Northampton

I got up at shit o'clock yesterday and drove to Northampton where I'd been booked to do a day of filming with BBC Look East about the Nene composition.

The day started at the music school, with an interview at a piano, where they asked me to play a few themes from the piece which I couldn't really get my fingers around! The thing about telly is that you always get told to do painfully embarrassing things which usually involve mocking up a scene to demonstrate something which the cameras weren't there to film when it actually happened. Yesterday's involved Beth coming into the room and our having the most painfully embarrassing conversation about red kite bird song! Egg sandwiches all over the place!

The thing is, as a maker of telly myself, I completely understand why these things have to happen. And Shaun from the BBC is so good-natured and fun to be around that it never stays eggy for that long. It was great to be at the music school. That building literally hums with memories. Every single corner has some significance attached to it and it never seems to change. I talked passionately about the importance of access to creativity and culture for young Midlanders. So much gets written about inner city kids but, in my view, that's not where the issue is. If you live in Elephant and Castle, for example, you've got all the Southbank London cultural institutions not just on your doorstep, but coming into your schools and running local initiatives to fulfil their funding criteria. This allows young people to aspire to be involved in the arts. You just don't get that level of initiative in the Midlands, where kids often can't get back to their homes by public transport after the theatres in Northampton have finished. If your nearest theatre or concert hall is 20 miles away, and your school has cut music and drama from its syllabus, how can you ever be expected to experience art, let alone participate in it?

From Northampton, we went to Hardwater Mill at Great Doddington. On my epic walk along the Nene last December, I stopped there for some time, listening to, and recording, the sound of a sluice gate, which actually turns out to be a hydro-electricity generator. It made a fabulous rhythmic boom which has become a feature of my composition and actually set the tempo for the first four minutes of the piece. In summer, however, the sonic experience created by the generator is entirely different and far less exciting than the sound I heard in December.

The filming day ended down by the Nene in Higham Ferrers, my childhood home. I was encouraged to talk about my past which was a little difficult at times. I don't really see myself in the lad who used to go down to the river on blustery winter days, or the teenager who sat doodling the initials of people he was in love with in a dusty area of soil underneath a bench down there. It all seems very distant now. There's a little plaque down there which talks about the nature reserve they created after my time. The plaque shows a photograph of an old, high-humped Victorian bridge, which I remember very clearly. There was a picture of it being pulled down in 1987. I'm sure the kids who walk past it now think 1987 was a million years ago.

I came home via Toddington Services on the M1, which are, without question the nastiest Services in this country. Every time I go there there's something awful happening in the loos. Yesterday it was floods. Pissy floods. Broken doors. A general lack of interest in making the place nice.

Friends Fest

Yesterday was a long old day. My dear friend Tanya is staying with us at the moment and we spent last night chewing the fat and putting the world to rights. By the time we were done, I was too knackered to write a blog. Yesterday afternoon found me with Llio, in darkest Essex, in the grounds of a country house somewhere near Chelmsford, laughing.

One of the benefits of being an impoverished freelancer is that I can say yes when a very close friend asks me to accompany her to the "Friends Fest" on a random midweek day in September. "Friends Fest?" You ask. "Absolutely!" I reply, "a celebration of that American sitcom which has managed to enter every single British person's brain by a process of osmosis brought about by being played on an almost constant loop on British television."

I'll confess to loving a bit of Friends. I think if you did a bit of digging, most people would say the same thing. Nathan and I watched the entire box set, beginning to end, about ten years ago. I think we all wish we were part of a mutually exclusive group of six perfectly beautiful, deeply witty mates who live in an impossibly cool set of flats on Bleecker Street. Fortunately Friends never made it into the 2010s, or else we'd have had "the one where Monica gets chucked out of her rent-controlled West Village flat to make way for a Hotel Chocolat."

So, we arrived at Hylands House just after lunch and immediately found ourselves in a world which resembled a tatty summer festival. I think I was expecting everything to take place inside the house itself, but instead we were ushered to patch of scrubby grass in a far corner of the estate, where a series of marquees had been erected. It looked a bit pathetic. The Friends theme tune played on a loop. It must have been almost mind-numbing for the event's staff, most of whom seemed to be Welsh. A smattering of carts were selling Friends-themed food. One marquee had been set up to look like "Central Perk", the cafe which features so prominently in the show, but you couldn't buy anything to eat or drink there. What you could do was queue for twenty minutes to look at it, and then queue for another ten minutes to have your picture taken on something resembling the famous orange sofa and then stand on a little platform by the window holding a guitar whilst pretending to be Phoebe playing Smelly Cat. On an hourly basis, a staff member, would grab the guitar and do a mini concert of Phoebe's greatest hits.

You could queue to put on a ghastly prom dress to look like Rachel, or queue to have your picture taken in a Vegas wedding chapel to look like... actually I don't know. Elsewhere, there was a queue to be photographed in a New York-style yellow cab. People seemed content to queue.

A giant screen in the middle played episodes of the show on a loop, whilst people sat watching on deckchairs. An abnormally high number of the people there were fat. Many wore T-shirts which said things like "Joey doesn't share his food" and "Regina Phalange."



Llio and I queued up to have our photo taken on the opening credits set, with the fountain, the random Tiffany lamp and the sofa. I can't remember the fountain being made of polystyrene in the show, or any of the cast dancing on badly-fitted pieces of AstroTurf, but, as we reached the front of the queue, we were duly handed a couple of ghastly branded umbrellas and a member of staff grabbed Llio's iPhone telling us we could do two poses. Generous. The staff member proceeded to take about a million shots of us without once saying "ready?" or "smile." It actually made me feel rather anxious. There's definitely an etiquette to the art of taking a good photograph which most people don't seem to understand. Photographing by stealth never gets the most brilliant results! I watched a bloke later on taking photos of his wife holding Phoebe's guitar on the Central Perk set, and he kept pressing the button even as the poor woman was stepping down from the stage. I was standing behind him so could see what he was photographing. The final picture was a close-up of the poor woman's rather well-proportioned midriff, which will no doubt wreck her day!

The big draw of the fest was a "tour of the Friends' set" which you had to individually book for. Our allotted slot was 6.10 so there was slight panic in Llio's voice as she looked around the somewhat tawdry selection of attractions and said, "we'll have to look at every blade of grass."

After drinking some hot chocolate in the cafe tent next to Central Perk, and watching people shuffling around in semi comas, we realised it was going to be preferable to go away and come back for our set tour. We decided to go into Chelmsford, which threatened to take us from the proverbial frying pan into a pile of dung... As we left Friends Fest we asked the man on the door if we'd be able to come back. He looked confused before acquiescing, rushing to his table and grabbing a Sharpie. He then proceeded to draw a rather detailed little star shape on my hand which instantly looked like a blob as the blue ink sank into my pours like a badly done tattoo. It's still there now. Of course it is. It was drawn with a Sharpie!

We parked up in Chelmsford's Chelmer car park, which, for the record, is as badly signposted as it is impossible to pay for. Llio and I spent some time searching for payment stations and then minutes more trying to work out where to scan our ticket as we left the building. I tweeted Chelmsford Council to tell them how difficult we'd found the experience. It's difficult to know how they could have given less of a shite!

After drifting around the indoor market, which, according to publicity photographs on the outside, is full of smiling elderly people holding hands and buying cheese, we went to Queenie's, a highly charming little cafe, where Llio ate gluten free toast and I had poached eggs, because we know how to live.

We took ourselves for a post prandial walk around the city. Llio made the somewhat bizarre, yet accurate, observation that all the buildings in the centre looked a tiny bit smaller than you might expect them to look elsewhere. I don't know why this should be. Perhaps we've just got used to London where everything is maybe a little bigger?

Top of the list of things to do, in a city not blessed with a great list of things to do, is a visit to the suitably compact and bijou cathedral, which is a very calming place to be. Both of us were rather impressed by the pulpit. Is that what you call the place where old people mumble readings at carol services? Whatever it's called, it's a rather beautifully sculptured object made from organic ripples of leather-lined brass in the arts and crafts style.

We were lucky enough to be accompanied on our visit by an organist who played a wonderful Bach fugue which seemed to start when we entered the space and end as we walked out. The organist was highly skilled and played with great panache. It was a real treat. After the shallow impermanence of Friends Fest, it felt like a proper ascension from the ridiculous to the sublime, but, as Llio sagely pointed out, how lucky we are to know the difference.

We went back to the mayhem of the Friends event for our set tour, which, in fairness, was a huge improvement on everything else that was being served up, all of which had seemed somewhat shonky. We entered a marquee and immediately found ourselves greeted by glass cabinets filled with costumes worn by the central characters in the show, and various key props which had featured prominently, including Joey's huge cream dog. It was fascinating stuff but I got a bit irritated by the member of staff who showed us around, "have you had a good time so far?" She shrieked, to deafening silence which suggested everyone had had a rather similar experience to us. "Well I do hope you fans enjoy this part." And I realised at that point how much of an issue I have with the word "fan." It's a deeply dehumanising term which somehow turns a person into cattle. Fans behave in a weird way. They go to extremes. They make nuisances of themselves. Maybe you desire not to be a fan is the product of twenty years work in the entertainment industry!

From the room filled with props and things, we were ushered into the big draw of the fest, in the shape of a full-scale replica of the two main apartments featured in the show. I have to confess to being impressed. There are so many iconic aspects including that big sloping glass window in Monica's house and the little frame around the peephole in the door. Llio was in her element and it was a true pleasure to see her excitement and take her photograph in every corner. "I want to live in that world" she said, like a little child, as we left, "everyone's nice to each other and money never seems to be a problem." 

And as we pulled out of the Estate's grounds, a sparrow hawk landed on the grass next to the road. It was no more than three meters away from us. What a lovely end to a brilliant day out.

How big?!

I've had another day jam-packed with formatting scores and creating this mega piano reduction of the Nene composition. On and on it seemed to go, and then the process of making it all look neat and tidy took another lifetime. There's always a quandary when it comes to creating a piano vocal score. Do you make the dots large and totally legible to even the oldest pair of eyes? Or do you try to limit the number of potential page turns and make the music a little smaller on the page. I spent at least half an hour today auditioning different sizes, printing out a page here and a page there. I went for safety in the end. I could hear the accompanist messing up and blaming the fact she couldn't see the music. Of course what will now happen is that there are so many pages of music that they'll all fall off the piano and everyone will blame me anyway.

These are the sorts of pathetic things which worry a composer on a daily basis. It's not all about sitting at a piano with a pencil behind your ear and a buff-coloured sheet of manuscript in front of you!

Never give up

September 4th always means we're going back to school. I am almost convinced that I started secondary school on September the 4th. It was the day I met my bestest school friend, Tammy, whose birthday it also is today. Imagine starting school on your birthday? I remember, on that first day, she was sent by the teacher to do an errand at the school office and said "if I'm not back in an hour, send out a search party" and I thought, "there's a sparky girl I could get along with." We were pretty much inseparable for seven years. Tammy, if you're reading this, happy birthday, chunkus!

Of course, having a September birthday has its benefits: You're the first in the year to learn to drive and you've had eleven months more to mature than people like me who are born in August. And, you get to vote in the 1992 general election. Still bitter? Too bloody right!

It's been another utterly brutalising day. I worked at the kitchen table for twelve hours straight, formatting scores for the Nene piece and then, horror of horrors, trying to create a piano reduction so that the choirs have something to rehearse to. The work is of epic proportions. It's scored for 600 musicians. Imagine trying to condense all that into one piano part?!

My computer software has a little button you can press for an automatic piano reduction, which I thought it might be worth trying. Alarm bells ought to have started ringing when the process took half an hour! I'm not lying when I say that every note in the composition was there, across two staves... every last demisemiquaver... including representations of snare drums and whips! It was the most bewildering and bizarre score I've ever seen - and I've performed Eight Songs for a Mad King! Five virtuoso pianists wouldn't be able to play it, there's so many notes. It would be like listening to a row of a pianolas on crack!

So, I've had to go old school and am writing it note-by-note which is like pulling teeth. By the end of the evening I'd managed half. In first draft. And I was so convinced this morning that there was light at the end of the tunnel. But then again, a composer without patience is a useless entity. A piece of music starts with a glorious pin prick of inspiration which can often lead to a veritable vomiting of pen on manuscript. An entire song, theme or leitmotif can be scribbled down in broad strokes on paper in seconds. Then the orchestration process begins and everything slows to a standstill. Notes are inputted at a ludicrously slow pace. Every note in every chord needs to be drawn in. Looking at the empty stave is deeply intimidating, but all you can do is sigh and make a start. One note at a time. Just as my epic walk along the Nene was one step at a time. People give up smoking one day at a time and deal with grief one week at a time. One day you'll look back and be astonished at the distance you've travelled. If you spend too long obsessing about how far you still have to go, you'll freak out and give up.

Charlie Birger

Note to self: the next time you're feeling a bit glum on a Sunday, whatever you do, do not spend the day formatting orchestral parts whilst sitting on the same spot on your sofa from 10am till 11pm. Just don't do it! You'll end the day with a terrible backache, and instead of a massive sense of achievement, you'll be climbing the walls in a dreadful panic and pacing about like a polar bear in a concrete cage. And next time, if you decide it might be fun not to eat anything all day, remember how shaky you feel right now... and learn.

The only interesting piece of news I learned today is that Carbondale, from where we watched the eclipse, is but a stone's throw away from where family on my father's side lived. My Great Grandmother went to stay with said relatives in Harrisburg, Illinois, in 1928. We know this because she witnessed the public hanging of Charlie Birger, a rather famous bootlegger and gangster, who was hanged in a placed called Benton, just north of Carbondale. Birger was quite an interesting character - a sort of anti-hero who waged war on the Ku Klux Clan. I'd like to say this was due to his proud Jewish heritage and his support of black people, but suspect it was more likely due to the organisation's support for prohibition. His hatred of the Clan meant he was hanged wearing a black hood, despite tradition dictating he be hanged wearing a white one. His last words are said to have been "it's a beautiful world."

I believe my Grandmother had a souvenir programme from the event which my father found in one of  her draws after she'd died. He said, rather wistfully, on the phone to me today that he couldn't quite believe that his grandmother had witnessed a public execution. It does seem strange.

I believe his grandparents used to play an old 78 record featuring a song about the hanging, which did the rounds after his death. A quick bit of research reveals that the words to the song are:

I heard of Charlie Birger way back when I was young
My daddy told me all about the day that Charlie hung.

I've heard so many stories, some of his ghastly deeds
Another tells how Charlie helped poor folks in their needs.

One said he was a kindly man who never told a lie
But when somebody crossed him, that man was sure to die

That Charlie had no Master you can tell from all the tales
He fought the system all the way, and stayed out of their jails

I've seen so many pictures, they're hanging on the walls
The pictures tell the story of Birger's rise and fall

And when they finally caught him he was sentenced to be hung
But they hadn't broke his spirit the day the trap was sprung

When the State had had its vengeance—When Charlie's life was done
It made one stop to wonder, Who had lost, and who had won.

Synagogue

I spent another day yesterday in a state of utter bewilderment, trying to learn music in Hebrew. I'm now absolutely fine with all the slow stuff, but when the pace goes up a notch, I feel like a 'cellist playing semiquavers all over again. There's a lot of scuffing and my face blushes crimson! I just need time for it all to sink in... and to develop a set of skills to style it out when I can't get my teeth in quickly enough!

After my previous blog, I was half-expecting a load of "hugs babes" type posts on Facebook. You know the sort? Someone has a fragile moment, announces they're feeling down, and receives a load of emoticons and the word "hugs" from people who can't think of anything else to write, but don't want to appear callous to mutual friends. Fortunately my friends were a little more respectful! 

I actually sometimes think it works to throw something out there in the world, because yesterday morning, just hours after posting, I was offered a job! It's only a few hours over a five-week period, but because my employer has already announced the news on Twitter, I can confirm that I am soon to start leading the show choir at Trinity Laban. Students had better watch out! If there's one thing I love more than anything else, it's a good show choir! 

So, first thing this morning, somewhat terrified, I entered the St Petersburg Synagogue for a quick choir rehearsal prior to the service. It's an orthodox synagogue, so there are a huge number of regulations and rules which need to be adhered to on the Sabbath. You can't ring doorbells, kippahs are to be worn at all times, you can't even use a pencil to make changes to the scores, so you have to make a series of mental notes. 

The rehearsal slightly eased my mind about the music, as did the fact that we were singing today in an eight-voice choir, which meant another, hugely experienced, bass always had my back to prevent me from entering a state of perpetual panic. Most of the tunes went brilliantly, and the congregation heaped praise on us, saying we were the best choir they'd ever had in the building, and all the other platitudes and gushing superlatives you often get in these situations. There were, however, a few moments when I found myself corpsing because I couldn't believe the nonsense words which were dripping out of my mouth! 

The synagogue itself is a very fine Victorian brick built building which it felt like an honour to be singing in. A young lad was being bar mitzvahed and delivered the most astonishing speech. I have seen less wisdom in 40 year olds! 

After shul, and much relieved, Michael and I had a lengthy walk around North Kensington, which is an area I know very little. We explored Holland Park and the fringes of Shepherd's Bush, before making a sort of pilgrimage to the Grenfell Tower. It was my idea. I have been so profoundly haunted by that particular story, and seen the building from a distance on so many occasions that I felt it was appropriate to go and read some of the tributes and ad hoc memorials which have been scattered about on the streets in that part of the city. 

It's a very eerie spot. Although you can see the building on the skyline in countless locations, there's actually only one place you can get anywhere near close enough to see the horror in any kind of detail. And it is horrifying. Floor upon floor of twisted metal and charcoal. You can't imagine how anyone got out of the place alive and of course your mind forces you to look to the top floors, where we know large numbers of the building's residents, fleeing flames, gathered together in just one or two flats. It's unimaginable. 

The tributes on the streets are wonderful. One street off the main road is lined entirely with yellow ribbons and countless strings of hearts knitted and crocheted by I've no idea whom. It's a moving and curiously beautiful sight: a reminder that, even though the government and local council were sluggish at best when it came to responding, local people did everything they could, and have subsequently heaped piles of love into the area. On another street, local school children have painted scores of wooden stars, all of which have been attached to fences and lamp posts. 

We had a spot of late lunch in an Austrian cafe on Goldborne Road, which looked rather special bathed in late-summer, late-afternoon sun. And then it was home James and don't spare the horses...

Onwards and upwards

There's nothing really to say about today. I had jet lag in the night so was exhausted when I woke up, and, shockingly, I haven't left the house. I'm in hibernation mode. I applied for a scheme and then literally spent the rest of the day tying to get my head around the shedload of music I have to learn for shul on Saturday. Pages and pages. None of the words make any form of sense to me. I haven't been this stressed about learning material since I performed A Ronne by Berio in 1995!

In other news, I have started applying for jobs which will take me out of the world of writing musical theatre. It's been a decision I haven't particularly enjoyed making, and, until the end of the year, I'm slightly seeing where the wind blows me. If some writing work comes in, great. If some part-time teaching comes in, even better, but if a half-decent sounding, full-time job away from the creative arts pops up which would give me a pension and some security, I think I'd be foolish not to go for it. No one can say I haven't given musical theatre my absolute best shot, and, if I were ten years younger, I could probably do another five years without earning properly, but this year has not be kind to me financially, and, at a certain point, I have to start thinking about the future. And I have to be able to feel proud about what I do again. This industry has a horrible habit of making you feel like a beggar.

So, watch this space. And if anyone hears of any job opportunities which they think might suit me, please give me a shout. I suspect I may have to think a little out of the box to avoid working as a Saturday morning check out girl in Tescos. I suspect my qualifications and job experience are a little too specific to naturally open a huge number of doors.

Onwards and upwards!