Sunday 5 August 2012

Some activities are incompatible with multi-tasking, for me anyway. Rehearsal is one: everyone’s in the room to concentrate on making music, so any other activity has to stay outside.  My other one is writing. Last week I had to finish 3000 words of academic prose, which I’d mostly completed three weeks ago, and the only way I could get it done was to abandon all communication with the outside world for two days, apart from occasional visits to twitter, and get very grumpy indeed. So I now have a backlog of email and other fairly urgent stuff to deal with. If I ever attempted to write a book (which is unlikely) I would have to go and live in a hermitage for a couple of years, and even then I’d spend most of the day making tea, going for walks, or cycling.

The instrumentarium for next week’s Hume project is becoming ever more exotic. Apart from Clare’s nyckelharpa, and the two orpharions, Tommy is going to bring a cittern as well, and the 14-string item of magnificence pictured here last week is Alison’s new tenor lyra-viol with sympathetic strings. I think I called it a lira d’amore in the programme, but I’m not sure if it even has an official name yet.

Alasdair and I will be sharing in public the current state of our piano ballads, on the opening night of the Music is the Music Language festival at 78.

Robert Fripp’s first press interview for many years reveals his excellent strategy for keeping your music alive: ‘whenever you get close to success, the band splits up’. This may sound self-defeating, but the underlying principle is further up the page: ‘The greater the success, the greater the pressure to keep repeating yourself’.

If you thought Korean pop was all about characterless girl bands, get this.