twang twang twang - MUNICH

painting the lilly

From Jeremy Denk:

"Things happen, life happens, directions veer and sway, paths blur and whir like blades of a fan, your best lays go agley, and overall let me put it this way: you have no idea what will happen next. This can even be true in the boring Classical world.

I had plans, magnificent plans! I was playing a four-hand work with a certain music director of the San Francisco Symphony (anonymous of course), a beautiful slow movement which is one of those marvels of Mozartean simplicity. But, content on the reprise I was not. I yearned, the second time around, to fill its basic intervals with elaborations, like a chocolate bar with nougat, and said music director encouraged me at our first rehearsal, averring that by historical accounts Mozart ornamented heavily ... that it was "like Chopin." Haha. I barely need encouragement in general, in almost every facet of my existence, so watch out! The next day, submerged in the pit under the Davies stage, I spent my "practice breaks" concocting ornaments... like Christmas ornaments really: some quite cheesy, some unnecessary, some beautiful, some graceful, some edible (?) and some making you wish you had never come home for Christmas at all. I laughed and giggled and generally ridiculously entertained myself, which calls to mind the magnificent line of Homer Simpson: "But I was getting lonely being happy all by myself."

The point was I was going to be an audacious ornamenter, and catch Anonymous Music Director by surprise onstage, etc.  I used just a few of my ornaments at our dress rehearsal, and even this mere sampling elicited the following remark: "Jeremy, what have you been smokin' the last few days?" This I considered a success; yes, it's a slightly different kind of success from what most people yearn for, but we all set our bars in different places, so to speak. So, anyway, I was feeling very pleased with myself, but as usual, the first night I didn't really have (to use the vernacular) the cojones to do everything I had planned; I did some things but couldn't go "all the way." "

 

educashun

I am what Janet Mills at the RCM describes as a "performer-teacher" - "performers for whom instrumental teaching is integral to their professional identity."  I love teaching, and here is a really excellent piece by Baroness Warnock on music teaching in schools.  Informed, clear, and best of all, offering solutions that marry practicality with an understanding both of how music lessons need to be executed if they are to be any good at all, and why music is important in larger terms:  "The sense of infinite possibilities lies at the heart of good education; it is through music that many children can find this sense of the inexhaustible. To deprive children of such a permanent source of pleasure is to damage them."

Just as music itself is a marriage of feelings and ideas with a practical execution of them, teaching music is almost always a juggling act between what would be the best possible tuition you could offer in an ideal world, and what you can do with the money, time and support available.  The more compromises you have to make, the lower the level.  If you can work with someone one-on-one for two hours once or twice a week and fly them round the world to competitions and masterclasses, they will play better than someone who gets half an hour a week and has to share a clarinet. 

Like many musicians, I am pretty left-wing, and there are no class barriers in the music profession.  But the only teaching I do in Britain at the moment is at Eton, because it means I don't have to compromise.  There, my pupils have enough lesson time, enough suitable rooms to practice in, a decent-quality (not fancy) instrument to work on, and a civilised environment  where you aren't called a poof if you play the harp.  Nobody is carried around on a golden treble clef, but the set-up lets us teach properly. 

In contrast, the government reckons a half hour violin class shared between 10 7-year-olds is a music lesson.  As my colleagues unfortunate enough to teach these absolutely pointless group lessons will testify, by the time you've said hello and got everyone's fiddles out, it is time to pack up.  Witness, similarly, some wonk's inspired idea to take the funding away from the local music authorities and divvy it up to individual schools.  As Mary Warnock so insightfully and comprehensively explains, most schools simply haven't got the resources to organise music properly - only the private schools, creating an even bigger chasm between the kids whose parents can afford cello lessons and those who can't.  A well-run local authority - Birmingham, for example - has a range of realistic systems to provide opportunities for all and extra help for the best.  Their budgets are far from unlimited, but they are properly managed, by musicians, who - amazingly - know more about teaching music than non-musician politicians. 

I benefited hugely from the local authority youth orchestras up in Northumberland.  I also remember the saintly man in charge, who'd spent his life helping kids from deprived ex-mining communities either to enjoy music for the rest of their lives, or to enter the profession - he had his budget cut, and cut, and cut again, so he had to merge the different, carefully levelled orchestras, and to compromise.  I don't know where the money went instead.  Did it buy ukeleles? 

Calender (sack)butts

The soprano Katy Tansey is fighting a rare and aggressive form of cancer.  In order to help raise funds for the best treatment, and for the bills that of course keep arriving while she and her husband are unable to work at the moment, the brass boys from Shakespeare's Globe have done a calender-girls style shoot, their modesty only protected by tastefully positioned period instruments. 

You can order a copy or copies (Christmas presents for your musician friends!) of the calender online here and follow Katy's progress here.  Please spread the word and support this vital cause.

the long and winding road

I really hope that I suddenly chance upon a glut of fantastically-paid work that requires moving my harp myself (English readers - orchestras here have their own harps), so all the effort I am going to to to register my car in Germany will have been worth it. 

On the bright side, my car passed his health check, and we went and got my friend's new harp, all marvellously convenient apart from suffering a blow-out on the A3 coming back from Bonn.  Girls, if your car suddenly starts vibrating enormously at 160km/hour - it is not the road surface.  Don't keep driving, past the service station, before deciding you are going to have to pull over after all and await your shining knight from ADAC on the freezing hard shoulder. 

I must say though, the ADAC men are lovely.  It is the second time in two months I've availed myself of their services (look, my car is marvellous - complete coincidence the wheel weights fell off in October) and it is almost worth the drama for their smiling faces and car-healing powers. The first time, I said (sharp as a tack):  "hello! There's something wrong with my car!".   He said, "the steering wheel's on the wrong side! That's what is wrong with your car!".

You don't see many British cars in Bavaria.  This has its advantages - other drivers nervously give me lots of room to manoeuvre, which is probably for the best.  Thanks too to the helpful chap who honked to tell me I had drifted onto the wrong side of the road in Ulm. 

Manny Hurwitz has died.

I first met Manny when I was 14, where Daphne Boden and Manny's harpist daughter-in-law Miriam Keogh ran a harp summer school alongside Kay and Manny's string chamber music course.  Every night there were concerts of string quartet after string quartet (followed by more unofficial quartets outside in the middle of the night), and I remember vividly Manny having everyone in fits of laughter with a loud - as the traffic on and off-stage got a bit chaotic - "Tsk! It's like a Jewish wedding".

Alongside being a wonderful artist and with his wife Kay, Manny tirelessly developed music education.  The first time working with someone who is equally a performer and a teacher is something a young musician never forgets, and which buoys them for years, forever. 

If I could do it, I would print the opening rising sequence in Mendelssohn's Octet.  I'm listening to Manny and the Melos Ensemble playing it. 

As it says on another great violinist's grave, he who makes music in this life makes music in the next. 

harps return

I have yet to hear Emmanuel Ceysson, but I gather from all my most reliable sources he's fantastic, and he's playing in the States.  The harp traditionally has this funny status, where you can bash out the most incredible rubbish and people will still say, "how beautiful", but at the other end of the scale it's not always taken really seriously.  Truly exceptional virtuosi like Ceysson are doing much to change this image, as are the best composers.

Everyone's entitled to his own opinion, but given that serious harpists should be recognised as such, I'm not totally bowled over by this, from the NYT:

"Ravel's ''Introduction and Allegro'' came at the end. It may not be as profound as Debussy's more softly spoken ''Sacred and Profane Dances,'' but it is perhaps more delicious. Curvaceous, cuddlesome and irresistibly charming, the ''Introduction and Allegro'' is something like the Marilyn Monroe of the classical-music repertory."

Ravel's septet is certainly full of beautiful sonorities, but I've always found the cadenza adds a note of desolation, shadows, picked up from the opening motif and so revealing that it perhaps wasn't just an effective colour after all.  That's why the piece is a great work:  aside from its technical brilliance,  it's emotionally three-dimensional.  The recapitulation is much more moving because of the cadenza, courageous and triumphant as well as sunlit.

Then again, Marilyn Monroe was also another "cuddlesome" entertainer crying inside.  Arthur Miller got it right:  "a great comedienne, but I also think that she might turn into the greatest tragic actress that can be imagined."

drinking song

Patti writes:  "There has always been alcohol abuse in the music biz, but it always saddens me to read about college students—especially an entire oboe studio—getting blasted."

Wise words, but I feel I should pay tribute here to the legendary Alan Civil, whose obituary in the Telegraph contained the immortal lines "It would be unrealistic to gloss over the fact that Alan Civil enjoyed a drink."  I could have got this wrong, but I believe Civil also had a large wine-cork collection, date of drinking and in what company inscribed on each one, which at the end was buried with him.

I am listening to his Brandenberg no.1 with Karajan and the Berlin Phil.  Cheers!

drivel

I am chuffed by Loose Poodle's praise, but heed a comment's caveat that TwTwTw "tells me more about the harp than I particularly wanted to know." 

What can I write about that isn't about harps?

<silence descends>

I did buy one of those little hanging bird feeders for my balcony, hoping for a few green and gold feathered friends who would perhaps perch tamely on my finger and sing Messiaenically.  It had only been up a day when word got round and now scores of huge Bavarian tweeters splat in for breakfast, lunch, dinner and tea.  I am getting through 2 kilos of sunflower seeds a week.  I have also learnt that, while the German word for "tit" is, indeed, "Tit", in an avian context you need "Meisen".

A propos the awful german language, if you are feeling unwell because of a bad reaction to tablets, you should tell your professor it is because of "Medikamente".  Not "Drogen".  "Drogen" is cocaine and so forth.  It is a good job I am unembarrassable. 

Other than that, last night I went to a cracking harp concerto (well, flute and harp - or "flat and sharp", as we say in the biz) at the Residenz;  tomorrow I'll play (the harp) in a concert;  on Sunday I'm going to Bonn with a friend to help her buy a harp; on Tuesday we return and I will do Alexander technique to help me play the harp;  on Wednesday I'll alphabetise all my harp music and send off applications to get paid for playing the harp;  on Thursday my lesson will filmed for German TV so I'll buy new make-up to wear whilst playing the harp; on Friday I'll fly to England, to give harp classes.

Ach, it's not a job, it's a way of life. 

"In music one must think with the heart and feel with the brain" - George Szell

it's simply...

Admittedly, when I talked of simplicity, I was thinking more about wonderful musicians, great teachers, connections between body and soul, the Alexander Technique, meditation, religion, Mozart...But, TwTwTw has always tried to marry the philosophical with real life, and hey, there's a symmetry here that would be funny if I wasn't out of pocket.

I have, for the last five years, taught chamber music on a summer school.  Last July, I was only there for the first of the two weeks, as I was ill for the second.  Seeing as all the stuff to do with harp was in any case finished, the course said it would be fine for me to return to London to see my doctor.  What they didn't mention at the time was that they were then going to halve my fee. 

I appealed (I mean, I waived my entire fee one year out of the goodness of my heart, when the festival was particularly broke), and it was agreed they would resolve the matter one way or the other by the end of October.  It looks, however, like it will be a cold day in hell that I see the money - I've just been thanked for my understanding that the decision is indefinitely postponed, because the secretary is...ill.

Get well soon and all that, but it takes the fucking [without asterisks] biscuit, doesn't it?