Vivaldi! Yes, *actual* Vivaldi!

So there I was being a tourist in Florence and, thinking as I do with my stomach, looking very hard for the address of the restaurant I had just learnt about thanks to a flyer, and suddenly I hear something familiar. Opus 3, No. 6 in A minor to be precise - and for those of you who knew me back when I had a full head of hair, the same concerto that I had played at my quarter-century birthday bash.

(I'm right posh, me. Violinists and everything.)

Utter perfection, to have my favourite violin piece played for free by a busker in an time-warp Italian city. Then I got the final movement of Summer too, which was totally impressive. Then I got a pizza.

(Verdict on Rome vs Florence: Roman food wins, hands down. But ye gods, it's expensive. Even for those of us earning Brown pesos.)

Hmm. Hungry now. Where is my supper?

Happiness is an hour at the Wig

Or, more precisely, an hour of Haydn string quartets at Wigmore Hall. Scarcely, dear reader, does one find a Haydn performance and almost never four string quartets played back to back.

I was - and still am - in heaven.

No, the mathematically minded of you are not wrong, I didn't stay for the second half. This is because I have a very hurty head indeed and general not-feeling-well and also a loudly rumbly tummy, owing to having forgot to have lunch. Yes, it's been that kind of a week. Anyway, now I am propped up with a hurty head, my anti-rumbling Pot Noodles and the last movement in my head.

Haydn's a bit like Austen - his works are just so irresistibly happy.

Thanks London, for dusting off those Haydn quartets for us.

'I am a retard'

I love this story from Reuters: 'A teacher who forced a pupil to write “I am a retard” 100 times was acquitted by an Italian court on Wednesday of abuse charges. The teacher, whose identity was withheld to protect her privacy, forced the punishment on the 12-year-old boy after he blocked a fellow pupil from going to the toilet and called him “gay” and “girly.” The parents had sought 25,000 euros in damages and a public prosecutor had called for a two-month prison sentence, but the court cleared the teacher, a court source said. The teacher said her punishment of the boy had been appropriate, particularly after a widely publicized case of an adolescent who committed suicide in Italy, apparently after receiving taunts at school about being homosexual. Gay rights groups had called for the charges to be dropped.'

But I'm a bit worried that there should be a call for a two-month prison sentence for giving the homophobic bully lines.

Of London and murder

There is a wonderful site which exists to enable gay professionals in the City (so largely finance and media types) to meet each other and socialise, do business, that sort of thing.

Of course, while it might be nice to procure business with fellow pink businessmen, the site has recognised that some of its members might prefer to (ahem) get busy. So now there's a dating section.

Yours truly has had a brief chat to someone randomly 'met' on the site about the composer Gesualdo. Talk about a 'niche' interest - within the subset of classical music listeners there are the early music fans, and within those, the fans of late Renaissance latin church music, and within that set, there are those who might know about Gesualdo.

It's one of the most interesting conversations I've had in my life.

That is probably a little sad, but reinforces the point that in London, Vivaldi will find many characters worth noting in his folio; in Joburg there is not one. I can't think what gay men in Joburg talk about but I haven't found one who knows much about the arts, and certainly nobody - gay or straight - who has so much as heard of Gesualdo.

Ah, the delights of London and the advanced creatures who reside there.

Ah, but the delights of murder! See, Gesualdo is less famous for his work (let's just say it's chromatic in the extreme, and not always worth the effort it takes to listen) and rather more famous for offing people. Apparently he lost interest in sex with his supposedly gorgeous wife, who had an affair with someone else in the court (if I recall, Gesualdo was of noble birth). G found out, and since infidelity was a punishable crime, decided to kill his wife and her (very handsome, we read) lordly lover. No problem if you're noble and it's the 1500s, nobody's going to ask questions. But it's not terribly fabulous to have to do the work yourself, so he hired some goons, who caught the pair in flagrante and killed them. There are several reports of the murders, but they're all pretty gruesome, involving variously removal of genitals, disembowelment, torture and slitting of throats. Let's just say that it doesn't seem wifey or lover went quickly or painlessly. There's also a pretty persistent rumour that the priest(s) performing last rites on his wife's body couldn't resist her necrophilic loveliness. Oh, and I believe he also killed his child (himself this time), thinking it couldn't have been his, and, I think, the nanny too.

A few years pass and G marries again - you'd think the girls would steer well clear of him, but there's obviously no accounting for taste. And then Wife II has an affair too! Talk about asking for trouble. G, clearly too used to being cheated on to get too worked up, had Lover II's throat slit (v. tame) and locked Wife II up in a tower somewhere.

La Messe De Notre Dame

I am gobsmacked.

It really can't be.

And yet it seems it is.

Tonight, you see, I am going to buy Guillame de Machaut's Notre Dame Mass, which holds an important place in music history for being the first known mass in which all the movements are (a) polyphonic and (b) contain the same thematic material, so it's one mass instead of several movements.

Enough with the music history lecture already - the point is, I don't own this piece of music yet. And although I find it quite weird (it's so early it doesn't sound very much like western music at all) it is nevertheless interesting. And I've found a cheap and nice copy of it, so: yay! But the *real* thing to note is that suddenly, my music library is Complete. There's actually nothing else I know of that exists in a recording I can actually purchase that I covet at the moment.

Don't expect it to stay that way for long, I mean, I am the person who has no real furniture of his own but a vast collection of pretty, interesting and exciting tunes. Thanks to my many Lovely Friends who gave me generous amounts of Musica vouchers for my birthday, I now own all the things I probably wouldn't have splurged on if I was paying for them myself - and am at a loss as to what to buy next.

Oh. Now that I think of it, I don't have Fuer Elise. But I don't feel I must own it.

There's lots of opera I'd like to experience, but since it should be all about the Whole Experience (set, costumes, sex appeal of singers, oh - and the singing) I'd rather go watch operas in London (Universe, listen up) than buy recordings of them.

So, It Is Done. Complete. All 7000-plus works. Man, I love iTunes.

Edit: It took two days, but my state of completion has come undone. I have discovered obscure avant-garde Scandinavian chamber music. Must have!

Look, you didn't *really* think I was going to stop my lifelong accumulation of tjoonz, did you?

You've got mail

Now, although I have in fact been to a musical event this afternoon and even had an argument with a music exec about the recording industry versus live performance and Joburg audiences' apathy (eg. Arguer: 'There's no classical music in this town.' Me: 'Uh, how about that event at City Hall?' Arguer: 'Oh no, it's FAR too dangerous to go into the centre of town.' N.L.: 'Mini Cooper just had a launch in the CBD that was something like 60 BLOCKS WIDE attended by thousands of people. I know lots of people who went.' Me: 'And there's always the JPO at the Linder.' Arguer: 'You can get shot waiting at traffic lights at night.' Arguer 2: 'Why don't musicians come and play at schools. I'd go if they came to my kid's school.' Me + N.L. look at each other.) this is not about that.

I apologise, let's make this one of the few posts not supposedly actually pretending to be about music.

At the moment I may be Meg Ryan or Tom Hanks, I'm not sure which character is more fitting. And you'd think I would steer clear of such activities when I tried for two weeks to dissuade H.E. from going to Oxfordshire to meet the (as it turned out) spongey, sexist pig who she thought was her boyfriend. THAT didn't work, and now I'm doing the same thing.

I know it's not love to chat via email, but at the moment I wait with great anticipation for any word from M.L. Luckily, his words are many, and entertaining. He's in Manchester, I'm in Johannesburg. Though Vivaldi keeps trying to move his violin case to London, that's not Manchester. That's another town, far oop north, and coincidentally right next to where I spent my formative years growing up. So I'm well disposed to the place. But I'm not planning to move there, am I?

And yet I cannot tear myself away from my laptop, for there is an email from M.L. coming in...

You know, MORE is more

Two dear friends and I are having a joint birthday party in two weeks' time, and because we are jointly turning 101 (35 + 35 + 31) we felt we should inflict our memories of youth on our equally old friends by having an 80s pop star party. It's great to dress 80s (teased hair, shoulder pads, plastic jewellery and ridiculous make-up) but even more fun to live out your fantasies and come as your favourite 80s pop star, no?

Of course, that means we'll have 17 Madonnas and at least two sets of The Cure.

Actually, there were other birthday party participants - Taurus seems to be one of those signs that gets on best with its own kind - and we nearly had a willing Bananarama, but May is, for this crowd, insanely social. And expensive. You can't give the Star Sign of Material Possessions a shabby gift. And in fact it's generally a bad idea to come to a Taurus birthday party without a gift at all (Bulls have long memories when it comes to Stuff).

But back to the 80s for a second. Weren't they great? Bigger hair! More make-up! Dafter clothes (which we thought were, like, totally fresh back then). And an explosion of creativity in the realm of pop. I wondered to myself today, who would I remember from 2007, popstar-wise? Er, I'm not sure I would. Where's this decade's outrageous Madonna? Is there one? Will the class of 2010 think back on how silly they were to have done the equivalent of 'Walk Like An Egyptian' (and secretly liked it, though we knew it looked silly)? Will they know all the words to their enduring equivalent of 'Love Shack'? Will they know how to have fun? Will they know how to Wang Chung? I wonder if the great industry that pop music has become isn't just churning out artists who look and sound like other successful artists. After all, if you want to be the next Pop Idol you have to sound, well, exactly like Bono (think back to the end of the worldwide competition a couple of years ago) - and as little like yourself as possible.

It might be just that I'm removed from pop because my formative years are over (yes, looooong over, shut up) and that's why everyone seems to look and sound quite similar. But I don't think so. Because I'm stuck for choice as to who to dress up as for my birthday party. Do I don a suit, white socks, a pencil neck tie and a floppy fringe and be Spandau Ballet, or should I have leather pants, lots of crucifixes and go as Billy Idol? Curl my hair, slap on lipstick and black nail varnish and I could be the transvestite-y dude from Depeche Mode. Put on dark glasses and a piano-key jacket and lose all kind of facial expression and then I'd be the non-Neil Tennant half of the Pet Shop Boys. Tease my hair, find an eye patch and dress like a flouncy sailor and you've got Pete Burns of Dead Or Alive. Actually, dress in any extremely weird way and you will likely end up looking like an incarnation of Pete Burns. And those are just a few of the options for the boys. For the girls, there may be even more. Ankle boots and a ruffled skirt? Pat Benatar in 'Love Is A Battlefield'. Huge, teased hair and a wind machine? Bonnie Tyler.

See, everyone had a look, a bit of individuality within the general excesses of the 80s. Off-the-shoulder jersey-tunic with a belt and white pointy court shoes? Oh, well I suppose that could be *anyone*, couldn't it?

I'd like it if the world went back to having individuals, though I've recently read that this insistence on standing out from the crowd is, like, so Generation X.

Of course, 80s pop creativity could also just be because everyone was off their tits on coke and acid. But damn, I miss it.