Spring is definitely here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The town drain

Spoonerisms - uniquely English. Actually, no. The French have had their own version, known as Contrepèteries, for a lot longer. According to my Petit Robert dictionary, the word dates from 1582, but the example they give, from Rabelais, is even older: "Femme folle à la messe" pour "femme molle à la fesse". The contrepèterie is usually a bit rude. One French favourite, which I've heard from at least two independent sources, is "glisser dans la piscine". Work it out for yourself. It all makes the Revd. Spooner (you have tasted two whole worms, etc) seem a bit, well, Victorian.

Of course there are rude Spoonerisms in English too, but Lowri won't let me repeat them in polite company.

I like the unrude one which the French attribute to the Belgians - their version of an Irish joke - "Il est beau et chaud".

Vroom

Classe de neige successfully accomplished. They did have some snow, and Herne returned yesterday with a badge and an official stamped booklet to show that he has reached 'Flocon' (snowflake) level in skiing. His football match against Mazamet today has been cancelled, probably because of the unremitting rain. But never mind, it's the first day of half-term hols.

Transporting a family of five with no public transport has been a bit of a juggling act, on top of which our faithful Audi estate is now reaching a mature old age at 12 and a half. So we've decided to get a second car. Here it is in the garage forecourt. Still an Audi, an A3 this time, smaller but newer. We'll pick it up next week once we've sorted out the payment, insurance etc.

Skiiiiiiiiiiiii

Herne has gone on a Classe de Neige this week. It's the school ski trip, seen as an essential experience in French education. They have gone to a village called La Cabanasse in the Pyrénées Orientales. I hope they have some snow. Here's a postcard of it in pre-global warming days.

In Catalonia

Back last night from a weekend in Girona where the Chuckerbutties were playing a concert in the brand new Palau de Congressos. It's (just about) within driving distance from home, and it was Philomena's 11th birthday too, so we made a family trip of it. We stayed in the smart new Hotel Palau Bellavista and the children had a great time running around and emptying all the soft drinks from the complimentary minibars. There was an overdose of anxiety for three of the Chuckerbutties, since the fourth one (who shall not be named) missed his flight, but he managed to arrive in time......

Family music

Quick update on the family music front.

Fearnley played his Prokofiev Tarantella in a student concert on Wednesday. He's been working hard at it and it went well. He's been promoted into a higher music theory class and is much happier with that.

Philomena has been doing Step (a dance routine) classes at school. And practising at home, with the backing music, so we all now know "Love don't leave me now" better we might want to...

Herne's trombone, on hire from the music school, has gone in to be repaired because a small but important lever has broken. It should come back next week sparkling clean and oiled, in time for the short residential course that he's doing at half-term. As an inducement, the attendees have been promised ping-pong and archery as well as band rehearsals.

Blowout

We were invited out for two splendid meals this weekend.

Number one: David is a footballing friend of Herne's, a lively little chap who never stops talking, and his parents wanted to treat us all to some French new year's specialities. So we had salade de gésiers, smoked salmon, foie gras, oysters, and galette des rois. Yummee. David's dad Patrick wore a special protective glove for opening the oysters, which was made of chain mail and looked like something from a suit of armour. Very professional. Herne and David enjoyed themselves watching Real Madrid TV. Staggered home late and got up late on Sunday morning in time for...

Number two: a superb slap-up lunch with local British friends. Charcuterie, lasagne, cheese with genuine English cream crackers, chocolate cake and fruit salad, followed by an DVD for the children. There's something very reassuring about having a good old chat in English about home affairs, and it helps to reinforce the sense of English roots for the children. Very enjoyable too. Somehow we didn't feel the need for any supper in the evening.

I saw today that Natalie Wheen from Classic FM has chosen the Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet as one of her favourite CDs from 2006. Thanks Natalie!

The children have already memorised the complete Fawlty Towers which I brought back from England last week.

It's a charango, but not as we know it

Home again, somewhat exhausted after playing six concerts and driving 750 miles in four days.

This picture shows one of the weirdest instruments I have ever seen. This is Ernesto Cavour playing his 'Little Star' charango. It provides a little light relief in a largely incomprehensible academic article on The Charango as Transcultural Icon of Andean Music. Maybe when I grow up I will understand what 'mental syncretism' means.

On the road

I'm travelling to UK tomorrow for a busy few days of concerts:

Wednesday 17 January 1.05pm
The Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet - FREE Lunchtime concert in City of London Festival Winter Series
St Lawrence Jewry, Gresham Street, London, EC2V 5AA
http://www.colf.org/events_details.cfm?e=255

Friday 19 January 8.45 pm
Sambuca at Islwyn Acoustic Guitar Club, Crosskeys Hotel, near Newport
http://www.geocities.com/jenks436/nextevent.html

Saturday 20 January 1pm
Sambuca - Foyer concert, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff
http://www.wmc.org.uk/index.cfm?UUID=EBF45918-E3B2-6B63-F45209BD0D902ACD

Also Saturday 20 January 7.30 pm
Sambuca at Dorset Guitar Society at Kinson Community Centre, Pelhams Park, Millhams Road, Kinson, Bournemouth, BH10 7LH.
http://www.dorsetguitarsociety.org.uk/

See both groups at http://www.seaview.dial.pipex.com/video.html

TOTP

The children's favourite French pop songs at the moment are Fous ta cagoule, a rap ditty about getting too cold in winter, and Coup de Boule, a cheerful song celebrating Zidane's headbutt against that Italian in the World Cup.

Bang

Out across the fields we can hear the guns and dogs of the Sunday afternoon hunt. There are no foxes being shot here: the preferred game is boar and deer. Cars with dog cages park in clusters along country roads and signs are erected, warning of "Chasse au Grand Gibier" (big game hunting!). Men in bright orange jackets carrying rifles line the edges of the woods, waiting for something to emerge. Last winter a passer-by brought a lost dog to our house. It had been gashed in the side by a boar. We gave it a blanket and a bowl of water while he tracked down the owner.

As ever, administration rules, and only those capable of hacking through a thicket of formalities are allowed to hunt.

Overstuffed

Our friends Brigitte and Bernard hosted a wonderful Reveillon de Saint Silvestre last night to welcome in the new year. Over the course of five hours we ate:

Champagne and canapés
Oysters
Foie gras
Barbecued beef with potato gratin and vegetables

--- break for fireworks at midnight, but no Auld Lang Syne ---

Salad
Cheese
Les Treize Desserts
Coffee

This is apparently a 'typical' French new year's meal. Well, it was fantastic and neither of us has had room to eat more than a couple of morsels today.

What's on the box?

French free-to-air TV is dire, so it's much more rewarding to find interesting stuff on YouTube. Here's one of the more tasteful offerings, Hopkinson Smith (see earlier posting) playing some pieces on vihuela: Conde Claros, Cancion del Emperador, and Baxa de Contrapunto by Luis de Narvaez, from Los seys libros del delphin published in 1538.



It's taken from the New York Guitar Festival's third biennial Guitar Marathon. They've posted quite a few other videos of various players, including this one of Paul O'Dette playing baroque guitar: Santiago de Murcia's Passacalles por la E and Fandango.



Other YouTube viewings include Tom Jobim (the man himself), Cellorhythmics (so that's what Alfia Bekova is doing now), and various plectrum guitarists tackling Paganini Caprices, some quite successfully.

Joyeuses Fêtes

The big present this Christmas was a basketball hoop, purchased with generous funding from Grandma and Grandpa Blake. It wasn't easy to assemble, but with a little perseverance we managed to finish building it by mid-afternoon on the 27th. Now the whole family is shooting dunks and slamming hoops or whatever it is you do with basketball.


The Jenga bricks were popular too. This is Fearnley's 2D prototype pyramid, sadly no longer standing.

The DVD of series 2 of The Young Ones finally arrived in the post today, a bit late for Christmas (blame all that fog) but never mind. The children are already memorising the unsuitable script.

Multi-me

Lowri was delighted to spot that I was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours earlier this year, for Services to People who Misuse Substances (I think this means helping them to stop misusing substances, rather than supplying them). I had to admit to her that this was not actually me but one of my numerous alter egos.

I first encountered the problem when I was working at Arthur Andersen, and another Peter Martin transferred in from the Dublin office. We got fed up with receiving each other's post and grudgingly agreed to start using our middle initials to differentiate us (so I became Peter P, he became Peter A).

More agreeable to find myself doubling as a London fashion house ("Peter Martin - a captivating collection of contemporary day and occasion wear"). I still have a label somewhere that a thoughtful friend attached to a birthday present.

I get the occasional music teacher asking me about my violin publications and I have to explain that no, that's not me, that's the other Peter Martin who writes educational string music.

Then there was the eminent journalist Peter Martin, who was the chief business columnist and deputy editor of the Financial Times. He died in 2002 but the FT has set up a Peter Martin Fellowship so his memory lives on.

And's that's all before I start looking on Google, which throws up a staggering range of alternative careers that the real me failed to follow: consultant neurologist, plant scientist, fund manager, lawyer, engineering scientist, herb doctor, lecturer in dental care, surgeon, artist, psychologist, antiques dealer, sociologist, and even "the" musician and songwriter Pete Martin. All this just in the UK. We're a talented bunch, aren't we.

It's icy, it's frosty

No chance of seeing the Pyrenees at the moment. In fact, the fog is so heavy that we can't see the end of the garden.

Everything in the garden is covered in frost, even the funnel spider webs.

Most of the mushrooms and toadstools have finished by now, but there are still some splendid specimens enjoying the winter chill. Click to enlarge pictures.

p.s. Fearnley (V) has posted some Golden Wedding pictures on his blog.

Reading

It can be hard reading books in French. The books I took back to the library this week were:

Diabolus in Musica by Yann Apperry. One-quarter read. It may have won the Prix Médicis 2000 but I was deeply unimpressed with it. It tries so hard, with its absurdly flowery extended language, but just seems juvenile.

Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee. Half-read. Maybe it's just more difficult in French. But many of the reviewers on Amazon seem bemused by it. Basically it's a set of lectures on literary subjects, supposedly delivered by the protagonist, dressed in a thin coat of narrative so that it passes as a novel.

De la Terre à la Lune by Jules Verne. I didn't even start this because I was so occupied with the others. However this is the one that I've renewed for the holidays.

I'm also ploughing through Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, this time in English but not much more comprehensible for that. I will persevere for a bit longer since it's a novel that has a fanatical following ("The greatest work of literature since Ulysses" and suchlike). 100 pages in and some of the threads are beginning to come together.

Shostakovich

The cheerful strains of the Shostakovich cello sonata have been ringing through the house over the last few days. Again and again and again. Lowri is doing a programme for Radio 3 next month, reviewing the different CDs available of this piece. And there are a lot of them: the BBC has sent her a spreadsheet listing 34 different recordings. A dozen or so are deleted and so don't qualify for inclusion, and a few others haven't made it through the BBC's initial filter, but that still leaves plenty. Lynn Harrell, Yo-Yo Ma, Pieter Wispelwey, Truls Mork - they've all been at it. It's an intense job boiling this lot down into a 45 minute programme, illuminating, eliminating, and coming out with a lucky winner at the end.

All the more intense if you're trying to pack in as much of the work as possible before the end of term which is ...... an hour ago! Three children at home on holiday means serious competition for computer time. The best opportunity comes before 10 a.m. each day (or before 6 a.m. if Christmas day).

It's been frosty and foggy down here. Just like England.

Still termtime

20th December, and the children are still grinding on at school. They don't finish until Friday 22nd which makes for a damned long term since the beginning of September. And of course there's end-of-term things crowding in. Fearnley was singing in Christmas concerts for the Ecole de Musique on Saturday and Sunday evenings (theme: Walt Disney - none of this Christmas carol nonsense), and running in an athletics meeting in Toulouse on Sunday afternoon for a bit of variety. The best thing about the holidays will be not having to leave the house in the dark for the 8 a.m. school start.

Must bring in some logs and light a fire.

Which reminds me (flames, you know...) - there definitely is something about the lute which inspires intense brotherly hatred. This time the battlefield is the flute-backed vihuela, something that most people manage to remain reasonably calm about. Interestingly, the publisher Matanya Ophee, nemesis of Ness, also appears in this one.

Sublime and ridiculous

If you're interested in looking at any Mozart other than L'Oca del Cairo, the homepage for the Neue Mozart Ausgabe online is at http://nma.redhost24-001.com/mambo/index.php

Another excellent musical site is the Chopin Early Editions collection at the University of Chicago. As they explain it:

"The Chopin collection at the University of Chicago Library includes over 400 first and early printed editions of musical compositions by Frédéric Chopin, maintained in the Special Collections Research Center. Chopin Early Editions consist of digitized images of all scores in the University of Chicago Library's Chopin collection. Users can search or browse Chopin Early Editions via a variety of data points, including titles, genres, and plate numbers."

Have a look at an original edition of say the Mazurkas, compared to a modern Associated Board edition. It's eye-opening to find out which bits are actually Chopin, and just how much has been added by the AB editors: fingerings, pedallings and more.

Actually it's amazing how much musical source material is now on the internet. How about the Jean-Baptiste Lully collection at the University of North Texas - who also have digitised copies of several dozen other substantial 18th century works in their Virtual Rare Book Room. Godfrey's Bookshelf is another super site, with digitised copies of music books by Dowland, Robinson, Hume, Playford and others. And then there are the collections of the major libraries. For instance, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France has an extensive digitised collection of rare books at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ . Search under the heading Musique, and up pops a list of 251 volumes including Fronimo (Galilei), Le Nuove Musiche (Caccini), L'art de toucher le clavecin (Couperin), Il ballarino (Caroso) and others, all viewable and downloadable in full. Magic.

Sometimes scholarship can go horribly wrong. Most of the website of the respected lute scholar Arthur Ness, editor of the pioneering complete works of Francesco da Milano in the 70's, is taken up with long and bitter rants against the publisher Matanya Ophee. This has been going on for years. They're as bad as each other. At one point Ophee was blacklisted from the (normally freewheeling) internet lute mailing list for his endless posts attacking Ness. This sort of vendetta destroys the dignity of both men. Someone should throw a bucket of cold water over them.

Outdoors and indoors

Correction to my last entry: clearing the leaves IS an ordeal. Especially now that it's colder and damper and they don't want to burn. I did try using the lawnmower to gather them up, but it has now gone off sick and is awaiting a spare part. So I gave myself a change yesterday by getting out the chainsaw and cutting up some of the many large branches still lying around after last January's destructive snowfall.

Back indoors. There's an excellent new website just opened with digital scores of Mozart's entire works, in the authoritative Neue Mozart Ausgabe edition. So I thought I'd take a look at one of his pieces which I'd heard of but never actually encountered, the opera L'Oca del Cairo (The Goose of Cairo - yes, really). It quickly became apparent that Mozart left it incomplete - very incomplete - which is itself a gift because it gives a fascinating view of how he composed. The various songs are complete in the sense that the vocal line(s) and the bass line have been fully composed, so the structure of each song is there. But the orchestral parts are still waiting to be written. Sometimes the orchestral opening to a song has been written, giving a clear idea of the intended style and texture, only to vanish once the voices come in. Occasional important counter-melodies have been written in, just a bar or two at a time. It's the composer's equivalent of an incomplete painting, where the artist's intention is clear enough but the raw canvas is showing through. What's there is good authoritative Mozart, with confident melodies and masterful ensemble work. A shame that he abandoned it.

This evening I did a presentation on the lute and baroque guitar for a music class of 11-14 year olds in Réalmont. They've been studying renaissance music this term and the idea was to bring it to life by presenting it on the instruments of the time. All went well (apart from cutting my finger on the music stand) and they all enjoyed it. A journalist from Le Tarn Libre came along to take pictures so I hope to get a newspaper article out of it.

We were all back in England last weekend for my parents' golden wedding celebrations. Lovely occasion. So many other people were taking photos that I forgot to take any myself. So, no pictorial evidence here yet until someone else sends me some!

Leaves, leaves...

...leaves, leaves, leaves, acorns, leaves, chestnuts, leaves, leaves.... I must have raked up and burned several million of them by now. Still, the weather is pleasant and sunny, so it's not such an ordeal. Apparently it's been the warmest November for 50 years or something like that.

Tomorrow Lowri's book club is descending on us. These ladies set an impressively high standard of household loveliness and of catering, and we're not going to try to compete. Nevertheless the hoover has been out today, the piles of papers are being put into cupboards, and the hamster cages WILL be cleaned.

The boys are practising their cycling tricks - wheelies, bunny-hops and riding up and down stairs (OUTSIDE, please).

Home again

Rather a long time since my last post. However, since then I have been to Cambridge, Mallorca, Leeds, Southampton, Oxford and Reading, finally back to Castres, and family life on Tuesday night.

Here's some pictures of Mallorca, where the COQ was playing two family concerts. It's a treat to be able to sit outside in the November sun, with a beer and a harbour view, and dream up plans for the next stage of ocarina world domination. The palm trees were in the courtyard of our hotel. The fancy building is the La Caixa cultural centre where we played. It was also hosting an impressive exhibition of Edvard Munch, specially assembled for Palma. Not bad.

Leeds, where we played next, is less obviously a tourist attraction (much less, actually), but has a very nice venue called, imaginatively, The Venue. Audience participation was part of the deal, so we got them all to blast along with Also Sprach Zarathustra. Dangerously ambitious, but it just about worked.

Enough for now.

(p.s. some of the pics have disappeared.... I'll try to get them back again)

Secrets of the ocarina

There's an interview with me on the website of the Leeds International Concert Season, where the Chuckerbutties are appearing on 26 November. Find out some of our trade secrets.

Spinacino

There's a nice review of the Chuckerbutties' recent Ibiza concert here in the Diario de Ibiza (in Spanish). This weekend we're taking the quartet to Palma de Mallorca.

In between, I'm enjoying some light relief practising the lute instead. Next year is the 500th anniversary of the first ever printed lute music, Francesco Spinacino's Intabulatura de Lauto, published by Petrucci in Venice in 1507. In fact it's almost the first music of any sort to be published. But, far from being tentative, it shows how highly developed lute music already was by this time, even though there's tantalisingly little earlier music in manuscript. (One happy earlier survivor is the late 15th century heart-shaped Pesaro manuscript, available in facsimile - at a price - from Amadeus Music in Switzerland.)

In 200 pages of music Spinacino presents extensive solo lute transcriptions of polyphonic vocal music, both sacred and secular, duets for two lutes, and 26 highly individual, free-form recercares. I really can't tell whether these are daringly innovative or looking back to an earlier age. They certainly sound innovative - irregular phrase lengths, fluid melodies breaking up into angular pseudo-polyphony, jaw-dropping harmonic shifts. But those same single-line fluid melodies look back to the medieval tradition of playing the lute with a plectrum (as indeed is still the case with the Arabic oud). On the renaissance lute, these melodies are played with alternating thumb and index finger on the right hand, giving a strong down-stroke and a weaker upstroke like a plectrum.

This is meticulously marked in the tablature. If you look closely (click picture to enlarge) you'll see that alternate notes are marked with a dot beneath, indicating the index finger of the right hand. This thumb and finger technique, different from the classical guitar technique of playing melodies with alternating index and middle fingers, remained in use throughout the sixteenth century, its speed making possible the 'divisions' which were such a feature of renaissance lute writing.

The first line of this Recercare has a wonderful, wrenching harmonic shift, typical Spinacino. The improvisatory opening seems to be settling nicely into E flat major. Until the first cadential chord comes in bar 5, and it's not E flat at all, but an assertive, unambiguous D minor, miles away. A shock which sets a suitably unsettled mood for the rest of the piece. I must do a transcription into staff notation to show this more clearly.

Spinacino's one-page guide at the beginning of the book, in Latin and Italian, gets as far as explaining how to write quintuplets. Unexpected.

'Spinacino' is also a cut of veal. Here's a recipe.

Back in the Tarn again

... Cambridge...Ibiza...Cambridge...Castres and STOP.
My suitcase will be delivered to Cambridge tonight. Thanks Iberia.

In Autumn the leaves on the house turn red, the sunsets are vivid and the Pyrenees appear in the distance.

Ocarinas

Can you imagine the sound of 96 ocarinas being played at the same time? By 8 and 9 year olds? Sadly there is no sound attached to this photo of our ocarina workshop today at St John's primary school, Tunbridge Wells, so you will have to carry on imagining.

Afterwards we played to 400 pupils all sitting cross-legged on the floor in the school assembly hall. They particularly liked Michael Murray's graphic rendition of the Can-can.

A progression

...Finchley...Calne...Chepstow...Purley, where we have settled for a few days.

Huge family gathering for the wedding in Calne. Here are Thomas and Clare cutting the cake, plus a small representative sample of the Martin clan.

We've managed to fit in a certain amount of culture to this trip. Fearnley snapped this genuine fake mermaid on display in the King's Library at the British Museum. It's only about a foot long - I hadn't realised that real mermaids were so small.

We went on an expedition around Chepstow Castle in weather conditions politely described as a 'Welsh mist'. Protective headgear required.