AbsoLute 81

Pau

2009-12-13T15:06:00.005+01:00

I've not been doing much on this blog recently. For the last six months, in fact. Shameful. Although I have been more active on my other blog, http://eatslutes.blogspot.com/, which is more specifically lute-related.

Anyway, sort of covering both areas, I've just played a couple of concerts in the magnificent Château de Pau. It's in a fabulous location, with a long south-facing facade giving a panoramic view of the nearby Pyrenees. The Château itself is strongly associated with king Henri IV, who was born there in 1553, and our concert presented pieces by his musicians. Which means that our music might actually have been played in the same space 400 years ago...

Antiphona is a Toulouse-based vocal group, largely made up of professors and former postgraduate students of the early music department at the Toulouse Conservatoire. They're a good group, with innovative programming, and I hope to be doing more with them in 2010.

Sodium chlorate

2009-05-22T19:25:00.002+02:00

I was nearly as surprised as Fearnley to discover that the Lycée Barral comes in at number 41 out of the 1,909 lycées in France in the recent rankings by L'Express. Barral achieved a 99% pass rate for the baccalauréat in 2008. Pretty impressive.

Look a little further down the tables and an interesting story emerges. Lycées cover the final three years of school: seconde, première, terminale. At Barral, only 62% of those in Seconde make it through to the final baccalauréat exam at the end of terminale, against 75% nationally. So there is some pretty ruthless weeding going on. And, according to the tables, there are 142 students in seconde, whereas in troisième (Fearnley's year) there must be close to 200. More weeding. Where do they all go? Mostly to Castres' biggest lyceé, the Borde Basse, which presents nearly four times as many Bac candidates and comes in at a still-respectable 713 in the national rankings.

In the Figaro listings, Barral comes even higher at number 26.

France's got talent

2009-04-30T10:41:00.002+02:00

We have some excellent local bands here in the Tarn. Such a shame I'm not around this weekend to see Burning Fart in action. I assume they take their inspiration from the Flaming Lips.

Marten not Martin

2009-04-09T21:54:00.006+02:00

Just saw one of these outside the dining window. Quite startled me - it's a bloody great thing, the size of a large cat. It ran along the window ledge, up the wall and disappeared into a hole at the top of the window with just its tail hanging out. Nesting, maybe.

Pine martens are extremely rare in Britain: the few that are left are almost all in Scotland, though it's believed that they're beginning to reappear in England and Wales. They're more common in France, especially in hilly or mountainous regions. We have pine trees in the garden, so maybe it's not so surprising to see a marten here.

Rising Sun

2009-02-26T19:56:00.003+01:00

This makes it seem real. The Tokyo Bunka Kaikan calendar for March 2009 includes, on Sunday 15th:

"The first concert of Chuckerbutty ocarina quartet in Japan"

Suddenly it's scary.......

Les voitures

2009-02-06T11:36:00.002+01:00

More words you never wanted to know:

Rotule = broken bit on car
Barre de direction = broken bit on car
Amortisseur = broken bit on car
Pris en charge = covered by insurance : )
Franchise = excess on insurance : (

Social progress

2009-01-24T19:30:00.004+01:00

French TV is showing a programme on 27 January called L'abolition about the end of the death penalty in France in .... 1981. The last person to be guillotined was in 1977. Britain got there rather earlier, with the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965.

One of the main forces behind the abolition in France was a lawyer called Robert Badinter, who became Minister for Justice in 1981. He was also responsible for decriminalising homosexuality in 1982. Again, England got there first, in 1967, although the Scots had to wait until 1980 and the Northern Irish, for some reason, until 1982.

France has also lagged behind on other social reforms. Women have been able to vote in the UK since 1918, subject to limitation, and all women since 1928. French women got the vote in 1945. British 18-year olds have been able to vote since 1969; French ones, despite (or maybe because of) the 1968 riots, only since 1974. Britain has had separate taxation of husbands and wives since 1989; France hasn't got there yet.

Still, in one area of life the French are a century ahead. Church and state were formally separated in 1905, and laïcité is now a central Republican value. Not so in Britain, where the connection goes right up to the very top and, incredibly, 25 bishops still sit in the House of Lords.

Underground music

2008-12-28T10:02:00.003+01:00

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

Córdoba

2008-12-10T22:36:00.004+01:00

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

2008-11-28T12:51:00.002+01:00

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

2008-11-09T22:59:00.003+01:00

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

2008-10-05T10:08:00.003+02:00

This computer has no mouse.

K 406

2008-08-30T09:31:00.003+02:00

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

2008-08-24T14:48:00.002+02:00

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

2008-08-06T11:34:00.004+02:00

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

2008-07-12T15:41:00.005+02:00

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

2008-04-26T09:02:00.004+02:00

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

2008-04-17T22:33:00.003+02:00

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

2008-04-04T12:38:00.004+02:00

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

2008-04-02T18:56:00.001+02:00

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

2008-03-26T15:44:00.005+01:00

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?

2008-03-24T11:47:00.004+01:00

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

2008-03-20T14:19:00.002+01:00

Some words you never wanted to know:

Fosse septique = septic tank

Vidanger = to empty

Election fever, continued

2008-03-19T13:10:00.002+01:00

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

2008-03-11T10:29:00.001+01:00

Then: 1976

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

Election fever

2008-03-06T22:36:00.003+01:00

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

2008-03-04T14:58:00.002+01:00

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

2008-03-04T13:51:00.003+01:00

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

2008-02-24T23:13:00.004+01:00

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

2008-02-15T16:31:00.004+01:00

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

2008-02-12T17:37:00.002+01:00

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

2008-02-10T13:02:00.000+01:00

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

2008-02-06T09:21:00.000+01:00

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

2008-02-03T10:19:00.000+01:00

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

2008-01-09T09:05:00.000+01:00

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).

Spain again

2007-12-31T11:12:00.000+01:00

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

2007-12-22T22:36:00.000+01:00

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

2007-12-22T19:01:00.000+01:00

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

2007-12-16T09:37:00.000+01:00

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

2007-12-04T22:12:00.000+01:00

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.

Shiver my timbers

2007-11-28T13:21:00.000+01:00

The hot summer of 2003 was kind to capricornes (q.v.), which laid lots of eggs. Some of them in our attic. The larvae have been chomping at our beams and the wood treatment man came this morning to inspect the damage. Nothing too serious, thankfully, but we're going to get him to come in to cut back the flaky surface, insert injection nozzles, and then pump high-pressure poison in there to knock them out.

Every type of beam (poutre) has a different name in French, most of which I have immediately forgotten. The whole construction is the ossature, literally a skeleton. The main vertical beam is a poinçon, which confusingly is also the name for the metal tool which he used to poke at the holes in the wood.

We also went to look in our dépendance, where a little pile of sawdust regularly appears on the floor. His diagnosis was that this was caused not by insects but by loirs nesting in the roof. Dormice. Apparently they don't cause damage.

Dear diary

2007-11-18T09:32:00.000+01:00

It's been a busy few days.

Saturday 10
Played as lute and theorbo soloist for La Saltarelle in their historic dance show at the Théâtre de Castres.

Sunday 11
Flew to England, rehearsed with Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet.

Monday 12
Filming with Granada at Sutton House in Hackney for University Challenge: The Professionals as part of the Lute Society team.

Tuesday 13
Fetched newly acquired oboe from restorers and visited the museum of archaeology and anthropology, the human-era sister museum of the Sedgwick earth sciences museum.

Wednesday 14
Flew back to France.

Thursday 15
Gaillac Primeur drinks hosted by mayor of Castres.

Friday 16
Reception for Accueil des Villes Françaises to welcome new arrivals to Castres (the same event that we ourselves were welcomed at two years ago).

Saturday 17
Dinner at chateâu

Sunday 18
Might go to piano recital at théâtre but might just stay at home instead...

An ancient university

2007-11-08T18:46:00.001+01:00

In Cambridge earlier this week, I enjoyed a visit to the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, which I never actually went to while I was studying there. It's like a smaller version of the Natural History Museum but with the distinct advantage that I was the only visitor.

At the heart of the collection are 1.5 million fossils, mostly collected in the late Victorian period and still bearing Victorian labels. Chalk, clay and cliffs yielded huge numbers of fossils of every sort of life form: sea urchins, fish, sponges, molluscs, ferns. And bigger stuff: the hippopotamus skull shown here was excavated in the chalk pits at Barrington in Cambridge. This was the evidence that dramatically changed nineteenth-century minds about the origins and development of life and the earth itself, and which showed that climate change is nothing new.

There's also a very fine minerals gallery, with lucid and non-patronising labelling explaining the crystallography of the specimens.

Commercialisation has started to reach this part of the University in the form of a gift shop. But it hasn't got very far. They don't publish a guide book to the collection. Instead, for the grand total of £7.50, I bought some very pretty samples of:
Quartz
Amethyst
Iron Pyrites
Fossilised Nautiloid
Peacock Ore
Agate slice
Haematite
Obsidian
Fluorite

Fortunately Easyjet has a more generous luggage allowance than Ryanair.

I didn't know that

2007-10-31T18:23:00.000+01:00

Who would have imagined that Arnold Schoenberg attended a dinner hosted by Harpo Marx in Hollywood? (or even that Harpo Marx hosted dinners, come to that?). This snippet from a review in this week's Economist, on the strength of which I've just ordered a copy of Alex Ross's new book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Ross's aim is to provide a history of the 20th century through its music, not just a history of the music itself. An interesting distinction. And, according to the review, he succeeds magnificently. I look forward to finding out for myself once the slow boat from the US arrives (the book's not published in the UK until March 2008). Amazon US is probably cheaper anyway, even with shipping costs, because of the weak dollar.

Maybe Schoenberg composed Harpo's shipboard piano solo in A Night at the Opera (starting at 7:30 in this YouTube clip) ...

Stop Press

2007-10-30T11:24:00.000+01:00

There's a nice long article, with pictures, about me and Lowri in the latest issue of Classical Music magazine. I used to work with journalist Andrew Stewart at Askonas Holt, and he decided that our French adventure would make an interesting piece. See what you think.
Page 1
Page 2

Not just witches and pumpkins

2007-10-26T23:03:00.000+02:00

Half of the road outside the main city cemetery in Castres has been temporarily redesignated as a parking area. The reason? The strong French tradition of visiting family graves at Toussaint, All Saints' Day, on 1 November. Dozens of chysanthemum stalls have set up shop outside the cemetery gates. The town council has even set up a system of voiturettes, basically golf buggies, to transport visitors within the cemetery. (But only from 9-12 and 14-17 heures: even here, the two-hour lunch break must be respected). Halloween is present in France but rather more muted than in England, let alone the United States. And a good thing too.

Shameful

2007-10-21T17:24:00.000+02:00

I notice that I haven't posted anything since 12 September. That's, er, more than a month ago. My fans (slight exaggeration here) have been clamouring for more. What happened? I think I'll just fall back on "Never apologise, never explain."

Actually life has been quite busy. First I was away teaching and playing a concert on the Lute Society's residential course in the Yorkshire Dales, then Lowri was away for 10 days playing chamber music at Prussia Cove in Cornwall (see pics on her blog), then I was off for nearly two weeks on Sambuca's grand concert tour of England and Wales, covering all the corners from East Grinstead to Huddersfield to Cardiff. A lot of driving. Back home now and practising for the next events - Monteverdi's Orfeo in the Aude and an early dance theatre production with La Saltarelle in Castres.

Out in the open air today with Fearnley, who hauled me along to a favourite VTT site (off-road biking...). My twenty-something-year-old three-speeder wasn't really up to the job but we had fun skidding down slopes and avoiding ruts. (Ah! that's the word for a 'rigolle'. Better than ditch or furrow).

I had a bit of fun last week doing the 'selection interviews' for University Challenge - The Professionals at the ITV Centre in London. Following which, our Lute Society Team has been chosen as one of the 10 teams to take part, fighting off stiff competition from The Antiques Roadshow and 78 other hopefuls. So I'm going to be on the telly! Filming is in Manchester on 1 and 2 December.

Éducation, éducation, éducation

2007-09-12T22:17:00.000+02:00

For the rentrée last week, President Sarkozy has issued a thirty-page Lettre aux Éducateurs. Addressed to all teachers - and indeed parents - it sets out, in stirring and inspiring language, why everything is wrong with the current school system and how it all needs to change. Expect a winter of discontent and strikes.

More cute animals

2007-09-10T07:57:00.000+02:00

Right now, what is a "tatou" in French?
It's not a tattoo - that's a 'tatouage'.
It's not the star of Amélie and of the da Vinci Code - she's Audrey Tautou.
Here's a clue.
Of course. It's an armadillo.

And a 'piano crapaud'? It's the less than respectful word for a baby grand piano like ours. A toad piano, indeed....

After being bitten by a radioactive spider, young Peter Parker...

2007-09-05T20:58:00.000+02:00

Alright, I know it's not long since the last weird wildlife picture, but this one is truly scary. All your phobias rolled into one. And only ten feet away from the swimming pool.

Update: Thanks to the magic of the internet, I have identified this beast as a female - i.e. big - Argiope bruennichi. All the web :-) pages about it seem to be in French, so I guess it is a local resident.

3,000 years before Obélix

2007-09-03T12:41:00.001+02:00

We all went yesterday for lunch with some friends who have a house in a very empty part of the Sidobre. In the afternoon we went walking to see a newly-discovered menhir, dug up by neighbours of theirs a few months ago. The carving is a simple stylised human representation, life-size, with belt, legs and collar. It was probably done about 5,000 years ago. These carved menhirs are a local feature in and around the Sidobre, and there is a museum in Rodez which has a fine collection of them.

Our friends think they may have found another buried menhir in the woods a couple of hundred yards from their house. The shape certainly looks promising. The children lent a hand with the excavation.

Fitou

2007-09-01T23:20:00.001+02:00

Back yesterday from playing a solo recital in Fitou, which is near the Mediterranean coast between Narbonne and Perpignan. Fitou is wine country, and boasts four separate Appellations. The white wine harvest has just finished and the red is about to begin. It's rocky and dry around there, very different from the Tarn only 100 miles away. There were cactus growing wild outside the Chapelle where I was playing.

The Chapelle is a pretty little place, tiny in fact, whitewashed inside and now used for exhibitions and occasional concerts. I played a mixed concert for lute, baroque guitar and classical guitar, which I always enjoy doing, although practising three different instruments for one concert can be a challenge.

I took a bit of a risk programming Benjamin Britten's Nocturnal, a big work for classical guitar, at the end of what was otherwise an early music programme, and was pleased that it went down really well. Nocturnal is based on a song by John Dowland from 1597, Come Heavy Sleep, and I like that connection between old and new. I'm playing a mini-recital for the Lute Society later this month, at their residential weekend course in Yorkshire, so I'm planning to do the same for them and hope that they appreciate it!

I met some interesting characters there, including an American artist who divides his year between his places in France, New York and Hawaii. Lovely man, and very knowledgeable about music. My host was a friendly Scottish potter who ran a restaurant in Fitou for twenty years.

Tread carefully

2007-08-26T22:42:00.000+02:00

I've had a request for more postings about weird wildlife. With pleasure. This splendid giant capricorn beetle (Cerambyx cerdo) appeared on our terrace last week. Its body length was 4.5 cm, not including the antennae. That's a big bug: think of a stag beetle and double it. They live on large oak trees, which makes sense because we have quite a few of those in the garden.

When one of them popped up in Wales last year, it was headline news in The Times. Apparently they have been extinct in Britain for 300 years.

The COQ blazes onto MySpace

2007-08-23T08:54:00.000+02:00

Quel thrill! With a little help from Lowri's brother Ian, who is visiting at the moment, I have set up a MySpace page for the one and only Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet. Check out the audio, video, reviews and suchlike at www.myspace.com/chuckerbutty and become one of our first Friends.

Next project will be a page for Sambuca. Which is far from being the one and only, as I discover to my dismay when I search for Sambuca on MySpace music, but I don't think there's much risk of confusion between the real Sambuca (mine, of course) and the Hip Hop version in New York or the funk one in Sydney.

Star of wonder

2007-08-18T22:31:00.001+02:00

We were sitting out on the terrace this evening when we saw a bright star moving through the sky. Surely not Christmas, we thought. It turned out to be the international space station. It'll be appearing again at around the same time for the next few evenings. Check the precise time, because it only appears for a couple of minutes.

Unexpected hitch

2007-08-10T08:44:00.000+02:00

An invoice has arrived from Dell, claiming that the new memory was delivered on 3 August, but no sign of the memory itself. I phone Dell, who say they will chase the delivery company. Meanwhile I have an increasingly agitated end user to placate, who wants to get on with using his Expensive Software. I am going to England today for a week, which won't help.

We've had a houseful of people this week and actually used our disco for the first time. The strobe light with ultra violet background work extremely well, though only for a few seconds before someone howls for them to be turned off.

What the owl brought

2007-08-03T16:24:00.000+02:00

Not one but two copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows arrived last week, sent by some kind English friends who visited recently. A wise move to avoid serious conflict. All three children (me too) have now read it, and Fearnley is half way through for the second time. I can reveal that it ends happily ever after.

Meanwhile, I agreed to buy some Expensive Software for Fearnley's birthday. Imagine the dismay when we placed the order and the estimated delivery date came up as 25 October. In fact the package arrived two days ago. Imagine the dismay when it refused to install itself because our computer doesn't have enough memory. On to the Dell website to order some more. Imagine the dismay.... no, stop it. It WILL work once the new memory arrives.

Unaccompanied Minor

2007-08-01T08:06:00.000+02:00

8 a.m. and I'm just finishing off my second breakfast. The first was at 4 a.m., since when I've been to Toulouse airport to drop off Philomena for her first ever solo flight as an Unaccompanied Minor. She should be in the air now, enjoying her second breakfast en route to Gatwick where she will be met by her friend Natalie and mother. The whole Unaccompanied Minor business is bristling with formalities, paperwork and identifications. Lowri got very frustrated during the long hours on the phone to BA setting up the booking, and more than once suspected that they were making up the procedure as they went along. Still. It's worked, and at least BA do offer an Unaccompanied Minor service, unlike Ryanair.

Lots of travelling at the moment. Fearnley's friend Simon (another Unaccompanied Minor) came out to visit us last week, Lowri is in Dartington this week, I came back from England a few days ago, going again in 10 days' time.

Fakebook

2007-07-21T22:18:00.000+02:00

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

2007-07-19T13:44:00.000+02:00

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

2007-07-17T11:33:00.000+02:00

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...
ûùÿÖÜø£Ø×ƒáíóúñÑªºº¿®¬ ‼öôÆæÉÅÄì
...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

2007-07-09T12:30:00.000+02:00

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

2007-07-06T09:13:00.000+02:00

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...)

In the shade

2007-06-29T10:07:00.000+02:00

This shameful object on the left, known as a store in French, is shortly to be replaced. I went with Philomena and Herne to the stores shop (this is getting confusing) and we chose this cheerful bright blue pattern for the new one. It should be installed before the end of July.

The folding stuff

2007-06-26T14:18:00.000+02:00

The folding theorbo is now a reality. Prompted by the sad tale of a Ryanair calamity, lutemaker David van Edwards set about designing an instrument which could be dismounted for travel and easily reassembled at the other end. It's a brilliant piece of work, and the casemaker's contribution is pretty impressive too.

Read the full story on David's site, illustrated with an excellent set of pictures of the new instrument, as well as one of the shameful Ryanair case smash which started it all off.

The instrument plus case costs £6,500. Unfortunately you still have to buy a seat for it, but at least you can be sure it will fit - airline seats were not designed with theorbos in mind...

Emissions

2007-06-24T08:45:00.001+02:00

Lowri is returning to the UK on Tuesday for a couple of days, her fourth visit in just over a month. In these carbon-conscious days one can feel a bit guilty about flying.

But not very. Not when there is a UK government agency called Visit Britain whose purpose is to encourage as many people as possible to do just that. Visit Britain is proud that 2006 was a record year, with 32.1 million overseas visitors, with 2007 set to increase by a further 4%. Ten times as many as in 1964.

I will be interested to see the results of the carbon footprint consultancy for the 2012 London Olympics, if they're ever published. That will involve an impressive amount of flying. I'm not convinced about the urban regeneration effects of the Olympics either. We walked round the 1992 Barcelona Olympics site when we went there last month. It looked sad and empty and the stadium was covered in scaffolding. To judge from the DCMS press release, I don't think Tessa Jowell and Sebastian Coe were shown that bit when they went on their fact-finding mission to Barcelona last November.

More pesky predictions

2007-06-19T12:33:00.000+02:00

"'Nicolas Sarkozy heads for a huge parliamentary majority ... The UMP's share of parliamentary seats is likely to rise from 359 to 405-445, out of 577."

So said The Economist on 16 June, the day before the second-round elections. The actual result? A mere 313 seats for the UMP. Still an absolute majority, but miles below the prediction.

What went wrong? Possibly the new government's plans to increase VAT by 5%, notably missing from the presidential campaign. Even calling it 'social VAT' doesn't seem to have helped. Or maybe people just lie to polling agencies.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

2007-06-19T08:09:00.000+02:00

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future". Nice one. But who said it? 'That great baseball-playing philosopher, Yogi Berra', according to The Economist a couple of weeks ago.

Just a moment though - here's the latest issue of The Economist, attributing it this time to Sam Goldwyn.

I always thought it originated from Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist. At least it would have had some relevance to his work with quantum mechanics.

It turns out that the quote has been attributed to at least a couple of dozen people. See
http://www.larry.denenberg.com/predictions.html

I'm confident that more claimants will keep popping up.

Ecole - collège - lycée

2007-06-15T10:37:00.000+02:00

The end of the school year approaches. Now that language isn't so much of an issue, the children need more challenge to keep them stimulated, so we've decided to change schools next year. We've spoken to a lot of parents and Barral is widely agreed to be the best school in Castres, so we're going for that.

Barral is a private school, but fortunately these are much cheaper in France than in England. Fees for the Collège are €460 a year, plus lunches. Contrast this with Whitgift, back in Croydon, whose website states that 'the tuition fees for the academic year 2007/08 will not be more than £12,412'. About 40 times as much. The difference is possible because Barral, although a private school, operates 'under contract' to the state, which pays for the teachers' salaries. This means that public and private schooling are much more integrated in France than in the UK, and makes possible genuine competition between them.

Not that Fearnley's current headmaster would accept this. He was most miffed when we went in April to tell him that Fearnley would be changing school next year. He clearly detests the private sector on ideological grounds and refused to countenance the idea that any other school might be better than his. When Philomena's class (final year of primary school) went to visit Fearnley's current school recently, he told them that children at Barral all smoke and fight in the streets. And he's still miffed: there was a meeting of the class council this week, and the student reps told Fearnley with great excitement the following morning that the headmaster had blown his top about Fearnley's leaving. Seems fatally blinkered to me - he would do better to accept that competition exists, and to confront it by sharpening up his own act.

Barral is a Catholic school. Religious schooling seems to be a main reason for the existence of the private sector, since religious education is expressly prohibited in state schools, a consequence of the separation of church and state introduced in 1905. Surprising that the state still pays the bulk of the costs of religious schools, then, but I'm not going to complain.

Road rage

2007-06-09T11:11:00.000+02:00

In yesterday's issue of Mon Quotidien, our children's daily newspaper:

"Depuis peu, des buses attaquent des cyclistes sur les routes du Berry. L'un d'eux a été hospitalisé après avoir été renversé par un de ces rapaces."

Rapacious buses attacking cyclists? Sounds rather alarming. As it turns out, they are buzzards rather than public service vehicles. Still rather alarming, though.

Up North

2007-06-09T10:26:00.000+02:00

We were invited to a picnic last night at the Camping de Gourjade. Twenty primary-school footballers from Wakefield and their families have descended on Castres and the organiser, our friend Brigitte, was looking for some moral support.

Castres has been twinned with Wakefield for the last fifty years. Both were important textile towns, and the scheme used to be commercially important. No more; but it's still good for school exchanges and for developing Castres' fledgling tourist business.

Herne, wearing his Beckham shirt, happily joined in a foot volleyball game with Owen, Gerrard, Ronaldo and other replica stars. Ronaldo went off to play cricket after a while.

My lot were intrigued by the visitors' strong Yorkshire accent. The lady from the Mairie confessed herself totally baffled by it.

Old and new

2007-06-08T09:31:00.000+02:00

But one good thing about the new car is that it has a CD player which actually works. A great chance to listen to all those lute CDs which have been sitting on my shelves. So, I've been listening to
Paul O'Dette playing Kapsberger
Rolf Lislevand playing Bach
Jacob Heringman playing Holborne
Hopkinson Smith playing de Visée
Michael Niessen and David van Ooijen playing Terzi
Paul O'Dette (again) playing Francesco da Milano
Taro Takeuchi playing baroque guitar
Andrea Damiani playing Galilei
Nigel North playing Varietie of Lute Lessons

and there's plenty more to go. In fact there's a dazzling quantity of lute CDs being released now, far more than I can keep up with. It's very gratifying.

I can only listen to them when I'm alone in the car. With the children it's more likely to be Skyrock or Radio NRJ.

On the blink

2007-06-01T23:25:00.000+02:00

There is some French vocabulary that I would rather not have to learn.

Les clignotants on the car stopped working yesterday, so I've been into the garage to get them fixed. Le warning was still working fine, so the technician quickly diagnosed that it was simply the commutateur that needed replacing.

While I was out, I went to the swimming pool shop and bought a new flotteur for the robot and a new panier for the prefiltre since both the old ones were cracked. When I came to fit the panier I discovered that the vanne for the skimmer outlet pipe has failed and no longer closes properly, so I got very wet before bringing it back under control. Rather like Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Apples and pears

2007-05-28T09:31:00.000+02:00

We're not going to get many cherries this year. They were all bumped off by a mighty hailstorm in the middle of the night a couple of weeks ago. Fearnley's friend Tom has kept some of the hailstones in his freezer. They were as big as ice cubes.

Lowri's parents came from England to visit last week, and we went with her dad to the nursery to buy some fruit trees. We stuffed the car with a Granny Smith, a Royal Gala, a Louise Bonne, a Beurré Hardy, and an Agen. Dig dig dig dig dig.

Hot air

2007-05-27T07:32:00.000+02:00

The Figaro website reported yesterday that the US was blocking a common declaration by the G8 countries about climate change, ahead of the G8 summit meeting next month. Not much doubt who the villains are: "La lutte contre l’effet de serre se heurte toujours à l’opposition frontale de l’administration Bush."

Greenpeace, who launched the story by leaking a US negotiators' document, are even more scathing: "The Bush administration once again proves with this intervention that they both ignore the global scientific consensus and the rapidly rising concern in the US on climate change."

However, the Financial Times explains: "Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, would like the summit to agree limits on carbon emissions but the US says climate change should be tackled with technology-based solutions rather than mandatory emissions targets and accuses Berlin of ignoring its stance."

That's better. It acknowledges that the US is not simply a climate change denier (surreal images of stockings spring to mind), but does have a different approach to tackling what it agrees is a serious issue.

Helpfully, Greenpeace have published the leaked document. It's quite illuminating. The US position on climate change displays more of a scientist's caution than a politician's certainty (para 41). All quantitative targets have been struck out. As well as technology, there's an emphasis on economic structures, indicating more faith in market-based solutions.

As a bonus, the US language is clearer. We will...

"support a clear and predictable policy framework to stimulate global development, commercialization, deployment and access to technologies" [original]

"support policies to stimulate development, commercialization, and diffusion of new technologies" [US redraft]

But I think I know what really upset Greenpeace. It's paragraph 63a, where the US has added "and nuclear" onto a worthy list of clean fuels (winds, solar etc).

Reptiland

2007-05-24T10:46:00.001+02:00

The weather is hotting up and the reptiles are out and about. The photographer didn't want to get too close to the intertwined snakes.

The peninsula

2007-05-19T21:40:00.000+02:00

I've not had a lot of computer time recently (here's the reason - highly recommended), so my blog is lagging behind a bit. Anyway, this is a picture of the beautiful village where I played a concert last weekend. Ambialet lies on the river Tarn, some miles upstream from Albi.

Confusingly, there seem to be two rivers in the picture (click it to see a bigger version) but actually they are both the Tarn. Between them is a narrow rocky strip that the river can't get over, so it goes on a loop of two or three miles before coming back within fifty yards of where it started. Have a look at the aerial photo on Géoportail to get the full effect. So Ambialet and its 11th century church are almost on an island (indeed, it's called a presqu'île in French).

Pictures of Spain

2007-05-17T11:01:00.000+02:00

Absolutely Fabius

2007-05-07T23:32:00.000+02:00

We got home from Barcelona last night (the whole family, two Chuckerbutty concerts, pictures to follow) to find that it was all over and that Sarkozy had won. Want to know what the next five years will bring? Read it here.

There were lots of politicians and campaigners on the television with not much to say but nonetheless saying it at great length. Laurent Fabius, a former socialist prime minister, had an ingenious line: It's dangerous to have too much power concentrated in the hands of one person, so the voters must give the socialists a strong result in next month's parliamentary elections to ensure a proper democratic counterbalance to the president. I wonder if he would have proposed the same argument if Ségolène Royal had won. By the way, it was Fabius who, when Royal announced that she was running for president, asked "But who will take care of the children?"

La gloire

2007-05-04T08:45:00.000+02:00

We all snuggled down on the sofa on Wednesday evening with our coca-cola and giant tubs of popcorn to watch this week's big feature, the grand presidential debate between Sarko and Ségo. Two and a half hours - what a slog. Curious, reading the many comments the next day, how people see what they want to see. A blistering performance by a powerful Royal, with Sarkozy cowering in the corner. Or a flailing rant by Royal, short on detail, with Sarkozy calm and in clear command. The two moderators, France's finest apparently, kept quiet apart from occasional clock-watching. Where was Paxman?

And where was the rest of the world, for that matter? In one of the rare moments when these would-be world leaders lifted their heads up from French domestic issues, Ségo advocated boycotting the 2008 Beijing Olympics (in China) to deal with the Darfur crisis (in Africa). Sarko ruled out ever allowing Turkey into the EU on the grounds that it isn't in Europe.

Strangely enough, the British Labour government seems to support the right-wing Sarkozy rather than the Parti Socialiste's Royal. So would I if I had a vote. We'll find out what happens on Sunday evening.

The power of machines

2007-04-27T15:27:00.000+02:00

The man from the quarry kindly drove his lorry up and down the drive, tipping out the gravel as he went, and saving me hours of hard labour. Still quite a lot of shovelling and raking, even so, but it's done now and looking very smart. The car is happier too.

The children always enjoy playing with new technology. This tandem requires a rare level of co-operation.

The electric cello visited us for a couple of days along with its owner John. It sounds like four rubber bands without the headphones, but superb with them on.

Give me strength

2007-04-20T12:51:00.000+02:00

It looks perfectly harmless, doesn't it. This is the thing that our front gates bolt into. However, over the years, the drive has eroded around it and it now stands five inches proud of ground level. That's too high for the new car, which is a low-slung model with slimline tyres and an exhaust pipe that hangs just above the ground. So everyone has to get out of the car before going up the final short slope into the drive.

Well, we're all fed up with that. So I have been to visit the Carrières de La Montagne Noire and ordered some gravel to be delivered on Monday. Only a small lorry-load, but it will still weigh 11 tons, so I am bracing myself for an awful lot of shovelling and raking before we have the perfect drive (and a happy car).

Nature study

2007-04-13T17:51:00.000+02:00

The wildlife has been putting on a good show for us today. At lunchtime we watched a pair of nesting jays hopping in and out of a split oak tree near the house. Then a splendid pair of green woodpeckers. All of this capped by the hoopoe, a spectacular bird with a swept-back crest on its head. Our bird book says "Migrateur transsaharien, c'est avec plaisir que l'on redécouvre la Huppe au début de chaque printemps". So, welcome back from Africa.

Yesterday we found a confused baby red squirrel in the dining room. It scampered off to safety when we opened the kitchen door.

Randonnée

2007-04-09T17:28:00.000+02:00

A couple more wayside crosses, snapped on my long walk with Herne this morning. It took longer than we had planned because part of the route, although marked on the map, was officially closed. We took it anyway and climbed over fallen trees and crossed bridges with missing planks.

Our walk started and ended near the Chapeau de Napoléon, one of the massive granite boulders strewn around the Sidobre.

Spring is definitely here

2007-04-08T19:23:00.000+02:00

Easter Sunday out in the garden, clearing and planting. Thunder this afternoon but the rain didn't last. Back outside after supper for an easter egg hunt.

Crucifixus

2007-04-07T18:44:00.000+02:00

I try to listen to one of the Bach Passions each Good Friday. Two years ago I heard a magnificent St Matthew Passion live in Cadogan Hall in London, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. I didn't manage it yesterday, because I was teaching a lute student who had done me the honour of driving two hours to get here, but this afternoon I sat down to listen to Gardiner's recording of the St John Passion.

The St John Passion has a lute in it for all of two minutes (the arioso Betrachte meine Seel'). The lute writing is puzzling because it has quite a few chromatic bass notes in it, which don't work on a normal baroque lute. I posted a message to the internet lute list about it, and got a couple of helpful replies from people who have found ingenious ways of retuning their bass strings for the purpose. And they usually play continuo for various other numbers, so the conductor can get more than two minutes use out of them.

France is officially a secular state but there are still plenty of religious symbols on display in town squares and at road junctions. There's a fine crucifix in the centre of our village, La Caulié. And just outside our back gate, on the adjoining farm, there' s a large granite cross, now surrounded by tractors and bags of fertiliser.

That hat

2007-04-04T16:52:00.000+02:00

Remember Michael Murray's hat from a few weeks ago? Here's the original model, as worn by a big chief in Hawaii in the early 19th century, which I caught sight of in the Musée du Quai Branly at the weekend.

Tourism

2007-04-04T16:11:00.000+02:00

After my weekend at the Journées du Luth (very enjoyable) I stayed on in Paris for some sightseeing on Monday. Here's a classic scene of the Tuileries gardens with, of course, the Eiffel Tower in the background. As usual, click to enlarge.

Before that, I'd been to the Louvre, which is enormous. It needs to be, to accommodate the huge number of visitors. Especially around the Mona Lisa, which has a whole wall to itself and its own queuing system. For 5 euros you can hire a special Da Vinci Code audioguide to get the best out of the museum.

Far fewer visitors in the North European sculpture department, where I came across this wonderful carving of Mary Magdalene by a German sculptor in 1510. She is quite well covered at the front too.

The flight back on Monday evening was delayed by an hour. Our pilot admitted that the plane had been struck by lightning on its inward flight from Madrid, and he had called for engineers to inspect it. The storm reached us at home on Tuesday afternoon: torrential rain, hail, thunder, lightning and overflowing gutters.

The children have gone ice-skating this afternoon.

Paris in the the spring

2007-03-30T22:35:00.000+02:00

It's been years since I last went to Paris, so this weekend I am going there to catch up with what's changed (and get a new metro map). The occasion is the French Lute Society's annual Journées du Luth: exhibition, concerts, discussions and a bit of good old-fashioned networking. I shall take the camera and report back next week.

Creative commons

2007-03-26T22:38:00.000+02:00

Last night's catering novelty: Ken Hom's egg fried rice. The children want to have it again.

Tonight's: Pink omelette. Ken Hom hasn't done a recipe for this one but the secret is simple - just an ordinary omelette with red food colouring. No-one wants this again.

Winter

2007-03-23T16:13:00.000+01:00

So now we know. Spring has not yet arrived. I have put my giant hedge-trimming project on hold because it's just too darn cold and miserable outside for that sort of thing.

Lowri has gone to England for a week's intensive work, so I am temporarily the sole chauffeur/ cook / homework assistant etc. Still I'm managing to get some work done during the day. I have just completed three arrangements for cello and guitar of some favourite pieces by Albeniz (n.b. safely out of copyright), which Lowri and I will be playing in a concert in Castres this summer.

Philomena has been studying Emile Zola at school and now wants to read La Bête Humaine. It's one of the master's shorter works at only 435 pages. It's a story of homicidal folly and blind violence on nineteenth-century steam trains. Good luck to her. Meanwhile Herne is rapidly devouring the collected Blake and Mortimer, Lucky Luke, and Asterix, while Fearnley is working through the Lord of the Rings. I'm reading La Dame aux Camélias and can't decide whether it's genuinely sympathetic to the tragedy of the femme entretenue or just prurient. Probably both. Lowri is being kept up to the mark with a pile of fat French novels from her book club. Too heavy for a hand-luggage-only trip, though, so she's taken some Sudokus instead.

Let's talk about the weather

2007-03-20T13:32:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow is officially the first day of Spring. Today, however, it has been snowing. Ten minutes ago there was a fierce north wind, bringing with it a horizontal hailstorm. Now the sky is blue and sunny. Will it be Spring when we wake up tomorrow? Nailbiting stuff.

A handful of dust

2007-03-17T08:41:00.000+01:00

Sculpture that cost £132,000 crushed to dust

A sculpture by Anish Kapoor, entrusted to a specialist fine art storage firm, was probably mistaken for builders' rubble, dumped in a skip and destroyed by a waste crusher, a high court judge concluded yesterday.

Full story in the Guardian here.

Menorca

2007-03-12T12:46:00.000+01:00

Here are two of the Chuckerbutties enjoying a beer in the hotel of the Hotel Barceló Hamilton in Menorca, their expressions showing clearly their delight at the hotel facilities. Just out of sight behind them, but most definitely within earshot, is the Saturday night live entertainment in the hotel bar. Sample it yourself here, in a mercifully brief video.

The theatre that we played in was beautiful. Built in 1829 and refurbished a few years ago, it's a wonderful construction in red and gold with five layers of balconies and a lovely clear acoustic.

The concert was also memorable for the first public exposure of Michael Murray's new South American hat, a rastafarian mohican fashion riot.

Busting out all over

2007-03-09T11:17:00.000+01:00

Spring in France does not officially begin until the 21st of March but the flowers are coming out already: daffodils, hyacinths, violets, primroses, japonica, forsythia, azalea (I think...).

Meanwhile indoors, Herne's orange plant, grown from a seed and brought with us from England, has started to develop some very business-like spikes. I guess the plant considers that it has made the transition from expendable seedling to aspiring orange tree, and that there is now something worth protecting.

Wah-wah

2007-03-06T13:57:00.000+01:00

I've started going to the weekly jazz workshop at the Ecole de Musique. Which gives me the chance to play my venerable old semi-acoustic Harmony guitar. It dates from the early 60's and I bought it second-hand from the original owner, a fellow-member of the Lauderdale Guitar Society, in the late 80's. The guitar is nothing special (in fact I have been told that the Bigsby tremolo arm is worth more than the rest of the instrument) but it's fun to play, and it's louder than the lute. Now I have to learn to improvise something convincing when it comes to my turn to do a 'chorus'. This requires instantaneous recall and assembly of a frightening quantity of scale patterns and extended chord shapes. I love a challenge.

Meanwhile, on Sunday Lowri and I played a concert in the Temple de Castres, with recorder player Pierre Hudrisier, of sonatas and trios by Vivaldi, Bach etc. Good for Anglo-French relations, and we were able to rustle up the local Brits to help swell the audience to a respectable 120. Philomena's friends came rushing up to her in great excitement at school this morning, brandishing the local paper which had our pictures in it.

Off to Menorca this weekend to add yet more territory to the Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet's gradual conquest of Spain.

Motors

2007-02-24T18:22:00.000+01:00

Lowri has just gone out in the New Car to fetch Philomena from visiting a friend. The New Car got off to a bad start (or rather, didn't) because the day after we brought it home, the battery was totally flat and wouldn't do anything. So, I phoned the garage, went down there in the old car to borrow their battery kickstart thing, came back home, started the new car, drove that to the garage, and got them to replace the battery. Which they did graciously and without fuss. I just wish they'd done it before.

By contrast, the lawnmower is rejuvenated since its service. They have even got the self-propelling mechanism to work again, so it springs forward like an eager thoroughbred when I squeeze the handle. We cleared a lot of leaves together yesterday.

Stage

2007-02-19T21:43:00.000+01:00

Yesterday we went to fetch Herne from his music course, held in the deepest wilds of the Tarn countryside at the Base de Razisse. The course finished with a half-hour concert, which we and the 28 other proud families greatly enjoyed. Quite an achievement for a bunch of mostly 8 and 9 year olds, put together in only three days. Herne looked thoroughly professional with his trombone, even though his feet didn't quite reach the ground. And, much more important, he got to the final of the course table tennis competition.

Today the wind and rain has stopped, so I went into the garden this afternoon and hacked out a huge amount of dead wood from the rhododendrons. I hope they reward me with a bumper display this spring.

Ragtime

2007-02-17T15:42:00.000+01:00

If you're a Scott Joplin fan, this site will be invaluable. It has 50-60 pieces of Joplin sheet music, assembled from various digital collections.

The site also has links to several collections of digitised sheet music, with an emphasis on ragtime and ragtime-era music. How about the E. Azalia Hackley (you couldn't make it up) collection of 19th and 20th Century Sheet Music of Negro Themes, in the Detroit Public Library? It even has an index by subject, so you can quickly browse for (say) "Overweight Women -- Songs and Music" and come up with this little gem, You've Got To Love Me a Lot.

"Miss Susannah Jackson,
was a great attraction,
weighed about four hundred pounds,
Coffee coloured beauty,
and they called her cuty,
a hunk of love that knew no bounds,
Loved a midget nigger,
and he was no bigger
Than a measly black and tan" etc etc

Prudently, the site has a disclaimer:
"The Detroit Public Library presents these documents as part of the record of the past. These primary historical documents reflect the attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs of different times. The Detroit Public Library and DALNET do not endorse the views expressed in these collections, which may contain materials offensive to some readers."

All in a row

2007-02-17T12:37:00.000+01:00

We found these fellows walking along the path in our woods today. They are called 'chenilles processionaires du pin' because they walk in long lines, head to tail. We counted 91 of them in this procession. They develop in nests high up in pine trees where they can cause a lot of damage.

And they're dangerous when they come to earth too, because they have a highly irritating spray which can cause a serious rash, as I discovered last year before I knew this. Apparently they are particularly dangerous to dogs who, being dogs, will snuffle at them and even eat them and then suffer the consequences. So, stay away.

Click the photos to see the full hairy detail.