April Cried and Stepped Aside

April is one of those wonderful yet miserable months.  Flowers begin to blossom, while we all have to knuckle down and crack on with the pile of work that remains to be done at the end of our academic slog.  Instead of spreading it out over a whole year, naturally, most students leave it until the very last moment – and even if you do spread it out, you always seem to end up with an 'all-nighter' or several long days of non-stop work, sustenance comprising of black coffee and a speedy snack from the pizzeria next door.

London is glorious, however, and it keeps my spirits up.  The windows are open, the sun is streaming in, and it's boiling hot.  Last year, the Easter weekend was around 11ºC, while this year the weather is an astonishing 26º.  I'm beginning to worry that the beautiful weather isn't going to stick around after my Tuesday deadline.  I'm excited about Tuesday, as I've had a bottle of champagne sitting on my shelf for the last two months – all of us musos are going to sit outside Somerset House and soak in the sunshine, and open up the bottle.  If it's very hot I may run into the fountains …  I'm looking forward to revision, just because I can do it wherever I want!  I have to do my coursework at a keyboard because most of it is jotting down music, while I can go and revise in Hyde Park or Hampstead Heath.  It's going to be good.

And, ah, the summer …  The Proms, the sun, live music, no work to be done, free to write whatever music I want to write, lots of time with friends, road trips across Britain, ice cream, – I'll obviously pop home for a cup of Joe's – shorts, and loads more.  Very much looking forward to a busy summer!

But before I get ahead of myself, next week is the Royal Wedding.  Our Prince William is getting married to Kate Middleton.  The country's getting more and more excited – well, at least in the south east!  I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet.  Some of the muso societies are all going down to Hyde Park to toast the royal couple, but I wanted to head down the Mall and get swept along like an ant before its queen, a subject of Her Majesty.  Instead, I think I'm more than likely going to stay in Hampstead and join my friends for some kind of houseparty – we will be donning some royal masks.  I suggested to a friend that I should go as Princess Beatrice, to which she quipped, 'You'd best get a horse's head then'.  Oh dear.

I think there should be a national Blue Peter competition to find the tackiest piece of merchandise in the Kingdom.  In return you could get given a Blue Peter badget, but with Kate and Prince William's face on it, just to top it all off.  One of my newest friends, Honor, posted some random toy train ('a commemorative coal hopper') which commemorates the wedding on my Facebook wall – it's certainly a contender for the prize. Naturally, it's painted in a majestic purple colour with gold fringes.  What we really need to find is a Union Jack baseball hat with bright pink Minnie Mouse ears with two antennae stretching out from the centre with the pictures of the royal couple contained in laminated love hearts.  That would be what I would make, and it would sell in the millions.  You know it's true.

Anyway, I'd best be heading off.  I have to write a Mozart sanctus and a Debussy melodie in the next three days – it's going to be stressful, and perhaps fun at the same time.  Oh, and happy Good Friday may I add.  I've been listening to Ron Kenoly's 'Jesus Is Alive' all morning – great 1980s gospel-funk worship!  Check it out.  It even has Michael Jackson's bassist, Abe Laboriel, and the old Weather Report percussionist, Alex Acuña, playing, as they're both 'born-again believers'.  Great stuff.

The Tale About the One-Eyed Sculptor

Scrap that, I meant to say the two-eyed sculptor.  He has one eye in the mind of my neighbour Agnes.

I now live in a flat on Finchley Road, situated opposite a Sainsbury's, Wetherspoons and a VUE Cinema.  One of the finer qualities is our Hungarian neighbour, Agnes, who could be described with a shedload of different superlatives.  We usually see her when the music's playing too loud and she wants to complain about the noise, but we also have the odd bit of banter – about my eye.

In case you didn't know, I have an eye condition called glaucoma, which means that there is a risk of increased pressure in my eyes.  If the pressure isn't kept at a certain level then there is risk of sight loss – as it is, the sight in my right eye is not great.  On first impression, many hazard a guess as to how much I can actually see in the "bad" eye, and they're often surprised to find that I have enough sight to enjoy a 3D film without me thinking it's in 2D – but Agnes is surprised to find out that it's not made of glass.  She still believes that it's not organic and that the original one is in a tip, as if I'm deliberately trying to deceive her.

This week, she kindly invited me to go along to a sculptor's exhibit at the Air Gallery, which is close to Buckingham Palace.  She teaches children and adults ear training in a similar manner to that of Béla Bartók, and so has a wide variety of arty friends who invite her to different events.  David Begbie, a world-class sculptor, kindly invited Agnes and a guest to attend an opening of a new exhibition, and as he only has one eye, she thought it would be great inspiration for me to come along and meet him.

I tumbled in off the street in a suit to be greeted by rich pursuers of new art, sipping on expensive wine and snacking on nibbles being paraded around the room.  I managed to bumble my way through to Agnes who was chatting to a smartly-dressed lady.  The lady had clearly had a little too much to drink as she couldn't button her mouth – for around five minutes I couldn't get a word in.  She admitted that Agnes gave her a knowing smile and approached her as though she'd known her all her life, even though she'd never met her.  When I let loose that I was a musician, I received a five-minute pleasant speech on how wonderful it is to follow one's hobby for a living.  Eventually, she was led out of the Gallery by her husband, to attend another event.

Agnes was in high spirits, showing me the models of metallic mesh which were littered throughout the room as shrines to the female form – one male form was in the middle as a rebuttal to any cries of sexism, most likely a self-portrait.  I was told that if David Begbie could pull this kind of stuff out of the hat, then I certainly couldn't complain about the poor lighting on the stairs leading up to the flat again.  His work was most impressive in the detail: the way in which he subtly molds the metal into a convincing human form. 

"Unuud" (2008) is made of steelmesh and costs £23,900.01 (make sure to bring the one pence). 

She introduced me to the artist and pointed out that I also had one eye, to which Begbie responded, 'No, I have two eyes' – he proceeded to tell me how beautiful my eye was.  I offered him the opportunity to sculpt it into wire mesh, but he declined (I didn't actually have the nerve – no pun intended).  He was very pleasant and was more than willing to converse about his work.  My neighbour explained to him about how wonderful it was to know that people with eye conditions could bypass their condition to create wonderful works.  And how right she was – only last week, I was at RNIB (the Royal National Institute of the Blind) Judd Street taking part in a composition course with blind and partially-sighted composers.  It was fascinating to watch blind musicians writing music in braille and dictating their compositions to a sighted person to transform it into written notation for the performers.  Begbie said that it had aided his success, as he was always remembered for his work and for his condition.

The creative arts are scattered with individuals who have worked with their conditions to achieve great success – perhaps the most famous being Beethoven, who wrote some of the greatest music in the Western world, despite gradually becoming deaf during his twenties.  With the invention of braille in the nineteenth century, it's exciting to know that blind musicians (often with keener ears than sighted folk) can now create in a way that they couldn't previously.

You can check out some more of David Begbie's works at the Air Gallery from the 9th of August or visit http://www.davidbegbie.com/index.cfm/main.view/gallerydifferent.  To read more about my kind neighbour, Agnes Kory, and her work, please visit http://www.bbcm.co.uk/.  Please support the wonderful work that the RNIB do with partially-sighted and blind musicians, by visiting their web site at http://www.rnib.org.uk/.  The course I went on was run in partnership with the Handel House Museum.