Advent 4: Can I have that on a…
In the years that I’ve been playing for student ballet teachers, I’ve always found the notion of asking for ‘dance rhythms’ a bit silly, unless dance rhythms are your thing.…
Advent 3: On being too ‘musical’
In the summer of 2000, Christopher Hampson (a.k.a. Chris in this blog elsewhere) created a five-minute graduation-day piece for the final year students at the RAD called Finale, for which…
Advent 2: The chord game
Prokofiev’s March from the Love for Three Oranges strictly speaking doesn’t end at the end of its first 16 counts, but it has all the gestures of a perfect cadence…
Advent 1: Solving musical problems
The opening of Mark Morris’s Drink to me only with thine eyes, choreographed to piano etudes by Virgil Thomson begins with a bizarre, meandering bitonal extravagance called Chromatic Double Harmonies…
Advent
It’s that time of year again. I didn’t stir up any puddings on this, stir-up-sunday, much as I would have liked, but I have decided what my advent calendar will…
The Owl & the Pussycat
On the way to the Tate Modern for tea with Chris got forced down a side-street as a diversion to Southwark Bridge, and came across this wonderfully eccentric house, where…