twang twang twang - MUNICH

Ring out, wild bells

I did absolutely nothing over Christmas.  I did my last Christmas concert and then got on a train and headed north without the harp.  This is the first time in about three years I have been away without And Harp Comes Too for more than two days.  It was great.  Ate turkey, watched the queen, went for walks, sat in ye olde village pub, had family row, enjoyed mutual forgiveness ten minutes later, wondered if I'd put on weight - customary festive cheer, without a massive gilded instrument of guilt, fear and misery in the corner of the sitting room.

Nonetheless I am quite pleased to see it again as we're gearing up for sound collective's biggest concert to date, in SJSS on January 7th.  Tom Hammond will conduct a historically-informed Beethoven 3, and premiere Matthew Taylor's third symphony.  Matthew uses the Beethoven line-up for his symphony, but, bless him, has added a harp so I can be in it (for this he is going on my Lovely Boys list, along with Tom who came up trumps with my Xmas Ipod :) ).  Tom H was up in the North East as well over Christmas so I had a peek at the whole score -  I haven't looked forward to the start of January so much for a long time.

Rather than even attempt to pretend this is not a plug, Download sound_collective_jan_press_release.doc .   Prior to the downbeat John McCabe will talk with Matthew Taylor :  a rare chance to see two living composers discuss the importance of the symphony to modern music and culture.  John and Matthew agreeing to do this is the icing on the cake for me, really, because the whole programme appeals to my obsession with the co-existence of old and new in classical music.  It'll be fascinating to  track the development of a musical form over almost exactly two hundred years. 

Reading List

Clare Stevens lists her music books of the year in Classical Music Magazine.  I'll be getting:

- On Creativity (Methuen h/b).  "Thirteen artists from a range of disciplines interviewed by John Tusa for Radio 3 and published in edited transcripts"

- Sing, Ariel (Ashgate h/b with CD).  "Elliott Carter and Goehr's pupil the musicologist Nicholas Cook are among the contributors to a collection [celebrating Alexander Goehr's 70th] which inludes, according to our reviewer Andrew Stewart, 'a far higher count than usual of outstanding essays'"

- Ivan Hewitt's Healing The Rift (Continuum h/b).  "The rift is between avant-garde and experimental art music and traditional classical music.  Hewett alerts us to the danger that classical music may be becoming at the same moment ubiquitous and invisible;  we have a choice, he believes, between keeping faith with it and reanimating it so that it stays a living art, 'or being faced with its ghost murmering at us from restaurant loudspeakers and CD shops and TV screens.'"

Eclectic ITunes #1

I've just discovered Itunes (I know, I know - but at least, unlike a composer friend of mine, my grandmother didn't have to teach me how to send a text message).

Here's my first Eclectic Playlist.  No theme other than that the songs must be good, and not follow on from one another with such a crunching of gears it offends the ear.

UPDATE:  is this instant ipudding, the death of the album? Or is it part of the natural selection which can lead people to think Mozart et al were better than composers today? All the dross has got lost in the mists of time, which is why they look better, whereas we have to sift through piles of rubbish contemporary music to find a really good piece.

Sparkling Diamonds (Various artists - Moulin Rouge soundtrack.  Hindi Sad Diamonds from the same score is also great)
New York, New York (Sinatra live)
Taxman (Beatles)
My Fair Lady Selections (Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops)
Tosca "Mario! Mario! Mario!" (Domingo/Freni)
What's Going On (Marvin Gaye)
Saint-Saens Rondo Capriccioso (Oleg Klagen)
In Persuit of Happiness (The Divine Comedy)
Trees (Pulp)
Dichterliebe:  Ich Grolle Nicht (Fischer-Dieskau)
Heavy Soul (Paul Weller)
Barbie Girl (Acqua)
Every Good Day Dies (The Sun Brothers)
Mysterious Ways (U2)
Woke Up This Morning (Alabama 3)
She's A Lady (Pulp again)
Sleeping Beauty Rose Adagio (Berlin Phil/Slava)
Goldberg Variations (Gould)

Dubious

Driving to my teacher's house to pick up a last minute Bax nonet (students - if you're going to pull out of a concert the day before, preferably fix a dep who has played the piece before;  failing that, supply them with the music), I listened, as is my wont in town, to London's Heart 106.2.

This, for the yanks and readers outside zone 1, is London's ultra-cheesy pop radio station.  Get into the Groove, Heaven candlelight mix, Eternal Flame, you get the idea.  One harpist friend and I always listen to its Late Night Love Songs after gigs as well.

It struck me that I am not the only classical musician to have a seriously dodgy taste in pop music.  I wonder why this is?  Do we get enough high-mindedness from work, so we gravitate towards the musicial equivalent of Mills & Boon romances for time out?  On a long drive, I don't listen to it.  Then I have beard-scratchingly serious stuff or it gets too boring.

Hmm...komisch...

strings attached

I have had some nice comments from a harp major and a lover of shop-talk, so will continue in harpcentric vein tonight.

Sometimes I hate playing the harp.  Take today.  I arrive early at cathedral, heave harp in, tune for hours.  Rehearse first minute and a half, conductor happy, I am free to go shopping.  Come back before concert, tune for hours again (it's very cold here - makes the harp go sharp).  Knit through first half, go on in interval, tune all the notes that have gone sharp.  All fine.    Orchestra comes on.  Valade walks on. Important string breaks suddenly.  Change string acrobatically from sitting position with harp on wonky flagstone during Act 2. Discover L'Enfance Du Christ is too tenderly scored to allow sneaky tuning-up.  Perform trio with uncharacteristically clever (necessity is the mother of invention) alternative octaves, inversions, etc, to avoid the bum note.  Survive.  Most of the band don't notice string went at all.  Don't know whether to curse, or give thanks that it was not the A string, which gives the pulse throughout, and for which there is no enharmonic alternative.

Now I see why oboists are neurotic.  My harp hardly ever pings strings without warning, but reeds go like this all the time. 

Icing on cake was a bat shitting on us from the cathedral roof, in perfect unison with the first C#.  Didn't come in late 'though.  I am stronger than bat crap.

Inconsiderate Berlioz

Today I sat for seven hours to run through a five-minute number (and we had a little ten-minute rehearsal in extra time, thanks to the generosity of my flautist colleagues). 

I don't expect everything to revolve around the harp & reckon on some waiting around but surely this is a trifle excessive?  By the end of it I'd done half my scarf and was so brain-dead I came in nearly a quaver late in the allegro.  Hope I don't do that in the concert.

:(

Berlioz should've written a harp and horn opening duet, followed by a black-out long enough to get the harp off, then the rest of the opera.

Steve Hicken posts on enharmonic notation and kindly invites me to comment from a harp perspective. 

Harps, as ever, are different to everyone else.  If you write something that involves one foot changing two pedals at once (such as A# and F#), the harpist will probably re-write it so that the pedals can be shared between the feet (F# and Bb, because the left foot does D,C,B and the right E,F,G,A.  You can bring a foot over, but only for some combinations - E and G can usually be done together, or F & A;  something like F&G would be much harder).  Or we will rewrite things to make them lie better on the strings - thirds, for example, instead of seconds, reducing the possibility of buzzing.  And sometimes we will bung everything into flats to make it sound richer, as in flats the string is the most open (this explains the confusing scoring at the end of Dives and Lazarus, for example). 

Just because an enharmonic version is easier to play, however, doesn't mean it's the best option.  A D flat is not quite the same as a C sharp, especially on the harp, and you can spend hours wondering if the easier enharmonic versions sound right against the other parts.  I think the best thing to do is to notate it for the integrity of the whole score, as harpists have different ideas on what is the best compromise.

Hindi Sad Diamonds

It is hard to play classical music if you bottle up what you feel.  Traditionally it is not concerned with spectacle and focuses instead on the emotional, the spiritual, and so on.  But when you go on stage you put on a show, acting confident when you don’t feel confident. And despite the adage that courage is acting bravely no matter how scared you really are, because in music you cannot lie, it is not the same. I love show business, but it is not the same.

%&*£**!

On Thursday I must perform a difficult sonata for the first time.  Having played like an idiot in my lesson last week I've been somewhat going for it since.  This evening, Tom was summoned to the harp room to be dummy audience.  It wasn't bad.  I was quite pleased.

Tom reflected that the execution had been good but was not forthcoming with the gasping handkerchief-wringing admiration that is the correct response in these situations.  The music wasn't his sort of thing, and alas he has a point in that it's a charming sonata in the galant style, but the Goldberg Variations it isn't.  Very fine music, but if you aren't a musician, not as overwhelming as one of the big guns.

That fast, light and sparking texture might not at the top of the canon but it's one of our heaviest pieces and -

!  EIGHT WEEKS OF MY LIFE that's taken me!  Of singing inner lines, and playing top lines only while placing all the rest, and practicing each hand separately in different rhythms, and memorising, and remembering exactly where the twangy bits on my harp are in G Major because it needs a service, and doing mental practice, and critical reading and analysis, and even occasionally trying to communicate the music's feeling and humanity with honesty and love.

Well, I like it. 

The organ, where Thou art the harmony

John Adams/John Donne, Negative Love

 

 

 

 

"I never stooped so low, as they
Which on an eye, cheek, lip, can prey,
Seldom to them, which soar no higher
Than virtue or the mind to admire,
For sense, and understanding may
Know, what gives fuel to their fire:
My love, though silly, is more brave,
For may I miss, whene'er I crave,

If I know yet what I would have.
If that be simply perfectest
Which can be no way be expressed
But negatives, my love is so.
To all, which all love, I say no.
If any who decipher best,
What we know not, ourselves, can know,
Let him teach me that nothing;  this
As yet my ease, and comfort is,
Though I speed not, I cannot miss."