Monthly Archive for April, 2004

A Pretty Normal Saturday

Published
by
Dan Sumption
on April 3, 2004
in It Happened to Me!
. 0 Comments

A Pretty Normal Saturday really.

Woke up early, but managed to drift in and out of sleep until about 10am. The kids were angels. I wolfed down Rowan’s leftover porrage for breakfast, but it didn’t quite feel right so… I rushed (too much) together an ensemble of Spanish ham (which was gorgrous), mojama (which was a bit too fishy) and fried egg (which was cooked in a dirty pan, and tasted awful - I hardly ate any).

We planned on visiting our new allotment… but somehow that didn’t come off. So instead I decided to pay some attention to the houseplants that I’ve been putting off repotting for about five years. Gill told me to buy some light-weight water-retaining ballast stuff for the bottoms of the pots, but I came back with some tiny gel crystals, so we used the polystyrene from our Heals storage pots delivery to bulk out the bottom of the pots. After several years as a seriously unbalanced piece of household clutter, our yucca plant (now rotated 45 degrees) can once again stand up without the assistance of a nearby wall. The umbrella plant still looks pretty terminal though, and the cheeseplant is 50/50. For the rest… tune in again next week.

Jim the plumber came, and installed our new cooker hood while I watched the Formula One qualifying. Gill took the girls to Meadowhall for some new clothes.

The cooker hood was a problem - the window men had cut a hole (for the ducting) in the wrong pane, so Jim had to take both panes out and swap them (one broke in the process). So we still haven’t got a functioning cooker hood, and we need a new pane of glass. Ah well, at least it’s progress.

I drove to Granville Road to meet Gill - she’d taken the kids to work with her. Picked them up, and their shopping, and came home in time for You’ve Been Framed and Stars in their Eyes Kids. Ho-hum. Busied myself with packing and finishing off work for tomorrow, when me, Rowan and Lola are off to London for the week.

Rowan was very sweet at bedtime - she asked me whether I had a nickname, and what I thought her nickname should be. I told her I’m sometimes Mr Function, because of a badly-addressed direct mail I once received at work (actually addressed to Mr Funchion). I tried to think of a few for her - Long-trousers, Rosie-Rose, … then she came up with the best. Arty Pants.
Two nights ago when I put her to bed, Rowan said “imagine if you were asleep and you started acting Shakespeare in your sleep ‘to be or not to be…’”

Spem in alium

Published
by
Dan Sumption
on April 2, 2004
in It Happened to Me!
. 5 Comments

I’ve been to see the Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller show at the Millennium Galleries a couple of times this week. Most of it is interesting, but not hugely elevating - TVs showing video footage, pairs of headphones offering … binaural? … sountracks, recorded via two microphones placed at the position of each ear. It’s an interesting experience, but artistically… I’m not so sure.

But the undisputed crowd-puller of the show is Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet, the forty-part choral harmony of Spem in Alium nunquam habui, written by Thomas Tallis, played back over forty individual speakers, each one recording an individual singer or group of singers’ voice. It’s incredible, and it’s something that could only be achieved in this way. Of course, you could go to a church and hear the original sung (it was composed for a church with eight alcoves, with a group of five standing in each alcove to make the forty parts of the harmony). But you would feel a little strange walking around, encircling members of the choir, your ears inches from their head.

As it is, you can freely explore the eight groups of five floor-standing loudspeakers which form a circle around the room. Or you can sit in the middle, and be transported to a higher plane.

The piece loops every ten minutes or so, and before it starts each time you hear about a minute of the choir preparing. In the distance, the choirmaster issues vague instructions, while somewhere near your ear you hear the chit-chat of awaiting singers, one from each speaker. You have to get real close to catch the one or two voices closest to you… A bass clears his throat of phlegm. The tenor two places down from him says “I didn’t quite hear that properly”. They laugh. A boy soprano in a put-on voice says “and this is Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis… la de la…” while other boys chatter (each group of five speakers is the same, bass on the left, then baritone, tenor, … something higher [do men sing alto?], and on the right-hand end, a group of chattering choirboys).

(oops, I looked it up. It’s: treble, mean [mezzo/alto], countertenor, tenor, and bass. That’s what I get for basing my knowledge of choral music on my knowledge of saxophones.)

It’s awesome, and if anyone gets the chance to see (err, hear) it, it’s definitely recommended.

Heh. I also just read:

The earliest surviving evidence of Spem in alium’s existence is in a catalogue of the library at Nonsuch Palace made in 1596 lists “a song of fortie partes, made by Mr. Tallys.”

Anything from Nonsuch Palace is goode with me.

PS, can anyone tell me what Spem in alium means? One of the visitors’ comment cards said “ha ha ha. I just found out what spem in alium means”.
Perhaps their enlightenment was on a higher level?

Chernobyl Road Trip

Published
by
Dan Sumption
on April 2, 2004
in Found on the web
. 1 Comment

This is an incredible photo-journal of one woman’s regular bike trips to the deadlands around Chernobyl, “a town where one can ride through with no stoplights, no police, no danger of hitting any the living thing”:

Every time I pass through a check point, I am trying to realise what I feel being in a dead zone. This is new feeling. Villages, roads, woods here might look the same as beyond zone, but they are not the same. It feels like you steped inside of the picture. Everthing is not real, like painted.