twang twang twang - MUNICH

HOW much?

Twang twang twang has a guilty addiction to excessively expensive cosmetics (I am very sensitive, you know, so I need quality).

However, self-delusion about one's means is the stuff of universal human tragedy.  Post-Claridges this afternoon I stepped into the make-up shop next door.

Call me tight, but even I reckon £128.00 for foundation, powder, a brush and a lipgloss is too much. 

"HOW much?"  roared I.

Everyone looked a bit suprised.  I don't think people roar "HOW much?" very often next door to Claridges.  Still, it's good to stand out from the herd. 

It is cruel, you know

Mankind is fond of duality.  The desire neatly to pigeon-hole leads to the common assumption that if you are intellectually well-furnished you are somehow emotionally pale. 

Take Britten, for instance, often criticised for being too clever.  On the contrary, it is precisely his cleverness that allows his exceptional emotional perception.  Like the great poets with whom he has such affinity, he feels the real complexity of things, sinister gloom and childlike joy alike. 

"It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength & freedom."

Of course, the criticism that makes us angriest is that we fear to be true, and so Britten particularly resented any harping on his facility.  Here then is WH Auden's advice to him in 1942:

"Goodness and Beauty are the results of a perfect balance between Order and Chaos, Bohemianism and Bourgeois Convention.

Bohemian Chaos alone ends in a mad jumble of beautiful scraps;  Bourgeois Convention alone ends in large unfeeling corpses.

Every artist except the supreme masters has a bias one way or the other.  The best pair of opposites I can think of in music are Wagner and Strauss.  (Technical skill always comes from the bourgeois side of one's nature.)

For middle-class Englishmen like you and me, the danger is of course the second.  Your attraction to thin-as-a-board juveniles, i.e. to the sexless and innocent, is a symptom of this.  And I am certain that it is your denial and evasion of the demands of disorder that is responsible for your attacks of ill-health, i.e. sickness is your substitute for the Bohemian.

Wherever you go you are and probably always will be surrounded by people who adore you, nurse you, and praise everything you do, e.g. Elizabeth, Peter...Up to a certain point this is fine for you, but beware.  You see, Bengy dear, you are always tempted to make things too easy for yourself in this way, i.e. to build yourself a warm nest of love (of course when you get it, you find it a little stifling) by playing the lovable talented little boy.

If you are to develop to your real stature, you will have, I think, to suffer, and make others suffer, in ways which are totally strange to you at present, and against every conscious value that you have;  i.e. you will have to be able to say what you never yet have had the right to say - God, I'm a shit."

"Sylphid was beginning to play professionally, and she was subbing as second harpist in the orchestra at Radio City Music Hall.  She was called pretty regularly, once or twice a week, and she'd also got a job playing at a fancy restaurant in the East Sixties on Friday night.  Ira would drive her from the Village up to the restaurant with her harp and then go and pick her and the harp up when she finished.  He had the station wagon, and he'd pull up in front of the house and go inside and have to carry it down the stairs.  The harp is in its felt cover, and Ira puts one hand on the column and one hand in the sound hole at the back and he lifts it up, lays the harp on a mattress they keep in the station wagon, and drives Sylphid and the harp uptown to the restaurant.  At the restaurant he takes the harp out of the car and, big radio star that he is, he carries it inside.  At ten-thirty, when the restaurant is finished serving dinner and Sylphid's ready to come back to the Village, he goes around to pick her up and the whole operation is repeated.  Every Friday.  He hated the physical imposition that it was - those things weigh about eighty pounds - but he did it.  I remember that in the hospital, when he had cracked up, he said to me, 'She married me to carry her daughter's harp! That's why the woman married me! To haul that fucking harp!'"

Philip Roth - I Married A Communist

bella Italia

Aeroporto Luton's tarmac was only a slatey shade darker than the sky as I shivered through the rain, forked £2.50 for terrible coffee and hoped mournfully the bright lillies from the previous evening's concert would survive the journey home. 

Italy was fantastico.  I have more handbags (Tom:  "but I thought you were terribly poor." H:  "It is precisely through poverty I have to go to Milan for well-priced leather").  More importantly I am  inspired and rejuvanated, by wonderful teaching, terrific new friends, and beautiful surroundings. 

Professional musicians usually juggle music with administration and hitting on creative ways to earn a living.  This gruelling regime is the price we pay for doing something more beautiful than a nine-to-fiver, and the chance to work undistracted by email, contracts, mail-outs and city pandemonium makes you all the fitter to face it all again.

The other thing that always makes me feel shiny about what I do is meeting people who give up hours of their life to help musicians.  We could not have been looked after better in Castelleone - welcomed by the mayor, taken to Cremona to have a Stradivarius played for us, given concerts in stunning churches and presented not only with flowers but books and CDs.  It is easy to spend a lot of time muttering about the idiots one encounters (such as, the guy leaning against me and my six-foot harp at a crowded background date the other day.  When I asked he desist standing on my instrument he remarked he'd had no idea I was there...) - but, I like to remember the perfect courtesy and warm hospitality of so many others.  All because, they love music. 

 

 

va bene

I'm off to Isabelle Perrin's masterclasses in Castelleone for a few days. 

You will be able to tell when I have returned from the new-found artistry radiating off the tarmac at Luton airport.

xxx

Is that who you are?

In music you cannot pretend to be someone you're not, but equally you have to learn to control any offputting mannerisms (sniffing, swaying, moaning, etc).  The music helps you to project a finer version of yourself, a hard-won, public self-improvement. 

Women's magazines make a relaxing comparison.  They project a particular audience - idealised.  Read Marie Claire, for example, and you think you are a sophisticated urbanite monied career-girl:  but usually this is not who you are, but who you want to be.

Like my classicist grandmother, I am addicted to these magazines but nonetheless it does make me smile when I find a line that gives it all away.  Viz:

"there's a three-hour wait for the Uffizi Gallery...with 45 rooms packed with masterpieces, it's another two hours before we emerge."

TWO HOURS?? I was in there all day, although it could have been sheer bloody-mindedness after the epic queue. 

The best teachers...

...are the ones who make you believe a) that something is wonderful, and b) you too are good enough to know it.   

Drew's running Take A Friend To The Orchestra month over on the excellent Adaptistration, and today is my turn to contribute.

Read the rest here, along with many other pieces by musicians, critics and commentators throughout May. 

"Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, sweeten my imagination.  There's money for thee."
                                                                                                                        King Lear IV.v