twang twang twang - MUNICH

cold enough for snow

I have been thinking about Scarlatti, my great-aunt's funeral and the snow (an entire inch has fallen on London, preoccupying the city).  A singular collection, but matters have a habit of coming together in unexpected ways. 

As regular readers of twang twang will know, I am learning this Scarlatti sonata and a week into it   considered that Scarlatti is in a world of his own, entrancingly and infuriatingly weaving around the borders of the musical establishment.  Entrancing, because the sonatas fizz with an energy that is the more intense because of their individuality;  maddening if you are trying to make musical decisions with the weight of conventional classical training behind you.  Sutcliffe admits in Scarlatti's Keyboard Sonatas that he has spent many hours at the piano gazing at his Scarlatti scores, hoping for inspiration to strike.

I was similarly waiting gloomily for a bolt from Apollo this morning.  The F minor sonata is emotionally enigmatic.  A spidery melody passes between treble and bass, decorated by small motifs that threaten to distract from as much as they support the tune.  The dissonances are particularly intense, but in their dissonance are ambivalent, and this intense ambivalence reaches its high points in strikingly deliberate delayed voice leading (bars 20-21 and 59-60).  The mood of the music shifts constantly, from the hushed and taut to the delicately wistful;  a more impassioned statement, then a relaxation into the relative major;  again a more agonised build-up, another relaxation, and a final seven bars that could crescendo or diminuendo, I haven't decided which.  All these emotional variations are contained within a structure of impeccable design and economy, heightening the intensity, and also reinforcing the sense that here is a world in minature, complete.

I had plenty of time to arrive at these observations as it took an hour and a half to eradicate an uneven second finger, and then I looked out of the window at the snow.  And I thought about my great-aunt's funeral, last wednesday, where it also snowed as we processed from the church to the graveyard.  The cemetery is on a hilltop overlooking a valley, and the snow falling gently and silently made everything look even more beautiful, particularly in the eyes of everybody assembled there, for it had snowed at the same church when my great aunt walked out of it on her wedding day, fifty years ago.  As we lowered her into the ground the sun came out, and so the world was white and bright, as well as sad.

The bright snow, and the primeval inevitability of the committal ("We therefore commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life") suddenly brought home how co-existing and conflicting feelings define our most important human experiences.  When someone dies the universe is no longer the same, but all around others are alive, as before:  the world has changed forever, and it has not altered at all.  And your own grief is mixed with complicated other emotions, and an overwhelming realisation that, no matter what you do, nothing can bring them back, and nobody can tell you where they have gone.   There are few words for that, even for a wordy type like me.

Sometimes I want to stay forever, for a moment, on that peaceful hillside, still with my great aunt amid the whirling snow.  A world is contained in the handfuls of earth we pick up and scatter down, and, as in Scarlatti, we stand at the edge between what we know and do not know.  The brief sonata ends, hoveringly, and stretches into the silence.

outside the box

As soon as we pick up an instrument or nervously peruse our college reading list we're taught particular ways of thinking about music.  Almost nobody can teach themselves how to play well, and techniques breed stylistic schools of thought (like rolling every chord with more than two notes, if you were a Paris conservatoire harpist in 1900).  Musicology also builds interpretative systems:  historical context, the importance of biographical detail, or analytical methods.

Without order life would resemble the theatre of the absurd rather than planet earth, but every system has mavericks who refuse to play by the rules.  Some are the system's casualties;  some anarchically reject it;  others slither in and out of the boundaries.  These last are the rebels we can learn most from, because most of us have to start with something we already understand before we can learn new things.

I am learning Scarlatti's F minor sonata (K466).  Some keyboard music works very well on the harp (the Italian concerto is another example), and gives us the chance to play great music we'd otherwise be denied.  There is plenty of wonderful music in the orginal harp repertoire - but working on JS Bach, Scarlatti or Mozart provides an extra dimension:  the easily accessible academic.  Contrary to popular belief, musicianship and harping are not mutually exclusive, but because there is almost nothing written about harp repertoire, if you want to be intelligent about it you have to be a bit more self-reliant.  We are outside the system, if you like.  Heaven knows why, given the harp's one of the most ancient and symbolic instruments, developed to have a vast range of colours (Grandjany's "orchestra in every string"), but there it is.

Being a misfit is not necessarily a bad thing (if pushed for time, you can just make your harp programme notes up :) ).  Take Scarlatti.   There is almost no biographical information;  no autographs;  and the music itself escapes definition.  Is Scarlatti Spanish, Iberian, Neopolitan?  Baroque or classical?  Inspired by folk songs or high art music?   If I need help interpreting the F minor sonata, I will not find it in any eighteenth-century treatise on The Art of Keyboard Playing. 

Scarlatti is a world by himself - a highly deliberate, self-consciously stylised world, but one that refuses any one style.  It is emotionally and intellectually unsettling, but also liberating.  I like this, from W.  Dean Sutcliffe:

"This musical body language provokes and tempts the critic to match its direct, exuberant, sometimes delirious character, to let go of contexts and causes and join in the dance.  Then there is the deep sense of strangeness that infuses any sustained contemplation of the composer's circumstances and output - strange both because of what we do know and what we don't know."

(The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti)

[If it's your cup of tea, I would also recommend Sutcliffe for his incisive work on how Scarlatti's maverick situation reveals assumptions within musicology, both about why people write music and why we study it]. 

How d'y'do?

Hello, readers from the Mercury News!  And thanks to Richard Scheinin for including twang twang twang.  I hope you enjoy my blog and the blogroll to your left.

I have never been telephoned from California before, so it was terribly exciting.  I was able to say to Tom at about midnight "If the phone rings, it's California for me", which sounded rather grand.

out of joint

Oboeinsight has some amusing descriptions of off-putting audience members.  Audiences are the performer's raison-d'etre - I love you all, and it's great when people come up with comments and questions after concerts.  I don't even mind the piccolo jokes and how-much-does-it-cost, really. As with all human encounters, 'though, there is the odd hilarious moment.

My favourite anecdote stems from my recital days on the QE2.  I was trying to get my harp off the stage and there is a law of nature that dictates that the ship must roll most violently when you are carting a £20 000 instrument down narrow stairs.  As I struggled with it, a chivalrous-looking gentleman came over.  Did he help?  Did he hell!  He stared at my precarious progress and then asked "is your harp tuned to A440?"

I said "not if it falls on top of you, it won't be."

daybreak and a candle-end

Woo-hoo! Unbritishly effusive thanks to everybody who commented on my Brahms post.  Particular kisses to Paul, who constructed a detailed defence with musical examples for me to download.  You may not eat fruit, Paul, but then nor does my best friend, not even raisins.

The comment flurry raised interesting ideas.  Steve began the argument that refusing to admit a sense of effort and struggle in music is not necessarily a good thing, which Martin is also thinking about.   Paul's view that Brahms "is the most humane composer" is similarly related to his acceptance of what is troubled and difficult.   

I listened to Paul's favourite lullabies and downloaded the clarinet quintet Terry suggested (which  I should have had already, but I spent all my money on solo harp works by Parish-Alvars and Krumpholtz).  I still didn't like it, really.  The lullabies were nice enough but lacked the sort of confidence, structurally, melodically, or harmonically, which makes you feel either that the music could not have been written any other way (as with Mozart), or jolts you with unexpectedly brilliant twists (like some of JS Bach's suprise modulations, or Scarlatti's astoundingly modern dissonances).  The clarinet quintet is an incredibly impressive composition, but again there seemed to be a diffidence about it:  for all its craftsmanship, an underwhelming absence of drive.  It is probably too subtle for me.  Like Tim, hopefully I will grow into it. 

Steve compared Brahms' sense struggle to Beethoven's, and as I sat listening and wondering why I still didn't like it, this got me thinking.  I love Beethoven.  Beethoven is probably my most favourite composer in the whole world.  The great irony in my life is that Beethoven never wrote a note for me to play.  Steve is right, too, to compare Beethoven and Brahms.  Similarly tortured souls (muss es sein?  es muss sein!);  a shared classic/romantic dialectic. 

For me, Beethoven succeeds where Brahms never quite pulls it off.  Beethoven is feverishly powerful, not diffident or neurotic.  He has terrible violence and misery, but equally intense sweetness.  I know of no sweetness in music sweeter than Beethoven.  In Brahms, there is perhaps a lovely tune - the cello second subject in the first movement of the fourth symphony, for example - but then it is worried to death through over-development.  In Beethoven, such as in the great F Major quartet, there is a clarity, a simplicity, never facile, but more firmly rooted. 

It is certainly human to be anxious and unsure.  At the moment, in art, I prefer to hear that anxiety either co-exist equally and honestly with an awareness of the exquisitely lovely (personally, I find Brahms' nervousness outweighs any optimism) or manifest itself powerfully, overwhelmingly - Shostokovich, for example, or Yeats' Wild Old Wicked Man, or Dylan Thomas raging against the dying of the light.

With the wisdom of experience my perspective will probably alter.  For the moment, there it is, although next time I have to sit out a Brahms symphony at an orchestral date, I will listen in rather than leg it to the nearest bar out of earshot.  Thanks again to you all for the help and advice.  Next week on twang twang twang:  why J S Bach is overrated. 

Burn your Brahms?

Twang twang twang is customarily mild-mannered but today I am feeling militant.  So, in what passes for iconoclasm if you're into classical music, I have never liked Brahms.  Obviously Brahms is a great composer, and I am loath to fall prey to that sort of unseeing arrogance that says things like "King Lear's quite a good play", so I do listen to him in the hope I will finally get it.  There is something neurotic in his endless development and variation, and an overwhelming sense of personal misery or disquiet.  I have nothing against sad music - on the contrary, it's terribly important - but in Brahms I find little hope or resolution.  Even the waltzes are nervous.  It does my head in.  Fortunately there is very little harp in Brahms, such as the German Requiem, the fourth most tedious piece in the world, and only surpassed by (dullest first) The Kingdom, The Apostles, and The Dream Of Gerontius. 

I am reminded of my Big Blind Spot (along with being unable to park, do any sort of maths, cook, read maps or eat anything without spilling it down my front) by a searching post from Mark, the across-the-pond half of musica transatlantica:

"Let's say that we composers are, in some fundamental sense, descendants of both, oh, say 1.Orpheus and his masterful playing upon the lyre, and say 2.Brahms. I'll be reductive (whimsical too) and let the former represent the ease and joy of song, virtuosity, and the immdeiate pleasure of the musical moment, while the latter shall be the act of work and difficulty in the sense of laborious intellectual activity. I believe composers listen not only to the piece of music but also to the composer in the act of composition; that is, we listen to each other thinking and acting. Intellects like to recognize each other. So, I would say it is possible to hear the ease of composition, or the difficulty. This cuts across the old simple/complexity divide, for most composers know that it can be really difficult to write something simple and really easy to write something complex. And the more intuitive visa versa also holds.

What it seems to me, in a very broad sense, is that composers post-Brahms are generally thought to be keepers of the aesthetic of the difficult, in the sense of evidence of intellectual labor, while it has fallen to performers to preserve the aesthetic of ease. Virtuosity, after all, is making the difficult appear easy; no matter how tricky a passage, a virtuoso has played scales and figures twice as fast and in fact has just done so this morning after breakfast, thank you. Composers, on the other hand, are generally relied upon to produce a Work, showing evidence of some thinking, working out, difficulty of some kind."

It would be hard to get very far in music without intellectual craftsmanship, of course, as well as inspiration, but I am with Mark in that the greatest art sounds effortless, and perhaps there is sometimes a dichtomy between composers and performers which is not helpful.  My sister remarked recently, for example, that if a performance is really great you forget about the performer, you stop worrying about them, and only hear the music.

Poor old Brahms, I do feel the most frightful cow whinging on about him like this, I mean, he must have been inspired as well as intellectual or he wouldn't be a great composer.  Perhaps some of you could write in with listening suggestions that are not unremittingly troubled or overwrought. 

Trauermusik

My dear, much-loved great aunt, Rosalys Gill, died on Sunday.  She was the most wonderful, inspiring lady:  one of those people you are the better for having known.  How proud my too-soon dead great uncle would have been to see everything she achieved during her long widowhood:  a large costume hire centre; thriving community groups; lectures and talks; so many friends.  She was wonderful with children and so from when I was very small I always adored her.   I will miss her very much, and her courtesy, gentle grace, wise tolerance and joy. 

The Standing Room movingly describes singing at his friend's funeral:

"Yesterday was a strong reminder to me of how music functions in our lives. It's not just entertainment, and it's not simply a concert-hall experience. Our calling as musicians is to help people mark important life events, and make them memorable. We create those moments when genuine emotional release is possible. We allow people to enter that space where they can express real joy and real sorrow without judgment or self-consciousness or artifice."

I had to play a recital 48 hours after Rosalys died and while in some ways it was hard, it was also terribly important to go on and give 110%.  Partly because she was an actress and would have insisted that the show must go on - but more because, as TSR so eloquently identifies, one can find an emotional space within the music which is entirely honest.  Great music combines vitality (particularly in live performance) with sorrow, anger with acceptance:  conflicting feelings that everybody experiences, but to express these conflicts in black-and-white words is hard (not impossible, though - see below).

Sometimes when awful things happen I can find no music I want to listen to, but because my great aunt was a beautiful, rare person, she has inspired me to listen to much fine music, such as Ravel's Pavane pour une infante defunte. It is like her, not least in the vitality it retains even as it is elegaic.  As Ravel said, "a Pavane for a dead princess, not a dead Pavane for a princess".

Dylan Thomas's poem, below, is an outstanding piece of verbal Trauermusik.  Its searing rhythms and imagery acknowledge death's dreadful sides, but are also beautiful. Such are the equal,  conflicting strands of the human condition, in all its wonder and pathos. 

AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION

       And death shall have no dominion.
       Dead men naked they shall be one
       With the man in the wind and the west moon;
       When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
       They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
       Though they go mad they shall be sane,
       Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
       Though lovers be lost love shall not;
       And death shall have no dominion.

       And death shall have no dominion.
       Under the windings of the sea
       They lying long shall not die windily;
       Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
       Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
       Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
       And the unicorn evils run them through;
       Split all ends up they shan't crack;
       And death shall have no dominion.

       And death shall have no dominion.
       No more may gulls cry at their ears
       Or waves break loud on the seashores;
       Where blew a flower may a flower no more
       Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
       Though they be mad and dead as nails,
       Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
       Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
       And death shall have no dominion.

 

culture vulture

Scott draws our attention to the virtual instrument museum.  It only yielded a couple of things for "harp", but hopefully it will develop into a wonderful large resource.  I only know of a couple of books of any weight about the harp, a pity for an instrument with one of the longest, most culturally diverse and symbolically resonant histories.  Perhaps I will email in and offer to extend it for them.

Instrument museums are a killer for bringing out your inner geek, no matter how cool a young modern classical musician you pretend to be.  In the summer of 2002 I was giving recitals on the QE2 and we had a day's stopover in New York.  I was so excited by the thought of seeing the beautiful 1916 Louis XVI Lyon& Healy in the Met again I dragged my flautist all the way across Central Park in 95 degree heat.  I am not proud of this - I like the heat, but by the time I was skipping up the stairs she'd almost collapsed with sunstroke (and I was reminiscing loudly "ah yes, and here, on these very marble steps, in the summer of 98, Yoran the Yugoslavian artist grabbed my arm out of the blue and told me I was his muse and he had to paint me", which didn't help).

I got my well-deserved come-uppance, though.  The Lyon was on loan somewhere else and I had to stay and look at old flutes with her instead, which was really boring. 

pop tart

Tom and I were breakfasting in Starbucks today when he got phoned up by BRIAN ENO!!!!!

I said:

"how the hell do you know Brian Eno?"

and he said:

"He supports the site I'm launching on Monday". 

T is now emailing Damon Albarn about the same site.  I dunno how he does it.

Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind

This post is replacing my rueful competition whinge.  There will be some analysis of harp music, so if that's all a bit nerdish, the potted version is that it can be tempting to be more of an player than a musician, but, obviously, musicianship is everything, otherwise one may as well go and join a circus.  Now you can go and read Alex's hilarious one-size-fits-all-email-response.

Thanks to all of you who wrote in supportively when I got thrown out of my competition because of bad repertoire choices.  It turns out, if the voting had been down to the harpist on the panel, I could have gone through because, choice of music aside, I did play the harp well.  But more generally competitions and repertoire is an issue with wider implications than prizes.   

You have to avoid getting bogged down in the sort of instrumental minutiae that may appeal in a single-instrument competition.  Instead you have to consider firstly what is the strongest music you have to offer (before you think of your own playing).  Then, secondly, you have to be sure that that music comes across well on the harp.  The CPE Bach G Major adagio, for example, is very hard to bring off, because a harp does not sustain a melody like a violin and so the slow movement can easily limp along in 6 instead of a graceful 3.  The aforementioned Faure Une Chat.  is another killer:  technically extraordinarily difficult, but even more difficult to render appealingly for those who are not harpists, and this again is to do with problems with sustain and also technical awkwardness.  Faure's Impromptu (edited by his harpist mate Hasslemans) lies well under the hands, but musically is also a dangerous piece.  Techniques and traditions very common to the harp mean that to other musicians' ears not everything we do naturally sounds convincing.  We spread so many chords, we do not always play together enough;  slowing down to damp and accomodate an evil pedal change may sound like a tedious grind to a halt.  Salzedo's Variations on a Theme in the Ancient Style, in contrast, is just as difficult as these last two but with huge impact.  I have never performed it without the audience cheering, and that is not because of my rendition of it, it is the piece's own strength.

The harp is not boring or insignificant, but there is such a thing as boring music, even refined classical music - or, music which is exceptionally difficult not to play boringly on a particular instrument.   Rueful I am, that I have always moaned about going to concerts where the musicians can't see past their own middle-class noses and just play the most staggeringly dull programmes, only to do exactly the same thing myself.  Still, such is the wisdom of humility, as Terry quotes. 

After those breathtakingly fascinating remarks I'm off to have some passport photos done and go to Tescos for my sick friend.