Tuesday 3 November 2009

Till the weekend, you can hear August's concert from Caraquet with Suzie & co. here, even if you're not in Canada. I'll have a listen when I'm done practising ... 

later
I'd forgotten Suzie played the melodica in that show - I only realised when I couldn't work out who was playing the harpsichord in The Widow's Laddie (she plays harpsichord too, of course, but not in this show as far as I can remember). And I'd forgotten we all sing in harmony at one point - it's just well Suzie's at the top, as each phrase kind of implodes at the end underneath ... and you don't often hear early Italian balletti played on two melodicas, clarinet and a double bass playing really high. But really you can ignore all this crap and just listen to Suzie singing for an hour. It's quite something. And Mark's klezmer outburst at the end is superb.

For an alternative view on how to integrate percussion into art music, there's always this, which I thought was the kind of thing that undergraduates did in 1974, not 2009. But it did make me laugh a lot. When I was a student Craig McLeish and I used to play Orlando Gibbons verse anthems on organ and electric guitar, but we didn't expect people to take us seriously. No, we didn't.