This was actually the second of the Unknown Public series that I got. Having first heard about it when Mixing It covered Issue 2, I got this one as a back issue.
As you'd expect, it sets out the agenda and aims for the publication:
Perhaps UP can help extend the performing life of new music commissions — whether big expensive operas of small self-financed events. Our inspiration for the project comes from Granta, the literary periodical that has provided a splendid platform for new writing over the past decade. We aim to provide a similar platform that enables composers to reach beyond the big cities, academic institutions and commercial ghettoes. UP's music information will be available wherever there is a postal service.
About 16 years after the above was written, I received a letter (dated 26 March 2008) from the same two guys — John L. Walters and Laurence Aston who've stuck to their mission throughout — which suggests that it will soon be available just wherever there is a broadband connection.
CheerUP 08 is a pilot scheme for an online music service, with a number of selected albums that you can stream, download or own as physical copies through mail order. You can also listen to podcasts, follow links and add your thoughts and recommendations to the blogs. Our eventual aim is to re-invent Unknown Public as a social media site [how 2008!] for niche musics; moving from being a CD-book publisher to being a portal for creative music will take time, enthusiasm and investment.
Given that the majority of CDs I acquire these days are those that come with magazine subscriptions, this announcement reminds me of the possibility that, by the time I reach the end of my collection on Music Arcades, I may have literally reached the End of Collecting — which would make a nice kind of narrative symmetry with where we began.
I'd forgotten what was on this CD and there are several little connections. Like the Kevin Volans piece, which I would have listened to after reading Bruce Chatwin on Volans
But I'll concentrate on two other pieces in particular. Jonathan Harvey's Mortuous Plango, Vivos Voco reminds me of Pete Adamson. Pete was possibly the last person with whom I would arrange an evening dedicated just to playing each other records and talking about them (with Tim it was usually talking about relationships first, drinking second, and playing music third). After he'd checked out that I was the sort of person who took care of records, he loaned me Jonathan Harvey, as well as records by Trevor Wishart and John Cage (mentioned here). I can't remember much of what I played him, but it certainly included Fragments of a Rainy Season. This would have been about 1992, just before I got this CD. Pete was quiet and reserved, sensitive to a fault, but got animated when describing what was great about the Harvey piece. I wish I could remember what he said, because I don't entirely get it. But it reminds me of Pete, and that's enough. He was working in Admin Support for Psychology Branch of the Employment Service, then. The last I heard he was working at Leeds University, though that must be at least a decade ago now.
I first heard Steve Reich's New York Counterpoint at the Sheldonian in Oxford on 8 February 1986. I spent this afternoon reading, for the first time in decades, some of my journal entries from that time. I share this humiliating story as a lesson for me, not for you:
I got to Jeremy's room about half past four, by which time I had only just begun my half bottle of whisky. I took it with me, though, when we went shopping with Sue, Jeremy's new girlfriend, and drank openly from it in WH Smith's etc so that by the time we got to the Co-op (not Sainsbury's, on my insistence) I was on the way out. I sat in the trolley, and took a peeled satsuma to the checkout to pay for it. Oh no. I also slung a 2 litre bottle of cider into the trolley. Somehow both bottles were empty by seven 'o' clock, I hadn't eaten, and we had to be at the concert at half past. Meanwhile, though, I had to spend quite some time staring into a Hertford College toilet bowl (a lot cleaner than it Magdalene counterparts, I must say), and then I noticed that it wasn't empty any more. I think Jeremy was a little concerned for me, but we just managed to get to the theatre in time. It was just as well that I bootlegged the concert, because I don't think took much of it in at the time…
Not exactly Brideshead Revisited, is it? (And the bootleg quality was rubbish, of course — I think I've still got it.) That part of the evening is shameful enough to be seared into my memory. However, the journal goes on to detail how, after the concert, we ate, went the bar, gatecrashed a party, before I passed out on Rupert's floor and had to be bundled into Sue's (vacant) room for the night. Stamina.
Anyway, next time I see someone acting yobbishly at a minimalist concert, I'll remind myself of my own misdemeanours as a 20-year-old.
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