I'll be improvising like mad this weekend: it's the Respect festival at The Street Theatre in Canberra, hosted by Impro Theatre ACT. Actually, I'm usually improvising but this time it's official... The Blue Bear has been recording local hiphop people Young Proof and experimenting with bearish beats. Thanks here to Multicultural Youth Services ACT. I'm knitting a soundwork from Moya Simpson's voice and some noises of London for the show Big Voice: at The Street Theatre starting May 13th. It features Moya and Sandy Evans, and is directed by John Bolton. Rehearsals are well under way for NachtMusik, the latest concert from The Pocket Score Company. Australia's Renaissance blokes take on a slice of good music from German-speaking countries, from the thirteenth-century Neidhart von Reuenthal to JS Bach, via Senfl, Isaac, Hassler, Eccard, Othmayr, Gumpelzhaimer, Vulpius. We hadn't heard of some of these chaps either until we started nosing around a bit... and you can't go past a composer called Gumpelzhaimer. In fact, we were thinking of re-naming the group The Gumpelzhaimer Brothers. Or perhaps The Liederhosen. The concert is at 3pm on July 5th at All Saints' Church in the Canberra suburb of Ainslie. So it's NachmittagsMusik rather than NachtMusik. We needed to change the time... but it's still full of good stuff like Heinrich Isaac's hit Innsbruck, ich muß dich lassen — here we are, rehearsing in tenor George's kitchen: