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My friend Pete is a cellist as well as a composer, and as a personal challenge attempted to write something new for every day in January. As someone who can't even begin to imagine what writing music would entail, I am very impressed. Take a look at his January Pieces, though read the first post there to get a sense of the project – it's not a finished set or anything. 

I can't think of a better thing to start the year with.

Happy Christmas everyone, and thanks for reading Fugue State this year. I always appreciate every one of your comments and good wishes. I wish you brilliant music-making in 2010. xx 

Basquiat Strings & Elysian String Quartet > 17 October / Kings Place / 9pm
Jazz string quartet meets contemporary classical, merging into a big scary ball of fire at the end.

The Night Shift > 31 October / Royal Festival Hall / 10pm
See the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment for £5 if you book with their special text tickets. Always fun.

I hate first rehearsals of a new orchestra, especially as a woodwind player (I'm playing flute with the Chamber Academy Orchestra).

There's the who is playing first and who is playing second dance, which is essentially trying to ascertain how crap the other person is, how hard the parts are and how best to not make a fool of yourself by asking for the first part and proceeding to screw it up in front of the other 50 people for two hours. It's not like the cello section, where you can just fade in and out of the background, no my friends, it's you and you only on that part.

Anyway, I ended up playing first in Beethoven's First Symphony, and acquitted myself pretty well in rehearsal. The man playing second flute is really lovely and we had a good chat, the first oboe is my friend Lorraine from the last orchestra I played flute in, and we've played chamber music together as well, so we're quite comfortable blending our sound and I know how she plays.

And, best news of all, when we do the Sinfonia Concertante (no flutes you see), I get to switch to cello. And there's been no mention of Strauss' Serenade for Winds which I saw on an early draft of the repertoire list. I really don't like it, gives me high school band flashbacks.

I am still jetlag ridden. And I need to practise cello desperately ahead of orchestra rehearsal on Saturday morning. I'm seeing one of those Met Live cinema broadcasts on Saturday evening – Salome. If I don't fall asleep on the tube after orchestra and end up in West Ruislip of course.

I'm back from the old country and feeling like a stretched out marionette with the jetlag swirling around my system. So instead of thinking of something insightful about cello playing, I'll answer Jessica's call for a blog meme:

Six things you probably didn't know about me

1. From 14-18 years old I lived and breathed indie and punk rock – putting on all-ages concerts in a community centre, writing fanzines distributed in Canada, the US and the UK, sold records out of a milk crate at concerts, my parents even helped out by letting touring bands sleep on the floor of our living room and argued with border agents trying to block bands coming up from the US.
2. The same night I performed the Chaminade Concertino for Flute I also sang with my band at a Battle of the Bands. We came in last. I was proud.
3. I have about 20 novels started on my laptop – none of them anywhere near finished.
4. I love science fiction desperately.
5. I am a video game nerd… I helped run a guild of 80 people in World of Warcraft, have played Baldur's Gate for 14 hours straight and many many others I could name. I am such a nerd that I was offered a job as Content Writer for Amazon's Video Game channel, but turned it down.
6. After getting into one of the best journalism schools in Canada, I left halfway through to finish my degree in media theory. Following in my parents' footsteps, as they are/were political speechwriter, spin doctor, copywriter, graphic designer, creative director, social marketer, journalist, editor at various times in their careers, I've ended up with a similarly eclectic collection of writing from details on refrigerators and toasters to relationships to every kind of music, dance and visual arts.

So, in true blog meme form, I tag: Pete at Notes from a Defeatist, Gottagopractice, Elaine Fine, Rich at Cello Geek, Emily Wright and Guanaco at Cellomania. Hey, I picked a viola player in there somewhere… no one can say I'm entirely lower-strings biased.

I picked up my hire cello and despite a booming C string, and slightly crappy strings overall, it's not too bad. It was one of those moments where you're sitting in the middle of an all-purpose music shop trying cellos (no private room with humidity control for me, apparently) trying not to act like you're too up your own arse about the whole thing… anyway, I picked the cheaper of the two because I couldn't get a decent sound out of the other one.

The lighter bow has been good with the Bach, I wonder whether I should try another one on a regular basis.

The jetlag is killing me. And I can't figure out why there is so much water in the loo bowl… I keep thinking they're going to overflow.

I'm about the leave for the airport, so I'll post in a couple days from the other side. No doubt with complaints of the state of the hire cello we end up with.

Home after our first day of term at orchestra, and the pub of course.

Christopher and I play with the East London Late Starters Orchestra, which is a hilariously diverse group of adult learners of all sorts. Truly all sorts. The first day of the autumn term is when the beginners arrive. Our orchestra will taken you on even if you don't know how to read music, and have never played an instrument before in your life. It's quite fun to watch these new beginners with a violin in their hands for the first time looking terrified and incredibly excited. Today there were about 30 new beginners clutching instruments straggling back to the tube station after rehearsal.

Film students from Ealing Studios have found us, and are spending a term with us making a documentary. I'm surprised this hasn't happened before really, because we're tailor-made for one of those heart-warming and funny films. We ended up at the pub with them after orchestra today and they were saying how fun it was to watch everyone welcome the new beginners and how chaotic yet somehow still organised we managed to be.

And it's good to remember, no matter how hungover you are, or how much you're ready to kick your music stand over in frustration with listening to the first violins go over a passage for the eighth time, or how pissed off you are that someone took the last decent sandwich at tea time, that this is, in the end, pretty fun. And pretty incredible it's happening at all.

Read this (very old but still relevant) Sunday Times article about the orchestra.

Most of you have probably run across Passionato by now, the new online shop for classical music downloads. A few little things make it different from iTunes: the quality of their audio files, the lack of DRM and their relationship with classical labels. The CEO, James Glicker, expands on his plans for the site. Not sure on his community with blogs, reviews, etc running alongside the music service.

I wanted it to be brilliant, but the truth is there's still loads of work to be done to make this an alternative to iTunes. To test it, I looked for a recording of Vaughan Williams' Variations on a Theme of Thomas Tallis [edited later - Pete has kindly pointed out, in the nicest possible way, that it's Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, but I maintain if the search worked well I would have still found it], that I've been meaning to buy for awhile. I searched Vaughan Williams and came up with what looks like an unordered list of albums, some of which don't look like they have any Vaughan Williams on there at all, though I suppose they must. When I instead searched Variations on a Theme of Thomas Tallis I came up with no results. I went back to my composer search and used the drop down menu on the left to narrow my search to orchestral works, and ended up with a Best of British album. Though when you click through to the track listing, there's no way of telling which composer's works they are, as it's not listed with each track – just things like Communion Service in C major, Op.115: Gloria. I'm gathering that means Passionato doesn't have it yet, but I'm not confident at all.

For comparison's sake, I searched for the same work on the iTunes store – two clicks and I had the option of the BBC Symphony Orchestra or St Martin's in the Fields with Sir Neville Marriner.

To their credit, there are some interesting things on Passionato, and I did end up buying Marin Alsop and the LPO doing Brahms 4 and some Hungarian Dances (which is Jessica Duchen's fault, I'm reading her book of the same name right now) for £4 for the mp3 version. It's nice to be able to take advantage of Naxos' great pricing and interesting choices in repertoire and performers online, as they aren't on iTunes.

I remain unconvinced.