Don’t Forget Your Mouthpiece

I know, I know, it’s been nearly a year, so in an effort not to disappear from the blogosphere altogether, here’s a little thought:

Next week I have to go to Hexham Abbey in Northumberland to shoot Songs of Praise, followed by a brass quintet recital in Cardiff the day after. Without going into too much detail on the logistics of the trip, I have the choice of either getting the train up to Hexham or driving. The train takes 3 1/2 hours (or so says the timetable), while Multimap reckons it’s a 6 hour drive. I would guess at spending about 40 quid on petrol, while the train ticket (saver single) costs 95 quid.

Now I’d quite like to take the train - not least because I can leave later and I don’t have to drive all day, but mostly because it is of course the environmentally responsible thing to do. What beats me is that at a time where “carbon footprints” are trailing all over the news and politicians on all sides are desperately trying to flaunt their green credentials (or pretending that they have them at all), it is deemed quite reasonable for a train journey to cost more than double the same car journey.

Does that seem completely backwards to anyone else? Is having a conscience really supposed to be that expensive? And speaking of consciences, what the hell happens to my 95 quid? This is not a left-wing pinko commie rant (ok, maybe it is a little bit) and I’m aware that the chances of ever having a fully nationalised rail industry are pretty slim, but considering where people’s priorities are these days it seems obvious to me that there are a hell of a lot of votes in it for the guy who can make train fares cheaper.

I’d like to say I’ll be making my protest by taking the car, but the notion of an environmental demonstration by one person in a car seems equally absurd.

I wonder how much flights to Newcastle are these days… (runs for cover amid a hail of Greenpeace placards)

I was moderately surprised this morning to read about the trials of my old mate Bill Cooper, trumpet player extraordinaire and key member of England’s Barmy Army, currently stationed in Brisbane for the first Ashes test. Bill was chucked out of the Gabba ground just after lunch on Day 1 having been warned by the police that playing his trumpet in the stands was not permitted.

Initially putting it down to a transparent attempt by the desperately insecure Aussies to sabotage one of English cricket’s most deadly weapons (given the quality of English cricket so far this week they needn’t have bothered), I was saddened on further investigation to discover that the long arm of the law reached as far as the home fans as well, stamping out such dangerous behaviour as the Mexican wave, the throwing of beach balls and the consumption of alcohol (and given that one of the most dangerous places in the world is between an Australian and a tinny they must be seriously worried about potential crowd trouble).

Someone should show the Queensland police some footage of the kind of behaviour seen at English football games during the 70s and 80s, so they can see just how lucky they are only to have Bill and his trumpet to deal with.

It’s CRICKET for God’s sake!!!!

I am…

• In Copenhagen.
• Tired.
• Hung over.
• Full of cold.
• In need of doing some laundry. Have been wandering around the area for half an hour in search of a launderette which I’m sure wasn’t where the hotel receptionist told me it was. Maybe I was just too tired, hung over and full of cold to comprehend.

I’m on tour with ABBA - The Show again, and while it’s nice to be properly working (i.e. playing the horn for a living), it’s a long one (nearly a month) with a lot of long coach journeys and not much free time. Today is our first real “day off” - we have a show tonight but are free until 3pm, and most of our actual day off yesterday was spent on a coach from Oslo. So I really ought to be outside enjoying the sights and sounds of wonderful Copenhagen but instead I’m sat in the hotel foyer with the laptop and a cocktail of cold remedies.

I promised a post on musicians and airline security, and since this is the first time I’ve flown anywhere since the incidents in August this would be a good place for it. It’s nice to see common sense has prevailed and specific provisions have been made for musicians in the Department for Transport’s regulations on aviation security, meaning that musical instruments of any (reasonable) size are now allowed in the cabin as a second piece of hand luggage (apart from cellos and such which need to be bought a ticket). Less pleasurable is the process of getting through security - in the past you could arrive 2 hours before departure and still have time for a leisurely beer or two and a browse through duty free. Not any more.

I can live with that though. What struck me most about recent discussions on the issue was the extent to which people seemed to accept August’s security crackdown without objection. The discussion on the BBC website featured contributions from notable musicians such as Steven Isserlis, but also elicited reactions such as Matthew from Newcastle’s “Let me remind them (musicians) that we are still in a ‘critical’ state of alert in this country, and if these inconveniences save lives, then they should learn to put up with it” and the ever-so-helpful Laura from Middlesex: “Get real, there is more to life than music”.

Apart from the obvious point that we cannot afford to simply “put up with” what is effectively a bar to working and earning money (if the stricter controls were still in place now I’m quite sure this tour would have been cancelled and I’d have lost about £2,500) there is a broader point. I’m quite sure that at some point in the future there will be a similar terrorist alert. Maybe then the security measures will be tightened again, and maybe then they will not be relaxed afterwards. Do we accept this as necessary to control terrorists, or do we question that which we are told by our government is necessary? Why is it necessary? Will it really make a difference?

Was the country on a critical state of alert before the 7/7 bombings in London? I don’t remember that it was, I would like to think we would have been warned. Can acts of terrorism really be accurately predicted? I doubt it.

While the main goal of the terrorist may be to kill on a mass scale, the secondary and more pernicious aim is to disrupt peoples’ daily lives and work. Every time a restriction is placed upon how we live and work in the name of anti-terrorism, this is a small victory for the terrorist. Yes, of course these measures are sometimes necessary, but there needs to be a constant dialogue between the people imposing these measures and the people whom they affect.

So, Matthews and Lauras of this world, I have no qualms about questioning actions taken for our own security. In a democracy we should do this, otherwise our own control over our lives is taken away. Government by fear is just as insidious a threat as terrorism and engaging in debate on these issues is a responsible course of action to protect our civil liberties as well as our security.

Forgive me for I have sinned. It has been THREE MONTHS since my last post!

Many things have happened since then which were certainly blogworthy, but for one reason or another I didn’t get around to writing and the moment passed. The main reason for this is a project I have been working on, more of which to follow very soon…

Other things I’ve been doing:

• Building a patio.
• Playing with Fine Arts Brass again.
• Discovering Flickr (not too many photos yet, and I haven’t got around to hooking the feed up to here, but soon will).
• Enjoying the start of the football season - the two (Championship) games I’ve been to so far were more exciting than anything the World Cup had to offer.
• Worrying about the implications of the new airline security regime for freelance musicians, a subject which deserves a post of its own - hopefully not in another three months.

Right now I’ll finish by plugging a site I heard about recently. Scarletmist.com is a site designed to allow the ethical exchange of tickets for gigs, festivals and the like for no more than their face value. It has become very hard of late to get tickets when they first go on sale, as demand tends to greatly outstrip supply and web servers and call centres can’t cope with the numbers. This frustration is normally compounded merely hours later when the same tickets start appearing on eBay, often for several times face value. The laws that prevent the reselling of tickets for football matches do not currently apply to music events, and the result is that bona fide music fans are often priced out of the market.

Anyway, hurrah for Scarletmist. Please use them if you can. I will be.

From the current Private Eye:

The other week (Tessa) Jowell (British Culture Secretary) accompanied Condoleezza Rice (US Secretary of State, and an accomplished pianist) to a concert by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, after which there was a dinner…

..Ms Jowell asked one of the Philharmonic’s principal players: “Are you paid for playing in the orchestra?”

Read the rest of Beyond belief?

Someone is selling a rowie on eBay.

The rowie (a.k.a. the buttery, or the morning roll), which is composed of flour, butter and salt Read the rest of Great Scottish Delicacies: The Rowie

Don’t worry, I haven’t lost it. I have temporarily removed the stylesheet from the site in honour of the 1st annual Naked Day on April 5th. The point of the exercise is to promote Web Standards, and in particular the use of clean, semantic HTML markup in documents, so they don’t appear a garbled mess to those without fancy new-fangled browsers.

So here I am, in all my glory, comfortable in my nakedness.

(brrr) It’s a bit nippy though…

As I start to think about a redesign for this site, the first and most obvious question is: what is it for? I always intended to produce a site advertising my services as a performer, arranger, conductor and teacher, but up to now the only element of jamestopp.com has been this blog, and its purpose and intended audience was not something I defined at its beginning. I was more of a mind just to start writing and see what happened. Read the rest of What am I?

During the tea break at a session for Songs Of Praise yesterday, a member of the choir collars me and says, “We were just favourably comparing you to the horns we were working with last week.”

“Oh thanks”, I replied, “who were you working with last week?”

“It was the English Symphony Orchestra, we were doing Beethoven 9″.

“Errmmm… well, that was me as well.”

I suppose that means my practice regime is working then…

On Friday the ESO’s Beethoven symphony cycle came to an end in fine style at Worcester Cathedral with performances of the 8th and 9th symphonies. To do these two pieces back-to-back, following 5 hours of rehearsal the same day, with no bumper, is seriously hard work for the first horn, but I didn’t do much to make it easier for myself. Read the rest of Motivation