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....