Fakebook

I'm having fun with Facebook. The Lute Society group that I set up on it about 10 days ago is already up to 27 members. (27 down, 700 to go ... but lute enthusiasts are not necessarily the standard Facebook demographic).

I do wonder about authenticity though. Comment on this issue has largely been about the risk of identity theft. Sharing your date and place of birth, pet's name, or first school with the world at large encourages the world at large to come swooping in and clean out your bank account. Possibly.

But are people who they say they are? The 12 people registered as J.S. Bach, the 16 Ludwig van Beethovens, and the lone Elvis Presley are easily denounced as impostors. More difficult are the semi-famous. The moderately famous tenor Ian Bostridge is up there, complete with photo and 36 friends. Is it really him, or has some crazed fan (they do exist) set up an Ian Bostridge homage account? So is the rather more famous conductor Simon Rattle (West Midlands). Among his 42 friends are Ludwig Beethoven, Leonard Bernstein, Johannes Brahms, Edward Elgar, and a few other illustrious but dead composers. Probably a fake, then.

It's tempting to set up an illustrious alter ego and see how far I could get with building that person's 'social network' for myself. And then empty their bank account, of course.

Fame and fortune beckon

The COQ sampler CD has been reviewed in Lute News issue 82, July 2007. They like it....


The Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet , www.seaviewmusic.co.uk

Just occasionally a reviewer is given something so weird it's wonderful. One of this lot is our own Peter Martin (who presumably reckoned if Lute News wouldn't review it then no-one would!). Another appears from the photograph to be Kenneth Clarke, but maybe that's wishful thinking. Authentic repertoire for such an ensemble being thin on the ground, the quartet have drawn widely, from 18th, 19th and traditional 20th century sources. We open with Offenbach's can-can, played as near to straight as it can be in the circumstances. An Andean piece has three ocarinas and a charango (vegetarians look away now: it's a sort of mandolin with an armadillo shell for a bowl) together with some odd shrieks. A fade-out extract of the finale to Beethoven's First Symphony might well have made the old boy glad he went deaf. The nearest we get to Lutesoc standard repertoire is 'Ungaresca' - the lowing sound of four fat cowhorns. A Bulgarian piece with guitar goes at a hell of a lick. 'Pizzicato Polka' offers 'the sound of the Viennese plucked ocarina' (meriting a Zen round of applause, everybody's one hand clapping?). The longest piece is the finale. The Hallelujah Chorus on crumhorn, melodica and ocarina.

What can I possibly say? The playing is highly virtuosic. Humour in music is notoriously hard to pull off - though the word means 'joke', when did you last giggle at a Brahms Scherzo? Here it works brilliantly, and doesn't go on too long. The whole disc takes less than 10 minutes. My only regret is that the sleeve photograph shows and text refers to them playing Schubert on four rubber trout, but that's not on the record. Get hold of it, and give a copy to someone you like very much.

Meic Goodyear

Summer music

The audience settles down for our concert last Thursday in Vénès, about 20 minutes drive from home. We were playing at La Baïlesse, a lovely 18th century maison de ma...
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...ître (found it! French accents on English keyboards...) owned by British friends of ours, who organised a splendid soirée musicale with food and drink and wandering round the grounds.

We're repeating the same concert tonight in Castres. Open air. Fortunately the weather today is calm and warm, after three days of fierce wind.

We will rock you

We were invited to a barbecue yesterday at the country house of some friends about five miles away. Fabulous place set in an estate of 300 hectares of woodlands, which makes our patch look rather modest. It's in the Sidobre and is littered with huge granite boulders. They even have their own Rocher Tremblant deep in the woods: a delicately balanced 500-ton boulder which moves gently up and down if you push it. Magic.

The Sidobre is one of the world's top granite producers, although it has been hard hit by Chinese competition. The top product is gravestones, 150,000 a year of them. The granite business has been boosted by the recent craze for tram systems, which need miles of rock solid bedding for the rails.

Fun with computers

The children have been hard at work with their blogs. See the links on the right of this page for progress so far.

Lowri and I have joined Facebook. How many "friends" do you have? Lowri is ahead - so far.

I unwisely introduced the children to the Monty Python Spam sketch, which is now receiving repeated YouTube viewings. Did you know that the Japanese for Spam is スパム ?

On a more gentle note, someone has kindly posted some episodes of Tales of the Riverbank from 1960. This one finishes with the animals in a high-risk car run. I hope the actors all survived. The guitar music was an early inspiration. (And as for Pinky and Perky...)