Jokes for Friday night

I was trying to research something quite serious, but found this site by chance and have been cracking up ever since. Jokes for every instrumentalist...

Q: What's the definition of a major second?
A: Two baroque oboists playing in unison.

Plenty more where that came from.

Barging in

I wish we had this in London. New York's Barge Music sounds simply incredible, and this article from yesterday's Indy gets right to the heart of the matter, spelling out in excellent writing why we need classical music and why we need it to be presented more like this more often.

'RITES' rights

Since Andrea's raised the question of pre-ordering RITES OF SPRING in the US, I thought I'd better mention, regretfully, that as yet we haven't sold the US rights. Hodder & Stoughton are publishing it in the UK and Commonwealth territories - so if you're in Canada, South Africa, Australia etc, you'll be able to find it in a shop near you sometime after 13 March. But in the USA, nope. I suggest pre-ordering from Amazon.co.uk via the link at the top of the index - I'm sure they can ship to the States. Sweet of you to toast me/it, Andrea - thank you!! My cat decided to join in and brought me a well-mangled mouse as a present last night...

By the way, the Amazon blurb has nothing to do with me, and, frankly, not all that much to do with my book. RITES may not exactly be Ian McEwan, but it's a little more serious than it sounds in their paragraph. Anorexia ain't funny and the girl in the story is in a life-threatening situation. Before you ask, I've never had anorexia. Given the amount of it in the school I attended, that seems little short of miraculous, but I always liked my food far too much. Especially chocolate.

HELLO!!! - ANY US PUBLISHERS OUT THERE WANT TO HAVE A LOOK AT MY BOOK????

Fiddleblog?

Tasmin Little is on tour in South America and is ALMOST blogging it. She's writing 'Letters' chronicling the trip on her website. To me, that looks like blogging, Tasmin - welcome aboard the blogosphere! In just a few days her experiences have included an earthquake, an almost equally alarming cocktail, some astonishing-sounding food and some fantastic audiences at her recitals. But does Roger Moore do the Spanish cryptic crossword? To read the latest, click here.

Memory lane

A post at Sequenza 21 about Palestrina takes me back twenty years to heady (and chillier than now) days at Cambridge University, where all music students had to learn to write 16th-century counterpoint. It was rather like filling in a crossword puzzle. I suppose it kept us out of all-night parties, dangerous drugs and, worst of all in the faculty's eyes, daring to practise our musical instruments. I'm not certain what other useful function it fulfilled, but I do have a vague fondness for the calmness and beauty of Palestrina as a result. Two LPs of it found their way into my then-modest collection and I used to play them frequently in an attempt to immerse myself in the ancient aesthetic we were attempting to recreate. The trouble was that the music is so calm and so beautiful that it's also extremely soothing. I don't remember ever hearing either album to the end - I always fell sound asleep about half way through...

If you're new to the wonders of Palestrina, try this CD.

Meanwhile, to wake you up, here are a few responses to Google searches that have led to some readers finding this blog:

The Octobass is huge and magnificent and lives in the Musical Instrument Museum in the Cite de la Musique in Paris.

I don't think Nikolai Znaider is married, but I may be wrong.

I don't know who Leif Ove Andsnes's girlfriend is.

Marc-Anthony Turnage is NOT 'awful'. He's a great guy and writes fantastic music.