Evelyn Glennie performing...

A friend of mine (he's also a composer and arranger), Ryan Youens, alerted me to a You Tube video of Evelyn Glennie playing a piece called Libertango.  It's a wonderfully evocative piece, not sharp in the rhythmic sense in a way many tangos are, but warm and tender, with resonating bass notes rumbling along underneath.   And all done with four sticks.   I think piano playing is difficult sometimes, but creating this sort of music with four quite awkwardly-held sticks is a miracle.

And then, of course, there's the added complication in this performer's case, of being profoundly deaf. She lost her hearing at the age of 12....

Promotional

At the moment, life is a bit of a juggling act in relation the musical I'm writing: Grimhilda!

On one hand I'm getting close to finishing the music and that's taking up a lot of brain-space, and on the other, I'm involved with some other people in figuring out how to advertise the piece so that it gets plenty of coverage well in advance, and so that it's not an unknown quantity when it finally gets to performance stage.

Perhaps I should use some promotional items: pens with Grimhilda! on them, for instance, or promotional t-shirts. It's an idea that's been used before with some of the other musicals put on in town. I need to find out how effective people think it's been to do this.

One of our team talked about having an advertisement on the back of a bus - though this can mean that your show is still being advertised several months after it's finished! Still, people do see these ads. As well as some of these well-worn routes (well-worn not meaning they're no longer effective) I'm leaning also towards using clips on You Tube, and MP3 versions of a selection of music from the show, so that people can get an idea of the music before they go. My instinct is that people like to have some idea of the music beforehand, so that they're not faced with a wad of unfamiliar material. And of course I'll continue blogging and facebooking and twittering about it - hopefully not to the point where everyone is sick to death of it!

I only heard about the group, Phantom Billstickers, the other day. They're the people who paste up all those flyers on hoardings and purpose-built round thingees and fences and special boards around the town. Rather than you going out in the middle of the night in your black gear (looking like a burglar without anything to burgle) and sticking up a pile of posters, they'll do the job for you. So they're on the list too. As are many other things....which seem likely to eat up the budget before we're started!

You can see what I mean about juggling.

The Screening Room

A piece in the local newspaper alerted me to a new area of You Tube called The Screening Room, where short movies are able to be viewed.

Short movies used to be a staple of going to the pictures when I was young, but somewhere along the line distributors decided that they didn’t make enough money and that short movies got in the way of the big movies (which started to stretch out to fill up the space left by the lack of short movies, and so the distributors weren’t actually any better off).

But people kept on making short movies. After all, not every story is a full length movie, and some are perfect in their shortness.

So I checked out the Screening Room, and have just watched a charming animated movie called The Danish Poet. The film asks if we can trace the chain of events that leads to our birth? Is our existence just coincidence? Interestingly enough, the other night my grandson asked where he’d been before he was born (he meant before he was conceived even, or as he put it, before he was a seed). The movie starts off with the narrator (Liv Ullman, of Ingmar Bergman films fame) suggesting that she was just a seed floating around space needing to find a home.

The film then goes on to show how a succession of events, all small and unimportant in the scheme of things, finally bring this seed ‘home’ as the child born of a particular set of parents.

It’s delightfully done, and worth watching more than once – it’s only 15 minutes long. (A few other movies could do with being as short).

When we lived in our previous house, our neighbour’s daughter grew up to become a short film maker – we saw her name on a documentary that was showing on TV last night, in fact. She’s not famous – I don’t suspect many short film makers are – but she is doing something she loves. And probably living on the smell of an oily rag.

The Danish Poet is directed by Torill Kove, and won the 2007 Academy Award for Animated Short.

The only thing about watching movies on a computer is that things aren't set up so well: no comfy chair, no plasma tv mount, no nothing to make it feel like a movie. Not to worry, this particular movie is captivating enough on its own.

Richard Dawkins in a swimsuit

I've been coming across a bunch of references to Richard Dawkins on the Net lately, including several videos on You Tube. In some of them he makes an ass of himself; in others he certainly shows his intelligence, but still seems to miss the point of much of what other people are trying to say. In one he makes a surprisingly crude joke, which has some bloke standing off to the side of the conference table rocking with laughter. This bloke seems to be wandering around in a rather ad hoc manner, so don't ask me what he's actually doing there.
In another video he's apparently stumped by a question asked by a girl off-screen. Seems that it may be a hoax, but it certainly makes Dawkins behave really oddly!
In fact, there are so many Dawkins videos around just now, that you rather wonder if he isn't the man of the hour; some are from tv interviews, some from discussion panels, one from a documentary in which he interviews a very aggressive white Muslim and is then puzzled by the bloke's reaction (!), one is a very odd thing that ends up with Dawkins blowing himself and the lecture room up after 'proving' that he won't. I don't quite get the point of this, as it seems to shoot itself in the foot somehow!
All we need now is Dawkins in a swimsuit, I guess, and we'll just about have run the gamut.

He's such a nice man; yes, he really is - he really, really is! Just look at that smile....