Touchable Dreams

	Touchable Dreams
When	Friday, June 24, 2011 19:30 - All Ages
Where	The Shakespeare Centre (map) Henley Street Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, UK
Other Info	A performance of the poetry and music show "Touchable Dreams", given as part of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's 2011 Poetry Festival.

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Knocking and Pulling

Here’s another video of a track from the “Touchable Dreams” CD. Jeremy and I are planning more of these soon! This one features a poem by Jeremy himself, and the musical accompaniment is from the violin sonata op.27 no.2 by Eugene Ysaÿe: Called “Obsession” this movement from the sonata features recurring motifs from Bach’s solo violin prelude in E minor, interspersed by angry outbursts and quotes of the “Dies Irae”!

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New video – “Sanza”

For my first post of 2011 here’s a video of the track “Sanza” from the “Touchable Dreams” album.

The piece started life as a looped, semi-improvised violin piece which used lots of pizzicato. However when I came to record it I decided to have a look in my ‘miscellaneous instruments’ cupboard, and “Sanza” (another name for the thumb piano) was the result!!

I’m hoping that this will mark the beginning of a series of videos of original material throughout 2011……

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Touchable Dreams

A long-awaited release!

After many months of work, initially recording, then editing and mixing – plus a tremendous amount of time spent contacting poets and their publishers in order to get copyright permissions – my CD with Jeremy Harmer entitled “Touchable Dreams” is finally at the pressing plant ready for a September 1st release.

Because of the amount of time it took to get all the poetry permissions sorted – and we really only managed it due to some superb help from professional permissions person (what would be the correct title I wonder?) Rachel Thorne – and also due to a last minute refusal for what would have been our closing poem, we have been able not only to get the CD pretty well exactly as we would like, but were also able, while trying to find a replacement final track (and with some excellent inspiration from Jeremy!), to end the CD in a really (we hope) inspiring way.

I asked my son Chris to do the CD artwork and design for us, and he’s also taken some excellent photos at our most recent live show, some of which are now online on a new “Touchable Dreams” blog site – http://touchabledreams.posterous.com. Do take a look at it.

It’s now just over a year since we first did the show live, and it’s hard to stand back from it and view it objectively, but we feel that the CD is an exciting and fairly unique recording, mixing words and music in a way that we haven’t come across before. We certainly hope that others feel the same about it!

You can buy the signed, numbered limited edition “Touchable Dreams” CD from my online store. It will also be available for download from iTunes and other stores very soon (with just two poems missing where download permission was not forthcoming!).

Our next live “Touchable Dreams” show in the UK is in Ely on September 10th (details here), but we’re also doing it in Bucharest on September 4th!

Plans are also now afoot for a new show featuring the words of Charles Dickens. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…” (A Tale of Two Cities)