Charles Valentin Alkan

I bet you haven't heard of this composer. Neither had I until this morning. But he is an eye-opener - or should I say ear-opener. He was a neighbour of Chopin and contemporary of Chopin and Liszt. Have a listen. His organ music should be interesting. He composed funeral music for a dead parrot 100 years before Monty Python! He sadly died pinned to the ground by a falling umbrella stand.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00k121z

Latin saying

I heard a Latin saying on the radio this morning: Solvitur ambulando, meaning "It is solved by walking".

Coast to Coast on BBC4 starts next Thursday

BBC4 are starting a new series following the success of the Wainwright Walks. Julia Bradbury is walking Wainwright's Coast to Coast Walk (ref http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jqp0m). The first episode of six starts next Thursday at 8.30pm. You must see it - or, better still, walk it!

Haydn: The Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross

St Mary's Church Choir and Cadence are performing Haydn's The Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross at 6pm on Palm Sunday evening, 5 April at St Mary's Church, Thornbury.

Letters to Myself

Listened to an interesting programme on BBC radio 4 "Letters to Myself" this afternoon based on letters written by people to themselves sometime in the future. Some of them were from this website: http://www.futureme.org.

Choir jokes

Guide to the SATB Choir

In any chorus, there are four voice parts: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. Sometimes these are divided into first and second within each part, prompting endless jokes about first and second basses. There are also various other parts such as baritone, countertenor, contralto, mezzo soprano, etc., but these are mostly used by people who are either soloists, or belong to some excessively hotshot classical a cappella group (this applies especially to countertenors), or are trying to make excuses for not really fitting into any of the regular voice parts, so we will ignore them for now.

Each voice part sings in a different range, and each one has a very different personality. You may ask, "Why should singing different notes make people act differently?", and indeed this is a mysterious question and has not been adequately studied, especially since scientists who study musicians tend to be musicians themselves and have all the peculiar complexes that go with being tenors, french horn players, timpanists, or whatever. However, this is beside the point; the fact remains that the four voice parts can be easily distinguished, and I will now explain how.

THE SOPRANOS are the ones who sing the highest, and because of this they think they rule the world. They have longer hair, fancier jewelry, and swishier skirts than anyone else, and they consider themselves insulted if they are not allowed to go at least to a high F in every movement of any given piece. When they reach the high notes, they hold them for at least half again as long as the composer and/or conductor requires, and then complain that their throats are killing them and that the composer and conductor are sadists. Sopranos have varied attitudes toward the other sections of the chorus, though they consider all of them inferior. Altos are to sopranos rather like second violins to first violins - nice to harmonize with, but not really necessary. All sopranos have a secret feeling that the altos could drop out and the piece would sound essentially the same, and they don't understand why anybody would sing in that range in the first place - it's so boring. Tenors, on the other hand, can be very nice to have around; besides their flirtation possibilities (it is a well-known fact that sopranos never flirt with basses), sopranos like to sing duets with tenors because all the tenors are doing is working very hard to sing in a low-to-medium soprano range, while the sopranos are up there in the stratosphere showing off. To sopranos, basses are the scum of the earth - they sing too damn loud, are useless to tune to because they're down in that low, low range - and there has to be something wrong with anyone who sings in the F clef, anyway.

THE ALTOS are the salt of the earth - in their opinion, at least. Altos are unassuming people, who would wear jeans to concerts if they were allowed to. Altos are in a unique position in the chorus in that they are unable to complain about having to sing either very high or very low, and they know that all the other sections think their parts are pitifully easy. But the altos know otherwise. They know that while the sopranos are screeching away on a high A, they are being forced to sing elaborate passages full of sharps and flats and tricks of rhythm, and nobody is noticing because the sopranos are singing too loud (and the basses usually are too). Altos get a deep, secret pleasure out of conspiring together to tune the sopranos flat. Altos have an innate distrust of tenors, because the tenors sing in almost the same range and think they sound better. They like the basses, and enjoy singing duets with them - the basses just sound like a rumble anyway, and it's the only time the altos can really be heard. Altos' other complaint is that there are always too many of them and so they never get to sing really loud.

THE TENORS are spoiled. That's all there is to it. For one thing, there are never enough of them, and choir directors would rather sell their souls than let a halfway decent tenor quit, while they're always ready to unload a few altos at half price. And then, for some reason, the few tenors there are are always really good - it's one of those annoying facts of life.. So it's no wonder that tenors always get swollen heads - after all, who else can make sopranos swoon? The one thing that can make tenors insecure is the accusation (usually by the basses) that anyone singing that high couldn't possibly be a real man.. In their usual perverse fashion, the tenors never acknowledge this, but just complain louder about the composer being a sadist and making them sing so damn high. Tenors have a love-hate relationship with the conductor, too, because the conductor is always telling them to sing louder because there are so few of them. No conductor in recorded history has ever asked for less tenor in a forte passage. Tenors feel threatened in some way by all the other sections - the sopranos because they can hit those incredibly high notes; the altos because they have no trouble singing the notes the tenors kill themselves for; and the basses because, although they can't sing anything above an E, they sing it loud enough to drown the tenors out. Of course, the tenors would rather die than admit any of this. It is a little-known fact that tenors move their eyebrows more than anyone else while singing.

THE BASSES sing the lowest of anybody. This basically explains everything. They are stolid, dependable people, and have more facial hair than anybody else. The basses feel perpetually unappreciated, but they have a deep conviction that they are actually the most important part (a view endorsed by musicologists, but certainly not by sopranos or tenors), despite the fact that they have the most boring part of anybody and often sing the same note (or in endless fifths) for an entire page. They compensate for this by singing as loudly as they can get away with - most basses are tuba players at heart. Basses are the only section that can regularly complain about how low their part is, and they make horrible faces when trying to hit very low notes. Basses are charitable people, but their charity does not extend so far as tenors, whom they consider effete poseurs. Basses hate tuning the tenors more than almost anything else. Basses like altos - except when they have duets and the altos get the good part. As for the sopranos, they are simply in an alternate universe which the basses don't understand at all. They can't imagine why anybody would ever want to sing that high and sound that bad when they make mistakes. When a bass makes a mistake, the other three parts will cover him, and he can continue on his merry way, knowing that sometime, somehow, he will end up at the root of the chord.

---

Top Ten Reasons for Being a Soprano

1. The rest of the choir exists just to make you look good.

2. You can entertain your friends by breaking their wineglasses.

3. Can you name an opera where an alto got the man?

4. When sopranos want to sing in the shower, they know the tune.

5. It’s not like you are ever going to sing the alto part by accident.

6. Great costumes - like the hat with the horns on it.

7. How many world famous altos can you name?

8. When the fat lady sings, she’s usually singing soprano.

9. When you get tired of singing the tune, you can sing the descant.

10. You can sing along with Michael Jackson.

---

Top Ten Reasons for Being a Alto

1. You get really good at singing E flat.

2. You get to sing the same note for 12 consecutive measures.

3. You don’t really need to warm up to sing 12 consecutive bars of E-flat.

4. If the choir really stinks, it’s unlikely the altos will be blamed.

5. You have lots of time to chat during soprano solos.

6. You get to pretend that you are better than the sopranos, because everybody knows that women only sing soprano so they don’t have to learn to read music.

7. You can sometimes find part time work singing tenor.

8. Altos get all the great intervals.

9. When the sopranos are holding some outrageously high note at the end of a song, the altos always get the last words.

10. When the altos miss a note, nobody gets hurt.

---

Top Ten Reasons for Being a Tenor

1. Tenors get high - without drugs.

2. Name a musical where the bass got the girl.

3. You can show the sopranos how it SHOULD be sung.

4. Did you ever hear of anyone paying $1000 for a ticket to see ‘The Three Basses?’

5. Who needs brains when you’ve got resonance?

6. Tenors never have to waste time looking through the self-improvement section of the bookstore.

7. You get to sing along with John Denver singing "Aye Calypso."

8. When you get really good at falsetto, you can make tons of money doing voice-overs for cartoon characters.

9. Gregorian chant was practically invented for tenors. Nobody invented a genre for basses.

10. You can entertain your friends by impersonating Julia Child.

---

Top Ten Reasons for Being a Bass

1. You don’t have to tighten your shorts to reach your note.

2. You don’t have to worry about a woman stealing your job.

3. Or a preadolescent boy stealing your job.

4. Action heroes are always basses. That is - if they ever sang, they would sing bass.

5. You get great memorable lyrics like bop, bop, bop, bop.

6. If the singing job doesn’t work out, there’s always broadcasting.

7. You never need to learn to read the treble clef.

8. If you get a cold, so what.

9. For fun, you can sing at the bottom of your range and fool people into thinking there’s an earthquake.

10. If you belch while you’re singing, the audience just thinks it is part of the score.

Aelfwig's Stone

Could this be Aelfwig's Stone from which the name Alveston was derived? Grid reference: ST 624 875 at Lower Hazel.


I am pleased to see this track opened up just below the stone - could be ancient.

Fry's English Delight

Listened to this programme about cliches this afternoon: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00d5cd8 on radio 4. Entertaining and interesting. Do you know the derivation of "Sick as a Parrot" or "the Dog's B*ll*cks"?

Rory Bremner

I am a great fan of Rory Bremner because of the way he combines humour, impressions and political satire. You can see his blog here: http://en.wordpress.com/tag/rory-bremner/

I have just found this videoclip I have not seen before.

Evernote

I've just discovered Evernote. This looks jolly useful. I'm going to try it out - and it's free (unless you want to upgrade).

Masonry paint

I cannot recommend this Leyland Truguard Pliolite based masonry paint highly enough:

It fills in small surface cracks, keeps its colour and lasts several years in the wettest of weather conditions. It is available at Johnstone's Leyland Decorating Centres, see here:

Not only that, but I ordered some more yesterday afternoon from the Bristol (St Phillips) Decorating Centre and it was delivered free of charge this morning at 9am (Christmas Eve)!

Berghaus advert

Worth a look! http://www.berghaus.com/ourworld/LeoAndAnnikenBaseJump.aspx

Cadence & Continuo in Provence

Had a lovely week in Provence. We were based in Avignon and visited a lot of places. More details can be found on the Cadence page of my website. Within 20 minutes of posting my YouTube video of the Roman arena at Nimes, a frenchman corrected me. It was at Arles not Nimes!

Robert Peston

If you are interested in the current goings on in the financial world, BBC's Robert Peston is a key reporter and his blog can be found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/.

Cotswold Way

At last, I completed the Cotswold Way last Friday.

Here is the last leg:
Cotswold Way Old Sodbury to Bath at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail:GPS Geotagging

I have put a page on my website about the Cotswold Way, see here.

Hear Here! Beat the Clock

Test your classical music knowledge here! Warning: it is addictive!

Ospreys in South Lakeland

Are there ospreys in South Lakeland? They have been reported there in the Beacon Fell log book and also in the Westmorland Gazette. I reckon I saw one on my last visit to the Lake District around Beacon Fell.

Radio 4 For One Night Only - The Prom of Peace

Quite ironic that this was on the radio today with Russia in Georgia - and even more ironic at the time when a Russian soloist and orchestra were playing Czech music during the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia (as it was then) in 1968.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/foronenightonly/pip/aj66v/

More Czech music at the Proms tonight and next Thursday.

Can Maths be fun?

Try this fun quiz from BBC Radio 4: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7558000/7558786.stm

Don't look now!

Found on http://www.livefortheoutdoors.com/

Extreme Cellists

I've heard it all now - on BBC radio 4's 6 o'clock news tonight in fact: http://www.extreme-cello.com/ - four peaks challenge!

Vodafone 1615

I thought I would put a few of my experiences down for my future reference and maybe it will be of some help to others.

I wanted to upgrade my phone and PDA to a single unit which could browse the internet, send and receive e-mails, take photos (ideally geotagged), have an inbuilt GPS for Google Maps, TomTom, Anquet, etc, have normal PDA functionality with notes, calendar and contacts, and of course make phone calls! Not a lot to ask. Oh, a sliding keyboard would be nice as well. But I also wanted to stay with the Vodafone network as it gives me the best coverage where I live and also in the Lake District.

So off I went to the Vodafone shop in the Mall one day and put the question to them. They hadn't heard of geotagging, but they recommended the Vodafone 1615 which is the HTC TyTN II, which had TomTom installed so I guessed it had a GPS. However, they hadn't got one in to show me. So I went to PC World and found a Vodafone salesman and he agreed that the Vodafone 1615 fitted the bill. They had got one in and I signed up for one there and then.

There is a long story which I won't go into about how I switched telephone numbers so I could use my old mobile number of the new phone. Anyway, that was successful eventually and I needed to switch the SIM cards over.

That was several weeks ago now and I have been having fun ever since trying to see how to use different sofware. People might be interested in each of them and the problems I have been having and in most cases the solutions.

Windows Mobile
I found that Windows Mobile 6.1 is now available from Vodafone (see here). I am always keen to upgrade software wherever possible as the latest software is usually an improvement - better functionality and fewer bugs. You need to back up the whole of the contents of the phone's memory (not the card) or be sure you can recover the contents by synchronizing from your PC Outlook, files and programs, etc. This can be a pain but is not a bad idea from time to time as it gives you an opportunity of throwing out files or programs you don't use or need. The only problem I have had with the new version is that the GPS Photo function was turned off. I found that you can turn it back on by hacking into the registry using Mobile Registry Editor and changing a value. See here.

ActiveSync
The latest version is 4.5 and it still has problems with large amounts of data. I have had a problem with certain error codes when synchronizing. I have a large number of contacts, e-mail folders and calendar entries. I think the problem was down to the e-mail folders. (Typing in the error code got a number of threads. These were not complimentary to activesync and WM6, but seemed to point to e-mail synching.) I have disabled synchronizing e-mails as I can get e-mail directly from the phone. However, I had to reduce the folders and re-establish a new connection before it worked properly. I have since increased the number of folders with no problem.

Anquet
Pocket Anquet now works properly on my machine. I have been in e-mail correspondence with them to solve some problems. Even though this is a phone, I needed to load the PocketPC version of Anquet. I have managed to get the GPS to talk to Anquet and obtain a GPS position and tracklogs by using GpsGate (see below). The tracklogs can be uploaded to Anquet on a PC, saved as a .gpx file and uploaded to EveryTrail.

Google Maps
This is a relevation. I can see where I am using Google map and satellite views. It would be good if this had a tracklogging facility.

GPS
Anquet suggested that I needed something like Franson GpsGate so that multiple applications could use the GPS data. I have installed this. It has the additional functionality of creating an NMEA logging file on the phone (and even on a website, so that your movements can be tracked by someone else - sounds useful for trekking!). Also, an NMEA file can be read by EveryTrail.

Geotagging
This is also a relevation. With the GPS Photo option, you can add information to a picture which records where it was taken. If you upload the photos to Flickr, for example, Flickr (limit 100Mb per month) can show the pictures on a map (a Yahoo map) exactly where they were taken. You can load them directly to EveryTrail as well and show them on your tracks. Picasa can also show photos on a map (limit 1Gb), but this time it is a Google map, which is much better, but it doesn't seem to be automatic - you've got to place them by hand - and they can't be imported to EveryTrail.)

Here is my first tracklog with photos on Everytrail using the phone: http://www.everytrail.com/view_trip.php?trip_id=28616. My wish is that Anquet will be able to do the same thing on an OS map using their new MARS system when it has been launched.

Microsoft Money
Microsoft do not support a Pocket PC version which can be synchronized with old versions of Money. Shame on them! So the only way I have found to do it is using Ultrasoft Money. I am trying this out on trial and it looks as though it does the same as Pocket Money.

TomTom Navigator
This program comes free with the phone. However, you can only get one free map (in my case I downloaded Bath which includes the Bristol area). Anywhere else you have to pay for.

Media
ActiveSync 4.5 assumes you want to sync Media files. This takes a very long time and requires a lot of space. Unless you want to use your phone as an mp3 player or view videos, I would disable this and only copy across files you want manually.

Blogging
Another 'nice to have' feature is to be able to blog from the phone. I have used Mail-to-Blogger, and this works, but Vodafone doesn't support blogger mobile (sending messages to go@blogger.com).

Battery
This seems to be the weakest link. With the GPS on, the battery was 50% down after 2 hours use. It takes a long time to recharge as well. I have got an extended battery which doesn't seem a big improvement. It adds to the thickness and weight of the phone. I have been told of iDOL which I might consider at some future date.

Cardiff Philharmonic

Sang in Mahler's Symphony no 2 with the Cardiff Philharmonic last night at St David's Hall, Cardiff (see here) - absolutely fabulous! There were 116 members in the orchestra and 200 singers. There are rumours of the Verdi Requiem next year - yes, please!

The Gloucestershire Society

Sang Mattins with Cadence for the Gloucestershire Society at this lovely little church in Ozleworth Park. Lunch at the Gumstool (Calcot Manor) afterwards - fantastic!

Harry Christophers and The Sixteen

Saw Harry Christophers and The Sixteen tonight at Tewkesbury Abbey. They are on their choral pilgrimage around the country singing music of 16th century Tudor England. This is highly recommended, superb singing in superb surroundings - go and see them if you get the chance.