Jeremy with his guitar, and some of my sound equipment, at a recent Touchable Dreams performance given at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, with Shakespeare's birthplace in the background.....
Jul 28
Jan 9
Knocking and Pulling
Here's another video of a track from the "Touchable Dreams" CD. Jeremy and I are planning more of these soon! This one features a poem by Jeremy himself, and the musical accompaniment is from the violin sonata op.27 no.2 by Eugene Ysaÿe: Called "Obsession" this movement from the sonata features recurring motifs from Bach's solo violin prelude in E minor, interspersed by angry outbursts and quotes of the "Dies Irae"!
Jan 3
New Video
Here's a video of the track "Sanza" from the "Touchable Dreams" album.
The piece started life as a looped, semi-improvised violin piece which used lots of pizzicato. However when I came to record it I decided to have a look in my 'miscellaneous instruments' cupboard, and "Sanza" (another name for the thumb piano) was the result!!Jeremy and I will be filming some more videos soon......
Oct 31
Live video clip
We thought we should put up a video clip to give you an idea of what Touchable Dreams looks and sounds like. Filmed at the British Council in London, this is an excerpt from an evening we did there a few months ago. The music is a piece written especially for Steve by Andrew Keeling - called You Cut The String - and the poem is the exquisite Lullaby by WH Auden. We feel that the this mix of words and music exemplifies what we wanted to achieve by blending these two forms of expression. Hope you like it!
(download)
Sep 12
CD Launch
On Friday September 10th in Ely, we finally launched our CD called, unsurprisingly, Touchable Dreams! We are thrilled with how it sounds and with the design of the flatpack/sleeve in which it is housed. It contains most of the material we use in our live show but also a new piece by Steve called Sanza, and a new blend of Bach, Nystedt and Shakespeare as the final track. It has been a huge task (it seems to us) to have recorded the music and the poetry, but a labour (obviously, given the content!) of love. Steve’s engineering and mixing have filled me with awe, an emotion which has now morphed into a potent blend of excitement and pride at what he has achieved! It has taken a long time to release Touchable Dreams, mostly because getting permission to record many of the poems has been tortuous. It is somehow better if you can contact the poet herself or himself, but when you are dealing with the estates of writers - those who look after their interests after they have died - it can be extremely difficult. No problem with Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Thomas Hardy, because they have been dead for more than 70 years. But writers such as E E Cummings, Margery Williams etc are still in copyright and so proved more 'troublesome'. However, we were lucky enough to secure the services of Rachel Thorne, a permissions expert (http://www.rnpermissions.co.uk/), for without her we would never have made it. If you ever want to use copyright material she has our strongest recommendation! But all that is over. The CD is here and you can buy it by going to the 'online store' button at the top of this page. You can hear excerpts from the CD there too. Jeremy
Sep 8
Between Bucharest and Ely
Well, we did it! Our first foreign tour. Well hardly a tour, but we did do our show to round off the Fischer English Language Teachers' conference at the Rhin Hotel in Bucharest. I am not sure that Daniela Vaduva, the owner of Fischer Books was completely certain that Touchable Dreams would be a success to a couple of hundred teachers of English from around Romania; in fact I think she might have been a bit nervous.... But she had nothing to worry about! That extraordinary mixture of music and poetry, of Steve's amazing playing and the beauty of the words I have the privilege of speaking, well it works for us and it worked for them too. The response was wholehearted and somehow, it felt as if all of us - performers and audience - had been involved in something special. (and we sold lots of copies of our Touchable Dreams CD) And as our plane took off from Bucharest airport, heading for Heathrow, I took a decision! My Martin D28 guitar which I love, which has been with me for, well, years, and which has been smashed but still plays on despite that, just seems a bit big and bulky, heavy gauge strings just too much in some way. Both for my own playing (which needs some serious work) and for the show I needed something different - even though the guitar only makes one or two appearances in the whole thing. So yesterday, in London, after looking around the Internet, I went out and bought a smaller, lighter-string-gauge guitar (a Turner) which will plug into Steve's system and which will make the couple of times it turns up (in the full version of Touchable Dreams) just that bit easier. It’s a cheap and cheerful instrument, but I am falling in love with it already. It will get its first outing in a couple of days in the Methodist Church in Ely, UK. I wonder what people will think! Jeremy
