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Sorry, guys. I've got blogblock. Too many gigs. I have knitted quite a lot of my Christmas Scarf (all the men in my life get one of these at some point), however, waiting in the wings. I look forward to completing it during the Northern Sinfonia's L'Enfance du Christ later this week, where the harp only plays for five minutes during the third act.
The time is right for time-killing in the toon - the Sage is up, and I'll be nosing around.
Sigh. Everyone Stateside is scoffing turkey and watching films. Here in Blighty it's grey November business as usual. I did a lunchtime recital and then four hours of background music for Jil Sander. The fee was a bit low but they said I would get to see Trinny & Susannah of What Not To Wear.
Anyway they must've been somewhere else, 'cause the closest I got to fashion was parking my ancient subaru outside Chanel, causing the doorman to look alarmed. Car rather stood out amongst the Jags and Lexuses with his various dents and "Stop The Music Cuts" militant union stickers.
The good thing about wheeling a harp around town is you become totally unembarrassable. As I trundled it towards the store I paused to admire the handbags in the Dior window, harp in one hand (advanced harp-driving = the ability to trail it casually behind you with one hand on the trolley only), talking on the phone with the other and it wasn't for some minutes that I realised I was attracting funny looks from the assistants inside.
It is hard to play classical music if you bottle up what you feel. Traditionally it is not concerned with spectacle and focuses instead on the emotional, the spiritual, and so on. But when you go on stage you put on a show, acting confident when you don’t feel confident. And despite the adage that courage is acting bravely no matter how scared you really are, because in music you cannot lie, it is not the same. I love show business, but it is not the same.
"I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that
would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a
wall you won't be able to get through.' So I said, 'I'll beat my head against
that wall.' " --John Cage
To Claridges this afternoon. All the 4-hour-stay bays were suspended (someone important must be in, although how coning off 2 parking spaces will prevent a member of the royal family being assasinated, I am not sure. Particularly if, as when I played for John Major last week, the VIP is dining at street level with the curtains open). I am early, because of the time it takes to set up, and the time you must allow in central London for jams, roadworks, anti-war demos and no meters being free and having to go to the NCP. So I park in a 2-hour bay, unload and set up. I am playing for an hour and a half. Thus I need to move the car, as close as possible to the start of the set to have a hope of getting back to the car before the 2 hours run out and I am ticketed (number of wardens on the Brook St block this afternoon: three, in continuous circuit. Somebody calculated the average grace period before you get a fine in this part of London at 40 seconds. The fine is £100). So I move the car. I am a bit late moving the car because of a random person walking in when I am tuning asking me to play them Sephardic music. Because of that, and the two-hour-max-stay on the meter, by the time I have put the maximum amount of money in (£4/hour), I have seven minutes on this, second meter after my set officially finishes. Packing up the harp will take longer, so I leave it naked in the French Salon and run out, planning to bring the car to the front of the hotel to load up. I cannot pull over, because of rich people getting out of 4X4s carrying tiny bags. I circle for ten minutes. I find another meter. To it I bequeath my last 60p. This buys me 9 minutes, enough time to ask the nice doormen to keep a loading spot for me. I circle again. Another rich person has dumped a Bentley in my loading spot. The doorman comes to move it. The Bentley fails to start. He gets out, expertly whacks the bonnet and gets back in the car, at which point it glides off. As I load the harp, it rains heavily.
I dedicate this saga to The Standing Room, singing and parking in San Francisco.
On Thursday I must perform a difficult sonata for the first time. Having played like an idiot in my lesson last week I've been somewhat going for it since. This evening, Tom was summoned to the harp room to be dummy audience. It wasn't bad. I was quite pleased.
Tom reflected that the execution had been good but was not forthcoming with the gasping handkerchief-wringing admiration that is the correct response in these situations. The music wasn't his sort of thing, and alas he has a point in that it's a charming sonata in the galant style, but the Goldberg Variations it isn't. Very fine music, but if you aren't a musician, not as overwhelming as one of the big guns.
That fast, light and sparking texture might not at the top of the canon but it's one of our heaviest pieces and -
! EIGHT WEEKS OF MY LIFE that's taken me! Of singing inner lines, and playing top lines only while placing all the rest, and practicing each hand separately in different rhythms, and memorising, and remembering exactly where the twangy bits on my harp are in G Major because it needs a service, and doing mental practice, and critical reading and analysis, and even occasionally trying to communicate the music's feeling and humanity with honesty and love.
Well, I like it.
A thousand thanks to The Standing Room for these fine pictures of opera singer Nathan Gunn. Quite the thing after a hard day at the harpface.
John Adams/John Donne, Negative Love
"I never stooped so low, as they
Which on an eye, cheek, lip, can prey,
Seldom to them, which soar no higher
Than virtue or the mind to admire,
For sense, and understanding may
Know, what gives fuel to their fire:
My love, though silly, is more brave,
For may I miss, whene'er I crave,
If I know yet what I would have.
If that be simply perfectest
Which can be no way be expressed
But negatives, my love is so.
To all, which all love, I say no.
If any who decipher best,
What we know not, ourselves, can know,
Let him teach me that nothing; this
As yet my ease, and comfort is,
Though I speed not, I cannot miss."
Today I have: hoovered the harp room, alphabetised my CDs up to Elgar, thrown all my money stuff into a LBW box file, filed my notes, mailed demo CDs to brides, signed and returned contracts, called musicians about programming decisions for 2005, paid my visa bill, stacked my old programmes, sanitised the kitty litter tray, written funding begging letters, clipped out relevant articles from back magazines and binned the rest, and practiced Bach in different rhythms with a metronome.
Harpists aren't angels for nothing, y'know.
else in the news: the sun brothers posts rarely, but beautifully.
Alex Ross links to me anew as "the renegade harpist". Uneducated harpist, more like, I had to look "renegade" up in the dictionary. Anyway, it's nice finally to give that impression. At school the cool kids weren't very into harp music.
Punkish iconoclast that I am, here's one for the jazzers. I'm listening to Alice Coltrane's India-inspired, jazz-harp recordings ('Turiya and Ramakrishna', 'Shiva-Loka', etc).
I'm not convinced by the harp. Glissandos on a modal pedal setting are a good jazz effect, but here they're pretty much the only effect. I wouldn't mind if they were decorative - a glissando's role in life - but they create the solo line.
Obviously, if the music is good, it doesn't matter to what extent one instrument is used or not. But the tracks where Coltrane plays piano are stratospherically superior ('I want to see you'; 'Gospel Trane'): imaginative solos with good use of pause, clear and exciting rhythmic variety and, because she's not just playing whole-tone glissandos, melodic interest.
Am I missing something here? Only glissandos on every harp track? Coltrane's a great artist and can do what she likes, and after all, my own jazz harp "skills" so far extend to some seventh chords and the odd cadence with a secondary dominant. Still, if you're interested in jazz harp, do at least compare this album with something like Dorothy Ashby's In A Minor Groove.
