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Monthly Archive: 2009
Let your work be impermanent
Posted on Monday, December 14, 2009
(This piece was written for the CompositionToday site)
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"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 McCannOne 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...
Indian Singers List
Posted on Saturday, December 12, 2009
A few days ago I met up with the amazing Nicki Wells whom I heard singing last month with Nitin Sawhney at the Akram Khan show at Sadlers Wells. Although raised mostly in the West, Nicki surprised everyone by beautifully singing a Shloka which is a sansrik poem or prayer - I say surprised because I've never heard a non-Indian reproduce the tones and embellishments of Indian music so movingly and effectively, and singing at first hidden behind a wall of fabric, blonde hair was not the most expected site to see when she finally emerged!
Nicki kindly wrote a list for me of some of her favourite Indian musicians, and partly for my own sake I am writing them down here for future reference:
Hindustani Classical
Pandit Jasraj (male singer)
Rashid Khan (male singer)
Parveen Sultana (female singer)
Ashwini Bhide (female singer)
Dr Prabha Atre (female singer)
Shubha Gurtu (female singer)
Gavri Patnekar
Qawwali
Nusrat fateh ali Khan
Warsi Brothers
The sabri brothers
Ghazal
Ghulam Ali
Bollywood
Lata Mangeshkar (female singer)
Sonu Ningam (female singer)
Also some bollywood films she recommended
Jodha Akbar (and the song Khwaja mere Khwaja )
Lagaan
Guru
Kuch kuch Hota hai
Taal
Devdas (and the hit song dhola re)
Asoka
Paheli
Water (song: piya Ho)
Gumboots in Berko
Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009
In the run up to Christmas, the wonderful Chroma are putting on a great children's concert in Berkhamsted on Dec 18th called Gypsies and Dancers featuring excerpts from my Clarinet Quintet Gumboots, a storyteller and lots more fun. Then in the evening they will perform the full Gumboots, alongside Golijov's crazy, tender and divine 'Dreams and Prayers' - I think this is my first candelit performance! So anyone in the home counties to the North of London please come and enjoy this wonderful group! Details below.
Tasks in hand
Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009
A few tasks in hand:
Tattered rags
Posted on Thursday, November 5, 2009
Having been through several opera ideas recently before eventually discarding them, the process seems to be something along these lines:
1. Take a large old black tattered rag.
2. Your opera subject is hidden behind it. You can make out little details here and there.
3. You must stare at the rag with an enormous intensity and try to get it to catch fire.
4. If you're lucky, and after an awful lot of intense staring, little fragments of the cloth burn away. If you're really lucky, eventually the whole thing catches fire, the tattered rag burns away completely and the whole opera subject lies before you, view unhindered.
5. If you're not so lucky, however hard you stare the holes just glow red, a brief puff of smoke, and out. The holes don't get any larger, the opera as inaccessible as before, despite all your efforts. Eventually you realise this rag ain't gonna to light. You are forced to abandon it.
Golden Gumboots
Posted on Friday, October 30, 2009
The Golden Gumboot in Tully, Australia
I just heard from Lachlan O'Donnell from the Strahlend Quintet who have just finished their tour of regional Queensland where they were performing Gumboots. The final concert of the tour threw up a rather fantastic coincidence, as Lachlan relates:
I had a lot of people approach me after the concerts and ask about Gumboots. It was definitely the most popular work on the program. The most enthusiastic response we received was at our final concert in a small town called El Arish, a few hundred km north of Townsville. A lot of people came down to see us from Tully which is the neighbouring town about 20 minutes away. As we drove through Tully we saw that they have a giant Gumboot sculpture in the middle of town. Apparently Tully is officially the wettest place in Australia and their big annual event is a Gumboot festival which includes Gumboot dancing among other things! It was a nice coincidence and it seemed as though the locals all really enjoyed hearing your work.
I'm delighted performances of Gumboots have taken off in recent months. There is a further performance by Chroma here in the UK in December, the Ensemble ACJW performances at Carneige in February and an exciting one brewing in Belgium, of which hopefully more soon.
Mr Adams, I presume
Posted on Thursday, October 29, 2009
I've always enjoyed a heavy musicological discussion. I even, in my day, used to write some fairly heavy-duty articles for the Musical Times; but after a while you begin to question whether it all matters. If nobody listens to contemporary music anyway, what's the point of arguing endlessly over the finer details? One contemporary composer people do listen to a lot is John Adams, and Adams has, much to everyone's surprise (does the guy really have any time on his hands?) he has started a blog.
So in a post discussing Adorno, Adams talks about what he calls an 'Empty Form' - a form in which elements that have an 'intentionality' create an 'intentionless' whole. He counts Mahler as an exponent of such forms.
Adams then also sings the praises of these forms: "but those exhausted, shattered empty forms still exalt, can still conceal and contain a lot"
Now I think I get the idea of elements that have an 'intentionality' creating an 'intentionless' whole - isn't Adams really talking here about music that makes a kind of sense moment to moment - as his music always does - but that does not have an overall form that makes a grand 'summing-up' kind of statement. Indeed, I once wrote about this idea in the Musical Times in connection to Birtwistle's music, and in connection with Maxwell Davies's statement that music could no longer have a "unifying confidence of outlook" found in earlier periods of music, because this would be "inimical to contemporary experience" (quotes from Paul Griffiths's book on Max).
If that is roughly where Adams is coming from I can understand it. Indeed, thinking about it again here, I can see Max's statement in a more positive light than I did 10 years ago. I took it originally to be a rather pessimistic and patronising position that 'because modern times are so tough, we can't possibly have an optimistic, visionary unity', but now I can see you could take it as 'because contemporary life in general is so fast-paced and so much more diverse and fragmented, then you can't expect art not to be those things either' - which makes total sense. Ahh, the navel-gazing value of blogging!
However, what makes me question whether I really get Adams' premise at all is his further points - firstly, are Mahler's forms really 'intentionless' as Adams seems to suggest? Meandering maybe, but surely highly 'subjective'; and 'intended'; and trying to make a ballsy, unifying statement if ever I heard someone trying to do that. And then when Adams talks about an 'exhausted, shattered' form - what are we talking about? Surely it is the classical, traditional forms that are 'exhausted, shattered', surely an 'intentionless' form is forever fresh and new because it is always chaotic and ...unintended???
Well, like I say, I love trying to get my teeth into these matters, and to be honest it's rare enough to find someone, like Adams, who is interesting enough to want to even engage in these kinds of questions with. So, yes, please keep up the blogging Mr Adams, and good to bump in to you here out in the jungle!
Giora
Posted on Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Some time back in the mid 90s I got hold of a CD that changed my view of what a clarinet - and indeed music itself - was capable of. This was the klezmer clarinet music of Giora Feidman, and these sounds - the shrieking, the wailing, the laughing, and a pianissimo of extreme serenity - have reverberated through my compositional style ever since. Indeed, I fashioned the blaring opening of my mini-opera 'Seven Tons of Dung' (I knew how to title a piece in those days) after a particular moment on the CD, without at that point realising that Giora had himself been imitating the Shofar, the traditional ram horn used in Jewish religious ceremonies.
So it was hard to beleive, 15 years later, when Giora himself got in touch with me, after hearing some of my music, and invited me to work with him on some projects, kicking off by making some arrangements for a forthcoming recording project. It's a tremendous honour for me, and quite surreal to be on the end of the phone to Tel Aviv with one of my musical idols, who seems only capable of speaking words of tremendous wisdom.
Centers of gravity
Posted on Friday, September 25, 2009
Dawn Upshaw, Bridget Kibbey and Avi Avital in the premiere of 'The North Wind was a Woman'
What a wonderful world-premiere of The North Wind was a Woman on Wednesday evening at the Chamber Music Society of the Lincoln Centre. We had a great reaction from the audience, which CMS director and cellist-extraordinaire David Finckel kindly describes on his blog:
"With highly-skilled instrumental writing to support Dawn's magical singing...the piece was one of the most smashing successes for a new work I have seen in a long time. A prolonged ovation brought musicians and composer to the stage time and again before the intermission."
The New York Times also praised the work, calling it the center of gravity for the evening, and describing it as 'fresh' and 'striking'. I was particularly happy that my dear friend and collaborator Avi Avital was singled out for much deserved praise of his 'exquisitely sensitive playing'. Bravo Avi!
Alex Fiterstein and Todd Palmer, who play a bass clarinet duet
in the opening of 'The North Wind was a Woman'
With Mandolinist Avi Avital after the performance.
A warm welcome from Alice
Posted on Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Tomorrow night is a very special night for me. My new piece The North Wind was a Woman will be premiered at the Gala opening of the Chamber Music Society of the Lincoln Center.
Special for the sheer quality, beauty and warmth of the singing, playing and atmosphere. It's a beautiful hall and a beautiful occasion. Sometimes you can't help feeling incredibly lucky...
