twang twang twang - MUNICH

rain and champagne

I have been in Devon at the Two Moors Festival Garden Party. Festivalmeister John and Penny Adie came up with the idea of using their rural Exmoor garden and gallery concert hall to get a bunch of musicians down to give two afternoon-long informal concerts, while visitors wandered about the gardens, in and out of the concert and snaffed cream teas, champagne etc. It rained, but in some ways that only added to the authenticity of an English garden party experience.

I kicked off the Sunday concert, as people were already arriving in the concert hall before the other musicians showed up. Someone went off to fetch them, but Tim Henman was about to win the first set, and by the time they'd all left the TV, I'd played almost everything I could remember and was beginning to think about making stuff up (I was not watching the tennis because I was changing a string. Harpists are very dedicated). It was a lovely, informal setting to play in, with audience wandering in and asking questions in between the pieces. Despite the lack of practice as I dug deeper into the recesses of my repertoire, I felt totally relaxed and so - unsuprisingly - played well.

Tom, who came to freeload a night in Devon and some cream teas, commented independently on how relaxed all the musicians were. The line-up was rather star-studded with Guy & Magnus Johnston, Jennifer Pike, Tom Poster, Stephanie Hughes from Radio 3, and so forth. When we arrived on the Saturday night we found everybody playing a wine-fuelled game of Articulate (my team won! 3 years at the academic coalface were not wasted after all!), and the weekend continued in this vein of partying, music-making and enjoying performing. It is not a problem I suffer from too much but I imagine my more illustrious companions are constantly performing under enormous pressure and expectations, and great pressure too to accept more and more dates. Down in Devon there is no mobile phone reception, no city noise and bustle, only a beautiful gallery to perform and practice in and like-minded people to be with.

It also provides an alternative sort of concert-going where you can sit and listen all afternoon if you like, or wander off and look at an art or sculpture exhibition (for there were these as well), then come back. One thing Tom most dislikes as a non-musician is The Pressure To Sit Very Still And Concentrate - he says it intimidates him away from the concert before it has even begun.

The garden party is a fun preliminary to the Two Moors Festival itself. If you take a look at the line-up you will see a series of top-notch concerts in rural churches. It provides much-needed quality classical music in North Devon and is well worth a trip. You could combine it with a holiday and rediscover those aspects of music that sometimes get forgotten about if music is also "work".

Hollow lutes

Went to dinner with my former harp teacher Satu Salo and her husband, the poet and translator Keith Bosley. Talking on matters literary and musical as we were, Keith described to me some lines from Mallarme:

"Mais, chez qui du reve se dore/Tristement dort une mandore/Au creux neant musicien"
("But, whom the dream gilds keeps/A lute that mutely weeps/In music's hollow void")

about how music comes from hollows, from emptiness -such as a soundbox.

This connects with all sorts of interesting discussions from the importance of silence in music, to the idea of beauty and life coming after or out of suffering and loss (cf the famous lines from The Tempest, Shakespeare's most musical play: ""Full fathom five thy father lies;/ Of his bones are coral made, / Those are pearls that were his eyes, / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange", with aptly strong rhythm and close rhyme, to make the verse more musical).

To my delight, Keith also gave me a copy of his Elek Book of Oriental Verse. It fell open on a Chinese poem by Li Shang-yin (813-858). All those centuries ago here is a poem that Mallarme echoes in the nineteenth century. (I know it has been Poetry Please on this blog recently. But I am off to the Two Moors' Festival Garden Party to drink gin and play Bach, so should return more of a musician and less of a frustrated English student)

THE BRIGHT LUTE
theme and variations

The bright lute - to what end? -
has fifty strings:
each string, each bridge
recalls a flowering year.

Chuang-tsu dawned, dreamed
of turning butterfly.
Wang-ti in spring
loved, wept and was a rose.
The vast sea, the moon full:
a pearl sheds tears!
The Blue Field, the sun warm:
jade gives off mist!

Did this scene wait
to hound the memory?
Well, it is past and gone:
now all is vague.

1.

Play the lute!
and she did, the god's daughter
so well the god's eyes swelled with tears, and he
smashed it in two.
How many years
double with sorrow, halve with tears?

2.

To see the
light, to know
all is one:
butterfly
do I dream
you or you
me?

3.

They named the city after me because
I turned spring floods away: but I had turned
a minister away to build canals
so that his wife and I
could flood each other. Now the nightingale
sobs blood into the rose: listen, they say
the Emperor is singing to his love!

4.

The mind is on the water:
the fingers on the lute
strum empty chords
but the lute's belly
fills as the oyster fills with pearls at full moon
as the mermaids in the south sea spill
pearls from their weeping eyes.

The mind is in the mountains:
the fingers on the lute
pluck high, far notes
but the lute's belly
fetches them back and warms them as the sun warms
jade, the cold virgin from the hills.
Likewise the poem: STAND WELL BACK!

5.

I stand. I sit. I dream. Or do I lie?

Starstruck

Gig on Sunday at the Opera House. 4 harpists were brought in to accompany Royal Ballet principal Alina Cojocaru doing "the Dying Swan". We came back after the teabreak to find them testing the lights and this prima ballerina shimmering two feet away in full costume in a frosty spotlight.

Now hopeless, devoted ballet groupie. I saw Cojocaru in Giselle and walked on air for a week, and this sealed my fate.

Lord, forgive them

Scottish Opera is to have its chorus removed and a "dark season" from the summer of 2005, where the company will not run a major opera for nine months. Witness the artistic director's attack on the Scottish culture minister in the Glasgow Herald.

What I always find particularly distressing in these situations is that the threatened organisations usually have to go cap in hand to people who know nothing about music. Frank McAveety is an English and History graduate whose biog does not suggest he has ever gone anywhere near an opera. For example, Sir Richard Armstrong reports:

"the Executive [McAveety, and a team of management consultants] did not want to talk about the mainscale work but was obsessed with tripling the company's already extensive education and outreach work, a move that Sir Richard described as extraordinary.

Mr. Pirnie and Mr. McAveety never spoke to Sir Richard or Jane Davidson, the opera's head of education, during this process, an omission he said was unbelievable.

"They were just brutal and basically told us all we knew nothing about what we did, which was just shameful," he said.

Sir Richard said the company felt a sense of absolutely overwhelming grief. "Within the company there is absolute incomprehension at how these cutbacks can work — how can they seriously think you have got a major opera company when you don't have a chorus?" he said."

The necessity of a chorus in a large opera company is clear to musicians, and music administrators: not, it would seem, to the people brought in to tell them how to run their business. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a barrister friend of mine. Frighteningly clever; an enthusiastic supporter of the arts; nonetheless he could not see why the ENO needed to keep their regular orchestra instead of running it free-lance. "Does the English National Opera need an orchestra?", he asked. He was serious.

I always get annoyed when people describe those who work in arts administration as "failed performers". If we don't have people with a good knowledge of music, as well as the ability to fill in more than one form a year and run a filing system (which defeats most players), then we are stuffed.

Words move, music moves

Nice litcrit post by Alex Ross on Wagner and James Joyce, and the way Joyce uses linguistic play and multilayered allusion not only closely to refer to Wagnerian ideals but also to interrogate them.

Ulysses has always been one of those books I prefer to read about than to read (although Penelope's monologue at the end is very moving) but there is no disputing Joyce's achievement (and a darn sight better than The Faerie Queene, which is currently propping my wonky desk, and best place for it, even if a gentil knight is pricking on the plaine).

It has also got me thinking some more about recent blogging by myself and Jessica Duchen on the productive relationship between words and music. At the time we'd come to the conclusion that it is a good thing because each art form can make the other more accessible. An audience member might not have had music lessons, but they might be an avid reader, for example, and if a concert has a literary slant, they are more likely to get the concert-going bug.

Now I am thinking further about the interrelation of different art forms. Unindulgent analysis of artistic tenets is important if you have any sort of belief in objective quality or moral integrity, and the more works of art, and by extension art forms, you have to compare with, as Alex Ross cites, Wagner's "Judaism in Music", the better. Satire is difficult in music (look at the trouble Shostokovich had), particularly in Wagner. So numb of bum at the ENO we are likely to take Siegfried seriously. And so we should, in many ways, but there is no denying that the ethics behind Wagner's wonderful music are paradoxically deeply troubling. Joyce can reveal this to us through parody:

"Stephen Dedalus is, obviously, one of the innummerable Wagner-worshipping youths who populated the last fin du siècle—at the drunken climax of the book, he will make like Siegfried and shout "Nothung!" "

(Alex Ross)

Alternatively, music can help the literature out of a tight corner. TS Eliot uses the unified structure of a string quartet to help him find spiritual peace in Four Quartets, for example. I find it healthy that sometimes music and words are mutually supportive; sometimes stern examiners. Sadly I can't go to Jessica's "Beloved Clara" in Chelsea on Sunday but fingers crossed I will eventually be able see it.

At this point I will allow myself a shameless plug for a poem my father wrote closely about not only the marriage of art forms, but of art and reality. In the late nineties he wrote a series of poems based on the nine rasas, the nine ancient Indian categories for the nine principal emotions common to human experience: wonder, laughter, love, heroism, fear, pathos, anger, disgust and calm. The nine rasas are aesthetic expressions of these emotions: "rasa" means "juice" or "essence, flavour", so in a musical rasa, there will be particular rhythms and modes designed to evoke the chosen feeling.

The rhythm for this one is: crotchet, crotchet, 3 triplet quavers, crotchet, crotchet, triplet, crotchet, crotchet.

Nicholas John, dramaturge with the ENO, fell to his death on 25th of June 1996, while walking in Liechenstein. He was forty-three. 'PV' is the Indian-born composer Param Vir. Meghnad-badh kabya is a famous Bengali epic poem by Michael Madhusdan Datta. It is based on the Ramayana but is heavily influenced by European literary epic. The allusions here are to the first book of the epic, which describes Ravana (King of Lanka) and his wife Queen Citrangada, grief-stricken after hearing their son Birbahu has been killed by Rama's forces, who are attacking Lanka in order to rescue Rama's wife Sita.

Shanta ("Calm")

no not Nicholas John dear friend whom I loved well
first shock surely not him name stark on the cold page
lone walk treacherous Alps path wrong when the fog closed
wet ground slippery shoes none saw when he slipped fell
friends old parents bereft no more shall your warm smile
bright eyes greet on the first night opera-mad crowds
no more wine in my glass poured fast from your kind hand

were I blessed with a great young voice I would breathe depp
stand tall sing out my heart huge orchestra rich horns
strings shrill oboes and flutes all wild with intense grief
strong lungs swelling my voice how high I would swoop what
pure bel canto would soar reach right to the last seats
no role grander than this your mother I'd be grief
pain love filling my heart such loss in my face arms

dear kind friend whom I saw there always on first nights
plucked up courage at last spoke to him Hello I've
seen you night after night who are you? what do you
do? write notes on the shows I'm dramaturge here though
God knows what the word means our friendship began like
that he noticed I find stairs difficult now so
kind Nick got me in cheap or free in the press seats

yes I'd sing on a vast scale Indian grief like
Queen Citr- angada not some corny old role not
Joe Green Wagner or Strauss Puc- cini or Berg great
stuff true but it's the huge lush sound of the new age
East West joined that I want grand stories untapped that
Megh- nad epic the bit my nephew read out his
friend P V as he's known could set it so well yes

Queen Citr- angada hair loose body without jewels
wild eyes brimming with tears like lotuses night- dew-
full half crazy with grief her might-armed son good
brave strong Birbahu dead grieves mother-bird-like when
some sly serpent her warm nest entering grabs her
brood grief's storm in the court loose her of her maids like
black clouds gales of their sighs dense thunderous rain- tears

P V's music would swell surge carry my voice high
East West joined by his hard- earned skill with ensemble line
pitch timbre texture precise honed perfectly made yet
high low Indian reach such cosmic extent such
weird far calm at the core such mystical peace all
grief all pain but a veil all passion but waves storm
clouds rain wind on the sea deep down it remains calm

like- wise calm as the sea- floor calm I would be though
wild my acting and voice my mind would remain calm
for I'd sing like a pro I'd be in command not
let my grief at his sad loss shake my control Nick
knew wello knew as a pro too second to none such
wide full knowledge of texts scores singers the whole art
knew how shows must go on gave audience first place

knew too life was an art would give all his friends such
non- stop brilliant shows so quick with his bons mots
deft wit mischievous quips swift shifts in his voice from
sharp con forza to sweet can- tabile mol- to
es- pres- sivo or con pas- sione his style so
grand such sweeps of his arms such welcoming hugs no
man could pour out a glass more warmly than Nick John

thus my singing should be not just a lament great
thick lush chords in the strings should emphasise love should
pour forth generous warmth large chorus behind sad
looks gold parasols fly- whisks shed from their limp hands
yet P V would express sweet warmth from the south blue
sea bright sun in the tune red wine in the chords for
Nick John Italophile loved life and its best joys

red wine summery warmth figs apricots grapes fine
bread cheese all in the score P V would compose Nick's
warm smile Latinate charm trim stature a slight paunch
red male glow in his skin thick hair on his head chest
jet- black starting to grey bright humorous grey- blue
eyes all caught in the rich lush harmonies timbres hues
strong tight sounds of the West yet India there too

long loose Indian lines sharp turnings and twists wild
swoops my intricate grief would fly like a high bird
Queen Citr- angada's voice would soar to the sky touch
sun moon stars at the end when grief would become calm
deep calm Indian night such millions of stars warm
air rich fragrance of flowers calm crickets and frogs their
noise so placid my mind soul calm as the sea- floor

Nick John friend whom I loved but knew not enough I
grieve in spirit perhaps but not in the way his
long loved lover must mourn his parents who watched their
one child grow from the babe they held in their arms not
I nor those who would share my song are bereft like
them all opera does is put on a grand night
great show calm of the pro deep down in the sea's depths

Eduardo Angulo

I have been sent two new flute, viola and harp trios by the Mexican composer Eduardo Angulo. The composer, myself and student flautists will premier them at the Stratford Flute Festival in July.

They are beautiful, lyrical works, with some great Latin American rhythms. It's times like this I feel very lucky to do what I do. Angulo's also writing a flute and harp concerto, so keep an eye out for that one.

Perhaps it's time for A List of really good modern composers.
My starter for ten is...

- Eduardo Angulo
- Lowell Lieberman
- Jean-Michel Damase
- Phillip Neil Martin (one to watch. I did a lovely orchestral piece by him when we were all at college and he's deservedly been doing very well since then)
- Matthew Taylor
- John Mayer (the flute concerto is amazing)
- Param Vir

This list is deliberately small, not only to cover my own ignorance, but to faciliate flowing debate.

Different Class

Clearing out my CD rack I came across Pulp's Different Class album. I loved this album like most people when I was about 17 but hadn't heard it for ages. So it's having a well-deserved Renaissance chez Radice.

To make stuff "accessible", the classical music industry soft-soaps everything into relaxing, uplifting, smooth classics (Classic F Off). But pop music doesn't do this: they're allowed to release dark, fin de siecle songs. 'Common People', obviously, from Different Class ("And we dance, and drink, and screw,/Because there's nothing else to do"); 'Spy' is even angrier ("My favourite parks are car parks, grass is something you smoke, birds are something you shag. Take your "Year in Provence" and shove it up your ass"), and that's before the later work on This Is Hardcore.

And this is popular music - that is, with wide appeal. In the quest for accessibility classical industry moguls are missing something. Pop musicians do face enormous constraints from the industry but at least they don't all have to release "flute moods." It's the songs with sadder or darker elements that are often most loved because they connect with multifacets of our experience, not just the gin and tonic at seven.

Further Fusion

Good article by Jessica Duchen in the Independent today, about words and music projects. This is a subject dear to my heart as I spent three years reading English before deciding to become a harpist instead. My father is a poet and translator and we recently did an Indian-Western Classical, words-music fusion based around the Indian aesthetic concept of the Nine Rasas at the Nehru Centre. The wonderful, late John Mayer (of Indo-Jazz Fusions) wrote us some new music and it was one of our most satisfying events of the year.

Aside from the artistic satisfaction to be found in these fusion projects (well, for me certainly, although I have a "simple butterfly mind"), I think Jessica is absolutely right that it is by combining different art forms that we improve the accessibility of each one - and not a wet T-shirt or a Pachelbel-canon-with-beats terrible crossover arrangement in sight. The trouble with crossover is that it is artistically dishonest, and therefore fails. Genuine projects with different elements that are fused for good artistic reasons retain their integrity and widen their appeal.

Music education in schools

Scott Spiegelberg has a suggestion for my last post, that classical music is more stymied and less outreaching than in the States:

"The differences could be in the educational environment. There has been a movement to re-evaluate the canon in American conservatories and music schools, starting about ten years ago. Perhaps British schools have been reluctant to do so."

The British Government line on music education is straightforward:

"We intend, in time, that every child at primary school who wants to has the opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument. We want as far as possible to deliver wider opportunities during the school day and on school premises. We want to see breadth of provision in terms of styles of music, types of instruments (including the voice) and range of providers. "

Outside school, there is the charity Youth Music, which runs projects which cover the music spectrum from classical to garage.

Clearly there is marvellous work being done both in schools and particularly by Youth Music, whose projects I have enjoyed in the past. And it is important to include garage, funk, music/dance/theatre projects, and so forth. It is regrettable that it remains difficult for everyone to have access to instrumental tuition ("We intend, in time, that every child at primary school who wants to has the opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument"), but that is a knock-on effect of the brutal cuts music lessons in schools suffered under the conservative government (chronic under-investment mirrored by the tube, the health service, teachers' pay, etc etc...). A look at some American High School websites showed school bands including orchestras, marching bands, jazz, gospel, rock, wind and brass groups all as the norm. You find this sort of provision in the UK mainly at expensive private schools.

What I could NOT find on the DCMS website, however, was a single page about classical music provision, not in schools, not in conservatoires, and not in the big wide world. My "classical music" seach produced an article about Estelle Morris saves a Princely Parcel-Gilt And Silvered Bronze Roundel (1480-1500) instead.

In order to fuse a music with a different music, clearly you've got to learn about both. It is not much good privileging garage over harp sonatas if you want to have genuinely developing, creative relationships because all you do is shift your focus from one genre to another without connecting up.

Because I worked with her (well, I say "worked with", I was the intern at AOP when I was 18...), I will Kitty Brazelton in NYC as an example of a music fusion artist. Her biog reads:

"For Brazelton, stylistic or genre-based separations are as untenable as trying to keep water apart---it inevitably flows into one ocean. So she launches her efforts without fear of pre-ordained boundaries, full of faith in music's ability to communicate.

Indeed, Brazelton (D.M.A. Columbia University 1994) rejoices in the keener expression she gets by infusing vernacular American dialects into deep, complex structures. Her full-length opera Fireworks, commissioned by American Opera Projects, concerns an extraterrestrial discovering the 4th of July, and incorporates Caribbean rhythmic motifs, r & b and classic recitative. She leads exploded rock bands (her second CD with the nonet DADADAH, Love Not Love Lust Not Lust, was hailed by Rolling Stone magazine as an "album of impressive nerve") and composes dynamic orchestral works (Sleeping Out of Doors (1998), her piano concerto commissioned and premiered by conductor Kristjan Järvi's Absolute Ensemble, featured electric bass and amplified classical guitar). Her chamber music ranges from the N.Y.S.C.A.-commissioned cyber-punk fantasia 5 dreams; marriage (co-written with Dafna Naphtali and premiered by their unique quartet WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT? at Sound Symposium 2000 in Newfoundland) to innovative works for the Manhattan Brass Quintet and the California EAR Unit (heard on her forthcoming CRI Emergency album "Chamber Music for the Inner Ear," due in spring 2002)."

Obviously I'm not saying you have to lead rock bands and include Caribbean motives if what really inspires you is plainsong written only in the phrygian mode, but Brazelton's all-inclusive approach does lead to exciting and dynamic performances that leave you thinking about fifty different art forms at once.

Of course there is music fusion going on in the UK as well. For example, the BMIC's Cutting Edge 2004 Tour, and the Cutting Edge Concerts at the Warehouse in London as well. This list looks excellent, but how many people come, and do the exciting new projects infiltrate down to schools and conservatoires? The BMIC, to be fair, does run composition workshops for conservatoire students, public platforms for their work. But there is no school work, no performance workshops and no outreach schemes.

Brazelton's website stresses the educational side to her work:

"Now a full-time composer/professor at Bennington College, Brazelton's teaching experience as BMI Composer-In-Residence at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art in New York City, as a Lincoln Center Institute visiting artist and faculty member at NYU and Columbia University, supports her concept. "Students feel forced to make choices between 'pop,' 'ethnic' and 'classical' music styles," she notes. They leave Kitty's classes empowered to find their own voices, drawing on all they've come to know and love."

I think Scott is probably right about the different musical educations here and across the pond. It would be good to be an expert in music education to probe further. If anyone has any useful know-how they'd like to share, please comment.

I'm blogging! I'm blogging!

Yikes. Scott Spiegelberg rightly suggested that if I'm going to post nice quotations about Blogging Being The Answer, better come up with some answers myself. I generally only have one thort ricocheting round at a time, and I used it up on the Britten post, but here goes.

I put Greg Sandow's post up because his recognition of classical music's diversity struck a chord. Some months ago I was encouraged to try and put together an overview of the current state of classical music in the UK. I haven't finished it, partly because in addition to surfing the internet I do play the harp for a living, but primarily because of the enormity of the task. As Sue Sturrock at the Royal College of Music wrote to me:

"Overarching questions such as this are not easily addressed by statistical research because of sheer scale. We end up, as you say, with what seem like subjective, anecdotal summaries by individuals based on others' data and interpretation, plus their own experience/opinion/agenda. I think you must break the question down into manageable chunks and do your best to find answers that you believe are honest. Are you interested in the arts economy? Or the impact of new media on professional performers in the future? The paucity of music provision in schools? Widening participation and its implications for classical music? These are three (of many) key issues you could look at but all could merit a book which would be out of date by the time of publication because things are moving so fast."

So to follow Sandow's suggestion of, in a blog, approaching the question of classical music's future "all in little pieces, following thoughts wherever they lead", is as good a method as any for such a vast topic. It is up-to-the-minute, highly diverse and, crucially, can be a rapid meeting of minds across continents and across different fields of musical expertise.

For example, Scott's "little piece for the moment" is that "the current division between classical music and popular music will continue to blur, creating a new aesthetic or musical language that will be the basis for the next generation of art and popular musics." This comment has got me thinking about an aspect of classical music, namely the contrast between the situation Scott describes in the States (Alex Ross blogs similarly: see his post "The End of Music") and that I know about in Britain. Certainly when I was in New York in 1998 I was keenly aware of this, working with Kitty Brazleton and the Hildegurls. There's also a strong sense of fusion and avant-garde musics in Berlin particularly and Germany generally, backed up by the score Friedemann Schmidt-Mechau has written for me. But in the UK I am less aware sucessfully of crossing the classical divide. There are commercially driven, artistically dishonest attempts at "crossover" music, where violinists play in wet T-shirts and wind trios have moody unsmiling arty photos, and there is some ultra-beard-stroking contemporary music supported by the Park Lane Group and the Huddersfield festival, but there is not the same multi-referential, successful genre-bending activity that I have enjoyed abroad.

The follow-on to this is, of course, why not? Or, if it does exist, why don't I know about it and therefore why is a non-musician even less likely to know about it? I'll get working on a piece on this, the question of conservatism in British classical music, and will this (rather like the Major government), be its downfall?

In the meantime, hopefully someone else will feel inspired to write on this topic, and the blogging tree-leaves will reach onward and upward...