twang twang twang - MUNICH

Dumb blondes and new perspectives

Update to this post, 30/09/04

Thanks to you all for the great comments below, and also to George for his perceptive comparison of the experience of a work of art with falling in love. It is as well you all commented, because I hadn't reached any conclusions myself and so made Much Ado About Nothing (boom-ching).

The passionate attachment you feel when first you discover a work of art is precious: youth orchestra concerts are so great because they are ardent (I remember in mine, a shaven-headed fifteen year old chap getting the Paul Gasgoigne award at the end of the course for crying during the Alpine Symphony). It is also easily lost. Professional music-making is gruelling. Driving through the night when you're so tired after a concert you have to wind the window right down in January so you keep awake; red-eye flights and a lunchtime concert in Barcelona, then straight back home and teaching all day the next; pouring energy every spare moment into generating your own income or chasing those who have "forgotten" to pay you; never being sick or injured; never having time to work on your favourite repertoire because you are doing outdoor prom dates in Northumberland in October. This is why musicians can look so famously miserable on the concert platform because everybody is just so bored: another Beethoven 5; once again the 1812; I'm just going to make this contemporary music up because I can't be arsed to practice it and I know everyone else will be so busy struggling with their own parts they won't notice me miming at the back.

Like anything precious, making your living doing what you love has a price. The all-consuming workload (being a musician is a life, not a job), unstable income and sometimes terrible working conditions makes it easy to forget what you bought with those long hours on the M1, just as, to continue George's analogy, if you don't work at a relationship you'll get bored and it will end. You have to discipline yourself to keep practicing and keep working and not drink yourself into a state where you're not much good even to a gruesome date. As well as doing those dates with good grace (assuming you're treated acceptably) because they allow you to be a musician and not an accountant: they are the price you have to pay.

If you play a soul-destroying gig it's important to put a CD of something really good on in the car on the way home to remind yourself why you're doing this. That could be the Tchaikovsky violin concerto you adored when you were sixteen, or something really deep and niche that you have come to care about through your professional training. As Peter points out, sometimes you have to get to know something or someone before you fall in love. That is why we bother to educate ourselves.

I've not put a poem on this blog for at least 24 hours so here's another conclusion cop-out by giving a great writer the last word.

AUDEN THE MORE LOVING ONE

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tonight I was duetting with Hunky Gareth, one of my favourite flautists, at the National Gallery. There is something about the NG which brings out my airhead side. I have never managed to negotiate the Trafalgar Sqaure one-way-system without cocking it up at least twice. Then, when I finally get inside, I always dump the harp wherever it is we're playing and slope off to look at my favourite Titian. Perhaps it is because I don't know much about visual art, but I can never remember how to get back to the harp from the Titian. Was it through 14th century Italy, or the Flemish school 1585-1700?

Anyway after I finally tracked my harp down again the gig passed uneventfully. At the end I trundled off to my car and put all my flute and harp music on the roof of the car while I loaded the harp. You know what's coming...as I zoomed off I became aware of sheet music blowing past my windscreen. Some nice drunks helped me scrape it all off the street, although I'm not sure my Jimmy Galway book will ever be the same again.

However, be reassured that as I neared the Royal Courts of Justice (about a mile further on) I remembered to switch my headlamps on.

I say the gig passed uneventfully, but actually it was rather better than that. The NG has a lovely accoustic because of all the stone floors and is a quiet, spacious place to play. We both arrived a little frazzled - me from losing a ring of sentimental value, Hunky G. from teaching the recorder to 15 nine-year-old girls. Normally at a background date you would probably have to launch straight into "Annie's Song", but because the NG's got a bit of clarse we felt able to play nothing but Bach for the first twenty minutes. Aside from the spirituality, genius, etc, there is something so profoundly civilised about Bach, that you cannot believe the world is all that grim, really.

After Bach we were both feeling much better. There are worse ways to pass three hours than playing music and talking to enthusiastic listeners. Near the end an elderly lady came up to talk to us. She said she didn't know anything about music, but liked it, and I said well, I didn't know anything about visual art, but liked it too.

"Ah yes", she said. "It's because you don't know anything about it that you like it. Once you become schooled in art history it's very interesting and fascinating and clever, but you lose the immediate emotional reaction you had when you didn't know anything. To love something from your gut you have to be ignorant."

She wasn't saying that you can't love art you know about, but it's a different affection. One of the security guards was so moved by "Annie's Song" we had to play it twice, and similarly I managed to reduce a bridegroom to tears last weekend with my terrible arrangement of "Angels". Professional musicians rarely find these pieces very affecting.

Would we, can we, get the same reaction with music we as trained musicians find moving? In performance, I think yes, because one's own emotional commitment comes across. If a performance is fantastic, no matter how untrained the audience, they always know. But in a background music situation, or on a CD, I am less sure.

"is't not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?"

Good Behaviour

Michael Billington lists in the Guardian 10 commandments for theatre goers.

Really, one would think most of these would have been obvious. Most also apply to concerts, although sadly nobody has yet, as far as I know, been inspired to give or receive oral sex during one of my recitals.

A Room Of One's Own

I need the 21st-century equivalent of a room of one's own and a thousand a year.

My lessons with my new professor are brilliant, but it takes over an hour to do one movement of a major work, and we could easily work four hours on one sonata at any one time.

So we are going to extend our lessons to long sessions, when possible. Wonderful - but paid for with what, I am not sure. I work all the time but, like Manhattan, London's so expensive it barely keeps one in capuccini. Can't ask TCM for more money - they already gave me three grand. And I refuse to cadge free lessons because I don't think it's right. Time to get the ol' grants register out.

Somebody should write an opera or symphony all to do with filling in forms and calculating budgets, because that's got as much to do with music as divyne harmonye - and it always has done, because to create art you can't generate money simultaneously, so you have to fund it, and so you do teaching like Mozart or a restaurant gig like Casals. And long, long live teaching and background music, but when you're working, you ain't practicing, and real progress is made on a practice regime of six or seven hours a day.

So we're always juggling the work we artistically need to do with work we financially have to do, which makes everything frustratingly slower. But nobody owes me a living, after all, so I'll just have to get on with it.

How's that for a statement of the obvious, so near the beginning of the week too. At least things have come a long way since Virginia Woolf's time.

While I'm on the subject of money, I am APPALLED to read from George that MOMA is going to charge $20 a ticket. What a fast track to art as the preserve of the white and middle-class. And here's a particularly offensive statement from Mayor Bloomberg, courtesy of Terry Teachout:

"Mayor Bloomberg had little sympathy yesterday for New Yorkers who find the new $20 admission to the Museum of Modern Art a bit steep.

"Some things people can afford, some things people can't," said Bloomberg, whose estimated personal fortune is $4.9 billion.

"MoMA is a private institution. It's not a city institution. And they have a right to set their own pricing policies."

Over the past five years, the city funneled $65 million in taxpayer money to help fund MoMA's expansion.

Despite the taxpayers' contribution, Bloomberg - who was in last week's Forbes 400 list of richest Americans - said the city should not be involved in "pressuring" private groups about fees. Besides, he said, there are plenty to choose from. "If you can't afford [admissions] at any one, you can go to another one," he said."

Good show, Mayor. Now you mention it I think I remember seeing a second Les Demoiselles D'Avignon in the Washington Heights subway. I'll go take a look at it there.

contemporary spanish harp music

If anybody knows of a good contemporary Spanish (not South American) harp piece, pref 1970+, could they email me? I need one for my Ludovico competition programme in June and I can't find one anywhere.

There is wonderful music by Guridi but I think the rubric wants something more avant-garde.

Don't all speak at once...

Office Chaos # 2

Several of us on the music-blog circuit are cat lovers. Jeff (pictured) suffers from computer envy. He doesn't normally care what I'm up to but the sound of typing brings him running to lie on the keyboard.

This is why I haven't typed up the ISM committee meeting minutes yet. Honest.

Larkinmania #94

Update: Peter comments below. I have changed "solicitors" to "busy professionals" in acknowledgement. Also he is down to one coffee a fortnight. How does he do it? I gave up coffee for a fortnight once, as the combination of it and my finals sent me pinging off the walls, but it is not an experience I care to repeat.

The final poem in Larkin's Collected runs thus:

PARTY POLITICS

"I never remember holding a full drink
My first look shows the level half-way down.
What next? Ration the rest, and try to think
Of higher things, until mine host comes round?

Some people will say, best show an empty glass:
Someone will fill it. Well, I've tried that too.
You may get drunk, or dry half-hours may pass.
It seems to turn on where you are. Or who."

If you are a harpist, you enjoy professionally an extraordinary variety of events. As busy professionals drink coffee, so you drink champagne, although alas only one glass a night, as you are always driving. Despite enforced restrictions, a certain taste can be developed. It would be interesting to see how it compares against those who actually know anything about wine.

HELEN'S PHNARR PHNARR BOOZE LIST, AFTER YEARS OF STRICTLY PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

- The house champagne at the Ritz is excellent. Always blag a glass, even if the event is posh enough for them to be serving something else.
- Only take a champagne cocktail if you can be confident the barman will not be too heavy-handed with the bitters. Similar caution should be applied to bucks fizz at weddings.
- Steer clear of faux-tudor mansions in Surrey, where the pink champagne is served warmer than I've had cocoa.
- 2002 is a terrible year. I know, because Alfredo at the bar where I do a lot of casino work told me. Tastes all right to me.
- A capacious coat or jacket is handy for smuggling interval booze into the second act at Covent Garden.
- Do not go out with your harpist mates to a rough pub in Stoke Newington where they don't have any wine at all. I guess prosecco is also out of the question, then.
- Do not complain when gigging mid-afternoon because the tea is bags, not leaves. Harpists have lost jobs for less. Similarly the still/sparkling/tap water gordian knot.
- Do not take a New Year's gig in Leicester Square where you are invited to leave your harp in the club, not drive home and enjoy a free bar. Not only was my harp covered in white powder when I picked it up (really), I had to return my friend John to his girlfriend in a truly shameful state on January the first.
- Beware gigs where a harp is in situ. You feel fine until you finish your three hour set, then realise, owing to the number of drinks you have been bought, you cannot stand up.
- A large strengthener is required before any harp concert at the Wigmore, whether you are playing in it or not. All the harp world will turn out with guns blazing to reflect that the hapless performer's 4th finger is really much weaker than theirs was when they played the piece in 1943.

(that's enough drinking. ed.)

Der schwer gefasste Entschluss

I am taking a bit of a drubbing at the hands of my new professor. I am delighted to be hung out to dry (so long as it doesn't go on for too long), for 'tis for the greater good. For the last nine months I have been whinging that my harp's sound just isn't the same since its big accident, and it must be sold and replaced with a £40,000 Horngacher; but now it is singing to me how it should, even the highest strings, which have never sounded as good as the middle register. At the same time I have just spent six hours working on the tune only of the first movement of the CPE Bach G Major (no LH, none of the RH harmony either), and I am still only half-way content with the first two lines. Painstakingly slow; every note even; all the voices taken separately and worked on in turn, even if you can sightread the whole movement easily, on one level. All my rubato and musical ideas have been stripped off, to be put back later (huh!): I have to prepare the canvas, as it were, on which the performance will finally be based.

Anyhow reflecting on how damm HARD it is to play a musical instrument I am comforted to read Alex Ross's analysis of the Eroica. Sound Collective is performing this symphony at St John's on January 7th, along with the world premiere of Matthew Taylor's third symphony. As Alex points out, there is always a struggle and tension in Beethoven, eventually to be resolved in the triumph of musical form. The drama, humanity and honesty show the resolution to be hard-won, and richly deserved. Much more moving and relevant than a facile perfect cadence.

I am not in the Eroica, obviously, although I am honoured to have been written in specially to Taylor 3. It has always been rather bleakly ironic that Beethoven never wrote a note of harp music, because he is my favourite composer. Such passion and rage; but then the moments of such incredible sweetness. I can't think of another composer with such haunting, intense sweetness.

There is currently a debate going on between ACD and Scott about technical analysis of music and the relevance of composers' biographical detail. Naturally there are occasions where art and life should enjoy a degree of separation (I like Larkin's honesty in his poetry, for example, but am loving it less in his filthy letters to Kingsley Amis) but if you are a musician and you go deaf clearly your life directly intrudes upon your work:

"Forced to become a philosopher already in my twenty-eight year, oh, it is not easy, and for the artist much more difficult than for anyone else" (Beethoven, the Heiligenstadt testament)

Art's not moving or life-enhancing if it has no humanity. Eliot's The Waste Land, for example, does it for me over the more ascetic Four Quartets, incredible poetic and religious achievement though they are. In The Waste Land, Eliot's literary and otherwise artistic allusions (Tristan und Isolde, etc) are what can bring fertility back to the desert: "These fragments I have shored against my ruin". And the poem is dedicated to Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro, the better craftsman. The power of art and art's craft to stop us all wanting to kill ourselves: Oed und leer das Meer*

People can argue art's absolute and ethereal nature if they want but I'm blowed if I'm spending all this time practicing Bach in an endeavour to perform it while I am alive to living audiences for its real value to be off in the ether somewhere between the British Museum and the Pearly Gates.

* "desolate and empty the sea", Tristan

Sunshine ahead

Layfayete, proprieter of the wonderful Brazilian cafe on the Caledonian Road, has got me a copy of his favourite CD of Brazilian music. I need to stop listening to miserable Pulp songs quite urgently, or this blog will progress from Sad Music and Larkin & the Decline Of Love, Old Age etc to The Bleakness of the Human Condition, Death & Decay, and Early Music.

Currently playing: Ole, Ola; It Might As Well Be Spring.

(I'm joking about early music, before you all start stamping your sandals. It's my pay-back for having to tune down to 415. Eulogising post about the abfab Andrew Lawrence-King to follow)

You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star

If anyone sends this post into Pseud's Corner, I want the ten quid. I found the titular Nietzsche quote specially.

I am one of the most untidy people in the world and gazing round my harp room after a long practice session, I wonder what this detritus says about my working life. I am claiming a percentage of my electric bill back against tax on the grounds this room is used professionally, after all.

On the mantlepiece: 3 mould-growing cups of coffee, a clock, a Durer print, an overflowing box of costume jewelry, a box of Mozartkugeln, my precious battered postcard of Munch's Towards the Forest 2

On the filing cabinet: a mould-growing cup of coffee, an overflowing in-tray; 6 harp CDs; a harp recital programme from 1990; a spare electronic tuner and 500 publicity leaflets, all with the same crashingly awful typo

On the floor: coffee, music by Damase, CPE Bach, Dizi, Chertok and Parish-Alvars; my wedding contracts folder; 2 harps (& one in the hall); about 84 string packets; angry letter from my accountant; the neck my lyon & healy had before it fell over and had to have a new one; 3 emery boards and a muscle heat pack

On the desk: an old cup of coffee...Laptop, Larkin, lighter (no idea what that's doing here - I don't even smoke), pearl necklace, old medal from harp competition, unpaid in deposit cheque, unopened bank statement, 2 pairs of wire cutters

And that's with a cleaning lady. How does everyone else fare in the battle against the rising tide?

Larkinmania

Picking it up for the first time on the advice of a friend and further spurred to it by Peter's List, I find myself absolutely crazy for Phillip Larkin.

Gone are the days when I could bike down to the English Faculty library's dreaming spires and nick an essay from the two books left on the shelves after the industrious locusts from St John's had taken the entire reading list out. My critical focus has also shifted, as I am now a musician. So here is my new I-read-the-poems-on-the-DLR-going-to-my-music-psychology-class perspective.

Two things strike me most about Larkin. One, his virtuosity; two, his honesty. These two attributes are closely linked to what musicians have to do.

Larkin's language is brilliantly shaped, to the point where it sounds in my ears like music. The opening of the famous 'High Windows' could almost be the start of a string quartet: sharp, spiccato articulation before the heartbreakingly lyrical long bow at the end of the quatrain:

"When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm
I know this is paradise"

As I discussed in my post about control and emotion in music, it is precisely Larkin's control that make his poems moving - his lack of sentimentality, his meticulous rhythmic pace, his ability to through-compose an image over an entire poem, and his contrasts (like the kids/fucking/pills/diaphragm and then paradise) spun on a sixpence. Already I can quote two poems from memory. I am not the quick study I was when I was 10 (those were the days! I only had to hear a passage and could quote it word for word), and would not be able to do this if the poems were not so musical, so virtuosically crafted, so linguistically impressive that you can't get them out of your head.

Larkin's verse is musical and lovely, but it takes no prisoners. Not for him, the lie of pandering to 'Fiction and the Reading Public':

"For I call the tune in this racket:
I pay your screw,
Write reviews and the bull on the jacket -
So stop looking blue
And start serving up your sensations
Before it's too late;
Just please me for two generations -
You'll be 'truly great.' "

This honesty means that his verse is often bleak ("Smiles are for youth. For old age come/Death's terror and delirium", 'Heads in the Women's Ward'); his imagery uncomfortable ("My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps/To come and waste their time and ours; perhaps / You'd care to join us? In a pig's arse, friend", 'Vers de Societe').

If you are any sort of artist, poet painter or musician, you fashion artifice, order and coherence. You construct virtuosically written poetry or manipulate sonata form through a bravura development to a beautiful resolution. If you are a performer you must work for hours to play effortlessly: to have control. Because of this technical compulsion to order, it is an obvious progression always to bring your thematic material to order too. T S Eliot's Four Quartets, for example, uses the string quartet form to support his religious journey to where "the fire and the rose are one." Similarly all the ideas about the order of art expressing on earth divine permanence up above. W H Auden, to bring poetic and music constructions still more tightly together, began to write libretti because he felt music elevated words to somewhere they couldn't get to on their own: "Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance."

Larkin recognises the possibility of such coherence. Gold (along with metal, coins, fire, trumpets, early morning and the beaming sun) is one favourite image, particularly in the early poems; a bright-beaten untarnished solidity and joy. Yet he is preoccupied by water and winter as well as gold, summer and fire; by dark four o'clock in the morning, as well as sunrise. He can see gold, but he cannot fully - or much at all - believe it. Reality intrudes: old age, death and decay. Nothing lasts. Sometimes he can see a way to something permanent in sexual ectasy ('Wedding-Wind'), but his love affairs always distintegrate, and he never quite makes it. The sexual freedom of 1963 "is rather late for me."

Larkin glimpses the beautiful at the same time as he recognises the disappointing. This is what makes him honest. He is neither stupidly optimistic nor always depressive, but he never flinches from what is most real. Art in his poetry can sometimes portray love that is forever, but carries with it all the bad things that happen too. There isn't always a resolution; or if there is, there isn't one we can access. The horses' peace of mind in 'At Grass' is not something we can share ("Do memories plague their ears like flies? / They shake their heads.") The high windows, "sun-comprehending glass", are out of reach: Larkin only sees the freedom of the young once he is older ("I wonder if/Anyone looked at me, forty years back, / And thought, That'll be the life"). His realistic 'Observation' is: "Only in books the flat and final happens."

Music sounds moments of perfect joy even beyond words (and I am a fan of words, in case you hadn't noticed): Ravel's sunlit Introduction and Allegro, for example, or the first subject of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. I don't think you could be a musician if you were not at least in part a romantic. But any art is the deeper, the finer, for the other musics you hear in Larkin. Virtuosity, not for showing-off; not for an almost smug "I'm OK, because I'm an artist; I'm in touch with the divine"; but as an entirely honest expression of the human condition. When I read Larkin, I do not feel comforted or pacified, but I find my own confused experiences sharply put into focus. Surely that is one of the greatest things a piece of art can do. Make us feel less alone.

Musicians have to combine technical skill with emotional openness and depth. Here the poems I have found most important today.

SINCE THE MAJORITY OF ME

Since the majority of me
Rejects the majority of you,
Debating ends forwith, and we
Divide. And sure of what to do

We disinfect new blocks of days
For our majorities to rent
With unshared friends and unwalked ways,
But silence too is eloquent:

A silence of minorities
That, unopposed at last, return
Each night with cancelled promises
They want renewed. They never learn.

THE MOWER

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A Hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

LATEST FACE

Latest face, so effortless
Your great arrival at my eyes,
No one standing near could guess
Your beauty had no home till then;
Precious vagrant, recognise
My look, and do not turn again.

Admirer and admired embrace
On a useless level, where
I contain your current grace,
You my judgment; yet to move
Into real untidy air
Brings no lasting attribute -
Bargains, suffering, and love,
Not this always-planned salute.

Lies grow dark around us: will
The statue of your beauty walk?
Must I wade behind it, till
Something's found - or is not found -
Far too late for turning back?
Or, if I will not shift my ground,
Is your power actual - can
Denial of you duck and run,
Stay out of sight and double round,
Leap from the sun with mask and brand
And murder and not understand?