4 posts tagged “choral music”

found this on northerngeek's vox, via the explore page and, me being me, just had to inflict it on you. you know the drill - consider yourself tagged

1.  wrapping paper or gift bags? wrapping paper, every time. there are a few odd occasions where gift bags work (e.g. when i was given jacques-etienne - have you ever tried to wrap a teddy bear???) but overall, they seem to indicate a lack of willingness to really try. wrapping in our family is very important. there are a few key rules: 1. wrapping for family members must be fresh, not recycled from previous years 2. wrapping and card must both be kept as secret from the receiver as the actual present, until the point where they appear under the tree 3. if possible, put a ribbon round it. maybe two ribbons. if you can squeeze in a little fluffy toy or a christmas decoration on the present too in a stylish and elegant manner, then you go straight to the top of the class.

2.  real tree or artificial? artificial. couldn't handle all those pine needles. BUT i'm very fussy about my artificial trees - can't stand the plastic sort that are trying to be real. the only right sort is the type that's made from green tinselly stuff.

3.  when do you put up the tree? 1 december

4.  when do you take the tree down? 6 january (epiphany, twelfth night) - when at uni i used to have friends round for dinner on twelfth night, which gave me an excellent excuse to make a sort-of twelfth-night cake, filled with custard (any excuse for custard). haven't done that in ages. maybe i should do it again this year.

5.  do you like eggnog? i love the word eggnog. have never actually had the opportunity to taste it though. it's not the sort of thing that goes with a 40-degree-C christmas. roast turkey, ham, christmas pudding, yes, but we seem to draw the line at eggnog.

6.  favourite gift received as a child? my cat

7.  do you have a nativity scene? nope. not a tradition in our family. i seem to dimly recall asking if we could get one when i was a child and being told that only catholics have nativity scenes.

8.  hardest person to buy for? my da

9.  easiest person to buy for? generally my mother. what tends to happen is that i can't find anything for her for ages and then i can't stop finding things for her.

10.  worst christmas gift ever received? a kris kringle present from someone who didn't know me very well. it was easy to see the reasoning: likes music and works very hard = relaxation cd. what she obviously didn't realise was that that stuff makes me want to break speakers... still, it's the thought that counts, eh?

11.  mail or email christmas card? both. mail for the rellies in australia and anyone i have a snailmail address for who i remember to send one to, email/blog/flickr posting for invisible online friends, people i don't have snailmail addresses for and people who i was just too disorganised to get around to sending a real card to.

12.  favourite christmas movie? hard to pick just one. there's sort of a trinity of tradition here: white christmas, miracle on 34th street (the original) and it's a wonderful life

13.  when do you start shopping for christmas? far too late. generally i start panicking and thinking of lists as soon as i realise that we have yet again missed the seamail deadline (start of october), with actual shopping starting about 1-2 weeks before the airmail deadline (start of december).

14.  have you ever recycled a christmas present? gosh no. that would be sacrilege.

15.  favourite thing to eat at christmas? the traditional christmas breakfast. every year in australia i would host a christmas breakfast for all our friends. the menu would change a little from year to year, but generally would include: ten tons of homemade gingerbread men, decorated with mini m&ms, blueberry muffins, cheerios (cocktail frankfurts, that is, not the cereal), my mother's sausage rolls, homemade alcoholic icy poles (always the mango daiquiri ones, others depending on the mood of the chef and the time available), homemade non-alcoholic icy poles (most notably lemon-lime, and a rather amazing lindt dark chocolate ice cream)

16.  clear lights or colored on the tree? coloured

17.  favourite christmas song? if you've been reading this blog over the past month, you'll realise that that's way too hard a question to answer. today's carol is just one of the many, but is one i particularly love singing. this recording isn't ideal (i don't seem to have an ideal one among the three or four on my hard drive) - it's a little slow and the lower parts of the glorias are a little furry, but at least they're on pitch, which can sometimes be... challenging :-)

18.  travel at christmas or stay at home? stay at home. in my family it's certain death to not be around at christmas. you can imagine how popular we've been, being over here for the past two, and now this one as well. this year will be the first christmas we've gone away and also the first christmas (and possibly the only christmas!) we'll have spent on our own.

19.  can you name santa's reindeer? i could, but i wouldn't like to without meeting them first. it would seem rude.

20.  do you have an angel on top or a star? neither. for some odd reason, the tradition in our family is always to have a santa on top.

21.  open the presents christmas eve or morning? christmas morning. although this year it will be christmas eve because of pretending to be danish, and that way we can also do our presents at the same time my parents are doing theirs in sydney on christmas morning and we can all natter away over skype.

22.  most annoying thing about this time of year? postal deadlines

for some reason, this song always comes up at christmas - i sang it a couple of times at school and it turns up regularly on the programme of the fabulous sydney university musical society's annual carolfest (and this recording is from one of their cds - don't miss carolfest if you should ever happen to be in sydney in early december). it's actually a spiritual and doesn't mention anything about christmas at all. but i guess it's about jesus and faith and heaven and maybe that's enough to warrant its inclusion. no matter, it's a beautiful peace of music.

heh. and just as i get home, vox posts a new sydney cityscape banner :-) so i'm just going to use it for a few days, i think. will replace the now-very-out-of-date easter eggs anyway.

yes, i'm home. as of 5am today, i am safely back in london at last. it feels a bit weird to have cupboards and my own kitchen and stereo and stuff about and to actually not have to go anywhere, and very little i really have to do. very very weird. but hopefully by tomorrow i'll be a little acclimatised.

i'm going to try not to rabbit on too much today, but so much stuff has accumulated in my brain over the last seven weeks or so, and feeling so jetlagged that it may be a hard ask. i humbly beg your forgiveness in advance.

to start with, i feel like the universe is giving me hints. big fat hints. big fat obvious wet-fish-slap-in-the-face hints. when i first quit my job, i had a nibble of a choral commission, which still may come through, but i haven't heard anything yet. while i was in sydney, a good friend of mine asked me to write something for the amateur choir she conducts. i wrote to the old girls' union at my school about their newsletter while in sydney, and got an email back including a suggestion that i might want to consider writing for an anniversary concert they're having next year (choir and/or orchestra). and now, coming home to find a file of spnm newnotes magazines, with their attendant flyers and composition opportunities, i discover that there's a juicy-sounding composition competition coming up, for - yup, that's right - SATB choir. so i think i'm meant to write choral music at the moment. which is fine and dandy by me. i've been feeling vocally inclined for a while now, between the satie song arrangement and the set of little walt whitman songs i've been working on, so might as well go the whole hog and work with SATB. so yay! direction!

which realisation has had me a little hyped up (well, as much as the jetlag will allow) to get back to sorting out my creativity stuff. i've done julia cameron's the artist's way a couple of times now, and it's been fabulous, but i'm still feeling a bit of a need for direction but it's too soon to read the same thing again, so while ordering another book from amazon this afternoon (more on that in the next paragraph, but it's medically related so feel free to skip that one), i made up the gap to get myself free shipping by ordering cameron's walking in this world as well. i've heard mixed things about this - some people saying it's great and a little more advanced than TAW, but others saying that she goes over a lot of the same ground. i think i'm not too concerned about the latter because she has a lot of useful ideas and approaches in TAW, and it's sometimes beneficial to run through ideas in different ways anyway, so i'll see how that goes. hopefully my new books will turn up at the end of the week.

the other book i ordered was because while i was in sydney, my doctor was finally able to diagnose the digestive problems i've been having which has set me off on an investigation of my assorted health issues in a quest to finally sort myself out and make life a little more enjoyable. at first she thought i might have some kind of bug we could kill, and i was most disappointed when she got my tests back and gave me a clean bill of health - no bugs to be found anywhere - grrr! but on the other hand, she was able to put a name to my problem - irritable bowel syndrome - and a bunch of reading has actually given me hope that i can really do something about this. seems it's not uncommon following gall-bladder removals as one's innards have no way of regulating the amount of bile floating about. so i have a couple of strategies for that, and we invested in both books of the csiro total wellbeing diet, which not only has had rave reviews from all sorts of people but came recommended by our doctor as a healthy and sustainable way to lose weight, lower cholesterol, etc. etc. (and the recipes look and sound - and by all reports are - delicious) and the second book i ordered today is about controlling the symptoms of polycystic ovary syndrome (another fun little health issue i have which mostly raises its head in the form of insulin resistance and a tendency to put on weight as soon as i look at anything that has a calorie) by diet. so i've got my reading cut out for me in the weeks ahead! i need to read all this stuff, digest (hah!) it and then come up with a plan based around the csiro diet which will keep the PCOS and IBS under control, allow me to lose a little weight, and keep my meals at least approximately in line with djeli's so that we're not having to cook six (or possibly nine - seems that small meals and lots of them may be the way to go for me) completely different meals every day.

</medical bit>

but it's marvellous to be home. i have no energy whatsoever at the moment, so just messing with some photos, ticking things off, deleting them or adding them to my to-do lists on rememberthemilk.com (which i am absolutely loving, i must say - it came in so very handy in our frantic last few days in sydney), catching up on a little tv and eating chocolate to try to avoid re-napping (i caught four hours earlier today during which djeli went up to the bank, came home, called the AA, changed the battery in the car, then drove to oxford and back to make sure it was ok - really need to not sleep again until it's properly night). tomorrow i think will be the time to clean off and reinstall the old vaio laptop in preparation for hooking up the 100-odd Gb of mp3s i ripped while in sydney. i'm fairly sure that if we counted individual discs, at least, i'd have ripped over 500 of the things. if i never look a ripping programme in the face again, it'll be too soon!

What albums are in heavy rotation for you right now?

at work, where pop music is required because the designers play all sorts of weird stuff and classical doesn't drown it out enough to be able to be heard in its own right, i'm listening mostly to...

• Go! Team - Thunder, Lightning, Strike
• Romeo and Juliet soundtrack
• Best of The Smiths

on the way home, i listen to my minidisc walkman (old school! yeah!) which at the moment is doing the rounds between...

• Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1 "Classical" - this is the most awesomely "up" music for after a hard day at work
• Stravinsky's "Renard" - best rendition of chicken music EVER
• an album of harp music by a very famous harpist whose name completely eludes me because it's on the cover of an LP back in Sydney and didn't make its way onto the MD listing. An assortment of Debussy, Germaine Tailleferre, Salzedo and other chaps.

and at home where i can play whatever i damn well want without concern for pop music or buses (or the neighbours - they say they can't hear me but one of these days i'm going to go completely over the top, i know it)...

• Shostakovich's "The Execution of Stepan Razin" - turn up the volume!!!!!
• Frank Martin's Mass - recent acquisition
• Leonard Bernstein's "The Lark" and Steve Reich's "Clapping Music", both on another recent acquisition
• Martinu cello sonatas played by Steven Isserlis
  
• choral motets and psalms by Mendelssohn

I've only recently come out of the closet as a Mendelssohn fan and it still feels weird admitting that one of my favourite CDs of the moment is by him. I spent years disparaging him as a lightweight Germanic Romantic - three cardinal sins in my rather narrow-minded musical youth - but have since discovered that he has written some absolutely gorgeous music. now i guess i'm going to have to work at rehabilitating Brahms too.