Saturday 2 May 2009
on the second of tonight’s four trains
I'm speeding north from Leeds to Edinburgh after a most entertaining day in Saltaire, which began with a visit to Pam and Phil Fluke’s astonishing reed organ museum. In my experience when I've found large fully-developed harmoniums with lots of stops and devices, they're about 95% reliable if they’ve been professionally looked after – they will still have a legion of quirks and idiosyncrasies to be overcome before you can just play some music. But with the best of Pam and Phil’s instruments, you can just sit down and make music right away. Between Pam's research and Phil's technical skill, they just know what to do to bring them back to life. Fantastic. And the range of amazing and bizarre instruments that they have at the Victoria Halls is just too big to list here: the combined piano and reed organ designed for accompanying silent movies was pretty astonishing, and the Mustel harmonium-celestes were really beautiful too. As for this enharmonic 53-note to the octave scientific demonstration instrument, what would Harry Partch have made of it?
I could have stayed for a long time making friends with various examples from their collection, but there was a concert to be played across the road.
There’s nothing like being well prepared ... and we were nothing like well-prepared – that’s not really true, but we were still rehearsing a song in the church hall downstairs with about 10 minutes to go.
Excellent fun in the concert with lots of risks taken, some of which came off very well. But I got the 'irretrievable train wreck' prize for playing the last piece at double speed and then not being able to work out why I couldn’t make it fit. It’s always best at a point like that to own up. Fortunately I think enough things had gone well for us to get away with it.
Hearing Olivia sing Monteverdi and Purcell accompanied by an Indian harmonium and make it utterly convincing, was a great illustration of how 17th and 18th century music can (and did) travel well outside its original context, like the Purcell songs that wriggled their way in amongst the fiddle tunes in James Oswald’s Caledonian Pocket Companion. Her subtle remoulding of the accompaniments to fit one-handed keyboard playing with a drone gave me plenty to think about too.
Anyway, I think the concert may have been more than the sum of its parts, or something. I'm left with the impression of having been on stage with, and in the company of, three very impressive people, in a welcoming and supportive environment. Which is a nice place for a musician to have been. And now I'm on a train listening to Fred Frith's To Sail, To Sail, which probably isn't a record anyone would want to listen to very often, but as a celebration of a worthwhile musical experience it's absolutely perfect.
wet floop at Waverley