twang twang twang - MUNICH

there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio

Writing about music is like playing a repertoire warhorse.

Confused?

Here's the gist of what I mean.

Most people can write and most harpists play the Faure Impromptu, arguably the most important work in our repertoire.  And the Faure is mostly massacred and similarly it's amazing what you often find in books.   I'm forever reading so-called musicology and thinking:  what are you trying to say?  where is your argument?  I know it modulates to the subdominant minor.  I can read music.  I want to know what the effect of that modulation is, how it influences the character of the whole, and why it is beautiful and lovely. 

Familiarity breeds contempt, perhaps:  we underestimate the Impromptu because we hear it (badly) so often, and we all have to write from time to time.  It is precisely this familiarity that warns us to take care. 

A piece becomes the most famous in the repertoire for a reason, and is rarely a cinch to pull off.  Well-crafted, writing is vital to that holy grail of musical survival, accessibility.  Entertaining, eloqent words help us hear and to understand, even without years of expensive middle-class music lessons.  If our programmes, journals, and histories are convoluted and humourless, pitched too low or too high, and seasoned liberally with lamentations about the death of classical music, well, are you suprised?

Classical music needs more vigorous, grandly powerful writing.  In such writing, beautifully demonstrated by some illustrious members of the blogosphere, intellectual rigour and a lyrical way with words justify and enhance the emotional range, humour and joie-de-vivre without which we have no music, and so without which we can have no truly useful talk about music. 

It is a truism that a musical masterpiece cries out for a similar combination of facility, feeling, intellect, and joy, else it is nothing but roaring.  Strangely though for something so obvious (perhaps I am slow of study), I have only just noticed.  I have only just perceived how seriously to take the Faure Impromptu.  And I have woken up to it because I went to work on it with, not just a very good musician, but a great artist.  At the end of our afternoon together I felt so elated, not just because she had told me she was pleased: because what she brought to the music not only transformed the piece for me, but my whole level of musical understanding.  I have an utterly transported view of phrasing, of tone quality, of the relationship of dynamics to one and other, about how to give every note something to say.   If my arm fell off tomorrow and I never played the harp again, I would stay thankful every day I had that afternoon. 

I think this is part of what defines an artist:  once you hear them, you are immediately inspired, with astonishing clarity.   What would it be like if we gave more thought to the artists among our writers, too?

poodle power

You may perceive that twang twang twang has been distracted from matters musical over the Easter holiday (although I have learnt Viejo Zortzico and a Renaissance fantasia).  As all those with jobs are back at work tomorrow, I promise this is the last of my run of unharply posting.   But I couldn't resist this, from my housemate's copy of Attitude.  I knew there was a reason why I live in Islington.

When David moved to the two-bedroom two-bathroom apartment in Islington seven years ago it was a shell.  The previous owner had been a born-again Christian and had left nothing but Formica units and prayer cards pinned to the walls.  "The first thing I did was to tear it all out and perform a pagan cleansing ceremony", David says.  Then he began to add his fanciful flourishes as the mood took him, gradually transforming the property over the years.

In the dining room, he remembers his first poodle, Hoover, bought for the princely sum of £80 while he was a student at St Martins.  "I've always thought of poodles as gods and goddesses", confides David who, to the wrath of animal rights protestors, dyed Hoover first flourescent pink and then mauve with assorted spots.  When Hoover died he built a shrine to his canine friend in the ornate dining room of the home in which they had lived so happily.  It contains Hoover's ashes in a china poodle and a gilded hand - dedicated to film star Jayne Mansfield, the patron saint of poodles - reaching down to welcome him into heaven, as well as mementos such as a diamante collar and a rather ornate tissue box, "for crying."

Brideshead revisited

I don't normally bother with all this phnarr-phnarr-oxon-cantab-cuppers-
scouts-mods-part1-bedders-collections-sub fusc-boaties
-the Bod-teddies-tit hall* nonsense, but I did smile to see Jessica admit she should've gone to Oxford instead of Cambridge.

I'm not sure she'd have felt so warmly, mind, had she been a friend of mine attempting to leave the Bodleian one afternoon.  The Bodleian is a copyright library and therefore doesn't loan books out, and you have your bags checked lethargically and inefficiently on the way out.   My friend got his fags out on the Radcliffe Camera steps and realised he had a book in his bag, so he returned to hand it in.

Instead of looking mildly embarrassed at not having bag-checked properly, the porter roared "not so fast, young fella-me-lad" and dragged him off by the scruff of the neck to the senior librarian, who in turn took him down to a secret interrogation room in the basement to read him a sermon about Stealing From The Bodleian. 

Protestations to the effect he wasn't trying to steal from the Bodleian fell on deaf ears until, in exasperation, my friend put his head on the table and said "look, if I was going to steal from the Bodleian, I would steal a decent book, not The Tomb Of f***ing Beowulf."

At which point the librarian retorted, triumphantly:

"So you would steal from the Bodleian..."

(Mind you - WHAT A BOAT RACE!!!!!!!!)

*Not porn slang, but Oxford or Cambridge terms for things like colleges, libraries, exams and rowing

Sunday morning soul II

"I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people."

    Vincent van Gogh

Sunday morning soul

From the Honourable Terry, in Washington:

"Under Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, public sessions of the National Council on the Arts always begin with a performance of an appropriate piece of music, and today we heard the finale of Walter Piston’s Fourth Symphony in a recording conducted by Gerard Schwarz, who was seated next to me. My eyes filled with tears as I listened, the same way they’d grown moist the day before as we watched a video clip of Ethan Stiefel and Alessandra Ferri dancing the pas de deux from Sir Frederick Ashton’s The Dream. That’s one of the biggest differences between a meeting of the National Council on the Arts and one of, say, the board of directors of Citibank. Great art has a way of slipping in under the radar and filling you with extraordinary sensations."

mixed up

The impressively broad Africa Remix is on at the Hayward.  Roger Malbert and Helen Luckett write in the exhibition guide:

"Deriving its title from popular music, Africa Remix is deliberately eclectic, mixing generations and media, high-technology and traditional approaches...it could be said that there is no such thing as 'African Art', only African artists.  The aim of the exhibition is to celebrate their diversity and creative energy, rather than emphasising nationalities or cultural origins."

My friend and I realised, as we looked at everything from politically-driven installations to elephant foetuses, that really we'd assumed we were going to admire, y'know, pots and handicrafts (and I had said grumpily that I wanted to go because after a week of juggling harpist internal politics I wanted nothing to do with the Western high art tradition whatsoever).  As is the way with most contemporary exhibitions, some of the art was searching and moving and some of it was a bit less good, but more importantly we left with our assumptions nicely upturned.  Just when you think you're broad-minded, you realise how much you're still jumping the gun.

Neither of us had any preconceptions about Africa (my friend's never been, and I only hit-and-ran Casablanca), but we did think we knew what a South Bank exhibition was going to be like.  Thank goodness we didn't, because why do we bother with art, if not to broaden our horizons?  The Caravaggio I saw on Wednesday, similarly:  there I was in the presence of truly great art, and left both with a new sense of the illogical conflicts that are part of being alive, and more deeply moved than I have ever been by an exhibition before. 

Eclectism is not an excuse for incoherence, of course.  You need to push your perceptions without entirely blowing your mind.  A re-mix, indeed, rather than a scary sonic whirl.

darkness visible

Oh Caravaggio.  Such human wisdom;  such awareness of the contradictory feelings that nonetheless must live together.  Malice;  guilt;  sorrow;  compassion; sadly knowing young;  the old lined with a thousand inevitable  regrets.  Sardonic humour, too, against sooty backgrounds.  Any clowning howls in the undercoat.

Wiser, sadder,  but not more angry:  the wisdom of experience understands as much as it is disappointed.

David slays Goliath, but gazes at him still, lovingly.

quizzical

Ooh!  The lovely Scott has sent me a book quiz.  I love quizzes -  I was about to look for some anyway on handbag.com (but those are things like "which celebrity's shoes are you?")

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be? 

I didn't know what happens in Fahrenheit 451, but fortunately Scott explains: "At the end, each person picks a book to memorize, becoming that book for the short-term future."  A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? No, but I was jolly sorry when I finished Jane Austen and there was no more. 

The last book you bought is:

Ivan Hewett's Music:  Healing The Rift

The last book you read:

Aaron Williamon: Musical Excellence

What are you currently reading?

Debussy Remembered

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

Shakespeare, like everyone
A Streetcar Named Desire
Great Expectations
The Bhagavad Gita
Les Liasions Dangereuses

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons)? And Why?

George, Jessica, and my dad, because they're the professionals.  One playwright, one novelist, one poet (although my dad hasn't got a blog, so I'll have to put his answers up later). 

pale hands

Ionarts links to Heather's thoughts on pianists' hands, and wonders if a specific hand shape is particularly desirable for playing the harp.

Very generally, if somebody has massive or tiny hands they will find it hard to play fast and cleanly/do big stretches, and hypermobile people don't always have enough strength in their fingertips to squeeze the strings without their fingers bending back.  There are also some theories floating about that if you have a good amount of flesh on the pad of your fingers this can help to produce a warm sound.  But there are also fat harpists out there with a poor sound, and thin ones with a good one.  Ieuan Jones has very large hands;  Sioned Williams has small hands, but both are wonderful players.

You can't do anything about the shape of your hand.  Whatever problems your own hand throws up, you have to find a way around it.  How sucessfully you do that depends on how determined you are, mostly.  If your fingers are weak, strengthen them.  If they are wide so you play with a lot of buzzes, work hard to achieve a good hand position and buy a harp with wide spacing between the strings.  If your fingertips are thin so you fear your sound quality is poor, file down all your callouses (as you can hear them harsh on the strings) and develop a very good articulation, which will help the tone.

Heather is right to remark on the importance of psychology, of visualizing the sound you want to produce.  Almost nobody should give up on something because they think they "haven't got the hands."  You might do it slightly differently to someone with a different hand, but do it you can, assuming you are musical, and have a healthy hand possessed of all its fingers.  It is easy to confuse natural ability with the amount of hard work it takes even the most gifted to play an instrument well.  As Carlos Salzedo remarked (and this now haunts all of us skiving off practice):  "to play like an angel you have to work like the devil."

Knowing all this, of course, doesn't stop one worrying about such things, even at a high level like Heather (and I doubt she'd've got this far without doing something right!).  My father wrote a poem about it, from his 1985 collection Louring Skies:

A fourteen-year-old boy breaks off his piano practice to reflect on his new piano teacher:

My previous teacher said that mine
Were true musician's fingers, thin
And long;  but his are short and thick,
Craggy, weathered, firm, like rock.
He says one's fingers must be strong
To make the piano dance and sing.
To make the piano shout and kill
One lets one's weight of body fall;
The greatest strength is used to form
Those softest dabs of sound that seem
To lift the heart beyond its beat,
Just as a dancer's feet are light
Whose calves are strong as piano-wire!
And this is why I'm still so far
From making the music match my heart.
He says that it will come out right
My hands grow stronger, if I try;
But he must know that there's no way
These spindly fingers can be made
As strong as his, as firm and wide.
My previous teacher said that I
Was very good:  one day I'd play
Superbly well.  She made me vain.
She said my hands were long and fine.

 

joy is not in things, it is in us

It goes without saying that the musicians I look up to the most have both technical mastery and fine musicianship.  They also love people:  are inverterate gossips, enthusiastic lovers, big eaters* and thirsty drinkers.

I am not sure what music would be without this warm humanity. 

King Alkinoos of Corfu, in The Odyssey:  "I confess we are not great fighters with our fists...but we love eating and harp-playing and dancing and changes of clothes and hot baths and our beds."

*UPDATE:  I take it back about the big eaters.  After thirds of trifle at a pudding party last night, I am sick as a dog, and I've got to do a gig later :(