Wednesday 30 December 2009

Encouragement for those of us who like playing 'toy' instruments is here - but this comes first.

Tuesday 29 December 2009

It's just possible that what sounded quite like a CD last week could become one, so plans to post our Edinburgh Festival recordings online are on hold for a wee while yet.

After over a week, white Christmas included, it's still all white and slippery outside, so I've been indulging in hibernation. I have an unprecedented collection of eye diseases at the moment, so I don't feel much like going anywhere anyway, other than in the direction of a good ophthalmologist.

Tidying up for visitors has made me aggregate all the piles of undone paperwork around my desk into two main collections while the other pile on my desk remains untouched.  I might make myself deal with at least some of this before doing anything more enjoyable. After getting attached to Martyn Jaques's Yamaha APXT-1 guitar a few weeks ago, I tracked a similar one down and successfully bid for it on eBay, so its imminent arrival is one incentive to get the paper off the floor. Also, a message came in from Sushil yesterday that he's recording an album next week, so that could make for an entertaining afternoon or two.  

Assorted medications mean that I can't always focus well enough to read, but recently I've made it to the end of 1960 in the complete Peanuts, read Innumeracy (I was trying to be ironic by spelling it wrong but got it right by mistake), and got halfway through David Rizzio & Mary Queen of Scots before my eyes packed up, while browsing the Beatles Anthology book and stealing my son's copy of TV Burp, which reminds me of the Goodies books of my youth. Oh, and Kim Deitch's enthralling Alias the Cat (thanks to Marie F).

Tuesday 22 December 2009

Having listened to everything up close and at a distance, the next test is to listen to it in company. I dipped my toe in on Sunday night playing Rob Howarth a track when he was visiting Alison, but this morning I took the whole thing over to her place on a CD to see what she made of it, and also what it was like for me to listen to it all with someone else in the room. And much to my surprise it pretty much sounds like a CD, but I now have a list of further tweaks to make.

Susie found these ice sculptures on the sledge in the garden - a penknife and a jetski I think.

Sunday 20 December 2009

It's all white here. I was back in the eye hospital yesterday, after achieving only one week of not putting steroids in my eye since April. At least it's the other eye that's gone this time. The point where I realised that I had to get to the hospital was exactly when the snow started, of course: it's just as well the eye hospital is only a short walk away.

I've finished editing the Edinburgh material, and now have to decide what to do with it. I've been listening to it all in two different ways: first with good headphones for detail, and then sticking it on at medium background level on speakers while I do other things. Sometimes the difference in my reaction is quite striking: a piece which seems really exciting when listening closely, can come across as an out-of-tune mess from a distance. And some pieces where the creaky stage or other noises off are a distraction when close listening, reveal a satisfying underlying shape when heard across a room.

My camera never made it back from Elbeuf, so I bought a replacement on eBay last week. I now have what I think is the world's only camera wrist strap that celebrates a now sadly defunct Edinburgh tea shop and chocolatier.

Also on my phone was this picture taken in the dark at the panto last week, of a card from my sister Meg's wallet. If you're looking for a big leather cushion to put your feet on, this is the place to go.

later
A bit bruised now from repeatedly falling off a sledge.

Lots of discussion in the house today about Christmas music. My favourite Christmas albums of days gone by, including the Andrew Parrott one and the John Waters one, are now joined by at least one of the Brian Setzer collections. And at this time of year I never tire of hearing the genius of Roy Wood (the only Christmas single with the balls to start with the sound of a cash register and a raspberry, and still be heartwarming), Jethro Tull (yes, in 7/8), the Wombles, or even the Darkness or Slade. Or of course Shane and Kirsty (blub).

Friday 18 December 2009

I'm still being a producer today, hiding indoors from the cold, editing and listening to Edinburgh recordings, but I also found time to buy a Christmas tree this morning, and saw it down to the correct height. As New Year approaches, the chances drop of heading out to the shops without bumping into several people I haven't seen for a while, so everything takes a bit longer than usual.  

For the last two years in late November/early December, I've put together a compilation CD of bits and pieces to send out to people instead of a Christmas card. This year I just haven't had time, so instead I'm compiling a sort of ConCal new year's present to post online. 

Yesterday's vital boiler part wasn't vital at all: the gasfitter had disconnected the boiler completely by mistake when fitting the fires. So, if you're looking for a good gasfitter, I can tell you who not to use. He did come back eventually today and put it right.

Thursday 17 December 2009

I'm doing some audio editing at the moment - not something I've done for ages - tidying up yesterday's work with Steve Portnoi, who came over to remix some of the recordings from the Edinburgh Festival. Between us at one point we managed to cover every available piece of floor space in this room with cables, equipment or general junk. But the music sounds much better for it: you'd think we were actually playing in a nice-sounding room. In contrast to the Bosendorfer that I played on Iain's album, at one point in the concerts I was playing Christopher Hogwood's rather nice Walther piano (I think it was made by Derek Adlam, can't remember), and could push it right to its dynamic limits almost without drowning out DG. Steve was telling me that David Owen Norris has been playing Brahms on his 19th century Broadwood, and discovering that the notes sustain for just the right length of time for the phrasing to work. 

Yesterday was slightly complicated by someone else arriving unexpectedly at 7.45am to fit two gas fires (you can just about make out the cast iron curve of one of them above), and then our boiler refusing to light again after the gas had been turned off. So it's just as well we got the fires put in, as the rest of the house is now freezing, awaiting a vital boiler part.

Tuesday 15 December 2009

Yesterday included a much-needed hour of helpless laughter, at the Òran Mór panto, a suitably ridiculous tour-de-force, much of which defies analysis. Seeing a panto veteran like Andy Gray at close range working a small audience while playing five parts simultaneously, some of them in drag, is quite breathtaking, even if Tiny Tim's lines were mostly 'Bastard!'. And his performance as Scrooge explains why Dave Anderson was sporting sideburns when he said hello in the Western Baths last week.

Alison brought Johannes Pramsohler over to play some Bach in the kitchen this morning: if music happened in the kitchen more often, I'd probably never leave the house. Then they went off to buy me a bottle of whisky while I cycled into town for a lunchtime meeting with Chrissy Pritchard: that seemed like a fair division of labour to me.

Remember a couple of weeks ago, I had a phone call from a certain public funding body suggesting we weren't proposing to pay our musicians enough? Well, they've given us some money for the recording project (hooray), but the accompanying letter, signed by the same person who rang me that day, tells us that they think we're paying our musicians too much, and have reduced the amount accordingly. What this suggests to me is that public funding bodies shouldn't decide what musicians get paid. To be honest, I agree with the very sensible assertion made by Brian Morton in print a while ago, that the only real way to support artists is to commission work. Anything else is a distraction, and also generates expensive bureaucracy. 

Sunday 13 December 2009

Thanks to Jim Donegan for his 'I've just heard you playing the harpsichord on the radio' text last night - after a bit of investigation, I discovered that Iain MacInnes's album is out! The ideal present etc. ... Listening to it once it had been through a broadcast compressor did help to reinforce my opinion that pianos have just got too big - I was playing a Bosendorfer Imperial which makes a pretty huge noise, and as a result I wasn't hitting it very hard. So although I'm being reasonably rhythmic, it doesn't have the dynamic impact I wanted it to. It's not such a problem in the piano tracks on Spring Any Day Now (also an Imperial, oddly enough, the one Peter Gabriel now has at Real World) because Tony Kime recorded that one like a classical record with full dynamic range, rather than with separation between the instruments. Still, piano and overdubbed harpsichord together make quite a racket for accompanying bagpipes: I don't think I've ever heard that sound before. It's here from about 17'45 in (and at 32'30), for the next few days.

Friday 11 December 2009

I'm enjoying being out of a performing phase for a while, and using the time for what seems like a lot of civilised lunch (or occasionally cup-of-tea) meetings to allow future projects and collaborations to take shape. Not having immediate concerts to prepare increases the likelihood of some of my worklist actually getting achieved. I hadn't thought of myself as a meetings type of person: at one point when I was working at BBC Scotland I stopped turning up to any meetings whatsoever, as all they seemed to achieve was a room full of people not doing any work for an hour and a half. Short, sociable gatherings get more ideas generated and decisions made. Unfortunately, you have to do the follow-up too - a quick half-hour's chat on Wednesday morning generated more than two hours of emailing later in the day to keep everyone concerned in the loop.

This week's work-related socialising included a morning with Marie Fielding comparing notes on in- and out-groups in different genres of music, a bibliographic tea with Karen McAulay at the RSAMD, lunch with various trad luminaries in Edinburgh for Distil, then a 10 minute  symposium today with John Butt and Barnaby, followed by a much longer lunch with B which hatched a number of intriguing possibilities arising from the first of our Edinburgh concerts in August. And today Alison also showed me her new flat, hooray. What's more, four days of next week are already earmarked for friendly meetings of one kind or another. No doubt by then I will have become completely over-socialised and will revert to type as a reclusive misanthrope, growling at passing 4x4s as they speed past, and shouting at the radio.  

Meanwhile, my new iPhone is living up to its reputation as a really wonderful pocket computer and a pretty lousy phone. Basic things like decent outgoing audio quality when using a bluetooth headset, or being able to choose your own SMS alert tone, or a visual repeating SMS alert, are notably absent. Just not there at all. You called it a PHONE, Apple people! How about including some of the functions we expect from PHONES these days? I swear it radiates smugness too. I did wonder before I got it, if it would gradually transform me into a Mac-head (like most musicians) but if anything it's pushed me the other way. I don't like some self-satisfied Californian dudes telling me how to live my life because they say their way is cooler. It's all beautifully elegant, until you find something it won't do. Then it mocks you: 'Why do you want to do that? Be cool. Like us.' No thanks.

Sunday 6 December 2009

I've been completely wiped out this weekend, possibly as a result of a gregarious Friday evening, spent first in the Research Club with future university colleagues, and then in the Chip Bar with past BBC colleagues. How west end is that? I'd been in at the university teaching the Performance students in the afternoon, and a very attentive bunch they were too.

Scottish readers who follow that national institution Oor Wullie may like to note that the featured character in today's Sunday Post story is my sister's late partner, John. Getting a whole Oor Wullie story to yourself is a reflection of truly legendary status: as Meg said, 'It beats an obituary in The Times, doesn't it?'. 

Thursday 3 December 2009

A moment's silence please, to mark the passing of my Sony SRS-T55 travel speakers, which have kept me entertained in hotel rooms, on holidays, and in various remote locations for the past 8 years and more, since I bought them at Heathrow on the way to LA.  The last time they stopped working, I took them to bits, put them back together again, and they worked perfectly thereafter. But this time there's something electronic that has failed and it's curtains. I managed to get some SRS-T70s on eBay a while back, but they don't fold up into quite such an appealing shape.

Still writing, and digesting large amounts of research-related written material. A steady stream of very enthusiastic emails is coming in, concerning a possible project for late 2010.

Wednesday 2 December 2009

Still largely desk-bound here, grappling with a large research proposal for 2011, and various projects for 2010 to be tweaked, moved on, or turned down. I had a call from a public funding body on Monday about one of these potential projects, pointing out that in the budget I'd submitted, I hadn't made the recording session fees quite high enough to meet the BPI/MU rate. Whoops, soon corrected that, how embarrassing. Then the following day I was contacted by one of the country's national companies and offered eight days of recording sessions at less than two-thirds of that same rate. Uh?  That'll be a no then.

Last week's soundcheck photos from Claus Buehler ...

our side of the stage

Tomas takes a break from his 'God is gonna get ya' Elvis impression

Matt is effortlessly cool as ever

proof that I played the guitar

Oh, and my mum gets a credit on Hue and Cry's new album. Work that one out.

Friday 27 November 2009 

At last, a day at home at my desk with no urgent performance deadline looming. I think this means I might be able to start on lots of long-awaited projects. But this is probably over-optimistic.

Yesterday became extremely sociable. I went over to Edinburgh for a quick meeting with Matthew at the festival, and his request for 'tea for two' in the Hub cafe was interpreted as 'afternoon tea for two', so that as we were happily  working our way down the pot of tea, suddenly an vast array of food arrived. Once we'd got to the end of the cakes and cream I wandered down the Royal Mile feeling like I'd had a particularly boozy lunch. 

There was just time to go to the library before giving my seminar in Alison House, and hanging around afterwards for intelligent conversation of various degrees of academic rigour with the Music Department history students and Simon Frith. I kept breaking out into involuntary grins on the train journey back west, as I was listening to bits of Tuesday's rehearsal and show, and finally hearing clearly some of the outrageous things that everyone was throwing in on stage. Let that Pamela Thorby off the leash and you never know what's going to happen: recorder players don't usually have such killer comic timing. And the backing vocals sound alright actually ...

Catherine Bott was in town last night in her BBC live broadcaster role, so after her gig we met for a natter in Babbity's and I inevitably missed the last train home by quite a large margin. Amongst other things, we could celebrate that the CD we made 15 years ago has just been pressed up again by those nice people at Hyperion. 

Wednesday 25 November 2009  
flying home from Paris Charles de Gaulle
Well, yesterday was our third shot at the Love and War show and it’s been different every time. Some of it (usually the complicated bits) went really well, and some of the easy bits were a musical pile-up of stupendous proportions, but the audience seemed to enjoy it very much, and so, I think, did we.

after the show: DMcG, Clare Salaman, Pamela Thorby, AMcG, Matt Wadsworth (the Tiger Lillies are busy selling CDs in the foyer, and Tomas Medici is behind the camera)

As well as playing guitar, Tomas talked me into doing some harmony backing vocals with him on ‘Love a Whore’, so if there are any pop singers out there looking for a balding Scotsman and a Danish "Muck Hicknall" lookalike to be their backing singers, do get in touch. Pamela and Clare said it sounded really beautiful but I have no idea if they were just humouring us.  Sitting at a harpsichord with an SM58 vocal mic in front of me is quite intimidating as I’m used to being able to lean forward, and would have belted it with my nose if I had.

Adrian Stout set up his ORF stereo microphone pair at the back of the hall near the mixing desk, and on the train to Paris this morning copied the recording of last night’s show and some of the rehearsal onto my hard drive. I wonder what it sounds like.

After the Adrians between them figured out how to get the microwave-grill to work, we subsisted through the day on the mountain of leftover pizza that Alison had somehow managed to jam into the fridge on Monday night, supplemented by the generous allowance of fruit and snacks backstage.

I’ve found myself having a go at speaking French much more here than I would in Canada. I think it’s partly because I know that I’m obviously coming across as a visitor rather than an Anglophone resident, but also because in France I can understand much easier what’s being said.

Tuesday 24 November 2009
Hôtel de la Cathédrale, Rouen (enjoying the French ads on Spotify)
Sunday’s rehearsal at Clare’s went extremely smoothly, and after a sociable evening and a night’s kip, Alison, Clare and I were off early to Ebbsfleet to join the Eurostar that Matt and Pamela had got on at St Pancras. French trains on yesterday’s experience are efficient and colourful …

One of the many highlights of our evening at Clare’s was the game where we tried to construct coherent sentences by providing one word in turn round the dinner table. Clare’s youngest, Laila (7) was the easy champion of this, finishing off many sentences so that no-one could continue any further for laughing. Her pièce de resistance was the final word of ‘When I die I will go upstairs and kill God’ which could be a Tiger Lillies song.

Our hotel here is far more interesting than most: it’s dingily lit, and there are obstacles of abandoned old furniture and hidden steps everywhere to trip up the unwary, or at least leave you with a bruise or two.  Adrian Huge followed Matt and me around with his video camera when we arrived, filming us bumping into things as we tried to find our rooms. But the peeling paint and the odd damp patch on the wall can be forgiven, because the place has lots of character, is very friendly, and the free wifi works! So it’s all fine.

the hotel cat at breakfast this morning

After attempts at afternoon naps, we met for dinner and headed off to the rather spectacular if unexpectedly concrete Cirque-Théâtre in Elbeuf for rehearsal.  Martyn is going to play harpsichord and organ in a couple of songs, so in return I’m playing piano in one and guitar in the other: he has a brilliant little Yamaha travelling guitar, which I covet as it’s halfway between being a guitar and a ukulele. Needless to say I’m very pleased at getting to wield it on stage between Matt’s theorbo and the two Adrians. 

We ran out of brain power at about 10pm, at which point an unfeasibly large amount of pizza was delivered, and someone in the crew somehow managed to locate some beer. So we ate ourselves insensible and came back to Rouen to sleep the sleep of the just (or at least the very tired).

I’m going to take a quick walk round the block and peer at the cathedral before lunch and we head for Elbeuf again …

[I had photos of this, but I have lost my camera ... I think it disappeared from the stage at some point on the performance day, unless I left it in the dressing room. Photos above from new iPhone]

Sunday 22 November 2009
flying to Gatwick
I’d intended to take the train south today, but the Sunday morning timetable was pretty much nonexistent, added to the fact that the line in the west is disrupted by floods. I don’t normally fly BA either, but I can happily report that even if the company is going down the tubes, the British Airways cooked breakfast is still a rare treat. But it does seem like a relic from a bygone age: I feel a bit like Alan Whicker.

Saturday 21 November 2009

It's No Music Day (just gone midnight here) - this year's suggestions from Bill Drummond include some great things to do on Sunday.

I've been piecing together seminar material, and paying a lunchtime visit to the Baths, where I met two other Bills, Lloyd and Sweeney. The edge of the cold plunge pool seemed a civilised place to be discussing plans for 2010-11.

Wednesday 18 November 2009

A very convivial lunch at the Glasgow Art Club today where Alison and I were the guests of David and Hazel Smith. On the way home in the rain I finally remembered to photograph this great cycle lane sign. I suppose it's there to stop cars using the lane as a shortcut, but it does seem to say 'bikes this way - if you can manoeuvre past this'.

Now an email deluge to deal with, and preparation for the Tiger Lillies and a research seminar on my return.

Monday 16 November 2009

One thing I've learnt this year is that if you make a worklist of things to be done on Monday morning, it will probably take you all week to score them all off.

This is a perplexing piece of news: to make the streets safer for visually-impaired people, cars are to be made noisier. Clearly because expecting motorists to have some real consideration for pedestrians or other road users would be ridiculous, and an infringement of their precious freedom to go wherever they want as fast as they like in their comfortable but potentially lethal machines without having to consider any consequences. Some of us were looking forward to our lives not being endlessly accompanied by the rumble and roar of the internal combustion engine. Will cyclists have to start producing fake engine noise too?  It'll have to be bloody loud for pedestrians with iPods to hear it ...

I've just been distracted by just how good Café Zimmermann's recording of the first movement of the Bach A major oboe d'amore concerto is.

Sunday 15 November 2009

For a number of reasons, it's not really been a week for diarising here. But I've been busy preparing the scores for next week's Tiger Lillies date, which took me two whole days, and I managed to get the company accounts to our auditors, which is always a huge relief. I'm now editing Alison's minutes from the board meeting.

On Tuesday I was one of the 30 000 people buying an iPhone from Orange on the day they launched, and I've been gradually coming to terms with its elegant idiosyncrasies. It was nice after visiting Sheila last weekend, to see John Barnes's Bach temperament included in the Cleartune software, but I have promised not to turn into one of those people who talk about their iPhone all the time, so mmffmblmmff [muffled enthusiasm with the odd gripe]. 

Someone from a certain conservatoire mentioned to me this week that their students were preparing for their scale exams. "Scale exams? You mean they play scales and get marked on how good they are?" That's what they are. Wow - it's like military drill, which would be fine if scales were universally useful. But what I found preparing Schetky's music to play on the fortepiano, was that although it includes some really fast scale passages in conventional patterns, I seldom used the 'official' fingerings that I was so painstakingly taught a long time ago. On old instruments, fingering is crucial, because it's possible to produce much more  detailed articulation than on a modern piano: if your hand movements don't make musical sense, it will come out in the sound. So even with something as basic as F major, I tended to use fingering determined by the phrasing rather than the accepted patterns - you'd never practise an F major scale with your thumb on G, but sometimes it's what you need to do. 

But then, conservatoires were set up to conserve playing traditions. The big lesson of the early music movement is that playing traditions don't need conservation; rather, they need to be constantly reinvented in the light of newly-available evidence. 

Sunday 8 November 2009

Have been out cycling in the sunshine today. Also contributing to the sunny mood is a date in my diary next June for a gig in York with Shirley Collins and Kate Bott, hooray.

I started yesterday by helping Suzie LeB decide between takes on a soon-to-be-released recording, then it was off to Edinburgh to a full St Cecilia's Hall (well, there were two empty seats) to play some music by people who frequented the very same room in the 18th century.  And to play some genteel tunes by Robert Mackintosh who played there often enough, but probably was never allowed to play his own music in the concert hall itself. It was good to have a programme tailor-made for a venue: Alison even had an anecdote ready about Schetky's first night in Edinburgh in 1771, when he was taken up to the hall and immediately recognised in the audience by the members of the Musical Society.  The Georgian Concert Society always seem to have a knack for a good party afterwards too: last night's was at Sheila Barnes's place, where I haven't been for ages. In the workshop was a half-finished harpsichord with some strangely familiar soundboard painting (Sheila painted mine in 1991, which is particularly cool because if you see it from the wrong side it looks like 1661).

Our rehearsal process was admirably smooth: lots of playing, and very few attempts to try to talk about what we were doing, except where absolutely necessary. In the 1770s it's not always clear what 'dynamic' markings mean: 'Forte' could mean 'the next section is loud from here', 'it's already got loud by here', 'this note is louder than the ones on either side', 'you've got a tune', 'everyone is playing much the same thing at this point', or 'everyone's joined in again, wahey'.  But most of our decisions about things like this were made by listening to the music as it went along and just doing it, rather than stopping and talking about it. This is good.

My favourite moment of Friday afternoon was when Miki said in passing, 'I hate bowings'. The idea that everyone's bow has to go up and down at the same time when they're playing the same music, is one of the most pernicious and time-wasting of modern musical myths - and is a practice that I think only became really widespread in the latter half of the 20th century. The amount of orchestral rehearsal and preparation that goes into this costs public funding bodies millions (I'm not joking), and musically it achieves close to bugger all; but it does serve to make a large body of string players look more like a military display in North Korea, and to deprive them of some freedom in how they use their body to make the music. So that's all right then.

In most classical music, where the same music appears in different parts with slightly different bowings or phrasings, it's common to assume that the composer or copyist has been lazy, and it's usual for an editor, conductor or a group of musicians to 'regularise' them. But in Schetky's quartets the inconsistencies were sometimes too marked to be accidental. So just out of curiosity we started playing what he printed in the parts, where two people might play one phrasing, and the other two a different one, simultaneously. And you know what, it sounds great. Why have classical musicians become entrenched in making everything the same? In most other forms of music, where two people play or sing the same material, they do it differently: that's what makes it sound interesting and gives it life. Or as Stephen Ratcliffe put it, the principle of simultaneous likeness and difference is the common denominator of aesthetic pleasure.  The likeness and the difference both have to be there.

It was a challenge to play a couple of solos on the 1793 Broadwood piano. It sounded great as part of a string quartet (try that on a Steinway D and see how far you get!), where its uneven damping added a patina of resonance to the overall picture, but on its own I was nervous about being able to tame all of its wild tendencies enough. I was also wondering what a modern copy would sound like - would it be more reliable? - and, in conversation with Darryl afterwards, he wasn't convinced that Broadwood's pianos ever worked that efficiently in the first place. But the wildness has an appeal that Viennese pianos don't: I'm sure that it wasn't against his will that Haydn changed his piano writing for his 'English sonatas' to take advantage of the big crazy racket that you can get from one. You just have to relinquish a measure of control.  John Raymond showed me a bit of the inside of the instrument, and you can see from where it's never been exposed to daylight that the original colour of the wood was a pretty wild orange tigerstripe. Given that Broadwood was a Scot, we have to stop calling these things 'English pianos'.

When I dropped in on Alison and Miki on Thursday in what I thought was 'spoon' cafe, it had changed that very morning into The Edinburgh Larder. We returned on Friday mid-rehearsal for extremely generous portions of cake (I wonder how long their accountant will let them keep that up) and excellent tea from eteaket - I had the Blue Mist and went back yesterday to buy some. It's good to see some serious tea preparation in that part of town continuing since the sad demise of Plaisir du Chocolat, who took tea very seriously. Here you get a sand-timer with your teapot, in different colours depending on what kind of tea you've ordered.

tea break: L-R Miki Takahashi, AMcG, Sarah Bevan-Baker, Alfonso Leal del Ojo

tea technology, and Alfonso's coffee ...

Thursday 5 November 2009

Yesterday morning Alison and I headed to the Jeffrey Room in the Mitchell Library, where a rather good fortepiano by Neupert now resides, along with three other pianos, a harpsichord and a clavichord. It's an understated kind of rehearsal space.

In fact, it would make a wonderful concert hall if the M8 wasn't 50 metres away: that's what happens when you drive a motorway through the middle of a city.

Mr Jeffrey's 19th-century library is quite a collection (including a double-elephant Audubon's Birds of America), and his bookshelves that hold the volumes are pretty impressive too.

Later, to Giffnock for a very valuable board meeting where opinions were sought and exchanged.

And today we've been back at St Cecilia's in Edinburgh with Sarah, Alfonso and Miki, playing good-natured Schetky quartets all afternoon, with added Broadwood. More of this tomorrow.

Tuesday 3 November 2009

Till the weekend, you can hear August's concert from Caraquet with Suzie & co. here, even if you're not in Canada. I'll have a listen when I'm done practising ... 

later
I'd forgotten Suzie played the melodica in that show - I only realised when I couldn't work out who was playing the harpsichord in The Widow's Laddie (she plays harpsichord too, of course, but not in this show as far as I can remember). And I'd forgotten we all sing in harmony at one point - it's just well Suzie's at the top, as each phrase kind of implodes at the end underneath ... and you don't often hear early Italian balletti played on two melodicas, clarinet and a double bass playing really high. But really you can ignore all this crap and just listen to Suzie singing for an hour. It's quite something. And Mark's klezmer outburst at the end is superb.

For an alternative view on how to integrate percussion into art music, there's always this, which I thought was the kind of thing that undergraduates did in 1974, not 2009. But it did make me laugh a lot. When I was a student Craig McLeish and I used to play Orlando Gibbons verse anthems on organ and electric guitar, but we didn't expect people to take us seriously. No, we didn't.

Sunday 1 November 2009

I'd spent part of yesterday reading through and timing some Schetky songs, before being entertained by a few troupes of guisers, and heading out by bike to Bill and Jo's joint birthday/Halloween party in the spectacular setting of John Thwaites's flat in Park Terrace, with its 1870s interior. Greg and I ended the night playing a variation of table tennis, where the table is simultaneously being used as a dessert trolley: you play on your knees, and the object of the game is to make amusing noises by bouncing the ball off various items of crockery and glassware while keeping it in play - without breaking or knocking anything over of course. Most of the table had been cleared by the time I took this photo with my phone, but the pumpkin on Greg's side is still glowing happily.

Yesterday I also went shopping with Susie for drumsticks, so that we can both practise snare drum rudiments on the furniture. Can't believe I've never done this before.

later
I was just about to go to bed when the skype-phone rang and I was greeted with this sight down the line from a party in Halifax. DG wasn't wearing a wig so he's not in shot ... I just about managed to play a belated Happy Birthday to Suzie on the ukulele.

Kirsty Money and Suzie LeBlanc

Thursday 29 October 2009

After taking some books back to the library in Edinburgh this morning, I had two different music technology tasks to accomplish. The first was trying out the 1793 Broadwood piano from the Mirrey Collection in St Cecilia's Hall for next week's concert. It's very bright, and like all British pianos of the time requires some serious taming: I will have to do some practice in the next week.  Here it is accompanied by the human blur that is John Raymond, and the 1793 Broadwood harpsichord (on its left) that I played on Mungrel Stuff.

There was just time to get distracted playing the famous green Taskin (now revoiced in crow quill and sounding ever more wonderful) and a very interesting Viennese-style piano actually made in Breslau (or Wrocław if you prefer).

Then to North Berwick to mix some tracks for series 4 of Skins with Calum Malcolm. Well, he mixed them and I mostly lay around on the sofa trying not to say unhelpful things.

Wednesday 28 October 2009

Looking up at a cupboard in the triage room in eye casualty this morning, I spied an interesting VHS video collection on the top: Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, The Muppet Christmas Carol and ... Cataract Surgery.  Nurse: "I don't think there's even a VHS player in the hospital." 

later
I've been listening to stacks of vocal takes in preparation for a mix session tomorrow, but when doing various admin tasks I've taken a break from this week's listening diet of German 70s experimentalism (I refuse to use the word krautrock) to revisit the Penguin Cafe Orchestra albums, which remind me that I really must make the time to make some homemade music. There are one or two tracks in there which still provoke that itch every time I hear them, as somehow Simon Jeffes managed to make music which was charming without being sickly. And Glasgow University has a dulcitone, as heard on Cutting Branches for a Temporary Shelter. 

Tuesday 27 October 2009

I spent ten hours today preparing the notation for next week's Edinburgh concert; at the end of this I have a sore red bulging eye. Bugger.

And someone around here has been writing helpful cooking tips on the food.

Saturday 24 October 2009

At last a day off: I made it round the farmers market this morning in the pouring rain, and now the house is resounding to gales of laughter as both kids have discovered Douglas Adams' original Hitchhikers adventure game.

Last night's gig was quite riveting, I thought. Ten very different pieces, all with something to say, performed with amazing concentration and polish by McFalls and guests. And some excellent musical camaraderie over pizza beforehand too.

So thanks to composers Matt Seattle, Marie Fielding, Corrina Hewat, Lori Watson, Aidan O'Rourke, Fiona Rutherford, Innes Watson, Simon Thoumire (what was he doing in there?), Karen Marshalsay (and her bray harp) and Karen Tweed, soloists Angus Lyon and Shona Mooney, and everyone else who for various reasons came along and made me think 'bloody hell, there's a lot of talented people in the room', including Mairi Campbell, Dave Milligan, Sally Beamish, Carolyn Sparey, Sarah-Jane Summers, Donald Hay, Mary Macmaster and probably loads more that I can't remember at the moment. And well done to Simon T and Dave Francis for cooking up such a great project. 

For me it was a bit like going through all the adrenaline highs and lows of preparing for a gig, but without doing any actual playing, unless you count hitting a pane of glass with a hammer, my sole musical contribution. There was a crowd of composers sitting around me at the back, and you could sense the collective will being beamed down to the stage of 'come on, this is going to work' whenever an difficult bit was coming up. Dave dragged me down onto the stage at the end to join everyone else and look sheepish.

warming up

We also discovered a brilliant way of amplifying acoustic gigs, by putting a stereo pair of 414s on the stage, and feeding the signal (by mistake) at a lowish level to the PA speakers above the audience, so far into the house that it wouldn't feed back. It sounded very transparent and natural. In fact I didn't even realise it was on until about three pieces in.

Thursday 22 October 2009

A packed auditorium awaits tomorrow night's Distil Showcase.

Corinna Hewat, Dave Milligan and Ella

Wednesday 21 October 2009
With the second (Stirling) leg of breakfast this morning, I had an excellent treacle scone for dessert from Baynes. Being a commuter for a week is tiring, but I am getting a lot of things done in transit: today's train task was editing a Schetky quartet score.

By day 3 everyone seems to have relaxed a bit, so rehearsals today were regularly punctuated with gales of laughter. We've worked on eight pieces so far, and they've all been very different from one another: it will be fascinating to see how it all fares in front of an audience on Friday. This afternoon I found a use for the cracked panes in my greenhouse, whose perspex replacements have now arrived: I will be donning gloves and safety goggles to smash them on Friday night in the service of art. Unless, of course, we decide in the next couple of days that it's a stupid idea, which it probably is. We mentioned it in passing to the excellent Alasdair Campbell at the Tolbooth and he knew exactly what was required in terms of technique, equipment and safety procedures, having personal experience of offstage glass-smashing. It's that kind of place.

Rick Standley generously annotated my notebook with the musicians' alphabet: where rehearsal letters appear in a score, the room will inevitably ring to the sound of 'ok, let's go from B [or whatever]' followed by 'B for ... [anything but Bravo]' for clarification. This provides an opportunity for some dreadful puns. My favourites were 'B for Risotto' (try with a cod Italian accent), 'I for The Engine' (that one was mine), 'S for Rantzen'. 'G for Police' (London accent), 'V for Espana', and the inevitable 'Q for hotel rooms'. Now go and make up your own.

Tuesday 20 October 2009
Mathieson's Bakery, Stirling
I'm here with a pot of tea and an indifferent bridie (Baynes along the road was better, but you can't sit in there), dealing with various bits and pieces before the day's work starts with McFalls and various composers up the hill at the Tolbooth.  Yesterday ended with Matt Seattle playing John Anderson My Jo in the style of Jimi Hendrix on the border pipes, which should justify the price of admission on its own in the gig on Friday night. The Tolbooth is a great place to rehearse: we're in the attic, a big loud room with a wooden floor and a balcony with a 180 degree view out to the Wallace Monument, and a generous supply of technical support, water, tea and biscuits. There's also a truly fantastic café across the road: my chorizo, tomato and lentil soup yesterday was perfect lunchbreak food.

Travelling by train has given me the chance to do some more listening to the Edinburgh shows, and start to catch up with lots of admin and contractual concerns. My list of pending projects on my desk is much longer than I would like it to be.

You'd expect me to feel refreshed after a week's holiday and a day spent sitting watching other people work. But when I got home last night I was so eager to open the book-shaped package that came in the mail, that I cut right through the new shirt I was wearing with the scissors. That'll be tiredness then.  

Wednesday 14 October 2009
Isle of Lismore
More wisdom from Fripp on 9 October:

periods of Doing Nothing have usually accompanied all the major transitions in my life, including Guitar Craft & marriage; to the extent that I feel this is a necessary part of the process.

It’s very important to be able to schedule Doing Nothing from time to time, even if it rarely works out in practice. I had intended to spend most of September Doing Nothing but it ended up moderately busy, and the amount of next year I intend to spend Doing Nothing is shrinking rapidly.  Doing Nothing allows for time and space to think, appraise and plan: all of these are vital to avoid becoming stuck.

Officially I am here on Lismore Doing Nothing, but I’ve been reading and listening, and today I've been online ordering secondhand copies of out-of-print histories of Scottish music by Henry Farmer, Cedric Thorpe Davie, and Kenneth Elliott & Fred Rimmer. I’ve read them all in library copies and made notes from them, but some books (not many) need to be within reaching distance.

But the most important part of today’s Doing Nothing was cycling to the Lismore café and sitting out on the balcony with a pot of tea.

Tuesday 13 October 2009
Isle of Lismore, on holiday
I can just about get online here via the mobile phone GPRS signal, and today I read in Robert Fripp’s diary for 6 October (when he was in Air Studio 1 a few days after I was)

Bill [Bruford] has referred on several occasions … to the guitarist’s strategy during the recording of Red, of withholding his opinion. That is, neither for nor against. A better name for this strategy is radical neutrality.

I’ve found myself using this particular rehearsal strategy more often recently: asking everyone else for their opinions, but not proffering my own. Perhaps it’s a useful conflict avoidance strategy in the short-term, but I don’t think I can dress it up as ‘radical neutrality’. In my case it’s usually a more passive-aggressive way of expressing this: ‘I think that was crap, but I’ll try and get someone else to say it rather than cause an argument by saying it myself. If everyone else actually liked it, then I’ll give in temporarily to the democratic mandate, and try a different tack a bit later.’  That’s not neutrality, is it?

I’ve started listening to the tapes of the Edinburgh shows from August, which reveal many things: some very cheering, some less so.

Thursday 8 October 2009 

I'm caught up in organising mode for the Distil Showcase in Stirling in a couple of weeks: 10 composers from the traditional music scene writing for Mr McFall's Chamber with the addition of one trad instrument.  All the scores coming in are very different, so it should be a really interesting project.

Yesterday Brandon Vance dropped in for a quick tune and a natter on his way to Shetland, and in the evening I dropped in on Barnaby, where Andy Lowings and the Gold Lyre of Ur were paying a visit, joining Barnaby's Silver Pipes of Ur. We found ourselves drinking some of Julian Goodacre's homemade blackcurrant wine too.

Monday 5 October 2009
flying to Glasgow
I picked up the hire car at Dublin airport, learning a valuable lesson: never believe a car hire quote on the web without reading every single term and condition in the small print. A set of miraculous additional charges inflated the original quote by a factor of more than 3. I should have realised I'd chosen the wrong company when the woman behind the desk spent a minute or so being angry to herself about some unseen irritation, before even acknowledging that I was there. And I would have been charged an extra €65 for nothing if I hadn't insisted on being shown the final account before going for my plane this morning.

But I made good time on the way to Sligo, passing a tractor run and a vintage 70s car rally on the way. In fact, one of Ireland's myriad radio stations seemed to be playing late 70s disco hits interminably, so suddenly seeing a load of cars from my youth on the road as well really was like stepping into a time warp. On arrival I settled into the Tobergal Lane Café, downstairs from our venue, with a pot of tea and a cake, and said hello to the Sligo Baroque Festival's intrepid director, and organic farming pioneer, Rod Alston. After a trouble-free rehearsal and a huge bowl of beef stew in Molly's Diner, our audience arrived and a good time was had by all, I think. What an attentive audience they were - and DG managed not to be intimidated by the presence of two serious fiddlers: Walter Reiter, and Steve Wickham from the Waterboys. For the first time in years I wore shoes on stage, as we were playing on the dance floor which was, um, a bit sticky. The harpsichord was nice too: a copy of the Edinburgh Goermans-Taskin borrowed from Cork County Council. The rather crucial D below middle C was missing a string that had just broken: I followed Rod's suggestion to turn the jack around to pluck the other one, which was working fine until the plectrum snapped halfway through the second half from the strain. But my running repairs during Chris's intro to Dorrington Lads worked a treat.

DG played some tunes for us in the pub in Beltra before we retired to Paddy and Barbara's place: it's a shame I never got to see it in daylight, as under the full(ish) moon I could make out the outline of the sea and the hills.

After just 3 hours in bed, we were back into the hire car and on the road at 4am, kept awake by the myriad radio stations. Thanks to Barbara's sound advice to leave early and miss the Dublin rush hour, we made it to the airport in time for a very rare Vortex 3 band meeting in Starbucks. I've never bought anything in Starbucks that made me think afterwards 'that was a good idea, I'm glad I ate/drank that', and today was no exception. I ordered some 'perfect porridge' which turned out to be warm milk with a few oats stirred into it. It was better than anything else they had on offer, but perfect? I don't think so.  The band meeting was a great idea though.

a little later, still morning
I'm unpacking now, severely jetlagged despite not having changed timezones. It's hard to believe that yesterday morning I was still in London, and I've managed to fit in a road trip from the east to the west coast of Ireland and a gig, in less than 24 hours. No wonder I'm tired. 

Sunday 4 October 2009
flying to Dublin
My €9 Aer Lingus breakfast this morning included unlimited amounts of wholemeal soda bread, yum. In fact it included unlimited amounts of pretty much anything, as I was sitting at the back of the plane and I was the only person on board trying to fit a full cooked breakfast into a 50 minute flight. So the hostess offered me seconds: 'we've got loads', which was a good introduction to Irish hospitality.

Saturday 3 October 2009
Hampstead, London
At about 3pm this afternoon I was standing in Air Studio 1, coaching the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain in some backing vocals. And thinking ‘this is an unusual way to spend a Saturday afternoon’.

But first some revision. Thursday was a very busy day indeed. We had a lunchtime concert at Glasgow University, with my future colleagues and my mum and dad in the audience, and then as Alison headed south leaving only the triple Vortex behind, I returned to that troublesome funding application and got it into the mail in all its paper glory.  At this point it seemed appropriate to take Chris and DG out for a world class meal in the unprepossessing environment of The Banana Leaf. This was partly to get them in a good mood to come back to my study and make stupid noises on their instruments for the benefit of my microphone (and eventually, sampler). Chris’s newly-refurbished smallpipes made a particularly comic collection of farts which we tried not to drown out with giggling.

Then yesterday, once I’d done my transcription and arranging homework for today’s session with the ukes, we loaded up the van for a trip down the M74 to the very welcoming home of Dumfries Music Club. It was only when we unloaded all the gear into St John’s Church that we realised that I hadn’t packed all of the harpsichord stand – oops. But we found a rather handsome oak table which did the job well, and I revived the historical practice of playing standing up, just like the girl in Vermeer’s painting. Well, not much like her really. It’s very satisfying being able to engage all of your body when playing, but if you don’t get the height exactly right it’s probably a recipe for tendonitis.

Driving north afterwards in wild wind and rain was very tiring: if I’d known I was going to be in London today, I don’t think I’d have been quite so keen to volunteer to tune the harpsichord and drive the van.  But hey …

This morning I was up again at 6 to get here in time to have lunch with George and Richie from the uke orchestra, where we formed an immediate bond between a harpsichord player whose instrument can only go pling, and a group whose chosen instrument basically goes plong. But at least they can do dynamics. An afternoon of precision ridiculousness followed in the studio: I even got to sing on the end result.

©2009 David McGuinness
all opinions are those of the author - you don't have to share them