Wednesday 13 March 2002

It's been an eventful week so far - on Monday I had a fruitful meeting with the guys from Delphian Records, who are keen to do some stuff with us. At least two possible projects made it past the 'that's a nice idea' stage to the 'what will it cost again?' stage without pain, which is pretty good going.

On Sunday I dropped into St Andrew's in the Square to hear Cape Breton fiddler and baroque violinist David Greenberg, who's over on this side of the Atlantic playing a few gigs in Scotland with Abby Newton and Patsy Seddon.  He used to have a group in Canada called Puirt-a-Baroque who played similar repertoire to ours, but sounded rather different.  He's coming over here tomorrow to jam for a bit, which I'm looking forward to a lot - by coincidence we're both teaching at the RSAMD in the morning.  

On Monday night Mr McFall's Chamber were playing in Edinburgh, including a project with final year animation students at Edinburgh College of Art, where they wrote and played live soundtracks to short animated films projected on a big screen behind them.  Great fun - it reminded me of our ECA collaboration a few years back on a big Venetian extravaganza.  I remember sitting in the middle of a Vivaldi recorder concerto, when I wasn't playing in the slow movement, and looking around to see that nearly every available surface in Greyfriars Kirk was projected with images of moving water.  Quite beautiful.

Last night we had what felt like a very productive ConCal board meeting.  Marie and I tend to talk about what we've been up to, and then we wait for the pearls of wisdom to come back at us.  We have a good variety of skills and backgrounds across our board members, not to mention a mine of experience, and I emerged from the meeting with plenty to think about, concerning our overall strategy as a group and how we achieve our aims.  It's easy to get diverted off-course when you're caught up in the details day by day.  Now what is this group about again?