent a fat cheque because they’d lost Big Red
on the way there too, so today I spent it and now have ‘Not Quite So Big But
Four-Wheeled and More Expensive Red’. The Red bit is important as then you can
tell from a distance whether it’s made it onto the airport baggage conveyor
without having to negotiate the scrummage at the conveyor itself. Talking of red, The Red Red
Rose should be mastered and ready for the
factory by the end of this week, and I’ve also just discovered that Yamaha
make/made melodicas. It’s only a matter of time before one is added to my
growing collection: if you’re going to collect musical instruments they might
as well be cheap plastic ones. But my weekend productivity is about to take a dive, as Dick and Dom in da Bungalow is back on BBC1 and CBBC, with Bogies Gold on BBCi for good measure. Most television doesn't repay the time spent in front of it as far as I'm concerned, but this is a completely joyous and creative experience – surrender to it now and look forward to a happy winter. Two rather accomplished TV presenters (and a very energetic and fast-thinking production team behind the scenes) squeeze every possible ounce of pleasure or entertainment out of often random occurrences, making riveting entertainment out of almost nothing. No celebrities, no PR, no commercials, no crappy pop tunes, no huge budget, just a celebration of what it’s like to be 8 or 9 years old (or about 20 years older) and being allowed to have a really good laugh. More ideas are crammed into 5 minutes than you can imagine. When it goes wrong or isn't funny they own up, shrug, and carry on. I can’t praise it enough. Hooray. Thursday 9 September 2004 I had a grand day out on Tuesday, visiting Tony and
Eve at Nenthorn School to record Tobias Hume's Lamentations with Alison, and
also some melodica overdubs. Chris sent me a copy of the forthcoming Chris Norman Ensemble album, featuring my overdubs from Halifax last month. It's always strange hearing your contributions to someone else's record for the first time, as they inevitably hear your playing very differently from the way you do. But the 'ouch' factor is low, and there are some really fun things - Chris's big French harmonium just sounds creamy. I'm going to be the guest on Radio Scotland's Celtic Connections this coming Tuesday, so I hope it will be a chance to air a few unreleased bits and pieces, from Chris's album and our The Red Red Rose. The programme will be on the web at 'listen again' for a week if you miss it. Today I was browsing Hohner's website and the melodica page in English really does start like this: Hohner
Melodicas Well, corporal punishment has taken many forms in history but that's a new one on me. Saturday 4 September 2004 In the occasional idle moments of a pleasurable domestic day, I learnt some Tobias Hume, played around on the cheap but effective aluminium djembe I bought in Edinburgh yesterday, and sterilised my melodica breathing tube (it was getting a bit smelly). Musical housekeeping. Friday 3 September 2004 On Wednesday I had lunch with Mark Padmore and we talked about his upcoming John Passion project with the OAE and the function of the conductor. (On our way down Byres Road we spotted John Butt sitting in a cafe, which is kind of fortuitous when you're going to talk about Bach.) It made sense of a lot of bad musical experiences I've had recently playing with orchestras. The root cause hasn't necessarily been the orchestral set-up or the personalities concerned, but rather that in some kinds of music, and Bach in particular, the conductor has no useful function other than as a rehearsal manager, assuming of course that you have a group of sensitive and engaged musicians. Bach doesn't write filler parts, so everyone has a contribution to make, and it's difficult to assess and fulfil your role as part of a very complex whole, when there's this guy up at the front getting in the way and homogenising the overall result. Now some conductors and directors have a more contributory attitude, and know how to leave space for the musicians to get on with it, but many don't. I remember not long ago going to a rehearsal of Bach's cantata Wiederstehe doch der Sünde: a wonderful piece which should have been excellent fun, with Michael Chance singing. And on the way there I said to Greg that although it was one of my favourite pieces of music and the performance would probably turn out very well, I'd rather stay at home and put a record of it on, than be here playing in it. I couldn't work out why at the time, but now I can see that listening to a CD was a more participatory way of being involved in the piece than trying to play it with some bloke waving his arms around and taking essential responsibilities away from the people in front of him. All of which made it quite easy to turn down the offer yesterday of a tour to Spain just before Christmas playing for a choral conductor ... The other thing about Bach's music is that the consensus is growing that it should be played and sung by small numbers of people. I started the day yesterday by digging out my LPs of Joshua Rifkin's B minor Mass recording, recorded over 20 years ago with single voices and a minimum of instruments. It's extreme in some senses, in that he tends to iron out any attempts at expression, emotion or character, and some of the playing is clunky and the singing a bit shapeless, but it's a fascinating listen because it has honourable intentions. You hear the sound of all these personalities engaging with this very complex music, rather than having an overall shape imposed upon them. I don't think the intentions of someone like John Eliot Gardiner in the music of Bach are honourable. Well-meant perhaps, but ultimately misguided. But having said that, my favourite Bach remark comes from a B minor mass rehearsal some years ago with Frans Brüggen. In the opening 'Credo' movement of the Symbolum Nicenum, he turned to the orchestra and said firmly 'no opinion'. He meant (I think) that there were so many things going on in the music that if everyone 'expressed themselves', confusion would be the result. But it was a great way to say it. Monday 23 August 2004 A day off. Last week brought some very interesting plans for the 2005-6 season. Can't give too many details yet, but I've got a fair bit of budgeting work to do, and I'm getting back up to speed on the current state of research about the performing forces required for the John Passion, and another big baroque warhorse. Yesterday I got up early to drive down to York, where the assembled throng of the
British Flute Society gave Chris Andy and me a very warm welcome indeed. In fact, after the first set of tunes was greeted with cheering, Chris's response was 'Oh. I thought you were going to be cynical'. A fun gig, and I got to play the organ that I used to get up early to go and practise on every
morning when I was a student 20 years ago. Met some old friends there too. And
despite over-running our slot, the audience insisted on an encore, so I just had time to say 'what key is this in?' and watch Andy's hands very closely for the chords (dropped D tuning, I think I can follow that).
Alison had come up on the train from London to hear us, so afterwards we all went for a walk around the city walls, and had a pint outside the
Kings Arms - an essential part of York culture (well it was when I lived there). But 9 hours of driving there and back are a bit much for my tired eyes, so today I took Paul his harmonium back and we sat drinking tea in the kitchen, listening in vain for the new Blue Nile single to get played on Radio 2 - it's released today, new album next week. A few days ago I found out after a bit of investigation with a reed puller, that the instrument wasn't built in the 1930s as I'd guessed and confidently printed in the CD notes to SADN, but rather in 1969. The company Pearl River didn't even start until the 50s, just as all the American organ companies were going bust. Their website suggests that they've just started selling harmoniums again (4 designs, including 3 folding ones). This seems unbelievable - I wonder if they'll respond to my email. And now I'm sitting on a bus on the way to the local friendly computer shop, before I'm go back to reorganise the huge pile of paper on my desk. I'm not going to deal with any of it yet, just reorganise it. Dealing with it will take most of next month. I had to turn down the chance to do a Highlands tour of tango numbers with Mr McFall's Chamber in September, as I really need to stay at home for a while and just deal with stuff. And it would be nice to feel like a useful member of my family again. Sunday 15 August 2004 On Friday morning we recorded the C major Geminiani sonata, which being louder was much easier for me, even though I nearly got the sack from the third movement after my pleasant walk along Hampshire lanes to the church took longer than I'd thought, and they started without me. Oops. Yesterday I made the pilgrimage to the Parcel Force depot (on a street in the Gorbals which isn't where it used to be, so that if you look it up on an old map you end up in completely the wrong place) and picked up yet another melodica, an Excalibur this time. Sara Greenberg suggested that as my Angel melodica has been called Eric ever since Greg bought it a name badge in an airport in Connecticut a couple of years ago, the other two should be Larry and Bruce. Larry made his brief recorded debut on the session for Chris's album in Halifax, because his upper register was a bit clearer than Eric's. Thinner and reedier at the bottom though. Bruce's strengths are yet to be determined. Next Sunday I'm playing with Chris and Andy at the British Flute Society conference in York. We'll be in the Lyons Concert Hall, where for some years I arrived faithfully at 8am every morning to practise the organ. And news from Delphian: the release date for The Red Red Rose is now 1 November. Thursday 12 August 2004 I find the stop-start part of the classical recording process very tiring (or maybe I'm just very tired). I certainly feel like I haven't played particularly well in the ensemble stuff. We opted for the big harpsichord in the end, which was great for the solos, but a bit too loud for at least some of the sonatas. So I've been concentrating on keeping out of the way by not playing too much: a constant reining in of musical ideas, rather than having the freedom to play and respond to the sounds around me. Couple that with the necessary repetition and interruption that the recording process employs, and it becomes very difficult to feel like you're doing anything musical at all, as by the time you've played a short section for the 5th time it stops feeling like it's part of a larger discourse. I suspect the end result will be rather good, but it's nice right now not to be playing for a while, and just to listen to everyone else making beautiful sounds. One of Geminiani's helpful instructions to continuo players in his book The Art of Accompaniament (sic) is that if you're creating confusion, just play the bassline and miss out the chords. I think I'll be following his advice quite a bit on this record. But then he also says you should fill in all the gaps whenever the soloist stops ... I've been doing a bit of that too. Eligio Quintiero joined us today and let me play around on his alto baroque guitar in the lunch break. Eligio is one of those musicians (like Chris) for whom making music really is playing. Well I guess so anyway; maybe he feels differently about it. But musical ideas just pour out of him constantly, so it's nice to able to leave the bulk of the improvising work to him and concentrate on being unobtrusive. The llamas in the adjoining field are very inquisitive. Sunday 8 August 2004 Mixed emotions as I flew out. I'm desperate to get home, as 10 days is the absolute limit for me to be away from my family, and all of us to be halfway sane. But over the last week and a bit I've had a wonderful time with a really excellent collection of quality people. What fun. I'll miss them too. Anyway, DG picked Chris and me up from the airport yesterday, and we all assembled for a happily shambolic rehearsal and CBC balance test yesterday afternoon. The broadcasts are on Radio Two on Wednesday at 1pm, then on Sunday 15th at noon. Rod Sneddon got a fantastic sound balance, better than the CD ...
The jolly boys and Betsy went round the corner to African Highlife for a sumptuous meal of goat stew and the best peanut soup I have ever had. And then we were in the mood to play. For some reason, lots of extra drumming sneaked into the concert, as Suzie had bought a couple of drums earlier in the day, and we were all pretty relaxed. The audience seemed to be in the mood for a good time too, and made plenty of encouraging noises throughout. It's nice to look back on a week of concerts and only have one where the whole audience didn't leap to its feet at the end (and that was a polite afternoon concert in Ottawa, and even then some of them did). The second half started with DG playing the Black Jock variations on his own, so Chris
Back to chez Greenberg/Dunlay afterwards for food, prosecco and beer. Well I did it, 6 concerts and a recording in 8 days, with 5 different programmes. Now all I have to do is go home for 24 hours, then I'm off again to record a load of Geminiani.
Saturday 7 August 2004 Humanization of a tedious process: in my experience Canadian airport security are very strict but fair. There were 3 staff guiding the movement of me and my belongings through the x-ray machine in Ottawa this morning. The first was a bass player who pointed out that there are only three kinds of people in the world: the Scots, the Irish, and those that wish they were either Scots or Irish. The second recognised my melodica case, helpfully translated the chinese characters on it for me (one is a brand name, the other bit reads 'very suitable for junior and elementary schools'), and told me she'd had a melodica just like it 24 years ago. And the third should have confiscated the contents of my flask of 1990 cask strength Ardbeg, but allowed me to taste it instead. Nice man. Meanwhile Chris has borrowed my copy of the Ensemble Ambrosius CD 'Metrix' and said that it had the best possible effect on him. He now wishes he were 25, Finnish and in that band. I've emailed Olli to ask when and where his audition is. Friday 6 August 2004 The concert was lots of fun, to a big friendly audience, who were on our side throughout. I got them to sing Happy Birthday to Chris to get some audience participation going early. And they laughed heartily on cue at all my feeble jokes. The harmonium and Steinway D were fine, and the 4 manual Casavant organ did a nice turn in Chris's tune 'The Flower of Port Williams'. Everyone played great - as I said at the time 'it's wonderful to play in a band that doesn't speed up' - but the star of the show was undoubtedly Simeon, whose percussion solo brought the house down. He even got a cheer for moving onto the cajon halfway through. And at a chamber music festival. We went to the Manx bar afterwards, where the Polaris barbershop quartet struck up in the middle of the pub and entertained us royally - we got them to sing Chris Happy Birthday too of course. Over the course of the day the back of my left hand has changed shape, as a result of a spider bite I received in last night's concert interval: which serves me right for going outside at dusk to photograph the sunset really. I now have no visible knuckles or veins, just a large bulge three inches across, radiating heat. At least today it's gone down far enough for me to able to make a fist again. Which brings me to today's adventure. Our concert was at 2, and something told me that the morning might be stressful, so taking no chances I had a steak for breakfast (for the price of a couple of pints of beer at home). Sure enough, Jamie our venue manager greeted me at the hall in the University of Ottawa with the news that we had no tuner (off sick). He went off to work his way through his endless list of tuners' phone numbers while I practised Geminiani to pass the time. Jamie (Blachly, on gamba this time) appeared soon after, and eventually so did Chris, and we were just getting down to work when the other Jamie came back with a tame tuner. So I sent the guys off for lunch. After ten minutes the tuner (poor guy - it had dawned on me by now that he was a piano tuner and had probably never seen a harpsichord before) had taken the jack rail off, jammed the action, and was turning the pin of a 4' string while playing an 8' one. By this time his hands were shaking and he was clearly terrified. Hmm. 'Let's be realistic about how long this is going to take you' I said. 'Why don't I do it?' And I started putting the action back together and did a quick touch-up job. The number of North American gigs I've done with dodgy harpsichord tuning still outnumbers the well-tuned ones by a factor of at least two. OK, so perhaps we could rehearse now. Nope, Chris and Jamie had gone out to get some lunch by this time. Oh well. By this time the audience were queueing round the block to get in. The gig itself was fine. It did feel strange to play a straight chamber concert to rows of quiet respectful people though. As Chris told the audience in the church the night before 'just remember, rowdiness is part of God's plan'. I didn't feel like playing the Duncan Gray variations to such an atmosphere, so I told them it was too cheap a piece for such a classy audience and played Geminiani instead. They seemed to like it, and we sold vast quantities of CDs afterwards, signing copies for half an hour. I came back here exhausted for the adrenaline comedown, with food and beer from the shops across the road. I've been listening to old XTC singles here in the hotel for the last couple of days. Perhaps it's because I'm playing loads of Scots music anyway, but I often find myself listening to self-conciously English music when away from home: Robert Wyatt, XTC, Richard Thompson. It seems to remind me of home. Spare me your theories of the effects of cultural imperialism please.
Thursday 5 August 2004 photo: DG, DMcG, Chris
Norman In the break this afternoon I gave Suzie her one and only melodica lesson: 'you hold it there, you blow in there and you play the keys' - I think she's going to be rather good at it. If Chris gets one too, we could have three in different sizes and play trios. At least 20 000 soprano points are awarded to Suzie for giving me a shoulder rub after the rehearsal when I was just about to tune the harpsichord. This sort of selfless behaviour is not usual for sopranos who are about to launch a CD. This was the view from outside the dressing room in the interval.
Talking of selfless behaviour, David drove Chris and me back to Halifax last night, we got to bed around 2, and then he got up again before 6 to drive us to the airport. Tonight we have a boy band gig (ahem, Chris Norman Ensemble concert) in the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, then a baroque chamber gig tomorrow lunchtime. Hope I can get a nap later on ... Wednesday 4 August 2004 Suzie gave us all copies of the CD we recorded just a few weeks ago (they were waiting on our dinner plates), and now we're listening in the car to remind ourselves of the tunes. We're all suitably appalled/surprised/amazed/amused at the various things we can't remember playing ... Great raspberries. We've already had an enormous breakfast, and the rest of the working day already has its two restaurant visits planned and booked. Suzie knows just how to prioritise food. Tuesday 3 August 2004 Yesterday was a day off: some practice, then off with the Greenberg/Dunlay clan to see the 40-odd tall ships down at the harbour (it was the Natal Day holiday), followed by pumpkin ice-cream, and rosewater and mint sorbet in Halifax public gardens, sitting under the large statue of one Robert Burns. Back home for more practice (some harpsichord, some frisbee) and then DG decided to set about tuning his Estey suitcase organ to A440. He'd just about done the 8 foot stop when I headed for bed around 1am. This morning I was in The Music Room doing my piano, melodica and harmonium overdubs for Chris Norman's Christmas album. Andy and James came along too for moral support, and also so that I could moan at them for playing so many unexpected chords! I really like recording sessions where there's just me doing overdubs. It's just sad attention-seeking really. It's harder to get a good feel, as nobody else's playing will respond to yours, but the technical and mental challenges are very absorbing. I did the seven-minutes of 'In fields of frost and snow' in one complete take (attention-seeking again), and at the end put down a few takes of Coilsfield House on the Steinway D in memory of the night when I played it in New Orleans. I don't think I've ever recorded a piano solo before. It turns you into a tiresome hyper-critical unpleasable pain - the treble register of this rather nice piano suddenly felt quite inadequate, and the acoustic of the room didn't feel up up to snuff any more either. Sure enough, Chris came out of the control room afterwards and said, 'Were you happy with the way the inner voices came out there?' Oh well, I'll listen back in a few weeks when I've forgotten what it was like. Afterwards I was nicely adrenalised. It's strange to feel like that at 2.30pm without having played a concert. later, Saint-Bernard On the way here I had my first ever encounter with true Canadian culture in the shape of a visit to Tim Hortons. We made the girl behind the counter laugh so much that she gave me a bumper helping of Timbits. Apologies to non-Canadian readers who may not appreciate the significance of this. Or care particularly. photo: DG on beach. 'looks like an Alasdair Fraser album cover' Chris Norman Monday 2 August 2004 As the afternoon dragged on yesterday with no sign of it (underwear or suitcase), DG and I decided to go to the airport and get it ourselves, which is not the ideal preparation for a tough evening concert. The staff at Continental airlines are great when you finally get to speak to them, but you have to negotiate either their interminable phone system or a customs official at the airport first. ... By late afternoon I had a suitcase, and DG had an exploding nose with the stress. He went off to lie down while I practised Geminiani. The concert was hot and sticky (we were both soaked through by the end), but had some great moments. DG played a breathtaking Robert Mackintosh sonata, and for an encore we played 'good to get home' live for the first time. A guy in the front row said 'all right' as I let go of the last note... Then today (yesterday?) I spent the morning catching upon email and practising, and we drove off to Camp Geddie near New Glasgow on the north coast of Nova Scotia. It's a presbyterian summer camp that just happened to have its hall free for the day, for the promoter to book it. A dilemma: will we rehearse or will we go for a swim? Can you guess? We dropped the harpsichord off at the hall, and Jennifer and Derek Grout took us off to their beach house so we could get in what are supposedly the warmest waters north of Carolina, and in the ocean we met Vivi, our host for dinner. We had a very short rehearsal, and then I sat and got increasingly anxious about the harpsichord not staying in tune, as we had all the doors open to get the temperature down, and it was sitting in a cross-breeze. After an hour I decided I was too hungry to tune any more, and off we went to Vivi's for some fantastic food. After that the tuning was easy. A friendly audience, nice and close, and a fun concert. I briefly left the building by one of the many doors during my melodica solo, and then once I was outside I started to wonder what was going on back inside. This unexpected anxiety transferred itself to my breathing and all the phrases came out a bit short. I also got bitten by various insects in the course of the show, and at one point David had to carefully remove a spider that was occupying his part of the stage in mid-air ... Back to Vivi's for more food & beer, and then what with the full moon and the beautiful night, a midnight swim was too good to resist. So five of us headed down to the shore, swam in the wonderful warm water, and toasted hot dogs and marshmallows by the fire, playing tunes and singing. Perfect. We got a ride back up the hill in the back of a pickup and set off for Halifax at about 1.45. © 2004 David
McGuinness |
concerto caledonia
It's very special to back in the room where we recorded the best bits of SADN in
the dark at a few hours' notice. It's not full of building rubble any more, it
has lights, decorated walls, windows that let light in, and all round good
vibes. It must have been a happy school. A very very good room to make music in.
There will probably be the sound of occasional passing cars on the record (the
windows are getting fixed now) but I don't care. Even so, it was still very
tempting to spend even more time than we did sitting outside in the sunshine,
watching the swallows feed their young, and eating Tony's bread and Eve's
soup. The five overhead electricity wires made a perfect stave against the
blue sky, so in the spirit of John Cage we could have sat there and played the
music that the swallows made as they came and went. 
Our occasionally fragmentary attempts to keep up with Chris in
Marlys Norman's Reel ended with Chris turning to me before the final phrase on the last time round and saying 'Diminished'. 'Thanks.' Wry smiles all round. Marlys herself was already in the foyer with Alison selling CDs anyway ...
and I found some hymnboard numbers backstage and took them on with us to give him a score of 95 and 87 -
reasonably generous I thought, but Chris later revised his opinion.
Lunch was some of the biggest and best pan fried scallops I've ever had, and I also tried for the first time the gelatinous Acadian mush of potatoes and chicken (or rabbit) that is Rappie Pie. I think I'll stick with stovies actually ...
