twang twang twang - MUNICH

Twang Grenfell Requests the Pleasure

The scene is a youth orchestra summer course at an English preparatory school.

Good morning girls!  Covers OFF the harps please, music OUT...on the stand, Lavinia, not on your head...thank you...we are beginning with "Suite of Merry Madrigals", please, Merry Madrigals.  It is not stupid music, Titania, it's super jolly music, and it will sound marvellous when we are all together in the orchestra.  Mrs Elephantine-Volvo is going to be the singer, which will be lovely, won't it?  Now, who heard how good the trumpets sounded in First Orchestra yesterday?  And why?  Because they all played EXACTLY TOGETHER, didn't they:  pa-pa-pa, pa-pa-pa-pa, pa-pa-pa-PA!  We are going to play like them, together.  Figure 69 please!  'La Verginella'.  And one, two and - what is it, Xenia?  Well, your music's not very helpful sitting in matron's study, is it?  Go and see Mr Bird and ask for a photocopy  - WALK, DON'T RUN...AND SAY THANK YOU...thank you.  69!  Two and pom, pom, pom tiddle-om - Belgravia, what are your pedals here?  All naturals.  And what key is that?  No, not F...Alycinthia, when I ask Belgravia a question, I want Belgravia to answer it.  Is your name Belgravia?  Sit quietly then - properly on your stool please, nice straight back, elbows UP!  Stop picking your feet. 

Harps in C Major please! Has everyone got their pedals in C Major?  What do we do if we aren't sure of our pedals? We draw a pedal diagram.  Everybody take their red pencil and draw a lovely big diagram.  Yes, if you haven't got your red pencil then pink will do.  Or green...you can choose, girls, but QUICKLY!  The conductor will not wait for you to write in pedals!  Mr Greenwood would already be 'Bewailing the untimely death of Prince Henry!'.  No, Ophelia, 'Bewailing the untimely death of Prince Henry' is the title of the next Madrigal.  Not a real death.  Well, it might have been a real death, but a long time ago.  Yes, before I was born.  We aren't going to find out if it's real or not if you don't hurry up!  Figure 69.  One, two, three and pom, pom, pom tiddle-om, tiddle-om pom pom hey nonny non - Chlamydia!  Why have I stopped conducting?  No, not because it's lunchtime.  Nor am I feeling tired.  If you are tired you should have gone to bed earlier;  lights out is at nine o'clock and is to be strictly respected.  You may not feel like sleeping but that is no reason to prevent others from doing so.

I have stopped conducting because you didn't follow my beat.  You must watch and play your crotchets in time with my arm.  Let's all practice clapping along to my arm:  one, two, clap, clap, clap-clap-clap, clappity - come in quietly, Xenia, we are clapping at 69 - clap clap clap and OFF!  Good.  Now with the harps.  Xenia, when I said come in quietly, I did not mean lounge on the sofa.  We are in a rehearsal, and like Mr Greenwood said, rehearsals are times for ABSOLUTELY CONCENTRATING.  Ready to play, girls! One, two, pom, pom, pom tiddle-om, tiddle-om pom pom hey nonny nonny, C, D, C B A, C D G F OFF!  Good. 

...Covers OFF, girls, everybody else is ready to start!  If I go to the trouble of carrying all your harps upstairs for you, you are responsible for your stools, music and being ready to play when Mr Greenwood is.  He won't wait!  Xenia, what's the matter?  He isn't scary, he's the conductor, it's his job to lick us into shape.  Come on!  "Pomp and Circumstance" letter C!  Harps on shoulders, pedals!  Louder, Lavinia! Of course you can, "I can't do it" is banned in my harp section.  So is "I cannot do it".  So is "Je ne peux pas" - ALL NEGATIVE STATEMENTS IN ANY REAL OR MADE-UP LANGUAGE.  Bad luck, Belgravia, that run is tricky - if you can't do it, leave it out.

[sotto voce] Shh!  ABSOLUTELY CONCENTRATING!  Just because Mr Greenwood is talking to the trombones does not mean you won't be needed in a minute!  I know we haven't done anything for forty minutes, Ophelia, but if you play the harp you have to sit still and be patient.  Face the front.

Mr Greenwood!  Will you be needing us after the Beethoven?  Oh.

Well DONE girls!  That's MUCH better.  I know you got lost fifty million times, Belgravia, but you got back in!  We all get lost sometimes - no, not Mr Greenwood.  He is always right, that's why you have to watch watch watch him all the time.  I know he looked at us a bar early but maybe he felt like a change.  Come along now, covers ON before we all go to lunch!   Alycinthia, come back at once!  Would you leave your harp at home like this?  Your mummy and daddy have paid a lot of money to buy you this, and if you don't cover it up, all that gold leaf will chip chip chip away and then what will we do?

What's that, Louis? 

Yes, it is fantastic being in First Orchestra, isn't it? 

working too hard

Had terrible dream that I was sharing a joke at the back of the pit with the first horn, came in wrong, got lost in the emphatic solo triplets and RUINED Blond Ekbert's urban scene in Act 2.

keep taking the tablets...

social lemon muppet

The Duchess of Gloucester is really nice - most bigwigs understandably don't have time to say hello to me when I am bringing special atmosphere to their functions, but we had quite a long chat.  She asked me if I had chosen a minimalist maple harp without gold cherubs on deliberately.

Suavely I said: "No, your Highness.  It was cheaper." 

Kensington Palace brings out the worst in me.  The last time I was there I remarked that a bird had shat on my harp in the sunken garden, although at least that time I wasn't talking to royalty.

You know, I am Italian really.  My great-great-grandfather Evasio was gaoled in Naples for inflammatory political remarks, escaped and fled to England.

(So, my surname is pronounced rah-dee-che, were you wondering.  Once Tom finally proposes and I become TwTwTw Steinberg, I won't have this rigmarole at every hotel reception any more).

Ah! The motherland...che bello...

***** :)

Despite the opening line (I wondered why I didn't see him at the World Harp Congress), a nice review of Thursday's Birtwistle from Andrew Clements today.  He's quite right, Crowd is an extraordinarily good new addition to our repertoire.

7/7

       And death shall have no dominion.
       Dead men naked they shall be one
       With the man in the wind and the west moon;
       When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
       They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
       Though they go mad they shall be sane,
       Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
       Though lovers be lost love shall not;
       And death shall have no dominion.

       And death shall have no dominion.
       Under the windings of the sea
       They lying long shall not die windily;
       Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
       Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
       Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
       And the unicorn evils run them through;
       Split all ends up they shan't crack;
       And death shall have no dominion.

       And death shall have no dominion.
       No more may gulls cry at their ears
       Or waves break loud on the seashores;
       Where blew a flower may a flower no more
       Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
       Though they be mad and dead as nails,
       Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
       Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
       And death shall have no dominion.

Dylan Thomas

the ages I had dreamed

Tomorrow I'm off to the Cheltenham Festival to perform the UK Premiere of Harrison Birtwistle's Crowd.  The recital's sold out, but here are some more detailed reflections on this great new work. 

Despite no direct connection, I can't stop hearing Auden's The Sea and the Mirror throughout the piece: at once from your calm eyes, / With their lucid proof of apprehension and disorder, / All we are not stares back at what we are.

HARRISON BIRTWISTLE: CROWD

Harrison Birtwistle writes:

“This piece is an exploration of resonance.  My choice of title reflects my interest in the essential nature of the earliest harps, which is their quality of resonance. Crowd (etymologically related to the Celtic crwth, cruit and crot) was the English term used for instruments of the lyre class, and ultimately for a frame harp, from pre-Christian to medieval times.

Crowd's slow-moving harmonic structure allows space for the strings to vibrate freely.  In performance, therefore, the resonances of sustained notes – in particular those marked with a short pause – should not be cut off artificially to create a silence.  The pauses, and the slightly shorter hesitations starting at b.121, should allow for this resonance without interrupting the continuity of the piece.”

Birtwistle, of course, best describes his own piece.  Within the work, four ideas stand out:  resonance (deliberately sparse pedal changes, for example, which always damp the strings as one semitone is exchanged for another); complex patterns (melodic and rhythmic); and elements of suprise and unpredictability playing about the delicate structures (such as hesitant pauses).  Birtwistle is also interested in the idea that resonance is at the heart of the harp's special and fundamental character, hence the title's reference to the earliest harps, and not to a crowd of people.   

Patterns upset by random elements are at the heart of all Birtwistle's work. To summarise a vast oeuvre with almost criminal brevity, it boils down to a preoccupation, shared by many great artists, with the differences between the flawless order art appears to glimpse in the distance, and the imperfections both of the world, and in ourselves. While it is in the artist's nature always to strive for something perfect, reality gets in the way, by chance events or our human limitations.  Birtwistle's recurrent interest in ancient things (as in Crowd's Old English associations) also evokes this desire for order:  to invent an archaic world anew suggests perpetual recurrence, cyclic unity and wholeness.   

It is Birtwistle's habit, when asked to comment on what governs his work as a whole, to cite other people.  One such quote Birtwistle has supplied is from the psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim:

“All autistic children demand that time must stop still.  Time is the destroyer of sameness.  If sameness is to be preserved, time must stop still in its tracks...In the autistic child's world the chain of events is not conditioned by causality we know.  But since one event does follow another, it must be because of some timeless cosmic law that ordains it.  An eternal law.  Things happen because they must, not because they are caused.”

Non-autistic people (including Birtwistle) realise that, if such cosmic continuity does exist, we will never see it.  Even within ourselves, however intellectually able we may be, we are all subject to sensual and irrational impulses as part of our human condition.  It is Birtwistle's recognition both of the external chance whims to which we are all subject, and the internal conflicts that define us as individual human beings, that makes Crowd, for me, so deeply moving.  It is powerfully intellectual music, written with an astounding understanding of how the harp can sound most effective – but it is also profoundly human.   

By the time we reach our mid-twenties, most of us know what it is to construct systems, believe them perfect, and learn that they are not. Musicians, in particular, are constantly dealing both with music's beauty and wonder, and the mistakes we make as we try to create it. This is why we are, like Birtwistle in other works, fascinated by the Orpheus myth: about the power of music and the frailty of the musician.  The harp's resonance in Crowd is similarly ambivalent.  The harpist does not control it the resonance, but it is the instrument's heart.

 

David Beckham, I feel your pain

I am beginning to accept that I am unlikely ever to attain the calm, organised and Chanel-polished luxus that delicately swathes proper harpists (actually, my toenails are Chanel-polished, but they're chipped).   Witness, for example, my recent audition in Munich.  Proper harpists go to bed early before a big performance, having eaten a nutrious whole-grain, teetotal supper.  TwTwTw went and had a pizza in some dodgy pavement cafe, because it had the currently all-important widescreen TV.  At 3am I started throwing up.  At 10am I had to turn up and register, where I related my sad tale in rather more detail than was perhaps dignified. 

The sympathetic office staff dispatched me to the chemist to buy anti-barfing pills;  en route, I threw up in the U-Bahn.  I bought the tablets, staggered back and opened the packet.  "Christ", thought I.  "These are the biggest tablets I've ever seen.  They must be extra strong and Teutonic and effective."  I was just about to swallow one when I saw the box said: suppositorien.  At this point, cowardice joined inelegance (so, no! none were, erm, administered) - although I suppose, at least I didn't have to explain that I was even iller because I didn't know my a*** from -

Anyway.  The actual audition went very well.  But, I mean, honestly.  I bet this never happens to Catrin Finch.