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There and back again….

Saturday, September 11th, 2010

da Danilo: restaurant of dreams

So I’m back home now, and apart from some wistful browsing of estate agents’ websites, probably not going back to Italy for a while (mm, isn’t that what I said in June?). Still, I found myself thinking, as I walked back from the Ristorante Danilo – my current Modena fave – to the train station, that I finally feel that I’m where I wanted to be, mentally and intellectually, when I set out for my first trip last October. I no longer have that nagging, sinking feeling of not having covered enough archival ground; I’m confident that I can finish a book, not just start one.

I must admit, the coming months are still a little terrifying. In fact, I had a nasty moment as the plane was taking off on my way to Bologna, when I woke from dozing in a panic because I didn’t have the chittara. Which I didn’t need until the next trip…

In five days I’ll be flying out again, this time to do a shortened version of Sacred Hearts: The Musical at the East Cork Early Music Festival. Then back to Cork at the beginning of the last week of September to perform my external examiner duties (and briefly getting to enjoy the company of not one, but two, inestimable fellow hip and groovy female musicologists, Melanie Marshall and Bonnie Gordon). Later that week I officially begin my new role as director of postgraduate studies, or head of the graduate school, or some other title, which when confirmed will certainly be capitalized.

October begins with another Sacred Hearts in Warwick, and the following fortnight in Chester. Hoping that the new Simple Wimple will make at least the dressing up a little easier. Thank goodness for DIY hijab websites.

The next week (oh, how the diary is cruel, sometimes) Musica Secreta presents their new programme, Four Weddings and a Funeral, at the Brighton Early Music Festival. Oops, just realised I need to make a page for that on the website. Oh, no, something else to do! But what a programme it will be: we’re joined by Don Grieg and Mark Dobell for lots of wedding music for multiple Gonzagas and Medicis. Highlights will be “Giunto alla tomba” sung by Don as a solo aria, and Monteverdi’s sestina. The final wedding is, of course, celestial, so a cameo role for the wimples here, too. But – and who knows how this will turn out – we plan to end the programme with the blokes singing “Si ch’io vorrei morire” and the ladies singing the latin contrafactum “Oh Jesu mia vita.” May sound like a dog’s dinner, but life and death are often like that.

The next week is half term (are you keeping up?) which is always a barrel of laughs in terms of childcare, and then I’m off to AMS at Indianapolis to give a paper. Two weeks respite, then the whole famn damily for Thanksgiving (which will be lovely, don’t know WHY I even mention it). Somewhere in there, I may have to begin my Christmas shopping.

And finish my book.

Nice to be home?

Posted in Musica Secreta, Musicology, Sacred Hearts, The Family | 2 Comments »

In the mood / In a mood

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

So, still struggling with priorities, then? Warning: less of a post, more of a rant, so read on only if you are really interested or really sympathetic…

Half past eleven on Sunday morning, and we were having a lovely walk in the country park, enjoying the first sunshine and above-zero temperatures for days. Yet Grumpygills here couldn’t reap maximum benefit, as I’d already succumbed to bile blacker than the coffee in my George Clooney mug.*

*generously gifted by the inestimable Sirens in commemoration of many “George Clooney moments” achieved in rehearsals for both the Palestrina Third Book of Lamentations and Josquin des Prez’s equal-voiced Alma Redemptoris mater.

You’d have thought that falling heavily on a slippery wooden bridge would have been the last straw, and it almost was. I had to fight back the tears right the way through the remaining half hour of the walk, and very nearly decked Son No 2, just for doing what nine-year-olds do best (i.e. swagger and badger). And I resented like hell the fact that Pete did not understand that my measured, “I’m feeling a little uncomfortable and would rather like to get back to the car soon,” actually meant, “I HURT LIKE **** AND I WANT TO GO HOME, NOW!” Not my finest moment.

But the truth was I’d been making excuses for my vile mood all weekend, right from the moment that I chose the wrong route home in Son No 1′s driving lesson back from college on Friday evening, when we ended up in a traffic jam. I knew that I would be back out in the same jam less than an hour later on the way to Son No 2′s umpteenth football training session of the week, so I had every right to be unhappy. But then I just blamed it on the need for SnarlStop (i.e., any snack that can even temporarily raise the blood sugar to functioning levels).

Back to Sunday; and oddly, having realised I would be spending the rest of the afternoon on the sofa, I was also able to come to terms with the root of my chronic ill temper, which was – quelle surprise – the state of my writing on Friday afternoon. I am, I’m ashamed to say, the perfect caricature of the petulant artiste, furious with everything and everybody if work is not going well.

In the middle of the week, I finally abandoned the chapter I’ve been working on for the last few months. I was at my wits’ end with it and gradually realised that if I was hating writing it, folk would almost certainly hate reading it, too. So I parked it on the hard drive, and decided to start on the introduction. Normally, I would have left this until last but something told me that if I could get on with it, maybe I’d work out what I’m really trying to write. And, lo and behold, the words started to fly on the keyboard. Then Friday morning, it all screeched to a halt again.

Maybe I was tired. Maybe I was distracted. But I sure wasn’t in the zone. It all picked up in the middle of the afternoon, huzzah, another 500 words and then suddenly the phone rings and it’s, “Mum, can you come and pick me up? I won’t get any driving in today if you don’t.” Completely unable to say no, and (if I’m honest) fully aware that it was going to make me unbearable to be around, I sighed and turned off my computer with my brain somewhere still in 1586.

There has to be an alternative to blaming my family for having the temerity to exist when I could so easily carry on writing until the cows come home (as Pete once put it, these are no ordinary cows, they are space cows who have been lost in the galaxy since the collapse of their mission to find alternatives to their home planet, Bovinia, which has since been destroyed in a cloud of methane).

My mother once wryly proposed that I needed a wife. That was a long time ago, and I still don’t have one. I do have a cleaner, but that in itself can provoke frustration and resentment when things aren’t where I left them (especially if I just left them “somewhere”), or my socks get mixed up with Son 2′s (our feet are nearly the same size), or if the saucepans don’t have the right lid on them. Any excuse for a moody, because every little twinge is a reminder that a) I’m not as in control as I think I am; and b) I can’t do everything that I think I should be doing.

A wife: shorthand for someone who not only does all the things you think/know have to be done, but that you don’t want to do right now – but also does all the organising for you. A wife would be able to organise this post into a beginning, middle, end, but as I don’t have one, I think it will just peter out.

Now, there, that’s better. On with the chapter.

Posted in The Family | 11 Comments »

Priorities

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

Yesterday afternoon, Son No 1 came into my office to chat, despite the picture on my door , about his impending visit to Estonia. He’s a skateboarder, and he’s just recently been offered sponsorship by a major US company (don’t ask me, I’m not skate-hip). His team has been invited to some big skate competition in Tallinn in February, and he had to go and pay a deposit for the fare. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that he was trying to convince himself, not me, that it was not just a good idea, but imperative, that he should go. All I could do was say, “It’s only money, and with the sponsorship, what are you looking at? What you’re spending to go is what you would have spent in three months on boards.” He reminded himself that he now has a responsibility to go and do these events, otherwise the sponsors will drop him.

But he’s also seventeen, right in the middle of his A-levels, trying to learn to drive, with a girlfriend, a social life, and a part-time job depping at the local afterschool club. And, bless him, he’s just going to have to learn a) to prioritise and b) to stop procrastinating and start working in an organised fashion.

And this is where the point of this instalment comes in. Most of my waking hours between 11pm and 2.30am are spent trying to sort out my work priorities. Do I work on this programme, or do I forge on with the chapter? Don’t I have to get some proofs off somewhere? Oh, yeah, I need to order that film. But I have got to get my accounts to the accountant or the Inland Revenue will fine my ass. Oh, and there’s that thing to do with the CD, gotta fax that permissions form, and, oh no, I’m not sure I made a note of how many CDs I sent out. But then the family things come in – I’ve got to get cash tomorrow to pay the cleaner, and write a cheque for Son No 2′s football coaching, and get tickets for the FA Cup match. Should I take the cat to the vet because he keeps throwing up even if it’s just hairballs? Oh, is that him throwing up again…better get the carpet cleaner. Dammit, forgot to buy carpet cleaner. And so on and so forth.

Given that there is no way my situation is unique, I’m faintly surprised that anyone ever manages to write a book, especially a good one. But maybe there is a clue in the approach taken by Suzanne Cusick, who has written just about the best musicological book I’ve ever read, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power. Utterly wonderful, deeply engaging and compelling (really), beautifully written, it is a model of what musicology should be. The point here is that it took her twenty years to write it, from the first grant in 1990 for the archival work to publication in 2009. Clearly, she did not allow herself to be rushed or stressed into bringing it out before she felt the research was good and/or mature enough. One of the biggest problems academics face at the moment, wherever they are, is the pressure to publish continuously. Their careers depend on it. MY career depends on it. So what if I find, as I’m writing, that I’m not happy with the quality of what I’m doing, and I need more time for more archival research, or analytical thought, or background reading? Something tells me I’m just going to have to stick to my guns if this happens, and find other ways of dealing with the pressure that don’t involve agonised and sleepless nights. A good friend did say to me, at the beginning of the book proposal process, “Don’t let yourself be bullied into publishing before your ready.” Very good advice – perhaps the cynic in me would think, “Fine for you, you’re a full professor,” but when it comes down to it, the book will hopefully last a whole lot longer than me, whether I’m working or not. My priority has to be the quality of the book, not some arbitrary deadline set by the beancounters.

As a final aside, I’ve just had to eject, GENTLY but FIRMLY, the other two male members of my family, both with valid, but conflicting, demands for my attention. Maybe I will have to learn to shut my door completely, rather than leaving it ajar. Failing that, I will just have to get a bigger sign.

Posted in Musicology, The Family | 4 Comments »

Sacred Hearts beating faster

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

Amidst the snow and chaos that has descended on Hampshire, my house has suddenly become a haven of peace and quiet, as the boys have disappeared with their friends to go and play on the Common. The schools and colleges close, but Mum PLC does not. I, as usual, am stuck at my computer, trying to write, but now am also juggling all the housework as well, as my lovely Vicky is stuck at her house, too.

I’m hoping against hope that the weather will abate by Friday, as Deb and I had finally got it together to ask for administrative help from the choir, and we were due to have our first meeting on Friday. Said help is now critical, as the Sacred Hearts bandwagon could turn into a juggernaut, if all goes well. The book has been chosen for Channel 4′s new book club, which is the successor to Richard and Judy’s book club. Apparently, R&J had a reputation for making their authors into millionaires. Who knows if this club will do the same, but as the purveyors of the “official soundtrack” (as some reviewers have called it), we had better be ready.

I have to say, I am prouder of Sacred Hearts, Secret Music than I am of anything I’ve yet done. The reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, particularly approving of our approach of mixing professional and non-professional voices. And all the anti-female-voices flak that I expected didn’t materialise, even given that most of the disc is devoted to Palestrina. Who knew? The Gramophone’s Editor’s Choice was the icing on the cake. I had to buy an issue in Gatwick Airport as I was on my way to Italy. I wanted to show it to everyone in the departure lounge, “See that? That’s me, that is!”

But there is still so much to do. We’re looking to tour a costumed show, something like we did at Sarah’s book launch at the South Bank, but expanded to a full evening. We have our first outing at the Brighton Fringe on May 3, and hopefully more will come in soon. Having Sarah as the reader will undoubtedly help; she is so charismatic, and audiences love her. Aren’t we lucky that she is so happy to have dozens of wannabe-nuns hanging on her extensive coattails!

I’m not, however, looking forward to making more habits and props. Or booking rehearsals. Or doing the accounts. Hence the need for help – and our lovely Sirens have rallied round. It would be amazing to see this choir able to launch itself with this opportunity as a springboard. We can’t lose sight of the fact that once the project is over, we will be back to Square One, looking for more programmes and more gigs.

And I will, of course, have to work out how to juggle more performances, work, research, family and the all-important sports-taxi job (although Son No 1 is now learning to drive, and I could trade use of the car for him taking responsibility for getting his brother to and from his myriad weekly training sessions and matches. Oh. Did I hear someone say, “In your dreams!”?).

Basta. Time to load the washing machine again and tend to the chapter, with another cup of tea.

Posted in Musica Secreta, Sacred Hearts, The Family | 2 Comments »

Teatime

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

Up later than usual having had friends to tea, that exceptional type of old friend that doesn’t care if you haven’t begun cooking when they arrive, and that just muck in.  Which is just as well, as I was still editing short scores for the recording this afternoon at 6pm.  OK,  well, it probably wouldn’t have been such a rush if I hadn’t taken advantage of an otherwise empty house to do some harpsichord practice at around 5pm – having sent the Beloved down to the supermarket for the second time to pick up essential items.  In my experience, you have to grab your chances when they occur.

A quick heads up, then, for Sibelius 5, which is making the chore of producing short scores a whole lot easier than it used to be.  Still unpleasant and time-consuming, but the end product is so much better that is doesn’t seem such a futile exercise.

I am now facing a dilemma, or could soon be, given the state of my throat this evening.  Do I even care if a weekend spent daytripping on the Isle of Wight, and then depping all three services at Chichester Cathedral is going to wreck my voice for the recording?  Does it even matter, as all I will be doing is growling on Alto 2 parts?  Probably.  But frankly the prospect of grubbing about for dinosaur bits on the beach at Compton Point is so attractive that I might just risk it.

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Never say never again

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

Well, after two years’ absence, the Beloved has convinced me to revitalise my blog, luring me in with promises that the new software will help me delete the 350-odd spam messages I was getting per day.  And in the end, blogging does hone the writing skills, and it will keep me away from Facebook and forums.  So I tell myself.

In the intervening years I have won awards, had major back surgery and done all sorts of exciting things, but oddly some things don’t change.  She’s So Fine still isn’t published, for instance.  Not for want of trying on my part, but I got into an argument with the editor – he’d say it was over content, I’d say it was over style AND content.  Dammit, I want the book to mean something, not chronicle some ghastly academic navel-gazing exercise.  Twaddle, I say, to the gravest excesses of cultural studies martinets.

Accepting my award in New York, Dec 09I noticed that I wrote in my blog many moons ago about how happy I was that my article on the Boswell Sisters had been accepted by The Journal of the Society for American Music.  Last September I had even nicer news, that the article had won an ASCAP Deems Taylor award.  I had to go to New York last December to accept the award at a spiffing ceremony – and combined the trip with one to make my kids officially American.  Having never been to NYC before, I don’t know who was the most child(ish)(like) – definitely a perk of the job. 

I also note that my last post prior to falling off the edge of the inter-world complained bitterly about promoters and their lack of enthusiasm for anything different.  Fallen, in the end, only had one more performance at the South Bank Early Music Weekend in 2007, but life has a way of leading on to wondrous new paths.  Because of Fallen, Musica Secreta and Celestial Sirens have been drawn into another nun-esque project, recording the ‘soundtrack’ to a new novel by Sarah Dunant, Sacred Hearts.  There will be performances, too.  Could be that I will be dragging out the old habits again, except that this time they will have to be black.  Well, you know what they say – old habits dye hard.

It’s good to be back.

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From the back of beyond…

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

and it’s time to start blogging again. Seriously, I wondered if I’d ever get back in the habit, but a curious thing happened to me a few days ago, and my Beloved said, “You should put that in your blog.”

A very nice gentleman emailed me asking me to help him discover what strange instrument his great-grandfather had bought when serving in WWI France. He wrote his mother that he had bought a mandolin and a “xxx” – the gentleman scanned the letter for me and asked me if I could decipher the script. In the end, it was not an instrument, but a puppy. I laughed a lot, and then thought – so this is why I have a blog. People need musicologists.

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All over, bar the shouting…

Sunday, October 15th, 2006

Well, it’s done. Again, for the last few weeks I have found myself a combination of too busy and at a loss for words to even think about posting. But last night was the premiere of Fallen, and twenty-four hours later I feel enough at liberty to begin posting again.

This has, without a doubt, been the busiest month of my life. First Peru, then the induction of the 2006 intake at work, then Fallen. It’s enough to make a grown woman cry, and that’s what I’ve been doing, on and off, since about 9pm last night. I began to weep before the end of the last music cue (do understand that the band weren’t wholly visible behind the scrim), more from relief and gratitude than anything else, then burst into tears as soon as we got backstage. And I have been on the verge ever since, with stupid things setting me off – Barber’s Adagio on Radio 4′s Desert Island Discs this morning didn’t help at all!! But that was after I had dropped off the incomparable Mel at the airport, which was cause for tears enough. I blame the hormones, myself.

In truth, it went as well as I could have hoped for, and far better than I expected. There were a few sound hiccups, which was a shame, but from my point of view as MD, pretty damned good for a first run through (at the dress rehearsal, we didn’t even make it to the end, so on the night we were doing the close of the show for the first time). It could have been more precise in terms of synching with the film, and the band and choir were commendable for reading my mind, rather than my down beat, but we got from one end to the other in tune, together, and with feeling. All in all, a job well done. We had to change the veils at the last minute – too much faffing around at the dress rehearsal. I had tried to make them look like Sofonisba Anguissola’s portrait of her sister, with a little starched peak at the centre, but in the end we went all Nativity-Play-cum-Life-of-Brian and stretched them over our foreheads, pinned at the back.

After it was all over, we celebrated with a glass of wine and a slice of the Ferrarese delicacy, pampepato. This is a rich chocolate fruitcake, coated with a thick layer of dark chocolate, originally devised by the nuns at Corpus Domini. I iced four of them on Friday morning before the dress rehearsal, having laid them out on cooling racks with sheets of paper towel underneath to catch the drips of chocolate. Mel and I seriously considered staying at home and sucking the paper towels instead of driving two hours to Brighton and being professional performer-musicologists….

So, now I’m totally wiped out – my shop is not so much closed as raised to the ground. Today I was treated to coffee in bed (having laid there lazily, listening to Pete downstairs, labouring away at the ancient coffee grinder clamped to the kitchen table). However, as he presented me with said coffee, Son 2 barrelled into the bedroom behind him, and sent the coffee all over himself, the pillows and the rather too expensive chinese rug. C’est la guerre. So instead of a lie-in, I’m treating scalds and carpet stains before 9am on a Sunday morning. But all was forgotten as we had lunch at a beautiful little New Forest pub, the Royal Oak at Fritham, before a long walk in the unseasonal sunshine through a wood that Son 2 insisted was Endor. We fended off arrest by several Imperial platoons, identified mushrooms eaten by Ewoks, and hid in the undergrowth from Imperial spies before safely making it back to our starship. Fantastic – at last, after what seems like eternity, I could just breathe the air and marvel at how many different kinds of moss one can spot standing still in the forest. I know that the rest of my life will start again tomorrow, but I’m in no hurry.

Pete has just told me that I should take tomorrow morning off, and just blob around the house. OK, I said, but maybe I’ll tidy my office, too. No, no, said he, just rest, otherwise we all will suffer. !. Then he said that the only way he could get me to relax was to make me feel guilty if I didn’t. Oh, right. So now he’s a psychologist.

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Back from the back of beyond

Monday, September 25th, 2006

Got back from Peru yesterday lunchtime, and I can honestly say I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright (thanks, Messrs Dubin and Warren). So much has happened in the last 10 days that I feel as if two years must have passed. And on the other hand, I can be doing something and think that only ten minutes have elapsed, when really an hour has gone by. Tomorrow I must resume responsibility for the hearts and souls of literally thousands of students, but in the meantime I don’t know if it’s Tuesday or Selfridges. Hopefully a good night’s sleep will sort this little conundrum out.

Trekking the Andes (and btw, it wasn’t the Inca Trail, but a – much tougher, higher, and generally more extreme – Inca trail) was so much more than I thought it would be… the best of times, and the worst of times. I can’t even begin to summarize here, so will have to work on a blow-by-blow account on another page. But I can now say that I have survived bigtime altitude sickness, camping at -5 degrees C, climbing over 2500 ft in three hours and descending the same before lunch, close proximity to llamas, and serious digestive discomfort, all framed by the vicissitudes of travelling stateside by air and its attendant indignities visited on the person by so-called security officials. Can’t wait to go to AMS conference in LA in November. The challenges will be slightly different, of course, but equally character-building. OK, so maybe not so different, what with hotel air conditioning and all – except LA is at sea level.

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Chant changes lives; or, you learn something new every day

Wednesday, September 13th, 2006

This morning at God’o'clock I walked downtown to do an interview on Radio Solent, about the Peru trek and APEC. I had to be there at 6.45, so set off around 10 past 6, iPod at the ready to get me in the mood for some swift walking. As usual, I needed something loud and funky to wake me up, so after considering the Foos (not funky enough) and Missy Elliot (not loud enough), on went the RHCP. Thanks, guys, for another job well done – I got to the studio in record time, nearly two miles in twenty minutes.

I will not be taking my iPod to the Andes as there is no point – nowhere to charge it, and I can’t be fussed with one of those little battery chargers. But not having music electrically supplied hasn’t been a problem during our weekend training hikes, simply because it’s going on in my head all the time. The only difference is that it tends to be one bit of music on a continuous loop (nearly wrote “continuous loup” just then – wonder what that would be like? Owwoooo…). A few weekends ago it was the Boswell Sisters’ “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” (someone else likes this one, too – click on http://katry.blogspot.com/2005/07/between-devil-and-deep-blue-sea.html). Last week it was the chant Regnum mundi et omnem ornatum saeculi contempsi from the profession rite for a Clarissan nun – one of the chants featured in Fallen.

Now, as I’ve said before I’ve never really been into chant: not my kind of thing, no no, just the boring bits you have to sit through before you get to the swingin’ polyphony. However, I have to say, since starting to research Fallen I’ve fallen in love with it, especially with singing it. I find myself humming little snatches of chant tunes as I’m filing in my office, or tidying the bathroom. It was great to sing it in ensemble when we had our first chorus rehearsal last week; incredibly calming, and grounding, and quietly energizing. Being a Quaker sympathiser, I guess strictly I’m not supposed to be into hymns and the like, but I’ve retained an affection for the good old tunes since my church-job days (excellent for giving it some welly when digging the garden – “HE who would valiant be, ‘GAINST all disaster”), and now I’m just going to have to admit chant into my pantheon of weaknesses. If nothing else, it helps make low-level housework more bearable.

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