Winds blow south and winds blow north

Been meaning to do a post for ages, but I seem to be still spending most of my time falling asleep, either on buses or at home! But never mind. House update, for those who have asked: I have accepted an offer on the house, although it's an extremely low one (£17000 below the valuation). But it's the only offer on the table, and since time is running out I didn't have much choice. It will still leave me considerably better off than if the repossession goes ahead. So the only things to worry about now are the survey (it shouldn't be any problem in theory, but you never know), the court costs of the repossession process (which I've been told could be up to £40000, but hopefully most of that will be removed if they don't actually have to repossess), and where to move to. There have been a few places that would have been ideal, but they've all been snapped up quickly, so there's no point in looking seriously until I know when I'll be definitely moving. But rental properties are coming and going all the time, so hopefully there'll be somewhere decent when I can actually do something about it.

Oh, and packing, but I'm having great trouble with that - there's so much of it! Several people have offered to come and help, but the problem is that I need to actually get RID of about half the contents of the house, and there's only me that can decide what to keep and what to throw out. Until I've done that, there's no point anyone else coming round to help. Maybe this weekend I'll make some progress, though - I'm feeling a BIT more motivated and less exhausted.

(As for work, I'm still doing the part-time 3.5-hours-travel-per-day temp job for the NHS in Oldham - the job that was supposed to be for 3 months starting last May - but it will definitely be ending at the start of March. Recently I did apply again for a job at the RNCM - the fourth time I've applied for this particular job in the past couple of years, and the seventh time I've applied to the college overall - but they obviously don't want me!)

Anyway, onto singing. After the usual madness of December, it feels as if there's been hardly any singing this year so far. I've been trying to get my band together for a rehearsal, but have totally failed so far - there isn't/hasn't been a single day in January or February on which everyone was available. So much for trying to record a couple of our newer Christmas songs while they were still ingrained! Not to worry - I'll try again in March.

As for choir, we've been mainly concentrating on Sea Drift by Delius (for which the concert is on 17th March), although this week we also started working on bits of Britten's Spring Symphony (14th May). I've done the Spring Symphony once before, although it was a very long time ago (it was in the Free Trade Hall, so it must have been about 1994/1995) and I don't remember much about it, other than that I obviously didn't like it enough to buy a recording of it. But I think it will be fun to do it again, and I can't wait to hear the children's choir doing their bits.

I've never done Sea Drift before, and when I first tried it I thought it was one of the weirdest pieces I'd ever sung. I actually did a bit of quick research to find out whether Delius was a bit insane. (Answer: not particularly, although he did suffer from syphilis for many years.) But it's definitely grown on me, and there are bits of it that have been stuck in my head for weeks. I'm looking forward to the performance.

Dr Liz came back from Australia last week! Great to see her again. And it feels like much longer ago than last June that we did the Spem in Alium surprise for her. (Those videos are doing quite well on YouTube - if you search for "spem in alium manchester" they're the top results (unsurprisingly!), and even if you just search for "spem in alium" they come up as featured videos (at least they do for me). If you haven't watched them yet, go and look!)

Talking of YouTube, two other videos I want to show you: a promotional video for the wonderful Bournemouth Male Voice Choir (which includes two of my arrangements!) and (thanks to Barbara) an amazing set of improvised piano variations on the Harry Potter theme. I wish I could do stuff like that. I defy you not to watch it with your mouth hanging open in awe.

One bit of singing I did do in early January was Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir, which I mentioned here a while back (and, more recently, I think an email went round to choir members telling them about it). Originally the deadline was the end of December, but he extended it due to people having snow-related problems. That was good, because I still had too much of a cough at the end of December to sing anything (and the earlier part of December was much too busy). So I actually recorded my bit the night before the deadline - not great (I still had a bit of a tickle in my throat and my breathing was even worse than usual) but at least I sang the correct notes, and I think I was in tune. I hope lots of you did it as well. Anyway, in the end he got 2051 videos from 58 different countries - not bad considering he was aiming for 900. (There are some interesting stats here. A few people sang all 8 parts!) Currently his team is busy mixing everything together, and the finished version will be released in April.

Eric Whitacre also caused a bit of controversy when it was thought that he'd said that British choirs are the best... but, as he explains, that's not actually quite what he said!

For the Wagner fans amongst you: tickets are on sale for the Manchester International Festival performance of Die Walküre (which sadly doesn't involve a chorus, I'm reliably informed), and there's a video on that page of Uncle Mark talking about Wagner.

A bit late for this to be topical, but it's still interesting: the Radio 3 blog describes the issues involved in recording the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's. But I still don't understand why the TV version is different to the radio version - can anyone explain? I can understand why they film the TV one separately, but not why they have different carols!

In the Guardian, Cecilia Bartoli explains the problems faced by mezzo-sopranos. (Try being an alto - there are even more!) Also in the Guardian, Tom Service tells us about a postcard that Elgar sent to Hans Richter in Manchester, and the recent Henley report on music education. He also provides a useful commentary on the Bachtrack performance league tables.

I bet this was a weird experience: via Intermezzo, news of a performance at Covent Garden in which they couldn't move the safety curtain, so the whole cast had to do their stuff on the narrow bit of stage in front of it, and the chorus sang from the stalls!

On an Overgrown Path points us towards a BBC story about a record club in which they have very strict (but reasonable) rules: no talking, no texting, and you have to listen to the whole album in one go.

Also from the BBC: help them with their research by taking the Musicality Test.

Leanne at The Chorister blog hates Bach, particularly the B minor mass! It's one of my favourite pieces, and I think Bach was a genius, but then I've never sung any of his stuff as a soprano...

Stephen Hough has a series of blog posts (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) discussing different types of recording sessions, in which he describes short patching sessions after live recordings as the most stressful thing he's ever done in his professional life. I must admit that when we've had to do these, I've been desperate to get home so I can rest, rather than particularly stressed, but I can imagine that it's probably a different matter for the soloists, conductor and producer. (The producer he mentions is the fabulous Andrew Keener, who's our regular producer too.)

Here's an interesting piece from the Guardian about the British habit of not caring about getting people's names wrong. It had never occurred to me before reading this that it was a mainly British thing, but I can certainly believe it. I've got used to having my name mispronounced or misspelt, but that doesn't mean it doesn't annoy me EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Also from the Guardian, a great story about a community that decided to protest about their local library being threatened with closure by taking all the books out. Brilliant!

Rands in Repose always does great articles, but I particularly like this one, which describes why it's important to get away from The Noise every so often.

I find that whenever I explain to a new group of my Silver Surfers (my current 12-week course is my tenth!) how internet traffic is conveyed between continents by cables under the sea, they're really surprised, as they'd always assumed (if they'd ever thought about it, which mostly they hadn't) that it went via satellite. So I was delighted that just after I told this to the current group, there was a news story about a cable finally making it to Cuba, which has the western hemisphere's lowest ratio of internet users.

As a temp, the vast majority of my working life over the past few years has been spent typing, and I certainly do lots of typing at home too... so I was a bit put out when a colleague informed me, a few months ago, that I was doing it wrong. If she'd been saying that my wrongness was because I type with only one hand, I would have probably agreed with her (even though I can type faster with one hand than many people can with two! I know it's wrong, but I've never learned properly - I just ended up doing it this way!) But her criticism was that I only use one space after a full stop and I should be using two. I tried to explain to her that the two-spaces rule was very, very outdated and didn't apply to wordprocessing, but she had been taught at secretarial college that two spaces were vital, and she would not be swayed. I wish this Slate article had been published before that argument - it might have convinced her! But I've definitely bookmarked it in case anyone tries to argue with me again about this :-)

Another thing that's worth bookmarking, for any of you who uses Twitter (or just reads it) and is a bit confused about hash tags. I was quite confident about what they were, until I tried to explain it to someone else! But this New Yorker article explains it quite well.

Also useful: Wikipedia's List of Common Misconceptions, and the National History Museum's Postcode Plants Database.

And finally, there was a total lunar eclipse just after I last posted here, but needless to say I didn't see any of it due to an overcast sky. But the Big Picture has some great photos of it.