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David McGuinness's diary - Mar-Apr 2001 Sunday 29 April 2001 Nearly finished on the text of Gentle Shepherd. Meanwhile, a deeply depressing moment at lunch today - I was sitting with the newspaper, when my daughter (3) pointed to a photo on the page I was reading. 'That looks like you.' 'Really?' 'That man looks like you.' 'What, him?' 'Yes.' It was Bill Wyman. Helen's comment: 'Yeah, that's Daddy, a sad old rocker.' I'm sure he's not sad at all. Friday 27 April 2001 Very tired after a busy week, editing the text of the Gentle Shepherd on trains while travelling to SCO rehearsals and concerts. The concerts went very well in the end, although I made a spectacular cock-up tonight in the Rameau. The 'bruit de guerre' movement from Dardanus is really wild, and just as we were about to start, someone in the audience's mobile phone went off. So the 'bruit' was quite spirited in response - I was figuring out ways to hit the keys sideways to make them rattle, playing great handfuls of splashy chords, that sort of thing. And it was just starting to get a little out of control, so I was thinking about how to rein it back in when ... I completely forgot about the crucial unexpected bar's rest half way through the movement. Cue a very spirited but utterly wrong two-note harpsichord solo, completely wrecking the dramatic entry from the bassoons due one beat later. They were sitting behind me so I couldn't even look over apologetically at them until the end, when to my relief they fell about laughing. Well, experiences like this are supposed to build musical maturity - fat chance in my case. It was a joy to listen to Ursula Leveaux play the Vivaldi D minor bassoon concerto three nights running, if rather humbling to know someone who can take something commonplace and make it so uncommonly beautiful - she can say more in two notes than I ever will in a lifetime. And on the bassoon. I had dinner with Robert McFall and Ursula Smith in Cafe Source, which is in the basement of St Andrews in the Square, and we went upstairs to look at the space itself. It really is perfect for what we do: an 18th century building with a fantastic acoustic, a centre for traditional music, and with a great bar and food underneath. I'm meeting Tom Laurie next week to firm up our concert series there, so hopefully soon we will have three more dates in the diary for this year. I'd passed on the Robin Williamson stuff to Robert to see if he'd be interested in working on it, and sure enough, he's very keen (another future St Andrews in the Square project). And I had an interesting conversation with a promoter in London this afternoon, about the increasing possibility of getting the Ensemble Ambrosius over from Finland to play their Frank Zappa arrangements for baroque instruments (yet another). On Monday I'm off to Calum Malcolm's place to listen to him mix the session tapes for the new CD - I haven't listened to most of it for over a year now so it will be a bit of a voyage of discovery. We recorded it all to multitrack as I wanted to mix the record like a pop album rather than a pure, unsullied, minimal microphone technique, classical thing. On reflection it'll probably be somewhere in between. Can't wait. Monday 23 April 2001 Finished twiddling with the website tonight - a job begun and aborted yesterday. Hopefully more people will have this font (Trebuchet MS) than Gill Sans which I was using before. When I first started the site I used Lydian, as in our logo above. It looked great, but hardly anyone has it on their computer so it was a bit pointless if no-one could see it. As a self-taught webmeister, it gives me some satisfaction when people write and say that they like the site - I'm just busking it really. But then it's the self-taught musicians that usually turn out to be the most interesting. I nipped round to Marie's tonight to pick up the complete e-text of the Gentle Shepherd, which she's spent the last week typing, as we decided against using the secretarial service in the end. So my every spare moment for the next week or so will be spent proof-reading and fitting in the songs, before we make Andrew's modest selection of cuts. In one of the editions, I came across an extra epilogue, complete with song, which we may put in at the end. Once we have a text, I can start work in earnest on the score. I was playing Rameau in the SCO this afternoon - Antonini started the rehearsal very reserved and undemonstrative (is anything ever going to happen, I thought). Then as he got warmed up and got used to the orchestra, he became more and more expansive until by the end he was making huge gestures and singing phrases in great detail. He's very pernickety and also very patient, so we're making slow progress but it's worthwhile. Greg and I shared our moans in the break about how frustrating it is to be surrounded mostly by people who play with very little character or personality. That's orchestras for you I suppose - the SCO is a lot better than most in that respect, but even then it can get depressing. I find myself sitting in rehearsals with my ears desperately latching onto the sounds of the few people I enjoy listening to, in amongst the general mush. Sunday 22 April 2001 I spent this morning doing the first edit of the keyboard pieces for the next CD. It's a horrible experience listening to your own solo playing in great detail, as you only hear the things you wish you'd done better. It's only when you play the finished thing back in full, while looking out of the window to half-distract yourself, that you realise it's not so bad after all ... or is it? The Venetian swell on the 1793 Broadwood sounds suitably over the top. I had a day of writing on Friday - I got the programme note for the Gentle Shepherd finished, and made serious inroads into the CD liner notes. I'm not a natural writer, so I spent nearly two hours tidying my desk before I wrote a single word. But then most real writers do that too, maybe I am one after all. I'm playing in the SCO next week - Ursula Leveaux is playing one of the Vivaldi bassoon concerti, with Giovanni Antonini of Il Guardino Armonico conducting. I was slightly taken aback on Wednesday, watching the on-train television on the Paddington Express from Heathrow, when sandwiched between the BBC news and two minutes of an Enya video, appeared Signor Antonini and his cohorts, looking extremely stylish in outdoor monochrome, playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Thursday 12 April 2001 This week's been pretty busy considering I was supposed to be on holiday, but my holidays usually work out that way. They're the only time I get any serious thinking done. A lot of time was wasted going over the music for Melrose - scores and parts didn't necessarily agree, so I spent a whole day's work just checking for errors and correcting inconsistencies in the dots, with no chance even to begin to think about what the music might sound like! The Bach is full of editorial additions (and it's still the only commercially available edition of that version of the piece). I wonder if the publishers realised back in the 1970s when they commissioned some poor soul to add a load of crap to Bach's rather detailed score, how much pointless work they would generate for musicians a few decades down the line, as we have to remove it all again. And the Stamitz parts are from a different edition to the score, with lots of maddening little discrepancies which I ought to make decisions on now rather than wasting everyone else's time in rehearsal. Meanwhile, I've found a helpful secretarial service willing to turn The Gentle Shepherd into an e-text for us, which should be ready next week, for our own editorial meddling. The dates for our concert series in Glasgow are beginning to come together, as Marie collates everyone's availability - no mean feat. And I've added a copy (well, two copies of different editions) of Robert Bremner's Thirty Scots Songs to my collection of 18th century arrangements of the Gentle Shepherd songs. When I finally get around to putting the score together I want the biggest selection of options to hand. But this week had its relaxing moments too - we managed two visits to the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh (one with kids and one without), and it was a real treat. I suppose one thing that we Scots are good at is being proud of our past - the present we're not quite so sure of. In the 18th century section, there was a quote from Ramsay's 1721 address to the Music Club about mixing Italian and native tunes - I must remember to include it on the Mungrel Stuff CD cover. ... And shew that Musick may have as good Fate This could be a Concerto Caledonia manifesto. Tonight I listened to the SCO who were live on the radio, as I wielded a paintbrush in the bathroom. It's a toss-up which is the more enjoyable, listening from the stage in a set of tails, or from the safety of the bathroom floor in a paint-splattered T-shirt. Friday 6 April 2001 Today is a saga in itself, but the past week's been fun. On Saturday I went back to St Cecilia's once again to hear Ricordo give a terrific concert, all from memory as ever. It was a pleasant surprise to sit in a concert and not be bored - this is rare, but then Ricordo do rehearse for a whole week before they play. Afterwards I had a chance to help manhandle two and a half million pounds worth of harpsichord into a lift, before heading for the party at the inimitable Joy Graham-Marr's flat overlooking Princes Street Gardens. Wednesday was spent organising music for Melrose, general admin, and a very productive meeting with Andrew McKinnon going through the text of The Gentle Shepherd for the first time, working out where all the songs go. This isn't entirely simple, as few of the 18th century sources agree. I also made it to Glasgow University Library for a look at Robert Bremner's settings of the songs, and to order photographs of some of David Allan's pencil drawings of Edinburgh shepherds in the 1780s. These should look nice in the concert programme, and, I have to admit, on my study wall. But today was fun-packed. I got up at 4.50am to get the early flight to London, and met Kenny Glenaan on the plane, who was heading south to cast a film he's making about asylum seekers. By the time we got into London he'd offered me a bit part, as a doctor! I hope I can fit it into my diary, as I haven't been on telly for a while: my brief appearance as a mugger in 'Rab C Nesbitt' was my all-time favourite. When I last worked with Kenny about 10 years ago we were in a play together, and he was a fearless performer. His character was to be shot dead while up a tree, and every night he did a spectacularly gruesome fall (in his safety harness) which drew shocked gasps from the audience. One night he threw himself into it so much that he cracked two ribs, but he carried on with the show the next night nonetheless. Things haven't changed much: he's taken to working out, and recently had to be rushed to hospital for an emergency operation after giving himself an umbilical hernia doing his daily 400 sit ups. I was in London (well, Harmondsworth) for the mastering of the McFalls CDs with Ben Turner at FineSplice. While he compressed, EQ'd and PQ'd, I sat with a bottle of Tippex removing all the editorial dynamics from the score and parts of Bach's Ich habe genug that have just arrived. Alison was going to be playing a concert just round from Euston station, so I was going to pass on the cello parts before getting the sleeper home, rather than putting them in the post. We finished early at FineSplice, I dashed across to East London to visit some friends and read their kids bedtime stories (why does this feel like less of a chore with other people's children?) and then made it to the pub outside Euston about 10pm. I looked around the place for Alison, and spied her sister Katherine, their dad, and a host of other early music people, including Gail Hennessy, with whom I played my first concert in London when I was 19, and then later Jennifer appeared as well (who I'd missed by only a few hours at Joy's in Edinburgh the previous Saturday), so there was just time for some quick reminiscences about Rome before running for the train. It's kind of odd to stagger into a pub on a Friday night in a strange town, and unexpectedly be joined by an assortment of people you've encountered over the last 15 years ... Friday 30 March 2001 I've spent a tiring but enjoyable day at St Cecilia's Hall in Edinburgh recording the two harpsichord pieces for the forthcoming CD. One of them is Domenico Corri's variations on Duncan Gray, which culminate in a Tambourin. Corri was in Edinburgh for 14 years, and portraits of him and his family, gifted by his descendants, are hung in the entrance lobby to the hall, where he put on many concerts. Corri was also the Scottish agent for Broadwood pianos and harpsichords, and I was playing on the last known harpsichord by John Broadwood, an amazing instrument from 1793 with a machine stop and a Venetian swell. As if that weren't enough, I did some background reading for The Gentle Shepherd on the train from Glasgow, and then the 5 minute walk from Waverley station to St Cecilia's took me past the sites of Allan Ramsay's theatre and of his original bookshop. Edinburgh's like that I suppose, its past is never far away. Anyway, the Broadwood was great fun. Normally it's considered a bit infra dig to play around with the registration on the harpsichord, but playing music from the 1780s on an instrument with a lute stop, a harp stop, a swell, and a machine pedal, is just asking for it, so I spent the morning working out how to use as many combinations and gadgets as possible. I then spent a lot of the afternoon session pushing the wrong knobs and pressing the wrong pedals, which serves me right, but there was the opportunity to include some great clunking noises as various bits of mechanism engaged and disengaged. Again this is something that your humble harpsichordist is normally very embarrassed about, but this instrument has great big brass knobs that make satisfying noises so I've unashamedly kept them in. It's strange recording music that doesn't usually get played at all, as there's no 'performing tradition' to fit into, or rail against. I asked Ursula Leveaux to come along and lend her ears for a while, to check that my playing wasn't incomprehensible, and she made some very useful observations which I hope I managed to act upon. She was also very keen that the mechanism noises stay in, which was reassuring. St Cecilia's isn't the quietest hall in the world - the glass cupola tends to amplify the sound of passing lorries - but Calum didn't seem too worried by this. I was reading recently in Jake Heringman's diary at www.disciplineglobalmobile.com about the problems he had making a lute recording in York recently, with days wasted while the sounds of the traffic outside leaked in. Maybe I've just been reading too much John Cage recently, but when listening to old records of church music from the 60s and 70s, the fact that you can hear the traffic going past has never really bothered me. Someone told me that you can hear a phone ringing at one point in Jacqueline du Pre's famous record of the Elgar cello concerto. A harpsichord is a bit louder than a lute, but I suppose the real problem with extraneous noises is that you can't do so many edits - the background noises suddenly disappear and your cover is blown! Friday 23 March 2001 I was going to be recording the keyboard pieces tonight, but co-ordinating Calum's diary and John Raymond's babysitting has proved increasingly difficult! John is now the assistant curator of the Russell Collection, but when I was a student, he had a harpsichord workshop at Otley Mill in Yorkshire. Even then his ears were legendary, not for their physical appearance, but their acuity. He could sit in the corner of a room full of musicians playing, and tune a harpsichord in a different pitch, in any temperament required, and still do it more accurately than many tuners could in complete silence. The score of the Stamitz flute concerto for Melrose arrived today, so the only issue left to be resolved is whether the concert happens at all, given the foot and mouth outbreak. Melrose is in Border farming country, and there is a case 20 miles away (I think), so giving concerts and gathering an audience of farming folk may be out of the question. We'll have to wait and see. The Edinburgh International Festival had its press launch yesterday, and I'm told The Gentle Shepherd was spoken of, so we can go public properly now and try to generate some media coverage. It's certainly nice to be in a festival brochure in such august company as Merce Cunningham. But I think that our extensive rehearsal period means that I won't have time to play in the SCO, which is a shame as they're doing a Handel concert with David Daniels and Rinaldo Alessandrini. I'm tidying the study today (clearing up correspondence mostly) while my computer is in for repair. The various upgrades I've done over the last few years have finally overloaded the motherboard, so it's time to start from scratch. There goes my weekend, loading all the software back on. I was back in the recording studio on Monday, and while Stuart was working on his software conflicts and hardware glitches, I was messing around once more with the Strat and Pod. He expressed surpise that I hadn't gone out and bought one since the last session ('most people do'). The lovely thing about the Pod, is that it makes all the wonderful extraneous noises that electric guitar amplifiers make - buzzes, crackles, bangs, clicks. Having spent many years learning how to play the harpsichord as cleanly and noiselessly as possible, I now find that I'm putting some of the noises back in, lifting my fingers off the keys quickly so that the jacks bounce off the jack rail, hitting the case, or even stamping my feet. Once you've got the sounds under your technical control, why not? 2 CDs arrived in the post in the last couple of days - one from a promoter friend, wanting my opinion of the possibility of staging Robin Williamson's latest project, settings of the Psalms in Latin. I was pretty sceptical, but Robin's voice won me over completely. It's pretty rough at the edges, but there's a commitment to the way he sings: you can tell he really means it. If only more classical singers had that quality - it not something that gets taught very much at college. And after a 4 month wait, amazon.com finally delivered me a copy of Capella Savaria's 2CD set of all the Muffat Concerti Grossi. The playing's a bit ropey, but what music! Friday
16 March 2001 Got back
home eventually on Wednesday, and headed off to the studio in the afternoon for
a session. There was a nicely set
up Fender Strat lying around, and a Pod, a great little device that simulates
guitar amplifiers, so I spent an hour getting a lesson on funky rhythm guitar
from Stuart the engineer. Listening
back to the track now, it’s better rhythm guitar than I’ve ever played
before, but it’s still pretty duff. Robert
Fripp had a League of Crafty Guitarists, but I’m a member in perpetuity of the
League of Crap Guitarists. I won’t
be doing the gig next month with Alistair Anderson after all, for the rather
tiresome reason that the promoter wouldn’t come up with a decent fee – it
was a Radio 3 broadcast too. Ah
well, win some, lose some. Tuesday 13 March 2001 1600 This, and getting caught in a Roman thunderstorm, was all very refreshing after yesterday, which as predicted was very hard work indeed.
So we got to rehearsing, the harpsichord went hopelessly flat under the lights, Mr Beard-and-Spectacles admitted he couldn't tune at all (what was he doing there then? he hung around all day), and just as we were making some headway, someone from the theatre told us the technicians were going to take a 30 minute break and we had to clear the stage. Hey ho, time to go out to the piazza for a pizza. But 30 minutes eventually became 90, so I sneaked back in, tuned the thing all over again, and played through some tunes with Chris. In the theatre blackout. We'd met Jennifer Fairgrieve on Saturday night. Her dad is our accountant, she's studying in Rome for a year, and she bravely volunteered to hang around with us and be our native guide. On Saturday night she'd achieved the travelling musician's ultimate goal: getting the hotel bar to re-open. We were very impressed. On this occasion, she did a sterling job exchanging insults with the stage crew and blagging us some more rehearsal time, and then she took me off to a bar to coach me in Italian so that I could talk to the audience. Just time for a quick siesta back at the hotel before the gig. Marie rang the promoter to say that we'd need a good 30 minute interval to tune the harpsichord - going on in the first half were Shine: Corinna Hewat and Mary McMaster playing electro harps, and Alyth McCormack singing. No way, says Riri, you'll have to tune it before the concert and go on first. OK, deep breath, mad rush to the theatre, I start tuning, and then gradually it dawns on us that two of our number who went shopping rather than come back to the hotel haven't been told about this, and we don't know where they are. At 9pm the audience (sell-out) are in place, and we are still two musicians short. This is not nice. At 9.10 we revert to plan A, the PA is set up and Shine finally hit the stage at about half past. One of our missing people has the only key to the dressing room, so the remaining three of us are perched on metal steps backstage during Shine's set, looking very worried. They turn up about 9.45 unaware of the fuss of course, and we stand by to set the stage. Then we discover why the promoter didn't want a long interval - the audience aren't going anywhere, there's no interval at all. And what's more, the stage manager refuses to lower the curtain: it takes two people todo this apparently, though strangely enough, raising it didn't seem to be a problem at the start of the show. So having given their all and said their goodbyes to the audience, Shine then have to creep back on stage and dismantle their gear in front of everyone, to raucous cheers and applause, and great embarrassment. We set up, I sit down at the harpsichord (giving the audience a sneak preview of my kilt which gets quite a response), and I quickly realise that if I embark on tuning it I am going to get lynched, or a slow handclap at the very least. I get off again quickly. Well, what our set lacked in accurate intonation it made up for with adrenaline. I'm told we went down very well indeed, but it passed in a bit of a blur. I got some laughs for my Italian jokes (Jennifer's really) which was very satisfying, as without help I can't even ask for a cup of coffee. I really must find out the original significance of the title of the tune 'Put the Gown upon the Bishop' (o in italiano 'metti il capotto sul vevesco'). I don't think safe sex was a big issue in the 18th century so it can't be that. Well, the hints I'd dropped at the party the night before about how cold beer after a concert is the sweetest drink in the world, were clearly taken, as Bernard delivered two carrier bags full of cans of chilled Peroni which made the bus ride back to the hotel most cathartic. 2300 Sunday 11 March 2001 Made it to Rome yesterday, mostly hassle-free. Chris missed his connection in Paris by 5 minutes and ended up stuck there for 6 hours, only reunited with his luggage this morning. Marie had had the foresight to book a table in a great restaurant for last night, so we all ate very well, feeling a bit underdressed for a Roman Saturday night compared to everyone around us. And for today's free day, the sun shone, the breeze blew, the Colosseum and the Forum were beautiful, and even the roads were closed - it was a pedestrian Sunday. Another stunning meal at lunch, courtesy of Paula's recommendation this time: with her usual style, she booked the table not in her name Chateauneuf, but as Castelnuovo. I came back, slightly sunburnt, to the hotel for a siesta before our party at the British Council. Brendan Griggs has the good fortune to live in the flat above the Council's offices, complete with huge roof terrace, so we stood under the stars and watched the moon rise. Now tomorrow we're going to have to do some work. Thursday 9 March 2001 Today was pretty much filled with last minute preparations for Rome. Solitary practice isn't something I do very much - usually I have to make do with playing exercises regularly just to keep the finger muscles from seizing up - so it was good fun spending some hours getting Domenico Corri's silly variations on Duncan Gray up to scratch. I'll be recording them in a few weeks as well so I had half a mind on that, but I gave in to the occasional distraction, such as dusting the harpsichord more thoroughly than it's been done in 10 years <cough>. The soundboard paintings came up a treat. Hopefully in the next few days of hanging around airports (dull), and hanging around Rome (not so dull) I'll get a chance to read through The Gentle Shepherd properly again: last weekend I only got as far as the end of Act 1 in snatched moments. The mail this morning brought me a copy of the 1808 edition from a bookshop in Philadelphia: I found this on Bibliofind, so my credit card details are now probably being used to buy car accessories and pornography by several thousand people across the USA. I've decided on the programme for Melrose at long last: Katy Bircher's going to play a flute concerto by Johann Stamitz, who taught the Earl of Kelly, and she and Catherine Bott will take the solo parts in the high version of Bach's cantata Ich habe genug, a heart-breakingly beautiful piece which is really all about how awful life is (sorry, I don't feel like explaining the Pietist theology underpinning this right now). A bleak message is far more powerful when it's pronounced beautifully: if its sounds are as hideous as its meaning, the effect is not half so convincing. And after all these years I have officially joined the ranks of the professional musician: a camera caught me speeding through a temporary limit on the way to Aberdeen the other week, and now I've got a ticket. A badge of the profession. © 2001 David
McGuinness |
concerto caledonia
We arrived at the theatre around 10.30 in the morning, an underground auditorium in an apartment block, with a raked stage: not your usual early music venue, but we can cope with that. There was a bearded bespectacled man sitting tuning the harpsichord - he told me he was the maker, and I let him carry on tuning while we got acclimatised to the acoustic, or lack of it. When he'd finished, I sat down at the instrument and played a few chords. It took me a few seconds to realise that not only did it sound like a bag of spanners, it was also hideously out of tune. Hmm. On a hunch that something like this might happen I'd packed a tuning meter, so I got it out and discovered the instrument was also well sharp of pitch. Our man was not much of a maker, and certainly not a tuner. Time to ask everyone to hang loose while I tuned it from scratch. Time to ditch the harpsichord solo from the concert and get Chris to play some flute tunes instead. Nothing to panic about yet.