My World Music Blog : April 2007

Week three with rehearsals for Bizerka were fun and the music has started taking shape i.e the arrangements are starting to creep in. Our guitarist even learnt to fingerpick Music for a Found Harmonium which sounds really good!

We concentrated on about 4 different sets of tunes (each has 2 or 3 tunes in it) and got them fairly tight.

Musical purists would have a heart attack though as our sets consist of combinations like Greek/Romanian/Moldavian tunes back to back. But hey, if they work, why not!

One strange thing though is that most of the pieces are from tunes I've found on the internet and haven't necessarily heard before - we just play them how we think they should go. Sometimes our version is completely different to the original like Hasapikos Horos which the guitarist tracked down last week. We've been playing it like an Irish Jig when it's nothing like that at all - I think the transcription I have is completely wrong!

Another piece we do is meant to be in 9/8 (2 + 2 + 2 + 3) but I misread it as 4/4 with the 3 quavers at the end being a triplet. It works well like as 4/4, but it's wrong, wrong, wrong and I'm sure we'll get hassled by someone who knows the real version :-)

No matter though - I think as long as we continue to do justice to the tunes, it's all good.

Bizerka had it's second rehearsal yesterday and went through most of the set - our aim is to get 45 minutes worth sorted out and ready to be gigging with within 6 weeks - that leaves 5 weeks to go. It's a lot of work - though less for me as I know most of the tunes.

One of the tunes I've got to learn is Music for a Found Harmonium which not only featured in an 80's Australian movie called Malcolm, but also a popular Irish session tune since being played by Sharon Shannon on the button accordion. We're doing it back to back with a very circusy-sounding Romanian piece called Itele.

Our poor Violinist doesn't read music very well so he's got to learn everything by ear - and there's a LOT of notes to learn. On the other hand, I'm good at reading, but crap at learning by ear. The guitarist is going well but has come up against 7/8 for the first time. Once we talked about strumming patterns it was all nice and easy to do. The secret to time signatures like 7/8, 11/8 or even 25/16 is not to be scared of it and breaking up the whole thing into groups of long and short i.e 3 quavers or 2 quavers per beat.

On a different note, M and I went and saw the musical Sweeney Todd last night. The music and lyrics were written by Stephen Sondheim. Even as a conservatorium trained musician (well, actually composer), it came across as fairly challenging music-wise. It was great and I loved his playing with different rhythms and cheeky musical references, but there wasn't really anything memorable in the music i.e nothing you could walk away singing (except for one riff which both M and I had going through our heads while trying to get to sleep).

However, I'd still highly recommend it as despite being a very dark theme i.e a barber who ends up murdering lots of people, it's pretty funny and the music really interesting!

The first rehearsal of our new band went really well! Although I've played with the fiddle-player for nearly 10 years, we'd never met the Guitarist so it was a bit of a wild-card. Fortunately he was really good and had most of the repertoire down pat!

We started off pretty easy with a whole bunch of Romanian, Moldavian and Greek tunes in 2/4 or 4/4 just to get some repertoire together. Once we get a 45 minute set together we'll start learning the trickier pieces like some physically exhausting Bulgerian Rachenitsa's (in 7/8) and Kopanitsa's (11/16).

A couple of the tunes we're playing are available here on World Music World in PDF format:

• Biserka
• Hasapiko Grigoro

I've been collecting the sheet music for these pieces for years and have been keen to play this sort of music, so it'll be good to finally have them see the light of day.

On Sunday I also heard the final mix of the songs for my girlfriend's play - it's pretty bizarre to hear the pieces I arranged with Italian lyrics over them - I had mainly English lyrics to work with. But it's over and done with - well, at least until when she has to do the German version - but that really only involves re-recording the lyrics onto the same backing track.

After being lazy and complacent for a couple of years I've finally got around to organising a new band of my own. Sure it's fun to play in other people's projects, but starting your own band is very rewarding. It is however, a pretty time consuming thing - there's tunes to find, gigs to organise, posters to make etc etc.

Organising the other musicians is probably the hardest and most frustrating bit of the whole process though - I'm yet to play in a band where everyone is reliable and on time regularly!

But still, it should be lots of fun as I have a whole bunch of Romanian, Moldavian and Greek material I've wanted to do for a few years. Plus there's a number of my own originals that would be good to do as well.

In other news, I've finally finished all the music for my girlfriend's play - she's in the recording studio today adding the vocal tracks. I can't wait to hear how it all turned out - and she'll be glad it's all over as well no doubt.