BanniBlog » Music

Odd day

Michael — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:43:46 +0000

Last week I was drumming for a pantomime version of Treasure Island. It went as well as could be expected, but I wasn’t impressed with the choice of songs. It also took up the whole week: tech on Sunday, Act 1 Monday, Act 2 Tuesday, full dress Wednesday, then performances Thursday, Friday & Saturday (x2).

Today was quite strange, though not in a bad way. Last week the Chairman of JLP, Sir Stuart Hampson, turned 60, so someone decided to hold a little surprise celebration for him today, and then someone asked if members of the Cavendish Singers (our chamber choir) could sing “Happy Birthday” at this event. However, our conductor was away today, so he asked me to lead it. He couldn’t find an SATB arrangement of the music, so guess what I did on Sunday?

So, this morning I remembered to wear my suit and tie, and at 1.30 we assembled in Sir Stuart’s office along with most of the board of directors, ready to surprise him when he arrived. It was all a bit surreal; though why should I feel out of place just because most people in the room were at the level of my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss?

Then, after work, I met up with my mum and sister near Oxford Circus, then dad joined us for a meal at Efes (on Great Titchfield Street). Good food, and plenty of it. I split the bill with dad, which felt very grown-up!

Gardening

Michael — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 23:26:49 +0000

Tomorrow I am going to a “Virtuoso Violin” concert at The Gardening Club, Covent Garden. Unusual venue for a classical gig, I know! Violinists Simon Hewitt Jones and David Worswick and cellist Tommy Hewitt Jones are headlining, and I’m going because it sounds too cool to miss. Also I know Simon and Tommy from my days at RCM Junior Dept. I’ve arranged to go with Amy, a friend from 6th form, so it will be a great chance to catch up with her as well.

Also, played Torres with mum and dad this evening. Dad won, I think to his surprise as he was learning the rules as he went along! Tikal looks amazing; can’t wait for a chance to play it.

PIM, LJ and SfP

Michael — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 22:11:33 +0000

A mixed post this evening. First of all, I have finally joined a new team at work. I’ll be working on the new Product Information Management (PIM) tool that John Lewis is going to be using to replace some fairly old in-house-written screens and things, and will introduce totally new functionality as well. It’s a third-party product with its own terminology, concepts and scripting language, so I have quite a lot to learn! But it’s very exciting and I know I’m going to be doing a fair bit of scripting, so I’ll be away from the mainframe for at least a while, which will make a nice change. I’ve some experience of some of the systems we’ll be connecting to, including the tables and data model for the existing product information system, which should prove useful.

I’ve just found out how to enable authentication on the RSS (actually, Atom) feeds I get from friends’ Livejournals, so I can read friends-only posts without having to go to Livejournal itself. This is a good thing, as I have a very nice RSS/Atom reader and it’s nice having everything syndicated to one place.

Finally, tomorrow evening I am travelling up to Bolton (where?) for a Sing for Pleasure conducting course. It should be fun and I’m hoping to improve both confidence and technique – in particular making more eye contact with the choir, and some more expressive gestures. As I’m travelling straight from work, I’d better pack my case now.

Finally, I’m going to see Spamlot on Monday. Tickets were booked through the Social Events office at work, and they got some kind of huge group booking. We’re in the second row of the stalls! Not bad for £15, I reckon. ;-)

And that reminds me, I need to get some nice emoticons and get WordPress to use those instead of its defaults, which are so ugly I’ve turned them off.

minimal

Michael — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 20:26:07 +0000

I went to a fantastic concert last night at the Barbican:

Steve Reich Three movements
Stravinsky The Rite of Spring
Steve Reich (arr Alan Pierson) The Desert Music

London Symphony Orchestra
Synergy Vocals
Xian Zhang conductor

Once I had got over feeling nervous on behalf of the players (keeping your place in any of the works must be really hard!) I was just buzzing with the whole thing. I don’t think I can have heard The Rite of Spring all the way through before—at least, only on CD when I probably wasn’t really listening—and it really is quite something.

But for me the real gem was The Desert Music. I’d heard of it, as we had to study minimalism for A level music and it’s a work that was alway mentioned in encyclopedias and so on, but didn’t know what it involved. A (smallish) choir, and instruments including: 2 each of marimba, vibes, glock & xylo; 2 timpanists with rototoms as well; 2 pianos; 3 keyboards (at least 2 of which were DX7s!); and some brass, woodwind and strings.

I’m not eloquent enough even to begin to describe it, so I won’t try. Just wow…

Gig 2

Michael — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 23:35:24 +0000

This time on the other side of the fence. Went to see This Town Needs Guns at a pub in Shoreditch. Dan Adams, the bass player, is a mate of mine from school. (I was slightly surprised to discover that he got married a couple of weeks ago; I knew he was getting married, but didn’t realise it had already happened.) Anyway, they were extremely good, although a bit slow in moving between songs—I gathered this was largely because at least one of the guitarists had to tune differently for each song. Dan played the trumpet in one song, which was cool. One thing I really like about TTNG is that they make unusual time signatures sound so natural, which ties in nicely with my mild obsession with 70s prog rock. Yay. I look forward to buying their single, to be released next week. It’s called “Hippy Jam Fest (the likes of which has never been seen)”

I was sadly neglectful of International Talk Like A Pirate Day today. I was thoroughly unprepared for it, and only managed a few half-hearted yarrrrs.

Gig

Michael — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 07:34:16 +0000

Last night I played at a wedding party. My cousin asked me to play; he’s an amazing bass player, and the guitar and drummer were both really good, so I felt like the amateur there. There were quite a few jazz/swing numbers and some Elvis rock’n’roll, which is really hard work to play, especially on my heavily-weighted keys! Enjoyed Superstition though, it’s just one of those songs that really grooves. Really enjoyed the gig, though. It’s been ages since I’ve played that kind of stuff, and I kind of miss it.

Gig!

Michael — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 21:57:14 +0000

I’ve been asked to play keys for a wedding gig—swing and rock’n’roll stuff, I think. It’s not until the beginning of September, but should be fun. :-) Also means I’ll have to learn (ok, so I’ll play from lead sheets, but still) some new songs and in a different style which is always good; there’s only a finite (if surprisingly large) mileage one can get out of “Dancing Queen” and “Spinning Around”!

I’m currently suffering from a lack of direction in my non-work activities. I want to do too many different things, and as a result I do none of them—or, at least, give none of them enough time to make very much progress. You might say I have my fingers in too many pies (mmmm, pie).

Dammit.

It’s a grand night for singing…

Michael — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 22:56:00 +0000

Well, tonight was the John Lewis Partnership Music Society’s summer concert, “An Evening with Rodgers and Hammerstein”, in Cadogan Hall. We had glittery cowboy hats and brightly coloured shirts and lots of fun. I was on timpani, with my friend Zoë-Laura on tuned percussion, and it was a lot of fun. The radio-mics seemed to work very well (as they should, given that they’re the top-of-the-range Shure system) and all enjoyed it, as far as I could tell.

Yay!

Tired now. Really very tired. Goodnight…

Host transfer complete

Michael — Thu, 04 May 2006 21:16:47 +0000

My site is now hosted by Prime Hosting. I’ve switched away from WebFusion for 3 reasons:

I was paying too much.
WebFusion only offered me 1 MySQL database; I now get 5, which is plenty.
Prime Hosting offers Ruby and Ruby on Rails support. This is a Good Thing™ as Ruby is cool. :-)

I think I have successfully transferred all content from my old site; this took a bit of faffing as I had this blog, a phpBB forum and an SMF forum, plus some random crap.

Unfortunately, in the MySQL unload/reload the character sets of my posts and comments seem to have been munged a bit. Since I like Unicode (well, UTF-8) and I like typing in “special” characters like ellipsis (…), Trademark (™) and en- and em-dashes (– and —), there are a fair few posts with glitches, as they are now apparently Latin-1 in the database. Or something. I can’t figure it out, but if I change them through the WordPress interface, it seems to work.

I want a Theremin. OH WOW! Moog Music is due to release a sort of cut-down Minimoog: the Little Phatty. Yum!

Jazzy fun

Michael — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 21:15:33 +0000

I’m going to be accompanying another of my piano teacher’s pupils for her clarinet diploma in December, with a concert in November as a sort of practice run for the recital. Went to have a play-through of the pieces this evening. The pieces are very nice; I especially enjoyed Joseph Horovitz’s Sonatina, the third movement of which is very jazzy indeed, with some cool “walking bass” left-hand parts, lots of spiky syncopation and generally jazz-tastic chords. Really looking forward to the recital already—it’s at the end of November so we’ll have a few more rehearsals first.

At work, had much frustration with a test pack, but got to go home early as the electricity went off briefly, and when it returned it wasn’t feeding the computers, only lights and phones. ISPF (the editor/thingy on the mainframe) doesn’t auto-save, so I suspect there were many curses just then.

Bowling the other evening really wrecked my right wrist/forearm. It seems to be getting worse, not better. Perhaps I should stop typing…