Saturday 29 January 2011

Remarkable musical experience of the week was watching Barnaby having a musical conversation with Prakriti Dutta, he in canntaireachd and she in Sargam syllables, with Hardeep Singh singing the taal rather than playing it on the tabla. It was extremely sophisticated and completely artless at the same time, and managed to be both disarmingly simple yet extremely profound. Catherine Motuz is visiting Scotland at the moment and one of her responses was 'I want to learn to do that'.

Rather than reply to some of the screens of unanswered mail awaiting my attention, it seems like a good time to tell the story of a few of the things that happened in late November/early December, and which I was far too busy to blog about at the time. I have hours of audio and video footage, but those can wait (hopefully for someone else to sort it all out). So ... cast your mind back to when there was snow everywhere, and Monday 29 November:

Our adventure began when Alison appeared here and we realised that our conversation with the hire car company about what constituted a big enough vehicle for 4 people and several large musical instruments hadn't quite gone to plan. 7 seats: great. No usable luggage space whatsoever: not. So after digging the hire vehicle out of the snow four times, and a lot of phone calls to car insurance people and an investigation of someone's (not saying who) many speeding convictions, and we got Bill (licence clean as a whistle) onto my car insurance and we set off with two vehicles and three drivers for what turned out to be an 11 hour drive to Suffolk. By the end I couldn't remember which car I was driving, and Alison was imagining one-way streets that weren't there, but we got to Aldeburgh in one piece before midnight. I never travel long distances by road, so the experience of learning how to read service station roadside signs to avoid McDonalds in favour of Waitrose was a new one for me.

Well, what a civilised place Aldeburgh Music is to work. We had Tuesday afternoon in the Pears Recital Room, and then we moved into the Britten Studio which would be our home for the whole project: rehearsal, concert and recording. It's quite a luxury not just to have world-class facilities at your disposal, but to have them run by people who already understand what it is that you need in order to work effectively. So when we were in the room almost all of the time was spent on useful work, and we got 73(ish) minutes of music prepared, some of which had been roughly planned beforehand, and some of which, like Up In The Morning Early, were just ideas that we had in the car on the way to rehearsal that day. By Tuesday it was clear that Martin Carthy wasn't going to be able to join us, as he quite rightly had to be close at hand for Norma who'd only recently been taken into hospital, but Jim Moray arrived the following day with the beautiful 1960s red Epiphone guitar he'd just acquired and fitted right in.

While I was in charge of music management, Alison took responsibility for group management, and by the end of our first day staying in Elizabeth Court (the converted sheltered housing block that is Aldeburgh's artist accommodation), we had a cooking rota, which meant that we ate very well indeed. The post-prandial sessions were good too: there's something very cheering about watching a bunch of world class early music professionals accompanying a ballad by blowing across the top of a selection of beer bottles.

After the Sunday afternoon gig, three of us felt in need a bit of andrenaline to get us through the recording sessions the following day, so we returned to the beach at 8am and jumped in the sea. It was minus 3 and the beach was actually frozen solid, but it felt great - afterwards. The focus and concentration from everyone in the sessions was pretty remarkable, in that we recorded all 73 minutes of music in two 3 hour sessions, with time to spare. Now if only I had time to start editing it ...

Most of the photos below are courtesy of Liz Kobes and Steve Portnoi. 

Olivia and Alasdair, ever refining their ensemble ballad singing

We had a flipchart, but all that ever made it onto it was a drawing of an oatcake,
later amended by Alan Gotto to make it historically pertinent

Pamela's-eye view of my harmonium complete with real oatcakes

Liz's atmospheric shot of Aldeburgh beach in the snow

final rehearsal, tutti

Alasdair, Jim (looking visionary) and Olivia in the show

8am pre-recording swim 

Olivia, Pamela, Olivia's harmonium, microphones, me

Pamela's growing attachment to my school glockenspiel

Clare's hurdy-gurdy tuning was worth the effort every time

Bill and Pamela are here seen doing the Guardian crossword in the lunch break of the sessions:
it was just after this that Alasdair appeared ('ask him, he knows lots of words') and proclaimed 'Ocelot ... of course it's ocelot',
which for some reason summed up the whole week for me. I don't know why. 

also at lunchtime: this one won't be the group publicity shot then
L-R: Nick, Jim, Bill, DMcG, Olivia, Alison, Mairi, Alasdair, Clare, Pamela

massed choral singing in the session

dazed and confused in the pub afterwards: 
'Are we really finished? Can we really have a beer now?'

driving home through the frozen Midlands