I’m going to Auckland tonight. Given my history of hurriedly writingblog posts at Dunedin airport just before boarding, I thought I’d give myself a two-and-a-bit-hour head start.
The scores I need for my trip to Auckland. Thanks to Alison at the Music office for doing the binding.
Plenty of projects for my four days up in Auckland.
Seeing the family. Always a pleasure, never a chore. Mightily convenient for an airport pick-up too 🙂
Beatrice. A cor anglais solo feature, just a 1-minute thing, extracted from a larger work. Tomorrow day, the APO plays it in an Education Concert in the Town Hall. I might have to say something from the stage.read more
Well, it’s local TV. Still waiting for that big 7pm current affairs feature or whatever.
A Channel 9 crew came into my office yesterday to ask me some questions and shoot inserts of me noodling on two different types of keyboard. It’s a quickie look into what the Mozart Fellowship is about.
I think this is the "Swell Box"... err... I really can't remember.
The Auckland Town Hall Organ has a lot of stops – 84, in fact. Despite having been on a tour of the instrument and consulted the fantastically comprehensive resource that is the Organ Trust’s website, I can make neither head nor tail of the stop list.
It has designations like:
Posaune 16 ext #14
Double Open Diapason 16
Salicional 8
Hohl Flute 8
Wald Flute 4
Nazard 2 2/3
Superoctave 2
Sharp Mixture IV 19.22.26.29
The numbers I mostly understand. 16 = the length in feet of the longest pipe (which is generally a C). So Wald Flute sounds an octave above Hohl Flute because the pipes are half as long, I get that. But what the hell is the difference between those two colours anyway? ‘Wald’ means ‘forest’, I know, but ‘Hohl’? The only German words like that I know are ‘Hohle’ (pit or cave) and ‘Hölle’ (hell). I didn’t know they played flutes in hellish caves.read more
Yesterday I was catching up on podcasts from Upbeat.
Phil Brownlee reviewed a concert by NZTrio in which they brought in a drum kit for Kenji Bunch’s Concerto for piano trio and percussion (from 10:38):
“It’s often challenging in a concert setting. […] [An] issue with the drum kit is just the balance, particularly if you’re alluding to the rock setting, the rock-jazz kind of sound. Early on the piece it felt like Lenny Sakofsky was holding it down to balance with the trio and it doesn’t sound like a drum kit until you start hitting it hard.”read more
I am one of six participant composers in the APO’s Town Hall Organ Composition Project. Yuss. We are each writing a piece for organ and orchestra – we’ve got three workshops this year, and a concert on 2 May 2013 23 May 2013. (Save the date.)
This is a joint venture of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and the Auckland Town Hall Organ Trust. A week or so ago I had a tour of the instrument and saw the innards… probably not every single innard, but most of the 5,291 of them. Here’s the back end of the console:read more
I’ve been discovering the joys of SoundCloud. For those of you unfamiliar with the site, it’s a clean, functional host for audio.
Free accounts can upload up to 120 minutes of audio, but I’ve just about hit that limit. I’ve parted with €29.99 for a year’s worth of upgrade.
The first thing I get is another 120 minutes of audio. I can start making a dent in that with such things as a uni electroacoustic work, theatre music from shows I’ve done in Wellington (Young & Hungry 2008, German Play 2008, Two Day Plays 2009), and another composition or two.read more
Previous Fellow Chris Adams put my name on the door. Ah, bless.
On 1 February 2012 I began my time/term/tenure as Mozart Fellow at the University of Otago.
I ran the numbers a while back looking at the list of all previous Mozart Fellows – at 27 years, 1 month and 19 days, I am the second youngest to take up the position. That’s cool.
Rather awesomely, I get my own office. In contrast to Radio New Zealand House in Wellington, you can actually open the windows and have contact with fresh, outside air. In fact, there are eight such openable windows. Rest assured, I can close them when it gets cold in winter.read more
Some lyrics changed in the rehearsal process (and we certainly slowed it down from my speed-demon intentions), but most remained the same. Forgive my falsetto for soprano parts.
“Sorry, I meant to see your show” was performed last night at the Wellington Opera House by MC Emma Kinane and the Shoreline Cab Savs (Carmel McGlone, Bryony Skillington, Jess Robinson, Martyn Wood, Nick Dunbar & Gareth Farr/Lilith La Croix), with me (Robbie Ellis) on piano.read more