Sunday 1 May 2011

I'm taking it easy today after spending yesterday engaging with redundant technology of a different sort from usual, negotiating thirteen 19th-century locks on the Crinan Canal, and then cycling all the way back against the wind to pick up the car. Great fun in the sunshine but hard work.

Watching that wedding on Friday, my daughter pointed out that the Choir of Westminster Abbey looked a bit creepy. Well, yes. I'm glad that when an undergraduate organist, I had similar reservations about the all-male atmosphere at York Minster and kept my distance from that sort of musical culture. By about 11.30 I'd turned from being pretty ambivalent about the whole thing into a passionate republican, uncomfortable about the selective use of history and tradition to prop up the least defensible parts of UK society. If a bomb landed on Westminster Abbey now (assuming no-one was in it at the time) I wouldn't be that upset. Sometimes you have to clear away the past to see the present for what it is - and I'm saying that as someone who spends most of his time exploring the culture of the past in great detail. Isn't that sad? But the guy playing the timps was great - who was it?  

Speaking of the culture of the past, I've just received a modest grant for the preservation and cataloguing of Dolly Collins's music (a job for this summer I hope), and I got an email yesterday pointing out that an Ivor Cutler Songbook is long overdue. Wouldn't that be fun?   

I was very cheered on Friday to note that I'm not the only one who thinks that on the whole, opera singers make a horrible noise - but I think it's a 20th-century development rather than a 19th-century one. Listen to early 20th-century recordings of opera and you can usually make out both the words and the notes.

Notes ... I must practise some, I've got two concerts next week.

spaceship sunset