Wednesday 16 November 2011

Today I managed to get just a little bit of research done on a ConCal programme for next year: the problem with having space in my diary to do something like that for an hour or two in between chores is that by the end of the day my inbox is full of all the other things that have to be done, on top of the new ones that I’ve found in the course of the intriguing research.  Really the only sensible course of action if I’m to get some sleep is to give up on any notion of ever doing any interesting work again.

The thing about wanting to hear music that I haven’t heard before, is that every time I have to invent at least part of the process. This is time-consuming, not just in activity, but in thinking time:  for example, starting with the thought ‘I don’t really want to hear that kind of singer in this’ leads to the thought ‘What kind of singer do I want to hear then?’ which involves testing a range of possibilities and weighing them up.  To make music in a more conventional way, I could skip this part and go straight to booking musicians.

But I did also drop in on Alison today to have my first Feldenkrais lesson ever, which is helping my body gradually re-arrange itself again after last week’s pedestrian-aided collision with tarmac.  I bet most Feldenkrais lessons don’t begin with unaccompanied Bach played on an original Amati 5-string cello. Like my experience with the Trasuntinis harpsichord the other week, it kept telling her to play slower too.