We attacked one of the bookshelves last night, as part of my continual drive to get rid of things out of the house and out of our lives. Over the last few weeks we’ve thrown away 30 or so old VHS tapes we’ve recorded off the box, and given some commercial ones to charity shops. I’ve also thrown away a dozen cassette tapes, though must be another 100 to go through. I really don’t want to pay the studios again for buying the same music on a different medium (be it CD or MP3), but my options are limited:

• transfer from tape to MP3 – all sorts of simple or complex software out there to help me (and if I had a desktop PC some hardware too), but I think the time consumed per tape will be quite high (fiddle with levels, get the track breaks right, title songs right), and I may well not be delighted with the quality of the resulting tracks. I’ve tried before recording some important items into PCs, and it was always harder than it should have been, and with a loss of high frequencies, and the addition of lots of hiss.
• buy replacements through iTunes – dead simple for those albums available on iTunes – but they will almost certainly be locked with DRM, which limits my options unhelpfully. The situation is improving slowly as the Studios appear to be swallowing DRM-free licensing just avoid Apple getting a complete monopoly of supply. In the UK this includes 7digital which is growing quickly.
• hunt around on BitTorrent sites for others who have shared the files – after all I have paid once for the song already! However, my limited experience in this in the past for some critical tracks showed it was very hit and miss, time consuming, and of course liable to malware.

It’s looking bad. My best bet has to be to take a deep breath and be ruthless about what I really want to listen to still. And pay up for MP3 versions for those that I really want to still be part of my life. Most of the artists I like aren’t chart toppers, so they could do with the money …

Now to the books: we got rid of 35 (novels to the WRVS for the hospital library, some to charity shops, and a few in the bin). Unfortunately that still leaves a whopping 710 according to the catalogue We are managing to part with more novels that we’ve read, so the fraction that are Christian reference books keeps going up. But all of this is less impressive still have calculated that we’ve bought about 100 books so far this year … ahem.

We’ve sold a few DVDs off, but we’ve hardly thought about them, or the CD collection. Maybe I need to ironically buy a copy of It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff by Peter Walsh to further motivate me to keep the de-cluttering going.

Last night we tried something different – a bunch of experienced folk players, but from different musical spheres. ‘Folk from Here’ was formed to fuse Northumbrian Pipes (Kathryn Tickell), Sitar (Jonathan Mayer), Melodeon (Julian Sutton), Fiddle (Marie Fielding), led by Kuljit Bhamra on Tabla (etc.).

Half of the music was written specially by Society for Promotion of New Music composers, though we preferred the pieces written by the performers themselves, which we really enjoyed.

It was one of those gigs that we only went to because it was on the doorstep – we’d not have chanced something so different if we’d had to trek to Birmingham or Bristol or London. So, three cheers to all the festivals in Cheltenham!

Excellent – Chris Roberts has written a ESV Bible plugin for WordPress. I’ve had this in mind as a programming project for a while, but I don’t mind someone else getting there first.

For example here’s John 3:16 you can see as a tooltip.

(For Jonathan’s reference: it didn’t seem to work as dynamic creation, but static creation picked it up OK.)

I discovered some annoying additional charges had been added to our BT phone bill, and that led me investigate a range of cost saving options when I couldn’t sleep the other night.

It started because we use Sky Talk for phone services but still getting line rental from BT. They get miffed by this arrangement and decide to charge you £7.10 per quarter for two of their services if you don’t place 6 calls a quarter over their network. (The 1571 answerphone service we do use and what’s worse the caller display service we don’t (can’t) use. Hmph.) The answer is to remember to dial 1280 on 6 calls a quarter, which routes back through BT, not Sky. But who’s going to get that right?

Well, I hope the Orchid Dialler will, so I don’t have to. You plug it in next to the master socket, and it has a built in clock that allows it to be programmed to switch to different carriers at different times. So, Sky at some times, and cheaper carriers such as 18866 at other times. Or 1899 for all calls to UK mobiles. It also allows you to translate one number for another, ideal for translating all 118 calls to a low cost 118 number, or for pushing certain numbers we call every few days back through BT. It also allows you to bar call types (Mobile or Premium Rate), or calls to specific numbers, and some other things.

I’ll post again when I’ve sorted out what the best settings for the dialler seem to be.

Having been at some concerts this weekend, I’ve just read a really interesting piece by the Director of the Cheltenham Music Festival. What exactly is classical music? Here are some of his musings:

Our name, the Cheltenham Music Festival, remains fraught with issues. For starters, what is the ‘jazz’ of our sibling Cheltenham Jazz Festival, if it isn’t also ‘music’? And how wise would it be to call ourselves the Cheltenham Classical Music Festival? … In a programme like this year’s, where would it leave Romanian gypsy kings Taraf de Haidouks, Northumbrian pipist Kathryn Tickell …?

And how potentially unappealing is that word ‘classical’ anyway? For too many it seems to imply something that’s a bit dried up, exclusive and unattainably complex – sounds dreamed up by dead people and residing in a musical museum. Yet every single note of every single concert in this Festival will, I hope, blow these notions apart – this same classical music is vibrant, welcoming, absorbing and very much alive.

But if ‘classical music’ is a problem term, are the alternatives any less problematic?

Some call it ‘Serious Music’. Oh dear – can we possibly dare to take it, and ourselves, that seriously? Where is the joy of music in that, even if some classical music is extremely serious and beautifully miserable?

Some call it ‘Art Music’. I know where they’re coming from, but does that imply that any other kind of music isn’t ‘art’?

If people are drawn to this kind of music, as they seem to be, later on in life, should we call it ‘Grown Up Music’? …

If for most people a Music Festival takes place outdoors, why not call it the Cheltenham Indoor Music Festival? With the exception of all our weekend Surround Sound events, that would at least be true…

And I suppose if a Music Festival for most means, in its broadest sense, ‘Popular Music’, how about the Cheltenham Un-Popular Music Festival? The trouble is, quite a bit of the music featured in this 2008 Festival – Carmina Burana, The Planets, The Lark Ascending, Grieg’s Piano Concerto – really is very popular music.

He doesn’t know the answer, and neither do I. Do you?

Went to a great concert yesterday with Tim and Ann, who are visiting for the weekend. Unusually, we sat on the Town Hall stage and watched the orchestra that was on the ground at the back of the hall, I guess because the BBC Philharmonic at fairly full strength was too big for the stage. They started with Vltava from Smetana’s Ma Vlast, and I was reminded what a beautiful piece it is, even with its false ending. It was also great to be hearing it live; the depth of the double bass and the sparkle of the percussion add something that I don’t remember just with recordings.

The challenge of the evening was Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra, completed in 1954. Tim and Ann really like it, but on my first hearing I wasn’t grabbed. Too often the percussion, for example, seemed to be playing completely incidentally to the rest of the orchestra. However, as a percussionist, at least there was an impressive range of percussion, including 4 different cymbals, 2 tenor drums, 2 side drums, gong and celeste. I must listen to it again — and it was recorded for BBC Radio 3, but I can’t find out when it will be broadcast. Alternatively the Phil have recorded it.

The second half started with a very robust rendering of Grieg’s Piano Concerto with soloist Aleksandar Madžar. Fantastic – with lots of great tunes that the Lutoslawski seemed to lack. The evening closed with Kodály’s Dances of Galanta, which was quite enjoyable, and raised a smile with its unexpected final few beats.

Second up we tried our luck with The Dowland Project – an intriguing mix of 15th – 17th Century tunes with tenor, lute, viola and, err, sax. The Dowland refers to composer John Dowland, but they only did a few of his tunes, with music from all around Europe. One review of their most recent album Romaria says

Romaria is an ethereal listening experience. Its bold improvisatory elements make this recording well suited for the jazz enthusiast who is looking for a little something different.

John Surman’s sax clearly lift it beyond just an ‘early music’ ensemble, and I thought his use of bass clarinet was inspired. He pushed into its higher registers, where it sounds quite sax-like, plus using it down low where it adds a funky woody vibe. It didn’t quite attract me like the Hilliard Ensemble + Jan Garbarek combination does, but it was great to see them live, because they were quite clearly enjoying themselves as they played. And that’s something you can hardly ever tell on a recording (except one Nina Simone track where one of the players at the end says “that’s groovy, baby”).