Just over a year ago I published a post about my experience learning a difficult piece of music, I Sleep At Waking by Ian Wilson, for solo saxophone, which has lots and lots of notes. Well, the good news is that I’ve made progress: I’ve memorized it and I can play it through, after a [...]
I don’t often walk the stretch of Lothian Road between the Usher Hall and St John’s, but for a reason I can’t remember, that’s what I was doing one morning in May, and if a higher power was responsible for this circumstance I’d just like to thank him or her or it.
For that was how [...]
Two posts ago I reported on my success in the jazz grade three exam. Now it’s about time to start preparing for grade five, the top jazz grade, but I don’t much like the tunes. Should I still do it? I think I need to, because my practise has become rather aimless lately.
But one thing [...]
Last night I went to the Edinburgh International Festival performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Eclairs sur l’au-delà – which is usually translated as Illuminations of the Beyond – at the Usher Hall, played by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with a sprightly young fellow named Ilan Volkov conducting.
In my seat in the upper circle I waited [...]
I have two reasons for the recent lack of blog action, and I mention them because they’re quite interesting (though I feel that neither will counteract the suspicion that if one takes four months off from work then one has time to write blog posts pretty frequently): I was preparing for my saxophone grade three [...]
(To any sax players out there: yes, my fingers should never be that far from the keys – one of many bad habits I’m trying to break)
Last week I gratefully received, from my friendly postman, the book of tunes for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) Jazz saxophone grade 3 exam. [...]
Last September, I had a debate with Brian Rowan in the comments of one of my blog posts. The debate was about music: whether you can say, for example, that Stravinsky is better than James Blunt. I said yes, you can, and Brian said no, you can’t. Well, I saw this article in the American [...]
Such has been my obsession with saxophone practise over the past few months that I’ve badly neglected my blog, so here I am with a new post…about my obsession with saxophone practise.
Obsession
I’ve been working in Edinburgh since March, and the main benefit has been that I’ve had time to practise the sax almost every day, [...]
Often when I wake up I start singing the song Sing Hosanna! I was reminded of this on Sunday when I heard the song on a comedy show on the radio.
Most of the time I merely mouth it in a whisper as it runs through my head, or else I hum it or whistle it. [...]
The other night we interviewed a prospective flatmate with the help of a good friend of Laura’s, the lovely Kris, an Australian nutritional expert. Our interviewee was Australian himself and fresh off the boat, so perhaps Kris’s Oz-related small-talk put him at his ease. So this guy Daniel – despite having an irrational fear of [...]
