twang twang twang - MUNICH

Transform and Exchange

Elvis Costello was on Radio 3 today (you can hear it under CD Review for the next 7 days- fast forward a couple of hours into the four-hour programme), talking about his collaborations with classical musicians - most recently, Il Sogno, an album of orchestral compositions inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream, released on DG.

Honest and creative "crossover" (or even, "music") - not souped-up arrangements and they even got the Italian right. Rock n roll with Purcell and Dowland. The courtly airs and funky jazz blasts of 'Oberon and Titania' are leafin' my forest.

Conversations II

Harrison Birtwistle in an interview with the Sospeso ensemble:

"When you have painters like Cy Twombly or Bacon who smudge paint on their canvases, or put it on with a rag, or throw it, or mix it with chemicals with certain properties that make it smear-there is no equivalent to this in music. What you have to do in music, to create that smear, is to compose every ingredient. We deal in quarter and eighth notes, and consequently when composers write about music, it’s always technical. Whereas when you read what painters write about their art, it’s very much the opposite, it’s very creative. So in that way I’ve been influenced by painters."

Oscar Wilde as Gilbert in The Critic As Artist:

"All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate. No poet sings because he must sing. At least, no great poet does. A great poet sings because he chooses to sing. It is so now, and it has always been so. We are sometimes apt to think that the voices that sounded at the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and almost without changing could pass into song. The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its steep scarped sides are bleak and barren, but once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to the shepherds in the vale. But in this we are merely lending to other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own. Our historical sense is at fault. Every century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to be the most natural and simple product of its time is always the result of the most self-conscious effort. Believe me, Ernest, there is no fine art without self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are one."

I'll have the rioja

Hurrah! Red wine is healthy after all. Musicians of the world, rejoice.

sour taste

Helen in conversation with a background music agent today:

He: "Helen, can you do a gig?"
She: "Sorry, I'm not available that day. Do you need any more numbers?"
He: "Well, I've got lots of numbers [reels off list of established harpists in their early forties]...but they're getting on a bit, I'd rather send pretty young things out, who is your favourite dep?"

Really. I don't have many illusions about what background music is for and I can see why you wouldn't want a minger at dinner, but all these ladies, while not teenagers, look immaculate. And the gig was in Lincoln's Inn, where everybody is a hundred years old anyway.

This is one young "thing" who won't be working for that agent again. Those harpists include my friends and mentors and my first teacher when I was five.

Birtwistle

Everyone's loving Birtwistle at the minute. Birtwistle Games is running at the South Bank to celebrate Sir Harrison's 70th. I'm in Blackheath Halls on Thursday doing Dinah and Nick's Love Song (my father's going to the South Bank Birtwistle that night instead. Huh! although, as the Love Song's only five minutes long, he'll get a lot more Birtwistle for his money in the QEH than chez moi) .

The Birtwistle Games site cites Francis Bacon as one of Birtwistle's inspirations:

'all art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself... the artist must now deepen the game to be any good at all'

I'm intriegued. D&N's L S isn't horrible squeaky gate music - it's transparent and magnetic. Part of the attraction is in the performing - the free choices we can make, and hearing the variations each time. Realistically, the audience aren't going to notice what we decide, so that satisfaction is a private one.

Birtwistle's appeal is multifaceted: the interest for performers, choosing a rhythm or where to place a motif; the freqently ritualistic or mythic resonances of his subjects; the matted textures, interpersed with beautiful ppp clarities. His layers (and his interviews) reveal a fascination with independence and interdependence:

"what always happens in music is that when you put two separate things together you get another kind of oneness, and that becomes an element in the piece."

Hmm. Much food for thought about the nature of music's power (or musick, in a Beethoven's Anvil sense): solely notes in our ears, or connotations far wider. I wish they'd rerun Gawain, I missed it.

Unfinished Journey

To be a musician is to concern oneself with harmony, resolution and perfect unity, but simultaneously never to have done as we continuously hone the physical, intellectual and emotional processes in which we musick. (My extended essay on this topic, with regard to WH Auden's libretti, will be up as soon as I have finished editing all the bl**dy typos having to scan in my only copy has produced. It has sentences even longer and less elegant than this post's opener). Yehudi Menuhin - one of my heroes along with Shakespeare, Larkin and Jarvis Cocker - titles his autobiography Unfinshed Journey, and there is a wonderful photo near the end of Menuhin "off to work in cloak and hat with baton and scores; the Journey is still Unfinished."

I have been thinking about the musical reaching for perfection whilst always having more to work on a lot recently. I have a great new teacher and stimulating classes at Trinity College of Music, and as a result of these have been working towards new aspects in my technique and musicianship. Sometimes I feel downcast at how long it takes to do anything properly, and how as soon as you've ironed out one problem there is another to be tackled, but I am also exhilarated that at least I am working and moving forward, however slowly.

Menuhin, despite his previous success, put himself through a technical and musical dark night of the soul to become fully conscious of and at peace with his music-making, instead of relying on superficial facility without a considered intellectual back-up. To read in Unfinished Journey of his diligence, humanity and wisdom is deeply humbling and supremely inspiring.

Mid-Menuhin-musings I put in an appearance at a party last night and emerged thereafter into the bedlam that is Leicester Square on a Saturday night. One of a group of three men shoved me out of his way shouting "God, I hate women!" and what with that and the all-around boozing, shrieking, honking, flashing, jeering, brawling and vomiting I went home gloomy about what a piece of work is man.

Menuhin, gentle, humble and so noble a musician, rescues:

"Each human being has the eternal duty of transforming what is hard and brutal into a subtle and tender offering, what is crude into refinement, what is ugly into beauty, ignorance into knowledge, confrontation into collaboration, thereby rediscovering the child's dream of a creative reality incessantly renewed by death, the servant of life, and by life the servant of love".

If I were you I would read this quotation again listening to Menuhin's recording of Beethoven's Spring Sonata, with Kempff.

UPDATE: I will, if I may, also quote Utopian Turtletop, which I came across after writing this post:

"NOCTURNE

Late, late at night, the skies hunker down close, making the houses and trees and cars smaller.

Woke up at 2 this morning to go count homeless people sleeping outside with the Coalition for the Homeless. While I was putting on my shoes I listened to Mieczyslaw Horszowski's rendition of Chopin's Nocturne in E-flat. So, so tender and sweetbitter melancholy.

Someone in a sleeping bag out in the wide open park near the mouth of I-90. Chopin's Nocturne echoing in my mind's ear, seeing someone sleep is so tender and intimate, and the crushing indifference of go-go America to our internal economic exiles. Two people up late talking in their sleeping bags under the I-90 bridge. A man with a backpack walking manically around, flapping his arms, hoping for lift-off. Something, something about bluebirds flying, flying beyond the rainbow. Why can't I?

Home again Finnegan, time for bed and up again soon."

Charge of the Light Brigade

Norman Lebrecht writes in the Evening Standard (Wednesday October 13th) about programming timidity in British orchestras:

"...while a programme of family favourites may stabilise finances and reassure creditors, it casts into accute doubt the survival of the symphony orchestra in the modern world. Who, after all, needs so many orchestras if they all play the same music and none of it is new? It is a question that is starting to trouble hardcore supporters of classical music- consumers like me who have experienced life's most sublime moments in a concert hall."

Lebrecht's piece caught my attention because I was just about to go into rehearsals for sound collective's mini-tour.

sound collective was set up by Tom Hammond and a group of orchestral musicians fed up with chronically inadequate rehearsal time, stupefying programming and autodidactic working methods (all-powerful maestro, marrionette musicians). So we rehearse three times more than is the norm for a concert, programme interesting repertoire ranging from little-heard Vaughan Williams to the premier of a full new symphony, and are allowed to enter into artistic conversations with the conductor, so artistic decisions are made democratically.

It is an intensely rewarding way to make music and the concerts buoy us all up through our muddy field dates with Russell Watson singing "O Solo [sic] Mio" in a key 3 semitones lower than normal. We share the administrative workload but Tom Hammond is, of course, the driving force, putting everything he has into a group putting down of a musicianly foot, to say it is unacceptable to retreat further and further into, as Lebrecht remarks, "the dreariest rehash of old faithfuls since the days when Beethoven's Pastoral vied with Dvorak's New World as the highlight of every other South Bank week."

Particularly important is Lebrecht's identification that timid programming not only bores "hardcore supporters of live music" but destroys the sense of what orchestras are for:

"To justify sustaining full-time orchestras (and the BBC expensively employs five of them), Listen Up! [a six-week concert promotion beanfeast coming up from the BBC] highlights "60 education projects, 80 community projects and 15 health initiatives," thereby prompting the question whether such important social benefits might not be more responsibly dispensed by social and medical professionals...the National Theatre or the Royal Ballet...do not need to pedal health initiatives because their purpose is demonstrated by a judicious mix of classic and contemporary work, allaying conservation to continued creation. That is the ground from where orchestras used to stand, and from which they have mortally retreated."

This retreat from artistic purpose is why, in Britain, increasingly you see film and literature and visual art flourish, and music flounder. BBC Music Magazine, for example, has a column this month about how it's become bizarrely fashionable among the chattering classes to know nothing about classical music.

Even if you do not feel brave, you should act as if you are. That's the old definition of courage anyway. We have to do it every time we step onto the concert platform - never tired, never crippled with nerves, always delighted to be there, never with sore arms or bleeding fingers or down with the 'flu - because we are professionals. And we owe it to our profession to represent it with artistry, and integrity, or it will fade away.

Conversations I

"first I had to discover that aquiring a skill consists as much in unlearning as learning. Those of us who develop bad violin-playing habits must, before we overcome them, experience a point of zero tension which might correspond to the purgatorial middle ground where sinners shed their old identity. The wrong strength must be let go and a period of 'no strength' endured."

Yehudi Menuhin, Unfinished Journey

"Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance."

W H Auden, 'Notes on Music and Opera.'

A great backhander

Apologies for arthritic blogging over the last couple of days. I have not made it back before 2am for the last few nights and early starts too with concerts. There will be a proper post about programming issues tomorrow night once I return from the Barbican.

However I have to log this wonderful backhanded compliment received tonight after a recital with Florica:

Lady to Helen: "ooh, you're coming to play for us in March as well, aren't you?"
Helen, smiling modestly: "yes, that's right."
Lady: "Oh! but you'll be on your own! Shame!"

She was trying to say she really liked the duo. I think. Fortunately somebody else came in at this point to tell me they were now converted to the harp, so I didn't throw myself out of the window after all.

World Music

I love different cultures and different languages (I am one of these irritating people who take hours ordering pizza in Florence in Italian, while the fluent-English-speaking waiters look on patiently), because you discover new ways of thinking, and through the cultural contrasts also learn more about your own conditioning and beliefs.

The key to understanding a culture is to understand its language: not simply to comprehend its vocabulary and syntax, but really to hear it: its rhythms and sound patterns, its music. So in Spanish the combination of sensuous lisp and guttural throat sounds evoke a nation of great warmth and passion, and also pride and even a certain beautiful cruelty. Italian is similar but less directly earthy, without the throat sounds - a Leonardo, not a Goya. French is exquisitely polished and elegant and German has sincerity and honesty, albeit with the most infuriatingly pedantic grammar and word order. British English, I always think, reveals our desire not to get into an argument with a one-vowel-fits-all sort of "uregh".

As with the sound of a language, so too does the music, obviously, articulate a culture; that's what it's for (as Beethoven's Anvil discusses). This is why it is particularly lovely to hear great musicians playing music from their own country. And why I have been very much enjoying my Vaughan Williams CD in preparation for Dives and Lazarus rehearsals tomorrow. As well as Dives, my EMI recording features the wonderful Five Tudor Portraits, set to Skelton's rumbustious poems.

So many different aspects of Englishness. Restraint, obviously, and the kind of impassioned feeling that is haboured under restraint; dottiness about animals (Lament for Phillip Sparrow); a particularly developed fondness for booze; and the capacity for venemous satire.

And, never make your life comfortable when it can be slightly uncomfortable and frayed about the edges (cf British food, central heating systems, public transport) - every harpist has their own trick of the trade to get round the undifficult-sounding but damn awkward third variant in Dives.