It is my intention during 2015 to do something creative each day. As I am principally concerned in my work with music and sound, this will feature in the snippets or fade-ins that I share with you on this blog.

January 31st
Today I have mostly been rehearsing and performing with choirs. This is the Bailiffgate Singers (or at least a quarter of us) singing at the Feltonbury music marathon in aid of the Community Allotment Project. You can hear me conducting 😉 This is a picture of Bailiffgate Museum in which we rehearse. Later on I heard my friend Sarah Gray and her band The Alpacazz who are sensationally brilliant.

January 30th
Today I have been making arrangements of Northumbrian songs for choir. This is a mining song from the Durham Coalfields, Jowl Jowl and Listen. I was looking for a coal mining picture in my many photos of the past few years, but could only find this – some coal in the back of one of the A4 engines at the National Railway Museum in York!

January 29th
Youtube keeps telling me I need a trailer video for my Seapieparcel channel, so I’ve made one this morning. “Between 30 and 60 seconds,” they say, so it fits in perfectly with the fade-ins. I’ve chosen one of the favourites of my 2014 sunrise pics and a snippet of my most popular pieces: Hodie Christus Natus Est, which is getting another real-life airing this weekend as it happens.

January 28th
Today I have musically rested, except of course for preparing for tonight’s Bailiffgate Singers’ rehearsal in which we shall be ploughing on with our Purcell, including getting started with this duet for sopranos and altos, “Sound The Trumpet”.

January 27th
Today I have introduced two brand new songs to two very eager and appreciative classes of youngsters: songs composed especially for them to fit in with our musical rivers theme – one about the machinery of the mills in Upper Calderdale, and one about the flood defence lakes around Wakefield. This is the song you hear here (The Great Crested Grebe). In the evening, after much excitement on the buses of Wakefield I went, as a special guest (!) to a Brownie meeting in Crigglestone and we composed up a storm with just what we could find and our own voices, and they took to the Zebra Zig Zag with gusto and joy. I then boarded my 4th and 5th trains of the day and came home for a rest.

January 26th
Today I have been playing The Peanut Vendor endlessly. I really have perhaps had enough of that very excellent song for one day! Instead I have selected an arrangement of the beautiful Northumbrian folksong Bonny At Morn which I am currently arranging for Bailiffgate Singers after a request from Sue.

January 25th
Today I have composed new songs and walked along Warkworth Beach and remembered my Robert-Burns-setting phase on this Burns Night. This music is from my setting of Tam O’Shanter, completed for my Doctor of Music degree in Auckland. The words are “But pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flow’r, it’s bloom is shed…” and the music is from a short madrigal sung by the women of the chorus immediately after an increasingly raucous drinking song – the root of Tam’s later problems 😉 The image is of Burns’ hand on his statue in the Octagon in Dunedin.

January 24th
Today, I have made no music. I have spent the day at the indoor athletics in Glasgow with Mum. There was much motivational heart-pumping music of a loud and sing-along nature and then there was rhythmic clapping and raucous screeching incited by the commentators. Here you see a pole vaulter getting over a 2nd-place-securing height, you hear a high-jumper not quite making a personal best height (but he nearly did and he’d already won anyway), and then you hear a sprinter making a disqualifying false start and the exclamations of those around me.

January 23rd
It’s the third choir in three days this evening. This time Rock Festival Choir as we prepare for our Candelmas evensong outing in Longhoughton on Feb 1st. We sang this one at the 2013 service. It’s RFC singing The Lamb – my Lamb, not the more well-known Taverner one!

January 22nd
Today I have been Purcelling away with great enthusiasm and joy, and the thrills of the day are about to increase as I’m off to spend the evening singing with these lovely fellows. It’s Lionheart Harmony! Wheeeh! A fade-in-and-out of a track from our recent album. If you want to hear the whole thing, you know what you need to do – just contact one of us and purchase it. Only £8! Bargain.

January 21st
Today I have mostly been waiting for photocopying, then folding and stapling music for Bailiffgate Singers. Whilst waiting for the photocopying I did shopping. This was successful. When I got home I did a quick transcription of this Thomas Tallis gem which I was reminded of last evening and which may well find itself worming its way into our repertoire this term. It’s Manchester Cathedral, by the way.

January 20th
When I went to visit Great Auntie Vera on Monday night we had a brilliant chat about creativity and colour and inspiration. Here we are being jolly and here we also are performing on the recording of my song “I Wanna Car”, composed in 2013 for the project I was doing in Lupset. She’s from Gateshead, so has what she calls a “Northumbrian lilt”.

January 19th
After a day of extreme ploppiness at school, I went to visit Great Auntie Vera who gave me a right old cheering up with talk of projects of creativity and the sharing of Christmas chocolates, then I walked back to Mum and Dad’s. Mum wouldn’t say hello to me when I got back without whispered prompting. Oh how we chortled.

January 18th
I have most of today working at The Hepworth Wakefield, inspiring more families to make new music with each other. Here’s the end of our “Five Ships” song. What you hear is our three-wave finale and the rapturous applause we got from other gallery visitors. This picture is of one of the five ships, part of Folkert de Jong’s installation.

January 17th
Today I have spent the day with creative families making music inspired by sculptures in The Hepworth Wakefield. Natalie took some pics of us. Here’s one (us singing Five Ships and composing up a storm) with some Hepworth-inspired ping-pong music from an earlier workshop.

January 16th
Today I have mostly been dealing with Purcell again, but have managed to spare a thought for my new songs for next week’s river lessons, and also for tomorrow and Sunday, when I shall be once again delivering Musical Sculptures workshops at The Hepworth Wakefield. This is part of a song I composed inspired by the building, and the picture is me in action at the gallery.

January 15th
Earlier this week, and not for the first time in my life, I found myself being confronted by a grown-up expressing disbelief that it was possible to create much in the way of music/literacy lessons around the poetic phenomenon of kennings. I told them the stories of earlier forays into this very specific genre and reminded myself fondly of the Roman Head Choppers from Swansfield Park First School’s 2008 production “Red Jemma Goes Back”. Oh, how Orange Class rocked those kennings! This was the staff T-shirt for the performances.

The lyrics on this extract:
Who’s this boy invading our space?
Look’s like trouble on his ugly face.
Rally round comrades – we’re the schoolboy stoppers!
Orange Brigade – we’re the Roman Head Choppers!

3.Neck crackers (crackers)!
Soul spillers!
Bone clickers (clickers)!
Flesh carvers!
Leg breakers!
Blood blenders (blood blenders)!
Body (body) halvers!

January 14th
This was the sound of my day yesterday – the A3 printer printing music for Bailiffgate Singers. Shortly after this it ran out of ink so that was that so we had to make do with limited pages! In the background is Whittingham Fair as played by the computer – this arrangement is what I was working on as I printed merrily.

January 13th
This is me at the end of a splendid day, waiting in our delightful red car for Jamie at Alnmouth Station in the snow having just come back myself from Wakefield on a previous train. Our system of parking the car in the right spot and having duplicate keys worked like clockwork. The football is on the radio and this song is the beginning of Magical Glass. Some days are just so good that you have to sing, right? I was told by four different people that I was brilliant today and only one of them was my mother and only one of them was a child. One of the other two also said, “This is how music should always be taught.”

January 12th
I had hoped to have children playing these rhythms for you today, but there was so much distractedness from them due to some altercation at lunchtime, that they were incapable of concentrating for more than 15 seconds at a time. They did manage to play all the rhythms though, and I am optimistic for improvement next week! I’m always optimistic. In the meantime here’s non-children playing them instead.

January 11th
Because I’m who I am, I did put the Northumberland folksong “O The Bonny Fisher Lad” in irregular time signatures, when I did my arrangement all those years ago. I rather like it and hope that Bailiffgate Singers will too!

January 10th
Today I have been mostly doing arrangements again for Bailiffgate Singers’ new term. I’ve had a few requests for Northumberland music, so Have been sorting out my Three Northumberland Folksongs from my days conducting the Duchess’ High School Girls’ Choir for this SATB ensemble. Here’s a bit of Felton Lonnen without the Ts and Bs. Lonnen means road up here so here’s the Felton Road one frosty morning!

January 9th
Just popped down to Middlesbrough to see the “International Exchanges: Modern Art and St Ives 1915-1965” exhibition at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art Mima. It’s brilliant, I should say, and you should all head there before it goes away later this month. Lots of Hepworths and the like, but to my utter joy there was Victor Passmore’s Snowstorm. I used to do workshops on this at The Hepworth Wakefield, (that’s what this snippet of music’s from) and we saw it in St. Ives in the summer. This picture is of some other Middlesbrough landmarks!

January 8th
Today I have been continuing to consider this term’s music for Bailiffgate Singers after being given encouragement at the New Year meal last evening, and acting upon all that considering I have commenced to make Purcell’s “Come Ye Sons Of Art” suitable for our choir. Here’s a bit of what I’ve done today with an appropriate picture of a stained glass window at St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall.

January 7th
Today I am very sleepy after my four days of intense composing japery. Here is a lullaby. This bird is not a pigeon, but this is a lullaby for pigeons, or at least the end of it. I have spent the day so far considering the new term’s music for Bailiffgate Singers, but for now, I need to sleep so that I may sport merrily with them later – the choir, not the pigeons.

January 6th
I have spent much of today getting to know some new classes of Year 6 children. We have composed musical rivers. Here’s the beginning of 6C’s brilliant effort. You hear the source of the boomwhacker river, then the source of the scrapey things river which joins the boomwhacker river at the bottom of a waterfall – this is a confluence, you know! The water calms down in a pool in which frogs are ribbitting. What you don’t hear are the goldfish swimming upstream and the river meeting the ocean on a sandy beach. Top creativity from the youngsters, I thought.

January 5th
My mother said “Good morrow!” this morning when my brother entered the living room, and then launched into this song from her childhood. It’s been in my head all day, and now I’ve done a teensy arrangement of it. That’s my Mum on the intro and a picture of the two of us from November. Elsewhere, I have been renewing my acquaintance with loads of lovely children and two annoying ones. I have a plan for the troublesome twosome.

January 4th
I have spent today at The Hepworth Wakefield again with workshopsful of families composing music inspired by the art works in the gallery. In this one you hear the fourth verse of my song “Five Ships” inspired by Folkert de Jong’s work and some of the accompaniment patterns the group composed. You can hear we had an eager Dad in the group singing heartily. The lyrics are:
Pipe down, pipe down.
All’s clear, gliding through the sleeping, swishing ocean.
Even keel, even keel.
Heave to! Dreaming peacefully of home. Heave to!

January 3rd
I’ve spent the day encouraging eager families to compose music at The Hepworth Wakefield. A bumper crop of them today in fact. One of the workshops used this work to inspire a story and incidental music about Toby, a big foot and a teapot. The group decided that Toby was a dog, he wanted a bone, the bone was in the teapot – inaccessible. A giant stamped on the teapot with his big foot so Toby could get the bone. This fade-in is “Dog Music”. You hear three lots of scurrying, four pantings, four barkings and three more scurryings.

January 2nd
I’ve spent today tidying up my mess from last term in readiness for the new one on Monday. I found this ration book which helped me illustrate one of my new songs last term.

January 1st
I have spent the day writing letters about last year’s exploits to friends far and wide. Here’s an extract with a photo from last May.