Croydon Minster are a lovely community, and it’s always fun to work with those who are passionate about the organisation they belong to and support, so I was pleased to launch croydonminster.org with their support earlier this month.
Video
I particularly enjoyed filming the two-hour long Minster Making service, though condensing it down to a 15 minute highlights video was tricky! Here’s that video:
Technical gubbins
The site runs on a Drupal 7 core, and is a departure from the Parish Church’s site, which was more static. I’ve tried to take across the concise copy and really good navigation from the old site in to the new, while adding new features like online ticket sales, fundraising, and an integrated CRM (CiviCRM).
In its first two weeks the site raised £106 in event ticket sales, which is great for a small site, and has offset the hosting charges (£19 per month VPS from myhosting.com). For the first time the Minster has a Twitter feed, YouTube channel and Audioboo channel, and their established Facebook page is being used more actively. We’re also using Posterous to make things like uploading the weekly newsletter as easy as sending an email.
Moving to Drupal 7 has not been without some pain – important CiviCRM modules like GiftAid and the Theme switching module aren’t yet Drupal 7 compatible. But it’s good to be very future proof at the earliest stage.
Next steps
The Minster community have been involved in supplying ideas and content, and the next step is to hand it back to the community to own it and run it themselves.
All in all it’s been a great project to work on, and there’s one last challenge to overcome – because the VPS is based in the US, it’s natural SEO for UK searchers isn’t strong. So it’s no coincidence you find me blogging about Croydon Minster, yes, that’s Croydon Minster, at croydonminster.org.
It was great to be asked to make a return visit to the Association for Cultural Enterprises Annual Convention earlier this year. ACE is the UK’s largest network of heritage commerce professionals – the people who make money for the museums, galleries and other institutions which we enjoy like churches and even parliament.
ACE asked me to speak to the session title “social media hysteria” – now a few months have passed I can share my presentation from the day, and it’s really pleasing to see my big prediction – search is changing and becoming social – really starting to come true in the last few months.
As I’ve mentioned in earlier blogposts, a CD and DVD is about to released by a group of singers called I Fagiolini - the little beans. It contains, among other things, two pieces of music for a phenomenal forty separate voices* (hence my attempt to get the #phenomenal40 hashtag off the ground – help!). One is called Spem in Alium (a well known piece to music boffs and people who generally don’t see enough sunlight), and the other is called the Missa Ecco sì beato giorno / ecce beatam lucem.
This is such a crazy, big, groundbreaking recording, I’ve gone out and bought a surround sound DVD system just to hear it at its best.
Composed around 450 years ago, there is a real connection through this music to an age long past, but which fascinates us still – the age of Tudor England, and our intoxication then and now with the elevated lives of royals and high society.
If you’ve seen the first of these two videos, you’ll know that last weekend I was lucky enough to grab a couple of hours with the man who has made this recording happen – Robert Hollingworth. In this video there’s a tantalising extract of the recording, you get a sense of what it is like to stand in the middle of these ethereal voices – choral and instrumental – and how it feels to be totally enveloped by Striggio’s mighty, long lost Mass.
If, like me, you learned a new word while watching the video. You’ll find the definition of “bifurcated” here. A day without learning, ey?
Because this recording is unlike anything so many people will have heard before, I really want to encourage you to share this video and blog post, to get news of the recording out there. If you’re excited by this recording I’d love you to share this blog post, Facebook ‘like’ it (up there at the top!) and if you tweet it, it’d be great if you could use the hashtag #phenomenal40.
On Monday, a CD and DVD is released by a group of singers called I Fagiolini – or the little beans.
It contains, among other things, two recordings of giant scale. They are two pieces of choral music composed around four hundred and fifty years ago. One – Spem in Alium – is well known to music boffs. The other – Missa Ecco sì beato giorno - has rested in a dark corner of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, undiscovered, for most of that time.
Both pieces are, in their own way, phenomenal. Both are for forty separate voices, seemingly doing their own thing, but wrapped around one another to construct the extraordinary whole. This is music the like of which you may have never heard. There is nothing in modern music to compare it with. Despite that, it’s not up there on a pedestal, it’s not the preserve of the posh. It’s coming out on CD and DVD on Monday, and you can pre-order it now for £9.99. I urge you to do so.
Last weekend, I was lucky enough to grab a couple of hours with the man who has made this recording happen – Robert Hollingworth, Director of I Fagiolini. We met in the stunning church of St John the Evangelist, Upper Norwood, South London. Standing in the middle of a set of surround sound speakers, won on eBay for £60, convinced me I have to share more about this recording with you. So here’s the first of two videos which we recorded that day in which he talks about the recording – where he was surrounded by performers – and how that was transferred to CD and DVD.
I hope this will go some way to persuading you to get this recording, and perhaps even to do as I did – and spend a few quid on a surround-sound system in the process. If you’re excited by this recording I’d love you to share this blog post, and if you tweet it, it’d be great if you could use the hashtag #phenomenal40. I’ll be posting the second video – which goes more deeply in to the music – later today.
Two weeks ago my car inched its way through the rain-soaked streets of a run down corner of Ipswich, to pick up a particularly special set of eBay winnings – a surround sound DVD system, won for £60.
One week tomorrow, a spectacular CD and DVD by the vocal group I Fagiolini will be released. It is the first recording of a complex, vast, and yet somehow intimate piece for forty – and then finally sixty – separate voices. A huge choir. The piece is a mass entitled Ecco sì beato giorno (that blessed day), it was composed 445 years ago, but only very recently rediscovered – there is a Spectator article on the discovery here. I heard its first modern performance at the Proms a couple of years ago, and on the strength of that performance, I am filled with anticipation.
The piece was recorded in the round – with the listener completely surrounded by a circle of singers. That is why this lost jewel of a composition is worth buying a surround sound system for. In eight days from now, I will be able to be surrounded by this magnificent sound, hearing it travel the room around me. The only way, in my opinion, to listen to what should be a ground-breaking recording.
As an introduction to the piece, here is a video from the academic who rediscovered the score:
