What's on the box?

French free-to-air TV is dire, so it's much more rewarding to find interesting stuff on YouTube. Here's one of the more tasteful offerings, Hopkinson Smith (see earlier posting) playing some pieces on vihuela: Conde Claros, Cancion del Emperador, and Baxa de Contrapunto by Luis de Narvaez, from Los seys libros del delphin published in 1538.



It's taken from the New York Guitar Festival's third biennial Guitar Marathon. They've posted quite a few other videos of various players, including this one of Paul O'Dette playing baroque guitar: Santiago de Murcia's Passacalles por la E and Fandango.



Other YouTube viewings include Tom Jobim (the man himself), Cellorhythmics (so that's what Alfia Bekova is doing now), and various plectrum guitarists tackling Paganini Caprices, some quite successfully.

Joyeuses Fêtes

The big present this Christmas was a basketball hoop, purchased with generous funding from Grandma and Grandpa Blake. It wasn't easy to assemble, but with a little perseverance we managed to finish building it by mid-afternoon on the 27th. Now the whole family is shooting dunks and slamming hoops or whatever it is you do with basketball.


The Jenga bricks were popular too. This is Fearnley's 2D prototype pyramid, sadly no longer standing.

The DVD of series 2 of The Young Ones finally arrived in the post today, a bit late for Christmas (blame all that fog) but never mind. The children are already memorising the unsuitable script.

Multi-me

Lowri was delighted to spot that I was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours earlier this year, for Services to People who Misuse Substances (I think this means helping them to stop misusing substances, rather than supplying them). I had to admit to her that this was not actually me but one of my numerous alter egos.

I first encountered the problem when I was working at Arthur Andersen, and another Peter Martin transferred in from the Dublin office. We got fed up with receiving each other's post and grudgingly agreed to start using our middle initials to differentiate us (so I became Peter P, he became Peter A).

More agreeable to find myself doubling as a London fashion house ("Peter Martin - a captivating collection of contemporary day and occasion wear"). I still have a label somewhere that a thoughtful friend attached to a birthday present.

I get the occasional music teacher asking me about my violin publications and I have to explain that no, that's not me, that's the other Peter Martin who writes educational string music.

Then there was the eminent journalist Peter Martin, who was the chief business columnist and deputy editor of the Financial Times. He died in 2002 but the FT has set up a Peter Martin Fellowship so his memory lives on.

And's that's all before I start looking on Google, which throws up a staggering range of alternative careers that the real me failed to follow: consultant neurologist, plant scientist, fund manager, lawyer, engineering scientist, herb doctor, lecturer in dental care, surgeon, artist, psychologist, antiques dealer, sociologist, and even "the" musician and songwriter Pete Martin. All this just in the UK. We're a talented bunch, aren't we.

It's icy, it's frosty

No chance of seeing the Pyrenees at the moment. In fact, the fog is so heavy that we can't see the end of the garden.

Everything in the garden is covered in frost, even the funnel spider webs.

Most of the mushrooms and toadstools have finished by now, but there are still some splendid specimens enjoying the winter chill. Click to enlarge pictures.

p.s. Fearnley (V) has posted some Golden Wedding pictures on his blog.

Reading

It can be hard reading books in French. The books I took back to the library this week were:

Diabolus in Musica by Yann Apperry. One-quarter read. It may have won the Prix Médicis 2000 but I was deeply unimpressed with it. It tries so hard, with its absurdly flowery extended language, but just seems juvenile.

Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee. Half-read. Maybe it's just more difficult in French. But many of the reviewers on Amazon seem bemused by it. Basically it's a set of lectures on literary subjects, supposedly delivered by the protagonist, dressed in a thin coat of narrative so that it passes as a novel.

De la Terre à la Lune by Jules Verne. I didn't even start this because I was so occupied with the others. However this is the one that I've renewed for the holidays.

I'm also ploughing through Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, this time in English but not much more comprehensible for that. I will persevere for a bit longer since it's a novel that has a fanatical following ("The greatest work of literature since Ulysses" and suchlike). 100 pages in and some of the threads are beginning to come together.

Shostakovich

The cheerful strains of the Shostakovich cello sonata have been ringing through the house over the last few days. Again and again and again. Lowri is doing a programme for Radio 3 next month, reviewing the different CDs available of this piece. And there are a lot of them: the BBC has sent her a spreadsheet listing 34 different recordings. A dozen or so are deleted and so don't qualify for inclusion, and a few others haven't made it through the BBC's initial filter, but that still leaves plenty. Lynn Harrell, Yo-Yo Ma, Pieter Wispelwey, Truls Mork - they've all been at it. It's an intense job boiling this lot down into a 45 minute programme, illuminating, eliminating, and coming out with a lucky winner at the end.

All the more intense if you're trying to pack in as much of the work as possible before the end of term which is ...... an hour ago! Three children at home on holiday means serious competition for computer time. The best opportunity comes before 10 a.m. each day (or before 6 a.m. if Christmas day).

It's been frosty and foggy down here. Just like England.

Still termtime

20th December, and the children are still grinding on at school. They don't finish until Friday 22nd which makes for a damned long term since the beginning of September. And of course there's end-of-term things crowding in. Fearnley was singing in Christmas concerts for the Ecole de Musique on Saturday and Sunday evenings (theme: Walt Disney - none of this Christmas carol nonsense), and running in an athletics meeting in Toulouse on Sunday afternoon for a bit of variety. The best thing about the holidays will be not having to leave the house in the dark for the 8 a.m. school start.

Must bring in some logs and light a fire.

Which reminds me (flames, you know...) - there definitely is something about the lute which inspires intense brotherly hatred. This time the battlefield is the flute-backed vihuela, something that most people manage to remain reasonably calm about. Interestingly, the publisher Matanya Ophee, nemesis of Ness, also appears in this one.

Sublime and ridiculous

If you're interested in looking at any Mozart other than L'Oca del Cairo, the homepage for the Neue Mozart Ausgabe online is at http://nma.redhost24-001.com/mambo/index.php

Another excellent musical site is the Chopin Early Editions collection at the University of Chicago. As they explain it:

"The Chopin collection at the University of Chicago Library includes over 400 first and early printed editions of musical compositions by Frédéric Chopin, maintained in the Special Collections Research Center. Chopin Early Editions consist of digitized images of all scores in the University of Chicago Library's Chopin collection. Users can search or browse Chopin Early Editions via a variety of data points, including titles, genres, and plate numbers."

Have a look at an original edition of say the Mazurkas, compared to a modern Associated Board edition. It's eye-opening to find out which bits are actually Chopin, and just how much has been added by the AB editors: fingerings, pedallings and more.

Actually it's amazing how much musical source material is now on the internet. How about the Jean-Baptiste Lully collection at the University of North Texas - who also have digitised copies of several dozen other substantial 18th century works in their Virtual Rare Book Room. Godfrey's Bookshelf is another super site, with digitised copies of music books by Dowland, Robinson, Hume, Playford and others. And then there are the collections of the major libraries. For instance, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France has an extensive digitised collection of rare books at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ . Search under the heading Musique, and up pops a list of 251 volumes including Fronimo (Galilei), Le Nuove Musiche (Caccini), L'art de toucher le clavecin (Couperin), Il ballarino (Caroso) and others, all viewable and downloadable in full. Magic.

Sometimes scholarship can go horribly wrong. Most of the website of the respected lute scholar Arthur Ness, editor of the pioneering complete works of Francesco da Milano in the 70's, is taken up with long and bitter rants against the publisher Matanya Ophee. This has been going on for years. They're as bad as each other. At one point Ophee was blacklisted from the (normally freewheeling) internet lute mailing list for his endless posts attacking Ness. This sort of vendetta destroys the dignity of both men. Someone should throw a bucket of cold water over them.

Outdoors and indoors

Correction to my last entry: clearing the leaves IS an ordeal. Especially now that it's colder and damper and they don't want to burn. I did try using the lawnmower to gather them up, but it has now gone off sick and is awaiting a spare part. So I gave myself a change yesterday by getting out the chainsaw and cutting up some of the many large branches still lying around after last January's destructive snowfall.

Back indoors. There's an excellent new website just opened with digital scores of Mozart's entire works, in the authoritative Neue Mozart Ausgabe edition. So I thought I'd take a look at one of his pieces which I'd heard of but never actually encountered, the opera L'Oca del Cairo (The Goose of Cairo - yes, really). It quickly became apparent that Mozart left it incomplete - very incomplete - which is itself a gift because it gives a fascinating view of how he composed. The various songs are complete in the sense that the vocal line(s) and the bass line have been fully composed, so the structure of each song is there. But the orchestral parts are still waiting to be written. Sometimes the orchestral opening to a song has been written, giving a clear idea of the intended style and texture, only to vanish once the voices come in. Occasional important counter-melodies have been written in, just a bar or two at a time. It's the composer's equivalent of an incomplete painting, where the artist's intention is clear enough but the raw canvas is showing through. What's there is good authoritative Mozart, with confident melodies and masterful ensemble work. A shame that he abandoned it.

This evening I did a presentation on the lute and baroque guitar for a music class of 11-14 year olds in Réalmont. They've been studying renaissance music this term and the idea was to bring it to life by presenting it on the instruments of the time. All went well (apart from cutting my finger on the music stand) and they all enjoyed it. A journalist from Le Tarn Libre came along to take pictures so I hope to get a newspaper article out of it.

We were all back in England last weekend for my parents' golden wedding celebrations. Lovely occasion. So many other people were taking photos that I forgot to take any myself. So, no pictorial evidence here yet until someone else sends me some!

Leaves, leaves...

...leaves, leaves, leaves, acorns, leaves, chestnuts, leaves, leaves.... I must have raked up and burned several million of them by now. Still, the weather is pleasant and sunny, so it's not such an ordeal. Apparently it's been the warmest November for 50 years or something like that.

Tomorrow Lowri's book club is descending on us. These ladies set an impressively high standard of household loveliness and of catering, and we're not going to try to compete. Nevertheless the hoover has been out today, the piles of papers are being put into cupboards, and the hamster cages WILL be cleaned.

The boys are practising their cycling tricks - wheelies, bunny-hops and riding up and down stairs (OUTSIDE, please).

Home again

Rather a long time since my last post. However, since then I have been to Cambridge, Mallorca, Leeds, Southampton, Oxford and Reading, finally back to Castres, and family life on Tuesday night.

Here's some pictures of Mallorca, where the COQ was playing two family concerts. It's a treat to be able to sit outside in the November sun, with a beer and a harbour view, and dream up plans for the next stage of ocarina world domination. The palm trees were in the courtyard of our hotel. The fancy building is the La Caixa cultural centre where we played. It was also hosting an impressive exhibition of Edvard Munch, specially assembled for Palma. Not bad.

Leeds, where we played next, is less obviously a tourist attraction (much less, actually), but has a very nice venue called, imaginatively, The Venue. Audience participation was part of the deal, so we got them all to blast along with Also Sprach Zarathustra. Dangerously ambitious, but it just about worked.

Enough for now.

(p.s. some of the pics have disappeared.... I'll try to get them back again)

Secrets of the ocarina

There's an interview with me on the website of the Leeds International Concert Season, where the Chuckerbutties are appearing on 26 November. Find out some of our trade secrets.

Spinacino

There's a nice review of the Chuckerbutties' recent Ibiza concert here in the Diario de Ibiza (in Spanish). This weekend we're taking the quartet to Palma de Mallorca.

In between, I'm enjoying some light relief practising the lute instead. Next year is the 500th anniversary of the first ever printed lute music, Francesco Spinacino's Intabulatura de Lauto, published by Petrucci in Venice in 1507. In fact it's almost the first music of any sort to be published. But, far from being tentative, it shows how highly developed lute music already was by this time, even though there's tantalisingly little earlier music in manuscript. (One happy earlier survivor is the late 15th century heart-shaped Pesaro manuscript, available in facsimile - at a price - from Amadeus Music in Switzerland.)

In 200 pages of music Spinacino presents extensive solo lute transcriptions of polyphonic vocal music, both sacred and secular, duets for two lutes, and 26 highly individual, free-form recercares. I really can't tell whether these are daringly innovative or looking back to an earlier age. They certainly sound innovative - irregular phrase lengths, fluid melodies breaking up into angular pseudo-polyphony, jaw-dropping harmonic shifts. But those same single-line fluid melodies look back to the medieval tradition of playing the lute with a plectrum (as indeed is still the case with the Arabic oud). On the renaissance lute, these melodies are played with alternating thumb and index finger on the right hand, giving a strong down-stroke and a weaker upstroke like a plectrum.

This is meticulously marked in the tablature. If you look closely (click picture to enlarge) you'll see that alternate notes are marked with a dot beneath, indicating the index finger of the right hand. This thumb and finger technique, different from the classical guitar technique of playing melodies with alternating index and middle fingers, remained in use throughout the sixteenth century, its speed making possible the 'divisions' which were such a feature of renaissance lute writing.

The first line of this Recercare has a wonderful, wrenching harmonic shift, typical Spinacino. The improvisatory opening seems to be settling nicely into E flat major. Until the first cadential chord comes in bar 5, and it's not E flat at all, but an assertive, unambiguous D minor, miles away. A shock which sets a suitably unsettled mood for the rest of the piece. I must do a transcription into staff notation to show this more clearly.

Spinacino's one-page guide at the beginning of the book, in Latin and Italian, gets as far as explaining how to write quintuplets. Unexpected.

'Spinacino' is also a cut of veal. Here's a recipe.

Back in the Tarn again

... Cambridge...Ibiza...Cambridge...Castres and STOP.
My suitcase will be delivered to Cambridge tonight. Thanks Iberia.

In Autumn the leaves on the house turn red, the sunsets are vivid and the Pyrenees appear in the distance.

Ocarinas

Can you imagine the sound of 96 ocarinas being played at the same time? By 8 and 9 year olds? Sadly there is no sound attached to this photo of our ocarina workshop today at St John's primary school, Tunbridge Wells, so you will have to carry on imagining.

Afterwards we played to 400 pupils all sitting cross-legged on the floor in the school assembly hall. They particularly liked Michael Murray's graphic rendition of the Can-can.

A progression

...Finchley...Calne...Chepstow...Purley, where we have settled for a few days.

Huge family gathering for the wedding in Calne. Here are Thomas and Clare cutting the cake, plus a small representative sample of the Martin clan.

We've managed to fit in a certain amount of culture to this trip. Fearnley snapped this genuine fake mermaid on display in the King's Library at the British Museum. It's only about a foot long - I hadn't realised that real mermaids were so small.

We went on an expedition around Chepstow Castle in weather conditions politely described as a 'Welsh mist'. Protective headgear required.

Where am I?

Sheffield...Leicester...Papworth...Cambridge. Yes, Cambridge now. Been a busy day.

I'll post some pictures of the COQ's expedition to Tarragona last weekend once I can get the camera connected to a computer. Update - here's some pics of two of Tarragona's finest performance spaces. The Roman amphitheatre, two thousand years old, in a splendid setting overlooking the Mediterranean. And the concert hall of the Fundació La Caixa, where the Chuckerbutties are limbering up for the evening show. Bread and crumhorns should keep the crowds happy.


Tomorrow Cambridge...Stansted...Finchley.

Smooth ride

It was Fearnley's birthday in July, and after due consideration a decision has been reached about the preferred present. The synthesiser and the drum kit remain on the wish list, but he is now the proud owner of a new VTT bike with sturdy front and rear suspension and disk brakes. Just what's needed for bumping up and down hills and over exposed roots in our woods.

Tomorrow I head for Tarragona for a Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet concert, then Sheffield on Tuesday with Sambuca, then the rest of the family follows to England for half-term hols and cousin Clare's wedding on Saturday. Should be fun.

Radio Star

At short notice today I got the call to be a Radio Star. BBC Radio 5 Live were going to run a piece on Sting's new CD and wanted to interview someone about it.

Moi? (as Miss Piggy used to say). Well, the new CD is of lute songs by John Dowland, which is not Sting's normal territory. And, even more improbably, it has gone straight into the charts at number 24. That's the real charts, not the classical charts, where it stands at number 1. On the alternative measure of amazon.co.uk sales, Sting's CD stands at number 9. The next highest lute CD, Nigel North's solo Dowland volume 1 on Naxos (highly recommended, by the way), stands at a surprisingly respectable 1,767. After that, lute CDs quickly plummet to around number 30,000.

So that means a load of people hearing the lute for the first time. Fortunately Sting has taken the precaution of engaging a proper lutenist, Edin Karamazov, for the album. Sting sings the songs - though he has learnt the lute for the project and plays a duet on one track.

As he is the first to admit, Sting is not a trained singer. So standard notions of breath control and purity of tone go completely out of the window (or Go from my Window - sorry, that's a lutenists' in-joke). Instead he approaches the songs with a refreshing emphasis on the text and the story - unrefined but sincere. And very brave for someone who is used to being able to hide behind massive studio post-production.

The classical music public will flock not to buy this CD. But if it raises awareness of the lute and John Dowland among the other 97% of the population, that can only be a good thing.

Oh yes, the radio. I got 60 seconds just before the news, and faced challenging questions like "So, it's a bit like an old guitar then?" and "Can you play rock and roll on it?". Next time I will insist on Radio 4.

Travellers' tales

An early start for Lowri, to drive her parents to Carcassonne airport for their journey home. The mornings are dark now. We are an hour ahead of UK time but only 2 degrees east of Greenwich, and still on summer time.

A wasted effort, as it turns out, because their flight was cancelled. The incoming plane swooped tauntingly down towards Carcassonne airport, then lifted up again without landing and headed off to Perpignan instead. Problems with the weather. Nine hours to wait until the next flight. Ggggggrrrrrr. Luckily Ryanair is still on its summer timetable, so at least there was a next flight. The winter timetable has only one flight a day, and then not every day. The threads connecting us to England are tenuous.

Neil spent most of the visit labouring magnificently in the garden, chopping down dead trees, pruning old roses, digging beds, and finishing with an all-day bonfire. The perfect guest.



Meanwhile, today was Herne's eighth birthday. Top present was the long-coveted Beckham football shirt. We had some lively classmates round for tea who rushed around the house blowing squeakers, playing darts and fighting. Huge fun all round.

Gee up

Philomena went on her first horse ride today. Manga lives in the field just down the road and came to the house to fetch her. They went out for about half an hour - terrifying but thrilling.

The Curse of Seaview

Back from England yesterday. The queues at Stansted have disappeared. What's going on? Lowri's parents travelled with me and are now visiting for a few days.

As usual, I was struck by the Curse of Seaview while staying at Michael's house in Cambridge, and woke up on my first morning feeling absolutely lousy. Michael assured me that we'd only drunk a modest amount of wine the previous evening, but I'm not convinced.

Following my lunchtime recital, I did a workshop on baroque guitar for the music students at Anglia Ruskin University (attendance compulsory). The course director, an enthusiast actually, briefed me by explaining:

a) that Friday afternoon was the 'graveyard slot' with everybody keen to get away for the weekend, and no-one would mind a bit if I finished early
b) the music technology students had never even heard of Handel and would have no idea what I was talking about.

In fact they all knew about modern guitars, the music technologists more than most. So it was easy to make that connection, and everyone seemed to be bright and interested and enjoyed the presentation. A couple of the students played some Corelli with me on violin, cello and guitar. Afterwards, an unlikely-looking electric guitarist enthused to me about how cool Corelli was, how he'd been playing the solo violin parts on guitar, and where could he buy nylgut strings from?

Airport runs

Lots of travelling ....

Lowri's just back from England
I'm going there today to play a concert in Cambridge on Friday
Then I come back on Saturday with Lowri's parents...
... who return home on the 12th
Then Lowri goes to England on the 15th for a few days
Then when she's back I go to Spain on the 21st for a concert with the Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet
Then I go directly to England for a concert with Sambuca in Sheffield
Then the rest of the family comes to England for cousin Clare's wedding and half-term holidays, during which we drive all over the place
Then they go back to France and I go to Ibiza for another concert with the COQ
Then I return to the UK and then to France
Then - oh, that's enough for now. That takes us up to early November. Another instalment later.

I am reading David Ruelle's Hasard et Chaos at the moment but it's a bit heavy, in more senses than one, to take on the plane with me. So I am going to take Jules Verne's Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours instead, to remind me of how travelling used to be.

Prussia Cove

Lowri arrived back yesterday from Prussia Cove in Cornwall, where she was playing chamber music all last week. The house is in a fabulous setting, up on the cliffs looking out to sea. For many years it has been the home of the International Musicians' Seminar, founded by the Hungarian violinist Sandor Végh.

Lowri used to go on courses there when she was a student. Not much has changed since then except that they now have an internet connection, so the house is less cut off from the world than it used to be. If you care to switch on the computer, that is.

Yank

A family outing to the dentist yesterday. Most of us got off lightly but Fearnley had FIVE teeth taken out. A whole line-up of stubborn milk-molars that were preventing the big ones from coming through straight. Fortunately his friend Simon had a similar experience a few months ago so it didn't come as too much of a surprise.

Herne has joined the Racing Club Salvageois football club. He is a "poussin", which is an important step up from a "débutant". Today they played in a huge tournament of poussins from all over the Tarn. There must have been 70 or 80 teams. Although they didn't win the tournament (or in fact any of their matches), the Racing Club Salvageois were still awarded a trophy and Herne, as captain, went up on stage to collect it.

Our pool has a robot which wanders around underwater, sucking up bits and keeping the water clean. At least that's the theory. In practice it has been heading straight for the corner and sulking there. So today I went to the robot shop and bought some new wheels and tyres. Magic! A rejuvenated robot. I celebrated by going for a rather cold swim.

Tachograph

This 'home alone' business involves an awful lot of driving. I'm in danger of needing one of those tachograph things. Today for example:

0800 Fearnley to school
0830 Herne and Philomena to school (then back home with Philomena because her teacher was ill)
1100 (sic) fetch Fearnley from school for lunchbreak
1130 Fetch Herne from school
1330 Herne and Philomena back to school (a replacement teacher has by now been found)
1500 (sic) Fearnley back to school. What with 'study periods' and the standard French two-hour lunch, he has a four-hour gap in the middle of the day on Thursdays
1630 Fetch Herne and Philomena from school, then on to doctor's appointment. (Fearnley walked home)
1900 Take Fearnley and Philomena to choir
2030 Fetch Fearnley and Philomena from choir

That's nine separate outings. Then of course I have to prepare the meals, help with homework, etc, and even try to do a bit of my own work in between. Much easier when both parents are there!

The Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet - the video!

Filmed at the same concert at the Orpheus Centre as the Sambuca video, here's an eight-minute video of the Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet in action. It's got samples of some of our favourite pieces -

Pizzicato Polka - without the strings
Fiesta Aymará - accompanied by the charango, a Bolivian mini-guitar
Schubert's Trout - on a quartet of fish, of course
Rossini's Largo al Factotum - not at all slow, in fact
Radectomy - the grand finale, with ocarina, melodica, bass crumhorn, and kettle

I'm getting a higher-resolution copy of the video soon, which I'll post when it arrives. Meanwhile, enjoy!

Home alone

Up horribly early this morning to drive Lowri to Carcassonne airport. She's off to Cornwall to play in the Open Chamber Music course in Prussia Cove. Fortunately, the UK hand baggage restrictions have been relaxed as from yesterday, so she was able to take her cello on board with her. It couldn't have gone in the hold and this would have been a problem.

So I have ten days sole charge of the children. They were very polite about Dad's special sausage stew this evening, but did venture to suggest that I had overdone the spices. Will I never learn?

France is the land of unexplained acronyms.

ACPE
URSSAF
GUSO
ASSEDIC
SIRET
CSG
CRDS
TPE
MSA

Social security leaflets are difficult enough to read anyway, without having to guess at what this lot means.

Sambuca - the video!

I've just received a video of the concert that my duo Sambuca gave last year at the Orpheus Centre in Godstone. Hurrah! There's seven tracks, so there are seven separate video screens below. (It's possible to play all seven at once, but I recommend watching them separately).


Jolly Sicilian tunes on ocarina and guitar.


The Italian Ground - a gentle 18th century number on treble recorder and baroque guitar.


Handel's Sonata in F op 1 no 11, Siciliana and Allegro - still on treble recorder and baroque guitar.


Macedonian tunes played on frula and guitar. "Life in Macedonia has always been absolutely miserable but they have wonderful music there" - see if you agree.


Something very different now - the Toccata Arpeggiata by Kapsperger, published in 1604 and played by me on the theorbo.


...which leads nicely into the sultry tango Café 1930 by Astor Piazzolla, for flute and guitar.


And finally two Bulgarian tunes, one slow and one fast. The guest percussionists are Michael Murray and Yuzuru Yamashiro, otherwise known as the two other members of the Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet.

Django

Didn't know this existed - a short video of Django Reinhardt playing with Stephane Grappelli and the Hot Club of France. Takes a little while to download but it's a treat to actually see him in action. And the video is a reminder of his extraordinary achievement in playing everything with only two left-hand fingers (the others were injured beyond use in a fire) - though he does bring in his LH thumb from time to time. An amazing player.

Hiss (part 2)

OK, all you herpetologists out there. This fellow was in the swimming pool this morning. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending upon your attitude to snakes) it was already dead. I would love to know whether it was deadly poisonous or just an amiable little critter. Can anyone identify it? Click on the pictures to see a bigger version.

Today M. Mailhe from Concept Jardin came, finally, to remove the greenhouse that collapsed in the snow at the end of January. The space immediately looks better. The insurance money hasn't arrived yet, though.

Puivert

I went to play a solo concert in Puivert in the Aude yesterday. Puivert is a small medieval town surrounded by a huge empty landscape of green hills, with the Pyrenees looming large in the background. This is Cathar country, close to Monségur, the scene of the grand finale of Kate Mosse's Labyrinth. I was playing in the Musée du Quercorb as part of the Journées du Patrimoine, in a room where they had an exhibition about the making of a baroque guitar. I was playing on baroque guitar, lute and theorbo. Not easy practising three instruments at the same time, I realised, but the concert went well and I was pleased with it.

Today is my birthday and I am the proud owner of a new dartboard, which we have installed down in the cellar.

Wet weekend

It's still raining.

So the Repas de Quartier that we went to today, rather than taking place outside, was relocated into a large garage. It's an annual occasion - the first time for us - where ten or so local families get together for lunch. Well, we scarcely knew anyone but that didn't matter because everyone was extremely friendly and had all brought along huge amounts to eat. Inspired by this, we watched the video of Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor back at home in the evening.

In between, we went to the Castres ice skating rink to take advantage of a special free introductory session for children. They loved it. Fearnley has done a lot of roller blading so he went whizzing away immediately. Philomena fell over three times. Herne stopped counting at fifty. All keen to go back again as soon as possible.

Clochemerle

Right, Clochemerle. 290 pages down, 90 to go. Gabriel Chevallier's bestseller first appeared in 1934 and is set in the idyllic small town of Clochemerle-en-Beaujolais, where the men are heroic drinkers and the women are buxom. The installation of a new urinoir splits the town into two bitterly-opposed camps, pro and anti, and a provincial civil war breaks out.

Well that's the plot, but actually the book is about its characters, whose cunning, lubricity and hypocrisy are humorously but unsparingly depicted in loving detail. How about the two parish priests, old friends from the seminary, who for 23 years lived in sin with their housekeepers, granting each other absolution every Thursday so that they could be in a state of grace to celebrate Mass at the weekend. Or the notaire who computes his fortune at 4,650,000 francs, his donations to injured soldiers during the 1914-18 war at just 923 francs, but his expenditure on 'secret charities' (involving young persons in Lyon) during the same period at 33,000 francs. So far the provincial warfare has dragged in the Archbishop of Lyon and the Minister of the Interior. I hope it all ends happily ever after.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the wind has stopped. We've just had 24 hours of heavy rain instead.

Things that cost too much in France:
Car insurance
Postage
Books
Batteries

Bluster

The local cousin of the Mistral is called the Vent d'Autan. It's blowing hard now. It runs in multiples of 3 days. I think today is day 4 so I guess we have two (or five, or ....) days to go. According to my Petit Robert, Autan is a Provençal word derived from the Latin altanus "vent de la haute mer" and means the stormy wind that blows from the south or the south-west. Our neighbours say that it brings sand from the Sahara. True or not, I don't know, but it certainly leaves the car even dirtier than before.

And it has set off the pool alarm several times, including the middle of last night. The electronics are supposed to be clever enough to tell the difference between a wind and a child, but maybe our alarm is just thick. We've tried turning it off but the b**** keeps turning itself on again. Next time, the battery comes out.

I can hear thunder now and it's started to rain.

Lowri has gone to have her hair done this morning. The children disapprove. They want her to grow it longer, but every time she goes to the hairdresser he cuts it again.

Shifting the CDs

In a burst of creativity yesterday, I set up a merchandise page for Seaview Music. Hopefully this will generate thousands of CD sales for Sambuca and the other groups. Setting up the e-commerce bit was quite easy, with Paypal. Much more fiddly was creating new jpg images of the word 'merchandise' and getting them to match the style of the existing headings on the site. Got there in the end.

The next stage is to try to get hold of stocks of the Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet's CD The Classic Ocarina, which hasn't been available since the label Dorian Records went bust last year (without paying the advance...). Natalie Wheen has been playing the CD on Classic FM recently, and apparently plans to feature it as one of her favourites later this year, so we need to get that onto the merchandise page too.

There's a review of the Ely Monteverdi Vespers. How about this - not bad, eh?

"The theorbo player, Peter Martin, charmed us with sexy appeal, combining well with the soloists and shaping the harmonies sensitively and sensuously, adding to the vivacity that these performers engendered in this 17^th century composition."

Crazy name, crazy guy

I'm reading Science & Music by Sir James Jeans (what a fantastic name). It was first published in 1937. I bought the Dover reprint in 1976 for £1.75, which is roughly what the book still costs secondhand on abebooks.com. Or if you must have a new copy you can get it from Amazon.

It's good writing of its period, which does mean that it now feels a little stiff. And surely 'shew' instead of 'show' was obsolete long before 1937? Never mind, he covers the physics of music admirably, without ever becoming too forbiddingly technical. Helmholtz's theory of harmony, which attempts to determine the amount of dissonance produced by any given pair of pure tones, is intriguing. And I love Jeans's speculations about the music of the future: watch out for the 53-note scale.

Following my trip to Sarrant last month I have now got hold of a copy of Clochemerle. Published at almost exactly the same time as Jeans, but much much racier..... more to follow.

The Siena Siren

Thinking further about Hopkinson Smith's comment about polyphony on the lute (see my last post). Here's the start of a piece by Francesco da Milano, his Recercar no 21 from the Siena lute book, which I'm playing in a concert later this month. Embedded in this tablature is an intricate 4-voice polyphonic composition, packed full of tight imitative counterpoint. HS is absolutely right: the flexibility of the lute does make it possible to bring out voices and entries, and therefore the structure of the piece, more than on the organ.

Here's a transcription showing it in staff notation (as ever, click on the image to enlarge). Now the musical content appears, but the fingering is lost. To study a piece like this seriously, I like to have both versions available and to treat them as complementary to one another. But I always play from the tablature, and preferably from a facsimile of the original, even when it's as squiggly as this.

The Siena lute book has been dated to c. 1560-70, a good 20 years after Francesco's death in 1543, which shows the lasting power of his music. This recercar also appears in the Casteliono lute book of 1536. There are some nice extra touches in the Siena version, such as the twiddly bit in bar 20 and the B flat / B natural opposition in bars 24-5 (Casteliono has B flat throughout - safer but less piquant). Many years later, the recercar turns up again in Besard's collection Thesaurus Harmonicus, published in Cologne in 1603, and attributed this time to Edinthon Galli (who he?).


This strange creature is the watermark from the Siena book. If you want to buy the facsimile, you'll find it at Minkoff Editions for the eyewatering price of €114.

Corelli

I'm working hard on the baroque guitar at the moment because I have a couple of solo concerts coming up. Here's the first page of one of the pieces I will be playing (click it to see it bigger). It's by Santiago de Murcia and comes from his manuscript collection Passacalles y Obras de Guitarra (1732) in the British Library. Actually no, it's not by him: it's borrowed from Corelli. This is the start of Corelli's violin sonata op 5 no 8, beautifully reworked for guitar. The fancy ornaments are all SdM's own; but Corelli took a similar approach to his work, and there are original editions of the sonatas which purport to show Corelli's own, very extravagant, ornamentation.

By the way, the music is written in tablature. It's quite like modern guitar tablature, where the lines show the strings and the numbers show which fret to play, although here the lines are inverted, i.e. the lowest line is the highest sounding string. The capital letters in the first two bars are chord symbols, showing B major and E minor respectively with a barré at the seventh fret.

The facsimile that I'm working from was published by Editions Chanterelle in 1979. Unfortunately it doesn't appear on their website any longer, although they are still selling the facsimile of SdM's other book, Resumen de Acompañar la Parte Con La Guitarra (1714) for the reasonable price of €26.

While I'm in lute mode, there's a good interview with Hopkinson Smith here. A novel thought from him:

One would think that the organ would be the best instrument to perform polyphony because you can sustain everything, and that the lute would be the worst, because nothing can sustain. But, I think it’s just the opposite, -the organ is the worst instrument to play polyphony and the lute is the best. This is because with the lute one can really give life to every voice - one can breathe, adding a whole suggestive dimension to polyphony that is extremely difficult to do on the organ.

Upstairs

The first floor loo is coming on surprisingly quickly. M. Pinto did a great job of stripping out, plastering, painting etc last week and M. Vidal the plumber turned up today, his first day back from hols, to get on with his bit. We need a washbasin in there, and I had a long and increasingly bewildering conversation with him about lave-mains, lavabos, vasques à encastrer (or was it lave-mains à encastrer?) , plans de travail etc. And became increasingly gloomy at the prospect of having to trudge round loads of shops looking for these things. Thankfully when Mr V. came back in the afternoon he was bearing a simple white basin which will do just fine. Problem solved and many miserable hours saved.

By some sort of telepathy all the French children, or their mothers, had divined the things that were unspoken on the school stationery list. Everyone else in Philomena's class turned up with a small whiteboard for their ardoise (which used to mean a slate). Everyone else in Herne's class turned up with cardboard dividers for their file, not plastic. Back to the supermarket pronto.

The earth moved...

... while Lowri and Herne were walking round the back garden yesterday. Something was digging a Tunnel under the lawn. The Tunnel carried on spreading and is now quite extensive. Luckily the lawn is no showpiece. So we have cute wildlife - assuming that it is indeed a mole - as well as nasty bugs.

It's been a quiet weekend at home following the excitement of the choir courses. I'll leave it to Fearnley to write about his course in his own blog. School starts tomorrow... The children are whining [I was told to write this].

I have been revising my Japanese. I was learning it quite seriously before we left England, but it's lapsed since I have no teacher here and I've been concentrating more on French anyway. Today I reached the end of chapter 18 of Japanese for Busy People volume 1. The stories were dull first time round and are crashingly dull the second time (who cares whether Mr Tanaka has a meeting at the Kyoto branch office tomorrow?), but the language stuff is good. Worth persevering, especially if the Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet does manage to land that tour to Japan : )

Nostalgia

In between rehearsals last weekend, we were reminiscing about the good old days of the Cambridge Buskers shows on Radio 2 in the 1980's, each episode featuring a hastily-concocted guest band. One of our favourites was The Boys from Brazil. Michael Copley on flute, John Cook on bass clarinet (and compering), me on guitar, Giles Lewin on tea caddy, Geoff Tyndall on small saucepan lid, Lowri ('Lolita') Blake and Julia King on percussion and vocals. So when I got home, I rooted around in the cassette drawer and found a recording which, with Fearnley's expert help, I have transferred onto mp3. Monteverdi it's not. Enjoy....

Buzz

It is hornet season. They are twice as long as normal wasps, eight times as heavy and sixteen times as loud. They scoff at spiderwebs. They are attracted by the light and at night they hurl themselves against the windows, trying to break through. In the morning we sometimes find several lying dead on the ground, having concussed themselves against the glass. Fearnley was stung on the foot while sleeping last night - we couldn't find the culprit so we can't be sure that it was a hornet but it was certainly a big sting. Lots of anti-histamine.

Talking of unpleasant insects, I am now reading John Fowles' A Maggot. I found it hard going when I first read it years ago, but I thought I'd try it again since our friend Howard recommended it as one of his favourite books. And it is good. It's still hard going because of the language - it's an eighteenth-century mystery story, largely told in depositions by the main characters in eighteenth-century language, which makes it a tour de force for a modern author. But the build-up of the story is tremendous. Thanks to the internet, we can still read Robert Nye's review of the book in the Guardian from when it first came out in 1985. He liked the first two-thirds but thought the ending was 'rubbish'. A shame.

All the children have been away on choir courses this week. Fearnley's closing concert was last night, Herne and Philomena's is tonight. Then school starts on Monday....

Ely

Back from England, where I was playing in the Monteverdi Vespers in Ely Cathedral. The concert was in the Lady Chapel, shown on the left hand side of this picture. It was packed full and the audience was fantastic.









The choir Cambridge Voices was directed by Ian de Massini (otherwise known as one half of the Classic Buskers) and the orchestra was the Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet, here performing under the pseudonym of the Orchestra of the Age of Reason, on recorders and trumpet. In this picture at the rehearsal I am playing theorbo for soloist Katy Edgcombe in Audi coelum.





Remember the hungry creature from St. Pompont a week or two back? Here's an English cousin, above the door in the Lady Chapel. This is a Green Man, with sprays of leaves coming out of his mouth and winding around his head.







p.s. the theorbo got back home safely afterwards, despite having to go down the 'fragile' chute at Stansted and travelling in the hold.

Footsore

Since I don't expect to get much exercise in England over the next few days, I went for a long walk up and down hills in the Tarn yesterday. Fearnley accompanied me for the first couple of miles but after that I was on my own. France has a network of Grandes Randonnées or long distance footpaths. The GR653 passes about a mile from our house. It is one of the Chemins de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle, which starts at Arles and goes to Santiago de Compostela. So I went about 15 miles east and then struck northwards up the GR36. At 6.45 p.m., after 8 hours walking and facing another hill, I realised my legs wouldn't go any further. Lowri came to fetch me. I could hardly lift myself into the car. Long bath and early night. Fortunately I can move again today.

I have swathed my theorbo in bubblewrap and am hoping for the best for today's flight. This is turning out to be a monster problem for all travelling musicians, to judge from the reports on the BBC website 1, 2.

Fiddles and flies

Christian and Sue Urbita came round for dinner yesterday, and Christian brought four of his new violins with him for Malcolm to try out.

Here's Malcolm taking one of the instruments through the Sibelius concerto ....


... while Christian listens intently on the sofa. Lovely instruments, very special.

Today we went out fishing for trout with Malcolm on the Agout between Burlats and Roquecourbe, only about ten minutes drive from home but a beautiful setting, with a clear fast-flowing stream and impressive wooded cliffs above us. He'd brought along his second rod so we all learned how to cast a fly over the water. Like a super-long whip with a high-speed hook on the end - to be treated with respect. No fish were harmed during the day. Here's a fishing map of the Tarn.

Johnny English on the TV this evening. A little surreal to hear Pascal Sauvage, John Malkovich's camp French villain, speaking real French, but great fun nonetheless.

I have bought a 50-metre roll of bubble wrap for my theorbo.

Dordogne

Back last night from the Dordogne where Lowri was giving two concerts with Malcolm Layfield and friends.

Here's the Château de Croze where they played on Saturday night.




Applause at the end of the concert after an exhausting but triumphant performance of the Schubert C major quintet.







The anglo-french amitié barbecue the following day. There's Lowri on the left, in the hat, and Philomena standing up. Fantastic barbecued magret de canard followed by cabécou, the local goat's cheese.

Dangerous fun in the afternoon tearing round the field on a sparky little bike.

This hungry creature sits just above the door in the church at Saint-Pompont, where Friday night's concert took place. I am really not sure how the theology of this works. It's similar to the Green Man, common in medieval churches in England, France and beyond.



The boys had fun on the drums in the stables.