Friday 8 June 2001

Well, after a year or so of collecting 18th century sources for the songs in The Gentle Shepherd, I finally got around this week to going them through them all systematically in the search for the most useful ones to use in our performances.  No doubt some early music purists will be horrified that we're doing this 'greatest hits' approach rather than trying to reconstruct one particular production or historical performance, but I think the days when the early music movement spent its energies trying to recreate specific events are gone, and rightly so. Apart from anything else, I think the urge to relive the past betrays a disturbing attitude to history.  What I try to do is understand the past, and then use that knowledge to create something in the present - I think that's a more responsible attitude towards life, let alone music.

Having written this, I'm reminded of a quote from XTC's Andy Partridge which surfaced in the newly released CD of their home demos: 'Opinions are like arseholes: everybody's got one, but no-one wants to hear yours'.

Anyway, it's hard work comparing anything up to half a dozen versions of a song against the text of the piece, and trying to work out which makes the most musical and dramatic sense.  For light relief last night, I added a gallery page and some links to the website, and inevitably encountered a variety of technical problems which I was still fiddling with this morning.  But this in turn gave me a chance to listen to the radio for a bit, and I was entranced by a recording of a 1940s arrangement of the Gloria from Monteverdi's Vespers, for full symphony orchestra and chorus.  It's not a performance I'd like to hear live now, but the sheer vitality and excitement of it was wonderful, and it also proved what an astonishingly good composer Monteverdi was.

If my brain gives up this afternoon, I might go and trim the hedge outside for a bit.