Sunday 15 November 2009

For a number of reasons, it's not really been a week for diarising here. But I've been busy preparing the scores for next week's Tiger Lillies date, which took me two whole days, and I managed to get the company accounts to our auditors, which is always a huge relief. I'm now editing Alison's minutes from the board meeting.

On Tuesday I was one of the 30 000 people buying an iPhone from Orange on the day they launched, and I've been gradually coming to terms with its elegant idiosyncrasies. It was nice after visiting Sheila last weekend, to see John Barnes's Bach temperament included in the Cleartune software, but I have promised not to turn into one of those people who talk about their iPhone all the time, so mmffmblmmff [muffled enthusiasm with the odd gripe]. 

Someone from a certain conservatoire mentioned to me this week that their students were preparing for their scale exams. "Scale exams? You mean they play scales and get marked on how good they are?" That's what they are. Wow - it's like military drill, which would be fine if scales were universally useful. But what I found preparing Schetky's music to play on the fortepiano, was that although it includes some really fast scale passages in conventional patterns, I seldom used the 'official' fingerings that I was so painstakingly taught a long time ago. On old instruments, fingering is crucial, because it's possible to produce much more  detailed articulation than on a modern piano: if your hand movements don't make musical sense, it will come out in the sound. So even with something as basic as F major, I tended to use fingering determined by the phrasing rather than the accepted patterns - you'd never practise an F major scale with your thumb on G, but sometimes it's what you need to do. 

But then, conservatoires were set up to conserve playing traditions. The big lesson of the early music movement is that playing traditions don't need conservation; rather, they need to be constantly reinvented in the light of newly-available evidence.