Monday 29 December 2008

Yesterday I met Alison for a walk in Pollok Park, along with the great and the good of the city taking their Sunday constitutional - well, we did meet Fiona Fraser. It was freezing cold, but very picturesque. This really is in the middle of Glasgow ...

Later in the day DG and I had a jam session by Skype on stylophone and octave violin which wasn't really an artistic triumph but was pretty funny, and then today Sushil came over for the afternoon and we spent a few hours putting down the basic tracks for a Joe Raposo cover which might see release next year as a Future Pilot AKA vs. Concerto Caledonia track. I got to use my 414 in figure-of-eight (that's one for any sound engineers reading). By mid-afternoon we needed a screen break and a blood sugar lift, and Susie obliged by demolishing her carefully constructed gingerbread house with a rolling pin. 

before: fairytale cottage

after: abandoned croft

 Saturday 27 December 2008

In amongst the holiday preparations, lots of musical things fell through my letterbox. Among them were a CD-R containing the manuscripts of the Hertel trumpet concertos in JPEGs from Brussels conservatoire library, a shiny silver Stylophone from Pamela, the Dvorak bagatelles and some Michael Marra songs from Robert McFall, and a CD of the 2006 Boxwood Tempest concert from Kirsty, each of these fascinating and extremely entertaining in its own way.  And then my Christmas presents included this 10" LP, complete with original lyric sheet!

While it's tempting to just lie on the sofa reading books (and playing the stylophone) for the duration, somehow there are four tracks on my laptop in various states of completion or abandonment, and I'm just off the phone with Sushil, planning another Future Pilot AKA vs. Concerto Caledonia collaboration which might start to take shape on Monday. Last week I tried to record DG playing octave violin down the line from Halifax on Skype, but I think I only succeeded in recording whatever was going into my webcam mic at the time. Next time I'll put some thought into it first.

Tuesday 16 December 2008

Today I found myself in the rather strange position of researching a project by listening to some of my own records. I don't think I've heard Mungrel Stuff for a few years, and to my surprise I enjoyed it, agreeing with whoever it was in the Sunday Times who called it 'bizarre, but utterly compelling'. It certainly doesn't sound like anything else - for me this is a good thing.  But it feels like a long time ago that I was there.

The project I'm planning is rather complicated and won't reach a final shape until various people's diaries have been investigated, which could take some time. Meanwhile, I'm amassing lists of possible repertoire in a number of categories: 'music I would like to play in' basically. I have to get the whole thing together for a print deadline of 9 January, and given that there's a great fat holiday between now and then, I need to get ahead with it now.

In the process I finally got around to listening to the copy of Alasdair Roberts' No Earthly Man that's been lying around my study for a while. About four seconds after the end of the first track my stunned neurons were trying to get him on the phone.   

Getting into so-called 'creative' mode is difficult though. Before I could even think about making lists, I had to try out some previously unvisited guitar tunings, do some laundry, and practise the art of work avoidance for a bit. Graham Linehan would recognise this as storing up material in the sub-conscious.

With the passing of the peerless Oliver Postgate, has anyone else noticed that the song that the mice on the mouse-organ sing is to the tune of 'Sumer is icumen in'? I only just figured it out.

Saturday 13 December 2008

The latter part of this week got busier. Alison and Liz Kenny joined me in the British Library café on Thursday for tea and cakes: Liz assured me that these are an essential part of any library work day. I also bumped into David Owen Norris in the Reading Room, gleefully holding out an obscure edition of Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words and declaring 'This is gold dust!'. Then back in Glasgow yesterday, Matthew from the Edinburgh Festival joined me in Mother India for a very fine lunch, after the Wee Curry Shop was booked out. The spiced haddock with puy lentils, and Matthew's smoked lamb were particularly memorable. But if it sounds like all I've been doing is eating, it's just that I've been working on my own on an assortment of future projects, and such solitary wrangling doesn't really lend itself to be written about.

Still, I did start playing again this week, as last night Mark O'Keeffe and I had our first rehearsal of Hertel partitas in the balcony of the Guinness Room at the RSAMD.  Mark's initial surprise at how fast I was playing them 'That's impossible', soon gave way to him doing even more impossible things on the trumpet - it's really oboe music after all.

Yesterday I also got some hardware delivered along with my Sibelius upgrade, so that I now have a complete mobile studio that will fit in a bag (apart from the mic stands which won't). Sitting here at my desk, I'm surrounded by three pairs of speakers, which seems like an extravagance just to listen in old-fashioned stereo. I did a quick comparison once I'd set the new nearfield monitors up, which went like this. Computer speakers on my desk: well, they sound ok, nicely balanced, easy to listen to, what's the problem? New monitors, just above them: ah, now there's lots more space around everything and I can hear what's going on and where it all is in more detail and with less effort. Hifi speakers (Castle Acoustics Richmond 3) on either side of the fireplace: [response non-verbal, now dancing about].  So I think each set has justified its existence for its own type of listening. 

Tonight with the aid of the monitors I've been timestretching a fiddle part that DG recorded here some time ago ...

Tuesday 9 December 2008

Quote of the week from Jimmy McGovern, cited by Russell T Davies in Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe on screenwriting last week: "I would rather be confused for 10 minutes than bored for 5 seconds". 

I was listening the new Gotan project live album again this week - well, half-listening to it: good as it is, it's long on feel and short on content - and it made me think about how difficult it would be to do something similar with Scottish music. With their stuff, a track starts, and you can instantly tell it's tango even though the tune or the singer doesn't come in for another couple of minutes. The beat and the groove just have certain inflections and vocabulary. But you can't do that with Scottish traditional music, because there's no accepted accompaniment style that has sufficient character to carry a sense of identity. Why's that then?

I'm having to readjust to playing again, learning Hertel partitas and reading soprano clef. It's disposable music really, but good fun.

Just space for a quick plug for Sandy Semeonoff's show on Celtic Music Radio next Tuesday, 'cos he's playing one of my tunes along with some Buddhist funeral music from Thailand ... 

Saturday 6 December 2008
the café at Sandyflat
I've just managed to tear myself away from the newly-arrived Acme Novelty Library 19 for long enough to write this. For the last week or so I've been reading Mark Newgarden, which is a bit dark even for me, although Meet the Cast and The Little Nun make me laugh out loud: disposable gags with a questionable aftertaste.

Anyway, the British transport system still has trouble with the British climate. I was looking forward very much to getting on a train in Glasgow on Thursday, and getting off at the other end with a five-minute walk to the British Library. I got to Central Station, looked up at the board, and read '1249 London Euston - cancelled'. But some good advice and a bit of persistence got me to Edinburgh and a train down the East Coast Line instead, which gave me wintry views as the sun went down, and free wifi at my comfy seat. 

snowy fields from the train in North East England

I lost an hour of valuable library time, but was cheered by the biggest dosas I've ever seen at Ragam with Maeve: thanks to Keith and Sushil for the tip.

Speaking of Sushil, Alison and I will be the Concerto Caledonia contingent in his Orange Juice Dub Arkestra at Celtic Connections on Burns Night in January. Among the treats awaiting me at the BL were a couple of 18th century fiddle tunes dedicated to Scots in Jamaica, so now I need to work out how to play them as part of reggae versions of Orange Juice songs. Hmm.

Also in the BL was Pietro Urbani's 'Ever Memorable Battle of Bannockburn', a bizarre cantata in which Burns's 'Scots Wha Hae' gets massacred along with the English. The postman just brought a large envelope of photocopies to the door: I think it's in there ...

Tuesday 2 December 2008

I've just been out with a shovel and a bucket to the nearest grit bin, to try and make the pavement around our house a bit less treacherous. There was some light rain early this morning, which landed on the freezing ground and formed a carpet of sheet ice. The council don't bother gritting our road (and they don't grit pavements at all - how come it's only the people already surrounded by airbags and crush zones that get local government protection from danger?), so there's been occasional entertainment watching cars spin around out of control. It's entertaining as long as there are no pedestrians within range, as walking downhill on sheet ice is difficult enough without trying to dodge wild cars as well. Cycling is a complete no-no, and the hockey pitch is now an icehockey pitch, lit in stripes by the hotel across the road. 

Monday 1 December 2008

It's cold here now, cold enough for cycling to be a scary business: if the ice on the hills doesn't get you, the low sun in an oncoming driver's eyes might.

This morning I was in the university library reading a list of Stationers' Hall music entries from 1710-1815. I only found some of what I was looking for, but inevitably I came across lots of other very interesting things along the way.  My recent experimental purchase of some Sennheiser CX300 headphones made working in an already quiet environment into a kind of blissful isolation.  To get warm I went to the baths on the way home: the Russian bath didn't seem as hot as usual. The cold plunge was still pretty cold though.

Susie's knitted case for my headphones to keep them cosy

On Friday I finally got to the end of writing a budget and funding application that's been on my to-do list for well over a year, and sent it off to Andrew. Then over the weekend I fiddled around with a new tune (now on myspace), and at last stopped my laptop from spewing out distortion and requiring a reset of its ASIO driver every few minutes: it was AVG's anti-virus software getting in the way. Even so, AVG is still less hassle than Norton, which was clogging up all the computers here until I removed it in frustration a few weeks ago.

I was spurred on with the new tune by the desire to produce another new year CD. I haven't written Christmas cards for years, but last year I made up a CD of various tracks that I'd recorded at home over the year, to give away to a few friends as seasonal entertainment. It had been bothering me that this year's offering, if I did one, was going to be a bit sparse. Anyway, the domestic CD factory is now up and running, although I wasted an hour today trying to locate the source of some digital splats on the end product. I checked every stage of the production chain, even remixed the track, until I remembered that I'd recorded the initial guitar part in a completely slapdash manner, and even titled it 'dirty git' to remind me that it was full of crackles. I made a mental note to re-record it if the music ever started to sound less chaotic. And then forgot. GIGO.

Thursday 27 November 2008

My cold still hasn't gone away, so rather than venture out into the weather (which isn't that bad actually) I'm sitting at my desk surrounded by the bits of paper which explain the ConCal company accounts, making sure that there's nothing missing before I send it all off to our splendid auditors. It's effective punishment for a whole year's worth of hurried or incomplete record-keeping, where the explanation of an unlikely amount of money could be on a scrap of paper hiding in an envelope, or in a spreadsheet filed under the wrong year, or in an email now cowering in 'Sent Items' after a moment of carelessness with the mouse. Must do better. 

On Tuesday I sat with my laptop on the train to Edinburgh, for a meeting with Jonathan Mills and Matthew Studdert-Kennedy. On Jonathan's recommendation I've since been listening to Géza Anda's recording of the Bartók piano concertos, which impressed me not so much for the piano playing as for the raucous racket that the WDR wind section make: a reminder of the days when all orchestras didn't try to sound the same.

Yesterday I wound up at Barnaby and Elinor's for lunch: I'd called him from the train and it seemed easier to carry on our conversation by biking the couple of hundred yards to their house from the station rather than going home and calling him back. My notebook is now full of ideas from the two days' meetings that I will have to bash into some sort of coherent shape in the next week or so.  My brain was already a bit pummeled by about 2pm, so it was welcome relief to get a message from DG in Halifax saying that the Moneyville household (Kirsty, Ethan & co.) had finally got around to joining skype, so we celebrated this with a long and silly four-way conference call including all of Vortex 3, various related family members and a ukelele. 

Monday 24 November 2008

Day four of my stinking cold here: today I didn't so much throw in the towel as pick one up, spending the afternoon at the baths with Greg, where we agreed to swap harmony lessons for violin overdubs. Speaking of overdubs, you can hear the results of last Wednesday's kitchen session on my myspace page.

I caught some of the coverage of the 40th anniversary of the Beatles White Album over the weekend. When I was discovering that music 20 years ago or thereabouts with the help of Mark Lewisohn's 'sessions' book, getting hold of the original mono mixes was pretty much impossible unless you were very lucky and came across a very expensive mono copy at a record fair (or as I did last year, a cheap one in a jumble sale). Now thanks to P2P, you can find it all very easily, not to mention alternate mixes, outtakes, demos, you name it. Given that the Beatles records constitute some of the most influential pop music of the last century, it's quite incredible that EMI haven't released the mono versions commercially yet: it's the mono mixes that the Beatles largely concerned themselves with at the time. Anyway, the White Album is one of those records that you put on and think 'come on, half of this is just a mess' and then you find yourself humming all the tunes for days afterwards and realise how good it is. Unfortunately it opened the door to lots of lesser talents making similarly undisciplined records at great expense: that'll be the 1970s then.

Saturday 22 November 2008

Lots of admin and planning getting done here for forthcoming gigs and recordings, all still pencillings in the diary but requiring much time and effort nonetheless. And I've got a stinking cold, so it's taking a while.

As I was observing No Music Day yesterday I couldn't watch Steeleye Span night on BBC4 but have been catching up with bits of it on the iPlayer today instead. I was the subject of some ridicule as a first year music student in York (having given up maths after 4 weeks) when instead of going along to hear the London Sinfonietta doing Frankenstein! with HK Gruber in the university concert hall with everyone else, I got on the bus to Leeds and went to see Steeleye Span instead. At least then they didn't have people shouting 'ARSE!' during All Around My Hat: explanations of this are here, here, and here.

Despite the credit crunch I gave in to my periodic urge to buy pictures this week, picked up one of these, and am now eagerly awaiting the trip to the framers when it eventually arrives. James Kochalka is best known for his addictive four-panel diaries as American Elf.

Wednesday 19 November 2008

Just back from lunch at the Wee Curry Shop with Alison, where we finally tied down the shape of a potential ConCal recording that we first planned out about six months ago. Sometimes things move slowly. A bit like my cycling today: when every road seems to be covered in a thin film of wet leaves, you don't go too fast in case you can't stop. 

This morning Barnaby came over for a triplepipe overdub on a tune that's been languishing on the computer since March. We turned the kitchen into a studio, which involved unplugging the toaster. If you're in the UK you can watch him playing the triplepipes in Iona Abbey as part of this programme.

toaster unplugged

some more pipes

in case you need reminded about Friday

Tuesday 18 November 2008

Today I wasted 4 hours trying to work out why my laptop was now producing random short bursts of white noise with certain tracks loaded. Ignoring the advice on one website 'you have trial version of software loaded', I tweaked every parameter and clock I could find until eventually tracking down the culprit as a VST plugin that, yes indeed, was a trial version I hadn't registered since putting it on the laptop. Fixed in a few minutes. Oops.

At lunchtime I bumped into Karen McAulay at the RSAMD, which was fortuitous, as I've recently worked out that because it's 15 years since I tried to do any serious academic work, all of my bibliographical tools are 15 years out of date, and the innovations of those 15 years include such helpful delights as the widespread use of the three w's. Who better to ask for advice than a music librarian who's writing up her PhD?

Back in circulation on my iPod after being ousted by all the Maria Kalaniemi albums is the new one from Flipron, which is on release at last. Thanks to my soon-to-be-relinquished role as a 'specialist media tastemaker' (yes, that's really how Music Week described me) I got a copy a couple of months early. And it's everything I would have liked it to be: funny and heartbreaking, polished and ragged, and extremely intelligent without being ashamed to use the word 'arse'. Get it here. As if that wasn't enough, Jesse has just admitted to me that his great-grandfather was Arnold Dolmetsch, and now I'm utterly confused as to whether that explains anything about Flipron at all. One thing is for certain: this man is no stranger to a gamba. And my timewasting this morning is best summed up in his final words from the album: "I've always known the price of each squandered day/I've always known what each hour cost/Something lost...".

Friday 14 November 2008

Sadly, the Flipron gig I was hoping to go to on Sunday has been cancelled, but in partial recompense the copy of Barry Andrews' single 'Win A Night Out With A Well-known Paranoiac' that I tracked down, has arrived in the post, and it sounds dangerously like proto-Flipron. As I remember, Annie Nightingale still used to play it on her Radio 1 show years after it came out. Not bad for a B-side that was never a hit.

A text message arrived during the night from Katy Bircher, saying she's in a taxi in Mexico City and Mungrel Stuff is on the radio. Hooray.

You can watch DG in his dynamic role as S.M.A.W. (substitute middle-aged weirdo) in Red Priest here - especially his rock 'n' roll Tartini Devil's Sonata. And the two of us are blasting away behind Adrianne Greenbaum on youtube here: the harmonium is cunningly hidden behind the harpsichord. 

Thursday 13 November 2008
BL again, desk 131
I’ve got an unexpectedly free day after what I was going to do this afternoon got cancelled at the last minute, so I’m back here in the Rare Books and Music Reading Room with Tuesday’s pile of 18^th century tune books. This is a very nice place to work: it almost makes you proud to be British.

Last night in Cambridge I had a very enjoyable if slightly too alcoholic evening with old buddy Gordon’s family and friends, which went well into the night. Some of it we spent in the sympathetic confines of the Live and Let Live – you just don’t get pubs like that in Scotland ...

Tuesday 11 November 2008
British Library Rare Books and Music Reading Room, desk no. 106
I made it to London last night in time to catch the end of a party at Lucy’s (which I wasn’t expecting) and was surprised to find that I knew all but one of the people there. That’s the Walthamstow early music collective for you. It’s always great to catch up with Lucy, and I enjoyed the benefits of Peter McCarthy’s wisdom too. Peter is that valuable asset, a musician who has worked out when not to play. In his case as a bass player, he’s learnt from his research that 16-foot bass wasn’t played that much in a lot of the repertoire he specialises in, so he’s essentially put a lot of effort into putting himself out of work. Which I guess isn’t a lucrative way to make music, but it is an honest one.

I’m just waiting for a pile of 18^th century books to be delivered to the issue desk, and in the meantime I can enthuse here about what an excellent building this is. To my shame I haven’t visited the British Library since it was in the British Museum, and it’s a deeply impressive place. I’ve just had a rather good pot of tea and some excellent cake downstairs in the café to help me while away the allotted 70 minute wait, and passed on some Oswald scores to Maeve’s hard drive in the foyer.  It’s just as well I’ve finally got myself a laptop as otherwise I really wouldn’t feel like I fit in here.  

Monday 10 November 2008
on the train to St Pancras
Glasgow airport’s had an internal refit of sorts: the security hall is a vast improvement, but once you’re through that, every passenger now has to walk all the way through one of those dismal World Shopping experiences, a long snaking path through shiny overpriced nonsense. It’s very ugly and rather demeaning: now that your belongings have been officially deemed safe, all that you are left to be is a potential retail opportunity. Bleah.

Yesterday Mark and I had a look at a possible recording venue just a short walk from home. It has a wonderful bass-enhancing acoustic, and a chamber organ by Neil Richerby in situ, but it’s a bit heavy on the traffic noise from outside.  I’d had the bright idea in the morning of going for a bike ride, fuelled by a breakfast of porridge and kippers from Saturday’s market. Five minutes in when the hailstorm started, I wondered if it was really such a good idea. And six miles later when I hit a patch of wet leaves and fell off, I nearly regretted setting out. When I got home I shopped on eBay for Gore-Tex patches for the resultant rip in my waterproof trousers, and put all my muddy clothes in the wash. The lump on my leg’s gone down a bit now but last night it was quite impressive: I probably aggravated it by crawling around on the floor after our amazingly cute baby niece, who was visiting while her dad was in town picking up a BAFTA.

Friday 7 November 2008

Returning to academic pursuits after a break of a couple of decades turns up some nice discoveries, not least being able to access the British Library catalogue on the net. Quite a resource. Maybe it's just as well I haven't explored it before, or I could have wasted countless hours, weeks, and months digging out all sorts of things.  

Of course, as with mp3 files of all kinds of music now being available for free, when you have access to absolutely everything it can stop being interesting. At breakfast in Brighton a couple of weeks ago I suggested that in addition to Radio 3's programme Discovering Music, there should be another called Abandoning Music, where a piece that's been played quite enough over the years gets a final performance and recording from a BBC orchestra before the score and parts are destroyed. I was quite serious, but no-one seemed to think the idea had legs. Does the world really need another state-subsidised performance of (insert your choice of lacklustre orchestral work here)?

Thursday 6 November 2008

Listening to this while having a skype conversation with Catherine Motuz this morning got my brain moving a bit. The music is carefully worked out, but it still sounds fresh: you get the sense that they're looking forward to hearing how each note comes out. It's also the difference between knowing how something's going to happen (good) and knowing what is going to happen (dull). Having a well defined musical process is vital - it stops you getting nervous for one thing - but deciding in every detail what it's going to sound like is not usually helpful. 

Healthy doses of improvisation in early music might also help to convince the jazz cats that there are vocabularies to improvise in other than the 1950s one ... and that going to Berklee to learn how to play in D flat might not be strictly necessary for musical freedom. Personally I've lost pretty much all interest in playing in keys that don't sound good in a nice unequal temperament: these days I like major chords to have credible thirds in them where possible.

I watched Top Gear the other night, partly to see how offensive Jeremy Clarkson was, and partly to enjoy watching him injure himself, and was struck by what an entertaining and generally well-crafted programme it is, and how engaging the presenters are. Unfortunately, everything the programme stands for stinks: bullying, casual misogyny, cheap stereotypes and pointless destruction - quite apart from the worship of fast cars. You don't have to smash things up to have a good time. Then I came in the following day and saw Susie watching Blue Peter, where they were blowing up a garden shed to demonstrate the Gunpowder Plot. Now that the IMF is telling the entire country that it's about to be completely skint, the attraction of smashing things to bits for fun might wear off. 

Tuesday 4 November 2008

Even though I might make it to the British Library next week, it's good being able to plan work that doesn't necessarily involve travelling, and it's refreshing to be planning a recording that might take place in a church five minutes' bike ride from here. I had to drop some scores off with Mark O'Keeffe today, so just to make the point that I wasn't in a hurry I went there on the 1950s Humber bike that I fixed up a few months ago. Brakes and gears aren't exactly 21st century, but it was still fun and I didn't end up under a bus.  The pannier rack was becoming less than attached to my other bike, so thanks to the guys at West End Cycles who were standing outside in the sun as I passed this morning, and fixed it for the princely sum of 20p before I'd even taken my helmet off. 

These people played a fun session on Vic's radio show last night - available here for a few days: they reminded me a bit of Iva Bittová, which is no bad thing.  Meanwhile for pleasure I'm still listening to nothing much other than a pile of Maria Kalaniemi albums ... I still like Timo A's piano playing as much as ever.

Saturday 1 November 2008

It's my first weekend at home for two months: when not further refining repertoire for a future project I've been picking apples (more off the ground than the trees), and avoiding leaf-raking by using the lawnmower with the blades set high. The solo harpsichord recital has turned out be a safe 38 hours after thrashing the Steinway, so that's OK then. I don't think I'm due to go on a stage now for almost three months, which is just as well as I have lots of catching up to do. I can see urgent tasks on the list beside me that I wrote down as urgent in April.

Tuesday 28 October 2008

Now that all of those concerts have been accomplished, the future can begin to present itself. So lots of logistical arrangements were underway today, including the possibility of double-tracked trumpets, the Rezillos meeting the Flying Lizards (metaphorically), technical riders, potentially sharing a stage with some very famous reggae musicians indeed, assessing the relationship between an ideal fee and a minimum fee, and deciding whether it's possible to play a solo harpsichord recital 14 hours after thrashing a Steinway into submission (I don't think so). Also today came the extremely frustrating news that Shirley Collins came to our gig on Sunday, but her bus was late and then she couldn't actually get into the building once we'd started, and was stranded out in the pouring rain - argh! So my unspoken wish to post a picture here of me with Bott, Bowman and Collins was closer to fruition than I'd realised ... bugger.

Monday 27 October 2008

Sure enough I ended up in the bar with Kate and Stephen before Saturday evening was out, taking up Stephen's recommendation of Fever Tree as the basis of a good G&T, and noting his observation that the entire population of Brighton seemed to be completely shit-faced. I'd gone for a walk along the pier for fish 'n' chips and sea air earlier. It was quite windy.

The audience at the Silas Benney theatre got us off to a good start yesterday by laughing heartily at the news story about Peter Mandelson from the Radio 3 feed before we went on air. I'm not sure if I covered myself in glory in the broadcast playing Cavalli arr Leppard, a Dowland song, and then completely fouling up the intro of the Handel duet I was reading off the full score, but the concert afterwards was good fun in a suitably bizarre way. And in the audience was someone who'd been at our Dundee gig a few weeks ago, and Maeve, going for the audient award for maximum coverage of the UK. She hadn't made it to the British Library on Saturday either.

My broadcast career really isn't going as well as it might this weekend, as I'm told CBC also broadcast me yesterday sight-reading my way through Paul Halley's music like a rabbit caught in headlights at Boxwood. Oh well.

later
Isn't YouTube wonderful? Now you can see this (the first four minutes are just a silly but entertaining gag), and this remarkable abstract guitar duel complete with string break (Mary  was a pretty tidy player too, though the Gibson Les Paul with the 50s dress now looks weird - in a good way) followed by this completely surreal bit of lipsync, with the broken string still hanging there. My gob is smacked.

Also on YouTube you can contribute to an (almost) private joke by clicking here.

Saturday 25 October 2008
on the London-Brighton train
I’m on my way to tomorrow’s Early Music Show/Brighton Early Music Festival gig, enjoying the luxury of a whole evening off with nothing but a room in the Grand Hotel to look forward to (well, I might have a beer with Kate and Stephen if she gets back from her gig in Chichester in time).

Yesterday’s rehearsal with Ms Bott and James Bowman in a basement was very entertaining in lots of ways. Any rehearsal with Kate is entertaining, and James’s legendary near-constant stream of filthy gags keeps everything moving along very effectively indeed. Even with a Kawai grand piano, the Dowland song we ran through suddenly reminded me that this voice singing to me was the one that I found so arresting, singing lute songs on a record I borrowed from Glasgow’s Mitchell Library when I was about 14.

I was staying at Alison’s place in London last night while she was in Paris rehearsing with Emmanuelle Haïm. I’d planned to make her some supper when she got back on the last plane out of Paris, but her train to Charles de Gaulle was late and she missed it, so I ended up booking her onto the (very) early morning Eurostar and looking up hotels while she got on a train to Lille. Then that Eurostar got cancelled, so the supper which was briefly going to be breakfast became lunch, before she headed to her concert later on in Wales.

I made good use of her piano anyway: I’d planned to go to the British Library to get a reader’s ticket for the first time in about 20 years, but doing some practice for tomorrow seemed more important, and I’ll be back in London again soon anyway. And I’ve spent the last two hours in a café with Barb Jungr getting some ideas in motion that might start to take shape in the future …

I’ve also been completely enthralled by a 90-minute film about Les Paul which I downloaded from the BBC last weekend. I suppose I’d always assumed that his records with Mary Ford were clever novelties, never having listened to them properly, but I was utterly amazed at how good they are. If you’re going to invent multi-tracking, home recording, and the solid body electric guitar you might as well get all of them spectacularly right. And the results are more unashamedly pop than those of his fellow genius musician-inventor Raymond Scott.

The documentary also showed him in the 30s playing in a hillbilly band with a cello in it rather than a double bass.  Nowadays we’re conditioned to hearing 16 foot bass on everything, and not just in early music.  I really think that it’s only in the last few weeks that I’ve properly recalibrated my ears and brain not to think that there’s something missing when it’s not there. I’m still listening to Maria Kalaniemi records when I can, and knowing most of the tunes from the peerless Tokyo Concert recording which is just accordion, piano and guitar, now hearing the original studio versions which have more instruments seems wrong: What is that bass doing there? It’s too low! It doesn’t sit in the track, it’s in its own frequency space! Join CANLOB, the Campaign for the Abolition of Needlessly LOw Basslines. You know it makes sense.  

Monday 20 October 2008

Next Sunday I have my last gig for quite a long time, at Brighton playing in this, and then a little cabaret with Mr Bowman and Ms Bott afterwards. It should be fun, even though I've never exchanged more than a quick hello with James Bowman. Having said that, he came along to one of our gigs in 1999 with Linda Ormiston, and sang along enthusiastically in the chorale of a Bach cantata, to the great surprise of the people in the row in front. He's also on one of my favourite records ever, Simon Preston's 70s recording of the Handel Birthday Ode for Queen Anne with the AAM, on which his account of the opening 'Eternal Source of Light Divine' is quite stunning.

So I'd better learn the notes: everything from Cavalli and Handel to Noel Coward and Flanders & Swann. The failure/success parameters are rather complex. 

Strange things happen in BBC buildings at night: things like this.

Sunday 19 October 2008

When we first started going on holiday to the west of Scotland and its islands, you would habitually see wonderful seafood being landed, but you couldn't buy any of it as it was all being boxed up and sent to Spain. If you went to the local cafe or pub, it was frozen scampi and chips on offer. But now on the harbour at Oban, there are several kiosks touting for business selling fantastically fresh stuff from the sea - my scallops in hot garlic butter yesterday lunchtime were terrific. And we managed to stop the shamelessly greedy seagulls from stealing any. Then we passed three car accidents in the 30-odd miles between Oban and Tyndrum on the A85: sunshine and showers look great, but they don't half make the roads slippy.

But anyway ... while climbing up the hill at Lismore Point yesterday I got the news that I've become a great-uncle, so a big welcome to Beth Rachel Lawson. Hooray!

Wednesday 15 October 2008  
Isle of Lismore

view from the laptop

The other (possibly more important) thing about playing classical music is that it sets out clear failure/success parameters.  If you’ve played Mozart badly, or in a mediocre fashion, it’s very difficult to have achieved anything other than mediocre Mozart, or getting it wrong.  But when you’re making music without direct reference to an event or a composition in the past, then sometimes (in fact often) when you get it wrong, the end result is far more successful than what you had originally intended. And who’s going to tell you you’re doing it wrong? The early music police? Don’t think so.

Other bits of today… I saw an otter playing on the rocks and swimming off, from the living room window this morning. Tonight I cycled to Port Ramsay in the dark: no streetlights, no road markings, just an occasional sheep jumping out of the way, and a cattle grid. Unsportingly, the moon stayed behind the clouds, but cycling across the island alone under the hills in the quiet feels good. For reading material I’ve moved on to the Acme Novelty Library 18 (Building Stories rather than Rusty Brown), which takes some digesting but repays the effort. And tonight with the laptop at the kitchen table I’ve also been learning my way around Steinberg’s Halion sampler.

Monday 13 October 2008
Isle of Lismore
The total lack of phone signal on stage at ABC2 meant that I couldn’t call Catherine for her sackbut solo after all, but Robbie recorded a spoken message on my phone for me to use instead. What the set lacked in technical cohesion it made up for with spirit as expected, including such bizarre additions as a mutated theme from Here Come the Double Deckers making it into Daniel Johnston’s Mountain Top: Raymond Macdonald came up with a stonking Roy Wood-type sax riff for the intro, I said ‘that’s the Double Deckers theme’ and Duglas ended up singing ‘Get on board the Future Pilot’ if I remember rightly.  

What was less chaotic was doing a couple of songs with Alasdair Roberts – Sushil invited the audience to join in the campaign to rescue Ali’s song Coral and Tar from its destined resting place as an obscure B-side. Come to think of it, we saw a whole new side to Ali when Finlay didn’t make it to the soundcheck and he stepped in on drums, transformed from his usual quiet mild-mannered self into a wild grinning animal on a determined mission behind the kit.

We weren’t the only bizarre set of the night: King Creosote was on after us and he sang the ‘La-Di-Da’ song that I first heard on a Francie and Josie LP we had on reel-to-reel when I was about 7. Now that was weird.  

Alison and Anurudh

I did make my stage laptop debut though, and with a phone, a harmonium and melodica, there was a real opportunity to play on stage, although perhaps Sushil introducing me as the Scottish Brian Eno was taking it several steps too far. The Phantom Band had two melodicas lying around the stage as well, but as I didn’t see their set (sheltering from the torrential rain in one of Sauchiehall Street’s noodle bars) I’ve no idea what they did with them.

Anyway, now we’re on holiday: no car, no work, I’m just reading Persepolis which I finally bought in the comic shop in Boston, and listening repeatedly to the Maria Kalaniemi albums I loaded onto my iPod before leaving.  I’ll cycle the 3 miles down to the shop a bit later when the rain stops.

later
The sun came out; it was a beautiful day. I’m running up a tab at the shop and I just about managed to get everything home in my pannier, except for the cans of Guinness that fell off and exploded. At least it wasn’t my tyre that exploded, which is what happened in October the last time I cycled back from the shop. But I didn’t really mind, as the view up Loch Linnhe when cycling up the island with the wind behind you in the sunshine is profoundly cheering. And I went back and got more Guinness later when we all visited the café.  

Thinking about what I wrote earlier, I’ve just realised that what’s still missing from most of my musical life is play. Here on holiday I still have lots of things to do, whether it’s the shopping or the washing up, but I now have some time to play; our kids, on the other hand, are free to play pretty much all of the time here. It’s not coincidental that we use the same verb 'play' for making sounds with an instrument, but playing really means being free to mess around, try things out, have fun, make mistakes and make discoveries. And if that’s in front of an audience as on Friday night, then even better. There was a moment in the middle of one song at the ABC when I looked down at my phone lying on the harmonium and thought ‘Will I pick up the phone, will I play some chords, will I set off some sound effects, what will I do?’ and the excitement of being able to play like that on stage was very real.  I’ve no idea what it sounded like but it’s a freedom that I’m keen to revisit.

The theme of play comes back time and again in the thinking of musicians whose thoughts I read, whether it’s Robert Fripp talking about his friend Eno, or Fred Frith pointing out that an artist is someone who hasn’t forgotten how to play. Someone like Chris is extremely good at it too. I need to be able to make the time and space to let myself play, as most of the music-making process for me is just work, and it’s time I shifted the balance.

One of the problems with classical music generally and particularly with early music is that it’s labour-intensive, and especially preparation-intensive. To a greater or lesser extent you’re involved in an act of historical reconstruction, so you can’t just pick up your instrument and make music. You have to do your research, pick the right instrument and get it into playing condition, learn the notes, and get yourself through a large number of mental and physical processes before you can set yourself free to actually make some music.  If the music involves a large number of people then the management of that becomes very complex too.  When there are simpler options available, which offer a more satisfying and efficient music-to-effort ratio, this form of music-making becomes less and less attractive.

Thursday 9 October 2008

I'm working unexpectedly late tonight: having dug out the soundboard recording of our gig last year with the Tiger Lillies, I'm now doing a quick premaster job on it to make it presentable enough to send to a German agent.

The set of guitar strings I bought at the tea break on Tuesday night will have to wait. I couldn't help gloating that I could buy a set of strings for £5.50 - a set for Alison's cello is about £140.

Wednesday 8 October 2008

We were just about to leave for the Future Pilot AKA rehearsal at A-side Studios last night when I got a skype message from Catherine M asking where the rehearsal was and if anyone was allergic to squash-related foodstuffs.  The upshot of all of this was that she came along with a sackbut, a pumpkin pie and some icecream.  She's not going to be here for the gig on Friday but the plan is that I will phone her up in Switzerland from the stage, and she can play sackbut down the phone which I will hold up to the harmonium mic.  This is the sort of thing Sushil thrives on I think.

traditional Glasgow diet of roll and crisps, 
and Alison's red shoes (that the angels want to wear)

alternative Glasgow diet of newly baked pumpkin pie and ice cream

It was my first attempt at using laptop in a live situation and to my surprise it seemed to work quite well, making a nice contrast with the harmonium, melodica, and mobile phone held up to the mic. I didn't have any suitable speech recorded on my phone to replace Damo Suzuki's improvisations on the recorded version of Festival of Lights, so I just rang up the Orange answering service instead. As we are playing at a mental health festival, the plaintive instruction at one point 'for help dial zero' was quite poignant. 

my play corner

I started the day today with a visit to Bradford's bakery before dropping in on Greg for breakfast. Is calling a cake a 'Jap Fancy' racist?  

Another moral dilemma: in the latest They Might Be Giants podcast they've included a rather brilliant cover version from the early 90s of Hello Hello by Gary Glitter. Presumably detailed news of his recent history is not that current in Brooklyn. By telling you this and how much I enjoyed it, am I potentially contributing to 1) his bank account, or 2) his justification of an indefensible lifestyle? Neither of which I would be very happy about.

If you're in London on Saturday, go to this! If you're interested in harmoniums of course. I'm sorry I can't go.

Thanks to Tim Hamilton in Cambridge, MA who sent me some adverts from 1894 for one of these, which comes with a 'support et grande branche pour l'adaptation au piano', allowing the player to play piano and what is essentially a melodica simultaneously, without precariously balancing the melodica in their lap like I have to. As it says, 'le même artiste peut jouer l'instrument de la main droite en s'accompagnant de la main gauche', or in my case do the funky chords with the right hand and the bassline with the left.

Tuesday 7 October 2008

A very very wet morning: the kind that presents two options. Either stay indoors and wait for it to stop, or clad yourself from head to toe in waterproof clothing and get on with what you were going to do anyway. I chose option 2. Being out in the pouring rain is no problem, it's great fun. But the transitions from inside to outside and vice versa are a little problematical. I managed to achieve a visit to my Iranian barber, the cheese shop and the greengrocers and still be back just after 11am on my trusty Dahon. But I was the only customer at each establishment.

While typing the above I've just managed to get Catherine Motuz picked up at Edinburgh airport by Andrew, who just happened to be there. Her bus was late and she missed her flight back to Switzerland ...

Anyway, Sunday gradually improved in outlook, even if my harpsichord obstinately refused to stay in tune (which may have been because it was sitting in a sunny window and had been near an electric heater all night) so that our planned rehearsal time was pretty much entirely taken up with me tuning the thing from scratch three times in a row.  I managed a short walk along the shore of the loch, which as you can see was glassy and still. The house is on the extreme right of the picture.

An expectant and welcoming audience is a great help to the making of music. An appropriate setting helps too. And somehow David Sumsion's Muir, Wood & Co. square piano was still in tune after my visit with DG here in April, so it got pressed into service in some Alexander Reinagle and a John Reid flute sonata.

Pictured above enjoying tea and cakes afterwards by the roaring log fire in the dining room with Chris are Maeve McMahon and Catherine Motuz, who both found novel ways of getting to the gig. Catherine had come from Basel but was playing in Shrewsbury the previous night: miraculously her flight to Glasgow got in on time less than 2 hours before we started, and Andrew picked her up from the airport. But the prize for sheer ingenuity goes to Maeve, just arrived in London from Ohio, who got the bus the whole way (from London, not Ohio). With about ten minutes to go I said to Andrew, 'Well, it doesn't look like Maeve made it after all', walked out into the hall and there she was.

Saturday 4 October 2008
8.30am at breakfast 
I suppose when we arrived at 1am last night we should have taken it as a bad omen that the hotel reception was covered by full riot-control metal shutters.  A wedding party will still well underway, so the lack of any effective soundproofing in the rooms (mine anyway) lent the night a near-constant soundtrack of various guests in assorted states of alcoholic dereliction.  Readers outside Scotland may find the notion of the archetypal Scottish drunk amusing, but the reality isn’t much fun. And I wasn’t asleep much either.

Still, things are now looking up, as the chef’s just delivered some Arbroath smokies to my table.

10.30pm
The Lily Room, Ardkinglas House: in bed
I seriously unravelled this morning after having to tune another harpsichord: one of the reasons that I prefer not to tune if at all possible (we couldn’t find anyone reliable who was free for these gigs) is that being the tuner as well as a player keeps you away from the rest of the band. You don’t get to share in the communal pre-gig or pre-rehearsal conversation, or the food: I had the smokies to myself this morning. So you can start to feel isolated pretty quickly.  If there's no alternative, I don’t mind picking up the extra jobs and dealing with this, as long as everything else is working OK. But when other things start to go wrong and I’m at full stretch then it starts to become impossible. And today I didn’t deal with the stress very well at all.

Somehow despite everything we played quite a good gig, the audience were definitely up for it, bought lots of CDs, and to cap it all Michael Marra complimented Chris on his singing afterwards.  We were unprepared for the audience’s enthusiasm though, and managed to get ourselves stranded on stage at the end without a encore, so we crashed our way through The Arses set with an air of slightly alarmed desperation.

Simon Chadwick showed us his amazing harp afterwards too.

When we got here we were greeted with an excellent dinner in the dining room with David, Angela, Isabella (Sophie was asleep) and their Finnish visitors. It's always a treat to be outnumbered by Finns. 

some views of Loch Fyne in the 24 hours we were there

Friday 3 October 2008
driving to Dundee about 11.30pm
We’ve just played our first gig of the week at Mugdock Country Park. I didn’t even know there was a theatre in the visitor centre, but it was a terrific venue: just enough space for 60 people at the most in comfy seats, but still room for a Yamaha baby grand and a generous acoustic. Nice audience too. I borrowed a big stone that was helping hold down the cover on the well outside, to jam down the sustaining pedal in Dorrington Lads so that I could play piano and harmonium simultaneously.

cosy theatre inside

tea and sausage sandwiches outside (I was tuning and forgot to get mine)

Our gig in Dundee is at 11.30 tomorrow morning so we’re driving through there tonight, Alison and I taking turns at the wheel with Chris in the back.

I had just enough time this morning to get my head in gear for this mini-tour and prepare the material for our gig at the ABC next week. It’s rare to have a series of concerts that I haven’t really had to prepare for at all. We’ve played all the music before, Chris arrived via Amsterdam at 8.25 this morning, and we just got ourselves into trio mode and did it. I wonder how we’ll sound tomorrow morning when the tiredness kicks in a bit more …

Wednesday 1 October 2008
back home
It took me all of Monday and Tuesday just to get through the accumulation of paper that built up around my desk over the past week while I've been away, leaving no time for any remotely creative activity. Then today I read this in Robert Fripp's diary:

As a rule of thumb, if a Happy Gigster is away for 4 weeks it takes 4 weeks to catch up. So, if the Happy Gigster is away for 6 months & one week, they never catch up. Their lives become a mess of stuff that waits to be addressed, settled & stored. This is a brief description of my life over the past 39 years. The time has arrived when, until the past is settled, there is no bright & shining future world that can be brought into being.

Time spent settling the past (or filing it away) does indeed stop the future from coming into being. It's frustrating. But dropping the past into the recycling via the shredder is not necessarily wise, however attractive it might occasionally seem.

©2008 David McGuinness
all opinions are those of the author - you don't have to share them