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David
McGuinness's diary Tuesday 24 December 2002 Did I say something about a holiday ? All I've got to do is prepare the performance material for one concert and three recordings, listen in detail to the October session tapes, do the first edit of half of the duo CD, and draft an Arts Council funding application. But now I'm off to a certain city centre pub for the traditional Christmas Eve drinks with various McGillivray clan members ... happy Christmas ! Friday 20 December 2002 Played in the Vivaldi 4 seasons with the SCO again last night - Alexander Janiczek is doing a refreshingly wonderful job, stripping away all the 'traditions' that go with the piece and playing what Vivaldi actually wrote, and with loads of character. The main problem is that we're dressed up like 19th century servants in aristocratic cast-offs, and that doesn't lend itself to relaxed music-making. The actual music is fine: however hackneyed it is it's still a great piece, I'm enjoying sliding around between harpsichord and organ, it's spontaneous, it's fun - but physically I feel like I'm sitting doing a desk job and have to stare impassively at the floor when I'm not actually playing, rather than relaxing and listening to everyone else. If you're dressed as a servile chattel, you start to act like one, even if it's your job to be the entertainment! At the end, when the sensible thing to do is smile at the audience (wave if you're feeling a bit showbiz) and get off, we have to go through this tiresome ritual of calls and bowing and standing around like a lemon. I suppose I'm doing less and less orchestral playing now so I'm just less used to it, but when the music is good, it feels ever more ridiculous to dress it in such an absurd way. It wasn't until about an hour after the gig that I remembered how good it had been, because on stage it had felt so awkward - as I said to Jayne Spencer afterwards on the way home, 'hey, we must have made some music tonight, I feel like I could do with a beer'. Glasgow City Hall tonight, and then (whisper it quietly) a holiday! Good grief, two moans about orchestras in a row. [much later, in the small hours after Glasgow gig and two parties] City Hall concert was much more relaxed for some reason, just good fun - the organ and harpsichord were at the same pitch too which helped (no mean feat in very cold weather and a succession of hot concert halls). I tried to fit 'We wish you a merry Christmas' into the organ part in the slow movement of Winter, but it came out too low and virtually inaudible. I'm sure there'll be another year ... Monday 16 December 2002 We finished the Requiem recording yesterday, but I'm heading back to Dundee again today (on the train this time) to rehearse for the coming week playing Vivaldi concertos. The recordings were good fun - Mackerras maintained his irrepressible good humour to the end, despite being kicked out of his hotel at 1a.m. the previous night by a fire alarm - but what glaringly stuck out was the anachronistic position of the soloists. In the 18th century they would have sung in the choruses, and been part of the overall 'community' making the music. In a 20th century orchestral/choral environment (hopefully this practice will die out soon when performing this music and not become accepted 21st century practice too!), they only sing the solo passages, and only show up in the room for rehearsal or recording when actually required to sing. They're paid differently (more of course), treated differently (ferried to and from rehearsals by the orchestra), and as a result the music they make is different - 9 times out of 10 it just doesn't integrate with the overall sound. If the soloists had to sing in the choruses too, they would have to change the way they sing for reasons of stamina if nothing else, and if they had to stay in the room for the whole process, they would actually get into the habit of listening to what is going on around them, instead of just hitting their spot and doing their own thing. It amazes me that after the period-instrument bandwagon's been going this long, the vast majority of performances still perpetuate an artificially great distinction between the soloists and choir, which is to the obvious detriment of the music. So there. There was just time in the dinner break for a quick chat about Linn Records's interest in the Kellie recording - things are gradually coming together on that front. By February we'll have three unfinished CDs on the go - product, I love it. Sunday 15 December 2002 I'm in the middle of sessions with the SCO playing organ in the Mozart Requiem for Sir Charles Mackerras, who's been on very cheery form all week, eager to show us all his old facsimile of Mozart's autograph manuscript, and picking gentle fights with the producer over the talkback to induce a cosy 'us vs. them' attitude in the room. CM: "Erm, we're going to do another take of that, apparently." Member of chorus: "What was wrong with that one?" CM (with hint of irritation, but smiling): "Absolutely nothing, it was perfect". Sir C has of course been making records for forty-odd years and he knows what he's doing. His legendary 1959 recording of Handel's Fireworks Music with every oboe player in London on it (24 of them, recorded in the middle of the night when they were all free) has just been re-issued - I must get hold of a copy. Greg and I were helpless with laughter as we arrived in Dundee for the sessions, as we were listening to Burt Bacharach's soundtrack to Casino Royale (another re-release) in the car - some of the most astonishingly funny playing I've heard in ages, and the sleaziest guiro ever committed to tape. Hilarious. In the break, we had dinner with Robert McFall, who is working on an arrangement of Zappa's Echidna's Arf for Mr McFall's Chamber - the repertoires of our respective groups have some strange confluences. I sent him the Sibelius file of our version when I got home last night. The logistics of moving around the country has caused us a few tuning problems, as after an overnight stay in the SCO truck, the organ gradually warms up as the day goes on, and the pitch rises steadily with the temperature. On Wednesday I spent the dinner break tuning it back down myself with help from assorted SCO crew members. Calum Malcolm is one of the engineers on the session, and when we arrived he greeted me and Greg with good news about the Prefab Sprout project we were doing this time last year - a release is not too far away, with the possibility of a gig or two as well: the album is called I Trawl the Megahertz. Meanwhile, February is shaping up, with a recording in Kellie Castle now very much on the cards while David Greenberg is over here finishing off our duo album, and we might try to fit in a radio appearance in January too if the dates work out. Monday 9 December 2002 I spent an anxious day yesterday watching the news reports of the huge fire in Edinburgh, as it all happened in the block next to St Cecilia's Hall, complete with Russell Collection. The people and instruments all survived unscathed - there was a concert going on Saturday night, and as the 18th century frontage is all bricked up, the fire crews assumed the place was empty and didn't bother to evacuate it, so the audience staggered out just as the electricity failed, into a street full of smoke, police and fire appliances! Paradoxically I spent the afternoon burning garden rubbish in the brazier I bought that morning, musing that all those Taskin harpsichords from the Paris Conservatoire that were chopped up for firewood in the cold winter of 1791 can't have burned for very long. What a waste. I've been working on the arrangements for January and February - the Scots Musical Museum and Robert Bremner for the Concerto Caledonia record, and Fred Frith and Hungarian tunes for the one with David G (and both McGillivrays guesting). It's all starting to take shape, and Katherine is going to bring her viola d'amore ... Today I went into to the RSAMD to give a lecture (more of an illustrated ramble really) about James Oswald, to students on the traditional music course. I spent the morning digging through various bits of research, and by the end of it had opinions on all sorts of things I hadn't before - a useful exercise. Had an interesting chat there with free-reed expert Stuart Eydmann about the use of harmoniums in Scottish folk music. Time for a more general revival I think - you can hear me pumping my harmonium stuff on 'The Caledonian Flute' CD, now available to buy from Chris's website at www.chrisnorman.com . Thursday 5 December 2002 I've been getting down to the business of preparing for the various things we're doing in January, finalising programmes, preparing editions, it all sounds very simple until you start doing it. Have I time to fit in a visit to the Duke of Buccleuch's library in England to look at a manuscript, and still get the parts out to everyone in time ? What kind of radios do you need to play John Cage's Radio Music ? All was going smoothly until someone I won't name realised they had the wrong dates in their diary for the sessions (out by weeks!), so the whole thing has to be re-organised, everyone's availability re-checked, lots of time and money wasted. It now looks like we'll have a rather wonderful band sitting around twiddling their thumbs for a while, so I'm trying to think up a scheme to put them to good use in front of some microphones. Had a good meeting with Ben Twist and Marie the other day about a possible tour in a year or so, travelling with a classy PA system and lights so that we can play in venues which don't necessarily have perfect acoustics. A few other possible dates are nuzzling their way into the diary too. I've always held that the internet in its present form finds its true purpose in helping people decipher the lyrics of songs. So today I finally got around to seeking out the words for one of the finest records ever committed to vinyl, the Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch. And it was well worth the wait. I've been listening to that record on and off for 25 years, and I've only ever had the haziest notion of what the hell was going on in Howard Devoto's head. I'm not sure I'm any more enlightened now in that respect, but knowing what words he's approximating just adds to the laugh-out-loud brilliance of it all. Walking home this afternoon I was mulling over the possibilities of a baroque instrumental arrangement of Boredom, with a beautiful violin rendition of its legendary 2-note (well, 3 really) guitar solo, but some things are best left just as they are. The Scottish Psalter project may be about to re-surface in another form - I'm not allowed to mention anything about this in public yet though ... Saturday 30 November 2002 Happy St Andrew's Day and all that stuff. After me moaning about the clampdown on live music in public places, I was delighted this morning by a jazz quartet in Maryhill Shopping Centre. I'd just dropped the car off for its MOT (passed). There's nothing earth-shattering to report from the past week, apart from some movement towards making the Earl of Kellie recording (possibly with some of it recorded in Kellie House itself) and my still trying to finalise the repertoire for January's concert. I have had time to hang out with some musicians though - something I can recommend with confidence to the sick, infirm and feeble of mind. I was in London on Wednesday night and made it to the pub with some of the finest representatives of Walthamstow's baroque ghetto: fishing for suggestions for where else to take ConCal's repertoire now that we've dipped into the last century by playing Zappa, the consensus was that Piazzolla and Cage might be our next targets. So watch out: the scores are on their way. And then yesterday Margaret Preston came over to play some flute tunes and swap some music: I got some of Robert Edwards' virginal tunes in return for Oswald's basslines for his Macbeth music ! But we spent more time talking - we both have family experience of Asperger's Syndrome, so I think we swapped more anecdotes than tunes. I'm coming to the conclusion that when making music in a small group, the social functioning of the group is as important as its musical function (hence more time yesterday spent drinking tea and chatting than actually playing). You have to take a lot of musical competencies and compatibilities for granted of course. Joanna MacGregor was talking on Wednesday about how she chooses collaborators, and her theory is that 'interesting people write interesting music'. If you enjoy someone's company, you're more likely to enjoy the process of making music with them. Thursday 21 November 2002 Back at my desk again, after two more visits to casualty, with a lot of mail to answer and bills to pay. I'm now wearing a eye-patch borrowed from my son with his permission, but I don't think I'll be leaving the house still wearing it, as the skull and crossbones might cause unnecessary mirth to passers-by. I was lecturing at the RSAMD this morning to an attentive bunch of second year undergraduates. I'm told there were nine singing students there, but only one of them was prepared to even have a go at translating a bit of Rameau's French - I'd have thought if you're going to be a classical singer of any sort, you'd make it your business to have at least a working guesswork if not knowledge of as many languages as possible. Maybe they were just shy. A couple of nice reviews have appeared of last week's gigs with Chris in Cleveland and Pittsburgh. I had a failed brush with MiniDisc technology over the last week - I bought a little Sony machine at the airport on my way to the US, and then unpacked it in Pittsburgh to discover it had no microphone inputs. How can you have an instrument called a 'recorder' that can't record sounds?? All you can do is copy stuff from other media, unless you have separate microphone amplifiers. So I went back to the shop on the way home, and bought a more expensive one (sigh) that had the all-important red-rimmed socket. I got that home and recorded a few things, some from analogue, some digital, and guess what, it all sounded terrible. The bass all but disappeared, there was a horrible mid-range bulge, and any sense of space in the recordings was sucked out - the session tapes from Crichton sounded atrocious. You could even spot the difference on the cruddy speakers in my kitchen. So back I went to the shop today to patiently explain that 200 quid's worth of Sony's finest sounded like a load of pants and I couldn't imagine ever wanting to listen to it, so could I have my money back please. Honestly, even good old cassettes sound better. But then, I suppose these days people actually listen to mp3s for pleasure ... The lack of mic inputs is a curious kind of sign of the further decline of live music in favour of the pre-packaged variety. Here's an extract from a UK government consultation document issued on 30 October (Halloween, when in Scotland the streets are traditionally full of kids engaging wantonly in public entertainment, rather than just demanding treats with menaces). "The presence of beggars, rough sleepers, peddlers, buskers and other persons who are threatening or who engage in anti-social behaviour can affect the use of and condition of public space." Guardian, 1 November Note the inclusion of buskers - it's now official, musicians are engaging in anti-social behaviour. Personally, I find all-pervasive muzak much more offensive, even if, as it was in New York's Penn Station in August, it's playing baroque trio sonatas ... Sunday 17 November 2002 Chicago O'Hare airport. I don't like O'Hare much, too many people in not enough space. My abiding memory of being here last time was pushing my way through the crowds coming in the opposite direction on my 20-minute walk from the duty free shop to the gate, and being aware of someone farting very loudly as they went past. Anyway ... it's been an eventful couple of days. At Case Western we played in the wonderful Harkness Memorial Chapel, with a very generous and bass-friendly acoustic. It was hard to believe that Jamie wasn't playing through an enormous PA rig, as his bass actually got louder the further you walked from it. Simeon didn't bring his full drum kit, so for the kick drum in the reggae section of 'Macdonald's Salutation' he stamped on the rostrum in his socks - it sounded fantastic. Mid-rehearsal we broke off for a while for Chris and I to give a masterclass to some baroque chamber music students, and the gig itself was good fun despite a few temperament problems (that's tuning temperament not artistic temperament). I'm going to have to start factoring in tuning practice time for myself before tours, so that I can just tune the harpsichord myself as a matter of routine without panicking that I'll screw it up. Off for a Greek meal afterwards to celebrate Ronn MacFarlane's birthday, complete with cake. Ronn is playing a lute with a very discreet jack socket built in, for his equally discreet amplification in the second half of the gigs. I've never seen an electric lute before ... So far, so good, I got up yesterday morning in Cleveland and our hosts made us a wonderful breakfast, I played their harpsichord for a bit and gradually woke up to the fact that my sore eye wasn't jet lag but felt suspiciously like iritis, which I haven't had for about 10 years. The prospect of being unable to open my right eye for the pain wasn't really what I wanted on the day of a big concert, and the day before a 19 hour journey on 3 planes. So I skipped the rehearsal and Kathy Ayres sat patiently for me in the waiting room while the kind people in the emergency room at Pittsburgh university hospital waited for the ophthalmologist to come, look in my eye and say 'hey, you got iritis'. Two hours later I was back in rehearsal clutching my two bottles of eye drops, and with one red and artificially-dilated eye. Now I know how it feels to be David Bowie. Well, hardly. Given my concern to make it through the gig, unfortunately I lost the plot on the tuning front again, and we had another squiffy temperament. Better than the previous night though. The gig for the R 'n' B society (still makes me laugh) was a sell-out in another great venue, Synod Hall in Oakland. We opened with Oswald's 'The Thistle', and the whoops and cheering that followed led us to think that we might just be about to have a good time. Not the most technically correct of performances, but some great vibes, and most of the audience on their feet at the end. In the second half I joined in some pipe tunes that I'd never actually heard before let alone rehearsed, and at one point earlier in the set I'd turned to Ronn and said 'Is this is F?' 'D.' 'D. Really?' 'Mm.' 'Good. Thanks.' I just had time to move my hands before playing the first note. It would have been even more fun if I hadn't been so ill! Still, we had a great (and long) Q&A session with the audience afterwards: I'd told them about Corri's note in Duncan Gray that 'The 6th variation may be left out if it is too difficult for the performer.' The final question of the night was 'When are you gonna learn that 6th variation?' Adrenaline rush kicked in twice in the course of the night, once for the gig and again for the beer drinking afterwards which was particularly joyous. I'd only intended to have a token quick one, but once everyone arrived a good time was soon on the cards, and the huge scary doorman made my day by insisting on seeing ID to prove I was over 21. 'How old do you think I am?' 'Where you from?' 'Scotland.' 'Hey, great, my mother's Irish.' So now having this morning enjoyed both the luxury of sleeping in without being jumped on by my kids, and a fascinating conversation about the future of classical music with Russ Ayres, I'm one flight down, two to go, feeling exhausted, ill and with very sore eyes. It was worth it though. On the way to Pittsburgh airport this morning, my friendly volunteer driver from the Society (and originally from Barnsley) said 'So your group's Concerto Caledonia. I bought one of your CDs last night because it had a dog on the cover.' Isn't that great? Friday 15 November 2002 On the Ohio turnpike in Andy Thurston's truck. We're on the way to our Cleveland gig tonight at Case Western Reserve University. Andy's driving while I sit here yawning with my sunglasses on - I'm doing my best to pretend that I'm not jetlagged, but my eyes always let the side down by going red and hurting a lot. Yesterday I had most of the day to myself to recover from the long journey, so I put in some practice time on 'Duncan Gray', which I've never actually played in public despite recording it complete with Venetian swell on Mungrel Stuff. It's one of those pieces where you can either play safe and get all the notes (like on the record), or you can live a bit more dangerously, play with the tempo a bit, and have the twin possibilities of it either becoming tremendously exciting or degenerating into a embarrassing mess. Great. I found an excellent artery-clogging pumpkin cheesecake in a cafe at lunchtime, and to my smug satisfaction was able to give directions there to a passing motorist who stopped to ask, despite the fact that I'd never walked down that street (or any other street in town) in my life before. Last night Chris and I put in a brief drivetime appearance at KQED in Pittsburgh (I left them some ConCal CDs) and then we rehearsed with the band in my generous hosts' front room: the guys had already done a couple of school shows that day. It was fun to finally play live with the band the stuff that I'd done on my own in the studio, although more than once Chris said 'can you do that thing you did on the record?' and I couldn't remember what it was. I dug the CD out this morning to remind myself, but I'm going to resist transcribing my own playing so that I can reproduce it! Still, what a great bunch of musicians to be in a room with - this is going to be fun. Wednesday 6 November 2002 I've had lots of listening to do, what with the session tapes from last week and a real copy of 'The Caledonian Flute' arriving from Chris. I have to learn the entire album (some of which I didn't play on) for next week's gigs in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, but it's not really a hardship as it's all great stuff. A fellow BBC producer bounded into the office this afternoon beaming 'what a great CD' after listening to it all the way through, and I have to agree, even if I'm on it. I'd forgotten that I'd agreed to play Corri's Duncan Gray (on the Mungrel Stuff album) next week, which I've never actually played in public and is a bit hard. So I'd better do some practice. And there's the other little problem to be overcome which is that my melodica's pitched at A444 and Chris's harmonium's at A440 - it's not a problem when you're making a record because you just slow down or speed up the track, but when you're switching instruments in the middle of a set of tunes, it's a bit unreasonable to expect everyone else (and the audience's ears) to retune. So the tuning meter and the sawn-off chainsaw file will be coming out of retirement I think. I read the Guardian's obituary of Philip Brett at the weekend. When I was doing my PhD he was a huge encouragement to me: I would send him my work by mail to Berkeley and it would come back to Scotland a few weeks later (usually with an apology for not doing it sooner) carefully annotated with helpful patient comments and pointers for improvement. Generous and kindly. On Saturday morning I made an ill-advised trip to the local jumble sale and returned with a pile of products from Dundee's legendary publisher D.C. Thomson - comic annuals for my son, and some 1940s Oor Wullie and The Broons for me. When I was growing up, they were still reprinting Dudley D Watkins's work in the Sunday Post even though he'd died when I was two - it took them nearly a decade to find someone to fill his shoes. At its best, his work is quite brilliant, simple but full of character - when I was 8, I dreamed of playing Wullie on stage! Tuesday 29 October 2002 I got up at 4.45 this morning to take David G back to the airport - since then I've spent the morning trying to put away all the detritus that results from 6 days of rehearsals, concerts and recording, and making 24-bit backups of the session tapes from last night (a much easier task than I expected). So, since I last wrote, we played in Glasgow on Thursday to a small but appreciative audience. There were unusually large numbers of my family in there, so I didn't really relax until the second half, after David and I had thrashed our way through some Finnish tunes in the bar downstairs. On Friday, after an afternoon rehearsal in St. Cecilia's Hall (and a mindblowing sandwich of marinated smoked haddock on thick wholemeal from the Spoon café in Blackfriars Street) we headed for Biggar, and had an extremely good time in the frighteningly dry acoustic of the Corn Exchange Theatre. Since David arrived he'd been looking for a D string for his modern fiddle, and we never quite had time to find a shop. Jim O'Neill, who was promoting the gig, tapped him on the shoulder, introduced himself and said 'I hear you're looking for a Dominant D - do you want aluminium or silver?'. We were being sponsored by Jim's new mail-order string business stringmail.co.uk ... My favourite audience remark was at the end when someone said to me 'loved the Zappa, if I'd known you were going to play that I'd have brought my copy of Roxy and Elsewhere for you to sign'. Back to St Cecilia's on Saturday to play for the good burghers of the Georgian Concerts Society. I had programmed a load of material by members of the 18th century Edinburgh Musical Society, who built the hall, but I'd failed to spot that William McGibbon had died before they built it, so my poignant introduction, telling how he'd spent so much of his life playing where we were now, was complete garbage. Thankfully, no-one pointed this out to me until the party afterwards. I got to play my favourite harpsichord in the Russell Collection, the 1755 Kirckmann, and we were told that the GCS audience stamped their feet in approval for the first time in living memory, which must count for something. Marie told me of a lady in her 80s who at the end of the first half had remarked 'who was that man who came on then?' (Steve walked on playing the guitar during Bremner's Old Sir Symon the King), and after the second and an encore of the Zappa had said 'Mmm, I really must go out and buy that Zappa'. I wonder what she'll make of Penguin in Bondage if she buys the album. David and I stayed with the wonderful Sheila Barnes (who painted the soundboard of my harpsichord) and the wonderful keyboard collection built up by her and her late husband John. If we'd not been completely exhausted to begin with, I'm sure we'd have stayed up half the night playing, but we settled for a quick tour of some favourites, then off to Crichton Church to start recording in the morning. Crichton has (dare I say it) a perfect acoustic for what we do. The sound is even across the frequency spectrum, the resonance is absolutely huge, but the reverberation time is relatively short. So we used a grand total of two microphones and that was that. Great fun, just time to visit the castle in the lunch break. 13 years ago, I nearly got married at Crichton but we decided it was a bit remote (and muddy), and we settled for the more civilised but less dramatic Cranstoun Kirk down the road. Speaking of weddings and recording venues, my gran got married in what is now CaVa studios, where David and I finished last night, recording some duo stuff with the studio's big Bosendorfer Imperial Grand. We put some pretty wild stuff down, and some pretty seriously weird stuff too. Now I just need to work out when on earth I'm going to listen to all these tapes ... Then this morning I got a package from Chris Norman in the mail, including a promo of the new CD The Caledonian Flute which features me on harmonium and melodica, recorded in Washington DC back in August. Great, I thought, and dashed over to the CD player shaking with anticipation and lack of sleep. Unfortunately, he's sent me a blank CD-R by mistake. Well, I hope it was by mistake ... Thursday 24 October 2002 Yesterday's rehearsal bodes well for the rest of the week - we've tacked the baroque-d Frank Zappa Echidna's Arf onto the end of the bizarre Geminiani arrangement of Bonny Christy to make a medley of 'inappropriate music' to start the second half. David G is jet-lagged and bug-bound - by the end of the day he could barely stand up, but you'd never guess from the way he's playing. I'd hoped that the combination of David and Steve Player in the same room would work well, and sure enough it does, so if you're within travelling distance of Glasgow Biggar or Edinburgh in the next three days, drag yourself and anyone else you can think of along, and prepare to be seriously entertained ... This morning I've just got time to look over all the music and come up with a game plan for this afternoon's rehearsal. In preparation for Sunday and Monday's recordings I've already loaded up the car with various heaters that were lying around the cellar, as I have a suspicion that Crichton Church is going to be absolutely freezing. Even yesterday we were sitting around with coats and scarves on in the breaks, clutching warm cups of tea for comfort. When the temperature drops below a certain level and damp starts to make its presence felt, you can feel the harpsichord quills (at least those that are made out of feather rather than plastic) soaking it up and gradually becoming less and less inclined to do what you tell them. Thursday 17 October 2002 I did a radio interview on Tuesday to plug next week's concerts - you can hear it for the next few days at www.bbc.co.uk/radioscotland - follow the links to the programme Celtic Connections and 'listen again'. I'm about 15 minutes in, I think. Apart from that, all available time this week's been spent learning notes and learning tunes. For the former, I've almost mastered the art of practising while watching television. Sunday 6 October 2002 We've had much humming and hawing this week over recording venues for the end of the month, and we've settled on the stone-vaulted Crichton Collegiate Church in Midlothian (where I nearly got married, before we settled for the 19th century church down the road instead). It's loud, cold and damp, and if we can manage not to squeak too much it will sound great. Thanks to a kind offer of babysitting yesterday, we visited the late 15th century Alloa Tower, and I was amazed to find a minstrel's gallery above the main room on the first floor (photo). It's set into the curved wall above a sweeping staircase, and the acoustic is far bigger and more open than you'd expect to hear in a domestic setting, even such a grand one as this, home to another branch of the family of the Earls of Kellie. It all seemed a bit improbable, and after a bit of questioning of the guides, I found out that it had been added after 1800, possibly for musicians to play for the church services held in the tower. So the quest for an authentic 18th century Scots acoustic that will sound good on a record remains unfinished. The room on the floor above is hung with the usual assortment of family portraits of various earls and such, painted by David Allan (of Gentle Shepherd engravings fame), Raeburn and co., and very nice too. But my attention was caught by two small naive paintings half-hidden behind the door: of a woman standing by a concert harp, and of a man standing by a table. Tradition has it that they were painted in the early 19th century by the butler (or possibly the gardener) and they're breathtakingly charming and beautifully detailed, but they break several basic laws of draughtsmanship. The pattern on the carpet has no perspective, going vertically straight down, feet are far too small, and arms are about twice the expected length, but the thin, drawn, faces are fascinating. I could have stared at them for hours. The chair that's featured in one of the pictures now rests on the floor below it. I've just got the concert dates from Chris for my guest appearances with the Chris Norman Ensemble next month, so if you're near Cleveland, Baltimore, or Pittsburgh, come and cheer us on. I'm playing harpsichord, harmonium and melodica, an excellent combination. Watching James Taylor's band playing a number on TV last night, his keyboard player had about 5 keyboards, and on the top of one stack was, yes, a melodica, complete with extended breath tube, which he played at the beginning and end of the song. He didn't pick it up and wave it around though, which was a bit of a disappointment. A cassette arrived in the mail from David G of some tunes for our duo record for Marquis Classics, so I'll be applying some imagination, and hopefully melodica, to those over the next couple of weeks. There's been an explosion of junk mail hitting my inboxes recently. I used to get about 10 a day, but overnight last night to one of my addresses I got 71 unsolicited mails, of no interest to me whatsoever. And that's not counting the garbage that's been generated by the Bugbear virus over the last week. Monday 30 September 2002 Today I finally managed to finish preparing all of the notation for October's concerts and recording, with a final burst of photocopying, scanning, printing, penciling and sticking. When you're not playing music that's 'off the shelf', this preparation can take a very long time indeed. We're still mulling over possible recording venues, cold January weather (for the final day of sessions) and frequent overhead flights being the main problems at the moment. I spoke to Tony Kime this morning, who said he was just about to mail me the 2nd edit of the Pisendel record. Which seems like a good opportunity to display this photo, taken in my back garden last Tuesday. It's the Outdoor Classical Record Producer's Kit™.
clockwise from top left: CDs
of takes, Saturday 28 September 2002 In Prague airport, flight home delayed by 2 hours. I've never been to Prague before, and the architecture is breathtaking, but recent Westernisation has included the import of lots of English blokes on stag weekends. This means that if as I did last night, you walk down the street at night in the middle of the city, as part of a group of men who clearly aren't native, you get accosted every minute or so by drug-dealers, prostitutes or someone offering you a visit to a striptease club where 'you can touch - no problem'. It's very depressing. I was here with a group of journalists, and we ended up in our hotel bar swapping scurrilous gossip on UK politicians, none of which I'm going to repeat here. It was strange to get up this morning and hear about the latest political sex-and-hypocrisy scandal in the UK, involving some of the very people we were talking about. Wednesday 25 September 2002 Yes, we're back online after a little glitch of a couple of days. Apparently our hosting company simply.com, rather than renewing our subscription last March, used the money to open a new account under another domain name, and then let this one lapse and switched it off without telling us. Wasn't that helpful ? [insert plural of unflattering term here]. Saturday 21 September 2002 Well, since I got back home, things have got a bit frantic. I had a useful meeting with Delphian Records on Wednesday, where me managed to pin down most of the details of October's recording, and mull over some future possibilities as well. I've been preparing the performance material for October, finally nailed the repertoire and budget for then and for January, wrote up a draft proposal for the Scottish Psalter project (to get it clear in my head as much as anything else), prepared my accounts for last year, fitted in a few long overdue phone calls about other possible projects, spent 5 hours in my son's bedroom assembling furniture from a certain Swedish retailer, and the first edit of Adrian's Pisendel disc has arrived too (with 6 pages of notes from Ade) so that needs my attention. Not much time for writing diary entries at the moment. Musings on arts funding, Nova Scotia, and the quality of supermarket fish will have to wait. Monday 16 September 2002 In the air between Toronto and Glasgow, I'm on my way home after three days' intensive playing with David Greenberg in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Between the two of us were a massive pile of 18th century source material, a piano, a pump organ, a harpsichord, two fiddles (baroque and modern), and occasional musicological help, fiddling and step-dancing from David's wife Kate Dunlay. Their son Owen gave me a bodhran lesson too. We got well over a hour's worth of repertoire out of it, now we need to decide which concerts and whose CDs it all goes in - meetings with record company people on either side of the Atlantic await. Friday 6 September 2002 Despite never having been there before last week, I was back in East Sussex yesterday after only 36 hours, this time on BBC duty to have lunch with Joanna MacGregor in Brighton (if such a thing can be described as a duty). I only mention this because while walking along the beach from the pier, and not paying enough attention to what I was doing, I perfectly re-enacted Neil Kinnock's famous slip into the water when a big wave came in. Except that I had bare feet and my trousers rolled up, so I didn't get wet. But then the pier wasn't covered in photographers watching me either. When not listening to Adrian's session tapes, I've been firming up the schedule for October's concerts and recordings. Tuesday 3 September 2002 On the train to Luton Airport. On Friday Marie and I went to a meeting to convene a consortium of groups led by the SCO, looking into the live presentation of classical music. It was the director Ben Twist's idea, and his proposal has attracted a nice big Lottery grant. Now one of the conditions of the grant was that we commission some audience research, and here I have to swallow my innate cynicism about such an exercise. My natural belief is that such work tends to ignore the elephant in the room, which is: people don't go to classical concerts because usually they're not very good. Still, it was a very encouraging meeting and I'm sure it will turn out to be a useful project despite my moaning. On a rare night out, Helen and I went to see the Canadian Opera Company at the Edinburgh Festival on Friday night. In case you think I've suddenly developed an enthusiasm for opera, we got free tickets, and it was Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, which isn't really an opera anyway. That's my excuse. Director Francois Girard came up with a marvellous solution to the presentation problem. The production was visually stunning, with a huge mound of plague victims dominating the stage, and during Jocasta's aria, which was sung competently if almost completely without interest, the bodies behind her began to move and eventually revealed themselves to be beautiful young women swaying around seductively in slow motion with their tops off. Now this solved the boredom problem instantly. Paul Morley complained on BBC2's Late Show that they were kind of distracting him, but surely that was the whole point: 'Oh bugger, this singer isn't up to much, let's get some dancers to take their clothes off'. Perhaps I should suggest at the next meeting that soft porn is the answer to classical music promotion. As one of the audience near us said on leaving, 'I really enjoyed that, probably for all the wrong reasons'. I made it down to East Sussex in time for Adrian's concert of virtuosic fiddle sonatas with La Serenissima, and had a quick beer with Philip Pickett in the interval to muse on the difficulties of getting work in America. The sonatas were all written by or for the Dresden court orchestra leader Pisendel, and we've spent the last three days recording them with me acting as producer rather than harpsichordist. On Saturday night I had a chat with soprano Julia Gooding, who to my amazement remembered the salient points of a conversation we had 8 years ago ... Anyway, we've been recording in a little medieval church along the road from Adrian and Mhairi's place, which has the UK's biggest barrel organ in the loft, and a pyramid-shaped mausoleum (and plentiful brambles) in the churchyard. Also a wonderful brass inscription in the church which keeps referring to 'the said Master Batys'. If my surmise on 17th century pronunciation is correct, this must be a joke. Tony Kime parked his recording truck out on the road and we've had a productive few days, although it's felt like the main activity of the week has been eating and drinking extremely well (Ade's a good cook), interrupted occasionally by making a record. I've got all the session CDs with me in my bag so that I can finish my editing notes in transit. And finally, check out www.giantkid.net - both my kids have just road-tested the 'No!' CD and it passed with flying colours. Instant community singing of a rare strangeness. © 2002 David
McGuinness |
concerto caledonia