I've been playing all day at the excellent Northern Streams event in Edinburgh.  Great bands,  great venue, great acoustics at the Grassmarket centre in Edinburgh.  We played music from Orkney, Sweden, Norway and Denmark.   

Check out Fjärin,  Fiona Driver  Oleman

 

Just bought the album X.  This is a gorgeous track by Ed Sheeran - great vocals.  

What an amazing piece this is, written  by Bartok in 1937, at the height of his powers. 

Its an amazing soundscape of percussion and pianos, pushing what the instruments are capable of.  All of the parts are given equal importance and they are hard to play.  It sounds quite impenetrable and is absolutely frantic. But once you have heard it few times and know that Bartok was very keen on the Golden section, and the Fibanocci series it begins to make sense.  He also uses loads of tritones.  So, so clever.  Worth a listen for any composer.

It was originally performed by Bartok and his wife Ditta in Basle.  Blimey, they both must have been good!  Imagine living in their house!

I made this view about how to import graphics into Sibelius in relation to a particular project that I am doing at the moment. However I thought it might be helpful more generally,  so here it is.  Let me know if its useful.

Check out my You Tube channel.  I have loaded up a couple of compositions and I've put film to these.  Great to know what you think?

Very interesting day today.  Want to the @EdSciFest Music on the Brain event.  

Interesting panel of speakers with gave us a lot of information about research, sound, music instinct.  Food for thought. 

I have also spent a fair amount of the day scoring a piece by ear.  Its time consuming.  But now enjoying some late night Janacek.  Enjoy.  I love anything with pizzicato. 

The Edinburgh Science festival has a great programme focussing on light as its key theme.  There is a really interesting event,  Music on the brain, tomorrow for those of us that are musicians.  

Many people do extreme sports. I do extreme Sibelius Notation!  This is an extract of Mikka.  The wavy slur line is done with graphics.  Very cool. I've made a few videos of how I did this and other equally other challenging contemporary notation. I'll put them up on You tube when I finish them.