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Given all my recent moaning about tax and driving and musicians' tortured but heroic endeavours it would perhaps be timely to congratulate my pupil Tomos, who took a first prize in the UFAM harp competition in Paris at the weekend.
Hooray for him! And I even managed to get my highlights done at Gallerie Lafayette. A prudent gesture, as it's much cheaper than in London, and I'm claiming it back against tax.
It's UK tax deadline day. Throughout our sceptered isle, the self-employed are weeping and drinking whisky.
Last week I said piously to my friend Harriet (almost gesturing poetically with a furled copy of The Guardian) that tax was a necessary evil in a civilised society because it paid for hospitals and schools and opportunities for all. This was before I found out I have to pay more than I'd thought. Thieving red bastards.
Of course, back in December when I took this date, I forgot that tomorrow is Mozart's birthday. How am I celebrating? 3 hours of background music in bloody Nottingham. Tsk.
I suppose, were Mozart still alive, he'd probably be doing a gig himself, although I hope he'd at least get a reception afterwards in the bit of the QEH bar they cordon off for VIPs.
At a recent book launch I found myself in a group of men paying court to an unimpressive Guardian journalist (I'm unimpressed by men who use their louder voices to stop women saying anything). Their discussion concerned whether we are unhappier now than in the 1930s.
This is not a question that can really be answered at all (especially not by TwTwTw's piping blonde tones), because analysing 1930s emotions in retrospect is impossible, but it does make you think. Is happiness the same as, say, contentment - and is it to be measured, or guaranteed?
Musicians are miserable bastards. If I was writing an account of a rehearsal, it could go like this: Arrive at work. Unpack instrument, crossword, knitting, books, magazines, accounts. Moan there is not enough space. Open music. Moan the part is unplayable. Orchestral manager arrives to check everyone is there. Moan the hall is too hot/cold/dry/humid/light/dark. Conductor arrives. Moan it's him again, last time he made you play on your own. Rehearsal starts. Moan conductor is Very Unclear. Teabreak. Moan there are no chocolate fingers. Manager hands out tour sheets. Moan about the dates/flight times/accomodation/schedule/repertoire (see moan 2)/conductor (see moans 4&5). Rehearsal restarts. Break string. Accuse the punishing schedule (see moan 7)/unplayable repertoire (2)/ hall (3). Moan that the orchestra doesn't pay you a string allowance. Etc.
Many people, not just musicians, don't like work. That's why it's called 'work', as opposed to 'play', 'fun' or 'holiday in the sun'. But musicians, or artists generally, are dreamers. I want to work on Bach's partitas, but today I have to teach 15 ten-year-olds the recorder 6 times over, and I'm an artist, goddamit. Before you know it you are not practicing, and drinking too much (not me, of course, although today I've not practiced because I taught for six hours and then went to the pub).
Recently I was much moved by a scene in Stephen Jeffries' play about the Earl of Rochester. Rochester needs the theatre like a drug: against the real world's seamy chaos, theatrical structure and chains of significance afford the only chance for something true and fine. Desolately affecting as Rochester's solution is, it's cold comfort to musicians, because we don't see our world as make-believe.
Daniel Barenboim has an answer. When playing, one might not be in an ecstatic, idealistic frame of mind. You are probably freezing, broke, hungover and/or cuckolded. Thus, in order to build music and make it true, one cannot, as Barenboim says, live in the moment and hope inspiration will strike when you need it. In performing, you have to recollect your past happinesses. Not just remember, but feel those feelings again.
Quietly, Barenboim perceives how hard this is to do. How difficult, always to feel the "white heat", to find again a child's idealism - but one that is conscious, studied, not ignorantly naieve. It is the preserve of great artists.
such stuff posts this, from Coleridge:
Music is the most entirely human of the fine arts, and has the fewest analoga
in nature. Its first delightfulness is simple accordance with the ear;
but it is an associated thing, and recalls the deep emotions of the
past with an intellectual sense of proportion. Every human feeling is
greater and larger than the exciting cause, -- a proof, I think, that
man is designed for a higher state of existence; and this is deeply
implied in music, in which there is always something more and beyond
the immediate expression.
"On Poesy or Art"
Thank God. A reach beyond the beautiful, from Greg Sandow. Nothing drives me more insane than the insistence that classical music must be beautiful. It's so boring. It also impoverishes music's moments of genuinely exquisite beauty by over-using the word so it becomes trivial. You couldn't have an entire aria consisting of the perfect three high Cs in the Queen of the Night, could you?
It's lucky Greg argues eloquently (although I know a few people over 40 who don't hold a season ticket at the beauty-parlour either). Maybe I will grow out of it, but at the moment, whenever anyone bandits the words "pretty", "beautiful", "tinkling", "fairies", "fairies dancing", etc, I have an (almost) uncontrollable urge to shout rude words VERY LOUDLY. Especially when all of the above is applied to harp music.
Such behaviour does not befit a beautiful lady harpist, so, I will leave it to Greg to put it better than I:
"... a problem with the word “beautiful.” Often classical music marketing copy stresses this word, as if beauty was one of classical music’s great attractions. And so it is, for members of the traditional older audience. But not with younger people, I think. Or at least not with many of the smart ones. “Beautiful,” at best, means not much more than “pretty,” these days, and music that only can be called beautiful would seem pretty empty. How about thoughtful music, challenging music, ambiguous music, wry music? Or even troubled music, conflicted music, since all these words might show up in some description of smart alternative bands.
If classical music is mainly “beautiful,” then it’s not even playing in a very intelligent ballpark. It’s just about advertising its emptiness, or rather what people are going to believe is its emptiness. “Beautiful” music is many things, but in modern terms it certainly doesn’t sound very interesting. “What’s your friend Melissa like?” “Oh, she’s a beautiful woman!” “Yes, and…?” Is she a supermodel type, a bimbo, or a gorgeous woman with brains and attitude? You’d want to know more. And the same is true about music.
And I treasure this little gem, sent to me in an e-mail exchange about this very subject:
“Beautiful” [has] gone to this magic point beyond overused adjective. It's become one of those words you just don't even notice, just there to connect other words and fill up space. At this point I just classify it with “the” “an,” “it” and “or” and such…"
Here are, not only my YP boots, but my very own legs modelling them. This is a Gesture Of Compromise, as I'm keeping the minimalist blog design, new photo and tiny print.
Blimey. Harp music eases pain.
I've got blisters and a bad foot where I tripped over my harp trolley. Physician, heal thyself.
(More seriously, I did take part in an interesting hospital music therapy research project where Dr TwTwTw was voted THE BEST instrument...my predecessor was a solo cellist who performed nothing but baroque slow movements and everyone felt suicidal, so I was onto a winner before I'd played a note.)
OK, everybody. I am trying to learn a major new work by Harrison Birtwistle and, following on from the preparatory two quotations below, compose some searingly imaginative discourse on Mozart's operatic portrayal of the human condition. However, Drew, on behalf of the Chamber Music America conference, has just sent in another comment bemoaning TwTwTw's new layout.
Jerry Bowles no like; nor does Lisa. Ebren digs it. If anyone else gives a shit, cast your vote in the comments box below.
AND my best friend just described my favourite furry driving boots as "Helen's yak pube shoes". I am a style icon. I am the only brown-and-white sited, yak-pube shod, growing-out-butch-hair harpist with a blog photo taken in a toilet at a gig in the world.
I believe you need to contemplate and recollect at a distance in order to express something in music...There is a clear difference in English between recollection and remembrance or memory. In music and musical performance this is an important distinction. A young man remembers and an old man recollects. Memory is something that immediately comes to your aid, whereas recollection can only come through reflection. Recollecting is an art for which you require skill in the use of illusion. To give a simple example: the sensation of feeling homesick although you are at home. This involves recollection and has little to do with memory. This is very important and creates a lot of problems for interpreters today, since we play so much music from memory. Recollection requires individual effort. Everything in musical performance depends on the power of recollection. In other words, even if you have learned Tristan und Isolde by heart, and know it by heart, and you can feel the white-heat intensity of the music, you must be able to recollect this white heat, not just remember it, and from performance to another add up the sum of recollections you have.
...At the start there should be a naieve encounter with a work of art. The next, more complicated stage concerns the way one works and what one can learn from analysis and observation. This should ideally lead to the third stage, to an increased knowledge about a work of art, a kind of conscious naievety. This type of music is often found in Mozart...something almost childlike. Child-like does not mean childish, just as sentiment is not sentimentality. The childlike element in art and musical expression is very important. It is a development few great artists achieve"
Daniel Barenboim, A Life In Music
ROCHESTER: Ask yourself what you want from the theatre.
BARRY: I want the passionate love of my audience. I want, when I make a sweep of my arm to carry their hearts away, and when I die that they should sigh for never seeing me again - till the next afternoon.
ROCHESTER: There is your answer. I want to be one of that multitude. I wish to be moved. I cannot feel in life, I must have others do it for me here.
BARRY: You are spoken of as a man with a stomach for life.
ROCHESTER: I am the cynic of our golden age. This bounteous dish which our Great Charles and our Great God have - in more or less equal measure - placed before us sets my teeth permanently on edge. Life has no purpose, it is everywhere undone by arbitrariness: I do this, but it matters not a jot if I do the opposite. But in the playhouse, every action good or bad has its consequence; drop a handkerchief and it will return to smother you. Outside the the playhouse there are for me no crimes and no consequences.
BARRY: Except in the eyes of God.
ROCHESTER: God is a thing men have made to frighten themselves with. Once frightened, they find meaning, like children playing in the scarecrow's field. Well I am not to be frightened. I have shied my stones at the scarecrow, it is struck down and I am not.
BARRY: But you are not content.
ROCHESTER: Contentment is the drug of fools. I prefer truth. And the truth is that we are animals scratching and rutting under an empty sky. Here in this theatre we can pretend that our lives have meaning. But the pretence only holds if we are given the truth. That is why I wish to see you shine on this stage, that is why, selfishly, I wish to train you. The theatre is my soothing drug, and my cynic's illness is so far advanced that my physic must be of the highest quality.
Stephen Jeffreys, The Libertine
