Thursday 25 August 2005

I'm sitting in the Edinburgh Playhouse watching Scottish Ballet's tech rehearsal of a Balanchine show to music by Stravinsky and Webern. Which is quite a nice place to be sat on a Thursday afternoon. I'm only playing harmonium for about 5 minutes of the Webern, so the rest of the time, rather than sitting in the very claustrophobic and airless band room directly under the stage, I'm watching the show. It looks great. Wish I could get so enthusiastic about Stravinsky's music.

I have the Debain harmonium (c.1868) from Cambridge Reed Organs to play, which is in near perfect playing condition. Given that the Webern part is so sparse, I'm playing nearly all of it on the expression stop, so that the reeds are fed directly from the bellows controlled by my feet. It's great for making accordion-like swells and sudden accents. One of the few places where I don't use it is for some very high repeated notes, which sound like the alarm of a distant lorry reversing. Or a persistent mobile phone.

It's been bothering me recently that my work rate is slowing, so I've been reading a lot, and waiting for something to arise out of the mental mulch. Sure enough, on Tuesday night a research proposal started to formulate, and now I'm occupying myself on train journeys by wading through 150 pages of guidance notes on research funding applications. Next week I start meeting with staff of academic institutions to help me decide what to do next.

[later]
I had a very productive meeting in Valvona's with Svend Brown from Perth Concert Hall this afternoon, pinning down the contents of our three concerts there this season. In January we're going to do a Burns and Neil Gow night, with a selection of guest singers and Chris Norman too, to reunite the Jolly Boys with the McGillivray sisters. We also want to add a certain bass player who I won't name yet in case we can't get him, but it will be one hell of a band. We now have a draft rehearsal schedule for the John Passion too. I'll put the dates in our concerts diary now.