Cornflower

Remembrance : music

   For an example of the music of war I've chosen a favourite piece of mine: the intense and very beautiful "Metamorphosen" by Richard Strauss. Written in 1945 and inspired partially by the bombing of Dresden, it is described in The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century as "dusky and doleful" with a mood of "wounded desperation" and "contrapuntal lines intertwining like kudzu on a ruined mansion". You can listen to the first part of it here, and follow the links there to the second and third parts.

Chain reaction

    Lindsay and Peter may be pulling my (third) leg about my birthplace, but I ought to mention that I was born in the Jane Crookall Maternity Home, Douglas, I.o.M., whose most famous babies (until me) were the Bee Gees. And I couldn't not give a link to them, could I, so here's a song whose modulations are 'key'!

Task avoidance

     I'm supposed to be doing something other than this; that is, I am allowing myself to be distracted from the real task in hand which is typing up the minutes of a meeting. So far this morning I have visited a few favourite blogs, had a cup of coffee, played several games of solitaire and read the latest episode of Corduroy Mansions, all displacement activities - I own up! I have made a start on the minutes, doing the preliminary, formulaic bit, but now I'm on to the meaty stuff and having to decipher several A4 pages of my handwritten notes in order to produce a document dense with fact and stylish yet economical in its prose. Because I'd much rather be doing something else I'm having to force myself to get on with it, but doing so on a 'reward' basis - another paragraph or section done earns me a few minutes off to do something more fun. I've just had a browse around for some music to keep me 'on task', and how about that for an excuse for slacking. So far I've had a little dalliance with this favourite, a change of mood with this one, or I could listen to numerous repeats of this, (and for complete silliness there's always this - blame my children). If all that doesn't work I'm going to remember I have a pressing engagement with the ironing board (sorry, the pun wasn't intended!) which will give me a legitimate reason to leave the minutes for a minute.
Back later, I hope, with a proper post, (though at the rate I'm going today I wouldn't hold your breath).

Rapt

   

Let it not be said that we don't keep up with the modern idiom here on Cornflower, nor that the range of this site isn't sometimes surprising. Today, for your delectation, I bring you a couple of examples of 'contemporary style in song', but this is not just for the sake of it, there are underlying educational messages, too!
     First off, physics. My lack of knowledge of this subject stems from a couple of dull years in senior school when we worked from the misleadingly named (brown, if I remember correctly) textbook, "Physics is Fun";  all that electron/neutron stuff failed to excite me and I dropped it and its fellow sciences at the earliest opportunity. But nowadays physicists are playing with toys on a scale far removed from the old Van de Graaff machine, and the magnets they use are not wee things with 'Duracell' on the side. We are talking about The Big Stuff here, so if you want a reductionist version of what must surely be the largest experiment in the world given a musical interpretation, have a look at this. (My thanks to Peter the Flautist for that link - he's involved in the science, if not the rap).
    Still in the same vein but changing to a part of the curriculum I'm more familiar with, what can I say about this version of a very famous poem?
    Words may have failed me with that one, but the next clip is a classic, written long before raps were ever devised but yet, to my ears, sounding remarkably similar in style. M.C. Auden, anyone? (Bet he didn't scratch his records).

Later: it seems this post is more topical than I thought as Sir Ian McKellen is rapping away, too!

Reading and listening

 

 
  Daniel Barenboim's Everything Is Connected: The Power Of Music is published today and tonight he is performing at The Proms, conducting his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in this programme. Much of his book is about music as a model for co-operation between peoples, and how and why - along with Edward Said - he came to found an extraordinary orchestra of young Arab and Israeli musicians which is an inspiration for long-term optimism about peace in the Middle East.
     He talks about how even the most passionate phrase in music requires an underlying sense of order and discipline, and how an orchestra depends on that and a clear hierarchy. "The hierarchy that exists in all music respects the individuality of each voice, which may not have the same rights but certainly has the same responsibility as all the other voices...how difficult it is in the world to create equality within hierarchy". But then he goes on to stress the importance of dialogue, listening and understanding: he quotes Goethe - "To merely tolerate is to insult; true liberalism means acceptance", and how with that in mind music requires a perfect balance between intellect, emotion and temperament, and can show society how those things along with the fundamental interconnection between transparency, power and force foster sympathy and harmony.
    It is a lively book, eloquent, considered and Barenboim speaks equally from head and heart. It does not require in the reader a close knowledge of either music or politics but rather, as he himself says, "a curious mind that wishes to discover the parallels between music and life and the wisdom that becomes audible to the thinking ear".
    I've enjoyed it greatly and my only complaint is that it is too short - I wanted more! Encore, maestro, please.

It's wonderful...

   

     As a dog's coat is to burrs from the plants it rubs against, so is my brain to the tunes it hears - it hooks them in the musical memory and they remain firmly stuck.

Years ago I was taken by the catchy song used to back an advertisement for investment trusts but I didn't know what it was. Earlier this week I heard it again, in a restaurant, and now thanks to Youtube, I've tracked it down. And for your delectation, ladies and gentlemen, here is a true renaissance man: poet, painter, musician and lawyer (yes!), it's Paolo Conte, performing his wonderful Come away with me (the rest of the world probably knew this, but I didn't). Go and listen, and don't tell me you didn't tap your feet to that!

Unenamoured by my musical taste, my children thrust headphones at me, pointedly shut doors and caution me not to snap my fingers in time to the music even. Huh! They're used to the pattern, you see - Mum gets a craze and listens ad infinitum. They don't understand my capacity to hear the same piece over and over again (the youth of today have no staying power...). We had it last summer with Astor Piazzolla's Libertango (first heard on a programme about physics, then rediscovered on Tower of Goo the computer game) now here it is 'for real' with YoYo Ma. Then there was Music for a Found Harmonium (Terry Wogan chat show, Irish seaweed piece in the series Coast), and previously The Divine Comedy's Songs of Love (Father Ted - of course -  and accompanying a Gary Rhodes dish involving cabbage, as I recall).

But now I have the rest of Paolo Conte's oeuvres to discover (and I feel a CD purchase coming on...)

Hanging on the telephone

    

I had to call a mobile phone company yesterday and while I waited to be put through to a member of staff heard the following welcome addition to the usual options menu: "If you don't like the music you're listening to, press 1". I did so and was given these alternatives: "For Norah Jones, press 2, for Jools Holland, press 3 and for Classic FM's "Relax" album, press 4". I went for the last one and got a Rachmaninov piano concerto which sounded as though it had been recorded at the top of a mountain in a gale. Maybe this is some ploy of the putative "Extreme Romanticism Society", taking their cue from the Extreme Ironing practitioners ("combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt" - I love it!). But to get back to Sergei played, as it were, on the Beaufort Scale, is this some film version of the piece or was it just interference on the phone line? Either way, it was better than the usual "hold music" (see last week's experience).
    There is immense scope for originality in telephone answering services and companies of all types could do well to explore it. I heard of one business which uses a recording of the actor Leslie Phillips saying his suggestive and seductive "Hello" to great effect - no-one could hang up after that. Or how about Blondie's "Hangin' on the telephone"? - it strikes an ironic note and is better than a lot of things. But surely they could come up with something more interesting and enjoyable than the bland and irritating stuff usually played. Anyone got any ideas for what would be perfect to listen while hanging on?

Conductivity

     "I do a bit in the garden. I do a lot of knitting. I read as many books as I can".  No, not me, it's the wonderful Sir Colin Davis!

Glass works

     To respond to Peter's comment on the previous post, what about the esteemed Philip Glass, who writes for films and is a 'serious' composer - mentioned in The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century! If you have a look at his website (and you can hear some of his music there) you'll see his work described as "Sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops: extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that [weave] in and out of an aural tapestry" - a lovely description of compelling music. His score for The Hours was perfect.

And we haven't even mentioned Michael Nyman yet!

Barry, Bond and beyond

     A drive down to the coast this morning gave an opportunity to listen to a CD I hadn't heard for a while: John Barry: The Beyondness of Things (if you follow that link you can hear excerpts of the tracks).

      Barry is best known as a composer of film scores and as such his music is easily recognised, but that shouldn't cloud the fact that he writes wonderfully good tunes.

      Does anyone remember this programme for instance? Or how about Out of Africa and Midnight Cowboy. He's best known for his Bond scores, of which these are a few of the less obvious ones: Moonraker (sung by Shirley Bassey), Thunderball (Tom Jones !) and, in a very different mood, Louis Armstrong singing All the time in the world.

     (The beach was this one, by the way, and the morning as perfect as it looks in the pictures).

Sacred music

    Our recording of Bach's St. Matthew Passion features the wonderful Kathleen Ferrier. I'd hoped to find a link to her singing the aria "If my tears be unavailing", but could not. You can hear Julia Hamari's less distinctive recording of the piece here, or listen to Kathleen Ferrier herself sing "Have mercy, Lord, on me" from the Passion in this clip.

Train of thought

     I'm in unapologetic nostalgic mood today, caused in part by listening to the Flanders and Swann song "Slow Train". If you don't already know it, it's about the closure of the less-used railway lines and stations (the so-called Beeching Axe); you can listen to it here, and I urge you to as it's sad but lovely.

    Who better to look to for a sympathetic view of railways than John Betjeman. Here's a passage from Trains and Buttered Toast: "Best of all I know that station in Cornwall I loved as a boy - the oil lights, the smell of seaweed floating up the estuary, the rain-washed platform and the sparkling Cornish granite and the hedges along the valleys around, soon to be heavy with blackberries. I think of Edward Thomas's lovely poem 'Adlestrop', on a country station in the Cotswolds:

     Yes. I remember Adlestrop - The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June.

      The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. No one left and no one came On the bare platform. What I saw Was Adlestrop - only the name.

That verse recalls one of the deeper pleasures of a country railway station - its silence, broken only by the crunching of a porter's feet on the gravel, the soft country accent of the stationmaster and the crash bang of a milk can somewhere at the back of the platform. The train, once in the centre of a noisy town, has drifted into the deep heart of the English country, with country noises brushing the surfaces of a deeper silence."

 

     Betjeman goes on: "I like an old, bumpy carriage with a single gaslight in the ceiling, that peculiar design only known to railways on the upholstery, views of Tenby, Giant's Causeway, Morecambe Bay, Bala Lake and so on under the rack marked 'For Light Articles Only'. I like to see a loop of upholstered leather in the corner seats of first-class carriages into which you are meant to put your arm should the train travel fast...."

    As to station refreshment rooms, who could forget the one in Brief Encounter where Laura and Alec meet and their romance - all clipped vowels and Rachmaninov - begins. It's wonderful stuff, and to get a taste of it have a look here.

    And after Flanders and Swann and Johnson and Howard, there can't be a dry eye in the house!

Recent acquisitions

     Just acquired - from various sources - are what you see above. At the bottom is the fourth review book for this week, Alexander McCall Smith's The Careful Use of Compliments, which I've mentioned before. Then comes The Lying Tongue by Andrew Wilson. This is described as "A deeply atmospheric story of one person's delusion and another's dark past", and is set in Venice, I city I have yet to visit [hint, hint]. It is so good, I'm told, that it deserves more publicity and a wider readership so it's being passed around the book blogs; I got it from Harriet Devine who in turn got it from Random Jottings, and when I've read it and written about it I shall send it on to someone else.

     The third book in the picture is the third volume in Anthony Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time" series. Regular readers will know that I wasn't too struck on the first book but fared much better with the second, and as I'm now officially a "Powellite", I'm hoping for the equivalent of a twirl around the ballroom in the arms of a very skilled partner when it comes to tackling The Acceptance World and its successors!

     Lastly, some music. The man with the most eclectic taste in music I've come across (coupled with a vast knowledge of the subject) is my flautist friend, Peter [our 'revival' of the Poulenc sonata has gone surprisingly well, I'm pleased to say]. He sees it as his mission to introduce me to music I may not have heard before and on this visit he's given me Regina Spektor's album Begin to Hope. He tells me this is "from the queen of the New York anti-folk scene", but whoever she is and whatever she does, I love it!

Rusty

     I've been dusting off the piano keys this morning in preparation for the revival of a long-neglected musical partnership. Very old friend and loyal visitor to this site, Peter the Flautist (who happens to be a distinguished academic in 'real' life), is coming to stay tomorrow, bringing his flute, and expecting me to be as competent (and I use that term loosely) an accompanist as I was at one time.

     We shall be tackling Poulenc's Flute Sonata. Peter will be playing all the notes Poulenc wrote while I shall play some of them; the words 'sketch' and 'nod in the general direction' may more accurately describe my interpretation, I fear. While P. takes his music extremely seriously these days, putting in many hours of practice despite his numerous other commitments, I am hopelessly rusty. I do play, but not nearly as much as I should or would like to. Still, it will be fun; this is how the piece ought to sound:-

     To music on a grander scale, and here in Edinburgh tonight the Festival comes to a close with the spectacular fireworks concert. While the Scottish Chamber Orchestra plays in the open air in Princes Street Gardens, high above them on the Castle Rock a massive fireworks display is set off to complement the music. Tonight's programme is an all American one, including Bernstein, Gershwin, Ives and Copland, and a favourite of mine, Barber's Adagio for Strings. It will draw the crowds into the city like no other event, not even Peter's and my 'comeback'!

    

Perfect pitch

     To the Book Festival again last night to hear journalist, writer and broadcaster James Naughtie talk about music. He spoke with a great deal of passion and eloquence on this vast topic which is the subject of his forthcoming book,  The Making of Music: A Journey with Notes. His overview of the development of music and its place in society stressed the dendritic pattern inherent in its progression: everything is linked, though not always directly or seamlessly, often tangentially, but traceably so.