My request for letters to the editor has produced two very detailed arguments on the subject of our President Jeremy Montagu’s views on the importance of playing the appropriate instrument, and a letter requesting more Saturday events. These are to be found towards the end of the newsletter, and more views on both subjects will be very welcome.

In this edition you will also find two reviews of our Christmas event, and one of the NEMA day in November. I enjoyed the David Allinson Christmas workshop enormously, but I could almost wonder whether Jackie and I were in the same room for the NEMA workshop which I personally did not find very musically satisfying. To my ears the musical standard was lower than one would expect at a TVEMF event, particularly in the morning, and even Philip must have found the uneven balance of voices and instruments difficult to manage. Perhaps it was just a question of where one was sitting. I agree with her though that Jeremy Montagu’s talk was fascinating and the concert by Apollo and Pan absolutely excellent.

David has had another offer of help with sending out Tamesis but more would still be welcome.

I have been asked to add some more information about Peter Collier’s Baroque Day at Oxford on 24^th March. It will be held at Headington School which is on the main road on the left hand side just before you get to the Headington shops from the Oxford direction. The entrance is in the side road with the pub on the corner. There are many buses which stop just outside, as well as ample parking in the school. The day will start with coffee at 10 for 10.30 and you do need to let Peter know if you cannot be there for the whole day. As is customary at our TVEMF baroque days, people who bring harpsichords and spinets will not be asked to pay.

I am already getting enquiries about Michael Procter’s Kilburn weekend in April. The form will appear next month, but you might like to know in advance that the main work will be the 6-part Missa super congratulamini (1570) of Orlande de Lassus, a parody on his own long motet Congratulamini (1566) which we shall also prepare, together with other festive music for Eastertide. Michael aims to achieve a balanced choir of about 36 singers SSATTB. Applications from good cornetts and sackbuts and a bass curtal and/or violone will also be welcome. If you want to book a place before the form appears, send me an e-mail now and follow it with your form and cheque next month.
Victoria

Our Christmas event at Marlow seemed to go very well in spite of the somewhat less than ideal state of the printed music. We had borrowed most of it but I had elected to type in some sections to obtain better instrumental parts. Thanks to Ken Moore for helping to supply a few missing bars in the finale of the Sch�tz Christmas Story and to those who managed with the ancient copies. Having typed "Sch�tz" many times, I rather wish we had chosen a composer whose name did not contain any accents! The soloists performed very well, David Allinson was his usual cheerful self and I enjoyed the day very much. Many thanks to Johanna Renouf for her excellent organisation.

This month's event is a Renaissance Chamber Music Day and although we already have more takers than for the last such day, we could accommodate more. Where are all the tenor voices, renaissance flutes and viols?

With the magazine you will find forms for the Philip Thorby and Alan Lumsden events and also a renewal form. Please do not lose the latter - fill it in now and return it to ensure membership for 2002.

I had quite a good response to the competition, and I hope it brought you all a little fun and nonsense at Christmas.

There were several wrong answers as well as lots of correct ones. All the wrong ones were different, so I do not think it was an error in construction. The winner (the first correct one out of the hat) was Elaine Mordaunt, and she wins a year's subscription to TVEMF. Good luck to you next time!

This was my second attendance at this annual event, which I thought might be a rather sad one in view of all the rumours about NEMA’s imminent demise. However, with Philip Thorby directing the playing event, a fascinating talk from Jeremy Montagu and a short concert by ‘Apollo and Pan’, the atmosphere was very positive and the day very enjoyable.

Philip’s choice of music was from The Triumphs of Oriana, a collection of twenty or so five- and six-part madrigals by various composers, compiled in 1601 in honour of Queen Elizabeth I. With our own Queen Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee celebrations coming up I see from the events lists that there will be plenty of opportunity for everyone to study these during the current year. I have sung some of the better-known 6-part ones several times, in particular ten years ago for the 40^th Jubilee celebrations. On that occasion they were complemented by a similar 20^th Century collection, A Garland for The Queen, a group of ten part-songs commissioned from composers of the day such as Britten, Tippett and Rawsthorne, in honour of Queen’s Elizabeth II’s coronation. It will be interesting to see whether anyone else makes this pairing in the coming year.

I was delighted to discover that there were so many Triumphs and that Philip had chosen three which I didn’t know. These were John Hilton’s ‘Faire Orianna beauties Queene’, Ellis Gibbons’ ‘Round about her Charret’ and George Kyrbie’s ‘With Angells face’. The King’s Music scores had been put together hurriedly by Clifford Bartlett in the face of various technical catastrophes, and despite this were excellent as usual. He was on hand to answer queries and very happy for us to play ‘spot the typo’, although we found very few.

Philip, as always, gave us that superb mixture of humour and good sound early music experience that we have come to know and love. Although most of the regulars now know that we should try to find the natural rhythms and look for the word stresses above everything, he only has to speak or sing a phrase and suddenly it comes to life and seems so obvious. Trying to reproduce the effect is more of a challenge, and there is no doubt that it is initially more difficult to keep one’s place when there is no regular beat. Once you’ve learnt to cope with memorising and feeling a phrase, the hardest part then is in returning to the regular rhythm at the end. However, word-stress, dynamics and the word-painting serve to bring madrigals alive and, let’s face it, they can sometimes seem very dull without.

With so many musicians in a modest-sized room, there were some inevitable tuning problems, which were taken in good heart, with threats of applying araldite to some slippery pegs, and comments such as ‘I didn’t realise how elastic these strings were’. We made a start on ‘Faire Orianna’ with the encouraging instruction ‘however awful the first three bars are, we’ll go on’, and after what was described as reluctant warming up we started to get into our stride. Striding wasn’t appropriate for the first bit of word-painting however, as we were accused of goose-stepping on the green when we should have been skipping and dancing on it.

The rhythmic structure of Ellis Gibbons’ ‘Round about her Charret’ was more straightforward, but with greater imitation between the parts. We were still encouraged to shape the phrases, and the words had to be clear - ‘what vowel are you aiming for?’ eventually improved towards ‘now the vowels are very good, let’s add some consonants’. None of this was at the expense of accuracy though - ‘I wonder what the problem is. Perhaps you were worried about the E flat, or if not, perhaps you should be’.

Finally, the opening phrase of George Kyrbie’s piece ‘With Angells face and brightnesse, and orient hew’ caused some speculation among us on the nature of the ‘orient hew’. Was she a rather dusky maiden, or was this orient (i.e. eastern) hue from the face shining as the sun? In the phrase ‘with nimble foot she tripped o’re hills and mountaines’, Philip didn’t want us to be too majestic on the mountains, but to think of them as vaguely Chiltern. It took us some time to get the hang of the dancelike rhythm of ‘The Faunes and Satirs dancing, did shew their nimble lightness’ - ‘we’ve tried it to la, how else can we simplify it?’- but we enjoyed it rather too much once it sank in, and were warned not to get too tango-like on the dotted rhythms.

In the afternoon, after being accused of sinking to a post-prandial low, we rallied and polished all three pieces a little more before a final run-through. It’s good to take the music apart and find out what really makes it work, then put it all back together again, even though the final performance on such occasions isn’t always the best, as we don’t remember to put it all in practice at once. I enjoyed seeing this process afresh in the reaction of newcomers who, while taken aback at having to learn to count all over again, were amazed at the effect it has on the performance. You can never become complacent in applying the techniques though, and there’s always more find and bring out in the phrasing, which Philip inspires you to keep doing, both in his presence and away from it.

Vicky has already reported on the AGM and Jeremy Montagu’s talk, which I found revealing and thought-provoking, although like her I didn’t agree with all of his conclusions. Having the perspective from somebody who was in on the ground in the early days was both encouraging and discouraging in how far we had come - a long way stylistically, but not far enough from a funding and support angle. Hearing him talk about the lack of awareness of temperament among singers prompted me to wonder why this is taught to some players but not singers, at least in amateur circles, and I would certainly be interested in a workshop on the subject.

As for style versus instrumentation, I agree that while it is good to strive for correct instrumentation, there are many practical difficulties, such as the cost of owning and transporting several instruments of different dates and playing them appropriately. While we should support this perfectionist approach in order to benefit from musical research and performance practice, wouldn’t it be a shame if I as an amateur were discouraged from playing trio sonatas on a modern oboe. It is not possible at the present time for me to become proficient on a baroque instrument, but I have learnt a lot about the style through workshops and practice. Taken to its extreme, few of us would have the opportunity to explore the world of early music. Greater authenticity comes with experience and the growing desire for the ‘correct’ sound, as in my case plastic recorders are gradually replaced by wooden renaissance and baroque copies.

Two examples come to mind. When preparing Cavalli’s Callisto, Geoff and I were lent one of the (then) few recordings available, by Raymond Leppard, complete with rich string sounds with full vibrato, operatic voices and slow tempi. At the other extreme, while writing this I have been listening to Radio 3’s round the world Christmas broadcast. The Finnish concert included a brass consort playing excerpts from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, and I really enjoyed the familiar alto solo "Prepare thyself Zion" accompanied by trombones and a tuba! Yes, the instrumentation was all wrong, but the effect was very pleasing and the style ‘historically informed’; in fact the only ‘correct’ instrument, the alto voice, was the least well informed as her vibrato was rather strong. The brass chorales, of course, sounded wonderful as did several other solo sections.

After tea, Peter Holman expressed his embarrassment at introducing a recital by Apollo and Pan, as the three-strong ensemble included his daughter Sally. However it was NEMA’s tradition to invite the winners of the Early Music Network International Young Artists competition and there was no way out! The group consists of Sally Holman (bassoon), Tassilo Erhardt (violin) and Michael Borgstede (harpsichord), although Michael was unable to attend due to a family bereavement and was ably substituted at very short notice by a Professor from their conservatoire in the Netherlands. Apollo and Pan’s programme explored works for this little-known combination with a stylish appreciation of musical structure and of the aural delights inherent in this engaging combination of strongly-contrasting instruments.

All in all it was a very enjoyable day, and whatever NEMA’s fate, I hope that similar events will continue into the future.

I greatly enjoyed playing on Saturday and thought that David Allinson (with whom I had not worked before) had very much the right attitude and lots of good musical ideas. If my lip had been stronger, I might have felt that he left the players resting for rather long periods, but as it was, and being surprisingly on the Soprano 2 part for much of the day, instead of my usual Alto, I was grateful for the time to recover. Many thanks also to David Fletcher for his efforts on the parts and scores.

I thought all the works were well chosen and liked both the acoustic of the church and the sound of its organ.

The Christmas event took place on a cold but cloudless day in the United Reformed Church in Marlow, a neo-Greek design of 1838-40 by James Fenton of Chelmsford. The pretty interior, refitted towards the end of the 19^th century, was an excellent venue for our music, while the hall below was extremely cosy.*

As always with the Christmas event, the day began with the bringing in and sorting of lunch contributions (though I kept mine outside in my mobile Peugeot fridge for the time being), while others helped with the collating, folding and stuffing of the latest issue of Tamesis. Eventually it was time to make music, and David Allinson introduced the session with an excellent sequence of warming-up exercises with more than a nod towards Alexander Technique. Next on the agenda was a four-part setting of ‘Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen’ followed by a version in canon for which the various forces were eventually "scrambled" in our places. From my vantage point at the back of the hall I counted 14 sopranos, 12 altos, 8 tenors and 11 basses, with instrumentalists including a cornett and mute cornett, 2 violins, 2 sackbuts, 3 recorders and 4 viols, with Robert Johnson tackling the church’s organ. This was good music to start with, and David was immediately pleased with the ensemble and our willingness to do as we were told!

Then it was on to the Christmas Story, for which David had selected the three main choruses as well as other Intermedii for solo and group voices and some related sections for the Evangelist. We started in German with the final chorus, for which David demanded a variety of approaches, included a fizzing "sing-en" as if we were touching an electric fence. He wanted us to enjoy all the cross-rhythms and hemiolas, which David made the most of with a wiggle of the hips, not for the first time during the day! Dull singing he described as "going to the shops". We tackled the six-part ‘Ehre sei Gott’ (Intermedium II) with the contrast between legato and more marcato phrases being one of the main points of discussion, and then the opening chorus.

Musically the next item was a six-part ‘Hodie’, with varied verse sections in duple time followed by an Allelluia refrain in triple time. This was a superb piece which we eventually performed properly "scrambled", with the instrumentalists being given one Allelluia section on their own for the sake of variety. As always, David’s enthusiasm encouraged the best from the available forces, finding the lines and the movement in otherwise quite dense choral writing. Even so, on one occasion he had to remind us that one section was "a light souffl�" rather than a "stodgy pudding"!

After a brief look at Giovanni Gabrieli’s wonderful double choir ‘O magnum mysterium’, we finished the day by running through the choral movements of the Christmas Story, incorporating in the relevant places some additional Intermedii for solo and ensemble. Celia Hart and Penny Bagshaw each took a turn as the Angel in Intermedium I announcing to the shepherds in the fields. After ‘Ehre sei Gott’, David Tierney, Helen Dymond and Sue Butcher as the three shepherds in Intermedium III responded in a forthright manner and were certainly "not afraid"! Robin Whitehouse, Neil Edington and I then "dropped by" in an unscheduled visit as the Three Kings, before the closing Evangelist section and the final rousing chorus. As I have performed the role in English, I was particularly pleased to be asked to look at the Evangelist part, for which David had selected the opening and closing storytelling as well as two short sections introducing Intermedii.

The day was a great success, aided by the groaning trestles and the complementary glass of wine at lunchtime. Thanks are due to David Allinson for his infectious brand of fun and erudition, to Robert Johnson for his work on the keyboard, and most of all to Johanna Renouf for her hard work in organising the whole event. Johanna has asked me in return to thank all those who helped out, particularly those who stayed on at the end to help clear up.

*Architectural information from the 1994 ‘Pevsner’ for Buckinghamshire (p. 458). I was particularly fascinated to find that the front of the church with its pediment and fashionable yellow bricks did not face the street: the most visible part of the church was a plain side elevation in a more ‘common’ red brick. Perhaps there was originally another building where we parked our cars, or else there may have been plans for a street parallel to Henley Road which did not materialise…

On the Saturday before Christmas Janet and I decided to have a day in town and booked for two concerts in the Purcell Room, to see two well known ensembles I have previously missed. In the afternoon was Christmas at the Renaissance Courts of Europe by Sirinu, obviously a programme designed with children in mind, although the large audience was mainly adult. Quite where Peruvian street music on panpipes fitted in I’m not sure, but it was a fun concert and I doubt if anyone minded. I make my usual observation that professional groups often make far less effort to be authentic than I do (even though they undeniably practice more and play better). Two statements with which to challenge you (I’d quite like to be proved wrong): drums did not have wooden counterhoops until the seventeenth century, and until quite recently hurdy-gurdies were tuned in c, not g. I am sure a g instrument sounds more refined and is easier to sing to, but they were meant to be loud and strident. If you don’t believe me listen to ours.

In the evening Jeremy Barlow’s Broadside Band performed a lecture concert based on Hogarth’s The Enraged Musician, contrasting the Italian taste in classical music (Handel) with the lower English style of Playford and John Gay. Both this concert and the afternoon one by Sirinu featured Sara Stowe’s soprano voice. A packed room saw an informative and flamboyantly played presentation. I always carp at something: Jeremy’s commentary was too quiet.

The instruments found aboard the Mary Rose were the topic of an afternoon programme on Radio 4 just before Christmas: thank you Don Gill for alerting me to it.

Lucy Skeaping interviewed various expects, including our own Jeremy Montagu, and extracts of music were played on reproductions of the instruments. This was typical modern information broadcasting - 10 minutes of useful information, twenty minutes guff. What more we could have been told: Jeremy said the tabour pipes were unique, but did not get an opportunity to say how. Judging by the musical examples the fiddles had flat bridges, interesting as violin types had been around for quite a while by 1545. The "still shawm" was addressed at some length: something I did not realise is that it could be overblown, which explains the unusual addition of an extra finger hole for the left hand as a way of getting "over the bridge": does the extra bottom key fit into this as well? We were not told. Better than nothing, but mere I could have written a better script. What has Lucy Skeaping got . . .

A few weeks ago Janet and I, under the Non Troppo label we use as street musicians, attended a procession through the streets of Chichester organised by the local council. We were sent about 40 sheets of A4 paper which showed how well they had prepared for any eventuality. There was not much about us:

"As mentioned earlier in this manual, the Event Manager has appointed two companies to provide music for the procession - Tudor music by Non Troppo and Samba music by Carnival Collective. Both companies are used to processing in such events. All music will be live with no amplification, and should not therefore be seen as a health hazard."

We did tell them we’d be playing bagpipes.

On Saturday 19^th January Florilegium will be giving a concert at Beaconsfield High School put on by Beaconsfield Music Society. Their Secretary tells me that the committee are unwilling to put on early music concerts because they do not attract such a big audience, so do take advantage of this rare opportunity to go to a concert by an internationally famous group without having to travel into London. They will be playing Vivaldi’s Concerto in C major (recorder, oboe, 2 violins & continuo) and La Follia Variations Op.1 No.12 (2 violins & continuo),Torelli’s Sonata in D (trumpet, strings & continuo),Telemann’s Sonata in B minor (flute & continuo) Trio in E flat (2 violins & continuo) and Quartet in G major (flute, oboe, violin & continuo), Finger’s Sonata in D major (trumpet, violin, oboe & continuo) and Corrette’s Concerto Comique (flute, 2 violins, viola & continuo). I am told that there should be tickets at the door, but to be on the safe side phone 01494 673905.

If you do live in London, Florilegium will be giving a completely different programme in the Wigmore Hall on the following afternoon including two of my favourite Telemann pieces, the E minor flute and recorder concerto and the Introduction and Conclusion, also in E minor, from the Tafelmusik.

TVEMF member Andrew Benson-Wilson will be giving a workshop on the Organ Music of Vienna on Saturday 16 March in the Chapel of New College Oxford for the Oxford Association of Organists (as a prelude to their trip to Vienna after Easter). TVEMF members are welcome. Andrew will cover the period from around 1450 to the late eighteenth century. For further information and to book places, please contact Michael Popkin (Oxford Association of Organists) on 01865 762499.

Rhiannon Evans has asked me to tell you about the Oxfordshire County Music Service Early Music Workshop on Saturday 23 February from 2pm - 6pm at Oxford School, Glanville Road, Oxford. The fee is �6 per person and the workshop is open to all ages and abilities. The workshop is led by members of the County Music Service staff who are Early Music specialists, and will consist of two groups - one concentrating on Medieval music, the other on Renaissance.

They have some instruments available, but take your own if you have any. It sounds to me as if this would be a good opportunity to play that unusual early instrument which you have hanging on your wall or which never normally comes out of the cupboard. For more information or an application form, please phone 01865 798855.

Our President's magnificent oration is indeed a stimulant to thinking and comment.

I quote - "Our own members have done us a good deal of damage over the years". They have indeed. Well-meaning enthusiasts antipathetic to all other, 'later' music sometimes repel people of more catholic tastes who might otherwise be brought into the fold. They have all too often seized on fashionable hypotheses and promoted them as if they were established factual truth. We still too often hear the assertion that some practice 'is musically right' when it really means 'I think it sounds right'. But I find it even more disquieting that so many early music devotees do not face up to the practical problems of trying to live, in our own time, in the diverse musical worlds of some eight centuries; we are really attempting the impossible. The consequences are ever-increasing complication, fragmentation, specialisation. We are exhorted to use the right facsimile texts - the 'right' instruments-strings-pipes-reeds-pitches-temperaments-ambiance-pronunciation-unrealised figured basses 'in the style of the period' - the performance and notational conventions of all periods (etc. - as if we even knew all the answers!) over twenty-odd generations of musicians who were themselves concerned only with their own times. Professionals, as a result, inevitably specialise, but even they have problems. The violinist gets off comparatively lightly for his five-century history, but the pianist! just to have the 'right' sound and 'feel' for 1726-1867 - only two lifetimes - he will need half-a-dozen grand pianos for a start, let alone squares-upright-grands-'cabinets'-pianinos. Schumann, Chopin (and Liszt during his barnstorming younger days) never had a piano like today's standard issue - or like an early Stein.

The amateur who is a listener only may just buy disks and become a connoisseur. But spare a thought for poor amateur music-makers like me, who love many kinds of music. We have for a century been an endangered species anyhow. Early music fifty years ago offered us encouragement, because we were content (with the approbation of people such as Dart and Donington and Gordon Dodd) to compromise. What now?

My attitude is that of our Editor - which was Bishop Blougram's:

'The common problem, yours, mine, every one's

Is - not to fancy what were fair in life

Provided it could be, - but, finding first

What may be, then find how to make it fair

Up to our means...'

We need our idealists, our specialists and even our purists, and should support them. They have done a great service in cleaning up performance styles. But music is a performance art, a social art, to be widely enjoyed. We must not allow it to become the preserve of the specialists and purists - the best to be the enemy of the good. I am for practicability and compromise. Not long since I found myself playing a viola part in ‘The Entry of the Gladiators’ on my bass viol, it being that or no tenor line. If need be I will happily play viol consort music with violinists and viola players, from modern editions with barred parts. But there - I am little better than one of the wicked, I suppose. Good music, for me, is not early or late but timeless.

**********

I think the views expressed by Jeremy Montagu in his talk were extreme. How would he apply his aphorism, "if the sound's wrong, the music can't be right", to Bach organ transcriptions of Vivaldi's violin music, Tchaikovsky orchestrating Mozart or Schoenberg Brahms? In my opinion, a work played on instruments other than the original ones (and that phrase applies both to modern developments and other instruments contemporary with the work) is nearer to being a new composition than an interpretation, and you should judge it by the same criteria. Also, whether such a performance is worth the effort depends not only on how closely the modified performance captures the spirit of the original but also on what possibilities its audience has for hearing a more authentic one: nowadays, Liszt transcriptions for piano duet of Beethoven symphonies are of mostly musicological interest (notably for what they tell conductors and players about the performing practice of Beethoven's time) but they were written for amateurs to play to an audience for whom a trip to the nearest city to hear an orchestra might be a very rare experience.

The question of authentic instrumentation for a modern symphony orchestra is also not cut and dried. It partly depends on what you regard as "the earlier parts of their repertoire". Fifty years ago, J S Bach was part of the repertoire of the symphony orchestra. Nowadays we can hear his music played by ensembles using much more appropriate instruments (I would rather hear it played on a long trumpet with tuning holes than a short one with valves) and I no longer regard it, nor Haydn, nor Mozart as repertoire for the modern symphony orchestra.

I have long wished to hear the music of Debussy played on the appropriate instruments that Jeremy Montagu describes and I welcome the formation of the New Queen's Hall Orchestra. However, the trouble with following this argument to its logical conclusion is that instruments have been changing for millennia (particularly rapidly during the last 200 years), and that not only different countries but even different composers within the same country preferred different designs of instruments at the same time. Imagine the investment of the members of a horn section to cover the period from 1824 to 1987 with the composers' intended instruments:

Beethoven (Symphony No. 9), three natural orchestral horns (soloists' horns were different), one (probably: the historians are still arguing) with two valves and crooks. Berlioz ("Beatrice and Benedict"), two natural horns, two with three valves (probably rotary, as it was written for Germany, but for his Paris works after about 1840 they could be piston) and crooks; the same suffices for Wagner's "Lohengrin" and earlier works.

Wagner ("Rheingold" onward), four single horns with three rotary valves, probably with crooks but possibly with replacement tuning slides to give basic lengths of F, E, Eb and D.

Mahler (Symphonies 4 to 9), four Vienna horns, with crooks and unique moving slide valves (Sir Roger Norrington used these for a historically informed recording of the Brahms symphonies about five years ago; they were not what Brahms prescribed, but possibly what his first performances got).

Ravel ("Pavane pour une infante defunte"), two narrow bore horns with three piston valves, either with G crooks or with an ascending third valve to give the length of the natural horn in G. The players should use hand horn technique and not move their valves. Again, these instruments are not what he asks for but almost certainly what he got. Four similar instruments (but a different playing style) are required for Debussy and most other Ravel.

Shostakovich (Symphonies 9 to 12), four medium bore double horns (i.e. four-valve) in F and Bb, with rotary valves (German style, possibly by Alexander or Hoyer).

John Adams ("The Chairman dances", from "Nixon in China"), four wide bore double horns in F and Bb (Conn or Holton).

I don't think audiences would be prepared to finance this variety (and I have omitted some radically different 19th C. designs) in reality. What players and conductors need to do is take account of its implications for tone quality and balance and match the originals as well as possible with the instruments they have. I'll settle for that and for historically informed style.

**********

from Mary Kenchington

Dear TVEMF committee

I'm not sure who to address this letter to so I hope you'll forgive the impersonality of the address! I'm prompted to write by the last two copies of Tamesis; I was intending to respond sooner but You Know How It Is....

I think it was the November issue which had a wonderful article about a recent playing day with Philip Thorby. I'm afraid I forget who the correspondent was, and I've thrown out my copy so I can't look it up, but I still remember the enthusiasm and wit with which she described the day. Having enjoyed several occasions of Philip's brilliant tuition in the past (when I belonged to the sadly now defunct EMEMF) I thought to myself, "I HOPE I can get to one of his events in 2002". And I read through the events list, and looked forward to the December issue of Tamesis with great anticipation.

Perhaps you can understand my disappointment when, having received the December Tamesis, I found at its beginning a list of TVEMF events for 2002. There was indeed Thorby Day... but on a Sunday. And ALL the other TVEMF events for the year were also on Sundays or on weekends for which I assume one would be encouraged to participate in both days. What a SHAME! Due to personal commitments and my dependence on public transport I can never get to events on Sundays. I realise that other people have similar problems with Saturdays but, surely, at least SOME of our "home" events could be put within reach of non-Sunday-ers like myself. Or am I the only one?

Yours sadly (but still determined to enjoy Early Music, even if I have to do it at home on my own)
Mary Kenchington