twang twang twang - MUNICH

chorus of gossips

As the thousands of you who read my swinging post (trebling my hits - thank you - and also revealing that it's all you think about) will know, I was toying with the idea of writing a music & sex post.  In a frightfully serious and Important way, of course, linking perhaps the pacing of dynamics in a piece of romantic music to, well, use your imagination (but don't crescendo too quickly!);  or more prosaically discussing why so many musicians have affairs on tour (no, I haven't).  It was all going to, er, climax in a cunning twang-twang-twanging melange of music, sex and the human condition;  how we define ourselves as musicians, and, if 'twere late enough at night when I finished writing it, What Is Art.

Alex lowered the tone before I did but records more seriously today that Tindall intends her whistle-blowing exposee of classical music's sexy side, Mozart In The Jungle, "to illustrate how the Cold War-era 'culture boom' established an unrealistic blueprint for arts economics and attitudes in America."  It's not only about revealing which well-known composer was caught in an embarrasing position with a broken leg, a tied-up girlfriend and a superman costume (I already know, but am sworn to secrecy). If, as Alex says, "Tindall uses a bit of gossip to draw attention to the bigger issues, more power to her." 

I began my career as a Noyes-Fludde-esque gossip when I lived with a singer on a show we were doing, and thus had inside information on the exploits both of the bandroom and the chorus dressing-room.  Arriving in the theatre early to tune every day meant I overheard any rows the management were having, and before you could say "you'll never guess, but" people were appearing in the harp loft, reverently asking "is it true that...".  If I couldn't answer them, I could by the end of the matinee.  I suppose you could say I discovered something of a talent for it - the most crucial aspect being, if you hear something you really shouldn't have, keep silent.  Gossip is only fun if it is not malicious.

Whistle-blowing is different.  In gossip it's easy to tell when something will be entertaining to hear and either harmless or positively edifying for the gossip victim (like a friend of mine who ended up in a threesome with two Swedish girls.  That one's being publicised, I can tell you);  or when it will cause harm.   Whistle-blowing demands subtler judgment.  To expose, for example, a major concert hall screwing up the box office so orchestras lose thousands of pounds - is that defamation or standing up for musicians' rights?  Or, if there is a teacher causing trouble, and you are asked formally to log exactly what the problems are - to do that can be as malicious as it can be morally courageous, depending on the circumstances.

I am a great believer in taking a stand;  equally in not hurting or humiliating people unless it is absolutely unavoidable.  The arts world particularly is a combination of organisations and individuals and so many of us walk a constant tightrope between going the extra mile, and stepping over the line.  It's a jungle out there.  I hope Mozart will be OK. 

Start spreading the news...

Noo York, NOO YARRRRRRRK

I am going to take a holiday to New York in March.  I have only had one stop-over since my two-month Super Summer of 98.  Time to see if the Yaffa Cafe is still giving out yaffacafecondoms with the bill. 

1) would any of you lovely bloggers care to hang out with me?  Particularly as, if the exchange rate continues like this, I will be buying the drinks.
2) even if you don't want to see me, let me know what unmissable Arty Stuff is going on in NYC, to help me plan my flights.

Hooray!  George is back.  Welcome back, George.

Jammer der Erde

Alex Ross invites me to reflect on the doom-laden twangings of the harp bass.  There's various ways I could approach this, such as a homily on the harp's wide range of colours and sonorities;  how the composer can best exploit these;  the effect of technical developments on harp writing through the ages;  and lamentation that I just forked out £300 to have my bass wires replaced. 

The concert harp today stands six feet high, weighs 90lbs and carries a string tension of three tons. 

The thickest, longest, lowest notes are not catgut, like the upper strings, but instead are made of silk wrapped round with wire, breaking rarely, but with a bang like gunshot.  They are big f***ers and, as Alex says, sound dark and devastating.  Play the lowest C ff and it will vibrate for several minutes. 

These strings have modern power, resonating round extended soundboards and pulling on a frame reinforced by sophisticated resins and hidden girders.  As with all instruments the technical work's ongoing.  The Salvi firm has just brought out another harp with an even greater soundboard extension than normal. 

Such harps were very much still in development when Mahler began to write Das Lied von der Erde in 1907, where Alex notices "bass tones [that] can mess with your head."  I am not a big expert (although I know a man who is, so if anybody wants sharper academic detail, email me) but I think it likely that early performances of Das Lied would have used Gothic 46 string Erad double-action harps.  Here, for example, is what would have been the largest sort of harp in 1870 (it's about nine inches shorter than the one above, but I couldn't find a pic to scale).

You can get a good noise out of these harps, but to have a fighting chance at the back of a full symphony orchestra you really need a modern instrument, even in Schoenberg's one-to-a-part orchestration of Das Lied.   Is this why Mahler writes low harp notes with pizzicato double basses?  If it is, from necessity springs felicity:  the basses provide the attack, and the harp the extended vibration.  Matthew Taylor used the same effect when he included the harp in his third symphony. 

Geniuses like Mahler push the boundaries of their time.  The small detail of the harp bass notes is one instance of Mahler's focus on melodic polyphony, an exploration of instrumental sonorities, outstanding in a western classical tradition which normally priviledges harmony. 

What makes different effects on any instrument exciting are the emotional worlds they unlock.  The harp has laboured under an image of hotel musak and tinkling local colour in the orchestra (the only thing Tchaikovsky reckoned it was good for, but at least he left us hours of fun cooking the books in the cadenzas).  Mahler's understanding both of high-tech bass and a mature middle range (the harp's most expressive register) - lets us in, not just to the kingdom of sweets or Marie Antoinette's salon, but to some of the most devastating music ever heard.  His harp writing is at once tender and respectful, mindful too of what lies well under the fingers.   Ravel is the same, and Debussy; Tailleferre;  Caplet;  and Faure also once he'd had a little help from his harpist friend Hasslemans.  They are the giants' shoulders on which some of our greatest later repertoire stands:  Holliger, Berio, Britten, Ginastera, Hindemith.

I am a player rather than an academic or theorist (not that they should be mutually exclusive), and so for me the combination of emotional sympathy and technical understanding is essential to beautiful composition.  Find unusual noises (like wrapping paper in the strings, howling into the soundbox, blowing biro caps, praising the conductor), but give them a soul.  Don't write against the instrument.  By all means require virtuosity - true virtuosity takes hours of work, but is rewarded by an impression of soaring effortlessness.  But music that grates against the instrument, while it may not technically be all that hard, is never expressive.  If the instrument cannot express what the music has to say, you might as well not have written it. 

The world has enough white noise.  Enjoy the dark side.   

the tonic of wildness

Terry Teachout, bless him, has catapulted twang twang twang into a megamonga all-new hits record with his racy link to my last post.  By way of contrast today I played classical sonatas in Kensington Palace.  There was no funny business there, I can tell you.  I asked them if there ever had been and they said one of the royals sat on an old bed and put a dent in it once. 

Besides, be you clad in ermine or easy-clean, I am trained to maintain perfect professionalism at all times. 

Seriously, there's a proper ungossipy piece to be written about classical music and, er, the wild side, but I haven't got the nerve tonight.  Maybe tomorrow, but first I must master the legato in my Scarlatti sonata and put in my order for replenishment harp polish. 

oo-er

Today I went up to this stately home in Shropshire to play for a Venetian masked ball... like Eyes Wide Shut.  I was playing for the perfectly normal pre-dinner hour in the foyer, but then Tom and I were invited to join the main party.  "Oh well," I said, "we have to get back, but I wouldn't mind having a quick look, as it's all so beautifully done up."  "That's fine", said the guy in charge, "if you just like to watch." 

At this point I realised - normally I get tipped with a bottle of champagne or money or something, but being offered swinging is certainly different.

(and no, we didn't, we went back to London instead)

inquiring of that mystic trinity...

..."body, mind and muse", as John Donne metaphysicked in a Letter To R.W.  I am back from the gym and a sadistic trinity of lifting weights, leaping around and faking sit-ups at the back of the core stability class.  I'm going to be, like, the world's fittest harpist.

It is a curious paradox that, for a profession that involves the physical so heavily, musicians often pursue highly unhealthy lifestyles and keep quiet about their injuries.  The obvious reasons for drinking too much, eating junk and not exercising are the stress and irregular routines;  and if it gets out that you aren't in good shape, you will lose work, because like a racehorse you are little use off-form. 

The reasons for this poor situation are both simple and, in their clarity, hard to resist.  Nonetheless, as in Donne's intricate imagery and like half the fiddle section's shoulders, the injury problem is knotted, entangled in minds and hearts alongside aching bodies.

Learning technical exercises is dull and so usually sold to us, thus:  the right technique will allow to you express whatever it is you want to do artistically, and it will also stop you getting injured.  To have good technique, then, is fundamentally essential, and full of emotional investment, pride and personal dignity.  If you have no technique, you are a bad musician.  If you get injured, by implication, you must have had bad technique;  and, by extension, likewise be a poor musician. 

Like the reasons for living unhealthily and denying problems, all of the above about technique is, broadly, true.  But again, the reality is subtler.  Technique, at the highest level (one that will sustain your body though a small repetitive action for six plus hours a day), has to be honed to your own physique.  You learn the general principals from a teacher, but you also have to be aware how best to manifest them yourself. 

Yehudi Menuhin picked his technique apart.  He realised that what he had done unconsciously as a young man would, without genuine understanding, soon unravel (as always happens if you decide to go on stage and "trust your fingers" to perform from memory a piece you have only learnt mechanically).  Menuhin also recognised that music is an unfinished journey, intellectually, emotionally, and physically.  Your body changes as you get older;  with time it is easy to develop bad habits.  And what causes one person no problems might give you RSI, because some people are tougher than others.  Anybody who says "but surely you don't need to worry about technique any more now" thinks amateurishly.  If it's a journey good enough for one of the world's greatest musicians, it's good enough for me.

Without Menuhin's saintly disposition, it is the most terrific bore to take apart a technique that took years to learn, and it is not enjoyable to confess that you might not be feeling fine.  But, of course, when injuries are not admitted to early and properly investigated, they grow far more debilitating than they need to.  Arm pain is often caused by a trapped nerve in the back, not by how you move your wrist as you play the violin.  But you have to have a certain awareness of anatomy and be prepared to talk to enough physicians to discover this. 

I live near the excellent Islington Chiropractic Clinic.  Last year they diagnosed a locked joint in my back in five minutes (typically, there was nothing wrong with my arm); my spine was adjusted back into line with a gratifyingly fortissimo crack, and I walked out pain-free.  I had some follow-up sessions but it was miraculous.  Newly enlightened into the mysteries of the nervous system, I made a minor adjustment both to my general posture and when I play, which took all of five minutes to master.  And I am fine, playing for hours every day, and the whole business has been so easily resolved:  without drugs, without surgery, and - crucially - without ever having to dep a gig out.   

The Royal Ballet dancers get two weekly sessions of pilates and daily physio as a matter of course.  Menuhin did yoga as he reworked his technique (I'm learning yoga as well, so I will not only be the world's fittest harpist, but the calmest).  Body-awareness like this and the Alexander technique are now, happily, being taught in conservatoires. 

Apart from anything else, a spot of exercise affords an agreeable break from staring at harp strings.  Although the stomach crunching session was definitely a mistake.  Everyone else looked like a body-builder, with abs stronger than my legs.  I can hardly stand up.

PS: ACD helpfully points out my spelling mistakes, and my British inflection. Awfully decent of you, old chap.

 

In dreams begins responsibility

Along with every other harpist in the land, I just auditioned for a ballet job.  I don't expect to get it - I'm up against famous virtuosi and people who play with the Vienna Phil and distinguished twangers twice my age and the French mafia - but harp auditions only come up about once every 30 years, so you have to do them.  And if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing properly, so I did some work; learnt useful things;  and emerged from the audition both in one piece and with the added distinction of being, I am told, The Only Harpist Asked To Play Something Again A Bit Differently.  It's good to stand out from the herd, I suppose. 

Auditions have their blue periods (not this one, actually, they'd really thought about the audition conditions and treated me very well).  Such a great job (and I love ballet and opera work);  so many people to compete against.  So few harp jobs.  I will never get a sodding job.  Etc.  Just because you are good enough to do a job, doesn't mean you will get it, ever.  There might always be somebody better than you. 

The world doesn't owe anyone a living:  we make our own.  Nobody owes me a job in a ballet company;  I just have to keep trying (or give up; but as I say, I enjoy the work.  If I were striving all the time to be a tax collector, that might be different, but then again it could be my life's vocation to catch those no-good creative types and their shoeboxes full of bus tickets). Sarah Bullen has a very good line in her 'Principal Harp' book:  "you can get better and learn, or get bitter and decline.  The choice is yours."

In a creative field learning goes beyond knowing Romeo and Juliet so well you never mess the pedals up.    Alex eloquently poses the overwhelming question,  "Authenticity in today's musical market" - where integrity leaves off and destructive conservatism begins.

"Now, who chooses to fail, who wants to fail? No one consciously does, I suppose, but there is an attitude which amounts to the same thing, and it can be detected in some corners of the classical world. It’s the attitude of, well, things seem to be going down hill, so the best thing to do is to hold on to one’s dignity. Kind of like Mr. and Mrs. Astor on the Titanic, or Victor Garber in that movie, holding his head high as the water laps about his feet, his chest, his chin. After all, there can be a kind of excitement, even a strange elation, in bearing witness to the demise of an art, in being the last man standing. I detect an eagerness to see the end, an appetite for destruction, to take a phrase from Axl Rose. But the music refuses to die according to the schedules that doomsayers have devised for it. And, in any case, the death of a great institution or of a genre or of a style is not the same thing as the death of an art. It can feel like death, but it is only change and evolution."

I refuse, for example, to work for what I think are inappropriate fees.  This I consider a sign of integrity and strength.  But if I boycotted TV work because it wasn't concertos, not only would that be joyless, but also too exclusive.  Look at Howard Goodall's great popular musicology documentaries;  excellent work in a new musical arena.

It is a complicated decision-making process,  weighing up what went before with what's happening now and separating development from decay.  So it is in the music itself.  We note it down in black and white, but sing a rainbow of colours, each performance different from the last.

 

the nasty sty

Hamlet is a play of many colours, but I think it's about the tragedy of being so much more intelligent than everybody else around you.  Brutally aware that something is rotten, Hamlet's isolated knowledge is nothing but a postlapsarian curse, a Miltonic "solitary way" powerless against a world "stew'd in corruption." 

Hear the gears crunching as I tell you that the other day I was phoned by Celebrity Big Brother's Little Brother, asking if I would go and play on the show.  I have never been able to sit through more than three minutes of Big Brother without a break for gin and Shakespeare, but I thought I could dine out on a tale of meeting Sly Stallone's mum, and never let it be said I don't have a sense of humour. So I quoted the same fee the Royal Opera House had paid me and three others for a similar amount of work a couple of months ago. 

Once the producers had established from me what the going rate was, they called a friend of mine and asked her to do it for £150 less.  £100 and a cup of tea is not a fee for over four hours' TV work.  Less than you'd get for an amateur choral soc date, for chrissake.  And while I haven't seen the Big Budget, I find it hard to believe a show with five million viewers a night really can only manage a tenth of cash-strapped Covent Garden's largesse.

Persuading people to play for peanuts is the perogative of the free market, but it is exploitation which may eventually price us out of a profession.  I have moaned this moan many times before:  once again, musicians, if you give in, it will happen. 

I am reasonably militant on the subject of fees, not because I care only for money (if I did, I would have gone to the City), but because I care about music, and the performance of it to the highest level;  the amount of work it takes to do that requires a living wage.  Nevertheless, even I have to admit that low fees are not as clear-cut in practice as they are in principle.  If I am asked to do a charity date for a charity I support, then I will do it;  I don't charge anything when I  play in hospices;  if a pupil is skint, I give them free lessons.  And I would be kidding myself if I did not admit that I will sometimes work for little money plus some sort of in-kind reward, such as a free advert (and this is Channel 4's justification for the low fees they offer).  Generosity makes the world go round, and it's a tightrope between helping people and being taken for a ride.

Celebrity Big Brother exemplifies the tough call between perfect publicity and poisonous piss-taking.  I didn't reduce my fee, despite the five million viewers;  I hate the show, and gambled that playing background musak on depressing voyeuristic trash was not going to make me hit the big-time.  I would have done it, sure, for a laugh, but if I am going to sell my soul, it may as well be expensive.  In hindsight I think I was probably right, but you can never be sure. 

Even if it would have made me famous (for the sake of argument, let us pretend that sharing a dressing room with D list celebrities is the way forward), having watched over two hours of CBB in the interests of research, I'm appalled that this is prime-time viewing.  On the day I was telephoned, Germaine Greer walked out of the house, in protest against CBB's  "crap".  Because Greer is intelligent, she was specific, objecting to the bullying and manipulative handling of the contestants, both within the house and from the producers of the show. 

What shook me, doubly, was how upset Greer was:  tearful, "slightly humiliated";  why?

I would feel tearful myself after 24/7 downtime in that house, and I suppose would be potentially embarassed by my association with it, but Greer's courageous whistle-blowing outweighs anything dubious about her inital decision to go on the show.  It is not for me to dictate the reasons behind others' feelings.  But, somewhat like Hamlet, Greer is the only person bright enough to appreciate the full ghastliness of the house, and so, she is maddened by it.  Why else, on the day of her dramatic walk-out, did the programme which supposedly exists to comment on the day's events not once mention it?   

Something is rotten in that house.  It entices people in with what you'd charitably describe as generosity with the truth (Jackie Stallone was told she'd be surrounded by eight of the brightest people in England.  I thought I'd be playing for the housemates, not for the opening credits on the follow-up late show, a misunderstanding nobody was in a hurry to clear up); it bullies and humiliates people live across the nation;  and it exploits its extra staff.  It is not, nor it cannot come to good.

 

PHWOAAAAAAAAR!

Lyon and Healy are bringing out a new Harp To End All Harps.

It's based on a one-of-a-kind instrument built in 1916 (which I admired much when it was in the Met in 1998), takes two years to make and it costs...

$179,000!

That's $179,000!

A normal really good professional harp costs about $30,000!*

What is it, touched by the hand of the Lord?

I'll add it to my amazon wish-list.

*I suppose I should add, especially for the string players amongst you, that while harps start expensive they don't normally get to Strad stratospheres, because only up to a point do they get better with age.  Obviously the wood matures, but after about 100 years or so the massive tension on the frame from the pull of the strings (c. 3 tons) means that the soundboard comes up and the neck gets twisted and then it's time for repairs so expensive usually you may as well just buy a new harp.  So there is a price ceiling, or I thought there was.