FinishMySong Blog

To celebrate the launch of their brand new online music store, The Philadelphia Orchestra are offering free downloads of their recording of Beethoven's 5th Symphony. This offer is for a limited time only so to take advantage of their offer visit The Philadelphia Orchestra Online Music Store.

My friend, Karen, is selling her lovely black VW Golf GTi (on 05 plates), so in the interest of getting word out about it I figured I'd give it a little plug here on the FMS Blog!

For pictures and full details about the car / price etc. click the link below :

http://www.pistonheads.co.uk/sales/100651.htm

Seriously snazzy car with only 8,500 miles on the clock for a snip under ÂŁ17k. Give her a bell on the number provided on the link if you're interested. :)

I wonder if all businesses that use the internet as their primary marketing tool have to put up with as many attempted scams as I seem to have to. Back in 1997, Bradford band Terrorvision wrote about the dilemmas of having a 'Pretend Best Friend' - well here in 2006 all I seem to have enquiries from half the time are pretend customers!

In the interests of political correctness I shouldn't really say it... but the first indication I have that an email about my services is not genuinely someone passionate about taking up music lessons or needing a pianist for their wedding is the standard of English in which it is written. Take today's (real) example of an email sent to me, allegedly to enquire about piano lessons :

Hello,
I am Mr.Derrick Lampard
I was ask to contact you on piano leason Well my son Mark is coming to stay with his freindfor some couple of month in West Yorkshire UK and he lovesto Play piano. i want you to help me teaching him how to play piano lesson.However you are based on recomendation from a google directories,So Note:my son Mark is just a beginner. so plaese kindly teach him well. So kindly let me know your charges cost per week's ,inother for me to arrange for his payment before he travells down to your side. i have even made preparation for his
personal equipment he will be using privately durning his stay and bring back to USA when he is going.

Please Advise back on
1. How many week will he use...
2. weekly charge's will and payment method ( Let me
know if you will accept usa bank cheque
I look up to your reply regarding that.
Regards
Mr Derrick.

Well, clearly this person does not have the best grasp of the English language ever but we can't blame him for that - it's just that all of the scam emails I get seem to be written in broken English, incredibly blunt and often immediately requesting bank details, full address etc. Now, I think I'm a fair person so I always give these people chance to show me that they are genuinely interested in the services I offer but 9/10 times that I respond with more information about the piano lessons I give, these people come back to with the suggestion that they will transfer a large sum of money into my personal bank account so that I can be paid for a given period of tuition, the remaining balance I am *instructed!* to transfer back into another account (even when I have specifically stated that I do not deal in large sums of money so only accept sterling cash or cheques from British banks with guarantee cards, my contact has come straight back offering me up to ÂŁ3,500 to put the transaction through my account). Failing this, a telephone number is provided for me to call, always turning out to be a high-charge, foreign number that's routed through a standard UK 07 mobile number.

Now, it's clear to me that these people are pulling a scam, either coaxing me to call a number that turns out to cost the caller ÂŁ5 or more to dial, or else trying to bribe me into 'cleaning' up money (that's probably related to some other criminal activity) by allowing it to pass through my account, risking my reputation and possibly my freedom. Other details these people seem very keen to gain are personal addresses etc, presumably for the purpose of identity fraud. So, it's not altogether surprising that I'm getting increasingly weary of emails that are of this ilk.

My point is, though, that these people are out there trying to rip me and you off by whatever means they see fit, including passing themselves off as customers to a business in a field as inoffensive as musical tuition. I am now receiving on average 2 or 3 emails per week authored by people who are happy to waste my valuable time and efforts for their own financial gain through criminal activities and attempts to launder money. As a customer-facing business, I have to sensitive to the different needs of any potential customer but it's also sad but true to say that I need to be very careful about who I even bother to deal with, for the reasons stipulated above. The internet is a great marketing tool and it has brought me lots of work over the last few months, but it is also the single biggest threat to our freedom and safety, so must be used cautiously.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a promo on my forum for the Ray Brown play Vacant Possession. This comedy is running in theatres across the North of England throughout September and into the middle of October.

Today Mr Brown posted this advert on the Freecycle-Leeds message board :

On Thursday Friday and Saturday of this week we are playing VACANT
POSSESSION at Dearne Playhouse in Goldthorpe (Near Barnsley). It's a big,
refurbished theatre trying to build an audience. If you would like free tickets for
Friday or Saturday, just send me an email and I'll put you on the guest list
(unless we sell/give out early). VACANT POSSESSION can be read about at
the website below. What I don't give out to the general public, but will to
freecyclers, is that it is my take on the death of the 'trendy' left iin the
mid to late Eighties.

So, if you would like to support this production and Freecycle, contact Rawbrown@aol.com for your free tickets to Vacant Possession at the Dearne Playhouse, and visit www.normalproductions.co.uk for further details.

After the events of the last few years I haven't been able to bring myself to vote Labour, even though placing my cross against any other party representative's name meant risking a return to Tory power. It's been pretty simple, really : I've felt that Tony Blair could not be trusted to deliver a truly left-wing mandate and, although his policies have mostly led to greater prosperity in Great Britain, the Prime Minister seems to have turned his back on many of the basic principles of the Labour movement, shifting to a more central, populist position in order to remain in power and retain governance over the country. Labour MP or not, I simply could not support a man who would blindly take us to war on a pro-USA agenda at great cost to our own country's safety, to say nothing of the financial implications.

I had, in fact, almost lost hope altogether of ever being able to support Labour again, becoming increasingly concerned that we would very soon see a return to Tory leadership of the Commons as a result of a divided left-wing majority of the electorate, some sticking to their guns with Blair in the hope that things will get better and others spoiling ballot papers, not bothering to turn out to vote or just voting-and-hoping for the alternative (true) left such as the Liberal Democrats or the Green Party.

And then came along Gordon Brown's speech to the Labour Party conference this lunchtime. Listening live while driving up the M6 motorway, I found myself with a new-found respect for our current Chancellor, and I was left with an optimistic air as I thought that we might finally be lead again by a proper 'lefty'. Brown's speech demonstrated a real sense of awareness about the current public mood surrounding our political present and (until now) increasingly gloomy future. He talked of how important it was for the people to be active in their communities and in shaping their own landscape through positive politics. He spoke of the importance of the continuing growth of our public services so that they can keep being funded by the tax-payer, free to those who need them and dished out according to need rather than ability to pay. And, most importantly, he reiterated how crucial education is to our country's future. Other than his remarks on terrorism, in fact, I thought that this man's views fairly well reflected my own more realistic but hopeful ideals for the coming years in the UK and beyond.

See below for a few choice extracts from Brown's speech of this afternoon :

...our starting point must be the concerns, the struggles and the hopes and ambitions of families in every part of our country. I think of the young couple I talked to who work all the hours of the day and yet cannot afford their first home. The grandmother who's come out of hospital desperate to stay in her home who doesn't have the support to make it possible. The mothers I met in Broadwater Farm, trying not just to build a children's centre but to rebuild a whole community. The young people I met on the streets who said they would not be there if they had somewhere to meet. The employee who wants to branch out and start up her own business but doesn't feel she has enough support to make it happen. All of them know how they want to live their lives - but want a government on their side to enable them to make the changes they need.

Most of all my parents taught me that each of us should live by a moral compass. It was a simple faith with a fundamental optimism. That each and every one of us has a talent. Each of us a duty to use that talent. And each of us should have the chance to develop that talent.

...we cannot tolerate second best investment in our schools. And, step by step, we will raise investment in state school pupils... And I make this challenge to all parties - if you believe, like us, in equal opportunities in education, support my priority for the future: invest in education first. I want a Britain not just of excellence in education but a Britain of full employment and an end to the dole as we know it. So let us also remove one by one Britain's biggest educational and employment handicaps.

...as individual citizens of Britain we must act upon the responsibilities we owe to each other as well as our rights. Here is the deal for the next decade we must offer: no matter your class, colour or creed, the equal opportunity to use your talents. In return we expect and demand responsibility: an acceptance there are common standards of citizenship and common rules.

...we will not only raise the minimum wage next month but enforce the minimum wage and as we legislate an offence of corporate manslaughter, stage by stage eliminate second class citizenship in the workplace.

Let us expose and banish once and for all a doctrine of race based exclusivity that is the wholly unacceptable message of the BNP.

But we should also do more to encourage and recognise the vast majority of young people who abide by the values of our community. So let us in every area of the country champion youth councils and youth budgets, young people deciding for themselves the shape of youth facilities in their communities.

British composer Sir Malcolm Arnold has died in Norfolk and Norwich Hospital at the age of 84. News and blog articles on this subject below :

BBC News
Malcolm Arnold's own website
Wikipedia Entry on Malcolm Arnold
MusicWeb article 'Malcolm Arnold in Europe'
Entertainment News Article
Obituary on Alternative Film Guide
'A Shroud of Thoughts'

On 4th of this month I wrote a blog about Bob Dylan's remarks with respect to the quality of recorded music in this day and age. In summary, he told Rolling Stone that a decent record had not been produced in the last couple of decades and this was largely because of the rise of digital recordings. Because these digital tracks were so worthless, infact, that he went on to say that he is not concerned about music piracy across internet peer-to-peer networks because what the users of these programmes are sharing is not worth anything anyway.

And, yet, adverts currently running on British television to promote Bob Dylan's newest album do so in conjunction with iPod and iTunes - the Apple-branded mp3-style technology! Is Dylan being ironic here? Or is something fishy going on??

Your guess is as good as mine!

I find it a little bit frustrating to read article like the one I came across today on the website of The People's Media Company, entitled Classical Music: For Relaxation and Healing. Here are a few short extracts to give you an idea of its content :

...is there a way to reduce at least some of the stress that affects us? Thankfully there is, and it comes through the beauty of classical music. It can relieve anxiety and physical tension, lower blood pressure and calm your mind.

Mozart in particular can provide a calming experience for both mother and child during [pregnancy].

Try listening to classical music while you eat. The benefits are many, as studies have shown it causes people savor their food more so they eat less.

You get the idea! What's frustrating about people writing about classical music in this fashion is that they're contributing to a stereotype suggesting that music of this genre only has value in as much as it is good background music for other activities. The fact is that not all 'classical' music promotes relaxation and stress-relief. On the contrary, composers of this style write to invigorate the senses, speaking through music directly to the most complex of human emotions, attempting to stir within their listeners something deep and profound. This is a world away from the music of lifts and maternity wards - it is usually not designed to encourage its audience to drift off to sleep but to engage them in a meaningful way.

I would suggest that those who write about classical music as something that is perfect for closing down the senses; switching off the aggravations of everyday life (and particularly when they cite W. A. Mozart as a specific example of someone who writes like this) that they really need to get themselves off to the local record store and pick up some random recordings of 'classical' music and listen intently to them, examining their own responses to these pieces : Orff's Carmina Burana, perhaps; a concerto or two by some of the virtuoso composers like Liszt, Rachmaninov or Tchaikovsky; big orchestral works by Shostakovich or Stravinsky; the Mozart Requiem or any number of his operatic works; the wonderfully colourful pianistic style of Claude Debussy or orchestration of Maurice Ravel; some German Lieder - perhaps a bit of the Schubert Wintereisse... read the lyrics and listen to how the voice weaves a melody around the piano accompaniment. It is nothing if not heartbreaking in places.

Then ask yourself : should we really be passing off this entire genre of music as nothing more than a little light background to do homework or eat dinner to?? Sure, it can sometimes be relaxing to listen to classical music, but then the same can be said of listening to SOME repertoire from most any genre.

While in Whitby enjoying a weekend away with friends a couple of weeks ago, I read an article in The Guardian that I haven't been able to get out of my head since I casually picked up the paper that morning. It was an extract from Michael Fryan's book The Human Touch that the paper reported was going to be about what happens to us while we are sleeping. In actual fact, Fryan I think gets to addressing some much more pertinent ideas in this article about the nature of how we experience our own lives within our minds and in the wider physical world, and how this translates to conscious thought processes. In it he has this to say about difficult passages in dreams :

The different players in the game often battle with each other for control over the game's content and conventions. The author, too, sometimes finds himself struggling to regain control of his own story. Some stories fight back at the author; some games defeat all their participants. The same sort of struggle occasionally goes on between the dreamer and the dream he is participating in.

...

In the case of the story I still know I'm the author, even if I'm losing the fight. I still - regrettably - have all the labour of invention and writing to perform, however much the character is jogging my elbow. Dreamer and author alike, however, have become entangled in their own creations. Although the author began by telling the story, and the dreamer by dreaming the dream, the story has ended up by telling the teller, the dream by dreaming the dreamer.

I think the point Fryan is making here is one about control. We often consider our own ideas and thoughts as self-penned - each of the scenes we dream and all of our waking thoughts, whether they be lists of the shopping we need to buy later or a great idea for a new invention - but what Fryan seems to be getting at is that, by means of the incredibly complex biological and social environment we live within, these, along with all our other mental constructs, to some degree think themselves; are arbitrarily created beyond any conscious choice or control by ourselves, out there then to be described by our lingual conventions. The suggestion is, then, that feelings, ideas, perceptions - everything infact - present themselves to us for interpretation. The only question remains who's doing the presenting and who's doing the interpreting? I guess this is where my peers would cite the possibility of the existence of soul.

This November will see the beginning of another great contemporary music festival in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.

This is what the organisers of this years' Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival have to say about it :

"The UK's largest festival specifically dedicated to contemporary and experimental music is back, and continues to set the tone and pulse for contemporary music across Europe.

Across the 10 days of the festival [from 17th to 26th November 2006] the key word is diversity! As expected, HCMF presents some of the most challenging and innovative contemporary classical music being written and performed today, as well as the opportunity to revisit key works by major composers of the 20th Century. This year we also offer an intoxicating mix of large-scale orchestral works, chamber opera, guitars, downloads, music theatre, laptops, biotechnology, free improvisation, white noise, wise words, scientific research, installations, silence, film, degraded instruments, found objects, graphic scores, and choral work (deconstructed)!"

I'm not sure I'm up for too much white noise or wise words, but this series of events certainly sounds intriguingly worth a visit, if only to find out if it lives up to the eccentricity of their promo-writer! Looking at the festival diary, though, there will be loads of items that sound promising, including performances by the City of London Sinfonia, the Northern Sinfonia, the University of Huddersfield New Music Ensemble and the Smith Quartet. To get more details and a brochure detailing every event (including fringe performances), log onto the HCMF website and fill out their contact form.

The first time I visited the United States, back in 2001, my friends and I chanced upon a cinema in the Southwest Plaza Mall (Littleton, Colorado) and, after a long and convoluted discussion about which film we each preferred to see that afternoon, we sat down to John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale in Serendipity. This is a tale of two people who meet by chance, while they're both shopping in New York City, and immediately hit it off. Jonathon is convinced that he wants to be involved with this new woman who stumbled into his life but Sara isn't so sure and so decides that she'll let fate decide whether the two of them should be together. Reluctantly, Jonathon eventually agrees to this, so Sara writes her contact details in the cover of a particular book and, after they part, gives the book to a secondhand book store in the belief that if their relationship was 'meant to be' then Jonathon would somehow come across the book at some point in the future and so be able to get in touch.

I won't ruin the rest of the plot in case you have never seen the movie but, hasten to add, they do eventually end up together (albeit after over a decade apart) but serendipity really has little or nothing to do with their reunion. Of course, because Jonathon knew which title it was that Sara had written her details in, the 'random' or 'fateful' element of their coming together was already severely degraded - desperately wanting to get in touch with Sara, for years Jonathon became obsessed by checking every bookstore for copies of that particular novel. When he does come across her again for the first time since they parted in New York it is as a result of a thorough investigation and the finale of the movie that sees the couple (presumably) reunited for good comes about as a result of their mutual desire to spend their lives together, not by a chance encounter, unless you count their initial meeting as the serendipity event but, if I'm honest, I think that caused them both an awful lot more grief than it did good fortune!!

So, for a movie entitled Serendipity, the plot seemed a little confused, actually seemingly concluding that mostly we make our own luck and as such are the masters of our own destiny. Handy little chance encounters can always help but your happiness ultimately depends on your own decisions: this is essentially how I feel about life.

You can now access the last 8 entries on the FMS Blog and the FMS Pictures & Poetry section from the front page of FinishMySong.com.

Going to my homepage, you will be able to see at a glance the titles of the most recent entries on these sections of the website - the list will update automatically as soon as I make changes or additions to the Blog or Pics & Poetry. I also intent to use a similar system to display recent updates on other music related websites, linking straight back to the source. These will most likely appear in the Resources section of FinishMySong - watch this space!!

I give a few singing classes in primary schools around the Bradford area and I recently took up a post teaching singing to children and young adults at the Northern Academy of Performing Arts (in Otley, Skipton and Yeadon). Because of the nature of (mainly) this latter role and because many of the kids who attend this school are interested in musical theatre, I've been looking much more closely at scores of West End / Broadway shows. Close enough, in fact to notice that in the most part these mass-produced manuscripts are absolutely littered with errors!

And it's not just subtle mistakes that these arrangers are making, such as a dubious interpretation of the way Michael Ball (or whoever) enunciates a given phrase, but rather huge gaping blunders with the most basic of musical elements. One of the most common of these seems to be the reduction of a full piano score to basic chords (that either a keyboard or guitar player could interpret) that are printed about the staves. Not only do the people who write these things tend to miss out suspensions and added notes to chords, but often seem to totally mistake one basic chord for another. For example, I saw one today that was marked F (indicating an F Major chord) even though the piano and vocal parts clearly had the notes A, C and E in them (giving an A Minor tonality). This isn't an isolated case - it seems like every score I pick up has at least a couple of these kinds of blunders and it makes me wonder if these are just typos or if the arrangers simply have no clue what they're doing... given the frequency of the mistakes I sadly conclude that the latter case is so.

In the music news today is the story that a study by Dr Adrian North of the University of Leicester has found that fans of Classical music are more likely to have taken cannabis than fans of any other genre of music. Almost a quarter of classical fans overall have at least tried dope and 12% of opera buffs have taken magic mushrooms at some point in their life.

Dr Adrian North, a psychologist at the university, is now extending his study to find out if there is a relation between taste in music and other aspects of a person's lifestyle. This further study is taking place on the internet via an anonymous form - you can be part of the study by going to musicaltastetest.com I just did the test - it took about 10 minutes and is similar to other 'personality' tests that can be found on the internet and are often used by large employers to ascertain whether certain individuals are suitable to join their workforce.

Read more about the results of Dr North's study in the following articles :

Glasgow Daily Record
BBC
Leicester University Website : Official Paper etc.

One of the first and most crucial things that a student of ethnomusicology will learn is that music's function is not consistent throughout the world, nor is it static. Ethnomusicology (the study of world music, and usually non-Western musics with an emphasis on folk traditions) teaches us that the 'concert culture', so respected by audiences across Western Europe and North America, simply does not apply in many other regions. Other cultures employ music for different reasons (or, at least, reasons that are more explicitly clear) and enjoy it in entirely different ways.

Attending any concert anywhere in the Western World, a music lover will, in the vast majority of cases, find a very similar arrangement, both physically and philosophically. In terms of the physical arrangement of the space, there is usually a separate area for the two groups involved in a performance - one for the audience and one for the performers. The performers' area is usually raised in some way and, especially in larger venues, is sectioned off from the audience, either with some kind of physical barrier (such as a set of monitors) or simply with a space that neither the audience nor the performers enter (we're all subconsciously aware of the 'rules' by which this game is played so it is rare that it is necessary to mark these spaces in any way). When the venue is seated, the first row is usually some distance away from the front edge of the performance area and the chairs are arranged facing the stage. Equally, of course, the musicians are arranged so that they are looking back at the audience (except in cases where there is a practical need for a performer to look elsewhere, such is that of the conductor of an orchestra).

This physical arrangement of the objects and spaces around a performance venue go some way to dictating the roles that each participant is expected to play when they enter the room - the separation of audience and performer indicates that the two have entirely different parts to play in the proceedings and, in fact, the raising of the stage area suggests that there is a hierarchy of sorts being set up - placing the performers in a physically elevated position has the effect of psychologically elevating their social status (perhaps as a result of the evolutionary awareness of the vulnerability forced upon beings who are closer to the ground?!). These factors put together (among many more subtle signals) leave Western audiences with little flexibility in terms of how they approach a live musical performance - they are mostly expected to bestow their every attention on the musicians to the detriment of all other things, especially in Classical music concerts where it is usually considered rude even to whisper to the person next to you whilst the performance is going on, saving coughs and sneezes for the silences between movements and claps for the end of a piece. Even in more informal environments such as rock concerts played out in large auditoriums or stadiums, the physical space is very carefully divided up according to some measurement of rank, with those on the stage at the top of the pecking order and those in the cheapest seats or standing areas at the bottom.

The fact is, though, that this particular tradition / habit of experiencing live music in this fashion is not common throughout the world and actually many examples can be cited where the clear line between performer and audience is considerably blurred to the degree that all those present are simply considered participants of an event. One such example I have described in this blog a couple of months ago : in the pubs in Ireland people are invited to be involved in the music either by listening while they enjoy a drink, singing along or bringing instruments and simply joining in with those who are already playing. There is no physical barrier between performers and audiences because these events take place in public bars with the musicians just gathered around a table or sitting in the corner somewhere. Equally, in parts of South Asia concerts are approached in a very different manner to the way we in the West participate as audience members - whilst some Asian Classical music is being performed many of the audience members continue with conversations, eat, turn away and generally allow their attentions to wander to other things - behaviour that would be seriously frowned upon in the concert halls of Great Britain, even when the performers themselves are used to another concert culture (I remember seeing Ravi Shankar playing a concert in Bradford's St. George's Hall many years ago and I thought it was strange even then that everyone in the audience sat in silence to respect this Indian player of sitar).

One of the reasons I think people in the Western World continue to embrace our notion of the concert culture is because they believe that observing these customs (including the way musicians and audiences dress during the course of a concert) bestows respect on those musicians who have worked to hard to become masters of their trade, and maintaining a distinct divide between performers and listeners ensures some element of quality control on the product that they have (usually) paid to experience. Certainly, this seems to have been the reaction that Professor Eric Edburg got from some of the audiences members at DePauw University who attended his recent 'experiment to combat crisis in Classical music' in which he attempted to break down some of the aforementioned cultural requirements for a Western Classical concert:

The program of short Romantic pieces invited the audience to clap between and during movements, dance in front of the stage if they felt the urge, and, above all, feel free to enjoy themselves outside of the usual constraints of a classical music performance. Edberg performed wearing a Hawaiian shirt and jeans.

The professor says, since the August 30 recital, "The overall consensus in the comments on my blog seems to be that the informality and participatory atmosphere worked, at least to a point, but that things got a bit out of hand at times. Some people liked the playing so much that they would have liked more silence," noting that is "nice to hear." He adds, "the more seriously committed, the more deeply in love with music the student I've talked to, the less they liked the audience-participation aspects of the evening. But with colleagues, at least the ones I've encountered, the more concerned they are with the incredibly shrinking audience for classical music, the more enthusiastic they are about the high attendance and the high energy at the concert. And every non-musician in the audience I've heard from simply loved it."

Another view that I have come across in the past from those who are big fans of the traditional concert culture is that they would struggle to take an orchestra seriously if the instrumentalists and conductor were all wearing jeans and t-shirts rather than the traditional suit. For me, this again speaks clearly of a social hierarchy that supports the notion that those who are dressed in a given way will behave or perform in a complementary fashion. This, I believe, to be the reason that it is still the norm in workplaces across the UK and USA for staff to conform to certain (mostly) unwritten dresscodes, such as the shirt-and-tie for office workers - totally uncomfortable, impractical and unnecessary. Equally with orchestra members : I know from experience that wearing loosely fitting clothes (such as t-shirts) makes the job of playing an instrument or singing much more comfortable and, so, it stands to reason that the standard of musical performance at live concerts would be generally better if the musicians did not conform to the dinner-suit dresscode.

I applaud Prof Edberg for his brave attempt to look at alternativees to the Western concert culture, especially as his primary motivation is to save Classical music from what seems like an already inevitable, terminal decline. I think bringing such music to a new audience by means of trying out new ways of presenting it could be what the genre needs, although a cautionary note will always have to be made that it is better to have few people publically playing classical music well than many thousands doing it badly, however they are seen and heard by those who participate as listeners.

The 'Resources section' of FinishMySong.com now includes TFF mp3's that are free to download.




The tracks that are available on this website are songs that we in The First Few have put together over the past 3 years and listening to each one demonstrates an ongoing development of our style. Hopefully, we will be back in the studio very soon to record the newest material that we've had the pleasure to bring to audiences in West Yorkshire at our more recent live appearances. But, for now, the increasingly well-known songs that you can download from this website are as follows :



All of these songs were written and performed by The First Few. Copyright on these recordings and the content of the songs (including lyrics etc) is owned by The First Few. Please DO NOT distribute, broadcast or otherwise use these files for any other purpose than for your personal enjoyment without first seeking permission from The First Few!

... makes countless thousands mourn.


Today, the 5th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the United States mainland brings back painful memories to many, especially those who's lives were drastically effected by the events of that day. For me it is a reminder of how utterly uncaring some humans are capable of being to one another and how despicable their resulting actions. Over our entire history, people have endlessly fought and killed one another and what is most disturbing is that these murderous attacks have so often been carried out in the name of peace, God or with a view to following someone's agenda based on their idea of a utopian world for the future. On other occasions, of course, such actions are carried out through sheer malice or hatred.

September the 11th, then, not only reminds me of a day when over 3,000 innocent people were brutally executed, their crimes being no more than making the daily trip to their office or catching a flight, but it also conjures memories of two worldwide wars that included, among other things, the cold, efficient execution of 6,000,000 people who were Jewish, black, disabled or did not 'fit the Nazi's bill' for some other reason, and it makes me think of a day in 1916 on which over a million casualties were the result of a huge battle in Northern France as British forces attempted to break through German lines at the Somme river. September 11th forces me to consider the current war in Iraq - part of an offensive against an allusive enemy that Bush's regime simply refers to as 'terror', one that has already cost many thousands of lives and is likely to add fuel to an already ferocious fire, the recent bombing of Lebanon and the ongoing assault on Palestine by Israeli forces, bloody battles for land such as that in the Falklands just a couple of decades ago, and violent meetings on religious and cultural fronts, including the war in Vietnam - a country that to this day has not fully recovered from the war that took place on their territory. The list goes on and the question we pacifists cannot help asking ourselves is 'what can all this have possibly achieved and why does it go on day after day and year after year?'

Another aspect of the September 11th attacks that is often highlighted in the American media is the heroic and brave actions of New Yorkers on that day, and this brings me to address the other side of the coin - the fact that there were many people of peace present in Manhattan on 11/09/01 when the twin towers of the World Trade Center were struck. Hundreds and thousands of people, in fact, gave up their time and efforts and, in some cases, their lives to help those who were injured or trapped in the area. These people fought a battle of peace, not for political gain, not for religion or to collect some of God's brownie-points, not for financial rewards or to massage their own egos, not for their country or for patriotism or for freedom or for pacifism - simply through a deep-seated concern for their fellow humans. A concern that transcends any other and one that drives those who experience it to do extraordinary things for the sake of others. It is these people who strengthen my resolve in human nature and remind me that, despite an overwhelming body of evidence, not everyone is out for what they can get and not everyone is willing to step over their neighbour to get it.

A couple of months ago I posted a rant on here about ClassicFM TV - basically saying that what it broadcasts is not in actual fact Classical music at all. Today I read an article by David Stabler that perfectly sums up exactly what it is about this musak that we're all growing to hate so much - a genre ClassicFM enthusiasts refer to as 'crossover':

When Amici, the English popera group, sings "Whisper of Angels," phrases billow like spinnakers and voices reverberate with woo-woo vibrato. The song bears almost no resemblance to Gabriel Faure's plainsong "Pavane," on which it's based.

Crossover is nonstick, nonabrasive music. Its coating of goo resists dings, scrapes, surprises or provocations. It's so innocuous, you can't even get mad at it.

Well, it does drive me nuts!!! Goo is exactly the word I was looking for when I wrote my last blog on the subject!! You can read the rest of Stabler's article Five Things I Hate About Classical Music by clicking here.

In the current climate of terrorist attacks, religious wars (a strangely ironic term) and ongoing discussions about the threats posed by supposedly extremist Muslim groups (as opposed to those the media neatly slots into the category of 'moderate Muslim'), it's rare to see anything in the media that sheds light on the great many positives that have sprung out of the Islamic world through history. I read one today, though, in the most unlikely of places - on a website called Family Security Matters - the National security resource for American families. In it, Paul Sullivan asks what one can admire about the Islamic world :

Knowledge is a vital part of the Muslim psyche at its best. Mohammed directed that Muslims “seek knowledge,” and stated on many occasions that the pen, literacy and knowledge are far more powerful than the sword...

For centuries the Islamic world was on top of the world in science, art, architecture, medicine, philosophy, translations, mathematics, astronomy, map-making, banking technology, and so much more...

Some of the architectural methods we use today were first developed in Muslim lands long ago. The barrel vault, battlement, blind arch, and stucco made great innovative headway through the help of Muslims. Muslims also made significant contributions to decorative arts, such as the arabesque, ceramic arts, calligraphy, and more. There were also great strides made in the development of music theory.

Now, I'm not a big fan of any organised religion but I recognise every individual's right to their own choice of belief system and the freedom to practise according to whatever doctrine they buy into. But, certain religious groups have historically drawn the short straw in terms of the way their culture is portrayed by the wider (mostly secular) world and there is a certain need to redress the balance, if only by stating, as Dr Sullivan has, the facts about the historic context from which a given culture has sprung. I don't necessarily agree with everything he has to say but I think Sullivan's article stands as a gentle reminder that, despite the difficulties of the recent past, we do not live in a them-and-us, divisive world, nor do we wish for the future to turn out like that.

We've all got them - people who constantly send things to our email inboxes, whether it be funny pictures, jokes or, in the case of a couple of my 'Forward Friends', newsletters about their own lives. But to qualify to be a proper Forward Friend, this person has to fail to make any other attempt to connect to you - they never call or visit, they never ask how you are or what you're doing.. hey, they don't even bother to respond to your [proper] emails with anything other than a one-liner (if you're particularly honoured on that occasion) and they sure don't make the effort to write to you personally. So, why on earth don't we tell these people where to stick their email distribution list?

Well, an email I got from an ex-girlfriend today pushed me far enough to do just that - for several years now she has included me as one of the recipients of her 'newsletters', most of which speak of her ongoing Christian missionary work / training and include requests for prayers to help her through trying times et al, and also for financial support (a bit sick, really, considering that the reason she no longer sees me is because I don't share her faith in God!). Nevertheless, despite the awkwardness of the situation and my feeling that she's heading down a very slippery slope with her increasingly fanatical outlook on life, I did initially try to be supportive and would email her back personally to express good wishes etc. Of course, she never returned the compliment, did not take any interest in my wellbeing or any other aspect of my life but continued to bombard my inbox with a one-way stream of religious drivel.

So, when I got another one of these newsletters today I decided that it is the day to confront her on the situation. I emailed her to say that I'd be happy to maintain a friendship with her if she so wishes but that, frankly, whatever relationship she felt she was conducting with me was not fulfilling (on account of her not actually engaging with me as a human, let alone one she once allegedly loved) and actually that her sending me these impersonal mails without ever bothering to try to connect with me in a meaningful way was quite upsetting and insulting. She came back to me with the obligatory 15-word response that only really acknowledged her receipt of my message, ending "I totally misjudged your response". Well, I ask you - given the circumstances, how was I expected to feel about being on the receiving end of these things but always ignored in every other respect?

This whole situation smacks of a total lack of empathy on the part of my former Forward Friend and, although it saddens me that I might well have just hammered the last nail into the coffin of our real-life friendship, I can only remind myself that whatever the charade was that our relationship had turned into over the past couple of years, it certainly wasn't a meeting of minds or souls. A shame that in this life it is always necessary, sooner or later, to let go of the things that have been so dear in the past but, as George Harrison said (and as one of my proper friends often reminds me), all things must pass. I think snipping this one was probably the right thing to do for both our sakes!

I had no idea that LCM (Leeds College of Music) was so influential, with contacts in the arts industry all around the world. I stumbled upon an advert they have posted on the artshub website in Australia for administration posts that reads :

Leeds College of Music is a unique UK institution providing specialist music education at both further and higher education levels. The Academic Registry, in which this post is based, provides a customer-focused quality service across a range of student-based, learning and teaching, governance, quality and research activities.

It did strike me as odd that they are trying to recruit administration staff from the other side of the world - I'd have thought that there are enough skilled administrators in West Yorkshire to fill LCM's books and then some, so why try to get office staff from Australia?? It would be normal practise for academic institutions to look far and wide for specialists in a given field but it's hardly necessary to fill admin roles.

But, hey, if that's what LCM want to spend their money on...!

With all the admin I've needed to look after to get my website up and running over the past few months, I've been forced to put some aspects of the site on the backburner until more time was available to deal with them. One such aspect has been the Resources section of FinishMySong.com - originally conceived as a free-to-view portal of reference sheets for music students and teachers.

Now that things are a little more under control, I've been able to start properly working on the Resources section and have recently posted 12 new documents designed as brief reference sheets for those people who are fairly new to the study of music, some covering the fundamentals of music theory and others outlining the main trends in Western Music since the Early Baroque. These pages don't claim to be in any way exhaustive (far from it!) - just useful reference points / study notes. As the coming weeks and months go by I intend to extend this section hugely to encompass a much broader range of subjects from practise techniques to musical analysis, both self-written and linked to other people's work elsewhere on the internet. In the meantime, keep an eye on the main page : http://www.finishmysong.com/resources.php - it will be growing rapidly very soon.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine, the legendary singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan, had this to say :

We all like records that are played on record players, but let's face it, those
days are gon-n-n-e. You do the best you can, you fight that technology in all
kinds of ways, but I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent
in the past twenty years, really. You listen to these modern records, they're
atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no
vocal, no nothing, just like -- static. Even these songs probably sounded ten
times better in the studio when we recorded 'em. CDs are small. There's no
stature to it. I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like,
'Everybody's gettin' music for free.' I was like, 'Well, why not? It ain't worth
nothing anyway.'

I find it interesting to read Dylan's opinion about the state of recording these days because I know quite a few people who would agree whole heartedly with his point of view that digital recreations of sound simply don't cut the mustard; that they lose some special element that is detectable in analogue recordings, and especially those played on traditional record players.

To some degree I see the logic : by definition, a digital platform will always break a continuous sound down into it's component parts, splicing it into many thousands of pieces to be reconstructed at the other end, and so there is lots of room for degradation of the original sound environment. The successfulness and usefulness of the final product, though, is entirely dependent on the recording, processing and reproduction methods, and the sample rate (the number of sample slices of the original signal that are taken per second) at which the sounds were originally inputted and at which they are eventually outputted. And I agree that since the invent of mp3's digitally recorded products have suffered - this particular format compresses any sound file by enforcing a pretty dismal sample rate and using other techniques such as repetition of slices that are considered 'the same' by some criteria or other. It is this reason, I believe, that ultimately music lovers will turn their back on downloadable media in favour of higher quality recordings such as is available on compact disc (CD) where much higher sample rates are possible.

But, as Bob Dylan's interview with Rolling Stone highlights, many vinyl enthusiasts still claim that even listening to CD's cannot compete with the experience of hearing music played on original old record players, now practically extinct due to the cumbersome, inconvenient and fragile nature of the hardware involved (records are very vulnerable to accidental warping or scratching, resulting in clicks and hiss on the output signal, and unless the record player is very well protected, the stylus needle has a tendency to jump with any surrounding vibrations, including those caused by the output of loudspeakers themselves). Actually, a few months ago myself and a friend decided to test this theory, comparing two recordings of The Beatle's Rubber Soul album, one original vinyl bought in the late 60's and a copy of an original CD. The results were immediately noticeable - indeed, the vinyl record did output a warmer tone, somehow as if the edges of the recording had been carefully rubbed with sand paper. But, I felt that some of the detail was lost as a result, allowing the 'harsher' sounding CD recording to stand out in terms of the range of audible sound events it offered the listener. Yes, the CD signal is made up of thousands of 'slices' of the original sound experience but this alone did not impede the listener from distinguishing the most delicate nuances of the songs in question, particularly in the higher frequency range.

Of course, one of the main reasons digital is now used as a practical alternative to analogue recording is because the resulting files are much easier to handle, share and manipulate. The job of editing a track that would once perhaps have taken the studio worker an hour, while he literally cut up bits of audio tape and stick them back together, can now be done in a matter of seconds with a few clicks of the mouse. Manipulation of the signal is then also much easier to achieve, especially since the rise of powerful computer technology, allowing a skilled engineer to do the most amazing things with a soundscape in a fraction of the time it would otherwise have taken, and with a lot less in the way of consumable wastage. Personally, I believe that if one weighs up all these advantages against the slight loss of tone (subtle enough that it is barely possible to accurately describe without falling back on metaphor, let alone technically identify) it is clear that digital recording has a long future ahead of it yet, although perhaps turning back toward high quality recording and playback methods. Failing this, there's always the live performance to consider!

I just stumbled upon the most accurate description of musical practise I think I've ever read, in an article by Timothy Mangan on the ocregister.com. The following is a quote from it :

There is nothing quite like practicing an instrument. Practicing a sport comes closest perhaps, but practicing an instrument is less physical (though not unphysical), more mental, and solitary. One goes into a room, closes the door and faces nothing but oneself, one's limitations and one's instrument – a humbling scenario.

This concept of facing one's limitations, or rather battling against them, really sums up the way I've always experienced instrumental practise - it is actually a war against the negative perceptions we have about our own abilities as much as it is an exercise in rehearsing physical manouvres and re-routing neural networks to handle the tasks at hand. This again highlights the importance of maintaining a positive state of mind when attempting to stretch oneself - it is very easy to get despondent if things don't immediately happen the way you would like. Of course, this is when it is most important to persevere and remember that being a great musician is possible if you approach it right. Rome wasn't built in a day but those who worked hard on it surely believed that it could be done.

Imogen Cooper is to direct the Britten Sinfonia in an all-Beethoven programme. This is what the Britten Sinfonia website has to say about it :

In a way, this concert needs no introduction. It’s Beethoven. It’s Imogen Cooper. Two years ago Imogen directed Britten Sinfonia in Haydn and Mozart concerti: her absolute love for this repertoire shines through her playing, creating a joyful and extraordinary rapport with the players and audience. An unmissable opening concert.

The programme will include the first and second piano concerto by Beethoven and will take place in three venues at the end of September : Cambridge Corn Exchange on the 28th, St Andrew's Hall in Norwich on the 29th and then on the 30th at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.