A nice surprise this morning - Linda Ormiston rang to tell me that Mungrel Stuff is in Stephen Pettit's top 10 classical CDs of the year in today's Sunday Times.  I don't normally do this, but I think that merits a self-congratulatory email to a few friends and the players involved.  We got a nice review in BBC Music Magazine this month too, which I've put on the press page. 

Well, in the last week, we've gone from having an empty diary to having upwards of four projects in the next year and a bit, not counting any recordings for which we've got funding applications pending.  Speaking of which, I heard on Wednesday that the contemporary music project I'd cooked up didn't even make it onto the shortlist for funding - hey ho.  Rejection is good for the soul, if not the bank balance.  We're also about to join a little consortium of groups applying for money towards new methods of presentation in concerts - unfortunately we first have to undertake an audience research project.  Since when was audience research a vital part of artistic endeavour?  It seems crazy at a time when we have to struggle to find the resources to mount even the simplest of projects, that public money is readily available for audience research.  It's not as though our Scottish audience is so enormous as to be a particularly useful statistical sample.

I fought through a cold (still there) for the rest of the week to lecture at the RSAMD, start work at last on the Prefab Sprout scores, and to go and hear Mr McFall's Chamber in Edinburgh. The RSAMD was more fun than usual, as the students are being imbued with a wonderfully streetwise attitude to the music business.  Myra Soutar introduced me to the class by listing some of the things I do, and saying 'learn from this guy, or you'll end up stuck in the back of the 2nds in some provincial orchestra and have a miserable life' (or words to that effect).  The students gave off a genuine air of intelligence, which is rare.

The McFalls gig was great fun - I didn't pack my harmonica as I was going only as an audient this time.  Greg played some staggering klemzer tunes he learnt from a 7 foot tall Armenian piano player in an orange kaftan (something like that anyway, he told a long and hilarious story before launching into it), and he sounded like he was on fire.  Brian, Graeme and Rick played a beautiful tango-based piece for viola, piano and bass by a composer whose name I forget.  Su-a's musical saw spot featured a Raymond Scott electronic jingle arranged for the ensemble, and if they'd got a second encore (Robert told me) they would have played the Animal Magic theme.  There was some Takemitsu and some Zappa in there too.  Not bad for a Friday night.

Yesterday I saw Alison and Liz who were up playing in Concordia at St Andrews in the Square: a really excellent programme put together by Mark Levy, of music for Mary Queen of Scots.  Lorna Anderson sang very beautifully indeed: I must ask her to take part in The Gentle Shepherd if we ever get enough money to record it. 

On the way home I bumped into the conductor Martyn Brabbins outside our local shop - next week he's recording the music of Cecil Coles for Hyperion with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.  Coles was a Scots-born pupil of Holst who was killed in the trenches in 1918, and six years ago I made a radio programme featuring the first recordings of some of the music, and an interview with his surviving descendent, Penny Catherine Coles, who some decades ago also wrote a series of 'Mallory Towers' type adventure stories about girls at boarding schools.  She has painstakingly gathered as much information as she can about her father, who died when she was a few months old.  Martyn was taken with all of this, and very impressed with the music, and he's orchestrated some unfinished pieces and talked Ted Perry at Hyperion into making a CD.  There's a concert next Friday at the BBC in Glasgow, and Penny will be there.  Can't wait.