Gospel Truth

This evening, I attended the gospel workshop at Southampton Philharmonic Choir. This was much more fun than the motet workshop, for several reasons.

First of all, I switched from being a tenor to being a bass, which suited me much better. I just like the bass parts much more.

Secondly, a whole bunch of people from the Winchester Community Choir had decided to come along this week, so it was like a mini invasion by us. (Last week it was just me).

And, most of all, was the way it was taught. I wrote last week about how impressed (or intimidated) I was by the way they just handed out sheet music, and people seemed to be able to pick this up, and sing it! And even sing it well! Very professional singers.

Well. This week, it was a guest workshop leader, who taught entirely by ear. No sheet music. She started with movement exercises, then had us making animal noises and so on to loosen up, and finally singing a simple "hallelujah" by ear in 4 parts, just her singing it and us picking it up. Most of the serious singers seemed to struggle with this -- but at WCC, that's exactly what we do every week. So we were all completely used to it! At one point, she was covering a piece that apparently Mary J Blige had done, and sang us a bassline that just went "dum-dum-de-dum-dum". And then she said, "just improvise some bass parts over it if you feel like it". That's bread and butter to me, making up a bass line over a series of chords, but most of the basses seemed baffled and many ended up just singing the tune part in with the tenors.

So I had my revenge for the previous week, and much enjoyed it. Even if I can't really get down to low F.

The Crowd Went Mad

Karen and I went last night to see Roger Waters perform "Dark Side of the Moon". It was billed as the "last ever" performance. (For those who don't know, Waters was the bassist with Pink Floyd. He plays a Fender Precision, and that was what it looked like last night.).



My title is a reference to the "insanity" thread running through it -- there was a bit of a tribute to Syd Barrett.



There were also a couple of good chunks from "Wish You Were Here", and he closed with the big hits "Another Brick in the Wall (part II)" and "Comfortably Numb".

It was really excellent. The sound was loud enough, that is, very very loud but not distorted, with the bass felt as much as heard. I had a little bit of whistling in the ears afterwards, but not as bad as I've had after some gigs. There were also excellent visuals -- mostly projected




. . . and in those photos, as well as the brains on the screen, you can also sort of see a tetrahedron thing, representing the cover off DSOM, which was beaming light down on to the performers and projecting the spectrum of the rainbow around the audience.

The basic set was this:

which is the radiogram from "wish you were here"

and they had lots of lasers, pyrotechnics, and the famous flying pig:







Special effects aren't the point, though.

The musicianship was amazing. While it wasn't the original band, it was the best musicians money can buy, particularly Dave Kilminster on lead guitar. (Youtube and more)
The drummer (whose name I didn't catch) was also excellent.

By the end, everyone was singing along with everything. A very memorable evening.

Motets

Hands up who knows what a motet is? No, me neither, despite having read about it on Wikipedia.

It seems to be a piece for multiple voices in harmony where the voices don't all sing the same words at the same time, probably shortish, possibly but not necessarily in Latin, possibly but not necessarily unaccompanied. A serious choral thing.

Anyway, I went to a workshop with the Southampton Philharmonic Choir on motets. This is a slightly larger and more serious choir than the Winchester Community one. The first thing that happened when I arrived, was they asked me what I "am" -- tenor or bass. Now I think I'm a baritone, but that doesn't count for this kind of singing, so I hopefully said tenor. Next week I may try being a bass.....

At WCC, the choir leader teaches us songs by ear. We might spend between 5 minutes and several weeks learning a song, depending on how long and complex it is. We learn it line by line: she sings it, then we sing it back.

At the SPC, by contrast, sheet music was issued, for a piece many people had not sung before, and quite a few had not even heard before, and then the leader, at the start of the session, just said "Let's do the Bruckner", waved his arms, and everyone started. And sang it very well! I was gobsmacked. These people are serious!

If I know how a song goes, I can then use sheet music as a reminder of the exact notes and rhythm, but I can't "sight read" something that I have no previous idea what it sounds like.
And these motets are complicated! There isn't a one single tune that everyone sings. So even after once through, I don't immediately "get how it goes" as you would for a pop song.

So anyway, it was very challenging, very rewarding, a good choir, a big "growth experience". I did like the singing "serious" choral pieces rather than the folk songs and African songs we mainly do at WCC. I like the WCC style and the people, but am getting a bit tired of the repertoire. I can see I'd learn a lot if I joined SPC. Unlike WCC, they have a "voice test" before you can join, but I think I could pass that. Hmmmmm.

Next week, a "gospel" workshop!!

The bike

Under a scheme organised by Surrey County Council and supported by Logica, I've been lent a bicycle for four weeks to cycle to work. They emphasise the health, financial, and environmental benefits, which are real, and I suspect Logica are also looking at their real shortage of car parking spaces. . . . .

So I can try it for four weeks, and if I like it, I can buy the bike off them at a discount. And unless I hear in the next 4 weeks that I'm not going to be working in Leatherhead any more (which can always happen) I'll probably buy it.

Of course, when I say "to work", I don't mean from Hampshire, I mean from Karen's, which takes about 50 minutes (maybe less when I get better at it) and that's not much different from what it takes to drive. So I've got all the gear.... helmet, tyre levers, scary lycra shorts....

Queueing

I was with Karen at Wimbledon AFC the other day. They were celebrating a promotion at the end of the season, and the bar was hugely busy -- like 30 mins to get served.

And, to my amazement, they formed a queue to get served. I mean, I know we Brits believe in queueing, but at the bar it's just not done. I don't think I've ever seen a queue at a bar before.

Traditionally the bar staff should know, and there's a lot of "no, you were first" and this kind of thing, but no straight line of people at ninety degrees to the bar. It was necessary though, and I guess the huge positive atmosphere and bonding in the room made it work. Certain disreputable types just joined the bar at the front of the queue, of course. . . .

Two interacting factors

Diet and exercise. . . .

One thing that I find fascinating is that some advisors say "it's all about diet" and other say "it's all about exercise". I was thinking about this, about the way factors interact. (A bit like "nature and nurture", i.e. genes and environment). Usually it's context-dependent.

What brought this on was an article on a weightlifting/bodybuilding site that said "if you're not losing fat as you want to, or if you're not gaining muscle as you want to, it's almost certainly your diet".

Now this is addressed to a community where (presumably) almost everyone exercises. If you're on a site like that, you do some weight training. Most of the people he's addressing are obsessed with exercise. So in that context, that advice is valid. If it's not working, it's probably the diet. But if you address the same question for a group of weight watchers who all control their calories and obsessively eat the right things, then the correct advice is "if you're not getting the results you want, it's probably about exercise".

The two factors interact, and whichever one has more variability in the particular context, is probably the one to work on.

Nature and nurture: people often try to say, "this characteristic (e.g. height, or criminality, or cancer, or whatever) is xx% genes and yy% environmental. But usually, the genes and the environment interact, so it's like having two switches for a landing light: it's not that each one controls the light 50%, or one controls it 40% and the other 60% -- they both control it 100%. Whichever switch you play with, you can turn the light on and off, whatever the setting of the other switch. With genes and environment, it's more often like two dimmer switches, where either can separately produce the full range of brightnesses. So the xx% / yy% thing doesn't mean anything. It's entirely context dependent, just like the diet / exercise thing.

In a setting where the environment is very uniform and there is a lot of genetic diversity, any scientist who does experiments will find that most variation is caused by genes. If there's less genetic diversity and wide environmental diversity, then most variation is caused by environment.

For example, the classic study on intelligence: look at identical twins separated at birth and raised in different families (how those people must get tired of being studied, there are so few of them and they are so useful). See how the correlation between their intelligence compares to that in the population at large, and between twins not separated.
If you do this in a country where everyone gets reasonably well fed, and reasonably well educated, and so on, a lot of the intelligence will be down to genes. If you did it in a country with some very good areas and some areas of dire poverty with starvation, no schooling, no TV etc, and the separate twins sometimes crossed between those, then the percentage due to environment is suddenly going to look higher.

My advice then: if you're not getting the results you want from your diet / exercise regime, it's probably whichever factor you're not really focussed on.

More about "growing up"

Someone said to me that the piece about "growing up" was a bit prescriptive -- "this is how you ought to behave" -- and I guess that's fair. It does represent the author's opinion, and so what they're really saying is, "this is what I like in a person". I posted it because I share that author's tastes.

It's a subtle point, though. I felt that what the author was saying was, for example, not just "everyone should always be on time", to which one might respond, "are not other things sometimes more important?". What they were pointing to, specifically with the heading about "now you're over 25", is the syndrome where some people exhibit helplessness or thoughtlessness: no money, always late, inconveniencing other people, "crowd surfing" (i.e. constantly relying on friends for rescues), as a way of affirming eternal childhood or rebelling against authority. There are good things to be retained from childhood, but those aren't them. And there are effective ways of confronting authority, but those aren't them. You can't bring down the government by not cleaning your teeth.

It's not so much the specific examples of behaviour mentioned, though I liked those. It's the willingness to admit that what you do always and inevitably affects other people, and so you are not free to act as you choose. You have to accept that responsibility. And that's "growing up". And to me, yes, I believe that is a truth and not just an opinion.

More plumbing

Oh, by the way, while I'm ranting about plumbing (see 18th April)....

A few years ago a European friend chided me about UK plumbing. He said that "over there" all the taps are mixer taps, so you can have whatever temperature of water you want. Why do we Brits persist in having "hot taps" and "cold taps" ?

Well, excu-use me. Mixer taps seem to be becoming more common over here. And I very rarely seem to see anyone operate "both halves" of a mixer tap at the same time to get an intermediate- temperature stream.

Perhaps that's because it doesn't work. For sanitary reasons, the water has to be kept separate... so what you usually get if you turn both halves on is two adjacent streams, one of cold water, and one of scalding water. I've just returned from trying to wash my hands under such a mixer tap, and I could feel both the cold water and the scalding water. Not at all pleasant.

The other drawback is, of course, that it increases the cross-heating effect between the pipes, so when you first turn on the cold tap, it comes out warm, if you've been using hot water recently, so you have to waste more water running it through to cold if you want a drink.

What I don't understand is why people want more than two choices of temperature anyway. I want two temperatures: cold, for making drinks, rinsing things, watering plants, etc; and "as hot as I can bear on my skin", for bathing, showering, washing up, washing my hands, and so on. I want two separate taps, one for each of these.

What's the point of having my hot water hotter than I can bear to put my hands in? It puts the hot water system under more stress, costs more in wasted energy; if there are children in the house, it's positively dangerous; and it is of course un-green... what exactly would it be for anyway?

If I have my hot water at hand temperature, it's easy to run a bath or wash my hands. A separate hot tap and a cold tap. Those are all I need. No mixer tap. I thank you.