Tuesday 9 April 2002

Time to put another date on the events page - there's more to come, but we're still sorting out venue and personnel availability.  This is the first time I've sat at my desk for a while, and there's a mountain of email to get through and some thinking to be done. 

Last Thursday Marie and I went to see the ever-supportive Helen Jamieson at the Scottish Arts Council to discuss what we'll do with the money they've given us for this year.  I thought our plans had looked a bit lacklustre, as to some extent we'd put in the kind of things we thought they'd fund, rather than what we actually wanted to do.  But by the end of the meeting I got the impression that next time we should just tell them what we really want to achieve and see what happens.  On the way through on the train (for non-Scottish readers, you travel through from Glasgow to Edinburgh, not across, up, down or East) we came up with a list of projects we'd started thinking about over the last couple of years, and it was much longer than we'd expected, and looked like fun too.

From next year, the state funding of music in Scotland is going to get a bit of a shake up, with more of a level playing field for rock, jazz, traditional and everything else alongside the classical and opera people who've been getting nearly all the dosh up until now.  About time really. When the Scottish Parliament was set up, the Executive came up with a wide-ranging Cultural Strategy which singled out the three 'national companies', the RSNO, SCO and Scottish Opera/Scottish Ballet, for special treatment, because (amongst other reasons) "companies with national roles should focus on excellence in all they do" - which kind of implies that the rest of us just fanny about doing any old crap.  And having two 'national' orchestras and an opera company, without a 'national' theatre, a 'national' jazz band, a 'national' hardcore thrash combo, a 'national' DJ, or a 'national' mask and puppet centre (or a 'national' baroque group of course), is a bit strange to say the least.  Let's face it, Scotland's greatest cultural gifts to the world are not in orchestral music or opera, are they?  Now what about a 'national' comedy club ...

Last Wednesday I did my annual stint of DIY, wielding a paintbrush. Virgin Classics have been wringing out the last few drops of cash from their back catalogue by releasing Roger Norrington's complete Beethoven symphonies and overtures for the price of 1 CD, so I bought a set intending to use it as background music around the house or in the car, but that didn't really work, so I listened while painting instead. Beethoven is such macho music, I felt like I should be doing something more aggressive than painting a bathroom pink: invading a neighbouring nation perhaps. Still, I'm glad to say that even in the 1990s I got to know the symphonies by playing them in their piano duet arrangements rather than listening to records. In the lunch-break of my day job at the BBC, I used to go over to Lynda Cochrane's flat and we would play duet transcriptions of orchestral music on her big old Bechstein grand. Some people may have suspected there was something other than music-making going on during our frequent assignations (and we had some slightly suggestive photos of ourselves taken in the vain hope that people might want to actually book us to play this stuff), but I can assure you that after you'd worked up a sweat with someone on a few Beethoven climaxes, anything more carnal would have been a bit of a comedown.

Speaking of photos, the prints from our ConCal session with Kevin Low on 1 November have just arrived, so expect some new shots scattered around this site soon.

Before our trip to the SAC on Thursday, I offered some tech support to Greg, printing out his first string arrangements for the Trashcan Sinatras, so that I could see the look on his face when the first sheet came out of the printer.  When you've been sweating over a piece or an arrangement for weeks, and you first see it appear as a beautifully laid-out part, the satisfaction is sweet indeed.