“Dear choir,
I’d like you to come and sing in my new concert venue. It’s a sumptuously renovated barn and is the next big thing in the county. It’s going to be like Glyndebourne. I will enhance the programme with my internationally acclaimed harpischord playing…”
“Dear Mr Barn,
Delighted. Please find attached a copy of our booking form [...]
“Dear Quartet,
We’d like you to play for our wedding in two months’ time, at St Gerald’s church. Just the service - it’s a nuptial mass so should last about an hour. We’d like you to play as the guests arrive, as the bride walks in, while we’re signing the register, during communion and as we [...]
Well - more or less, anyway.
Twenty years ago today, I was in my second term as a sixth former at a minor provincial public school. I had discovered that there were two places in which I could hang out in my free time. There was the girls’ house, a civilised place which I associate with [...]
Some people make their living from music, other people have music as a hobby. I do both. I make my living by playing the viola and teaching viola & violin, and I’m an amateur singer. I sing in a small, amateur choir which is stuffed full of good musicians, some professional, some not. I find [...]
“Have you had any of those credit crunch brides yet?”, was the opening conversational gambit from a friend in the same line of business as me. I thought about that for a while, and considered the recent dealings with people who have wanted our string quartet recently. Well - there was the father of the [...]
I’m still laughing about yesterday’s gig.
This was a civil ceremony booked through one of the agencies that give us work. No specific requests for music had come through, and we just had the basic venue and time details, until our first violinist got the contract with the names and phone numbers on.
Then I got [...]
And… it’s the middle of the wedding season in the shires again, and the last couple of dos have each had an element of ‘who the heck are you?’ about them:
For wedding no 1, I had been phoned a week before by a violinist with whom I used to do irritatingly intense chamber music [...]
Two concerts recently with rather lovely sopranos.
1st one was with a really top name singer - the type you expect to have an entourage and demands - only of course, you discover that the lives of the top classical performers are scarily normal - probably not like the ‘classically trained’ (whatever the heck that means) [...]
It’s half term, and until the end of term I have far too much teaching on the go. It’s making me work a 6 day week most weeks, and is a terrible juggle when I have weekday concerts.
However - from the beginning of July I lose the v posh school that I started two [...]