Goggle

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

Spain again

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

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

The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner

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

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

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

Goosey

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

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

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

All that jazz

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

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

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

Improvising is harder than it seems.

God bless you, ma'am

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

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

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

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

Shiver my timbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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.