richard vodden’s blog

Once again I feel it necessary to have a rave about how amazing the rehearsal orchestra are to play with. This weekend I have had the delight of playing 4^th trumpet under the guidance of Levon Parikian. Playing in a section of 5 trumpets (4+bump), 5 trombones (again 5+bump) and 8 horns is an awesome feeling in itself, but when those players are extremely experienced and supportive it transforms the game into a sport.

We played Richard Stauss’ Alpine Symphony, which is a tone poem of gargantuan proprotions – well worth a listen. I recommend listening to it a few times as, whilst its mostly tonal, its not the most approachable of pieces. Once you’ve approached it however, you appreciate that it really is genius.

One of the most exciting pieces I have listened to in quite a while is Karl Jenkins “The Armed Man : A Requiem for Peace”. Karl Jenkins is best known as a Jazz Musician and plays (amongst other things) Piano, Oboe, Soprano and Baritone Sax.
The Armed Man definately reflects this is its syncopated themes, but its its juxtaposition of traditional choral tonality against a more modern sound in the orchestral accompaniment which really interests me. Throughout the piece Jenkins uses techniques reminiscent of John Williams to the point that, listening to the Sanctus, a collegue of mine commented “It sounds like the kind of thing you might hear while Indiana Jones is doing something quite exciting, not very exciting, but quite exciting”. The brass writing is nothing short of magic and combined with his gorgeous use of choral harmony the piece stands as one of the most original compositions of the last decade – definately worth a listen.

Much as I dislike posts which simply exist to inform people that I’m still posting, I feel it is necessary, as I’ve not posted for ages!

Several things have happened in the gap. One of the more interesting was a Christmas party held by a clarinet player called Sharon, at which I met a fella who is the brother of a ‘Cellist called Sophie. He write a webpage called Toilet Scroll which is rather amusing – go and have a look!

Or maybe depraved – I’m not sure. Very much in the style of Edward Monkton A Beautiful Revolution is very dark and in places incredibly deep and clever web “comic”. I recommend having a look – don’t do it when you’re down though!

I’ve further improved the “Google User Interface Enhancements” Grease Monkey script. Version 0.13 allows you to:

• navigate to the “Cached” and “Similar Pages” links with the ‘c’ and ‘r’ keys respectively.
• move forward and back through the results pages with the ‘,’ and ‘.’ keys. Finally
• if you haven’t yet selected a search result, ‘enter’ will take you to the “did you mean?” link if it exists.
• pressing ’s’ will bring the cursor to the search box.

Google User Interface Enhancements v0.13

Yesterday, my flat mate asked me if I’d ever written a search engine plugin for Firefox. The answer was no – so I asked him why he wanted one. It turns out he wanted to be able to search the P and H website from the little box. The solution is here.

Not content with adding mousewheel support for 30 Boxes, I have since written a GreaseMonkey script which provides keyboard and mouse support to Google. Several people have tried this in the past, but I couldn’t get any of their scripts to work – mostly due to simple mistakes in the XPath queries. My script, hopefully, uses XPath generically enough that google will have to make radical changes to their layout code for it to break. It has the following functionality:

• Number Keys 0-9 – Jump straight to the link with that number (0 jumps to result 10)
• Letter Keys J and K – Move up and down through the results
• Enter or F keys – Follow the currently highlighted link.
• Mousewheel – Scroll through the selections and the page (try it – it works).

I’m happy to add more functionality as I think of it. If anyone has any suggestions then post them in the comments section and I’ll see what I can do.

Follow this link to download the Google User Interface Enhancements

UPDATE

No sooner had I posted this than a bug report arrived stating that I had hardcoded the number of result to 10. The following link fixes that and makes the link numbers slightly less obtrusive.

Click here to download the Google User Interface Enhancements v0.11

I’ve also been told that the links don’t install – I need to log into my webserver to fix that. In the mean time please change the extension to “.user.js” and then dragging the script into a firefox window should install it.

Last weekend I went to visit the sweet little baby mention on this blog previously. Whilst there I, amongst other things, pinched some productivity ideas from its father. One specific thing is the use of 30 Boxes for calendar management. It is very good web application, but lacks many features one would normally associate with a modern Web2 application, so armed with a copy of Mozilla Firefox with the Grease Monkey extension I modified a pre-existing script to provide both keyboard short cuts (press H to see them once the script is installed) and mouse wheel support. This makes the application much more usable. Download 30 Boxes Mouse Wheel Support here.

My CD is amazing. It really is something out of this world. I have come across the combination of Trumpet and Organ in a baroque context before but never in a contemporary composition.

 The first piece, written by Czech composer Petr Eben, is called “Windows” as is a tribute to the Berlusian Artist Marc Chagall. Chagall produced a series of paintings titled The Jerusalem Windows and Eben has taken four of these images – namely Reuben, Isachar, Zebulon and Levi – and set them to music in a truly original way. He uses the full capabilites of both the organ and the trumpet employing a range of stops and mutes to create a hugely varied set of musical colours and Anthony Plog’s performance certainly does the music every justice.

 The second piece is also based on a set of paintings – this time those of Edvard Munch, the creater of works such as “The Scream”. Written by the performer, Plog’s composition is a stark contrast to that of Eben. Opening with a huge a-tonal fanfare on the trumpet force of this piece is unmistakable. The trumpet has two quite distinct roles throughout this piece, it functions as a bright clear sound overpowering the organ but also, muted, blends with the organ’s subtlety to act almost as an additional stop.

 Following these two rather avant guarde performances comes a truly sublime work from the pen of american composer Alan Hovhannes. The piece was written as an interlude to Hovhannes’ opere “Etchmiadzin” and it sticks to a more traditional tonality - almost remeniscent of Barber. The organ plays a choral style accompaniment to a flowing melody on the trumpet - a melody which couldn’t suite Plog’s clear haunting sound more. The piece has an increadible passion to it, and has invoced different emotions in every person I have played it to. If you only listen to one piece on this CD – make it be this one.