Spudge Surprise

Today you find me covered in flour and with sticky hands, as we attempt to create Dessert. More particularly, I have been trying my hand at a very tasty looking zuppa inglese as there are friends coming to dinner. Baking on a day like today (the Sydney prediction was for 37 degrees) is quite bad enough even when all goes well - for a time the kitchen was so stifling that I was tempted to just nip out for gelato instead - but the fact that I was cooking faster than dinner was a minor inconvenience compared with the contortions that the dessert itself caused. Unfortunately, you see, the first phase of this delectable concoction is a type of sponge cake. Simple enough, one might think. But the Page-Davises are simply not a sponge cake family: give us muffins or shortbread or chocolate pudding or anything else dense and moist and we can whip things up as well as the next amateur culinary clan. But there isn't a single relative I know of that has mastered the sugar-spun-airiness of a simple sponge. (As it happens, Jeannette from church confessed to me some time ago that she has the opposite problem, in that everything that comes out of her oven has a certain spongy consistency, from scones to mudcake. Neither flaw, it seems, is very convenient.)

In an effort to counter the Cookery Curse, I made good use of every special sponge trick and knack I could find - I warmed the bowl, used a metal spoon, sifted the dry ingredients several times - and it still turned out scarcely higher than my thumb (which is distressing in a cake that is meant to be split into three parts). It's a lovely light gold colour, and it smells nice, but that isn't really the point with a six-egg sponge. Its gloomy and disappointing texture reminds me of A.A. Milne's Roo, who happened to see Owl's bath-sponge and exclaimed "Oh, Owl! Owl, it isn't a sponge, it's a spudge! Do you know what a spudge is, Owl? It's when your sponge gets all---" and Kanga said, "Roo, dear!" very quickly, because that's not the way to talk to anybody who can spell TUESDAY.

So as I type this, a new cake is in the oven - a lovely foolproof Jessie Sand Cake where the only instruction is to plop the ingredients in a bowl and beat for four minutes - where you can really get to grips with mashing flour pockets and butter bubbles - and where any excess air merely bores lovely windy fairy tunnels through it. Hopefully this one may actually rise enough to be split in two, and after battling a bit more with custard and cream and strawberries and whatnot I can crown the whole thing with my unique spudge.

List #1: 5 composers whose works sound like fun

Fun to be at/ fun to participate in as an audience member, that is; lots of composers write works that are fun to play.

1. P.D.Q. Bach
The obvious choice, and Professor Schickele's greatest discovery. I always wanted to see Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice (an opera in "one unnatural act") and various other works live, because on the recordings there is plenty of laughter from the visual side of things alone. A friend of mine was once at a "serious" concert where each audience memeber was handed a paper bag containing a balloon and a pin as they entered the auditorium - P.D.Q's version of the 1812 Overture was on the programme and someone had to supply the canon sounds!

2. Gerard Hoffnung
Not a composer as such, but an impresario, presiding not over works but extravaganzas... Oh for the Hoffnung Interplanetary Music Festival! Have you ever seen a picture of Hoffnung's specially-made personal tuba? The thing is about as big as a single bed - how he ever managed to get enough air through it I shall never know. I would have loved to have seen the accordion so long that two people had to run across the stage to open and close the bellows, and the works for vacuum cleaners, not to mention a live performance of the Surprise Symphony (With Extra Surprises), the least of which is when an abnormally large bass drum is torn through to reveal a children's choir within.
(Come to think of it, 2008 would be the perfect time for a 50th anniversary rerun of the Hoffnung Festival - to whom would I speak about that?)

3. R. Murray Schafer
I first discovered Schafer, a Canadian composer because (why else?) his work The Princess of the Stars, which takes place by a wooded lake at dawn, includes instrumental imitation to induce live birds to sing. This is part of Patria, a cycle of music dramas that Schafer has been creating for over thirty years now - but personally, I think they sound much more appealing than the only other thing I know of that sort of size and scope, Stockhausen's Licht (which was over a quarter of a century in the making). There are lights, lamps, boats, beautiful colours - in various other parts, audience members become initiate priests of Ra (complete with robes and headdresses), create and later harvest (and consume) a garden, and take part in an 8-day forest ritual to which they return every year as part of the same clan. Cool.

4. Alexander Skryabin
I can never remember which of his works really get into the crazy theosophical and synaesthetic vein - I'll take a stab with the Poem of Ecstasy - but they do sound marvellous, if you can manage an authentic light organ and all the incense and things that are supposed to go with it.

5. Trevor Wishart
Another composer discovered in the process of Birdy explorations (British, this time), and another one whose music is almost more like performance art at times. Wishart's Tuba Mirum is scored for psychiatric patient, bureaucrats, props, and tape, while the rather jollier Beach Singularity and the dreamy Forest Singularity come under the heading of "site-specific events". (The latter ends in total darkness, leaving the audience to find their way out of the forest by themselves, to the best of their abilities.) There's even one scored for teddy bears.

If I could add some more, I'd probably also include the Futurists and anything done at Le Chat Noir or the Cabaret Voltaire (the homes of French randomness and dada, respectively) as well as those Russians - whose names I can't recall - who wrote industrial music for several factories at a time, the idea being that if you stood in the middle of the steppes separating them it would all come together somehow. What a great opportunity for a picnic!