Spain again

What a satisfying sight outside the Cultural Centre of Lleida - a huge poster for the Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet's concert there. So huge that it reminded me of the monolith in 2001, A Space Odyssey. Fame at last. We're still working on the fortune.

Lleida is the Catalan name for what used to be known as Lérida, two hours' drive inland from Barcelona. Driving from France takes you over the Pyrenees and takes rather longer. The route follows the river Garonne upstream, which steadily diminishes from a mighty watercourse in Toulouse down to a little mountain tiddler at Vielha in the Spanish Pyrenees.

The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner

Listening to the slow movement of Bruckner's 2nd symphony in the car yesterday, I found the rhythms strangely unsettling and tried to work out why (it's less dangerous than talking on a mobile phone while driving, just).

It turns out to be an extended passage of twos against threes against fives. And slow enough for it all to tell. A disturbing genius. Disturbed too, if Ken Russell's Bruckner film is to be trusted, which of course it isn't.

Image from the splendid Variations website at the University of Indiana, which has a large collection of online scores.

Goosey

The cathedral church of Saint-Benoît in Castres is justly less well known than the rival Sainte-Cécile in Albi. Saint-Benoît was conceived on a grand scale in the 16th and 17th centuries. Unfortunately the building funds ran out, so it is rather shorter than originally intended. Despite its prominent city centre location, the building is largely ignored. There is a large net suspended from the ceiling to catch falling debris. The ornate baroque decoration and bright Christmas crib are not quite enough to dispel a somewhat cheerless atmosphere.

In a moment of distraction during the massed flute class Christmas concert this afternoon, I spotted a fine statue of a bishop with a fat goose at his feet, looking adoringly up at him. A goose? Possibly the bishop is meant to be Saint Martin, associated with the geese eaten at Christmas. But a more convincing candidate, after a little searching on Google, is Saint Ludger or Liudger of Utrecht. Here he is on the coat of arms of Coesfeld in Germany, with his goose. And here (pictured), again with goose, on a monument in Germany. I must go back to Saint-Benoît and take a picture of our man in Castres.

Why Castres? St Ludger never came anywhere near here. He appears to have some connection with the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, so maybe it's connected with that, since Castres is on one of the pilgrim routes. Or maybe it's just an affection for geese in this land of foie gras.

All that jazz

Talk to a classical musician about modes and he will think you mean ancient church stuff that died out four hundred years ago. But, as I've been discovering in my jazz class, modes are alive and well and swinging. D minor? You'll need a Dorian scale starting on D. Or how about a Lydian scale (major scale with sharpened fourth), or a Mixolydian (major scale with flattened seventh)? Or even the exotic Locrian (all the white notes of the piano, played from B to B, starting with a semitone)?

Jazz improvising is heavily based around scales of all sorts, chosen according to the current chord and its context. The church modes are just the start of the story. There's the pentatonic scale (think of it as the black notes of the piano). The blues scale (pentatonic but with a telling extra note). The diminished scale of alternating tones and semitones, independently discovered by Messiaen who called them 'modes of limited transposition'. Or the baffling diminished whole tone scale (a major scale with every note flattened apart from the tonic).

And then discovering how to use them. For example, if you want to, you can use a single blues scale throughout a twelve bar blues. For example, the B flat blues scale of Bb, Db, Eb, F, Ab, Bb will fit (more or less) with any of the three chords Bb, Eb, F major. And the diminished whole-tone scale comes into its own on the dominant of a II - V - I minor key progression. It doesn't look as though it should work, but it does.

Improvising is harder than it seems.

God bless you, ma'am

A strict security embargo imposed by Granada TV prevents me from writing anything about my exploits at the weekend. So instead, here's an amusing story from the newspaper I read on the journey home.

National Anthem 'could be anti-Scots'
Lord Goldsmith, leading a citizenship review for Gordon Brown, said that "some of it is not actually that inclusive". He's referring to verse six, which gleefully refers to crushing rebellious Scots.

Actually, it's even juicier than that. The National Anthem used to ask God to scatter Britain's enemies and "Frustrate their Popish tricks", until George V asked for the words to be changed. Now the tricks are merely knavish.

Of course, national anthems do tend to be nationalistic. France's Marseillaise is an orgy of violence from beginning to end, with blood flowing in furrows and tigers ripping up their mothers.