Top music events: where The Guardian and I differ

Spotted on the Guardian’s culture webpages today.

Not what I’d have in mind…

We clearly have different ideas as to what constitutes a ‘top music event.’

 

Temper, temper Mr Nyman

Dear me, Mr Nyman. Calm yourself down.

It has been reported in the Telegraph recently and elsewhere that Nyman has recently thrown his toys out of the pram on being told the Covent Garden will not be commissioning an opera from him. In petulant style, Nyman is reported as having ranted on Facebook about not wishing to pay his taxes to a nation that does not wish to support his work.

As a composer-colleague of mine observed on Wednesday, Covent Garden are turning composers down a lot of the time, and why should Nyman be any different ? Simply because Nyman is already an established and successful composer doesn’t mean that a major national opera house should take work from him by default. Covent Garden declared that Nyman’s musical language ‘is not what we want to pursue in our next commissions,’ before adding that this is not a dismissal of Nyman as a composer.

It does seem appropriate that British musical institutions support home-grown composers; and Covent Garden do so – earlier this year saw the premiere of Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune, and last year it was Turnage’s Anna Nicole, whilst the Linbury has in recent years housed Luke Bedford and James Macmillan premieres. So he can’t throw that at them.

Whatever your views about Nyman’s music, it does seem rather childish to adopt an ” I’m British, therefore British opera houses should commission me” attitude, which rather smacks of childish temper-tantrums. Especially when your shouting and stamping can be heard all the way from your home in Mexico City.

Come along, Michael; other composers have been disappointed too. Just get on with it.

Bruckner-bashing

I’m delighted to read Jessica Duchen’s articulate insight into her lifelong dislike of Bruckner; not just because classical music critics don’t always express their dislikes as often as they ought to (in as justified, well-reasoned terms as I’ve just read) – but because it mirrors my own dislike of Bruckner. And Brahms. And Beethoven.

It’s often frowned upon to admit to such a fierce dislike of a Venerable Old Master; to bash Beethoven or Brahms usually results in having all of your views dismissed, even if they are well-thought through, and supported by reasonsed argument backed up by hours of listening (usually in great boredom). I left a concert recently in the interval, having gone to hear a twentieth-century piece performed by one of the world’s great string quartets, because the second half promised a piece by Beethoven, and life’s really too short for that.

Quid pro quo, Clarice...

So bravo to Duchen’s article.

(Is it me, or does Bruckner look a little Anthony Hopkins-Lecter-esque in this photo, too ?)

Modern music all the way, please. Nothing before 1903!

Floating in stillness: David Lang’s Wed

There’s a beautiful, hypnotic quality to Wed by American composer David Lang, a solo piano piece that seems to suggest a weightlessness, a free-fall in space from a scene from a science-fiction film like  Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 or Stephen Soderbergh’s Solaris that I can’t quite put my finger on…

Rather like a modern Gymnopédie by Satie, the piece seems to walk around an idea, viewing it from several angles and meditating on it in a way that defies the normal passage of time. (Satie famously said ‘Before I start writing a piece, I walk around it several times accompanied by myself.’). Originally written asn incidental music for a production of The Tempest, the bittersweet dissonances pervading the harmonic landscape of the piece seem to convey a sense of uncertainty (perhaps even regret ?) about a marriage vow.

The more muscular side of Lang’s music is shown in Cheating, Lying, Stealing

But there’s a mesmerising, lulling beauty to Wed that has me returning to it often. There’s a live video of a performance at Poisson Rouge, which, if you can forgive the poor ambient noise quality, offers some sense of the piece’s quality.

(Preview tracks via LastFM.)

Breitkopf ? Scheisskopf, more like!

I recently ordered a copy of a piece of choral music from publishers Breitkopf and Hartel, by way of an on-line sheet music ordering service. The copy duly arrived: stamped on the title page, and every other page thereafter, with ‘Perusal Copy’ in German, in bright blue ink.

Having paid the full price for the copy – it’s for me to look the piece over, certainly, with a view to deciding if I wish to order further copies to perform with an ensemble, but it’s not a ‘perusal copy,’ as I have paid for it and am not intending to send it back – I was naturally rather blindingly f*cked off.

Speaking to the music ordering service, who were extremely helpful and co-operative, it transpires that this is standard practice by Breitkopf when despatching single copies of a piece of music. Other purchasers have raised the issue with the music ordering company before. Even if you are ordering, say, a single copy of a flute part, rather than a complete set of orchestral parts – perchance your first flautist walked off with the part and has subsequently lost it – you still receive a copy with ‘Perusal Score’ stamped all over it, presumably in order to prevent illegal photocopies being made.

Having made a traditional purchase, I do not expect a piece of music to be stamped or de-faced with anything; it smacks of a lack of distrust on behalf of Breitkopf, who simply assume that a single piece of music has been ordered, in order to make illegal photocopies from it.

Now, you don’t purchase other products, and expect them to be de-faced by a company which is trying to protect itself from having its products ripped off. You don’t purchase a DVD and see ‘Not for Duplication’ across the screen throughout the film, or buy a novel and expect to see ‘Do Not Photocopy’ emblazoned across every other page. I’ve purchased a product for legitimate use, and I expect it to arrive in pristine condition.

So I will be returning the copy to Breitkopf with a stiff missive declaring my f*cking outrage, and shall not be ordering any music from them ever again. If a representative from Breitkopf reads this and would like to reply or comment on their company’s practice of defacing legitimately-purchased scores because they don’t trust their customers, I should be delighted to hear from them and to appraise them rather swiftly of my dissatisfaction, and hear their reason for such outrageous practice.

Scheisskopfs, indeed.

Best work of art for subsidy ? Let’s help the Government

Here’s a thought.

We’re always being encouraged to ring up and vote for the best in Saturday night television: the Best Singer, the Best Performer, the Best Dancer, or the Best Goal Scored This Season.

With all the debate about the value of culture, and the moral question about what art is good and should be supported by an ever-dwindling budget for the arts, why don’t we apply the same principle to works of art?

Let’s encourage everyone to ring up a specially-created cultural phone-in, where we can all vote for what we each think is a great piece of art. One week we can vote for a piece of music, the next for a painting, the following for a piece of sculpture, and so on. The piece which elicits the most votes will have been democratically chosen, and therefore have the greatest value. Funding for it would be assured, and it would be sustained for the future enjoymemt of others.

Pieces which atract the fewest or no votes are thus not valued by the democratc masses, and need not be funded. Fewer works would therefore be competing for a limited amount of funding, and the value of the winning piece would have been quantifiably and publically shown to have value.

To those who argue that art is not valued and should therefore not be funded, opponents  can demonstrate a democratically selected work whose value is sufficiently significant enough for the majority to have voted for it.

Finally, meaningless competitions in which people currently participate, like ‘The Nation’s Favourite Poem,’ or ‘Favourite Operatic Aria,’ or ‘Best-loved Tea-Cosy,’ could wield genuine artistic clout, and have a real purpose in directing funding towards publically-valued works.

A sure-fire way of proving the value of art, liberated from vague arguments about its educative or moral worth, and a celebration of our democratic right to choose.

I’m surprised the Department for Culture, Media and Sport hasn’t thought of this already, a means of harnessing pointless, powerless pseudo-democratic action without any real merit to a real decision-making policy process.

Who’s with me?

Did James Corden do Adele a favour ?

Having read about all the brouhaha surrounding James Corden’s curtailing of Adele’s acceptance speech at the Brits, I decided to look for the infamous moment on YouTube, and see what had actually happened.

Having watched the incident, it seems to me that Corden actually did Adele a favour. Clearly, once the singer began speaking, Corden suddenly thought: ”Oh my God: she’s actually a) got nothing worth saying and b) she surely won’t want her fans hearing her speak, surely ?”

Articulate and poetic: image credit The Metro

You see, as soon as popstars start speaking, quite often the bubble is burst. Far from being a tortured genius, giving voice to the anguish lurking inside our innermost and private souls, we find they are mindless, inarticulate morons, for whom the act of speaking in public actually lets them down.

Even the Speaker of the House of Commons is reported as saying he is ”disappointed” at Adele’s speech being cut short. Then again, that’s probably because, had Adele continued her presumably erudite and witty speech, he would have looked even better in comparison.

Bravo, James Corden: in cutting Adele’s doubtless winningly articulate and profoundly insightful speech short, you did her (and her Marketing Machine) a great service. If I were her management team, I’d be thanking you.

If you can ignore Aled Jones, listen to the Muhly music

Aled Jones has a wonderful skill: no matter what the subject matter is, about which he is discoursing, he always manages to sound as though it’s all about himself. I’m nore sure how he accomplishes this feat; it’s a tricky one to pull off, when you’re not actually discoursing at length about, well, yourself.

If you can get past his involvement in the programme, though, then listen to ‘The Choir’ on Radio 3 iPlayer from yesterday, for a chance to hear an interview with, and music by, composer Nico Muhly.

Steeped in the English choral tradition, Muhly writes some transclucent gems for choir – several sections of his ‘Bright Mass with Canons’ are featured in the broadcast, as well as ‘Archive’ from Mothertongue, which explores (as Muhly indicates in interview) the emotional associations people can have with mundane collections of letters and numbers such as area postcodes and telephone numbers.

Muhly comes across as lively, garrulous and full of vibrant enthusiasm for music; he’s a terrifically articulate guest, who readily trounces the idea of the composer as Romantic master scribing giant masterpieces; there’s a moment where, when asked about the future of his music, he negates the idea that, as a mdern composer, he is looking to ‘take over the world with my next symphonic gesture… I’d rather go home and pat the dog.’

Such a down-to-earth and readily communicative personality should not belie the fact that Muhly writes some of the most exciting and colourful compositions around at the moment in a musical language which combines accessibility with sheer joy in inventive writing, whether the skirling patterns of Motion or the dynamic rhythmic punch of Step Team, or the evocative string instrument soundworld behind the tenor soloist in Impossible Things.

The whole programme is online for a week here.

Classical music is not for you

Hello; thank you for this opportunity to speak to you all, and for the chance to help explain why the difficult sphere of classical music is most definitely not for you. Feel free to ask questions as we go along.

As you all know, classical music is immensely difficult to understand, and can only really be fully appreciated by connoisseurs who have taken many years to study it in some considerable depth, often at degree level and  beyond. It is well known that, without many years of rigorous grounding in the academic analysis of classical music, listeners cannot really get anything out of the experience. Classical music is very much an intellectual exercise, where only the truly attentive and well-schooled listener can genuinely appreciate the many levels across which a piece of music is unfolding; many hours of formal analysis are required in order to unlock a full appreciation of music’s structural and tonal architecture, backed up by many, many hours of listening

You have a question ? Please. Do you have to understand all this to enjoy a piece of music ? Well, yes of course. What’s that ? Can one simply listen to the surface texture ? Well, yes I suppose you could, although that wouldn’t be half so gratifying. Listening to the music for the sake of texture is perhaps one way of listening, but not the only way.

I’m sorry ? Spectralists, did you say ? Well, yes, there are certain composers for whom the texture of a sound, indeed of sound itself, is an important aspect of composing, indeed some might say the most important. So, yes, I suppose listening to just the sound will suffice. But that won’t help one appreciate the underlying harmonic relationships operating in a piece of music, the laws governing cyclical harmonic relationships and the over-arching tonal unity involved.

What’s that ? Serialism, you say ? Well, of course, strict serial composition attempts to escape from a formal tonal hierarchy, and seeks to liberate each semitone to a status equal to all the others, so, well, I suppose there are some pieces where tonal listening is not appropriate. But some composers combined serial practices with tonal relationships – Berg, for instance.  But serialism really benefits from close analysis, where pleasure can be had from spotting retrograde inversions and hexachordal combinatoriality being deployed. What ? Can you really hear such devices in use in a piece ? Well, no, not usually.

And tonality; the founding concept governing classical music, the structural device operating across the very fabric of the musical language itself. Many years of harmonic studies are needed in order to really appreciate how music works in this regard

Pardon ?

Well, yes, I suppose that’s not wholly relevant after the early twentieth century, you’re right. Serialism and the era of post-tonality mean that tonality is either abandoned or operates differently. But think of all the music before then. Whole-tonality represented one of the first attempts to move beyond the scope of orthodox tonal systems, in Wagner and Debussy in particular.

Go on ? Impressionist ? Yes, Debussy was part of the Impressionist school. And yes, emphasis was placed on colour. What ? Well, yes, I suppose you can just listen to the sounds being made and enjoy them just as they are. But there’s much more to it than that… Well, yes, Debussy did say ”You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.” And composers like Takemitsu, for example, employed some aspects of serialism and whole-tonality with a love of the colour of sound, it’s true. On reflection, I suppose you could argue that you can listen to Takemitsu for the sheer pleasure of the soundworld.

Hello ? Rhythm ? Well, yes, for some composers, rhythm was of primary importance in music. I mean, listen to Bartok, say, or Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Now that is a difficult piece, isn’t it ? Extremely challenging harmonically, with its use of octatonic chords and iso-rhythms. It is jolly hard. What ? Well, yes, youth orchestras can play it, certainly. And jolly well too..

To listen to classical music successfully, with real insight,  is to be able to follow all the composer’s creation, with intense study of the way in which Western music is notated necessary to being able to read the score. A musical score is a very precise set of instructions passed from the composer to the performer, with the full weight of over five hundred years of exactitude.

I’m sorry ? Well, yes, John Cage was an exponent of aleatoric music, where some factors are left to chance and are outside the control of either performer or composer. But you have to ask yourself if that’s not just a fad, really, don’t you ? Of course you have to be able to read music to understand it.

Sorry ? Gut reaction ? Well, I mean, yes, we all have an instinctive reaction to a piece, but is that really enough ? Your first emotional reaction to a piece must be tempered by an understanding of the compositional forces at work, in order for your reaction to have any worth, obviously. No ? Well, you can’t simply say ”I don’t like that!” without really being able to say why, can you ? Why should your emotional response to music be important ? It’s the intellectual response that is the only genuine one, isn’t it, where the brain understands where the heart does not. You can’t simply listen to colour and texture and sound without recourse to an analytical perception, can you ? That’s just listening for pleasure without reason.

I’m sorry ? Well, yes, pleasure is an important factor in your response. But it’s not valid without some sort of clarified reasoning behind it. After all, if just anyone were allowed to listen to a piece and make up their own mind about their response to it, then music theorists and analysts and critics and writers would be out of a job, wouldn’t they ? And we wouldn’t want to add to the burden of unemployment, surely ? Especially in the current financial climate. By re-iterating the conceit that classical music is jolly intellectual and the privilege of only an educated and enlightened few, such people can keep themselves in valuable jobs explaining to others how they should be listening to music whilst also reminding them how jolly difficult all this is.

Which brings me back to where this talk began. I hope you have enjoyed this brief look at the difficult world of classical music, and feel reassured that, without being armed with all manner of highly important intellectual tools, you can’t possibly hope to even begin to approach classical music in all its rigorous and challenging pleasure. You can’t just listen to it and simply decide whether you like it or not; after all, anyone can do that, can’t they ?

Thank you for your kind attention.

Hearing the angels: Jonathan Harvey’s Messages

I’ve listened in twenty-five minutes of utter wonderment to Jonathan Harvey’s Messages, which was broadcast on Radio 3′s Hear and Now over the weekend, in the second of two broadcasts from last week’s ‘Total Immersion‘ day devoted to Harvey’s music at the Barbican.

Premièred in April last year, and with a text consisting entirely of the names of angels, the piece captivates from the very opening gesture, as though a veil is being parted into another realm. A major piece for chorus and orchestra, Messages follows in the tradition of other mighty choral works such as the Dream of Gerontius or Vaughan Williams’  Te Deum; however, Harvey’s work transcends the epic-choral-piece niche and becomes instead a sublime and powerful evocation of the immediate presence of angels, singing above a landscape of shimmering sound.

The piece is on iPlayer until Saturday, and there’s a video of the first ten minutes of the piece here.

Also in the same broadcast is a choral piece Harvey wrote in the 1980′s, Come Holy Ghost, a blend of plainsong and sustained choral chords, the colours of which positively glow, sung by the BBC Singers. Listen and revel in the sonic pleasure of both pieces.