Category Archives: Music

Posts on musical topics

Doctor Who, Movies & TV, Music

Look Who’s Top

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So having been released on Monday, guess what is top of the chart for iTunes downloads, and has been all week – Murray Gold’s Doctor Who Soundtrack Album. It also has an almost perfect run of glowing reviews, with only one person knocking off a mark for the fact that the recording of Song for Ten isn’t the one that was used in last years Christmas episode, but a new arrangement.

Anyway, looking at the track list there is a broad selection of extracts from the first two seasons of the new version of the series. Unlike the bulk of the eighties series, with their largely electronic incidental music produced by Radiophonic Workshop, and subsequently Keff McCulloch, Mark Ayres and Dominic Glynn, this soundtrack is much more orchestral, however not nearly so orchestral as the John Debney soundtrack for the ill fated Doctor Who television movie in 1996.

The album also shows the benefit of having a single composer for the whole series, so track 3 of the album is the Doctor’s Theme, a haunting, mournful solo soprano, variations of which you often find intertwined into other tracks throughout the album, and track 14 is Rose’s Theme elements of which appear at key moments for her. But having a single composer certainly doesn’t mean that everything sounds the same, with styles varying widely from the electronic heavy music from Tooth and Claw, through to the classical themes for Madame de Pompadour and the beautiful piano themes for episodes such as Father’s Day. Amongst the other gems on the album you also get the doom laden choral theme for The Daleks, and the memorable solo strings for the Impossible Planet. Alongside that you also get two songs – Song for Ten and Love Don’t Roam – the first, as previously mentioned coming from Christmas Invasion, the second due to appear in this years Christmas episode The Runaway Bride.

Last but not least, the album includes two versions of the main title theme, opening with the 41 second main theme used on the programme, and ending with a full version, parts of which have been used as the closing theme throughout the second season. However, I still have to say (and I know I’m in a small minority in this) that I’m with John Debney in that the arrangement needs to be changed to get a good orchestral version of the theme. Whilst part of Murray Gold’s brief was to keep it close to the original theme, the John Debney version changes the arrangement significantly, lowering the tempo and opting for purely orchestral, and is all the better for it. (Of course the ultimate version of the theme still has to be Bill Bailey’s Belgian Jazz version…)

Having said that, the Doctor Who Soundtrack by Murray Gold is an essential purchase for any fan, and is certainly a great listen.

Computers/Technology, Music

iPod or Zune

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Last week Scoble posted an interesting item comparing the iPod to the Microsoft Zune.

Subsequent to that David Caulton, who works on the Zune posted a response countering many of the points that Scoble raised.

However, what struck me as interesting is that the points that aren’t countered are the cool factor, nor the iTunes lock-in – something that all the competition in the marketplace has to try to beat, and has so far failed to do so.

Whilst I’ve seen various other geeks with different sorts of MP3 players, Scoble is absolutely right, for the kids we know in the UK it has to be an iPod too. He’s also correct that they’ve bought a lot of songs from the iTunes Store. Even if any of the competition produce a better player than the iPod (and indeed they have), the fact that it isn’t an iPod, and isn’t compatible with all the songs they’ve bought means that I doubt it will come close to knocking the iPod off the top spot.

Church, Music

Organ Restoration Photoset

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Playing the Refurbished Organ

Over the six months or so that the organ has been out of action, I’ve been periodically adding shots to the set of pictures, showing how things have changed.

This weekend marked the return to service of the original organ, although the restoration is not quite finished. The original trumpet rank was beyond repair, so a new one was ordered, however when it arrived at the organ workshop it was found to have been damaged in transit. As a result the last rank, and another rank of pipes that has to be put into the organ casing after the trumpet rank are yet to be installed.

Today I have added one last picture to the set which shows one of a number of special guests at the service on Sunday morning. The gentleman at the console is a former Director of Music at St James. Now in his nineties, he can remember the Compton organ when it was originally put in the Church back in the 1930’s, and also the hand pumped organ that it replaced.

Church, Music

Work Finally Starts Returning the Organ

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Organ Work in Progress

Tonight I got my first chance to check out progress on the organ.

Initially, it was hoped that it would be back in time for Easter – certainly it seemed that having the Bishop come to re-dedicate the instrument at the end of July wouldn’t be a problem, however it wasn’t until this week that work finally started putting the instrument back together again.

On Monday the youth room in the parish centre was filled with pipes, and several pews had been removed to accommodate scaffolding to allow the workmen to remove the Charles 1st coat of arms that was placed in the centre of the panelling. The coat of arms is to be moved elsewhere in the Church, and an ornamental grille will replace it, giving the sound of the organ a better chance to come out into the body of the church.

As of tonight the scaffolding had been removed to allow us to use the church at the weekend, however the front is open allowing us to see some of the pipes. You can also see the new compressor and wind-chest from the back, and also looking through get to see the roof of the knave at an angle that will probably never be seen again, as you look from the vestry through the opening in the front of the organ casing. To be honest, putting aside the pipe/electronic debate one of the biggest arguments for getting rid of the old Compton was that we would be able to get rid of the great big box at the back of the church and open up the arch into the tower. As anyone who has been in our church will realise, the organ has a pretty big and oppressive presence over the back of the church, leaving the back few rows, and the door into the vestry fairly gloomy. I always thought that taking that out, and opening the arch into the base of the tower behind would allow light in from the west window over the great west door, and bringing a good deal of light to that part of the church. However, the argument was lost, and we’ve spent the money restoring the existing organ. Thankfully the talk of expansion was dropped, and we are restoring the existing Compton, and remaining pretty true to it’s voicing, and design (both the great and swell will still be in the swell box, and the organ will still make use of extension to broaden the range of stops). Hopefully what we will end up with will be a more reliable and renewed version of what we had before, able to last another seventy years!

Music

Temporary Blip – Or a Total Change?

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Now on the basis of all the pre-publicity, thanks to the number of Finns complaining about their entry, I thought that Finnish Rock Band Lordi would probably do fairly well. However, they pretty well walked away with the whole competition, beating the second place song by almost 50 points. Considering that Father Mitro Repo, who appeared on the BBC complaining about the band said that he thought it was a protest by youngsters annoyed that Finland had failed to score highly in Eurovision the previous year, perhaps the youngsters seem to have a better idea of what would go down well than the rest of the country!

In terms of the competition as a whole, Lordi stood out mainly because they were something a bit different. Indeed one of the old ladies at church today commented that she thought they were entertaining as a band – which did slightly surprise me. It did also help that Finland is in one of the many Eurovision voting blocks, which gave it a boost over and above the Russian entry, which as usual was helped by big votes from all the former Soviet Republics (which of course all have large Russian minority populations). Ireland made a big improvement by sending Brian Kennedy, who I first came across supporting the Corrs on tour a few years ago. Their song was really the kind of thing that won them the competition a number of times a few years ago, however with the block votes of the Balkan countries, the former Soviet republics and the Scandinavian countries they ended up in the middle running – enough to keep them in the top flight next year. The UK finished well down the rankings again – better than last year, but still in a spot where if we weren’t paying a large part of the costs of the competition we’d be relegated to the semi-final next year.

So the real question will be whether this is just a temporary blip, or whether the win by Lordi will result in something a bit different next year from the pop numbers and ballads that usually get performed. The thing is that they are not the first to try something different. For example the UK entry this year was a rap number, which didn’t do overly well, and the Germans put in a Country and Western song, which didn’t do much better either. Of course whether it is a change or not, trying to win against the block votes is getting increasingly difficult – and largely it won’t change much until the EBU come up with a voting system that can negate the effect of the block voting.