tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42249186042535714652024-03-05T05:03:45.463+00:00From Beyond the StaveThe Boydell & Brewer Music BlogBoydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.comBlogger157125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-26151909617683456112011-10-21T17:42:00.000+01:002011-10-21T17:42:31.502+01:00Coda<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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When we started this blog just over four years ago, it was intended to be a way to bring our music books to the attention of a wider audience. We quickly dropped the idea of mentioning events in music generally - other bloggers are doing that better than we could - and instead concentrated on stories from our authors and excerpts from our broad range of books on classical music. Many of you seemed to enjoy it and a flattering number of other music bloggers linked to it or referenced it, including <a href="http://www.therestisnoise.com/">Alex Ross </a>and the mighty <a href="http://www.overgrownpath.com/">Overgrown Path</a>.<br />
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Well, all good things come to an end, and we feel it’s time to bring down the curtain on our beloved <i>Stave</i>. We’ll soon be replacing it with an online newsletter - the <b>Posthorn </b>- which will feature articles on our books, interviews with our authors, excerpts from new titles, competitions, special offers, free books, and balloon-twisting - well, not balloon-twisting. To sign up for the Posthorn, simply send an e-mail to <b>posthorn@boydellusa.net </b>and a link to the first issue will be sent to you in November 2011. <br />
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In the meantime, anything posted on the web is there for eternity, and we invite you to look over our past posts and sample some of the best writing on classical music in cyberspace and, indeed, in the real world too.<br />
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Many thanks to all our readers. See you again soon in the <b>Posthorn</b>.<br />
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<i>Michael Richards and Ralph Locke</i><br />
<br />Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-3576772622347683202011-09-19T16:16:00.000+01:002011-09-19T16:16:47.801+01:00Gunther Schuller at the Met<div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<em>Next month the <a href="http://www.urpress.com/">University of Rochester Press</a> will publish a book that is already attracting critical acclaim from proofs that were sent out to potential reviewers, <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13603">the first volume of Gunther Schuller’s autobiography</a>. Whether you know Schuller as a jazz composer and performer, or a jazz historian, or a composer of contemporary concert music, or a conductor or writer on classical music, or even - for those with long memories - a horn player, you will be charmed by Schuller’s attempt to ‘document the incredibly fortunate, exciting life in music (and its sister arts) that I have been privileged to live thus far,’ as he puts it in his Preface to the book. </em><br />
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<em>Here, after our summer break, is the first of a number of extracts from this compelling memoir. In this week’s edited extract, we join Schuller as a horn player in the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera in 1949:</em><br />
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One of that season’s happiest encounters for me—and I think for most of the orchestra—was the arrival of <a href="http://www.soundfountain.org/rem/remperlea.html">Jonel Perlea</a>, one of the best conductors to grace the Met’s podium during my years there. Romanian-born, but trained in Munich and Leipzig, where he studied with Max Reger at the Hochschule (he must have been in the same classes with my father, both being the same age), Perlea had already enjoyed a distinguished conducting career in Europe, including leading the first performances in Romania of <em>Rosenkavalier</em>, <em>Meistersinger</em>, and <em>Falstaff</em>.<br />
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At the Met Perlea was given four operas to conduct: <em>Rigoletto, Carmen, Traviata</em>, and for his American debut, <em>Tristan und Isolde</em>. In his very first rehearsal we could tell that we were in the hands of a superior musician. (I found out later that he was also a fine composer, more than just a conductor-composer.) He managed to bring to that ecstasy- and hysteria-laden score a wonderful calming restraint. With Fritz Stiedry the more frantic episodes in Tristan, especially in the third act, could easily spin out of control. It is incredibly intense music, sometimes more intense than it can readily tolerate. Perlea treated the music with an almost chamber music transparency—lyric, eloquent, even elegant—without diluting the drama and emotional excitement of <em>Tristan</em>, or for that matter of <em>Carmen</em> or any of the operas Perlea was given.<br />
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All this was all the more amazing since Perlea had had a heart attack and a stroke, and as a result was paralyzed on most of his right side; he conducted only with his left hand. This is highly unusual and takes some getting used to—which we did very quickly. We really loved this man. Alas, Perlea was at the Met for only one year. All year long we kept hearing backstage rumors that certain conductors, especially Alberto Erede, also new at the Met in 1949, were agitating with the management to have Perlea retired. If true, it was but another typical example of what is known far and wide in the music world as “opera intrigue.” I saw Perlea several times in the 1950s in the hallways at the Manhattan School of Music, where both of us were on the faculty, and I could never resist telling him how much we missed him after he was let go.<br />
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Near the end of the 1949 Met tour we began to hear rumors that our orchestra might be hired to play a two-week season—at the Metropolitan Opera House—of the visiting Sadler’s Wells Ballet. The rumor turned out to be true, and the two weeks with Sadler’s Wells were a wonderful musical and educational experience. It brought back many happy memories of my days with the Ballet Theatre, six years earlier; and now I was fortunate enough to witness with my own eyes the brilliant work of England’s premier ballet company, with its outstanding, oh so graceful prima ballerina, <a href="http://www.ballerinagallery.com/fonteyn.htm">Margot Fonteyn</a>. (This was a special bonus for Margie [Schuller’s wife], who was so keenly interested in great ballet. She came to almost every performance, accompanied by Jeannie Clark, my dancer friend from Ballet Theatre.) But for me the two major highlights of the Sadler’s Wells visit were the discovery of Prokofiev’s extraordinary Cinderella music (in its first performance in the United States), and the amazing experience of working with <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2005/may/07/dance.proms2005">Constant Lambert</a>.<br />
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I really looked forward to playing with Lambert, for I admired him greatly as a composer, and for years had heard that he was a marvelous conductor. In England he was generally considered a lightweight composer, I assume owing to his very jazzy 1929 <em>Rio Grande Suite</em> and his catchy, devilishly clever ballet <em>Horoscope</em>. I thought of him more as a kind of British George Gershwin, a high compliment. <br />
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I was thrilled with his conducting; it was so intelligent and sensitive, although I noticed that sometimes in certain performances his beat, his direction, would be kind of wavering, wobbly. I began to realize that the man was at times not entirely sober. It got worse when, in the middle of the second week, disaster struck. Halfway through Tchaikovsky’s <em>Hamlet</em> music (which Lambert had turned into a ballet), completely befuddled, he simply broke down in tears and slumped over the podium. We tried to keep playing; Felix Eyle, our concertmaster, beat time with his bow. But it was no use; we barely knew the music (none of us had ever played <em>Hamlet</em> before), and we certainly didn’t know the dancers’ tempos. We never finished the performance. It was a truly tragic occasion; I felt so bad for Lambert. We now all knew that he was a raging alcoholic, and wondered how he had held up so long.<br />
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Discovering Prokofiev’s <em>Cinderella</em> music was a much happier experience. It was completely new to me—the first recording (of only excerpts of that ballet) didn’t come out in England until a year after the New York performances. I was so taken with the sheer melodic, harmonic beauty of the music, with Prokofiev’s seemingly boundless creative imagination, that I knew I had to somehow get a look at the score. When I found that none was available for purchase, I did the next best thing: over a period of fours days, in every intermission during the six rehearsals we had of <em>Cinderella</em>, I copied out, either fully or in a shorthand of mine, a dozen of my favorite excerpts from Lambert’s conducting score—which, bless him, he always left on his podium in the pit.<br />
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I was now approaching my fifth year at the Met. Two major events loomed ahead, which made my life there much more agreeable, much more rewarding musically, professionally, and artistically. One such event was my full promotion to co-principal horn. David Rattner was relieved of his position near the end of the 1949–50 season, and I was told sometime on the spring tour that Max Rudolf, Fritz Reiner, and Fritz Stiedry had all recommended that, without need for an audition, I be moved up to first horn—with an appropriate and, I thought, rather generous raise in salary. “Would I please accept the offer?” Would I? Well, of course I would. I was thrilled and gratified that my work as third horn (and first horn in Mozart and Rossini operas) had truly been appreciated. It was nice to know that the conducting staff and the management valued my particular way of playing, which contrasted considerably with Richard Moore’s generally more boisterous, extroverted style. I think they recognized that I brought a composer’s insights to my playing, an intimate awareness of the music’s inner workings, structurally, orchestrationally, conceptually, particularly in regard to ensemble considerations.<br />
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For me it wasn’t just a horn part, which one could use to display one’s soloistic and technical prowess. My horn part was just one of some thirty other voices that in toto yielded the complex and constantly variable ensemble relationships in an orchestra. I can truly say that there was no ego involved in my playing—pride yes (when justified), but ego, no. I knew that I and my horn part were just one small cog in a great wheel that required constant flexibility and pliancy in adjusting to the myriad and diverse collective demands of the composition. Fitting in—rather than standing out—gave me the greatest pleasure—and still does to this day, a commitment I ardently pursue as a conductor as well.<br />
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The other event that not only affected my life as a musician but also significantly enlivened New York’s musical scene, and probably, by extension, the entire opera field in the United States, was the ascendancy of Rudolf Bing to the general manager throne of the Metropolitan Opera Company. I use such language because, in my view and that of most others in the opera world, Bing was an authoritarian aristocrat, virtually a dictator, certainly not a pleasant man to work for and with. He had a rather severe don’t-mess-with-me look about him all the time. Indeed, with his balding head, piercing eyes, and hawklike nose, he always reminded me of Max Schreck in <em>Nosferatu</em>, Murnau’s famous vampire film of 1922. His twenty-two years at the helm of the Met were marked by continual strife, altercations, feuds, and controversy—although they weren’t always his fault or his creation. <br />
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All that said, one has to acknowledge that he was in the end an extraordinarily talented, genial impresario–general manager. He really knew his stuff. Bing was what we call in German a real <em>Opernhase</em> (opera hare), richly experienced as managing director (<em>Intendant</em> in German) of the Stadttheater in Darmstadt, Germany, the Charlottenburg Opera in Berlin (that city’s second opera house), and as artistic director of Glyndebourne in England, literally bringing that institution to international prominence in the 1950s. In 1957 he helped organize and then managed the Edinburgh Festival. <br />
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Bing was remarkably knowledgeable in musical matters, especially in his primary function and responsibility of bringing to the house the best and most appropriate singers. He set the highest standards in selecting and hiring the casts himself, a skill that had eluded Edward Johnson in his later years. It is not enough to know that a certain role is for a soprano or baritone, and then hire the most famous soprano or baritone in the business. Every part, every role, has its own characteristic requisites: questions of range, timbre, size, and quality of voice. In the category of soprano alone there are officially three kinds: dramatic, lyric, and coloratura. But the Italians make further distinctions, such as <em>soprano acuto</em> (high soprano) and <em>soprano leggiero</em> (light soprano), and—I like this one—<em>soprano sfogato</em>. Furthermore, the Italian vocal tradition is significantly different from the German, and even from the French and English. In addition, not all composers always conformed in their vocal works to these basic categorizations. The same distinct differentiations exist in the other four vocal types: alto, tenor, baritone, and bass. So the opera manager must know particular singers’ voices really well in order to choose someone with the right quality, timbre, and expressive character—not to mention acting ability and stage presence, another aspect of casting decisions that Bing addressed very seriously and successfully. In these matters he engaged a whole roster of singers in his first year as manager who, by their presence and artistry, raised the overall artistic level of the Met. To name a few: the galvanic mezzo-soprano, Fedora Barbieri; the outstanding (but woefully underappreciated) Lucine Amara, who sang important roles at the Met for another incredible twenty-seven years, still in beautiful voice to the very end; Hans Hotter, in the twilight of his career, but one of the greatest Inquisitors ever in Verdi’s <em>Don Carlos</em>; Roberta Peters; Mario del Monaco; Victoria de los Angeles; and, above all, Cesare Siepi, one of the very greatest vocal artists I had the privilege to work with in my fifteen years at the Met.<br />
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<a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13603">Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty</a><em> by Gunther Schuller is scheduled for publication in October by the University of Rochester Press, and can be ordered from your favourite bookseller now.</em><br />
Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-68707410135934957142011-08-12T10:53:00.003+01:002011-08-12T11:16:13.651+01:00Springtime on Funen<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpC8Hms2nEW-2ieABPi-ivEl9F0F1o6b8rzMBlCEOR8a5iC3Nvg4k5G0dVSQ0kOJo5O74-VCsVLJbSeQl7CUPxV9fD3Ym6bxitr2E5BBC6PwAJVzGYH6MPpXMRE-kuNEtiobUZhjOYbg/s1600/ZCN.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 133px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5639910864514634434" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpC8Hms2nEW-2ieABPi-ivEl9F0F1o6b8rzMBlCEOR8a5iC3Nvg4k5G0dVSQ0kOJo5O74-VCsVLJbSeQl7CUPxV9fD3Ym6bxitr2E5BBC6PwAJVzGYH6MPpXMRE-kuNEtiobUZhjOYbg/s200/ZCN.jpg" /></a><em>“Finally, everyone’s talking about Nielsen” is the witty title of an article by Andrew Mellor in the </em><a href="http://www.gramophone.co.uk/latest-issue"><em>September issue of the Gramophone</em></a><em>. It includes contributions from Daniel Grimley whose recent book,</em> <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13418">Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism</a>, <em>will certainly help nudge along any Nielsen revival. The BBC Proms included a Nielsen symphony alongside one from <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13783">Sibelius </a>and the Grieg Piano Concerto on </em><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0132n6w/BBC_Proms_2011_Prom_33_Nielsen/"><em>August 8th</em></a><em>, so perhaps the revival is already underway. Here, in a second extract from Daniel Grimley’s superb study, is an evocative look at Nielsen’s pastoral cantata,</em> Springtime on Funen.
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<br />One of the recurring tropes in Nielsen reception, both at home and abroad, is his association with the Danish landscape. Repeatedly presented as a true and faithful son of the soil, Nielsen is held to have captured some elemental quality of the Danish landscape in sound, just as the landscape seems somehow to have determined the texture and grain of much of his musical work.
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<br />The pastoral cantata, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxjajGJjyAg"><em>Fynsk Foraar</em> </a>(‘Springtime on Funen’), is emblematic in this respect. It is here that Nielsen’s evocation of the Danish countryside, and <a href="http://www.visitdenmark.com/international/en-gb/menu/turist/turistinformation/regionaleturistsites/fyn/funen.htm">the island of Funen </a>where he was born, appears most powerful and explicit. But Nielsen’s response to the idea of landscape, and to the construction of Funen as specific place and sensibility in music, is more ambiguous than it first seems. In a brief, illuminating moment towards its closing bars, the whirling round dance with which <em>Springtime on Funen</em> concludes unexpectedly gives way to a hushed cadenza for tremolo violins, solo voices, horns, and bassoons. Marked <em>molto adagio</em>, the seven-bar passage is canonic: the soprano’s ornamental melodic arabesque is imitated first by the tenor and then by the baritone (doubled by the woodwind), beneath a shimmering inverted pedal in the upper strings.
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<br />Texturally, dynamically, and harmonically, the cadenza is an exceptional and striking event: its Ab minor orientation is a sharp diversion from the round dance’s final tonal goal, a radiant E major (the transition pivots on the enharmonic transformation Eb/D#), and the sudden drop in dynamic level and textural weight is in sharp contrast to the finale’s prevailing <em>fortissimo</em> tutti. The cadenza marks an abrupt change of direction that seemingly brings the whole work momentarily to a stop at the line: ‘Se, Æbleblomster drysser over vejen’ (‘Look, apple blossom scatters down upon the road’). The three soloists repeat the words hypnotically, as though held in rapt attention as they watch the white petals slowly falling to the ground, until the chorus re-enter in the final bar, whispering ‘Natten er vor egen, Æbleblomster drysser’ (‘The night is ours, apple blossom scatters down’). As the words slip silently away, the round dance returns, swiftly cranking up speed and volume once again so that the poignant memory of the spring night, and its associations of vernal love, are breezily blown away as the cantata spirals towards its celebratory final cadence.
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<br />On closer inspection, the cadenza might be heard simply as a moment of modest reflection, the brief calm before the uplifting storm of the cantata’s energetic final pages. It can also be understood generically as a closing curtain call for the three soloists who appear, partly in character, earlier in the work, alongside a children’s choir and an adult chorus. <em>Springtime on Funen</em> opens with a gentle sunrise heralding the turning of the season. The soft contours of the landscape are feminised, the spring blossom flowering upon ‘the gnarled apple tree/behind hills as rounded as young girl’s knees’ [det knortede Æbletræ/bag Bakker, der rundes som Pigeknæ]. The soprano solo enters as a spring goddess – Demeter or Persephone, or perhaps a local Nordic deity (Freya) – followed by the tenor, a young sap-filled hero, who greets ‘the gentle day, so mild and long/and full of sun and birdsong’ (‘den milde Dag [så] lys og lang/og fuld af Sol og Fuglesang’). The baritone appears twice: first as the earthy voice of experience, an ‘old bachelor’ whose dark lower register grounds the passage in the rich tilth of the Funen fields, and then later as the melancholy blind musician, ‘Blind Anders’ in Nielsen’s autobiographical account of his childhood, whose mournful clarinet solo provides the cantata’s greatest moment of pathos: ‘small hands seek my old hand/it is as if I touched the spirit of spring (små Hæder søger min gamle Hånd/ det er, som rørte jeg Vårens Ånd’).
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<br />In contrast, the cadenza has the feeling of withdrawal and abstraction, a liquefaction or draining away of meaning, as though the characters who enter elsewhere in the work suddenly lose their individual identity and drift from view. The cadenza’s haziness thus assumes the quality of a dream sequence, a hallucinatory episode that seems in some ways emblematic of the act of remembrance itself: the sudden unexpected lighting upon a forgotten image that is simultaneously familiar and strange. The shimmering string tremolo suggests the acute tingling of nerve endings, of a state of heightened awareness, the soprano arabesque appearing almost imperceptibly and then reproducing itself canonically as each stage in the process of recollection generates a further image in turn. The falling apple blossom hence becomes a Proustian key that momentarily unlocks a privileged domain of sensory experience and temporal projection backwards, or rather inwards, towards a hitherto inaccessible level of imagination. And, as swiftly as it emerged, the vision vanishes once more, swept aside by the inevitable return of the closing <em>Dansevise</em>.
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<br />Memory, the cadenza reveals, is as much about letting go as about recollection; landscape here is more concerned with erasure than with recording the permanent mark of dwelling and occupation. Nielsen’s springtime is a festival of celebration and rebirth, but it is also merely a seasonal stage in a larger cycle of growth and decay, of flowering and dissolution – it is the trace of landscape’s mutability and constant capacity for change and renewal.
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<br /><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13418">Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism </a><em>by Daniel Grimley is published by the Boydell Press and is available from all good booksellers, as is Grimley’s </em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=9059"><em>earlier book on Grieg</em></a><em>. Dan Grimley will be appearing at the </em><a href="http://fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf/2011/"><em>Bard Music Festival </em></a><em>which starts this weekend. Andrew Mellor's</em> Gramophone <em>blog post on Nielsen can be found </em><a href="http://www.gramophone.co.uk/blog/the-gramophone-blog/nielsen-langgaard-and-one-of-the-strangest-works-in-musical-history"><em>here</em></a><em>.</em>
<br />Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-91488507944455305922011-07-29T16:43:00.004+01:002011-08-04T19:31:51.275+01:00John Ireland’s Companion<div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCfB1Mz3G5ifCECtqPlbIAuJEu-nFd5RdFkNMpxYlLHihDE5Dlu49tAGaVoG5inGRWIrEXuD86sLtyTd7H9x928q1jUjAqbHSg_Ww49ZaTsew_rMGPiBxHeoUitpMq8ns0pNxFGv8sGg/s1600/ZJIC.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 131px; float: left; height: 200px;" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634812782692431042" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCfB1Mz3G5ifCECtqPlbIAuJEu-nFd5RdFkNMpxYlLHihDE5Dlu49tAGaVoG5inGRWIrEXuD86sLtyTd7H9x928q1jUjAqbHSg_Ww49ZaTsew_rMGPiBxHeoUitpMq8ns0pNxFGv8sGg/s200/ZJIC.jpg" border="0" /></a><em>2012 will mark the 50th anniversary of the death of </em><a href="http://www.musicweb-international.com/ireland/ireland.htm"><em>John Ireland</em></a><em>. His reputation lies somewhat in the shadow of </em><a href="http://www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=12500"><em>Vaughan Williams</em></a><em>, </em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=8415"><em>Elgar </em></a><em>and others, and his music, with its European influences, sits uneasily in the pastoral tradition of twentieth century British music. The anniversary year will see a welcome rush of new and reissued recordings of his endlessly fascinating and attractive work. To open proceedings, the Boydell Press is pleased to publish, later this year, the</em> <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13776">John Ireland Companion </a><em>edited by that great champion of British music, Lewis Foreman.<br /><br />We open a short series of extracts from the book with something rather special. Here Bruce Phillips, Boydell’s music editor-at-large and director of the Ireland Trust, remembers his introduction to the music and to Norah Kirby:<br /></em><br />I first became aware of John Ireland’s music in 1961, when I was 16. My piano teacher at school, John Alston, placed in front of me a piano piece called <em>Month’s Mind</em> and said that if I learned to play the piece properly he would take me to meet the composer, then living not far from the school in a converted windmill just outside the village of Washington in West Sussex. I struggled with the piece but became completely captivated by its atmosphere of nostalgic yearning conveyed through harmonies that reminded me of Ravel’s <em>Sonatine</em>, a piece I had attempted to add to my rather restricted repertoire. Here though was music that seemed as quintessentially English as Ravel’s was French, and moreover evoking a rather different Englishness from that of my then musical god, Ralph Vaughan Williams.<br /><br />In June 1962 I read the obituaries of John Ireland, who had died at the age of 82. Much mention was made of the Sussex windmill in which he had passed the last nine years of his life. My relief at not being compelled to visit him and perform his piece to him in person — he would by that time have been unable to see me — was mixed with intense sadness at the news of his death and curiosity to know more about him. Acting on impulse a few days later I went to the one phone booth in the school and looked him up in the local directory. There he was: Ireland, Dr John, Rock Mill, Washington. I rang the number without of course knowing whether anyone would answer or what I would say if anyone did. I heard a woman’s voice at the other end, pressed Button A, and found myself speaking to a lady who introduced herself as Mrs Norah Kirby. I introduced myself as a schoolboy speaking from nearby Lancing College and said that I had been greatly moved and saddened by the news of John Ireland’s passing and that I had come to love his piece <em>Month’s Mind</em> above all other music that I knew.<br /><br />I discovered in the course of our conversation that Norah Kirby had been John Ireland’s (or as she always referred to him, Dr. Ireland’s) companion, secretary and housekeeper for more or less twenty years. I learned later that she divided the world into those who loved his music and those who did not. By revealing that I had fallen completely in love with Month’s Mind I had fortunately placed myself in the former category. On hearing that I had not heard anything else he had written and that I knew no more about him than had been included in the obituaries, she invited me to lunch, promising to drive me to the beautiful converted windmill in which he had spent nearly the last decade of his life.<br /><br />I obtained leave from my housemaster and met Norah in Steyning High Street. She was driving Ireland’s last car, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Popular">a green Ford Popular </a>which she later told me he had bought in the 1950s through contacts in Guernsey, which was then an export market for cars. We drove past Chanctonbury and turned right along a small slip road that led to a drive flanked by pine trees. There at the end of the drive was the windmill, minus its sails but with an adjoining two-storey building erected when it had been converted from a working mill into a residential house.<br /><br />At that first meeting Norah was in good health. She told me about Ireland’s funeral that had taken place at Shipley, a village between Washington and Horsham. She showed me round the main part of the Mill, especially the octagonal room at the base of the tower, and we walked out of one of the doors into a beautiful garden from which one could see straight up towards Chanctonbury Ring, a large circle of pine trees cresting a promontory jutting out from the line of the South Downs. I was shown Ireland’s study and bedroom and then taken up to the very top of the Mill, from which one could see the results of the extensive sand and gravel extraction that had caused Ireland and Norah so much annoyance almost from the moment they had moved in. I also made the acquaintance of Smokey and Laddin, two Siamese cats that had played an important part in Ireland’s last years and remained for Norah a living link with him.<br /><br />Over lunch she asked me what pieces of Ireland’s music I knew (at that time only <em>Month’s Mind</em> and ‘Ragamuffin’, the music of which I had found I had at home). She played me the 10-inch LP of Boyd Neel’s recording of the Minuet from <em>A Downland Suite</em>, and presented me with a copy. She showed me the leather-bound autograph book presented to Ireland on his 75th birthday in which a wide range of musicians and other friends and admirers had written messages of congratulations and memories. Prominent among these was one from Ralph Vaughan Williams. This book is now in the British Library along with the majority of Ireland’s autograph manuscripts and correspondence.<br /><br />Later that summer Norah suffered a series of strokes, doubtless brought on by the stress of Ireland’s death. She made a pretty good recovery except for her left arm, which was paralysed in such a way that it was very difficult for her to use her left hand despite constant physiotherapy. I for my part had left school at the end of December, leaving myself about ten months ‘gap year’ (as it was not then called) until I went up to Christ Church, Oxford. I had no plans for how to spend this time until I received an invitation from Norah to go and stay at the Mill and assist her in matters such as general domestic duties, as well as to provide a sympathetic companion and fellow listener to the many private recordings which had been made of performances and broadcasts of Ireland’s music. I would also be able to meet many of the musicians and friends who regularly visited the Mill. I accepted without hesitation, and was driven down to Sussex through the snow and ice of that legendary winter of 1962-3.<br /><br />For the next three months, under Norah’s supervision, I acquired rudimentary skills in cooking and cleaning, and learned to drive well enough to accompany her to the places she associated with Ireland: Shipley churchyard, Storrington (where Ireland had been wont in earlier times to meet Arnold Bax in the bar of the Black Horse), Steyning and Pulborough (where lived Mary and Percy Turnbull, the third composer besides Ireland and John Longmire to be on board the SS Antwerp when it left Guernsey for Weymouth a few days before Germany invaded in 1940). I also met the pianists Eric Parkin and Alan Rowlands, the critic Scott Goddard, the broadcaster <a href="http://www.gramophone.net/Issue/Page/October%201961/21/787366/More+Than+Music,+by+Alec+Robertson+%28Collins,+21s.%29.">Alec Robertson</a>, the writer <a href="http://jocelynbrooke.com/">Jocelyn Brooke</a>, the artist <a href="http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/display/2004/juliet-pannett.php">Juliet Pannett</a>, and Charlie Markes, whose friendship with Ireland had begun when they were choirboys at St Luke’s before the first world war and had survived a long interruption based on a misunderstanding between them. Another frequent visitor was <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/7640159/Lawrence-Norcross.html">Laurence Norcross</a>, who in 1959 with John Steele had formed the John Ireland Society that had done so much to rescue Ireland’s music from a period of neglect in the 1950s. Other visitors included Peter and Margaret Taylor, friends of Norah’s from the days even before she had met Ireland and later the principal members of the Trust which she set up in the 1970s.<br /><br />From this period dates my admiration for John Ireland the composer and interest in John Ireland the man. The picture I gained of him at that time was inevitably influenced by Norah Kirby, whose regard for him bordered on idolatry. There were times when, even then, I realised that he could not have been quite the perfect human being portrayed by Norah. A forceful and articulate person herself, she brooked not a single word of criticism or questioning of any aspect of his life or music, and viewed any failure to further his cause as evidence of malicious conspiracy, as for example his exclusion from the Proms after the <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13083">BBC music department was taken over by William Glock </a>and Hans Keller (though she much appreciated the hoax perpetrated by Keller and Susan Bradshaw when they recorded and broadcast on the BBC Third Programme music alleged to have been by the Polish composer Piotr Zac). She could take against perfectly good performances or recordings if she thought Ireland would not have approved of them, as for example the singer John Shirley-Quirk, whose Saga LP of songs elicited her constant disparagement. Yet it was Norah who from the mid 1940s, when Ireland had returned to London after the war, had brought order and comfort into the last two decades of his life.<br /><br />In the month after I left the Mill I was a Hesse student at the 1963 Aldeburgh Festival, one of a group of young people who helped with things like ferrying musicians to rehearsals and concerts, setting out chairs, and the like. A high point while I was there was a party for all the Hesse students given by <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13478">Imogen Holst </a>at her house. <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/aldeburgh_festival_2011.asp">Britten and Pears </a>both came. Bursting with adolescent pride and curiosity I told Britten what I had been doing at Rock Mill, then knowing only that he had studied composition with Ireland and not knowing of the difficult relationship that seems to have existed between them. I asked Britten for his opinion on Ireland’s music. All I can remember of what he said was, first that Ireland’s piano music was difficult to play because it had fistfuls of notes, and that in his answer to my question as to what Ireland was like to meet, Britten replied that he had a strong personality but a weak character.<br /><br />Ireland was once asked, so the story goes, whether he thought he was a great composer. He is said to have replied after some thought: ‘No, but I think I’m a significant one’. This perhaps tells us something about Ireland’s character. Born the fifth and by some years the last child of Victorian parents—his father was 70 when he was born—his childhood seems not to have been happy. Details of his early schooling are sparse but what is clear is that somehow at the age of 13 Ireland was sufficiently certain of his interest and ability in music to take himself unaided to the Royal College of Music, sit whatever entrance examination or audition was required, and return to Manchester to tell his mother what he had done.<br /><br />Ireland was never exactly prolific. He once described himself as ‘England’s most laborious composer’. His peak years were between 1910 and 1930, with the apex coming in 1913-23, the years in which <em>The Forgotten Rite</em>, the second piano trio and second violin sonata, the piano sonata, the cello sonata, the Housman cycle <em>The Land of Lost Content</em> and <em>Mai-Dun</em> were written. The 1930s saw the production of Ireland’s two great works for piano and orchestra, the Piano Concerto and <em>Legend</em>, plus <em>A Downland Suite</em>, <em>A London Overture</em>, the <em>Concertino Pastorale</em> for strings, and his one extended work for chorus and orchestra, his setting of John Addington Symonds’s poem ‘A Vista’ entitled <em>These Things Shall Be</em>, in which Ireland, with more than a little help from his friend and pupil Alan Bush, expressed an optimistic hope for an Utopian future seemingly at odds with his innately pessimistic outlook. During the Second World War came two masterpieces, <em>Sarnia</em>, begun in his beloved Guernsey, and the <em>Fantasy Sonata</em> for clarinet and piano. His <em>Epic March</em> was written in response to a BBC commission for a patriotic march. After the war came the overture <em>Satyricon</em>, a piece that deserves to be played more often if for nothing else for its glorious clarinet tune in the middle section. The immediate postwar period also brought Ireland’s only film score, <em>The Overlanders</em>.<br /><br />In England we tend not to celebrate our native composers enough unless they have produced a string of symphonies, concertos, large scale choral works and operas— and perhaps not even then. Ireland’s music is never going to achieve the same degree of popularity, admiration and wide exposure as, say, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Britten, or <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=12899">Walton</a>. He is often described as a miniaturist, sometimes in rather patronising terms. We can regret that he did not write more orchestral music given his mastery of orchestral colouring. His legacy is that of an intensely self-critical perfectionist who has given us some exquisite pieces for piano, many beautiful and deeply moving songs, some splendid sonatas and piano trios, and a handful of arguably great pieces for orchestra. It is to be hoped that the <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13776"><em>John Ireland Companion</em> </a>will contribute towards explaining some of the background to the life and music of this very significant composer.<br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13776">The John Ireland Companion</a>, <em>edited by Lewis Foreman (whose classic biography of</em> <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=7055">Bax </a><em>is also available from the Boydell Press), will be published in October. A further extract will follow shortly. </em></div></div>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-18135483094554822752011-07-28T12:47:00.004+01:002011-07-28T12:59:11.517+01:00Michael Talbot's Vivaldi<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdkGFNRfy7m6OWgYbbqvjjkNT9kV8QGYxT21yHVF-lu5-RubWeQtRNmIhgptjm1F3pzw7vqyzIOgNScVBrGDrSjQ8HIi_dVDd74IMGp8EQ937HpnuEgECbaTBWY5r85_EMw-aSlZCA4A/s1600/ZVC.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 132px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634370364719810962" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdkGFNRfy7m6OWgYbbqvjjkNT9kV8QGYxT21yHVF-lu5-RubWeQtRNmIhgptjm1F3pzw7vqyzIOgNScVBrGDrSjQ8HIi_dVDd74IMGp8EQ937HpnuEgECbaTBWY5r85_EMw-aSlZCA4A/s200/ZVC.jpg" /></a><em>The Boydell Press is privileged to publish a remarkable new book by the internationally renowned Vivaldi scholar, <a href="http://www.liv.ac.uk/music/staff/mt.htm">Michael Talbot</a>.</em> <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13733">The Vivaldi Compendium </a><em>includes a short biography of the composer, bibliography, a list of works, and takes us alphabetically from “Abate” to “Ziani, Marc’Antonio”. Here Professor Talbot gives us some background to what is certain to be considered an essential resource for anyone with an interest in the composer.<br /><br /></em>Every great composer needs at least one compact book of handy reference that enables anyone interested in him, from the ordinary music lover to the expert, to access basic data instantly and if possible to learn where to find more on the same topic. This is all the more true of a composer such as Vivaldi, about whom knowledge is growing so fast, so that constant updating is needed. For instance, literally dozens of new works by him have been discovered in the last fifty years. Vivaldi is not alone in being a composer on whom there is much ‘misinformation’ in circulation, and it is vital to set the record straight where one can.<br /><br />Some thirty years ago an eminent Austrian Vivaldian, Walter Kolneder, wrote what he called a ‘Vivaldi Lexicon’ in response to this need. This book had many drawbacks – for a start, it was printed in such small type that one almost needed a magnifying glass to read the bibliography – but it did enough to reveal the potential of a Vivaldi dictionary of this kind and suggested what other, complementary sections could appear together with it. The book that I have entitled <em>The Vivaldi Compendium</em> is a more ambitious, and naturally more up-to-date, realization of the same concept.<br /><br />The core of the book is its Dictionary section. This has entries for persons, institutions, places, genres, associated musical terminology, individual works and collections and many other items relevant to Vivaldi. To give a flavour, the entries for the letter E are: Echo-Repeats; Eller, Rudolf; Enharmonic change; Ensemble concerto; Ephrikian, Angelo; <em>Ercole su ’l Termodonte</em>, RV 723; Erdmann, Ludwig; <em>Estate, L’</em>, RV 315; <em>Estragiudiziale</em>; <em>Estro armonico, L’</em>, op. 3; Everett, Paul. (I should reassure the reader that most letters have many times that number of entries!) There is ample cross-referencing between the entries, so that the reader, starting at a randomly chosen point, can hop back and forth between entries following the drift of his interest. More important, nearly all the entries are cross-referenced to items in the bibliography that I have suggested for further reading.<br /><br />This Bibliography section, running to 26 pages, is the probably the longest on Vivaldi in existence. Since the book itself is in English, priority has been given to English-language publications, although full account has also been taken of the many vital contributions in Italian, German, French and other languages. The other two sections are, first, a list of Vivaldi’s compositions that, with its well over 800 items, absorbs the latest discoveries and the latest opinions over the authenticity of certain controversial works and, second, a concise biography of the composer that likewise aims to bring to light the latest information.<br /><br />Although <em>The Vivaldi Compendium</em> is as reliable and authoritative as I can make it, it is deliberately not an ‘impersonal’ product. On Vivaldi I have some strong opinions that I am eager to share, although I hope I have also shown fairness towards contrary opinions. While writing it, I have always been aware that its potential readership extends far beyond the academic fold. It is the sort of book, for instance, that a radio station might keep in the office in order to check a detail for the announcer of a broadcast piece by Vivaldi, or a collector of Vivaldi’s music on CDs might like to have handy. I will be interested to see how successful I have been in making the book serious but at the same time reader-friendly.<br /><br />I enjoyed the experience of writing the book. Since I have been researching into Vivaldi for over forty years, during which period I have been writing constantly on him, I had little extra work to do, apart from keeping up with whatever literature or discoveries made themselves known during the period of the writing (and right up to the proofs stage, actually). But it is too easy to forget things, especially as one gets older, and my work on the book certainly reminded me of many important details that had slipped out of my mind over the years.<br /><br />On the other hand, it was extraordinary how many absolutely new and unexpected things dropped into my lap while I was writing it simply by utilizing the resources of the Internet almost in a spirit of play. When I started out as a researcher in the early 1960s there were no photocopiers, let alone scanners and computers (with their music notation programs, search engines and e-mail). It seems almost indecent how easy it has become to acquire and store information, even though the problem of deciding how reliable that information is never goes away.<br /><br />The experience of writing the book certainly helped me – as I hope it will many readers – to co-ordinate things better: to see more clearly the multifarious interconnections between the composer, his world and his music. In a sense, the book is a ‘taking of stock’, showing exactly how and where Vivaldi stands in 2011. But it is also meant as an act of thanksgiving towards the worldwide community of Vivaldians and Vivaldi-lovers, who have sustained my interest in the composer for so long.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13733">The Vivaldi Compendium </a><em>by Michael Talbot is published by the Boydell Press and available from your favourite bookseller. Talbot's </em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=7574">Chamber Cantatas of Antonio Vivaldi </a><em>is also available</em>.Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-89076978077643729292011-07-20T17:10:00.003+01:002011-07-20T17:21:07.146+01:00The ‘Lights’ vs 'the Rival Party’<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJXu305Bnqaps3J5VYfnAo_W1osa3v904LAPpyi9o4WscPlV_nRaWn4bLgx6MlYK6bLTfbYt66YLhXeaG5Y132ttz5NKwb8Za-j2Yiuqp52zp_YRFymJqqRFiGuUXW1up_T6PWkFdbvw/s1600/ZGM.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 133px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5631470271073802162" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJXu305Bnqaps3J5VYfnAo_W1osa3v904LAPpyi9o4WscPlV_nRaWn4bLgx6MlYK6bLTfbYt66YLhXeaG5Y132ttz5NKwb8Za-j2Yiuqp52zp_YRFymJqqRFiGuUXW1up_T6PWkFdbvw/s200/ZGM.jpg" /></a><em>Last month we ran a post by Nancy Newman in which she explained her fascination with the history of the Germania Musical Society and its travels around North America, bringing a variety of music to audiences far and wide. In this extract from her book,</em> <a href="http://www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13434">Good Music for a Free People</a>, <em>Newman discusses controversies encountered by the Germanians in Boston over their programming. Some wanted more concentrated, homogenous programs of substantial works, while others favoured more dances and lighter fare.<br /><br /></em>Although it might be overstatement to say that “all eyes were upon the Germania” as they prepared for the 1853–54 season, it is not unimaginable that the members hoped to reach heights comparable to those of the previous year. The season began splendidly, with numerous “special attractions” and extra musicians supplementing the ensemble. As in the previous season, the subscription series of ten concerts had very reasonable terms: a package of thirty tickets was ten dollars, or fifteen for five dollars, all “to be used at pleasure.” The orchestra held some admissions in reserve for those who could not commit to the series: “In order to prevent the confusion and disappointment experienced upon the unusual demand for tickets last season, <em>Only a Limited Number</em> of subscription tickets will be issued.” Single tickets were available at the usual fifty cents apiece.<br /><br />The first half-dozen concerts were very much like those of the previous two seasons. With the exception of the “Wagner Night,” each program opened with a complete symphony. No dances or potpourris were offered, and one or more guest soloists appeared at each event. In early December, <em>Dwight’s Journal</em> published a letter to the editor suggesting that the Germania offer weekly, rather than fortnightly, concerts. The author claimed to speak for many like-minded people. “I have also heard the wish expressed that we might have from [the orchestra] concerts more entirely of classical music, which should present, too, not only the best works of the best masters, but should produce them consecutively, and in some kind of system; a series of ‘Mozart nights’ and ‘Beethoven nights,’ for instance, or something of the kind.”<br /><br />It was surely not a coincidence that the Germanians announced an additional subscription series devoted entirely to “classical” music the very next week. On December 10, Dwight called attention to the “new plan” in a long editorial. Each of the five concerts would include four major works—two symphonies and two overtures—with selections by Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart constituting nearly half the repertory (nine of twenty pieces). Schumann and Mendelssohn each appear twice, for another 20 percent of the total. With their concentration on works by the first Viennese School and other German composers, these programs are startlingly close to those of the modern symphony orchestra.<br /><br />The Germanians kept the new subscription lists open for about a month, with the first concert scheduled for mid-January. Despite Dwight’s efforts and the reduction of ticket prices, the series failed to attract enough subscribers to cover its projected costs. The Germania abandoned the plan just before the first concert would have taken place. Dwight attributed its failure simply to having been “brought forward too late in the season,” and urged the orchestra to try again next year. In the meantime, the members were still faced with the demand that they offer more concerts of some sort. Just two weeks later, they made a swing in the opposite direction. Instead of adding concerts devoted to an exclusively “classical” repertory, they proposed four programs emphasizing “modern,” that is, “lighter” genres.<br /><br />Manager Bandt gave two reasons for this decision. The first was that the Germania had already sold more tickets than there were seats available for the remaining concerts, and there were even more music lovers who wanted tickets. A season total of fifteen subscription concerts was needed to accommodate everyone. Second, “the undersigned has had application from many of the subscribers to compose the programme of mostly classical compositions; and again from many to have the Germanians perform more music of lighter character. To satisfy all, the Society has adopted the following plan: To perform alternately a programme of classical and one of modern music—which brings the next Concert in the category of the latter style, a Concert in which none but light music, with few exceptions, will be performed.”<br /><br />The first concert was to take place that evening, January 28. “To-night the ‘lights’ have it,” commented Dwight. “A programme light indeed! (and if we may be pardoned the suggestion) a little too closely modelled upon Jullien’s programmes, not to endanger the Germania prestige. But we are glad to see that good overtures and parts of symphonies are not excluded.” He anticipated that the “lights” would outnumber “the rival party” at upcoming concerts, and that the Germanians’ revised plan would “test effectually the relative strength of parties in this matter.”<br /><br />For the first time, Dwight described their audience in the language of partisanship. Previously, he had maintained that music lovers existed on a continuum of appreciation, based on education and prior experience, but always with the capacity for growth and further refinement. At this crucial moment, however, he recognized that alliances, whether voluntary or character-based, were being drawn. He hoped the next few months would “show that the ‘appreciating few’ fond of good music for music’s sake are not by any means so <em>very</em> few as it has been tauntingly and often said.” Dwight’s pessimism is epitomized by the fact that he dubbed those who appreciated “music for music’s sake” members of “the rival party.”<br /><br />The program that night consisted of twelve pieces presented in two equal parts. As Dwight indicated, a symphony movement and three overtures were included. There were three dances, and a potpourri was revived, representing the return of these two genres to the Germania’s subscription concerts in Boston. A song by local composer Thomas Comer was premiered, and the assisting pianist played Mendelssohn’s relatively flamboyant “Rondo Brillante.” In its general format, this program is typical of the “light” concerts added that season: twelve selections, with overtures opening each half, three dances, and opera excerpts for instrumentalists or guest vocalist. Virtuosic showpieces filled out the rest, with the occasional inclusion of a movement from a lengthy, serious work.<br /><br />The first program for “the rival party” differed greatly. It consisted of only five pieces: a symphony, two concerti, and two overtures. The overture to <em>Medea</em> may have been a Boston premiere; Beethoven’s Concerto No. 4 certainly was. “A purer and a richer programme never was presented to an American audience,” commented Dwight. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, performed by Wilhelm Schultze, were particularly well done. The next two “classical” concerts followed a similar format: each one featured an entire symphony, a piano concerto, and one or two overtures. Of the sixteen selections total, only one, an aria from <em>Der Freischütz</em>, required a vocalist. With the exception of Cherubini’s Overture, the programs consisted entirely of German and Austrian composers. Beethoven and Mendelssohn account for five selections each, or nearly two-thirds of the repertory. Two works each by Mozart and Weber, and one by Schumann, made up the remainder.<br /><br />While the Germanians carried out their innovations, Dwight began to articulate his own ideas on concert programming. It was a topic that had interested others in his circle for several years. Margaret Fuller, for instance, had “called on concert directors to arrange carefully the genres of music to be performed, with attention to the balance to be achieved as well as the effect on the listeners.” In his review of the Germania’s “Extra Concert” on January 14, Dwight made several observations about the relationship of individual works to the event as a whole. <em>Le Désert</em> was featured in the concert’s second half, but the first part seemed haphazardly planned. A chorus from <em>Elijah</em> was well done, but should not have followed Aptommas’s harp solo. Spohr’s song, “The Huntsman, Soldier & Sailor,” on the other hand, “was over before we could begin to make out what was the amount of it.” In conclusion, Dwight proposed that “miscellaneous programme-making should be more a work of art.”<br /><br /><a href="http://www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13434">Good Music for a Free People </a><em>by Nancy Newman is available now from your favourite bookseller. </em>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-17260431935481870302011-07-11T14:38:00.006+01:002011-07-12T09:14:28.401+01:00Modernism in the Modern World<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyABDJFAAr_dGyX5nw0UK39gi0NcZ7OFWkUS5WdNc9UWOgY9_cjkZYJfSIyf1svHmNGlVgK45S1pGywNO3-ewq48am2NRtSqeJUnXDlCgxpZTkaUtzaRM5AXV5ssphb-XNzj6vKIAO3w/s1600/ZPMM.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 136px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5628098321111360450" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyABDJFAAr_dGyX5nw0UK39gi0NcZ7OFWkUS5WdNc9UWOgY9_cjkZYJfSIyf1svHmNGlVgK45S1pGywNO3-ewq48am2NRtSqeJUnXDlCgxpZTkaUtzaRM5AXV5ssphb-XNzj6vKIAO3w/s200/ZPMM.jpg" /></a><em>Arved Ashby’s edited volume of essays, </em>The Pleasure of Modernist Music, <em><em>was first published in 2004 and <a href="http://www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13458">reissued in paperback </a>towards the end of 2010. Here, Ashby discusses notions of a ‘cultural war’ in the light of some reactions to the book.</em></em><br /><br />Although ideas for this book date back to the mid-1990s, it really only started coming together after 9/11. U.S. politics were starting to take on the bitter partisanship that now threatens the very cohesion and stability of the country, especially with the 2010 midterm elections. The "culture wars" first surfaced back in the 1990s: speaking at the 1992 Republican convention, Pat Buchanan informed the citizenry that a morally depraved Clinton presidency would be a tragic setback in the "religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war… critical to the kind of nation we will one day be."<br /><br />Putting together the words "culture" and "war" had a certain self-conscious bombast back then, a certain pre-9/11 innocence: Buchanan was using the phrase to market his own political ambitions, for the most part. Twenty years later, however, these oppositions between progressiveness and conservatism have become so acrid and divisive that the "war" has come to involve guns as well as words. Tragically, national events seem to have less and less to do with culture and more and more to do with war. I often fear for the future of my country these days, but then it must be said that an angry, even sick conservatism — a militant resistance, at any price in blood or humanity, to the future and to the communalities that define culture —has reared its ugly head in so many places around the world.<br /><br /><em>The Pleasure of Modernist Music</em> arrived early in this divisive history, when it was becoming clear that musical taste and reception — as part of these "culture wars" in North America and beyond — had more to do with politics than with aesthetics and needs of expression. Some would say, no doubt, that musical reception has always been a political matter. And to read Eduard Hanslick criticizing Liszt's symphonic poems in the 1860s is to see someone hearing a particular musical novelty through a thick cloud of pure ideology or, rather, someone refusing outright to hear that music because of ideology. Some would go further and say that aesthetics and listening are necessarily forms of ideology, are ideologies by definition. But if that's true, how can people of different backgrounds, tastes, and agendas agree on the value of certain musicians, composers, and works? How could Hanslick seem not to have even listened to Liszt — at least not to the Liszt we know and accept today? In other words, how could a person as smart as Hanslick <em>have been so wrong</em>? (That is presuming Hanslick's view of Liszt was obscured by ideology while our view today is less obscured — a fairly safe presumption, I would say.)<br /><br />And let us remember that Hanslick talked about culture without mentioning war. He heartily berated Liszt, but didn't resort to a 21st-century style of critical privilege or strategic purging of those things that happened to offend him. He didn't say Liszt's music was in the ashbin of history, or that it should be burned, or even that it should be ignored. Nor did he couch his arguments in moral terms. By contrast, people of the past decade or two talk about "killing" or "burying" certain kinds of music, or of "letting nature takes its course" and pulling the plug on styles that are said to be "on artificial life support." Whence the homicidal, or at least vulgar Darwinist, rhetoric? I wouldn't say all kinds of music are equally worthwhile, and I can understand how the historical and aesthetic contexts surrounding some musics might inspire resistance or active animosity. But styles themselves are rather like human beings, tangled skeins of weakness and delight, strength and foible. They are breathing bodies — entities that might not insist on being heard, but want at least to abide, to be allowed to exist.<br /><br />Heine famously said, "Where people burn books, they end up burning human beings." So, if it is hard to see what value or moral utility — or raw usefulness, even — there might be in burying or unplugging artworks, it is easy to see how "always remembering" might be in our best interests. Just as we shouldn't be any more eager to rid ourselves of artworks than of human beings, it also behooves us to keep the historical record as rich and complete as we can. We should avoid consigning those segments of culture we don't approve of to The Dustbin of History — lest we sound like the lobotomizing bureaucrats who operate the strategic "memory holes" in Orwell's <em>1984</em>. While denying certain segments of history is a criminal offense in some countries, which is as it should be, in most North Atlantic venues it has become strangely fashionable to single out modernist cultures and dismiss and ignore them <em>on history's behalf</em>. This is a very odd thing — perhaps self-contradictory, and certainly hypocritical.<br /><br />* * *<br /><br />One lives and one learns. While <em>The Pleasure of Modernist Music</em> garnered rave reviews from modernists and non-modernists alike, others were quick to see naivety in its attempt to "rescue" modernist art from modernist discourse. If I held on to the idea that non-ideological hearings of music were possible, reviews of <em>The Pleasure of Modernist Music</em> showed just how implausible the idea of reading "around" or "past" ideology might be. One reviewer pointed to the hopeless futility of de-ideologizing art, and said the book "has dug [its] own grave" by "piling still more words on the problem" — in short, by propagandizing onanistically for de-propagandization. The book's contributors, instead of offering coffin nails, should have been smart enough to just shut up and let nature takes its course.<br /><br />Fred Maus's essay "Sexual and Musical Categories" proved a particular hotpoint: I've always thought Fred's chapter one of the book's most shrewd and powerful, and indeed I now give the essay to all my undergraduates to read, but I have yet to see a welcoming response in print. Instead, Fred's piece set off diatribes from people who had clearly decided what it said before they read it. One eminent reader said the author was crying victimization, an accusation that betrays not only misreading, but complete ignorance of the queer theory that Fred clearly describes — a philosophy that has nothing to do with oppression, let alone redressing oppression, and everything to do with identity, making do, and finding any available way to carve out "a place of one's own" in the world. Other readers resolved that Fred was telling us how gay 20th-century composers were attracted to tonality rather than an atonal compositional language.<br /><br />Regarding his chapter "'One Man's Signal Is Another Man's Noise,'" Andrew Mead was accused of hitching his wagon to recent trends in experiential discussion of post-tonal music, when what he did was describe his personal history with post-tonal music all the way back to boyhood. Several chapters were dismissed as apologia. The book was said to claim that serial music had never differed in its aims from any other kind of music, certainly not a claim advanced by my introduction, where I stated that "modernist music is the most conflicted that we have. More than any other kind of music, except maybe for rock 'n' roll, it offers each listener a unique, volatile, high-stakes dialectic of inseparable pleasure and pain, reward and risk." Amy Bauer and Jeremy Tambling invoked schizophrenia in their essays as a non-pathological parallel to this kind of conflicted aesthetic and artistic sensibility, and thereby pointed out the arationality of "rationalist" modernism, but they were interpreted as saying that modernist music and its practitioners are mentally ill. The list of astonishing misreadings goes on, some readers jerking their knees to the point of dislocation.<br /><br />I would like to lay out some of the book's more important conclusions here, less out of didacticism or indignation with reviews than the conviction that a book is less a thing than a process, that it has a necessary pre-history and post-history. So if the post-history of <em>The Pleasure of Modernist Music</em> started with its readers and reviewers, it will continue here. I take the following statements to be indisputable, even self-evident enough that they hardly seem worth propounding in a book — so maybe there is a shred of truth to that review after all. As opposed to most accounts of modernist music, which begin — and often end — with the composer, why not begin here with the listener? Many claims of complexity in understanding modernist music are ill-conceived or simply beside the point, since people do not process musical "information" as if they were computers — how does one even go about defining musical "difficulty" or pointing out a musical-aesthetic disconnect?<br /><br />Getting to know a new musical style is more like acquiring a literacy, and it's hard to see why a culture that prizes literacy and varieties of language should resist such acquaintance. As one corollary to this, the very notions of modernist music being edifying or otherwise good for you are obsolete, to put it mildly. The premises behind art appreciation are offshoots of modernist thinking, in fact — they propound the idea that hearing music is the necessary obverse of composing music, and that it needs to be heard the way it was composed. Such premises are more oriented to the notion of connecting with the composer's intention, of formatting our brains and sensibilities in order to process music on its creator's terms, as opposed to assimilating new styles and allowing our listening experiences to be self-transforming.<br /><br />Modernist music is really more about immediate experience, less about knowledge and learning, than mainstream music of common practice. That often means, however, that the styles in question are awkward and disordered — as opposed to the more frequently touted, supposedly modernist qualities of complexity, organization, difficulty. And that awkwardness, that manner of resistance, represents the modernist critical gap between art and society that is not to be bridged or done away with, as "education" has tried to do, but allowed instead to condition the listener's experience. Such modernist gapped-ness has proved deeply evocative and provocative in film music, in fact. The theater is one place where the public, free from the onus of modernist discourse and "educated listening," has connected with modernist sounds, gestures, and even structures. Movies show the possibility, the inevitability even, of modernism's relevance once it has been separated from modernist ideology. The newness to what Schoenberg student and film composer Hanns Eisler called "the new musical resources" is in fact not an ideology, but an anti-ideology. As if to prove the point, modernist sounds and gestures proved very popular and influential in 1960s and 70s rock music, where said sounds and gestures were commonly called called "out there," "trippy," and "far out," descriptions that associated them with freedom, with out-ness rather than in-ness.<br /><br />As for the much-discussed and -reviled notion of compositional techniques, two major composers among the book's contributors, the "postmodern" William Bolcom and the "modern" Pierre Boulez, both say that techniques like canon and 12-tone serialism are not so much instruments of conscious control as they are necessary tactics for liberating the possibilities of the unconscious. They serve to open up the creation to a higher number of possibilities, they take the creator into uncharted waters. As such, compositional techniques are described by Boulez as a simple extension of the act of writing music down: techniques that in and of themselves beneficially remove that which is written from its writer, that in a sense kill the author for the sake of enlivening the possibilities of authorship. The act of encoding an experience into script is the point where "disconnection occurs," according to Roland Barthes, the point where "the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, [and] writing begins."<br /><br /><br />* * *<br /><br />Happily, in addition to the uncomprehending reviews and the predictably positive reception from modernism enthusiasts, some students, composers, music-lovers — younger people, mostly — have told me directly that <em>The Pleasure of Modernist Music</em> was an exciting, transformative experience for them. This shows some success in realizing the original intent of the book, which was to encourage people to reconsider assumptions, certain aesthetic-historic-musical clichés. It's an awful, tautological idea that those who disagree with you don't understand what you're trying to say, while those who do, do. But one always likes to imagine that if one's work stirs things up, said stir-up will not involve arguing over a book that one didn't write, but will lead to a productive debate over one's presumptions and bases.<br /><br />And so I will end by joining a debate that no one has yet started: yes, <em>The Pleasure of Modernist Music</em> cultivates naivety, and the particular kind of idealistic naivety that it proposes can sometimes be a misleading, frustrating, and unproductive thing. (Martin Scherzinger felt liberated by the naivety that cover artist Yoshiaki Yoshinari showed in trying to reconcile the bleak abstract expressionist shapes of Motherwell with the pop-art colors of a Hockney or a Howard Hodgkin. Martin said he was thrilled by Yoshi's "smears of modern paint in post-truthful times!") But I don't think naivety can ever be dangerous in a homicidal sense — indeed, it seems the single mindset that could benefit the current climate of cynicism, myopia, and murderous greed. The "culture warriors" of current affairs could certainly use a healthy dose of it. And just as certainly, if <em>The Pleasure of Modernist Music</em> suffers from naivety, it is a naivety worth defending.Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-21845292514448210872011-06-28T15:48:00.004+01:002011-06-28T16:16:47.366+01:00Conversations with Elliott Carter<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEKgpe0T51y_hqFk2l07-Su3hyBuWOstS7jCWCZ30reAE6yShqoTy5TWR07cDfqQuj8uCPzQPqxHoLhbELOVFka0PCp4MmAh-tRgDA5KPjEixSPdDv6JUt6U_tvXFA3FmFvRLkdZnKrg/s1600/ZEC.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 129px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5623289769898523474" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEKgpe0T51y_hqFk2l07-Su3hyBuWOstS7jCWCZ30reAE6yShqoTy5TWR07cDfqQuj8uCPzQPqxHoLhbELOVFka0PCp4MmAh-tRgDA5KPjEixSPdDv6JUt6U_tvXFA3FmFvRLkdZnKrg/s200/ZEC.jpg" /></a>If the <a href="http://www.aldeburgh.co.uk/news/aldeburgh-festival-reviews-and-images">Aldeburgh Festival </a>began (almost) with a bang (see <a href="http://frombeyondthestave.blogspot.com/2011/06/beside-seaside.html">‘Beside the Seaside’ </a>below) it ended (almost) with the sound of a tiny cymbal - the final note of Elliott Carter’s <a href="http://www.boosey.com/cr/news/12259"><em>Conversations</em> </a>which received its world premiere in Snape Maltings last Sunday. Performed by the <a href="http://www.bcmg.org.uk/">Birmingham Contemporary Music Group</a> with Festival director <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pierrelaurentaimard">Pierre-Laurent Aimard </a>on piano, <a href="http://www.colincurrie.com/">Colin Currie </a>on percussion and conductor <a href="http://www.harrisonparrott.com/artist/conductor/oliver-knussen">Oliver Knussen </a>on a rather precarious-looking chair, the seven-minute piece packs in a great deal within its short span. Luckily Knussen and his musicians played it twice on the night.<br /><br />With two other recent pieces on the bill, <a href="http://news.scotsman.com/entertainment/How-this-28yearold--.6192395.jp">Helen Grimes’ </a>exuberant <em>Everyone Sang</em> (2010) and <a href="http://charlottebray.co.uk/">Charlotte Bray’s </a>haunting violin concerto, <a href="http://charlottebray.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/pns.pdf"><em>Caught in Treetops</em> </a>(2010), it was an evening (indeed a weekend) for new music at the Festival. One hopes that Carter would have felt in good company. In 1994, in a piece reprinted in his <em><a href="http://www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=12137">Substance of Things Heard</a></em>, Paul Griffiths wrote:<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">You do not have to be eighty-five years old to feel marooned in the past while time races on, but you probably have to be that age - and specifically to be Elliott Carter - to have the reverse feeling of desertion by time’s skidding hurriedly backwards from a point you thought was not only yours but everyone’s. At a public interview before the world premiere in Chicago of his newest orchestral work, <em>Partita</em>, Carter reacted passionately to a question about the future. How could he have any certain hope for his music, he said, when the last decade had seen a rush of young composers - by whom he probably meant anyone under seventy or so - ‘writing like Brahms, and doing it badly’? His tone was regretful, bewildered, but not bitter: he has too much gaiety of mind ever to turn sour - or indeed, ever to write like Brahms. We therefore have the paradox of an aged composer producing some of the most exhilarating music around, and doing so with majestic accomplishment (if that does not seem too settled a term for this athlete of the mind) in his new piece.<br /><br />But perhaps the youthfulness is not so paradoxical; maybe only the old, in these jaded times, have their innocence intact, and stay able to be surprised by immediate sensory impressions, as Carter is evidently surprised and delighted by sounds. Simplicity and directness have always been as much his blessings as the vaunted ‘complexity’. (Why should this always be introduced as a problem? Who complains of the complexity of a forest?) Indeed, the abundance, to give it an apter name, comes out of a simple certainty about the nature of a composer’s task… [p.22]<br /><br /></span>Listening to <em>Conversation</em> on Sunday evening - how the piano often seemed primarily percussive and the percussion instruments, especially the vibraphone, took on the more melodic role expected of the piano - we were reminded of a paragraph in <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=8421">Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler’s ‘centennial portrait’ </a>of Carter:<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Carter has drawn on existing traditions for key points of his creative process and his artistic philosophy, preferring to prolong and rejuvenate them rather than call them into question. This applies to his preservation of the idea of a self-contained work of art, set down in writing with maximum precision, and to his focus on working with conventional tonal material (for example, precluding electronic sounds and largely avoiding experimental performance techniques on conventional instruments). It applies equally to his understanding of the role of the performer, whom he employs primarily as an interpreter of his ideas and not, as in aleatoric music, as a ‘co-author.’ And finally it is no less applicable, at least in intention, to his understanding of listeners: although Carter has often said that he never thinks of the audience while composing, but only of the performers, his efforts to make the musical events audible, and his penchant for casting his musical discourse in quasi dramatic roles, doubtless spring from a desire to make statements of maximum concision and urgency and to communicate them to his listeners. [</span><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=8421"><span style="font-size:85%;">Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents</span></a><span style="font-size:85%;">, pp.16-17]<br /></span><br />Let’s hear finally from Elliott Carter himself, as quoted in Bálint Varga’s essential new book, <em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13537">Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers</a></em>:<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Each of my works is an adventure into a new conceptual, expressive, and musical domain which I have not yet explored. Their style is not something consciously thought about, but is a reflection of the expressive and musical intention. To work out a series of stylistic devices and then use them as formulae bores me as a prospect and it bores me in others who do it. Self-repetition is to me a sign of fatigue. [p.43]</span><br /><br />In a 1985 postscript to Varga, Carter wrote: ‘The plan of your proposed book seems interesting and I hope you have the best of luck with it. It is courageous of you to include something about an American composer—for all of us have had a very hard time penetrating European indifference to our work.’ There was certainly no indifference on Sunday evening, as rapturous applause followed that delicate cymbal note in the closing minutes of the <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/aldeburgh_festival_music.asphttp://">64th Aldeburgh Festival</a>.Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-3605539276571125342011-06-16T17:01:00.008+01:002011-06-20T10:36:47.680+01:00Beside the Seaside<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp750tT8L6MWVfKc0-ceI5h_ZKDmzV8EFA2MPDeYKf4p2wLLHTneUzsenQPd11vCgvv_fhxE3GP6wTABg5hi5dxnLBJ0njNgwCSCwltrIz4mw9bTGa7VWdPF_vMenOIM7RCCOWc3FAtQ/s1600/ZAA.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 126px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5618855427239209170" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp750tT8L6MWVfKc0-ceI5h_ZKDmzV8EFA2MPDeYKf4p2wLLHTneUzsenQPd11vCgvv_fhxE3GP6wTABg5hi5dxnLBJ0njNgwCSCwltrIz4mw9bTGa7VWdPF_vMenOIM7RCCOWc3FAtQ/s200/ZAA.jpg" /></a><em>The </em><a href="http://www.aldeburgh.co.uk/"><em>64th Aldeburgh Festival </em></a><em>opened last Friday with a bang. Several, actually - many from the gongs and tam tams in Messiaen’s</em> Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, <em>performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Simon Rattle. The second half of </em><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/reviews/kozenarattlekirchschlagerbostridgeknussen-aldeburgh-festival-2297656.html"><em>this thrilling concert</em></a><em> was given over to </em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=9088"><em>Mahler’s</em> </a>Das Lied von der Erde, <em>with an ailing </em><a href="http://www.kozena.cz/core.php?lmut=1"><em>Magdalena Kozena </em></a><em>nevertheless giving a superb performance right down to the closings</em> Ewig<em>s</em>. <em>Such is the variety of the Festival programme, even after this big opening number there will be <a href="http://asp-gb.secure-zone.net/v2/indexPop.jsp?id=699/865/2120&lng=en">much more to enjoy </a>over the coming weeks.<br /><br /></em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/aldeburgh_festival_anthology.asp">The New Aldeburgh Anthology </a><em>is as essential an accompaniment as the </em><a href="http://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=4740543268&searchurl=bt.x%3D0%26bt.y%3D0%26kn%3Daldeburgh%2Bfestival%2Bprogrammes%26sortby%3D1"><em>highly-collectable </em></a><em>Festival programme book. This remarkable collection of prose, poetry and images of Aldeburgh and the Suffolk coast has, at its heart, the Aldeburgh Festival in Benjamin Britten’s time and beyond. We celebrate both the Festival and the</em> Anthology <em>with excerpts from </em><a href="http://www.stevenisserlis.com/"><em>Steven Isserlis’ </em></a><em>contribution to the latter, appropriately titled ‘Aldeburgh: A Magical Festival’:<br /><br /></em>My first performance at Aldeburgh was as part of a short masterclass seminar given by the distinguished Danish cellist <a href="http://www.erlingbb.com/">Erling Blondal Bengtsson</a>. I remember playing the Prelude of Bach’s fifth suite at the end-of-course student concert; about ten minutes after I’d finished, Britten arrived. So alas, I just missed my only chance to play to him. I did, however, get to play Bach to <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13478">Imogen Holst</a>, who was a friend of my teacher, Jane Cowan. As a result of that, I became friends with ‘Imo’ (well, if a rather bumptious teenager and a distinguished eccentric in her late sixties can be called friends), and she invited me to play her lovely piece for solo cello, <em>The Fall of the Leaf,</em> at a concert that marked her seventieth birthday in 1977. (I received my first-ever national review for that, the Telegraph graciously describing me as ‘the talented Roger Isserlis’.) Later, she invited me back to the festival to give the first performance for many years of her father’s only work for cello, <em>Invocation</em>. So my early memories of Aldeburgh are very much bound up with her. I really don’t think that a character like Imo’s could exist now. I remember her speeches to audiences: bending from the waist down, she would inform them, in the sort of voice now heard only in nursery schools, that they were about to have a ‘lovely, lovely time’. They would sit there meekly, putty in her hands.<br /><br />At the concert in which I played <em>The Fall of the Leaf</em>, Peter Pears sang songs by <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=11642">Quilter </a>and his contemporaries, with Roger Vignoles at the piano. I listened backstage and was bowled over by the performance; when they came offstage, I was ready for them. ‘That’s the best performance I’ve ever heard of British music!’ I gushed. Peter Pears looked at me a little strangely, as well he might; to him, having introduced so many of the greatest works ever written by a British composer, it must have sounded very foolish. Well, it was a silly thing to say; but I was young…<br /><br />Another striking memory is from 1974, when Rostropovich was finally allowed out of the Soviet Union and was able to give the premiere of Britten’s Third <em>Suite</em> for solo cello, which had been written for him some years earlier. Again, Britten was sitting in the box; I remember thinking how frail he looked – but he was still a strong presence. We knew that we were listening to history in the making. Since then, I have performed that same <em>Suite</em> (the only one of the three that I play) several times at the Maltings; on each occasion, I have glanced towards the darkened box and imagined that Britten’s ghost was sitting there. It is quite an eerie feeling!<br /><br />As I think of Aldeburgh and Snape, other memories come tumbling into my brain: the sight of <a href="http://www.bris.ac.uk/theatrecollection/grenfell.html">Joyce Grenfell </a>striding into a concert, seemingly oblivious to the excitement she was stirring up among her fellow audience members; Peter Pears and Murray Perahia getting to the very heart of Schumann’s <em>Dichterliebe</em>; Olly Knussen’s torso heaving with enjoyment of a somewhat risqué joke, with his co-director Steuart Bedford sitting with cocked head and knitted eyebrows, doing his good-natured best to understand it; my friend the pianist Paul Coker watching with amused concern a temper tantrum of mine backstage including (I’m ashamed to admit) some kicking of a dressing-room wall, when I felt my cello hadn’t been speaking properly during the first half of a recital; my mother attending a Bach recital I gave in the beautiful <a href="http://www.holytrinityblythburgh.org.uk/">Blythburgh church</a>, shortly before she died; Stephen Hough being thrilled by the sound of Britten’s piano, kept at the <a href="http://www.brittenpears.org/?page=about/redHouse">Red House</a>; and so on. Variety has always been a hallmark of the festival and its associated activities, every visit offering a new and different experience.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/aldeburgh_festival_anthology.asp">The New Aldeburgh Anthology</a>, <em>edited by Ariane Bankes and Jonathan Reekie, is available in paperback, hardback and </em><a href="http://www.camden-house.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=10579"><em>a limited edition</em></a><em>. More books on Benjamin Britten, music associated with Aldeburgh and the history of Suffolk may be found </em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/aldeburgh_festival_2011.asp"><em>here</em></a><em>.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Pronunciation note: Aldeburgh almost rhymes with Marlboro rather than Nuremberg. </span></em>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-38545002146286996592011-06-09T16:44:00.005+01:002011-06-10T11:41:22.563+01:00Selling Serialism<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyCBJkeLa3WDkzV67vZ2R5m5joUTCVSZmeoeTiMFoGmYhjM71-8nrbM7Blnl3oJUmTXOwEaembeNBGlOCqAyBgCMsE2WWNNsBB9u2oEyUsaln-zmB1rX5H8y4HhRzZThCTmqJ79M_LUA/s1600/ZLD.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 133px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5616248146542608034" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyCBJkeLa3WDkzV67vZ2R5m5joUTCVSZmeoeTiMFoGmYhjM71-8nrbM7Blnl3oJUmTXOwEaembeNBGlOCqAyBgCMsE2WWNNsBB9u2oEyUsaln-zmB1rX5H8y4HhRzZThCTmqJ79M_LUA/s200/ZLD.jpg" /></a><em>Luigi Dallapiccola was the first Italian composer to work within the twelve-tone system, and is considered one of Italy's most important composers of the twentieth century. As <a href="http://new.oberlin.edu/conservatory/departments/music-theory/faculty_detail.dot?id=20541">Brian Alegant</a> writes below and in his recent book,</em> <a href="http://www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=12432">The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola</a>, <em>the emotion in Dallapiccola’s music makes his version of twelve tone an exciting place to start for anyone who thinks they won’t enjoy it.<br /><br /></em>Anyone who has had to teach twelve-tone music knows that it is a “hard sell.” Having taught music majors for nearly a generation, I can say without hesitation that no other genre of classical music inspires such a hostile reaction as serialism. I have seen and heard students, performers, and even critics denigrate it as abstract, tortured, inhuman, and more about numbers than music.<br /><br />And yet, most scholars would agree that twelve-tone composition is among the most important musical developments of the twentieth century. Even a partial list of composers who experimented with—or fully embraced—serialism is staggering: Babbitt, Barber, Bartok, Berg, Boulez, Britten, Carter, Crawford, Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Mamlock, Martino, Mead, Morris, Nono, Perle, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Sessions, Schnittke, Skalkattos, Stockhausen, Stravinsky, Webern, and Wuorinen, among many others. And most scholars would also agree that Luigi Dallapiccola (1904–75) is among the most accomplished and admired serial composers. His output includes ballets, choral music, concertos, film scores, piano pieces, song cycles, orchestral pieces, and operas. Dallapiccola enjoyed international fame as a lecturer, teacher, and author, and he was a member of the national academies of arts in the U.S., France, and England.<br /><br />I have been entranced by Dallapiccola’s music ever since I heard David Burge play the <em><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N5bYAGq_Sk&feature=related">Quaderno musicale di Annalibera.</a></em> I have been listening to his music ever since with increasing appreciation and admiration, and I use his works to introduce twelve-tone to my students (with overwhelmingly positive results).<br /><br />The scholarly literature on Dallapiccola is vast, and comprises a host of books and monographs, countless articles, and an ever-growing number of dissertations and theses. As a result, we know quite a bit about his <em>oeuvre</em>: namely, his predilection for self-quotation and symbolism, his fondness for intricate counterpoint and systematic designs; his penchant for languages and text setting; his stylistic eclecticism; and his appropriation of Anton Webern’s techniques. And yet many facets of Dallapiccola’s music await further explanation, chief among them a gradual but inexorable absorption of Arnold Schoenberg’s techniques.<br /><br />In simplest terms, this book does not ask <em>why</em> Dallapiccola composed twelve-tone music, but, rather, how. It examines his repertory through a technical lens and traces the evolution of his praxis over a thirty-year period. In so doing, it highlights facets of his music that have not been previously disclosed, and sheds light on compositions that have been virtually ignored. Ultimately, it aims to complement the existing research in order to understand more fully his technique and his language.<br /><br />This book attempts in several ways to fill in some of the lacunae in the state of Dallapiccola research: it sheds light on several twelve-tone works of high quality that have been virtually ignored; it discusses these works in depth, so as to help readers understand them analytically and engage with them aurally; it builds upon recent developments in the post-tonal theory by Allen Forte, David Lewin, Andrew Mead, Robert Morris, Joseph Straus, and myself; it documents the composer’s seemingly limitless invention and his extraordinary skill and delight in text setting; and, most of all, it endeavors to continue the conversation on this important composer and his serial compositions, whose enchantments and challenges are so richly rewarding.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=12432">The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola </a><em>by Brian Alegant is published by the University of Rochester Press. Anyone interested in the life and work of Dallapiccola should also seek out another Rochester publication,</em> <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=10498">The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola </a><em>by Raymond Fearn, which is available in paperback from your favourite bookseller. </em>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-67425331577208166912011-06-02T15:59:00.002+01:002011-06-02T16:11:33.389+01:00Good Music for a Free People<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDKbMToAs084ys_55s-Dmayet66era9w6o9LgbCZt7HBWh1hKeHOg6AbReNasbSAG5abRCbQfKmRiftWIlA6DdQcTfoQ6c1yYiOu6-vOI7dGWufcTMiWdrpzmJ03hkHOiF78SMPMyLjA/s1600/ZGP.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 133px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5613640212590707762" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDKbMToAs084ys_55s-Dmayet66era9w6o9LgbCZt7HBWh1hKeHOg6AbReNasbSAG5abRCbQfKmRiftWIlA6DdQcTfoQ6c1yYiOu6-vOI7dGWufcTMiWdrpzmJ03hkHOiF78SMPMyLjA/s200/ZGP.jpg" /></a><em>During the revolutions of 1848 two dozen members of an orchestra left Berlin for America to bring their music to new audiences. With their repertory of symphonies, opera selections and social dances they helped shape an audience for orchestral music at a seminal time in the history of the public concert. In her new book,</em> <a href="http://www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13434">Good Music for a Free People</a>, <em>Nancy Newman looks at the history of the Germania Musical Society, as they called themselves, and their effect on their adopted land. In this piece, written specially for the</em> Stave, <em>the author describes how she came across the orchestra and their fascinating story.<br /><br /></em>My first encounter with the Germania Musical Society was through <em>Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America</em>. Lawrence Levine’s provocative book had ignited a debate across disciplines about the historical relationship between so-called classical and popular music, a subject that interested me deeply. The Germania Musical Society makes a brief appearance for having played a pivotal role in the emergence of the symphony orchestra as a regular feature of American musical life. Its members were a group of young Berlin musicians who immigrated to the United States in 1848 and presented nearly nine hundred concerts to approximately one million listeners over the next six years.<br /><br />Although it’s widely acknowledged that German immigrants had a profound effect on American musical practices, what intrigued me was Levine’s characterization of this particular group’s motivations. The orchestra members wanted “to further in the hearts of this politically free people the love of the fine art of music through performance of masterpieces of the greatest German composers”? Why would their listeners’ <em>freedom</em> have mattered? What did <em>political</em> liberty have to do with appreciation of the foremost classical compositions during “the century of artistic autonomy,” as Carl Dahlhaus described it? The relationship between absolute music and political thought was also of on-going interest, and the Germania Musical Society offered a new perspective on this complicated topic.<br /><br />Following Levine’s trail led me to <em>Skizzen aus dem Leben der Musik-Gesellschaft Germania</em>, a brief memoir by Henry Albrecht, viola and clarinet player for the orchestra. This little-known account raised more questions than it answered. For example, Albrecht describes the members’ departure during the 1848 Revolutions in terms of their adversarial relationship to patronage. The prevailing system in Europe did not produce ideal musical results because it encouraged currying favor. Although noble courts were musically sophisticated and employed “virtuosi of the first rank,” nearly all the musicians sought to exhibit themselves through “exceptional mannerisms.” Albrecht claims that as a result, “a performance rarely appears totally flawless.”<br /><br />The Germanians, in contrast, were willing to sacrifice their egos for the sake of the ensemble. “In the performance of orchestral works, every member realized that it was his holiest duty never to exhibit an exceptional, individual artistic mannerism.” To me, this articulated a fascinating paradox: by coming to the cultural wilderness of the United States, the Germanians sought the freedom not to show off. Even more surprising, they gave their desire for an alternative to patronage a form that was explicitly political. Not only did they seek an environment that was democratic, but they organized themselves accordingly. They drafted a constitution and agreed to share equitably in rewards and obligations. Aware that in leaving Berlin the orchestra became their sole means of support, the members pledged to place the welfare of the group above self-interest. A social-utopian motto, “One for all and all for one,” was adopted.<br /><br /><em>Good Music for a Free People</em> makes Albrecht’s fascinating memoir available in English in its entirety for the first time. It also chronicles the orchestra’s travels to the major cities and small towns of the Eastern seaboard, west to the Mississippi, and to southeastern Canada. The ensemble offered Americans first and repeat hearings of works by major composers—especially Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Wagner. They familiarized listeners with current opera repertory by playing overtures and excerpts by Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Auber, and Verdi. The Germanians performed with many of the era’s traveling virtuosi, including singers Jenny Lind, Henriette Sontag, and Teresa Parodi; violinists Ole Bull, Camilla Urso, and Miska Hauser; and pianists Alfred Jaëll and Otto Dresel.<br /><br />At the same time that they helped forge a “classical” canon, the Germanians varied their programs with lighter genres such as polkas, waltzes, and potpourris. A good number of these works were original compositions by members, especially conductors Carl Bergmann (who later conducted the New York Philharmonic) and Carl Lenschow. The diversity and eclecticism of the Germania’s repertory had not been explored previously, however. I analyze how their programs changed over time in response to audiences in Baltimore, Boston, and other cities. During the orchestra’s final year, debates over whether they should segregate their repertory into lighter and more demanding concerts were aired in <em><a href="http://www.archive.org/details/dwightsjournalm20dwiggoog">Dwight’s Journal</a></em>. The controversy affords unique insights into contemporary attitudes toward the social significance of the public concert as a place where heterogeneous audiences gathered. Ultimately, the Germanians’ manipulation of their repertory reflects a struggle to define the semiotic arena of the arts and leisure by those who served it.<br /><br />Much of <em>Good Music for a Free People</em> is concerned with events of the 1840s, a remarkable decade in transatlantic history. The Germanians were part of a great movement of Europeans, dislodged by economic and political upheaval, to the New World. German-speaking immigrants became known as “Forty-Eighters,” so named for the Revolutions of that year. The merging of their diverse and often innovative practices with the dominant culture would have a deep impact on many areas of American life.<br /><br />The 1840s also saw experimental forms of music-making by “private orchestras,” modeled after the touring ensemble of Johann Strauss, and in “promenade concerts” in Paris and London. In these forums, audiences for orchestral music grew from a few hundred to several thousand enjoying “mixed repertory” concerts indoors and out. Such democratization of musical experience helped solidify the middle class’s consciousness of itself. These first truly “popular” musical events led to the realization that the same processes of commodification and mass mediation—sheet music production, instrument sales, and journalism—worked equally well for both serious and lighter genres. And the image of the United States as a place where musicians operated exclusively within a market economy increasingly tempted individuals and ensembles to make the dangerous Atlantic crossing. The Germanians’ origin as a private orchestra situates it within a formative stage of the “culture industry,” the Frankfurt School’s term for the institutions and practices that shape the commodification of art.<br /><br />In <em>The Dialectical Imagination</em>, Martin Jay posits that the intellectual ferment of the 1840s make it “the most extraordinary decade” of the nineteenth century. For the first time, abstract German philosophical thought began to be applied to social and political matters. Social utopians Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Étienne Cabet had embarked on a similar path, and their adherents pursued the implications of their systems in France and abroad. Music critic John Sullivan Dwight, for example, lived in the Fourierist community Brook Farm on the outskirts of Boston. Before he left Berlin, Albrecht read Cabet’s utopian novel, <em><a href="http://www.archive.org/details/voyageenicarie00cabeuoft">Voyage en Icarie</a></em>. Shortly after the orchestra disbanded, he went to live in Cabet’s model community in Nauvoo, Illinois. The ideology of “Icarian communism” played an important role in shaping Albrecht’s idealized view—his utopian vision—of the Germanians’ attempt at self-determination.<br /><br />In many ways, we are still living with the ramifications of musical, cultural, social, and political developments that occurred during the 1840s. It is my hope that the Germania Musical Society’s extraordinary story will shine new light on the possibilities unleashed during that eventful decade.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13434">Good Music for a Free People</a><em><a href="http://www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13434"> </a>by Nancy Newman is available now from your favourite bookseller. Excerpts will follow over the coming weeks in this blog. </em>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-5603665587620202982011-05-23T17:23:00.007+01:002011-05-23T17:50:10.538+01:00Words and Music<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiITXsJKxgueBwXjW9C1xd8qJzIQ-NX7e3T4e_PLV0wtrloCBLScCVJoAAKn7vEOVbnAF98h6MaLKW6TJ2mOyGq_FpWu2tG2Q8b7FXnpzWXcqxmJncTa9egqsY7kKtPLjZBI4F_vJ-DFw/s1600/Pages+from+Varga_First_Proof.tif"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 142px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5609953448709168994" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiITXsJKxgueBwXjW9C1xd8qJzIQ-NX7e3T4e_PLV0wtrloCBLScCVJoAAKn7vEOVbnAF98h6MaLKW6TJ2mOyGq_FpWu2tG2Q8b7FXnpzWXcqxmJncTa9egqsY7kKtPLjZBI4F_vJ-DFw/s200/Pages+from+Varga_First_Proof.tif" /></a><em>Advance copies of Bálint Varga’s </em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13537">Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers </a><em>have just arrived, and what a remarkable publication it is. Birtwistle, Boulez, <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=7318">Cage</a>, <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=8421">Carter</a>, Henze, <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=9094">Kurtág</a>, <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13726">Ligeti</a>, Nono, Reich, Tippett and Xenakis are just a few of the artists who agreed to discuss their music and their influences. In this post we extract a few choice morsels but urge you to seek out a copy in your favourite bookshop, as we are unable to reproduce the compelling flow of conversation and ideas within the confines of a blog post.</em><br /><div></div><br /><div><strong><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13603">Gunther Schuller<br /></a></strong><br />To get back to Darmstadt: in the early fifties there came about an alliance between the German radio stations, composers, publishers, modern music journals, and festivals. Radios, as you know, are subsidized by the state and can broadcast new music without any great risk. A political/business linkup developed: a festival premiered a new work, it was recorded or taped by a radio station, and then the tape was broadcast throughout Europe. And everybody became richer and more famous. As a result of a terrific publicity machinery, everything was made to sound bigger and better than it really was. That is how lesser composers, like Pousseur or Kagel, became touted as “great” composers. We were told in Darmstadt that they and Boulez and Stockhausen were the masters of our time, and we should all compose like them.<br /><br />There were three composers in Darmstadt in those early years who thought this was all pretty silly: Alexander Goehr, Harrison Birtwistle, and me. We were young and fairly cocky, and didn’t necessarily swallow Stockhausen’s line. I am proud of that. In the end—around 1957—I left Darmstadt, never to return.<br /><br /><strong>Pierre Schaeffer</strong><br /><br />I am going to tell you why, at a particular moment in my life, I embarked on an adventure which I called concrete music.<br /><br />I am not a composer. I have a degree in engineering but I have always regarded writing as my calling. As for my profession: I was one of the pioneers of broadcasting. I set up an experimental studio during the German occupation (today, they would call it an <em>atelier</em>) with the aim of developing the bases of radio art. Is it possible to create art devoid of the visual aspect? Is blind art viable?<br /><br />Those were great years even though we had to work clandestinely during the occupation. We also participated in preparing the liberation of Paris. The first broadcasts went on the air a few days before the withdrawal of the Germans: it was rather a perilous undertaking.<br /><br />It was after the war that the development of radio art really got under way. We wanted to find out all the possibilities inherent in this genre based only on text, background noise, and music—a genre that freed the imagination. Logically enough, I attempted on one occasion to create an experimental work in which I set out to explore at what point background sound, the condensing of noise turns into music. (In other words, musique concrete was the outcome of an accident, just as most other innovations. One stumbles on something one was not looking for.)<br /><br /><strong>Toru Takemitsu<br /></strong><br />The pieces I wrote during the past several years have had a great deal to do with water. I love the sea. It has many faces. Numerous currents are whirling in it, each with a tempo, a color, and a temperature of its own. This phenomenon reminds me of the structure of music.<br /><br />Twenty-five years ago when I started composing, I carried out concrete musical experiments with water. During a visit to France I was surprised to find that Pierre Schaeffer was working in the same direction. In my <em>Water Music</em> (1960) I use the sound of dripping water. I collected material from rivers, wells, and the sea and in the process of concentrating my attention on these sonorities, I grew fond of water.<br /><br />Nature is important for my music in other ways as well. All four seasons are beautiful in Japan. I live on the shore of a lake and forty thousand cherry trees blossom in the neighborhood. Still, I prefer the autumn when trees, the grass—nature as a whole—change from day to day. One cannot catch the actual moment of change, only its result is tangible. It is a phenomenon that is of interest for me also as a composer.<br /><br /><strong>Iannis Xenakis<br /></strong><br /><em>Metastasis</em>, that starting point of my life as a composer, was inspired not by music but rather by the impression gained during the Nazi occupation of Greece. The Germans tried to take Greek workers to the Third Reich — and we staged huge demonstrations against this and managed to prevent it. I listened to the sound of the masses marching toward the center of Athens, the shouting of slogans and then, when they came upon Nazi tanks, the intermittent shooting of the machine guns, the chaos. I shall never forget the transformation of the regular, rhythmic noise of a hundred thousand people into some fantastic disorder . . . I would never have thought that one day all that would surface again and become music: <em>Metastasis</em>.<br /><br />I composed it in 1953–54 and called it a starting point because that was when I introduced into music the notion of mass . . . Almost everybody in the orchestra is a soloist, I used complete divisi in the strings which play large masses of <em>pizzicati</em> and <em>glissandi</em>. In other words, I do not use the term “mass” in a sociological sense.<br /><br />Another experience of my youth dates from the time immediately preceding the war. I used to make outings to the countryside near Athens. I would take my bicycle, select a spot to erect my tent and listen to the sounds of nature. Crickets, for instance: their chirping was coming from every direction and was changing all the time. Those are also mass sounds, you see? But I also liked listening to the wind and the sea or the rain as it was lashing at the side of the tent.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13537">Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers </a><em>by Bálint András Varga is published by the University of Rochester Press and will be available soon from all <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/new_music_buy.asp">good booksellers</a>. </em></div><br /><div><em></em></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;"><em>The image at the head of this post is taken from the book. The drawing, by Johannes Maria Staud, was made 'at the time of preparing the score of my opera</em> Berenice <em>in 2003/4.'</em> </span></div>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-65751559712356006892011-05-12T17:30:00.005+01:002011-05-16T08:58:54.108+01:00Who was that masked man?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEzzbSFfFxC7pwWmBh3IjeXFa4En7sCu-dvWOU3mCijcfUOq6KFzRHi3RigZme_W6P1fiHdxTVo9RrC91brY4_h75z5xfXuBW0IKGGRocu3tnfhbNWujjmdDBI1rljTRtsui17UTr3kA/s1600/ZMR.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 133px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5605872361165691938" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEzzbSFfFxC7pwWmBh3IjeXFa4En7sCu-dvWOU3mCijcfUOq6KFzRHi3RigZme_W6P1fiHdxTVo9RrC91brY4_h75z5xfXuBW0IKGGRocu3tnfhbNWujjmdDBI1rljTRtsui17UTr3kA/s200/ZMR.jpg" /></a><a href="http://www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13528">Unmasking Ravel </a><em>is the intriguing title of a new collection of essays on the French master, edited by <a href="http://www.music.uconn.edu/Faculty/Kaminsky_P.htm">Peter Kaminsky</a>. It joins an already impressive list of books on French music in the <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/listCategoriesAndProducts.asp?idCategory=88">Eastman Studies in Music series </a>published by the University of Rochester Press, including Stephen Zank’s acclaimed </em><a href="http://www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=9525">Irony and Sound</a>. <em>Here Professor Kaminsky describes his “Eureka!” moment with Ravel’s music and gives us some idea of what to expect from this new publication.</em><br /><br />Ravel’s music has had an irresistible hold on me since my first encounter with it in <a href="http://www.bu.edu/today/node/11139">Professor Joel Sheveloff’s </a>music history class at Boston University. It was there that I heard the combination of hilarious story and impossibly clever music that is Ravel’s first opera <em>The Spanish Hour (L’Heure espagnole);</em> and the shimmering and utterly original dance “Forlane” from <em>Le tombeau de Couperin</em>. Cut to 15 years later as I began my professional career as music theorist: imagine my surprise when my colleagues sneered at the mere mention of Ravel’s name — too lightweight, too effete, too popular. (The ubiquity of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnSh-KPV7QQ&feature=related"><em>Bolero</em> </a>did not help.) Needless to say, this situation presented precisely the thing that all writers need: A PROBLEM TO SOLVE. That is, how could I square my conviction that Ravel’s music was Hall of Fame material (I am a hardcore baseball fan), while all but a handful of scholars regarded him as strictly bush league*?<br /><br />After writing a number of journal articles and book chapters, I finally had a breakthrough, a “Eureka!” moment. I understood that the metaphor that everybody writing about Ravel seemed to employ — MASKS — was in reality a bunch of <em>tropes</em> that, beginning with his earliest reviews onward, gradually hardened into the public and critical reception history of his music. These tropes include what I term “Ravel as classicist,” as “artisan,” as “artificial,” as deliberately attempting the impossible (the so-called “aesthetic of imposture” made famous by his student and first biographer Roland-Manuel), as “cold,” as “virtuoso,” and as “ornamentalist.” Three realizations followed: his music presents all of these facets at once; I decided to assemble and edit a Ravel book rather than write a monograph to better reveal the panoply of musical, aesthetic and historical contexts; and I found a title for the book that captured all this: <em>Unmasking Ravel</em>.<br /><br />The book divides into three parts: Orientations and Influences; Analytical Case Studies; and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. In Part I, authors Steven Huebner, Barbara Kelly and Michael Puri—three of the most incisive current writers on Ravel’s music—engage aspects of cultural and literary history, biography, influence, reception, branding (in the modern advertising sense), memory, and interpretive strategies. Ravel provocatively stated that his most important composition teacher was the American author Edgar Allen Poe, especially the essay <em>The Philosophy of Composition</em> in which Poe describes the step-by-step creation of his poem “The Raven.” Huebner, equally provocatively, places this statement in the broader context of Ravel’s literary circle and unravels (pun intended) its crucial role in his aesthetics and concept of classicism (e.g., why Ravel loved Mozart and equivocated over Debussy). Kelly reveals how Ravel’s student and first biographer Roland-Manuel deliberately and continually manipulated the composer’s image in relation to ongoing music-critical currents to enhance his standing with audiences and critics alike, and how this effort subsequently shaped our current views on Ravel. Puri manages to interpret Adorno’s writings on Ravel with a positive spin by addressing the composer’s melancholic nostalgia in the context of the demise of the Western music tradition. (Do I hear <em>La valse</em>?)<br /><br />The five chapters comprising Part II provide close analyses of compositions representing the chronological boundaries of Ravel’s mature work (from the 1899 <em>Pavane pour une Infante défunte</em> to the 1931 Piano Concerto in G Major). My essay provides an introduction to the other analyses by comparing formal process in three pairs of like works (including Aloysius Bertrand’s poem “Le Gibet” and Ravel’s musical setting as the middle movement of <em>Gaspard de la Nuit</em>). As theorist/pianist and concert pianist, respectively, co-authors Daphne Leong and David Korevaar address Ravel’s virtuosity in “Scarbo” from <em>Gaspard</em> and other works in terms of “mechanical motion” and “dance-like motion” (and their merging), showing how musical structure, physical gesture, and expressivity come together in ingenious ways. Sigrun Heinzelmann addresses Ravel’s approach to sonata form in the pre-War <em>String Quartet</em> and <em>Piano Trio</em>, further demonstrating Ravel’s axiomatic and classicist economy of means. Volker Helbing deconstructs the waltzes of Johann Strauss into their sub-atomic particles to show their culmination in the “spiral form” and self-destruction of Ravel’s <em>La valse</em>. Elliott Antoloketz, better known for his work on Bartók and Debussy, shows the relevance of Bartók’s polymodal chromaticism in modeling Ravel’s modernist post-War music, in particular the elusive <em>Sonate pour violon et violoncelle</em>.<br /><br />In Part III, Interdisciplinary Studies, authors Lauri Suurpää, Gurminder Kaur Bhogal, and the present writer offer novel perspectives through the combination of philosophical, art-critical, or psychoanalytic theories with music analysis. Suurpää draws on semiotician A. J. Greimas and Schenkerian theory in dealing with text-music relations in songs from the cycle <em>Histoires naturelles</em>. Bhogal synthesizes aspects of the nineteenth-century Art Nouveau movement, pianistic pyrotechnics, current metrical theory, representation, and Ravel biography in her analysis of selected virtuosic piano works including “Ondine” from <em>Gaspard</em>. In the concluding chapter, I begin with psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s well-known interpretation of Colette’s libretto, and go on to explore contrasting psychoanalytic theories (Freud’s and Piaget’s) of moral development in children as a backdrop for analyzing the 1925 opera <em>L’Enfant et les sortilèges</em>. Readers will discover what is meant by “his [the Child’s] chord is his sword.”<br /><br />In conclusion, let us reconsider the notion of “Ravel as lightweight.” In a sense, the composer’s own irony and self-deprecation helps foster this impression. After all, any artist who heads a score with “the delicious and ever-novel pleasure of a useless occupation” (quoting de Régnier in <em>Valses nobles et sentimentales</em>) is not exactly asking to be taken seriously. But that is part of the seductive charm of Ravel’s irony. Indeed, Roland-Manuel cites <em>Valses nobles</em> as marking a seismic shift in his harmonic and compositional conception. (A glance at the voice leading of the opening two bars confirms this in spades.) Such a gap between the “face value” of a Ravel work and the depth of its technique, craft, and especially its expression manifests itself in virtually all of his major compositions. Perhaps more than any other factor, this argues for a re-examination of context, interpretation, perspective, style, and structure across his output. <em>À mes lecteurs: amusez-vous!</em><br /><br /><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13528">Unmasking Ravel </a><em>will be available soon. Why not order a copy from your local bookseller and help keep bookshops on the high street as well as in cyberspace? </em><br /><em></em><br /><em><span style="font-size:85%;">* For those of us not steeped in the terminology of North American sports </span><a href="http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-bush-league.htm"><span style="font-size:85%;">here </span></a><span style="font-size:85%;">is a definition of 'bush league'.</span></em>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-89690483374631142602011-05-06T17:32:00.007+01:002011-05-09T09:18:20.561+01:00Talking to Morton Feldman (and 64 others)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8bm53PNcJ8N18ExpPQC-tcJ1IUfonHt6IbTJ4CUoOH6PLaaVpsD1x8Z057079vDvmciT7dCVZABaLRkp-UlZT60eX7coVTaUN4Prw8T5G2PqDwrIkfm_GAylkI6PQTk0GExSY58Yp_g/s1600/Z3C.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 133px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5603645019031860082" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8bm53PNcJ8N18ExpPQC-tcJ1IUfonHt6IbTJ4CUoOH6PLaaVpsD1x8Z057079vDvmciT7dCVZABaLRkp-UlZT60eX7coVTaUN4Prw8T5G2PqDwrIkfm_GAylkI6PQTk0GExSY58Yp_g/s200/Z3C.jpg" /></a><em>Imagine being able to ask composers like <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=7318">John Cage</a>, György Ligeti, Steve Reich or Karlheinz Stockhausen detailed questions about their influences and their methods of composition. This is exactly what Bálint András Varga did for his new book,</em> <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13537">Three Questions for Sixty Five Composers</a>. <em>Here, as a taster for this fascinating book, are excerpts from three of his conversations. First <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13726">György Ligeti</a>:</em><br /><br />Noises do not influence me directly, but neither do I cut myself off from them altogether. The outside world makes an indirect impact. Music works with acoustic material, no doubt, but I do not think that the sounds of live or dead nature would influence me in a decisive manner. Various types of movement do. In my view, you see, music mirrors the processes of motion through sound. Machines play an important role… I have, after all, also written a piece for one hundred metronomes.<br /><br />Although <em>Atmosphères</em> and <em>Apparitions</em> are not programmatic in character—I did not set out to render the sensation of flying in either piece—flying did have an indirect influence on their floating, on the continuous transformation of their musical patterns.<br /><br />Without asking for my permission, Stanley Kubrick used extracts from <em>Atmosphères</em>, <em>Lux</em> <em>aeterna</em>, and the <em>Requiem</em> in the music of his science fiction film <em><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/2001-the-secrets-of-kubricks-classic-512162.html">2001</a></em>. I was angry with him but I did like his work (apart from the mystical beginning and ending). While composing, I did not think of anything “cosmic” (<em>Atmosphères</em> is meant to convey “atmosphere” rather than “air”), but the film made me aware of the possibility of associating infinity with my music.<br /><br />As far as <em>Lux aeterna</em> is concerned, the words only served as a chance for me to compose music which is in fact <em>musica aeterna</em>: as if it has been sounding from time immemorial and would be going on forever—we only hear a part of it. It emerges from nowhere, it is here and slowly disappears.<br /><br /><em>Interviewing Morton Feldman, Varga writes: <strong>I must plead guilty to having known precious little at the time about Feldman and his music. All I knew was that he was considered an important composer and that was enough for me to reach for my microphone. It will not be difficult to imagine my acute embarrassment in meeting this unique man face to face. I felt hopelessly European, hopelessly bourgeois, hopelessly underinformed. However, I made a brave effort to conceal my uneasiness and to conduct a conversation with Feldman as if it were the most natural thing in the world.</strong><br /><br /></em><span style="font-size:85%;">[On whether Robert Rauschenberg’s white pictures influenced John Cage]<br /></span>What influenced John Cage in Rauschenberg was an answer to a philosophical question about life and art. Robert Rauschenberg is exactly my age. And brilliant. He said something that was very influential to a lot of young artists at that time. I think this is the influence of Rauschenberg, with his white paintings, to Cage. He said that he does not want either life or art. He wants something in between. A very influential statement: neither life nor art but something in between. And Cage would see this beautiful white thing in the shadows of the environment. He lived in a very beautiful apartment, Cage, and he saw where art and the outside environment could collage.<br /><br />John Cage is only involved with music forms….That there is nothing there behind the material. So in that sense, John Cage is not a mystic.<br /><br /><em><strong>Don’t you think that his music exudes an atmosphere and in doing so, it communicates something beyond the music, it communicates a way of thinking?<br /></strong></em>I think it asks a lot of questions. I think it’s the atmosphere of asking questions.<br /><br /><em><strong>Whereas yours?</strong></em><br /><br />The atmosphere of answering them (<em>laughs</em>).<br /><br /><strong><em>In that case, one must envy you: you seem to have the answers. Few people can claim that</em>.<br /><br /></strong>Only for my music. Only. You see, that’s another problem: I don’t feel that it’s a community. I could never listen to a piece of Boulez and get some insight from the piece. I could listen to a piece of Boulez and could say to him what I said once to Ligeti, who I like very much, we are very good friends, and I said to him: “György, you are too gifted to write European music”.<br /><br />II.<br />Sounds do not surround you.<br /><br /><strong><em>There are sounds right now</em>.</strong><br /><br />I don’t hear them.<br /><br /><em><strong>You don’t hear them?</strong><br /></em><br />No.<br /><br /><strong><em>What sounds do you hear?</em><br /></strong><br />Nothing. I hear them but they are indigenous. In a place that builds modern buildings—do you hear the drilling that’s going on? It is absolutely like having a lion in a jungle. I mean it is indigenous to the landscape. It would be interesting if you would hear an Islamic chant. What’s happening here? OPEC, OPEC! (<em>Vienna - where the interview took place - is the headquarters of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries</em>). In other words: I hear it like everyone else but it is not a source of . . .<br /><br /><em><strong>. . . inspiration.</strong><br /><br /></em>It’s not a source of anything. Most of the time I think of it as pollution. Noise pollution.<br /><br /><strong><em>How about the sounds of nature, such as the wind, birds, and so on?</em><br /><br /></strong>I have no contact with them. They don’t interest me at all. I can live very well without them.<br /><br /><strong><em>So in composing, the sounds always come from within</em>.<br /></strong><br />Yes, only when I am composing. Otherwise, you are crazy. I don’t go around hearing sounds. Some people do! Stockhausen, I am sure, is one of them.<br /><br /><em>Let’s turn to Karlheinz Stockhausen for our final snippet. Here the Master describes what one might find in</em> <em>one of his best known pieces:</em><br /><br />In <em>Hymnen</em> there appear national anthems, that is, completely banal material as well as numerous other situations (recordings made in a Chinese shop, at a student protest demonstration in Aachen, at a ship’s christening in Hamburg, at a soccer match with crowds of people shouting, the squawking of birds, and boys shouting in a school yard). Linked to the American national anthem, you hear odd short-wave sounds (Morse signals, whistling, shrill screeching), as if someone has turned on a radio station at night, with distorted broadcasts. In the context of the “International” the words of a croupier: “<em>rien ne va plus Messieurs Dames</em>,” “<em>faites vos jeux Messieurs Dames</em>,” etc., are heard. Out of the “<em>Rouge</em>” called by a croupier in a roulette hall emerges a four-part fugue in four different languages on the word <em>rouge</em>, with all the different variations of the color red as listed in the color catalogue of a London paint company.<br /><br /><em>Longer excerpts will follow over the coming weeks.</em> <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13537">Three Questions for Sixty Five Composers </a><em>by Bálint András Varga will be published towards the end of this month by the University of Rochester Press.</em>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-10436216228450739352011-04-18T14:06:00.018+01:002011-04-18T15:38:45.972+01:00Leon Kirchner and 'a Boo for the Boos of Boulez'<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfk-njJJTv6pFDOInorOMJ4chRTgbO1fYRnf4PRVAlGh6urpuzm1IEOAhyAMRMVzwtMGAZ24XiPfBb_z7YlF1fO0RRiaNKMxMxQeJslA3emNSEh4AF-Cbcs3gqXJH2pCm2OzEYypy7CA/s1600/ZLK.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 137px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 165px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5596927032734724546" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfk-njJJTv6pFDOInorOMJ4chRTgbO1fYRnf4PRVAlGh6urpuzm1IEOAhyAMRMVzwtMGAZ24XiPfBb_z7YlF1fO0RRiaNKMxMxQeJslA3emNSEh4AF-Cbcs3gqXJH2pCm2OzEYypy7CA/s200/ZLK.jpg" /></a><em>Known throughout his career for his controversial stances and outspoken polemics, in 1952 <a href="http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/artist/biography?ART_ID=BOUPI">Pierre Boulez </a>aroused considerable ire with his essay <a href="http://ems.music.uiuc.edu/courses/tipei/M104/Notes/boulez.html">“Schoenberg is Dead”, </a>which denigrated the aging composer for being too conservative in comparison to Webern. </em><em></em><em><div></div><div></div><br />In 1963 Leon Kirchner was in his second year of teaching at Harvard. Despite his discomfort with Boulez’ attack on Schoenberg, he was prepared to offer camaraderie to the Frenchman during his own sojourn in Cambridge. During the following years Boulez became increasingly active and successful as an orchestral conductor and remained in contact with Kicrhner. Robert Riggs takes up the story in his recently published biography,</em> <a href="http://www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13361">Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher:<br /><br /></a> <div></div><div></div>In January 1969 Boulez’ appointment as music director of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London was announced, and in the spring of that year he came to the United States again, this time as a guest conductor with the orchestras in Cleveland, Boston, Chicago, and New York. Boulez agreed to be interviewed in Boston by Joan Peyser for a feature article to be published in the <em>New York Times</em>. During the interview over a long lunch at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Boulez became quite expansive, providing Peyser with numerous quotable but also controversial remarks for her article, which appeared in the Arts and Leisure Section on Sunday, March 9, 1969. The headline, “A Fighter From Way Back” (supplied by the <em>Times</em> editors), already gives a premonition of the article’s thrust: an attack by Boulez on various aspects of American musical life. <br /><br />According to Boulez, composers who publish in <em>Perspectives of New Music</em> “think they are great scientists. They are not. I know great scientists and they possess invention and imagination. Composers who publish in this journal never discuss important questions of choice and decision. They write only about putting different things together. This is not an esthetic point of view. It’s what I call a ‘cashier’s point of view.’’’ Addressing the perceived rivalry between European and American composers, Boulez asserted: “The Americans do operate under a severe handicap, of course; they have no strong personalities in the field. If they were strong enough to establish their personality on the world, they would see that no national favoritism exists. . . . They have no one in America as good as Hans Werner Henze, and that is not setting your sights very high. A composer the stature of Stockhausen they have not.” Boulez also offered a diagnosis of what caused this alleged impoverished state of music in America: <span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><br />European music in not connected with the university. There is no ivory castle for us. But here, the university people and practical musicians ignore each other. It’s a very unhealthy state of affairs. I do not like this pedantic approach. I do not like scholars who bring only Death to music. The university situation is incestuous. It is one big marriage in which the progeny deteriorates, like the progeny of old and noble families. The university musician is in a self-made ghetto, and what is worse, he likes it there. </span><br /><br />The night before “A Fighter From Way Back” appeared in the <em>New York Times</em>, Boulez was a guest at the home of Leon and Gertrude Kirchner in Cambridge. Although Boulez obviously knew that the interview/article would be coming out soon, if not the very next day, he was, according to Kirchner, urbane, charming, and completely relaxed that evening. After the very pleasant dinner party on Saturday, the Sunday paper brought Kirchner a rude and totally unexpected shock. Boulez’s inflammatory and judgmental remarks, the sting of which was augmented by his deceptively collegial demeanor the previous evening, disturbed Kirchner. In response, three weeks later he sent a lengthy letter to the editor of the <em>Times</em>. <br /><br />Peyser had begun her article by recounting how Boulez, as a twenty-year-old, had booed a performance of Stravinsky’s music in Paris. Boulez explained that his action had been directed not at Stravinsky, but rather at those in the music establishment who considered him a God and an idol. Thus, Boulez had booed Stravinsky in order to draw attention to Schoenberg, and eventually he was successful in doing so. Then, a few years later, after Schoenberg’s serial techniques had attracted a wide following, Boulez attacked him in order to promote Webern. <br /><br />Kirchner prefaced his letter with an extract from Peyser’s article that recounted this story of Boulez’s boos. Then, in the manner of Robert Schumann—who divided his persona between two fictitious interlocutors in order to debate musical issues in his journal, the <em>Neue Zeitschrift für Musik</em>—Kirchner launched a satiric dialogue between “Leon” and “Kirchner” who discussed their reactions to the Boulez interview: <span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><br />LEON: What did you think of “A Fighter from Way Back?” </span><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />KIRCHNER: Boulez lost his “cool.” He led with his right. Perhaps he should confine himself to leading Booing Groups. </span><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />L: Have you ever led a Booing Group? </span><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />K: Well, to be perfectly frank, I’ve booed Boulez’s Boos, not that I was attacking him. I have the greatest respect for him. I was only attacking the establishment which considers Boos “the God, the Idol, the Only Truth.” I’ll be honest with you. I did it to draw attention to Babbitt’s Boos. However, I soon realized I would have to defl ower Babbitt’s Boos with a dwindling supply of my own. Not that I didn’t respect him but I thought it was time to draw some attention to Carter. But really, I don’t want to be drawn into this, it can only lead to Boo dropping. I’d have to mention so many. </span><br /><br />The <em>Times</em> decided to use “A Boo for the Boos of Boulez” as the headline for Kirchner’s letter. <br /><br />After addressing several points in this manner, Kirchner discontinued his humorous repartee in favor of a traditional and serious examination of one the most troubling issues raised by Boulez: the role of universities in American musical life. Having been uncomfortable for many years with the increasing emphasis on positivistic approaches in the cultivation of music within academia, Kirchner proposed that the root of the problem was to be found not with the universities but with the individuals who reside there. <br /><br />As an example of a rare scholar who recognized this condition, he cited German musicologist Friedrich Blume, who, in a recent guest lecture at Harvard, had given “a vigorous polemic ‘against the encroachment of philological methods’ which ‘pushed aside concern with interpretation, meaning and technique’ to the point where ‘scholars forget that they have to do with music at all.’” In agreement with Boulez’s low assessment of much academic writing about music, Kirchner maintained that “composers can, apparently, demonstrate brilliantly that they are subject to the same restrictive and essentially trivial involvements as some of their colleagues in musicology.” <br /><br />Broadening the discussion beyond music, Kirchner touched on aspects of the relationship between the arts and the sciences that had concerned him in “Notes on Understanding.” He maintained, <span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><br />What affects the sciences affects the arts: the inability to distinguish between the operation of a calculus and the operation of human language forms. The enormous success of technology in the solution of a variety of soluble problems has made this inability to distinguish operations more difficult, and the result is that profoundly important areas of activity are suppressed and vanish in favour of a monolithic approach to what appears to be all there is. We are caught in a struggle of methodologies; control and prediction of human behavior vs. the demonstration of human competence and creativity. </span><br /><br />Buttressing his position from an unlikely source, and at the same time tying it in to current political issues, Kirchner noted with irony that <span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><br />we must turn to Vice-Admiral Hyman G. Rickover (the <em>New York Times</em>, June 9, 1967) to be told that “war is not quantifiable,” that human life is not a factor in mathematical cost-effectiveness equations that are fed into computers because there is no way to assign intrinsic value and fi nite proportions to it . . . that “our society is threatened by any man who knows method but not meaning, technique but not principle . . . any man who depreciates wisdom, experience and intuition.” </span><br /><br />In response to Boulez’s charge that many American composers, in their fixation on systems and analysis, devalue or even ignore the parameters of imagination, choice, and aesthetics, Kirchner admitted, <span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><br />In our recent craze and almost exclusive involvement with the “substantive,” we tend to fossilize our art and repudiate its function. One of the wonderful things about Schoenberg—whom Boulez not long ago likened to an unfortunate Moses who never got to the promised 12-tone land—is the contest between abstract rule (from time immemorial a catalyst) and sheer musical urge. The resultant modifications, or “mutants” if you like, are exciting, a result which would be statistically unlikely without the two. At all points, there is a choice to be made and it is the memory bank operating in the continuing present and all that the memory stores of experience and of contemplation that guides the choice. </span><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><br />We talk a great deal about systems analysis, determination of rules and so forth, but in the process we forget the act of total involvement, of physical and spiritual play. Rules are valuable and with a proper understanding we can construct models from which invaluable information may be inferred. But the adequacy of a rule is entirely dependent upon highly refined and sensitive observation and, given an adequate rule, we must also understand that the variables (a most productive area) are difficult to “cover.” When we grasp a fact by describing it, there is no reason to assume that we have understood the total phenomenon. </span><a href="http://www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13361"><br /><br />Leon Kirchner </a><em>is available from all <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/new_music_buy.asp">good booksellers</a>, both virtual and real, or in case of difficulty, direct from our website. </em>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-57426132912181218992011-04-07T11:04:00.004+01:002011-04-07T11:29:40.148+01:00Hans, Milein and Igor<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWcgZ-M3d7RnHY7wfmsuBwnkqVTBwrLhwnTqT03-SHXzEq_jJMi7gRydKt3xelk2lAbTbm_03-OCP0iAEvLRe92ND5GmsuorXnMyM1awoVmoAspHRmx-OqnO8NscYaMnXmllqNzlpgFw/s1600/ZSMM.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 134px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5592785072628427522" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWcgZ-M3d7RnHY7wfmsuBwnkqVTBwrLhwnTqT03-SHXzEq_jJMi7gRydKt3xelk2lAbTbm_03-OCP0iAEvLRe92ND5GmsuorXnMyM1awoVmoAspHRmx-OqnO8NscYaMnXmllqNzlpgFw/s200/ZSMM.jpg" /></a><em>In March </em><a href="http://www.toccatapress.com/"><em>Toccata Press </em></a><em>launched their new edition of Hans Keller’s writings on - and Milein Cosman’s drawings of - Stravinsky with a reception at the </em><a href="http://www.acflondon.org/"><em>Austrian Cultural Forum </em></a><em>in London. </em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=12082">Stravinsky the Music Maker </a><em>is the third incarnation of this book and the most complete yet, with all of Keller’s known writings on the composer, greatly enhanced by Cosman’s lively line drawings. </em><a href="http://www.plumbago.co.uk/plumbago/pers.htm"><em>Christopher Wintle</em></a><em>, one of the trustees of the Cosman Keller Art & Music Trust and a </em><a href="http://www.plumbago.co.uk/index.html"><em>publisher </em></a><em>in his own right, gave the following address on the night, which we are pleased to post here in full: <br /><br /></em><em></em><em>The Time</em>: Spring 1967. <em>The Place</em>: Oxford. <em>The Occasion</em>: I am cycling into College for dinner. As I come down the Woodstock Road, I see my tutor waiting at a bus stop. He is Dr. Egon Wellesz, one-time student of Arnold Schoenberg and classmate of Berg and Webern. I stop. “Good evening,” he says sweetly, “And what did you do today?” “I listened to Stravinsky!” I beam in reply. His smile becomes rictal: he is clearly agitated. “Stravinsky,” he cries, “was a FRAUD!” Whereupon he raises his arms as if dancing <em>The Rite of Spring</em> and emits a few primeval grunts. I bid him a pleasant evening and continue to College. Naturally, I spread the bad tidings among friends. No-one is delighted – but then, no-one is surprised: even in the 1960s, Igor is still ‘hot potato’. <br /><br />In the preface to this combatively-titled book – for Hans believed that Stravinsky, unlike others, genuinely made music – Martin Anderson claims I supplied the articles that got the project started. Well, as far as it goes that’s true– but I can go further still. What happened was this. First, I breathed heavily down his neck to ensure he included all Hans’s writings on Stravinsky; and then I was forced to draw in my breath as he and Mark Doran added in extra pieces I’d either forgotten or knew nothing about. The result of their expert sleuthing is not just a gratifyingly tidy piece of archival house-keeping, but also a generically richer collection than I’d expected. <br /><br />The writings are arranged chronologically over a period of 35 years from 1948 to ‘83; they are drawn from music magazines, learned journals, book reviews, newspapers, concert previews and programme notes; and they come to an imposing head in ‘Stravinsky Heard’, a reprint of Hans’s contribution to <em>Stravinsky Seen and Heard</em> from 1982. Yet taken together, they evince the refracted unity of a modernist collage. After a few introductory scraps, the main theme emerges in 1954 as Hans sets out to defend Stravinsky, not so much against Schoenberg, but rather against ‘the Schoenbergians’ – in other words, against the Welleszes and all those who couldn’t recognize genius when they heard it. Pre-eminently he targeted Theodor Adorno. It was, of course, an extraordinary mission: for if he didn’t count himself among the Schoenbergians, Hans was still deeply imbued with the thought of Schoenberg and the traditions behind him. Not for him was the Russian Stravinsky, the ‘neo-classical’ French Stravinsky or the time-travelling American Stravinsky; his Stravinsky could only be a co-opted Viennese. And it is no surprise that, during those 35 years, Hans had to wrestle with some demons of his own. <br /><br />Let me sift the evidence. At first sight, Hans’s attitude to Stravinsky seems ambivalent. True in 1956, he berates Adorno for not being ‘inspired by that great respect for a great genius without which the truest observation on him lacks perspective’ [:45]; true too he deplores how Adorno tears ‘Stravinsky to shreds with the intellectual power of … a philosopher and the subterranean passion of a fanatic’ [:53]: after all, Adorno likens Stravinsky’s repetitions – the celebrated ostinati – to ‘the mask-like ceremonial politeness of certain schizophrenics’ [:54]. And even when he and Adorno both recognize ‘a sado-masochistic trait’ pervading the music, Keller again springs to the defence: ‘I should never have dreamt of evaluating a creative character trait as such, negatively or positively’ [:59], he writes: for Stravinsky’s ‘anti-expressiveness does not, as Adorno thinks, result in emptiness, but in fullness fully opposed’, yielding a ‘statically intense tension [by] opposing the flow of rhythm [with] rhythm itself’ [:60]. And so on. <br /><br />But what happens when Hans himself takes the stage? His earliest views are so disrespectful that they’re not worth the debate. In 1951 he refers to <em>The Rake’s Progress</em> as a ‘sham creation’, ‘a pale and defective copy’ of <em>Così fan tutte</em> [:59]; and in 1954, in an essay that compares Schoenberg’s ‘Dance round the Golden Calf’ (which he sees as a rite) with Stravinsky’s <em>The Rite of Spring</em> (which he sees as a dance) he derides the <em>Rite</em> as ‘a musical failure’: <br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">I cannot see that it has any chance of survival, except as a museum piece [:40]. </span><br /><br />He listens uneasily to Stravinsky rehearsing <em>Agon</em> and failing to correct the ‘distonations’ in the string unisons: ‘his zest nevertheless carried off the passages in question,’ he remarks diplomatically, ‘but any lesser musician will have to be more pedantic at these points …’ [:71]. In a review of Robert Craft’s <em>Conversations with Igor Stravinsky</em> he reveals severe logical contradictions in Stravinsky’s pronouncements on music theory, resolves them in his own terms and saves up a stinging riposte to the end: <br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">’Critics’, says Stravinsky, ‘misinform the public and delay comprehension. Because of critics many valuable things come too late.’ All the more so when artists themselves turn into critics and proceed to misinform themselves.’ [:81] </span><br /><br />Hans berates Stravinsky (not unfairly) for ‘deceiving himself in his usual manner’ over the working of contrast in a later piece, Movements [:83]; and he notes how <br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">the master was not beyond descending to the level of uncomprehending gutter journalism when pronouncing upon the music of such dangerous rivals as Beethoven, Brahms, Schoenberg or, most savagely, Britten [:110] </span><br /><br />– especially when there was doubt as to how much of Schoenberg’s music Stravinsky actually knew [:142]. Finally in 1983, Hans considers it a positive ‘duty’ to reassure the reader that Stravinsky the man was not worth knowing about <br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">unless one is childish enough to enjoy the coincidence, within one and the same mind, of supernormal art and moral sub-normality. I only met Stravinsky once – and had never met such a small-minded great mind before. [:167] </span><br /><br />Of course, none of this is to suggest that Hans would happily have taken tea in Oxford with Wellesz: the positives far outweigh the negatives. But when we take these strictures, along with those on Colin Mason, Peter Stadlen, Robert Craft, Joseph Kerman, Paul Griffiths and others, we understand that his appetite for publicly criticizing the critics, already whetted in the <em>Music Survey</em> by 1950, never diminished one iota. <br /><br />More importantly, though, Hans set out to enrich ‘history of music’ and ‘textual criticism’ with ‘the application of psychoanalysis’ [:39]. It was a vital, lifelong initiative, though still not one much heeded by our relentlessly positivistic culture. As the book <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=10470"><em>Music and Psychology</em> </a>shows, Hans was a classical Freudian enriched by the British psychoanalysis and sociology of the 1940s; and, as a hilarious chapter in his book <a href="http://www.toccatapress.com/book/music-closed-societies-football-keller.html"><em>1975</em> </a>shows, he could also play the unpious ‘psychological observer’. So it comes as no surprise to find him talking, in <em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=12082">Stravinsky the Music Maker</a></em>, of sadomasochistic masterpieces (such as the Mass or the Symphony of Psalms), or of self-castigating aggression, identification, object-love, creative mourning and melancholia, the return of the repressed, the capacity in art for pathology to yield health, and so forth. What is fascinating, though, is to see how the psychoanalysis, once allied to aesthetics, interacts with and reshapes Adorno’s critical stance. This happens in three ways. <br /><br />First, Hans revalues the opposition between the respective followers of Schoenberg and Stravinsky into a positive dialectical field, and even considers a mutual influence between the two masters (though there is more to be said on how the mature Schoenberg not only reclaimed classical forms but also did a bit of neo-classicizing of his own). That is to say, Hans <em>celebrates</em> the tension between release and restraint, development and anti-development. Stravinsky, he concludes, is more a ‘counterpoint’ to Schoenberg than a ‘counterpole’ [:41]. Second, he relates this revalued dialectical field to Freud’s dual-instinct theory of 1920, with the Austro-Germans promoting Eros (love) and Stravinsky Thanatos (death). But that being so, he argues that the dialectic should not be between Schoenberg and Stravinsky, but rather between Wagner and Stravinsky – Wagner being the <em>counterpole</em> that Schoenberg wasn’t. He writes: <br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Clinically, it is of the greatest significance … that the most passionate Stravinsky-lovers … are, at the same time, the most conscientious – invariably moralizing – objectors to Wagner’s music. [:164] </span><br /><br />And third, he comes to recognize that it was not just Schoenberg’s death in 1951 that released the creative mourning behind Stravinsky’s late move into atonality and serialism, but rather Anton Webern’s in 1945. For Webern, ‘the ultimate expressionist’ [:112], was also, in Hans’s words, a fellow ‘sado-masochist’ whose ‘sparse, ultra-transparent textures [were] cleaner … than anything our entire musical history had had to offer until then.’ Indeed, they were textures whose brevity Stravinsky would emulate repeatedly, notably in the poignant setting of Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle …’ analysed with some attention in the book. <br /><br />All this is immensely stimulating. Today, for instance, we could extend the argument by aligning Hans’s work on small groups in the 1940s with modern sibling-theory. Juliet Mitchell argues that our deepest influences are not necessarily the father-figures of the past, but rather our professional brothers and sisters of the present. So not only did Stravinsky honour the ghosts of Schoenberg and Webern, but he also set out to prove himself with the post-war avant-garde – a Boulezian peer-group that, as we know, took for its pace-setter the pupil and not the master, Webern not Schoenberg. Add to that Keller’s observation that Stravinsky displayed ‘hostile identification’ towards Benjamin Britten by plundering the younger man’s texts and music [:100] and we conjure up yet another Stravinsky: the castrating father, the annihilating older sibling and – since Britten almost alone knew how to plunder Stravinsky to effect – a jealous cannibal gorging on his own, reclaimed flesh. <br /><br />This is not the occasion to assess the book’s technical aspect. On the one hand the analyses restrict themselves (now unfashionably) to theme and motif, but on the other integrate their findings with psychology and aesthetics. Suffice it to note that the terms in which Hans analyses Stravinsky are those in which he also analyses Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven – as is clear from the <em>Essays on Music</em>. In general he postulates a tension between a composer’s ‘background’ – his sources – and his ‘foreground’ – his invention. In Stravinsky’s case, though, he inverts the duality, with the sources now to the fore; out of this he reveals a new creative type, the anaclitic artist, one who can only operate by revealing his emotional dependence on others. And Hans also shows how style can arise from the exaggeration of some features at the expense of others. Although his contrast between Wagner’s surging ‘upbeats’ and Stravinsky’s restraining ‘downbeats’ may be a rhetorical exaggeration, he nevertheless illuminates counter-poles that were once united. Bach’s <em>St. John Passion</em>, for instance, begins with down-beating cries of ‘Herr, Herr, Herr’ and ends with up-beating injunctions of ‘Ruht wohl … Ruht wohl’. <br /><br />In these and other respects, Hans’s contribution to <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=12082"><em>Stravinsky the Music Maker</em> </a>may open up territory for others to invade, develop or dispute as they see fit. But it is still a momentous pioneering effort, and one that repays our closest attention.Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-11830104256469708642011-03-31T12:48:00.006+01:002011-03-31T13:01:04.898+01:00Round Stones<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsDFTJLXz8MW24pY-E2rXhfFg6bMnDEqIa9ZE7jXu_l1sreLa2ab7XzYHAgjl0tnlVuPLchzbhIkwwGf0pnS6czg5wlTfRhkwsR3NVYg7NKtEwFfoKHb4sT5LuTdDrMVNlyW5uCySl-g/s1600/ZST.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 141px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5590212558029046770" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsDFTJLXz8MW24pY-E2rXhfFg6bMnDEqIa9ZE7jXu_l1sreLa2ab7XzYHAgjl0tnlVuPLchzbhIkwwGf0pnS6czg5wlTfRhkwsR3NVYg7NKtEwFfoKHb4sT5LuTdDrMVNlyW5uCySl-g/s200/ZST.jpg" /></a> <br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzTZHGReXUISSDoIwKOb1MwEIHy9ZtSizNq8Px9hNIK45iwoYkTWhPR_3ZsuPu65rep8v3uewpeHY7z8uk9If2fYfB319TOTuHKRviuL5rKMdzjHG1ICPQvqI3G7YtXbIf_nfgUTlXWg/s1600/ZST1.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 150px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5590212029954023874" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzTZHGReXUISSDoIwKOb1MwEIHy9ZtSizNq8Px9hNIK45iwoYkTWhPR_3ZsuPu65rep8v3uewpeHY7z8uk9If2fYfB319TOTuHKRviuL5rKMdzjHG1ICPQvqI3G7YtXbIf_nfgUTlXWg/s200/ZST1.jpg" /></a><em>When the Japanese pianist, <a href="http://www.norikoogawa.com/">Noriko Ogawa</a>, read</em> <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13306">Out of Silence </a><em>by <a href="http://www.susantomes.com/">Susan Tomes</a>, she was so impressed she decided to translate it into her own language. Earlier this week, the two pianists came together to discuss the challenges of translating a book like this into Japanese (the various nuances of ‘practice’ in Japanese, did Susan Tomes write in a woman’s voice or a man’s voice, and so on). Their meeting was recorded and broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on their</em> <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zsds8#synopsis">Women’s Hour </a><em>programme. Here, by way of a reminder, is one of Noriko Ogawa’s favourite pieces from the book. Perhaps it is a cliché to suggest that the Zen calm of this extract appealed to her. <br /><br /></em>Back in the days when I used to play for the string masterclasses at <a href="http://www.i-m-s.org.uk/">Prussia Cove</a>, I developed the habit of going for a walk along the beach by myself after the classes to dispel the tensions of the day. My job was to play the piano for the violinists, viola players or cellists who were having a lesson. The lessons took place in front of a roomful of other gifted students and visiting teachers from all over the world, so the atmosphere was always intense and the stakes high. I wasn’t having a lesson myself, but this didn’t stop certain teachers from including me in their personal criticisms and tantrums, and I sometimes needed to remind myself afterwards that there were things in life other than music. <br /><br />I walked slowly along the beach, looking for interesting stones. My method was not to look for anything consciously, but just sweep the beach with my gaze and let the stones call to me. I took them back to my room and kept them on the windowsill as talismans, though I usually liberated them back to the beach before I went home. As I walked on the beach, waiting for ‘interesting’ ones to present themselves, I realised that I was always drawn to stones which were smooth and round. This may not be most people’s idea of interesting stones, but it’s mine. I am fascinated by the thought of the multiple forces of wind and water which have to work on a rough piece of rock for years and years to convert it into something smooth and round. Such tremendous forces from so many different directions: what are the chances of them making something round? Far easier to imagine how the clash of asymmetrical forces could produce jagged, dramatic shapes with attention-seeking personalities. There were plenty of those theatrical stones on the beach, but I passed by on another track. I see the round stones as survivors of a long process of buffeting. They hold more secrets. <br /><br /><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13306">Out of Silence </a><em>by Susan Tomes is available from all good booksellers. Her earlier book</em>, <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=7128">Beyond the Notes</a>, <em>largely concerning her time with <a href="http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/a.asp?a=A755">Domus</a>, remains in print. Both are published by the <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/new_music_home.asp">Boydell Press</a>. </em></div>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-63506393200523394602011-03-14T16:32:00.005+00:002011-03-15T10:40:29.901+00:00“. . . a vision of eternity”<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhunXTpuwo8g9GEtKZhEthKB9hwdiRiXjOky0lI-3RbPlGE1gcabu0kr0xZNIeH0Lx39Uk-OGbjyl9gYfIg6EIKMZ-vIGFG2YSb-blYHmSDeJsouWStbVvtBWqVxERQuEn0CwG8AUVbGQ/s1600/ZW.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 170px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5584254704743683906" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhunXTpuwo8g9GEtKZhEthKB9hwdiRiXjOky0lI-3RbPlGE1gcabu0kr0xZNIeH0Lx39Uk-OGbjyl9gYfIg6EIKMZ-vIGFG2YSb-blYHmSDeJsouWStbVvtBWqVxERQuEn0CwG8AUVbGQ/s200/ZW.jpg" /></a>As an organist, <em>writes <a href="http://www.principia.edu/college_faculty/index.pl/near_j">John R Near</a></em>, I cannot remember a time when I did not know the name Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937), but little did I know what lay beyond that name and the ubiquitous organ <em>Toccata</em>—a work so famous that it virtually <em>is</em> the music of the organ to many who may not even know the composer’s name. I have always loved playing Widor’s organ music; I think of it not so much as music for the organ as music <em>of</em> the organ. It rises organically from the instrument as if born of a loving parent. For Widor, the soaring tone of the organ was a “sound singing eternity to the stars.” He once told his pupil Albert Schweitzer, “Organ playing is the manifestation of a will filled with a vision of eternity.”<br /><br />Why wouldn’t I want to explore more fully the organ music of a composer with such a lofty notion of our chosen instrument? When I began my doctoral dissertation at Boston University in 1982, that was precisely my goal—nothing more. Then I began the research. I was soon overwhelmed to discover that Widor was not at all just an organist and organ composer, but rather a mainstream musician who composed in nearly every genre, and who had been a sort of cultural ambassador for France. It became clear to me that it would do Widor a grave injustice if I considered him only from the single aspect of his career as an organist, albeit legendary. I had to write a biography—a “life and works.” What began as an academic project soon became a labor of love. In hindsight, I clearly arrived at precisely the right moment, as no one was yet much interested in Widor.<br /><br />Completed in July 1984, my dissertation became the first full-scale posthumous biography of Widor in any language. Although it encompassed his entire work, it naturally highlighted his career as an organist and organ composer, and I felt certain that if there were to be a resurgence of interest in Widor’s music, it would be through the organ works. I decided I had to continue my research, and the study of Widor became a kind of mission. I had become quite aware that the composition and publication history of Widor’s organ works was knotty at best, and that a critical edition of the ten organ symphonies was sorely needed. I put that as a priority, but I had no idea how complex the puzzle would be. It required ten years, 1987–97, to research and to publish my edition with A-R Editions.<br /><br />Just when I thought I might start this biography in earnest, it was proposed that the Philadelphia Orchestra would perform Widor’s <em>Symphony in G Minor</em> for Organ and Orchestra in 2002, but with the stipulation that it had to be published. They had last performed the work from manuscript copies in 1919! The biography had to be put off as I undertook the research to publish a critical edition of the <em>Symphony</em>, again with A-R Editions. In retrospect, I can see how the twenty intervening years between my dissertation and the beginning of the present book only prepared me better to reach the summit of this biographical Everest.<br /><br />I have always thought it surprising that there were only a couple of fairly extended biographical studies of Widor during his lifetime. Although I had my doctoral research to build on, I was forced to mine original source materials, almost entirely in French. Over two decades, I collected a great deal of new material that I had not yet fully digested—countless letters, reviews, articles, news clippings, and a cache of material in the possession of Widor’s grandniece, whom I found in 1988. Perhaps the most extraordinary of the treasures that tumbled out of her huge armoire, was the 103-page manuscript of Widor’s “<em>Souvenirs autobiographiques</em>” that he was dictating in his ninety-first year. It required several visits to her home over a period of years to plumb the depths of those holdings as well as the memories of family members who as youngsters had known “Uncle Charles.”<br /><br />Born during the reign of Louis-Philippe, Widor endured more transitions in French government, wars, crises, and changes in the social fabric than perhaps any other musician. In this biography I have wanted as much as possible to let him tell his own story, either through his prolific writings or the recollections of friends, students, and admirers. His descriptions of backdoor intrigues in Conservatory politics, bureaucratic infightings, professional jealousies, and survival during the Franco-Prussian and First World Wars propel his life’s story with historical relevance, passion, insight, and wit. In addition, critical reviews have been drawn upon liberally, as they were an invaluable resource for piecing together the composite picture of Widor’s lengthy professional career and the critical reception of his works. Most of this material appears in English translation for the first time.<br /><br />In <em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13483">Widor: A Life beyond the Toccata</a></em>, the reader may be astounded to discover a musician of amazingly diverse accomplishments: organist, composer, Paris Conservatory professor, member of the Institute of France, leader in the French Bach revival, co-founder and first director of the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, journalist, conductor, music editor, scholar, correspondent, inspired visionary, and man of deep culture. Widor was well connected in social and professional circles; he seems to have known nearly everyone who counted. Living to become an icon in French music and his country’s cultural emissary, Widor also reigned for sixty-four years over the largest instrument in France at the Paris church of Saint-Sulpice where the elite of society, musicians, artists, litterateurs, scientists, politicians, and nobility flocked to his organ gallery. Far from being cloistered in that organ gallery, however, Widor is seen in this biography as a man of mainstream intellectual and artistic achievement.<br /><br />Adolphe Boschot, Widor’s successor as perpetual secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts wrote: “By his ever-generous narratives, he taught us to direct our attention not to the shadows, but rather toward the bright side of things—not to the inevitable pettinesses of men or the disillusions that events sometimes carry, but rather toward the beautiful works and the good deeds that enrich our intellectual and moral heritage.” Through his talent, indefatigable industry, and humanity, Widor left a wealth of beautiful works and the example of a life lived with grace and rich in good deeds. In his final days he reminisced, “I have had a beautiful life.” For what he left us, we are the lucky ones.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13483">Widor: A Life beyond the Toccata </a><em>by John R Near is available now from the University of Rochester Press or <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/new_music_buy.asp">your favourite bookseller</a>. It includes the most complete listing ever compiled of Widor's</em> oeuvre.Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-66348579514177457572011-02-28T11:01:00.003+00:002011-02-28T11:14:27.715+00:00Beecham's Salome<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQL03IYn_yIRQuMEl01qSj3ufrGxkNVRN3t3cgp54k6MbWZ-sCGzsqI9RXOmzfu9BzkOHz3MyEVQZ8oAOrg9r3NPN9wuQvgVSeyoJA_qTyup22H83Sk6NvA6U33LxHv7efzWtvI1JAVg/s1600/ZTB.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 133px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5578697115071607890" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQL03IYn_yIRQuMEl01qSj3ufrGxkNVRN3t3cgp54k6MbWZ-sCGzsqI9RXOmzfu9BzkOHz3MyEVQZ8oAOrg9r3NPN9wuQvgVSeyoJA_qTyup22H83Sk6NvA6U33LxHv7efzWtvI1JAVg/s200/ZTB.jpg" /></a>Thomas Beecham had intended that his first Covent Garden season should open in February 1910 with what was bound to be a sure-fire sensation, the British premiere of Richard Strauss's <em>Salome</em>. There was a problem, however. The Lord Chamberlain's office, responsible for stage censorship in Britain since 1737, refused to grant it a performing license. Oscar Wilde's play of the same name, on which Strauss's libretto was based, had been similarly banned twenty-eight years earlier, on the grounds that it portrayed on stage the New Testament figure of St John the Baptist, and the current Lord Chamberlain (Earl Spencer, great-grandfather of Princess Diana) was not prepared to change his mind on the matter. Beecham opened his season with <em>Elektra</em> instead, but continued to do battle over <em>Salome</em> with the Lord Chamberlain who, nine months later, at last gave in, but at a price.<br /><br />The Baptist was to be allowed back into the opera, though he was to be called, not Jokanaan or John, but ‘a Prophet’, while in the final scene the executioner was to hand Salome a blood-stained sword, rather than the saint’s head on a silver charger. Salome’s hymn to the head was to be bowdlerised and all Biblical allusions in the text eliminated. The action was to be moved from Judea to Greece and the Five Jews were to become Five Learned Men. For the sake of getting <em>Salome</em> produced in London at last, Strauss accepted the changes.<br /><br />The opera was licensed on 1 December, one week before the opening. Tickets for its opening night sold out within eighty-five minutes of the box-office opening, and before long touts were offering seats at more than double their face value. During the final dress rehearsal Salome, the lissom Finnish soprano <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aino_Ackt%C3%A9">Aïno Ackté</a>, found that the ‘blood’ dripping from the sword was staining her fingers and, using ‘some very drastic words in French’, wiped it off on the cloak of the nearest supernumerary. It was not a problem she had encountered in Germany, where she had held the charger bearing the head.<br /><br />Beecham stopped the rehearsal and in the hope of finding a solution ordered one of his staff to make an urgent telephone call to the Lord Chamberlain's office. After a long wait the shirt-sleeved stage manager rushed to the front of the stage and knelt before Beecham, who was waiting in the orchestra pit. ‘We can use a tray instead of a sword’, he shouted, ‘so long as there is no head on it.’ The news was greeted with cheers. Comedy had finally turned into farce.<br /><br />Beecham was tireless. The dress rehearsal took place in the afternoon. In the morning he had taken a three-hour rehearsal for his first concert for the Philharmonic Society, which he conducted that same evening at Queen’s Hall. The concert came at an awkward moment, but he had postponed it once already, and for the sake of future relations with the society he could hardly delay it again. It was not the only concert he conducted during the final week of <em>Salome</em> rehearsals.<br /><br />Three nights earlier he had conducted a programme of Wagner excerpts with his orchestra at the Opera House; and on the evening before that had given a concert of eighteenth-century operatic music at the Aeolian Hall in Bond Street, at which <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=8163">Maggie Teyte </a>sang arias by Méhul, Grétry, Paisiello, Isouard, Monsigny and Dalayrac. Teyte claimed to friends that she had an affair with Beecham, but, if true, it seems it was a brief one.<br /><br />Not surprisingly, given the enormous amount of pre-publicity it had received, the first night of <em>Salome</em> on 8 December was a <em>succès fou</em>, though several reviewers found the opera less musically satisfying than <em>Elektra</em> (Ernest Newman took the opposite view.) The Lord Chamberlain’s office came in for a good deal of criticism. ‘Truly the ways of the Censorship are past finding out’, wrote the <em>Times</em> critic, who wondered how anybody in the audience could possibly have been expected to miss ‘the very striking coincidences’ between the fate of the Prophet and that of John the Baptist. ‘Of what avail was it’, asked the <em>Sunday Times</em>, ‘that Salome had to say “Ich will dir folgen” [“I want to follow you”] instead of “Ich will deinen Mund küssen” [“I want to kiss your mouth”], when she expressed by every fibre of her being the very abandon of amorous desire?’<br /><br />In the heat of the performance some of the textual alterations were forgotten by the singers, though if these were noticed by the members of the Lord Chamberlain’s staff who were present, none of them mentioned it. Either they did not speak German or they chose to adopt a diplomatic silence.<br /><br />By all accounts Ackté’s performance in the title-role was remarkable. She expressed emotion ‘not only by glance and gesture, but by sensuous curve of bodily movement’, said one critic, who added that although the music was ‘rather exacting’ for her (recordings suggest that the top of her voice was not her strongest point), she sang ‘skilfully’ and with ‘rare expressiveness’. It was noted with approval that, contrary to the practice in Germany, she performed the <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Salome-Op-54-Dance-Seven-Veils/dp/B004K992XI/ref=sr_1_cc_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1298891041&sr=1-2-catcorr">‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ </a>herself, rather than handing over the task to a double. Less appreciated was the silver tray, which, though it lacked a head, was filled with ‘gore’. Ackté found it ‘inartistic and rather revolting’ and, after the sixth of the ten performances, asked if it could not be covered with a cloth, so that ‘people may imagine what they want’. Company manager Archibald Archdeacon passed on Ackté’s request to the Lord Chamberlain's Comptroller, who replied that ‘Lord Spencer says “yes”, the tray can be covered with a cloth, only care must be taken not to build up a great heap in it which would look suggestive.’<br /><br />So great was the ridicule poured on the Lord Chamberlain’s office for its part in the <em>Salome</em> affair that many imagined it could not be long before it was relieved of its licensing duties, but another fifty-eight years and two world wars were to pass before stage censorship in Britain, along with the Lord Chamberlain’s role in it, was finally abolished in 1968.<br /><br /><em>This post is adapted from</em> Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music, <em>the acclaimed biography of Britain’s greatest conductor by John Lucas. It has been reissued in paperback to coincide with the 50th anniversary in March 2011 of Beecham’s death. ‘This is the best biography of a musician I have read for a very long time,’ said the</em> International Record Review <em>of the hardcover, while</em> Classical Music <em>claimed that this ‘thorough, exhaustive and often highly amusing biography will...re-establish Beecham as one of the foremost musical personalities of the last hundred years.’ The book is available now in paperback from all <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/new_music_buy.asp">good booksellers</a>. </em>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-204012931904100932011-02-17T15:48:00.006+00:002011-02-22T09:10:19.102+00:00On Music and Beauty by Markand Thakar<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD9R2NYpquVBGBkD1U6mLNpIiJf2cobXlGAAAdzE1enLKdjdiJswKUF3yMgvv2nY-aPHs98qQ5ak_MnkSqG1-3ZcxErP5uNap0hjpyASoRDaf03VT8Mf-iT94-7XOYMEbgAQfGVb8inQ/s1600/ZMT.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 135px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5574690340855203330" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD9R2NYpquVBGBkD1U6mLNpIiJf2cobXlGAAAdzE1enLKdjdiJswKUF3yMgvv2nY-aPHs98qQ5ak_MnkSqG1-3ZcxErP5uNap0hjpyASoRDaf03VT8Mf-iT94-7XOYMEbgAQfGVb8inQ/s200/ZMT.jpg" /></a><strong>Part 1: A Visitor from Outer Space, Confused<br /></strong><br />Art is a vehicle for self-knowledge. Whoa, that’s heavy. With apologies, yes.<br /><br />I sometimes imagine a discussion with a visitor from outer space.<br /><br /><div><blockquote>Space Alien: What did you do last night?<br />Human Person: I went to a big box.<br />There were about 1500 people there. They turned off the lights, and in a corner<br />of the box some people made noise.<br />SA: EEW! How long did you have to do<br />this?<br />HP: It took about two hours, and I <em>wanted</em> to do it.<br />SA: So they<br />must have paid you well?<br />HP: Actually, I paid a handsome sum.<br />SA:<br />(scratching its left nose) Hmmm. I have just one question.<br />HP: Yes...<br />SA: Why?<br /><br /></blockquote>Why indeed!<br /><br />I have never seen myself. Don’t get too smug — you’ve never seen yourself either. I’ve seen my face in a mirror, I’ve seen photographs of my face, I’ve seen my lower extremities, the backs of my lower legs, parts of my arms. I’ve never seen my back, my rear end, or parts of my arms. I’ve never seen the essence of my physical presence to the world: my eyes, my mouth, my nose, my ears.<br /><br />My understanding of who I am is limited to the absence of what I am not. I know that I am not the table, the computer, the window, those trees. I am not the glass or the flowers. I am not the air or the smells. I am not the omelet, nor am I the taste of the omelet. I am not the death of my friend, nor am I the sadness. I am not the joke nor am I the humor. That thing that is missing from all the things I am not — that’s who I am. So the more defined, more present, more vivid to me are the things I am not, the better I understand my own being.<br /><br />Ordinary understanding — or consciousness — is a three-part process: subject—mode of consciousness—object. If I see the Tower of London, <em>I</em> am the subject, <em>the tower</em> is the object, and <em>seeing</em> is the mode of consciousness. If I remember the tower, <em>I</em> am the subject, <em>the tower</em> is the object, and <em>remembering</em> is the mode of consciousness. If I imagine the tower, <em>I</em> am the subject, <em>the tower</em> is the object, and <em>imagining</em> is the mode of consciousness.<br /><br />So here’s one answer to the “Why?”: we consume art because it helps to define us to ourselves. I read a novel; it has meaning for me to the extent that I relate the events in it to my own experiences of the world, it makes them more vivid, it heightens my awareness of the world external to me, and it brings my own essence into better relief. I see an opera or a play, or a Warhol <em>Campbell’s Soup Can</em>, I connect deeply with the loves, the losses, the joy, the sadness, the soup, and I have a more pronounced understanding of my loves, my losses, my joy and sadness, my soup. The external world is more vividly limned, what that world is not is in greater relief, and the “what-it-is-not” — me — is better defined.<br /><br />Ah but visual art — and music — can do something else, something different, something — yes — BETTER!<br /><br /><br /><strong>Part 2: When is a Tree not a Tree?</strong><br /><br />When is a tree not a tree? Or, more precisely, in observing a tree, when am I not observing the tree?<br /><br />Some 25 years ago I lived in an apartment in a rural area. Outside the apartment was a tree, a large one, with many branches. I saw the tree as I was coming and going, every day for two years. It was a tree. One day, though, leaving the apartment, I glanced up, and observed that tree. It was beautiful, and I was struck by it. And I was left with this nagging question: what was different about the tree when it provided an experience of beauty from when it was just there as part of my general observation of the world around me?<br /><br />Kudos to you, honored reader, who has presumably made your way gamely through part 1 (and more kudos and sincere apologies if you remember it!), but we return to the structure of consciousness of our ordinary experience, which is: subject — mode of consciousness — object. I (subject) see (mode of consciousness) the tree (object). The experience of beauty is different from that of ordinary experience. In an experience of beauty, the object comes to me in such a way that I absorb it. It takes me over. I lose myself in the object. And in “losing myself” in the object, in a very real sense I become that object. There is no longer a subject or an object, what remains is just consciousness.<br /><br />So what was different about the tree? Nothing. What was different was me: my openness to the possibility of losing myself in that visual image. Perhaps it was the incipient sunset in the background. Perhaps I approached it in a pensive moment of inner peace. Nonetheless, the visual image of that tree enabled me to absorb it, become it, and be moved. When the tree comes to me as beautiful, I am observing the tree but I am not observing it, because I am the tree.<br /><br />Now this extraordinary experience couldn’t happen from just any old tree. That particular tree had numerous branches fanned out in a particularly gratifying shape. And the experience was fleeting, to be sure.<br /><br />But there is an experience of beauty that is deep and profound: it is the one available from visual art, and from music. We open ourselves to the aesthetic object – the Rembrandt or the Picasso, the sublime performance of Mozart or Brahms. We focus on it, and it alone. We absorb it, it takes us over, we lose ourselves in it, we become it.<br /><br />And in so doing it takes us to a magical place: ourselves. Our Selves. In this act of becoming the object, neither subject nor object participate in the conscious act. What remains is the very essence of our being, our consciousness.<br /><br />Toward the end of his life Handel led a performance of <em>Messiah</em>. Afterward, legend has it, he was approached by a friend, who said, “Maestro, surely you have provided a great entertainment.” And he responded, “I should be sorry if I only entertained them, for I had hoped to make them better.”<br /><br />Why music? We can know the very essence of our being, and we can be better.<br /><br /><em>This essay is adapted from the April and May</em> Maestro’s Musings <em>columns in</em> <a href="http://www.duluthsuperiormagazine.com/">Duluth Superior Magazine</a> <em>(reproduced by permission of the publisher). <a href="http://www.markandthakar.com/">Markand Thakar’s </a>book,</em> <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13480">Looking for the “Harp” Quartet: An Investigation into Musical Beauty </a><em>is published by the University of Rochester Press and available from all </em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/new_music_buy.asp"><em>good booksellers</em></a><em>.<br /><br />For the month of February 2011</em> <em>readers of</em> From Beyond the Stave <em>can order Markand Thakar’s book at 25% discount from <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/default.asp">our website</a>. Simply use the discount code</em> HARPWEB25 <em>during our secure checkout.<br /><br />Or you can wait for the movie. </em></div>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-23588232037882390742011-02-10T12:45:00.005+00:002011-02-17T16:09:03.068+00:00‘To know a world of beauty…’<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy6jmZJoV_fGSmfys-y23CRY-1FVEMEB04kZ4FQyZ8-Nm8txySxsnQJPaokGsW71F81_l92961v4xfdlGiB4oWEp_QMjC63WLx98NAn0lzR62z46Gi7thcFijnyI_revb7h-53KFJmmA/s1600/ZPG.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 128px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5572063806133458290" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy6jmZJoV_fGSmfys-y23CRY-1FVEMEB04kZ4FQyZ8-Nm8txySxsnQJPaokGsW71F81_l92961v4xfdlGiB4oWEp_QMjC63WLx98NAn0lzR62z46Gi7thcFijnyI_revb7h-53KFJmmA/s200/ZPG.jpg" /></a>My first encounter with Grainger’s music - <em>writes Penelope Thwaites, editor of</em> <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13481">The New Percy Grainger Companion </a>- began not as a music student at Melbourne University, but in England in the 70’s, not long after my <a href="http://www.wigmore-hall.org.uk/">Wigmore Hall </a>debut. The composer <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/williamleonardreed/biography">William L Reed </a>said to me one day, “You’re an Australian – why don’t you play some Grainger?” I considered, and decided to include three folk-settings at the end of my next recital. I found them delightful, stimulating - and demanding. That, I learned, was a not unusual experience for those embarking on performing Grainger.<br /><br />Fifty years after his death in New York on 20 February 1961, a fresh evaluation of <a href="http://www.percygrainger.org/">Percy Grainger</a> is due. This Australian-American composer and pianist who spent much of his youth in Germany and Britain and who revered the Scandinavian countries and their culture seems to have been born into a state of reaction against existing norms. The necessity to earn his living and support his invalid mother took him to the heart of the British establishment as a society pianist, when his own genes were drawing him inexorably towards the music of ordinary people – folk music. His quenchless curiosity led him to experiment with new instruments to introduce into the lush panoply of Edwardian orchestral writing – an orchestra for which he wrote superbly. He envisaged a kind of music that would dispense with regular time signatures and conventional pitch, music that would move as freely as the sounds of nature.<br /><br />I have just come from rehearsing a trio of Grainger songs. Grainger’s pianist is a full partner to the singer and together, time and again, two artists are called upon to create a scene, a drama , more often than not with an undercurrent of sadness. <a href="http://www.percygrainger.org/prognot9.htm"><em>The Sprig of Thyme</em> </a>tells the old story of the young woman betrayed by the disappearing lover, but this girl has spirit, and hopes for better things. The music reflects all that, with a kind of gaiety that is far more touching than a display of self-pity. Absolutely characteristic in the song is Grainger’s harmony, now poignant, now twisting the knife in the wound. It all happens in three minutes – a masterpiece.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13442">Benjamin Britten </a>recognised Grainger’s unique greatness in this field : “In the art of setting folk song, Grainger is my master”. Britten may have produced the greater volume of works, but neither he nor any other composer I know comes near Grainger’s strangely affecting mix of emotional earthiness enhanced by harmonic sophistication.<br /><br />He wrote with passionate appreciation of the folk-singers who gave him their (often jealously guarded) tunes. Perhaps they sensed he was one of them? Grainger himself never mentioned, perhaps never knew, that his great-grandfather, Jacob Grainger (1796-1880) farmed in the south of County Durham, as did almost all of his (Jacob’s) family. Just one son moved to London in the 1840s and became a master tailor, and one of his family of ten left England to take a job in distant Australia as a draughtsman, later architect. That was Percy Grainger’s father.<br /><br />Some 350 performers in eight concerts will take part in the <a href="http://www.kingsplace.co.uk/music/weekly-themes?theme=167">Celebrating Grainger 2011 festival </a>at Kings Place, London, from 17-19 February. They will traverse his choral and solo vocal music, woodwind, brass and string chamber works, with the Royal Artillery Band and Orchestra his superb writing for military band, a concert including Grainger’s non-western settings, multi-hand duo piano works, percussion ensembles, Theremins, experimental music machines, and a chance for audiences to sing Grainger’s music too. On the actual 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, Sunday 20 February, speakers and scholars from Australia, Canada, USA, Denmark, Germany, and the UK will gather at the British Library for a seminar entitled <a href="http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events/event117204.html">Percy Grainger for the 21st Century</a>.<br /><br />Grainger’s universalism is one of the most important themes in the book I have been privileged to edit <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13481"><em>The New Percy Grainger Companion</em> </a>– important not because Grainger solved every problem, and certainly not because his life was some kind of pageant of triumph. He struggled. But he did think more widely than many classically trained musicians of his time – or of this time – and because he thought so freshly about music, his provocative thoughts are stimulating.<br /><br />At Kings Place on Saturday 19 February, we include a British premiere of his <em>Thanksgiving Song</em>. Ours must be a chamber version of a work written originally for full symphony orchestra and off-stage choir with instrumental ensemble. The first half of the piece is purely instrumental – a dreamy beginning leading to a frenzied apotheosis – then silence. The second half could not be more different. When it was premiered in 2003 in <a href="http://www.cityofadelaide.com.au/attractions/adelaide-town-hall.html">the spacious Adelaide Town Hall</a>, the off-stage musicians were able to realise Grainger’s highly original (seemingly almost comical) idea of the endlessly repeated chorale fading very slowly into the distance, as the singers and accompanying group were transported on a trolley outside the periphery of the hall. Yet as they finally stood in the outer corridor singing ever more quietly, the doors were slowly closed and a pin-drop silence followed. For this magical effect in our restricted space on 19 February, Trinity College of Music has recorded that final section with their singers and instrumentalists, and that will provide our conclusion. The live performers will listen, along with the audience.<br /><br />My hope is that audiences will leave feeling altogether happier!<br /><br />And now to continue my own practice...<br /><br /><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13481">The New Percy Grainger Companion </a><em>edited by Penelope Thwaites is available now from all good booksellers and will be on sale at the events mentioned above. More on Percy Grainger can be found </em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=7897"><em>here </em></a><em>and </em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=11104"><em>here</em></a><em>. For tickets to the Kings Place concerts, please visit their </em><a href="http://www.kingsplace.co.uk/"><em>website</em></a><em>, and for the British Library symposium </em><a href="http://purchase.tickets.com/buy/TicketPurchase?agency=AGENCY_NAME&organ_val=org_id&pid=6898967"><em>click here</em></a><em>. Chandos Recordings</em> <a href="http://www.chandos.net/details06.asp?CNumber=CHAN%2010638">Grainger Edition </a><em>is self-recommending. The quotation that names this post is by Grainger and runs, in full, ‘To know a world of beauty and not to be able to spread the knowledge of it is agonising’. </em>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-50017170197965335102011-02-03T10:44:00.007+00:002011-02-03T12:00:35.042+00:00Nielsen in the South<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZY1awNEeNIhfeHUzfTmgr8m6da-_lYuIJmd_tYnmVzmzf7txTBc-Dr5WEBgHM8AUkkujmRFJE0yWf8aCjp7RPeTV8PFLMgzt413asy9IVFBzWTHZV8j7rK0av-dKtnjJBWF3gFAJuLA/s1600/ZCN.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 133px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5569430652778479330" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZY1awNEeNIhfeHUzfTmgr8m6da-_lYuIJmd_tYnmVzmzf7txTBc-Dr5WEBgHM8AUkkujmRFJE0yWf8aCjp7RPeTV8PFLMgzt413asy9IVFBzWTHZV8j7rK0av-dKtnjJBWF3gFAJuLA/s200/ZCN.jpg" /></a><em>Danish composer Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) is arguably the most underrated composer of his generation, despite an ever-growing number of recordings and performances of his music. In a </em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13418"><em>new book</em></a><em>, </em><a href="http://www.merton.ox.ac.uk/fellows_and_research/GrimleyDaniel.shtml"><em>Daniel Grimley </em></a><em>offers a critical re-evaluation of his music and its rich artistic and literary contexts, drawing extensively on the newly completed </em><a href="http://www.kb.dk/en/kb/nb/mta/cnu"><em>Carl Nielsen Edition</em></a><em>. Topics include the composer’s relationship with symbolism and</em> fin de siècle <em>decadence and his response to the Danish landscape. Running through the book is an engagement with the idea of musical modernism - a term which, for Nielsen, was fraught with anxiety and yet provided significant creative stimulus. In this excerpt, Grimley looks at the overture</em> Helios<em>. For anyone who might sympathise with </em><a href="http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-about-music/"><em>the old joke </em></a><em>that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, this is how it’s done:<br /></em><br />The <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/content/docs/Helios_Overture.doc">opening page</a> of Nielsen’s concert overture <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXyg7z6V-9o&feature=related"><em>Helios</em> </a>(1903) is one of the most magical dawn sequences in music. Long pedal notes in the lower strings suggest a seemingly infinite sense of musical time and space, of floating weightlessly in the musical ether: the pause over each second bar momentarily suspends the perception of regular clock time before the work has properly begun, so that the piece literally begins in a state of timelessness. The hairpin dynamics, rising almost imperceptibly from <em>pianississimo</em> and falling back again, reflect the vibrating amplitude of the bowed open string: it is as much a description of the sound object or ‘Klang’ as a performance direction.<br /><div></div><br /><div>The horn calls that then gradually rise above the bass pedal sound almost impossibly distant, gently arching upwards first through the octave and then to the flat seventh, as though sounding the upper partials of a single glowing harmonic spectrum. As this sound slowly echoes and peals, the resonance gaining strength through its waxing reiteration, the upper strings begin to weave a gently flowing quaver figure, gradually filling in the gaps between the widely spaced intervals of the horn calls and bass, so that the orchestral texture emerges as if from a clearing morning mist. As this slowly shifting curtain of sound grows, the harmonic palette also widens and enriches itself, the rocking fifth steps in the bass (a horizontalisation of the earlier vertical chord structures) followed eventually by the first chromatic descent (b. 30), tilting the music momentarily towards the flat side and casting aside the drowsy somnolent sevenths of the opening page.<br /><br />The return to the opening white-note C major gains a greater sense of clarification or focus, prefiguring the arrival of the first fully fledged melodic statement, the striding chorale entry of the horns with a transfigured version of their opening call at b. 54, supported by a blaze of string tremolandos and organ-like woodwind writing. The final shadows of the night in which the piece figuratively began have melted away and the music surges irresistibly forwards to the start of the main section, an energetic Allegro ma non troppo in the bright, super-charged key of E major.<br /><br />Formerly broadcast every 1 January by Danish Radio, <em>Helios</em> has gained a deeply symbolic place in Danish musical culture. It has become a ‘Morgensang’ (‘morning song’ or aubade), sounded optimistically at the threshold of each New Year. Yet the richly associative gestures with which the music begins invite a range of critical and historical interpretations. For example, the horn’s striding chorale belongs to a local tradition of Danish dawn hymns, a musical subgenre headed by Niels W. Gade’s setting of B. S. Ingemann’s ‘I Østen stiger Solen op’ (‘The sun rises in the east’) in his cantata <a href="http://www.chandos.net/Details06.asp?CNumber=CHAN%209075"><em>Elverskud</em> </a>(1851–4), a pivotal reference work in the creation of a distinctively Danish musical romanticism in the mid-nineteenth century. The confident new dawn which <em>Helios</em> evokes, with its rising horn octaves and sonorous diatonicism, is at least in part a warm afterglow of this national romantic awakening, and also an affectionate tribute to Nielsen’s former teacher at the Danish Conservatory.<br /><br />Yet the music delves even deeper into imaginary ideas of Danishness in its opening bars. The horn calls at the start evoke the sound of <em><a href="http://abel.hive.no/trompet/lur/bronze/brudevaelte.html">Lurs</a></em>, curved Bronze Age brass instruments excavated (usually in pairs) from barrow mounds across Denmark and southern Sweden throughout the nineteenth century. They have discshaped bells that represent stylised sun symbols whose ritual function, it was believed, was to herald the passage into the afterlife. Pairs of <em>Lurs</em> were displayed in the Danish national museum, and in 1910 Nielsen even composed a <em>Lur</em> prelude as part of his incidental music for the Viking play <em>Hagbarth og Signe</em>, performed outside at Friluft Teatret in Dyrehaven (the open-air theatre at the deer park north of Copenhagen), one of his most atmospheric and evocative dramatic scores. Yet, as Svend Ravnkilde has revealed, <em>Helios</em> simultaneously evoked an even more startling archaeological discovery, now displayed in the antiquities collection at the National Museum.<br /><br />In 1902, the year before composition of the overture, a ploughed field at Trundholm bog in Zealand unearthed a precious miniature model of a <em>solvogn</em> (sun chariot), a golden disc pulled by a stylised divine horse (equipped with spoked wheels) that was believed to represent the journey of the sun across the heavens: a metaphor, in the Bronze Age Nordic mind, for the course of human life and its relationship with the cosmos and the seasonal cycles of the natural world. The structure of Nielsen’s overture, waxing and waning from near silence to full strength and back to silence, traces the same circular trajectory as the imaginary path of the <em>solvogn</em>. Nielsen thus responded to this complex mythic notion of Danishness on different levels, both through the highly localised evocation of an antique Nordic sun cult as embodied in the archaeological treasures at the National museum, and also in its reimagining through the prism of the nineteenth-century national romantic imagination in Gade’s <em>Elverskud</em>.<br /><br />Yet <em>Helios</em> also breaks out from such local associations and embraces a wider musical patrilineage. The musical representation of apparently organic, self-determined growth from a kernel cell points to a whole range of nineteenth- century evocations of nature – the opening of Wagner’s <em>Rheingold</em> is the most obvious and paradigmatic example. Such evocations conventionally serve as thresholds to an imaginary Arcadian landscape or enchanted nature realm, and signal displacement (or removal) from the modern world. <em>Helios</em> is similarly concerned with a sense of the mythic past, the temporal suspension and circularity of its opening bars a way of manipulating time so as to create the impression of reaching back into an imagined antiquity. </div><div></div><br /><div>Yet its re-creation of a lost golden age serves a double function, casting expectation optimistically forwards towards the reattainment of previous greatness and cultural renewal. The music’s growth, evolution and fulfilment thus begin to gain a more pointed ideological focus. The chorale-like treatment of the morning song at b. 54, with its shades of the finale from Brahms’s First Symphony and the <em>Academic Festival</em> Overture, becomes the apotheosis of a broader Northern European cultural vision, a stylised synthesis of Hellenic and Nordic streams with elements of the early eighteenth-century German Baroque. The manner in which the music sheds the mythic Wagnerian gloom of the opening page for a brighter, leaner and more athletic musical discourse at the work’s heart reveals a great deal about Nielsen’s stylistic orientation.<br /><br />The overture’s Hellenism becomes a musical realisation of Nietzsche’s decisive anti-Romantic turn and famous call for the ‘Mediterraneanisation of music’ in <em>The Case of Wagner</em>, promoted energetically in Copenhagen in the 1890s by Georg Brandes. The ritualistic dawn evoked by <em>Helios’s</em> opening pages thus gives way to a consciously modern, neo-classical, and ultimately comedic vision – its closest musical counterpart, in that sense, might be Richard Strauss’s tone poem <em>Also sprach Zarathustra</em>, a work which likewise opens with a dramatic musical sunrise and unveils the birth of a new Nordic-Hellenic superman. Just as his First Symphony had sounded a dramatic modernist breakthrough in 1894, therefore, Nielsen’s <em>Helios</em> became a further threshold to a new expressive and musical domain, a gateway that is as much the symbolic adoption of a particular aesthetic tone or vision as the literal depiction of the sun rising above the wine-dark waters of the Aegean Sea.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13418">Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism </a><em>by Daniel M Grimley is published by the Boydell Press and available from all <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/new_music_buy.asp">good booksellers</a>. Grimley's <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=9059">acclaimed book on Grieg </a>is also available from the Boydell Press.</em></div>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-3858212813312481092011-01-27T15:33:00.006+00:002011-01-27T15:57:03.317+00:00The Gamba's Return<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeNSVDXfrkfY6D0jlNXD6X5RhPVYQFwHJ1Yt2aPIVtAM_BQYPjShD3rOsW0FoTYCrlGalhlyk_sXNNYyPn47vQmg860IE3_egyORAIduFBAzbioZ2rJaBkqHUCUG3VtsRFQbRcVVlFwA/s1600/ZLAD.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 133px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5566895074425585426" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeNSVDXfrkfY6D0jlNXD6X5RhPVYQFwHJ1Yt2aPIVtAM_BQYPjShD3rOsW0FoTYCrlGalhlyk_sXNNYyPn47vQmg860IE3_egyORAIduFBAzbioZ2rJaBkqHUCUG3VtsRFQbRcVVlFwA/s200/ZLAD.jpg" /></a><em><a href="http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/staff/pkh/">Peter Holman’s </a>long-anticipated</em> <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13393">Life After Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch</a> <em>was published at the close of last year. In this fascinating post, he outlines how he came to his subject and some of the research that has grown out of it:<br /><br /></em>The origins of this book go back to a day in the late 1990s when my Ph.D. student Ian Davies mentioned that he had come across a manuscript in London University Library that contained some eighteenth-century English sonatas for bass viol – or ‘viol da gamba’ as it was more commonly known at the time. He had come across it as part of his research into English cathedral music around 1800, and he knew I was interested in stringed instruments and their history. The London University Library manuscript turned out to include six sonatas for bass viol and continuo or two bass viols evidently composed or compiled (it includes arrangements of violin sonatas by Angelo Michele Besseghi and recorder sonatas by Francesco Barsanti) around 1730. However, it was evidently copied much later: it also includes a gamba part from a hitherto unknown sonata by Carl Friedrich Abel as well as trio sonatas from Maximilian Humble’s op. 1 of 1768.<br /><br />Researching the manuscript for an article made me realise that the viol did not entirely drop out of use in England at the end of the seventeenth century, as was conventionally thought, and that there was scope for a larger study. At the same time I had become aware that I was in danger of repeating myself in writing about seventeenth-century music, and that it was time for a change of direction. Working in a later period would give me access to a far richer range of primary sources than was available before 1700. I was aware that others were developing interests in late gamba music in other European countries, notably Vittorio Ghielmi, Christophe Coin, and Michael O’Loughlin, for example. I also benefited from the interest and encouragement of the viol player and cellist Mark Caudle, an old friend and colleague in <a href="http://www.parley.org.uk/">The Parley of Instruments</a>; he is the dedicatee of the book. From the material I had assembled at an early stage, in 1998 we recorded a CD, <a href="http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/find.asp?f=noble+bass+viol"><em>The Noble Bass Viol</em> </a>(Hyperion CDA67088). It covered the repertory of compositions and arrangements for one, two and three bass viols with continuo from Purcell to Handel, including pieces by them and Benjamin Hely, William Gorton, Giovanni Battista Draghi, Gottfried Finger, Francesco Conti, and Arcangelo Corelli.<br /><br />In beginning to research and plan a book on the viol ‘after the golden age’ I started with two areas where I knew gamba players had been active and there was surviving music for the instrument. The first was a group of musicians associated with Handel and the orchestra of the Italian opera company at the Haymarket Theatre. It was known that Handel wrote a gamba solo in the famous Parnassus scene in <em>Giulio Cesare</em> (1724), and that about the same time he wrote out the first bar of his G minor violin sonata HWV364 in the alto clef, labelling it ‘Per la Viola da Gamba’, presumably as an instruction to someone else to copy out the whole work in that form. Handel’s involvement with the gamba had been explored before, though the problem had always been that these pieces appeared to exist in a vacuum: no gamba player was known to have been active in London around 1724, and no other contemporary English gamba works appeared to have survived.<br /><br />That quickly changed: in addition to the Williamson Manuscript (as it became known), colleagues working on Handel and his contemporaries, including the late Anthony Hicks and Lowell Lindgren, pointed me to a cantata by Pietro Giuseppe Sandoni for soprano, two gambas and theorbo, and cantatas by Tommaso Bernardo Gaffi and Francesco Gasparini arranged in early eighteenth-century England with gamba obbligatos. It also became likely that the various trio sonatas by J.C. Pepusch with gamba obbligato had been written for Pietro Chaboud, an Italian bassoonist and flute player who arrived in England around 1700 and played in the Italian opera orchestra. Chaboud may also have been responsible for a set of gamba arrangements of Corelli’s op. 5 violin sonatas, two of which were published in London in 1712, and the publication <em>Aires and Symphonys for ye Bass Viol</em> (London, 1710), which contains a set of arrangements for solo bass viol of arias from Italian operas in the repertory of the Haymarket Theatre. Arrangements tended to loom larger in the repertory of early eighteenth-century gamba players than their predecessors partly because Italian opera and violin music was all the rage at the time, and partly because gamba players in England had begun to read music in the (octave-transposing) treble clef, which made all music written for soprano instruments and voices available to them.<br /><br />The other task was to try to identify the person or people who had played this new repertory of gamba music. Chaboud was the obvious candidate for the second decade of the eighteenth century, but there is no trace of him in London (or anywhere else) after May 1719. To cut a long story short, a number cellists in the opera orchestra, including Nicola Haym, François Goodsens, Pippo Amadei and Giovanni Bononcini, may have played the gamba, though only the German David Boswillibald, principally a double bass player, seems to have been active in Handel’s circle around 1724. In the book I put him forward as the person most likely to have played the solo in <em>Giulio Cesare</em>.<br /><br />The other topic I researched early on was Carl Friedrich (or Charles Frederick) <a href="http://www.earlyguitar.net/Abel/Abel.htm">Abel</a>, the greatest gamba player in the late eighteenth century. Abel had been studied by Walter Knape in the 1950s and 60s, who produced a thematic catalogue of his works, a biography and a complete edition. However, Knape’s work is flawed in a number of respects and is now out of date; the time seemed ripe for a new study of his gamba music and his life as a gamba player. I started by reading through <em>The Public Advertiser</em>, the main newspaper for concert advertisements, for each London concert season between 1759 (when Abel made his London debut) and his death in 1787, omitting the period between 1782 and 1785 when he was in Germany. Getting a clear idea of his concert career (and the careers of other professional gamba players at the time) was subsequently made much easier by <a href="http://www.gold.ac.uk/music/staff/mcveigh/">Simon McVeigh</a>, who kindly made his database <em>Calendar of London Concerts, 1750-1800</em> available to me, and by the appearance of the online database <em>Seventeenth-Eighteenth-Century Burney Collections Newspapers</em>.<br /><br />Another topic that developed early on was the life and work of John Frederick Hintz (1711-72), who seems to have been the only maker of viols in England between Barak Norman and his contemporaries in the early eighteenth century and the first makers in the early music revival at the end of the nineteenth century. He is now by far the best documented London instrument maker of the eighteenth century, thanks to the work of furniture historians and those such as James Lomax and Lanie Graf who have researched the early history of the Moravian Brethren in England; Hintz was successively a furniture maker, a full-time Moravian evangelist, and an instrument maker. The realisation that he specialised in making and selling unusual and rare instruments led me to look more generally at the cultivation of them in the late eighteenth century, helping me to understand the role of the gamba in musical life. It led in turn to studying others in the same field, such as the inventors John Joseph Merlin and Charles Clagget, and the steam engine pioneer James Watt – who made at least one gamba before he moved from Glasgow to Birmingham in 1774 and went into partnership with Matthew Boulton.<br /><br />One of the pleasures of researching a rare instrument, one that was not used in mainstream public and private music-making at the time, is that many interesting people were attracted to it. James Watt is one unexpected example, and others are the American statesman Benjamin Franklin; the writer Laurence Sterne; the aristocrats Sir Edward Walpole, John, Viscount Bateman, Elizabeth Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, and her cousins Margaret Georgiana, Countess Spencer and Lavinia, Viscountess Althorp; the musician and writer Ann Ford; and the artists Thomas Jones, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Cheesman, John Cawse, and perhaps John Constable. Many of these amateurs were inspired by Abel’s example and tuition to take up the gamba. Others doubtless thought that playing an unusual instrument would make them appear distinctive among their musical friends. For aristocratic women it was just about the only ensemble instrument open to them, since wind instruments involved distorting the face and playing the violin or violoncello involved adopting ungraceful postures. In addition, artists seem to have been attracted to the graceful shape of the gamba, which often featured in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings they studied.<br /><br />A parallel study of amateur gamba players in the early eighteenth century revealed much about musical life at the time. Having made a list of all those amateurs known to have played or owned gambas at the time, it became clear to me that they divided into roughly three groups according to social status. There was a small group of aristocrats who probably received musical tuition from household musicians or on the grand tour – which at the time often meant a period studying in Paris or Leiden as well as visiting Italy. At the other end of the social scale there was an interesting group of self-made and self-educated artisans and tradesmen, including the musical coal merchant Thomas Britton, the apothecary and botanist James Sherard, the writer Daniel Defoe, and the clock maker John ‘longitude’ Harrison. In between there was the great mass of members of the professions – clergymen, doctors and lawyers – who must have acquired their musical skills and knowledge of the gamba at university in Oxford or Cambridge or (in the case of lawyers) at the Inns of Court in London; dissenters, who were barred from the English universities, went abroad, often to Leiden, or to Scottish universities.<br /><br />We know from letters, diaries, inventories of music and surviving manuscripts that these amateurs often used the gamba as a solo instrument, though it was also indispensible for providing the bass line in the music clubs that were springing up all over the country at the time; amateurs did not start to take up the violoncello in England until about 1730. In general, there was a transition at the time from using the gamba as a bass instrument, reading music in the bass and alto clefs, to a solo instrument in the tenor register reading from the treble clef. This was also associated with a change of name, from ‘bass viol’ to ‘viola da gamba’ or some Anglicised variant such as ‘viol di gambo’. After about 1720 most people outside elite musical circles normally used ‘bass viol’ to mean a four-string unfretted instrument. This was particular true in parish churches, where people would have been familiar with the Sternhold and Hopkins ‘old version’ of Psalm 150, which includes the phrase ‘Praise him upon the viol’. However, this usage was not confined to church: Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1789 that the six-stringed instrument ‘called <em>Viol de Gambo’</em> is ‘about the Size of a Bass Viol, but is not the same’.<br /><br />I originally planned to confine the book to the eighteenth century, but it soon became apparent that gamba playing continued sporadically throughout the nineteenth century. In 1889 the historian, lawyer and gamba player Edward Payne (1844-1904) stated in a lecture to the Musical Association (now the Royal Musical Association) in London: ‘I could prove, if it were necessary, that the art of playing it [the gamba] has never died out in this country, but that the traditions of the instrument have survived in a constant succession of amateur players’ – by which he seems to have meant Thomas Cheeseman (1760-?1842), John Cawse (1779-1862), and himself.<br /><br />The last professional player in England in the continuous tradition, the Dutch cellist Johan Arnold Dahmen, died in 1813, though other professionals occasionally took up the gamba for particular concerts throughout the nineteenth century, mostly as part of the developing early music movement. They include an unnamed player in a concert directed by the harpist Nicholas Bochsa in 1836; the cellist Richard Hatton in a Concert of Ancient Music in 1845; the viola player Henry Webb in at least one of Ernst Pauer’s historical concerts in 1862; and the cellist Walter Pettit (1836-82), who became well known in the 1870s for playing the obbligato parts in J.S. Bach’s passions on the gamba. By the 1880s gamba playing by amateurs and professionals was fairly common, so that when Arnold Dolmetsch organized his first old music concert in 1890 his innovation was not to revive the viol per se, but to attempt to assemble a complete viol consort and to use it to play English seventeenth-century consort music. Even so there were compromises: his first viol consort included a viola and a viola d’amore. However, Dolmetsch was a turning point, and the model he developed of the scholar-performer came to dominate the British early music scene during the twentieth century.<br /><br />As always with a major research project of this sort there are loose ends to tie up and further avenues to explore. One is the history of early music: I am hoping to write an article on the harpsichord in nineteenth-century England, and I have been asked to give a paper on the twentieth-century British early music scene at a conference in Salzburg in December. I have also been using material I have accumulated on other eighteenth-century ‘exotic’ instruments. I am editing Geminiani’s treatise on the English guitar for Christopher Hogwood’s <a href="http://www.francescogeminiani.com/"><em>Opera Omnia</em> </a>of the composer, and I have recently written a study of John Russell’s fine painting of the actress Dorothy Jordan playing a lute-family instrument. In addition, I am planning a study of Handel’s use of the archlute and theorbo, which will reveal the identity of the person I believe was his regular lutenist in the 1720s and 30s. I have also started work on another research project on the history of conducting and musical direction in Britain, in collaboration with Fiona Palmer. I hope it will result in another volume in the Boydell series <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/listCategoriesandproducts.asp?idCategory=151">‘Music in Britain, 1600-1900’</a>, provisionally entitled <em>Before the Baton: Conducting and Musical Direction in Georgian Britain</em>.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13393">Life After Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch </a><em>by Peter Holman is available from all <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/new_music_buy.asp">good booksellers</a>. </em>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-52072687654615831722011-01-18T16:53:00.005+00:002011-01-27T12:51:19.891+00:00Introducing Balcarres<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYSTC1cORvCht5PLScCuYDXSQ-08fja2KTgf_E37OGpJlo20GTqWZZYHek4VAmIxy-mCVzr7lvetKlicsCBqtlrtJuezJ1QNLPFgEkdY1gHRswmfuy2t_AJyEQJVCc-5XFVk8ZScu_7A/s1600/ZB.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 200px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 143px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5563573229339640722" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYSTC1cORvCht5PLScCuYDXSQ-08fja2KTgf_E37OGpJlo20GTqWZZYHek4VAmIxy-mCVzr7lvetKlicsCBqtlrtJuezJ1QNLPFgEkdY1gHRswmfuy2t_AJyEQJVCc-5XFVk8ZScu_7A/s200/ZB.jpg" /></a><em>With </em><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/robertburns/burnsnight/running_order.shtml"><em>Burns Night </em></a><em>fast approaching, we are pleased to post an article with a Scottish theme. Recently the University Presses of Glasgow and Aberdeen published the long-awaited</em> <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13487">Balcarres Lute Book</a> <em>as part of the Music of Scotland Series. Described as a ‘beautiful production’ by the</em> Times Literary Supplement, <em>it is intended both for the lute player with a facsimile of the tablature and extensive notes and concordances, and the scholar with a introduction on the background and context followed by a full transcription. Here, editor Matthew Spring provides some background to this important discovery:<br /></em><br />The Balcarres manuscript is the largest and arguably most important post-1640 British source of lute music. The collection is also possibly the most extensive and interesting of all Scottish late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century instrumental manuscript sources, whether for lute, keyboard, violin or lyra viol. It contains 252 pieces of Scottish, English and French provenance, written or arranged for the 11-course lute. It may have been copied out by or for Margaret, the fourth wife of The Earl of Balcrarres. Along with native Scottish music, <em>Balcarres</em> contains arrangements of violin music, English popular tunes and French baroque lute music by mid- and later seventeenth-century masters.<br /><br />Although its date of compilation cannot be pin-pointed, nor its early provenance traced, it clearly does not date from before the last few years of the seventeenth century and it more probably originates from the first years of the eighteenth. Hence it is contemporary with and comparable to the group of Scottish instrumental manuscripts that date from the period 1680-1725. These were the years before the trickle of printed collections of Scots songs, fiddle tunes and dance music produced for the English and Scottish market became a veritable flood. Seventeen twenty three/four saw the publication of Ramsey's <em>The Tea-Table Miscellany</em> and 1725 Stuart's <em>Music for Allan Ramsey's Collection of Scots Tunes</em>, both published in Edinburgh, and the first edition of William Thompson's <em>Orpheus Caledonius</em> in London. The popularity of such books, and those that followed, ensured that Scots songs were staple fare for music publishers aiming at the popular market in the eighteenth century.<br /><br />The sheer number of publications that continued throughout the century and into the next which included, or purported to include, old Scots melodies, largely ensured that the living and changing body of popular Scots melodies was gradually replaced by tunes that were full of the ‘highland humours’ that the general British public expected, in 'tasteful' eighteenth-century arrangements calculated to sell. <em>Balcarres</em> is representative of the pivotal years when manuscript circulation, which was clearly responsive to oral tradition, was being increasingly undermined by the scale of popular publications.<br /><br />Writers on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish music who have mentioned <em>Balcarres</em> have all assumed that the book originated from the household of one of the Lindsays of Balcarres. Certainly it survives today as part of the Crawford-Lindsay family possessions. The manuscript has the shelf mark, English MS 970.201 on the front cover. This refers to its cataloguing as part of the library at Haigh Hall, near Wigan, Lancashire, the residence of the Lindsay family after the merger of the Balcarres and Crawford branches in 1808. There is nothing within the manuscript’s contents to substantiate this, one cannot entirely rule out the possibility that it was acquired by the Lindsay family after completion. However given that it survives as part of the family papers, and that it formed part of the Haigh Hall library in the nineteenth-century, it is likely that it did originate with a family member, and was kept after its period of use because of the family connection. It is called the <em>Balcarres Lute Book</em> presumably because it came from Balcarres House, and had belonged to the Earls of Balcarres.<br /><br />Margaret Campbell, Colin, third Earl of Balcarres’ fourth wife, is the most likely candidate as author of the Balcarres lute book. There are a number of similarities between her known hand and that of the book’s compiler. While these similarities are insufficient to make a positive identification they certainly admit a possibility.<br /><br />One of the most striking characteristics of the book is that almost every piece has a careful attribution that names one, or often two, individuals. These attributions set the manuscript apart from contemporary music books, and give the best clues as the musical world from which it comes, and the manner in which the book was put together. In 85 pieces a certain Mr Beck is given sole credit for pieces as ‘by mr Beck’, or ‘mr Beck’s way’. This man turns out to be a certain John Beck, a musician working in the Canongate area of Edinburgh in the 1690s.<br /><br />A second important character mentioned frequently in the title is Mr McLauchland. Through the research of Sally Garden a geneology of McLauchland has emerged. He married Margaret McKenzie, on 19th April 1699 in Edinburgh, the marriage record listing him as ‘musickmaster’ in the city. His wife was the daughter of Daniell McKenzie and Eupham Miller. Birth records for Margaret McKenzie show that Daniell McKenzie was active as violer in Edinburgh in 1680, and that he lived in or around the Canongate. Witnesses to this birth suggest that the family was from the artisan class and well settled in the area.<br /><br />John McLauchland’s testament and inventory dated 30 July 1702 shows that he had died earlier in 1702, and had drawn up a marriage contract on 24 March 1699 with Margaret McKenzie. The considerable number and variety of beds, furniture, blankets and bedding, plates, cutlery, and drinking utensils might suggest that John McLauchland, his wife, and father-in-law, were running an inn. The inventory lists 8 instruments; 5 violins, a bass violin, a viol and virginals. His compositions alone suggest he was an important figure in Edinburgh musical life at the end of the eighteenth-century and one that was developing a distinctive style of violin composition that brought together native folk melodies and art music variation techniques.<br /><br />The manuscript was produced at the point in the development of Scottish instrumental music when the folk and art traditions were closely linked, when oral and manuscript circulation of music were predominant, and before printed music had begun to dominate the circulation of Scottish melodies both in the Lowlands and in England. The music contained in the manuscript reflects this background. Thus it includes French art music composed by celebrated lute masters, pieces drawn from Playford’s publications for the violin and much native folk music in various arrangements, many of which can only be found in this manuscript and were clearly locally produced by musicians known either to Mr Beck or the original owner.<br /><br />It is a magnificent manuscript both in its execution and in the rich diversity of its contents. It deserves to be better known by both lutenists and by those interested in the national music of Scotland.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13487">The Balcarres Lute Book</a>, <em>edited by Matthew Spring, is available from all <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/new_music_buy.asp">good music</a></em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/new_music_buy.asp"> </a><em><a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/new_music_buy.asp">booksellers</a>. </em>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4224918604253571465.post-86971315424349287522011-01-12T14:27:00.003+00:002011-01-12T14:48:50.901+00:00Marlboro Man<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimga7VRQdecsz2j1XSnrIjQsxvqdAG4jHEfuq3PE0imlKH5T-y_7F9od9IhBkeJvQZmXoJqycp7b1YzrglFV6WgWO48U9pFrC1ytl4F_UVeMuCuAaKBXIipY3qN1QVmJ7nrdmRvdK9tw/s1600/ZLK.bmp"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 169px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5561311052705427042" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimga7VRQdecsz2j1XSnrIjQsxvqdAG4jHEfuq3PE0imlKH5T-y_7F9od9IhBkeJvQZmXoJqycp7b1YzrglFV6WgWO48U9pFrC1ytl4F_UVeMuCuAaKBXIipY3qN1QVmJ7nrdmRvdK9tw/s200/ZLK.bmp" /></a><em>Leon Kirchner first visited the Marlboro Music Festival in 1959 but it was from 1963 that his participation started to grow. He enjoyed renewed contact with old friends—Schneider, Serkin, Fleisher, and Horszowski—and by conducting a performance of his</em> Double Concerto, <em>with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afs1HOmMy1g">Jaime Laredo </a>and cellist <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/09/obituaries/madeline-foley-59-cellist-a-marlboro-festival-founder.html">Madeline Foley </a>as soloists, Kirchner made many new friends. Kirchner and Marlboro proved to be an ideal match, and in the course of ensuing seasons his participation and role in the festival quickly grew. Rudolf Serkin, Marlboro’s artistic director, wanted to augment the festival’s involvement with twentieth-century music, and Kirchner was wonderfully suited to guide this effort. Here is another extract from <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13361">Robert Riggs’ superb new biography of the composer</a>, who died in 2009, which looks at a rather unwelcome political intervention in the Festival:<br /><br /></em>In the mid-1960s, at the height of the Vietnam War, world events were not just distant news—Marlboro occasionally had direct personal encounters with major players from the political stage. In 1967 an orchestra rehearsal conducted by Casals was disturbed by the noisy arrival of two helicopters from Washington, DC. They disgorged a team of sleek Secret Service agents sent in advance to run a security check on the premises prior to the arrival the next day of Vice President Hubert Humphrey and his entourage: Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, and Katharine Graham, owner and publisher of the <em><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/">Washington Post</a></em>.<br /><br />Graham, whose wealthy parents had helped Serkin establish Marlboro, spent a weekend there every year, and Fortas, an amateur violinist and music lover, was also a regular visitor. Years earlier, government business had taken Fortas to Puerto Rico, where he served on the Board of Directors of the Casals Festival and became friends with Casals, even playing chamber music with him informally. When Franco became dictator in Spain in 1939 at the end of the Spanish Civil War, Casals’s public musical profile became politically charged by his refusal to play in Spain or in any country that recognized its regime. Thus, Fortas had instigated a coup—both political and artistic—by proposing and orchestrating an invitation to Casals to perform in the Kennedy White House in 1961. Casals had requested and received a private meeting with the president, during which, it was later reported, their conversation focused on world peace.<br /><br />These visitors from Washington were not unequivocally welcome at Marlboro. Some musicians resented that Fortas, a mere amateur, would be playing with Casals, which they did not have the opportunity to do. A far more serious matter, however, was that without exception the younger participants, and most of the senior ones as well, were vehemently opposed to American policy in Vietnam.<br /><div></div><br /><div>Serkin—who had played in Minneapolis in 1947 and had met Humphrey, at that time the city’s mayor—viewed the visitors as musical pilgrims rather than as representatives of a corrupt government, but he was in a distinct minority. Strong sentiment to mount a political protest put Serkin in a very awkward situation. According to bassoonist Sol Schoenbach, Serkin threatened, “If you insult my friends, I’m leaving”; and Schoenbach noted: “We finally worked out a compromise: the angry students wrote letters of protest and Serkin promised to give all the letters to Humphrey. And he did just that: he handed him about seventy letters, which I’m sure Humphrey never read.”<br /><br />Although the visitors took an interest in and enjoyed the music making, the real—but unannounced and secret—purpose of Humphrey’s visit was more political than musical. He had come to urge Casals to accept another invitation to perform at the White House. Casals, however, was terribly disturbed by Lyndon Johnson’s policies, which he considered immoral, in handling the Vietnam War. According to biographer H. L. Kirk, “This time his conscience would not let him accept, but the decision preoccupied Casals for days and made him physically so ill that he curtailed his stay in Vermont, canceled scheduled engagements abroad, and returned to Puerto Rico.”<br /><br />Kirchner also had a dramatic personal encounter with one of the Washingtonians. On leaving his rehearsal studio, he ran directly into Serkin and McNamara, and was summarily introduced to the secretary of defense.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">I was very uncomfortable. There he was, the man who was sending out over a million of our men to Vietnam—a place where we didn’t belong and had no understanding of what was going on. There were people dying by the hundreds of thousands. This was McNamara. He asked me what I was doing, and I said that I was working on a piece. He asked which one, and when I told him it was by Hindemith [<em>Kammermusik No. 1, Op. 24, no. 1</em>], he wanted to know what it was about. I told him that it was actually about fascism. This really rattled him, so I explained that at the end of the work there was a dance-like section—rapid and fast, with a trumpet that seems out of control—and that it appears to end in violence with the tremendous whine of a siren. He listened without saying much, so I continued and told him that it was like a pickup truck. Some artists have the means to feel what is going on in the world around them. Hindemith left Germany not only because his wife was Jewish but also because he was severely antagonistic to Hitler’s policies.<br /><br /></span>They parted, but the following day Katharine Graham (whom Kirchner knew from previous visits) came up after a rehearsal and asked Kirchner to join her and McNamara, who wanted to speak with him again: “I had to; there was nothing else to be done. McNamara began to reflect on this Hindemith; he asked me all sorts of questions. I always thought he was a smart brute, a person who had no feelings, no sensitivities, but he was really quite sensitive to what was going on. He wanted to know how these things came about with artists. He asked me crucial questions.”<br /><br />When Graham came to Marlboro again the following year, Kirchner was reminded of these conversations, and he told her that he had found McNamara to be extraordinarily sensitive. She suggested that he might write to McNamara, who—due to intervening developments in Vietnam, and his subsequent “demotion” by Johnson in February 1968 to become head of the World Bank—had become one of the most unhappy creatures on the globe. McNamara was in agony, she explained, and now regretted his policies; he felt that he had made terrible mistakes. He knew it in his stomach—perhaps, Kirchner wondered, partially through the kind of intuitive, artistic process about which they had conversed—but not in his mind and did not yet have the courage to come out and admit everything publicly. Kirchner never wrote.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><em>It should be noted that Robert S. McNamara finally revealed his personal views and analysis of the Vietnam War when he published</em> In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam <em>(1995). In this book he discussed his mistakes in detail and acknowledged a strong sense of guilt and regret. The image at the top of this post shows Kirchner (on the right) and Jaime Laredo at Marlboro in 1965 (photographer unknown).<br /></em></span><br /><em>Robert Riggs’ new book,</em> <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13361">Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher</a>, <em>is published by the University of Rochester Press and is available from <a href="http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/new_music_buy.asp">your favourite bookseller</a>. </em></div>Boydell and Brewerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06408632024983935584noreply@blogger.com0