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David McGuinness's diary - Jan-Feb 2001 Tuesday 27 February 2001 At last! We have confirmation that The Gentle Shepherd is going ahead - see the 'events' page for dates. I suppose it's a bit naughty posting this now as the Festival hasn't gone to press yet, but I'm so delighted that it's happening that I just don't care. I also arranged with Calum today that we'll mix our Mungrel Stuff CD at the end of March. I still need to record a couple of crazy keyboard pieces for it, on the 1793 Broadwood harpsichord in the Russell Collection (it has all kinds of gadgets and a Venetian swell mechanism), so we'll do those the week before. I figured out the Oswald accounts today as well, but that achievement pales into insignificance compared to actual musical projects now appearing in the diary! Once the kids are in bed I will pour myself a drink and allow myself a brief moment of smugness. Saturday 24 February 2001 My part-time job at the BBC threw up some interesting conversations this week. I was producing two live broadcasts: one was the clarinettist Michael Collins with the BT Scottish Ensemble, and the other was Colin Currie playing the new percussion concerto written for him and the RSNO by Michael Torke. The BTs are mostly comprised of glamorous thin young women, and Michael Collins confessed to feeling like 'a big lump' when he stood in the middle of them to play the Finzi concerto in the first rehearsal. So he went and got his copy of the part, and hid behind a music stand from then on - a star soloist upstaged by the orchestra! This is pretty much impossible to upstage Colin Currie - I went to along to a rehearsal of Michael Torke's piece on Thursday morning with our sound engineer, to suss the piece out. Michael T was worried about the balance, as the wind really weren't cutting through the texture. 'It sounded fine on my MIDI setup at home,' he said. I'm still not sure if this was a joke. The idea of a celebrated composer working out his orchestration just so that it sounded OK on his computer seemed a bit sacrilegious. Maybe it isn't really. In amongst these, I fitted in a long visit to my accountant, during which I discovered I don't have accurate accounts for our Oswald CD (oops - another job for next week), and I'm starting to read through The Gentle Shepherd again, imagining our semi-staged version and making notes as I go. I'm trying not to get too excited about this until I have something 100% definite in writing saying that it really is happening, but I have a hunch that it will be a lot of fun. Jamie (who's going to play Patie) was on TV here in Scotland on Wednesday, to publicise the fact that he will be singing Harry Lauder songs at the Scottish Last Night of the Proms. He's such a shameless showman that I have a suspicion he will pull this off in some style. My computer is behaving strangely - I opened it up tonight and discovered the CPU fan wasn't turning, so all technology-based endeavours will have to stop for a bit this week while I get it fixed. Tuesday 20 February 2001 Today and yesterday became unexpectedly free after the record company (no names) backed out of the Prefab Sprout project I was going to start on this week. So while that's on hold, I can get going with The Gentle Shepherd, gathering all the original musical material I can get my hands on. Rob Mackillop's going to send me a copy of the Robert Bremner guitar versions, and I spent this morning in Glasgow University library looking at some of their original editions. The most spectacular was one copy of the Glasgow quarto edition with the beautiful aquatints by David Allan, which had bound in with it Allan's original pencil sketches of various 18th century shepherding types on the outskirts of Edinburgh. A brief internet search when I got home turned up a few affordable copies in antiquarian bookshops around the globe, so hopefully in the next few weeks I'll have my own copy of the 1808 quarto, which also includes Allan's illustrations. I sometimes think the internet was invented expressly for the convenience of record and book collectors. I had a word with Calum Malcolm yesterday about mixing our next CD - it's all been on MO disks on a shelf in the corner of his home studio for the last year. If we're aiming for a summer release, we'll have to get it mixed to stereo soon - he's working for The Blue Nile just now, but presumably he now has a gap in his diary where Prefab Sprout was going to be. This week's other task is dredging up two years' worth of old Concerto Caledonia accounts, so that we can finally agree this year's with the Inland Revenue. Riveting huh? Thursday
15 February 2001 It’s time for planning ahead once
more: our annual application to the Scottish Arts Council goes in next week, so
we have to think more systematically than usual about our plans for the coming
year, which is no bad thing.
Looking back at the year just past, it was a stinker.
No fewer than four major projects fell through, and we haven’t actually
played a gig since September. I’ve
no objection in principle to us having periods when we don’t play, but we had
expected to have a busy season, and if we don’t play I don’t get paid … Anyhow, this coming season (fingers
crossed) looks promising, especially if the St Andrews in the Square concerts
come off, as it really is our perfect venue.
If we can get a fair amount of press for the Gentle Shepherd and the CD
launch, then the musical world at large might remember we exist.
I’ll just breathe easier when there are less ‘ifs’ and more ‘whens’. Matthew Gelbart dropped in to see me
at home yesterday – he’s doing his PhD at the University of California at
Berkeley on traditional and classical music in 18th
century Scotland. Eventually we
got around to swapping ideas, favourite pieces, useful contacts, but not until
we’d plumbed the depths of my record collection for dodgy English early
music/folkie crossover records from the 60s and 70s.
Yes, that is the same ‘Chris Hogwood’ credited with playing
percussion on a Young Tradition LP in 1968! The weekend was improved by
listening to a great CD by some young Finnish players, who’ve made
arrangements of Frank Zappa tunes for baroque instruments.
Sounds like a ludicrous idea, but they really pull it off, and what
sounded a bit sterile in the original versions (Zappa was never one for emotion)
really breathes when put on the old instruments.
The leader Olli emailed me today in response to my BBC approach about the
possibility of a gig. They don’t
play old music at all, so my bright idea of a concert of music by Frank and his
18th century Milanese cellist namesake Francesco will probably have
to go back in the file. Meanwhile, I’m working on the cast for the Gentle Shepherd (Mhairi rang tonight - now at least 90% certain she can be free), I'm trying to track down scores for Johann Stamitz symphonies, and I'm preparing the parts for the Rome concert. At least I got to play some music last week … Wednesday 7 February 2001 Good news - the Edinburgh Festival want us to do The Gentle Shepherd this summer. Bad news (for me anyway) - they need a budget and all the copy for the festival brochure right away. So I have to agree on how to do it with the director, book the key members of the cast (this requires subtle negotiations in the case of singers' diaries, which are always full of pencil bookings which have to be cleared), and I have to work out how long it will take to rehearse. Right now. And then I have to do the sums and make it affordable. But once the panic's over and I've got time to think about it, it will be great fun doing the show. I just hope I can make the numbers add up in the meantime. I'm typing this in an SCO rehearsal of Handel's Theodora, with Robin Blaze singing away at the other side of the Queen's Hall. He says he's a bit knackered today, as the fire alarm went off in the middle of the night where he was staying, but you'd never guess. He sounds fantastic - technically spot on, and with a simple and unfussy communication of what the songs are about. The whole cast is extremely good (Robin's duet with Claron McFadden is particularly memorable) so despite the fact that the rehearsal is a bit of a scramble, and personally I haven't got much to do, which is why I'm typing this rather than playing, it's kind of cheering to be here. In the tea break there was a McFalls meeting in the café, which I got to sit in on as their producer (I wonder if I count as an honorary member, given that I'm playing on the record). They/We discussed whether the classical pieces should stay on the album, and whether the group should officially shorten its name from the unwieldy 'Mr McFall's Chamber'. I was over at Calum Malcolm's place for a couple of days last week for him to mix the tracks we recorded at Castlesound - I think it's going to be good. To be honest, given where we recorded it and who mixed it, if it didn't sound fantastic, I'd want to know why. Yesterday I was in a more basic recording studio just up the road, recording my version of a soap opera theme for a Glasgow City Council video, complete with cheeky textural quotes from EastEnders. Greg Lawson came along in the afternoon and recorded 16 violin parts in an hour and half, to make a one-man chamber orchestra. Shamelessly indulgent but good fun. At one point I was shocked to see him whip out from his bag a packet of oatcakes and an apple. For a year or two, oatcakes apples and water have pretty much formed my staple diet when I'm travelling around, and I thought it was a personal foible of mine. If it continues to catch on, I'll have to publish it before someone else does, so look out for 'The McGuinness Diet Book' at a remaindered bookshop near you. Eat yourself to musical nutrition with Stockan's Oatcakes, a Pink Lady and a bottle of Volvic. Tomorrow morning I hope to sort out the music for our forthcoming ConCal Rome trip, and draw up a final version of the plans for our proposed concert series at St Andrews in the Square. Our annual application for funding to the Scotish Arts Council is due in a couple of weeks, and this will form a hefty chunk of it, all being well. Last Friday I gave a lecture at the RSAMD, which was supposed to be on the subject of planning a concert or recording of early music, but mutated as it usually does into an illustrated ramble on the nature of the music business from my standpoint. Still, the students were great, asked intelligent questions, and gave interesting answers. My favourite was when I asked about a group's sources of income: 'If you're going to pay the players, where's the money going to come from?' From the back of the lecture theatre came a swift reply: 'The bank'. I think she meant looking for sponsorship, but it got a huge laugh nonetheless. At the end, a soon-to-be-graduate came and offered to work for us for nothing in the summer: 'I'll do anything'. Quite disarming really - the concept of work experience isn't that unusual, but the first time someone you've never met comes up and offers their services to you for free, is rather flattering. Friday 26 January 2001 This week's gone past in a bit of a blur. My daughter Susie was ill at the beginning of the week, so I ended up working at night instead of during the day, and since then I've been fitting in lots of little jobs and phone calls in amongst playing in the SCO. I have a grand total of 24 bars to play in Arvo Pärt's Concerto Piccolo on BACH, which isn't exactly taxing, but it's meant a lot of sitting on trains, and a lot of hanging around backstage, which I've been putting to good use. Didn't Charlie Watts say that his first 25 years with the Rolling Stones were 5 years of playing and 20 of hanging around? Had
a very interesting meeting today with Tom Laurie about the possibility of us
having some regular concerts in Glasgow again, at St Andrews in the Square where
we made our first record. We haven't played much in Glasgow since 1999,
and it would be great to build up our home audience. St Andrews is pretty
much the only venue in the city suited to what we do in terms of acoustic, size,
period and attitude (vital, this last one) so I hope it comes off. I remember playing prepared piano in Pärt's Tabula Rasa a few years ago, and the part was full of comments and annotations from a previous player along the lines of 'what the composer actually preferred at this point was ...' and the date. It was great fun going into a variety of concert halls and proceeding to wreck their best pianos by stuffing bolts between the strings, although I remember also spending quite a lot of time in ironmongers' shops that week trying to get just the right size of bolt. Incidentally, the Harp Consort gig from my previous diary entry is broadcast on Wednesday 31st, 1300 GMT at www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 and Hille Perl's own site is www.hillenet.net - complete with pictures of her Italian viol, and herself of course. I'd give you a link for the Harp Consort, but they specifically said to me 'Don't go there, we're having it reworked!' Just before going to bed on Tuesday I sat down at the piano and wrote a spoof soap theme, which I've been asked to provide for a Glasgow City Council video. It can't have taken me much more than a couple of minutes to write it. The irony is it'll take at least a whole day in the studio to record the thing. Friday 19 January 2001 I had some interesting conversations today. I was working for the BBC, producing a lunchtime concert broadcast of Andrew Lawrence-King's group The Harp Consort. They're a terrific group, and Steve Player, their dancing guitarist, is playing on our forthcoming record (download an mp3 of Corn Riggs from the recordings page). Hille Perl was playing a gamba which looked much like a cello - it has f-holes and only the sloping shoulders, the frets and the abundance of strings give its identity away. I asked Hille about it and she immediately went into a wonderful rant about the 'wimpy crap' that passes for a viol sound from most players these days. Her instrument's design was the standard in Italy well into the 18th century, and it makes a big noise. Phamie Gow showed up for a masterclass with Andrew which was fascinating. She was playing her own stuff on the clarsach, and Andrew was talking about the necessity of showmanship in new music (or old music that's new to the audience). Listeners aren't going to get the particular pleasure of anticipating their favourite bits of a well-known piece, so to make up for this you have to give them some visual clues as to what's coming, otherwise all they'll get is surprise after surprise, which can be a a bit of a one-dimensional experience. Had a chat with Phamie about the trials and tribulations of running a group and getting gigs - she's got a Celtic Connections date tomorrow night. At the end of the classes, I stuck my head back into the room to find the assembled Harp Consort sitting in the back row like a bunch of naughty schoolchildren waiting for Andrew to finish. 'Well kids, what have you learned today?' I asked. Quick as a flash, Hille replied 'If you play the harp, you get a fat ass' (she's 6ft tall and strikingly thin). It's easy to forget with all this going on that most of the students at the RSAMD still spend their time learning Brahms and Beethoven and co. Bob Inglis, the concerts organiser and a lecturer there, said 'we have to teach them all that stuff; we're training them to be orchestral musicians'. My reply was 'how many orchestras are there going to be for them to play in in twenty years' time? Not many.' And I suspect the ones that survive won't all be playing Brahms and Beethoven. It is worrying that a lot of the budding professional musicians of the future are still being taught only one way of playing music - it's not going to make the orchestras very interesting, is it? The classical recording industry has already been reduced to a fraction of what it was ten years ago. Will orchestras be next? If their continued decimation leads to a greater musical diversity and creativity, it'll be a step forward. I'm not knocking standard repertoire, as we need all the great music we can get. But the idea that there's a single mainstream classical tradition that we should all inhabit is now past its prime. Wednesday 17 January 2001 A day off in the middle of the week - amazing. No work in it at all, unless you count a couple of phone conversations, one with Marie about the forthcoming Rome concert, and one with my accountant about the tax position on Concerto Caledonia before its incorporation last year as a company limited by guarantee. I suppose the lesson always learned (or never learned) from these things is that if you're going to have to speak to an accountant, do it sooner rather than later. My harmonium playing came together in the end - I'd have liked to have done it better, but mastering a new instrument takes time. We were playing Schoenberg's chamber arrangement of Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer: it's terrible adolescent poetry (Mahler's own) but great music, and in the last few bars the harmonium has to play first with the clarinet in a low register, and then with the flute much higher up, and it has to blend with them both. For just a moment, I knew what it felt like to sit in the wind section of an orchestra. On the Friday night cellist Kevin McCrae lent me an enormous white bow tie to wear with my tails - for reasons best known to himself, he had just got a tailor to make him some outsize bow ties, and the first time I saw him wearing one, I laughed so much I couldn't stand up. It was wonderfully funny for no good reason, like Spike Milligan making an entrance in tights full of potatoes. I spent yesterday back at Castlesound, recording the last overdubs for the McFalls album: electric violins and viola, keyboards and some percussion. And my long-awaited blues harmonica solo. For someone like me who grew up dreaming of making records, there's something very luxurious about having a day in a studio in the country, with a first-class engineer, a Bösendorfer piano, a Hammond organ, and someone else paying the bill. It was hard work, but fun - you can tell I'm enjoying myself when I start running everywhere, too excited to walk. Robert McFall dropped by at the end of the day to see how it was going, and when we played him the overdubs I'd put onto his arrangement of the Richard Thompson song The Great Valerio, he threw his head back and laughed with delight. This was a great relief, as I'd suspected he was going to find them really tasteless and over the top. He couldn't believe there were just two people (me on piano, Rick Bamford on cymbals) making all that noise - it sounded like half a orchestra. Wednesday
10 January 2001 I’m still recovering from 5 days
spent with Mr McFall’s Chamber, producing their next record. It
had its stressful moments, but a fun time was had on the third day at the
wonderful Castlesound Studio in East Lothian. After
we’d added some overdubs of various silly noise-making toys borrowed from
Brian’s and my kids, the day ended with us turning the studio into a virtual
café. The idea was to add some
extra atmosphere to their version of ‘La Vie en Rose’, as if it needed any
extra atmosphere, what with Su-a playing the musical saw accompanied by
three-part whistling in the final verse. With
the help of some cutlery from the kitchen, and a plastic bucket full of crockery
that Robert bought from a charity shop that morning, we re-created the
inauthentic sound of Paris at 3am, complete with plate smashing, and an ensuing
argument in cod French. When the
record comes out, the person you hear briefly impersonating the Swedish chef
from the Muppet Show, is me. The
‘Queen’s Own Band of the Massed Kazoos’ section on Raymond Scott’s ‘Powerhouse’
was pretty funny too. Yesterday featured a ConCal board
meeting – mostly procedural things, but also keeping the board up to date on
our activities, future plans, and the state of our finances. We’re
planning to rehearse for our Rome programme when we get there, so Marie now has
the unenviable task of finding us a rehearsal space with a harpsichord from
Glasgow. Thursday 4 January 2001 Good news - a lost email from the end of last year resurfaced, confirming a gig in Rome in two months' time. Marie and Paula are both great Romophiles (?) so it'll be fun. We got snowed in over the holiday season which was a great excuse not to do any work. The snowman in the back garden is melting gradually, and is now only a pale shadow of his former self. I spoke to Mhairi Lawson tonight about a gig we have (not as ConCal though a few of the usual suspects will no doubt appear) in Newcastle in April, with the concertina player Alistair Anderson. This will be another chance for me to play the fortepiano in a folky environment, which is always an adventure. The strange thing is that it's usually the folkies who are worried about it beforehand - 'ooh I don't think we could do that' - whereas the classical people, who you'd expect to be more uptight and restrictive, are always the ones to muck in and say 'yeah, let's give it a go'. As ever, once you actually get everyone in the room together and make some music, the distinctions fall away pretty quickly. © 2001 David
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