February Variations (9-10)

February Variations (8)

February Variations (7)

February Variations (6)

February Variations (5)

February Variations (4)

February Variations (3)

How to compose

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)

(Variations are on this.)

Somewhere beyond a thought

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

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

Sunday

KSO Programme notes: Dohnányi, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky

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

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

Major-Minor

Waiting for Tchaikovsky

F.Y.B.T.

Ostinato

First Principles

PopStar to Opera Star

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

Who'd have thought that snow falls

Only

Triad on 7

Today is Morton Feldman's birthday.

Progression on a 3/2

Seven and syntonic

Dream

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

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.

Beats

2010 on D

New Year

Just Intonation Notation

For an explanation of Just Intonation and what all these ratios are, go here.

Ben Johnston's notation system for Just Intonation aims to produce something that looks similar enough to conventional notation that the average musician can get their head round it without going too batshit insane.

The basic notation is the C major scale. The notated triad C-E-G, F-A-C and G-B-D all represent just major triads, in ratio 4:5:6 (e.g. if C is 1/1 [=4/4], then E is 5/4 and G is 3/2 [=6/4])

One consequence of this is that the interval D-A isn't a perfect fifth, it's actually 40/27. This arises because of the syntonic comma, the difference between a just-tuned major third and a Pythagorean major third (i.e. one derived through the so-called "cycle of fifths"). This small interval is a ratio of 81/80, and that's notated by a + or a - (line a above)

(Another consequence of this is that if you tune to "A", as is standard practice, the open strings of a cello are therfore not A, D, G, C but A, D-, G-, C-. I experimented for a while with a version of this notation in which a key signature of one sharp indicates that the uninflected notes of the G major scale are the 4-5-6 triads instead of the C major scale. This meant that for a cello the open strings would be notated as naturals (although a violin's E string would have to be E+). I decided this was potentially too confusing and I've now reverted to Johnston's original plan.)

b) sharps and flats raise or lower a note by the ration 25/24, which is the difference between a just major and minor third (5/4 and 6/5)

c) the 7 and upside-down-7 signs raise or lower by 36/35, which is the difference between a just minor ninth (9/5) and the "flat" seventh partial in the harmonic series (in C major, Bb7)

d) the up and down arrow raises or lowers by 33/32, which is the difference between a perfect fourth and the "sharp" fourth that is the eleventh partial (in C, F^)

e) the "13" and upside-down "13" raise or lower by 65/64, which is, you guessed it, the difference between a minor 6th and the "sharp" minor 6th of the 13th partial (Ab13).

You can go on ad infinitum, adding a new inflection for every prime number, but that's quite enough to be going on with. f), g) and h) show a few examples of how these accidentals may be combined to form compound signs, except the +/- of 81/80, which is always separate and always closest to the note.

We're all retro now

When I think back to 10 years ago, it occurs to me that my own life has changed so drastically that the rate of evolution of my listening habits can only seem rather tame in comparison. Back in 2000 I barely had access to the Internet, and finding anything new was a much harder job, involving a great deal more effort than it does now. This is probably just as well, as a decade of aging has robbed me of much of the energy that I once carelessly expended in hunting down new sounds. These days I tire more easily, so it's a relief that new music is becoming increasingly easily accessibnle at a click or two. The downside to this is that there's so much available that sifting through the dross to find the gold is a much bigger task than it once was. One thing that our brave new online world definitely hasn't improved is our ability to self-edit.

Everyone and his dog seems to be drawing up lists of their favourite/ the best (pretty much interchangeable terms in fact) records of the past 10 years . I hesitate to do it too, because most of them are fairly uninteresting. But what the hell, opinions are like arseholes, and we all seem to like displaying them on the web, so here's a random selection of recordings I've picked up since 2000 that have touched me in some way. Not all of them originate from the past decade. Some were reissued, some are ancient things that I just didn't come across before. I make no claims to this being a list of the best or most innovative or fashionable or zeitgeisty or whatever you think a record ought to be. They're just things that came by at the right time and made some sort of impact on me. Being the right thing at the right time is what makes a great record. The fragmentation of public taste, the explosion of media that's happened lately means that big "event" records that mean a great deal to a sizable proportion of the population are becoming rarer. We all have to find our own milestones now. Some of us have always worked that way.

John Luther Adams: The Light That Fills the World

Beethoven in the Temperaments

Six Degrees of Tonality

Björk: Medúlla

The Bowmans: Far From Home / The Bowmans

Sam Brown: Ukulele and Voice

Bruckner: Symphony No.9 with reconstructed finale (Sinfonieorchester Aachen, cond. Marcus Bosch)

Kate Bush: Aerial

R. Crumb's Heroes of Blues, Jazz and Country

Smog: A River Ain't too Much to Love

Eliza Carthy: Dreams of Breathing Underwater

Tounami Diabaté: The Mandé Variations

Bob Dylan: Love and Theft

Julius Eastman: Unjust Malaise

The Fall: The Unutterable

The Feelies: Crazy Rhythms

Morton Feldman: String Quartet No.2 (Flux Quartet)

Fleet Foxes

Flight of the Conchords

PJ Harvey: White Chalk

Grinderman

Schoenberg: Violin Concerto (Hilary Hahn)

Glenn Gould: The Solitude Trilogy

The Imagined Village

Ben Johnston: String Quartets No.s 2, 3, 4 and 9

Elizabeth Maconchy: Complete String Quartets

Lubica Marić: Byzantine Concerto etc.

The Mules: Save Your Face

Joanna Newsom: The Milk-Eyed Mender

Harry Partch: The Wayward / 17 Lyrics of Li-Po

Radiohead: Kid A

Rasputina: Frustration Plantation

Zeitkratzer: Metal Machine Music

Kronos Quartet: Floodplain

Bella Hardy: Night Visiting

Viktor Ullmann: Symphonies/ Piano Sonatas

Vialka: Plus vite que la musique

Tom Waits: Real Gone

Scott Walker: The Drift

M Ward: Transfiguration of Vincent

Brian Wilson: Smile

Amy Winehouse: Back to Black

Cantigas de Santa Maria

Kathryn Williams & Neill MacColl: Two

Enough with the back-glances. Happy New Year, everyone, maybe time to push things forward in 2010.

KSO Programme notes: McCabe, Janáček, Shostakovich

Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)
Taras Bulba

1. The Death of Andrei
2. The Death of Ostap
3. The Prophecy and Death of Taras Bulba


Nikolai Gogol’s novel Taras Bulba tells the story of a Ukrainian Cossack and his two sons. Ostep is the more adventurous and true to the Cossack nature of the two, while Andrey is a romantic. They set out to join the war against the Poles who have occupied the western Ukraine. They besiege Dubno Castle. Andrey falls in love with a Polish girl, and renounces his heritage to help her and the besieged Poles. Taras discovers his son’s betrayal and executes him. Ostep, meanwhile, is captured during battle and tortured by the Poles. Taras attempts to disguise himself to reach the prison to see his son, but his ruse fails, and he witnesses Ostep’s execution from the crowd. Finally, Taras is caught in battle, tortured and burned to death by his captors. Even as he dies, Taras calls on his men to continue the fight, and predicts that a great Tsar will come to rule the world.

Leoš Janáček read the novel in 1905 and made extensive notes. At a time when the Czechs were still ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Taras Bulba’s tale of a nation’s struggle to free itself from oppression struck a chord. However, it was not until 1915 that he began work on his orchestral work based on Gogol’s tale. The First World War was raging, and the Czech nationalist movement was gathering pace, inspired by Russia’s offensive against Austria-Hungary at Galicia. By the time he completed Taras Bulba in 1918, the war had left the empire exhausted. Later that same year the creation of the state of Czecho-Slovakia brought an end to 200 years of Austro-Hungarian rule.

Trying to map the plot of Gogol’s novel onto Janáček’s music in any more than a vague way is problematic. Janáček’s memory of a story he had read a decade earlier would seem to be less than crystal clear. His own note on the work, written in one long, breathless sentence for the Prague première, perhaps reveals that the spirit that is more important than the detail:

“Not because he beat to death his own son for betraying the nation – Part I (the Battle of Dubno);
not because of the martyr’s death of his second son – Part II (the Warsaw torments);
but ‘because the fires, the tortures that could destroy the force of the Russian people are not to be found on earth’ – for these words that fall into the fiery sparks and flames of the stake at which the sufferings of the famous Cossack ataman Taras Bulba finally ended – Part III and conclusion, did I compose this rhapsody in 1915-16 based on a tale written by N.V. Gogol. Leoš Janáček.”



John McCabe (b. 1939)
Symphony “Labyrinth”


Underneath Edge Hill in Liverpool lies an extensive network of underground passages. The Williamson Tunnels were excavated between 1805 and 1840 at the behest of Joseph Williamson, an eccentric entrepreneur. Quite why he built them is not known for sure. Rumours spread at the time that they were intended to shelter a religious sect that believed that the end of the world was imminent. But it is quite possible that they represent nothing more sinister than a rich philanthropist’s desire to provide honest work for unemployed men returning from the Napoleonic Wars. Williamson himself declared that his workers “all received a weekly wage and were thus enabled to enjoy the blessing of charity without the attendant curse of stifled self respect.”

In the 1830s, Williamson’s path crossed both figuratively and literally with George Stephenson: the great engineer bored his own tunnel through the area to carry trains to and from the new railway station at Lime Street. Over a century later, the young John McCabe’s imagination would be fired by the thought of Williamson’s labyrinth as he rode the trains. Occasionally he would catch a glimpse of a bird in flight in a small patch of sky seen through a ventilation shaft in the tunnel.

That childhood memory provided the impetus when he came to compose a work for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra to perform in celebration of his home town’s 800th anniversary in 2007. “Labyrinth” is John McCabe’s seventh symphony, and like Sibelius’s seventh is cast in a single movement. It has no programme, although McCabe concedes that the bird glimpsed from a train can be heard in the piccolo that begins the symphony, while the sinewy lines that soon emerge in the cellos and basses perhaps suggest the darkness of the abandoned caves beneath Edge Hill. From this darkness, the symphony strives towards light, a struggle that reflects the turbulence of Liverpool’s history. A gradual, constant acceleration leads to a driving climax, which then evaporates, leaving the opening idea subtly transformed, as though we are now in the clouds with the bird we glimpsed at the outset.


Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Symphony no.5 in D minor, op.47

1: Moderato
2: Allegretto
3: Largo
4: Allegro non troppo

The singer Galina Vishnevskaya recalls a pointedly ambiguous statement made by Shostakovich in one of the many public submissions he had to make to the state during his life: “Our Party has so closely followed the growth of all musical life in our country. I have been aware of that close attention throughout my creative life.”

Shostakovich was particularly aware of that close attention in 1937. Since the attacks on his opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” and his ballet “The Limpid Stream” in Pravda the previous year he had found himself transformed overnight from the Soviet Union’s foremost composer to a non-person. The Great Terror that Stalin inflicted on Russia was at its height. Arrests and disappearances reached a vertiginous level. Stalin declared that 10 per cent of the population was subversive. The only way the police could make enough arrests to match this figure (which, coming from the leader himself, must be correct) was to detain people more or less at random. Like many others, Shostakovich kept a packed suitcase by the door, ready for the knock in the night signalling the arrival of the secret police to take him away. T be seen in public without a smile was to court arrest. Solzhenitsyn summed up the times: “Black Marias by night, demonstrations by day.”

Shostakovich completed his Fourth Symphony in May 1936 in the wake of these attacks. A performance was planned, but it became clear that the consequences of playing such a work could be severe for all concerned. After some strained rehearsals, Shostakovich withdrew the symphony, claiming dissatisfaction with it. The extraordinary, dissonant and dissident work would not be heard until 1961.

The only work available to him was film and theatre music. This may have worked to his advantage: Stalin was a keen film buff, and his awareness of Shostakovich prior to the Lady Macbeth controversy would have been as a film rather than a concert composer. Loyalty was next to impossible to demonstrate when the leader’s whims made citizens into enemies of the state overnight. Usefulness was another quality entirely, and Shostakovich’s film work made him look useful. This may be how he avoided the gulag: it also gave the party and Stalin an opportunity to be publicly merciful.

From the tone of the Pravda articles, Shostakovich knew that at the least he was expected to make his musical language simpler and more obviously tonal. What is remarkable about the Fifth is not, however, the compromise in style. The melodies are less angular and the harmony more straightforward than the Fourth Symphony, true, but it wilfully ignores the demands of the party in one very important respect: the Fifth is an explicitly and overwhelmingly tragic work.

Its famous and verbose subtitle, “A Soviet Artist’s Practical Creative Reply to Just Criticism,” was not Shostakovich’s invention. A journalist previewing the première in January 1938 coined it. The composer happily went along with the idea: it offered a very useful shield. He gave interviews in which he made vague pronouncements that the new symphony concerned “the making of a man.” The première in January 1938 was a huge success: it received a standing ovation nearly as long as the entire symphony. A long debate ensued, during which some astonishing logical somersaults were performed by party officials in order to explain why the symphony was in fact a straightforward, optimistic piece of Soviet Realist art. A “Hamlet” theory quickly became popular, which cast Shostakovich in the role of Shakespeare’s Dane. Thus the tragic element could be explained away as a superficial precursor to Soviet enlightenment. Shostakovich was rehabilitated – although he still kept the suitcase by the door, just in case.

The first movement’s opening gesture contains the seeds of almost everything that follows. It settles into an uncertain, shell-shocked mood, into which grotesquery gradually intrudes. A parody of the kind of four-square march beloved of totalitarian regimes throughout the world breaks out, before a climactic cry of anguish. This subsides into a deadpan passage in which a horn attempts to follow a flute into the stratosphere, before disappearing into an uneasy mist.

The second movement is a clodhopping affair brimming with irony. It attempts to display some finesse in its dance, but is never very far from a banana skin.

If the first half of the symphony is characterised by irony and distance, the third movement provides the emotional heart of the symphony. It was this intense, deeply tragic music that moved its first audience to tears. The effect of such deeply and genuinely emotional music on an audience that was effectively forbidden to have genuine emotion must have been overwhelming.

The finale continues to be the subject of controversy. For many years the official explanation was accepted without question in the West: that the “Hamlet-like” tragic (and therefore individualist and superficial) themes are overcome by the profound joy and triumph of the collective Soviet will. But one only has to listen to realise that the “triumph” is imposed. Any sign of genuine emotion is trampled by bullying brass. In a brief moment of hope, an undulating motif in the harp alludes to Shostakovich’s setting of Pushkin’s Poem “Rebirth.” But the “new and brighter day” promised does not dawn. Instead a darkly menacing restatement of the movement’s opening theme builds to a witheringly ironic conclusion: A crude, banal fanfare is upstaged by its own accompaniment of a single note hammered out 251 times, as Vishnevskaya describes it, “like nails being pounded into one’s brain.”

The conductor Boris Khaikin recalled a conversation he had with Shostakovich after the symphony’s premiere. The composer remarked, “I finished the Fifth Symphony in the major and fortissimo… It would be interesting to know what would have been said if I finished it pianissimo and in the minor?”

ABschied

KSO Programme notes: Debussy, Ullmann, Stravinsky

Claude Debusy (1862-1918)
Ibéria

1. Par les rues et par les chemins (In the streets and byways)
2. Les Parfumes de la nuit (Perfumes of the night)
3. Le matin d'un jour de fête (The morning of a festival day)

When Debussy composed Ibéria, the central part of his orchestral triptych Images (and the first to be written), he was at a turning point in his life. The notoriety that characterised his early successes had become international fame with the first productions of his opera Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902. The cult of “Debussyism” reached its peak, and scandal was replaced by expectation.

As is often the case, success was to be swiftly followed by a backlash. Those who had championed his earlier work found his new music staid in comparison. Those who had always considered his style to be a threat to the very foundations of all musical orthodoxy found more grist to their mill.

Shortly after he completed Ibéria in December 1909, Debussy exhibited the first symptoms of the cancer that would eventually kill him. In June 1912 his transformation from enfant terrible to yesterday’s man was brought home forcefully to him when he sat at the piano with the young Igor Stravinsky and played through the piano score of The Rite of Spring.

Some say that Images betrays a falling off of inspiration. This is unfair. Ibéria, in particular, shows off Debussy’s masterly and original way with an orchestra to the full, including what is for him an unusually unrestrained percussion section. Debussy had a strong mystical streak, which came from his involvement with the Symbolist movement. One of the aims of the Symbolists was to create art so evocative that it actually becomes the thing it depicts. In his attempt to achieve this, Debussy jettisoned traditional ideas of musical structure and form. A letter he wrote to a friend reveals something of what he aimed at: “You can’t imagine how naturally the transition works between ‘Parfums de la nuit’ and ‘Le matin d’un jour de fête’. It sounds as though it’s improvised.”


Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944)
Symphony No.2 in D major (“Theresienstadt Sketchbook”)
(Reconstructed from the Piano Sonata No.7 by Bernhard Wulff)

1. Allegro
2. Alla marcia, ben misurato
3. Adagio, ma non tanto
4. Scherzo: Allegretto grazioso
5. Variations and Fugue on a Hebrew Folksong

Terezín (Theresienstadt), about an hour's drive from Prague, was built in 1780, as a garrison town. The Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph II wanted to ensure that the borders of the Czech territory he had conquered would not be overrun by German hoards from the north. In the event, the town was never used for its intended purpose. Instead it found an effective alternative role as a high security prison. When the German invasion finally came in 1940, Terezín reached its final form as a concentration camp. At its height, the ghetto was home to over 60,000 Jews. The town had been designed to house a population of 5,000. Food was scarce and disease rife.

This was not so different from any other concentration camp. But Terezín was distinguished by one extraordinary fact: its cultural life, which flourished. The plan was to dispel rumours of death camps by promoting Terezín as a cultural beacon. To this end, many Jewish intellectuals were sent there. Artistic activity and the performance of otherwise banned musical and theatrical works was at first tolerated, and later actively encouraged. The results, paraded to visiting representatives of the Red Cross and filmed for a propaganda film, were held up as proof that the Czech Jews were living an idyllic life, separate from the “native” Ayrians (who had been encouraged to immigrate by the Nazis).

Terezín was host to many talented composers, but Viktor Ullmann was perhaps foremost. A former pupil of Schoenberg, he had in the years preceding the war forged his own style, building on but completely distinct from his teacher’s. When war broke out and the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia Ullmann found himself transformed overnight from an internationally renowned composer into a nonentity. His music was barred from performance and he was forbidden to appear in public. In 1942 he was sent to Terezín. For the next two years he was heavily involved in the musical life there, not only as a composer and pianist, but also as a critic. His surviving (by no means always kind) reviews of the musical productions there are one of the most important sources of information about artistic life in the ghetto.

That a vivacious artistic culture should thrive in a concentration camp seems scarcely believable. In an essay written towards the end of his time there, Ullmann reflected on the morality of art in captivity. “Theresienstadt was and is for me a school of structure. Before, when one did not feel the force and weight of existence because of comfort, this magic of civilisation, it was easy to create beautiful form. Here, where one must daily overcome the substance of life, where everything goes against the Muses: here is the masterclass... I must stress that I have bloomed in my musical work at Theresienstadt, without inhibition, and that in no way did we merely sit down and weep by the rivers of Babylon that our will for culture was inadequate to our will to live. And I am convinced that all those who have struggled to wrest Form from Art and Life will say that I was right.”

The symphony you hear tonight is a reconstruction: it has a dual existence as Ullmann’s seventh piano sonata. By the time he wrote it in August 1944, dedicating it to his children, such luxuries as manuscript paper were a distant memory. He wrote piecemeal on whatever paper came to hand. The manuscript is a fragmentary piano score, with notes for orchestration. It is unclear to what degree it was intended as a piano work or a short score for an orchestral work. Quite possibly Ullmann abandoned his initial ideas for orchestration simply because the resources were not available. Perhaps they reflect a hope for a day when he might be free again and able to write for a symphony orchestra once more.

The music contains many quotations, partly autobiographical, and partly coded messages to his fellow inmates. Mahler’s Song of a Wayfarer, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, and Richard von Heuberger’s operetta The Opera Ball are all quoted, as is Ullmann’s own opera The Emperor of Atlantis, also written for performance in Terezín. The latter is the source of an unusual feature of the symphony: the presence in the orchestra of a harpsichord, which also appears in the opera.

The “Hebrew folksong”that forms the basis of the Finale is in fact a Zionist song by Yehuda Sharett. It sets a poem by the Russian Jewish poet Rachel, in which the she imagines herself as her biblical namesake. Ullmann’s variations draw attention to its resemblance to the Slovak national anthem (also banned by the Nazis) and the Hussite hymn “Ye Who Are God’ s Warriors”. The famous chorale “Now thank we all our God” and the four-note motto derived from Bach’s name. Such Germanic Protestant music may seem incongruous in a Jewish ghetto, but it should be remembered that many of the prisoners would have previously considered themselves secular and German. Bach’s music especially was cherished as an important, and comforting part of their own culture.

Liberation came to Terezín in early 1945, too late for Ullmann: On October 16th 1944, having been persuaded by his friends to leave his manuscripts in their care, he was put on a transport train to Auschwitz. On arrival he was sent directly to the gas chambers. For all the darkness surrounding its creation, however, the lasting impression left by the music is one of great courage and determination. The music itself, and the fact of its survival, is a remarkable testament to the tenacious spirit of Ullmann and his fellow prisoners. Its diversity of influences and materials represents a plea for tolerance that is still all too pertinent today.

Igor Stavinsky (1882-1971)
Petrushka (1911 version)

Scene 1: The Shrove-tide fair
Scene 2: Petrushka’s cell
Scene 3: The Moor’s cell
Scene 4: The Shrove-tide fair (towards evening)

The Russian puppet-show Petrushka was a familiar fixture at the fairs of Stravinsky’s childhood. It was these he had in mind when he sketched an idea for a piece for piano and orchestra in 1910, in between his ballet The Firebird, and the next production he was due to write for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, The Rite of Spring.

Like many ancient national traditions, the show is a nineteenth century import. Petrushka himself is Russia's version of Mr Punch. The plot is essentially the same: the protagonist has a succession of confrontations with authority figures, all of whom he whacks with a large stick. Eventually he is tried and executed for murder, and goes to Hell. Diaghilev was taken by the music, and the idea of a production based around the carnivals, and asked Stravinsky to rework it as a ballet.

Anyone familiar with Stravinsky’s music will probably now be scratching their head, as the above plot bears very little resemblance to anything in the ballet. In fact, Stravinsky voiced the concern early on that librettist Alexandre Benois’s scenario for Petrushka contained very little Petrushka. What Benois (12 years older than Stravinsky) remembered most vividly from the carnivals of his youth were the Harlequinades – plays based on characters from the Italian Commedia dell’Arte. Thus Petrushka, the Moor and the Ballerina are in character closer to Pierrot, Harlequin and Columbine than what Stravinsky remembered from his youth. The closest Petrushka comes to his traditional demeanour is in the second scene in his cell (which derives from Stravinsky’s initial sketches) and in the closing pages where Petrushka’s ghost appears – which may raise the question, is the final apparition a ghost, or the real Petrushka? This is only one element of a disturbing undercurrent of the ballet: puppets behave like people; people behave like puppets; and the audience, which finds itself viewing events from the perspective of both as well as its own, may wonder where it fits into the scheme of things.

The combination of Stravinsky’s music, the exotic setting of the Russian carnivals and the flamboyant production values of the Ballets Russes added up to an instant hit. Not everyone was pleased with the result: many Russian critics condemned Stravinsky for his stylistic experiments and appropriation of folk materials. They saw it as a debasement of the legacy of Rimsky-Korsakov. This is a curious reaction given that Stravinsky’s veneration of his teacher is written in every note, sometimes to a plagiaristic degree.

When Stravinsky emigrated to America in the 1940s, he rewrote and rescored a number of his early works, principally to be able to copyright them under US law, but in some cases the changes were quite radical. The latter incarnation of Petrushka is largely unchanged in its music, but the orchestration is radically altered: by slimming down his forces, Stravinsky gave the work a new and lucrative life as a concert work. However, when he came to re-record the ballet towards the end of his life, he performed Petrushka in its original garb: more extravagant and theatrical than its leaner, concert-hall oriented revision.

Synopsis

The curtain opens on the eve of the St. Petersburg Shrovetide fair, sometime in the 1830s. – we hear the cries of the sideshow barkers drumming up audiences and street songs sung by drunken revellers. A barrel organist accompanies himself on the cornet (a rather rude song about the actress Sandra Bernhardt that Stravinsky had heard on a barrel organ while staying in Beaulieu on the French Riviera) while a dancer joins in. At the other side of the stage, another dancer performs to a music-box.

Two drummers appear in front of a little theatre and attract the crowd’s attention. The Charlatan, an old conjuror, appears from behind the curtain. He plays his flute, and the curtain rises to reveal three puppets: Petrushka, the Ballerina and the Moor. The Charlatan brings them to life by touching them with his flute, and they dance.

Petrushka is thrown into his cell and the door is locked behind him. The puppets have been filled with human emotions by the Charlatan’s magic, and Petrushka most of all. He curses the Charlatan for imprisoning him, and suffers at the knowledge of his own ugliness. The Ballerina enters, and he attempts to woo her. But she is terrified and runs away. He flings himself at the wall in frustration.

In contrast, the Moor is vain and stupid. The Ballerina finds him attractive, however, and uses every trick in her book to seduce him. Just as she succeeds, Petrushka bursts in, mad with jealousy. The Moor throws him out.

Ouutside, it is now evening, and the carnival is in full swing. The wet-nurses dance. A peasant with a bear enters, and the crowd scatters. A merchant enters, with two girls on his arm. He throws bank-notes into the crowd as the girls dance to an accordion. The coachmen dance, joined by the wet-nurses. A group of mummers burst in, and their leader, dressed as the Devil, provokes the crowd into dancing with him.

The revels are interrupted by a commotion. Petrushka runs out of the theatre pursued by the Moor, who pulls out his sabre and strikes Petrushka down. The crowd falls silent in horror.

The Charlatan arrives. He picks up Petrushka and shakes him. Seeing that the corpse is only a puppet, the crowd disperse. As the Charlatan pulls the body back to the theatre, he looks up and sees Petrushka’s ghost, threatening and mocking him and everyone he has fooled.