Author: GeoffreyKing

It’s Sunday!

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churchbellToday, for the most part, I was grumbling about the thought of having to go shopping. A tussle between opposing wills – you HAVE to go, no I don’t WANT to go – which got quite heated. Until, that is, I realized it was a Sunday and not a Saturday. Working so hard on finishing the score of my new piece I had lost a day. (Well that’s nothing – I also discovered an entire meal that I thawed out yesterday in the microwave but forgot to eat…….). Of course, now I have one day less for finalizing everything, but that loss is more than compensated for by the delicious fact, thanks to the Christian religion, of not being able to go shopping. The sun is shining, yes, but I think I will just IMAGINE a walk. And with all this lack of exercise I have been having lately, I am rapidly losing weight – another compensation………..

I am very pleased with à la mémoire for vibraphone and piano. It was written for Miguel Bernat and Ananda Sukarlan who will give the première in July, in Spain. The piece was almost complete even before I discussed the possibility of a performance, so this time I am spared all that anxiety about “writing something suitable”. Though of course I am deeply concerned about communicating with the common man etc.

The title (which floated into my head as I was reclining on the couch in the room above, where I compose) is a reference to a work by my former teacher Giuseppe Sinopoli. I remember him talking about his Souvenirs à la mémoire many years ago in Venice. I am just not sure whether I ever actually HEARD the piece.

I had been thinking about the ethos of my new work and fiddling around with various titles in my mind. I could appreciate that it was quite somber, yet, also gently wistful. I thought of the word lament and then all of a sudden the French title just, as I say, floated into my mind. It seemed appropriate.
Of course, I should add that I believe absolutely in Stravinsky’s views about music and expression…..

“For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc….”

Oh my goodness, yes, how true this is. In reality, music is not expressive at all. It is no more expressive than athletics. Does anybody care whether a discus thrower is expressing himself? We want to know how far he can fling that thing, that’s all. And we want to know if a pianist can get to the top of the keyboard without any lumps in his scales. Double thirds all round. Chromatic ones if you like. Personally I think of a dominant 7th as a sort of lapsed triad – a loose 4th finger could easily account for that F if we are in C, or that Bb if we are in F.

Music is sound. And painting is paint. Poetry is words and religion is sore knees. The world itself is sods of earth gummed together by green stuff we call grass. It’s all very simple if you think about it.

In the kitchen

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aliceinw

My two new suites for piano (2008-9) were created in a rather odd way. They originally came into being as a set of seven “one page pieces”. These I wrote in the summer of 2008 whilst holidaying at the house of my teacher in the north of Italy. There I had spent a lot of time in the kitchen chatting with the cook. I sat at a large wooden table watching what he was doing (I am quite interested in cooking) all the while teasing him about girlfriends etc. – the usual banter. But I was writing music at the same time. It was a deliberate strategy to remove one layer of consciousness in order to see what would come out.

I placed the completed pieces in my luggage and brought them back to Amsterdam and stuck them in a drawer and forgot about them. On April 5th 2009 I found them again whilst rummaging around for music paper. I played the pieces through and decided to gather them into two sets of four (a piece from the original set of seven I had divided into two in order to do this) – a diatonic set and a chromatic set. So seven became eight and eight became two.

The first suite (the diatonic one) is dedicated to Alan Rowlands, my piano teacher at the Royal College of Music, for his 80th birthday. The second (the chromatic one) is dedicated to the Edinburgh pianist and teacher Richard Beauchamp. The pieces have no titles and are, as they say, “completely abstract” – (in other words, not in the least bit abstract.)

Alan Rowlands and John Ireland

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rowlandsI have been listening to Alan Rowlands’ new triple CD of John Ireland’s music (Lyrita Ream 3112).

http://www.lyrita.co.uk/

Alan was my piano teacher at the Royal College of Music in London in the late 1960s. He also became a close friend, though in subsequent decades we saw little of each other. But our friendship remains and in a few weeks he will visit me in Amsterdam for the first time.

He is a tremendous pianist, but within that musical excellence there is something more special still. (I don’t refer to the unusual musical gifts he has – being able to go to the piano and give a pretty good rendition of bits he has liked from a new work just heard on the radio, or during conversation leaping up to play a few bars from a Beethoven symphony to illustrate some point – these Glazunov-like gifts are impressive of course). What’s so special is Alan’s engagement with the music of his time. He had a real bond with John Ireland. And this is what is good, that a performer has had at some stage (probably when he/she was very young) a proper bond with a living composer – something deep, that matters and has consequences. Let’s not mix that up with the sort of association that happens later on – where collaborations can be little more than shallow money earning ventures and sometimes quite dispiriting.

Of the other half of Alan’s life – his work as an Alexander teacher, or his fascination with Douglas Harding, Krishnamurti and more recently Ramana Maharshi – I can’t say much, as I have little interest in these things. But I have today been rereading Harding’s “On Having No Head”.

http://www.headless.org

Now back to John Ireland. As I say, I have been listening to his piano music. It is so familiar, so English………….so pleasing in many ways, yet I am struck by a “what if?” What if one were to rewrite certain ideas, turning them upside down, back to front, so to speak?

Alan worked closely with the composer on his interpretations and I have no reason to believe that he goes against his wishes. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that Ireland was well satisfied with the results of the collaboration. So when I target the performance of Chelsea Reach* (the first of the three “London Pieces”) it is not in a spirit of quibbling about performance, but instead to raise an artistic issue.

The rhythm of Chelsea Reach is very basic – almost entirely quarter notes, yet they are not played as such – these are “quarter notes” and not quarter notes. The beats are almost always delayed and by so doing you set up a polarity. You drift between strict and free. The word rubato is used for this. Some music teachers use the word “musical”, as in “he plays so musically”. It is in fact a routine addition to notated music in this period and when one is young and learning, it seems matter of fact and nothing worth commenting on. It’s as obvious as letting a woman go first through a door. Normal, one can say, except when viewed from a different cultural perspective.

When you view this issue of “rubato” from a distance, it appears anything but normal. It appears to me as extremely effete in fact. I haven’t just had this reaction, I’ve seen it in myself for a long time. And I’ve written something about a related issue – the custom of slowing right at the end of a piece and pausing very long on the last chord. This is uncomfortable for me – something like soap under the nails.

If I speak of a polarity, then I can develop that metaphor and begin to speak about “distance”. In the second of the London Pieces: Ragamuffin we are confronted by proletarian material. The composer let’s us know by the way he handles this that he has taken a distance from his material – he is no proletarian. In the strongly class orientated structure of English society this makes perfect sense. Why wouldn’t he take a distance from “street” material? The interesting question is “if you have to take a distance, why are you using street material anyway?”

If there were no distance, then what? If there were no rubato, then what? As I said, I am not criticizing anything here, I am raising “what ifs”. What if the last 30 seconds of Aubade were the beginning of a piece rather than an ending? That final descending fifth might be allowed to drift on, to multiply, in other words, you might like to imagine the music “after the ending.” Ditto the last 20 seconds of Equinox. Ditto the last 10 seconds of Sarnia – An Island Sequence. Ditto the last staccato chord of the Sonatina which is mainly there to thrill us into applause. Where could we put that in order to make another use of it?

I’m afraid I’m not much of a critic. First I can’t think of words to assign to feelings, second I get the urge to rewrite other people’s music and third, I am too soft hearted to do much damage. My beloved composition teacher Rubin de Cervin said to me this summer that “kitsch exists in order to protect us from the horror that is life”. Perhaps we can bear that in mind when listening to Ireland’s piano music. About where on the “scale of horror” does it appear?

Finally, talking once again about “street” musical material, Michael Bonaventure (my great mate, the Scottish organist) was here a few weeks back and we listened together in hysterics to two tracks from Russ Conway – his Roulette and his Lesson One. This is street stuff, real prole stuff, and no mediation whatsoever. The modulations are like gear shifts in a rusty old car. One of those black ones I remember from my childhood – on the floor by the back seat there will be a couple of screwed up tissues stained yellow with dried spunk. The music smells of beer, tobacco and urinals. …….We were talking about Russ Conway (a popular pianist in England from long ago) because I was telling a story about my dad sort of falling in love with him at one stage – we even had a picture on the mantelpiece…………(round about the time when dad went to see him at the London Palladium).

I myself like popular music very much and certainly don’t want to take any distance from it. Not at all. I think I speak for Michael when I say that the laughter we shared was one of joy – joy in the earthy aspect of English culture that goes along with the effete aspect. But then Michael next moment will be off to do a recital in Westminster Abbey, and I will be off upstairs to write a Sinfonietta. So I think it should begin to be obvious why he is such a great mate of mine…………

* [Rowlands has a nice story about Rachmaninov once telling Ireland that he liked his “Chelsea Leech”].

Secrets

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acornsEach trip I make to see my teacher in the north of Italy is different. Perhaps because the house is so remote, one tends to meet oneself there, not a pleasant experience. For the first three nights there were bad nightmares.

But dreams never fail to surprise me. Last night, for example, I was inspecting my own grave with a friend, discussing how far my body had rotted away……………

Right before I left for Italy, I had to write very fast an eight minute movement for small orchestra, consisting of four chamber music groups brought together for the occasion. Altogether, the ensemble was 2 oboes, 5 violins, 3 violas, 3 cellos and a bass. I added to that a percussionist, because the idea was to perform the piece without conductor. In the end however I had to conduct (the premiere was yesterday), as the musicians did not have sufficient time to rehearse.

I have a very bad characteristic – having finished a work, I am not really interested to hear it. I just want to move on to the next one. So, already in Italy I filled up loads of paper with ideas (I put it no higher than that). And I do like most of all composing at a desk with just paper and pen, but this time I did something that I perhaps never did before. I went to the kitchen to work whilst chatting with the cook – well tease him actually – and therefore only half concentrated on what I was doing. That produces very interesting results……Well you have to understand that I am very much of the Max Ernst school – down on my knees inspecting the floorboards, so to speak…………(*)

Lots of gossip where I was, but one has to be discreet………But I can say that at last I met someone who can help me with a text for the string quartet (the piece I have been mentioning ever since I began this blog). I think I have probably written already enough music for ten string quartets. However I have all along been after something very elusive. I’ve been like a hunter tracking down some shy animal.

A few walks in the forest near my teacher’s house. I visited my favourite tree, with some friends. One of them appalled me by picking off a large lump of bark, then throwing it on the ground. I picked it up and bought it back with me to Amsterdam. Another time, one in our little party actually climbed the tree. I tried to stop him, but he was showing off, so no use. Anyway, discussing the age of the old oak, the general consensus was that it could well be 600-700 years old. So with some quick reckoning we worked out that Guillaume de Machaut could have been alive in its early days. I pointed out that it will still be there when we are all gone. But that didn’t spoil the general good humour……… We moved on chattering away, only the tree and myself knowing that we had some secrets together, though I suppose also that those in the party may have noticed at some subliminal level something a little odd. If so, their dreams will report it to them. What are dreams for, if not to discuss all the things we noticed, without noticing them?

* “In art, frottage is an “automatic” method of creation developed by Max Ernst. The artist makes a “rubbing” of a textured surface a bit like a brass rubbing in a church. Frottage however is not concerned with conventional images but is instead aleatoric/improvisational/random in nature. The result can be left as it is, or used as the basis for further elaboration. The method was developed by Ernst in drawings made from 1925 onwards. Ernst was inspired by an ancient wooden floor where the grain of the planks had been accentuated by many years of scrubbing. The patterns of the graining suggested images to him. He captured these by laying sheets of paper on the floor and then rubbing over them with a soft pencil“.

……back to Croydon

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croydenI was born in Thornton Heath, Croydon, England, in 1949 and spent the first seven years of my life there, moving to a large estate on the edge of Croydon (New Addington) just before my eighth birthday. The estate (what the British call a “council estate”) is near Addington Village and also Addington Palace. In those days, the former archbishops’ summer palace was the headquarters of the Royal School of Church Music, and I became a chorister there. Living in public housing as I did was more than a mark of poverty for me. As a child I felt a stigma attached to it – the poverty was, somehow, shameful.

It is May 21st and I have returned to Croydon – the first time in many years (I have not lived in Croydon since 1970). Today was the centenary of my father’s birth and I came to visit his grave and pay my respects. He is buried in Bandon Hill cemetery, a short bus ride from West Croydon Station. The grave is on a hillside and all the headstones are arranged in neat lines, except that my father’s grave has no headstone. I was visiting Croydon, partly, in order to make arrangements for that. I learned that there is room for another family member to be buried in the same plot. It was daunting going back, I had been dreading it. In the event, things proved easier then I feared. I had not been to the area since 1977 (for the funeral) and I had no idea where it was.

I sat for a little while and tried to speak to my father. But in the end all I could bring myself to say was “I didn’t treat you very well”. He left hundreds of diaries in which he detailed the mental suffering he had to endure. There was no lasting way out for him. None of this is happy, not then and not now.

I did not consult a map and I do not know in which direction the hillside faces, but I had the idea that all the corpses were lined up facing Croydon, as if to contemplate a life that had been lived. (My father only ever once moved from Croydon – to Mullingar in County Westmeath situated in the Irish Midlands. His mother was from an Irish family and for one year during WWI he was evacuated there). So virtually his whole life was lived in Croydon. It is where his dreams gradually turned into a nightmare.

As I left the cemetery I paused and thought I should turn back. I had said and done almost nothing it seemed. But I didn’t return. Instead I found a very humble café just down the road and sat there thinking about things. I ordered a mug of tea and ate some cake with a strange yellow icing, tasting of marzipan. It was served by a middle aged man with dyed blond hair and several rings on his fingers – gay, so I thought. I looked at him, or rather, probed him, feeling both sorry for him and repulsed. I sat in a sort of cozy daze. After a time I realized the irony of eating cake on my dad’s birthday and dedicated the meal to him. Then I realized I was sitting too long and the owner was waiting to close the place, and I left.
I traveled back to London feeling as if I’d just had that stock fictional experience – an astronaut returns home to earth to find a hundred years have gone by. Everyone he knew is dead and everything has changed…………………………… Croydon was recognizably the same, yet also completely changed.

Composition v Improvisation

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1dab5-t2bThere was an improvisation concert given last week in the Bimhuis by three wonderful musicians: Joel Ryan (digital signal processing), Frances-Marie Uitti (cello) and Evan Parker (saxophone).

During this concert I was thinking about composition versus improvisation. It’s an issue that has interested me for some time. The performance included improvisations that approached a density and volatility that a great percentage of orchestral composers would be unable to achieve, working with traditional methods. The credit for this lies as much with Joel Ryan’s remarkable methods of transforming acoustic sound, as with the formidable improvising abilities of Uitti and Parker.

Actually I prefer the term “instant composition” for this kind of performance because I have come to view improvisation in close relation to composition. The “instant” aspect, by the way, reminds me of the huge scandal over Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. John Ruskin had written “I never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”. When Whistler sued, he was asked in court about how long it took to paint the picture. Whistler replied “Half a day.” His lawyer then said “So, you are charging two hundred guineas for half a day’s work?” The painter replied “No………….for the experience of a life time.”

The worlds of the conservatoire and the university music department have changed a great deal since I was trained (late 60s – mid 70s). I’ve written before that improvisation went unmentioned in those days as a possible modus operandi for a composer. I had to discover the value of this for myself. That was quite a confronting experience and one of many such over the years. I still remember, for example, the shock of hearing a beautiful Indian oboe for the first time during a performance of Peter Brook’s version of the Mahābhārata. It was a painful reaction – “My God, is that what an oboe can sound like!”

De Institutione Musica

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boethius

I am sure that many a student reading through a history textbook has yawned over Boethius and his De institutione musica. It was written about 1500 years ago and the assumption therefore might be that it has little or nothing to do with us. But when I read in that work that the true musicus is “he to whom belongs the ability to judge”, I find something for us to connect to. How often do we wish for this sort of musician to choose concert programmes, to conduct them, to perform them and to write pieces for them? And, crucially, to take a seat in the auditorium, and show an unfeigned appreciation. I am sure every performer craves that.

I continued studying baroque music today, listening amongst other things to the middle movement of Vivaldi’s Spring concerto from The Four Seasons. This has been in my mind for several months with regard to the aria that I am writing for my string quartet. Hearing the movement performed so terribly today, I wondered if any piece in the world is routinely played as badly as The Four Seasons. Bad performances, bad pieces, bad choices of programmes. All this surely relates to the Boethius point about judgement. The true musician is one who can judge, he said. In our time, it might be a music critic. But in the end, whoever it is, she/he must get the chance to give leadership. Otherwise where are we? What do we have? A bunch of pretty young concerto soloists playing fast scales and filling their bank accounts? Opera directors, doing whatever it is they think they are doing – they may know, but a lot of opera goers certainly don’t. There is a whiff of decadence here.

In contrast to this, yesterday, on hearing just a few vocal intervals from a Handel aria (a section of his Apollo e Dafne) I gasped out loud. What struck me was the beauty of the writing as well as the truth of the execution (by a superb soprano called Karina Gauvin). Now, I understand very well that times moved on and things can’t be what they were. We no longer have aristocratic and royal or ecclesiastical patronage, therefore we no longer have the culture that produced Handel and Mozart. But then we have somehow to hold on to the “good magic” that I noted in the Handel piece.

I don’t care how democratic we become. My point is that if the quality is lost, then this whole endeavour is also lost. And that is the message that I am drawing out of Boethius. Those who can judge must do so and give the leadership that is required.

Easter Sunday and a Jewish family

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gustave-caillebotteI had been studying some baroque arias this morning, in preparation for the movement for mezzo soprano that I shall include in my string quartet. It was the afternoon and I was troubled by something – a stylistic question. I was thinking about how to refer to baroque style, without simply imitating it and thereby writing pastiche. I began to get some ideas about how to do that when, suddenly, I felt tired and had to go and lie down. It had been snowing thick flakes of snow by the way – very pretty (I wish it would go on snowing, and on and on, becoming deeper and deeper).

I was wanting to continue thinking whilst taking a rest and I struggled to keep awake. But I fell asleep. The music I had in mind at that moment (a chromatically descending series of chords) transformed into an image; an image from Dutch life during WWII. A family is descending the staircase of a tenement house (like the one I live in, but grander) and exiting the front door. It is a Jewish family. The mother is the only one I can really see. She is a middle-aged woman, somewhat stout and with a forceful character. I sense behind her a father and some other family members. But my focus is on the woman. She is dressed in black, but prosperously so, and carries a handsome suitcase. The family is being expelled from the house and is sad, yet grave, rather than desperate. The mother actually looks more indignant than nervous. Yet there is no disguising the sense of doom. The family descends the staircase in perfect formation like the symmetrically spaced notes of the chords I had in my mind. The notes actually transformed into family members.

I sent a note to a Dutch colleague who might be able to locate a text describing such a scene. Probably it won’t be easy to find one, and I shall have to write something myself. People who wonder why I write my own texts nowadays should reflect that I am seldom able to find what I need. And if I do, and it needs some alteration, I’m not happy to make changes in the work of a writer who has passed on. If it is the work of living writer, then that can be just as daunting. They are maybe going to fight you over changing “but” to “yet”. And that is useless in a situation where the reality is that you go on altering “but” to “yet” and back again, even whilst making the final ink copy of the music……..

It is Easter and everywhere is quiet. Here also, even in this Muslim neighbourhood. Perhaps I should have gone to Mass, but I didn’t, and I never do. My father never took me, though he was brought up catholic (his mother was from an Irish family).

Anton Bruckner

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brucknerRadio Filharmonisch Orkest
Groot Omroepkoor
Jaap van Zweden, dirigent
Vanessa Barkowski, mezzosopraan
Leonard Sökefeld, sopraan
Rihm – Memoria (Drei Requiem-Bruckstücke)
Bruckner – Vierde symfonie in Es ‘Romantische’

The composers’ union arranged for us today to have some free tickets for the Jaap van Zweden concert. I went along with one of my students. As emotionally driven as an Expressionist piece is, the Rihm pushed lots of buttons and I failed to react. I left my motor on for a while and then eventually switched off and started looking at the chandeliers and stretching my legs out. At least we were in the very back row so there was some leg room. I don’t like to speak with any disrespect of colleagues who are living – at least if I have named them – because I know everyone is trying to do their best and I respect that. No doubt this applies to Rihm. So I’ll leave it for others to describe “Memoria” and to explain why it might be regarded as failing in some respects.

At any rate it was unfortunate to couple this music with the radiant work of Bruckner which hardly even knows what vulgarity is. We just have to bow to this man. I wish I could do that in person and kiss his hand. In the superb 4th Symphony, in contrast to the Rihm, the composer seems too restrained even to press anyone’s buttons, let alone to do so ineffectually. But he does affect me, and so deeply. Thank God there are composers like this to look up to. I’m not a critic, so that’s enough on this subject – except that the Groot Omroepkoor sang terrifically in the contemporary piece.

After the concert, my student and I walked from Museumplein through the town and down the shopping street (Kalverstraat). That’s vulgar enough for anyone by the way. We ended up in Dam Square which would be very nice, with its royal palace and all, if it weren’t for the clutter.

I hopped on a tram 14 and came home and went to bed and read my book. I’ve got a nice Scifi book at the moment which features a genetically enhanced squid steering a spaceship to a fictional second Earth moon. Great fun.

Peasants

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gpc

1883, Seurat – Peasant Woman Seated in the Grass

I completed the comic song “I know where my genius lies” today. It was written for two colleagues – a baritone and a pianist – to perform in April. I wrote the words a couple of weeks ago, the melody on Sunday and the piano part yesterday and today. Even so, I was irritated all day because of the time taken for this work. Also I hate playing things on the piano which I needed to do, so as to make the piano writing as technically easy as possible. But you immediately see all the different possibilities. Ugh, I hate that, it’s like soap under the nails. The only thing I use the piano for nowadays, by the way, is to practise five-finger exercises. And I enjoy those. They are pleasant and don’t give me any bother.

The decisions about “different possibilities” that I hate, have to do with alternatives which are equally valid. In tonal music (which this was) it can be the exact positions of triads, or the register in which you set them. I also hate choosing dynamics. A lot of this sort of time-wasting crap I just decide randomly nowadays. What was interesting to do was the little dance I put in at the end – each phrase in a different key. That was fun. (It’s like my apartment with a different colour marmoleum* for each room – yellow, blue, green, red, etc.). Also there was one nice moment where I combined two separate ideas to make something new, in a way that you would recall both sources.

I thought of John Cage and his colleagues at Black Mountain College. I write something for colleagues which is more or less a Gilbert and Sullivan comic song. Cage would never have done that. I thought about the difference between him and me.

Whilst working at my table I looked out of the window at the balcony of a house opposite. I saw a coloured woman and thought very fast “O my God, it’s a new neighbour, the white people have moved out” and “look she’s making an unsightly mess there, hanging out her washing, like a peasant “. Then I thought “wait a minute, perhaps she’s a cleaner…..I hope so”.

These thoughts happened so fast that there was no time for the censor to swing into action. And the observer in me noted my thoughts with some surprise – I don’t THINK of myself as racist!

I suppose then that I live in denial like my friends. I’d like to be honest with MYSELF at least! And that selfish issue has nothing to do with the sad issue of a woman being disliked just because of her colour and because she steps out on to the balcony to hang out some washing “like a peasant”. What can I say? I caught myself out!

* “Marmoleum is a thoroughly versatile floor covering made from natural and harvestable raw materials such as linseed oil, wood flour, chalk and pine rosin.”