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I have been chatting to someone who is a cox, the little one at the front of the boat who shouts all the orders to a rowing eight. She said coxing is rather like teaching, in that you learn how to motivate people: when to shout, when to cajole.
It's so obvious, and so often forgotten, how good teaching is half what you teach (thumbs up, fingers down, chest out, stomach in, chin up) and 50% care, communication, and common humanity.
Here are the Liberal Arts Quiz answers. Scott comments on the quiz helpfully, arguing there should be more social and physical science questions. The American definition of liberal arts includes much more of these fields than the British one - so if anyone wants to suggest some, fire away.
Scott also boast the highest score I know of to date, a cracking 15 out of 20.
On the day of the Prague Invasion (August 21, 1968), what happened in the Royal Albert Hall?
- (Russian) Rostropovich played the (Czech) Dvorak concerto in a Prom, with tears pouring down his cheeks.
What is Empfindsamkeit?
- Mid eighteenth century, German link between emotional and nervous sensibility and fiction (literature), or, in music, the expression of said sensibility thorough melodic directness, homophonic texture and judicious ornamentation.
Which major 20th century arts movement occurs in literature, music, painting, film and architecture?
Modernism.
What was unusual about the Original Dixieland Jazz Band?
They were white.
Complete the phrase "God save the Queen, / She ain't no human being,"
"/There ain't no future/In England's Dreaming"
What is "an artist's response to just criticism"? What was the criticism? (score 1 for each part)
i) Shostokovich 5. ii) Written in April 1937 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution, the fifth symphony was presented, outwardly at any rate, as an artistic return to the fold after the governmental outcry over Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.
Who were the Medicis?
The dynasty who dominated the Florentine Renaissance (and with whom my surname is often happily confused.)
Who was shot on the Upper West Side in 1980?
John Lennon.
Name a pop artist working also with classical musicians.
No one right answer, but, for example, Elvis Costello, Jonny Greenwood.
What is Le Moulin Rouge?
Yes, it's a film with Nicole Kidman, but more historically is the Paris nightclub, immortalised in 1889 for its Can-Can, and through the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec. Bohemians, y'know.
What is utilitarianism?
The moral idea that the greatest good benefits the greatest number of people.
In literature, what does the female hysteric have to say?
The basic idea is that language historically is patriarchal: created by and to articulate the thoughts of men: women have different ideas, need different language to express themselves, and where no recognised language is available to them, sometimes break down into hysteria.
How did Orpheus persuade Pluto to return Euridyce?
Singing.
What is the divine right of kings?
That the monarch's authority is ordained by God.
The three ways musicians physically and principally remember music are - ?
Physically (motor memory), aurally and visually.
What was Rock The Vote set up to do?
Encourage more voters between the ages of 18-24.
Who most famously espoused the Noble Savage myth?
Rousseau.
What am I talking about, if I mention the "tragic flaw"?
The concept (also known as the Bradleian flaw, after the scholar AC Bradley) there is something in your character that leads to your downfall, usually something that can also be put to the good: Macbeth's ambition, Othello's pride.
I'm reading The Artist As Citizen, Joseph Polisi's essays from his twenty years as Julliard president. In the introduction he describes how he has pushed for Julliard students broadly to be educated in the liberal arts, as well as highly trained in performance.
This caught my imagination and so here is my Are You Liberally Arty Enough? quiz for musicians.
SCORE ONE POINT FOR EACH RIGHT ANSWER
SCORE
0-5: Ahime! You reckon practice room 101's a bijoux pad, eat rosin, swear in Renaissance Italian, think that rap is something conductors do with batons, and if you knew where the college bar was, you'd hear the rumour you prefer to have sex with the metronome going. Fashionably rumple that black polo-neck, go catch one of George or Isaac's plays, and occasionally turn from your catalogue of Renaissance ornaments to David Byrne's Grown Backwards.
5-10: You have a certain arty air: you have a DVD of the Das Boot director's cut, know to whinge MOMA killed the Monet by hanging it in the hall, and went on the march about the war. Nonetheless you were caught with a Romantic cadenza for your Baroque sonata, think Kind of Blue is what you painted your bathroom, and your debut CD included an arrangement of The Flower Duet.
10-15: Well done - you went to most of your college lectures, can remember the subjectivity/objectivity debate, plan your peripetetic teaching with a nod to infant psychology, and recite poetry sensitively. A more tightly-honed knowledge of metaethical neo-nonnaturalism might even get you a job at Wire magazine.
15+: What are you doing reading this ill-educated blog, Jonathan Miller? I had to get Tom to tell me half the answers, and I wrote the quiz.
The composer Patrick Baxter is classically trained but recently has been creating electronic music. Last night I went to hear "Baxtatronic", in a smart church in Notting Hill. I arrived late from a rehearsal, and tip-toed into a darkened church with incense heavy in the air, and the audience facing an alter covered in candles. Eight tracks segued into one another for an unbroken 45 minutes, leading progressively from stillness to an exuberant and rythmically vital end.
Done well, I am keen on electronic music, but it can be tedious. Any kind of music can be boring, but especially this sort, through its combination of looped samples and cool reputation (meaning you get away with more rubbish). Baxtatronic is more interesting than repetitive beats and lookin' smart, both within the music and in the music's purpose.
Paddy explains his music:
"Although much of the music is electronic I don't think that it is in any sense inhuman or inorganic; similarly, although it is electronic it is arranged "classically", that is, influenced by musical forms, structures, timbres and attitudes...It is by hearing modern sounds through the sonic kaleidoscope of music history that I hope my music achieves something a little different to what is offered elsewhere...many sections are quite heavily cerebral...[but] I've tried to structure the music in a fairly basic manner - from quiet, introspective beginnings towards a huge, joyful sense of affirmation at the close. It's an old idea; striving through numerous difficulties and problems towards an elemental positive climax, but it's a good idea"
Classical music has already learnt to its cost that avoiding the interests of the present is to fossilize the art form; here then is a composer of modern music who similarly recognises the lessons of the past. The more one hears any sort of music the more obvious it is that what is musically powerful occurs over and over: rhythmic vitality, melodic interest, captivating colours, elements of suprise, and a structure intellectually and emotionally affecting.
Baxtatronic's relationship to the classical extends beyond the tracks on the monitor. I have done hundreds of concerts in churches, and as I walked in last night it hit me immediately: here was a concert in a church, packed with people under the age of 35. The classical establishment is dying to get this sort of audience, or so it says. I will give a harp recital in the same church later this year, and I bet you a copy of Playboy my audience will be 30 years older.
Musically, what people really enjoy tends to remain the same; history repeats itself, albeit in different clothes. But clothing is important, because it helps people relate to each other and recognise their own: so too must a concert consider the fashions of the time, if audiences are to feel it relevant to their lives. Some of us practice music as an art form: many more use it much more for a social purpose. The clothes you wear, the books you read, the films you see, and the CDs you buy all help define what you're into and who you are. It is as important a function of art as anything high-falutin'.
That said, serious and successful art needs an elevated dimension along with a popular one, or it will fade along with whatever's in the charts this week. Paddy staged Baxtatronic in a church in order to emphasise his music's cerebral and spiritual side:
"...the clearest and most important thoughts arrive in the mind only when the body is entirely still...the most important element of the whole process is the complete removal of distraction. Often this is surprisingly difficult, especially in a large city...the background drones of commercial radio and heavy traffic; the hum of a tumble dryer; someone snoring; the sound of a lawnmower; a crowded room; insects...traditionally churches have been places of reflection."
You would expect electronic music in a bar, not a church, because it is groovy. This church was packed with people from the bars, but not a single
parishioner came: somehow an electronic music concert seemed faintly
sacrilegious. But why not in a church, when I am allowed to play harp recitals of secular music at churches everywhere (and I have played the harp in bars as well, and even left it behind one, once, for a couple of days. It is a long story but the harp was fine)? Is it so, if you enjoy sitting in a bar, that you can't also explore music seriously? Most musicians, after all, have been known to frequent bars.
When two people give different accounts the truth never belongs to one entirely, but lies somewhere in the middle. Mesh two stories - electronic music and the Church - and you get another one. I couldn't put it down.
Tom has a theory that harpists are genetically unable to hold a telephone conversation shorter than an hour and a half. And it is true that I can pass a whole day phoning harpists, wondering whether to have the flowers embellished on my harp (it's not just me, my former teacher was going on about how he wanted a golden crown fitted to his) and checking my blog stats.
Not so yesterday, when I had a 2-hour session to get the Salzedo Variations on a Theme in the Ancient Style recorded (it's update my audition tape time!), and it takes about an hour and a half to get the covers off the harp, set the mikes up and have a, er, discussion about how much artificial aid the sound guys will give you (mine were into natural accoustics and wouldn't let me have any EQ. I suppose it's good to be honest).
Here's the end of the piece: Download salzed_final_movement_helen_radice.mp3
Jerry at Sequenza 21 is hopeful I might appear in a Playboy centrefold. All I really want is for someone to love me for my mind.
In the arts, it is important to be open minded, especially in these days of world travel and everything (like twang twang twang's, er, pioneering visit to New York), and so my most recent American adventure saw me darken MOMA's white doors for the first time. My taste in art is not particularly well-educated and has therefore always been rather conservative - the Italian Renaissance, a Munch woodcut (Towards the Forest II), a lot of portraits. I have always prefered pictures of people, preferably with feelings etched on their faces I haven't thought of before but recognise immediately. So I was not looking forward to MOMA with undiluted pleasure: I dislike impressionism, surrealism, and bits of crap left all over the floor bathed in pink light from a neon tube.
Neon or not, somehow it's enlightening to be surrounded by a lot of art one finds difficult. The pieces that succeed really impact, and carry doubly powerful messages about what makes a truly great work of art, instead of one that got on MOMA's first floor because the donors wanted it there. Human expressions are not the only gate to emotional power, I learnt: Klimt's Hope II touches through the colours and patterns' limitless possiblilities, not the opaque faces. Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon horrifies because we cannot tell what the prostitutes are thinking: the entire painting is grotesquely flat, two women obscured by ghoulish African masks. But these two incredible pictures both move us immediately. Here our feelings are high-minded, grave; equally we're enchanted by the carefree lightness of Picasso's Bather with Beach Ball.
None of these observations are earth-shattering to anybody who knows anything about art (that's a rhetorical statement, before some smart-alec comments "nor to the rest of us, love"). But you see, I would think twice these days before writing that a good piece of music must resonate emotionally, immediately, instead of being only cleverly composed or intricately textured, etc. I spend enough time on music to think that's obvious - but perhaps it isn't really, or we'd have more emotionally powerful contemporary music and less mind-numbing clever knotted darlings of the avant-garde.
So it can be good to be ignorant. Perhaps it helps you see the wood from the trees.
Damn! DAMN! When the shop assistant on 5th Avenue told me she liked my shoes, I said "ooh gosh thank you very much" and launched into a long description of where I'd got them and how the sequins had lasted suprisingly well, yadda yadda yadda...
When it's just a cunning sales trick from Elaine Mack at Bergdorf Goodman!
Normal posting will resume when I have recovered. Harpists don't like to make fashion faux pas.
Dear me. Bryant Manning has corrected my spelling of ManhattAN. I have never been much good at spelling, so you have to keep me on the straight and narrow. God bless America.
One of the reasons I particularly love New York is the sense of limitless extension: the long avenues, shimmering down as far as the eye can see, and bringing space and exhilaration to the skyscrapers. I can walk these endless streets for hours, embued with a sense that anything is possible, direct and clear.
Tom's American father has, after twenty five years in England, finally organised his British passport - patriotic zeal inspired by four more glorious years. Jokingly he says he can feel himself growing more small-minded by the minute.
Of course the British are not all small-minded any more than the New Yorkers are universally bagel-schmearing, therapist-speed-dialing, speed-dating, trucker-cap-wearing, latte guzzling hipsters. None the less, everything is bigger across the Pond. Food. Cars. Beds. Streams of invective against other drivers.
The British can get sniffy about portion sizes and car emissions. But the Enormous tradition has an enormous upside, reflected in the pristine panels of the skyscrapers: drive, ambition, enquiry, with a clear and searching focus.
Yes, the aim of this little diplomatic homily is, NYC-style, to jaywalk across and compare national perceptions of music and, because people perceive things through the media, music writing is key (and I just blogged on the importance of good music writing, so this is a Skillful Development). Moreover, from my own experience American and British artists are equally enquiring, with as much innovation on the South Bank as in Manhatten. It's what's reported that differs.
I bought American music journals you can't get in London: the helpfully titled Symphony and Chamber Music. These are professional periodicals, closest in market to the British Classical Music (BBC Music and Classic FM Magazine are aimed at amateurs). I've also been reading New York Times and broadsheet reviews, and Muso, the UK magazine aimed at conservatoire students. Reading the American press underlines what strikes me about the best American blogging: there is a bigger focus. Sarah Rothenberg, for example, discusses the contribution the ensemble Domus made to the development of chamber music in the 1980s (Chamber Music, April 2005 - and Domus are a British ensemble, which supports my argument it is the writings, not the musicians, between which the Atlantic flows).
Rothenberg tells us, of course, who Domus are: they distinguished themselves by hauling a portable domed stage around with them. She also deduces what their contribution is within the musical cultural context: outreach, before the term was commonly used, and part of a major shift from the assumption that "bridging the apparent gap between our love for music and a largely indifferent public was never viewed as the responsibility of the musician."
Having established this contribution, Rothenberg interrogates it: "how does one maintain high musical standards and at the same time meet populist goals?". The articles ranges honestly through the difficulties Domus encountered, and that to learn of these difficulties, through the professional press, is helpful to other musicians is firmly acknowledged - "Domus's conflicts between outreach ideals and musical ones will spark associations in many readers." Then we learn of some of the solutions other groups have posited, like the Emerson Quartet's theatrical displays; how these are in themselves shifting the nature of performance - and, most important of all, why these changes are particularly found in chamber music. We learn something about the nature of chamber music:
"It is not suprising that many of music's most passionate experimentalists are found in the world of chamber music, where interpersonal communication is central to the rehearsal process, to music-making itself, and where reaching out beyond yourself starts long before you walk on stage."
In a parallel British article, Roderic Dunnett's twin reports on New Kent Opera and New Sussex Opera ('A Tale of Two Opera Companies', Classical Music, 31/10/04), is essentially a potted history of the two companies, plus some description of their future plans. It's well written and I now know something about New Kent and Sussex Operas, and a little about how they handled the disappearance of their arts council grants ("Nowadays we scratch around, like our wounds and fund-raise like mad after the event"). This is reportage, not arts writing: it tells you what happened, but doesn't discuss art. There's nothing wrong with reportage per se, but in the British press it over-dominates. In the same journal, there is an article about cross-over. Here is a nature-of-music piece, but in two pages all it concludes is, keep an open mind and be versatile. Personally, I would argue the success of fusion music is fraught with subtler issues.
If you study performance, you do not necessarily have time to think like Adorno as well as play well. Substantial articles in the professional press, searchingly argued, are enormously valuable in their thought-provoking potential. I teach chamber music annually on a summer school. Often a very able player none the less has no conception of what it is to play chamber music, other than playing as you do normally, but with other instruments. That's a high school level of awareness. And you can work out the deeper levels of chamber music if you are lucky enough to work frequently with the same, very good musicians for at least a year and preferably two - but if you're told, be it by a teacher or in a journal - what the finer points of ensemble are, and why - well, everybody's different, but it would have saved me a helluva lot of time.
There is British writing about actual music, of course. It's in the papers. But it's really not in the professional press very often. And the newsprint articles tend towards the analytical and historical, rather than make many observations on the nature or state of music. Could the British journalists reveal how much they are fettered by the demands of the editors? Could the New Yorkers tell me if they really do feel uplifted, enlighted and improved by the NYT arts and Chamber Music?
If you can, let me know. My next post will be a bit less meta (an arty term picked up from George ), and a bit more Met: art and lattes in the Central Park sun.
