Here are Eva Hoffman, Janice Galloway and me at the Royal Festival Hall discussing what it’s like to write about music and musicians. Janice got us all laughing, and it turned into a fun evening. We three speakers all said something about why we wanted to write about music; we read extracts from our books, […]

I’m looking forward to taking part in a literature event at the South Bank on Monday evening at 7.45pm. The novelist Eva Hoffman has invited fellow novelist Janice Galloway and me to join her in a discussion of what it’s like to write about music. I don’t really know either of them except through their […]

My copy of the newly-published Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music arrived today along with about 35 other items of post suddenly released from the backlog of the current postal strike. My contribution to the book is just a short article on ‘Learning to Live with Recording’, but it turns out to be the first thing […]

In the past few days I’ve spent some time studying scores of pieces I’m going to be teaching in a masterclass at the RSAMD this week. The date has been in my diary for a long time, but because the academic year only began a couple of weeks ago, it was impossible to find out who the students would […]

In Monday’s Guardian, Umberto Eco laments the decline in children’s handwriting ability. He gives various reasons why he thinks it’s a shame that we don’t handwrite letters any more, but surprisingly doesn’t talk about the impact that someone’s handwriting can have on the reader. When I was a teenager, long before we had computers – let […]