Concert photo

A photo of me and my fellow musos as we finish a performance at Wendy Jore's final Masters recital last Wednesday (that's me on the left, sitting at the harpsichord).

How to make yourself feel old...

...without even trying!

It's easy, especially if you are born in those dark days before 1980! Just walk through a university campus during orientation week. I made the mistake of doing that yesterday, on my way to the Baillieu Library to photocopy some esoteric harpsichord music. The place is crawling with eager new first year students, wide-eyed and full of enthusiasm for parties and pub crawls. Ten years ago that was me. Ten years! I am a whole decade older than them - a decade less enthusiastic and a decade more cynical...

but I don't feel any older or wiser, really.

Ground Elastic Sound

Oh, the heat! The last few days have been absolutely tropical here in Melbourne town. But somehow we have survived, mostly.

Last night I endured the un-airconditioned stuffy mugginess (but visual splendour) of the Forum Theatre to hear Ground Elastic Sound, a concert presented by Melbourne composers' collective Dead Horse Productions.

First of all I was very impressed with the audience they attracted. There must have been between 200 and 300 people there, which for a presentation of new compositions is very impressive for this city. Their marketing campaign was excellent, and I think struck the right balance between a street aesthetic and a more intellectual avant-garde feel. It certainly seemed to attract the punters.

I was expecting that there would be some works which I would really enjoy and others which I would think were crap, to put it bluntly. But I was very pleasantly surprised. All seven pieces in the program I found engaging and enjoyable.

I loved how the concert opened with a Biddy Connor's Ground Elastic Sound Fanfare played by clarinet, trumpet, trombone and baritone saxophone standing in the aisles in the audience, and making their way to the stage during the piece, joined in the middle by a tenor saxophone entering from side stage.

For some reason I remember really enjoying Wally Gunn's Eleven Fifty-Five, although now I can't really remember the specifics of the piece. There was some beautiful string writing, and a particularly poignant moment between a string trio, horn and clarinet.

Kate Neal's Semaphore also struck me with its timeless timbre, taking its inspiration from T.S. Elliott's poem The Rock:

In the beginning, God created the world. Waste and Void.
Waste and Void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep...

The poem was presented before the performance of the music, in a video projection of Kate's hand writing the poem on a piece of paper, which was much more personal and engaging than merely projecting the typed text onto the screen.

I think the highlight of the concert for me was David Chisholm's Ikebana, performed by both a live and a pre-recorded string quartet. I loved the driving momentum of this work, with the constant contrapuntal interplay of the 'virtual' quartet with the live musicians onstage. David describes this work as

almost a renovation of Baroque threads, a reupholstering, perhaps, of a threadbare couch utilising modern materials and instincts.

The musicians were superb - fully commited to the music and playing with a lot of focus and feeling on an almost unbearably hot and humid night. So kudos to them.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself through about 90 minutes of new music - which is more than I can say for some concerts of 'old' classical music that I have been to! Congratulations to Wally and the rest of the Dead Horse Productions gang, and I look forward to their next gig...

Revenge of the Dish Monster

Memo to self: it's best to attack the dish monster before the mould starts to grow!

Rain running

Yesterday afternoon, as I pulled on my running shoes, thunder rolled around the sky. A few minutes into my run, and little drops of rain started to fall. It was a lovely, light, steady rain, that cooled the air slightly, without making it cold. Smells of the earth and growing plants wafted in the air, and the most beautiful double rainbow I have ever seen filled the eastern sky.

I just had to stop running for a minute to take this photo with my phone.

Morning Routines

I slept in this morning. I kept pressing "snooze" on my alarm, and finally got up with only just enough time to sink down a cup of coffee, grab a bowl of cereal, throw on some clothes and jump in my car. I've had a headache all day and certainly haven't been my most focussed or productive self.

How you start the day certainly sets the tone for the day, and a pleasant, relaxed beginning makes for a much more pleasant day. We all know what happens when we get out of bed "on the wrong side" - when we start the day badly it can be very hard to turn it around.

So what is a good start to the day? I sat down and wrote my ideal morning routine:

• I would wake up at about 6am
• make myself a nice hot cup of herbal tea (somehow I miraculously no longer need my caffiene hit before I can do anything)
• write my morning pages
• do some yoga
• have breakfast, shower, etc
• make a fanstasic cup of coffee, and carry it into my warm, light-filled studio to settle down at my harpsichord for a long practice session.

This is not something I have yet managed to do (and I have to work on that music studio!), and currently I am a complete zombie in the mornings, but nevertheless it is something I intend to work towards.

Morning routines seem to be an important part of many successful people's lives. 17 out of 20 top executives that Jim Citrin spoke to woke up before 6am to exercise, check email, and start the day in a relaxed manner; 36 people on 43 Things want to develop a morning routine; and bloggers everywhere (here, here and here) are analysing how best to start the day.

What's your morning routine?

Image from Stock.xchng

Being yourself

I realised the other night what the phrase "just being yourself" actually means. This phrase used to frustrate me - as though I could be anyone else but myself! And when you're nervous before an interview or date, the last thing you want someone to say is "just be yourself". It doesn't seem very helpful or encouraging at a time when you're feeling vulnerable and unsure of yourself. Maybe you don't even like yourself much at that moment, or you don't really think you're that special. How can just being yourself possibly help?

The important part of that phrase is actually not "yourself", it's "be". It's not about who you are, it's how you are. The meaning resides in the concept of being. It is about turning off the external viewpoint, shutting down the critical observer's voice and just being.

So many times I catch myself looking over my shoulder, looking at myself, thinking "Why did I just say that? That sounds so stupid. Am I speaking too loudly? What are people thinking? Maybe I should have worn that other skirt today..." and so on.

It is only when I turn off this self-consciousness, and simply be me, looking out at the world with interest and wonder, and not looking back at myself in some kind of narcisistic self-feedback loop - it is only then that I am truly being myself.

Random acts of music

I saw a beautiful thing today.
Well, actually I heard it before I saw it.
On City Road, out the back of grey, humanless skyscrapers.
A waft of music on the air.
A burly security guard, in grey-blue pants and a shirt, a communication earpiece in his ear, huddled in the fire-escape,
Playing a mouthorgan.

The myth about beige cardigans

I am a musician. It makes sense for me to teach music, both financially and personally. Financially, I can earn almost twice as much per hour as I can doing most other things. Personally, it is good for me to be engaged with as much music as possible, and to "live" music. It is excellent to have to put my ideas about music into words, to find ways to explain musical concepts that I take for granted. And makes much more sense for me to earn my pennies doing something related to the career that I want to have.

So why have I been so reluctant to earn money by teaching? I realised the other day that I have a lot of resistance to the idea of being a "music teacher". Subconsciously I felt that music teachers are unattractive, lonely, boring people who wear beige cardigans (apologies to all music teachers for this terrible stereotype). I don't know why I had this image in my head, or where it came from. My music teachers have always been very vibrant and lovely people who would never go anywhere near beige!

Maybe I worry that I will become some kind of social outcast if I become a music teacher. Again, I don't know where all this baggage is coming from. Lots of very interesting, fascinating, friendly and sociable people teach in schools so what am I worried about? I'm not going to be some kind of gnome that hides in the music room and doesn't talk to anyone! And anyway, the purpose of working is to do just that - work. If friendships grow out of working relationships well so much the better, but that's not the purpose of working to earn a crust.

So I'm going to teach. I'm going to share the knowledge that I have gained in all the years of university and the life experience I have gained from, well, being alive. I want to inspire others and in turn open myself to inspiration and new inputs. I love music and it's time to share the love and blast any remotely beige ideas out the window!

Drops

I woke up to the beautiful sound of rain on my roof - rain that we haven't had since Christmas. There are big drops, little drips, pattering on the leaves and plants and drumming on the tin roof. I can almost feel the happiness of the plants, soaking it all up into their parched and yellowing stems.

I am reminded of the wonderful Score for a Hole in the Ground, which uses dripping water to create an incredible musical installation. I am completely in love with the concept of this piece - the gramaphone-like amplifier just sitting there in the woods, the way that people can just come across the piece unexpectedly, the fact that nature (the great creator?) is actually playing the piece now that it is out of human control.

I'm back

It's summer. It's hot. It's already 30 degrees, and only 7:30am. Yesterday in the city it was 40.8 degrees, and still Melbournians were buying their steaming hot lattes. I love the way this city is addicted to its coffee!

I feel as though I am just ready to start the year now. The last month or so has involved a lot of planning and soul-searching, and re-planning and dreaming. I am quite excited about the prospects for this year, although it is also very daunting.

It's funny how the idea of moving from one year to the next can be such a powerful motivator for taking stock of one's life and making decisions. Who doesn't make new year's resolutions of some kind or another? But in actual fact the difference between December 31 and January 1 is just that the earth has made one more turn - the importance of these dates is purely in our minds. Still, it's a good opportunity to plan and dream!

The Best Christmas Present

A few drops fell on Friday night, and yesterday afternoon, and then it rained all last night. The sound of heavy drops falling on my roof is something I haven't heard for what seems like months. The parched earth and thirsty trees are soaking it up. It is putting out the bushfires and bringing relief to all of us in this drought, and especially the people whose livelihood is directly dependant on the land. What better Christmas present could we have?


(Image from stock.xchng)

The true faces of our erstwhile leaders

Tanja Stark, you have made my day!
See more of her gothic genious at poligoths

via Sarsaparilla

Money and Study and Time

With a HECS debt that could easily serve as a deposit on a house, and that is going to take me years to pay off, I am very glad that my current course is not adding to it. In fact, I simply wouldn't be able to do it if I had to pay. As it is, I am struggling to work enough to pay my bills, while having time to devote to my music. This year I think the balance was tipped too far towards money-work and not enough towards study-work, and as a consequence I didn't gain the results that I would need to get a scholarship for next year, which would mean that I would be able to do less money-work and consequently achieve more with my music.

It is a chicken-and-egg scenario - it is hard to continually devote the time it takes to excel in anything without having any financial assistance, and the financial assistance is impossible to obtain without achieving results that require large investments of time and energy.

It hasn't always been like this, though: this article in today's Sunday Age reminds me that the baby-boomers who are now running the system, and making it harder and harder for current students, had the benefits of free education, affordable housing and stable employment prospects.

(Image from stock.xchng)

A Charn Sunset

The light from the setting sun was blood red on the trunks of the gum trees as I walked through Westerfolds Park this evening. The smoke from the bushfires is a feint haze in the air, but more than enough change the light to remind me of the old world of Charn, in C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew, a book that I hadn't thought about for years.

Low down and near the horizon hung a great, red sun, far bigger than our sun. Digory felt at once that it was also older than ours: a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon the world. To the left of the sun, and higher up, there was a single star, big and bright. Those were the only two things to be seen in the dark sky; they made a dismal group. And on the earth, in every direction, as far as the eye could reach, there spread a vast city in which there was no living thing to be seen. And all the temples, towers, palaces, pyramids, and bridges cast long, disastrous-looking shadows in the light of that whithered sun. Once a great river had flowed through the city, but the water had long since vanished, and it was now only a wide ditch of grey dust.

There are rivers and lakes in this country that are little more than dust, thanks to the drought, and with a Prime Minister who is gung-ho for nuclear power, is it so strange to think of a world being destroyed by "magic"?

Brian Eno lecture

A couple of weeks ago, while I was up during the night suffering biological payback (why is it always that the women suffer while men get off scott free?), I distracted myself from my discomfort by listening to this lecture by Brian Eno, as part of the BBC's Free Thinking series. Brian Eno is a fascinating chap, and an excellent speaker, and this lecture prompted me to continue my musings about time, particularly in relation to his Long Now project.

Existential crisis

Oh my! The bigger the project, the bigger existential downer afterwards!

The reason I haven't posted here for a long time is because I had my masters recital last night. This was one hour of music that I have been focussing on since February - it is as though the whole year's work was distilled into that one event. The focus was intense, to say the least.

I find it really hard to evaluate my performance. There were a lot of things I was very pleased with, and also quite a few moments I was distinctly not pleased with. But I realised a few days ago that I never really believed that I could actually get up there and do it, so the very fact that I did it is excellent!

I had it recorded, and it will be interesting to listen back to the recording, and see how it sounded from the outside. Often I find, when listening back to recorded performances, that mistakes and glitches that seemed massive from the perspective of the performer actually are barely noticable, while other things that I was hardly aware of at the time stick out like sore thumbs.

But it's all in the past now.

And I'm facing a sink full of unwashed dishes and a desk full of unpaid bills. Welcome back to normality!

Sparkling shiraz

Life is full of meetings and partings. Some last for a lifetime, some for only a few hours. The length of time does not reflect the significance of the encounter. A moment shared between two people. A memory held for life. A smile, a glance, a kiss. They won’t be forgotten. The heart holds more than photographs.

Is a bittersweet parting at the airport better than a messy domestic break up in a year’s time? Or is it the safe option?

(and by the way, Tasmania was beautiful)

Heading South

I'm off to Tasmania for a few days. I feel I may not be quite the same person when I return. I'll let you know...

Saturday morning in Eltham

The sun was shining, but it's not any more. The air is sweet, though, and I have my front door open. I am hibernating this weekend. Today is the first day for a month that I haven't had to drive into the city, and I plan to make the most of it.

I am listening to
and drinking organic orange juice, which is one of the best things eva :)

The plan for today is to practice, write, read, rest...

There is one phrase from a book I am reading which for some reason won't leave me alone: "every heart has secrets is dares not tell". I am not quite at peace with my life just now, there is a niggling feeling in my heart... but there's nothing I can do about it now, so it may just have to lie there for a while longer.