Vivat Libertas

I have a problem with musical imagery. Music is always playing in my head - so I put on more music to drown it out. I also get bored reasonably easily and keep looking for new music to listen to. I whacked on some early music - Renaissance and Baroque stuff - because I hadn't listened to it in a while and I genuinely like it. (Yes, I'm pretentious. Complexity is my thing and early music offers plenty of it.) I haven't done any choral singing since July, so hearing a cappella music was something of a shock - like being slapped in the face with colour. I forgot how much I missed it. Unless you're into certain types of music, you're unlikely to come across much a cappella music, or even care that much. I think people should care more. Firstly, a cappella music emphasises the voice far more than usual. When you sing a cappella, you have no instruments to help keep you in time or on pitch, or to "mask" your voice. You just have you, and maybe an audibl...

Dear friends: I apologise to you for having to put up with a diva like me. That is all. I am the only child of a music teacher who studied the interpretation of music in detail. At least, that's my excuse. I like different interpretations of pieces and have been known to listen to the same piece of music interpreted in four completely different ways. Only other music people seem to get this, particularly if I get into an argument with someone about how I prefer X conductor to interpret Y piece and they say actually Z was much better, and you won't be able to shut either of us up for the next hour... ...With this in mind, it's not exactly surprising that I like rearranging pieces too. (It's work, though, and I really don't have the time to spare to be working on full arrangements. Aaargh.) I suppose part of it is that I come from a very classical background, where technical skill in performing pieces other people have composed is paramount. One can think of W...

I think maths is beautiful. I've been saying this since I was in my teens and I don't think I'll stop until the day I stop being able to add one and one to make two. At the same time, I understand that a lot of people find maths very abstract and difficult to make sense of. (To me, maths is pretty much concrete, so I've had to actually put effort into understanding that other people don't see the world the same way.) I also think music is beautiful. I try my hardest to keep an open mind; I frequently fail, but hey, my music taste is now pretty eclectic. Or maybe just random, if you're feeling uncharitable. Over the summer, I had to write a vacation essay. Quite unsurprisingly, I chose to work on the physics of music. Slightly more surprisingly (at least to me), my friends all thought I was insane for working on something so boring. I don't blame them; the basic physics of a simple harmonic oscillator is important, but it's not exactly the most exc...

The other day I read a comment that really annoyed me about how normal people just can't get classical music, so classical musicians have a gift that they should share with the world. I am fully in support of the second part. I think art music might be complex, but it's amazingly fun to make and I want as many people as possible to have the chance to make that music. The first part? Not so much. I'm one of those "normal people" (well, not quite, but I'll come onto that later). I'm not a particularly talented musician, mostly because while I like music it doesn't have the same attraction for me that other subjects do. I got into music because of my amazing, gifted director John and because of practising a lot. That's all that happened. I don't have some sort of special classical music organ (pun unintended - sorry!) in my body. I'm an average schmo who trained a bit. I don't deserve to be elevated to an elite class. People who don...

I've had a lot of time over the past weeks - after finishing the semester (and nearly collapsing with exhaustion, which means I need to take it easy next semester) and flying south for the winter - just to think. It's been good; my brain was nearly frazzled through with physics. Considering that it's by and large frazzled anyway, this was not too great. I've been staying with my boyfriend, which is great because I get to relax, unwind and revise and not have my parents nag me (best of both worlds). Because he's an insomniac and I'm...well...not (my sleeping patterns are great if I can be bothered to get them right), I tend to wake up a bit earlier. I'm also a lazy arse owing to having overworked myself, so I just sort of...well...lie there and curl up and think. It's good for me to try untangling my mind. One of the things I managed to untangle was why I love music so much. Of course, lots of people like music, even to the point of saying it's th...

Since completing my Grade 8 in singing with an embarrassingly high mark (for me anyway), a lot of things have come my way. I've sung with a couple of choirs outside of school, been paid token amounts for my efforts (hey, money is money), and somehow weaselled my way into a choir of semi-professional real ale drinkers  musicians. And on top of that, I'm looking for paid choral work in Manchester - so if anyone needs a soprano, kindly drop me a line. (Seriously. I'm a student. It's a foregone conclusion that I'm broke - but fortunately surviving off more than just noodles and ramen because I know how to cook.) And  I want to continue and maybe do diplomas and such. Anyway, sometime in late August I went up to St Albans to sing with one of the choirs that my former music teacher helps run, which was pretty fun (if exhausting) and I met a lot of nice people...and we got asked, at more or less the last minute, to sing at a wedding. Now, I don't really mind doing ...

Salami, the best cat ever A lot of people say that music is their life. Well, I wouldn't go quite as far as that; while my life does consist of cool things, like music, experimental physics, my wonderful, loving boyfriend, and the best cat ever, it also consists of less cool things like chores and familial arguments. But I still love music - not in the sense that I get my panties wet over yet another manufactured idol with shitty hair, but...well... ...Let me tell you something about myself. My mother was a music teacher, pianist and chorister for years, and as a child I grew up with a piano in the house that I would plink and plonk at until I actually learned to play. I also grew up with one of those old record players in the same room as the piano, and I distinctly remember dancing around to an LP. My dad also loves music - OK, so his taste is crap and now mine is forever crap too, but the point is that both my parents got me to love music. It was always playing in the ...

Call me corny, but I really do like folk music. ...Right, now that I've been summarily pelted with corn, let me explain myself. Unless anyone reading this is a folk and protest music aficionado, or even has a passing interest (which I guess is very few of you), you probably think of folk music as someone strumming three out-of-tune chords and making a mockery of singing, while wailing about some lost woman or cow. Let me disabuse you of these illusions. Yes, there are some folk singers who can't sing or play - a terrible recording of bagpipe music comes to mind. But folk traditions are rich and the repertoire is varied, with much room for personal interpretation and improvisation. Some of my favourite folk songs aren't the ones you might hear bawled out a couple of painful times a year, but the ones that few people hear - ones about rakes in debt, or people leaving their loved ones, or sailors abandoning beautiful women, or cautionary tales about getting pregnant. Folk ...

Firstly, sorry for sporadic posting: school's started, I'm in sixth form now and therefore I'm back to long days and working my fat arse off during breaks, which I didn't do before, but AS levels (and a stray A level) are a fuckload of work and thus in order to not totally fail my subjects I do need to put more work in. I wasn't going to talk about that, though; I was going to talk about what I actually said  I was going to talk about - namely, classical music. For the pedants here, I don't mean the Classical period  of roughly 1750-1820, but Western art music (whether liturgical or secular) from about the 11th century onwards and continuing into the present time. The older I grow, the more disillusioned I become. I was raised in a tradition of classical music; my mother would pretty much always listen to Classic FM , a station I later grew old enough to detest, and then I started going to secondary school and joining a choir that basically chucked us in...

And I didn't even get a lousy T-shirt! Just joking. It was actually an awesome day - we (the Really Big Chorus ) rehearsed and sang bits of The Peacemakers by Karl Jenkins , then (eee!) went and recorded it, conducted by the man himself! The pieces we did are musically quite simple - not much range - but oh my god they're so slow  - it was like a breath-holding contest, because at points it's almost impossible to do it all without taking a breath. I'm not bad at breathing, but this took the cake! Still, rehearsing was fun and the chords were amazing . Singing is much harder work than it looks, by the way - loads of effort had to be put into the pieces. Initially I was nervous because I'm 15 (not 16 or 18) and wondered if I might be kicked out, but nobody commented on my age - in fact, there were a couple of girls who looked about my age or younger - and I was even complimented on my singing! These people came from all over the country (and I even saw one sopra...

...Basically, I've had it up to here with them. Let me raise my hand to show you. Now imagine that length extended up a couple of metres, through the ceiling and then through the roof of the building. That's how fed up I am with them. Not just with them personally, but with an industry which churns them out by the half-million while genuinely talented people are left out in the cold. I know I've said in the past that they should be left alone and that some do have genuine talent, but I've caught on (far too late, it seems) that while the individual acts will fade away, they'll always be replaced by more and more drones unless someone does something about it. And yes, some are actually fairly talented - if you define "talent" as "being halfway decent and/or being able to somewhat play an instrument". This in no way excuses them from churning out formulaic crap, as anyone with even half a music education could write and sing better music. Not...

...or, in other news, it's my birthday. I'm 15 today, if you didn't know, and this seems to be the only day where I've blogged on time. (I missed Christmas and New Year's, and now I feel selfish for remembering my birthday...never mind.) I didn't really expect much from today: my last two birthdays weren't any fun for various reasons, and I hate Tuesdays because of PE and Games. Bleh. But I was happily proven quite wrong, as people actually went out of their way to be nice to me today, which was a pretty good feeling, and some other good stuff happened too. Firstly, we finally got this year's issue of our school magazine, something I always look forward to: I know it sounds sad, but I like it because it gives me a chance to look back on the year before and what I've done. This time I contributed to it, so I was quite pleased with myself, and I got a good laugh out of seeing how much of a dork I looked in the photos. It reminded me of just how muc...