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In the last week, I have been on 12 trains, ranging from a super-shiny Deutsche Bahn sleeper to a Polish local train fashioned from sheets of tin.
How many were late?
- none.
Returning to London today - what was the scene at Luton Parkway?
- EVERY train was either delayed or cancelled.
Gott sei dank, I am on the Eurostar again on Sunday.
There must be cybercafes somewhere between the French Alps, Paris, Berlin and Krakow, but if not, I'm back on the 26th. Keep checking out the other music blogs and what's going on chez moi at the Proms!
If you get bored with my harp reports, check out Jeremy Denk's account of summer on the road.
I have spent five days at home since the beginning of June and am now a broken woman trying to work out how to get from Courchevel to Katowice and still get back in time for a Ravel Introduction & Allegro.
A professional flautist asked me today “what’s electronic music?” Pity - classical music must use it to survive. Not only are electronic sounds the medium most people relate to now, but done well it moves music forward tellingly.
In some ways electronic music is a fantasy – it does whatever we dream. It’s not dependent on the weather, the instrument or the performer (although a power cut would be a bit of a bummer). In Alvarez Javier's Acuerdos por Diferencia (1989) for harp and tape, for example, the tape imitates the harp sounds, but in unplayable figurations. The impossible figures weave about the live performer, entrancing us as much by their unattainability as by their brilliance. There’s a powerfully plastic flow around both limits and the limitless. Alvarez writes: “Picture yourself travelling at ease on a train. As you look through the window, you notice the power cables running parallel to the tracks. These tracks seem to turn as a volume that gently rotates and changes shape. This flow accelerates before being interrupted by the posts that hold them at more or less regular distances. In this piece, I have attempted to draw a musical parallel with a similar sort of speculation, playing with point of accord (Acuerdo), and variations, juxtapositions, superimpositions (Diferencia), between harp and tape. Thus my title could freely be translated as “accords within differences.”
Equally fluid is Nebulae, Stephen Andrew Taylor’s music-and-video celebration of “things [the harp] can’t do in the real world…the long, drifting sounds I was imagining reminded me of photographs of nebulas, giant dust clouds in deep space – so vivid and luminous, but impossibly distant and vast at the same time”. Yet “the drifting, changing shapes on the screen are partially controlled by the movement of the harpist’s hands playing the piece”, so the dialogue with human musicianship continues.
Good music is many things, containing among them an interrogative rigour, a powerful architecture deeply to explore. Michael Alcorn’s Psallo (a WHC world premiere) is meticulously thought out, taking as its focal point a fascination with gesture (the interaction of the player with the surface of the instrument), and the greek title’s myriad translations as to pluck, pull, twitch, play a stringed instrument with one’s fingers, or to sing to a harp accompaniment. The music builds up a soundscape as it goes along, so noises recur like revisited landmarks, growing familiar.
Just as an undisciplined performance is unsatisfying (not that there was anything but wonderful professionalism from Ann Yeung and Mercedes Gomez), no amount of intellectual dissection will make music out of sound without a fundamental rhythmic drive, and an emotional content. Without these, the music won't work – as we saw in the final piece of the concert. Apparently it was an exploration of chromaticism based on the pitches of the harmonic series audible on amplified instruments - all I know is six harpists had to hold electric toothbrushes on their soundboards and buzz loudly. Why?
