Thursday 23 April 2009

This was the scene in here later on Monday afternoon, committing some Mackintosh and Gow to hard disk.

Thanks to unaccustomed amounts of sunshine, I mixed and edited the results on headphones in the garden yesterday - I don't think I've ever done a mix outdoors before. 

I was in Edinburgh for David Johnson's funeral on Tuesday, a gathering which included academics, musicians, composers and eccentrics, and some who were like David a combination of all of these. We are undoubtedly poorer without him.

I've got Malachy's baroque bass here for company, which is en route to Dublin. I like the way that musicians' instruments often travel independently of their players: I suppose this will happen more as airlines' baggage charges continue to increase. 

But now back to the business of PowerPoint slides and academic argument. I've been half-listening to a load of old records (yes, vinyl records) to speed me along with writing, and this morning's first pick from the rack was the 1978 recording of Haydn's Missa Sancti Nicolai. What's striking about the standard white L'Oiseau-Lyre 'Florilegium series' cover, is that there's no mention of the soloists or even of the conductor on the front. It's sold on the basis that it's the Christ Church choir and the Academy of Ancient Music, and on the very strong brand identity of Oiseau-Lyre itself under Peter Wadland. That described a certain sonic signature; the names of the soloists, or the fact that it's Simon Preston standing up the front waving his arms, were quite secondary. That still seems like a radical idea, now that conductors and soloists are back at the forefront of the marketing of period-instrument performance. You'd have to ask people who were present at the sessions whether the implication that the music-making was more collective in nature was actually true!