It must ever be that we dwell in our dreaming, and our singing, a little apart...

Just a few links I need to share...

You must read this extremely interesting review of the final concert of the Chester Summer Music Festival. I think you'll feel pleased and proud :-)

In slightly less good musical news, the On An Overgrown Path blog tells us about a really alarming idea called Proms Idol, and the Guardian tells us of ENO's plans for an interactive version of Carmen.

And finally, in non-musical news, Harry Potter fans will find these two interviews with J.K. Rowling VERY interesting: Harry Potter: The Final Chapter and Wild about Harry. Needless to say they are very full of spoilers for book 7! But if you're a fan and you haven't seen this news, you will be excited to discover stuff like what the original last line was (you know how she said for years the last word of the last book would be 'scar' and changed her mind at the last minute?) and lots of information that she could have included in the epilogue and didn't. Also which character she meant to kill and reprieved, and which characters she didn't mean to kill but did! EDIT: And there's even more news in today's interview, and yet more in this webchat. Thanks, as ever, to The Leaky Cauldron for all these updates.

And some very exciting news for Buffy fans (I know there are others apart from me!), who don't expect to get new news these days, seeing as the series ended in 2003... it looks as if Joss Whedon is going to make the long-rumoured Ripper film, which tells the story of Giles before he met Buffy. Whee!

Back to musical news next time, I promise :-)

Save the cheerleader, save the world

I have a T shirt with this phrase on, which some people have asked me about. But soon everyone will know what it means, for tonight Heroes finally arrives on BBC2! It's on at 9 pm, repeated tomorrow (Thu) at 11.20 pm, and again on Sunday at 10.55 pm. It's also featured on the front of this week's Radio Times. I suspect I may have begged you all to watch it when it was on the Sc-Fi Channel, but if you didn't, now's your chance. It's the best TV in years, and my favourite thing since Buffy finished. Don't miss out!

That's my main reason for posting today, but while I'm here I may as well clear a few more links I've been saving. In no particular order....

I had no idea that the Manchester Jazz Festival was on, until I wandered through St Ann's Square yesterday and discovered a fabulous band playing, who turned out to be Tango Siempre. I'll definitely be buying their CD if I ever get a job. (I do have an interview in a couple of weeks for a job I'd really like, so there is finally hope!)

I am now on my second reading of the last Harry Potter book, and I have now seen the most recent film 3 times (no, I can't afford it, but luckily friends insisted on paying for me, because on each occasion they had no-one else to go with). I managed to avoid almost all spoilers beforehand, by staying away from most of the internet. However, those who have read all the books may be interested in the information in this interview, which reveals some minor additional details and some exciting future news from JKR.

I hope you all managed to catch at least some of the Manchester International Festival. I didn't see as much as I would have liked, due to lack of cash, but Alison and I did go to see the Monkey opera, and thoroughly enjoyed it. If you ever get the chance to see it live, do (I'm not sure where it's going, but I think it was due to go to Paris at some point later this year, if it's not already there) - there were things in it that, if I hadn't seen them with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed possible. (Here's a very interesting interview with Damon Albarn about the musical side of it.

Midomi is a website that lets you identify music just by singing it into your computer. In my experience such things usually don't work too well, but this one does! The only restriction is that it can only identify music that's already been added to its database. So it didn't recognise the first few things I tried, but when I checked, they weren't in the database. When I sang something that was in the database, it identified it immediately. I assume it will work better and better as more songs are added. If you're bored, you can add some yourself :-)

I forgot to mention that when I updated my online choir schedule, I noticed two things I hadn't previously known, so maybe others didn't know them either. Both are about the Verdi Requiem gigs - firstly, Mikhail Petrenko (one of our favourite basses) is the bass soloist. And secondly, the London gig is billed as a Royal Gala Performance. Exciting! (Oh, and tickets will be available from the Barbican box office - they don't seem to be on sale yet, though.)

Some guy at Manchester University wants to create an internet choir. (Thanks to ChoralBlog for both this story and the Midomi one.)

Those who remember Kent Nagano (fondly or otherwise - personally I thought he was fabulous) may be interested in this article about his time in Montreal. I like the idea of him gazing down from billboards and bus stops!

And, finally... if you know the song "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia, yet didn't see the Secret Policeman's Ball last December, you will be very amused indeed by this version of it. I saw it at the time, but was reminded of it again recently, and it wasn't till then that it occurred to me to look it up on YouTube.

Meet Edie!

Edie is Rachel's brand-new daughter, born on 5th July. I met her for the first time yesterday, when Claire and Alison and I popped round during the lunch break of the choir course. Isn't she lovely?

I'm sure I'm not the only one who still feels totally exhausted after the weekend, and I haven't even had to go to work today! It was good, though. Those who couldn't be there missed a lot of stuff, including: Maggie repeating her "Surfing USA" warmup; Maggie leading us in a great version of Abba's "Thank you for the music"; Paul's guinea pig impression; David's face when he arrived on Saturday morning to find Maggie demonstrating the Funky Gibbon exercise with Paul's help; the meaning of the word overdight (no, I didn't know either, I looked it up on my phone because I was curious. So, those who were impressed when the question was asked and I knew the answer - don't be!); Dimitri helping us to perfect our Russian pronunciation (my favourite was when he said "I hear a mixture of sh and sh"...); various group games designed to help people improve their rhythmic skills; lots of brain-twisting activities with chords and Kodaly method hand signals; and of course lots of singing!

All the pieces we did were great, and I hope we do them again. Well, I know we're doing Komm Jesu Komm again at the memorial concert in September, and one of the Vespers (no. 8, the one with the Aida bit) in the carol concerts. (The altos and basses have the tune in Vespers 8, and it was only when the sops and tenors sat down - so that we could be seen - that I noticed exactly how many more 1st altos there were than 2nd! There were almost three times as many!) We did perform everything at the end of the course, and we got an impressive audience of friends and family - about 30-40 people turned up, and they seemed to enjoy it. We warmed up in front of them, which we hadn't been warned about, but we lost all shame years ago :-) We also did the thing where we all sing any note, and then move until we make a chord as if by magic. (I'm always amazed when that works!) That was followed by a demonstration of the "choral chord progression" thing, which I love doing - except that on this occasion it took a while to get going. I think that that's because we were told that our starting chord was Db major, yet I'm fairly sure it was nothing of the sort.

(I was very pleased that such a lot of time this weekend was spent on the choral chords and the Kodaly method stuff, because both of these techniques are invaluable for my method of sight reading. In fact, I thought of a couple more things to add to what I wrote, so I plan to edit it slightly and then turn it into a downloadable or emailable (or printable) document, because I've had quite a few requests for that - although they've all been people from different choirs!)

Two things to finish. Firstly, my online choir schedule now has all the new season stuff on it (and football clashes). It's not Googleable (try and see, if you don't believe me), so you won't be able to find it unless you know the address. Choir members, email me if you want it. I promise it will be kept up to date (as it always has been).

And finally, for those who were curious about Marvin Suggs - here's his Muppaphone!

Will it EVER stop raining?

Well, of the 17 songs that my ex-boss asked me to find for his last ever assembly, he only used 6 of them! This might have been annoying, but I was expecting it - him asking me to produce music that he didn't subsequently use was a weekly feature during the 10 years I worked for him, so it was kind of endearing. Anyway, the school has now closed forever. I spent most of the afternoon in floods of tears - so did most of the rest of the staff (plus many of the kids), to be fair, but I left a year ago and I thought I got all my crying done at the time! It's hard to explain what a special place that school was, though, to anyone who didn't experience it.

To take my mind off it, the first session of the intensive choir weekend was tonight. We didn't sing through all the music, but we did a fair bit of it. Tonight we did O Clap Your Hands (in which the 1st altos go down to a bottom E flat and the 2nd altos are nowhere near as low! What's that about?), one of the Rachmaninov Vespers (the first one), and Faire is the Heaven. It was all very lovely, particularly the yummy chords and key changes in Faire is the Heaven. As usual I felt that the 2nd altos (only 6 of us tonight! Quality rather than quantity, as we always say...) won the sight reading contest, although the rest of the choir did much better than they usually do. Anyone who wants some hints, see my sight reading instructions that I wrote earlier this year :-)

Only one more thing to add: Rachmaninov had big hands!

Just when you thought I'd gone...

... here are some mp3s for your delectation :-)

Faire is the Heaven (Harris)
O Clap Your Hands (Gibbons)
Komm Jesu Komm (Bach) - part 1
Komm Jesu Komm (Bach) - part 2
Komm Jesu Komm (Bach) - part 3
Komm Jesu Komm (Bach) - part 4
Vespers (Rachmaninov) - no. 1
Vespers (Rachmaninov) - no. 3
Vespers (Rachmaninov) - no. 7
Vespers (Rachmaninov) - no. 8

I've spent the last hour or so doing a favour for my ex-boss, which involved (as so many of my favours for him do!) finding a load of songs for him. I always used to do this for his weekly assemblies, but tomorrow the school closes down forever, so it's his last ever assembly. It'll be an emotional occasion. And one of the few benefits of being still unable to get a job is that at least I can attend :-)

Anyway, while faffing around with mp3s, I realised that I hadn't got round to putting mp3s online of this weekend's music, and I had meant to. So, here you are.

(As a matter of fact, I spent an hour this afternoon doing something else (not online) that hopefully lots of people in the choir will find helpful this weekend. I'll be interested to see how many of them notice!)

Thanks again for all the comments and emails in response to my last post. They are much appreciated. As for the future of this blog, I'll make a decision after the weekend. Hopefully I'll be able to keep it going in some form, although it will be necessarily different to how it has been in the past. We'll see.