Tag: music

A Louder Recorder

I spent today at Bunkfest, playing recorder for Aldbrickham Clog & Step Dancers. I was (somewhat unexpectedly) the only musician, a position I’m going to find myself in more often next season. Originally I played tenor recorder, but quickly discovered it was just too low to be audible out of doors. I switched to descant, as you can see, but it’s still a challenge to be heard above half a dozen clog dancers, ambient noise from an audience and in this afternoon’s case, a Punch & Judy show and a helicopter!

After that particular performance a lady came over to me and asked whether I’d ever played a Renaissance-style recorder. I said I hadn’t, so she handed me one of these. I hadn’t been aware that Renaissance recorders have a much wider bore, which makes them much louder – and therefore ideal for playing out of doors. Perfect! I’d already been thinking about going to the Early Music Festival, but now I’m definitely going to go and try out some Renaissance recorders. So thank you very much to a lovely lady with a bag full of covetable recorders, for her extremely helpful advice.

As well as meeting some lovely people, we also saw some fabulous performances. The Outside Capering Crew had been recommended to us as a must-see, and we did manage to catch the tail end of one of their sets. The highlight of the day for us was watching their performance with Berkshire Bedlam, collectively known as The Big Caper. If you think you know what Morris Dancing looks like, go and see these dancers – they’ll blow you away. We also loved Wild Hunt – visually stunning with black tatters and masks, they also had no traditional musical accompaniment, only drums, which made them very dramatic to watch.

We had an absolutely brilliant day, and I’m now inspired to venture up into the loft and try to unearth some of my old recorder music. If I’m going to treat myself to a new recorder, I’m going to need plenty of music to play!

Shaharazad

This is a little picture of “Shaharazad”, a mechanical organ owned by Boz Oram.

Today we went to Crofton Beam Engines with the Aldbrickham Clog & Step Dancers, to dance at their end of season gala. There were some vintage cars, a few different steam engines and this mechanical organ. (And the enormous beam engines, of course.)

It was very loud, but we stood and listened to it for ages, and I eventually plucked up the courage to be a little bit cheeky and ask Boz if I could have a look inside.

Oh my goodness, it was AWESOME.

Boz showed me all the cards of music, and how they fed through, and explained how he makes them (he makes them himself!) and I was gutted to have to run away after only a few minutes because it was time for me to play the recorder again.

It was absolutely mesmerising to watch the wheel turning and the holes in the cards slowly moving along – I was surprised how quickly I could read the holes, and understand what the music was going to do next.

When I run away and join the circus, I’m definitely going to have a mechanical organ. (And some earplugs. Very loud!)

I had an absolutely fabulous day. Apparently I’m even more of an Industrial Revolution nerd than I’d thought.

Common Concertina, Third Class.

Wheatstone English Concertina

Did I mention that I was buying an antique concertina on Ebay?

Well, I did, and I’ve been learning to play it for about three weeks.

It’s a Wheatstone 48-Key English System concertina with hexagonal wooden case. Its serial number is 18270. According to the Wheatstone ledgers the concertina was one of four sold to a person named Wilkie on the 31st of July 1867. It’s described as “Common (3rd) Class”.

It’s a tutor model, which is why the names of the notes are stamped into the ends of the keys. The black and white keys correspond to the piano (which I don’t play, so that’s no help!) and the red ones are all C. I’d guess that the fact that four identical tutor concertinas were sold together means that they were destined for a school.

It’s much less fancy than the one I’ve been borrowing, and has smaller bellows. This makes it much lighter to hold, which is great, but there’s less resistance from the bellows which makes it a bit harder to play. (You need to push harder to make a decent sound.) I think there’s also a small leak in the bellows, at the right hand end, which will need fixing eventually. But it’s more than playable for now, as long as I don’t push it too hard.

I was a bit worried when I opened the box, because it absolutely reeked of cigarette smoke. Lots of old concertinas were played in pubs, and the smoke gets into the bellows so it’s pretty much impossible to get rid of the horrible musty pub smell. Thankfully the smell was confined to the box and the bubble wrap, and the concertina just smells old. Which it should do, having been made in 1867!

The box is lined with purple velvet, and was tied with a brown ribbon. Inside, the concertina was wrapped in a silk scarf, so I could lift it out without pulling on the bellows. It’s a very snug fit, so I’ll probably buy a modern carrying case.

The steel reeds make a pleasant sound – not too loud and brassy – and I’m really enjoying learning to play on such a lovely instrument.

Gypsy Music

I was walking past a music shop on my way home from work today, so I popped in and asked whether they had any books that might help me with learning to play the concertina. They didn’t, but I spotted this tucked away amongst the violin music.

I promise I didn’t only buy it for the beautiful artwork on the cover. (Just mostly.) It’s by Rima Staines, whose blog I follow and whose artwork I adore.

To be honest, I think this book was a bit of a rash and ambitious purchase. I’ve only been learning the concertina for a week, and here I’m looking at pieces in 11/16, in very peculiar keys, and with notes that may not even exist on the concertina. Talk about throwing yourself in at the deep end.

The book also comes with a CD, which I am currently transferring to my iPod so that I can listen to the tunes on my bus ride to work. Hopefully I’ll be able to sneak the music into my head, so that when it comes to getting it past my fingers and out through the concertina it’ll be a tiny bit easier than it looks on paper.

In and out and in and out and in and out and in…

accordion

This is a Wheatstone English Concertina. It belongs to my friend David, who has very kindly allowed me to borrow it. I’m not entirely certain, but I think it’s about a hundred and twenty years old. It makes a lovely sound, and I can’t wait to learn how to play it.

I’ve had a couple of hours’ practice so far – this started going more successfully when I stopped reading forums telling you how to play the concertina, and just started pressing the buttons. Funny, that.

I tried to start with scales, just going up and down the C major scale, to learn where all the buttons are. That very quickly gave me brainache, and isn’t often how you play an instrument in practical use, so I dug out the few pieces of clog music that we play in C (so as not to have to worry about accidentals) and got stuck in.

It’s hard work trying to look at the fingering chart and read the music and find the right buttons and squidge the bellows all at the same time, but I’m slowly getting it. Once your brain’s got the hang of the fact that the notes that sit on the stave are on the left hand and the notes that sit in the gaps are on the right, it becomes fairly intuitive to work out where the next interval should be. Kind of.

So, I can now play the notes for three tunes (Donkey Riding, Click Go the Shears and White Cockade), in the right order, but not at the right speed or in the right rhythm. And with a few extra wrong notes thrown in for good measure. This could take a while!

I had a particularly stressful day at work today, so when I got home I immediately grabbed the concertina and headed out to the Shed. I’m having to limit my practicing to an hour at a time, otherwise my thumbs and wrists start to get a bit painful, so I figure it’s better to build up gently. But today I’m better than I was yesterday, and tomorrow I hope I’ll be a little bit better again.

I can’t wait to be able to do justice to this beautiful little instrument.

Birdies at the Barbican

Hopefully you can all see this embedded video of the finches at the Barbican in London – an installation by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. We went on a little trip yesterday evening, and had an absolutely magical time watching and listening to a room full of little birds and musical instruments.

The video is of a previous incarnation of this installation, so the environment isn’t quite the same. The floor at the Barbican is wooden decking, with little islands cut out of it which are filled with sand and grass-type plants. The guitars and cymbals are mounted in these islands. The rest of the room is white, and there are roosting boxes high up on the walls so that the birds can hide away if they want to.

The sound at the Barbican isn’t quite as dramatic or as loud as it is in the video – unless the birds were just in a particularly quiet mood yesterday. The speakers are mounted well away from the individual instruments, so it’s quite hard to tell exactly where the sound is coming from. This makes the experience slightly more surreal, and presumably helps the birds not to be terrified that they’ve just made a bass guitar go CLANG.

The birds do fly free, so if you’re nervous about that it might be a bit stressful.

But you can get really close to the finches, and pay real attention to them as they go about their birdy business. I stopped noticing the sounds after a little while, but it’s really interesting how the noises that the birds make blends in really well to the constant little feedback sounds of them landing on the guitars or the microphone cables. Every now and then there would be a flurry of activity on a cymbal or a guitar, but for me the excitement and magic of the room was getting to see the birds up close and personal, interacting with one another. The whole room was filled with quiet, respectful, smiling people. You could see that everyone was dying to get really close to the birds, but everybody kept their distance – and if you got too close, the finches would simply fly away. At one point a finch sat on a man’s foot, and he looked as though he might explode with joy whilst standing extremely still.

Paul spent ages watching and listening to one little finch that liked to sit on the cable of a microphone that was attached underneath a cymbal. His little feet made scratchy pickup sounds as he shuffled back and forth. The cymbals were really lovely to listen to. They were mounted upside down, and two were filled with seed and another with water. As the birds pecked at the cymbals to eat the seed, there was a beautifully gentle ringing sound, like the softest gong.

I spent ages watching one little finch that had fallen asleep on the neck of a guitar. He looked so comfortable, perched on the strings! His eyes were shut tight, and he was gently rocking back and forth as he slept. Bless. There were also a pair of birds that had made a nest on another guitar. They were making a lot of noise as they rearranged all the strands of grass to their satisfaction. They were also quite defensive, and would sing loudly at anyone who came too close.

The Curve Gallery at the Barbican is open from 11am-8pm every day, and until 10pm on Thurdsays. We went at about 6:30pm, which turned out to be ideal. We only had to queue for about five minutes (sometimes the wait is up to three-quarters of an hour), and we spent around an hour inside. They only allow 25 people inside the exhibition at a time, so it never feels crowded. Entry is free, and sadly you’re not allowed to take photographs inside.

I only wish I lived close enough to go back again and again.