A change of priorities

I snapped this with my phone the other day. I was at the house of a friend with young children. Behind the alphabet primer and numbers poster lies his CD collection. A reminder that life moves on.

Sites and Sounds

Last Monday saw the launch of the Sites and Sounds project in Norfolk. This will see musical practitioners including singers, instrumentalists and beat-boxers going onto traveller sites in order to share their skills with the young people who live there. The launch took place at County Hall, the seat of regional government, a 1960's Brutalist edifice, outside which had been placed a vardo, or traditional gypsy wagon. I wish, now, I had taken a long shot to show the incongruity.

The keyboard club of a local primary school bashed out 'Wagon Wheel' with the assistance of some of the team of tutors, yours truly contributing an alto sax solo towards the end. We must have played this three times for various visitors and dignitaries. The band included a handful of traveller kids but most travellers are away at this time of year. Travelling of course.

Other tunes, with the children accompanying on various percussion, included 'Dark Eyes' the theme to the movie 'Chocolat' in which Johnny Depp plays a gypsy. You can probably tell by now that neither diaries nor the budget had allowed the members of our impromptu band the luxury of a rehearsal and we fell back on common repertoire.

Being the parent of daughters, dolls houses are not unfamiliar to me. I even had the misfortune to assemble the Barbie caravan as a kit (nothing fitted and I spent Christmas Day cursing under my breath while my friend built his son the immaculately engineered Lego castle). But I had never before seen a proper doll's caravan. These are used in schools with a traveller intake in order to make the environment feel less alien to very young children.

The project proper kicks off in the autumn and I shall post my impressions then.

Singing Bowls

One item that always scores a hit is the singing bowl. Children are fascinated and thrill-seeking (but usually clean living) Five Rhythms dancers can't get enough.

If, like me, you are fascinated by Tibetan singing bowls then this link to BBC News will interest you. It reports on research into the peculiar behaviour of water in the bowl when the instrument is sounded. If you have a singing bowl and have never tried this then give it a go.

The first bowl I acquired has a tiny hole in it so it is unsuited to this activity, at least indoors. Perhaps it would be prudent to hold your bowl over the sink for a moment while you check for leaks. Incidentally, my holed bowl is perfect and fully functioning in all other respects.

The BBC article touches on potential engineering applications when the physics of the bowls is understood. Perfume atomisers and fuel injectors are cited as early beneficiaries But so far, it seems, the Tibetan singing bowl has not given up its all its secrets.

Automata

I have always been fascinated by automata - toys that move when a handle is cranked or a lever pressed. So when the opportunity came up to help children create an installation for their primary school I jumped at the chance. However, the first hurdle was convincing the interview panel that I was the most suitable applicant. To this end I constructed a machine with a strong musical element.

After some experiment I came up with a construction that, on turning the handle, plays the first two bars of Good King Wenceslas while a Christmas Tree goes up and down. (The interview was in December.) It was an object in need of refinement but held together on the journey to Bedford and performed on the day.


I immersed myself in the project for the next few months, experimenting with designs I hoped would be accessible to 8 and 9 year olds. It was to culminate in a big festival in the school's extensive grounds and Year 4 were to present the installation at this event. The theme was 'White British Culture' and the point we were making was that much of what we think of as quintessentially British, from Fish and Chips to Chicken Vindaloo, would have been unrecognisable to the subjects of King Henry VIII.

To illustrate this we made a large globe set on a turntable, showing where tea, sugar, pizza ingredients etc come from. (This became a very foody take on British culture.)







We built a boat, the centrepiece of the installation, showing how we brought so many British characteristics from overseas. The waves go up and down and sea-life appears and disappears. The sound of the waves was sacrificed to time constraints but I was rather pleased with the ship's bell.

Finally all this wonderful imported food appears at a banquet featuring HM the Queen, William and Kate Windsor, Rod Stewart, Simon Cowell, Cheryl Cole, Mr Bean and an unnamed ancient Roman.





The heads of some of these characters moved from side to side while the mouths of others opened and shut, all with levers or cams. (Cheryl was mouthy, Simon big on the negatives while her majesty appeared less than pleased with the company she was keeping. Mechanisms were mounted in carpet tube - very strong but also rather tight on space. The heads were originally to be made of (nice and light) expanded polystyrene but, one of many compromises, ended up being papier mache.

I was lucky to have the assistance of visual artist Abi Spendlove for part of the project. (The Christmas tree had exhausted my repertoire.) Sadly she was elsewhere when the boat was drawn. What should have been an 18th century galleon looks more like a cross channel ferry as a result.

The Boneshaker Medicine Show

The best part of writing music for theatre is seeing the show for the first time with my sound fulfilling its intended purpose. I haven't made it to a performance of Luminous Tales by Ripstop Theatre, which opened last month (although was involved in the development). But yesterday I caught the first outing of Bob Percy's new act, The Boneshaker Medicine Show, which he performs as his alter ego, The Great Whydini. For this show I worked purely from a brief and didn't see any rehearsals so it was all a delightful surprise. It's a wonderful mix of magic and off-the-cuff humour with a Victorian showman sensibility which had the audience laughing and gasping by turns.

This was part of the opening weekend of the annual Norfolk and Norwich Festival. So far, in spite of promises of (much needed) rain the sun has shone on the many outdoor events.

It's not clever but it is funny

One of the downsides of touring on a budget is that there is no guarantee of a good night's sleep. The Travelodge at Wall's End, just north of Newcastle, was fine on Thursday and Friday nights but on Saturday night the corridor outside my room erupted at about 2am and kept bursting into sudden life until I got up at 7.30. Having taken a wrong turning on the way back from a gig I found myself driving the Norwich Puppet Theatre van through the city centre just as the pubs were closing and the clubs were opening so I had some idea of the state of mind of the lads in the corridor with their 'wayay man' and 'fookin' this and that'.

It seems the idea is to book a room for the night so when you pull you have somewhere to take your new friend. And if all that booze hasn't worked its charm, what do you do with your room? How do you avoid wasting it by falling into a drunken stupor that you may just as well have enjoyed at home? Well apparently there is a craze for taking ecstasy by injecting it into the mouth. And, I kid you not, it is called E by gum.

(My apologies to non-UK readers for whom this is probably neither clever nor funny.)

Jabberwocky

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Last Wednesday all the museums in Cambridge stayed open late for an event called Twilight at the Museums. The lights were switched off and children issued with torches in order to see the exhibits in a new light. All except at the Fitzwilliam where torches were distributed but the lights remained resolutely on. The institution remains nervous after the high profile shattering of two Qing dynasty vases by a hapless visitor a few years ago.

The brightness of the lights made the recital of Jabberwocky a challenge. Indefinite Articles had opted to illustrate the Lewis Carol poem with projected sand drawings and shadow play. My role was to set the scene with music and provide an illustrative, and entirely improvised, soundscape between the verses.

The six performances were very well received and no one commented on the reduced impact caused by light falling on the screen. As is often the case with live theatre, I imagine that everyone assumed this was how it was meant to be. And many people watched the show more than once. Having seen it from inside the gallery they came round to the staircase to see it from the other side. Here they could observe Steve, Sally and our vorpal swordsman and 'beamish boy' achieve the effects.

The screen was hung in the doorway at the top of the stairs that lead up from the grand entrance. The landing provided our 'back-stage' area while I soaked up the limelight in the gallery where I could respond to the images.