The Rambler

The BBC Proms season has almost completely passed me by this year. When I was a teenager, and used to come with a friend of mine and get drunk listening to Messiaen, sitting in the balcony for 3 quid, it seemed like the world’s greatest music festival, and that it was a pleasure to live within easy travelling distance of it. But since I moved back to London 5 years ago, I’ve steadily gone to fewer and fewer Proms each year, until this year I’m barely going to one – and that’s tonight. I’ve loved Monteverdi’s Vespers for years. One of the most moving holidays I’ve had with milady was to Venice – for me this was a pilgrimage to San Marco to see where, as far as I’m concerned, modern music history was born. There can’t be a single building on earth responsible for so much. The architecture of San Marco, full of balconies, side chapels and alcoves encouraged several generations of composers to introduce antiphonal effects into their music, setting groups against one another, creating tension and drama through the opposition of ensembles. A few decades down the line and the concerto, one of the central forms of Western art music was born. Without San Marco, you might say, we wouldn’t have many of the best works of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Bartók or Stravinsky.

OK, that’s drastically over-simplifying the point, but there are still very few occasions when you can (even naively) trace the origin of an art form to a single place, and that makes it special.

Monteverdi’s Vespers, while not composed in Venice, were written largely with San Marco in mind. Monteverdi was after the job of capellmeister at San Marco – possibly the most prestigious musical post in Italy – and Vespers was his job application. Unsurprisingly it did the trick.

Tonight’s concert is going to be a little odd for me – I can’t remember the last time I went to a concert of non-contemporary music; still less a concert of early 17th-century music. Still, the Vespers are audacious in places (the opening chorus is simply chanted on a monochord, almost like Xenakis, or Glass), and Monteverdi’s film-cut structures can sound Stravinsky-like, so I won’t feel too lost.

Alex Ross has covered Shostakovich once more in the new New Yorker, following up on a previous blog post. The choice line for me is, “Russian composers seem especially vulnerable to urban legends, as if facts mattered even less behind the old Iron Curtain.” So true. It’s that occasional chestnut of West-East European politics once more. There’s a tendency among Western European critics to approach Soviet-era art as though the adjective was all that mattered: Soviet-era = X, where X is a fairly consistently defined narrative of oppression, subterfuge, underground triumph, etc. The designation is enough to deny the work the free air breathed by every piece of Western art. The problem is compounded by the fact that casting an East European artist as a struggling, samizdat hero often seems the noblest thing to do; many people follow this line unconsciously assuming that this is desirable. Not everyone takes up this position – to claim this would be to commit the same mistake in the opposite direction: Euro-occidentalism, anyone? – but sufficiently great a number to encourage great wariness when approaching any criticism of Eastern European art from a Western perspective. Make troubled heros out of Havel, Milosz and Shostakovich if you must, but never lose sight of the works they made, as works in themselves.

Apologies to Rob @ musicircus, who I have accidentally snubbed in my sidebar links overhaul. I though you’d stopped writing Rob – but I’ll see that you’re back on there soon. Sorry about that! Glad to hear the dissertation is finally put to rest. There really is nothing like that post-submission feeling!

… was just a little while ago when BBC’s Clare Balding admitted that during Paul Green’s Taekwondo bout, she had been shouting “Just kick him in the face!” at the studio monitors. Lovely.

Since my monthly SPNM newsletter came through today, along with the usual sheaf of flyers, here are my tips for what to listen to live in the coming months (if you, er, live in London that is).

The BMIC’s Cutting Edge series is always worth paying attention to. Probably the most important new music series in the city, and regularly an occasion for new Brit experimentalism. All concerts are at the Warehouse, Theed Street, Waterloo. Highlights for me include:

23 September: Three Strange Angels – including works by Reich, Fitkin, Montague and Cage. Three Strange Angels are led by Richard Benjafield (the hardest working percussionist in London?) and Ensemble Bash co-founder Chris Brannick.

21 October: I’ve never actual seen any of Holliger’s music performed live. I’ve got a CD with him playing one of his oboe studies in overtones, and speaking as an ex-oboist I have absolutely no idea how he makes the sounds he does. Chris Redgate is the kind of player who can approach Holliger’s virtuosity, so he’s worth seeing anyway. The Holliger piece here is Cardiophony, which uses the live, amplified heartbeat of the performer to form part of the work’s rhythm track – so the performance tempo is wholly contingent upon the nerves of the player. Another work here, Ferneyhough’s awesome Time and Motion Study II, also uses an amplified performer, this time a cellist. This is not a concert for the meek, or those who don’t fancy a bit of musical body fetishism.

If this doesn’t floor you, there’s a similarly gritty show on the 9 December when Ensemble Exposé (directed by Chris Redgate’s brother, composer Roger) roll up to play Dillon, Holliger, Finnissy, Ross Lorraine, Joanna Bailie and Ferneyhough (the fab Etudes transcendentales included in my Music Since 1960 run down).

28 October: Two works here by composers I have academic interests in – Ian Wilson and Krzysztof Penderecki, so I’m compelled to go to this in more than one way… Wilson’s Phosphorous is a relatively new work, and one I don’t know all that well. Penderecki’s Trio (1990-91) belongs to his most recent phase of development which has come since the fall of the Berlin wall, and represents a less sprawling, more capricious phase after the vast neo-Romantic marathons of the 1970s and 80s. It’s a neat little piece.

2 December: Juice Vocal Trio. This is a concert including 6 (count ‘em!) world premieres, and aside from Meredith Monk and Paul Robinson (neither among those being premiered) I don’t recognise a single name on the bill. This counts as a good thing. Writing for vocal trio must be pretty tricky too, so there should be some interesting work here.

And finally, it’s a looong way off yet, but Rambler favourite Kaija Saariaho has two works in a free concert (part of the Philharmonia’s Music of Today series) on 7th June next year at the Festival Hall – the classic Lichtbogen, and the UK premiere of her flute concerto Terrestre. Top. A little nearer to the present day, the BBC Symphony are performing the orchestral version of her Quatre instants at the Barbican on 1st October, paired with Mahler’s 2nd Symphony.

That’s enough pluggery for one day …

Now if this was available in RSS, that would be the greatest thing…

I’ve had a dink around with the link bar on the left there and added a bunch of names to it, so do have a look.

Now, this site, curated by Margaret Greentree, seems well worthy of a mention. Like the Well-Tempered Clavier site I linked to a couple of months ago, this one also came from my professional overhaul of a rather bloated database of music links. And once again this one stood out a mile from most of the others. Bach’s 371 chorales hold for me a curious place in music history. For a start, ‘the Bach chorale’ is almost unique in that it is something that almost any music student will learn how to write at some point in their studies. Whilst there are other large, coherent compendiums of musical style – Vivaldi’s concerti, Schubert’s songs, Scarlatti’s sonatas, Chopin’s piano pieces – because of their simplicity, and brevity, the Bach chorales are the only ones that are consistently taught, and at a relatively early stage (I started writing them at 16). What this did for me, as someone who had youthful aspirations at composition, was cement them in my mind as both a guidance (not stylistically, but in terms of voicing, and vertical balance they can’t be bettered) and a resource. There is something so abstracted about them that they can serve as springboards towards another composition. I wrote a few pieces – all rightly languishing behind my desk – that bore some relationship to a chorale. What they meant for me compositionally, I think – and were I to begin composing again, I’m sure this is from where I would start – was that the chorale sketched out an extremely durable form which could have many things poured into and onto it, and that would aid (to a point of course) a certain amount of musical coherence.

The whys and wherefors of how I went about this in different pieces is for a future post perhaps, but the discovery for me of the complete chorales online is exciting, and something that I’m sure many composers as well as musicologists would find tremendous value in, so much applause to Greentree for maintaining her site over the years.

It’s like some kind of music-news rollercoaster round here. As a probably inadvertent follow-up to two posts I connected below, Greg Sandow takes Gavin Bouchert to task over his recent joy-saying with regard to the classical music industry. Sandow has a lot of figures to back up his case, and of course I can’t speak for the state of things in the States, but I don’t think the picture he paints (with regard to new music/young audiences, eg) mirrors my experience in the UK. But the Tower Records case (and I brought them up as well, in a slightly different context) is rather more complicated – yes, they are going (gone?) bankrupt, and yes they did as a rule have the largest selection of classical recordings of the major high street chains, but the reason for their collapse is most probably due to the bizarre machinations of the global record industry at the moment, so their stance on classical music is I think coincidental. This is not to say, however, that the disappearance of Tower will not be keenly felt. The double Piccadilly whammy of Tower then Waterstones (then a cheeky G + T at a great bar near Green Park if one was still feeling flush) is always an excellent way to spend a Saturday afternoon, and a small fortune.

Kyle Gann is joyously pointing readers to his latest discovery, Iridian Radio, which he describes as the radio station of his dreams. From what he says, it sounds magnificent, and I will be tuning in before long. However, as Test Match Special* has just come on air, I have the next 8 hours of perfect radio sorted, thank you.

*Primary souce P.G. Wodehouse for the unitiated; includes live radio cake reviewing.