Balanescu String Quartet

It’s Nathan’s birthday, but we only managed breakfast together before zooming off in separate directions. I bought him some wool. He’s all about the wool at the moment, having recently become a very talented sock designer. Who’d have thought!?

Today, I sat in the wonderful West Heath Studio in West Hampstead listening to the Balanescu String Quartet playing their sequences in The London Requiem. There are no real words to describe how exciting it is to hear a legendary quartet interpret your music. The Balanescu specialise in taking music to a different level. Twee is not a word you’d ever be able to use to describe their playing. They are ferociously talented players, but they come alive when you ask them to shake things up a bit; add an extra bit of colour, an extra dimension.

I am thrilled to announce that they will be playing at the live premier of the work in Abney Park cemetery on September 29^th.

I am also thrilled to show you all this photograph of the guys, which I took after the session. I think it’s the absolute antithesis of a string quartet publicity shot. It somehow feels incredibly appropriate.

Tomorrow the vocal sessions begin and very soon we’ll have a proper piece of music. I’m officially excited.

350 years ago, Pepys arrived at the office to find a maid cleaning. “God forgive me!” he wrote “what a mind I had to her, but did not meddle with her.” Thankfully...

He spent the afternoon, very randomly, boring holes into the wall, so that he could see from his closet (in the house next door where he lived) into the great office, one assumes to spy on people from the comfort of his own house... but a very bizarre thing to do in my view.

He spent the afternoon in the company of Lady Carteret, gossiping, showing her boats in Deptford, and then his house in Seething Lane (where I was only yesterday) where Pepys “took great pride to lead her through the Court by the hand, she being very fine, and her page carrying up her train.”

The stairway to heaven

My day started at Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in the East End. We have been shooting sequences for the ten films which are being made about The London Requiem. Each movement of the work has its own film, all of which will be displayed on The Space (www.thespace.org)

Our first interview was with a charming old lady called Doreen, who talked to us a little about Victorian gravestone symbolism, which is a genuinely fascinating subject matter. Death in Victorian times was something of an industry, which I'm convinced is largely due to the fact that Victorians could control almost anything; steam, water, electricity and diseases, but they couldn't stop people from dying. Perhaps as a result, the mystery of death fascinated them. It became grand and ritualised. As people grew wealthier and more class-obsessed, so they showed off with ostentatious tomb stones, mausoleums and monuments. Hidden symbols gave clues to the occupation of the grave's occupant, how he'd died, where he'd lived, whether his wife had gone first and even his secret religious leanings. There was a symbol for everything.

After bidding a fond farewell to Doreen, we interviewed one of the maintenance officers at the Cemetery Park, who talked with fabulous enthusiasm about how important the space had become as a nature reserve.

From Tower Hamlets, we went to Bethnal Green to interview people about the Stairway to Heaven campaign, which aims to finally build a monument to the 180-odd people who died in the wartime stampede and crush at that station. One of the women we spoke to had lost a cousin and a grandmother in the tragedy. The details are horrific. Many of the most seriously disfigured bodies belonged to women, who had died in strange contortions in a vain attempt to protect the children who were crushed underneath them.

We stood and looked down the staircase where it happened; just 19 steps. It's almost inconceivable that so many people died there; but in a crush of this nature, which happened in the dark, as people fall, they stick their hands out, which means everyone becomes horribly intertwined. It's almost impossible therefore to pull people out, and the result is slow suffocation. The woman we spoke to said that her grandmother was heard to scream "they're treading on me, they're killing me" before she died. It took the family hours to identify her body in the morgue. In those last traumatic moments, her hair had turned from jet black to snow white. Almost inconceivable.

After lunch we returned to the cemetery and I did a series of pieces to camera about my requiem, perched on gravestones, basking in the sunshine, surrounded by wild flowers. Believe me, it doesn't get much better than that.

From Tower Hamlets to Westminster Bridge. Each of the films is being presented by a different member of the choir and today was the turn of Anthony, one of our tenors. We walked in tiny circles on the bridge, trying to avoid the hell of waving tourists, a low, bright sun, horrid high winds and pretty much every piece of rubbish the location wanted to chuck at us!

It's now 8.30pm, and this workaholic has returned to Highgate cemetery in the hope that it might yield a few decent bird noises, or something, which I might use as atmospheric sound for the recording.

I think I need to knock things on the head and go home for a nice bit of food and put my feet up however. I have a seemingly unending week. I must try to recharge the batteries!

Pepys did his accounts for the end of June on this date 350 years ago and discovered himself worth 650l, the largest amount he'd ever possessed. To celebrate, he took his wife to church, and gloried in her new "green petticoat of flowered satin with fine white and gimp lace of her own putting on."

He met up with Sir William Penn in the evening, who was being suspiciously nice. Pepys was unimpressed, and assumed the rogue was up to no good; "I shall never be deceived again by him again, but do hate him and his traitorous tricks with all my heart." 17th Century dissing was an art form!

Angel Studios

A very relieved man is writing this blog tonight; a man who has spent the day at Angel Studios recording strings for the London Requiem. It is difficult to imagine how the session could have gone any better. Angel Studios is not cheap, but arriving in a space which has already been set up for your session - so professionally that players don't even need to shuffle their chairs about - is worth its weight in gold. The studio engineers were beyond top notch; completely on the ball, and almost psychically attentive.

Sam conducted. I didn't have to get sweaty. I could sit back, relax and focus on the sound that was being brought to me by the extraordinary players. At one stage, during the Gradual and Tract, I became absolutely overcome with emotion. The strings finished their sequence and Sir Arnold's vocal kicked in. It sounded raw and filled with emotion; a voice in the wilderness. I suppose it was a mixture of pride and joy that I felt. The music I've written in this requiem is filled to the brim with little pieces of me; and hearing it coming alive for the first time was a heart-stopping moment. I explained to the strings that the melody they'd just played was dedicated to Jacqueline du Pre. I didn't tell them that I'd sat writing it at the foot of her grave. That felt a little too much, but I suspect, because they played it with such great tenderness, that they knew it had come from somewhere important to me.

I am beginning to think this recording could be something very special indeed. I just received this email from one of the string players:

It was an incredible day. I can honestly say I haven't enjoyed a session like that in quite some time.

I was moved too and am proud to have been part of it.


350 years ago, a genteel woman, claiming to be a relative of our hero, paid Pepys a visit, and asked to borrow 10s, which she promised to pay back that evening. Unsurprisingly she failed to return. More surprisingly, Pepys revealed that she'd played the very same trick on him on a previous occasion; "I shall trust her no more" he wrote. I wouldn't have given her a second chance!

Pepys spent the entire day in the office and went to bed, writing that his "mind is now in a wonderful condition of quiet," on account of all the work he'd been doing in the office of late. "business" he wrote, "is a delight to me."

Westminster Shabby

In the style of my great hero, Pepys, I have walked today through all corners of London, starting bright and early at Westminster Abbey. I went there, essentially, to take a photograph of the plaque to Lewis Carroll in Poet's Corner, which features in the Requiem. Sadly, as I arrived, the first sign I saw informed me that photography was strictly banned and the place was riddled with offical-looking people, so that was £16 down the pan!

Nevertheless, I decided to stay and have a look around the place because I’d never visited Westminster Abbey before. I also used the experience to record a few blasts of atmospheric sound in the building. I became quite excited by the weird sibilant noises and echoey squeaks of groups of tourists trying to keep quiet.

It’s a funny sort of building. It reminded me of the John Soane museum. It’s like someone emptied a bag of enormous treasures into a building and someone just pushed them to the sides and stacked them up to the ceiling. It's like a hoarder's house; the various tombs, and smaller chapels make everything feel incredibly small and claustrophobic, add to that about a million tourists, and you've got yourself a problem. I didn’t like the place at all. It doesn’t have the majesty of St Paul’s.  It feels a bit pokey! I also HATED the tourists who were rushing through the space with me. None of them seemed at all bothered by the fact that they were in a place of worship and great historical importance. I'm not religious, but I do understand the need for silence in a place like that. I got a very strong sense that people were simply there because they felt it was a place to visit. The kids looked bored. None of the people in the space seemed at all interested in what they were looking at.

I walked from Westminster Abbey to the Thames, firstly to record the chimes of Big Ben, and then to record the sound of the Thames lapping at the beach on the South Bank. To me these are two of the true sounds of London.

From Waterloo, I went up to Kensall Green to stroll around the cemetery there, recording all the sounds I could hear; trains passing, helicopters juddering in the sky, and then sudden blasts of silence when all I could hear were the tweets of birds; blackbirds, robins, pigeons, magpies, and even parakeets. I became obsessed with the hundreds of little chimes hanging from the roses in one of the gardens of peace.

I went home via the dentist in Tufnell Park, where I was fitted for my new gum guard, which will hopefully stop me from grinding my teeth into oblivion.

The rest of the day has been spent doing admin... SO much of it, and I'm creaking under the pressure of it all. More musicians pulled out of tomorrow’s session, so I had to deal with getting information to their replacements. There were bad contracts to renegotiate, piles of manuscript to put into little folders, I had to text all the players for tomorrow's session to make sure they were okay, the first lot of texts I sent didn't reach some people and arrived 4 times in other phones. I'm in a panic about the fact that even my cousin doesn’t feel capable of helping me to sort out contracts to send out to the Requiem backers and performers.

350 years ago, Pepys’ diary entry went on forever. He didn’t say a great deal. Sometimes he used his diary to write down (in minutiae) things that he felt he might be quizzed on at a later point. He’d had a very long chat with Lord Sandwich, and pretty much wrote down every single word of the conversation.

He got home, to find his wife feeling a great deal better:

“Mr. Holliard had been with my wife to-day, and cured her of her pain in her ear by taking out a most prodigious quantity of hard wax that had hardened itself in the bottom of the ear, of which I am very glad.”

Labradoodle

I woke up in York this morning, and once again it took me a few seconds to remember where (and indeed who) I was. It took about an hour for me to wake up properly. I sat at breakfast staring at the woman's perm on the table next door, for no other reason than because I couldn’t be bothered to move my eyes! She also looked like a labradoodle.

The sun was shining as I walked down Micklegate at 8.30am. It was a hugely pleasurable experience, which was over a little too soon. After about five minutes I'd reached my destination. You tend to forget, when you’re a Londoner, how quickly it’s possible to get from A to B when you’re not in the capital. And, frankly, how much more pleasurable it is to take a leisurely stroll, rather than cramming oneself into a crowded, stinking tube.

We kicked the day off by the side of the Ouse, looking at the boat we’re going to be singing on as part of the flotilla on July 7^th. As we arrived, someone was spraying an industrial hose across the mooring and the steps down to the river. Two days ago, the whole area was under a meter of water. The woman who runs the company was at her wits’ end. They've had floods now at least once a month for the past three months. Even if it’s a beautiful sunny day, if the level of the Ouse is too high, the boats won’t go under the bridges, and have to stay moored. She’s laid off most of her casual staff. When we complain about the weather, we forget that it’s actually affecting some people's livelihoods.

From the boatyard, I went up Bootham to BBC Radio York, where I was interviewed for a sort of Desert Island Discs type show. I’d met the presenter, Russell, about two years before, when we were both panellists in the Symphony for Yorkshire auditions. He seemed very well-prepared, and was a very fine interviewer, listening to everything I said, and maintaining eye contact with me throughout. Heaven knows what I burbled on about. CND women, tourettes, electrocutions... We laughed a lot.

I returned to London on the midday train, and then hot-footed it to Islington and St Pancras cemetery to do some more sound recording. It was warm and peaceful there. It’s very much a working cemetery and I walked past a number of burials, and clusters of people who'd come to the graveyard simply to hang out with their loved ones. A family of Irish people had obviously bedded in for the day, sitting on deckchairs around their daughter/ sister’s grave, and as I left, I walked past an enormous group of teenagers, who were obviously there to see a school mate. I was surprised by how many people there were laughing, which I thought was rather lovely. Death doesn't need to be formal. There is no appropriate emotion. The experience reminded me of the grave of Yasi, at Brookwood, which reads “and we laughed and laughed and laughed,” and has gone right to the centre of the Requiem. I’m thrilled to report that I’m going to be meeting Yasi’s brother as part of this extraordinary requiem journey on The Space. It’s a wonderful thought.

350 years ago Pepys had a cold and his wife had earache. There’s not much else to say!

Water everywhere

For a moment, as I exited a tunnel on the train this morning, and found myself staring and blinking at a village nestling in a lime green valley, I had no idea where I was heading. A sure sign that I'm travelling too much at the moment. It turns out I was going to York, and within a few miles, it was obvious I was up north because of the dreadful floods by the sides of the railway tracks. This place has taken a proper hammering. York itself was even flooded; not terribly... but enough to know that something is wrong with the weather.

About 125 of us danced and sang and skipped through the streets of York tonight. The sun was low in the sky and lighting the tops of sandstone buildings. Hot air balloons drifted low above the city. We were rehearsing the Ebor Vox with possibly only about one sixth of the full of amount of singers who will converge on the streets of York in 2 weeks’ time. It’s going to be an astonishing spectacle – young men were even cheering in the streets today - and I'm so touched at the work that many of the choirs have put in to learning the music I’ve written. One particular group, who shall remain nameless, impressed me hugely. They stood to my right when we reached the York Eye and have the most infectious love for singing, which is an absolute joy to behold. I was really proud of so many of the people who joined us this evening; the woman who walked along with her hand in the air keeping count of the number of bars we’d sung, the wonderful characters from the male voice choir who camply serenaded the ladies from the steps of Clifford’s Tower, the young drummers who kept time for 2 hours without complaining. It’s going to be a wonderful occasion; join us on July 9^th at about 6pm outside York Minster.

My hotel room up here is less joyous. The bathroom smells of mouldy flannels, and there’s blood spattered on the wall! The hotel Ibis charges £5 for 24 hours’ Internet, and £3.75, I discovered, for a cup of tea and a Mars bar, to a customer who is waiting for his room to be made up. I don’t really mind. The bed’s comfortable enough, and there’s tea and coffee making facilities... and a telly. I’m lucky enough to be next door to the ironing room, so, you know, small mercies and all that...

I'm struggling with the admin for my recording of the Requiem. At the moment I’m simply trying to create a contract for some of the performers and backers, which offers them a cut of the profits, should we make our money back. I sent it to the MU for their opinion and the solicitor tore it apart saying I’d need a proper solicitor and a lot of time to work something out. The advice from the MU is that I should pay the singers more up front, and not offer them a cut of the profits. Problem is, there is no more money up front, and I want people, my friends, to make money if the sales are good. The problem is, when you start paying musicians, the MU suddenly regards you as a contractor. I’m suddenly a record company in their eyes, not a composer, and therefore, their standpoint shifts towards supporting players rather than me. I fully understand why it's happening, but the unfortunate fact is that the big record companies, with their ridiculously complicated contracts and in-house lawyers, are not funding new classical music any more. More and more composers are having to self-fund and self-release albums without any understanding of the legalities involved, and in my view, the MU needs to step up and help composer entrepreneurs, because without us, very little interesting music will be released, and the classical recording world will collapse under the weight of Catherine Jenkins and Rolando Viazon singing the hits from Carmen.

It’s difficult to know what the next step should be. Nathan bore the brunt of my stress in the middle of the night last night when I started thrashing around and screaming in my sleep. I was dreaming about a rocket attack, and trying to push Nathan out of the way of an explosion. I subsequently woke up this morning with an aching jaw. I’d plainly ground my teeth throughout the night. It’s frightening. On Thursday I’m paying 20 string players to perform my music. What if I’m completely off the mark? What if they all start playing in the wrong clef? What if everyone sits there thinking I’m a complete nutter like Florence Foster Jenkins? Of course there’s the other part of me which goes “bring the session on, and watch those musicians weep at the sheer beauty of what you’ve written...” These are seriously the thoughts that bombard a composer when he lies in bed at night. Music is so bloody subjective!

350 years ago, and Pepys was constipated. There we go. Now don’t read on if you have a fragile constitution because Pepys went to lunch with Commissioner Pett and was horrified to find his fish coming to the table covered in “very many little worms creeping,” which he put down to the staleness of the pickle. Absolutely gipping in my view.

He spent the evening playing the violin. Pepys was genuinely meant to have been a pretty useful bass viol player, but the violin is a very different technique, which involves a contortion which can only be coaxed into supple, young bones or the player sounds like he’s sawing wood.  My friend Sharon learned the hard way that it's impossible for an adult to take up the violin. She did a recital of Blow the Wind Southerly at a party I was at. The E string slowly unwound, seemingly without her noticing. 2 people wet themselves, someone laughed so much they farted and then followed through, and I couldn't look at her for the rest of the evening. 

The joy of the unknown

I went to Highgate cemetery with my little recording device at midnight last night, and sat, sheltering from the rain, under the eves of the church which backs onto it. I managed to catch the clock chiming midnight, and also, rather curiously, a number of inexplicable "noises off," including a fairly audible ghostly sigh and the sound of murmuring just before the bells struck, which, for some reason was carried to me from heaven knows where, over the sound of the splashing, pattering rain. 

The entire experience made me somewhat uneasy. I was genuinely quite scared, and rather enjoyed the sensation. It struck me that life is genuinely made more exciting by those things we still can't quite explain. I strive to give my music an air of mysticism, and have always found myself drawn to legends, standing stones and strange atmospheres in buildings. I turned my back on organised religion, not just because I think it's deeply corrupt and damaging, but because what it's offered in 2000 years is pitiful compared to what organised science has offered us in 100. That said, I refuse to turn my back on the thought that everything can, will or even should be explained. 

Only last week, Nathan, the biggest cynic of them all, returned from a gig in Guildford saying he'd seen "what people would probably describe as a ghost." He was using the loo in a hotel room and saw someone walking through the room out of the corner of his eye. If a ghost is an unexplained presence, then a ghost he saw. 

I suppose one of the biggest mysteries of them all is music. Why is it that certain intervals work? What gives some people the power to play or sing a melody with such exquisite beauty that people gasp? What is it about a musical suspension which makes a grown man cry? Yes, of course science will attempt to answer these questions, but the answers will always be speculative. And that's how it should be. It's what makes us tick. It's what makes us know that we're alive. 

350 years ago Pepys was starting to reap the rewards of his new-found diligence in all things work-related. He was even beginning to feel more knowledgeable than his seniors. As the most junior figure in the office, and the only non-titled officer, he was also the man who people tended to pick on when they wanted an easy ride. A man called Edward Field, for example, had major beef with the Navy office and slapped a number of subpoenas specifically on Pepys' head, which our hero was forced to fight in and out of court, until a 1664 act of Parliament, specifically brought about  by the business, gave the Navy board the power of magistracy within the City of London. Take that Mr Field!