twang twang twang - MUNICH

the play's the thing

George Hunka posts on live theatre performance (in response to a letter from ACD) versus film or recording, and argues "We American theater workers won't get ACD back to the theater until we can give him a theater that he recognizes as a worthwhile aesthetic experience, an experience he can't get from a movie, a DVD or a television series. We must take our art form as seriously as other artists take theirs."

Live performance is absolutely crucial because it's an otherwise unattainable artistic dimension, vital player in what all art is for - broader perspectives, extended empathy, improved self-knowledge and a greater heart.  Live, the play (or music) rolls forth in real time and through the efforts of real people, not airbrushed screen gods.  In live theatre, this immediate connection to reality - the collective other, as George says - is necessary for the play on truth and illusion that drives the dramatic voice.  The actors pretend to be what they are not - on-stage, nothing is what it seems;  but, acting live, they are also real, and so we question the realities we construct around us too.  See better, Lear...And, to deal plainly/I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

A film of a play is a film, not a play; the text's function alters sans live acting. Recording, too, is something else.  You may have, as Glenn Gould had, a very fine account of a score - even a perfect one, if you believe in that sort of thing.  You can splice together your takes and drop in new notes to cover the fluffed ones;  singers' voices can even be put in tune.  Half of me rejoices in those clever engineers, because they can make you what you want to be.  When you leave the studio and put the CD on in your car, that perfect playing is you, putting two fingers up to your nerves and insecurities and cold shaky fingers.  For once, the music is unsullied by your human error.  You got it right.  Bravo.

Is it possible to be a perfect artist?  To deal plainly, there is always more to do.  That is the performer's Catch-22, striving for something we can only manage in patches, if at all.  As Eliot remarks in 'The Dry Salvages', "For most of us this is the aim/Never here to be realised./Who are only undefeated/Because we have gone on trying."  But that is why it is moving to see a performance.  It is heroic - it carries on regardless of difficulty, and it aspires to something that, because it does not come easily, is rare and precious.  When somebody performs astoundingly well, they defy their human limitations and deliver something rich and strange.   As I quoted in my earlier Auden post,  "Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance."

Why do people cry bravo, after all, if not for uncommon joy?

start together and finish together

It's all-out excerpts here at the minute, what with the sound collective gig and an audition I've got coming up.  Orchestra is probably my favourite sort of work anyway, involving music so great it is a privilege to be on the stage;  musicians so fantastic it is equally a privilege to be on the stage with them.  Many aspects of orchestral life also appeal to my somewhat gregarious nature, but enough of that, lest I lower the tone on a classical music blog. 

Anyhow via Iron Tongue of Midnight I have been reading Drew McManus's excellent Adaptistration, about orchestral management and its machinations across a continually changing musical landscape.  There is much to skive off Tchaikovsky harp parts with on diverse music/management issues, but especially pertinent are the posts that argue for the need to work with change, not against it; likewise musicians and management to work together, not war.  I think a lot of the orchestral administrators I work for in the UK are incredible - I don't know how they do it.  I can hardly post my Christmas cards on time, let alone run a band.  Simultaneously you've only to experience really dodgy management once to wake up to how destructive it can be, not just when you don't get paid in time or whatever, but because it really puts a damper on the music if, for example, you discover you, as a section principal categ-D porterage instrument, are on less money than the rank-and-file second fiddle married to the leader of your scratch opera date.  Not because of the £££, really -   because, as Drew points out in Looking At The Money Drug, if this happens when you have turned up and worked hard and done a good job, it mocks your professionalism.  And given that professionalism is vital for the secure running of a concert, for the managers to hold it in light esteem is something we don't deserve.

"treat musicians like professionals and they will do the same in return.  Eliminate contractual loopholes and the fuzzy language that allow for abuse and games.

The old parable “good fences make good neighbors” can be applied in a number of ways to the orchestra industry.  Managers and musicians have to live side by side and work together.  They don’t have to like each other but they have to respect each other and eliminate the opportunities for abuse, apathy, and retaliation."

Better stop.  Symphony in Three Movements is calling me, with the metronome at...
 

Ring out, wild bells

I did absolutely nothing over Christmas.  I did my last Christmas concert and then got on a train and headed north without the harp.  This is the first time in about three years I have been away without And Harp Comes Too for more than two days.  It was great.  Ate turkey, watched the queen, went for walks, sat in ye olde village pub, had family row, enjoyed mutual forgiveness ten minutes later, wondered if I'd put on weight - customary festive cheer, without a massive gilded instrument of guilt, fear and misery in the corner of the sitting room.

Nonetheless I am quite pleased to see it again as we're gearing up for sound collective's biggest concert to date, in SJSS on January 7th.  Tom Hammond will conduct a historically-informed Beethoven 3, and premiere Matthew Taylor's third symphony.  Matthew uses the Beethoven line-up for his symphony, but, bless him, has added a harp so I can be in it (for this he is going on my Lovely Boys list, along with Tom who came up trumps with my Xmas Ipod :) ).  Tom H was up in the North East as well over Christmas so I had a peek at the whole score -  I haven't looked forward to the start of January so much for a long time.

Rather than even attempt to pretend this is not a plug, Download sound_collective_jan_press_release.doc .   Prior to the downbeat John McCabe will talk with Matthew Taylor :  a rare chance to see two living composers discuss the importance of the symphony to modern music and culture.  John and Matthew agreeing to do this is the icing on the cake for me, really, because the whole programme appeals to my obsession with the co-existence of old and new in classical music.  It'll be fascinating to  track the development of a musical form over almost exactly two hundred years. 

Comfort and joy, everybody!

I'm looking forward to the Queen's speech, gawd bless 'er.  The spin doctors went trendy a few years ago and now you get HM sort of romping through the reign in soft focus against patriotic musak.  About the only time of year I am delighted to be English.  Still, wherever you are, Happy Christmas.

Jeff Cancels Christmas

Farewell, Sidonie Goossens.  I remember her from when I was about five, and Marie, too.  I wonder what they thought of the orchestral scene now.  We are the poorer without them.

An interesting detail is that Eugène put both his daughters on the harp as it was the only instrument that allowed women a performing career at the time; other than the harp, orchestras were men-only.

The harp is still the instrument whereby one has the best chance of making a living, as I sometimes rather coarsely remind the smart-alecs who inform me "you chose the wrong instrument!" when they see me trundling about.

It is good to learn from the Goossens sisters that you can be savvy, a great artist and a lady, all at the same time.

PS:  I failed to be very ladylike the other day, when a Porsche honked at me because, by stooping to get something out of my car, I impeded his left turn by all of five seconds.  I gave him the finger and then clacked down St James in my heels after him shaking my tiny harpist fist and squeaking "oaf!  bastard!" etc.  Then I had to wait in the cold for ten minutes in case he came back and let all my tyres down or something.

In the chill I reflected I'd lowered myself to his level and all those other things your mother always told you. 

Reading List

Clare Stevens lists her music books of the year in Classical Music Magazine.  I'll be getting:

- On Creativity (Methuen h/b).  "Thirteen artists from a range of disciplines interviewed by John Tusa for Radio 3 and published in edited transcripts"

- Sing, Ariel (Ashgate h/b with CD).  "Elliott Carter and Goehr's pupil the musicologist Nicholas Cook are among the contributors to a collection [celebrating Alexander Goehr's 70th] which inludes, according to our reviewer Andrew Stewart, 'a far higher count than usual of outstanding essays'"

- Ivan Hewitt's Healing The Rift (Continuum h/b).  "The rift is between avant-garde and experimental art music and traditional classical music.  Hewett alerts us to the danger that classical music may be becoming at the same moment ubiquitous and invisible;  we have a choice, he believes, between keeping faith with it and reanimating it so that it stays a living art, 'or being faced with its ghost murmering at us from restaurant loudspeakers and CD shops and TV screens.'"

I hope Santa brings me an Ipod for Christmas.
In anticipation of this happy event, I must reorganise my Itunes so that Kraftwerk does not segue into Tosca. 

on with the show

On wednesday I lured an unsuspecting friend into the car and we headed east.  The M11 turned into the A11, that single carriageway into a B road, winding its way through Thetford forest, the Norfolk market town of Swaffham (last year, fighting to have no Tescos, and only small local shops), and up a dirt track to Fakenham and finally the tiny North Norfolk hamlet of Thursford.  Thursford, for the last three years, had been my home for two months every Christmas as the show band harpist for the Thursford Christmas Spectacular.  I retired this year - or at least, took a year off - so for the first time I was going to see the whole thing out front.

Other than the church and the village hall, the Thursford Collection is the only building in the village that isn't a small cottage.  During most of the year it is a museum of local farming equipment through the ages and also has a large collection of Wurlitzer organs, from which the idea for the Christmas show stems.  Phil Kelshaw, a Wurlitzer virtuoso normally based in Blackpool, comes down to play Christmas music on the main Wurlitzer What began as a small carol concert with singers and Phil is now an all-singing, all-dancing, multi-costumed, million-pound extravaganza, with a company of over a hundred up from the West End and over 180,000 tickets sold.  The entire shebang is created and masterminded by the museum director John Cushing.

The actual nature of the performance is impossible accurately to describe but owes something equally to variety, Victorian music hall, panto and reflective carol concert, all pulled together as slickly as it's possible to do anything and with a lighting book as big as the yellow pages.  The audience are mostly coachloads of pensioners up from Eastbourne or wherever, plus a few friends of the cast up from Soho.  The principal audience return annually for a feel-good celebration of Christmas cheer:  the show follows the same format, and Cushing gets letters of complaint if he tries to alter it. Those of us who have never seen it stand and stare at its truly awe-inspiring concoctions.  Somehow, Cushing ties together what you would think could only stand asunder.  The Coventry Carol segued into Jesus Christ Superstar this year, and the Gloria in Excelsis intro rapidly morphed into Gimme Some Lovin' for the disco number, with the dancers in outfits that surely stopped a few pacemakers in the house.  And everybody loves it.  The house is sold out every night, for 72 shows, seating 1500 people each. 

How?  How on earth has Cushing done it?  He's entirely untrained in theatre, but clearly has a natural gift for production, perfected over the years and supported by an all-professional company.  And the show offers good lessons in professionalism. Each show is three hours long and the cast do two a day, pretty much seven days a week, from early November until December 23rd, although early in the run you get some evenings off (there is always a matinee).  I was 22 when I first did it and had never had the experience of doing a long show, with seven costume changes, solo numbers and memory work, plus the whole of the second half onstage (no reading the paper in the pit here) - and then doing it all again an hour later.  Every day.  For two months.  There is no second cast, and it is very good to know one is capable of that sort of work.  You have to give 100% each time, not only out of professional pride, but because the audience have all paid £20 a ticket and it is the highlight of their winter. 

Behind the scenes, as is normal for a section of humanity over ten weeks, people get sick, have rows with their partners, crash their cars, have to sort out domestic crises, and every so often somebody has a moment where they're really not sure they can go on for the 45th show.  But they always do.  The professional drive is very strong.  Every musician is asked at some point or another by a well-meaning punter something along the lines of "what's your real job?" or (usually if they want you to work for free) "but you're doing something you love" (yes, but Jeff and Janet still need Kittymunchies).  But professionalism is how you do something, not what you do, and if you have 1500 people coming to see you, you need a cast who will deliver, even if their boyfriend's run off with the choreographer or they're down with gastric flu.  At an  orchestral run I did the other week the oboist turned up for the second concert and he'd been in casulty all night, having eaten something to which he'd turned out to be allergic.  He was clinically dead for a couple of minutes and it was only when he showed us his jacket, sleeves slashed so they could get the drugs into him more quickly, that we believed him.  He played brilliantly. 

 

blindness

The wretched David Blunkett has resigned.  The press is emotional:

"David Blunkett's fall is an epic tragedy.  Here was a man who succeeded against near-impossible odds, brought down catastrophically by love.  Has even blindness triumphed over adversity so astonishingly?  Was ever love so tragically blind?"
(Polly Toynbee, The Guardian) 

The reason he has actually resigned, however, is because an email was found:

"An e-mail was sent back which we were not aware of by the deputy general secretary's office which actually said no favours but slightly quicker.

Once I had found that out yesterday I realised that I had to resign."

You can call it a world lost for love.   Broadly.  Whether one approves of Blunkett's hard line as home secretary or not, few question the sincerity of his resignation statement.  He was in love with Mrs Quinn;  he believes her child to be his, and for this he feels he is sacrificing his career.   But it is the email, not love, that did for him in the end.

How interesting that, despite that brutally factual email, Blunkett's personal despair is more real not just for us arty types but for most press and political commentators.  But in the real world, unlike in Othello or the death of Orpheus, it's a reality that simultaneously distracts from a bleaker truth. There's a river of tears, but no catharsis:  a problematic layering of events and distorted interpretations, not an emotional release.  This is for real, not a play. 

So this press talk of epic tragedy and blind hubris makes me feel fine texts and scores have been nicked bare-facedly to justify a fall effected by, as well as that email, a media feeding-frenzy of breathtaking callousness.  Blunkett would have done well not to fall in love with a social-climbing Tory and he was stupid to fast-track her nanny's visa, but neither cock-up is a resignation offence.  For shame, hacks, for pinching fine art to make yourselves look moral and reflective when really you only contributed to the unecessary destruction of a man's career.