Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

I took my harp to a party, but…

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
The Daily Telegraph has the full story - click to read

The Daily Telegraph has the full story - click to read

Harpist at Royal wedding charged with burglary and fraud. This story is for my friend Adam, who by curious coincidence happens to have a love of harp music, and an encyclopedic fascination with royalty.  When was the last you saw both combined in a narrative that could make a good plot for a ballet (another passion of his)?

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Swimathon 2008

Friday, January 11th, 2008

Blog entries are like buses, aren’t they – you wait for ages and then….

In the middle of doing something far more important yesterday, I got an email from the Swimathon people yesterday afternoon, and it was just too tempting – I’ve signed up again to commit myself to swimming 5 kilometres for charity.  If you want an excuse to donate some money to Marie Curie Cancer Care, please visit my Swimathon page and click on the relevant boxes (make sure you tick the one that allows other people to see how much you’ve given, if you want to enter the scrolling credits on the Swimathon page). 

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Mac & Noodles in Tokyo

Monday, October 29th, 2007

noodles.jpg
Just waiting to board my flight back from Tokyo, so I thought I’d show off my lovely toys. My new Macbook has been absolutely superb for the series of lectures/seminars on playing for ballet that I’ve just given at the Ballet Research Centre at the Academia Musicae, Showa University. 

But how’s this for connectivity? Logged into the Narita airport wireless network, eating noodles in the departure lounge, taking pictures of Mac & noodles in the café, download the images by bluetooth to the Mac, and then upload to my blog. 
Call me nerdy, but I think that’s pretty damn cool. 

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In memoriam IMSLP

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

I have never been so sad to see a website die and end up as a holding page as when I made one of my almost daily trips to the International Music Score Library Project to find that the founder has had to close it due to a cease-and-desist letter from Universal Edition


For people like me who spend a lot of their lives researching music, particularly that of the nineteenth century, IMSLP was the most amazing resource. It was wiki-based, with dedicated contributors who scanned entire public domain orchestral scores lovingly and altruistically. It was the Project Gutenberg of the music world, and in the short time that it was going, I learnt enormous amounts from it because it gave me access to orchestral scores that I just wanted a quick glance at, but would not be able to afford to get, either in terms of time or money.  A few years ago, I despaired of ever finding Tchaikovsky’s piano duets of the 50 Russian folksongs, because the only edition in print was just a selection  IMSLP was just the kind of place where some good soul would have scanned them and uploaded them, and the world would be a better place for it.  

To be fair to Universal Edition, they weren’t asking for the whole site to be taken down. There was some thin ice being skated on where composers were out of copyright in Canada, but not elsewhere. But once the legal challenge has been made, not just against the founder but the contributors too, you can understand why an individual wouldn’t want to take the risk of being sued and bring his colleagues down with him. it’s tragic that a site that was primarily of benefit to researchers, students and music lovers should be cut off in its prime, and I’m feeling the loss already – one of the greatest resources for music research on the internet has just disappeared overnight, and its a sad day not just for music, but for the internet, too.  This is what it was made for, but this disappears and spam, porn and Texas hold’em remains.   What a shame UE couldn’t have found a way to support and work with IMSLP instead. 




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The Art of Swimming

Monday, October 15th, 2007

The Belvedere at Chelsea WharfBack from a wonderful day at the Conrad Hotel (now the Wyndham) for a one-day course in breaststroke from the Art of Swimming People.  All-round genius of the moving body, Dominic Hickie, recommended this to me when I was training for the Swimathon, but I didn’t get on a course until it was over. The first one I did was an hour a week over five weeks back in April, learning to do front crawl again, and it was as amazing as he said it would be. It’s the logic & wisdom of Alexander technique applied to swimming, and it works. I was nervous about doing the breaststroke day as it’s the stroke I swim most, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to unlearn my stroke in a day. But our instructor, Janet, was fantastic, and when we came to look the video clips of ourselves at the end of the day putting it all together in the pool, I was really pleased with the result.  


Having got so much out of it (I can’t wait to get in the pool again to put it all into practice), I inevitably spent a lot of time pondering the way we learn things and why. The sessions on crawl were just a few hours, but those hours have an enormous impact on the way I swim, every time I’m in the pool.  It’s like piano lessons – there are some things which you take with you for life from your teacher; a single sentence spoken at the right time, or something they tell you to think about which always works for you. You take it with you, and carry on learning ever after, at the piano and away from it.  At other times, you can spend hours, days, weeks ‘learning’ stuff which either you never really get or benefit from, or forget & don’t use. 

In the breaststroke day, we spent time doing things on dry land, slowly, gently & thoughtfully, with plenty of time allowed to let things settle in before going to the pool.  A hundred hours isn’t necessarily ‘more’ learning than five, and ‘doing more’ in an hour doesn’t necessarily mean that you achieve more – it depends so much on the quality and nature of the learning experience.  

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MT4

Friday, August 17th, 2007

Powered by Movable Type 4.0-rc1For the foamers among you, I’ve just migrated this site to Movable Type 4. As usual, I only have a fraction of a clue as to what I’m doing, and hope it all works, but if you notice any weirdness in layout or behaviour on these pages in the next few days, it’s due to technical reasons (i.e. I don’t know how to use the new software).

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Plumbing the depths

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

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OK, it’s a bit childish, but I thought this was quite a funny number plate for a plumber. Nothing to do with music, IT or dance, but I was keen to get another entry in for May before it ended. The month of June is going to be dedicated to music & dance, so it’s the last chance for some random silliness.

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