Nov 2001

concerto caledonia

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David McGuinness's diary
November 2001 - January 2002

Tuesday 29 January 2002

Much number-crunching to be done today on the recording budget for The Gentle Shepherd. Record companies don't like shelling out for musicians anymore, and understandably so given the sad state of CD sales at the moment. So I'm trying to drive down the minimum figure we need to raise in order to get the dates in everyone's diaries without ripping anyone off, or committing ourselves to money we haven't got. It was interesting to read in the newspapers yesterday of George Michael's new one-single deal, where he decides whether to pick up the album option depending on how well the company promotes the single. No more fat advances from Sony for him. Even at our paltry level, things are going in the same direction.

Last night I watched the movie of the late Dr. Seuss's The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T with my son. I'm still reeling. Made nearly 50 years ago, and ten times more weird and screwed-up than anything David Lynch or Terry Gilliam will ever aspire to (partly because an hour was cut out of the film and the narrative barely hangs together). And it's about a power-crazed piano teacher wanting to set up a music institute. Mr Geisel himself (Dr. Seuss) supervised the sets, the screen-play and the lyrics, and it's just astonishing in its sheer nerve. The musical sequence set in the non-pianists' dungeon is even more surreal than the flying pink elephants in Dumbo, but it's shot as live action rather than animation. The dancing accordions reminded me of André Popp, another 1950s original who now sounds like he took psychedelics one decade too early. Chances are he didn't of course: some people are just weird enough without chemical assistance. And doesn't that gladden the heart?

Saturday 26 January 2002

I've just added an mp3 of outtakes from the Clerk sessions to the recordings page.

Tuesday 22 January 2002

I'm typing this on the way home from 4 days of sessions at Calum Malcolm's place, exhausted even though I didn't play a note. In the breaks we seemed to talk about music nearly all the time, which sounds anal but was actually rather nice. It's rare for me to be hanging out with a bunch of musicians, all of whom have such a great breadth of musical reference.

Just listening to the sessions progress was pretty tiring in itself, as Calum and Paddy McAloon both have very acute ears (let's face it, they've made a few immaculate records between them) and they kept picking up on things that I missed. We had a damn good laugh as well of course: I'd never met Paddy before and he's the nicest of men.

Incidentally, if you're thinking that the concert diary looks empty - let's face it, it is empty - it's only because we haven't fixed definite dates for the various projects ahead. October to February will start to fill up eventually.

Wednesday 16 January 2002

It's been difficult to get back into the swing of work after a pretty much showbiz-free holiday. It doesn't feel like I've got going again yet, and I'm starting to feel a bit like a writer, finding endless things to do to avoid the growing pile of work. I installed more memory in my computer yesterday (OK, I know that's not exactly rocket science and it only took 5 minutes) and passed on a load of Clerk and Kelly material to the Scottish Music Information Centre. How things have changed since 1994 - to get the Clerk pieces that we recorded then, Alasdair had to come over here and go through boxes of old paper from my attic to find clean scores and sets of parts, and now he has to photocopy them, bind them and send the originals back to me. To obtain the Kelly material that we performed last November, I email him one tiny Sibelius file for each piece.

Today I spent mostly on administrative things: booking flights for next month's viola d'amore extravaganza, working out the schedule for the recordings that start this weekend, and starting to put together budgets for the ConCal year ahead. I also managed to practise some Hindemith, listen (twice) to a rather fun CD of a gig of early Scots and Irish stuff that Thomas Tallant's just sent me from Knoxville, Tennessee, and talk to Ben Parry of the Dunedin Consort about a possible collaboration. Maybe I've been quite busy after all.

Having just plugged the last few numbers into the spreadsheet for a New Year's Day performance of Messiah, I'm now looking at it and thinking '****'. Marie is off at the Scottish Arts Council today - we'll reconvene on Friday, look at the figures and toss a coin to decide whether to laugh or cry.

Last Friday I went into the little Classics in the City CD shop in Glasgow's Candleriggs, in search of Rob MacKillop's new CD of Montgomerie songs with Paul Rendall. Sure enough, he had one in stock (buying a CD marked ©2002 on 11 January is pretty good going), along with the newly-released Naxos recording of Muffat Concerti Grossi 7-12 and, of course, all three of our recordings (didn't buy any of those). It's only a tiny shop, but the stock is amazing - carefully chosen back catalogue that's worth listening to, rather than the same old stuff the major companies are touting, and a good stereo system with a comfy chair and shelves of magazines and record guides. And he stays open late when there's a concert on round the corner in the City Hall. I only mention this because in the last two years Scotland's two main independent bookshops (John Smith and James Thin), both substantial companies with an 18th century heritage, have gone bust, unable to meet the competition from Borders, Waterstones and the rest. For all their faults they were shops of character. You can go into a Borders or a Virgin or Tower or HMV in any town, and see almost identical stock: those few records that what remains of our classical record industry thinks are commercial. I hope Classics in the City makes it - I'll certainly be back.

Monday 7 January 2002

Back to work today - I went for a swim at lunchtime, and for no real reason other than it was staring at me, in the rest room (part of the Turkish Bath Suite, not 'rest room' in the American sense, I can't remember its proper Latin name) I picked up a copy of last Saturday's Independent, and there was a nice review of Mungrel Stuff in it. I've added it to the press page. Meanwhile, I'm putting finishing touches to the arrangements for the Prefab McFalls sessions which start in a couple of weeks, and learning the piano part of the Hindemith (Hindemith!) viola d'amore sonata. On Thursday Marie and I are going to sit down and plan what ConCal's priorities are for the year ahead.

My reading matter while waiting for kids to go to sleep has moved on from discussions of Handel's Messiah to Chris Ware's wonderful graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan - The Smartest Kid on Earth. It's awesome - get one and wonder.

Sunday 23 December 2001

I've been dividing my time recently between string arrangements for Prefab Sprout/Mr McFall's Chamber, and reading about Handel: Chris Hogwood's biography, Donald Burrows's book on Messiah and John Tobin's on its sources. That and the usual pre-Christmas stuff. Tomorrow, the McGillivray sisters take up their usual Christmas Eve residency in the bar of Babbity Bowster, so I may well drop in. Katherine rang up the other night to talk me into playing for a viola d'amore recital she's giving in February. I had to say yes - going by accepted statistical averages, this is probably the only time in my life that anyone will ever ask me to play in a viola d'amore recital.

Monday 17 December 2001

I was playing in a Messiah with the SCO last night. People assume that if you're a harpsichordist you spend the entire Christmas season playing in Messiah, but I hardly do any. In fact, I lost my score a few years ago and had to buy a new one of Clifford Bartlett's edition last week. Trying to come to it as you would any other piece is very interesting. I've an idea in the back of my mind (which may come to nothing) of putting on a New Year's Day performance sometime, so it's been a useful exercise getting to know the score again, by playing it. Some of it is undeniably wonderful: the Sinfony at the beginning, The trumpet shall sound, Comfort ye, Hallelujah, and more are Handel at his best, but a lot of it is obviously unfinished. Harmonically it goes a bit wonky from time to time, and some of the choruses could be a bit more focused in intent. Going by the definition of a masterpiece as something you couldn't improve, it clearly isn't one, presumably because Mr Handel never had the time to finish improving it. Jennens did a fantastic job with the libretto though.

It's been so long since I've played in an orchestra that I'd forgotten some of the things that go through your head on stage in that environment, when responsibility for the overall effect is solely delegated to the guy standing up with his back to the audience waving his arms around. Depending on the musical circumstances at the time, you can be thinking 'this is fun', but it's just as likely to be 'who's that in the fifth row?', 'did the fiddles really have to bow it like that?', or 'I would rather be anywhere but here, when can I get off?'. One member of the orchestra (no names) admitted in the interval: 'I just think about sex - it gets you through it, doesn't it?' I don't think she was joking. This is why I don't like orchestras much: they take a bunch of great musicians and stop them from making music.

Saturday 15 December 2001

I went to hear the Palladian Ensemble playing in Glasgow University Chapel yesterday lunchtime. At the end of the concert, Bill got up and said 'we've got a short encore for you - normally people play to plug their own records, but we're going to plug someone else's', he told the audience about Mungrel Stuff, and then they played Clout the Caldron! Made my day. Marie had come to the concert as well, and she was to be seen immediately after this incident, presenting Bill with a cheque, but it was for the gig he did with us on the 15 November rather than the record promotion. It was freezing cold in the chapel, so the Ensemble did the gig wrapped up in jumpers and scarves rather than in concert dress, which was rather nice. Tremendous playing too.

Last night was the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's Cecil Coles concert (see previous entry) - the dramatic cantata Fra Giacomo was great, though it's a shame Paul Whelan wasn't in better voice. I hope the CD recording worked out OK. It was wonderful to see Coles's daughter Penny, now in her eighties and very frail, sitting at the back in her wheelchair. For decades she's fought and worked to get access to her father's music, and to get it performed, and now finally there will be a commercial recording out there. I remember six years ago sitting in her flat playing her the cassette of a recording session we'd just done of some songs and piano music. Some of the music survives only in a shrapnel-damaged notebook brought back from a trench - he didn't make it.

There were a few SCO members dotted among the orchestra last night, having taking the week off from doing The Pirates of Penzance with Nicholas McGegan: sitting in the orchestra for that piece is not everyone's cup of tea. I'm making a rare appearance with the SCO tomorrow (I haven't played in the orchestra for several months) in Dundee, but apart from that all my spare moments are being taken up with arranging Prefab Sprout tunes for January's sessions. After a couple of months of ceaseless activity and organising of people, it's very nice to just sit at a computer manipulating dots on a screen and hearing the results in my head.

Sunday 9 December 2001

A nice surprise this morning - Linda Ormiston rang to tell me that Mungrel Stuff is in Stephen Pettit's top 10 classical CDs of the year in today's Sunday Times. I don't normally do this, but I think that merits a self-congratulatory email to a few friends and the players involved. We got a nice review in BBC Music Magazine this month too, which I've put on the press page.

Well, in the last week, we've gone from having an empty diary to having upwards of four projects in the next year and a bit, not counting any recordings for which we've got funding applications pending. Speaking of which, I heard on Wednesday that the contemporary music project I'd cooked up didn't even make it onto the shortlist for funding - hey ho. Rejection is good for the soul, if not the bank balance. We're also about to join a little consortium of groups applying for money towards new methods of presentation in concerts - unfortunately we first have to undertake an audience research project. Since when was audience research a vital part of artistic endeavour? It seems crazy at a time when we have to struggle to find the resources to mount even the simplest of projects, that public money is readily available for audience research. It's not as though our Scottish audience is so enormous as to be a particularly useful statistical sample.

I fought through a cold (still there) for the rest of the week to lecture at the RSAMD, start work at last on the Prefab Sprout scores, and to go and hear Mr McFall's Chamber in Edinburgh. The RSAMD was more fun than usual, as the students are being imbued with a wonderfully streetwise attitude to the music business. Myra Soutar introduced me to the class by listing some of the things I do, and saying 'learn from this guy, or you'll end up stuck in the back of the 2nds in some provincial orchestra and have a miserable life' (or words to that effect). The students gave off a genuine air of intelligence, which is rare.

The McFalls gig was great fun - I didn't pack my harmonica as I was going only as an audient this time. Greg played some staggering klemzer tunes he learnt from a 7 foot tall Armenian piano player in an orange kaftan (something like that anyway, he told a long and hilarious story before launching into it), and he sounded like he was on fire. Brian, Graeme and Rick played a beautiful tango-based piece for viola, piano and bass by a composer whose name I forget. Su-a's musical saw spot featured a Raymond Scott electronic jingle arranged for the ensemble, and if they'd got a second encore (Robert told me) they would have played the Animal Magic theme. There was some Takemitsu and some Zappa in there too. Not bad for a Friday night.

Yesterday I saw Alison and Liz who were up playing in Concordia at St Andrews in the Square: a really excellent programme put together by Mark Levy, of music for Mary Queen of Scots. Lorna Anderson sang very beautifully indeed: I must ask her to take part in The Gentle Shepherd if we ever get enough money to record it.

On the way home I bumped into the conductor Martyn Brabbins outside our local shop - next week he's recording the music of Cecil Coles for Hyperion with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Coles was a Scots-born pupil of Holst who was killed in the trenches in 1918, and six years ago I made a radio programme featuring the first recordings of some of the music, and an interview with his surviving descendent, Penny Catherine Coles, who some decades ago also wrote a series of 'Mallory Towers' type adventure stories about girls at boarding schools. She has painstakingly gathered as much information as she can about her father, who died when she was a few months old. Martyn was taken with all of this, and very impressed with the music, and he's orchestrated some unfinished pieces and talked Ted Perry at Hyperion into making a CD. There's a concert next Friday at the BBC in Glasgow, and Penny will be there. Can't wait.

Friday 30 November 2001

Last night's was one of our best gigs for a long time. Kate sang wonderfully, everyone contributed musically, the programme was a mix of bizarre curios and seriously good stuff, and the audience was warm and appreciative. Excellent beer in the bar afterwards too (Caledonian's Golden Promise, the Deuchars IPA had run out).

The Kelly pieces we were trying out for the first time were very interesting - his one and only song is nothing special, but the C minor quartet is a wildly bizarre exercise in Sturm und Drang, with a beautiful Andante movement in the middle. His violin duo is tough to play but a great listen - the normally unflappable Sarah at 6.15pm: "I am so stressed".

We rehearsed the Mozart Divertimento in D the least (and quite deliberately so: we'd played it through the night before, made a couple of logistical decisions and then decided to wait and see what happened on the night) and it was easily the easiest and most relaxed piece to play. It felt like an educated discussion between the four parts, supported from below by Nin on bass and with me in the middle chucking in my tuppenceworth on the harpsichord from time to time. It was very satisfying to sit there thinking 'well, this sounds great - I hope the audience are enjoying it as much as I am'. That's the advantage of playing harpsichord in early classical music as opposed to baroque - you can't actually play very many notes or they get in the way, so you get to sit and listen instead. Judging from the reaction at the end, the audience did enjoy it too.

Alison likened the first half of the concert to having a few glasses of wine and a nice meal, sitting on the edge of a cliff: below the calm and relaxed surface, a continual sense of narrow escape from disaster. And she's realised for the first time why violinists don't look up much, but keep their eyes glued to the music a lot of the time. It's because there are so many bloody notes to read.

On Tuesday I was at a meeting of St Andrew's in the Square users, to discuss what capital projects should be put started next: staging and lights are the front runners here, besides trying to quieten the heating system.

On Wednesday morning I realised that if I'm nervous before a performance these days, I don't worry about the show itself, I just become gripped by a total disinclination to do it. I was doing a bit of last minute research and translations of texts in a reluctant kind of way, wishing I could just go back to bed. It wasn't until halfway through the first rehearsal in the afternoon that I really felt like I wanted to do the gig. Very odd.

This morning I had to get the car to the garage by 8.30 - not the ideal way to start the morning after a concert but never mind. The car passed its MOT for the first time ever - as the man at the garage said 'that's a result for a Friday night isn't it?'. And I heard the news about George Harrison on the way there this morning - as life achievements go, writing Something, playing its beautiful rhythmically disconnected final guitar break, and making sure that The Life of Brian got made, are not bad for one person. Well done GH.

The last three books I've read have been the biographies or autobiographies of Rolf Harris, Frank Zappa and Billy Connolly. Now what a trio they would make: guitar, banjo and wobbleboard (or didge). It's a great shame that Connolly and Zappa never met - I can imagine them together improvising hitherto undreamt-of absurdities ...

Monday 26 November 2001

I did some rudimentary harpsichord maintenance this morning. This isn't something I do often, as I'm not very good at it. In fact I'm hopeless with anything fiddly and mechanical - I don't know which area of the brain separates playing the thing from trying to fix it, but there's a world of difference as far as I'm concerned. I was only trying to remove the lever that operates the buff batten, so that I can send it to Bob to replace the brass knob which sheared off. This necessitates the removal of a couple of strings: no problem there, except that in putting them back on I stabbed myself in the thumb with one and bled everywhere. This is the sort of thing that usually happens the night before playing a taxing concerto. After application of a plaster, I spent the rest of the day working on the music for Thursday's concert, and dropping anything I tried to pick up. Duh.

It was good to see Olivier Baumont on Saturday - we were able to swap our respective recordings of Alexander Reinagle pieces. He's kindly given me a credit on his, for going to the library for him last September. His is part of a fun CD on Erato of North American harpsichord music, which includes some great variations on Yankee Doodle, not unlike Corri's on Duncan Gray. There's a beautiful if slightly unfortunate photo on the front of the CD booklet, showing a certain pair of twin towers.

I've been listening to old Zappa albums while doing non-musical work today. Reading Neil Slaven's book has been very enlightening, helping to explain some areas of FZ's work which previously I'd found a bit tiresome. I now know why God talks about sofas in German, and I enjoy the guitar solos more. I remember reading in Evan Eisenberg's book on phonography about someone who mapped her entire emotional life with Zappa guitar solos. You could do worse I suppose. My 3 year old daughter came into the room in a flouncy dress during the disco spoof Dancin' Fool and after trying to dance to it, asked "Is this a real song?". Not sure what the answer is to that one.

Friday 23 November 2001

I bumped into a few kindred spirits in the course of today. I went along to the lunchtime concert at the RSAMD where Rob Mackillop and Steve Player were entertaining (in several senses) with various kinds of lutes and guitars, and with Steve's dancing. They nattered to the audience in the tuning breaks, and Steve came up with an interesting piece of linguistic trickery, where the Galliard's 5 steps in 6 beats became 'cinque passes' in French and, nearly, Syncopation in English. And I thought it was Greek ... . Alison was there, much to my surprise (we just missed each other in London on Wednesday) so we had a chance to look at the contacts of our photo session.

Now I'm sitting in the bar at St Andrews in the Square waiting for Bob Deegan to arrive and deliver a harpsichord for Olivier Baumont's recital tomorrow. Olivier's chosen a very appropriate programme, including Alexander Reinagle's variations on The Lea Rig, a piece written by Du Phly for a captain in the Royal Scots Regiment, and a little piece by William Selby, who like Reinagle emigrated to the States. It's odd to sit in a bar and hear Scottish lute music on the jukebox. I wish it happened more often.

I rang the BBC Pronunciation Unit today for some hints on how to pronounce Reinagle. Their Hungarian expert didn't recognise the name at all, but would have pronounced it as though it were German, "so that is our advice". So there.

Saturday 17 November 2001

I'm sitting outside on a winter's day admiring the beech hedge's spectacular shades of brown and yellow. Thursday's concert was very enjoyable - we played on the floor rather than using the stage, and had the audience around us in a semicircle, which was much more relaxed. The dance tunes sounded better than ever, much to my surprise given that half the band, for one reason or another, were deps. I'm not sure our ensemble or intonation were quite what they could have been to do the Muffat sonatas full justice, but we had a pretty good shot. There was a very nice review in yesterday's Herald - here it is.

Playing in the bar afterwards was great fun: Chris, Greg and I joined the piper and guitarist who were already jamming down there, and then Mhairi, who'd given a stunning performance upstairs, led the assembled throng in The Jeely Piece Song and Wild Mountain Thyme, before taking over at the piano when I'd nipped to the loo, to sing The Wild Rover. This is not normal behaviour for a soprano of such stature, but then I remember a few years ago at the St Magnus Festival in Orkney, Mhairi and Jacob Heringman were giving a lute song recital live on Radio 3, and within a couple of hours we were dancing a Strip the Willow in the Festival Club.

Tuesday 13 November 2001

I went to hear Diamanda Galàs last night - a jolly evening of songs about Eastern European genocides in a variety of languages. I can't think of another performer who combines technique and intensity in quite such quantities: the guy sitting beside me had both hands over his mouth at one point, and we were only listening to someone singing at the piano. At the end I wandered out into the street in a daze - I haven't been so astounded by a performance since I heard John Zorn's Masada a few years ago at the Edinburgh Fringe.

I've spent today preparing for this week's concert, and looking at the contact sheets of our photo session from a fortnight ago. Some useful shots I think.

Friday 9 November 2001

I had a wonderfully music-free day yesterday: I installed a CD drive into my parents' computer and got them connected to the internet at home for the first time, and then I did my accounts. Accounts are the bugbear of every self-employed musician - it only took about four hours to do, but I've been putting it off for seven months. The other major achievement of the day was raking up leaves in the garden, out in the cold sunshine.

So this morning rang some journalists to tell them about our plans for a post-concert session on Thursday, and sent out a couple of CDs to interested parties around the globe. Then off to St Andrews in the Square with Marie to plan staging and lights for next week, and an amble home via the bookshop. I emerged with Neil Slaven's book on Zappa, and to my delight, the reprint of Michael Nyman's book 'Experimental Music' which I first borrowed from the local public library and read on a family holiday about 20 years ago, and haven't seen since.

The deeply scary but wonderful Diamanda Galás is playing in Glasgow next week, and the not remotely scary They Might Be Giants the week after. I haven't seen either of them live before, so I hope the babysitting works out and I get to be a grateful audient.

I had a phone call the other day from someone who'd heard me playing the fortepiano on the radio and got my number from the BBC. He was looking for advice on instrument restoration, and recommended I learn one of the Weber piano sonatas. Sounds like a good idea. One of my favourite records ever is Alan Hacker's 1978 recording of Weber's clarinet quintet, and spookily enough, two of the players on that record will be in ConCal on Thursday: Carolyn Sparey and Duncan Druce will be our viola players.

It's just dawned on me that in a moment of mental weakness earlier in the week I agreed to do four days' playing in the RSNO in December and January. I think I said yes because Roy Goodman is conducting Messiah on the 2nd January, and I've never worked with him before, but even so, on past experience sitting in the middle of a vast symphony orchestra trying to be musically interesting is far from rewarding, and the money is rubbish. What was I thinking of?

Saturday 3 November 2001

Well, one concert in St Andrews in the Square down, two to go.

Thursday's gig was very interesting from a musical point of view, as it was the classical core group: Lucy and Sarah on violins, Alison on bass viol, and Liz on archlute. At the end of the rehearsal day (Wednesday) I was in a really good mood, as things were going well. We all know each other's playing, and rehearsals are easy. We don't need to talk too much, we can just play, and as we're all working towards a common aim it just gets better the more we do. It's very liberating not to have to discuss every detail in the music, but to develop a common mind instead. Our keyboard technician Roy actually re-arranged his day on Thursday so that he could listen to the whole rehearsal, as he thought it was the best we've ever sounded.

On Thursday we had a photo session with Kevin Low at lunchtime, and then we played the gig to a small but appreciative audience. I wasn't in such a great frame of mind that day, and I'm not sure why. In the interval, Alison and I sat on a table backstage and I tried to work out why I wasn't smiling - the music was great, why wasn't I just enjoying it? After a couple of post-gig beers (and post-gig beer is the nectar of the gods) I felt just fine.

When we came off, there were some guys playing tunes in the bar downstairs, and one of them was playing smallpipes. There's a piano there too, so I think after the 'ceilidh baroque' gig on the 15th, we'll have a session in the bar - I must ask Chris to bring a flute at 440Hz. We'll do the posh bit of the concert upstairs, and then revert to modern pitch and carry on with pints to hand, and the audience at closer range (and possibly joining in) downstairs. This could be fun.

We went to see The Others at the cinema tonight. The director Alejandro Amenábar wrote the script and the score (and a pretty good score it is too), but after 45 minutes we decided that neither of us really gave a toss about what happened to any of the characters apart from Eric Sykes's gardener, and he hadn't been on screen for the last half an hour, so we came back home. I think it's one of those movies where you're supposed to admire the film-making and ignore the fact that the drama is a load of cheap cliché: nice direction, not so great writing. If you've seen it through to the end you can let me know what happens, but honestly I didn't get that interested.