(If you click on that photo you should arrive at my Flickr photostream, where you can see more pictures of it.)
As I blogged recently(*), I've been listening to a lot of music on my computer (either playing stuff from my own collection or using Spotify) over the past year, which has given me the opportunity to have some fun arranging playlists.
I came up with an amusing, although almost certainly not particularly original, little game, whereby I arrange my playlists so that the titles of consecutive songs make a complete sentence. Usually when I play the game (which is by no means all the time that I listen to music on the computer) I add the further constraint that all the songs should be by the same artist. Punctuation can be tweaked to clarify the sense of the phrase, but the word order should be preserved. As a minimum, of course, you need at least 2 titles, although 3 is better; there is no upper limit. A few examples will help to illustrate the idea.
I'm not sure when I first came up with the idea, but the first lists I made a note of were from songs by Bix Beiderbecke. These included:
Billy Bragg's album Mermaid Avenue yielded the list:
From Beth Orton's album Trailer Park I got:
A small collection of Beatles songs gave me two sentences:
The longest and, arguably, most impressive one I've come up with so far is based on a bunch of pieces by John Renbourn. Unlike most of the others I've listed, this one definitely benefits from some clarification of the punctuation:
So there you have it - a way to listen to your favourite music in a different order and have some fun with wordplay at the same time.
* Recent is, of course, a relative term :-)
Exactly a year ago today, I signed up for a free account on the music website Last.fm, little realising quite how much it (and later also Spotify) would revolutionise my music-listening habits.
I was first introduced to Last.fm a year or so earlier, when my brother mentioned it to me. I took a quick look but mistakenly understood it to be merely a service for broadcasting information about the music you were listening to. At the time, I did virtually all my home listening from non-networked media (principally CDs on my hi-fi system) and the bulk of my work-time listening (while I worked, obviously!) from a Mac on which I didn't have administrative rights to install the software that Last.fm seemed to require. Therefore, I decided that Last.fm didn't have anything to offer me and looked no further at it.
Then, last July, I took a short trip to Hungary with some friends, one of whom used Last.fm from his laptop. Seeing it in action, I realised that it offered the potential to explore a vast array of music from all around the world, including lots of stuff that would be very difficult to locate on CD or which I wouldn't necessarily want to listen to more than once or twice. Although Last.fm does have some premium services available, the free services have been plenty to keep my ears occupied for the last year.
Some time later, I was directed towards Spotify, which also contains a wide selection of music, including quite a lot that isn't available directly at Last.fm. It is easy to set up Spotify to upload your listening data to Last.fm (the same is true, in fact, of many media players for listening to local music collections). Unlike Last.fm, the free version of Spotify lets you set up your own playlists. I find this a lot more convenient than playing the tracks I want to hear one at a time and more satisfying than just listening to a random stream of tracks via the Last.fm radio stations, so I tend to use Spotify for most of my day-to-day listening. I have also copied a reasonable portion of my CD collection on to my computer so that I can put together my own playlists and keep a record of what I have been listening to, although I still do use my CD player when I don't have the computer switched on.
In the past year, I have listened to a much greater range of music than ever before, and have come across some excellent musicians that I might never have heard about, or at least not had a chance to listen to, otherwise. Some of my highlights are a Flemish vocal trio called Laïs (who have overtaken J. S. Bach to reside in the top spot on my Last.fm listening chart, with over 400 plays in the last year), a Finnish band called Loituma (I'm particularly fond of their tune Ievan Polkka) and an Australian singer called Butterfly Boucher. I've also been able to listen more widely to the repertoire of many artists that I've previously only heard in a narrower context; for instance the Norwegian fiddler Annbjørg Lien (I have had two of her albums for quite a while but have been able to listen to several others on Spotify) and jazz musicians such as Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus (again, I have several of their albums but I can now listen to a much wider selection of their music).
I've no idea what new technology will turn up next to revolutionise the way I listen to music but it seems likely that for the near future I'll continue to do a lot of listening with Last.fm and Spotify, and continue to expand my musical horizons as I explore the vast riches of recorded music.
On many fretted instruments, a capo is a very handy device for changing keys. The 5-string banjo has the problem that its shorter 5th string gets missed out by a regular capo, at least if you're using it at one of the first 5 frets (which is the most common place to use it). There are various ways of getting round this problem:
My Dad (who was my first and principal inspiration to take up the banjo myself) sometimes uses a little piece of bone to wedge under the 5th string. It seems to work quite well although it can be fiddly to get it properly positioned and it is prone to flying out at inconvenient moments. It's also quite easy to misplace.
A few years ago I came across a variation on the same idea while
surfing the web, which was to fashion a 5th string capo from the cap
of a ballpoint pen. I always intended to make one for myself but
never got round to it until yesterday, having heard another reference
to the idea shortly before discovering a spare pen top. Armed with a
few basic tools (a mini hacksaw, a Stanley knife, a pencil and some
sandpaper), I set to work and within minutes came up with this:
(If you click on that photo you should arrive at my Flickr
photostream, where you can see more pictures of it.)
The main benefits of this over the bone version (apart from the fact that I didn't have any spare bits of bone to use) are that the extra size makes it slightly less fiddly to use and harder to misplace and that it can conveniently sit on top of one of the tuning posts when it's not in use. Also, it's a great way to recycle pen tops (which always seem to mysteriously turn up independent of pens) and it's easy to make and easy to replace if it gets lost. I've not made very much use of mine yet, but it seems to work quite well.
After making my new capo, I dug out the link to the website from which I'd originally got the idea: www.frets.com. Evidently I remembered it pretty well, as my capo has come out very similar to the one shown there and I seem to have got the storage idea from there too.
I was at a wedding on Saturday and during the signing of the registers (which took place off in one of the back rooms of the church) we got to enjoy a live performance of some solo cello music. One of the two pieces played was a pair of movements from a cello sonata by Vivaldi, which was unfamiliar to me but very pleasant. The other was the prelude from J. S. Bach's third cello suite.
Bach's cello suites are amongs my all-time favourite music in any genre, although I've not previously had the pleasure of hearing them performed live, other than by myself on the viola. Much as I enjoy them as viola pieces I think they work even better an octave lower in the original cello version.
Suite 3 is, along with the first suite, one of the ones I'm most familiar with as they are, to my mind, the easiest ones to play and, for that reason, the ones I tend to play the most. I once played the last 3 movements from suite 1 at a concert, although most of the time I just play them at home for my own enjoyment and edification. In fact, they are pretty much the only thing I've played on the viola in the last couple of years and they alone give me plenty of reason to keep my viola. I have also got an arrangement of them (transposed up a 5th higher still) for violin, but find them a lot less satisfying at that pitch.
In addition to the cello suites, I have got a copy of the dots for Bach's solo violin stuff. That's also great fun to play, although several steps further beyond my level of technical ability than the cello suites. Whereas I can play several movements of the cello suites passably well on the viola, and could probably get at least two of the suites up to a reasonable amateur performance standard without too much trouble, I can only (so far) manage some of the easier passages within selected movements of the violin sonatas at anything like a reasonable standard.
I definitely agree with Organ Morgan from Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood who, when asked who he liked best, replied "Oh, Bach without any doubt. Bach every time for me."
Last night I had a gig with my regular twmpath (barn dance) band, which was a lot of fun but not quite as exciting as the gig I had the Saturday before.
The main features of that gig which made it so exciting were:
To backtrack slightly, the reason I was playing for a twmpath in Hungary is that my friend Andy is getting ready to move over there soon to a farm he has bought near Szeged, and wanted to put on a social event for people in his church there. If nothing else, it was a great excuse for me to have a holiday.
Unfortunately due to the baggage restrictions on my flight I couldn't take my own fiddle with me, but I was able to borrow one while I was there. It was a lovely instrument, apparently locally made, with a slightly sweeter tone than mine. We also managed to misplace the only copy of the sheet music I'd taken for the dances, but they were all tunes I knew well anyway and Andy was able to busk along with the chords without trouble - in fact he probably did it better playing by ear than trying to read the changes, and it did allow some flexibility in making the tunes fit with the dances when they went wrong. The only other member of the band was Ben, who was playing djembe and completely unbothered by the lack of dots.
Originally I put together a list of about 12 dances to do at the event, with a few more in reserve. We only had time to translate about 8 of the dances and in the end we only actually used 4 of those, but we did them at least twice each. Given that none of the dancers or the callers knew the first thing about barn dancing, they did a fantastic job and, while we wouldn't have won any prizes (except perhaps the wooden spoon) in a competition, a great time was had by all.
More random posts about my Hungarian adventure to follow soon...
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