Plenteousness within thy palaces

I've had a busy few days, but it's been fun. Dr Liz gets married on Saturday, and I've sorted out the mini-choir for the wedding, and I'm VERY excited about it. There are six of us, and I think we sound pretty amazing! We had a rehearsal on Sunday afternoon - the first time we've met as a group, and the only rehearsal before the day - and we all had a great time. I can't wait to see what Dr Liz thinks. Oh, and one of the things we're singing is an a cappella version of "I Was Glad", which no-one really thought would work - but it does! It sounded great in Claire's front room - I'm hoping it will be even more impressive in the church acoustic.

(We'd expected to end up giggling in "I Was Glad", but we didn't - the most amusing part of the rehearsal was actually one of the other songs, in which the sopranos have to sing a harmony part most of the way through, only getting the tune in the last two bars. The first time we tried it was HILARIOUS - they were very unsure of their parts, but when it got to the final two bars, they both eagerly sang as loudly as they possibly could. It's still making me smirk thinking about it - maybe you had to be there!)

I had fun last night because a friend bought me the 4-track iPhone app as an early birthday present, so I was experimenting. At first I was discouraged because it seemed as if it wouldn't work unless I had a microphone that would connect to the phone - I have several mics, but none that would connect, so that would have been no good. But it turns out that it works brilliantly with just the built-in mic on the phone itself. The only problem, if you're using the tracks for singing, is that you need to be able to hear the OTHER tracks you've already recorded while you're recording each new track, and the only way to do this is to plug in headphones, and even then it's really difficult to hear. So tuning can easily become an issue. (Keeping the beat is no problem, because there's a metronome that you can set up, and the clicking doesn't come out on the final recording.) It'd be fine if you were playing an instrument rather than singing, but unfortunately it'll be mainly singing I'll want to use it for. But it's still useful for rough recordings. (I'll make one for you and post it, so you can see what I mean.)

I enjoyed the last episode of Gareth Malone's community choir thing, in which he organised a festival which was attended by the entire population of the town, as far as I could see. What was particularly nice was that they actually showed a performance of a full song, with no interview clips in the middle and no commentary over the top of it. It's sad that this is a remarkable occurrence, but there you go! And as a nice postscript to the series, the choir begged Gareth to stay longer than he'd planned, and he agreed. (They have a website too.) There's a nice article by Norman Lebrecht about the series, and another one on the Radio 3 blog.

Tom Service at the Guardian has an interesting interview with Bernard Haitink.

ENO are looking for people to take part in Messiah - but not singers or instrumentalists!

Via J-Walk blog, the strangest thing I've seen in a while: Concert Hands: "a revolutionary product that allows you to play the piano in hours". *boggle*

During last week's Kingdom rehearsal, there was some discussion of a statue I'd never heard of, so I looked it up: the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (clearer picture here).

The Guardian brings to our attention the effect of changes in copyright law on session musicians.

The LA Phil website has a conducting game in which you can pretend you are Gustavo Dudamel. You can download it as a free app if you have an iPhone (you then conduct by waving the phone around!) - the non-phone game on the website is nowhere near as much fun, sadly.

The Manchester Camerata are doing a live synchronised concert with a group in Venice. Interesting idea. Hope it works a bit better than that time we sang in the Last Night of the Proms and we were supposed to be synchronised with the orchestra in the Albert Hall....

I'm fascinated by this: I mentioned to a friend yesterday that I was on my way to Gorton for a wedding rehearsal, and I was a bit taken aback when she immediately said "Gorton girls know all the words to songs by Chaka Khan"! Turns out this is a famous piece of graffiti that appears all over Manchester. I've never seen it myself, but I will be looking out for it from now on!

Talking of Manchester things, don't forget it's the Manchester Food and Drink Festival soon.

Did you know you can now borrow books from any library if you're a member of a different library? I like this idea. (I was in my local library today, actually, teaching my Silver Surfers class, and the librarian asked us to fill in a survey. One of the questions asked what effect my library use had had on my personal relationships, which seemed a bit of an odd thing to ask!)

I recently discovered the Rands in Repose blog, and I particularly like the article about book stalking and the one about people networking.

And finally - the always-wonderful Big Picture has some great photos of a recent dust storm in Australia. I don't think I saw this even mentioned on the news over here, but it looks like a big deal!