Music
Ian Carpenter 40th birthday concert party!
Well it’s been over 6 months since this event, and a commentary on it, together with recordings from the concert, are long overdue. I shall hopefully do the commentary before the New Year, but the easy bit was posting the downloads, and I thought that deserved to be done before Christmas. So, here are the indvidual tracks or else you …
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The Royal Blackbird
As part of the assessment for my choral conducting diploma with ABCD I was tasked with arranging, typsetting and recording a folksong of my choice. I chose the Royal Blackbird (sometimes just known as The Blackbird) which is Irish in origin. The first stanza, which I set, is below and the full poem, with *a* version of the original melody …
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My piano duets, upsetting the council and BBC interview
First we played… (I wouldn’t bother watching all 2 mins of this!) Then we got moved on… Then we got interviewed about it on regional TV… Didn’t bank on all of that when I set off to play a few piano duets on College Green on Monday morning! If you want to find out about this fabulous project take a …
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Top five composers revisited
During the interval of the opening night of the proms last week, a friend got me thinking. If pressed for my favourite 5 composers, I can state them without hesitation, and they’ve been fairly consistent for a while now. Rachmaninov Poulenc Purcell Vaughan-Williams Mozart (in no particular order) If pushed, I could happily survive on a diet of those five …
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Music and creativity – an escape
In various talks and books, Ken Robinson speaks passionately of how Gillian Lynne, the famous ballerina, might nearly have been diagnosed with something like ADHD (had it been an “available condition” in the 1930s, he quips) was it not for one psychiatrist who saw what she really had: a talent and a desire to dance – one that just couldn’t …
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