I did know, or would at least have guessed, that David Bowie and Prince were singers, and in talking about them I recognised the line "Ground control to Major Tom" and the phrase "The entity formerly known as Prince", but otherwise I knew little about them and the outpouring of emotion at their deaths was rather a mystery to me. More generally, questions such as "name the ten albums that most influenced you as a teenager" aren't really meaningful to me, since my teenage years were largely music-free. more
Yesterday I set Helen up with the iPad, only to have her come to me after five minutes saying "Enough iPad, I want to watch some Legong Dance". And so we watched nearly an hour of Legong Lasem and Barong Taru Pramana. more
The lullaby I use most regularly with Helen is the song "Donna, Donna, Donna, Donna", one of the few songs I remember from my own childhood. more
The lyrics of any children's song can be improved by changing a key word to "walrus". more
Due to flooding in the music faculty, my (Javanese) gamelan group wasn't able to rehearse last week. So we met at our leader Pete's place instead, where it turns out he keeps an entire Balinese gamelan anklung in the loft. And this week my sister took me to the opera as a birthday present, to a production of Donizetti's Anna Bolena by the Welsh National Opera. more
