twang twang twang - MUNICH

on with the show

On wednesday I lured an unsuspecting friend into the car and we headed east.  The M11 turned into the A11, that single carriageway into a B road, winding its way through Thetford forest, the Norfolk market town of Swaffham (last year, fighting to have no Tescos, and only small local shops), and up a dirt track to Fakenham and finally the tiny North Norfolk hamlet of Thursford.  Thursford, for the last three years, had been my home for two months every Christmas as the show band harpist for the Thursford Christmas Spectacular.  I retired this year - or at least, took a year off - so for the first time I was going to see the whole thing out front.

Other than the church and the village hall, the Thursford Collection is the only building in the village that isn't a small cottage.  During most of the year it is a museum of local farming equipment through the ages and also has a large collection of Wurlitzer organs, from which the idea for the Christmas show stems.  Phil Kelshaw, a Wurlitzer virtuoso normally based in Blackpool, comes down to play Christmas music on the main Wurlitzer What began as a small carol concert with singers and Phil is now an all-singing, all-dancing, multi-costumed, million-pound extravaganza, with a company of over a hundred up from the West End and over 180,000 tickets sold.  The entire shebang is created and masterminded by the museum director John Cushing.

The actual nature of the performance is impossible accurately to describe but owes something equally to variety, Victorian music hall, panto and reflective carol concert, all pulled together as slickly as it's possible to do anything and with a lighting book as big as the yellow pages.  The audience are mostly coachloads of pensioners up from Eastbourne or wherever, plus a few friends of the cast up from Soho.  The principal audience return annually for a feel-good celebration of Christmas cheer:  the show follows the same format, and Cushing gets letters of complaint if he tries to alter it. Those of us who have never seen it stand and stare at its truly awe-inspiring concoctions.  Somehow, Cushing ties together what you would think could only stand asunder.  The Coventry Carol segued into Jesus Christ Superstar this year, and the Gloria in Excelsis intro rapidly morphed into Gimme Some Lovin' for the disco number, with the dancers in outfits that surely stopped a few pacemakers in the house.  And everybody loves it.  The house is sold out every night, for 72 shows, seating 1500 people each. 

How?  How on earth has Cushing done it?  He's entirely untrained in theatre, but clearly has a natural gift for production, perfected over the years and supported by an all-professional company.  And the show offers good lessons in professionalism. Each show is three hours long and the cast do two a day, pretty much seven days a week, from early November until December 23rd, although early in the run you get some evenings off (there is always a matinee).  I was 22 when I first did it and had never had the experience of doing a long show, with seven costume changes, solo numbers and memory work, plus the whole of the second half onstage (no reading the paper in the pit here) - and then doing it all again an hour later.  Every day.  For two months.  There is no second cast, and it is very good to know one is capable of that sort of work.  You have to give 100% each time, not only out of professional pride, but because the audience have all paid £20 a ticket and it is the highlight of their winter. 

Behind the scenes, as is normal for a section of humanity over ten weeks, people get sick, have rows with their partners, crash their cars, have to sort out domestic crises, and every so often somebody has a moment where they're really not sure they can go on for the 45th show.  But they always do.  The professional drive is very strong.  Every musician is asked at some point or another by a well-meaning punter something along the lines of "what's your real job?" or (usually if they want you to work for free) "but you're doing something you love" (yes, but Jeff and Janet still need Kittymunchies).  But professionalism is how you do something, not what you do, and if you have 1500 people coming to see you, you need a cast who will deliver, even if their boyfriend's run off with the choreographer or they're down with gastric flu.  At an  orchestral run I did the other week the oboist turned up for the second concert and he'd been in casulty all night, having eaten something to which he'd turned out to be allergic.  He was clinically dead for a couple of minutes and it was only when he showed us his jacket, sleeves slashed so they could get the drugs into him more quickly, that we believed him.  He played brilliantly. 

 

Parties and tributes

I swear, I will never drink again. Our summer party was a good one but I have the Britten Suite to get up for Sunday and 10,000 beer cans to remove from the garden, bath, stairs, cats, etc.

Else in the news my father wrote a poem in memory of John Mayer, so I have added it to my July post.

Proper posting will follow after a fried breakfast and seven hours of Britten practice.

Sliding Doors

Over on Artsblogging there is a discussion about the need to have a broad range of artistic and cultural reference, beginning with my post about the range of blogging versus traditional journalism; George observes that art forms inform each other; and Jessica articulates some sophisticated connections between narrow-mindedness and our Zeitgeist:

“a reaction against the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, perhaps, or part of the tendency through the late 20th century towards isolation? Or just part of our ever-busier lives, battling against lousy transport systems, the onslaught of appalling TV, noise pollution, family break-ups and the rest. Do we no longer have the time or energy to examine anything beyond our own familiar territory?”

I hope George is feeling gratified that within the first three substantial posts on his new blog a fascinating issue has been reached, and one that I myself have only just become conscious of in my reading today.

I have had orchestral calls all day, which if you are a harpist requires a good book, even if you are playing both harp parts simultaneously in a chamber arrangement of Das Lied von der Erde. So I have been reading Paul Morley’s Words and Music (a virtuosically written history of pop), and Deryck Cooke’s Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to his Music. Contrasting material, but also with enough common ground to make me feel I learnt something new about what music and maybe art in general is about, which makes me feel good about the day.

This is a long post, but I shall work hard to write clearly.

To start coherently I quote the blurb on the back of Words and Music:

“HAS POP BURNT ITSELF OUT? Inspired by the video for Kylie Minogue’s hit single ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’, acclaimed rock journalist Paul Morley is driving with Kylie towards a virtual city built of sound and ideas in search of the answer. Their journey bridges the paradoxes of twentieth-century culture, as they encounter a succession of celebrities and geniuses – including Madonna, Kraftwerk, Wittgenstein and the ghost of Elvis Presley – and explore the iconic and the obscure, the mechanical and the digital, the avant-garde and the very nature of pop itself.”

Throughout his journey through twentieth-century culture, Morley has as a focal point Kylie’s intensely synthetic, uber-polished, ultra-produced “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’, and Alvin Lucier’s 1969 experiment in the relationship between the purely acoustic human voice and the manipulations of it recording can produce, I am sitting in a room. He does this because of the contrast between the two works:

“I am sitting in a room is a natural sonic sculpture. ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ is synthetically tuned pop art.”

Simultaneously, the songs are similar:

“Kylie’s song, a lovely little drama about love and loss, a mesmerising observation of obsession, is certainly a pop piece, but there is art to it as well. It can be satisfying mentally as the Lucier piece, as tantalising and as mysterious for all its aggressive, even cynical, commercial glitter. Lucier’s piece, not a song, aches with artistic intent, but it is also, in its way, about love, loss, obsession, and is as satisfying physically as Kylie’s song.”

What can be perceived from this at once difference and similarity, Morley argues, is a layered reality, more subtle than the familiar concept that each has his own reality. Two very different pieces of art can meet in the mind of an individual, and do so through the dialectic between what they have to say that is original, and what is referential – clichés, perhaps, or everyday images:

“I can hear the music develop in my mind as I think about it, I can feel its weight, and understand its magic. It has a magic that is to do with time, and how you find time, and how time finds you, and what happens when you meet, time and you, and you, in the middle of nowhere, timed to meet, timed to perfection, from time to time, time stops, in the middle of music, which is all about time, and the way that time and timing is everything, and music is time itself turned into form, time is the past and the present turned into content, form and content connect to float across time, time for thought, time to listen, time to feel, time to end this sentence”

So – music has magical power because it sounds so many different resonances deep within us and the worlds we inhabit. Different eras, for example – Morley is conscious of the temptation to listen to “rebellious” rock bands who no longer constitute rebellious rock music, but who were when you personally were feeling rebellious aged 15 back in 1987. And to refer to one time and be in another is also a manifestation of fluid realities:

“I was becoming less real in a world that was becoming less real, and at the same time I was gaining in reality, the reality of being able to live across time zones, across cities, across space.”

When you look at classical music, too, there is a constant and shifting scheme of reference. Take Das Lied von der Erde, which I was playing today. On the basis of one 120 page guide and my own ears, here are some of its references. Chinese poetry; German translation; Mahler’s own words at the final coda. Passionate love of life, and awareness of inevitable death. Romantic hope for the transcendent potential of mankind through art; modern consciousness of sordid, beastly humanity (it is Mahler’s popular, burlesque, vulgar inclusions that distinguish him from other Romantic composers. Much of Das Lied is spent rolling drunk). Das Lied’s last movement, 'der Abschied', is full of cross rhythms, and rubato within the rhythms, creating a shifting sound for the music’s programme: a bittersweet personal farewell, where the individual must die, but the lovely earth blossoms in Spring and grows green again eternally. At the end, it is Mahler’s ability to perceive more than one reality that allows him courageously to face out his untimely death:

“Waking from his vision of mankind redeemed to find himself in the valley of the shadow of death before his time, what could he now set against the ‘spirit that denies’? The vision remained valid – for humanity, but it was no comfort for the individual faced with disintegration. The affirmation of vitality of the First and Fifth Symphonies was impossible; the faith of the Second, Third and Fourth ungraspable; and the nihilism of the Sixth unthinkable. Spiritual defeat stared Mahler in the face. He was forced back on his one indestructible possession – his intense love of living.” (Cooke)

Granted, Romantic music is intensely interested in issues outside the musical – the ascent of man, the expression of something (feeling, for example), and the links of art with the divine. As Jessica notes, there were and are many profound reactions against this supremely reaching reference in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But to react against something, often you have already been shaped by it – Debussy never escaped Wagnerian influences. Other very different musics lead by their very existence to new realities and new references, such as minimalism. Take Morley’s citation of Cage, on performing Satie’s eighteen-hour Vexations (840 repetitions):

“The experience over the eighteen hours and forty minutes of those repetitions was very different from the thought of them or the realisation that they were going to happen…I had changed, and the world had changed.”

How on earth are we to keep music apart from other art, and the experience of living,if we are ever even to feel we understand what it is, what it's for, and why we are writing about it in the first place?