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David
McGuinness's diary Friday 30 September 2005 Damp windy weather has set in here, but the Lion CD is progressing apace: the vocal tracks are now mixed and sounding great. I suspect that this will have a knock-on effect on the running order: once you can hear more closely how things will actually sound, the ideal sequence starts to change. Today I have to do some long overdue practice for Sunday's concert, but first I'm going to catch up on at least a week's worth of email and bits and piece of company admin, some fixing, some availability to collate, and some fees to agree or haggle over. The Early Music Show seem to want to broadcast our programme from an acoustically dead basement radio studio, which isn't exactly the ideal sonic environment: so, will the useful time spent together in rehearsal for the show mitigate the depressing experience of sounding less than perfect on the radio for an hour? Hmm. Don't know really. Probably. But playing old instruments in a purposefully dead space does rather cancel out the point of playing them in the first place. There was an overwhelmingly positive review of the Geminiani disc in the Herald on Saturday - not available online unless you want to pay though. You'll just have to take my word for it. Tuesday 27 September 2005 Just back from London rehearsing with Alison for Sunday's concert. On reflection it is a bit strange to travel 450 miles just for a morning rehearsal, but it was very worthwhile. Far better to rehearse a few days before a concert and digest the outcome, rather than do it all at the last minute and not have time to really learn what you've figured out. Not that our rehearsal technique is particularly 'figured out': we just play until it starts to sound like music, say 'hmm', or 'yeah, that's getting there' and move on. It's quite civilised really. Some new (to me) Bononcini and Vivaldi sonatas were rather good fun. Emerging from St Mary's Walthamstow we bumped in to Simon Jones, who's going to be guest leader in our St John Passion in March. He was rehearsing with the Avison Ensemble in the church this afternoon. Our Burns gig has changed date again - I'll post the final solution when I know what it is! Meanwhile, some possibilities have been opening up in season 06/07, and the vocal tracks for the Lion CD are ready for mixing tomorrow. Did I mention that Dick & Dom are back on telly? Going very well after a shaky start. The Sunday programmes are cut to only one hour, but still retain a measure of amiable slackness. Friday 23 September 2005 Another date change: our Burns gig in Perth is now on Burns night! I bumped into Nic McGegan (check out his new site) at the counter in Heart Buchanan at lunchtime today, on his way to Norway. Proof that the best people go to where the good food is. Heart Buchanan, not Norway. Thursday 22 September 2005 Still ill, but getting things done today. The date of our John Passion performance has changed, so there's a lot of chasing of people to be done to check whether they're still free to do it. On Tuesday I was in Ardnamurchan with John Purser to record Bonnie Rideout playing some stunning fiddle pibroch. Driving back south through Glencoe, across Rannoch Moor and down Loch Lomond on a sunny evening is always spectacular. I made it home just in time to hear Alison playing a CPE Bach concerto live from Brussels on Klara. But 5 minutes ago I became the custodian of an old Casio MT-45. So Bach can wait, while I relive teenage drum machine memories. Sunday 18 September 2005 It's my turn to be ill now: that was inevitable really. So I hide on the sofa under a duvet and read about Bach's slurs between snoozes. Occasionally I get as far as the computer and reply to emails. But before the lergy struck, editing was proceeding apace, my intonation (and everyone else's) being electronically tweaked, and mp3s winging across to Canada for comments from DG. The first two tracks I sent made him laugh and scared respectively, both of which are good, he says. I think the running order works OK - it's an eclectic record, but it seems to hold together purely by virtue of the fact that the four of us are playing it all (apart from our guests and the odd sample). And our first whiff of record company interest has wafted past. Thursday 15 September 2005 Nursing a sick daughter again. But lots to do here, catching up on ConCal correspondence. I also have a pile of Bach scores to get re-acquainted with, and John Butt's book on Bach articulation marks which I meant to read 15 years ago and didn't. Given that I can get excited by reading the articulation marks in a Bach score and hearing the possibilities in my head, it's high time I read it now. I also have Alfred Dürr's book on Bach's cantatas beside me - OUP have just published it in translation, but it's prohibitively expensive so I'm ploughing through the original German (but not all of it: my German is very rusty, and was never that well-oiled to be begin with). Must do some practice too. Editing the Lion CD has resumed - last night I got halfway through Tobias Hume's Lamentation, as played by Alison on viol and me on melodica, recorded a year and a week ago on a sunny day at Nenthorn and until yesterday still only in a very rough first edit in three parts. After much in-car listening I've decided to stick them all back together into one. Last weekend I took my son to see 'Arthur - the story of a king' at the Theatre Royal. The theatre was half-full, and before the show began I was feeling for the actors: an 11am start on a Saturday to a less-than-full audience mostly of kids can be a bit of a grim prospect. But then it started, and it was one of the most brilliant, multi-layered, virtuosic, intelligent, fun pieces of theatre I have ever seen. A bit long perhaps but riveting from start to finish. Touring now - if they're in your town, go along, and take someone else's kids (or your own) ... Final tweaks are due to my research proposal today. Adrian Scahill sent me his 2004 PhD thesis on accompaniment in Irish traditional music, which was fascinating, and much valuable feedback and advice has been coming in from people who know more than I of what is academically appropriate. Since making friends with the Cristofori piano in New York, I've now become rather addicted to the sound of the Cristofori copy by Denzil Wraight - you can hear it here. I think I would like one of these instruments very much ... . My other recent listening: Fred Frith's Prints CD, podcasts of From Our Own Correspondent (addictive), and Liz Doherty, as recommended by the piper Iain Macinnes. But outside my window here now, there's an increasing flow of sombrely dressed people, and the occasional large black car, on their way to the funeral of a neighbour who died suddenly and unexpectedly at the weekend. The air seems very still all of a sudden. Thursday 8 September 2005 Bad Science. A good read though. And the homeopath joke here just seemed timely after the sign I saw at the weekend. I spent most of today tidying up around my desk and nursing a sick child. Unfortunately I now have a sore throat too ... Wednesday 7 September 2005 Another visit to Edinburgh University this morning, with a 100% cocoa hot chocolate with chilli from Plaisir du Chocolat on the way. On reflection, it seems a bit pointless for me to go through the whole process of giving up coffee (years ago) and my tea habit (very recently) only to hit my system with a very powerful chocolate hit, but the prohibitive price will ensure it doesn't become a habit. Sitting outside a café on the lower reaches of the Royal Mile is also incredibly noisy, what with the endless tour buses working their way up the hill. I've pretty much given up on alcohol now too, purely because it stopped me from getting things done. Either this is plain common sense or I'm just too busy. But the new Tovey Professor of Music at Edinburgh is none other than Simon Frith, which is very good news I think. That he's Fred's brother and he once told me he listens to my radio programmes is neither here nor there ... honest. I spoke to Katherine (via Skype) from a very different educational establishment in Sweden last night: it sounds like nyckelharpa and Swedish folk dancing are going well. Alison, meanwhile, was chatting to Juan Martin in the visa queue at the US Embassy this morning. I'm assuming their conversation was more civilised than this one. You can see and hear Eligio (who plays exquisitely on our Gemininani CD) this Saturday night playing at the Last Night of the Proms with Andreas Scholl. I wonder if they'll wear matching glasses. And an email from Suzie LeBlanc today about a Canadian tour in October 2006 ... and new repertoire for the Jolly Boys. Great! My screensaver is a slideshow of a selection of favourite photos: nothing unusual there. But it's always very arresting to see happy images of 2003's trip to New Orleans with Chris and co. The contrast with more recent pictures from the same place is difficult to comprehend. Saturday 3 September 2005 Proposed research is
still taking up lots of my energy: I had lunch with our
chairman Noel O'Regan in his garden in Edinburgh today; this
after a chance meeting in the street with Peter Nelson,
the head of the Music Department at Edinburgh University this morning, and a picnic lunch with John Butt (who's going to guest with us on December 3
playing the organ obbligato in Bach's cantata 170) on Thursday in Glasgow's
Botanic Gardens. I was at the RSAMD on Wednesday. The proposal is gradually
coming along. I saw this sign on the way to the station this morning. Expected to find an enormous puddle underneath, for you to leave a scientifically impossible impression of your vehicle in. I've been listening to Alan Emslie's new album while typing away in an academic fashion, and have since had to put up with his email ridicule at my being a fan of Steve Morse. Alan was playing even less notes than I was in the Webern last week. Monday 29 August 2005 A free afternoon in Edinburgh. To Drumsheugh Baths, where I had the sauna suite to myself, and the refurbished pool almost to myself. Stayed far longer than intended. Then, via Harvey Nichols food hall for Amedei chocolate (the 66% in the green packet), to Plaisir du Chocolat on the Royal Mile, where I'm now sitting outside on the terrace typing up my research proposal with a cup of 73% Tanzania and a glass of water. I'll peruse the tea menu in a few minutes. I don't get time off to myself very often, but this is a great way to spend it. Thursday 25 August 2005 I'm sitting in the
Edinburgh Playhouse watching Scottish Ballet's tech rehearsal of a Balanchine show to music by Stravinsky and Webern. Which is quite a nice place to be sat on a Thursday afternoon. I'm only playing harmonium for about 5 minutes of the Webern, so the rest of the time, rather than sitting in the very claustrophobic and airless band room directly under the stage, I'm watching the show. It looks great. Wish I could get so enthusiastic about Stravinsky's music. I have the Debain harmonium (c.1868) from Cambridge Reed Organs to play, which is in near perfect playing condition. Given that the Webern part is so sparse, I'm playing nearly all of it on the expression stop, so that the reeds are fed directly from the bellows controlled by my feet. It's great for making accordion-like swells and sudden accents. One of the few places where I don't use it is for some very high repeated notes, which sound like the alarm of a distant lorry reversing. Or a persistent mobile phone. It's been bothering me recently that my work rate is slowing, so I've been reading a lot, and waiting for something to arise out of the mental mulch. Sure enough, on Tuesday night a research proposal started to formulate, and now I'm occupying myself on train journeys by wading through 150 pages of guidance notes on research funding applications. Next week I start meeting with staff of academic institutions to help me decide what to do next. [later] Saturday 20 August 2005 Not many diary entries here for a while: some news to report though. Those nice people at Radio 3 will be recording our first Perth concert for transmission in its Bach week just before Christmas, and next year's concert diary is coming together, including a possible orchestral Kellie bash in October. Back in this year, Alison and I are playing a duo recital of Geminiani, probably with some other Scots and Italian music on 2 October in St Cecilia's Hall, Edinburgh. As I type this, Alison and Katherine are both in Oslo en route to Sweden where K will be living and mastering the nyckelharpa for the next year or so. Back here in Glasgow, the sun is shining, a last gasp of summer before the fresher air of autumn. And I still haven't finished editing the Lion CD. The Edinburgh Festival is in full swing. What I like most about festivals isn't going to the performances, it's the high concentration of musical people in one place, so that if I just sit or stand around in the street, I inevitably get accosted by someone I haven't seen for a while, and ideas are exchanged. It's much more civilised than waiting for the phone to ring. Friday 5 August 2005 On holiday. For holiday I reading I brought Philip Tagg's hugely entertaining Ten Little Title Tunes (as recommended by Fred Frith) which argues from the UN Declaration of Human Rights the need for a semiotic musicology of the mass media, and then goes on to develop one with the necessary combination of academic rigour and fun, as you'd expect from someone who wrote his PhD thesis in 1979 on the theme from Kojak. It touches on countless subjects, mostly with great skill, but it's a book in sore need of an editor. Easier going (despite its very serious subject matter) is the Freemuse collection 'Music Censorship Today', and I've also brought several good books about Bach and baroque music, none of which I've opened yet. I've been enjoying the new album by The Shortwave Set - they get extra points for a great title 'The Debt Collection' - which features the best bit of ukelele sampling you will hear for some time. Wednesday 27 July 2005 Various strands of thought came together this morning in a simple idea. Why don't musicians have coaches? If you're in an Olympic team, you have a coach giving you advice and training on how to maintain yourself at peak condition for your performance. There's an academic discipline called Sports Science. Why not Performing Arts Science? Is it the horror of seeing those last two words together? There is Performing Arts Medicine but that tends to deal with crises rather than performance management. So musicians tend to rely on experimentation with drugs (caffeine and alcohol for starters), vapid concepts (see my discussion of 'excitement' below), or new age nonsense. They're not as superstitious as actors, but I do sense a training gap to be filled, both for students and seasoned professionals. Tuesday 26 July 2005 I got up early this morning to edit the vocal tracks further, and was in the edit suite by 7.30am, taking many liberties with Lisa and Mary Ann's intonation. The thing about this kind of work is that when you're done, you don't get the satisfaction of having made something good, all you've done is made it easier to listen to, removing as many distractions as possible. The less of your work you hear, the better you've done it. Before the morning was out I'd paid a visit to the city planning office for an explanation of the building site that we're now living next door to, and en route I listened to some of John Eliot Gardiner's Schumann recordings with the ORR. Well, it's an Orchestre, but I don't think it's either Revolutionnaire or Romantique. The wind sound great and the horns are fantastic (three cheers for Roger, Sue and the rest) but for all the supposed historical accuracy, the strings just sound like any other London session orchestra: actually many of the players are from the Philharmonia and played with me on Vanity Fair. They get better as they go on, but the most distracting thing about the performances is the lack of space in the phrases. The tempi are fine, but it tends to be driven so much that downbeats come early all over the place and the tunes can't breathe. It's too excited. Robert Fripp made a remark in his diary recently that he didn't think musicians should get excited when performing. When I read it I thought 'what a strange thing to say' but I think he's absolutely right. The best musicians can generate excitement in an audience (and other musicians) without actually getting excited themselves - they're too busy making music happen. And experiencing that is much more entertaining and involving than watching someone get excited. Before lunch I still had time to choose a harmonium to play in the Webern 5 Pieces from Cambridge Reed Organs. Then it was time to prepare the paperwork for tonight's board meeting and AGM, a splendid occasion which I'm too tired to write up properly here, as I've still got to do it as the basis for the minutes. But I hope no-one will mind if I say here that Fiddler Tam has outsold every other CD in a certain Edinburgh record shop since January. Cause for celebration. OK I admit it. I only just got around to buying the Keane album last week. And I really like it. Big tunes, oblique Abba ripoffs, redundant technology (Yamaha electric grand piano) and great singing. Can I go now? Friday 22 July 2005 Yesterday turned into a bit of an adventure. I got up at 5am to fly to London, a flight which was admirably hassle-free. Clearly enough people haven't yet realised that flyglobespan.com now fly Glasgow to Stansted, so there was no check-in queue at all (or on the way back - a miracle), the plane was half-empty, the staff were friendly and the seats were very cheap. Hooray. I met Alison in Walthamstow and just as we were about to rehearse, Katherine rang to tell us that news was breaking of explosions on the tube. So we kept a radio handy for updates and got to work, not quite sure whether we were going to get to play at the end of it. Eventually we set off early, and got
to Broadcasting House without much trouble. Sean was great fun as ever: if you
stop to think about it, playing difficult music in an acoustically dead radio
studio live on air without warming up, and being interviewed as well, is
potentially stressful, but it was great fun and I had the presence of mind to
plug our forthcoming Lion CD and say 'arse' three times, which I haven't Afterwards, a walk across Millennium Bridge in the evening sun to Bankside for Matt Wadsworth's birthday party, with a backdrop of the sunset behind St Paul's. Katherine beat the bomb alert at St Albans to make it in, and Gary Cooper and I reconstituted our mutual appreciation society and promised to play fortepiano duets in summer 2007 (we've been offered a gig already). Then a very fast journey back to E17, as the roads were deserted and our bus driver was clearly enjoying the chance to throw a very large bus around central London at speed. Alison is just underneath St Paul's, with her cello on her back Wednesday 20 July 2005 Playing Bach in the 21st century: 1. I had an interesting conversation the other day with a colleague who was engaged to play on two different recordings of the newly-discovered Bach aria. She was made to sign a secrecy contract by one group, and then the (knighted, if you need a clue) conductor of the other rang her up the day after the first recording to ascertain certain details of it. All very cloak-and-dagger. Grow up, people! Playing Bach in the 21st century: 2. Katherine and I have been inviting people to play in our performance of Bach's John Passion next March. It will be an unconducted performance directed by Mark Padmore, a bit like his forthcoming project with the OAE. I got a response from one violinist today, saying that she would be delighted to play, but stipulating which seats in the band she would be prepared to sit in. Now seating violinists in an orchestra, even a small one, is a tricky business. On one level it's hierarchical in that the best players tend to sit at the front, and as a result there are self-esteem issues at stake. But there's a lot more to it than that. You have to take into account the personalities, who would work well sitting next to whom, and what kind of sound each player makes. It's a delicate business. And in any case we may not sit in a conventional orchestral formation at all. So when someone reduces it to 'I'm only prepared to sit there or there' the only honest response is tell them to get lost: a zero tolerance policy has to be enforced here. Either you want to be in the room and help us all to get closer to Bach or you don't. This is not a group for people with an orchestral mindset. Tuesday 19 July 2005 On Thursday, Alison and I will be playing Geminiani live on Radio 3's In Tune, around 7pm I think. Meanwhile, I'm just about getting used to the sound of Lisa's impassioned shout of 'Get yer hand oot o ma troosers' in Boredom. Everyone I've played the rough mix to so far has loved it. The CD running order's gradually taking shape too. Sunday 17 July 2005 Work is now under way in earnest on the vocal tracks for SADN II. I've just about done rough edits of everything, so now I can listen to it all in different environments and decide what I want to live with and what might get cut. It's great having the vocal tracks isolated for the first time on a ConCal CD (not something you normally do on a classical recording) as it means I can play with the timing and intonation of individual notes without worrying about what will go wrong with the instruments underneath. Unfortunately this is leading me towards a certain kind of anal perfectionism which makes the editing process take several times as long as it otherwise would. There was a very nice review of the Geminiani CD in today's Sunday Herald: I'm 'subtle and absorbing' apparently. But I'm having a tough time keeping up with my daughter in the press stakes. On Friday night we stayed up till 1am waiting for her to come home from her evening out with a boy who lives up the road. And then the following day her picture was in The Sun! (For readers overseas, it's a sensationalist scandal sheet masquerading as the UK's top selling national newspaper.) Perhaps I should point out that she's 7 years old and was at a Harry Potter launch party. But she avoided contributing further to the wealth of Ms Rowling or Bloomsbury Publishing by getting invited to the Glasgow City Libraries party, where you don't have to buy the book; instead you get to be the first to borrow one of the city's copies! Now isn't it great that libraries still exist? Friday 15 July 2005 I had a fun afternoon at Butterstone yesterday with Lisa Milne and Jamie Maclean, working quickly and getting five songs in the can in very little time indeed. Lisa manages to inhabit so many vocal characters convincingly that listening back to it, it's difficult to imagine that it's all sung by the same singer. And her Aberdonian version of the Buzzcocks song 'Boredom', accompanied by us on baroque instruments and with Chris Norman playing the three-note guitar solo on the flute (recorded in a Montréal kitchen), is undoubtedly unique. Today I edited nearly all of Lisa and Mary Ann's vocal tracks, so recording has now officially stopped on the Lion CD, or SADN II or whatever it's going to be called. Katherine is in town for a few days learning Swedish, so this afternoon she dropped in with luthier Ruth Caldwell (and a half-rebuilt quinton) to hear how it was going. Simultaneously with this, Alison was buying us both iPod accessories in Singapore's Changi airport ... For a while this week it looked as if my Estey reed organ was going to get its first classical gig, in the Webern 5 Pieces op.10 at the Edinburgh Festival for Scottish Ballet. But it doesn't have all the notes to play the high bits, so we're going to have to find something else for me to play it on. Given that the harmonium only plays about 20 notes in the whole piece, they may as well be the correct ones. Wednesday 13 July 2005 First things first. If you're reading this before Saturday, click here and vote for no. 6, thus increasing the chances of Alison's Geminiani CD getting a good chunk of airplay at the weekend. I'm in the middle of the week, between two drives to remote recording studios in the Highlands. By lunchtime yesterday I was on the Corran ferry across to Ardnamurchan to spend the afternoon at Watercolour Music with newly-weds Nick and Mary Ann, recording Mary Ann's contributions to the Lion CD, and playing with their dog. Tomorrow it's the newly-enobled Lisa at Butterstone. She sang me a bit of the Buzzcocks song 'Boredom' down the phone this afternoon in her Aberdeen accent, which bodes well. Sunday 3 July 2005 Which is more polite? 1) Saturday 2 July 2005 I've been playing Nathaniel Gow's fiddle tune Coilsfield House for at least 20 years in various forms, but it's only yesterday that I finally went to Glasgow University Library to look at the original book from around 1809, and to find out how Gow's own bassline goes. And of course it changes the character of the tune completely from my version. So I now have a choice: stick with mine which I like, or be faithful to Gow (or something in the middle). And this is at the heart of the 'early music' experience: you think the music goes a certain way, and then a striking piece of evidence comes along and points out to you that it clearly doesn't. So you have the option of historical awareness or historical ignorance, both of which can have musical value. You can stick with the familiar or easy version, but with a bit of application, you can also look for a way to make the historically informed version as musically meaningful as the freer but ignorant one. © 2005 David
McGuinness |
concerto caledonia
done on
Radio 3 for a few years. You can hear the whole thing on 
or 2) 