Nat King Cole:
I’m an interpreter of stories. When I perform, it’s like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.”
Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
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Thinking aloud
For some years, I have been arguing that music is a form of thinking. (See prior posts here, published in 2011, and here, 2010.) I realize that this statement would likely be obvious to most musicians, but I still receive push-back to it from those people (especially many philosophers) who believe that thinking requires words. In this belief, they are mistaken. Even with other forms of thinking (geometric, visual, musical, kinetic, etc), though, we may still need words to explain our thinking to others.
Celebrity page turners
Pianist Roger Woodward in his memoir, Beyond Black and White, (2014, Kindle Edition, location 5265):
Violin virtuoso George Enescu and acclaimed pianist Arthur Rubinstein were once lunching together at Enescu’s Paris apartment when there was a knock on his door. It was one of Enescu’s violin students, who was beside himself. Enescu tried to calm him down as the student explained that his piano accompanist had telephoned half an hour earlier to say he had fallen ill and was not able to replace him for his debut that evening. Since Enescu was as fine a pianist as violinist, he reassured his student he would accompany him. Rubinstein volunteered to turn pages. Next day, one of the Paris critics described the concert in the following way: “Except for the fact that the pianist should have played the violin, the page-turner the piano, and violinist the pages, the concert was memorable.” “
Woodward tells this story when recounting a rehearsal of Iannis Xenakis’ Eonta in UCLA in March 1972 under Zubin Mehta at which Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod turned up unexpectedly, having braved rioters and police on the UCLA campus to get there. Eventually Messiaen turned Woodward’s pages for him. However, Messiaen, who had been Xenakis’ composition teacher and knew his music (and who was always supportive of his student), first helped the brass players (from the LASO) deal with the many challenges and mis-prints in their parts for Eonta.
Four pianists enter a bar (in Paris, in 1832)
Felix Mendelssohn stayed in Paris between December 1831 and April 1832. His stay overlapped with those of fellow-pianists and friends Frederick Chopin, Franz Liszt and Ferdinand Hiller. Hiller later wrote an account of his long friendship with Mendelssohn, telling the following story.
At the time (early 1832), all four men were were aged between 20 and 23. Mendelssohn had earlier met and heard Chopin play in Munich and was greatly impressed with his abilities. The story concerns a meeting the four had with Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785-1849), a German pianist, teacher and composer, who was influential in Parisian music circles. Mendelssohn had known Kalkbrenner from Berlin, and suspected him of faking improvisations (ie, playing a written piece from memory while telling people it was improvised). Kalkbrenner had further angered Mendelssohn by insisting, upon meeting Chopin in Paris, that Chopin take his group piano classes to “improve” his technique. Chopin, too polite to refuse, did so for a time.
I remember that one day, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, and I [Hiller], had established ourselves in front of a cafe on Boulevard des Italians, at a season and an hour when our presence there was very exceptional. Suddenly, we saw Kalkbrenner coming along. It was his great ambition always to represent the perfect gentleman, and knowing how extremely disagreeable it would be to him to meet such a noisy company, we surrounded him in the friendliest manner, and assailed him with such a volley of talk that he was nearly driven to despair, which of course delighted us. Youth has no mercy.”
Ferdinand Hiller [1874]: Mendelssohn: Letters and Recollections. (Translated by M. E. von Glehn). Macmillan. Page 26.
Concert Concat 2025
This post is one in a sequence which lists (mostly) live music I have heard, as best as memory allows. I write to have a record of my musical experiences and so these entries are intended as postcards from me to my future self. All opinions are personal.
Other posts in this collection can be found here. The most recent prior post in this sequence is here.
- Vadym Kholodenko in a recital at the Bechstein Hall, London, on Thursday 10 April 2025. This was a superb performance to about 40 people under the artificial stars of the new Bechstein Hall on Wigmore Street. The acoustics of the hall are very good, even with the hall being only about 2/3 full. The programme was:
The etiquette and responsibilities of concert audiences
Earlier this week, at a solo piano recital in the Wigmore Hall, London, a man near to where I was seated started complaining in the interval about how poor he thought the performer was. His statements were apparently unsolicited. The people seated either side of him disagreed with his view, and asked him to be more specific. This occurred as people were returning to their seats at the end of the interval, and he could be heard several rows away.
Continue reading ‘The etiquette and responsibilities of concert audiences’
Music performance and morphic resonance
Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance posits the existence (in some metaphysical or conceptual sense) of morphic forms which arise when living beings act in the world. In this theory, these forms are strengthened with each repetition of the action, and create a force field (a morphic field) which can be drawn upon by subsequent beings repeating the same act. The theory predicts that doing the same thing should become easier over time, even when the entities doing the acting are different, in different locations or not not even alive at the same time. Morphic resonance, if it exists (whatever that may mean) is a form of action at a distance and action through time. I have been fascinated by this theory since first reading Sheldrake’s book about it 36 years ago.
Concert Concat 2024
This post is one in a sequence which lists (mostly) live music I have heard, as best as memory allows. I write to have a record of my musical experiences and these entries are intended as postcards from me to my future self. All opinions are personal, although music historians from the 25th Century may find some of them of interest.
Other posts in this collection can be found here. The most recent prior post in this sequence is here.
- A concert to launch a scholarship for musicians from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine in memory of the late Russian pianist Pavel Kushnir in the Swiss Church, Endell Street, London on Saturday 21 December 2024. The Foundation sponsoring this event was hosting a similar event simultaneously in Paris, two days later in Berlin and Amsterdam, and two days later again (on 25 December 2024) in Tel Aviv.
The London Swiss Church serves both French-speaking and German-speaking Protestant communities, and perhaps both because of its Protestantism and its dual nature, the Church has a very austere interior. The building has recently been redecorated, apparently. The altar appeared to be just a wooden writing desk raised on a single step, and next to it on the step was a simple nativity scene. There was no chair for the pastor nor even a pulpit. A grand piano stood in front of the raised step.
Loud Living in Cambridge
I was most fortunate this week to hear Jan Lisiecki in an outstanding recital at the West Road Concert Hall, Department of Music, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, on 26 February 2024, in a concert sponsored by Camerata Musica Cambridge. West Road Hall is a fine modern hall with very nice acoustics, and was fully packed. The hall management turned off the lights over the audience (as in a theatre), which should happen more often. Perhaps that darkness helped create the atmosphere of great seriousness this performance had. I later learnt that this recital was the twelfth time in the series that Mr Lisiecki had played the Preludes program.
Vale: Peter Schickele (1935-2024)
The composer and musician Peter Schickele, manager of that lesser-known last son of JS Bach, PDQ Bach, has just died. He was heavily influenced by Spike Jones, whose music was a strong presence in my household growing up. With the death last year of Barry Humphries, it feels like the 1950s may now just have ended.
From his obituary in The New York Times, Mr Schickele is quoted as having said in an interview with the Times in 2015:
“Years ago I used to watch Victor Borge, still concertizing in his 80s. And it never occurred to me that I would do the same. I’m amazed that P.D.Q. has gone on for 50 years.
It just goes to show: Some people never learn.”