Ice Cycle

Where can I get one of these?
Just the job for cycling in this weather.
A large spiked wheel, steerable runners, great!

300th Anniversary of Pergolesi's birth

Today is the tercentenary of the birth of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, the 'Father of Comic Opera'.
He only had 26 birthdays while on this earth - if he had lived longer would he have been another Mozart? But then Mozart died young as well at 35.

So here is my new portrait of Pergolesi which I completed last week. I have also published a profile of him on my site www.52composers.com

January anniversaries of famous composers

Here is a list of anniversaries of some prominent classical composers that fall in January:

4/1/1710 Pergolesi born
6/1/1872 Scriabin born
6/1/1838 Bruch born
7/1/1899 Poulenc born
27/1/1756 Mozart born
27/1/1813Verdi died
29/1/1862 Delius born
30/1/1963 Poulenc died
31/1/1797 Schubert born

2010 Classical composer anniversaries

2009 was a great year for famous composer anniversaries and 2010 is also a good year. Strangely a lot more anniversaries of births than of deaths.

Births:
Scarlatti (Alessandro) 350 years
Pergolesi 300 years
Cherubini 250 years
Chopin 200 years
Schumann 200 years
Albeniz 150 years
Mahler 150 years
Stravinsky 100 years

Deaths:
Balakirev 100 years

Happy New Year everyone!

I wish everyone a happy and successful new year - and indeed a happy and successful new decade. Let's hope it doesn't go as fast as the last one. I can't believe it is 10 years since the millenium celebrations.

So today we went to the London New Year Parade. It was the first sunny day we have had for some time and there were lots of happy faces (and gossepimples). It is a great show and there were participants from 20 different countries.

Of particular interest are the several marching bands who come all the way from the States just for this parade. So I got some good photos of sousaphones to use on my Sousa page on my 52composers.com site.

I'm getting organised!!

It's the end of 2009 and almost the start of a new decade.
Time to get organised!
For the last three years I've been using an organiser software called AZZ Cardfile and I have been really pleased with it.
It is advertised as 'a modern replacement for Microsoft Cardfile'.
Now with version 4 you can use it with your USB flash memory stick which makes it truly portable so I think I will be upgrading.
It is a freeform database without predefined fields. You can add clickable URLs, email addresses, dialable phone numbers, images shortcuts to files on your computer and much more.
You can see the full spec on their website at:
http://www.azzcardfile.com/

I wouldn't be without it. Honestly!

Happy Christmas everyone

I wish everyone a very joyful Christmas.

I hope that Santa brings everything on your list!