All posts by Jay

Musician, aesthete, lover of concord.
what I'm up to

Back home

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We got back home last night after spending Christmas visiting and enjoying the wonderful hospitality of our two families. Today my mum, my step-dad, Jenny, and I walked along the East Pier here in Howth. I’m playing tonight in The Millstone restaurant for New Year’s Eve, so I’m chilling out now. Listening to a CD that I found in a record shop near Botanic station in Belfast when I used to commute to work there from home in Portadown. I didn’t realise before but the vibes on it are played by Joe Locke, whose praises I was singing in my last post.

‘Breath of Heaven’ by Grover Washington Jr.

Brilliant, composers, cruciverbalism, reviews and reports, Technical

Crosaire No 14,970 (and Tim Garland)

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Completed most of this one quite quickly last night and finished it this morning. But for two clues:

16d Rank fellow with you close to messy room (= FUSTY)

I actually had _UST_, and my mother impressed upon me at a young age the usage of ‘sty’ to mean a messy room. ‘You’ equating to U is a commonplace device, but I just didn’t cop ‘fellow’ as being F. As in FRA (Fellow of the Royal Academy). I got sidetracked with thinking that ‘rank fellow’ referred to a person of rank. ‘Rank’ here is, of course, the definition.

The other I missed was 24 down:

Come in for the end of the traffic light (= UNDERGO)

I got that ‘GO’ is the traffic light, and (with the benefit of the answer in front of me) that something one ‘comes in for’ – like criticism – is something that you ‘undergo’, but I don’t immediately get how ‘under’ is used for ‘the end of’.

Anyway, quite chuffed to get all the rest. Excited to get cracking on the Christmas Crosaire over the holiday.

Happy Christmas 🙂

PS Listening to an album called ‘Rising Tide’ by saxophonist Tim Garland recorded in New York in 2002. We saw him in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London a few years ago with a band that included the two amazing players who play with Garland on this, Geoffrey Keezer on piano and Joe Locke on vibes & marimba. There are a couple of pieces, the long-form work ‘Sonata’ and the (regular size!) ‘Fantasy’ that feature a string quartet. ‘Sonata’ was, according to the liner notes, written for author Paulo Coelho. All beautifully inventive and with the ‘tonality dial’ at just the level I like! Some of the vibraphone runs are just breathtaking – check it out 🙂

composers, lyrics and lines I especially admire, New Dublin Voices and other choral singing, togetherness, what I'm up to

Finlandia

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Up early this morning and off into St Ann’s to assist with the music. Charles is playing a ‘Fugue, Canzone, and Epilogue’ by German composer Sigfrid Karg-Elert. He played a bit of it for me yesterday and I’m looking forward to hearing it again. After the organ opening (in what *looks like* F# major…), there comes a part for violin and also female chorus. They sing the last line of the creed, “I believe in the life everlasting”. I’ll be turning pages.

I’m going to be having another crack at leading the congregation in a hymn, too: the mighty ‘Finlandia’ by Jean Sibelius. It’s a poignant hymn and its stoic words are very fitting for Remembrance Sunday. One of the most prominent features of St Ann’s is its memorial to those who died in The Great War – the names flank the altar. I often look at them as I sit up beside the organ console. One is a Wilson, one is a Dobbin (my step-father’s name).

The memorial in St Stephen’s church (which lost as many of its young men) is to the side of the church. Consider the painful discussions that must have gone on in churches all over these islands.

Be still, my soul…

New Dublin Voices and other choral singing, togetherness, what I'm up to

You must remember this…

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I’m in Spain with New Dublin Voices – we’re staying in a lovely town by the sea called Garautz, and the competition is taking place in a town about 45 mins south, Tolosa. It’s the first time I’ve visited Euskadia, ‘the Basque country’.

Two of the pieces we performed yesterday in the ‘folk’ competition were in the Basque language – one of them based on folk rhythms and which proved very tough to learn by heart. The music was easy enough, and it helped to have a strong ‘earworm’ to hang the words on.

It’s funny how memorization happens. Most of the task is repetition and using as many tricks as possible to come at it from different angles, because it’s obviously necessary to do most of the learning outside the precious rehearsal time. I found the input from other choir members really useful in the past few days. Not even ‘input’, more a shared concentration – literally going over the words beside someone else doing the same thing. Sharing little ways to link phrases in the memory. There’s something about the ‘hothouse’ environment of a competition that focuses everyone.
We’ve one more rehearsal now, for a gig tonight (the competition performances are over now…results tonight).

Addendum: we got 3rd prize! 1st was a choir from Ukraine, 2nd was a French choir. Next thing on the horizon, our concert in Christ Church Cathedral on the 18th.

forthcoming events, what I'm up to

Dublin today

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Things I saw walking from the end of the 31 bus route over to Aston Quay to get the 39a out to my piano students:

Poster and rehearsal photos on the wall of The Abbey Theatre for ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, directed by Neil Bartlett. I love the pics they put up – all around the outside of the building – actors are so dynamic! Hope to get along to see the production. The quote they’ve selected for the poster is “No civilised man regrets a pleasure”…

Next, just at the end of the road the Abbey is on (Marlborough Street), is the most prominent building project in the city at the moment, the New road bridge across the Liffey. It will eventually carry the long-awaited Luas track that will join up the Red and Green lines, but I’m hoping it might also allow an extension of the 31 from Howth over to the Southside…

Next, on O’Connell Bridge, stood a slightly sad looking man with some small, fanned-out business cards in his hand. I didn’t see what they were, nor did I stop.

At the end of the traffic island that runs down the bridge was a group of men with an expensive film camera. One of them had a clapper board that informed me they were shooting ‘The F Word’. I admit I looked around for Daniel Radcliffe, who’s in town filming it (and partying randomly with the victorious Dublin Minors team the other night, apparently). He was not to be seen: I suppose they were just shooting exteriors; establishing-shots and so on…

…and now I’m off to teach piano until I head out to Navan for the second night of Les Misérables in the Solstice Arts Centre.