Anna Langley   Sat,  8 Jan 2000 20:24:09 +0000
------------

Anna Langley, from London (the original one) here.

I'm 38 and moved to London from Melbourne (Victoria, Australia) in late 1998.  
I grew up in Adelaide (South Australia) and moved to Melbourne in 1983.

My brother and I were brought up on "The RIte of Spring" and the "Nutcracker 
Suite", until we came across the old "Switched On Bach" when I was about 10.  
>From then all our pocket money was spent on buying Bach LP's (Michael Stitt 
probably knows my, still Bach obsessed brother, Steven Guy) and exploring 
earlier music, trying to work out where Bach's music came from. When I 
finished high school, we had 185 LPs of Bach alone!

When I was 13 I had a 7c lute kit freighted out to Adelaide from the Early 
Music Shop in Bradford (UK), and with some effort, a few tears and a bit of 
help from my dad, the first lute I ever held in my own hands was one they had 
built.  It still works, and I gave it to one of my friends before I left
Melbourne.

"Switched On Bach" also captured my imagination with the range of sounds on it 
(thank you Wendy Carlos, you're an inspiration!), and I eventually managed to 
buy a little synthesizer.  Through one thing and another I wound up having a 
partnership producing music for TV ads, recording bands, doing session work 
and the like.  This all came crashing down after "Black Monday", when the 
bottom fell out of advertising budgets in Australia. 

I then went into clerical work and started indulging my interest in computers. 
 Pretty soon I quit work to do a degree in computer science and mathematics at 
the University of Melbourne.  That's where I was when I discovered the net in 
1992, and was on the lutenet shortly afterwards.  Soon I was resurrecting my 
old lute ... and the rest is history.

I work as a Unix System Administrator in an investment bank in London. I play 
the lute most days and occasionally play duets with friends (which was an 
extremely rare luxury in Australia).  I'm also the co-ordinator of "The Pink 
Singers", the longest established gay and lesbian choir in Europe, and was the 
inaugural president of SAGE-WISE (The System Administrator's Guild of Wales, 
Ireland, Scotland and England).

Currently I play on a beautiful new 6c lute in g, made by Stephen Barber and 
Sandi Harris.  So nice after all this time to have a really superb instrument 
to play on.  Probably the next one will be a bass lute in d, which is at least 
a year off.

Cheers,

Anna