Underground music

At last, someone discovers how to make money playing the theorbo.
Thanks to David Hill for the cartoon. More here.

Córdoba

These characters are Galatea and Polyphemus. You can tell it's Polyphemus because of the eye in the middle of his forehead. This large mosaic from the second century AD was dug up 50 years ago in Córdoba and now adorns a wall in the Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos in the city, along with various other equally splendid mosaics.

I was in Córdoba at the weekend to play a concert for the Sociedad de la Vihuela, the Spanish lute society. Such a specialised audience could have been intimidating, but they were actually extremely warm and friendly and the concert went well. José Romanillos, maker of Julian Bream's guitars, was in the audience and came to chat to me afterwards. A good weekend.

My concert was in the Casa Góngora, in the old part of the city near the Mezquita. Luis de Góngora, as it happens, was a Cordoban poet who wrote La Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea in 1613, long before the mosaic was uncovered. The Mezquita or mosque is an astonishing building from Córdoba's Arab past: endless pink and white arches below a low roof, with a cathedral plonked in the middle of it by the Christian reconquerors. I wandered around it for an hour just admiring the space.

Musical extremes

Last week was the Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet, recording a new CD in advance of our Japan tour in March 2009. Our usual bizarre mix of repertoire, ranging from renaissance pieces on super-large bass ocarinas (which feels like playing a set of weights) through to a new addition to our repertoire, Michael Murray singing the serenade from Don Giovanni to the accompaniment of ocarinas and charango. His new English words are nicely lascivious yet in keeping with the spirit of the original (we persuade ourselves). The CD will be called 'I love my Ocarina' or, for the Japanese market, Okarina ga dai suki desu. I'm sure they'll like it....

Then next weekend I am playing a solo concert in Córdoba for the annual meeting of the Sociedad de la Vihuela. The Sociedad has put together a fine programme for the weekend. I'm going to play more or less the same programme that I played last year for the Lute Society in England, with renaissance lute music by Dowland, Holborne and Spinacino followed by Britten's Nocturnal for classical guitar. I hope it'll be warmer than it is here - it was below freezing this morning. I'm looking forward to seeing Córdoba, especially the Mezquita , the old Moorish mosque which was converted into a Christian cathedral. Meanwhile, lots of practice.

Home from home

There are relics of France's colonial past scattered around the world. Commonly known as "les DOM-TOM" (département / territoire d'outre-mer), they have their own government ministry to look after them.

Some of them - Guadeloupe, Guyana, Martinique, Réunion - are treated as départements equivalent to those on the mainland. This apparently means that they are part of the European Union, despite being thousands of miles away. Then there's a whole bunch of lesser island territories in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans, plus a chunk of the Antarctic. The journalist Matthew Parris once wrote about his voyage to the Kergeulen Islands in the Southern (i.e. cold) Indian ocean. It was pure whimsy - he just liked the name. There wasn't much to see when he got there.

Possibly the strangest is Clipperton. No, I'd never heard of it either. Clipperton was discovered in 1705, taken over by France in 1858, and confirmed as French in an arbitration by the King of Italy in 1931. It is a tiny uninhabited island 1,300 km off the west coast of Mexico. Even though it is only two square kilometers in area, this gives France sufficent grounds to claim an Exclusive Economic Zone of 425,000 sq. km. around it, and the right to catch lots of Pacific tuna. It boasts some coconut trees, lots of crabs, about 300 rats, thousands of seabirds and a pervasive smell of guano. See the pictures here.

Half cat, half computer

This computer has no mouse.

K 406

We've just had a lively bunch of musicians in the house, who descended on Castres to play some chamber music concerts with Lowri. The tour covered Croze (Lot), Saint-Pompont (Dordogne), Saint-Gaudéric (Aude) and Vénès (Tarn) on successive days. Herne went on tour with them and must now know this music better than any other nine year old on the planet: a Mozart quintet, Brahms B flat major sextet, and Strauss sextet from Capriccio. I made it to the last two concerts: a real treat to hear such good music, so well played.

As it happens, I recently brought home a miniature score of the Mozart, bought second-hand in England for the bargain price of 10 pence. It's in excellent condition, right down to the slip inside it still advertising new releases for 1917.

World of Silicon

I'm writing this on the New Laptop which I bought last weekend. The Old Laptop has been seriously misbehaving: not a good idea during the summer holidays when there is serious contention for computer time at home. Since I was visiting Purley, my father kindly gave me a lift to PC World and settled down to watch the Olympic cycling on a display of 30 large flat screen TVs while I got stuck in to the computers.

I wanted to buy in England because then you get an English keyboard. I am not good with French keyboards because the keys are all in different places and I end up typing a load of Qs instead of As. It's also nice to have software talking to you in English rather than French. I ended up with an HP Pavilion Entertainment PC which has a decent sized screen and a numeric keypad, useful for the occasions when I do want to type in French (Alt-130 and all that). It works (phew), and I am online (double phew).

Timeo Danaos

My hotel in Zagreb last week was next to a grand edifice, the Mimara art museum. I was one of the few visitors and wandered round the antiquities, medieval polychrome wood carvings and old masters alone. The museum was opened in 1987 to house the collection given to the nation by Ante Topic Mimara. The leaflet given out to visitors is gushing:

"This publication provides us with a further opportunity to express publicly our gratitude and our appreciation of our late donor, Ante Topic Mimara, who has placed his nation and the city of Zagreb in his debt by a noble gesture - the gift of his magnificent art collection ..... He was a man of subtle taste with an innate sense of true beauty and the harmony of aesthetic experience, a cosmopolitan spirit, to whom no expression of true artistic worth was alien .... It is certain that his personality, his intelligence and the nobility of his purpose will remain for ever present in the display, the richness and the beauty of these works of art."

No information, though, about who he was or how he acquired the means to build this collection of over 3,750 works, or where it came from. Curious, I googled him and came up with an article by Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which describes him as

"a scam artist, art thief, art forger, a master spy for Tito, a KGB agent and perhaps a killer"

Which is a rather different assessment. Hoving's article alleges, in some detail, that Mimara stole hundreds of works of art from the Collecting Point, the Nazis' central repository in Munich for works of art seized during the war. There's another long article entitled The Master Swindler of Yugoslavia on lootedart.com which sets out Mimara's villainy and dismisses many of the works as fakes. Intriguingly, the collection includes paintings which used to belong to Martin Boorman and Hermann Goering.

So maybe this is why no-one visits the museum: it's a highly visible embarrassment for the city.

Hello, hello, I'm back again

It's been rather a long time since my last posting to this blog. Apologies, all my faithful readers.

Part of the reason for the gap is that I've started doing some English teaching for the Chamber of Commerce here in Castres. My work is individual coaching for business managers who need to improve their English. All my students work for the CCI's biggest client, and Castres' biggest company, the Laboratoires Pierre Fabre. It's rather extraordinary that a modest-sized town like Castres is the headquarters of an international pharmaceutical company which employs over 9,000 people worldwide. It was founded by Pierre Fabre, who ran a pharmacist's shop in central Castres, in 1961. Nearly 50 years later, he's still going strong as the major shareholder and absolute boss. He's invested heavily in the town too, including the Castres Olympique rugby club and a local paper, Le Journal d'Ici.

Since I am supposed to 'simulate business situations' with my students, I am rapidly finding out about all sides of the company: IT projects, recruitment of graduate trainees, accounting, environmental regulation, product marketing, patents, logistics. I now know about the REACH regime for handling of chemicals, the CMMI software engineering standards, and the differences between filing patent applications in Europe and the US.

It makes a change from practising music, which is also keeping me busy. My next concert is in Vénès, near Castres, playing music for cello and guitar/theorbo with Lowri on 24 July. Then Sambuca and the Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet in Zagreb on 29 and 31 July, followed by the COQ in Bled (Slovenia) on 1 August. That's three different programmes, of which two are from memory. Always good to have a challenge.

p.s. follow the title link...

Goosey 2

Finally I have procured a picture of the bishop with the goose in Castres cathedral (see my post from last December). The poor beast has suffered some damage around the head but the bodywork is sound. It's really very odd.

Thirty minutes of fame

I finally managed to see my episode of University Challenge this evening, courtesy of a kind friend who recorded last week's programme and sent me the DVD from England (thank you, Sarah!). Wow, it was close! I don't think I realised at the time that the opposition came within five points of us before we pulled away at the end. Phew.

It was nice to see our little film at the beginning too, with the four of us playing a lute quartet in a wood-panelled room in Sutton House. Came over very well, I thought.

Those of you who have been following the series will now know that we didn't get through to the semi-finals, despite winning our first round match. There were five first-round matches but only four places in the semi-finals, and we were unfortunately number five. Still, it means we retired undefeated from the contest. Well done, Lute Society!

Boot

I'm not normally an active football supporter, but I thought last weekend that I should go and support Herne in his match playing away for Castres Football Club Poussins against Blan. CFC played a fine match but in the end went down by three goals to two. Better luck next Saturday.

On the way back the car overheated and clouds of steam came out from under the bonnet. It's working again now after shelling out €192 for a new relai de ventilateur (more unwanted vocabulary).

Fish glue

The Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet is in conclave at the moment for three days of intensive rehearsal prior to our concerts in Madrid this weekend.

Our set of rubber fish (as seen in Schubert's Trout) is suffering from years of enthusiastic overuse, so master fish repairer Yuzuru Yamashiro has set to with glue, scissors, cutter, sticky tape, and a packet of ham (on far right of picture) to repair them. When the clothes pegs come off we will find out whether the repairs have worked.

National characteristics

Kanji (Japanese pictograms) are often made up of two or more elements.

The lower half of the kanji for 'man' is the character meaning 'power':



The lower half of the kanji for 'cheap' is the character meaning 'woman':


The Japanese haven't quite cottoned on to this feminism thing yet.

What's the buzz?

My children are enthused by anti-adult ring tones. Adults can't hear as high as children. So an appropriately-pitched ring tone can sound in the classroom, say, without the teacher hearing it. (Presumably you have to speak in a high squeaky voice as well for this to be really useful).

The principle is sound, anyway. My hearing cuts out before 12KHz. But a loud 16Khz will send the children diving for cover with their hands over their ears, while I blissfully wonder what the problem is.
http://www.freemosquitoringtones.org/fr/

Which points to the other use of this phenomenon. The 'Mosquito' is a device used to disperse unwanted teenagers at shopping centres. As the inventor says, "It's very difficult to shoplift when you have your fingers in your ears."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/29/international/europe/29repellent.html

Vocabulary

Some words you never wanted to know:

Fosse septique = septic tank

Vidanger = to empty

Election fever, continued

For all (any?) of you who've been waiting to hear the result of the Castres municipal elections, Pascal Bugis got 50.32% of the vote, the combined left (now led by Philippe Guérineau, Samuel Cèbe having yielded) got 32.19% and Philippe Folliot 17.49%.

The somewhat complicated rules provide that the top list gets half the seats on the council, and the other half of the seats are split between all the lists in proportion to the number of votes achieved. So Bugis's 50% translates into 75% of the seats, or 33 out of a total of 43. The left got seven and Bugis's arch-rival Philippe Folliot just three. Ouch.

Then and now

Then: 1976

Now: Tuesday 8 April 2008 at 8 p.m. on BBC2.

Election fever

There are elections this Sunday for town councils and mayors throughout France. For these, we actually get a vote, unlike the presidential election last year.

On the right, the current mayor Pascal Bugis is standing for re-election. He's being challenged by the centrist local member of parliament Philippe Folliot (slogan: Castres Ensemble - Le Changement Responsable) who wants to do both jobs at once. This 'cumul des mandats' is quite common in France, if not always popular.

Up against them both are Samuel Cèbe, the official Parti Socialiste candidate (slogan: Ensemble pour Castres - Le Vrai Changement), and Philippe Guérineau, representing everyone else on the left (slogan: Castres à Gauche Vraiment - Un Réel Changement), a split memorably described by a dismayed Green party councillor as 'mortifère'.

As the slogans suggest, it's difficult to detect any real difference in their manifestos. Bugis seems to have been doing a good job, and to be popular, so I expect he'll get back in.

Technology, again

That seems to have worked. So here's my other database table, of individual books and manuscripts available online. When I'm confident the databases are working well, I might turn this into a collaborative project that other people can contribute to. That would speed up the research and data input no end!

Old music, new technology

I'm experimenting with setting up a database of lute and early music sources available online. And this further experiment is to embed it in my blog. Here goes.....



It should even be possible to add records from here (I've disabled Edit and Delete records for now).

Database (free!) courtesy of www.zoho.com

In the can

Here I am in the recording studio in West Road in Cambridge last Thursday. Michael Copley and I were recording a new Sambuca CD (Dowland, Albeniz, Romanian panpipe music, Vivaldi, Jobim...). Doesn't it look glamorous with all those microphones and equipment! Actually it's hard work, with two implacable men in the control room scrutinising every note and telling us kindly but firmly to do it again. And again. Exhausting.

Thanks to Yuzuru Yamashiro, our guest second recorder player (and fellow member of the Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet) for the photo.

Pushing it

The road from Castres up to La Caulié is busy, winding and unlit. Each evening, an old gent pushes his wheelbarrow, also unlit, down the road. I'm amazed he has survived this long. I have got used to watching out for the wheelbarrow hazard around the next bend. Fortunately the days are lengthening now, bringing him a little more safety.

Hot club

Last week was my jazz guitar concert debut. Here I am with Christian, the other guitarist. Out of shot are the rest of the band: Béatrice on vocals, Maurice on saxophone, Svetlana on piano, Josiane on bass and Bernard on drums.

Back to practising Sambuca repertoire now, before travelling to the UK next week to record a new CD with Michael.

Pigs

Mon Quotidien, our children's newspaper, carries a report this week that one million sangliers (wild boar) live in France. And that French hunters killed 500,000 of them in 2007.

Cause for alarm? Is the sanglier going the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon, with extinction imminent? Not a bit of it. Without the gallant hunters, the sanglier population would explode, apparently. And they can cause damage if they get onto roads or into cities. So no worries about the slaughter.

The French government office responsible for such matters is the Office National de la Chasse et de la Faune Sauvage. In that order. Motto: "Aimer la chasse, c'est avoir une autre passion : celle de la nature."

Digging for gold

The new Mrs Sarkozy is nearly ten times as rich as her husband, according to a report in yesterday's Figaro. Which has led to speculation about what sort of marriage contract they may have signed.

To explain: in France you can choose from a selection of financial regimes for your marriage. French tradition and law favours the bloodline over rapacious spouses. The default regime, the one that automatically applies unless you choose otherwise, is the communauté réduite aux acquêts. The spouses' revenues are equally shared but any inheritances, donations etc remain the property of each individual spouse and are kept by them in case of divorce.

The officiating maire at the wedding let slip that the Sarkozys have chosen otherwise. Possibly a communauté universelle? Unlikely, thinks the Figaro, since all existing assets, as well as revenues, go into the common pot and would be split equally in the event of a divorce. Carla wouldn't want to give away half her fortune like that.

Or there's the régime de la séparation des biens which keeps everything separate. Or indeed the régime de la participation réduite aux acquêts which keeps everything separate during the marriage but provides for an equal division on death or divorce of assets acquired during the marriage. The Figaro doesn't come to any conclusions about which régime they may have selected.

All of which is alien, even bewildering, to an English reader. Wealthy newlyweds may try to protect their fortunes with pre-nuptial agreements, but they're not binding, and it's only recently that courts have started giving them any consideration when dividing up the assets on a divorce.

300 decisions

Last July Nicolas Sarkozy asked Jacques Attali to investigate how to promote economic growth in France. The resonantly named Commission pour la libération de la Croissance française reported last week and and has been making waves. The report is wide-ranging, covering health, education, transport, deregulation, technology, tourism....

Attali was an interesting choice. He made his name as an economic adviser to the socialist president François Mitterrand before becoming head of the post-communist European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in the early 90's, a useful apprenticeship for the equally challenging task of rebuilding France.

Attali rather hopefully said that his 316 measures were interconnected and must be implemented as a whole. The prime minister François Fillon has been letting him down gently, saying this this was 'maybe a little excessive'. But the government does so far appear to be taking the report seriously and intends to act on it promptly.

It's intriguing to see how often the UK is cited as an example of good practice to which France should aspire. Attali praises the UK's sustained engagement in reform of school and health systems, in markets and public services, and its financial services industry. Detailed recommendations where the UK leads the way include, for example:

US/UK model for university research funding (Decision no. 29)
Help research establishments to commercialise their discoveries (31)
Facilitate access by smaller companies to the Alternext market, cf AIM in London (40)
Open up the mobile phone market (61)
'Massive' development of preventative healthcare (66)
Construction of Ecotowns (91)
Harmonise financial services rules with those of the UK (97)
Massively develop teaching of business English (100)
Develop low-cost airlines (104)
Develop better paths for changing employment between private and public sectors (148)
Welcome more foreign workers (222)
Advance evaluation of new legislation (231)
Committee for Better Regulation (232)
Speed of enacting European directives (238)
Use of agencies for public administration (248)
Civil service employment contracts along private sector lines, not for life (256-7)
Performance indicators for local public services (265)

Many other recommendations are already well established in the UK, for example:
More autonomy for schools (4)
Schools inspections, results to be published (5)
Parents to be able to choose schools (6)
Deduct income tax at source (PAYE) (304)

Clearly the UK is a shining economic paradise.

Some of Attali's recommendations will run into trouble. I doubt whether the public services can cope with every secondary school child having to do half a day of civic service per week. And three weeks a year of work experience from age 13 upwards does not fit well with the high rate of youth unemployment in France (Attali says rather weakly that companies tempted to rely on work experience rather than offering real jobs to youngsters should be 'dissuaded'). And the most outrageous protected sectors attacked by Attali are outraged. The taxi drivers are threatening to take to the streets (!). But with the price of a second-hand taxi licence at Orly now running at 400,000 euros, there's something very wrong with the taxi market and he's right to address it.

My favourite Decision is number 213. There is a class of lawyers called Avoués près les cours d'appel. They have had no purpose since their monopoly was abolished in 2001 but there are still 444 of them drawing fees. Attali recommends that the position should be abolished.

Goggle

Of course I want to see myself on University Challenge when they broadcast it in the spring. So, as of yesterday we have English television at home. Strapped to the chimney, high above the ground, an 80cm dish points towards the Astra 2D satellite and picks up the main BBC and ITV channels, Film 4, and a bewildering array of total rubbish. Arab channels, shopping channels, Christian pastors, girls on sofas, pop videos, S4C. We were glued to the live Commons debate on Adult Learners on the BBC Parliament channel last night (not many people can say that - not many MPs either, in fact).