The horn is still going well, having had its most recent outing at the October 2007 meeting of the Farnham Chamber Music Club, where I played in the Three Shanties for Wind Quintet by Malcolm Arnold. I still play double bass from time to time, mainly with the Aldworth Philharmonic Orchestra and recorders, 'cello and keyboards mostly with friends in private.
I would still like to make contact once again with Antoine Trimouille, the pianist for whom I wrote my “Sonatine for Piano Left Hand” in 1999, and his mother Dominique. They used to live in Paris, where she taught English. If anyone reading this knows their current email address, please tell me.
My revision of the “Octet for Wind Instruments” included correction of some transcription errors, and I think it has now reached its final form. Extracts from this, the “Sonatine” and my “ Sinfonietta for Wind Band”, one of my best works, are available as MIDI playback on this site. “Actaeon”, a short tone poem for two flutes, second doubling piccolo, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, two horns and vibraphone, is now complete in its second version and I played in a performance of it at the Aldworth Patrons' Evening in September, 2006, under Andrew Taylor's sensitive direction. “Sisyphus”, the second movement, is complete in two versions. I have heard one of them from the outside, when DA CAPO performed it at one of its end-of-term soirées, and the other from the inside, in a playthrough at a private chamber music weekend. I have plans to add two more, at present tentatively named “Atalanta” and “Odysseus”. However, these have been set aside for the last few months as I have been writing some pieces of lightish music.
The first was “Sortie Angélique”, performed at a birthday party for Angela Bockett-Pugh, whom I know through her daughter Ruth, at Aldworth Philharmonic, and through Farnham Chamber Music Club. Angela had requested a performance of Mozart's “Gran Partita”, K 361, so “Sortie Angélique” is for the same players, but with three clarinets and only one basset horn. A sortie is usually a short organ voluntary, played at the end of a church service in France, with a great deal of florid decoration and sounding very similar to a Dutch street organ, and I have tried to match this style with the wind ensemble.
Two more were for the Aldworth Philharmonic Education Project, which took place on Saturday, 14 October 2006. We were showing various aspects of music to children from Wokingham primary schools. My pieces were each of three minutes and were designed to illustrate the wind and brass instruments. For the woodwind I wrote for two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contra-bassoon and three horns; this piece is named “Polka-Rondo”. For the brass I wrote “Ragtime Canzona ”, for three trumpets, three trombones and bass tuba. Early rehearsals for both were a bit fraught, since there were players missing from the second until the night before and from the first until the morning of the performances; also, the rhythms in Ragtime Canzona gave some trouble. To my great satisfaction, both pieces gelled well on Saturday morning, and the performances (four of each) were even better. Since then, I have written three more similar movements, constituting a "Birthday Suite for Adrian Rushton".
I went to Canford Summer School again in August 2004, on Malcolm Singer's "Composers' Workshop". The course was very full, inspiring in several ways, and very well planned and managed. My fellow students included several very talented performers, and many whose aural imaginations I admired and envied. The weather was hot and the building we occupied unpleasantly so during the majority of the time we were in it. Also, I found the living arrangements less satisfactory than in previous years. Since 2005, Canford Summer School has been at Sherborne. Patsy went to 2005 and 2006, and was impressed by the quality of the food and the friendliness of the kitchen staff.
After four months as Musical Director of Pangbourne and District Silver Band, I decided to resign, as I felt that I had insufficient knowledge of or feeling for the repertoire that they need to play for commercial reasons.
Jennifer has decided to home-educate her daughter, Anna, and, having watched a television programme called "The Dyslexia Myth", I have become interested in infant and junior teaching, especially that of reading. I have registered on the web site of the Reading Reform Foundation (RRF), and am following the arguments about the implementation of the Rose Report with morbid fascination. The Rose Report was requested by Ruth Kelly, then Secretary of State for Education and Skills, and was published in March 2006. It recommends the use of synthetic phonics as the best method for teaching beginning readers, but has failed to deprecate sufficiently forcefully the admixture of guessing methods (pictures, context, word outline, etc.) that sabotage it and are a major reason for illiteracy. An unholy alliance of the teaching unions and so-called experts in university departments of education is now fighting to water down the Rose proposals. As part of my involvement with the RRF, I maintain two web pages for them: the abbreviations commonly used in discussions of teaching methods and some links to interesting on-line documents of relevance to the subject.
Ken Moore