Saturday 3 November 2007

At my desk, after a morning visit to our local church's annual November jumble sale where I bought my old bike two years ago. This morning's bargain was a pile of vinyl including several mono Beatles LPs - mono copies of Revolver in good nick don't come along at 50p very often. It really does sound better than the stereo, honest! 

Andrew dropped in yesterday, and with his encouragement, I've finally started to get my head around some of next year's gigs. So I have a wee trail of post-it notes around my desk, each of which represents an empty space (usually a concert programme) to be filled. January will see the first outing of our Scottish Dance Band, which will only play music from traditions other than the usual fiddle/accordion one. I think it will be a lot of fun, and it's also a continuation of our many years trying to persuade people that Scottish music doesn't necessarily always sound the way people think it's going to. Speaking of which, the new edition of John Purser's indispensably opinionated Scotland's Music book is now out at last. Get one. And not just because John's very nice about me in the acknowledgements.

If you're in a buying mood, I've also added some more product to our CD shop.

One idea that came together in my head while talking to the students at the RSAMD on Wednesday was the homogenising effect of the recording industry on the early music world. It now feels like there is a kind of global consensus on how to play 'baroque' music: a Japanese group sounds much like a Canadian one, which sounds much like an English one, or whatever. Now in the 18th century this would have been quite a ridiculous idea: a group in Paris would sound completely different from a group in Lisbon or Venice or Prague. The musicians in each place would be surrounded by different folk musics, dance different dances, and come from different musical backgrounds. And they would only rarely hear musicians from another cultural centre.

You can trace the 20th century homogenisation through the recordings particularly of the 1970s and 80s, as the groups begin to copy each other's records, which is great in terms of musicians from different parts of the world being able to play together easily, but ultimately it makes for dull music. Eventually it always comes out the way you expect it to, and there are groups all over the world doing pretty much exactly the same thing. What a waste of effort! Why bother? Then when someone comes along who sounds different (like our very own Mr Greenberg) they get listened to with suspicion by the 'consensus'.

When I was an undergraduate at York University, one of the first things I learnt was to be suspicious of tradition. The collegiate/cathedral choral tradition (in York maintained by the Minster) is still seen even now as the most appropriate way to perform the choral music of the 16th and 17th centuries, but a cursory study of the music of Gibbons and his ilk shows that there are many aspects of the music that don't survive in such performances. But don't get me started on the effect on British musical culture of the whole English choral tradition or I'll start ranting ...

later
There's a new tune on my myspace page, for those who are interested.