I would love someone to make this possible. If you get the idea from me, I’ll be happy with a free copy and one percent of profits 🙂
I have an iPod touch, so if I want to use the maps feature I need to plan ahead because it can only get online via wifi. If I know where I’m going I can take a screenshot of the part of the map I need. If I’m planning on doing some exploring, using this method gets cumbersome. The maps app will also store a certain amount of info in its cache, but this is also not enough to rely on. Here’s what I need:
• the ability to choose a point (okay, easy…)
• the app will save map data
• the user can set radius from starting point and can choose high and low values for zoom
• when saved map is accessed offline, the iPod touch GPS will allow tracking of the user’s location
• street names would be searchable
• places, e.g. restaurants, would be a bonus but maybe just a user choice – don’t want to muddy core function
This is an app for walking about, not a routefinder. Tourists could use it, hillwalkers, anyone who wants to wander. In fact, there’s a name for it – ‘Ariadne’ – after the girl Theseus frees from the Minotaur’s lair. He ties a red string to the entrance and is able to find his way out by following it back – there’s the icon, a ball of red yarn.
My subscription to the New York Times crossword app expired today so, rather than furrowing my brow over that on the train today, I thought I’d use the time to blog. The NYT crossword is published every day – Monday is the easiest and they get more difficult each day until Sunday’s larger, themed puzzle. I can usually do Monday and Tuesday without help, but the later part of the week usually leads to a good deal of head-scratching on my part. Couldn’t recommend it highly enough. After all, who doesn’t like having their head scratched?!
So, if you enjoy crosswords and have an iSomething, go get the app. And when you get stuck, go and find Rex Parker – a terribly clever person whose blog about the crossword is what I turn to in times of extreme trichotilomania.
I found the big music shop in Sydney – Allan’s on Pitt Street. Downstairs: guitars, drums and such (I got three sets of Martin guitar strings for the price of two PLUS a very compressed t-shirt!). Upstairs is sheet music, orchestral instruments, keyboards, and…pianos.
There are pianos everywhere in Sydney – we saw one in David Jones, a big old-style department store, on our first day; there was one in the hotel where we had (amazing) High Tea on Julija’s birthday; there’s even one in the tattoo parlour we pass on our way home every day! Maybe it’s because I had to leave my lovely Nord at home and I’m just hallucinating. Allan’s is a real treat, though. I spotted the music, composed by Dario Marianelli, from Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice and asked if I could play through it. They kindly obliged (although they put me on an electric piano…I’ll hopefully work my way up to one of the grands with a bit of practice!) and I happily played through the book.
The main theme – ‘Dawn’ – is lovely, with its threes-against-twos, its chromatic urging, and its full, ruffly arpeggios, all culminating in a marvellously long, decorated trill. *sigh*
Before I left Ireland last week, I took part in a school project in Daingean, County Offaly. It was funded by the Arts Council’s ‘Percent for Art’ scheme, which allows schools that have completed a new building to apply for an artwork to commemorate it. Usually this is a piece of visual art or poetry, but on this occasion it was an hour-long musical work devised by Aingeala de Burca and performed by every single child in the school (191 in total, I believe).
The theme was Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll’s grandson, Charles Dodgson, is buried in the town) and my role was to set the children’s words to music and also to play in the final performance. Aingeala and I have worked together on a number of similar projects over the past few years, but always under the auspices of other organisations. This was particularly exciting, as it was the first time I’d worked with Aingeala on something of her own.
It was interesting, too, coming in towards the end of the process. On a bigger budget project it might have been possible to have me come in to the school with Aingeala to help write the lyrics, but my role was more defined and I got the lyrics fully formed and was charged with composing musical settings of them. The lyrics were very well put together and I only made a few, very small changes in a couple of places. I visited the school once I’d written the songs and had the wonderful experience of auditioning them for the lyricists. They loved them and I think it was a moment of great relief for the teachers, too, as they finally began to see how this was all going to come together. It’s quite a tall order to ask teachers to commit to rehearsing a show while it’s being written!
We had songs about Mike the hedgehog (the royal croquet ball), Heather the flamingo (the royal croquet mallet), decapitation, Alice’s lake of frustrated tears after the ‘eat me drink me’ debacle, and the Mad Hatter’s tea party. There was also a refrain that the whole school sang at intervals throughout the show and lots of other music from the younger classes that Aingeala had done. It was a really wonderful show and a great way to finish up my work schedule. The way we did it made me think that I could easily work on something like that from afar, too…
I am writing this from Sydney, Jen and I having transplanted ourselves for a year(-ish).
The flights were rather good. I was impressed at pretty much everything that they did for us: one of the by-products of being treated tricked like a Ryanair customer in recent years, I suppose. We flew with Etihad (the ‘h’ is pronounced, so I learned) and [sticks tongue out of side of mouth in concentration] I’ll just chop this bit out of Jen’s facebook post to tell you about that…
Anyhoo, the 7 hours flew – really, no pun intended, I just can’t think of another way to say it. When we landed in Abu Dhabi we got off the plane and into a sauna… Oh, I’m sorry, I meant walked to the airport!! 40 degrees (celsius) at 8:30pm? Crazy heat, we couldn’t believe it, especially considering we left Ireland during a heatwave of 18 degrees!
We only had an hour before boarding the next flight so we went straight to the gate and used the free wifi before the gate opened. Chatting to a nice Australian couple, who live in Bahrain, we learned that this 40 degrees was actually not even the hottest it gets – in the height of summer you can expect 50+ in the UAE. We were glad to be going to the “cold” Sydney winter, of 17 degrees.
The flight from Abu Dhabi to Sydney was 14 hours. As we trundled down the aisle to our seats, Jay wondered if he might ask he air steward if he could move to an emergency exit so he could stretch his legs but as we got to our designated seats, lo and behold, they were at an emergency exit door! The pure joy of that moment soon waned as we realised it was also the space for every Tom, Dick and overweight Harry to stretch in during the 14 hours – thank God for eyemasks!
…
Finally landed in Sydney at 6:30pm, local time (9:30am body clock!) and made our way through customs. On the plane we had to fill in a landing card, asking details about where we were staying, if we were carrying anything illegal in our bags. Thanks to Joanna, who made us watch ‘Border Control’ before we left Ireland, we were suitably paranoid about everything we were carrying, causing me to check ‘yes’ in the ‘carrying prohibited medicines, weapons of any kind or illicit drugs’ box as I had some Ibuprofen in my bag! (hey, they are restricted in Ireland!) The lady at the customs desk just laughed at me when I told her. Welcome to Australia.
Tad was there to greet us, in a winter coat (seriously, 17 degrees out!), and we got a taxi to Surry Hills. Couldn’t see much of the city as we drove through as it was already dark but, as Tad pointed out, it was similar enough to any other city that was only 200 years old – the road signs, layouts and crosswalks are very similar to what you’d see in the States.
Arriving at Tad and Julija’s house was surreal – the familiar paintings (all by Julija’s fair hand), furniture and books was a real treat for us, as it made us feel not too far from home.
We’ve done a bit of exploring – one day we walked down Elizabeth Street into town and to the breathtaking Sydney Opera House, yesterday we walked down Oxford Street to the Centennial Parkland. It’s nice not to have to cram our sightseeing in and to just take time to look around and notice things. I read Alain de Botton’s ‘The Art of Travel’ before we set off and was very impressed by the attractive picture that emerges of a person who travels. One of the characters he talks about is John Ruskin, who advocated drawing as a way of learning to see things, and I bought myself a sketch pad. We’ll see…
At the beginning of this year, NDV were recording some Christmas music for a proposed CD release. In between takes I wandered over to the upright piano in St Ann’s church and quietly played some chords – the first comprised two Bb triads in second inversion either side of middle-C, the second was formed by shifting the lower three notes to an Eb triad in first inversion. The effect was lovely to my ears and I expanded the idea a little before we left and then more when I got home.
I have almost entirely reworked the piece since the choir sang through the first draft in February. I listened to a recording of them singing through it and felt it needed to resonate more: it was too chordy, too blocky.
On Saturday – in the very church where it had its genesis – my finished piece, ‘Confession’, will be performed for the very first time…
On Saturday I was on Craig Doyle’s show, singing with James McMorrow. My fellow backing singers were Jill Deering and Peter Ryan and I did some tambourine, too. We sang a track from James’s album called ‘This Old Dark Machine’ and, unusually for telly, did it completely live and acoustic.
It was a great thrill to be part of the show. It’s recorded on Wednesdays and we were shown to a dressing room (with a nice big box of jelly beans to munch on), and had a lovely runner guy who took our dinner order and got us whatever we wanted. We were all too nice to ask for a while, but then I ventured a request for a Diet Coke (rock’n’roll, eh?). Doubtless the guys were summoning all sorts of debauchery after I left and they got a bit more bold 😉
Here’s the clip (the song starts at 03m13s…):
Thankfully the TV people taped our bit first, as I had to rush off to play piano for my girls choir at Loreto Senior Primary in Crumlin. They were doing their Spring show and I had two choirs to play for: the 88-strong group that had taken part in the Hallelujah Chorus project (massed school choirs get together each year to do a concert with a full orchestra), and the younger ‘school choir’. The 88 did an Abba medley and the school choir did two songs I’d been working on with them this term – ‘Colors Of The Wind’ from Pocahontas by the amazing Alan Menken (look him up and marvel at his body of work) and ‘The Peanut Vendor’, a Cuban song about a dude who sells peanuts. I got there with minutes to spare before I was meant to be on…I think the poor head teacher was a little emotionally frayed by the whole experience! Of course, I breeze in with not a bother on me 🙂
A few weeks ago I did a recording for one of my fellow tenors in New Dublin Voices, jazz pianist Stephen Kenny. He has formed a duo with a Finnish singer called Milla Mamia and they needed a demo so they could advertise. I used my Zoom H4 recorder in my kitchen to make the recordings. Firstly, Milla and Stephen did the song and I took a direct stereo output from my Nord Stage piano. Then, I was able to have Milla listen back to that piano track through headphones and sing into the Zoom’s built-in stereo microphones. I then did some editing to do in Audacity, the final stage of which was adding reverb to Milla’s voice.
One of the songs they recorded was ‘The Rainbow Connection’ by Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher. This song was pipped for a Grammy in 1979, the year Kermit the Frog sang it in The Muppet Movie. It’s been covered by many people since then (check out the list on Wikipedia’s entry for the song) but I couldn’t find one I liked as much as Milla & Stephen’s. Actual tears!
Kermit is, of course, the benchmark 🙂 I love the attention to detail – the way his hand moves on the chord changes and he strums the correct pattern. Genius puppetry.
The rules were that the piece had to be for SATB with a small amount of divisi permitted. The text also had to be Irish, preferably. I found a great poem by James Joyce (whose poetry I didn’t know at all) called ‘I Hear An Army’ and fell in love with it, despite being warned that permission to use Joyce’s work is hard to get. I actually still haven’t heard back from the copyright holder…fingers crossed. I think it comes out of copyright in six years anyway, by which time I *might* be happy with the piece! My composition professor in university, Nigel Osborne, encouraged me to use comtemporary poets’ work but there is something to be said for not having to worry about copyright. Assuming the publisher/poet is nice, though, it’s still nothing to be put off by, really. You’ll probably have to pay a bit to use the text and write emails and talk to people, but that helps one feel like a proper composer. Which is half the battle.
John Adams also has a few things to say about composition workshops on his (also beautifully designed) site…
I’ll say more about this in another post…
Two videos to finish. I have to return some instruments that I borrowed for some ‘Introduction to Musical Instruments’ sessions I did the other day for some lovely kids in Chapelizod. I brought along my piano (“…but you said it was a keyboard…” “Yes, yes, you’re right, it *is* a keyboard. It sounds like a piano, though, doesn’t it?” “Sort of…”), guitar, clarinet, drum, shaker, some violins, some chime bars, some lovely bass chime bars and we had a marvellous time playing all those and talking about them and all the other, far more interesting things that they thought of that second. Kids are great 🙂
First video is of Conor O’Brien (whose band, Villagers, are about to release their debut album) singing on Jools Holland. I think he’s a very very good performer and songwriter. I saw him play a solo set last summer and I was hooked. Enjoy 🙂
Second video is of the lovely Kristin Chenoweth singing ‘The Girl in 14G’. I was rehearsing this song with Suzanne McDonnell for her recital on Tuesday week. Fun piece and another great performance. Quick gripe: the recital may have to be in the afternoon, not the evening as it has been in previous years. Why? Because of the work-to-rule that the unionised university employees are following. It means that family and friends don’t get to come and the students play to an empty hall. Brilliant.
I accompanied Suzanne McDonnell today at her mid-term performance exam at Dundalk IT. She did really well and I was happy that we did a good set. She opened with a solo piece by Morton Feldman called ‘Only’ and then I joined her for the rest: Antonio Carlos Jobim’s ‘Chovendo na roseira’, Erykah Badu’s ‘Green Eyes’, and a bluesy original called ‘Play Me’.
The three other students who did their exams today all did great pieces. First up was Cathal Johnston, a trad. harmonica player, who did one of my favourite tunes, O’Carolan’s ‘Sà Bheag, Sà Mhór’, amongst others. Another soprano, Siobhain Murphy, did Sondheim’s ‘Green Finch and Linnet Bird’ – Johanna’s song about captivity from Sweeney Todd – and three of Britten’s ‘Cabaret Songs’ (all settings of Britten’s friend W.H. Auden): ‘Oh tell me the truth about love’, ‘Funeral Blues’, and ‘Johnny’. Finally Mark Nutley did Edward Gregson’s Tuba Concerto which I really enjoyed. A great gig!
I’ve been working on choral pieces which I’ll do a seperate blog post about. My friend Jonny Boyle let me know about an SATB carol competition being judged by Bob Chilcott and James Macmillan. Macmillan is one of my absolute favourite composers, so it would be a real thrill to have him judge something I’d written. The search is on for a Christmas/winter text…
Wind turbine at Dundalk IT - taken with Hipstamatic iPhone app
jay wilson :: music 