Mind your hurdy-gurdies

We are right in the middle of the Celtic Connections traditional music festival at the moment and earlier this evening I experienced one of the most bizzare and fascinating musical ensembles ever gathered together - la Banda Europa.
If you already know the difference between your nyckelharpas and your hurdy-gurdies and your panderttas from your duduks then it may not be strange to you, but it was certainly strange to me... but great fun all the same.
Click on the link above to learn a bit more about the band, or drop into their myspace page to hear them for yourselves.
As most of my readers know, I love classical music (amongst other styles of music.) I guess it could be argued that in some way the classical orchestra gathers together musical instruments at the very pinnacle of their development - but this has meant leaving behind some of the fascinating instruments that preceded the ones we are familiar with now. I tell you, there is something hypnotically relaxing about a hurdy-gurdy quartet! (Although it does look a bit bizarre.)
Watching the players cranking the handles of their hurdy-gurdies reminded me of the mechanical calculating machines that my secondary school invested in - just a year or so before the invention of the electronic calculator. (What a waste of money that was!)
When the teacher left the room we used to play a game. A kind of competition really.
If you set all of the levers of the calculating machine to 9, then cranked the handle backwards as fast as you could, eventually all the levers would return to 0 and a bell would ring. The trick was to crank the handle as fast as you could and the first to get the bell to ring was the winner. Amazing. Fantastic exercise for the upper body! Although once or twice when the teacher returned early and saw everyone furiously turning the handles of their machines we had to quickly think up some highly implausible excuses for our bizarre behaviour.
I never once thought to say: "I'm practising for when I play the hurdy-gurdy!"

*by the way, just in case you wondered - the people in the picture above are playing nyckelharpas

This is not a rehearsal...

A cheeky smile from one of the cast (Amelia- not in costume, by the way) during last week's Panto rehearsal. Tomorrow is the final "dress rehearsal" - the last chance to iron out any problems and get things right for the opening night. Bit scary really as we haven't had nearly enough of these things called rehearsals.

But at least we've had more of them for the panto than you get in real life.
In life there are no rehearsals. The curtain is up from the moment we are born and we are on stage, ad-libbing all the way. No wonder we get our lines wrong so often and sometimes even lose the plot!
Talking of ad-libbing. I went to a Celtic Connections concert during the week - the lovely Kate Rusby and her very talented musical friends, including Roddy Woomble. It was a great gig, though at one point John McCusker was taking some time trying to re-tune his bouzouki. (Well it would take you a lot of time to do it too!) He uttered a heartfelt plea for someone else in the band to "keep talking" whereupon the accordion player (whose name I have forgotten for the moment) stepped forward and gave the Royal Concert Hall audience.... a recipe! All the ingredients, all the instructions... everything except an actual demonstration. He managed to while away a good four minutes. I think he may have a future as a TV Chef if the accordion-playing doesn't work out.
However, I better not blether here any more or I will be "ad-libbing all the way" during the sermon tomorrow morning.

[*don't forget you can click on any of the photographs on this blog to get a full-size version]