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David
McGuinness's diary Tuesday 30 April 2002 Busy, busy. It's nearly midnight, I've been drafting and budgeting possible programmes for an open-air concert in August which I hope will come to pass. My email is full of replies to various messages I sent out earlier in the week: we've resuscitated an old notion that we had a couple of years ago, of a kind of summer-school come symposium getting traditional musicians and early music specialists together for mutual learning and some serious jamming. I've been suggesting it to various suggestible parties who might be possible partners in putting such an event together - it would be a year or two away yet I think, but it's looking promising. I heard back from the guys at Delphian Records, who are still keen to get a record out of us - the running order I'd drafted is a bit tighter now: some 18th century Scots tune book material, with song settings by Pietro Urbani and a smattering of Georg Muffat. The plan is to have it in the can early next year, but the best-laid schemes of mice and men gang up on glaikit musicians who take their eyes off the ball for a second, so ... fingers crossed. I bumped into Philip Hobbs of Linn at Glasgow Airport last week, briefly enough for our conversation to get as far as 'we must catch up sometime'. Thanks to a couple of obliging trusts, we're now about halfway towards getting enough funding to be able to record The Gentle Shepherd for Linn, as it's rather an expensive undertaking. This week I'm playing in the SCO in what should turn out to be rather good performances of the Bach John Passion. It's conducted with great enthusiasm and well-chosen attention to musical detail, and the soloists are great, with Mark Padmore as the evangelist. He's just recorded the Matthew Passion with Paul McCreesh, and was rather miffed that Alison couldn't be the continuo cellist for it, as she was away on tour with 'whatever orchestra it is she plays in' - the AAM. I was back in the RSAMD again last week, assessing 2nd year exams this time to see what the students have learnt about baroque performance practice. There were some really great players, including a pianist who after a year at the harpsichord played Couperin and Purcell with great fluidity and made a beautiful sound, but the singers (with a couple of welcome exceptions) seemed to think it was enough just to switch their vibrato off. I know you've got to acquire a technique, but the lack of musical imagination got a bit depressing occasionally. Still, the good ones made up for it, and after a long day of having someone new forcibly entertain me every 15 minutes and then talk about it afterwards, I felt quite exhilarated rather than exhausted. Just found time today for a quick hour in the pub with the editor of The List, Mark Fisher. We'd never actually met before, but have corresponded on and off (well, mostly off) for the last 15 years due to our shared enthusiasm for Swindon twosome XTC. Many years ago, Mark wrote an XTC fanzine and I had a suitably idiotic letter published in it in 1987 or thereabouts. We vowed to reconvene some other time for a completely pointless evening of beer and Partridge/Moulding-related reminiscence. Sunday 28 April 2002 I've just looked out of the kitchen window and seen hailstones bouncing off the lawn. That's April for you. The studio-cum-concert hall where we recorded Mungrel Stuff has just closed - I'm told it's been bought by Jools Holland to turn into a nightclub, which sounds good. The place has some strange quirks, including a huge one-way mirror in the green room, so that the audience can see you getting changed as they arrive, but you can't see them. I never got to the bottom of quite why this was there. Sunday 21 April 2002 Belfast City Airport again: waiting to take off this time, looking out at the rain on the tarmac. Possibly the best thing about this place is the complete absence of muzak - long may that civilised state of affairs continue. This afternoon's gig was pretty good fun: Ade played a storming Vivaldi fiddle sonata, and Mhairi sang Handel's early Laudate Pueri, which is the kind of piece where you think 'he's going to turn out to be a very good composer one day': big ambitious ideas not quite brought off. It's quite a sing though, an awful lot of notes. In the Ut collocet, I momentarily forgot what key I was in and improvised merrily in B flat when everyone else was in G minor - you can hear the result on Radio 3 on 8 May at 1300 BST. Rehearsals were a great laugh: theorbo player Eligio Quintiera, who's about to do some playing on the next Kate Bush album on a song where she plays clavichord, takes delight in wild stylistic incongruities whenever the rehearsal breaks down, so that Vivaldi had a habit of degenerating into 70s funk from the two of us without warning. I knew things were looking up when in the first break he sat down at the organ and played Michael Jackson's Thriller. Saturday 20 April 2002 A couple of hours to kill in Belfast City Airport: not the entertainment capital of the universe. I was going to bring my accounts to work on, but it's too early in the morning for anything so taxing (ha ha). I also got a package in the post from David Greenberg yesterday: some CDs, and the amazing book by his wife Kate Dunlay and himself on Cape Breton fiddling. His CD Tunes Before Dawn rocks like a [insert favourite profanity here]- not an electric or a bass instrument in sight, but still ten times as funky as all that folk-techno crossover kind of stuff. He also sent a cassette of him playing unaccompanied tunes, so by the end of the day I'd overdubbed some suitably abstract piano onto the opening slow air, burned it to a CD, and now I need to find a post office in Belfast this morning to mail it back to him. Virtual duets at several thousand miles distance. The diary miracle looks like it might take place - apparently my one free day in New York in the middle of a tour playing the harmonium is the perfect time to record with Chris, and what's more he wants me to play ... the harmonium. As Harry Hill would say 'what are the chances of that happening, eh?' Wednesday 17 April 2002 Well, my work rate has now increased from completely stationary to very sluggish. We've had the painter in (no, that's not a euphemism for anything biological, a nice man's been decorating our house) and this has necessitated packing most of our lives into cardboard boxes and sticking them in the cellar and the attic. On Thursday I spent 10 hours dismantling the study. It's a bit like moving house, but without the luxury of removal men coming and packing everything for you, taking care only to drop the items of greatest sentimental value. Anyway, the painter is done, the study is a comforting womb-like shade of red, and the huge Bakelite clock I rescued from the church hall of my youth now hangs above the fireplace, but pretty much everything else is still in the cardboard boxes. Now that I've unpacked the essentials of life like the record collection, it's a real temptation to leave everything else out for the bin men and start from scratch, but I know I'd regret it sooner rather than later. When you do a few different kinds of work, Stuff (capital 's') accumulates quickly. We moved here a couple of years ago, and I only kept things in the study that I thought I'd need on a regular basis, as I didn't want walls of shelves filled with books and files like an academic badge of honour. But the room soon filled up, and it's a good discipline to try and pare it back to a minimum again. A sort of Californian 'recipe for a calm life' (try not to throw up). Ingredients: one well-used room, several very large cardboard boxes. Method: place the entire portable contents of the room haphazardly into the cardboard boxes. Remove these from the room. Enjoy the peace and tranquility that results. Now replace in the room only those items which are a) necessary, b) clean. This may take some time. I think perhaps I should put some shelves up in the attic. I heard from Chris again today about US tour dates and some recording with his Ensemble in the summer if I can fit it in - it's just possible that my free day in New York in August might coincide with the sessions, which would be a miracle. This morning I assembled a press pack of ConCal photos and recent reviews to send to a US agent who's been in touch, and managed to do a bit of token practice for the gig I've got in Belfast this weekend, a BBC broadcast playing in Adrian's group La Serenissima. Tuesday 9 April 2002 Time to put another date on the events page - there's more to come, but we're still sorting out venue and personnel availability. This is the first time I've sat at my desk for a while, and there's a mountain of email to get through and some thinking to be done. Last Thursday Marie and I went to see the ever-supportive Helen Jamieson at the Scottish Arts Council to discuss what we'll do with the money they've given us for this year. I thought our plans had looked a bit lacklustre, as to some extent we'd put in the kind of things we thought they'd fund, rather than what we actually wanted to do. But by the end of the meeting I got the impression that next time we should just tell them what we really want to achieve and see what happens. On the way through on the train (for non-Scottish readers, you travel through from Glasgow to Edinburgh, not across, up, down or East) we came up with a list of projects we'd started thinking about over the last couple of years, and it was much longer than we'd expected, and looked like fun too. From next year, the state funding of music in Scotland is going to get a bit of a shake up, with more of a level playing field for rock, jazz, traditional and everything else alongside the classical and opera people who've been getting nearly all the dosh up until now. About time really. When the Scottish Parliament was set up, the Executive came up with a wide-ranging Cultural Strategy which singled out the three 'national companies', the RSNO, SCO and Scottish Opera/Scottish Ballet, for special treatment, because (amongst other reasons) "companies with national roles should focus on excellence in all they do" - which kind of implies that the rest of us just fanny about doing any old crap. And having two 'national' orchestras and an opera company, without a 'national' theatre, a 'national' jazz band, a 'national' hardcore thrash combo, a 'national' DJ, or a 'national' mask and puppet centre (or a 'national' baroque group of course), is a bit strange to say the least. Let's face it, Scotland's greatest cultural gifts to the world are not in orchestral music or opera, are they? Now what about a 'national' comedy club ... Last Wednesday I did my annual stint of DIY, wielding a paintbrush. Virgin Classics have been wringing out the last few drops of cash from their back catalogue by releasing Roger Norrington's complete Beethoven symphonies and overtures for the price of 1 CD, so I bought a set intending to use it as background music around the house or in the car, but that didn't really work, so I listened while painting instead. Beethoven is such macho music, I felt like I should be doing something more aggressive than painting a bathroom pink: invading a neighbouring nation perhaps. Still, I'm glad to say that even in the 1990s I got to know the symphonies by playing them in their piano duet arrangements rather than listening to records. In the lunch-break of my day job at the BBC, I used to go over to Lynda Cochrane's flat and we would play duet transcriptions of orchestral music on her big old Bechstein grand. Some people may have suspected there was something other than music-making going on during our frequent assignations (and we had some slightly suggestive photos of ourselves taken in the vain hope that people might want to actually book us to play this stuff), but I can assure you that after you'd worked up a sweat with someone on a few Beethoven climaxes, anything more carnal would have been a bit of a comedown. Speaking of photos, the prints from our ConCal session with Kevin Low on 1 November have just arrived, so expect some new shots scattered around this site soon. Before our trip to the SAC on Thursday, I offered some tech support to Greg, printing out his first string arrangements for the Trashcan Sinatras, so that I could see the look on his face when the first sheet came out of the printer. When you've been sweating over a piece or an arrangement for weeks, and you first see it appear as a beautifully laid-out part, the satisfaction is sweet indeed. Friday 29 March 2002 This week we heard about our Scottish Arts Council funding for next year - not as much as we'd hoped for, but enough to keep us ticking over nonetheless, so Marie and I got together yesterday to develop our plan of action for 2002-3. We've got a few other funding bodies to chase before we can get everyone's diaries booked, but we're on the way. The very expensive New Year Messiah idea will have to wait for another time - classical music respectability remains out of our reach for the time being, what a shame (!). Meanwhile, we've been offered a very interesting open-air gig in August, which I hope works out. Details will follow here if/when it's firmed up. Yesterday I made a brief appearance on Brian Morton's show on BBC Radio Scotland masquerading as a rock critic, reviewing the new XTC box set Coat of Many Cupboards. As Andy Partridge once said, 'We're very big with people who get their records for free'. Another guest on the show was to have been Michael Winner, to talk about the late Dudley Moore, but when he realised (just before going on air) that he wasn't the only friend of Dud on the programme, he promptly hung up, saying 'I don't do group interviews'. Make your own judgment on this ... Suddenly spring is making a convincing showing around here - I've spent a fair whack of the last two days in the garden enjoying the sunshine. Sunday 24 March 2002 At last we've confirmed the date for our next Edinburgh gig in October - I've fought shy of posting concert dates on the website for a while, until I can fix up other work around the various projects that are on the go. The final details are still to be fixed up, but I've booked David Greenberg and we'll try and get at least two concerts and a recording in the bag while he's on this side of the pond. Tuesday 19 March 2002 Well, last Thursday's encounter with David Greenberg was a lot of fun. I was giving the 50-minute version of the 'DMcG's guide to putting on concerts without losing too much money' lecture at the RSAMD that morning (someone shouted 'Bravo' at the end which was nice if a bit OTT). We ended up in the foyer with a student on the traditional music course whose name I forget, poring over some 18th century publications by Robert Macintosh, and musing over what was broadly French or Italian in style and what was unassailably Scottish. I was fascinated. I went to my first ever Musicians' Union meeting last night (I've only been a member for 15 years) as John Wallace, who's the new Principal at the RSAMD, was speaking, and we had a chat about the importance in buildings such as those of good communal areas, where people can hang around and wait for something spontaneous to happen. The RSAMD has a good one, as you have to walk past the foyer area to get pretty much anywhere within the School of Music, so you can be drawn into any discussion, argument, or jam session that might be breaking out when you pass through. When a fellow student of mine at York, Bob Gilmore, studied in California for a year to research Harry Partch, he once wrote to me complaining that the students were so busy amassing credit points for their courses, that they never just 'dicked around' or made the place look untidy, which was often the most potentially creative part of being in a musical institution. Anyway, I took David G and Abby Newton off to The Wee Curry Shop for lunch and stimulating conversation, and then while Abby went shopping, David and I repaired back here to play some Muffat with harpsichord, and then jam some tunes with first piano and then harpsichord. He's an amazingly rhythmic player and we got pretty funky, which is a bit of an achievement for a fiddle and a keyboard without outside help. I think one way and another we'll be playing together again before long. Shame he lives in Nova Scotia and I live in Auld Scotia, but that's the modern world for you. Just returned from a tour of the US with the Academy of Ancient Music was Alison, so I went to meet her off the plane on Saturday, so that we could go straight to a rehearsal with Martin and Jill Hughes for Sunday night's concert with Albaroque. I wish I'd thought of that name 10 years ago, but it's too late now. On the way back into Glasgow we couldn't resist a re-introduction to West of Scotland culture by stopping in Helensburgh for chips to eat on the pier. The failsafe method of 'find the chip shop with the longest queue and stand in it' struck gold, as the shop in question also served fritters. Only a select band of chip shops sell these things, which for the uninitiated are medium thickness slices from huge potatoes, battered and deep fried. You get the 'chip' part of the experience on the inside, and the batter on the outside: a total culinary event - just don't think of what it does to your arteries. Fritters always remind me of Sunday nights walking home along Argyle Street aged about 14. Thinking of culinary events, Sunday's rehearsal and concert prevented us from taking a full part in Marie's 50th birthday party, but we made a quick appearance on our way there, and it looked like it was shaping up well. The next few days are a bit of a voyage into the unknown for me, as my Psion 5 screen failed last night (and I stupidly reset the thing before backing it up, and lost 3 weeks' worth of data), so until it gets back from the repair centre in Milton Keynes my diary is largely guesswork and memory exercises. This feels very liberating until you miss an important appointment. Wednesday 13 March 2002 It's been an eventful week so far - on Monday I had a fruitful meeting with the guys from Delphian Records, who are keen to do some stuff with us. At least two possible projects made it past the 'that's a nice idea' stage to the 'what will it cost again?' stage without pain, which is pretty good going. On Sunday I dropped into St Andrew's in the Square to hear Cape Breton fiddler and baroque violinist David Greenberg, who's over on this side of the Atlantic playing a few gigs in Scotland with Abby Newton and Patsy Seddon. He used to have a group in Canada called Puirt-a-Baroque who played similar repertoire to ours, but sounded rather different. He's coming over here tomorrow to jam for a bit, which I'm looking forward to a lot - by coincidence we're both teaching at the RSAMD in the morning. On Monday night Mr McFall's Chamber were playing in Edinburgh, including a project with final year animation students at Edinburgh College of Art, where they wrote and played live soundtracks to short animated films projected on a big screen behind them. Great fun - it reminded me of our ECA collaboration a few years back on a big Venetian extravaganza. I remember sitting in the middle of a Vivaldi recorder concerto, when I wasn't playing in the slow movement, and looking around to see that nearly every available surface in Greyfriars Kirk was projected with images of moving water. Quite beautiful. Last night we had what felt like a very productive ConCal board meeting. Marie and I tend to talk about what we've been up to, and then we wait for the pearls of wisdom to come back at us. We have a good variety of skills and backgrounds across our board members, not to mention a mine of experience, and I emerged from the meeting with plenty to think about, concerning our overall strategy as a group and how we achieve our aims. It's easy to get diverted off-course when you're caught up in the details day by day. Now what is this group about again? Friday 8 March 2002 I had a terrific time playing in John Adams's Fearful Symmetries last night. I don't normally get nervous before concerts, but yesterday I noticed I was quite anxious. The prospect of playing complicated cross rhythms very loudly on sampled kick drums and thumping toms across a symphony orchestra, on a keyboard I didn't really know, was getting to me a bit. And in the morning rehearsal the polarity kept reversing on the volume pedal I was using, so that loud and soft were swapped without warning. Bye bye volume pedal. The gig itself was unexpectedly terrific - at one point I thought 'oops, that kick drum is far too loud and must be blasting everyone out', I looked up at Marin, and she was grinning all over her face, so I hit it harder instead. It was great to look around a symphony orchestra and see the players sitting grooving in their chairs and getting into it while playing some very complex patterns. And at the end Marin picked me first for a bow on my own - I know it's a bit pathetic and sad to be pleased about this, but it's not every day I get to be a human drum machine in a symphony orchestra, and I did feel a certain sense of satisfaction at not screwing up. Bernard Robertson sitting next to me deserved the approbation more: he was playing almost non-stop, had only got the correct equipment that morning, and had two keyboards and twenty-odd patch changes to negotiate, which he did. There were only about 100 in the audience - I hate to think what the financial loss on the gig was. It's very frustrating because it was an accessible programme of American music, and the audience who were there loved it. Natalie Wheen introduced the concert in friendly and non-technical terms, with Marin comparing John Adams to a good club DJ, never settling in a good groove for too long before mixing in the next one. So why was no-one there? Was it marketed wrongly? Are there just not that many people interested? Should the programme have included Grieg's piano concerto instead of Samuel Barber's to attract some punters looking for a tune they can hum? And incidentally, why was I wearing white tie and tails to play a sampler? When you compare it to the other much less cost-intensive gigs going on in Scotland that attract 100 people, it leaves a lots of questions to be answered about how music is subsidised and funded - or publicised. My fee alone was a substantial percentage of the box office gross, and there must have been more than 60 of us, including a brilliant sax quartet some of whom had come up from London, and an American soloist and conductor who are much more expensive than I. Not to mention getting EWF's keyboards over from Turkey. Food for thought. I always try to go there with an open mind, but I also realised afresh how much I really detest Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall. Whether you're in the audience or the stage, just entering the building saps all the energy from you, it's ugly and unwelcoming, its acoustics are rubbish, there are huge areas of wasted space, and the foyer messes with your sense of direction - the best things about it are the backstage technical facilities. I also had my first tuning lesson with Meg Munck yesterday afternoon. I spend most of my life using my ears, and have come to think that I can hear most things, so it was salutary to discover that I was completely failing to hear the right beats when trying to set a temperament. I was being distracted by the high 'wa-wa-wa-wa-wa' sounds rather than the lower pulsations that I should have been adjusting with the tuning hammer. I was so exhausted after an hour's lesson that I had to go to bed for a nap before the concert. At the Concert Hall, I told Scottish Steinway technician Norman Motion about this, and he said, 'yeah, ignore the beats and just feel the throb'. I'll practise next week. Wednesday had a nice balance to it. I practised Bach on the harpsichord in the morning, spent the afternoon's John Adams rehearsal in shock at how loud it is sitting in the middle of a symphony orchestra - heavy metal bands have it easy - I bought some new speakers for the study, and dropped in on Greg to help him out with a string arrangement for the Trashcan Sinatras. Not a bad musical range for one day. Tuesday 5 March 2002 I had an entertaining afternoon today in the first rehearsal for John Adams's Fearful Symmetries. The correct keyboards are (wait for it) stranded on tour with Earth Wind and Fire in Turkey, so instead I had a rather good Korg sampling workstation to play with. Of course none of the patches were set up for the Adams, so to misquote Eric Morecambe, I was playing everything in the right order, but not necessarily the right notes. There was no time to reconfigure the patches or get to know them properly, so I improvised the whole thing using any notes that didn't sound completely wrong. Occasionally I reduced surrounding colleagues to giggles by unexpectedly playing a samba whistle or a vibraslap in the most inappropriate place. Marin Alsop, who's conducting, was very apologetic - 'I had my annual tantrum about this'. We're expecting the right equipment tomorrow. Monday 4 March 2002 My Monday morning is cheered by a very nice review of Mungrel Stuff in Classics Today, sent to me by Linn. Saturday 2 March 2002 Whenever I think I'm going to get some thinking time or a bit of a break, something always comes along just in time to stop it. On Monday the RSNO rang me up to ask if I'd play the sampler in John Adams's Fearful Symmetries next week. Potentially it's a lot of fun - you get to sit and play a load of silly percussion samples on a keyboard in the middle of a symphony orchestra, even counting them off on the hi-hat at the beginning. But the RSNO pay their extras abominably, so I passed on it, gave them some numbers of other people to try, and said 'if you're stuck, ring me back with a better offer'. They did. So I've given in, and I'm quite looking forward to it now. Once you take into account a reasonable amount of preparation time, the pay as an orchestral extra is about a third of what you could earn doing instrumental teaching - it's hardly any wonder then, that the majority of orchestral players only manage to earn a living by teaching in what spare time they have. People from other walks of life are constantly amazed at how little jobbing musicians earn - if you chose to earn broadly similar amounts by cleaning toilets, even then you wouldn't have to buy and maintain your own £20 000 toilet brush, and keep up your technique at home. I've been sufficiently shamed and/or impressed by the Ensemble Ambrosius guys to decide that it's time I learnt how to tune harpsichords properly by ear, instead of relying on a meter. My experience in Rome this time last year taught me that it's time I was confident enough to take care of any potential disasters myself. So I've got all my old photocopies of tuning schemes out and started practising again, and I have a lesson booked with Meg Munck next week. It's also a useful distraction from practising the myriad notes of Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 which I'm playing in a couple of weeks. On the subject of lessons and self-improvement, I had a glorious Alexander lesson yesterday - the first one with my original teacher Evelyn Tingle for 7 years. I got hooked on the Technique after the Scottish Arts Council gave me some money in 1991 to get some harpsichord lessons - I went to see David Roblou who told me my ankle kept wiggling, had I realised? He said 'you could try Alexander Technique, it helped me'. I asked around some dancer friends in Glasgow for a recommendation, and after my first lesson with Evelyn, went home, sat down at the harpsichord, and discovered I could hear much more clearly: not the result I was expecting at all! So I spent the rest of the SAC money, and more besides, on Alexander lessons over the next few years. And since yesterday I've been rediscovering my neck ... In amongst all this I've been cooking up another recording project, and Marie and I have been working on plans and fund-raising for the New Year Messiah. As I write I'm half-listening to a borrowed CD of Messiah recordings from 1899 to the 1920s which is strangely fascinating. In those days people sang the English language as though it were the English language, and not a pale imitation of Italian. You can even make out the words! And Spike Milligan died this week. I've only ever written two fan letters, and one was to him, a great musician as well as a creative powerhouse in all kinds of directions. The theme to 'Q' is still the best TV sig ever : I remember being fascinated by the version with the buzzer at the age of about 8 - how could people manage to play like that? And somewhere on the bookshelves upstairs is a very well-loved copy of 'Small Dreams of a Scorpion', simple serious verse, some of it deeply affecting. When I wrote to him I said that in a just world, someone of his talent would simply be provided with the means to create. How someone as radical as he got access to the media in the 1950s is one of art history's miracles. Saturday 23 February 2002 I'm stuck in Stansted airport with a three hour delay to my flight home after an afternoon concert with Katherine McGillivray in Harlow ("Harlow - gateway to, um, Essex"). I just checked my email to pass the time, and there was a message from Chris Norman asking about a date in Vancouver in October. Fine, as long as it doesn't involve hanging around noisy airports, but I suppose you can't predict these things. Katherine had to dash for a flight to Amsterdam to get to a rehearsal tomorrow morning, so we had a car waiting for us at the end of the concert. I got changed out of my concert gear and packed my bag in the back of the speeding car (and without even taking my seatbelt off - I wonder what passing motorists made of this). Katherine caught her flight with minutes to spare, but mine to Glasgow is 3 hours late. Now, when you've just come off stage, a bit tired, and not wound down yet, a noisy airport is not a nice place to be. Every single eating place, and every shop is playing awful muzak very efficiently - I even asked the waiter at Garfunkel's (which seemed the least noisy) to find me a relatively quiet seat away from a speaker, but he looked at me as though I was completely mad, so I left. I didn't want to be bombarded with pseudo-plastic funk that's had all the bass rolled off, I just wanted somewhere to sit down and a pizza. The only time I've ever flown first class, the most worthwhile part of the whole experience was the passenger lounge - it was Virgin at Heathrow, which has a music room and a library and is a haven of rest. Out in steerage class, being bombarded by endless varieties of ambient noise when your blood sugar is low, your adrenaline is high, and you've just been told you're not going to get to go home for another three hours, is not much fun. Still, I eventually found a quietish corner of concourse, got a tea and some carry-out sushi and now I feel a bit human again. On the flight south yesterday I was reading a book by a person with Asperger's Syndrome, about the experiences of sensory bombardment and the anxiety that results: sometimes when I'm tired and hungry I can imagine something of what it must be like. But then I can have a cup of tea and a sit down, and feel better. The concert had its moments, but we never got to rehearse in the hall, except for five minutes as the audience came in. I've learned not to waste time and energy getting angry in these situations, but the truth is you're not going to give of your best without adequate preparation - winging it is all very well and quite fun in itself, but the chances are something will not go as well as it could. In today's case, the last movement of the Hindemith was a trifle, well, approximate to say the least. If we'd had a chance to work on the balance beforehand so that it wasn't at the forefront of our minds, we might have played all the right notes in the right order. One of the things about being a keyboard player who sometimes takes an 'accompanist' role is that you get used to the practice of quick adjustment. If your star soloist has a memory lapse, and skips a beat or a bar, you can jump almost instantaneously with them, and few people in the audience will notice. I was listening to a radio broadcast not long ago in which I'd done just this in some Haydn, and I didn't even notice! In a duo with as sensitive a musician as Katherine McG, what can happen (and did several times in the concluding section of the Hindemith) is that if one of you slips, you both adjust simultaneously to the error and thus perpetuate it. At one point - it was all rushing past so quickly that I'm not sure where - I think I skipped half a bar, and had just figured out how to put it back in, when Katherine skipped a corresponding half bar for me. So we ended up staying out of sync for even longer. This happened at least another twice in the closing two pages of the piece, and the honest thing to do would have been to stop, laugh, and say 'OK, this time we'll get it right'. But we had planes to catch ... Earlier this week I had a very nice time (wearing my BBC hat) with the Ensemble Ambrosius. To hear baroque instruments playing a range of music from jazz and Frank Zappa to abstract sound sculpture was very refreshing. Multi-instrumentalist Jonte Knif told me about the electric clavichord he's just had built: it has a very small compass, but you can play guitar solos on it, complete with feedback. There's something wonderfully perverse about combining the technology of the 15th century with that of the 1970s, but I think it shows that Finns have a healthy attitude towards cultural history. After the gig Robert McFall joined us in the bar, and he and Olli Virtaperko swapped stories of their very different experiences of dealing with Gail Zappa: nothing I can repeat here, but very entertaining. I've still got two hours to kill in this soulless airport - what I'd like is a nice warm bath ... Saturday 16 February 2002 It's been a week mostly of writing to people and filling in forms: the forms were our annual application to the Scottish Arts Council for the money that pays Marie and subsidises our fee to promoters, and the other letters were to various possible collaborators in the year ahead: musical institutions, record companies, and some talented individuals on our doorstep. I hate making initial approaches to people, and always start looking for anything to do that will put off the sitting down and writing of the letter/email/fax. I revisited my musical roots by playing the piano along with some old records, and even dusted the piano and hoovered under the gas fire in my study on Tuesday. Once I've got into 'action' mode I find it impossible to sit still and think - it's unfortunate that I can't write and walk at the same time, as I've always found it easier to develop ideas walking rather than sitting down. But eventually I got it all done (finished at 10.30 this morning), and I've had a few responses already, some of them very favourable. On Tuesday Marie came over and we worked on concert programmes and budgets for a few hours, with a break during which I cooked lunch, to her enormous surprise - Marie's a very fine cook, and I was a bit embarrassed to be seen for the klutz that I am in the kitchen. I may have overdone the chili in the fried rice as well. Katherine came for a day's rehearsal of viola d'amore hits on Thursday: step forward Herr Hindemith and M. Mélandre and take a bow for writing for this strange instrument with some skill. We're playing at the Harlow Viola Festival next weekend - well, where else would you hear a viola d'amore recital? And today is my birthday, with a splendid crop of presents from my family including an original Magical Mystery Tour booklet with the two mono 45s in it. I've always loved that little post-Sgt Pepper psychedelic splurge that the Beatles had before it all started to fall apart. And when I was small, we had a copy of the booklet lying around in the house - the records were long gone of course - so I knew all the words to I am the Walrus about 10 years before I ever heard it. I got some great Angela Anaconda fridge magnets as well. So now I'm half way through my allotted three score years and ten, and what have I learnt? That life is generally arbitrary and stupid, and in need of a policy of continuous improvement. Not much else. Friday 8 February 2002 I've been rushed off my feet this week playing in the SCO with Thomas Zehetmair, who is much cheerier than last time, and his conducting's more fluid too. It's been a while since I played in an orchestra, so I've had to re-adjust to the disciplines, like having a pencil, not swearing when you play a wrong note, and ... arriving on time. I miscalculated the drive to Inverness and missed the first 10 minutes of rehearsal on Wednesday, egg on face, head hung in shame. And I only made it to last night's gig in St Andrews with about 3 minutes in hand. Today I got the train to Ayr, with an hour to spare, and Zehetmair and half the orchestra were late, driving from Edinburgh! My other miscalculation was that the main difference between driving and taking the train is that when you're driving to gigs on your own, you can't really do much (write diary entries, answer email, think, plan ahead, file your nails, catch up on gossip) except listen to music. So I've listened to some great CDs, but there is a mountain of work waiting for me at home. At lunch yesterday with John Butt, he mentioned a plan hatched by himself and John Wallace (now principal of the RSAMD) to form a baroque orchestra in Scotland. 'OK, count me in' I said. Watch this space for further details in due course. And on Tuesday (on the train of course) I sketched out a transcription of 'Sofa', so before long I may get to be George Duke after all. As we walked on stage tonight, I asked Robert McFall "If I write an arrangement with two keyboard parts, can I come in and play it?" and he seemed keen, so Dukedom beckons. Monday 4 February 2002 My diary entries have been a bit sporadic recently: I'm not sure why, but it's useful to blame it on the foul weather and sense of dark foreboding and inertia that habitually descends upon the West of Scotland at this time of year. I'm still planning ahead to the later part of 2002, exploring possibilities for recording projects with various interested parties, and today I saw Tom Laurie about next season's concerts at St Andrew's in the Square. On Friday I gave a shamefully incomprehensible lecture at the RSAMD, as my brain was operating on vastly reduced power after a tiring trip to Newcastle. But I did get to stand on the Millennium Bridge across the Tyne while I was there, and it is a thing of great beauty. Mhairi and Adrian have got me a couple of gigs coming up (it's nice to work for them as well as having them work for me), one in Belfast for the BBC and one in the Perth Festival in which I have to play BBP: big black piano. This is becoming a habit. In March I've got a Brandenburg 5 to practise for as well, which definitely isn't on a BBP. And it looks like I may be reprising my harmonium turn in one of Schoenberg's Mahler arrangements on tour with the SCO in the USA in August. Oh yes, and I'm going to play the organ at our local parish church on Sunday morning - I haven't sat at an organ console for at least two years, so this could be an adventure. Can't wait. I heard some music that caught my attention on the radio tonight,and what's more, it's from a record company in Ayrshire, Mouthmoth. It was 'Caric Kills' by Frog Pocket, and it sounded like John Martyn playing dreamy electric guitar with frantic cut up beats underneath. Nice (as John Thomson used to say). But my attention's really been grabbed over the last few days by that rare thing, a Frank Zappa album with hardly any crap on it: One Size Fits All. George Duke and Ruth Underwood both play their socks off, and the tune for 'Sofa' really is a piece of genius, despite being allied to some stupendously stupid lyrics. The Ensemble Ambrosius's baroque version shows that it has some real emotional depth, and with Zappa this is very rare. I've been whistling it for days - I can't remember when I was last so keen to get to the piano and work something out so that I can play it for myself: I want to be George Duke! Now! © 2002 David
McGuinness |
concerto caledonia