All posts by Jay

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

Bournville music

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Last night was the first of a four-Thursday residency in The Purty Loft by Hamlet Sweeney & The Handsome Strangers (of which I am Handsome Stranger No. 1 ;-)).  On the way out to the venue in Dun Laoghaire we stopped into a garage and I picked up a box of Cadbury’s Heroes – miniature versions of popular Cadbury’s chocolate bars – for half price.  This competition product to Mars’ ‘Celebrations’ contains Bournville and the addition of the dark chocolate brings the Heroes collection up a level in my estimation.  It brings a maturity and gravitas to the box, like the plain licorice or ‘the bobbly ones’ in Licorice Allsorts…or the coffee Revels.

Cadbury's Bournville
Cadbury's Bournville

I was just giving a guitar lesson – working on Regina Spektor’s lovely songs ‘Samson’ and ‘The Call’.  ‘Samson’ is a beautiful, wistful piano ballad that offers a fresh perspective on the familiar bible story and it was interesting to figure out how to play it on guitar.

‘The Call’ was a different challenge again, it being scored for orchestra.  It actually works well with slightly unconventional Bb (6x056x)/ Eb (x6506x) chords I like the sound of.  The F chord, when it arrives, is scored strongly and, though I would often cheat on F, the way it’s used in this song means that the full barre chord is best.  It strikes me that the F barre chord is possibly the meatiest chord on the acoustic guitar: it requires the most physical strength to play properly and so has a pent up power that’s not as present in its jangly neighbouring chord of E.

Before she left, my student told me to go and look up a duo called ‘First Aid Kit’ singing a cover of Fleet Foxes’ ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song’.  Great harmonies – what @hamletsweeney would call ‘kitchen table harmonies’.

I was going to try and link the dark chocolate to the melancholy streak in the best songs and art.  The link is that I was eating mainly Bournville as I listened to the beguiling First Aid Kit girls, Hamlet and the others having scoffed most of the other varieties!

links, New Dublin Voices and other choral singing

Videos from Budapest

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I posted up the videos of New Dublin Voices in Budapest.  We won the chamber choir competition singing this programme:

  • Salve Regina – György Orbán
  • Ecco mormorar l’onde – Monteverdi
  • Bagairt na Marbh – Michael Holohan
  • Lullaby (from Four Shakespeare Songs) – Jaakko Mäntyjärvi
  • Double, Double Toil and Trouble (from Four Shakespeare Songs) – Jaakko Mäntyjärvi

Much to our surprise and delight we went on to win the Grand Prix the following day singing these pieces:

beautiful minds, forthcoming events

The first time ever I heard you sing

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I’m looking forward to playing The Stables in Mullingar on Friday with Hamlet Sweeney.  We’ve played there a couple of times and it was there that I first heard Audrey Ryan.  This time we’re supporting ‘Villagers‘, who I first heard in the distilled form of village chief, Conor J. O’Brien, performing solo at the launch of the Purty Loft a couple of weeks ago.  I was also introduced to the music of Andrew Bird yesterday.  This is a radio slot he did on Californian station KCRW’s ‘Morning Becomes Eclectic’ show (thanks to Gail for this and, indeed, for introducing me to Mr Bird).

There’s something wonderful about hearing somebody for the first time and them drawing you in with whatever it is.  It’ll be different after that, but the first time everything is new.  The lyrics may be the aspect that delights you, some turn of phrase that makes you laugh or catches you off guard with its honesty.  It may be the music, some charming riff or perhaps an instrument or combination of instruments that sounds beautifully fresh on your ear.  Whatever it is, it hooks you and beguiles you and crowns your day.

What a perfectly marvellous thing this music can be 🙂

forthcoming events, what I'm up to

Hamlet and I singing ‘Sunshine’ on Balcony TV

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Hamlet Sweeney and I climbed the stairs to the auspicious Balcony TV studio a little while ago.  Thankfully I didn’t have to lug the keyboard with me, just the cajon.  We played ‘Sunshine’ which, after the gig in Whelan’s the other night (30 April) with the full band, is fast becoming one of my favourite Hamlet songs.

click to go to Hamlet's MySpace page
click to go to Hamlet's MySpace page

We’re starting a four-week residency in the Purty Loft on the 14 May (not the 15th, as Hamlet says in the video).  Come along!

links, reviews and reports

Anderson & Roe piano duo

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I found The Anderson & Roe Piano Duo on YouTube yesterday.  Graduates from Julliard, these two have done some really fantastic work reimagining works such as Strauss’s The Blue Danube waltzes, Astor Piazzolla’s Libertango and John Williams’ Star Wars music to delight those who hear and see them.

The playing is flawless, but what really fizzes is the video work.  I haven’t played many piano duets, but it’s really quite an intimate experience.  Since they spend so much time alone there, I’m sure most pianists feel like the keyboard is theirs alone when they sit in front of the eighty-eight keys and so sharing the space with someone else is quite a charged environment.  One can only speculate as to the amount of piano duet music written for pretty students by admiring teachers!  (Greg) Anderson and (Elizabeth Joy) Roe’s videos allow the viewer access to the physical element of piano duetting and they use the medium to explore the narrative suggested by the music they play.  The most recent video, of Mozart’s Sonata in D for two pianos, is very well judged and uses various methods to sustain our visual interest, my favourite being the pianists’ hand reflections mirrored in a beautiful editing trick.

Of course Anderson & Roe are not writing music for the drawing room, but for 2000-seater concert halls, and so they purposefully rewrite the music to tangle themselves together.  It must take them so long to rehearse!  They claim not to do it for the ‘rock’-style, but some of their acrobatics are just plain dangerous (one false move and delicate pinky collides with sweeping elbow…ouch…piano career scuppered).  That’s what makes it such good viewing!  We love that stuff, right?  I personally could take less of their yearning, passionate moments.  Yeah, we love Eric Clapton’s/John Mayer’s guitar faces but for some reason that’s allowed in a way that some of this pair’s antics just aren’t.  IMHO.  (Which, when you think about it, should really be rendered imho, for extra humility…)

Enjoy 🙂

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

singing in harmony

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I was determined to start back strongly after the Easter break with the girls choir I conduct.  I’ve been experimenting with seating arrangements for the forty or fifty of them that turn up every week(!).  For a while there I arranged them in a circle to try and eliminate the talking in the back row phenomenon.  It sort of worked and certainly loosened things up a bit; I could walk around the circle and encourage sound production where necessary.

The sixth years have their conformation coming up – quite a big deal, I realised when the teacher produced the book of music they’d be singing.  I arranged them in as few rows as possible length-ways in the room where we rehearse and did a good hour’s work with them.  Starting with standing up (a huge challenge for some of them!), breathing and warm-ups – explaining why all these things were important – we progressed to the simple canonic Agnus Dei that was in the book.  The good thing about this music is that they all pretty much know it already.  Of course, that can also be a bad thing…we got into a discussion about what humility is (“…it’s like when you invite someone into your house…”) as I got them to think about how to sing the words.  The last note in the phrase is a semibreve on the word ‘us’, so we also had to think about where to place the ‘s’.

In contrast, we also worked on the refrain of the Gloria.  This had an optional harmony and, buoyed by our good work to this point, I forged ahead…  We sang the melody all together, then I taught them all the harmony line.  By alternating tune and harmony a few times we were eventually able to split into the two parts.  A great achievement for them – can’t wait for next week!

composers

Battles

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My brother-in-law, Dan, recommended that I listen to Battles a few months ago after he saw them do a gig in Dublin.  I just found some great photos from the gig on my friend Steve Ryan’s site.

Battles drummer, John Stanier
Battles drummer, John Stanier, photographed by Steve Ryan

Excellent music that is layered with interesting and infectious sounds and beats (and a fantastic loooong rallentando!).

beautiful minds

Flash, focus, record

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Waiting for the water to heat so I can finish the washing-up this morning, I just came across Nicholas Bate’s ‘The Rules of Life‘ e-book on Eclecticity.  (I also just read John Althouse Cohen’s ’15 rules of blogging for myself’, where he cautions fellow bloggers to write thoughtfully.)

Maxims and advice abound on the vast internet and selectivity is the name of the game.  To indulge myself in the metaphor of my title: there are lots of flashes going off, attracting our attention, but it’s up to us to focus and record the things that can be classed as either ‘important’, ‘investing’, or ‘interesting’.

Something I noticed about ‘The Rules of Life’ is that Bate encourages his readers to take a moment each day to mull over the truths he presents so they begin to sink in.  As much as we want to behave like machines and file things away, bookmark them, post links to them, we don’t work that way and my nice metaphor doesn’t really transfer to a human being’s brain.  We need to read, to re-read, to question, to think, to sleep on it, to talk about it.  Machines we most certainly are not.

photo by Jean-noël Lafargue (2005); used under terms of the Free Art Licence http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/