Saturday 2 March 2002

Whenever I think I'm going to get some thinking time or a bit of a break, something always comes along just in time to stop it.  On Monday the RSNO rang me up to ask if I'd play the sampler in John Adams's Fearful Symmetries next week.  Potentially it's a lot of fun - you get to sit and play a load of silly percussion samples on a keyboard in the middle of a symphony orchestra, even counting them off on the hi-hat at the beginning.  But the RSNO pay their extras abominably, so I passed on it, gave them some numbers of other people to try, and said 'if you're stuck, ring me back with a better offer'.  They did.  So I've given in, and I'm quite looking forward to it now.

Once you take into account a reasonable amount of preparation time, the pay as an orchestral extra is about a third of what you could earn doing instrumental teaching - it's hardly any wonder then, that the majority of orchestral players only manage to earn a living by teaching in what spare time they have.  People from other walks of life are constantly amazed at how little jobbing musicians earn - if you chose to earn broadly similar amounts by cleaning toilets, even then you wouldn't have to buy and maintain your own £20 000 toilet brush, and keep up your technique at home.

I've been sufficiently shamed and/or impressed by the Ensemble Ambrosius guys to decide that it's time I learnt how to tune harpsichords properly by ear, instead of relying on a meter.  My experience in Rome this time last year taught me that it's time I was confident enough to take care of any potential disasters myself.  So I've got all my old photocopies of tuning schemes out and started practising again, and I have a lesson booked with Meg Munck next week.  It's also a useful distraction from practising the myriad notes of Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 which I'm playing in a couple of weeks.

On the subject of lessons and self-improvement, I had a glorious Alexander lesson yesterday - the first one with my original teacher Evelyn Tingle for 7 years.  I got hooked on the Technique after the Scottish Arts Council gave me some money in 1991 to get some harpsichord lessons - I went to see David Roblou who told me my ankle kept wiggling, had I realised?  He said 'you could try Alexander Technique, it helped me'.  I asked around some dancer friends in Glasgow for a recommendation, and after my first lesson with Evelyn, went home, sat down at the harpsichord, and discovered I could hear much more clearly: not the result I was expecting at all!  So I spent the rest of the SAC money, and more besides, on Alexander lessons over the next few years.  And since yesterday I've been rediscovering my neck ... 

In amongst all this I've been cooking up another recording project, and Marie and I have been working on plans and fund-raising for the New Year Messiah.  As I write I'm half-listening to a borrowed CD of Messiah recordings from 1899 to the 1920s which is strangely fascinating.  In those days people sang the English language as though it were the English language, and not a pale imitation of Italian.  You can even make out the words!

And Spike Milligan died this week.  I've only ever written two fan letters, and one was to him, a great musician as well as a creative powerhouse in all kinds of directions.  The theme to 'Q' is still the best TV sig ever : I remember being fascinated by the version with the buzzer at the age of about 8 - how could people manage to play like that?  And somewhere on the bookshelves upstairs is a very well-loved copy of 'Small Dreams of a Scorpion', simple serious verse, some of it deeply affecting.  When I wrote to him I said that in a just world, someone of his talent would simply be provided with the means to create.  How someone as radical as he got access to the media in the 1950s is one of art history's miracles.