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Dead composers

It seems to have fallen to Radio 4 (rather than 3) to have informative and engaging programmes about classical music. The last one I heard was about the enduring power of ‘When I am laid in earth,’ by Purcell. Various bods were wheeled out to deliver their epiphanies and insights, and I have to say that I really enjoyed Alison Moyet’s gorgeous rendition, a fifth down – how much easier to do that tricky word ‘remember’ -normally on a top G! Everyone had their point of view, including the muso who declared it ‘the best melody of the 17^th century!’ Does it irritate you as much as me when people create league tables and play off one unique work of genius against another? I shouted ‘shut up!’ at the radio.

What was absent from a composer’s point of view was just that – the composer’s point of view. To me, whatever a piece of music becomes, whatever peg the composer hangs it on, it always starts with the composer. Amongst all their sense of personal ownership, nobody seemed to wonder about Henry Purcell, the human being, and what his personal input had been into those 40 bars of exquisite pain. Could anyone doubt that he identified with Dido rather than the colourless Aeneas? This is not an idle point, for Aeneas is on a mission to create a new country, surely something a creative person might identify with, and yet it is Dido’s fragility and easy decline into early death that is drawn with such pain. I wondered why nobody mentioned the surely pertinent fact that Purcell was a child of 6 or so when the Great Plague hit London, and then the following Fire. And/or wondered whether Purcell, still a young man, had just experienced something similar by way of a rejection.

It is the vagueness of music and it being a non-verbal language that makes people take ownership of it, and elbow the person that was the composer out of the picture. This doesn’t seem to happen so powerfully in the visual arts and it certainly doesn’t happen with books or poetry. It is a wonderful thing to become totally engrossed in a piece of music. I like to binge on a particular piece, playing nothing else for days, - the music becomes subsumed into your existence like the first days of being in love. The downside of this is the ludicrous and depressing mythologizing of dead composers that goes on. If you believe that some God-given gift is at work then that rules out any influence from dreadful upbringings, or hot-housing parents. Let’s face it, living composers are nothing like the Jill and John picture of dead ones. You can have a pizza and a laugh with them, get irritated by them, owe them money, talk about mobile phone tariffs with them. They can sleep with your wife or have to go to AA.

Recently I read a brilliant book about Schumann by Peter Ostwald called Music and Madness, - a psychological study based on letters and diaries. I nearly laughed out loud to read that Schumann, as a young man, may have had a sexual relationship with William Sterndale Bennett. Immediately, the two young men seemed totally recognisable as people I know now, and I felt a tremendous rush of sympathy for them. It made me want to listen to some Sterndale Bennett as well.

How different to the repulsion I feel (and I seem to be alone in feeling)towards the latest biogs of composers on BBC4, by Christopher Nupen, in which a profoundly reverential tone is taken and the things which influence other people – ‘normal’ people – are ignored – stuff like alcoholism, or child abuse. Psychologically, they are 100 years out of date. Near the end of the Schubert episode, which seemed to be made up of one long close up of the pianist’s right hand (modern piano of course – nothing too real!), Nupen mentioned in a hushed voice that Schubert had contracted syphilis. Now I am shouting at the TV! – When, where, why?? But already he has moved on.

It is this ghastly attitude to dead composers that bedevils the lives of living ones. The lack of compassion towards their everyday existence, the lack of interest from the press as compared to the truly extraordinary interest there is in books and writers, the impoverishment that accompanies the lives of 90% of composers, is only enhanced by this romanticising of the dead. Living composers can only ever be a disappointment.

Competitions

Last year I spent a couple of days at the Leeds Conductor’s Competition: Britain’s leading competition of this type, which happens every 2-3 years. I was there because an orchestral work of mine was being used as the modern test piece at a stage in the event in which there were only six contestants left. Each competitor had a slot to rehearse some Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, and my own piece. It was a fascinating experience on so many levels, not least in that it gave me the opportunity to hear my own music interpreted by six different conductors!

Since then I’ve spent some time musing over the nature of competitions, and come to the conclusion that there are basically three main types;

1) The Dead Certain. This is the sort of competition you get in sport; clear winners, and losers. Whoever runs faster than everyone else/jumps higher/scores more points or goals.

2) The Somewhat Hazy. Here the framework of winning and losing is more complex. I’d put arts based competitions in this category; the Turner Prize, Booker Prize, the Leeds Piano Competition (as well as the conducting one), and so on. Within this context a panel of judges may well take differing views on the quality of the artistic creations they have to appraise, and how to rank them, but they still have access to what they asses; they can read books, see works of art, and listen to performances.

3) The Downright Dubious. There’s only one candidate for this category; composition competitions. Here’s a typical scenario - one hundred and fifty composers submit orchestral works which are up to 20 minutes long, they are scrutinised by a panel, and the winning composition gets a cash prize and performance. At no point in this process do the judges get to hear the pieces in question! Given this situation one wonders how on earth it is possible to make a critical assessment of as much as fifty hours of dense and difficult music without even hearing a note performed (and forget midi playbacks, they’re a waste of time for orchestral works, and everything else really).

Instead of these random lucky-dip composition competitions wouldn’t it be wonderful for composers (especially younger ones) if every orchestra was to set aside a couple of sessions a year in which they’d read through and record previously unperformed orchestral works. Not an ‘open to the public’ workshop (these often seem to waste time with meaningless discussions that involve the audience), but simply a chance for a composer to hear his or her piece, get feedback from the orchestra, and take home a good quality recording.

No prizes, winners or losers: just a chance for composers to listen and learn in a sympathetic environment. I know that this is a crazy idea, given the scarcity of rehearsal time for most orchestras, but it’s a nice thought.

March Concert Picks - New Music in London

An amazing crop of new music concerts coming up next month in London:

Ensemble 10/10 at Wigmore (5 March)
http://www.wigmore-hall.org.uk/whats-on/productions/ensemble-10-10-24679
The acclaimed contemporary ensemble of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra

Atsuhiko Gondai portrait - Philharmonia Music of Today (9 March)
http://www.philharmonia.co.uk/concerts/09mar10mot/

Barbican Total Immersion: Wolfgang Rihm (12/13 March)
http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?ID=9272

Barry and Ayres - London Sinfonietta (17 March)
http://www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk/event/sound-music
Two love stories - Gerald Barry's 'Beethoven' and Richard Ayres quirky 'In The Alps' (below)

Celebrating Birtwistle's 75th at Wigmore (24 March)
http://www.wigmore-hall.org.uk/whats-on/productions/nash-ensemble-24685
Including Five Distances for Five Instruments and a new oboe quartet

Kagel and Casken, spoken text and silent film - Counterpoise at Kings Place (29 March)
http://www.kingsplace.co.uk/music/out-hear/counterpoise-%E2%80%93-loved-to-death

Also each Tuesday in March: http://www.prsformusicfoundation.com/news/spnmsolospotlights.htm
Solo Spotlights is a series of concerts of cutting edge music each Tuesday in March in the atmospheric setting of London’s Wapping Hydraulic Power Station.

Workaholicicism

Hildegard of Bingen

I’m becoming more and more painfully aware that I promised David quasi-regular blog postings for CT, but I now feel a little as if I have writer’s block – I feel like I should have something to say about something, but any ideas I have had recently seem to be a little self-serving or just plain dull. This is not, thankfully, an affliction (the writer’s block) that carries over to my composing, where the time available for writing still seems a little shy of the time I actually need and consequently I’m always ready and able to compose when those hours do free up. This, despite the fact that I am ostensibly a full-time composer. Where do the hours go? I do one day’s teaching a week as part of my post-Doctoral Research post requirements, but that should surely leave 4, 5 or even 6 days for writing depending on the level of workaholicicism I wish to engage with. And yet there always seems to be some rehearsal to attend, some promotion to be seen to, perhaps a little interview here or guest lecture there and there are always emails to write and reply to. Perhaps I need a secretary – or can one still get an amanuensis these days? And what about tea breaks? Perhaps if I had less of those I might write more, but then again the Reward system works very well for me.

Actually, I’ve got the first production of a new music theatre work coming up at the start of next month in Dublin – Una Santa Oscura is a bit like an opera but with no singers or text and instead a violinist is the sole protagonist (see, a self-serving blog entry). The interesting thing about this project for me, compared to my experience with writing chamber opera where one knows it’s out of one’s hands once the music is done, is that I formed the complete concept for the work myself – a staged work for a violinist inspired by aspects of the life of Hildegard of Bingen. Still, here I am willingly handing it all over to the director and finding myself very curious about what he’s done with the idea (because I haven’t had time to attend any rehearsals yet); after all, the concept might have been mine but he’s got the work of filling in the details. So, there go a number of days in the next couple of weeks with rehearsals and performances and little enough time for writing music let alone blogs.

Accidental Cultures

Picking up on some of the themes from Judith Bingham's fascinating post I recently did an interview for the American Music Centre's NewMusicBox site and I was somewhat surprised to hear the interviewer Frank J Oteri tell me that despite my never having returned to the US until 3 years ago (having been born there and left at the grand age of 6 weeks old), that there was something distinctly American in my sound-world - the article is titled "Accidental American".

I acknowledged to Frank that, like a lot of the US scene, I am happy to be open to a wide range of other cultures and musics from around the world; but on reflection, whilst I have loved klezmer, gypsy music and Eastern European folk music since childhood, British folk traditions have never held such an intense interest. I wonder if I am like my good friend who, as a Spanish composer based in London incorporated Spanish folk idioms into his writing, but then when he moved back to Spain these suddenly vanished completely from his music. In other words, if I didn't live in the UK perhaps I would take a deeper interest in its traditions. Perhaps, as Judith implies, it's to do with craving things that are not - for whatever reason - part of our daily lives?

Cultural identity

Friday night I went to a concert at the Bishopsgate Institute, that odd little tucked away venue in the heart of the City. The concert was Czech piano music played by William Howard and included some preludes and fugues by Pavel Zemek Novak, part of a huge piano work over an hour and a half long that William Howard has championed here.

There was a pre concert talk with David Matthews, an old pal of mine, and it was remembering his enthusiasm for Novak’s music that attracted me to the concert. Novak is very interesting, despite his very sober and rather shy appearance: he has a preoccupation with unison writing, and an interest in trying to erase dissonance both horizontally and vertically – he tried not to have the ‘melodic’ line travel in seconds or sevenths even.

The music is not without tension though, but has an unusual freshness and energy all of its own. Intriguing was the word that came into my mind. In the pre-concert talk I asked Novak what the music world in Czechoslovakia had been like after the war, given that so many musicians had died in Terezin or had fled the country. Did the composers that were left look back, or did they try and create something entirely new? Novak spoke very sympathetically (and with a lot of emotion) about two composers, Miloslav Ištvan, and Miloslav Kabelác who were subject to virtual house arrest by the Communists after the war, and not allowed to travel, nor have many performances.

I think I wasn’t alone in feeling a bit shame-faced that I hadn’t heard of them, or heard their music. He spoke with passion also about the different sorts of folk music in Czechoslovakia, and about national feeling. Afterwards I thought how different it is to live in a country that was not invaded, and how it has allowed us to be incredibly complacent about our own cultural identity. Can you imagine anyone ever asking me in a pre-concert talk about national identity? - I always feel that if I have used British folk music I have to be a bit apologetic, or risk looking either very conventional or worse, fascistic.

I wonder how we would feel about 20^th century composers like say Vaughan Williams, Finzi, Britten, Tippett, or Malcolm Arnold, Elisabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy et al if they had been carted off to death camps, or forced to leave everything behind and flee? The last time British composers came under any real threat was the Reformation, and their music has come to represent a kind of essential Englishness, and along with choral evensong it encodes an extraordinary national identity.

The other day some dimwit in a major newspaper talked about how few great composers Britain has produced, and was the usually disparaging idiot about contemporary music. When I was a student it was absolutely forbidden to like the sort of music known as ‘cow pat music,’ (a term coined by Liz Lutyens!) as if national identity was something to be utterly despised.

Then as now to some extent, professors in music colleges prefer a European model to a native one. We have no experience of what it would be like to lose our cultural exponents in the way most European countries have, and have become unbelievably careless with our own culture. Maybe one day it will all be taken away from us, and then we will talk, with tears in our eyes, like Novak, of the treasures we had and lost.

soundSCAPE New Music Festival

New music enthusiast Bob Schneider draws my attention to the soundSCAPE New Music Festival 2010. This composers and performers exchange takes place between 14-25 July 2010 at Lake Maggiore in the beautiful Italain Alps. It is an opportunity for composers to get their works premiered. Special features this year include a composer-in-residence fellowship and creating violin and guitar duets, to be performed by Duo46. Application deadline is March 31,2010. For details, visit http://www.soundscapefestival.org

No living composer sat BBC Music Magazine Awards

sorry...time to rant

http://www.bbcmusicmagazine.com/awards2010

If you care to peruse this link, you will notice something rather peculiar...wait, no, something completely normal!

Not one living composer represented.

Now, I understand this isn't 'the point'. But there is a message here, and that is "living composers are not part of the game". We are a side show. Not really worth noticing, actually. And if you are a performer, especially a hard working ambitious one, it is best advised to avoid new music as it won't get you recognition.

Ok, only one award - fine. But this is the BBC! I expect more from them. And understand that as I write this, the funding for Canadians to record new music has been scrapped. Gone. So, not only do we have to "compete" against Mozart, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky for a crumb of attention, but now we (in Canada, but your turn might be coming) can't even get support to try.

Oh, it's an old argument, I know. But, I'll say it again: This is another blow down for classical music. Slowly inching its way into museum like obscurity. We stand close to the edge, folks. Or, are we already in the hole?

Here are some quotes from reviewers I'd like to highlight:

-"Tchaikovsky’s songs for solo voice and piano are relatively unfamiliar"

-"Pianist Iain Burnside here presents a superb selection of Liszt’s mostly too-little-known songs"

I'm just in tears. I hope another 120 years will allow these masterpieces to finally realize their potential.

-"Two of the three works on this disc are more than 50 years old, but they still tend to be regarded as 'new music', though Agon is one of Stravinsky's most appealing scores."

-"With so many Verdi Requiems on the market, it would normally be hard to justify another. But these are exceptional circumstances."

Yes, these are exceptional circumstances. New music isn't new.

"This is your chance to have a say in the UK’s biggest classical music awards."

Well, they are very good recordings, for sure. And I love all of this music. But this is where my 2 cents lies today. I'm just in that kind of mood.

Six Pianos in The Roundhouse

A few months ago, when the days were long and the weather warm (remember that?) Rolf Hind asked me if I would be interested in writing a piece for a concert featuring multiple pianos in London. I’ve been asked to participate in some odd projects but I think this one was the strangest. I think in this day and age composers have to be prepared for almost anything; the ability to be flexible is one of those extra things that still isn’t taught in every school and it’s a good skill to acquire. So, with that in mind I thought I’d write about my initial thought process when I started writing the piece.

So, the request with my initial thoughts in italics:

1) Six Pianos Okay, I haven’t written that much for piano, but I suppose that that’s not really a handicap when it comes to writing for six of them. I mean it’s not as if writing for solo violin really gives one a head start when writing for string quartet.

2) Percussion: OK now we’re talking! I’ve written a lot of percussion music.

3) Audience Participation. The audience is going to be asked to bring along percussion that they can play as part of the piece. Wow…

4) Built-In Flexibilty. It’s in a huge space and the set-up might be variable. Also as it’s on at the start and the end of the concert some flexibility has to be built-in. Well, now that we’re at it, why not?

Of course I said yes. I love a challenge. The first thing to sort out was how to deal with six pianos. My solution was not to use too much bass; I knew that it would get muddy. I have to say that, even though I didn’t know much multiple piano music my impression of it was that there was a lot of single-hand writing. There are two reasons for this, I think. First, the muddiness issue: single-hand writing just cleans up the texture. Second, because this writing adds to the sense of ensemble. It changes the idea of the piano from a self-contained entity to an instrument in an ensemble, each contributing to the overall sonority. So, the pianos are, like any other group of six instruments, a chamber ensemble. Right from the beginning I had this in mind. As a result of this, I started with the idea of having things passed around the pianos. When you have six of the same instrument this just seems idiomatic and it solidifies the idea of the chamber ensemble.

The second and third things kind of came together. I chose to have the percussionist lead the audience so that, broadly speaking, it plays what he plays. The visual aspect I thought would help keep everyone together. It also helps to create a useful visual link between what’s happening on stage and what’s going on in the audience.

The way to deal with the flexibility issue came from the limitation or particular feature of the ensemble. I’m always on at my students to get them to exploit instrumental limitations as compositional possibilities; it’s a little obsession of mine. At first I thought that the plan might be to have six grand pianos on stage. This wasn’t the case. The set-up didn’t call for six grand pianos on stage but two grand pianos and four uprights. This, apart from being much more practical, adds another layer to the sound, and divides the ensemble into two. I decided to have the grands do a lot of the heavy lifting, leaving the uprights more free to share material between them. So, the grands play together as a unit and the four uprights have a more flexible interaction.

Finally the performance is taking place in The Roundhouse. I had heard tales of this legendary venue, but hadn’t seen it since it reopened. I really had to see the space before starting the write. It’s really remarkable both visually and acoustically.

In the end I decided to try to project the inherent resonance of the pianos into the space. In many ways that became the theme of the piece: the piece is in three main sections each being in a state of flux. One way or another they each become more resonant. In the end, it was a strange but fun piece to write. It took a lot of strategising and working out logistics, but that became part of the piece. Having been to the first rehearsal I’m happy to say that things are sounding good. If you’d like to see for yourself, the piece is on in the Roundhouse, London this Sunday, January 31^st at 8pm and will be broadcast live online. If you do come, don’t forget to bring along some percussion.

My Perfect Weekend

I had hoped that would be able to get to Manchester for an early rehearsal of the piece I've written for the Hallé/BBC Philharmonic Mahler cycle - it's a setting of Wordsworth called 'Crossing the Alps' (from The Prelude) for unaccompanied chorus (well, not quite unaccompanied - it includes an organ pedal, for safety's sake), to partner Mahler 2 (I was briefly tempted to use the full orchestral forces, but fun as it would have been to have ten horns, repeat performances would probably be a little more unlikely than they usually are).

In the event all I've had is a phone converstion with Ralph Allwood, who's rehearsing the Hallé Choir (Markus Stenz will conduct the performance), which was reassuring : I know how good the Choir is, but you have to remember that they are all amateurs, and not push them too far (I think the piece may sound rather like Strauss . . .). But the thing that's surprised me is the amount of media interest in this cycle - a clever move on the orchestras' part to start the celebrations early in 2010, the 150th anniversary of Mahler's birth, rather than wait for 2011 and the centenary of his death. Too much Mahler overall, I fear. (The Concertgebouw started even earlier - they asked me to orchestrate Mahler's 1876 Piano Quartet, which kicked off their events last November.)

I've written a paragraph which went into The Observer, plus notes for the perfomance, and had numerous requests for interviews (only one of which I was able to do - there seems to be an obsession with doing these things live, which is hardly convenient, especially if you're trying to bring 3 composers together, as Music Matters hoped). And I was supposed to do an interview with the Nottingham Evening Post (the piece gets taken to Nottingham after the Manchester perfomance) but because they haven't got room in the weekday edition I've been asked instead to write a piece for their series 'My Perfect Weekend' (large amounts of alcohol, ideally). Since that sounds about right for a blog, this is what I've written, with the hope of following it up here with a report on the performance, now only 2 days away.

More years ago than I care to admit to - when I was at Nottingham University in the mid 1960s - my ideal weekend would have been spent largely at the movies. There was a big choice of cinemas in and around Nottingham in those days (does the Byron Hucknall still survive?) as well as an on-campus film club, and I would sometimes see as many as 10 films a week.

That particular passion hasn't lasted, although one that long predated my time in Nottingham, a hopeless devotion to Leyton Orient (where my dad first took me when I was six years old), still means that Saturday afternoons are often spent at Brisbane Road (I did watch Orient play - and lose to - Forest at the City Ground on the few occasions we were in the same division).

But weekends are generally, for me, part of the working week. As a composer, you don't do office hours and Saturday and Sunday consequently don't feel like days off. So while I feel I should say that my ideal weekend would be spent in Venice, or Amsterdam (my two favourite European cities), I'm not really happy unless I get at least some work done.

So the perfect weekend would have to include at least a dozen bars of music that I was satisfied with (at the moment I've been working for two or three weeks without a single successful bar!). I work quite a lot of the year in Somerset, surrounded by fields, so a walk, preferably in bright sunshine, would be essential. If my increasingly creaky limbs were up to it, a game of tennis would be a bonus, although there probably wouldn't be time to get to the tennis court in the South of France we were able to use during last summer's holiday - surrounded by mountains and overlooked by hang gliders.

I ought to say that a concert should be a part of this weekend : if it were, it certainly wouldn't include any of my own music, or I would spend too much of the time biting my nails. Perhaps an hour long concert (without an interval - they always get in the way) would fit the bill : preferably a blend of old and new.

But the most important thing would be a family meal, on Sunday evening (we never have Sunday lunch - what are you expected to do in the afternoon?) This has been a family tradition since long before our children left home, and they often join us to round off the weekend with a roast and a few good bottles. The simplest of pleasures are always the best.

BBC NOW Welsh Composers Showcase

The BBC NOW has done a lot for new music in Cardiff recently, in addition to regular commissions and premieres, the appointment of Simon Holt as composer-in-residence is a refreshing development, as is a new series of Composer Portraits including figures from the continent such as Christian Jost and Bruno Mantovani whose work is too seldom heard on these shores. (Coincidentally, Hear and Now will broadcast a BBC NOW new music concert on Feb 6 with works by Jost, Watkins, Sawer and yours truly - links to the podcast soon...)

As well as widening the scope of the orchestra's new music programming, the NOW is also initiating an important platform for area talent, providing a wonderful opportunity for Welsh-born and/or Welsh-educated composers of any age. I'm delighted that postgraduates from my department at Cardiff University are so well represented (Max Charles Davies, Christian Morris and Jack White) and it's lovely to see a local professional composer, Timothy Raymond, in the line-up as well.

Welsh Composers Showcase with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Jac van Steen
In collaboration with Composers of Wales, Ty Cerdd and the Welsh Music Guild
Thursday 28th and Friday 29th January 2010 – BBC Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff Bay

Workshops and culmination concert at BBC Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff Bay:
Thursday 28 January 2010
- Workshops - 10.00-13.00 and 14.00-17.00

Friday 29 January 2010
- Workshops - 14.00-17.00
- Concert - 19.00

The project will be led by Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Jac van Steen who has also selected the scores to be featured:

Max Charles Davies - Exultet
Iestyn Harding - Foray:Symphonic Movement for Orchestra
Chris Petrie - Percolation
Jack White - Y Deildy
Tim Raymond - Dreaming of Easter
Andrew Wilson Dickson - Blaen Myherin
Christian Morris - Lyra Davidica

All of these events are open to public audiences and free to attend. To reserve a tickets call the BBC National Orchestra of Wales Audience Line on 0800 052 1812.

Possibility

Possibility:

In the beginning, there was a sound...and this sound said "let me be free - i want to play". But, this sound did not have a language and context except those of its physical property. But those physical properties have very distinct characters that even without any musical system in place, have easily understood connotations. One could very convincingly, stand at the front of a stage, and emote through sound alone, very concrete emotional ideas - anger, love, sensuousness, fear, contentment. And one could relate these ideas to anyone, regardless of their training, nationality or language. The only restriction is the openness to experience.

Something has drawn the human mind towards making music. I don't care to discuss this, but simply hope it to be an accepted concept - we are born as musical entities, just as we are born with inherent grammatical skills. The music of a sound, or collection of sounds, is something we can understand from a very young age. In the maternity ward, when one baby fresh from the womb cries, they all cry. It is a reply to the musicality of a sound - a music we all understand in our deepest primal self.

For some reason, music improvisation is often viewed as an abstraction - a kind of learned skill. But we are improvising entities. As Noam Chomsky so elegantly describes, language is a continuous exercise in creativity. We do not "think" about our words, we just speak. Ask any group of people, as many as possible, to explain some basic concept, or describe an object, and the chances of two people using the exact same words is very improbable - we are constantly improvising, and no 2 people are the same, especially if we said they had to use at least 20 words.

In music, I have seen through my children (aged 1 and 3) that it is much the same. They do not think about making music, but simply react in musical ways. Musical gesture is immediate. Pitch inflection, repetition, and variation can be surprisingly accurate in the mind of a toddler. But over time, through a kind of criticism and conformity (music is this, not that) we unlearn these natural skills. The conscious mind overrides the unconscious - subdues it. The musician is taught that the music on the page is their duty, and since this duty has such lofty heights, we should not waste time with frivolous experiments. This is not necessarily said, but simply understood through the rigors of training. It is not possible to practice Mozart or Beethoven enough. As one small example, I remember hearing a violinist say that it takes at least 15 years of dedicated practice to achieve a "good sound"! Now that is time pressure.

I believe this is a problem for both composers and performers. But, as this is a composition site, I will attempt to explain why I believe this is so for composers (although the reasons do relate to each other).

First off, in this age of endless compositional possibility, I am often surprised at how many composers have decided what their music "is". How is it that one can understand fully know what they are capable of, until they have exhausted all possibilities (an impossibility)? How can we truly understand our potential? Perhaps because that unconscious mind has been shut off, or subdued. All ideas are left to simmer, passing through the various filters influenced by fears - failure, rejection, and their consequent aspirations - success and inclussion. As we progress through each stage of our development, we see areas to improve upon, and to regress to try something else would be a distraction. In essence, we decided what our music is in order to focus on achieving the best results.

But by the very nature of improvisation, we cannot have such thorough filters - there simply isn't time to allow for it. (I must note that I'm not really talking about jazz, where improvisation is key to the very structure and organization of the music - what I mean is free improvisation without any specific context except the in the moment). Improvisation frees the subconscious to explore beyond conscious limitations. Thus it feeds the creative urge - to continue searching, and not just building.

A second point is that improvisation can release a wealth of ideas for which the composer can future draw from. Raw material to be shaped into composition. I'm sure that all composers improvise to a degree, but I'm suggesting taking it further, and participating in group improvisation, as well as personal work at the piano (or any instrument or singing). Group improvisation creates situations in which timbre becomes the focus, and there are several exercises that help focus that timbral exploration. One I have particularly enjoyed is a simple structure: The improvisation is divided into 1min segments - at the beginning of each segment, each player decides in the instant what they are going to play for that minute. So, a somewhat random assortment of sounds is started, and it is then the job of the players to subtly alter their choice to find a blend and balance with the others. A searching for common ground that can yield some very unexpected, yet incredibly interesting juxtapositions. It is also a wonderful arena to explore extended technique in a room filled with people of similar intent.

Which leads me to my last, and perhaps most important aspect of improvisation, and that is the awareness of a larger musical community one can build improvising. Without the rigorous limitations of the score, any group of people playing any instruments from any genre can get together and make music. What could be more beautifully symbolic for our shrinking globalized world? An arena of limitless potential to search and find crossroads between any and all cultures musics.

In Toronto, there is an organization called "The Woodchoppers Association" that is a collective of around 200+ improvisers of a multitude of backgrounds. What is so very special about this group is that it's mantra is two-fold:

1- it is not possible to play a wrong note

2- we come together to play with love in our hearts!

Frankly, a dose of this kind of attitude once and awhile helps, well, "keep it real" as they say. Attitudes that are shunned by our fast paced commercial world where only the cream rises to the top, and crushes it's competitors. It isn't about winning a job or landing a commission. It is only about living in the moment, and sharing the great gift of music with any and all who want to join.

Scott

About the audio excerpt: A couple of years ago, I co-composed a "show" with a singer/songwriter. It was a 10 movement work in which each was in some way, a tribute to the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Covering a wide range of stylistic influence, the movement included here is a "free improv" section inspired by "The Sirens of Titan". But, it isn't completely free, as there were a set of instructions: From the ensemble (17 piece), 4 duos were extracted - and each duo was instructed to try and communicate with each other 'as if you have never held your instrument before'. Each duo tries to develop a language for which they can speak to each other. Any other members are allowed to try and join in, once the communication has been established.

At the magical 2/3rds point in the piece, all players join in together to recite lines in a variety of languages, but reciting with growing and growing grotesqueness and exaggeration.

These instructions were only provided at the end of the intermission - no practice nor did anyone know what was going to be asked of them. It would be the 2nd movement after intermission.

This was the result on this particular night. Enjoy!

Feb Concert Picks

My concert picks for Feb in the London area:

NY Philharmonic / Magnus Lindberg /John Adams

Newly appointed Director of the NY Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert brings the orchestra to London for the first time for the UK premiere of Magnus Lindberg's EXPO, 3 Feb, Barbican

http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?id=8561

also John Adam's Wound Dresser and Berg 3 Orchestral Pieces on the 4th Feb

http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?id=8562

London Sinfonietta / George Benjamin 7 Feb, QEH

The London Sinfonietta celebrates George Benjamin's 50th birthday, 7 Feb, QEH

http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/music/classical/tickets/london-sinfonietta-george-benjamin-50th-birthday-concert-46760

Pianocircus 15 Feb, Hoxton Hall

http://www.pianocircus.com/gigs/festival1.htm

Programme to include works by Yumi Hara Cawkwell, David Lang, Andrew Morgan, Lynne Plowman and Kenneth Hesketh.

Prokofiev's The Gambler (all through Feb), at Covent Garden

http://www.roh.org.uk/whatson/production.aspx?pid=10626

That which touches, or that which surprises

(With apologies to Jim Aitchison, as this covers some of the same ground as his own recent blog)

How very ‘present’ the past is these days. Our daily existence finds the past ghosting up beside us and making an appearance in so many ways: retro designs, the nostalgic costume dramas and history programmes on TV, and the current fascination for tracing the family tree, to name a few of many examples. No other culture has been as entranced with previous times as our own is.

I find the past endlessly fascinating, not for the reasons I’ve mentioned above but for the fact that it gives us a chance to see the world through other’s eyes, to try and break out of our own contemporary conditioning. When I’m in London I’ll often visit the British Museum, and wandering from room to room I come across affirmations of being and awareness; the way octopus designs curl cleverly around Minoan pottery, the Sumerian sculptures of power and shamanistic presence, the perfected and dramatic forms of ancient Greece. As I can’t access the music of these distant cultures I can at least see how they created artefacts that tackled problems of visual depiction - form and space, the precision of content – and somehow this experience, and my reflections on it, throws my own creative processes into relief. It also shows me how much creativity is enabled, and restricted, by the medium that is available for it to work through.

From a musical point of view, a quick survey of the contemporary composer’s resources proves illuminating. Instruments have reached a stage of ‘finite technology’; there are only so many ways one can produce sound – blow, pluck, scrape - and these seem to have been mostly explored. Electronic music has added a new dimension, but has failed to have more than a fringe impact in the classical arena. Another piece of finite technology is tonality, which slowly developed its complex and expressive system of harmonic relationships until it appeared to exhaust all possibilities. As classical composers we worry a great deal about the regressive aspects of writing tonal music, but the rest of the musical world seems happily undisturbed by this question – pop, rock, jazz, and many other styles, continue to produce new music that recycles the same harmonies. Are we fretting unnecessarily? After all, novelists fashion their work within the context of a verbal language that is developing very slowly, and mostly by small additions of vocabulary than by any larger changes to grammar and syntax.

If instruments are no longer developing in new directions, and if it is hard to create any previously unused harmonic relationships, is there any sense of the ‘new’ in music. Is it even necessary? Am I running up a white flag by suggesting that novelty and innovation are no longer a composer’s prized aspirations?!

Much of the music written in the decades that followed 1945 had something of the ‘shock of the new’ about it; graphic notation, improvisation, total serialism, silence, mobile forms, and so on. Many of these innovations have withered and failed to produce a genuinely new language that can move music forward; there were of course interesting offshoots from these experiments that shouldn’t be ignored, but they have not become mainstream. More importantly, there was a mindset during this period that contemporary music should be intensely serious, profound, difficult (to both listen to, and perform), and always striving to break new ground. This approach seems to have alienated audiences to the extent that contemporary classical music is now virtually off the cultural map.

François Couperin once wrote, ‘I would say, quite honestly, that I greatly prefer that which touches me to that which surprises me,’ a viewpoint that I’d concur with. The question of what was being communicated in post war music was at times ignored in favour of a scramble for innovation; no wonder so many listeners lost interest. Technical modifications and cutting edge processes were rarely partners to new sentiments, although some composers could do both, and continue to excite me today as much as they did when I first encountered their music.

This is why, for me, the experience of hanging around the British Museum is so important – a mixture of caffeine and culture is always heady anyway. Looking at the exhibits one can see objects that offer up passion, beauty, ritual, enjoyment, pleasure, craftsmanship, and many other qualities. Some show incredible technical refinement, others have a strange mythic presence.

The creative hurly-burly of the last two centuries (or to be precise, the whole process of the emancipation of the artist after the French Revolution) seems to have slowed. If we are to get modern classical music back into cultural life perhaps we need to worry less about the future of music, and more about the qualities we invest in the pieces we are writing right now. Those who fashioned Greek vases, or the decorative motifs of ancient Egypt, were not concerned with ground breaking innovation, but with pleasure, meaning and communication, which is why these objects still speak to us after all this time.

An afterthought: I was listening to BBC Radio 4 today – there was a trailer for a new series of programmes in which the comedian/writer/actor Lenny Henry is to explore three things that he’s always failed to get his head around. The trailer announced, ‘Lenny Henry will examine the plays of Samuel Beckett, the paintings of Jackson Pollock…and maths.’ There was a slight pause before the ‘and maths’ bit, in which my mind automatically filled in the blank with ‘the music of Stockhausen’. It was a logical thought, literature/art/music; but it turned out to be one of the many instances in cultural life that one notices contemporary classical music only because of its absence!

George Benjamin podcast

Ahead of his 50th birthday concert on Sunday 7 February 2010 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the London Sinfonietta has produced a new podcast profiling composer George Benjamin.

Sara Mohr-Pietsch talks to the composer about his life’s work, influences and compositional styles highlighting the music that has brought him international renown.

(via http://www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk/audio/london-sinfonietta-podcast-7-george-benjamin)

For a further overview of Benjamin's work see our feature article by Gavin Thomas

David Lang Interview

The good folks over at Sequenza 21 have been fortunate enough to link up with world-renowned violinist Hilary Hahn, to do a series of composer interviews. In the latest video, Hilary interviews composer David Lang, who's Little Match Girl Passion won the Pulitzer Prize 2008 (which you can listen to at the Carnegie Hall website )

David talks about his creative process, how in his training he felt your duty was to push all your composer colleagues under buses, and how, despite winning the Pulitzer, he is on the whole not in favour of competitions. It's a fascinating insight into one of the US's most prominent composers.

Video Part 2
Video Part 3

Earworms

I am writing a piece at the moment, a singspiel, which is taken from a satirical story by Hoffman. Hoffman was satirising Napoleonic times with its delusions of grandeur and attendant subservient flunkeys – a universal theme if ever there was one! Although I have moved the story away from Napoleon, I feel that I want to keep one foot in the early 19th century, and so I am referencing Rossini a bit, and using one particular melody ‘Di tanti palpiti’ from Tancredi (for all you Rossini fans!) as a basic source material for the music.

This tune is a real ohrwurm. I do recommend that you look at the Wikipedia entry for earworm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm) – it is amazing how much people have thought about tunes that get stuck in your head. And did you know that earworms should not be confused with ‘endomusia, a serious affliction, through which a sufferer actually hears music that is not playing externally.’ Hmm.

The brief for my singspiel was that the theme of the festival it’s in is Robert Schumann and mental health, and you may know that Robert Schumann had endomusia, and sometimes believed that angels were dictating pieces to him. But I wonder just where the dividing line is between hearing music in your head when you are composing and the serious affliction known as endomusia? I often wake up in the night and the piece I am writing is playing in my head, and I maybe even find it is solving a problem. (Sometimes I find it thinks it is solving a problem but it is not.) But whatever, I am always reassured that in the attic room that is my subconscious, work is being done while I (the drone) get to sleep.

History demonstrates that it seems to be important for a piece of music to be memorable in order for it to survive. But it is hard to define what memorability means. It doesn’t mean easy or hard, for something like the Rite of Spring is extremely memorable, both melodically and harmonically. When I was in the BBC Singers it was always interesting what stayed in your mind and what didn’t. We recorded all of Boulez’ choral works, and performed them many times and yet personally I could not sing you anything from any of them, or even properly recall them in the way that I can recall The Rite. Sometimes as soon as the rehearsal had finished, the music was gone and the reigning earworm whether it was by Reich, Radiohead or even me, would return as if it had simply been put on hold.

Pieces which have been heard only once but have impressed can be recalled months or years later in a sort of compressed memory chip, some aural image of them which has been retained. What it is that makes them memorable is not necessarily that they can be whistled, like Rossini, but that something about them is so important to us personally that we need to repeat the memory of them. Maybe our subconscious minds are sending us some sort of psychological message in the same way that I believe illness is a physical message. I realise that this is an unsatisfactory explanation! and would welcome everyone’s input. Meanwhile, I must get back to the serious affliction that is composing.

Homecoming Festival in Russia

I would like to update you on a festival in Moscow called Homecoming - a series of chamber music concerts. The idea was that the young top classical musicians who where educated at Moscow’s best music schools and subsequently settled in Europe return to Moscow every winter to play together. The festival, which started as a small group of friends making music to their pleasure, gradually grew into a major event on Moscow’s classical scene. Newspapers, programmes on national TV and Radio extensively cover it every season. The festival has its own devoted audience; when the house is full, people stand through the concerts or sit on window sills – in Russia they are not as conscious of safety rules!

Each year the Homecoming Festival commissions a new piece from a young contemporary composer –Dobrinka Tobakova, Ed Bennet and Brian Irvine are among the names you might know. Sometimes, European musicians are invited to join - this winter they have a British soprano Anna Dennis, who is going to sing Ades’ Life Story, Stravinsky’s songs and my own Two Cat Songs. Whatever new music Homecoming features, it is cleverly put in a context which allows a quite traditionally-minded Russian audience to digest it.

As well as premiers, the Homecoming musicians perform varied and eclectic programmes consisting of music of all possible epochs and styles. Each concert has a unifying theme. This season, for example, two themes are ‘Counterpoint’, with music by Guillaume Dufay, Webern, Schostakovich, Glinka, Reger, Schnittke and Beethoven, and ‘In Nature’ featuring works by Coelestin Harst (1698-1776), George Crumb, Stravinsky, Giacino Scelsi, Latvian minimal composer George Pelecis.

The concept of mixing contemporary music with other music is obviously not new. Still, I believe it is one of the best ways to create an exciting programme. Besides the programming, I think the success of the new music within the festival is due to the prodigious musicality of the performers, who bring exactly the same level of precision and interpretative refinement to their renditions of contemporary pieces as they would to a Schubert song or Beethoven string quartet.

For more information, visit the Homecoming Festival page on its Artistic Director’s website: www.romanmints.com

Progress to the Sounds of the Future?

There was an interesting letter published in the December 2009 issue of the Gramophone written in response to the magazine’s ‘The Shape of Sounds to come’ article from October 2009. In it, the correspondent described the article’s proposal of the general demise of serialism and its more despotic progeny as a largely positive thing, but was very troubled by its description of what he regarded as recent trends of rampant eclecticism progressively unmitigated by any historical perspective. The writer decried the tendency, as he saw it, for huge swathes new music not to adhere to a road of ‘progression’ arising from historically validated routes: new music, in his words, must evolve coherently (presumably becoming ‘better’?) from its predecessors (in a forwards direction?).

I endorse the feeling that an indefinitely unhomogenized cornucopia of wildly divergent styles, techniques and aesthetics is not necessarily a healthy state of affairs. Though it seems that music history, in its headlines if not the reality, is so often characterised by lurches between one pole or another and there has been an almost tangible, long dawn out sigh of relief across much of the new music arena that dogmas propagated by so few but which have held sway over so many, have, like the Berlin Wall, long crumbled, even if the legacies and the grooves remain potent and often fertile.

However, what really interests me in the Gramophone correspondent’s words is the notion of ‘progress’ in music itself, something with which I both agree and disagree – i.e. it is an idea that I find both confusing and elusive, but I am also passionately committed to the belief that our music should arise from a tradition. When we speak of progress as an end, what do we mean? Is this a chronological phenomenon? It may be over-simplistic, but do we consider that composers of the C20th modernist canon or those of our own period in some way surpass the composers, for example, of Bach’s era, both due to the passing of musical time in between them and because they employ an arsenal of devices that articulate a spectrum of musical parameters much wider and more detailed than Bach or his contemporaries could contemplate? Of course this comes down to how you define musical progress and who decides and defines what qualities are to be prized and which are to be demoted or discarded. The historical process of assigning value and status is, as we know, incredibly drawn out, often chaotic and capricious, vulnerable to ephemeral fashions and expediency and composers such as Bach were almost as likely as anyone to disappear into a historical black hole.

My feeling is that we are leaving a period in which the idea of ‘progress,’ if not fetishized, was certainly in some cases misapprehended and sometimes misapplied into an equation where preoccupation with quantity (or ‘density’), be it theoretical, material, expressive or structural, tended dangerously towards the eclipsing of artistic quality in the order of priorities (yes I know I haven’t defined what I mean by ‘artistic quality.’ But do I need to?). It could be argued that parts of the C20th modernist project propagated great material and theoretical complexity but sometimes with artistically primitive results but that this has been an entirely necessary first step in a process of destruction and groping towards re-building a musical language or languages. I think the fear of unmitigated and unbounded excess is understandable but will be ultimately unfounded. We have been through a hundred years of often clinging to the narrowest margins of extreme rigidity or to its polar opposite but now neither are really as necessary in the same way, even though one might chose such a path. The current phase of seemingly boundless adolescent possibilities may well eventually pass into one of greater integration and maturity, but it may take another 100 or even 200 years or so for this to happen, and it may not find its home in the Occident.

Having said all this it seems to me that perhaps the future has never been less certain. With the exception of electronic music (which has a host of its own problems), we are completing an arc in which our readily available traditional sound resources have largely stopped developing. It is so easy to forget that in the C19th the great European piano tradition was unfolding simultaneously with extraordinarily diverse innovations in piano building right across the continent. Composers were uncovering astonishingly new and fluid musical statements - what we now think of as classics cast in stone - exactly as these instruments were being innovated in a plethora of varying forms, rather as John Cage, some hundred years later, conceived an almost entirely new instrument in the form of the prepared piano and revealed such fertile soil in the ground of an untrodden keyboard landscape. In both cases it was the discovery of whole new domains of sound-resources that directly ignited an intense creative flowering. In the case of the former it was trans-continental in scale and happened hand in hand with a social and domestic revolution where the piano became an object imported into in a huge proportion of middle and upper class homes, giving composers an unprecedented market for their work that we in the so called classical music world may never encounter again. It is very difficult to see how and where music might evolve if our instruments and ensembles remain as static as they have become, but then I suppose our voices are instruments as old as we are, as are the limbs that beat out the slowly decaying pulse of our lives. This is the wonder of music: speculations aside, ultimately, it is impossible to know what will happen or where it will take us.

Let your work be impermanent

"To understand all is to forgive all, the French saying goes. In "Zoli," a novel about the Gypsies of Eastern Europe, Colum McCann imagines a deeper, darker watchword for this immemorially wandering and persecuted people: to be understood, even in part, is to be violated and destroyed." NY Times review of Zoli by Colum McCann

One of the fascinating themes of the novel Zoli (and I promise all this does relate to composing!), is the difference in attitudes between the Western/White attitude to the meaning and permanence of culture; and that of the Gypsies. Where the non-Gypsy protagonists in the story attempt to 'save for posterity' Zoli's brilliance as a poet and singer, the Gypsies find this very notion absurd and eventually outcast Zoli for what they see as her betrayal of their culture by allowing her words to be written down. At the end of the novel Zoli sends a message to her English/Czech former-lover and documenter who has spent lovesick years trying to find her again. The one thing she has to say to him after all this time is "nothing is ever fully understood" - that the white man's impulse to attempt to understand and document everything is doomed to failure. Culture and meaning are impermanent, incorporeal, impossible to capture. Indeed, like a quantum particle, the very act of looking changes their meaning.

Whilst I am a composer whose method of expression is tied completely to writing down my music, I can't help feeling us 21st Century composers fall far too far into the very trap the book so beautifully portrays. When we fetishize every last detail of how a note should be played, we are trying to turn music into something it is not. Our compositions are not physical, quantifiable things, however much spotlessly perfect CD recordings and Sibelius midi playbacks might lead us to believe they are. The meaning of a piece is passed by a performer from paper to the vibrating air the same intangible way friendship is sustained - through trust and respect, thoughtfulness, attention and understanding. Those are things you can't notate. A good musician will bring those things to your score however many dots and lines you add to a note. And in the spirit of friendship I believe it's important to give that trust back to the player as much as you can. If you love someone, set them free...