Just before Christmas

This will be my last post of 2014. I hope you all have a happy Christmas and festive break, and I send my best wishes for the New Year. Thanks for reading the blog this year.

During November I began making some videos which I hope will end up on youtube. They were clips of me playing guitar, including a couple of tracks from the Atlantic Canticles album I released in 2013, and a couple of Marc Bolan instrumentals. I hope to put those up in the New Year if I can sort out a couple of technical problems. I also wrote an entry on British guitarist Bert Weedon for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

I’ve recently revised some music I composed back in the spring: a second string quartet, a string sextet ‘On the Great Western’, and an arrangement of the sextet’s slow movement for a larger group of strings.

I recently read  Simon Reynolds’ Retromania which is a fascinating study of popular music and its own processes of recycling and remembering. It has many implications, some of which go beyond Reynolds’ main concern about whether popular music can ever again create a sense of the present as it once did. You will learn from this book how it is possible to be nostalgic for the future. A good read, and it may lead you to some new musical discoveries.

Listening-wise I’ve been enjoying Stackridge’s 1973 album The Man in the Bowler Hat. Stackridge were a minor British group who enjoyed some success as a live act on the college / university gig circuit in the early 70s playing charmingly eccentric songs which mixed late Beatles whimsicalness with touches of Betjeman, Noel Coward and the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. All very English. The album was produced by George Martin. It closes with a touching instrumental called ‘God Speed The Plough’.

On the classical front I’ve been delighted to make the acquaintance of William Walton’s Cello Concerto which has some wonderful mildly sinister lyricism. I’m generally not keen on concertos – their element of technical display doesn’t grab me – so I prefer the inetgration of musical voices in the symphony – but the Walton is just too good to resist. It is being performed in London on January 25 on a bill that also features Bax’s Tintagel tone-poem and Vaughan Williams’ own stairway to heaven, Symphony no.5. Three other CDs I can mention are Otto Klemperer’s version of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements (taken slightly slower than usual) on EMI Classics; a double CD on Chandos called Orchestral Pictures from Russia (Glazunov’s tone poem ‘Spring’ is a delight); and Nielsen Orchestral Works conducted by Rozhdesfvensky which gathers up some of the shorter pieces and arrangements.

So having tested my spellchecker to destruction with ‘Rozhdesfvensky’, I’ll quit while I’m ahead! Happy holidays.