Category — Art

We’re pleased to be able to tell you about the new book from our friend Mar­i­an­na Lines. An author­i­ty on ancient sites, espe­cial­ly in Scot­land where she lives, Mar­i­an­na is also a tal­ent­ed artist. Her book is avail­able now from all the usu­al places, includ­ing your local book­store and those online peo­ple who don’t pay their tax­es. The Trav­eller’s Guide to Sacred Scot­land is pub­lished by Goth­ic Image in Glastonbury.

The Trav­eller’s Guide to Sacred Scotland
A Guide To Scot­land’s Ancient Sites and Sacred Places
Mar­i­an­na Lines

Buy from the pub­lish­ers, Goth­ic Image

The first guide­book to weave togeth­er the cul­tur­al, his­tor­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al aspects of this fas­ci­nat­ing coun­try, it will enhance the expe­ri­ence of the arm­chair trav­eller as well as any pil­grim to the ancient mag­i­cal land of Scotland.

Scot­land has a rich pre­his­to­ry stretch­ing from Neolith­ic times through the Bronze and Iron Ages. She has islands from the mag­nif­i­cent Orkneys and Shet­lands to the Out­er Hebrides and the Uists, the Isle of Skye and the Inner Hebrides. Each one is renowned for its ancient sanc­ti­ty. Scot­land was home to many dif­fer­ent cul­tures includ­ing the Norse, Picts and Celts. She has a par­tic­u­lar­ly unique and stun­ning land­scape with holy moun­tains, spec­tac­u­lar lochs and sacred trees. The High­lands with their Pic­tish set­tle­ments and carved stand­ing stones offer yet anoth­er kind of awe-inspir­ing beau­ty. Fairy folk­lore, poets and bards, Arthuri­an and Mer­lin relat­ed sites, Celtic Chris­t­ian foun­da­tions and their Saints are all to be found in this land.

This guide­book not only takes the read­er on an inspir­ing jour­ney of dis­cov­ery into Scot­land’s past, but, also, offers direc­tions to places regard­ed by Scots them­selves of spe­cial impor­tance, what they mean and their rel­e­vance today.

• Pub­lished : 03/11/2014
• ISBN : 9780906362761
• For­mat : Paperback
• Imprint : Goth­ic Image Publications
• Size (mm): 110 x 215
• Cat­e­go­ry: Travel
• Pages : 500
• Price £16.99

I love Shake­speare, but I’ve nev­er real­ly thought of per­form­ing any.

How­ev­er when we were prepar­ing for the Relay For Life of Sec­ond Life Telethon, sev­er­al mem­bers of the team were invit­ed to record a series of poems to be played dur­ing the Lumi­nar­ia cer­e­mo­ny (one of the most mov­ing parts of the event).

Lantern release dur­ing the Lumi­nar­ia cer­e­mo­ny — image by Beq Janus

The Lumi­nar­ia Cer­e­mo­ny occurs at every Relay For Life event, whether in the organ­ic world, or as in our case, in a vir­tu­al world. As the sun sets, lumi­nar­ia lin­ing the track light up the night. A hush falls over the crowd that had been over­flow­ing with cel­e­bra­tion. Par­tic­i­pants, sur­vivors, and care­givers then gath­er to remem­ber loved ones lost to can­cer and to hon­our those whose fight con­tin­ues. The cer­e­mo­ny in Sec­ond Life includ­ed a won­der­ful addi­tion­al fea­ture: the releas­ing of illu­mi­nat­ed Chi­nese lanterns into the night sky (see Beq’s pic­ture above, tak­en in front of her amaz­ing Esch­er build that you can just make out).

The offi­cial com­men­tary is car­ried by T1 Radio, and they read a list of names, between which they play pieces of music. Now, they have a licence to play com­mer­cial records, but we don’t, so this year they kind­ly gave us a run­ning order and tim­ings and we were able to deter­mine what was to go in the slots occu­pied by music in their cov­er­age, so we could “opt out” to our own audio pro­gram­ming. This was the pur­pose of the pre-record­ed poems. Mem­bers of our team put these record­ings togeth­er with pro­duc­tion music (main­ly by Kevin MacLeod, see cred­it below) to cre­ate a series of real­ly beau­ti­ful sequences, which I will hope­ful­ly be able to link to for you short­ly where they’ll have full cred­its — they’re being assem­bled into a series of short videos accom­pa­nied by images of this year’s campsites.

One of the two pieces I chose to record was this speech from Pros­pero in The Tempest:

Our rev­els now are end­ed. These our actors,
As I fore­told you, were all spir­its, and
Are melt­ed into air, into thin air;
And, like the base­less fab­ric of this vision,
The cloud-capped tow­ers, the gor­geous palaces,
The solemn tem­ples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inher­it, shall dissolve;
And, like this insub­stan­tial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our lit­tle life
Is round­ed with a sleep. (IV.i.148–158)

In addi­tion to send­ing the voice-only record­ing off to the guys for incor­po­rat­ing in the sequence, I found a piece of music [Vir­tutes Instru­men­ti, Com­posed and per­formed by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Cre­ative Com­mons: By Attri­bu­tion 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/] and ran it under the voice record­ing. As it will nev­er be used for any­thing, here it is, and I hope you like it:

Pros­per­o’s Speech with music — click to play

I won­der if any read­ers watched the fas­ci­nat­ing BBC series The Secret His­to­ry Of Our Streets a few months ago, which traced 150 years of social his­to­ry of sev­er­al Lon­don locations.

In the intro there was a view of a fas­ci­nat­ing “dark Satan­ic mills” kind of city (see above), pre­sent­ed in a con­text in which you would imag­ine it was rep­re­sent­ing Vic­to­ri­an Lon­don. But if you look for a moment at the image, you’ll see at once that there was nev­er a Lon­don quite like that.

In fact it was a brief clip from a movie called Franklyn — and believe it or not, I know about this movie sole­ly because, intrigued by that intro­duc­to­ry image, I cap­tured the frame, stuck it into Google Image Search, and looked at what came up. Hence I came to this film four years after it came out.

Franklyn (not the world’s most inspired title, but it is actu­al­ly quite impor­tant to the action) tells a very nice­ly detailed and inter­twined tale of four char­ac­ters and moves between mod­ern Lon­don and a kind of neo-Steam­punk-medi­ae­val ana­logue, “Mean­while City”, in which all the inhab­i­tants are oblig­ed to have a reli­gion of some sort. It’s a very noir, Steam­punk, SF, psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller. There’s a cer­tain amount of vio­lence, which I don’t go for in gen­er­al but here it’s fair­ly essen­tial to the sto­ry: that is prob­a­bly what earned it a 15 cer­tifi­cate in the UK (and “R” in the US).

The film fea­tures gor­geous cos­tumes and CGI, yet on a rel­a­tive­ly small bud­get. Not only that, it’s a British film, with British fund­ing too, writ­ten and direct­ed by Ger­ald McMor­row. It was his first fea­ture, and con­sid­er­ing the com­plex­i­ty of the plot and the visu­al require­ments of the sto­ry, he does extreme­ly well IMO. Mor­row wrote it him­self, inspired by a short film of his, Thes­pi­an X.

The Mean­while City seg­ments are beau­ti­ful­ly done, and that’s where the CGI is con­cen­trat­ed, of course. The bud­get was able to be rel­a­tive­ly small by virtue of the fact that only around 20% of the movie requires top-lev­el effects like city-build­ing and recre­ation of busy streets with all man­ner of char­ac­ters milling about. The detail in the par­al­lel world is excel­lent, and the cos­tumes are won­der­ful and wondrous.

Yes, there are faint echoes of oth­er films here (notably V for Vendet­ta, some have sug­gest­ed, but apart from a char­ac­ter in a mask and a Lon­don set­ting most of the time, that’s about the extent of the similarity).

Reviews at the time of release (2008) were mixed, but that just shows how review­ers have dif­fi­cul­ty with sophis­ti­cat­ed plot-lines: it worked fine for me, and although there were some details that weren’t quite under­stand­able until you’d seen the film through, real­is­ing what those details meant after­wards was part of the appeal (I felt the same about Sixth Sense for exam­ple). And I do like a film where I can’t tell what’s going to hap­pen or how it’s going to end.

Some crit­i­cised it for not devel­op­ing the char­ac­ters suf­fi­cient­ly, but in fact I was­n’t con­scious of that. We learn about them grad­u­al­ly as the sto­ry evolves. We need to learn about them grad­u­al­ly, because the entire plot revolves around the con­flu­ence of the char­ac­ters and giv­ing us their back-sto­ries up front would be ruinous. Like Sixth Sense, you do not want to know too much about this sto­ry before­hand (don’t watch the fas­ci­nat­ing “Mak­ing of” extra on the DVD until after you’ve seen the film, for example).

Yes, there are some issues with this film, but they’re minor IMO and it’s def­i­nite­ly worth a look. Actu­al­ly two looks, because once you know how it ends, you’ll find you can sud­den­ly grasp some lit­tle sub­tleties through­out the film that per­haps passed you by. There are even some ele­ments of humour that are sur­pris­ing­ly appropriate.

And look out for the impres­sive dif­fer­ent use of colour and shoot­ing approach for each char­ac­ter. Mean­while City is all earthy tones, for exam­ple, with lit­tle or no blue. Scenes involv­ing the char­ac­ter Sal­ly are always warm and well-lit. Mr Ess­er senior is often seen in sil­hou­ette, in the mid­dle dis­tance, with cool colours tend­ing towards the blue. And so on. You may also notice (well, you will now) that as the action shifts back and forth between the two worlds, each loca­tion in Lon­don has a cor­re­spond­ing loca­tion in Mean­while City that echoes it visu­al­ly or at least functionally.

Here’s the offi­cial trailer:

The movie also has a very effec­tive sound­track by tal­ent­ed com­pos­er Joby Tal­bot (Once Around the Sun, Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy, Divine Com­e­dy, etc) with an impres­sive major the­mat­ic element.

Rec­om­mend­ed.

Sit­u­at­ed near the SW Sicil­ian coast is the town of Agri­gen­to, home of the so-called “Val­ley of the Tem­ples” (Valle dei Tem­pli), a ridge of land above the ancient city that is the site of a lin­ear clus­ter of (main­ly) Ancient Greek ruins, many of which are quite spec­tac­u­lar — the place is well worth a vis­it. It is a UNESCO World Her­itage site.

In addi­tion to the Greek and Byzan­tine remains, there is the Vil­la Aurea, which was home to 19th Cen­tu­ry British mil­i­tary offi­cer and archae­o­log­i­cal patron Alexan­der Hard­cas­tle, who financed, among oth­er things, the re-erec­tion of the pil­lars at the Tem­ple of Her­a­cles on the site.

Today, the Valle dei Tem­pli is not sim­ply a col­lec­tion of ancient sites: it’s also a loca­tion for mod­ern art which is dis­trib­uted among the ruins and else­where, such as in the Villa.

Thus it was that on a recent vis­it I encoun­tered this remark­able piece of stat­u­ary in the Vil­la Aurea gar­den, in bril­liant, shiny white mate­r­i­al show­ing a group of fash­ion­ably-dressed young peo­ple poised to kill one of their num­ber with var­i­ous weapons. What on Earth was this amaz­ing piece of work? There was no indi­ca­tion on or near the piece to indi­cate its ori­gin or significance.

After a sur­pris­ing­ly lengthy Inter­net search, I found the answer. It is a (small) part of a mul­ti­me­dia col­lec­tion of works by the Moscow-based art group “AES+F” titled Last Riot/Last Riot 2.

AES+F are named after their ini­tials: the group, found­ed in 1987, was orig­i­nal­ly AES — Tatiana Arza­maso­va, Lev Evzovich and Evge­ny Svy­atsky — but they were lat­er joined by pho­tog­ra­ph­er Vladimir Frid­kes — hence the “+F”.

Last Riot first appeared in 2007 at the Venice Bien­ni­al as a three-screen video pro­vid­ing win­dows into a high­ly detailed 3D vir­tu­al envi­ron­ment, inspired appar­ent­ly by the US Army video game “Amer­i­ca’s Army”, cre­at­ed to encour­age young peo­ple to enlist. You can see excerpts from it here:

AES+F say about the work:
“The vir­tu­al world gen­er­at­ed by the real world of the past twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry as the organ­ism com­ing from a test-tube, expands, leav­ing its bor­ders and grasp­ing new zones, absorbs its founders and mutates in some­thing absolute­ly new. In this new world the real wars look like a game on www.americasarmy.com, and prison tor­tures appear sadis­tic exer­cis­es of mod­ern valkyr­ias. Tech­nolo­gies and mate­ri­als trans­form the arti­fi­cial envi­ron­ment and tech­niques into a fan­ta­sy land­scape of the new epos. This par­adise also is a mutat­ed world with frozen time where all past epoch the neigh­bor with the future, where inhab­i­tants lose their sex, and become clos­er to angels. The world, where any most severe, vague or erot­ic imag­i­na­tion is nat­ur­al in the fake unsteady 3D per­spec­tive. The heroes of new epos have only one iden­ti­ty, the iden­ti­ty of the rebel of last riot. The last riot, where all are fight­ing against all and against them­selves, where no dif­fer­ence exists any more between vic­tim and aggres­sor, male and female. This world cel­e­brates the end of ide­ol­o­gy, his­to­ry and ethic.”

In addi­tion to the video, there are series of glossy white sculp­tures of which the exam­ple at the Vil­la is one, and remark­able still images fea­tur­ing the same weaponised, brand-name-dressed young peo­ple, in a kind of super­re­al­is­tic style that some­how echoes works of the Renais­sance as much as they do CGI-cre­at­ed videogame characters.

Here’s the stat­ue from the Vil­la in an art gallery set­ting (from the AES+F web site):

…and one of the images from the same source:

I would love to expe­ri­ence the orig­i­nal video as well as the oth­er pieces, espe­cial­ly giv­en my inter­est in vir­tu­al worlds. Kudos to the peo­ple who arrange the art exhi­bi­tions along the Valle dei Tem­pli for intro­duc­ing me — and many oth­er peo­ple I hope — to the stun­ning work of a fas­ci­nat­ing group of artists.

Vis­it the AES/AES+F web site
Last Riot on the AES+F web site

YouTube search for “Last Riot”

Last week­end I was lucky enough to get up to Durham, in the NE of Eng­land, to spend a cou­ple of nights expe­ri­enc­ing the lat­est event from Arti­choke, titled Lumiere. And a mag­nif­i­cent event it was too.

Lumiere was in fact how I first heard about Arti­choke, via a TV doc­u­men­tary on Sky Arts (in the old days when I used to sub­scribe to Mur­doch TV — we’re now on Freesat). That first Lumiere hap­pened in 2009, and of course I’d missed it. But they planned to do it again, and when I heard about the 2011 event I was quick to block out the time and book a hotel.

The event, which brought dozens of inter­na­tion­al artists work­ing with light into the heart of the medi­ae­val city, turn­ing it into a vast illu­mi­nat­ed art gallery, last­ed over four nights, nom­i­nal­ly from 6–11pm, and fea­tured around three dozen sep­a­rate exhibits. Some of the high­er pro­file instal­la­tions were in the city cen­tre, but many were rather fur­ther out, and in fact you would have need­ed all four nights to catch every­thing. I only had two nights, and that sim­ply was­n’t enough — I prob­a­bly saw about 2/3 of the instal­la­tions and missed some that I real­ly want­ed to see. Thank­ful­ly the weath­er was kind to us — no rain and in fact quite warm — a good deal warmer, in fact, than the last Arti­choke event I attend­ed, Din­ing with Alice, back in May!

What I had rather under­es­ti­mat­ed was the num­ber of peo­ple who would throng the cen­tre of the ancient city as night fell and we approached 6pm. We gath­ered next to the stat­ue of the Mar­quess of Lon­don­der­ry — not one of the nicest peo­ple in life, alleged­ly — who had been trans­formed, thanks to Jacques Rival, into an immense snow-globe with the words “I Love Durham” on the plinth. Hehe.

The crowd con­trol was excel­lent, despite the enor­mous num­bers of peo­ple, but what the organ­is­ers could have done that would have helped was to have had a fair­ly seri­ous PA set up in the Mar­ket Place so that the crowds could be informed about what was hap­pen­ing. The bull horns in use had an effec­tive range of about 10 feet, so most of the time none of us had any idea what was hap­pen­ing or going to hap­pen. It turned out that we were wait­ing to be allowed up the cob­ble streets to the Cathe­dral, but we did­n’t all know that. How­ev­er, that is the only mild­ly neg­a­tive com­ment I have about the whole fes­ti­val, and hope­ful­ly the planned 2013 event will take this sug­ges­tion into account.

Via Twit­ter, @ArtichokeTrust asked what my favourite exhib­it was, and it’s real­ly dif­fi­cult to say. Of course the amaz­ing son et lumiere at the Cathe­dral, high­light of the orig­i­nal 2009 show, must rate up there, and that’s the first thing we were effec­tive­ly queu­ing to see. Titled Crown of Light, it con­sist­ed of mar­vel­lous images of the Lind­is­farne Gospels and much more, illu­mi­nat­ing the front of the Cathe­dral with mul­ti­ple sec­tions slid­ing up and down inde­pen­dent­ly, accom­pa­nied by a pow­er­ful sur­round audio and music sound­track includ­ing actu­al envi­ron­men­tal record­ings from Lind­is­farne itself (though I think it would have sound­ed bet­ter in Ambison­ics, of course). Crown of Light was cre­at­ed by Ross Ash­ton, Robert Ziegler, and John Del’ Nero.

It’s actu­al­ly quite hard to con­vey much of a sense of Crown of Light as it was so immense. But here’s a taste:

The above video includes two extracts, one from near the begin­ning and the oth­er from the end. It’s a hand-held mini-cam­era run­ning at its high­est sen­si­tiv­i­ty, so it’s not won­der­ful qual­i­ty, but hope­ful­ly you’ll get the idea. The first extract is 16:9 and the sec­ond pil­lar­boxed 4:3, the lat­ter show­ing rather more of the building.

Fol­low­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion (there were three per hour), we could either go off to the left, and down towards the riv­er, or we could file into the Cathe­dral itself, where there were some amaz­ing things going on in the Nave, the clois­ters and the Col­lege gar­dens behind.

Com­pag­nie Cara­bosse had hung the Nave with lamps made of white vests on frames, while at the far end of the Nave, next to the pul­pit, was a gen­tle­man per­form­ing on elec­tric gui­tar, synth and vocals, in a rather cool neo-Steam­punk envi­ron­ment. This pho­to of him is a bit ropey, but hope­ful­ly you get the idea from that and the (even more ropey) raw iPhone video below (the audio improves dra­mat­i­cal­ly at 2:22).

In the clois­ters and gar­dens it was fire — with amaz­ing met­al frame­works and sculp­tures with flames issu­ing from var­i­ous parts — from the enor­mous (a rotat­ing globe cov­ered in fire­pots in the clois­ters) to fiery foun­tains and strange lit­tle figures.

Emerg­ing from the gar­dens through an ancient arch­way, we turned down the hill to be con­front­ed by a sequence of mar­vel­lous illu­mi­nat­ed wire-mesh sculp­tured human fig­ures, some­times fly­ing, some­times sit­ting non­cha­lant­ly on a roof, or reclin­ing in a gar­den. These were Les Voyageurs (The Trav­ellers), by Cedric Le Borgne — a num­ber of French artists were rep­re­sent­ed here.

We pro­ceed­ed down the hill, mar­vel­ling at these over­head, near­by and dis­tant fig­ures, until we came to Prebends Bridge, which gave us a pas­sage through a pro­gres­sive rain­bow of colours.

And then it was back towards the cen­tre of the city along the river­front, with the trees and bridges illu­mi­nat­ed by gen­tly shift­ing coloured lights — and vir­tu­al­ly all the lights in the Fes­ti­val, inci­den­tal­ly, were low-ener­gy vari­eties, with some City light­ing turned off so the over­all ener­gy impact of the event was minimal.

Some of the exhibits were low­er-key, but nonethe­less effec­tive. Real and imag­i­nary sto­ries were told in illu­mi­nat­ed text; a clock on a far build­ing spelled out the time in low­er-case Hel­veti­ca; and a series of illu­mi­nat­ed pan­els hung high above the nar­row streets. Pos­si­bly the best-known artist’s work at Lumiere was Tracey Emin’s: an illu­mi­nat­ed phrase, “Be Faith­ful to your dreams” in blue, hand­writ­ing-style text on the side of the chapel in a dis­used grave­yard, approached along a path lined with trees soft­ly shin­ing with slow­ly shift­ing colours.

Else­where, an enor­mous light bulb made of lights hung over the riv­er Wear:

…while com­mon­ly-thrown-away objects were mon­taged and lit with LEDs:

We had an invi­ta­tion to join friends and spon­sors in the Town Hall on the Sat­ur­day night, which was good fun, and I had some inter­est­ing chats — with Arti­choke co-Direc­tor Nicky Webb and with the peo­ple who organ­ised the food for Din­ing With Alice, who had quite a tale to tell, to name but two.

All in all, Lumiere 2011 was an amaz­ing, mag­i­cal, mar­vel­lous fes­ti­val of lights and art – exact­ly what I have learned to expect from Arti­choke. I do hope they are able to do it again in 2013.

For more videos of Lumiere (includ­ing some from the first event in 2009) on Vimeo, click here.

August 6th saw the unveil­ing of some­thing rather spe­cial in our NW Cam­bridgeshire town of Somer­sham: a free-stand­ing graph­ic pan­el in Church Street, some­what mys­te­ri­ous­ly titled “Hat­tie’s Map”.

The Hat­tie in ques­tion is Hat­tie Skeg­gs, long-time res­i­dent and mem­ber of the Parish Coun­cil, who passed away recent­ly. Her knowl­edge of the town and the orig­i­nal names and loca­tions of places was leg­endary, and the Map com­mem­o­rates her and the long his­to­ry of the town.

The pan­el is dou­ble-sided: one side shows a map of foot­paths around Somer­sham, pro­vid­ed by Cam­bridgeshire Coun­ty Coun­cil, while the oth­er depicts an aer­i­al view of the Parish, for which I was very pleased to be invit­ed to cre­ate the art­work. Indi­cat­ed on it are around 50 places in and around the town, pri­mar­i­ly of his­tor­i­cal inter­est, along with some pic­tures of the cen­tre of town and the Sta­tion area tak­en from old post­cards, and a brief his­to­ry of Somersham.

Putting it togeth­er has tak­en quite a long time, not least because of the dif­fi­cul­ty in obtain­ing and licens­ing the aer­i­al imagery around which I based the Map. When I was orig­i­nal­ly invit­ed to cre­ate the pan­el, it was­n’t spec­i­fied how it should be done, and I looked at a num­ber of pos­si­bil­i­ties. The one that appealed to me most was the idea of show­ing the Parish from the air rather than sim­ply draw­ing a map. I con­tact­ed numer­ous com­pa­nies that offered aer­i­al imagery with the appro­pri­ate licens­ing, and obtained quotes, some of which were with­in the kind of bud­get the Parish Coun­cil had in mind for the project. I did a mock-up using Google Earth imagery and pre­sent­ed it to the Coun­cil’s Work­ing Group on the project, and they liked it and gave me the go-ahead to cre­ate the artwork.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, now hav­ing had the idea agreed, when I went back to the poten­tial sup­pli­ers to order the map­ping they had pre­vi­ous­ly quot­ed me for, the prices were mys­te­ri­ous­ly now sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er, despite the fact that I had been metic­u­lous in my spec­i­fi­ca­tions for the project. Some claimed they had updat­ed their imagery since I had asked for the quote and the new imagery they were offer­ing was much more detailed and bet­ter in every way – a priv­i­lege one had to pay for. Oth­ers simpy denied they’d pro­vid­ed the pre­vi­ous esti­mate or that it was only valid for a sur­pris­ing­ly short time or that the per­son I spoke to had got it wrong. One of the new fig­ures was ten times the price I’d been quot­ed originally.

I con­tin­ued to try one com­pa­ny after anoth­er as time ticked by, and con­tin­ued to look for oth­er sources – includ­ing the Coun­ty Coun­cil, who had every­thing I need­ed but not the licences – but even­tu­al­ly I found one, GetMap­ping, towards the end of last year, which not only offered the res­o­lu­tion I need­ed but came in well with­in bud­get. They also had an excep­tion­al­ly help­ful staff mem­ber in the shape of Jake Laud­er, who bent over back­wards to get me what I need­ed. And when a lit­tle lat­er we had to make some revi­sions due to bound­ary changes that extend­ed the area for which I required imagery, they very kind­ly sup­plied a new, larg­er area file at no addi­tion­al charge. Kudos to GetMap­ping and Jake in particular.

Click on the map above to see a larg­er version.

I worked on the project in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent graph­ics appli­ca­tions. I’d ini­tial­ly brought the rough Google imagery into Adobe Illus­tra­tor as a tem­plate and over that drawn and labelled the major roads and oth­er fea­tures – like the course of the two rail­way lines that used to pass through Somer­sham. I also con­sid­ered how to indi­cate the places of inter­est. I decid­ed to go with num­bered call­outs in cir­cles with a line point­ing to the exact location.

It quick­ly became evi­dent that build­ing the entire A0 pan­el in Illus­tra­tor was going to become too unwieldy. It was fine with the low-res­o­lu­tion Google imagery, but the real hi-res file would be enor­mous and rather too big to scale, rotate and posi­tion pre­cise­ly in Illus­tra­tor: it was so big that it would also slow the appli­ca­tion down no end. As a result, I decid­ed to build the pan­el in InDe­sign, and cre­ate the num­bered call­outs direct in the InDe­sign doc­u­ment on their own lay­er. This was also a much bet­ter idea for set­ting the text which, while not exten­sive, was much eas­i­er to man­age in InDesign.

Help­ful­ly, you can bring all kinds of files into InDe­sign with a great deal of flex­i­bil­i­ty – in par­tic­u­lar if they come from anoth­er Cre­ative Suite appli­ca­tion. So I could import the Illus­tra­tor file in its own .ai for­mat and turn dif­fer­ent lay­ers (such as the roads and labelling) on and off as required with­out hav­ing to re-export the image.

The Big Imagery File ulti­mate­ly arrived and was sur­pris­ing­ly easy to bring into InDe­sign, size and rotate to the cor­rect angle. To allow the imagery to be dis­played as large as pos­si­ble, I rotat­ed the entire map so that the Parish ran from bot­tom left to top right. This put North at around 45 degrees. It also left a large area bot­tom right for a key to the Places of Inter­est and top left for the his­to­ry of the town. Mean­while along the bot­tom there was room for a pair of pan­els to include pic­tures of Old Somer­sham, kind­ly pro­vid­ed by the local His­tor­i­cal Society.

The Work­ing Group deter­mined the final list of loca­tions. Some went back to the 18th cen­tu­ry (and a cou­ple back to Roman times), and while the obvi­ous ones were easy to find, some were much more tricky. And I also came to find out a lot more about the his­to­ry of the area and where some of the names came from. I was soon study­ing 1st Edi­tion Ord­nance Sur­vey map­ping, and ear­li­er maps too: hap­pi­ly a lot is avail­able on-line these days. I found the sites of old wind­mills; the ori­gin of the name “The Pyk­le” (it dates back to around 1200 and means a field rem­nant: it is noth­ing to do with Parkhall Road for­mer­ly being called “Parkle Lane” – Parkle was a vil­lage to the North of town – and indeed, the name Parkhall had noth­ing to do with the Manor Hall that stood on that road); and the site of a weir used for clean­ing cart­wheels. I also dis­cov­ered that nobody seemed to be able to agree on the exact loca­tion of the Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Exec­u­tive airstrip that was active dur­ing the Sec­ond World War. Evi­dent­ly its secret was main­tained. Fascinating.

Final­ly the map was fin­ished and I was able to get my friends at local dis­play graph­ics com­pa­ny Cameo in St Ives to run up some full-sized proofs: the final result was approved and I gave the Parish Coun­cil a hi-res PDF for the pan­el man­u­fac­tur­ers to work from. We suf­fered a bit of a delay as the Coun­ty had to come up with their own foot­path map art­work, but even­tu­al­ly it was sup­plied and the project went into its pro­duc­tion phase. Ulti­mate­ly the pan­el was deliv­ered and a date was set for its installation.

Sad­ly, dur­ing that time, Hat­tie her­self passed away. The map was erect­ed on Fri­day 5th by Michael Mur­ray, who kind­ly pro­vid­ed these pho­tographs, and it was unveiled offi­cial­ly on Sat­ur­day 6th August 2011, rep­re­sent­ing a fit­ting trib­ute to Hat­tie and recog­nis­ing her love and good works for the town and peo­ple of Somer­sham. Here’s a video of the unveil­ing, and you can read more about it here.

I first heard about the bril­liant peo­ple at Arti­choke Trust through see­ing the TV cov­er­age of their 2009 Lumiere event in Durham (and appar­ent­ly there’s anoth­er one lat­er this year).

Arti­choke describe them­selves as “a cre­ative com­pa­ny that works with artists to invade our pub­lic spaces and put on extra­or­di­nary and ambi­tious events that live in the mem­o­ry for­ev­er”, and based on their lat­est event (“extrav­a­gan­za” in fact is not too strong a word), Din­ing with Alice, which runs until 21st May 2011, they have suc­ceed­ed in that goal once again. If you’re read­ing this before the end of the run, do try and get tick­ets if you can – but be sure to wrap up warm­ly if you attend.

Din­ing with Alice is pre­sent­ed as part of the Nor­folk & Nor­wich Fes­ti­val, around the gor­geous 15th cen­tu­ry pri­vate house Els­ing Hall in Nor­folk (see view of the North Front, left). Arti­choke have tak­en over the exten­sive and almost labyrinthine gar­dens and turned them into a won­der­land of the­atri­cal expe­ri­ences and al fres­co din­ing. As to the con­cept, Direc­tor Hilary West­lake sug­gests that the event is the answer to the ques­tion, “Just what hap­pened to all the char­ac­ter’s in Alice’s adven­tures when they were no longer need­ed in her dreams?” It’s in fact a re-stag­ing of an event orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed for the Sal­is­bury Fes­ti­val in 1999, when it was com­mis­sioned by now-Arti­choke co-direc­tor Helen Mar­riage when she was the Fes­ti­val’s director.

Peri­patet­ic din­ing, inspired both by the seat­ing arrange­ments at the Mad Hat­ter’s Tea Par­ty (where you keep mov­ing round the seats at the table) and by Lewis Car­rol­l’s inter­est in math­e­mat­ics, is at the heart of Din­ing with Alice, which is punc­tu­at­ed (and con­clud­ed) by a series of amus­ing the­atri­cal pre­sen­ta­tions from a small cast of around 10 “Hosts” – in the form of the famil­iar White and Red Queens, the Queen (and King) of Hearts, the Duchess, the White Knight, the White Rab­bit, the Mad Hat­ter, Twee­dle­dum & Dee,  but­ler Mr Alas­tair, and no less than half-a-dozen Alices – includ­ing “Alice After Won­der­land”, “Alice in Won­der­land”, a Tall Alice and some Tiny Alices. Plus a host of oth­ers, notably the “Tur­ban Team”, about whom, more in a moment. Most, if not all the per­form­ers are from the East of Eng­land. The food is pro­vid­ed by Bom­pas and Parr with the aid of City Col­lege Norwich.

To begin with, you walk into and through the immac­u­late gar­dens via a cir­cuitous route to find a mar­quee, with crisps and Vic­to­ri­an accom­pa­ni­ments, Hen­drick­’s Gin and a live string quar­tet, and have a wan­der around, talk to peo­ple – I was lucky enough to have a brief chat with Arti­choke co-direc­tor Nicky Webb, whom I met orig­i­nal­ly in the Cam­bridge Pic­ture House bar thanks to Bill Thomp­son – read the fas­ci­nat­ing pro­gramme and find your name on the curi­ous­ly-named “Seat­ing Plan”. I say “curi­ous­ly”, because there is, in fact, no indi­ca­tion where you’ll be sit­ting. Instead, there’s a colour and a num­ber – and you notice that your colour/number com­bi­na­tion is dif­fer­ent from those of any­one you arrived with. Hmmm. After the guests have all arrived, the main char­ac­ters march in to the accom­pa­ni­ment of a brass band and the first part of the event begins.

It turns out that the colour and num­ber iden­ti­fy the wait­er (“serv­er” is not the right word, as they don’t serve the food) who will lead you, per­son­al­ly, to your places dur­ing the course of the evening: the for­mer indi­cat­ing the colour of their tur­ban and the lat­ter a num­ber the mem­ber of the “Tur­ban Team” holds and announces. You are sep­a­rat­ed from any­one else in your par­ty as you go off, fol­low­ing your wait­er on a cir­cuitous route through the dark­en­ing gar­dens, while the sounds of Won­der­land are heard around you in the forms of the calls of strange birds and crea­tures echo­ing across the lawns and emerg­ing sud­den­ly from near­by bush­es. You have a chance to get to know the oth­ers who have the same colour and num­ber as your­self – I was lucky enough to find myself in the com­pa­ny of three women with whom I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to chat on our walk, before being sep­a­rat­ed as we were shown our tables for the first course. The main char­ac­ters flit among the tables as you eat, engag­ing in con­ver­sa­tions or not, until your wait­er col­lects you for a fur­ther intri­cate walk to the next course. The tables are lit­tered with strange things: lit­tle cards with rid­dles, labels, and oth­er para­pher­na­lia. You are indeed led into a kind of Won­der­land, with a mar­vel­lous fan­tas­tic atmos­phere unlike any­thing you’ve pre­vi­ous­ly experienced.

The evening was a series totalling six cours­es of excel­lent food, each tak­en at a dif­fer­ent table, and after the first course, with one or more dif­fer­ent peo­ple pre­vi­ous­ly unknown to me – a tru­ly won­der­ful idea and I’m pleased to have enjoyed sev­er­al excel­lent dis­cus­sions over din­ner. Soon you find your­self in the com­pa­ny of the rest of your par­ty, among oth­ers, and ulti­mate­ly you’re led to a din­ing area that’s laid out almost like a con­ven­tion­al restau­rant – except that it’s under the sky, and in front of you is a stage and live musi­cians before the South Front of the beau­ti­ful­ly illu­mi­nat­ed Els­ing Hall (see main pho­to) – for the dessert and finale (above). The din­ing area was actu­al­ly built out over the moat.

There’s a cer­tain amount of walk­ing involved, of which you should be aware (appar­ent­ly arrange­ments can be made if your mobil­i­ty is lim­it­ed, but I don’t know the details) and the night we were there, the tem­per­a­ture dropped to around 6º Cel­sius, so do wrap up well. But do be sure not to miss this mar­vel­lous event. Con­grat­u­la­tions to Arti­choke and the whole team involved for a quite remark­able and unmiss­able expe­ri­ence. Def­i­nite­ly the best event I’ve attend­ed for some time.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Vir­tu­al Muse­um in Sec­ond Life is wide­ly regard­ed not only as a won­der­ful reviv­i­fi­ca­tion of the lega­cy of Amer­i­ca’s great­est archi­tect, but as one of the major points of inter­est in Sec­ond Life and one held in high regard by archi­tects and those of an artis­tic bent, many of whom are drawn to vir­tu­al worlds.

The FLWVM con­tains fas­ci­nat­ing exhibits on the life and works of Frank Lloyd Wright, 3D vir­tu­al recon­struc­tions of his key build­ings, and much more, and it’s host­ed by knowl­edge­able and help­ful staff. For the last year or so there has been a licens­ing agree­ment in place between FLWVM and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion, the organ­i­sa­tion that con­trols Frank Lloyd Wright’s legacy.

One of the Foun­da­tion’s goals is to “Pre­serve the works, ideas, and inno­v­a­tive spir­it of Frank Lloyd Wright for the ben­e­fit of all gen­er­a­tions” – one of the things that the FLWVM def­i­nite­ly does. I was very much sad­dened and sur­prised at the deci­sion announced recent­ly, there­fore,  by the Foun­da­tion not only to ter­mi­nate its licens­ing agree­ment with Vir­tu­al Muse­ums, Inc, who run the FLWVM, but also to issue a Cease and Desist order effec­tive­ly requir­ing them to close forth­with. The Vir­tu­al Muse­um will there­fore close on Decem­ber 10 unless some­thing hap­pens to change that.

You can read more about the sto­ry sur­round­ing this deci­sion here in Prim Per­fect Mag­a­zine’s blog, and the let­ter sent to sup­port­ers of the FLWVM by the Chair of Vir­tu­al Muse­ums, Inc, Ethan West­land.

As a result of that deci­sion, I was moved to write the fol­low­ing email to the Foun­da­tion via their con­tact email address, info[at]franklloydwright.org. If you agree with me, you might want to do the same.

I was sad­dened to hear today of the immi­nent clo­sure of the Frank Lloyd Wright Vir­tu­al Muse­um in the vir­tu­al world of Sec­ond Life as a result of your Foun­da­tion with­draw­ing its exist­ing licens­ing agree­ment with Vir­tu­al Muse­ums Inc and appar­ent deci­sion not to renew it.

I was involved in a TV pro­gramme about the vir­tu­al muse­um some months ago and was excep­tion­al­ly impressed at the work they have been doing pro­mot­ing the work and lega­cy of Amer­i­ca’s great­est archi­tect in new areas of tech­nol­o­gy. It seemed to me at the time (the show went out just as the orig­i­nal licens­ing agree­ment was being signed) that the licens­ing arrange­ment was a per­fect idea in that it enabled the Foun­da­tion’s work and goals, and an aware­ness of the work of this great man, to be extend­ed into new realms with health and vigour.

I am thus extreme­ly dis­ap­point­ed that the Foun­da­tion has decid­ed to take the mea­sures, not only of fail­ing to rene­go­ti­ate the licens­ing agree­ment or some oth­er mutu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial agree­ment allow­ing the Vir­tu­al Muse­um to con­tin­ue, but with the addi­tion­al step of issu­ing a Cease and Desist order effec­tive­ly caus­ing the Muse­um to close immediately.

From what I have heard about this deci­sion, it appears to me that the Foun­da­tion has been labour­ing under the mis­un­der­stand­ing that as a result of the licens­ing agree­ment, the FLWVM some­how assumed respon­si­bil­i­ty not only for its own cre­ations based on copy­right designs and con­tent owned by the Foun­da­tion, but also those of com­plete­ly uncon­nect­ed third par­ties. I note this as a result of the fact that the Cease and Desist order was appar­ent­ly sent to the Vir­tu­al Muse­um and not to Lin­den Lab, the cre­ators of Sec­ond Life; nor did it take the form of a DMCA take-down order addressed to Lin­den Lab – the usu­al course of action in the case of per­ceived copy­right infringe­ments in the vir­tu­al world.

I would strong­ly urge the Foun­da­tion to recon­sid­er its action in this case and con­sid­er instead re-open­ing nego­ti­a­tions with Vir­tu­al Muse­ums Inc with a view to reach­ing a fur­ther mutu­al­ly-ben­e­fi­cial licens­ing arrange­ment that would allow the Frank Lloyd Wright Vir­tu­al Muse­um – wide­ly regard­ed as a prime exam­ple of the great pos­si­bil­i­ties of vir­tu­al worlds in pro­mot­ing art, cul­ture and design – to con­tin­ue oper­at­ing, con­tribut­ing so effec­tive­ly as it does to the lega­cy of this great man.

If you’re a Sec­ond Life res­i­dent and you want to vis­it the Muse­um before it clos­es on 10 Decem­ber, this link will tele­port you there.

It would appear that one thing that Word­Press isn’t nat­u­ral­ly good at is set­ting poet­ry. The default Word­Press action is that hit­ting Return inserts a line break, which is fine for prose arti­cles but not for poet­ry, where you want a bunch of lines with hard returns but no space between them.

Leona has this prob­lem all the time in the Poe­sie sec­tion of her own site, The Great Return­ing. One of her prob­lems, of course, is that she writes in Microsoft Word, and the great temp­ta­tion is to sim­ply copy and paste the result into Word­Press. This is prob­a­bly the worst of all pos­si­ble worlds, as Word is noto­ri­ous for bring­ing all man­ner of HTML crap along with it that screws up vir­tu­al­ly any web site formatting.

If you’re writ­ing direct into Word­Press, the solu­tion is gen­er­al­ly straight­for­ward (sub­ject to weird­ness­es caused by your choice of theme): for blank lines between stan­zas, hit Return; for sim­ple line-breaks, use Shift-Return – they’re essen­tial­ly the equiv­a­lents of “</p>” and “<br />” in HTML respec­tive­ly. But who would write poet­ry direct into Word­Press? I’m not sure, but most poets I know tweak their copy a good deal more than many jour­nal­ists and prob­a­bly need some­thing a bit more like a word-proces­sor to be con­fi­dent of doing what they require. Cer­tain­ly the default Word­Press edit win­dow does­n’t show enough lines for prop­er con­text — you prob­a­bly want to see the entire opus while you’re writ­ing. Do remem­ber though, that in Settings->Writing you can adjust the num­ber of lines vis­i­ble in the window.

My per­son­al pref­er­ence when writ­ing for the Web – what­ev­er the con­tent, by and large – out­side the web appli­ca­tion itself is to use the sim­plest of text edi­tors (my favourite is Tex­tWran­gler from Bare Bones — but you can equal­ly use TextE­d­it on a Mac­in­tosh or Notepad in Win­dows: basi­cal­ly the sim­plest text edi­tor you have) and then copy and paste that.

If you are start­ing from Word, then copy the text out of Word and paste it into the text edi­tor (thus strip­ping any Word non­sense for­mat­ting, but note you will also lose all the text styling too).

Then fix the copy as required so it looks decent (bear in mind you can’t style it, with ital­ics etc yet), copy it out of the text edi­tor and paste it into a new post in WordPress.

But. Before you paste…

Don’t paste it into the “Visu­al” Edit win­dow – that will add some more for­mat­ting that will screw things up again (you’ll lose all the line-breaks). Instead, click the HTML tab at the top of the edit win­dow, make sure the win­dow is utter­ly blank, and paste it there. Then go back to the Visu­al tab and it should look fine. That done, you need to go through the poem and style any text that needs it, adding ital­ics, bold and so on as required.

Even with all the for­mat­ting infor­ma­tion stripped off the text before you bring it in, there may still be some vari­a­tion in the result­ing look due to the Theme you’re using. We’re using The­sis and this does­n’t seem to give much trou­ble. Your mileage may vary.

The above is fine for basic poet­ry. When it comes to spe­cial for­mat­ting, start­ing lines in odd places and cre­at­ing shapes out of the text, I think I would prob­a­bly con­sid­er set­ting it in Word (or what­ev­er) and then tak­ing a screen shot of it and insert­ing it as a graph­ic — which is a dread­ful workaround, frankly. There must be a bet­ter way. Any­one got some bet­ter ideas?

On Sun­day last I had the almost unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to attend a per­for­mance of George Antheil’s Bal­let mécanique at the West Road Con­cert Hall in Cam­bridge, part of the Cam­bridge Music Fes­ti­val. The con­cert also marked the 100th anniver­sary year of the pub­li­ca­tion of the Futur­ist Man­i­festo.

My atten­tion was drawn to the event by my friend Paul Lehrman, whom I knew orig­i­nal­ly as a bril­liant jour­nal­ist who used to write for me when I was Edi­tor of Stu­dio Sound back in the 1980s. Since then we’ve done a bunch of stuff togeth­er includ­ing music for KPM Music Library and much more.

Today, Paul is a music pro­fes­sor based at a uni­ver­si­ty in the Boston area, and he has made quite a name for him­self for his real­i­sa­tion of a ver­sion of Antheil’s work which calls (at least in its full ver­sion) for a per­cus­sion orches­tra of three xylo­phones, four bass drums and a tam-tam (gong); two live pianists; sev­en or so elec­tric bells; a siren; three aero­plane pro­pellers; and 16 syn­chro­nized play­er pianos. As you can imag­ine, it’s a flam­boy­ant, con­tro­ver­sial, down­right noisy piece of avant-garde music.

This large-scale ver­sion of the piece, com­posed around 1923, was nev­er per­formed in Antheil’s life­time, appar­ent­ly because the friend of Antheil’s who told him you could sync up 16 play­er pianos was wrong: the tech­nol­o­gy of the time did not allow it. Paul Lehrman, how­ev­er, was com­mis­sioned by music pub­lish­ers G. Schirmer to realise the work for the 16 play­er pianos called for in the orig­i­nal man­u­script, using mod­ern dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy in the form of dig­i­tal play­er pianos, MIDI, and sam­ples for the air­craft propellers.

This he did, and the first per­for­mance took place at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts, Low­ell, exact­ly ten years ago (on 18 Novem­ber, 1999). Since then it’s been per­formed on numer­ous occa­sions around the world. You can read more about it, and about Antheil, at Paul’s site which you can find here at antheil.org.

Cam­bridge: rat­tles, pianos, Pianola and elec­tric bells

This was not the ver­sion per­formed at West Road on Sun­day, how­ev­er. That was a some­what more restrained ver­sion per­formed on this occa­sion on a sin­gle Pianola plus two live pianists, three xylo­phones, drums and per­cus­sion, rat­tles (per­form­ing the pro­peller parts), two elec­tric door­bells and a hard-cranked siren. Musi­cal­ly, it was a ver­sion first per­formed in 1927 (and not very often there­after). Paul asked me if I could go along and inter­view Paul Jack­son, the con­duc­tor, expe­ri­ence the per­for­mance and find the answers to some ques­tions about this par­tic­u­lar version.

This sound­ed as if it could be enor­mous fun (which indeed it was) so I duly turned up for the event, Music hard and beau­ti­ful as a dia­mond, part of the 2009 Cam­bridge Music Fes­ti­val, con­sist­ing of three works per­formed by Rex Law­son on Pianola, Julio d’E­scriván on iPhone, the Anglia Sin­fo­nia, Anglia Voic­es and MEME, con­duct­ed by Paul Jackson.

Pianola mech­a­nism with roll

The con­cert itself was pre­ced­ed by a 45-minute pre­sen­ta­tion by Law­son and d’E­scriván about the Pianola and the iPhone as an instru­ment respec­tive­ly (d’E­scriván’s piece start­ed the evening). I was par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in Law­son’s expo­si­tion on the Pianola.

The Pianola is quite dif­fer­ent from the Repro­duc­ing Piano and is not even tru­ly the stuff of “play­er pianos” in saloons in cow­boy movies, though they all use a “piano roll” to pro­vide the notes. In the case of the Repro­duc­ing Piano, the roll con­tains not only the notes but all the tem­po, expres­sion and oth­er aspects of an actu­al per­for­mance. Thus the big sell­ing point of these sys­tems, there­fore, was to get famous per­form­ers and com­posers to per­form their works, which could then be flaw­less­ly repro­duced at home.

Actu­a­tors in posi­tion over the Stein­way keyboard

The Pianola, on the oth­er hand, began life as a “cab­i­net play­er” – a box on cas­tors that you wheel up to a con­ven­tion­al piano (a Stein­way grand in the case of the Sun­day per­for­mance) and lock into place so that its felt-cov­ered actu­a­tors can press the keys. It’s pow­ered by ped­als, which dri­ve the roll and also force air through the holes in the roll to sound the notes. By chang­ing the pres­sure on the ped­als (eg by stamp­ing on them) you can also change the loud­ness of the notes – in oth­er words, give the per­for­mance dynam­ics – that can be applied to dif­fer­ent parts of the range. There’s also a tem­po slid­er – and even tech­nol­o­gy that picks out the top line automatically.

This is all rather impor­tant, because the piano roll for a Pianola con­tains only the notes – the play­er deter­mines the tem­po and expres­sion (in a solo per­for­mance, for exam­ple, includ­ing visu­al cues print­ed or writ­ten on the roll). Thus a Pianola per­for­mance actu­al­ly is a per­for­mance, and not a play­back. Yes, the notes are pro­vid­ed, but the expres­sion is man­u­al­ly applied.

Pianola rolls were not cre­at­ed by play­ing the instru­ment and record­ing what the per­former did, as in the case of the Repro­duc­ing Piano. Instead, they were cre­at­ed sim­ply from the score. Imag­ine a MIDI sequence cre­at­ed in step-time with no veloc­i­ty infor­ma­tion and you get the idea.

Most peo­ple could­n’t be both­ered to learn the sub­tle nuances of Pianola per­for­mance, how­ev­er, and sim­ply ped­alled away, giv­ing the instru­ments a rather life­less, mechan­i­cal rep­u­ta­tion which was entire­ly unde­served. Ulti­mate­ly, mech­a­nisms were built into (usu­al­ly upright) pianos – and hence the play­er pianos in the bars depict­ed in the cow­boy movies aforementioned.

The drum sec­tion and Paul Jack­son, Conductor

Rex Law­son, who per­formed the Pianola part in Sun­day’s con­cert, is a lead­ing expert on the instru­ment, and his pre­sen­ta­tion dis­posed of quite a few myths, espe­cial­ly when it came to the per­for­mance of Bal­let mécanique. The fact that the play­er con­trols the tem­po means that the Pianola can actu­al­ly fol­low a con­duc­tor in the con­ven­tion­al way – the Pianola does not have to set the tem­po and have every oth­er play­er sync to it. In Paul Lehrman’s per­for­mances, in con­trast, the MIDI replay sys­tem that dri­ves the play­er pianos also gen­er­ates a click track that every­one follows.

Sim­i­lar­ly, the fact that you can con­trol the dynam­ics of the Pianola means that the instru­ment does not sim­ply bash out all the notes at full blast. As a result, pri­mar­i­ly, of these two fac­tors, Bal­let mécanique takes on a whole new degree of light and shade. Yes, it’s still a cacoph­o­ny of 20s avant-garde exu­ber­ance, but it takes on a good deal of addi­tion­al subtlety.

Law­son feels that the piece is designed to be played on these Edwar­dian instru­ments rather than mod­ern dig­i­tal sys­tems, and that you need to actu­al­ly per­form the Pianola part – as he puts it, you need to “sweat”. How­ev­er, he is inter­est­ed in get­ting some fel­low Pianola-own­ing friends togeth­er to per­form the work on four Pianolas syn­chro­nised as far as tem­po is concerned.

Law­son thinks the idea of 16 play­er pianos was Antheil show­ing off, that it was prob­a­bly orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed for four live pianists, and that the big prob­lem with per­form­ing it at the time was that there were not near­ly enough play­ers in Paris who knew the sub­tleties of the Pianola and how to use its tem­po and expres­sion capa­bil­i­ties. In his planned 4‑Pianola per­for­mance, he would set the tem­po at his Pianola and the oth­ers would fol­low the tem­po he set by using step­per motors to sync them to his unit. Which sounds like a great idea, though there might be issues due to stretch­ing or slip­page of the rolls: it might need sprock­et­ed piano rolls, which did actu­al­ly exist.

The box­es for the three pianola rolls

The Sun­day per­for­mance of the sin­gle-Pianola ver­sion used three piano rolls, and to allow chang­ing them the per­for­mance was split into three movements.

The per­for­mance, for me, shed new light on a fas­ci­nat­ing com­po­si­tion from the 1920s. A rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tion from Paul Lehrman’s, it sug­gests inter­est­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties for a Lawson/Lehrman collaboration.

• The pro­gramme also includ­ed Grand Pianola Music by John Adams (no Pianolas involved), and Julio d’Escriván’s inge­nious and expres­sive Ayayay! Con­cer­to for iPhone, Pianola and orchestra.