Notes from a Defeatist

Some records that I liked this year

2011-12-21T16:35:00.000Z

They're not all new this year, but they were new to me.

Cornershop: And the Double-O Groove of
Birtwistle: Night's Black Bird
Björk: Biophilia
Kate Bush: 50 Words for Snow
Bill Callahan: Apocalypse
Eliza Carthy: Neptune
The Fall: Ersatz GB
Fovea Hex: Here Is Where We Used To Sing
PJ Harvey: Let England Shake
Katy B: On a Mission
Khyam Allami: Resonance/Dissonance
Julaba Kunda: Traders
Hilary Hahn: Ives Violin Sonatas
Jonny Kearney & Lucy Farrell: Kite
Katzenjammer: Le Pop & A Kiss Before You Go
Laura Marling: A Creature I Don't Know
Ben Johnston: String Quartets 1, 5 & 10
Misty Dixon: Iced to Mode
Mötorhead: The Wörld is Yours
Eliane Radigue: L'île re-sonante
Rasputina: Great American Gingerbread & How We Quit the Forest (reissue)
Roshi featuring Pars Radio: Mehregan
Spieres and Boden: The Works
The Fierce and the Dead: If It Carries On Like This We are Moving to Morecombe
Trio Scordatura: Dubh
Sun-Ra: Strange Strings
The Unthanks: Last & The Somngs of Robert Wyatt and Antony and the Johnsons
Tom Waits: Bad As Me
Abigail Washburn: City of Refuge
Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi: Rome
Little Roy: Battle for Seattle
Jane Weaver Septième Soeur: The Watchbird Alluminate
The Webb Sisters: Savages

Essays before a composition (4)

2011-06-24T14:27:00.004+01:00

The complete consort dancing together by petemaskreplica

The last time I wrote a piece for a symphony orchestra was in 2005: a small piece with a long title to celebrate Kensington Symphony Orchestra's 50th season. The last time I wrote for orchestra before that was in 2001, a work which got a play through in rehearsal but has never been publicly performed. When you're 20 years old and filled with energy and idealism you think nothing of churning out enormous pieces of music without a thought for who's going to play them, but as I get older it seems a waste of time and energy to slave over an orchestral score with no prospect of it being heard. It's so easy now and so satisfying to produce something large scale in my own living room, and immediately get it uploaded and out there; why sweat over something as arcane as an orchestra when I'll probably never hear the result?

As a result of this ideas stew in my brain for years. I've had the idea for the piece I'm about to begin work on for a long time. In fact, when I wrote The complete consort I had it in mind that it might be in part a preparatory sketch for the bigger work I wanted to write but couldn't at that time justify spending time on.

Over time ideas get half buried, maybe rethought for more realistic projects. Meanwhile new influences continually change my ideas of how to make music, and what sort of music to make. These new ideas and strategies sink into those half-buried seeds and mutate them. You'd think having had the germ of a piece fermenting in my mind for the best part of a decade would make it easy to produce when the chance finally comes. In fact it's hard: I and my music have changed in so many ways I couldn't have foreseen that the idea itself has begun to change, and many of the aspects that I thought were most fixed turn out now not to fit in with how I currently do things. It's not impossible that I'll raid the older music for elements I can use in the new piece, but it seems unlikely that it'll be as straightforward a relationship as I once thought it would be. Music's always on the move; any particular piece that's set down in a definable form is only a snapshot of a moment that's already gone.

Stretching it

2011-06-18T17:52:00.001+01:00

I've got a new toy.

In a Cavern by petemaskreplica

Essays before a composition (3)

2011-06-02T13:33:00.001+01:00

They chase, they chase their quarry, or the idea of it. Look at them, wildly swinging their nets, each lunge met with empty air. And still they hunt. And meanwhile I sit here, chasing an imagined sound, pen skittering across the page trying to capture my quarry, my conception, even as it recedes ever before me and behind me, each moment gone before it happens...

Essays before a composition (2)

2011-06-01T11:28:00.000+01:00

One of the problems for a composer trying to write a programme note is that the experience of listening to a piece of music is almost the precise opposite of the experience of writing it. When you compose, you begin with an idea, a concept of what impression you want the piece to give. The process of producing the music is then a process of unpacking this idea, expanding it and rolling it out into a time span. The listener does this process more or less backwards: over the time span, he or she absorbs the notes, the textures and so on and (if the composer’s done the job well) at the end will have a concept of the work in the mind (which may bear a greater or lesser similarity to the concept the composer had in the fist place). Moreover, what concerns and interests a composer in the act of writing isn’t necessarily what concerns the listener. The composer is concerned with processes: how do I put things together so a to realise this idea of sound? Of course, once he’s worked this out he feels very excited and pleased, and wants to tell people how he did it. But that’s exactly what a listener doesn’t need or want to know. Roberto Gerhard wrote, “Understanding comes first; knowledge second.” There’s a fundamental mistake that’s made all the time in the classical music world: people who like classical music know a lot about it, gos the reasoning, so if you tell people a lot about it they’ll like it. In fact what happens is that if you bombard people with technical detail they start to think that unless they know about it they can’t possibly like or even begin to listen to it. If people like a piece they may well find out more about it, and they may get into the nitty gritty of theory and technique, but that’s for later. Programme notes in which the composer drones on about the clever technical devices he used to write the piece are therefore the biggest turn off imaginable, and such notes often lose the audience’s sympathy before they’ve heard a note.

Essays before a composition (1)

2011-05-31T15:32:00.002+01:00

When I was young I discovered the record section of Birmingham Central Library (something that sadly would be all but impossible now in more than one way, and will become utterly impossible if this government gets its way). I discovered many things within those thing cardboard sleeves, sounds that I’d never heard or imagined could be made. I devoured Nielsen’s symphonies, Stockhausen’s Telemusik and Miles Davies’ Bitches Brew with equal enthusiasm, if not immediate understanding. I pored over the sleeve notes for the Stockhausen. They were all but impenetrable, and if I’d been relying on them to guide me into the music I doubt I’d have made it far. Fortunately I just liked the sounds and didn’t worry about what I was supposed to think about them. It was gratifying years later to hear Stockhausen himself introduce his music. His advice on how to listen to his music mentioned nothing of tone rows or retrograde inversions, but boiled down to: you will hear some sounds. Listen to them and hear what happens to them. It turned out Karlheinz was a lot easier to get my head round than Miles.

Essays before a composition (preamble)

2011-05-31T15:09:00.003+01:00

I'm about to start work on a reasonably big piece. I tend to steer clear of big pieces these days; it's all very well churning out page after page of music for an enormous body of musicians like an orchestra regardless when you're 20, but now it doesn't seem worth the effort unless there's a realistic chance of a performance. I'd rather work on the small scale, move fast, move on, have stuff ready that someone might actually pick up. Small forces make it easier to make a stab at originality, too; I think larger groups by their nature are more of the establishment and tend to drive out different ways of thinking.

But once the prospect of an actual performance raises its head all my worthy self-justification goes out of the window and I get childishly excited at the thought of having all those instruments to play with.

I'll have to write a programme note, of course. I was thinking about this at the weekend when I went to see the London Sinfonietta's "Pavilions" concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a curious mixture of music, not really a programme, more just a bunch of pieces that got played on the same night. I liked about half of it, which I think is a decent strike rate (dear professional composer in their 40s with a teaching post and a decent stretch as a composer: by now you really ought to be able to work out how long your piece is. A couple of minutes out is understandable, but nearly double the advertised length just pisses people off, especially when it doesn't justify the length).

Anyway, I got to talking to my friends in the interval, and I mentioned that I thought on the whole that composers shouldn't be allowed to write notes for their own music, something demonstrated by at least two of the composers represented at the concert. They tend to forget that what's interesting for a composer in what he's written isn't necessarily the same as what a listener wants to know. It was pointed out to me that I'll be breaking my own rule next year and writing my own note for my piece. I said I might write a programme note about why composers shouldn't write programme notes. "I'll remind you about that next year!" said E.

So over the coming months I'm going to scribble random thoughts and stick them up here. Don't expect any continuity or even sense between the posts. It'll essentially be a series of random thoughts that I put down to try and help me get my head around the ideas I'm tackling with this piece, how I might try and explain them in a programme note, whether I should. I'm hoping tat something might emerge magically out of this. It might just turn out to be a disjointed sequence of uninteresting waffle though. So sorry if that's what happens.

Ben Johnston: String Quartets 1, 5 and 10 (Kepler Quartet; New World Records)

2011-02-11T15:10:00.010Z

One of the most exciting recordings that's come my way in recent years is the Kepler Quartet 's CD of four string quartets by Ben Johnston. Johnston, possibly one of the greatest composers you've never heard of, is a sometime apprentice of Harry Partch , inventor of an ingenious notation system for Just Intonation, and has composed ten quartets in all, which explore the vastly expanded harmonic palette made possible by JI in an astonishingly wide variety of ways, ranging from the simplest chords imaginable to uncompromising modernist complexity. That CD was released in 2006, and was intended as the first of three releases that would make available for the first time the complete cycle of quartets in accurate, authoritative recordings supervised by the composer. Now finally the second disc has been released, and it's worth the wait.

This time, the Keplers present Johnston's first and last quartets, together with one from the middle of the sequence. The Fifth Quartet opens the disc, and is quite simply one of the most astonishing pieces of music I've heard in a very long time. It's a set of variations on the Appalachian song "Lonesome Valley," and in this respect is a natural successor to the Fourth Quartet (included on the previous release), which is a set of variations on "Amazing Grace." Whereas that quartet expanded the harmonic language to include harmonies derived from the seventh partial, the slightly "flat" seventh that lies just outside the normal scope of conventional Western harmony, this one goes further, deriving its sound world from the distinctly more alien intervals to be found at the 11th and 13th limits. The effect is ambiguous and unsettling to ears used only to the "major-minor" standard Western harmony. The "Lonesome Valley" of the song's title is the"Valley of the Shadow of Death", and the quartet is not merely a clever exercise in weird harmony; it's a profound and disquieting mediation on death that resonates in the mind long after it's over. The piece dates from the 1970s, but feels like something from the distant future, while at the same time speaking with an ancient voice.

Johnston's tenth and most likely final quartet (although still very much with us, he's in frail health and hasn't composed for some years now) belongs to a later style, which might be described as revisionist. Here he explicitly draws on old models such as Haydn, not as pastiche, but as a way of exploring how Western music might have developed had we not locked down our tuning system to a twelve note scale sometime around 1600. This quartet dates from 1995, but paradoxically feels like the work of someone younger. it's an energetic, smart and witty piece, ebullient and extrovert where the fifth is inward and contemplative. The last movement acts as a kind of précis of the history of music, beginning in quasi-medieval mode. It eventually turns out that the movement is another set of variations on a famous tune - a tune so famous, in fact, that's it's a high risk strategy to use it, as in lesser hands the point where its identity is revealed could be a moment of appalling kitsch. In the event, it's a wonderful coup de théâtre that will leave all but the most curmudgeonly listener with an enormous grin on their face.

The final work on the disc is Johnston's First Quartet, the only one of the cycle not written in JI, and perhaps something of a period piece in its post-Webern serial style, typical of its 50s origins. The experience of learning to pitch the exotic intervals in the later quartets has clearly paid off though, because the Kepler's performance brings a luminous quality that makes the piece (another set of variations, though of a much less obvious sort) seem much more voluptuous and much less "difficult" than this sort of music is commonly characterised as being.

If the earlier disc of the second, third, fourth and ninth quartets was a revelation, this set of three is no less so, and confirms that Johnston's is one of the finest and richest quartet cycles of the 20th century. It's to be fervently hoped that the Kepler Quartet manage to raise the funds to complete the cycle (including the so-far unperformed Seventh Quartet, one of the most complex and adventurous things Johnston has written). In the meantime, anyone who cares about music and what it's capable of should immerse themselves in these extraordinary works. All three of these quartets are stunning, but for me it's the Fifth which is the standout, a genuinely overwhelming experience not quite like anything else you've heard.

Happy New Year

2011-01-01T10:20:00.003Z

2011 by petemaskreplica

Don Van Vliet 1941-2010

2010-12-18T07:41:00.006Z

When I was a teenager, I heard two albums that baffled me, took all my preconceptions and threw them away and took me the best part of a decade to absorb properly. One was Bitches Brew by Miles Davis and the other was Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band.

There was something curiously old-fashioned about that "his"; it seemed to evoke old-time acts like Mantovani and his Orchestra. This is strangely appropriate. For all his avant-garde reputation, Beefheart was a showman, and there's a playful theatricality in his music that in another life might have made him a housewives' favourite. You'd have a shock if you put the record on expecting some smooth strings though. I knew the album's reputation, of course - I was an obstreperous child and got that one because it had the most forbidding reputation - but the extraordinary noise that awaited me was something I wasn't prepared for. It took years (and I mean, around 10) for it to click that for all the complexities of time and tone, it was at heart a blues album. That moment of realisation brought everything into focus, and thereafter it seemed incomprehensible that I'd ever found this music forbidding. It never became comfortably familiar though. Like all great music, it remains unpredictable, startling, new.

It's nearly 30 years since Beefheart fell silent. He was advised that he'd never be taken seriously as a painter if he continued to record, so the Captain was put to rest and Don Van Vliet the painter took his place. There's a strong continuity between the painter and the musician. The paintings have that same playful experimentation as his music, and the music comes to seem painterly in the way he spreads sound across his canvas. So it's not really true to say that he'd been inactive in music since 1982; he'd just made music in pigment instead, where before he'd painted in sound. But beyond that, it seems an immediate loss just because he was so far ahead that we haven't really caught up yet.

Cage Against the Machine

2010-12-14T06:44:00.011Z

I suspect the the attempt by Cage Against the Machine to take John Cage's notorious 4'33" to the Christmas No.1 spot is doomed to failure. There doesn't seem to be quite the focussed support for a single anti-X Factor purchase this year as there was with Rage Against the Machine last year. Anyway, Cowell's a canny enough operator to know that even such projects ultimately fuel his own machine, keeping the brand in the public eye. All publicity is good publicity, and the high-trousered one wins (and the rest of us lose) whatever happens, as long as we're not ignoring him.

Having said that, it's bound to be a noble failure, that gives a wider circulation to some of Cage's ideas. Some people seem concerned that the CATM project is "overexposing" Cage's notorious work (although I wonder if there isn't an element of hating it when our friends become successful). Meanwhile over at the Quietus, David Stubbs worries that people aren't taking the piece seriously enough. (There's an interesting discussion about about the question of humour in the comments.) He's partly right of course: 4' 33" isn't a joke. Cage insisted to the end of his life that it was his most important achievement, and that he thought about it before beginning work on every other piece he wrote. But at the same time Cage was certainly alive to the absurdity of the situation that performing 4'33" puts an audience in, and would have considered laughter as valid a response as any. The idea is important and robust enough to survive those who mock it.

Will CATM spark an interest in Cage's other work, so over-shadowed by his most notorious piece? Well, it's unlikely. But it equally seems wrong-headed to complain that it risks making Cage a cult. For one thing, he is already. For another, Cage knew the power of popular culture, and was happy to appear on a TV gameshow for instance. 4'33" was originally conceived as a protest against Muzak, so it seems fitting to employ it as a protest against the souless sausage machine Cowell operates. I suspect he'd have been delighted by the project.

Sceptics like to question how Cage can be said to have "composed" this piece at all, but its form is one of the most intriguing things about it. In its original form, it appropriates all the trappings of a conventional piece. It's divided into three movements, and that's not a joke: Cage's intention was that it should observe exactly all the conventions of classical performance, except of course for the production of any deliberate sound. The boundary between performance and the spaces between and around performance become blurred and uncertain. it's tempting to see this as a deliberate satire on the anxiety that modern concert etiquette inspires in people: the questions of how you know when the piece is finished and when you're "supposed" to clap. The CATM version, with its celebs getting together for charity and its remixes, actually seems to me to be a rather more faithful approach in this respect than the smirking of the BBC Symphony Orchestra that Stubbs mentions in his article.

A lot of those conventions - including the diktat that the audience should be silent - are essentially a product of the recorded music era. It would be silly to applaud a solo on a record in your own home after all. 4'33" reflects a fundamental shift: the audience has become divorced from the performer, and 4'33" formalises this by making the listener rather than the musician the focus, while also opposing it: as the work consists of ambient noise, the audience is as much a performer as anyone on stage.

CATM seems to understand and enage with Cage's idea in a way that "serious" musicians often seem incapable of doing. And four an a half minutes of "dead air"* turning up on the Radio 1 chart show would represent a genuine challenge to all contemporary convention, perhaps more so than David Tudor's premiere. After all, we now live in a world where silence* is becoming almost impossible to find. Background music has invaded music, and every shop, restaurant, pub and public space (even tube stations, increasingly) is overlaid with a patina of sound, there to protect us from our fear of being forced to be aware of ourselves. It's there not to be listened to, but to be ignored. The opposite of music.

This is the most elegant and important point 4'33" has to make. What is music? It's what happens when you pay attention.

Now go buy! Oh, and listen to some of Cage's other music too, because it's great.

(By the way, if you want a good starting point to explore 4'33" and how it fits into Cage's career I highly recommend Kyle Gann's excellent book No Such Thing As Silence.)

*Yes, yes, I know.

** The Classical Music World has few questions as burning as this, and it wonders why it's seen as irrelevant and detached from real life.

Serendipity

2010-11-09T07:11:00.000Z

November 6 by petemaskreplica

Spin Cycle

2010-10-02T13:59:00.000+01:00

Spin Cycle by petemaskreplica

A wash day, a cello, the result.

Forty

2010-08-13T23:39:00.001+01:00

In which I celebrate my impending mid-life crisis by considering the first forty tones of the harmonic series. This entailed using the 37th partial, which I've not only never used and don't really have much idea what it sounds like, but also had to work out exactly what the notation signified (a lowering of pitch by about 23.24 cents, since you ask). I'm rather more excited about having worked this out than I ought to be.

(Just Intonation notation guide here.)

Canyon

2010-08-07T13:56:00.002+01:00

Woo! We're back! Well, maybe. I've got a few ideas and I may blog about them as they develop. In the meantime here's a bit of actual music I made.

Canyon by petemaskreplica

KSO Programme notes 10/05/2010: Schubert & Bruckner

2010-05-12T06:58:00.002+01:00

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Symphony No. 8 in B Minor, D.759 (Unfinished)

1. Allegro moderato
2. Andante con moto

There are in fact five fragmentary symphonies by Schubert, but only one that proudly proclaims its incompleteness. What marks this Unfinished Symphony out from the others is that two of its movements exist in a performable state. The other unfinished symphonies (and the third movement of this one) exist only as fragments and sketches.

The torso was not performed until 1865, over 40 years after its semi-composition. Schubert gave the manuscript of the two completed movements and the beginnings of a third to a friend shortly before his death, and the symphony did not come to light again until the early 1860s. By then the myth of Schubert the neglected genius, fuelled by Robert Schumann's advocacy from the 1830s onwards, was fully established. The much delayed première added to this myth. The “Unfinished” Symphony seemed a reflection of Schubert's fate: Poor Schubert, the untutored genius who produced music as naturally and effortlessly as a bird, doomed to neglect and a young death before he was able to complete his destiny.

Schubert's position in Vienna was not so much that of a neglected composer as an undiscovered one. He was well known as a composer of songs and dance music and had a number of works published. The music for which he is best remembered now was largely unpublished and unperformed during his lifetime not because of a lack of interest, but because he was a young composer at the start of his career who was still hustling for a position in the Viennese artistic scene. Had he lived into the 1830s he would have benefited hugely from the support of both Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt. It is worth remembering that had Beethoven died at the same age as Schubert he would be remembered as a far less significant composer, if at all.

Austria in the early nineteenth century was in many ways at the forefront of European civilisation. Steam boats and hot air balloons were two modern transports that could be experienced in Vienna as early as 1820. Yet there were as yet no sewers and disease was rife. The deathrate in Veinna had declined in the early 19th century but rose again sharply in the 1820s and 30s. Schubert's frequent concern with death in his work was not simply a personal obsession but a reflection of the conditions around him. To us 31 is a shockingly early age to die. To Schubert's contemporaries it was not.

On top of this, the society he lived in was a restricted one. Social occasions such as dances and the soirées where Schubert's songs and chamber music were heard were the closest it was possible to come to personal expression. As the art form least easily interpreted as political, music flourished as a form of covert communication of the hopes and desires of the Viennese. Fantasy, whether in the form of Schubert's “Fantasias” or less salubrious forms of entertainment, was the order of the day. This reflected not only the need for diversion but the desire to be freed from the shackles that bound society.

Schubert was such a prolific composer that it is hard to imagine that he could have suffered writer's block. However, the early 1820s appears to be such a period. This slackening of productivity came between his first great public success, the première of his setting of Goethe's poem Der Erlkönig, and his final illness. It seems that Schubert knew that he had to produce something extraordinary to achieve his ambition of recognition as an equal of Beethoven, but was unable to achieve this until the point at which he realised that time was running out. His earlier successes had been music for domestic, amateur performance. The next step was to produce large-scale instrumental music for public performance. This was no mean feat to achieve. Professional music making was an idea still in its infancy. There were no professional orchestras outside theatres, and no purpose built concert hall in Vienna until the 1830s. The fact that, unlike Beethoven, Schubert was not a virtuoso performer made gaining wider recognition still harder. When he finally organised a public concert of his own music less than a year before his death, it was overshadowed by Paganini's first appearance in Vienna three days later.

This symphony is therefore only one of many incomplete works from this period of Schubert's life. Why he failed to complete it is open to speculation. It seems likely that his poor health was a factor. He spent the latter months of the year in a sanatorium being treated for syphilis, the infection that would eventually kill him in 1828. It may also simply be that without an immediate prospect of performance there was no reason to continue work on it. He may have been stumped as to how to continue. This was after all a radical leap from his earlier symphonies. The fact that between May 1818 and August 1821 he had begun and abandoned 10 symphonic movements suggests a certain insecurity about this new direction. He would eventually bring his ambitions to fulfilment with the “Great” C major Symphony a few years later, but the “unfinished” represents a real breakthrough. Its two completed movements display an astonishingly original conception of what symphonic music can be, quite different to the Beethovenian model that was the norm at the time. In many ways its expansive paragraphs and obsessive repetitions and reiterations anticipate the symphonies of another composer who would find fame in Vienna: Anton Bruckner.

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Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)
Symphony No.9 in D Minor (Unfinished)

1. Feierlich, misterioso (Solemn, mysterious)
2. Scherzo: Bewegt, lebhaft (With movement, lively)
3. Adagio: Langsam, feierlich (Slow, solemn)

Few composers have been quite so divisive and quite so misunderstood as Bruckner. To his contemporaries he was either a simpleton or an astoundingly gifted improviser, a creator of revolutionary, futuristic music or of symphonic monstrosities comically in thrall to the cult of Wagner. After his death his music was co-opted by reactionary forces in Austrian politics as a symbol of a lost Germanic Utopia, a trend that would lead eventually to the linking of Bruckner, along with his idol Wagner, to the Nazis. The published versions of his symphonies were denounced as the distortion by Liberal Jews of the master's true, and new, “untainted” editions revealed the “pure” Bruckner. Bruckner has never fully recovered from this association, which partly explains why his music remains contentious over a century after his death. Since the war a new Bruckner has emerged: the attempt by pre-war scholars to create definitive versions of the symphonies has been replaced by a new idea, that the multiple versions of certain works constitute valid alternative realisations of the same musical ideas. Thus Bruckner comes to foreshadow contemporary ideas of the artwork that is never complete but in constant flux, epitomised by Pierre Boulez's ever-evolving “Works in Progress”. To some Bruckner is a mystic, channelling profound spiritual messages; to others he is an incontinent (and possibly incompetent) bore. The music meanwhile remains, evading any easy explanation.

He cut a strange figure in late nineteenth century Vienna. He spoke with a thick upper-Austrian accent and dialect, which made him seem like a county bumpkin to Viennese sophisticates. So numerous are the stories about his eccentric behaviour and strange obsessions that it is difficult to establish which if any of them are true. The manias that gripped him, his obsession with counting and his compulsive reworking of his earlier music have been cited as evidence of mental illness (he had some kind of mental breakdown in 1867), or of an overwhelming sense of his own inadequacy as a composer. It is quite possible that today he would be diagnosed with some form of Asperger's Syndrome. Moreover his devout Catholicism was suspicious to some in a country where tensions between Catholics and Protestants often ran high. Anti-Catholic sentiments certainly contributed to some of the opposition to his music, and the stoking of the idea of a rivalry between him and the other prominent composer of symphonies of the time, Johannes Brahms.

Bruckner was conscious of the example of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and in some respects his own is modelled on it. It was intended to be a summation of his compositional life, and this sense of a final confession is heightened by its dedication to “beloved God.” He began work on it in 1887, but progress was slow. He had sent the score of his recently completed Eighth Symphony to a sympathetic conductor, Hermann Levi, who had performed his Seventh Symphony to great success. Levi rejected the Eigth, and a devastated Bruckner embarked on a wholesale reworking of it. He also revised his first four symphonies (some of them several times). The result of this was that by 1894 only the first three movements of the new symphony were ready. His last years were marked by a sharp decline in health, but he continued to work on the finale. In any event, the surviving sketches suggest that he was very close to completing the composition of the movement. The next stage would be to flesh out the structure with details of counterpoint and orchestration. It is ironic that death prevented Bruckner from completing his final declaration of faith in the promise of resurrection and the life to come.

The opening has an elemental force, as though we are witnessing Creation itself. Having brought a world into existence though, Bruckner proceeds by the end of the movement to bring it crashing down again, as though to demonstrate that all human endeavour must come to dust.
There then follows one of the most extraordinary, bizarre movements that Bruckner ever wrote. It is filled with ambiguous harmonies and unsettling switches of mood, containing extremes of violence and fleeting, spectral shadows.

The slow movement's second principle theme is a quotation of the “Miserere” from Bruckner's own Mass in D minor of 1864. This provides a clue to its character: it is as thought the composer here falls to the ground and prays for mercy as he faces death. Allusions to the slow movements of the seventh and eighth symphonies, which both have explicit death-related themes, also suggest that this is intended as a final confession and plea for God's grace. Bruckner himself described it as his “farewell to life.” And then...

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“Art is never finished, only abandoned” (Leonardo da Vinci)

Nobody worries very much about the fact that the Venus de Milo has no arms. As we all have a mental image of what a whole body looks like, the absence of appendages on the statue matters little. We may not know the precise details of her original posture, but the mind can fill in the gap satisfactorily from what the eye sees.

Incomplete symphonies pose a different problem. Music exists only in performance, so if a composer leaves behind only sketches for a composition (as with Schubert’s four other unfinished symphonies) it cannot be directly experienced without the intervention of another hand to elaborate or complete what is there.

We do not know how Schubert's symphony might have ended. Bruckner on the other hand left substantial sketches for a finale. Unfortunately many of the pages were stolen in the wake of his death by devotees seeking mementos. It seems likely that Bruckner had completed the structure in his head, if not on paper: his doctor reported that he had heard Bruckner play the finale through on the piano. Performing versions have been constructed from the surviving sketches which give a glimpse of what Bruckner had in mind, although this can only be a provisional impression of an emerging work. He planned nothing less than a summation of all music, climaxing with the combining of themes from all four movements and concluding with a “song of praise to the Dear Lord.” In the event of his dying before he completed the movement he suggested that his setting of the Te Deum might function as a substitute finale. This is rarely observed in performance, but the idea of a Te Deum gives us a clue as to the nature of what Bruckner intended as his conclusion, possibly more than emotionally: the surviving sketches show that he intended to use motifs from that work.

Unlike an arm, a missing movement is unique. Any generic principle we may have in our head about how the last movement of a symphony proceeds is of little help in understanding what the finished work might be like. The argument has been made for both these works that they are somehow complete in themselves, but this is wishful thinking. Certainly neither Schubert nor Bruckner would have considered their fragment to be finished work. Attempts to complete both symphonies have been made. The elaboration of an incomplete work is something that is only sporadically accepted. Bruckner's finale is controversial, yet the completions of Mozart's Requiem or Elgar's Third Symphony enjoy wider acceptance.

The German term for works such as these, Unvollendete [“Unperfected”], carries a greater charge than the more pragmatic English term “Unfinished.” It implies a distinction between a finished (i.e. performable) work and an ideal, which is unrealisable except by the composer himself. Perhaps the best way to consider all this is as an unintended extension of the idea of Bruckner's numerous revisions as separate, equally valid realisations of the same symphony: So the Ninth may conclude with a choral song of praise; or with an elaboration of the sketches for the finale, as a completed, albeit Unvollendete structure; or with a silence to be filled by our imagination.

Syntonic Progression

2010-04-20T07:03:00.003+01:00

Notational notes here. This is just a little progression, based on the difference between a Just and a Pythagorean major third, which then gets a little twist to push it up to the end.

Mrs Replica looks askance at her husband many evenings, and not for the usual reasons: he seems to spend an awful lot of time writing out fractions. She's used to his little ways, but even so.

It's a sobering experience, trying to work into a new and partly unfamiliar way of working. If I'd stuck to the old ways I could probably be rattling through churning out sketches for the next piece. As it is I'm slowly assembling fragments, trying to figure out what the sounds are called and how to tell the players, which is essentially what a notated score does. Moments of progress are interrupted by moments of realisation that I've got one tiny thing wrong and have to refashion everything as a result. You could see this as a pain in the arse, a lot of extra work and just making things difficult for myself. I prefer to think of the increased groundwork as a way of getting to know the DNA of the piece. These fractions after all represent the basic notes from which everything else will be built. The music's in there, it's just a matter of unearthing it.

Ensemble Plus Minus, Kings Place

2010-04-12T23:07:00.011+01:00

Or should that be plus-minus ensemble at King's Place? Or +/- @ kingsplace? This sort of typographical quandry is par for the course in the world of Modern Music.

And this gig was definitely Modern Music, with capitals and all. I felt like I'd been transported back to the late 80s. Within seconds of arriving I saw my first Man Dressed In Black.

When I was a nipper, there was a certain set of clichés about Modern Music and the people who went to hear it. Men (always men), almost certainly dressed in black, either bald as a coot or hirsute, possibly of questionable hygiene, never smiling. This is Modern Music. It's Serious. It's Art. NO SMILING. Angular, difficult, hard edged music. Music for Men. Men who smoke and shun deodorant. Men who probably write similar music themselves.

If you believe what you read on the internet (and why wouldn't you?) this sort of thing's yesterday's news. We're no longer scared of music written by non-dead people, we all love each other and even know girls. There were actually some girls there, but they tended not to be talking to the boys, a bit like a school disco. I did see a couple of people smiling, so things haven't remained entirely static since 1989 for these folks.

(I'm uncomfortably aware, by the way, that if you drew a Venn diagram of people who fit into the category I'm talking about, I'd have at least one foot inside it. A lot of these guys are dressed like 80s-90s students, i.e. exactly like I did when I was a student, and sometimes still do. Although I rarely wear all-black these days, it feels weird when I inadvertently do.)

Like Goths and Catholicism, though, the old guard survives, and you'll find them at a gig like this. The particularly fearsome man who sat stiff-backed, hands at the ready to applause the second the Xenakis finished to show he knows when it ends (and is therefore better than the rest of us), paunch nearly covered by grubby shirt and leather jacket, the gentle smell of stale fag smoke wafting gently from his person, was only the most striking example of this Lost World of Modern Music fans (as in fanatics). Gruffly barking "Bravo!" to show he understands and appreciates Difficult Music more than the rest.

Back in the day you'd have gone to a church or a school drama studio to hear this sort of stuff. Fortunately King's Place Hall two has much the same vibe as a drama studio, so there's some continuity there. The presentation is resolutely old-school, too. No talking to the audience or anything like that, just a procession of musicians coming on, playing, and walking off again. This is Difficult Music. If you don't understand it there's no point trying to explain it to you.

I've heard pieces by Xenakis that knocked me out, and others that bored me senseless. Neither of the works that began and ended the first half were at either extreme, though I preferred the piano solo Evryali to the violin and piano piece Dikhthas. Evryali came over like a cross between Ligeti's Piano Etudes and Ustvolskaya's Sonatas without being quite as compelling as either. In between came Rebecca Saunders' Vermilion. Saunders is published by Peters Edition, who despite their signing of the likes of Jonathan Dove in recent years will always be for me the publisher non plus ultra of Difficult Modern Music, printed in Very Big Scores. The scores in this case were surprisingly normal-sized, but it was still definitely the sort of piece where everyone plays from a score. Saunders clearly has a fine ear for texture, and there was much to admire in that respect, but I'm afraid it left me cold, neither seducing nor provoking me. It was there and it was OK, but I didn't feel any sense of its existence as being necessary.

It was the second half I was actually there for. I like Bryn Harrison's music, but there's no getting away from the fact that it's basically a massive rip-off of Morton Feldman. Talent borrows, genius steals, they say, which puts him firmly in the talented camp. If you're going to borrow on this scale though, you may as well do it well, and Harrison (Head of Composition at Huddersfield University) does. I do wish he'd reference something other than other pieces of his in his programme notes though. Unless you're deeply acquainted with his work it's unhelpful and irritating. The lengths he went to to avoid mentioning Feldman were amusing though. Repetitions in Extended Time was commissioned by the Huddersfield Festival.

I find myself wondering though. The Xenakis pieces are, what, 30-40 years old now? Which is old enough that the style has acquired a comfortably quaint, nostalgic patina. Is there some weird thing happening here where composers like that are for people like this what Beethoven and Mahler are for mainstream classical audiences? Something old and familiar, that they feel comfortable with (and therefore almost certainly no longer understand)? And is the Feldmanesque trope now becoming so common (there a a lot of other composers ripping him off, myself included) that it's in danger of going the same way? I'm certain that one day that style will seem just as quaint and cute as Xenakis does now. I'm sure the New Music Men see themselves as keepers of a flame. If there's one thing that's definitely better now than 40 years ago it's that there's no style police telling us what sort of music we can and can't write or listen to, so in a way it's reassuring that they're still about. But maybe they're just as hung up on nostalgia as everyone else. The trouble with writing the music of the future is that it tends to skip the present and go straight to being the music of the past.

Metamorphosis 31

2010-04-01T06:59:00.002+01:00

(Just Intonation notation guide here.)

Metamorphosis 30

2010-03-31T06:59:00.002+01:00

A Wild Rumpus

2010-03-30T18:56:00.006+01:00

Blimey, who'd have thought you'd get this sort of thing in Wigmore Street? The Jerusalem Quartet found themselves at the centre of a political protest yesterday as they played Mozart and Ravel at the Wigmore Hall. The ruckus was such that the BBC pulled the live broadcast and played a record instead. You can find viewpoints of the protest from both sides of the fence here and here. My chums at Classical Music report that the Wigmore's head honcho says:

"I want to make the point very strongly that we can’t possibly condone any kind of disturbance to an artistic event. Wigmore Hall is a totally non-political organisation, and by disrupting performances the protesters completely take away the whole meaning of an artistic event, which is something that transcends politics."

Let's think about that for a second: "an artistic event... is something that transcends politics."

Can the Arts really shut themselves off from politics? Certainly the Great and Good are happy to lobby for funding when there's a general election in the air. It's a bit difficult to claim that the Jerusalem Quartet stand apart from politics when their biography points out their proud serving in the Israeli military. They are promoted as ambassadors for Israel, and so I'm not sure anyone can reasonably complain if people who oppose that country's policies want to protest at their event.

I'm not standing up for the protesters' views here. I don't know enough to be able to offer an informed opinion on that. But I do think the right to protest is a valuable and important one that's under attack in this country at the moment, and I applaud anyone who stands up for their right to demonstrate in a non-violent fashion. I also have to admire the quartet for having the balls to complete their programme in the face of the protest.

Art encompasses (or at least can encompass) a larger world than political squabbles, but it's at best naive, at worst disingenuous to say that it's too high to concern itself with such everyday concerns. Music certainly has been called into the service of some very dubious acts in history. It's important for artists and musicians to engage with the world around them. The Wigmore Incident (should we call it Wigmoregate perhaps?) demonstrates that you can't shut out the world. Art has to confront if it is to have any meaning beyond a bit of entertainment for the middles classes. At the very least the Wigmore Hall audience must have been considerably more engaged in the moment than some people lead me to believe is often the case.

Want to hear this exciting event for yourself? You can't: the concert was supposed to be broadcast live on Radio 3 but got pulled when the disruption occurred. The quartet later recorded patches so when it's repeated all you'll hear is the music, which seems a tad of a Stalinist approach to the historical record by the Beeb.

Metamorphosis 29

2010-03-30T07:31:00.002+01:00

Metamorphosis 28

2010-03-29T07:18:00.000+01:00

Metamorphosis 27

2010-03-28T11:33:00.002+01:00

I can't believe March is nearly over already. It feels like I've hardly got going. I'm determined to complete a page for every day this month, but it does feel like I'm running out of steam at the moment. I have the beginnings of a large scale, fully worked out piece on the drawing board, so after March 31 I'll stop for a bit, take a step back and breathe, and give myself a bit of mental space to think about that a bit more.

I recently got hold of a microphone, so another thing I'd like to do is maybe try and record a few of these little sketches. This involves getting my playing back up to scratch though, so a fair bit of work needed to get that done.

Metamorphosis 26

2010-03-27T08:57:00.003Z

(Just Intonation notation guide here.)

Metamorphosis 25

2010-03-26T07:27:00.000Z

Metamorphosis 24

2010-03-25T06:50:00.001Z

Metamorphosis 23

2010-03-24T07:08:00.001Z

Kind of carrying on from yesterday. I became intrigued by how the "strange" intervals started to suggest more conventional ones.

Metamorphosis 22

2010-03-23T22:58:00.002Z

So, 22/03/10? Suggests ratios of 11/6, 6/5 and 11/10 to me.

They all move slowly towards a bright light

2010-03-23T13:30:00.002Z

Image generated by random pausing of Windows Media Player while playing this excellent CD.

Metamorphosis 19-21

2010-03-22T07:14:00.003Z

KSO Programme notes: Dean, Britten, Holst

2010-03-20T19:30:00.001Z

Brett Dean (b. 1961)
Komarov’s Fall

Australian composer Brett Dean’s short work Komarov’s Fall was written as part of the Berlin Philharmonic’s “Ad Astra” project: Simon Rattle invited four composers to provide “asteroids” to accompany a performance of Holst’s The Planets.

Opinions on the astrological significance of Asteroid 1836 Komarov appear to be lacking. It was discovered in 1971 and named for Vladimir Mikhaylovich Komarov, who has a significant place in extraterrestrial history if not in metaphysics. He was selected for training on the Soviet space programme in 1960, and became the first cosmonaut to go into space twice. This achievement is overshadowed by his other, more dismal claim to fame: on his second trip in 1967 on board the Soyuz 1 craft, he became the first man to die in space.

As he waited to die in his failing spacecraft, his wife spoke to him by radio, as did the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Aleksei Kosygin, who told that his country was proud of him. Komarov’s reply was inaudible. Rumours persist that he died cursing the designers of the spacecraft and the flight controllers. The Soyuz mission had been hastily assembled and many corners had been cut. Engineers are said to have reported 200 faults to their superiors, but their concerns were overruled. In the wake of the United States’ disastrous Apollo 1 flight, the Soviet authorities were determined to push ahead in the race to be the first nation on the moon and to provide a conspicuous feat to celebrate the anniversary of Lenin’s birth.

In 1969 the last action of Neil Armstrong before he left the moon’s surface was to leave a memorial on the surface. This commemorates Komarov, Yuri Gagarin (who had died in 1968 not in space but in a plane crash) and the crew of the ill-fated Apollo 1 mission.

Against a background inspired by the sounds of recorded telemetry signals, jagged textures reflect Komarov’s increasingly frantic radio messages to the control centre. A brief lyrical passage at the heart evokes his wife’s farewell, before the frenzy is suddenly cut off and there is only the cold silence of space.

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Sinfonia da Requiem
1 Lacrymosa (Andante ben misurato)
2 Dies irae (Allegro con fuoco)
3 Requiem (Andante molto tranquillo)

Britten’s attachment to his parents, and particularly his mother, was intense. Her sudden death in January 1937 came as a great shock, only a few years after his father. Britten was at the time living in a flat in London with his sister. They were both sick with flu and their mother had come to nurse them, only to fall ill herself. Within days she was dead.

This marked the beginning of a turbulent year for Britten. Only a few months later his close friend Peter Burra died in a plane crash. Britten took on the responsibility of sorting out Burra’s things. He was assisted by a mutual friend and casual acquaintance who would soon become closer: the singer Peter Pears. By October, when Pears was on tour in America, Britten was raising the idea of emigrating to further their careers. At the same time he noted in his diary, “The loss of Mum & Pop, instead of lessening, seems to be more & more apparent every day. Scarcely bearable.” In January 1939 they followed Britten’s friend and mentor Auden and crossed the Atlantic to Canada. The plan was only to stay a few weeks, but they remained there for six months before crossing the border to the United States and New York. In the meantime their professional relationship had become an intimate one, which would last until Britten’s death in 1976.

By now war seemed an increasingly inevitable prospect, and they discussed the subject with Aaron Copland, who later recalled that the pair “worried constantly about whether to return to England.” He wrote advising Britten to stay put: “Anyone can shoot a gun – but how many can write music like you?” In any case, the flow of commissions meant that Britten was able to tell his publisher Ralph Hawkes that he was simply too busy to return. It was Hawkes who told him that Japan was commissioning music to mark 2,600 years of the Mikado dynasty. Britten offered the Sinfonia da Requiem, which he dedicted to the memory of his parents. The Japanese government rejected the work. They considered its use of titles from Christian liturgy insulting. The rejection turned out to be a blessing in disguise when the bombing of Pearl Harbour in December 1941 pulled the USA into the Second World War. To be an immigrant providing music for the enemy would have been an unfortunate situation. In 1942 Britten and Pears returned to the UK and were eventually granted conscientious objector status.

The Sinfonia’s three movements play without a break. The titles of the movements do not indicate any specific liturgical meaning, but suggest the tone of each movement. Thus the opening has the character of a lament, followed by “a form of Dance of Death”, and finally a resolution into peace.

Gustav Holst (1874-1934)
The Planets
1 Mars, the Bringer of War
2 Venus, the Bringer of Peace
3 Mercury, the Winged Messenger
4 Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
5 Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age
6 Uranus, the Magician
7 Neptune, the Mystic

The origin of The Planets lies in a walking holiday in Spain that Holst took with his close friend Clifford Bax in 1913. They discovered a mutual interest in astrology, and their conversations sparked the idea for a large-scale work exploring the personality traits associated with the planets.

Such interests were not unusual. From Theosophy to Conan Doyle’s advocacy of the existence of fairies and the thriving trade in Necromancy, the supernatural and paranormal were popular throughout society. The frisson of scandal provided by the likes of the occultist Aleister Crowley added spice to the fashion for spiritualism of all hues. The British Empire, built on the science of the Industrial Revolution, created a ready market for mysticism from the East. This was reflected in the art of the era: Holst’s own Choral hymns from the Rig Veda were an early success.

Holst’s interest in mysticism and astrology was more than a passing fad: he continued to cast horoscopes for his friends throughout his life. His attention in The Planets however was focussed less on divination than character. Holst’s subtitles for each planet play fairly loose with strict ideas of astrological significance. It was more important to him to convey a sense of the development of human character than to be tied down by dogma. The overall plan combines a sequence of contrasting pairs with a progression from the physical to the spiritual. The movement that upsets this pattern, Mercury, was also the last to be composed, and Holst seems to have had trouble deciding how it should fit in. In a letter to a friend he recalled that “As far as I can remember I had the scheme of the Planets roughly worked out in my mind by Easter 1914 except Mercury which was added later.”

At the time he composed the suite, Holst was firmly established in his roles as director of music at St. Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith and at Morley College in Waterloo, two posts he retained for the rest of his working life. This settled life was disturbed when war broke out in September 1914. Holst rushed to enlist, but was rejected because of poor eyesight. He was eventually offered a post working for the YMCA in Salonika as part of their educational work with the troops based in the near East. Before he left, Balfour Gardiner, who had championed many of his earlier works, gave him a generous parting gift: a private performance of The Planets by the Queen’s Hall Orchestra, conducted by Adrian Boult. Holst enlisted his pupils as the chorus in “Neptune”, as well as copyists to produce the orchestral parts. The work was performed at the Queen’s Hall in September 1918. Boult conducted partial performances in 1919, omitting Venus and Neptune, but it was not until November 1920 that the complete work was “officially” heard in public for the first time. By then Holst’s Hymn of Jesus, composed immediately after The Planets, had been premiered to great acclaim, and the orchestral work’s official debut had become an Event. Reviews of the early outings of the movements had been mixed (the Times described it as “Elaborately contrived and painful to hear”) but the reception afforded the official premiere verged on the fulsome.

Mars is often taken to signify Holst’s reaction to the outbreak of war in September 1914. What is depicted, however, is a psychological conflict. The warlike temperament is one that turns upon itself, reflected in the theme that continually tries to expand but collapses in on itself, all the time driven by the restless tattoo that underpins virtually the entire movement.

Venus sounds much simpler than Mars, but is in fact filled with a sophisticated subtlety alien to the Bringer of War. Elements of the opening movement are here transformed from negative, unresolved tension into ethereal beauty. In this light, Mercury may be seen as a kind of transformation of Mars, showing how its characteristics may lead to positive and inventive behaviour when tempered by Venusian serenity. This playful and fleet-footed movement may contain an element of self-portrait: Holst’s own star sign was Virgo ruled by Mercury.

Of all the movements, Jupiter has perhaps suffered the most from its popularity. The unfortunate appropriation of its central melody as a patriotic hymn has brought associations of solemnity and piety that really have nothing to do with its true character. It is certainly exhilarating, but partial performances of the suite that use it as a finale miss the point: its energy is of the physical world and therefore transient (Holst’s use of the term “Jollity” rather than “Joy” is significant). This is emphasised by its complement, Saturn. However, the Bringer of Old Age is not the tragic figure some see it as. The steady tread reflects the inevitability of physical decay, and its conclusion the serenity that follows acceptance of this. Only by accepting the passage of time can one hope to transcend it and enter the metaphysical realm of the final two movements.

The first of these, Uranus, the Magician, would appear to be played as comedy. The term “Magician” has inescapable associations with children’s birthday parties, and Uranus comes across as a conjuror rather than the magus we might expect from the portentous opening flourish. Perhaps Holst is poking fun at the pretentions of the occultist movement. The music easily brings to mind a Crowley-like figure grandiosely casting spells. The comedy falls away at the climax, as something altogether more dark and powerful is revealed, and the Magician realises he is dabbling with something rather serious.

Neptune, the Mystic moves into another realm altogether. Its meter and much of its thematic material echo events right back to Mars, but transformed far beyond the concerns of the physical world. The incorporeal aspect is emphasised by an offstage female chorus (for the audience, literally disembodied voices). There is no conclusion of any conventional kind: only the voices, floating into the distance endlessly.

Five minutes...

2010-03-19T07:22:00.002Z

Ooh, seconds of Nu-Nu-Who!

(via Behind the Sofa)

Metamorphosis 18

2010-03-19T07:21:00.001Z

(Just Intonation notation guide here.)

London Sinfonietta play Barry & Ayres, QEH

2010-03-18T13:10:00.006Z

You'd think that as I'm on the South Bank Centre's mailing list I'd have heard about this gig from them. As it was an email limped into my inbox a few days after the man in Harold Moore's told me about it. He was particularly excited about the prospect of a Gerald Barry premiere; it was the Richard Ayres piece that dragged me along.

It's quite a while since I've been to a proper Sinfonietta-type "contemporary music" gig, so it was reassuring that the crowd seemed to be largely the familiar mix of composers, journos and the nearly-dead. It was also a relief not to have to avoid anyone I've offended over the years. It was the kind of audience full of people who recognised each other, some of whom I recognised, none of whom recognised me. Reassuring but also depressing, because this music ought to be getting a much wider audience than the same old clique.

A lot of this must be down to a failure of advertising. Arts venues generally seem incredibly complacent about their audiences, not really making much effort to reach beyond the audience they already have, and then wondering why they're going down the dumper. It's not really good enough, and the likes of the South Bank really ought to be taking a long hard look at what they do rather than sitting back and feeling smug because they had that Jarvis Cocker doing Meltdown a couple of years ago.

On the other hand, kudos is due for allowing punters to take their drinks into the hall, which I think is an entirely civilised thing to be able to do, and stuff anyone who says different.

But I digress. What of these two fine pieces I heard?

First up was Gerald Barry's Beethoven. This is a setting to music of Ludwig van's famous letter to the Immortal Beloved, in which the great man takes time out from metaphorically bashing us over the head with his cock to go all Emo on us. As Barry says in his programme note, it's a very odd love letter: a combination of declarations of undying love with declarations that it'll never work. If you're feeling sympathetic it's a desperate cry from the heart; if you're not it's some self-flagellating whiny shit.

I can't make up my mind about Barry's music. I like the idea of it,but somehow the reality of it never seems quite as exciting. On the other hand, this particular piece didn't seem too long to me, as a lot of what I've heard of his has. Singer Stephen Richardson negotiated the extremes of his vocal register with wonderful aplomb, and the final section that appropriated the very famous hymn tune that embarrassingly I can't remember what it is now is rather lovely.

I hope the man from Harold Moore liked it. For me though, Richard Ayres' No.42 (In the Alps) was the real deal. Ayres is a comparative rarity in these circles: he has an ability to combine full on, often very silly, humour with moments of genuine profundity, without becoming either superficial or pretentious. He makes it seem entirely reasonable that the band should all come on wearing woolly hats, while conductor Martyn Brabbins is dressed for a good long hike, backpack included.

The use of projected captions (in the manner of a silent movie) is an inspired way to convey the story being depicted in the ensemble, as well as providing some brilliantly timed jokes The female protagonist's raising by very maternal mountain goats raises a chuckle, as does the nicking of bits of Strauss to evoke the Alps (although that's not as funny as the woman next to me thought it was). this also fits in with the silent movie references, as that sort of lifting of well known music is a standard trick of the cinematic accompanist.

Barbara Hannigan (dressed like a post-punk Brunhilde) gives an astonishing performance, in which she's required to impersonate goats, hogs, cicadas and eagles (and probably some other things I've forgotten about), and does so brilliantly. The use of animal noises is a wonderful example of Ayres's way with a joke: it begins as something funny, but evolves into something strange, wonderful and affecting. Likewise Alistair Mackie (fetching in lederhosen) shows that the gag of a hero who can speak only through his bugle can be something much more than slapstick. The tale of unrequited love between these two characters ought to be just silly, but Ayres magically spins something moving out of it.

Two interludes and a postlude reflect on how animals with different heartbeats perceive time. As with so much of this piece, this began as comedy, but by the conclusion was transformed into something altogether more thought-provoking.

It's a terrible shame that the Queen Elizabeth Hall was half-empty. Both these pieces combine immediate appeal with a genuine depth that would repay repeated hearings. Both deserve to, and I'm convinced can find a much wider audience than that tiny in-crowd that turns up to this sort of show. So when are the organisations in question going to make a serious effort to find it?

Metamorphosis 17

2010-03-18T06:56:00.002Z

I scribbled this down in the foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall before a performance of a piece by Gerald Barry called "Beethoven" (of which more anon.). That turned out not to have anything to do with the Fifth Symphony. But let's face it, it's pretty much the first thing that comes to anyone's mind when they think of Beethoven.

Casanova revisited

2010-03-17T13:00:00.006Z

When the Beeb first screened Russell T. Davies' Casanova in 2005 we were at the height of a bout of frenzied speculation that David Tennant was going to succeed Christopher Eccleston in the revived Doctor Who. That was confirmed very shortly afterwards (possibly while Casanova was still running if I remember rightly), and I remember thinking at the time, "ah, this seems like Tennant auditioning for the Doctor."

So watching it again now, as Tennant leaves Who and we eagerly await Matt Smith's debut, brings a revelation: blimey, Casanova pretty much is the tenth Doctor. Tennant's performance is absolutely stuffed full of the vocal and physical tics that characterised his tenure in the TARDIS, to the point where you have to remind yourself that it's not a Who story set in the 18th century. The copious shagging helps with that, of course.

What's even more remarkable is that Rusty D's script seems just as hewn from the same cloth. You'd expect similarities of tone, of course, but so much of the schtick present is similar - the running about, the cheery smart-alec persona occasionally leavened by hints of darkness, even some of the dialogue ("I'm sorry, I'm so sorry") bears a relationship beyond even what you'd expect from two shows with the same writer. I wonder if it was a dry run for Tennant's Who for Rusty, too. Minus the shagging, of course.

It's not all marvellous: the scenes with Peter O'Toole as old David Tennant seem strangely stilted. Maybe it's a lack of chemistry between him and Rose Byrne. Or maybe it's just that the entire set-up reeks too much of maguffin to allow the narration of Casanova's memoir. The other thing is that for a writer who's so vocal about the terrible amount of expositionary dialogue on telly, Rusty puts a lot of expositionary dialogue in, especially in the first episode. And Tennant's blue contact lenses don't convince. Honestly, if they're going to go to the trouble of changing his eye colour to fit O'Toole's, you'd think hey could go the extra mile and choose the right shade of blue. Having said that, the performances (particularly Tennant) fizz with energy, as does most of the dialogue, and I remain very fond of the Adam Ant-channelling court scenes.

It remains a wonderful romp, and surprisingly affecting at the end. It's a shame it also shares Nu-Who's weakest characteristic: Murray Gold's shit music. I know he has his fans (e.g. Rusty T), but to my ears it's clumsy, half-arsed rubbish that really lets everything else down. I cannot for the life of me understand why TV people are so enamoured of his stuff. Every so often he threatens to have an idea that will match the inventiveness on the screen, but the execution almost always falls flat. And the crappy synth strings don't help, either.

Still, if you overlook that, it still stands up well even after the unimaginably long time of five years.

Metamorphosis 16

2010-03-17T07:16:00.002Z

(Belated) Happy Birthday Ben Johnston

2010-03-16T12:54:00.003Z

There aren't many words here at the moment (thank god, I hear you say), but I should put a few up to note the 84th birthday of Ben Johnston, one of the best composer's you've probably never heard of, yesterday. Kyle Gann posts a wonderful tribute to his teacher here.

I've never met Johnston, and almost certainly never will, but nevertheless finding his music has, as Kyle Gann puts it in the linked post, opened a door onto a new universe for me. I'm still finding my way round his notation system, but until I get round to blogging about that you'd be well advised to start here. And this book's worth getting hold of, too.

Metamorphosis 15

2010-03-16T06:54:00.002Z

Metamorphosis 14

2010-03-15T06:45:00.000Z

Metamorphosis 13

2010-03-14T08:42:00.000Z

Metamorphosis 12

2010-03-13T06:57:00.001Z

Metamorphosis 11

2010-03-12T07:39:00.002Z

Metamorphosis 9-10

2010-03-11T07:03:00.000Z

Metamorphosis 8

2010-03-09T07:07:00.001Z

Metamorphosis 7

2010-03-08T06:54:00.000Z

Metamorphosis 6

2010-03-07T09:06:00.003Z

Metamorphosis 5

2010-03-06T12:18:00.000Z

Metamorphosis 3

2010-03-05T13:53:00.000Z

Metamorphosis 3

2010-03-04T07:25:00.000Z

Metamorphosis 2

2010-03-03T07:02:00.001Z

March: Metamorphosis

2010-03-02T08:02:00.005Z

In February I wrote a variation for each day of the month* on the piece I wrote on the last day of January. March is slightly different. Writing each variation I often referred to the source, or at least to earlier variations. The idea this time is not to do that and see where my imperfect memory takes me.

I thought about using the last page of the previous month as a starting point again, and partly did in that I've used a similar texture to begin. But the actual "theme" is literally what the title says: a cypher on the word "March".

*Not the same as a piece every day; some days I wrote more than one, others none.

Have One On Me

2010-03-01T14:32:00.005Z

There are probably some naive souls who'll listen to Joanna Newsom's new album on its own merits and conclude that she's a singular talent who doesn't need to be lazily compared to other female singers. But none of these people will be music journalists. As everyone who knows anything knows, all women in rock and pop can and must be compared to a very small number of other women. Using this simple equation we can construct a compass which enables us to categorise all female artists without having to think about it very much. So rather than say anything genuinely insightful about Ms Newsom's excellent new release, I offer this handy graphic depiction of where she's come from and where she's at, as derived from sundry reviews of the record:

February Variations (28)

2010-02-27T10:34:00.002Z

This is the last of this sequence. Notes on the notes will follow.

I have an idea for the next series, more later.

I also had an intriguing idea mentioned to me this week for a larger scale piece, which chimes nicely with a few ideas I've had while churning out the stuff I've been posting here recently. Sometimes things seem to come along at the right time. We'll see what happens.

February Variations (26-27)

2010-02-25T07:18:00.000Z

February Variations (25)

2010-02-23T07:13:00.001Z

February Variations (22-24)

2010-02-21T15:48:00.001Z

February Variations (21)

2010-02-20T11:29:00.001Z

February Variations (20)

2010-02-19T07:16:00.003Z

February Variations (19)

2010-02-18T07:07:00.002Z

February Variations (18)

2010-02-17T07:43:00.001Z

February Variations (16-17)

2010-02-16T09:39:00.001Z

February Variations (15)

2010-02-15T07:22:00.001Z

February Variations (14)

2010-02-14T13:35:00.003Z

February Variations (13)

2010-02-12T07:26:00.002Z

February Variations (12)

2010-02-11T07:30:00.002Z

Law demonstrates itself to be Ass (again)

2010-02-10T07:13:00.003Z

You may have read about this court case. Now go and read this excellent post about why the judgement is so wrong-headed.

This sort of thing is what happens when a stupidly narrow view of what constitutes originality, a technology (recording) that means pretty much every bit of music ever created is available for ever and none forgotten (as would be natural otherwise), and avarice collide.

Those thieving bastards The Beatles nicked the tune for "Seargeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Cklub Band" from medievel song "L'homme armé". Mahler ran off with huge chunks of his friend Hans Rott's symphony and used them for his own First (and used them to vastly better efect by the way). Then there's that bit in Brahms's Third Symphony which is totally a rip-off of Dvořák's Seventh (or possibly Sixth, can't remember offhand) - or is it the other way around? Bastards, the lot of them.

Of course they didn't steal. Musical ideas crop up again and again, sometimes deliberately (Mahler, probably), sometimes by chance (Beatles, almost certainly). The idea that a combination of a few notes from a finite resource (a scale) is something to be set in stone and the basis to sue someone's arse off and get money off them is quite simply damaging to all music. I'm not arguing against creator rights here - of course musicians should have a right to protect their creations and make a living from them - for a limited time. But the reductionist view that copyright law takes of what constitutes originality, coupled with the ludicrous lengths of copyright terms, is an active obstacle to the natural growth and evolution of music as an artform.

February Variations (11)

2010-02-10T07:12:00.003Z

February Variations (9-10)

2010-02-09T07:00:00.003Z

February Variations (8)

2010-02-08T06:58:00.002Z

February Variations (7)

2010-02-07T16:50:00.002Z

February Variations (6)

2010-02-06T07:19:00.003Z

February Variations (5)

2010-02-05T07:45:00.001Z

February Variations (4)

2010-02-04T07:10:00.001Z

February Variations (3)

2010-02-03T07:11:00.003Z

How to compose

2010-02-02T13:16:00.003Z

Erin, in the middle of kindly linking here, says she can't imagine how you'd go about composing. Well, it's easy! Here's the Defeatist's Ten-Point Guide to Composing:

1. Take your instrument. If you don't have one, just sing or hum or something.

2. Play (or sing or hum) a tone. Carry on as long as you feel like it (or can without asphyxiating)

3. Now do another one.

4. And another.

5. Maybe you fancy playing a bunch of fast ones? Or not? Well, do or don't, whatever you feel like.

6. Maybe you fancy playing more than one at the same time? Well, why not? If you can only produce one tone at a time, consider having a friend handy.

7. Continue in this vein as long as you please.

8. Hey presto! You've just composed!

9. Write it down if you like. Or not. Doesn't really matter.

10. If you want to do something more complicated there'll probably be editing involved, but that's about it, really.

February Variations (1-2)

2010-02-02T07:32:00.002Z

(Variations are on this.)

Somewhere beyond a thought

2010-02-01T07:37:00.004Z

I didn't quite manage to achieve my aim of writing something for every day in January, but I got a respectable part of the way there. Somewhere in the middle of it all I reached my 500th post too, which chimes nicely with the thought that part of what this has been about is going back to how this blog started: Write something, get it out there, don't worry too much about whether it's any good, just write something.

So here are the January Pieces. Not all of them are "finished" pieces, though I think many of them would work if you just played them exactly as I wrote them down. To do that would be to miss some of the point, though.

There's more to it than getting over inertia, of course. Although I didn't write so much last year, I thought about the process of it all a great deal. Part of this is to do with exploring the possibilities of Just Intonation as a guiding principle (of which more anon) as well as the problems of notating it (more anon on this too), but there's a bit more to it than that, which shows in the fact that instead of the piano which I half-considered the sketches I put up here in 2005 to be for, all these are for my own instrument, the cello. there are several reasons for this. They're all practical, but also have more philosophical rationales lurking underneath. One is that as I'm beginning to explore a completely new method, and so starting from scratch, really, it's good to be able to experiment directly rather than try and imagine something that remains on paper until you can find someone else to play it. there's also the fact that you can't produce just intervals on a piano, and you can on a cello. But there's also the product of a lot of thought about what composing is and what role the composer has in music. I don't want to be one of those composers who doesn't play music, but has to rely on others to bring his work to life. I've always thought it's important for a composer to ave practical experience of performing, and I increasingly think this should be a primary focus. So these bits and bobs are meant to be the basis for a performance. Maybe not a finished "work", but a pool of ideas to dip into.

Backlog

2010-01-30T17:05:00.003Z

It has been a difficult week. The blog's always the first thing to go.

Sunday

2010-01-25T07:40:00.000Z

KSO Programme notes: Dohnányi, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky

2010-01-23T16:19:00.002Z

Ernő Dohnányi (1877-1960)

Symphonic Minutes, Op36

1. Capriccio

2. Rapsodia

3. Scherzo

4. Tema con variazioni

5. Rondo

Ernő Dohnányi (Ernst von Dohnányi in German, as he generally had it on his published compositions) is now an obscure figure, but in his day was considered the greatest pianist and composer to emerge from Hungary after Liszt. He studied at the Budapest Academy along with his childhood friend Béla Bartók. In the late 1890s he shot to fame after a single performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto in London. At the same time he made headway as a composer: his Piano Quintet was acclaimed by Brahms, who arranged its première in Vienna.

In the years that followed he also established himself as a conductor, and championed the music of Bartók among others. Unlike many star pianists of the day, he was equally comfortable appearing as a concerto soloist and as a chamber musician. His piano playing is preserved in what was for the day the cutting edge of recorded media: in the 1920s he recorded a number of pieces on the Ampico Reproducing Piano, which captured performances on piano rolls. This technological marvel’s life would be cut short by the advent of electrical sound recording, as well as the collapse of the market for player-pianos after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

He became head of the Budapest Academy, but resigned in 1941 in protest at the anti-Semitic policies being introduced by the fascist government under the influence of the Nazis. This stance was not enough to prevent him becoming the victim of a whispering campaign by the Communist government that took over after the war, and he lived the latter part of his life in exile in America. Only in recent years has his role in the development of Hungarian music in the early twentieth century been reappraised and recognised.

Although he took some inspiration from Hungarian folk music, Dohnányi the composer is not a nationalist like Bartok or Kodály. His music is firmly in the mainstream tradition of 19th century Europe, and in his lush harmonies and orchestrations comes across as a more cheerful cousin of that of his Russian contemporary, Rachmaninov. The five delightful miniatures that comprise the Symphonic Minutes date from 1933, shortly before he joined the Budapest Academy.

Pyotr IlyichTchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Violin Concerto in D major, Op.35

1. Allegro moderato

2. Canzonetta: Andante

3. Finale: Allegro vivacissimo

In July 1877 Tchaikovsky married Antonina Miliukova. He was neither the first nor the last man to enter into matrimony as a facade for his real inclinations. It was, however, by any standards one of the most catastrophically ill-advised acts he could have performed. He had first met her in 1865, when he was 25 and she 16. He did not remember this occasion although it seems she did, and carried a torch for him ever after. She later studied at the Moscow Conservatory where Tchaikovsky was one of her professors, but had to leave due to financial difficulties.

She wrote to him at least twice in 1877, and their engagement was announced that year. By then she was 28, rather past what was then considered the ideal marrying age, and Tchaikovsky was the subject of gossip concerning his sexual tastes. He hoped that marriage would provide the cover for him to pursue his own liaisons as before. The marriage would therefore appear to have been the product of a certain desperation on both sides. Even on their honeymoon, Tchaikovsky was writing to his sister detailing all that he despised about Antonina and her family.

Entering an institution to which he was so unsuited with a woman whom he did not even like very much was clearly not going to end well. Tchaikovsky duly suffered a mental collapse and walked out on the marriage after only six weeks. The couple remained legally married until Tchaikovsky’s death, and Antonina spent 20 of the 24 years she outlived her husband in an asylum. Her own reminiscences of her marriage were recorded there after her husband’s death. They suggest a naive woman unable properly to understand what had happened but vaguely aware that there had been some sort of misunderstanding between them. For his part, Tchaikovsky virulently criticised her in letters to his friends, referring to her as “The Reptile.” They met only a couple of times again, even then much to Tchaikovsky’s disgust.

Tchaikovsky escaped to a resort by Lake Geneva in Switzerland to recover. It was here that his Violin Concerto took shape. He was joined by a pupil of his: Yosif Kotek was talented enough to have been a pupil of Joseph Joachim. They played through a number of works on violin and piano, including the French composer Eduard Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole. This seems to have been the immediate catalyst for the concerto. He wrote to his patron, Nadezhda von Meck. “Lalo... does not strive after profundity, but he carefully avoids routine, seeks out new forms, and thinks more about musical beauty than about observing established traditions, as do the Germans.”

With Kotek on hand to provide technical advice, work on the new concerto proceeded swiftly and it was completed within a month, even though Tchaikovsky replaced the original middle movement with the Canzonetta that provides the lyrical heart. He hoped that the violinist Leopold Auer would give the first performance. In his enthusiasm he sent it straight to his publisher complete with dedication: it was in print before the dedicatee had actually seen it. Later in life, Auer denied the rumour that he had declared the concerto “unplayable”, but he was certainly not convinced of its quality, and felt that some of the violin writing was not suited to the instrument. He therefore declined to perform it, and the planned premiere in March 1879 had to be cancelled. Eventually Adolf Brodsky became the first performer, and second dedicatee of the concerto in December 1881.

Reactions were mixed. “Long and pretentious” was the judgement of the influential critic Eduard Hanslick, while Theodore Helm of the Wiener Signale declared it to be “an accumulation of discords, confused climaxes and dressed-up trivialities, covered by the national flag of the most barbarous sort of Russian nihilism.” None of this has prevented it becoming a firmly established favourite with violinists and audiences alike.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Symphony in C

1: Allegro

2: Larghetto Concertante

3: Largo

4: Allegro non troppo

Stravinsky’s Symphony in C was composed in difficult circumstances. He had been living with his family in Paris since 1934, while continuing a long-term affair with Vera de Bosset. His wife Katya had long since become aware and eventually, accepting of his infidelity. In 1938, Katya, already stricken with cancer, contracted tuberculosis, which she passed both to her husband and their daughter Lyudmila. They were all confined to a sanatorium where Lyudmila died in November 1938, followed within months by her mother. Then in June 1939 Stravinsky’s own mother died. This was surely the most wretched period of his life.

Stravinsky sketched the first two movements of what became the Symphony in C in the sanatorium in response to a commission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. A further sign of his standing in America came with the offer of a lucrative post at Harvard. Stravinsky’s star was waning from the height of his fame in Europe, and so he was only too happy to accept the post.

Politically the time was ripe to leave Europe, although Stravinsky was not in personal danger from the rise of the Nazis as were Jewish composers such as Schoenberg. He was essentially an apolitical conservative. Understandably for someone who had been cut off from his homeland and culture by revolution, he sought order above all. This probably explains his rather unfortunate admiration for Mussolini throughout the 1930s. If he was in any doubt that the winds were blowing against him, he would have received a rude awakening in 1938 when the Nazis included his work in their exhibition of “Degenerate” Art. This, coupled with his desperate financial straits (the Chicago commission was the only one on the table at the time) made emigration an attractive prospect. Thus in September 1939, as war broke out, Stravinsky boarded a boat for the United States. He resumed work on the symphony in New York. In early 1940 Vera followed him, and became his second wife.

Some of the philanthropic wives of Chicago who were bankrolling the commission had withdrawn their money from the commission when they found out how much Stravinsky would be earning for a year’s lectures at Harvard. Nevertheless, the symphony was completed in 1940 and premiered in November that year in Chicago. Its reception was lukewarm, and it remains something of a Cinderella among his works. Stravinsky would observe drily in later years that it only received as many performances as it did because he conducted them.

Stravinsky frequently and controversially changed his compositional style throughout his career. Many of his contemporaries accused him of adopting a series of masks in place of displaying a consistent artistic voice. With hindsight it becomes more obvious that beneath the constant shape shifting on the surface of his music there is anunswerving purpose and personality. Stravinsky’s approach to the past is more similar to our times than his own. It is seen not as a lineage to be continued, but a vast resource to be appropriated, quoted, distorted or adapted as suits the composer’s purpose. Although this symphony takes as its starting point the archetypes of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, it pursues its own course, transforming and distorting its found model to produce something that still sounds like it could have been written by no-one else.

The middle movements nod more to baroque models than anything classical. The third in particular caused Stravinsky some trouble. He attempted to write something that would perform the same function as a Haydn minuet or a Beethoven scherzo without being reminiscent of either. The finale begins forcefully, but concludes in an unexpectedly sombre mood. There is here a strong scent of Stravinsky’s devout Russian Orthodox faith: its ritualistic air suggests perhaps a prayer both for the three women he had lost and the continent he had left behind.

Notes on a Slow Walk

2010-01-23T14:56:00.006Z

I've signed up for Slow Club, an 8-week experiment in living life more slowly. Every week we have a task to perform. My first was to walk a walk I do regularly, but slowly. The following are notes I took on Thursday as I walked to the sandwich shop at lunchtime. Don't expect any startling insights...

Thursday, 12.38

Rush out of office. Remember - slow walk! Pause in corridor. Rattle of air conditioning unit. Somewhere a chair scrapes. Floorboard creaks as I move on. Wave to Jon as I walk out to stairwell.

High-pitched note - from building site over road? Small squares of sunlight dapple the road below. A drill somewhere.

Spots of light on stairwell from spotlights. Become conscious of my own footsteps, slow and irregular as I take notes - as I pause when I jot words down.

As I pass the First Floor, lift door slides shut. Out of the window: stone arch, two workmen on a crane over the road, 2 more inside above them. Doors open and close all up and down. Sudden distant shriek of people talking as they go past outside.

12.44

Outside. Chilly. Other people walking down the road past me, all going the same direction as me.

Two men through window in an office - one hunched over computer with tie over his shoulder, the other leans back in his chair, apparently napping.

Workman leans on corner. Below, past railing on basement window on corner - window boxes with small evergreen trees and ivy.

I feel the need to speed up as I approach the workman, lest I be looked at funny. I resist it.

A Volvo parks as I pause on the corner to write. Piles of planks on the corner pavement. Cars parked all along. Bike. Robert comes the other way, I say hello. Girl on phone follows, also the other way. A crocodile of kids behind me. Man with BBC pass approaches, concentrating on his phone (texting?) rather than what's ahead. He looks up in time to see me and not walk into me.

Cab on corner by pub with suitcases in open boot. Coming up to main road now, more people walking up and down.

12.50
Two men sat outside pub smoking. One has hat and (I presume) photo reactive glasses (not sunglasses?). Cross road. Gut on a bike with sunglasses (white frames) looks at me funny as he passes. Cross road. Cross of St George painted on lorry.

Pace of different people interests me. Cashpoint. Rejected! Bah!

Want to speed up, get back so I can check bank balance. Resist.

12.54

Speed up a bit to get across road before traffic kills me (I'd already started crossing before it went). People on phones everywhere. Man on phone - first person I've seen smiling.

12.56

Walking back

12.58

Cracks in pavement. People on phones - notice more people talking to each other. The people in company smile more. Two men stand on opposite corner having conversation. Woman leans on railing smoking and looking at phone.

Walk back down other side of road. Bike I passed last time has a horn on it. Jogger. "Thieves, beware" warns a sign on a post. Am overtaken by Lyr walking back to the office.

Another bike, tied to a lamppost, strange I didn't really register it on the way out (was it there?). It has a rear-view mirror attached to handlebar - hangs below it, I wonder how effective it is.

Leafy designs on cornices above doors. People now coming against me. Round window by side door to office.

I realise I came halfway round block same way back - wonder if I should have come back other way. See more people on way back, going upstairs. Have to pay attention! Walk slowly upstairs, feel my leg muscles tense and release, feel my weight going down into the floor/stair. Back in the corridor under the rattling aircon. One of lights in corridor isn't on.

13.08

Back in office - taken half hour on walk that'd normally take less than 10 minutes. Conscious of the cold in my fingers and nose.

The Moment

2010-01-23T07:53:00.000Z

Major-Minor

2010-01-23T07:51:00.000Z

Waiting for Tchaikovsky

2010-01-21T00:29:00.002Z

F.Y.B.T.

2010-01-20T07:26:00.003Z

Ostinato

2010-01-19T07:35:00.001Z

First Principles

2010-01-18T08:22:00.000Z

PopStar to Opera Star

2010-01-17T07:04:00.008Z

You know as soon as you see Alan Titchmarsh that you're not in for anything nasty. The housewives' favourite isn't going to preside over the sort of laughing at the mentally ill and desperate that Simon Cowell fronts in the early episodes of the X-Factor, is he? And so it proves in ITV's latest attempt to get some decent viewing figures by cobbling together spare parts from other TV shows like a cathode ray Frankenstein. You have to admire Mylene Kalss's professionalism, too. She stands next to Alan as he does his bumblingly affable schtick, and then delivers her lines with a steely determination. There's barely a hint of the pounding fear that must underlie every waking moment when you've rescued your career by wearing a bikini in the jungle and are absolutely, fiercely resolute that you are going to hang on to the spotlight this time, oh yes.

The judges on PopStar to Opera Star are a bizarre combination. One wonders what drugs the production staff were on when they chose them. I assumed before I switched on that Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen must have been chosen because he's a bit frilly and poncey - y'know, like classical music? - but it turns out he's on because he's a DJ on Classic FM these days, presumably because he's a bit frilly and poncey - y'know, like classical music? Meat Loaf, of course, is famous for his operatic records. Operatic in the sense of wildly ridiculous and over the top, that is. Which is the point at which you begin to realise exactly how opera fits into the scheme here.

The other two judges are also the coaches for the celebs, which is disappointing, because it means no-one's ever going to be anything other than nice to the contestants. This is surely going to be a strain when they get to Alex James, who is surely the undisputed king of Being Shit At Classical Music On Telly. They are Kathryn Jenkins and Animal from the Muppets. Ironically, Animal is the only person here who's actually been in an opera. That's not half as ironic as the presence of Katherine Jenkins, though - a woman famous for singing everything the same on a programme whose whole point is supposed to be about singing things differently to normal. There must be a personality buried somewhere beneath the blonde hair, makeup and cleavage - maybe she's really filthy in bed? - but if there is it's never allowed to break through the relentlessly bland facade.

The format follows the pattern we all know from Strictly X-Maestro Academy. Each celeb in turn is shown "in training", then emerges onto the set to bawl out a popular aria, every warble the subject of frenzied cheering form the (allegedly) live audience. There's no insight into how "operatic" singing differs from "pop" singing, or of why the celebs should want to do it (other than being paid to appear in an 8-week TV series, which is steady work for a couple of months, isn't it?). "I only know my song from the Stella ad!" exclaims Kym Marsh, to the hilarity of some canned laughter. Of course, most people only know that song from the Stella ad, but we'll let that pass, eh?

Animal and the Jenkster are never gong to be nasty to their pupils on live telly, not even Alex James, but you'd hope one of the other two might offer a more jaded counterbalance to their gushing. But no. Meat Loaf appears to be channelling John Barrowman, while Lawrence Fop, appears at first as though he might do a Craig Revel-Horwood, but as soon as he opens his mouth it becomes clear nothing's going to upset the applecart. You'd hope that at least a mild frisson would develop when Kym and Mylene have to share a stage, but even they manage to put on a half decent pretence of liking each other.

There's a decent idea for a TV show struggling to get out of all this. Well, there might have been, but it's been strangled at birth. There's no insight into how classical singing differs from pop singing, no indication why either might be worth attempting (oh, how I'd love to see a programme where Kitty J was made to try and sing in a "pop" style, or indeed to inject any sense of insight or understanding into anything she sings, ever). The complete absence of any criticism means that there's nothing to be learned. It's not really anything to do with opera, either. But I suppose "PopStar to PopStar Singing In A More Wobbly Voice" wouldn't have been such a catchy title.

Some will probably say that this is dumbing down classical music or opera. Well, duh. There's not really much point in fretting over that though. The classical music business sold itself down the river a long time ago, and really only has itself to blame that it's become the musical equivalent of a posh bubble bath. Anyway, this is ITV. We didn't come here to be educated. But you might at least hope to be entertained. You'd be disappointed.

ITV's absolute fear of doing anything that might be dangerous, or risky, or innovative, means that all the tropes they've stolen from other shows are neutered. There isn't even any danger that the celebs might look a bit shit, not even Alex James, the King of Being Shit At Classical Music On Telly. I know this because I saw his bit on YouTube this Morning. We actually switched off halfway through Kym Marsh's introduction, unable to take another seven contestants when we could be doing, well, almost anything else. I was hoping it'd be a bit of trashy fun, but it was just dull. That's what you've done, ITV: you've made a programme so dull I couldn't keep watching long enough to see Alex James being Shit at Classical Music On Telly. And that is surely the nadir of dull.

Vertiginous

2010-01-16T09:58:00.000Z

Who'd have thought that snow falls

2010-01-15T00:14:00.001Z

Only

2010-01-13T13:01:00.000Z

Triad on 7

2010-01-13T07:38:00.002Z

Today is Morton Feldman's birthday.

Progression on a 3/2

2010-01-10T11:59:00.000Z

Seven and syntonic

2010-01-08T11:58:00.001Z

Dream

2010-01-07T12:09:00.002Z

Seriously, this happened: a couple of nights ago I had a dream consisting of harmonies based on the 13th partial of the harmonic series. What I've written down isn't that - that's hard to describe. In a way it was really just the single 13/8 pitch at the start of this page, but somehow there was a multitude of other sounds shimmering round it. It wasn't a visual dream, but it had a huge sense of space. What can it all mean?

I could just sit and play that first interval for ages. It's a strange one, it takes some listening because it lies even further outside the harmony I was brought up with than the 11th partial (which does bear a passing resemblance to "quarter tones" in equal temperament).

Scordatura

2010-01-06T18:15:00.002Z

One of the things about Just Intonation on a cello is the fact that the strings are tuned in perfect fifths, which means that if you take C as your 1/1, the A string's actually too sharp. So here I detuned the A string by 80/81. I did this by stopping an E on the D string (tuned to make a just sixth with the G string) and then tuning the A down so it made a perfect 4/3 with that.

2010-01-05T07:33:00.001Z

Beats

2010-01-04T07:26:00.001Z