Thursday 14 June 2012

I spent this afternoon over at Alison’s, where with the help of a viol, a pile of books and a computer (and a lot of preparation beforehand) we distilled 130-odd pieces by Tobias Hume down into an hour’s programme for the Edinburgh Festival, all of it seriously good stuff.  There are so many practical considerations and mysteries with Hume’s music, that there are a lot of things to take into consideration other than just choosing good stuff and putting it into a satisfying order, so I hope we’ve come up with something that turns out to be physically possible on stage. We tried singing through the entire programme in one minute to check its structure and it seemed to work well, so let’s hope we haven’t landed anyone with the wrong instrument in the wrong tuning at the wrong time.

We had a few recordings to hand for reference, which usually drew responses of ‘well, we’re not going to play it like THAT’.  Similarly, it was interesting to hear some of our own Fiddler Tam on the radio on Tuesday, as with the benefit of a few years’ hindsight it’s crystal clear which bits of it really work and which bits don’t quite.  This morning I was walking past a university lecture room and heard the opening track from the same album coming from inside. I waited for the music to stop and then stuck my head round the door, to be faced by a room full of Chinese students who gave me a round of applause.

At the beginning of the week Kirsty Money was visiting Glasgow from Halifax, NS for a fiddle lesson with Lauren MacColl, so we managed fit in some tourism as well.