General

If you ever find yourself down at the bottom of the screen on Helping You Harmonise, you may notice that a Search box has arrived. This is a sign of the site reaching a certain maturity – there is enough stuff here now that it can take a while to navigate around it using the date and category links.

Of course, people who arrive looking for something in particular will probably have gone straight to whatever it was that their external search engine suggested might meet their needs. The on-site search is more likely to be useful to people who have been here before and half-remember something they want to check back on.

Helping You Harmonise is 1 year old today! On 26 November 2008 I made my inaugural blog entry, having spent the previous couple of weeks busy uploading my arrangements catalogue before the site went live. Since then, I have posted 88,300 words of blog material – which is more than I wrote for my entire first book, and nearly as much as for my second.

Having been an avid but sporadic reader of other people’s blogs for some years (i.e. I binge-read several months’ worth of posts in an afternoon rather than keeping track of each as they go), I find it interesting to speculate on people’s motivations for blogging. Sometimes there’s a sense of someone doing it because they feel they ought to – as part of a promotional strategy, for instance – and these are the ones I enjoy reading least. They also tend to fizzle out quite quickly. I think it’s very hard to write regularly if the motivation is extrinsic rather than intrinsic.

More often, and more successfully, blogs reflect a passion or a desire.

If you came here via the front page, you may have observed a notice announcing a set of new themed workshops I’ll be offering from the New Year. More details can be found on the menu to the left, under the ‘helping performers’ label. I’ll still be available to do bespoke coaching of course, but I’ve developed the new offerings as a way to help ensembles become more strategic in how they plan their skills development.

Tomorrow is my last day at Birmingham Conservatoire. I have decided that it’s time to step outside the academic calendar which has shaped the rhythm of my life since the age of five, and join the real world. I’ve done ten years at the Conservatoire, and it’s been a fun gig, but sooner or later you need a change.

The decision has been a long time brewing – though, the bit that took thought wasn’t whether to move on from my current role, but what to move on to, and when.

Me and my Magnum OpusWell, the new book has arrived! The project was first sketched out in December 2002, when I was part-way through writing my first book, and I started in on it in earnest in October 2003 after The British Barbershopper had been packed off to Ashgate for publishing. The first year consisted of bibliographical groundwork, and then I started visiting choirs in rehearsal in September 2004. I put together a book proposal over summer 2005, and finally got the contract agreed with Ashgate in spring 2007.

At that time, I also made an application to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for research leave to write the book up. That would have given me 8 months to write 90,000 words - 4 months funded externally, and 4 months provided by my own institution. Did you know that it is possible to have a funding application rated as 'highest priority for funding' and still turned down? Fortunately, Birmingham Conservatoire still honoured the 4 months they had offered as part of the funding bid, so I compressed my schedule and knuckled down to writing from December 2007-March 2008.

Well, had I remembered I was going to be on the radio this morning, I'd have said something about it earlier. As it happens, I completely forgot until I got an email from a listener halfway through the programme!

But with the wonders of technology, we all get a chance to catch up on what we missed using the BBC's Listen Again function: Click here to hear the programme.

The programme is called 'Hairspray and Harmonies', and it follows the Birmingham ladies barbershop chorus to convention last year. My role is as talking head to give some context and background. There's a second instalment next Friday at 11:00.

Not me - I'm still in Birmingham - but my blog post for today is enjoying a trip over to British Columbia at the invitation of Tom Metzger. Pop over to Owning the Stage to learn about Musical Performance and Flow, and if you've not been there before, have a browse around the archives too. I think you'll enjoy it.

As this website has been getting nearer and nearer to being ready to be launched, I've kept thinking that I ought to do a bit of research into what the done thing is for one's very first blog post. But somehow, there have always been more pressing things to do - like getting the arrangements catalogue ready, or uploading cartoons.

The thing is, I don't think inaugural entries get read very much. By definition, the blog hasn't had much chance to build up a readership by the time they appear. So the only people who look at them are the blogger's friends, and people from the future who dig back into the archive to research how to do their own first post.