"For most of us, the Apple store is a place to buy aspirational goods, and, if you’re a teenage boy, to try to leave a mildly explicit image on a Macbook Air. But for rapperPrince Harvey, the outlet in Soho, New York, became an entire recording studio. Using the GarageBand app and an inbuilt microphone, he recorded a whole album in secret while in store, on a display laptop." UK Guardian
Garageband is an amazing.
I can see why rappers enjoy it. It allows people with no formal musical education to write out and arrange their own music and not only rappers but classical artists especially singers, many of who do not play instruments.
I'dont. All though my career I have had to rely on friendly pianists or pay vast sums to accompanists to rehearse and of course the chances of singing major works with vast orchestras was out of the question and then at the end of my life along came Garageband and my life changed.
By accident I found out I could write out my accompaniments. I started with simple Schubert. Then I found I could orchestrate and I sung The Songs of the Auvergne, which are beautiful to sing but almost impossible for an ordinary accompanist to play.
September by Richard Strauss was always on my to sing want list and Garageband made this possible. I just wrote in the 90 instruments. Took a bit of time and for me a fascinating learning curve into orchestration but the finished product sounds better than any orchestra as an orchestra can never play it this accurately and if you think mistakes add to a performance you are sadly mistaken. Strauss is so subtle. The birds stop in mid breath and the bees a bit later. Sadly I cannot put this up because of copyright but I don't care I can sing it whenever I like with full orchestra and in about 5 years the copyright lapses and I will if I am still around.
Garageband is not a toy. It has enriched my life. More musicians should learn to use it. It can do anything and in fact more than many professional programmes for free!
I try to do this but being an artist myself I have never had the means to do this in a substantial way. Only rich patrons can indulge in true patronage. At least I can appreciate the work of other artists. I am a good audience and in my day an employer, although sometimes those I employed could make my life very difficult. I know what went into their creation, hours and hours of rehearsal, thought and angst. Today social media gives many artists like me an outlet and Like on FB and YouTube can be the only reward.
This small act costs nothing, you do not have to like the work but it shows the artist you have looked and appreciate it and yet this tiny action that costs nothing is so often withheld. I suppose it gives that feeling of power. I do notice when I put up a Lieder video that I have spent weeks on and I get not one Like from my friends. It tells me something I suppose, it tells me what I do is so useless even my friends cannot bother to look and if they do look they do not Like what they see.. Fortunately artists just soldier on. It is not my fault that my friends do not like Lieder the same way as they love other topic, sensitivity prevents me from naming them but a bit of encouragement along the way would help. They might get to Like Leider. Leider is super.
When I bought my Tony Fomisons, he was destitute. I was hard up. Today his oil paintings are sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars and grace the walls of art galleries and company board rooms. He knew he was great and carried on regardless. Pity public recognition came a bit late but because of me BNZ and Auckland Art Gallery possess works that would never have been if I had not commissioned them and recognised his genius when nobody else did. Only 600 came to our opera Fidelio Beethoven's music with his mise en scene based on his experience of life Paris prisons where he was sent for being an unlicensed pavement Artist with no money to pay the fine.
There are many ways to support artists without actually buying anything by sharing their work on FB and YouTube so they get known to wider audiences. A feedback, a comment would do and by comment I do not mean acid criticism even if you do hate it. Artists get enough of that already. We need artists to enrich our lives and broaden our horizons. Artists can say what ordinary mortals cannot through their art. We are usually sensitive creatures and well aware of our limitations.
Lastly I think society is too hard on artists. People want art for nothing and it is the artists who pays the price. The music industry today is being slowly killed because musicians and singers have difficulty in getting paid a living wage for what they do. Downloading too instead of buying DVDs is great for the buyer and Amazon but not the artist who gets little if any payment.
Message is be kind to your artist and grateful that they have the guts to do it and show appreciation in anyway you can. Here endth the lesson for today!
At the age of 33 I experienced total Alopecia. I lost every hair on my body. Being on the stage I was used to wearing wigs, my lank mousey hair made this necessary, so it was no big problem.
Now well past my sell by date I realise it was the best thing that could have happened to me as I have never had to experience the horror of my hair turning white. It is the white hair that seriously ages people. Mine is still the colour of my youth and I look years younger than my real age.
Having no hair is wonderful. Makes showering a breeze, no hours in the hairdressers, my hair always looks good, a good wig is all you need but you do have to wear it constantly to get ensure that nobody notices you aging.
The only hair I miss is my eyelashes. I do miss them but you can't have everything I suppose.
In June 2015 I made a submission to the Resource Consent Hearing for SkyPath a shared cycling/pedestrian 4 meter wide footpath across Auckland's Harbour Bridge. Having spent my life dealing with large crowds I was shocked to see that 14,337 people were expected to access the landing at Northcote Point through one 5 meter gateway which was blocked by turnstyles. To make matters worse there was a gradient ramp running down to the barrier. At the same time the public on the landing were expected to enter the SkyPath plus bicycles, pushchairs and wheelchairs.
It does not take much imagination to see this would be a disaster, especially if there was a panic as people will push forward unaware that the people in front are being crushed at the same time as people are trying to get on. No security was planned at all. The more I read and looked at the demonstration video the worse it got. It seemed to me that it was a gigantic cage for 2,000 people as there is no other exits. Once on the thing you are trapped.
The landing is just 50 sq meters at Northcote Point and the actual SkyPath takes up most of that so where on earth were the thousands of people to go? Each needs at least 1 sq meter for safety. The fact that there were to be no toilets and no parking and there would be difficulty in getting more than one fire engine in, and no hope at all for ambulances or police cars in the event of an emergency pailed into insignificance.
Having experienced an angry crowd myself when unexpectedly 2,800 turned up for my first children's show at Auckland Town Hall I know a disaster when I see it and if 20,000 turned up on the first day of SkyPath, as they will because Auckland has been sold this dream anything could happen.
There is no way 2000 an hour could make it through the two turnstiles available. It is very serious as people panic. It happens somewhere in the world many times each year, usually through miscalculating capacity and bad planning. Sometimes it results in many deaths.
Having had a rather serious illness I did not feel up to presenting personally so I made a 15 minute film to show the dangers of building SkyPath in its present form. A picture is worth a 1000 words and a moving picture is priceless and I knew that the Commissioners had experience with traffic & town planning but none with crowds. Crowds are not like cars that one can manage easily. People do what they want and cyclists are known to be aggressive.
It was not easy to do as the subject is not what the Commissioners wanted to hear as the Mayor had made it plain in the press that the consent had to go through. The Mayor chose the Independent Commissioners. However one hoped they would be reasonable when people's lives are at stake. A Shared Path of this magnitude in a 4 meter tunnel has never been attempted anywhere else in the world as it is too dangerous. It UK it would be illegal simply because cyclists are vehicles and can kill pedestrians as easily as cars kill cyclists.
The press who were supposed to be there were late so instead of the dangers to human beings being reported the danger to life bird life in the local reserve got the article. Not quite the same thing.
My video was watched in horror by the submitters and the Commissioners. It was clear everyone there had got the message but with no press it was quietly buried. The decision entry says "The video addressed issues of whether the facility would be safe for users"! This is the understatement of the year.
Today is not like yesterday where the powerful could do this and get away with it. Social media has given me the opportunity to set the record straight. If just one death from a shared cycle/pedestrian path occurs it will be the Commissioners fault because they have been warned. They know that the path is too narrow even under NZTA guidelines, there is no world research into shared paths and certainly not this type of shared path. They know it is dangerous. Our main street is just 4 meters wide yet nobody would think of sharing it with cyclists one way let alone going both ways on the same path. It is illegal because it is deadly.
I hope that the fuss I am making will make deaths from a human panic avoidable. Again the Commissioners know but have done nothing. They cannot say they have not been warned. I should not have to do this.
I have read all the evidence and they have seen mine so it is hard to understand how they can have come to the conclusion that SkyPath is fit for purpose and safe for humans without a complete redesign like make SkyPath a dismount for cyclists area and make them push their bikes over, or make the path 6.5 meters wide and put up a median barrier or have another SkyPath on the other side and separate the two. How you increase the ground footage on Northcote Point defeats me or solve the problem of the Onewa Road intersection where there is to be another shared path. This time cyclists and school children! I may win that one.
Hopefully now when 20,000 turn up on the first day something will be in place to avoid an angry crowd who cannot get on or off the SkyPath, cannot buy tickets and cannot park their cars and cannot get back onto the motorway without a 4 hour wait. The one thing the Commissioners did do was to provide a couple of WCs. They had to be forced to do this.
The fact that if the numbers do not eventuate will mean the Auckland Ratepayers will have to stump up is minor to the mayhem that might ensue if a 20,000 crowd were left to its own devices. This is one event where I hope I am wrong but like Cassandra at Troy I fear I could be right.
Beware the Greeks bearing gifts. Now watch the video!
I wish I had been given reading list like this when I was sixteen. It costs nothing and would have been so helpful. Culture is learned and shared so it would be good if everybody was, if not in the same loop, had least a taste of what the loop is. Every school could hand out such a list and let the pupils get on with it.
I had disastrous education. A true faith school run by Irish RC nuns. How I survived is a mystery so a reading list would have been a starting point. That is the difference between my faith school and Eton, I got belief systems so no science or sex education and a list of prohibited books and they get the chance of balanced education whether the children take it or not. They know it exists and where to find it.
This is what Eton does. It teaches conduct and confidence and it does it well. Eton teaches you to get on with people and remember your friends. They have a shared common knowledge. You can help them and they can help you and it works.
The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art does the same. Remember your colleagues all through your career. Mine the GSM&D did not! This was a mistake because all of us went our separate ways while those from RADA helped each other to get on.
So culture is learned and shared. Eton knows it and the rest of us don't. Knowing their shared reading list at least gives us some insight as to where they are coming from and honestly it is a good list. To be that well read at 16 is an advantage and yet anyone with a will and a list could do this. If I had had that list I should have used it then and I shall use it now.
Great list, some I have missed like Sophie's World.
In case anyone wants the full list but is bothered to by the Times pay wall, here is the full list (though without authors):
Literature
Gulliver's Travels
David Copperfield
The Age of Innocence
Atonement
Never let me go
The Bonfire of the Vanities Literature "In translation"
French: L'elegance du herrison
Spanish: La sombra del viento
German: Tschick
Russian: The Master and Margarita
Italian: Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno
Portugese: O Crime de Padre Amaro
Japanese: Hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world
Chinese: Wolf Totem
Arabic: Beirut 39 Science
Bad Science
Genome
Six Easy Pieces Philosophy
Sophie's World Ethics
Rethinking Life and Death Theology
The Case for Religion
The Sea of Faith History of Art
Michelangelo and the Pope's ceiling
The Story of Art Art
Blimey! - From Bohemia to BritPop
The Horse's Mouth History
The first Crusade: the Call from the East
The realities behind diplomacy Economics
Almost Everyone's Guide to Economics
The Affluent Society Politics
In Defence of Politics Geography
The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny and Globalisation's Rough Landscape
On the Map: A Mind Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks Classics
The Iliad
Confronting the Classics: Traditions
Adventures and Innovations Mathematics
To Infinity and Beyond: A cultural history of the infinite
Algorithmics: The spirit of computing Music
A Very short Introduction Design
The Language of Things
PS My father Major James Charles Hugh Miller knew all about a good education having gone to the very best schools himself. Had I been a boy I should have had his type of education and in fact just down the road from me was one of the best independent girls schools in London, The North London Collegiate and yet he sent his daughter to be educated by Roman Catholic 18 year old Irish nuns! I rest my case for independent reading lists!
A challenging GCSE maths question has left students so confused and angry that they are calling on the exam board to lower its grade boundaries.
The conundrum, set by Edexcel, involves a girl called Hannah, her bag of sweets and a perplexing equation:
There are n sweets in a bag. Six of the sweets are orange. The rest of the sweets are yellow. Hannah takes a random sweet from the bag. She eats the sweet. Hannah then takes at random another sweet from the bag. She eats the sweet. The probability that Hannah eats two orange sweets is 1/3. Show that n²-n-90=0.
Algebra! I never got it at school so I had a go at it when I was 26. It annoyed me to think I could not do it so I got out my father's Halls Algebra part one and worked my way through it. At the time I was very impressive with long division using algebra!
The problem I have with algebra is why a minus x minus become a plus? Who worked that one out?.
I can explain it now but is difficult concept to grasp at any age and on graph paper where + 2 on the x and + 2 on the y give you + 4 and the mirror minus co ordinates give -4. So how come this doesn't show up as +4?
I know there is a very rational answer but when you are 12 and can think visually this is a problem. Telling someone like me that it is when I can see it isn't doesn't give a child much confidence in the system.
Let me see if I can explain why multiplying two minuses make a plus. It goes something like this.
If you have a bill you don't owe and then receive another bill you don't owe even if you multiply them together you still don't it owe any of it and the money that you would have paid if you had owed them is still yours.
I think.
The only way to do algebra is to stick to the rules and the rules are difficult to remember if you are not using it every day or are under pressure. I was good at it and if necessary could get out my Hall's Algebra part 1 & 2 and be up and running in a couple of days but honestly I have never used it again in my life. Same for trigonometry as I do not fire guns.
I don't think it is fair to ask exam students to have to do this unless trained to do it or given lots of time to think.
If I were taking exams today and I didn't think a question was fair I think instead of trying to do it and making mess I should write out what was wrong with it. I recall my grandfather did this in 1904 in the Civil Service exam. He pointed out why the sum couldn't be done, It couldn't be done! He ended up eventually running Wembley Stadium. He came from the slums of Royston.
Sorry for rant but algebra bring out the worst in me.
New Zealand is privileged to welcome the current Wagner/R Strauss opera diva, Christine Goerke to it's shores. Last heard she was winging her way here from New York by Air New Zealand. At least she knows where it is because she has been here before which is more than can be said for some of her countrymen who suggested that she hug a Koala while here! For those in USA who are geographically challenged New Zealand is a sovereign country and the couple of large Islands shaped like a boot a thousand miles East of Australia which does have Koala bears. I must admit our flags are confusing. Only one star difference.
It is true that New Zealand is at the end of the world. It is the place where artists visit either at the very beginning of their careers, as I did when I desperately wanted to direct serious opera and ballet and because I was a woman nobody else in the world would let me, or at the end. We see a lot of artists here when they should have given up so it is refreshing for us to have an artist at the pinnacle of her career honour us for a very, very special Wagner Gala with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra where she will be singing highlights from Siegfried and Gotterdammerung.
Now I must warn that on the whole New Zealand isn't into Wagner mainly because our opera companies rarely present it. The odd Dutchman because of Donald McIntyre, a truly great Wotan and one Meistersinger in the 40 years I have lived here. When I once included King Mark's monologue from Tristan & Isolde in a concert I was forced to cut it the following performance as the audience really got restless. The abused King nearly chucked me in Lake Pupuke and I really didn't blame him because he did it well. It wasn't him or Wagner it is just that at that time the NZ audience had never seen a Wagner Opera. Even Tristan today would be shunned.
NZ loves La Boheme and for ballet Coppelia. When it came to funding The Sound of Music got the full Arts Council funding and our Fidelio with a mise en scene by fine artist Tony Fomison nothing! His oil paintings which I paid for, as the Art's Council reneged, are now hanging in the Auckland City Art Gallery and the director's room in the BNZ. They won't give them back!
So New Zealand is so lucky to hear Ms Goerke sing the major sections from Wagner's masterpieces first. We heard her Brunhilda first. New York is still waiting although Canada Opera and Houston Texas have had the experience.
NZ is only getting a concert version but what a concert version. Truly the very best bits. Wagner wrote The Ring over a very long period of time. He started with the book of the last of the four operas, Gotterdammerung, but then he felt he should write a prequel Siegfried and then another opera to explain that, Die Valkyrie and lastly a preliminary evening Das Rheingold. His style of writing changed during this period. Gotterdammerung is written in the old opera style with arias and duets as he progressed this altered so his first opera libretto is quite advanced.
Wagner then wrote the music for the first two operas and the first two acts of Siegfreid and then he stopped. He wrote Meistersinger because he needed a crowd pleaser for money and then he had that eureka moment with the chords of Tristan and Isolde and Western classical music was never the same again.
For serious Wagnerians, and my husband Miles was one of these, Act III Siegfried was the moment The Ring began. It is full of the most sumptuous sounds and from then on magnificent. It will be some sing too for the soprano because in the opera house she never has to sing Siegfried and Gotterdammerung on the same night and indeed it is a bit of an ask.
It is such a special occasion that I am actually going to go! I have a compromised immune system and it is not wise for me to attend large enclosed gatherings as if I catch a cold I end up in hospital but this is an exception. Nothing is going to stop me and I would like to encourage anyone who loves opera to go too. This is your opportunity. Don't miss it. You will regret it.
