Behind the curtain...

Playlist
Mozart – Complete Works (Preludes & Fugues/Oboe & Bassoon Works)
Wetton Downes – Icon II Rubicon
Grand Funk – Phoenix
Various – Music from US Teen Programmes
Various – The Wire Tapper 16
Ursa Major - Ursa Major
Barclay James Harvest – The Harvest Years
Be Bop Deluxe – Modern Music
David Sylvian – The Good Son vs The Only Daughter
Françoise Hardy – Parentheses
John Coltrane – My Favourite Things
Models – Local and/or General
The Frost – Rock’n’Roll Music
The Frost – Frost Music

After not retiring last night till gone 2:30, I slept in till 9:40 (Anne slept till well after 11)...

I considered driving into town to get us day tickets for tonight’s Handel opera but decided against...

I start the day with Mozart – the boxed set of 170 CDs I bought this week is turning out to be tremendous stuff...

Found a great wee site written by someone sort of like me....

On his recommendation, I’m actively considering some space saving measures by trying something like these – but what a huge job it would be...

Surfed the net till Anne got up then tidied up the back room where around three weeks worth of debris was just lying around...

Today I downloaded some more albums. A great find was the only album by Ursa Major, one of Dick Wagner (Alice Cooper guitarist 73-78)’s bands...

Rockin’....

Also finally got round to listening to the latest free CD from The Wire. As usual it’s a hit and miss affair. I just don’t know how anyone can find some of that stuff to be of any value at all. But then that’s the great thing about music (see below)....

Other downloads today are Be Bop Deluxe’s album “Modern Music” and the latest from Françoise Hardy which isn’t released till Monday according to Amazon...

Be Bop Deluxe’s is one I’ve seen around for nearly 30 years but never heard, other than the singles – it’s a superb album – and Françoise is back at her best on her new CD which is a collection of duets – more laid back than her last album “Tant les Belles Choses” which is also worth seeking out – it was my album of the month back in April 2005 although it was released in 2004...

As Anne wauched "Strictly Come Dancing" I burned some recent sownloads to disc - with David Sylvian, not content with uploading it in mono, my source had also put the first two tracks up at the wrong pitch - so I had to sort that out before burning...

Then, while Anne checked out her Hearts websites (a disappointing 2-2 draw away to my hometown team, St Mirren today while QoS achieved a good away draw 1-1 at Partick Thistle) I went to get our lottery tickets (two numbers so no win and I wasted £1 by inadvertently buying two identical tickets for tonight’s draw rather than one each for tonight and Wednesday) and our Indian takeaway (much better than our now abandoned-for-gloopiness takeaway – from the restaurant at the bottom of the road – around £5 more expensive but worth it)...

Then I watched “Robin Hood”, taped while I was away...

Then a quite excellent programme, third in a series of four, the first two of which I completely missed – “Howard Goodall’s How Music Works”...

Tonight’s episode, entitle “Harmony”, demonstrated to me just how it is that there are two ways of listening to music – you either hear it and react to what you hear or you listen to it and understand the composer’s intent in order to “get it” – because, often with more complex or atonal music such as much of jazz or 20th Century classical music, it can be very unpleasant on the ears and it’s about much more than “what you hear” – you need to understand what’s going on to appreciate it...

With “untrained” “pop/rock” music composers, I think it’s more often than not a matter of putting things together which “sound good” or “sound right” and they really don’t know what they’re doing, while a musicologist can explain why the piece in question is so attractive or what rule or other the composer has accidentally stumbled upon while merely playing their instruments...

Of course, that sounds patronising in the extreme and I fully concede there are many music scholars who make it into the “pop/rock” world and know exactly what they’re doing.....

Although I am probably more in the “sounds good/right” category rather than the “classical/jazz (and some pop) composer-who-has-studied-and-knows-and-understands-what’s-really-going-on” category, I do understand how things work...

But it was so good to have it all set out so succinctly in this programme – like a look behind the curtain or a Penn & Teller explanation of a magic trick....

I had around an hour back at the PC between this and “Match of the Day” and was listening to John Coltrane’s “My Favourite Things”, as featured in the programme, when a comment on yesterday’s entry led me to seek out some early 80’s Australian music on YouTube...

I was pointed by the correspondent to the band Hunters and Collectors which, in turn, led me to Models (sometimes called The Models) and two great tracks, “Two Cabs to the Toucan” and “Local and/or General”...

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get anything off Limewire – I may have to bite the bullet and return to e-bay – where I’ve not bought anything for nearly a month – the last thing being a purchase from a dodgy Russian which has yet to arrive...

I was too tired to watch the whole of “Match of the Day” and went to bed around 11:30 listening to Dick Wagner’s “Ursa Major” but couldn’t sleep due to a coughing fit. Not wanting to waken Anne I went through to the back room....

In the old days I could’ve spent the night in the spare bed but, in the big re-decoration of this summer, I threw it away in favour of a bed-settee which is a bit difficult to construct in silence, so I ended up sleeping on the floor while listening to two more Wagner discs, The Frost’s “Rock’n’Roll Music” and “Frost Music”..

Woke up around three feeling very uncomfortable and made my way back to bed...

Until the very end of today, I managed without any painkillers...

Highlight of the Day : How Music Works...