Monday 19 April 2010

A day of writing and practice ahead, with an excursion at some point into the bright, cold weather to stop me becoming completely sedentary. 

Sunday mornings at home are becoming increasingly associated with Dan Bodah's Airborne Event on WFMU: pretty much every week he comes up with at least one 'whoa, what's that?' moment, which has me scrabbling around on eBay for obscure old LPs. Yesterday's show featured some wonderful Sacred Harp singing and all sorts of things loosely based on it. The opening song 'Wondrous Love' is one that Edmund Brownless had us singing at Boxwood a couple of years ago, and the Word of Mouth Chorus makes a glorious noise. If you need some musical accompaniment for a long day, you could do worse than work your way through Dan's archives.

As broadband access (that's high speed internet in UK-speak) becomes taken for granted, or in Gordon Brown's words 'the electricity of the digital age', the focus and the data gradually move away from hard drives and into the cloud. Not having a tech support department to do the maintenance for me, I spent lots of the weekend defragging hard drives and organising online and physical backups of my two computers: after some investigation I settled on Mozy for the online bit, and an old, more reliable version of Novosoft's Handy Backup. I've already got into the habit of keeping most work-in-progress online (Google Docs or Dropbox) so that I can access it on my phone or laptop. But if net access collapses unexpectedly as air travel just has, what happens then? 

later
Practising piano music properly is really tiring. Or maybe it's just Haydn, because he never does what you think he's going to, so you have to be on total mental alert at all times. Starting from feeling pretty refreshed, I managed only about 90 minutes' total of serious practice time today (mostly in short chunks) before I was completely exhausted and had to find something less demanding to do.

After a final harmonium overdub yesterday, I made a rough mix of a set of dance band tunes, featuring Pamela, Bill and Alison, but it needs further tweaks before anyone hears it. I'll live with it for a while and make a list of improvements.