After a few years of resistance, I finally gave in yesterday and bought a laptop. But not an iBook like every other musician I know seems to have, a used Dell D410 with a huge hard drive put in it. The theory is that once it’s got my music software installed, it’ll be a portable recording device, but in the meantime I’ve got it loaded up with useful tools for on the move: Firefox, Skype, MS Office, that sort of thing. And I've gone through the tedious rigmarole of getting Windows Media Player to play DVDs and 24-bit wav files.

This morning I’ve been editing basslines for our Pittsburgh gig with Chris, refining a press release, and sketching out potential programmes for 2010. We might just spend some time around then as a baroque group playing more-or-less standard repertoire, something else I’ve always had some resistance to. Aren’t there quite enough baroque groups in the world playing that stuff already? For it to be worth doing, it has to be a fresh and rewarding musical experience, which requires rather more effort and investment (personal and financial) than is commonplace in the classical music business. So let’s see.  

laterI've been testing out my laptop battery by having it play the DVD of Step Across the Border over in the corner of the room, with Mr Frith ruminating 20 years ago about how performance should ask questions of the audience. There's an interview of similar vintage here. All of which is relevant to our current planning, as we have the possibility of a revival of our show with the Tiger Lillies, as well as the potential 2010 Vivaldi/Bach/Muffat thing that I've been looking at today.

I'm certainly not interested in playing a piece like the Four Seasons, for example, if it means delivering to an audience's expectations. But it is a great piece of music with rewards of its own if you take it on its own terms. If you try and play what Vivaldi wrote (or rather, our best guess at what he seems to have meant by what he wrote), it can be very interesting indeed, and possibly a challenge to the expectations of musicians and audience alike.

But most musicians use the piece as an excuse to show what they can 'do with it'. That doesn't interest me at all any more. In fact, the last time I played in it, the first thing the soloist/director did in rehearsal was to reverse Vivaldi's first two dynamic markings, with no explanation. The message being 'I can piss all over Vivaldi if I want, I'm the soloist now'. Well, good for you sunshine, but why don't you do your homework first?

On the other hand, just before we went on stage at the Usher Hall with the Tiger Lillies last year, I turned to Martyn and said, 'well, no-one out there is expecting what we're about to do', which was to play a 25-minute long, slow repetitive song telling the story of Orpheus and Eurydice ... which may or may not have been an artistic triumph. Perhaps bits of it were. But revisiting that is an interesting prospect.