Friday 3 November 2006

Tomorrow at Glasgow's own organic vegan café-bistro-record shop-brewery-library-performance space Mono, is the launch party for 'Get While the Getting's Good', a compilation of music by Scottish artists on the aufgeladen und bereit label. Katherine (viola), Alison (cello) and myself (glockenspiel) played on the Future Pilot AKA vs. Concerto Caledonia track 'Elephants'. I'll probably go along and play a bit of melodica in the Future Pilot acoustic set. See you there? Details from Future Pilot AKA here and from a&b here.

Yesterday I cycled into town through sunshine and leaves, strangely reminiscent of cycling through another city 3000 miles away, nearly three weeks ago.  My lecture at the RSAMD wasn't exactly a triumph, however, buckling as it did under the weight of technological failures.  The first was an electronic diary failure which meant that the harpsichord hadn't been tuned, so that anything I tried to demonstrate sounded like a bag of spanners: not quite the thing to persuade a bunch of second-year students that old instruments are worth spending time with. And they've replaced the old overhead projector and white screen with a cool new video projection system, from which the cables had been disconnected for some reason. Not a problem, I rang the tech guy, he fixed it, fine. But they've installed two plasma screens about the size of domestic television sets (some penny-pinching somewhere in the process perhaps?) so that even once it's working, if you project a normal-sized page of music, none of the students can see any of the detail at all. It was Rameau, but it might as well have been Elliott Carter.