Wednesday 4 July 2001

The Gentle Shepherd score is taking shape now - Ben sends me the Sibelius files of his transcriptions from the sources, and then I fine-tune them and add my extra bits of arrangements.  At the beginning of August we'll make up sets of parts and then it's up to everyone to make of it what they can.  It was very interesting listening back to the session tapes of the Mungrel Stuff CD, how much improvisation and musical embroidery went on that I wasn't necessarily aware of at the time - there's no shortage of, ahem, personality in the playing.  And quite right too: full marks to everyone for not playing what was written on the part in front of them.  I wouldn't apply this approach to Bach, but then we weren't playing Bach.  I'm keeping the Gentle Shepherd material as simple as possible to allow for maximum input from the players once we're all in a room together.  I suppose this could be the first rule of making good music - get all the right people in the room.

Most of our energy is going into organisation for August - Radio 3 has invited us onto the In Tune programme to play live on 22 August, which should be fun. We've been sending out invitations to the shows, and drumming up a bit of press, and there's still some work to do on pulling the CD together as well.  Last night I put together a CD-R of all the session photos for inclusion in the CD booklet, and included two of Jamie and me taken in 1972 when we were in the same year at Hillhead Primary School.  We were in different classes, but have near identical class photos - I wonder if they'll make it into the finished product.

Meanwhile, with my radio programme making hat on, I'm going to head off to Los Angeles for a bit at the end of the month to interview a load of movie directors and the composers they work with.  I'm producing a new strand for Radio 3 about film music (we recorded the first programme today for transmission on 30 July) which is an interesting diversion from 18th century Scottish culture.