Monday 27 January 2003

I'm sitting in the Special Collections department of Glasgow University Library waiting for a pile of 17th and 18th century psalters to be brought out from the shelves. Special Collections used to be on the ground floor, where you would sit surrounded by wooden shelves, with the books in cages with sliding ladders, like a library from an Agatha Christie mystery.  But now it's on Level 12, in a clean well-lit room with stunning views across the west end of Glasgow. OK, so today it's views of teeming rain but you get the idea. When I was working on my PhD, music was on the floor below, and on summer evenings you could sit at a desk surrounded by paper and just gaze out of the window for an hour, looking south over the rest of the city to the hills beyond.

It's been a busy few days - Friday's concert was a challenge, with its complicated programme (see below).  I likened one Bach fugue to cycling around on the top of a very steep hill enjoying the view, only to discover you're going downhill very fast and you don't know if you'll make the tight corner at the bottom or go head first through a hedge.  Radio Music went well, with a couple of nice chance finds: I got 'Back in the USSR' at one point, and then two radios picked up a conversation about children who love taking radios to bits.  After the concert, when I finally went back up to the hall to clear up, most of the audience were still there, which was very satisfying.  It's nice when people want to hang around afterwards and make the experience last as long as possible.  Or maybe they just wanted to get a close-up look at all the valve radios - they did look great.  Thanks to Stuart Gardiner for getting them in perfect working order and electrically safe ... The British Vintage Wireless Society are here!

As you can see from the quote above, on Friday this humble diary got a bit of press coverage too.

Off to Crichton on Saturday, where the church and castle looked spectacular in the sunshine, for our first day of recording.  Mhairi is in fantastic voice at the moment, and surrounded by players like Lucy, Sarah, Katherine and Alison, the actual music-making is just fun, it's only the preparation for these sessions that's work.  But that's how it's meant to be, I'm sure.  When I finally got home my son demanded a bacon sandwich, so I went down to the 24 hour 'we never close' supermarket at the bottom of our road while I still had my coat on - it was closed.  Oh well, I needed some cash anyway, so I stuck my card in the machine on the wall, which promptly ate it.  No food, no money, great. Was it raining? I can't remember. Things like this always happen when you're in the middle of making a record.

Yesterday we recorded Jamie's songs, after he flew in from Belfast, where he and the other two 'three Scottish tenors' were doing a Burns night bash.  I'd discovered last week that Pietro Urbani's tune for 'A Red Red Rose' was actually the original, predating both Burns's choice of air in the Scots Musical Museum, and the tune it's usually sung to now.  A nice selling point for the record I hope - as we were going for the last take I said 'this has got to be a good one, this is the track the Americans'll play on the radio'.