Thursday 12 August 2004

St Martin's Churchyard, East Woodhay, Hampshire
I'm on a short break from recording Geminiani cello sonatas with Alison and Joe 'Master of Sarcasm' Crouch: they're doing a movement I'm not in, it sounds lovely. I've done all my solo bits, some last night and the rest in the tea breaks, so just two more sonatas and then I can stop being a practising musician for a while, and go back to editing records and organising. It feels like the Geminiani solos have been hanging over me for a long time (they're very hard) so it's nice to have despatched them relatively quickly and have them in the can. Worth celebrating with a beer later I think.

I find the stop-start part of the classical recording process very tiring (or maybe I'm just very tired). I certainly feel like I haven't played particularly well in the ensemble stuff. We opted for the big harpsichord in the end, which was great for the solos, but a bit too loud for at least some of the sonatas. So I've been concentrating on keeping out of the way by not playing too much: a constant reining in of musical ideas, rather than having the freedom to play and respond to the sounds around me. Couple that with the necessary repetition and interruption that the recording process employs, and it becomes very difficult to feel like you're doing anything musical at all, as by the time you've played a short section for the 5th time it stops feeling like it's part of a larger discourse. I suspect the end result will be rather good, but it's nice right now not to be playing for a while, and just to listen to everyone else making beautiful sounds. One of Geminiani's helpful instructions to continuo players in his book The Art of Accompaniament (sic) is that if you're creating confusion, just play the bassline and miss out the chords. I think I'll be following his advice quite a bit on this record. But then he also says you should fill in all the gaps whenever the soloist stops ... I've been doing a bit of that too.

Eligio Quintiero joined us today and let me play around on his alto baroque guitar in the lunch break. Eligio is one of those musicians (like Chris) for whom making music really is playing. Well I guess so anyway; maybe he feels differently about it. But musical ideas just pour out of him constantly, so it's nice to able to leave the bulk of the improvising work to him and concentrate on being unobtrusive.
Or for that matter silent: I'm sitting out in the churchyard enjoying the breeze. Today the weather's been alternating between beautiful sunshine and torrential rain, which almost threatened our lunchtime barbecued trout and salmon. Disposable barbecues are a neat solution to the kitchenless recording venue dilemma, but only when it's dry.

The llamas in the adjoining field are very inquisitive.