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David
McGuinness's diary Saturday 29 January 2005 The Seabrook's Crisps mystery has been solved (and they weren't all tomato sauce flavour after all). Hooray! Sharp-eared listeners to Radio Scotland may have heard me playing the melodica on Songlines on Tuesday when I wasn't burbling on about Urbani, in the programme for Burns Night about Red Red Rose. I think it gets repeated tomorrow. Yesterday I had a fun afternoon at the RSAMD playing for Catherine Bott's singing masterclass. And some very good singers there were too, most encouraging. But how Kate can be entertaining, enlightening and fun for two and a half hours without a break when she's just sung a recital through the remnants of bronchitis is beyond me. Adrenaline is a powerful thing. Sight reading at the harpsichord for 2½ hours just about did me in. Then off to Edinburgh for an ECAT concert in association with the SPNM (society for the prevention of nice music) which included a great little piece by Rob Wright for cello and tape, where the electronic material was all derived from the things a cello bow can do with a string. Visit his site and play with the toys: the Flash Player Piano is my favourite, although the Wind Chime Marimba is now doing unexpectedly interesting things as I write this. If you have still haven't seen Dick and Dom in action of a weekend morning, this might give you some clues as to what the fuss is all about. This morning's Wild West version of Motörhead's Ace of Spades during Muck Muck Saloon was particularly inspired. But now to deal with an avalanche of email about Februaries 2005 & 2006 in Canada. Wednesday 26 January 2005 Very mysterious. I went to the post office first thing this morning to pick up a parcel that I'd missed on Monday. It was a box of Seabrook's tomato sauce flavour crisps, sent direct from the factory. With no explanation at all. It looks increasingly certain that
we'll have a live broadcast at the end of November this year, just before we
start our Perth concerts. I'll put details on the concerts
page as they firm up. Tuesday 25 January 2005 http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=90682005 A long evening spent on administrative niceties: gathering the notation for next month's concerts and recording, drawing up a schedule, and refining it. They're tedious jobs, but I know the importance of doing them properly so I get on with it. I took a short trampolining break at about 11pm. Yes, the trampoline was supposed to be a Christmas present for the kids, but late at night it's irresistible. I wonder what the neighbours think. Monday 24 January 2005 morning: an encounter with the NHS. My experience is that it is often populated by wonderful medical staff who are crippled by a communications infrastructure that would be more appropriate in a Carry On film. While the consultant was out of the room I had a nosey around his desk, and found out that in order to refer a patient to his colleague a few doors down the corridor, he has to get his secretary to write a letter. What century is this? afternoon: learning Bach + peppermint tea + occasional Venchi chocolate = adrenaline. evening: squeezed in amongst family meal- and bath-times I refined the edit of our not-quite-baroque version of Piazzolla's 'Coral' for SADN II. I don't think I've ever heard anything quite like it. This is good. thought for the day: music that costs us nothing is dull. Sunday 23 January 2005 We finally went to see Vanity Fair today to hear my appearances as Reese Witherspoon's pianistic stunt double. And a rather good film I thought - she's fantastic - but what were a Boehm clarinet and flute doing in a Brussels ballroom in 1815?! After all the trouble I went to to find them an 1801 Broadwood piano for the 1801 scenes ... . It was nice of them to give me a credit (two actually) in the roller, and I'm very pleased that my suggestion of Haydn's Mermaid Song made it into the final cut. We nearly had Becky Sharp singing the very rude song Watkins Ale (a 17th century euphemism for another fluid altogether), but Mira Nair wasn't quite convinced. Hearing the 1801 Broadwood at cinema volume in Dolby stereo is quite something. Giving my sister Meg a lift home after babysitting was a great excuse to drop into Delizique for DeCecco pasta, and some sublime Venchi chocolate with absinthe. That they keep the Venchi on the counter beside the cash register is criminal really: a sort of grown-up's version of the confectionery stand at the supermarket checkout. Saturday 22 January 2005 Thanks to everyone who voted for us on Radio 3's CD review: we got 13 minutes of prime Saturday lunchtime airtime today as a result. This morning's mail brought a cheque from the SAC and a contract from Linn for the Kellie disc. Not bad for a Saturday morning. I've come away with lots of ideas from last night's ConCal board meeting, including an excellent stunt to publicise the Kellie on its official release in March or thereabouts. Dinner was very good too (thanks Noel). We hope to have delivery of Kellie product in time for our concerts in February, so for a month or so the only way to get a copy will be to come and hear us. While I was in Edinburgh last night, I dropped in on Ursula to let her hear bits of the second edit: she's working with Karen Tweed and Timo Alakotila from time to time, which makes me rather jealous. Earlier in the week I had a chance to catch up with Mary Ann Kennedy about possible vocal overdubs on the Lion CD. But today I've mostly been concerned with buying food ('this week I are been mostly eating ...'): let's hear it for scallops, Cumbrae oysters and Pink Fir Apple and Ratte potatoes. New Year resolution no.2 was to buy less food in supermarkets. Well, I've now got two weeks to prepare for four weeks solid of being a performing musician. It's just as well I'm feeling better. Friday 14 January 2005 Still ill. I can just about do one thing at a time, but my usual multi-tasking is completely out of the question: walking and talking are a bit of a struggle. So this morning I managed to alternately proofread the Kellie CD booklet and look after a sick child; this afternoon was so fragmented I'm not sure I can piece the memory of it together. RRR got a 5 star review in the Scotsman today (and we got a very nice email from Alexander McCall Smith earlier in the week saying how much he likes it). Still on the subject of CDs, 'a source close to Linn Records' today told me a wonderful story about a public figure listening to Mungrel Stuff in a very particular environment, a story which I'm certainly not going to tell here, or possibly anywhere else. [Ahem.] I found out today that in amongst the other music that I'll be playing with some of the SCO principals and Giovanni Antonini in March will be the Bach E major violin and harpsichord sonata with Ruth Crouch. I was sure I'd played it before. I checked, and it's the only one of the six that I haven't played countless times with either Lucy or David G. In fact I've never played it in public at all - I looked at my copy and it's got one fingering written in (that's not unusual, I don't use pencils much anymore), and that fingering doesn't work (so it serves me right for writing it in). It's not an easy piece, so I'd better start practising again. I was just getting used to not being a 'serious' performing musician, and quite enjoying it. 'If I want to make music I can whistle' was my reasoning this morning. Then by teatime I was whiling away convalescence time by slowly sightreading through the Bach. Sure enough, my fingers won't do many of the things that part of my brain wants them to: it's been a few months since they were really up to speed. But one of the joys of being a keyboard player is that it doesn't take much work to get everything moving again. So I'm not anxious, I'll just gradually work it back up. And if it doesn't all come back, well, who wants to be a virtuoso anyway? Which would I rather be, a musician or a performing monkey? Sackfuls of technique are only a requirement for expression in music that is technically demanding, and most music isn't. I never had any time for the 'you must practise at least three hours a day' brigade. Get a life. Oh, and Vanity Fair came out in the UK today. Will try and get along next week to hear which bits of Reese Witherspoon's piano playing are really me. Meanwhile, the funniest thing I've heard for a while is Go Home Productions's 'Crazy Little Fool' - available here - almost too witty. Wednesday 12 January 2005 Oh no. I'm ill. On Monday night I had the feeling that my body was being taken over by something I couldn't control, then I felt a bit better yesterday morning (but I had Kellie to focus on then). Last night I made the mistake of dosing myself up on paracetamol and having a hot bath, which felt great but successfully conned me into thinking I was fine. And today I'm definitely not: my digestive system has given up completely and my temperature regulation is all over the place. I hate being ill; it's really boring. I hope it's nothing to do with the wonderful Cumbrae oysters I bought in the farmers' market on Saturday and consumed rather a lot of. Anyway I'm making very good use of the time spent unable to move, by reading short stories by Alasdair Gray, and slightly more troubling use of the time by sifting through the pile of paperwork that came with our letter of offer from the Scottish Arts Council. Once you've been through it all, the burdens that it places are not actually that onerous, but there are 19 sections of 'conditions of grant', a useful guide to the difference between 'monitoring' and 'evaluation' (personally, I thought 'evaluation' was the job of the critic rather than the artist), and a rather neat credit pack telling you how to use their logo properly. Unfortunately the minimum size stipulated for their logo is 35mm across which on a CD would look incongruously enormous - much bigger than a record company logo. All of this information could easily be stuck up on the web to save on paper, administration costs, postage, and my time spent working out where to file it all. Whatever happened to the paperless office? Am I imagining it, or are government departments and quangos now the only people left who routinely communicate by means of tons of paper in the post? For contracts, fine, but all the ancillary stuff just clogs up life. Earlier today, I engaged with a load of Shostakovich's film music - I hadn't realised that he'd written over 40 film scores. The music is wonderful, but for some reason I couldn't imagine myself wanting to listen to it again, and it took me a while to realise why. The recordings had been made like 'classical' orchestral recordings, with a very natural balance and deep sense of perspective. Now that's not how you record a film score, which has to do battle with dialogue and sound effects in the movie - it has to be much more in-yer-face, like a pop record. If it had been recorded like that, I would be spending the next few days listening to Shostakovich and precious little else ... Tuesday 11 January 2005 Whew. I've delivered the final set of edit notes and booklet blurb for the Kellie disc at last. John Purser's notes are as entertaining and as wittily written as you would expect, and the sound of it is very good indeed. I nearly lost my bottle at the last minute about the running order, but it's staying the way it is, with all the orchestral stuff at the beginning, a string quartet and a slightly wild trio sonata near the middle of the disc, and then the strathspey and reel and some wonderful flute playing from Katy B in Kellie Castle to finish. I'd celebrate with a fine whisky (though it should be claret in deference to Kellie's taste) but I'm feeling lousy, trying to shake off a flu-y virus while sheltering from the storm force winds outside. Sunday 2 January 2005 I'm in the land of the first edit. I'm finishing my notes on the first edit of the Kellie for Linn Records, and have finally got to the position where there is a first edit of the Lion CD, which I'm editing myself. The land of the first edit is a nice place, in that the records now have a shape rather than being hours of takes and a lot of written notes, but in a sense it's all downhill from here, as most of the work still to come entails tracking down all the things you don't like. You don't really get to listen to the music properly and enjoy it; instead, you're listening to weed out all the little distractions that will stop you and other people from enjoying it. That violin squeak here, the dodgy edit there, that place where the harpsichordist played random nonsense and nobody noticed at the time, the distant ambulance siren (no I'll leave that in, see if you can spot it in the Kellie). It's a tiring process: I can only listen with that level of concentration for 10 or 15 minutes at a time before my brain starts to fry. The Lion CD (or SADN II) is quite a beast. It's still lacking a couple of tracks - we're going to record some fiddle tunes in February - and there are no vocals anywhere on it yet, unless you count the snippets that appear in the middle of 'Road to Sanaig' of the four of us talking about what we think about on stage. But the overall shape is, well, a bit baffling actually. We've got 63 minutes of music so far, so there's room for weeding. My New Year's Resolution is to reply less promptly to emails (unless they're very short). People used to assume that as a person got older, their taste in music would mature towards more complex forms, as though you would grow out of pop music and into opera. Of course this is a laughable idea now. But I'm a little intrigued at my increasing capacity to listen to country music - I blame Loretta Lynn's album with Jack White. I've been listening to Willie Nelson's new album at home, and what intrigued me first about it is that it's got lots of very classy musicians playing on it, but they hardly play a thing. They keep right out of the way to showcase the main event that is the man's voice. And doing almost nothing in a very classy way is a skill that only the best have, in whatever musical genre: it's the art of moving the audience without drawing attention to yourself. Then when they turn the light on you, you can put on your spangly pants and go berserk of course. Thursday 30 December 2004 In amongst the holidays, things are ticking along nicely. Joe Davie's artwork for the Kellie CD cover arrived and is brilliant as expected. A sneak preview is on the CDs page - can you spot the re-appearance of the Mungrel Stuff dog? Over the next week I'll finish my notes on the first edit of that, as we're still aiming for a March release date. Katherine and Alison were in Glasgow for a few days which was a great opportunity to hang out and accomplish a few Lion-related tasks too. Katherine had been writing tunes to give as Christmas presents, and my jig changes time-signature every bar: I've just about mastered it now. On Monday the three of us went along to La Chunky Towers to play on a couple of vaguely country tunes for the new Future Pilot AKA album - including my recorded debut on glockenspiel. After a couple of very enjoyable hours we left clutching our souvenir model aeroplanes from Sushil, and spent another couple of very enjoyable hours as the only customers in the comforting surroundings of Tchai-Ovna. Then yesterday, we convened to watch the DVD of our March concert in Aberdeen: a sobering experience. It's revealing to find out just how much of how you're feeling reads to the audience. I look a bit sullen for most of the first half (what was I thinking about?) and only really seem to relax after David G has gone berserk in the Szapora. Then suddenly my whole manner with the audience changes. I'm surprised at how long it took for me to relax enough for it to be apparent, and to put the audience at ease too. I suspect we'll be giving a lot more consideration to our on-stage energy for our concerts in February. Friday 17 December 2004 This morning's been unexpectedly exciting. I've been editing away at the quartet CD and was just finishing the tweaks of a few tracks when the post arrived, including the first edit of the Kellie CD. And the orchestral sessions are really quite exhilarating. Loads of energy and shape, and dazzling playing from the horns (let's hear it for Anneke Scott and David Bentley). There's a bit of tweaking to be done yet, but I'm unusually pleased with the results so far. Perhaps that's because instead of trawling through the session tapes myself, I haven't actually heard any of the music since the day we recorded it. And the disc is 76'45 long - how did that happen? The running order needs a bit of thought though - there's a fair chunk of orchestral material, and the chamber music was recorded in two different places: Crichton Church and Kellie Castle. I think it might be best to keep them all separate rather than try and get the sounds to match up. And making the listener wait till the end of the record for the B flat symphony seems a bit churlish. Listening to the Crichton chamber stuff for the first time, it's much better than my mood on the day would have had led me to guess: the A major quartet in particular has some really beautiful sections. Also tucked in amongst the Christmas cards was a letter from the Scottish Arts Council offering us some money towards the completion of the quartet CD that I'm editing. It's not much money, but the principle that they're prepared to give us support to do things that we want to do is very encouraging. As a rule in the past, they funded us to promote a load of concerts which were something of a distraction to our real work. Alison dropped in on Wednesday morning while in Glasgow teaching at the RSAMD. Her quest for the ultimate chocolate has reached new heights with the awesome Grand Cru Fleur de Cacao by Pierre Marcolini. My previous best entry was the Madagascar Neapolitan in the I Cru selection by Amedei, which is more visceral but not quite so classy. I've found a shop just down the road from here that sells Venchi though ... Well, as if all that excitement weren't enough, I'm now off to the university to hear how harpsichordist Allan Wright's 'Felix namque I' by Tallis is getting on. Now that's exciting. Monday 13 December 2004 Having the loan of an editing suite makes for a very civilised way of working. It's set up at my desk, so that rather than having to go out to a studio, I can use a spare half hour to do a rough cut of a piece and come back to it later. So I've made a lot of headway just in spare bits of time here and there. Working for short periods keeps your ears fresh too. Also keeping my ears fresh is the Café Zimmerman Bach concertos CD which came in the post the other day. It's the first classical CD I've heard in a very long time which I wanted to listen to all the way through. Playing Bach's music involves a difficult balancing act of investing the music with enough personality and style to bring it alive, without overpowering it. I think it's fair to work on the assumption that Bach was a far greater musician than any of us, so the listener should be able to hear his work at least as well as ours. On this record, the musicians only get in the way very occasionally - I once tried to listen to the recording of Richard Egarr playing Bach concertos with the AAM, and it's the only record that's ever made me want to throw up: obstructions are constantly put in the way of the music. I would imagine it's a bit like trying to watch John Sessions reading tragic poetry. I took the afternoon off to be a tourist with Betsy MacMillan who's visiting from Montréal, and in the Gallery of Modern Art I was struck by a small painting by someone I'd never come across before: 'Unidentified Aircraft', painted in Montrose in 1942 by Edward Baird (1904-49). A bit of web searching turned up that there was an exhibition of his work earlier this year in London to mark the centenary of his birth. Did anybody see it? Wednesday 8 December 2004 Very sleepy. But this is largely due to a late night spent in a couple of bars with harpsichord builder Bob Deegan, and bass maestro Malachy Robinson, who were both here with Nigel Kennedy and the Irish Chamber Orchestra, staying in the hotel at the bottom of our road. How convenient. So in the wee hours of this morning a heartfelt hymn to the joys of playing continuo on a 8' violone could be heard in the hotel bar. Which made a change from discussion of Celtic's goal-less draw with AC Milan. We didn't just talk about music, honest. It's been admin central here today as I've been shamelessly dropping playing commitments and turning down gigs in order to get some time to think and deal with the never-ending pile of stuff. Ben Twist sent me a copy of his final report on the 're-presenting live classical music' project, of which our March tour was a part. There's 115 pages of it. I can only admire people who manage to be creative, and still engage fully with bureaucracy at that sort of level. I can do basic simple administration and that's about it. If I were writing something like that, I'd get 5 pages in, and then decide I'd rather go outside and stand in the rain, so I'd have something fresh to write about. Also in this morning's mail came some sketches from Joe Davie for the cover of the Kellie CD - they look great. Although to my disappointment, the dog from 'Mungrel Stuff' doesn't make an appearance relieving himself up against the Earl of Kellie's leg. On Monday I was talking to a room full of traditional music students at the RSAMD about 18th century Scots basslines for fiddle tunes - and a bit about James Oswald, but basslines were more fun. It was really refreshing to be in a teacher/students situation where the students were clearly looking for ideas that they could take away and work with in their own way, rather than just looking for something that they can replicate. I came out quite energised. If you haven't listened to it yet, you only have until Saturday to hear 'Don't wear a hat' at www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/listen/ - click on 'Between The Ears' near the bottom of the page. And if you order The Red Red Rose from our CD shop, the discs will be mailed out first class so there should be plenty of time to get them for Christmas. Friday 3 December 2004 First things first. The Red Red Rose CD is now available - and very red it is too. Check out the audio samples on our CD page. I listened to it in the car yesterday and was delighted to see CD-Text track titles appear - wasn't expecting that. My favourite track at the moment is probably Old Sir Symon the King, thanks to DG's amazing heavy metal fiddling and the rest of us trying very hard to follow him. That and our flagrant disregard for the printed bassline. And Auld Robin Gray is a very sad song when you're not actually playing it. There's a full track listing at the Delphian Records site - click on 'shop' and you'll find it. Tomorrow on BBC Radio 3 my Between the Ears programme 'Don't Wear a Hat' gets an airing at 9.50pm GMT. If you miss it, it will be available on the 'listen again' part of the website for a week afterwards. Greg plays the two lowest strings on the violin, and I play the white notes of the piano and talk to the residents of two Glasgow care homes about this and that. And there's a hysterically funny rendition of I Belong to Glasgow sung in a thick French accent and played in 3 and 4 in a bar simultaneously. Amongst other things. On Wednesday I went off to Nenthorn to borrow Tony Kime's SADiE editing system, and by the end of the morning we'd tempted Tony out of retirement for a day to record us at the school on 11 February, with a concert afterwards. Excellent. The following morning I went into the RSAMD to hear Alison's lecture on playing basslines - I'm lecturing there next week, so thought I'd better find out what they know already. She started by saying that continuo playing was all about harmony, which made me laugh because I start my lecture from a keyboard player's perspective by saying that it's all about rhythm. So between the two of us I think we cover the important bases (I'll resist the weak pun available here). As I left, Lisa Milne rang about a really quite bizarre concert opportunity in April 2006; I won't say any more here about that yet. On the drive to Nenthorn I was listening to a compilation CD put together by Radio 3's Early Music Show which included some of the best Bach playing I've heard in ages: the group was Café Zimmerman playing Brandenburg 5, a piece which I had pretty much lost interest in, having heard it murdered so many times. When hearing a piece you know well, it's very good to hear yourself responding with 'yeah, that's how it goes' rather than wincing. Monday 29 November 2004 CDs have suddenly taken over. The Red Red Rose arrives at Delphian Records tomorrow, so I've been preparing mp3s for this site and a group email to encourage some pre-Christmas sales. Today I was interviewed for Radio Scotland's Songlines programme (I think) about the title song, and managed to squeeze in a bit of melodica playing too. And yesterday I finished off the edit of the Kellie Castle material for the Kellie disc, and also bumped into the director of a rather well-known festival who expressed interest in us playing there in 2006. My thesis about Red Red Rose (developed in the taxi on the way to the interview) is that Burns fell out with Urbani not because he didn't like his singing or because Urbani stuck a string quartet onto Burns's song, but because Urbani allowed his ego into the process. Burns didn't accept any payment or even much credit for all his editorial work on the Scots Musical Museum. So for this Italian to be using the same Scots traditional songs to further his singing and publishing career would have left a bitter taste with the self-effacing Burns. Well, it's a good taxi theory. Thursday 25 November 2004 I'm just back from a few days in London. Contractual restrictions prevent me from describing it in detail here, but amongst many other things I learnt a Bollywood dance routine, sang 'I fought the law' on (a small) stage with Tom Robinson, and had all my personality defects brought out into the open and ridiculed - OK, I'm exaggerating that last bit. All useful mulch. And I heard a rather good band called Flipron: well, I only caught a couple of minutes of their set, but a couple of minutes were enough to realise that they were a cut above the rest. I also picked up my latest reed organ acquisition from Alison, and have unpacked it today after its Colorado-Seattle-Washington-London-Glasgow journey. It's a folding Pearl River organ, made in China a couple of years ago from dodgy plywood and then lacquered into submission. It's rough and ready in construction and sound: in fact it's so loud that my Estey is now cowering in the corner. Once I've tuned it I'll have to decide which of the two is the more useful touring option and get a flight case made accordingly. Speaking of flights, it's unlikely but not impossible that I'll join the Chris Norman Ensemble for their dates in Baltimore, NYC and Montréal in January, but I'll be spending my birthday in Quebec City with Suzie LeB and 'joli bois', and then in April Matt Wadsworth has come up trumps with lute & harpsichord duo dates in NYC and Montréal. Meanwhile back here last Thursday, I just made it to the Royal Concert Hall in time to play with Barbara Bonney and Camerata Salzburg - a nice bunch. I don't normally drive into town, and I miscalculated the time required to get into an already full car park, finally making it backstage just as the final movement of the previous piece was starting. Sitting helpless and frustrated in a traffic queue is actually a good way to get adrenalised for a short appearance in a longer concert, but it's not so great for the tour manager's nerves. Today brought a meeting with our accountant about last year's accounts. This current year is a very quiet one for us (and getting quieter - eagle-eyed readers will notice one gig less on the events page), but 05/06 is going to be busy. So really I should be making the most of this year to plan ahead. When I've finished mulching. But it's very refreshing to have your accountant ask the question 'well yes David, but how does this fit your vision for the group?' rather than just thinking about the numbers. I don't feel like listening to music much at the moment, as I've been trying to shake off a cold for the last couple of weeks so I can't hear as clearly as I would like, so some paper mulch has been working its way to the back recesses of my brain: a long-awaited reprint of the glorious McSweeneys 13, Clyde Fans by Seth which slowly but surely won me over, and joy when's yesterday's Guardian pointed out how good Michael Rosen's Sad Book is. Tuesday 16 November 2004 Editing continues apace - Kellie is turning out nicely, and copies of The Red Red Rose should be in our hands by 1 December. Yesterday's mail brought my copy of Michael Rosen's Sad Book, a very simple and eloquent book on bereavement and sadness written, I suppose, for children, with equally eloquent illustrations by Quentin Blake. I like it very much. But then I like things (or music) that make a real emotional point with very simple means. I don't think you have to be complicated to be complex. And I don't think you have to show off to make good art - 'ars est celare artem' and all that. Today I must remind myself how Mozart's Exsultate Jubilate goes, as on Thursday I'll be sitting in on the organ with Camerata Salzburg and Barbara Bonney ... Friday 12 November 2004 I'm sitting here patiently at a desk waiting for some manuscripts to be brought up from the store. A kind person tipped me off in the summer that the NLS had bought what appeared to be some late 18th century Scottish harpsichord music in MS, so some months later here I am at last with some free time in Edinburgh to have a look. The lighting here in the North Reading Room is effective but really ugly, unlike the main reading room outside, which I've only ever walked through but is probably the most latently erotic room I have ever been in. It's something about all these clever-looking people examining the objects of their affection/attention in great detail, in subdued light and faintly luxurious surroundings. I always emerge from this building slightly dizzy. But perhaps that's the fault of the awful lighting ... I spent the morning at Delphian Records HQ putting the final touches to the master of The Red Red Rose, and I was able to stay just long enough to look at the films of the booklet and inlays on their way to the printers. It all looks very good indeed. I'll get the CD available for pre-order here on the website soon. Should be easily deliverable in time for Christmas. Later today in Seattle (all being well - when I spoke to her earlier she was still in Tucson, Arizona) Alison will take delivery on my behalf of a Pearl River folding reed organ. I'll go and get it from her in London in a week or so. Yes, another eBay purchase, another harmonium (I use the term loosely) to tune. But this one might turn out to be an even better touring option than the Estey as it folds up into what looks like a wide and heavy briefcase, rather than a large wooden box. later, on the train In James Robertson's Music Book, there are additions to some of the tune titles ('Put the Gown upon the Bishop - but not on me') and an occasional musical direction: Maggy Lauder is to be played 'brisk. - as brisk can be'. But I couldn't resist transcribing two jigs with irresistible titles: 'Johnys bare arse' and 'Maggys covered arse'. Johnny's bare arse - a CD title perhaps? Had an unexpected burst of creativity on Wednesday night when an email from Chris arrived with photos of new baby Evangeline. She's already got a 'Valse d'Evangeline' (which we recorded on La Mer Jolie), so now after a bit of frantic scribbling from me, she has a hornpipe to go with it. Wednesday 3 November 2004 It's been an eventful week and a bit since my last diary entry. Last week I was writing some music for a radio project and one morning I found myself writing down the instruction to myself 'stop making music for musicians'. I'd sketched a couple of ideas which I liked, but I was also thinking that by certain critical criteria it was facile, simplistic, a bit naïve. But I liked it and it did its job in the programme perfectly well. It's very nice to have the approval of your peers, but it can make your work sound a bit pleased with itself, so I vowed to banish thoughts of 'what would my colleagues make of this?' from my mind. As a result I also had a purge of my CD and vinyl collection and after an hour or two had thrown out a large pile of music that I wouldn't want to listen to again, but was hanging onto for reasons now revealed to be spurious. Quite cathartic. As for the music I was writing, just to make the point I restricted myself to the white notes of the piano, and Greg to playing on the lower two strings of the violin. It worked fine. I'll let you know when the broadcast is. My harmonium is now tuned to a'=441Hz in Young temperament. Sounds pretty good but I hope it gets easier to pump with time, it's quite a workout at the moment. Mike told me the leather valves will take a bit of playing in, as it probably sat in someone's attic in Georgia unplayed for at least a couple of decades. I've been going over session tapes in readiness to start editing 'SADN II' and some of the Kellie CD. The Kellie is still scheduled for February release, so time is short, but I had a meeting with Caroline at Linn on Monday and it all looks possible. I'm delighted that they're as keen as I am to have Joe Davie do the cover again. Caroline also suggested the possibility of me making a solo harpsichord recording on an instrument in the Russell Collection, so I've been cooking up a repertoire scheme for that one - we'll see what happens. I went to look at Glasgow City Hall earlier this week - a hard hat visit as it's a building site at the moment. Looks very promising though, with the addition of a great little high-ceilinged recital room above the foyer. We might be one of the first groups to play there when it opens. If you need any convincing that XTC are pop genuises, then listen to this wonderful bossa nova version of Making Plans for Nigel by Nouvelle Vague. Took my breath away. But the CD that keeps finding its way back into the player at the moment is Maria Kalaniemi's live album with Timo Alakotila and Olli Varis. I don't really know why Finnish music connects with me the way it does, but I'm happy to let it happen. And this is great playing too. © 2004-5 David
McGuinness |
concerto caledonia