Music – the violin

My violin was an inexpensive old thing about 3-4 years ago, with no particular claim to fame. The label within mentions Antonius Straduarius so I concluded that the instrument was a cheap copy of the great “Strad” and there have been many thousands of those.
It was not the most encouraging of experiences when I started trying to play again earlier this year. First, not playing for the best part of 50 years had undermined my physical coordination and intonation. Secondly, the instrument itself sounded harsh, when it sounded at all. A lot of practice has brought me back to somewhere near my earlier capabilities though I am not sight-reading quite as fluently as before. I am gradually improving the instrument itself while recognising that it might, just,  become acceptable for my purposes but that is probably the best I can hope for. A new set of Dominant strings brought about a vast improvement in the sound, which has now been helped further by a new bridge, suitably modified. While it may seem illogical to spend very much on a bow for a violin of doubtful pedigree, I am beginning to think that my violin is a better instrument than I had thought previously and deserves better than the really cheap bow that is showing its limitations already. Even the “cheap Strad copies” varied considerably in quality and perhaps mine is not so bad after all. Admittedly, it seems to me to project itself rather well – or to put it in more down-to-earth terms, it is loud. On the other hand, something approaching a quite pleasant tone is beginning to become apparent  It will be interesting to hear how it changes over the next couple of hundred hours of practice.

Music – the clarinet

The painting has been a bit sporadic lately, the cycling non-existent (unless you count the exercise bike) but I have been quite productive in terms of musical endeavours. I am assured that there is no connection between this and the fact that one near neighbour has just moved and another will be going shortly! 
The clarinet poses an interesting challenge. It is a transposing instrument. Mine is a Bb clarinet, so if I play the note C on the clarinet, it sounds the same as the note Bb on the piano. So from time to time I get totally bewildered and wonder why they don’t just call it Bb on the clarinet as well instead of calling it C?  Is it me, or am I missing something?
The result of this is that if I want to play a duet involving a non-transposing instrument like a piano or violin, and if the piano or violin music is in, for example, the key of G major, then the clarinet part has to be in A major.
Having gained my musical training on the violin during a large part of my youth I can read treble clef music for the violin but struggle to connect the same music to the clarinet fingering – but that will come with practice. Trouble is, this process is not helped by the fact that I am able (too often in the present context) to play the tune in question “by ear” and tend to ignore the printed music – or I get so involved in actually playing the tune that I forget to look at the music and therefore lose my place in the score. Is this a musical “senior moment” I wonder?
If there is a really disheartening aspect of the clarinet it is reeds. Even experienced clarinetists have problems with reeds – or they would if they hadn’t found their own ways of dealing with them. The problem is that although manufacturers grade their reeds according to their hardness, the raw material is inherently inconsistent – and so are the reeds. The consequence is that a comparative beginner (in particular) may find that out of a box of ten reeds only two or three will be playable straight out of the box.  Just last week I had no playable reeds left, just a motley collection of rejects. Fortunately, I had acquired a copy of “Reeds Reeds Reeds!” by Alan Cresswell.  Alan is a New Orleans style jazz clarinet player, who plays with Max Collie, The Muskrat Ramblers and The Golden Eagle Band at clubs and festivals in UK and Germany. He says that he wrote the book to share his experiences hoping they will help others. It is a slim A5 book of a couple of dozen pages, which includes detailed (and well-illustrated) practical information about reeds, mouthpieces and ligatures and how to improve problematic reeds, whether too hard or too soft. I strongly recommend this book. Why? Last week I had a collection of reject reeds – a collection that cost me more than the book itself. This week they are all working well and producing quite a nice tone.  The book is available from Dawkes, who supply other music shops and Foyles bookshop in London and you may well find stockists by looking for Reeds Reeds Reeds on Google.

I knew very little about the clarinet when I started to play it but that soon changed thanks to David Pino’s book, “The Clarinet and Clarinet Playing”. It is packed with practical advice and information and is very readable. I found it at Amazon.

Desert Island MP3s revised

Since my post entitled Desert Island MP3s of a few months ago, I have made one alteration to my list of music…    …which is another way of saying that I have since discovered some more brilliant clips on YouTube which I would like to share with anyone who has not yet found them. They are by Anne-Sophie Mutter, who is considered by many to be possibly the greatest living violinist, playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, opus 61. For my stay on the  desert island I insist on having the entire performance and it goes to the top of my list. On YouTube the concerto is divided into six or seven clips and they are all easy enough to find  (via Google Video as well – just search for “mutter beethoven” without the inverted commas).
If you enjoy this type of music but have not yet discovered these clips, you have a treat in store.

Doesn’t time fly…

My posts here have been few during recent months but I have been busy. At least, that’s my story. When not sharing the domestic chores with Granny Anne I might be trying to paint a masterpiece (not much risk of succeeding but it’s fun trying). Or I might be messing about with music, or engaged in some domestic project or other, or doing a bit of gardening or just reading a book. You might even, on a warm sunny day, find me doing absolutely nothing – for a brief period only mind you – but sitting outdoors (in the shade of course) daydreaming while contemplating a large glass of cold Guinness. It is all part of the hard-earned pleasure of being retired and with, thankfully, few demands on my time but plenty of hobbies and interests to keep me occupied.
Besides, Granny Anne is doing enough posting for both of us and it’s all good topical stuff, not forgetting our daughter, Jennie, who is celebrating 70,000 visitors to her blog by running a giveaway competition until the end of the month. To enter, all you have to do is comment on one or more posts in her blog.

I spotted this little fellow in the garden the other day so dutifully dashed indoors for the camera. I think it is the caterpillar of a Grey Dagger Moth. It was one of the few really warm, sunny days that we have enjoyed recently and even Henry (our tortoise) wandered about for a few hours. This behaviour by Henry shouldn’t be remarkable at this time of year but he has started to behave strangely lately. Throughout most of the quarter century or so that he has been with us, Henry has been in the habit of hibernating from some time in early October until  mid-February. Last year he hibernated early. I imagined that this was due to the dull, wet summer and the resulting poor temperature and daylight levels, that combined to convince Henry that it was autumn already.  Though I didn’t quite realise it at the time, by August he was preparing to hibernate already – several weeks earlier than a few years ago. It looks as if he is doing the same this year, coming out from under his bush only on the warmest and brightest days and not going far or eating much even then. I don’t think there is any cause for alarm. Tortoises are not supposed to eat for some weeks before hibernating so that their digestive system is empty while they “sleep”. On the other hand I have to remember that he is likely to be waking again at the beginning of January and will then have to be pampered indoors for a few months!

I have started three paintings recentlyand they are looking promising so far.  I like to take time with the oil paintings, building them up in several stages with adequate drying time between stages.  Having started to paint it is better that I do an hour or two every two or three days. This is easy to arrange with three “on the go” together. 
Music has been a big preoccupation recently as I have had a lot of catching up to do in order to keep my side of the deal to help our young friend, Maria,  to start learning the violin. Maria, in turn, is helping me to tackle the clarinet.  It is nearly 60 years since I started to play the violin and around 50 since I stopped playing regularly. So I have started practising and I must say that, at first, I was not that far ahead of my “pupil”! It is all coming back to me though and now, just to be awkward, I want to play the violin again as well as the clarinet – but not at the same time of course.
Meanwhile, Maria is showing signs of becoming a “Star” pupil. I don’t think Anne-Sophie Mutter needs to start worrying  just yet but…
As for me, well, I can read the music fairly well and translate it quickly to fingering on the violin but the big challenge is to do the same on the clarinet.
We both have suitable learner’s books for our respective instruments and they are almost as tedious as they always were in my young days though the technology has since come to the rescue to some extent with CDs containing demonstrations and backing tracks. I have been scanning the internet for sheet music to vary the diet a bit. I have also found a lot of midi files in the public domain – or at least they are free for non-commercial use – together with software which (as I understand it) will produce sheet music from the midi files and allow both to be edited to make new arrangements. The same software allows composing from scratch. It is all on trial at present while I decide which particular package to buy, depending on how many of the functions I really need. Information about the Notation software that I am trying can be found here.

Reading the dots

During recent weeks there has been a serious outbreak of music in my family. I don’t know how it started but my daughter, Jennie, is now practising her tenor saxophone regularly and reverts to the trumpet now and then just for a change. Coincidentally, The Jobbing Doctor has ambitions involving the tenor sax and it will be interesting to read how he gets on with it. My older grandson (named Handsome in our blogs) now has a violin (his choice) and has made a good start with a half-size instrument. Meanwhile his younger brother, Cheeky, looks as if he is going to be a guitar man, his current instrument being a small version - though we noticed that he paid a lot of attention to a rather nice mandolin on a recent visit to our local music shop. Since then he has discovered electric guitars and, being an ambitious five-year-old, he wants one.
As for me, well, some time ago I bought a secondhand clarinet with no very clear idea whether I would have enough “puff” to get a sound out of it. As it turned out I had, but only up to “open G” above which I couldn’t get as much as a squeak. So I sought the advice of Jennie’s friend, Maria, who had played a clarinet in her teens and had even survived the music education system up to a high grade. Maria correctly identified the lower joint of the clarinet as the general area wherein lay the source of the problem but the exact cause could not be found. I  set about looking for a local repairer and was very lucky indeed to find a lovely old gentleman just a few miles from my home whose woodwind repairirng activities were little more than a hobby these days as he was in his eighties (though certainly didn’t look it). He was clearly very knowledgeable.  On my first visit we chatted for an hour while he examined the clarinet and carried out various checks and made small adjustments. I learnt a great deal about clarinets in that hour but eventually it was clear that the specific problem in my instrument would remain a mystery until some systematic dismantling was done. So I agreed to leave the clarinet with him and go home to await his call when it was ready in perhaps a couple of weeks time. Then, without any prompting at all from me, and to my great surprise, he handed me another clarinet and suggested that I use it to practise while he was fixing mine. I was delighted. That was what I call service and there is not much of it about these days but the story didn’t end there.

My Selmer Bundy was fixed and ready for collection the very next day. The damage to a small pad on the lower joint had been invisible prior to dismantling and a second, slightly damaged pad was also changed as a precaution. The cost of the repair was small and ( in my opinion) didn’t even cover the time spent checking and adjusting on the previous day. Meanwhile, I had been trying out the borrowed clarinet. My Selmer is made of Resonite (a hard plastic-like material) but the borrowed Corton was made of wood and was (I suspect) a bit older because it was made in Czechoslovakia – I think that later models were made in the USA and if anyone has any information about this I would be interested to hear from them. The Corton was fairly easy to play, despite my lack of experience, and it had a lovely tone. So I bought it.

At about this time I heard from Jennie that Maria had always wanted to play the violin but had been diverted to the clarinet after starting, like so many of us, with the recorder. Recently she has been given a new violin as an early birthday present. So we struck a deal whereby she would give me some instruction on the clarinet while I would give her some basic guidance regarding the violin.
I have always thought it much more fun to learn and to play a musical instrument in the company of others  than to struggle along alone. I can see great potential for duets, trios and even larger combinations a few months hence.

Twitter, the busker and the “lost generation”

 I have been signed up to Twitter for almost two months and it has been both entertaining and informative. This evening I spent some time sorting out a small pile of sheet music and it reminded me to look on Twitter for others with similar musical interests. This led me to various online stories and I couldn’t resist including links to two of them here. The first is about musical education in UK schools and it reminded me how lucky I had been. The second is about that brilliant violinist, Joshua Bell and I won’t say any more in case I spoil the story.

Desert Island MP3s

The BBC has a Sunday morning radio programme, ‘Desert Island Discs’ in which a guest is asked to imagine that he, or she, is about to be stranded, permanently, on a desert island and is invited to nominate eight records, a book (apart from The Bible and Shakespeare, which are supplied) and a luxury item (not something that will assist escape from the island) to take with them. The programme has been running for as long as I can remember (correction, it has been running for decades – I can barely remember last week!)
“Desert Island MP3s” is my daughter’s variation on the theme, except that she is a lot meaner than the BBC and allows only five records! She has invited her long-suffering parents and a few friends to join in. So for the sake of peace and quiet, here goes.
What a challenge! I have about 240 long-playing records, around 880 cassette tapes and about 50 CDs within a few feet of where I am sitting. I reckon that the music they contain is 60% jazz and the rest mainly classical with some older pop – and I am expected to pick FIVE records, that is (in the spirit of the BBC programme) five single tracks! 
I am not a big fan of singers, whether solo or in a group. The only group that I considered for this massive shortlisting exercise was The Beatles but even they didn’t make it. Soloists that were on the list for a while included the wonderful Ella Fitzgerald  – possibly singing “Mack the Knife” where she forgets the words and scat sings and makes it up as she goes instead. Then there is Shirley Bassey, singing “Something” by George Harrison, or maybe “I who have Nothing”, “And I Love You So” or “Where do I begin?” – that’s the trouble with Miss B, that voice has powered so many great hits. Then “Ol’ Blue Eyes” himself, Frank Sinatra “September Song”, “Fly Me to the Moon” – the latter in particular demonstrating the brilliant orchestral arrangements that marked so many of his hits.
There were a very few other singers who made an impression, none more so than The King himself but, sorry Elvis, you didn’t get into the last five.
Most of my favourite music is instrumental and I managed to choose number one on my list very quickly, despite years of devotion (and nostalgic attachment) to two violin concertos - the Brahms Violin Concerto in D  and the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D,  played by Isaac Stern, or David Oistrakh or Yehudi Menuhin. These are probably quite well known and therefore discounted by the “classics snobs”. They would probably “pooh, pooh” good old Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata for the same reason but I really couldn’t care less if the classic snobs regard my choices as a touch “common” – there was nothing common about messrs Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, or Mozart either.
A large part of my music collection is devoted to dixieland, New Orleans, traditional, or whatever you want to call them, jazz bands. These include Chris Barber, Alex Welsh, Humphrey Lyttleton, to name but a few, also the Dutch Swing College Band, my particular favourite on this side of the Atlantic.  So their style of jazz had to be represented in my final selection and I think I have been incredibly restrained to have limited it to just one tune. For this I decided to cross the pond and pick one of the many all-time great bands from just a bit nearer to the source.
In between writing bits of this post I have been playing tracks and trying to fill in the final five. There is one to go. This is difficult. I haven’t even looked at Ray Charles, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Errol Garner or even Duke Ellington. What about Jack Teagarden, Joe Loss, Glenn Miller and some of the beautiful music made by the Dave Brubeck Quartet?
I am not selecting entirely on the basis of nostalgia. If I was, it would be much easier. Both of those violin concertos would be in, and my jazz choices would be different. To me, music is a “mood adjuster” which can be relaxing or invigorating, depending on what is required. However, dependence on music when on the desert island might have to decline somewhat with only five tracks in the collection, so they had better be varied, and also genuine favourites, if they are not to be neglected rather quickly through sheer boredom.
So what is the final selection? Well, in the best traditions, here they are in reverse order: 

5  Katie Melua – “Learnin’ the Blues”. My daughter will accuse me of including her only because she is a very pretty girl. I couldn’t possibly comment! In the present context, however, Katie Melua composes very melodic songs and has a highly individual arranging style. She also has a lovely voice, behaves like a good professional musician rather than some would-be drama queen and, when she sings, you can hear every word. As Jennie has included a more typical Katie M song in her selection, I have nominated a tune that was recorded by Mr Sinatra around 20 years before Katie was born. And I reckon she made a better job of it!

4  Hymn to Freedom, composed and played by Oscar Peterson, and allegedly dedicated to Martin Luther King Snr. This is from Oscar’s “Night Train” LP recorded in 1962. There is a video version on the web which is best ignored. It was made much more recently and, in my opinion, utterly mangled by the backing group.

3  Fidgety Feet, by Eddie Condon’s Band recorded in 1955. This recording has that loose, relaxed, but essentially together feel that so many British and European bands did not quite emulate for one reason or another (though I happen to think that Humphrey Lyttleton’s band came close) and I suspect that all of those bands named above would applaud this choice, including as it does Wild Bill Davison (cornet), Cutty Catshall (trombone), Edmond Hall (probably my favourite jazz clarinettist), Gene Schroeder (piano), Eddie Condon (guitar), Walter Page (bass) and George Wettling (drums).

2  Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D (op. 35) played by Isaac Stern with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted byEugene Ormandy. The first movement. 

1  Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto – the second movement. See and hear it played here by Sharon Kam with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Manfred Honeck.

Now for the book and the luxury item. I rarely enjoy fiction so the book would be more or less surplus to requirements if I happened to choose (like my daughter, Jennie) a laptop computer as my luxury item. On the other hand, if I avoid anything which might improve my prospects of survival or escape, and choose for recreational purposes only, my book might be something like The Oxford Companion to Art, into which I could dip frequently without ever feeling that I had read it all. My luxury item would be my clarinet, fully serviced and with an indefinite supply of reeds so that I would have the challenge of learning to play it properly – perhaps one day playing along with the records.
All I am supposed to do now is nominate others to choose their five records, one book and one luxury item but I am not going to do that. Instead, I am going to ask for volunteers among my visitors to join in the fun and then comment here to let me know when you have done so.

Preserving the records

Recent discussions about the decline in handwriting have highlighted a disturbing thought, namely, can digital equipment and media provide a reliable means of long-term storage for our written records, photographs and music? If my experiences have been anything to go by then the answer is no. 
My first computers were Amstrad PCWs which stored everything on removable floppy discs. Just to be awkward, these were not the same discs as used in “IBM-compatible PCs” so that when I upgraded eventually to a Dell PC it was necessary to use a special cable and software to transfer all my text discs from PCW to Dell, and then import them into Microsoft Word. Those were the days when “state of the art” so far as the general public were concerned amounted to 100mb hard drives, Windows 3.1 and the WWW was for a small minority of “anoraks”.
Now, apparently, PC floppies are obsolete though I have still a couple of dozen unused. Anticipating this, I put all my back-up storage on to CDs. Then the trouble began. Despite careful storage some CDs later proved unreadable (even in the machine on which they had been recorded). Later CD drives failed to read CDs made on earlier drives and so on. Add to this major computer/hard drive breakdowns (three in 20 years) – precisely the reasons for making back-up discs in the first place – and, one way or another I lost hundreds of digital photos a few years ago and still more files in 2006.
Fortunately, most of the really important photos and text files pre-dated the advent of home computers and are safe still in their original paper form. Now, I use a one-year-old laptop and have everything important backed up on CDs and on a less than one-year-old USB hard drive. I am reasonably confident that I will not suffer major losses of computer content during the next few years but that is not the point.

The point is that I have family photos and other documents (for example) dating back into the 19th Century mostly in their original form. They, at least, could well last for another couple of centuries or more. However, in view of the ever more widespread use of digital equipment and storage media, how can today’s text documents, photos (and music files) be stored securely for the benefit of the next four or five (or more) generations? Or are we expected to become a society which is happy to discard anything that is more than a year or two old, including all traces of our own day to day history?

A fresh start? We’ll see.

To post or not to post? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler to woffle on interminably about nothing of any consequence or whether to wait until there is a story to tell, however brief, and preferably with pictures.

During the past couple of months I haven’t been anywhere and, worse still, I haven’t done anything that I imagine would be particularly interesting to readers of this blog. So I did not post for a few weeks though I continued to tour all my links at least every few days.

Autumn 08 was pretty miserable so far as I was concerned. It was a rather grey period in more senses that one as the days became shorter and colder. I have rarely caught colds in the past but made up for this in mid-September when I caught a cold which lasted longer than usual and then, with a few days off between each, was succeeded by all it’s cousins right through until early December. I might have kept cycling through the coughs, sneezes and runny noses and even despite the persistent tiredness but I have yet to figure out how to keep the legs going when the lungs just don’t want to know. So cycling was off the agenda and with it the exercise that was keeping the weight under some sort of control and, of course, the opportunity to see new parts of the neighbourhood, take pictures, and bore everybody silly by posting about it.

The vandal attacks on my car (about which I posted here and here) occurred during this period and did nothing for my sense of humour but I am hoping that they were isolated incidents rather than the beginning of a trend.

I gave up trying to paint when good daylight became a bit scarce some weeks before Christmas. I simply cannot cope with colour mixing in anything other than good daylight so it was better to stop completely and wait for conditions to improve, than to struggle on and become discouraged. I did manage a recognisable (but unfinished) self-portrait before I stopped painting. Mind you, it made me look rather angry (maybe I was!) and if my actual colours were anything like those in the portrait I don’t think the wonders of modern medicine could do much for me. That is not how I want to paint portraits.

Other interests have occupied the spaces vacated by cycling and painting and they might get a mention in this blog before long. For example, in the family history I have reviewed and re-organised most of the information gathered so far to help identify those lines of enquiry that need more work. Regular visitors may recall that I bought myself a guitar a few months ago and it has since kept me busy for many hours trying to see the logic (if any) in the standard guitar tuning and also trying to memorise a few scales and easily executed chords (“executed” being quite often a remarkably apt decsription judging by the sound) and even a few simple tunes.

And I have started reading books again or, to be more exact, buying and reading books that I have not seen before. My theme at the moment is animals, how they see and respond to the world and to us and what makes them tick. I have just finished reading “Animals in Translation” by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. Temple Grandin is a respected authority on animal bahaviour in the USA. She also suffers from autism, which has given her particular insights into animal behaviour because, like autistic people, animals see the world through pictures and in much greater detail than we so-called “normal” folks. To my way of thinking this is one of those exceptional, landmark books in the same league as “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson. It should be read by anyone with an interest in animals (it was available from Amazon when I looked recently). 

The book that I am reading at present  is “Learning Their Language” by Marta Williams. It is about intuitive communication with animals and nature and I am keeping an open mind on this one while finding it fascinating.

It is fun being retired and able to do pretty much as I please, while wondering how I ever found the time to go to work. However, all this self-indulgent hobby activity is all very well but I feel the need to do something (with part of my time anyway) that will have a useful end product. As yet I do not know what that wil be but I am working on it.

Menuhin Competition 2010

The post which I wrote here about the 2008 Menuhin Competition in Cardiff generated a lot of interest, which continues. So I thought I should point out that the next Menuhin Competition will be hosted in Oslo, Norway in April 2010 and more information can be found here.