A very strange thing happened last night: I went to an orchestral gig and really enjoyed it. Admittedly the presence of Fred Frith on the bill meant that my enjoying it was pretty much a foregone conclusion, but having him, George Lewis and Roscoe Mitchell on the same bill in front of a nearly full and noisily appreciative City Hall was great. Lewis’s piece of ‘post-genre cheerfulness’ was 25 minutes of rivetingly precise orchestration devices played with great panache by the SSO folks; the trio improvisation was as witty and serious as you could wish for; and Fred managed to drop one of his chopsticks off the stage in his piece, a gesture I’d assumed was a piece of Jimmy Page-like ‘tossing the violin bow away’ showmanship. But when he started looking for it and a helpful member of the front row retrieved it and passed it back up to him, I realised it had of course been an ingenious ploy to break down the fourth wall and engage the audience in the performance. Mibbe. Anyway, you can hear the whole thing on Radio 3’s Hear and Now on 19 April.

There was a cheerfully post-genre bunch of musical folks in the audience to bump into, including improvisers, folkies, rock critics, students and academics. I had the chance to tell Catriona McKay how much I love her Harponium album, and a colleague from another academic institution asked me ‘Are you still at the university?’ ‘Just about.’ (pause) ‘Well, I’m pleased and astonished.’ ‘Yeah … I think I am too actually.’

Simon Frith also alerted me to this event (PDF) coming up soon, where the Frith brothers will discuss what listening is: I’ll definitely be there listening to that. And Kate Molleson returned my precious Tracy Thomson hat which I’d left behind at another concert earlier in the week, after being in quite a hurry to leave within 10 minutes of it starting.

On Thursday afternoon I was very proud indeed of my Performance students who were presenting their Group Exercise, where nine brand-new groups performed for 10 minutes each. It was definitely post-genre, and often extremely cheerful: evidence too that musicians can learn much more from each other than they can from their 'teachers'.