Some people are just ludicrous! I was at Euston Station this afternoon, coming down the escalators. Londoners reading this will no doubt know that there’s an unwritten etiquette on the tube which dictates that, if you want to stand on the escalators, you must do so on the right hand side, thereby leaving the left hand side free for those in more of a hurry who want to walk or run down. If you’re not a Londoner and you stand on the left by mistake, you will very swiftly learn these rules! Someone will tut loudly behind you, say something snarky or, even more outrageously, give you a firm sideways nudge. The other rule of thumb, and this is vital, is that you have to be ready to alight the escalator at the bottom. You often get Out-of-Towners nervously putting a foot out first, or stopping out of fear. This can be extremely dangerous as it leads to a crush of people careering into you from behind. The great wartime tragedy at Bethnal Green station was caused by someone loosing their footing on a staircase and scores of people tripping over her. More than a hundred people died in the ensuing crush. Their bodies were so intertwined that it took hours to pull everyone out. There are just too many people in London for anyone to saunter, or stop in their tracks.
Today, as I started to walk down the left hand side, I noticed that a group of people were clustered in the middle of the escalator. I quickly deduced that there was no point in my tapping the shoulder of the person in front to ask them to stand aside. The issue was caused by a small Japanese woman with a massive suitcase, and as we hurtled inexorably to the bottom of the escalator, I could see exactly what was going to happen. She would be too weak to get the suitcase off the bottom of the escalator and royal mayhem would ensue! And so it came to pass. People went careering in all directions and had it not been for my walking backwards up the escalator we’d all have gone down like a house of cards. As I stumbled backwards, up and up the moving steps, I swore loudly. I, and several people behind me, managed to surf the escalators until the ever-growing crowd of people at the bottom had managed to push the suitcase out of the way. The Japanese woman walked away, completely oblivious, and the woman behind me, who heard me swearing, did that really irritating thing of saying, “yeah, calm down, it’s not the end of the world” before rolling her eyes and walking to the platform. And I thought, “if you knew how close I’d come to tumbling over the man in front of me, you would not be saying that…” Instead, I smiled politely and tried to calm myself down. An adrenaline spike at 4pm on a Monday is not good for anyone!
Monday, 30 October 2017
Balfour declaration
Yesterday was a day of concerts, which started at the New West End Synagogue. The day marked the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, written to Lord Rothschild by Arthur James Balfour, which confirmed support from the British Government for the creation of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. It was effectively the government’s green light for the creation of the state of Israel, and therefore of huge importance to Jewish people around the world. It was an upbeat event with talks from the chief rabbi and the Israel ambassador. The choir were singing five pieces, including a highly-charged rendition of Jerusalem the Gold and my setting of Ki Lekach Tov. I asked my mate Philip Sallon along, and he was fairly horrified that none of the discussion around the Balfour Declaration touched on the idea that Balfour only signed the letter because he was a rancid anti-semite who wanted to get rid of the Jewish Community in the UK! I’ve not heard this particular argument before and I’m not entirely sure it would have been appropriate for one of the dignitaries to stand up and railroad the celebrations with such cynical cries. The fact remains that the declaration was written, and, thirty years later, after the hell of the Jewish holocaust, Israel was born, and its leaders are not perfect, but it remains the only true democracy in the Middle East, and, compared to its neighbours, who seem to want to wipe it off the face of the earth, it’s a centre of learning, of freedom of speech, and of human rights. I believe passionately in the state of Israel.
The concert went well. I think perhaps there was a little too much chit chat. The audience seemed very relieved when the choir started singing, but because there were large gaps between our numbers, I felt we were never quite able to get ourselves in the zone. As mentioned, we aced Jerusalem The Gold and the audience were hugely receptive towards it. I felt incredibly moved, and very proud to be singing that particular piece of music in one of the country’s most ancient and beautiful synagogues on such an important anniversary. It’s one of THE great melodies. The Ki Lekach Tov was okay. It’s quite a hard piece, which stretches the tenors and forces them to sing quite high. It was difficult to get a sense of how it went, particularly as the writer, but Michael felt we’d sung it slightly better in rehearsal.
From Queensway, I drove into central London to hear Nathan, Llio, Abbie, and my mate Carrie doing a concert with their choir, Vocally Bespoke. You couldn’t actually imagine two choirs with more different sounds. Mosaic Voices (whom I sang with in the afternoon) are an all-male choir whose sound is highly classical. We exist to perform liturgical repertoire and get excited by a Neapolitan sixth chord! Vocally Bespoke, by contrast, is a mixed vocal group who mainly sing pop. And they do it brilliantly. It was such a fun, upbeat evening. Carrie, who founded the choir, introduced us to her singers one by one, and by the end of the evening I felt I had a good sense of each of them, although, of course, I wanted more solos from my friends. They did however sing Love Is Everyone from Our Gay Wedding, by means of introducing Nathan and Abbie and Llio, who joined Vocally Bespoke as a result of performing with Carrie and Andy in the wedding. The show happened at the Leicester Square theatre, which is where Taboo was staged, and therefore where I met Nathan.
The concert went well. I think perhaps there was a little too much chit chat. The audience seemed very relieved when the choir started singing, but because there were large gaps between our numbers, I felt we were never quite able to get ourselves in the zone. As mentioned, we aced Jerusalem The Gold and the audience were hugely receptive towards it. I felt incredibly moved, and very proud to be singing that particular piece of music in one of the country’s most ancient and beautiful synagogues on such an important anniversary. It’s one of THE great melodies. The Ki Lekach Tov was okay. It’s quite a hard piece, which stretches the tenors and forces them to sing quite high. It was difficult to get a sense of how it went, particularly as the writer, but Michael felt we’d sung it slightly better in rehearsal.
From Queensway, I drove into central London to hear Nathan, Llio, Abbie, and my mate Carrie doing a concert with their choir, Vocally Bespoke. You couldn’t actually imagine two choirs with more different sounds. Mosaic Voices (whom I sang with in the afternoon) are an all-male choir whose sound is highly classical. We exist to perform liturgical repertoire and get excited by a Neapolitan sixth chord! Vocally Bespoke, by contrast, is a mixed vocal group who mainly sing pop. And they do it brilliantly. It was such a fun, upbeat evening. Carrie, who founded the choir, introduced us to her singers one by one, and by the end of the evening I felt I had a good sense of each of them, although, of course, I wanted more solos from my friends. They did however sing Love Is Everyone from Our Gay Wedding, by means of introducing Nathan and Abbie and Llio, who joined Vocally Bespoke as a result of performing with Carrie and Andy in the wedding. The show happened at the Leicester Square theatre, which is where Taboo was staged, and therefore where I met Nathan.
Sunday, 29 October 2017
Poverty of aspiration
I woke up this morning to a debate on Radio 4 about Oxbridge and its apparent sluggishness when it comes to offering places to students from working class and BAME backgrounds. It's an argument which has been doing the rounds for years. Periodically, a set of figures, or some sort of initiative, will suddenly shed light on the issue, and, once again, we become outraged, accusing the various institutions of elitism.
My view on the subject is very simple. There is actually plenty of evidence which suggests that Oxford and Cambridge are doing their utmost to attract people from ethnic backgrounds, and furthermore that they're actually being rather successful. Whether or not this is the case (the man who announced this particular piece of information on the radio was cheerfully ignored because it undermined the very debate they were having) many would suggest that, in order to attract more of the "right" types of students, these universities might need to start lowering their standards...
This, in my opinion, should absolutely NOT be encouraged. Firstly, it's patronising. No one wants to gain a place at university that they didn't earn. Secondly, the argument is based on much more complicated foundations. The term "poverty of aspiration" was bandied about a lot in the debate. It's a fancy phrase for something I wholeheartedly believe to be a problem, namely that, regardless of colour, background, class or postcode, if you don't have aspiration, you're screwed. In my view, the problem, if indeed there is a problem, is not caused by elitist Oxbridge colleges, it's caused by secondary schools falling to raise the expectations of naturally-gifted, under-confident students. If they are to reach their full potential, bright children need to be stretched, but the British comprehensive system makes this very difficult to achieve.
I think back to my own school days and those painstaking lessons where the class was effectively held to ransom by badly behaved kids or students who simply took that little bit longer to grasp the concepts we were learning.
Academic success was never truly promoted or celebrated at my school. Brother Edward was the first student EVER from the school to get into Oxbridge. It was an astounding achievement, but it never felt like the school was that fussed about it. The sense was almost that he had ideas above his station and that his academic achievements needed to be kept low key to avoid others feeling inadequate. This, of course, may be a teenager's simplistic perspective on something which was far more nuanced. It may also be that these days, in an era where schools are judged largely on their results, my brother's brilliance might not have been so underreported. That said, a couple of years ago I wrote to the school offering to talk to the kids about careers in the arts and my email was entirely ignored!
My interest in music at school was met with equal bewilderment and dismissiveness. My desire to take part in school concerts and plays was seen as arrogance, almost as though there was a queue of people whom I was blocking by always putting myself at the front of the queue. Despite having had a brother who'd gone to Cambridge, no one ever suggested I apply to the place. Actually, my goal was always to get to York, the music courses at Oxbridge looked as dry as toast, but part of me also felt that, even if I'd wanted to go to Oxbridge, I didn't have the smarts to get in. The feeling that I'm most people's intellectual inferior has nagged me for much of my life. I've convinced myself that I'm a grafter rather than someone who shines with natural ability.
I think a lot about the fact that neither brother Edward nor I read fiction. I read factual books and my brother listens to audio books, but neither of us would ever sit down to read a novel. Sometimes I wonder if this is a result of our schooling. For GCSE English, for example, we barely read anything. We watched films, wrote about them, and critiqued a few short poems. In my entire school career I didn't have the chance to study Shakespeare, Dickens, Brontë, Austin, Steinbeck, Wolf or Joyce. We read Z for Zachariah and the Ghost of Thomas Kempe.
I'm not dissing the school. As I mentioned before, the whole point of a comprehensive school education is that it often has to focus on raising the grades of middling ability students. If you can get a whole swathe of kids up from a D to a C, then a great many new doors are suddenly opened to them. Sadly this means that the brighter students are often left to sink or swim. I come from a middle class background, so it was easier for me to swim. The assumption at home was that I'd go to university, and if my grades started to drop, my parents were quick to step in. I still remember my Mum's almost obsessive mantra, "just GET your GCSE maths, just get a C or above, and then you don't need to worry about maths for the rest of your life."
At my school, the students who risked falling through the cracks were the naturally bright ones who came from backgrounds where education wasn't perhaps as encouraged. My best friend at school had to pay rent through her sixth form and worked several nights a week at the local Kwik Save. The fact that she grabbed life by the balls and now has an enviable existence in Northern Italy is all the more remarkable as a result. Another good friend, who was fiendishly bright, sailed through his GCSEs without lifting a finger, but then tanked his A-levels, because he wildly underestimated how much work he'd need to do, and no one was around to crack the whip hard enough. He was one of the best writers I've ever met.
All this aside, perhaps the biggest problem in this entire debate is that we still fetishise Oxbridge. Even the presenter on the radio said to one of his guests "now you made it to Oxford..." It's seen as the highest possible achievement in early life, but those two universities aren't actually the be all and end all. In fact, they seem to create a powder keg environment which is very unhealthy for many young people and I'm not just writing this because I have a massive chip on my shoulder!
I don't really have a summing up for this blog, because I don't ultimately think the argument is interesting enough. I think this debate is a product of a much wider problem which is that we live in a hugely unequal society but for too long we've been trying to solve the problem by focussing our attention on very specific minority groups. Until we learn that there are aspirationally poor kids across all spectrums of society, all genders, classes, religions and cultures, we will never be able to move forward as a unit.
My view on the subject is very simple. There is actually plenty of evidence which suggests that Oxford and Cambridge are doing their utmost to attract people from ethnic backgrounds, and furthermore that they're actually being rather successful. Whether or not this is the case (the man who announced this particular piece of information on the radio was cheerfully ignored because it undermined the very debate they were having) many would suggest that, in order to attract more of the "right" types of students, these universities might need to start lowering their standards...
This, in my opinion, should absolutely NOT be encouraged. Firstly, it's patronising. No one wants to gain a place at university that they didn't earn. Secondly, the argument is based on much more complicated foundations. The term "poverty of aspiration" was bandied about a lot in the debate. It's a fancy phrase for something I wholeheartedly believe to be a problem, namely that, regardless of colour, background, class or postcode, if you don't have aspiration, you're screwed. In my view, the problem, if indeed there is a problem, is not caused by elitist Oxbridge colleges, it's caused by secondary schools falling to raise the expectations of naturally-gifted, under-confident students. If they are to reach their full potential, bright children need to be stretched, but the British comprehensive system makes this very difficult to achieve.
I think back to my own school days and those painstaking lessons where the class was effectively held to ransom by badly behaved kids or students who simply took that little bit longer to grasp the concepts we were learning.
Academic success was never truly promoted or celebrated at my school. Brother Edward was the first student EVER from the school to get into Oxbridge. It was an astounding achievement, but it never felt like the school was that fussed about it. The sense was almost that he had ideas above his station and that his academic achievements needed to be kept low key to avoid others feeling inadequate. This, of course, may be a teenager's simplistic perspective on something which was far more nuanced. It may also be that these days, in an era where schools are judged largely on their results, my brother's brilliance might not have been so underreported. That said, a couple of years ago I wrote to the school offering to talk to the kids about careers in the arts and my email was entirely ignored!
My interest in music at school was met with equal bewilderment and dismissiveness. My desire to take part in school concerts and plays was seen as arrogance, almost as though there was a queue of people whom I was blocking by always putting myself at the front of the queue. Despite having had a brother who'd gone to Cambridge, no one ever suggested I apply to the place. Actually, my goal was always to get to York, the music courses at Oxbridge looked as dry as toast, but part of me also felt that, even if I'd wanted to go to Oxbridge, I didn't have the smarts to get in. The feeling that I'm most people's intellectual inferior has nagged me for much of my life. I've convinced myself that I'm a grafter rather than someone who shines with natural ability.
I think a lot about the fact that neither brother Edward nor I read fiction. I read factual books and my brother listens to audio books, but neither of us would ever sit down to read a novel. Sometimes I wonder if this is a result of our schooling. For GCSE English, for example, we barely read anything. We watched films, wrote about them, and critiqued a few short poems. In my entire school career I didn't have the chance to study Shakespeare, Dickens, Brontë, Austin, Steinbeck, Wolf or Joyce. We read Z for Zachariah and the Ghost of Thomas Kempe.
I'm not dissing the school. As I mentioned before, the whole point of a comprehensive school education is that it often has to focus on raising the grades of middling ability students. If you can get a whole swathe of kids up from a D to a C, then a great many new doors are suddenly opened to them. Sadly this means that the brighter students are often left to sink or swim. I come from a middle class background, so it was easier for me to swim. The assumption at home was that I'd go to university, and if my grades started to drop, my parents were quick to step in. I still remember my Mum's almost obsessive mantra, "just GET your GCSE maths, just get a C or above, and then you don't need to worry about maths for the rest of your life."
At my school, the students who risked falling through the cracks were the naturally bright ones who came from backgrounds where education wasn't perhaps as encouraged. My best friend at school had to pay rent through her sixth form and worked several nights a week at the local Kwik Save. The fact that she grabbed life by the balls and now has an enviable existence in Northern Italy is all the more remarkable as a result. Another good friend, who was fiendishly bright, sailed through his GCSEs without lifting a finger, but then tanked his A-levels, because he wildly underestimated how much work he'd need to do, and no one was around to crack the whip hard enough. He was one of the best writers I've ever met.
All this aside, perhaps the biggest problem in this entire debate is that we still fetishise Oxbridge. Even the presenter on the radio said to one of his guests "now you made it to Oxford..." It's seen as the highest possible achievement in early life, but those two universities aren't actually the be all and end all. In fact, they seem to create a powder keg environment which is very unhealthy for many young people and I'm not just writing this because I have a massive chip on my shoulder!
I don't really have a summing up for this blog, because I don't ultimately think the argument is interesting enough. I think this debate is a product of a much wider problem which is that we live in a hugely unequal society but for too long we've been trying to solve the problem by focussing our attention on very specific minority groups. Until we learn that there are aspirationally poor kids across all spectrums of society, all genders, classes, religions and cultures, we will never be able to move forward as a unit.
Saturday, 28 October 2017
Tickly
The days are getting a little more relaxing at the moment which means it's time for a cold to sweep through my body, as my subconscious says "don't do that to me again." I thought I'd managed to stave this particular cold off. I caught it from Julian in the studio and it emerged for a couple of days at the start of last week, and then vanished. It's nothing massive. Just a tickly cough and a bit of a tight chest. As I go through life, I realise that my lungs are one of my weak spots. You know how we all have a part of the body which cracks under pressure? Some people get stomach problems. Some get bad backs. Others, like Nathan, get headaches. For me, it's always a tickly cough. Don't worry, I'm not the man on the cancer advert who coughs at the football match, I've just noticed that my illnesses usually manifest themselves in this way. I've even noticed that I sometimes start randomly coughing when I'm highly stressed. It's funny how the body works isn't it? I reckon quite a high percentage of illness is triggered by the brain.
There's not much else to say. I've been catching up on a lot of reality TV. There's an awful lot of it on at this time of year. I love it. I will happily watch X Factor, Strictly or Bake Off until the cows come home. I'll watch shows about potting, sewing, painting, drag... As long as there's a number of contestants who get whittled down on a weekly basis, I'm a happy man. I like the fact that I don't need to concentrate to watch them. They wash over me like a giant, sequin-covered wave.
The leaves are now dropping off the trees outside our house, which means, for the first time in eight months, we'll soon be able to see Alexandra Palace on the hill behind Queens Wood. The trees are so dense that, during the summer months, the only way you'd ever known the giant building was there, was by catching the odd glimpse of the red light which sits on the top of the television mast up there. In London we don't have that many clues that the seasons are changing. We rarely experience extreme weather. Back home in the Midlands it would regularly snow in winter, and get so foggy in the autumn that you couldn't see your hand in front of your own face. I miss those days!
There's not much else to say. I've been catching up on a lot of reality TV. There's an awful lot of it on at this time of year. I love it. I will happily watch X Factor, Strictly or Bake Off until the cows come home. I'll watch shows about potting, sewing, painting, drag... As long as there's a number of contestants who get whittled down on a weekly basis, I'm a happy man. I like the fact that I don't need to concentrate to watch them. They wash over me like a giant, sequin-covered wave.
The leaves are now dropping off the trees outside our house, which means, for the first time in eight months, we'll soon be able to see Alexandra Palace on the hill behind Queens Wood. The trees are so dense that, during the summer months, the only way you'd ever known the giant building was there, was by catching the odd glimpse of the red light which sits on the top of the television mast up there. In London we don't have that many clues that the seasons are changing. We rarely experience extreme weather. Back home in the Midlands it would regularly snow in winter, and get so foggy in the autumn that you couldn't see your hand in front of your own face. I miss those days!
Friday, 27 October 2017
Cov, Northants and Brum
The day before yesterday was insane. I keep thinking the insanity is nearly over and then something else crops up. I'm getting increasingly shocked by the sound of my alarm clock in the mornings, which surely means it's time to stop for a few days. I have also weighed myself. Enough said. If I don't go on an immediate health and fitness drive, I'm going to have to start looking for upholstery instead of clothes!
The day started at shit o'clock with young Josh upstairs in our loft. He'd come to see us the night before, for a relaxing and joyous evening of telly, chatter and food. He hadn't emerged by the time I left the house, so I called a fond farewell to him from the bottom of the ladder and jumped in the car.
I was heading to the music school in Northampton, where I was listening to the Youth Choir in their first rehearsal on the Nene composition. I realised yesterday that going back to that place is a bit like going home. The place still buzzes with expectation and excitement and everyone always seems so pleased to see me. I made myself a cup of tea and sat in the common room. Teenaged memories flooded my mind. I remembered, for instance, Sam Becker telling me he couldn't eat a Mars bar because it played havoc with his brace and that clarinettists shouldn't eat chocolate before playing. Quite why this conversation has stuck in my mind for almost thirty years I'm not sure. As I drank my tea, I could hear little stubs of my melodies from Nene emerging from the Upper Hall and floating along the corridors. I wondered whether my younger self would have been proud of the man I've become.
Anna and Rachel, both former students from my time and now people who work in the building, found me making a second cup of tea in the kitchen, and we put the world to rights, talking, amongst other things, about the extraordinary sixth form A-level music courses in Grendon in the early 90s, and the tendency for kids from Northamptonshire to be rather lacking confidence these days.
It was great to hear the young people singing. I was actually a founder member of the Northamptonshire Youth Choir and the Upper Hall is exactly where we used to rehearse. I had a little moment when I introduced them to the concept of heterophony, and realised that I was in exactly the same space, where, 26 years ago, composer, James MacMillan, visiting the music school to run a composing workshop, had introduced me to the same concept. The passing on of knowledge...We had lunch in a lovely little cafe which is attached to a giant vintage warehouse down towards the Nene between Jimmy's End and the train station. Whilst waiting for food, Rachel took me into a corner of the shop to show me a load of lamps which had been made out of all sorts of quirky objects including bowling balls, pairs of skates, tea pots and bizarre kitchen utensils. I'm afraid I fell in love with a lamp which had been made out of an old euphonium and I instantly knew I had to buy it.
There were more workshops in the afternoon, and then it was time for me to drive to Sutton Coldfield where I was due to run a quiz.
It was a beautiful day. The sun was warm and the Midlands was bathed in glorious sunlight. I decided to take a detour to Stoneleigh to say a very quick hello to my Grandparents in the graveyard of the church. The sun by then was very low in the sky, casting long shadows across the village and making the orange stones of the church glow copper.
I had a quick walk through the meadow before jumping into the car again to The Belfry, which is where the quiz was being held. It's a fairly soulless golfer's paradise, which I'm sure many of my friends who do corporate work will know like the backs of their hands. This is actually the third quiz I've been involved in at this particular location. As I set up my computer it had a major crash and all the film clips I was due to use vanished in a puff of smoke. There was a bit of a panic as I tried to get a sense of what on earth was going on. My default is always to panic with matters relating to technology. I'm not one of life's natural problem solvers in this field, and to make matters considerably worse, I didn't have any reception on my phone.
Fortunately I was being "assisted" by Lesley, the big boss of the company, who appeared in a blaze of calmness and instantly found a way around the problem. Even she was confused as to how the system had become so corrupted and couldn't quite manage to get everything back with all the correct thumb nails showing me what clips actually were. I genuinely think I have a bad influence on all technology. I think there's some sort of static electricity within my body which destroys machines. How many times have I sat down in an edit or a recording studio and heard the person I'm working with say, "well THIS has never happened before..."?
Anyway, the quiz went well. I had a few little errors with sound and things but by and large I felt pretty relaxed about things. Lucky, really, in front of the big boss!
The journey home was long. It was 2.30am before I was in bed.
The day started at shit o'clock with young Josh upstairs in our loft. He'd come to see us the night before, for a relaxing and joyous evening of telly, chatter and food. He hadn't emerged by the time I left the house, so I called a fond farewell to him from the bottom of the ladder and jumped in the car.
I was heading to the music school in Northampton, where I was listening to the Youth Choir in their first rehearsal on the Nene composition. I realised yesterday that going back to that place is a bit like going home. The place still buzzes with expectation and excitement and everyone always seems so pleased to see me. I made myself a cup of tea and sat in the common room. Teenaged memories flooded my mind. I remembered, for instance, Sam Becker telling me he couldn't eat a Mars bar because it played havoc with his brace and that clarinettists shouldn't eat chocolate before playing. Quite why this conversation has stuck in my mind for almost thirty years I'm not sure. As I drank my tea, I could hear little stubs of my melodies from Nene emerging from the Upper Hall and floating along the corridors. I wondered whether my younger self would have been proud of the man I've become.
Anna and Rachel, both former students from my time and now people who work in the building, found me making a second cup of tea in the kitchen, and we put the world to rights, talking, amongst other things, about the extraordinary sixth form A-level music courses in Grendon in the early 90s, and the tendency for kids from Northamptonshire to be rather lacking confidence these days.
It was great to hear the young people singing. I was actually a founder member of the Northamptonshire Youth Choir and the Upper Hall is exactly where we used to rehearse. I had a little moment when I introduced them to the concept of heterophony, and realised that I was in exactly the same space, where, 26 years ago, composer, James MacMillan, visiting the music school to run a composing workshop, had introduced me to the same concept. The passing on of knowledge...We had lunch in a lovely little cafe which is attached to a giant vintage warehouse down towards the Nene between Jimmy's End and the train station. Whilst waiting for food, Rachel took me into a corner of the shop to show me a load of lamps which had been made out of all sorts of quirky objects including bowling balls, pairs of skates, tea pots and bizarre kitchen utensils. I'm afraid I fell in love with a lamp which had been made out of an old euphonium and I instantly knew I had to buy it.
There were more workshops in the afternoon, and then it was time for me to drive to Sutton Coldfield where I was due to run a quiz.
It was a beautiful day. The sun was warm and the Midlands was bathed in glorious sunlight. I decided to take a detour to Stoneleigh to say a very quick hello to my Grandparents in the graveyard of the church. The sun by then was very low in the sky, casting long shadows across the village and making the orange stones of the church glow copper.
I had a quick walk through the meadow before jumping into the car again to The Belfry, which is where the quiz was being held. It's a fairly soulless golfer's paradise, which I'm sure many of my friends who do corporate work will know like the backs of their hands. This is actually the third quiz I've been involved in at this particular location. As I set up my computer it had a major crash and all the film clips I was due to use vanished in a puff of smoke. There was a bit of a panic as I tried to get a sense of what on earth was going on. My default is always to panic with matters relating to technology. I'm not one of life's natural problem solvers in this field, and to make matters considerably worse, I didn't have any reception on my phone.
Fortunately I was being "assisted" by Lesley, the big boss of the company, who appeared in a blaze of calmness and instantly found a way around the problem. Even she was confused as to how the system had become so corrupted and couldn't quite manage to get everything back with all the correct thumb nails showing me what clips actually were. I genuinely think I have a bad influence on all technology. I think there's some sort of static electricity within my body which destroys machines. How many times have I sat down in an edit or a recording studio and heard the person I'm working with say, "well THIS has never happened before..."?
Anyway, the quiz went well. I had a few little errors with sound and things but by and large I felt pretty relaxed about things. Lucky, really, in front of the big boss!
The journey home was long. It was 2.30am before I was in bed.
Wednesday, 25 October 2017
Nene
For those of you who read my blog and don't follow me on social media, here's a very quick plug...
Nene, my most recent composition, which charts the course of Britain's tenth longest river, is being premiered at the Royal Albert Hall as part of a junior prom on Tuesday 14th November. It's a somewhat epic composition which is being performed by 700 young musicians from Northamptonshire and Rutland. The piece was written to take its listener on a tour of the river from its source at Badby in the far west of Northamptonshire all the way to The Wash, where the Nene estuary marks the border between Lincolnshire and Norfolk. It's exactly 100 miles long and I walked its entire length last December. Actually, I walked a great deal more than 100 miles, on account of the Nene Way which takes walkers away from the river at regular intervals to visit nearby towns and villages.
My composition is meant to evoke some of the sights and sounds I heard on my walk, from red kites and geese flying through the air, to the sounds of the river recklessly cascading over weirs whilst bells ring in a misty Wisbech. A long sequence is dedicated to the Nene Valley steam railway which surges alongside the river on the border of Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire and all sorts of myths and legends associated with the river find their place in the piece. One section attempts to recreate my experience of walking through the echoing, mystical fens where willow the wisps, floating balls of light, are still regularly seen hovering over marshland.
There are some cracking visual elements including a specially commissioned musical sculpture, which is all I'm prepared to divulge at this stage!
So if you're interested in coming to see the piece, you can find all the information about ticketing here:
http://www.mfy.org.uk/events/mfy-proms/#programme
Nene, my most recent composition, which charts the course of Britain's tenth longest river, is being premiered at the Royal Albert Hall as part of a junior prom on Tuesday 14th November. It's a somewhat epic composition which is being performed by 700 young musicians from Northamptonshire and Rutland. The piece was written to take its listener on a tour of the river from its source at Badby in the far west of Northamptonshire all the way to The Wash, where the Nene estuary marks the border between Lincolnshire and Norfolk. It's exactly 100 miles long and I walked its entire length last December. Actually, I walked a great deal more than 100 miles, on account of the Nene Way which takes walkers away from the river at regular intervals to visit nearby towns and villages.
My composition is meant to evoke some of the sights and sounds I heard on my walk, from red kites and geese flying through the air, to the sounds of the river recklessly cascading over weirs whilst bells ring in a misty Wisbech. A long sequence is dedicated to the Nene Valley steam railway which surges alongside the river on the border of Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire and all sorts of myths and legends associated with the river find their place in the piece. One section attempts to recreate my experience of walking through the echoing, mystical fens where willow the wisps, floating balls of light, are still regularly seen hovering over marshland.
There are some cracking visual elements including a specially commissioned musical sculpture, which is all I'm prepared to divulge at this stage!
So if you're interested in coming to see the piece, you can find all the information about ticketing here:
http://www.mfy.org.uk/events/mfy-proms/#programme
Monday, 23 October 2017
The triangle
Today was meant to be my last day in the recording studio working on Em. Music should, by now, have been fully mixed and heading off to Scotland for mastering. Obviously I knew this wasn't going to happen, which is why I haven't booked the album in for this crucial next stage. You learn to take one step at a time in a recording studio and never to give yourself unrealistic expectations in terms of delivery dates. Who was it who once drew a picture of a triangle for me, with three words written at each of the corners? "Cheap. High quality. Quick." The point of the diagram was to show that any two corners of this particular triangle in combination would always block out the third. So, you can have something which is high quality and delivered quickly, but it won't be cheap, you can have high quality and cheap, but it won't be quick and you can have cheap and fast but it won't be high quality. In the case of Em we're aiming for cheap and high quality, so delivery won't happen any time soon!
Actually, I think we may need as many as two extra days in the studio, which is a bit of a bummer, as studio days are really expensive. At the same time I can't deliver something which is not as brilliant as it could be, simply because I've skimped at this final stage.
On the tube this evening I had to deal with a man who was so blindingly drunk that he was, in my view, a danger to himself. Watching him, and the way that people were interacting with him, I was suddenly struck by how people have a tendency to leave men to simply get on with it when they're in obvious peril. I'm fairly convinced that a woman in the same state of inebriation would have been rather speedily rescued. Maybe there's a sense that a drunk man would potentially get violent. I watched as the guy lurched, like a pinball, from one side of the corridor to the other, and then as he slipped down a flight of stairs, only narrowly avoiding losing his footing entirely and therefore injuring himself really badly. When he started listing towards the track on the platform itself, I was forced to intervene, grabbing him by his arm and steering him to the wall.
I asked him where he was going and ascertained he was heading for Marble Arch, so got him onto the tube. He folded up like a little piece of origami once inside and I was forced, yet again, to grab his arm to stop him from toppling out of the tube when the doors re-opened. I forced him to look into my face and asked if he was okay, and explained to him that he needed to be extremely careful when he got off at Marble Arch because I wouldn't be there to keep an eye on him and he was very drunk and likely to hurt himself if he didn't try very hard to sober up. I asked if he knew where he was heading and he seemed to, so I said he needed to try very hard not to walk into the roads because even though his legs were behaving like rubber, he wouldn't bounce like rubber.
He seemed touched and tried to give me his card but couldn't make his fingers work to pull it out of his wallet. It was a sorry sight. I hope he made it home.
Actually, I think we may need as many as two extra days in the studio, which is a bit of a bummer, as studio days are really expensive. At the same time I can't deliver something which is not as brilliant as it could be, simply because I've skimped at this final stage.
On the tube this evening I had to deal with a man who was so blindingly drunk that he was, in my view, a danger to himself. Watching him, and the way that people were interacting with him, I was suddenly struck by how people have a tendency to leave men to simply get on with it when they're in obvious peril. I'm fairly convinced that a woman in the same state of inebriation would have been rather speedily rescued. Maybe there's a sense that a drunk man would potentially get violent. I watched as the guy lurched, like a pinball, from one side of the corridor to the other, and then as he slipped down a flight of stairs, only narrowly avoiding losing his footing entirely and therefore injuring himself really badly. When he started listing towards the track on the platform itself, I was forced to intervene, grabbing him by his arm and steering him to the wall.
I asked him where he was going and ascertained he was heading for Marble Arch, so got him onto the tube. He folded up like a little piece of origami once inside and I was forced, yet again, to grab his arm to stop him from toppling out of the tube when the doors re-opened. I forced him to look into my face and asked if he was okay, and explained to him that he needed to be extremely careful when he got off at Marble Arch because I wouldn't be there to keep an eye on him and he was very drunk and likely to hurt himself if he didn't try very hard to sober up. I asked if he knew where he was heading and he seemed to, so I said he needed to try very hard not to walk into the roads because even though his legs were behaving like rubber, he wouldn't bounce like rubber.
He seemed touched and tried to give me his card but couldn't make his fingers work to pull it out of his wallet. It was a sorry sight. I hope he made it home.
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