Chamber music is still going strong, a feature of 2008 having been three performances of “Till Eulenspiegel einmal anders”, a shortened quintet (cl, bn, hn, vn, db) version of the tone poem by Richard Strauss. I played the horn part at Farnham Chamber Music Club, and bass in the other two performances, at a church in Hindhead and at Reading Bluecoat School for the Patrons Evening of the Aldworth Philharmonic Orchestra. The Aldworth Orchestra has now started a chamber music club of its own, but it has yet to hold its first meeting.
Since “Sortie Angélique”, “Polka-Rondo”, “Ragtime Canzona ” and the “Birthday Suite for Adrian Rushton”, I have composed only one original piece, a quartet for a flautist and string trio. The flautist owns piccolo, flute, alto flute and bass flute, so I use all four of them (one at a time, with plenty of time for changing instruments). Apart from that, I have arranged some organ music for Patsy's orchestra and some traditional tunes for violin, 'cello and baritone horn.
My interest in the teaching of reading continues, and I have written some computer programs to help in the production of vocabularies for decodable texts, though I have not yet made use of them. At present, my attention has been diverted to writing a program in the language MPL (MIDI Programming Language) to apply pitch bend to a MIDI sequence from sequencer to synthesizer in such a way as to make the intervals better tuned than equal temperament.
Ken Moore