I saw James Ivory’s film Slaves of New York soon after it appeared in 1989. The movie contains a scene set in a nightclub (minutes 63-69) with the most superb trance music, played by a male singer/guitarist and 3 female supporting musicians: one on percussion, one on synth, and a trumpeter. For most of this number, the trumpeter is smoking a cigarette, not playing, until near the end, when she plays while holding her smoking cigarette. The rhythm is a consistent, driving pattern: ta-ta-ta-ta daa daa (eg, 4 quavers followed by two crotchets) in each bar, or variants of this, with no changes of harmony, and drone-like chants over the top. The percussion includes a regular high-pitched woodblock (or similar).
Other than two songs by the combo of Arto Lindsay and Peter Scherer, this is the best music in the film (which apart from this music is forgettable). Unfortunately, this track is not on the official soundtrack, and the credits at the end of the film do not identify it clearly. The song is Mother Dearest, and the male singer (and the song’s composer) is Joe Leeway, formerly of British group, The Thompson Twins. It is a shame that he has not released any music under his own name, and no longer seems to be working as a muso. What a great loss to music.
Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Page 4 of 13
Unfunny music
Last night, I caught the BBC Symphony Orchestra, under Sakari Oramo, with Olli Mustonen (piano) and Sergei Nakariakov (trumpet), at the Barbican, playing Tristan Murail’s Reflections/Reflets and Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto #1. The Murail work was in two parts, the first (Spleen) a response to Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, oozed sound colours slowly and langorously across the horizon, while the second (High Voltage) involved rapid-fire scales and runs. I liked the first part more than the second. The composer was in the audience.
In the Shostakovich, Nakariakov’s trumpet was superb. I have never heard the sad, muted solo of the second movement played so hauntingly: His tone there was breathtaking, and it was as if the sound was coming from another room, perhaps by some form of ventriloquism (a trumpet ventriloquy?). What came immediately to mind was the similarly sublime green-tinged, luminous moon of Arkhip Kuindzhi’s famous 1881 painting Moonlit Night on the Dniepr (pictured). In contrast, Mustonen’s piano playing was disappointing. His left hand was decidedly softer than the right for most of the piece. At first, I thought this may be an acoustic artefact of where I was sitting (at the front left, almost directly facing the pianist’s back), but when he deployed his left hand loudly I did hear it loudly. The issue is that for much of the work, Shostakovich was writing – as he does so often – in the style of a two-part invention, not a music-hall song with a cantabile solo with uninteresting accompaniment, so the two hands need to play equally loudly so that we hear the parts clearly.
The performance had another, more existential, problem: This concerto is one of the funniest works in the entire orchestral repertoire, and yet last night’s interpretation was intensely serious. Perhaps having in charge two Finns – a nation notoriously dour – overwhelmed the fun in the music. And, I think it would have been better had the pianist not had his back to the trumpeter. The entire work is a sharp-tongued dialogue between the two, particularly the duel at the end, and to hear what is meant to be fast-witted banter played so seriously was disappointing.
Poem: Poem VI
A poem by Derek Jarman (1942-1994), written in 1965:
Poem VI
The days are numbered,
For us, and the old man
collecting pennies under
the bridge.
For he is in disguise
and has attended the concert –
before us,
But now he plays his
violin in a way which
demands our sympathy.
(From Sketchbooks, reprinted in The Observer Magazine, 2013-08-25, page 25).
Previous poems here.
Influential Music
Having written posts on influential non-fiction books and on influential fiction books, I thought it interesting to list pieces of music that have influenced me. To start with, I’ve confined myself initially to western art music (aka “classical” music). Jazz and world music to come in due course. The music is listed in alpha order of composer surname. Some pieces were introduced to me by friends, whom I thank with a Hat Tip (HT).
- Adams: Phrygian Gates (HT: RH)
- Arriaga: String Quartets
- Arriaga: Symphony
- Bach: Double Concerto for Violin
- Bach: Piano Concerto #1, BWV1052
- Bach: St. Matthew Passion
- Bach: St. John Passion
- Bach: Mass in B Minor
- Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier
- Bach: Cantatas
- Bach: Toccata and Fugue in D minor
- Bach: Partitas and Sonatas for solo violin
- CPE Bach: Magnificat
- Beethoven: Piano Sonatas
- Beethoven: Symphonies 3, 5 and 9
- Beethoven: Piano Concertos
- Beethoven: Piano Quartets
- Beethoven: Piano Trios
- Beethoven: Violin Concerto
- Bernstein: Overture to Candide (HT: DUJ)
- Binge: Elizabethan Serenade
- Cage: Music for prepared piano
- Cherubini: String Quartets
- Chopin: Nocturnes
- Chopin: Preludes Op. 28 (HT: KM)
- Debussy: Preludes
- Farrenc: Piano Quartets
- Farrenc: The Symphonies
- Feldman: Five Pianos
- Feldman: Triadic Memories
- Glass: Koyaanisqatsi
- Glass: Symphony for 8 (Cello Octet)
- Handel: Messiah
- Haydn: Sturm und Drang Symphonies
- Haydn: The Creation
- Haydn: String Quartets
- Hummel: Trumpet Concerto
- Ligeti: Etudes (HT: EK and AD)
- Maxwell Davies: Eight Songs for a Mad King
- McPhee: Tabu Tabuhan
- Meale: Clouds Now and Then
- Mendelssohn: The String Symphonies #7-12
- Mendelssohn: Magnificat
- Mendelssohn: Hebrides Overture
- Mendelssohn: Octet
- Mendelssohn: String Quartets and Quintets
- Mendelssohn: Piano Trios and Quartets
- Mendelssohn: Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Mendelssohn: Elijah
- Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor
- Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in D minor
- Mendelssohn: Concerto for Piano and Violin in D minor
- Mendelssohn: The Symphonies
- Mendelssohn: Songs without Words
- Montague: Piano Concerto
- Mozart: Last 3 Symphonies
- Mozart: Requiem
- Mozart: The String Quartets
- Nishimura: Bird Heterophony
- Nyman: Songs for Tony
- Ore: Codex Temporis
- Orff: Carmina Burana
- Penberthy: Saxophone Concerto
- Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 2 (HT: AD)
- Reich: Nagoya Marimbas (HT: JG)
- Reich: Music for 18 Musicians
- Alvidas Remesa: Stigmata (HT: KM)
- Riley: In C
- Roman: Drottningholm Music (Music for a Royal Wedding)
- Rzewski: The People united will never be Defeated (HT: AD)
- Schumann: Dichterliebe (HT: PP)
- Schumann: The Symphonies
- Sculthorpe: Sun Music III
- Shostakovich: Concerto for Piano and Trumpet
- Shostakovich: Incidental Music for Hamlet
- Shostakovich: 24 Preludes and Fugues for Piano
- Stockhausen: Stimmung (HT: LM)
- Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring
- Takemitsu: A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden
- Tchaikovsky: Symphonies #4 and #5
- Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto
- ten Holt: Canto Ostinato (HT: AD)
- Vanhal: The Symphonies
- Wagner: Prelude to The Mastersingers of Nuremberg
- Xenakis: Metastaseis
- Xenakis: Pithoprakta.
Mama don't allow
Norm’s latest entry in his Mommy and Daddy collection of songs is JJ Cale’s version of “Now, Mama don’t allow no guitar playing round here“. The version of this song that I first recall hearing was that of The Limeliters, who do not refer (as Cale does) to “My Mama“. So, I’d always understood the song to be about boarding-house owners, rather than natural-born mothers, and hence a fine metaphor for the suffocating nanny culture that was the US of the 1950s. I cannot find their version online.
Of course, a mention of The Slightly Fabulous Limeliters would be incomplete without a reference to their song about Harry Pollitt, long-time General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Influential Books
This is a list of non-fiction books and articles which have greatly influenced me – making me see the world differently or act in it differently. They are listed chronologically according to when I first encountered them.
- 2024 – Nikki Mark [2023]: Tommy’s Field: Love, Loss and the Goal of a Lifetime. Union Square.
- 2023 – Clare Carlisle [2018]: “Habit, Practice, Grace: Towards a Philosophy of Religious Life.” In: F. Ellis (Editor): New Models of Religious Understanding. Oxford University Press, pp. 97–115.
- 2022 – Sean Hewitt [2022]: All Down Darkness Wide. Jonathan Cape.
- 2022 – Stewart Copeland [2009]: Strange Things Happen: A Life with “The Police”, Polo and Pygmies.
- 2019 – Mary Le Beau (Inez Travers Cunningham Stark Boulton, 1888-1958) [1956]: Beyond Doubt: A Record of Psychic Experience.
- 2019 – Zhores A Medvedev [1983]: Andropov: An Insider’s Account of Power and Politics within the Kremlin.
- 2016 – Lafcadio Hearn [1897]: Gleanings in Buddha-Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East. London, UK: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Company Limited.
- 2015 – Benedict Taylor [2011]: Mendelssohn, Time and Memory. The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form. Cambridge UP.
- 2010 – Hans Kundnani [2009]: Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust. London, UK: Hurst and Company.
- 2009 – J. Scott Turner [2007]: The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself. Harvard UP. (Mentioned here.)
- 2008 – Stefan Aust [2008]: The Baader-Meinhof Complex. Bodley Head.
- 2008 – A. J. Liebling [2008]: World War II Writings. New York City, NY, USA: The Library of America.
- 2008 – Pierre Delattre [1993]: Episodes. St. Paul, MN, USA: Graywolf Press.
- 2006 – Mark Evan Bonds [2006]: Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. Princeton UP.
- 2006 – Kyle Gann [2006]: Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice. UCal Press.
- 2005 – Clare Asquith [2005]: Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare. Public Affairs.
- 2004 – Igal Halfin [2003]: Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial. Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard UP.
- 2002 – Philip Mirowski [2002]: Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science. Cambridge University Press.
- 2001 – George Leonard [2000]: The Way of Aikido: Life Lessons from an American Sensei.
- 2000 – Stephen E. Toulmin [1990]: Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. University of Chicago Press.
- 1999 – Michel de Montaigne [1580-1595]: Essays.
- 1997 – James Pritchett [1993]: The Music of John Cage. Cambridge UP.
- 1996 – George Fowler [1995]: Dance of a Fallen Monk: A Journey to Spiritual Enlightenment.
Doubleday. - 1995 – Chungliang Al Huang and Jerry Lynch [1992]: Thinking Body, Dancing Mind. New York: Bantam Books.
- 1995 – Jon Kabat-Zinn [1994]: Wherever You Go, There You Are.
- 1995 – Charlotte Joko Beck [1993]: Nothing Special: Living Zen.
- 1993 – George Leonard [1992]: Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment.
- 1992 – Henry Adams [1907/1918]: The Education.
- 1990 – Trevor Leggett [1987]: Zen and the Ways. Tuttle.
- 1989 – Grant McCracken [1988]: Culture and Consumption.
- 1989 – Teresa Toranska [1988]: Them: Stalin’s Polish Puppets. Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska. HarperCollins. (Mentioned here.)
- 1988 – Henry David Thoreau [1865]: Cape Cod.
- 1988 – Rupert Sheldrake [1988]: The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature.
- 1988 – Dan Rose [1987]: Black American Street Life: South Philadelphia, 1969-1971. UPenn Press.
- 1987 – Susan Sontag [1966]: Against Interpretation. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- 1987 – Gregory Bateson [1972]: Steps to an Ecology of Mind. U Chicago Press.
- 1987 – Jay Neugeboren [1968]: Reflections at Thirty.
- 1985 – Esquire Magazine Special Issue [June 1985]: The Soul of America.
- 1985 – Brian Willan [1984]: Sol Plaatje: A Biography.
- 1982 – John Miller Chernoff [1979]: African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms. University of Chicago Press.
- 1981 – Walter Rodney [1972]: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Overture Publications.
- 1980 – James A. Michener [1971]: Kent State: What happened and Why.
- 1980 – Andre Gunder Frank [1966]: The Development of Underdevelopment. Monthly Review Press.
- 1980 – Paul Feyerabend [1975]: Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge.
- 1979 – Aldous Huxley [1945]: The Perennial Philosophy.
- 1978 – Christmas Humphreys [1949]: Zen Buddhism.
- 1977 – Raymond Smullyan [1977]: The Tao is Silent.
- 1976 – Bertrand Russell [1951-1969]: The Autobiography. George Allen & Unwin.
- 1975 – Jean-Francois Revel [1972]: Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution Has Begun.
- 1974 – Charles Reich [1970]: The Greening of America.
- 1973 – Selvarajan Yesudian and Elisabeth Haich [1953]: Yoga and Health. Harper.
- 1972 – Robin Boyd [1960]: The Australian Ugliness.
PKOM at the Wigmore
This week, I was lucky to catch the first half of a concert by Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto and pianist/composer Olli Mustonen at London’s Wigmore Hall. I heard them play Beethoven’s Violin Sonata in A (Op. 30, #1) and Mustonen’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, which was a world premiere.
As always with PK, the playing was superb and full of energy. What he lacks in physical height, he more than makes up for in enthusiasm and pizzaz. He is an extraordinarily talented violinist, and I try not to miss opportunities to hear him play. (I have also heard him play piano, but the part was not a testing one.)
In the main, Beethoven’s violin sonatas do not impress me – our Ludwig couldn’t play the instrument nearly as well as he could play the piano, and this shows in his writing for the respective instruments. I view these sonatas as really being piano sonatas with violin commentaries. And, as so often with Beethoven, the music at some point comes to a stop, or nearly so, mid-way through the develoment section, like a clock winding down, and has to be re-started again. What underlying psychological thing is going on here, I wonder, that this happens so often in B’s music? After a while it becomes annoying, like a friend asking you the same unpleasant question every time you meet, and you end up wantIng to avoid talking with that person.
Mustonen’s Sonata was superb. The programme notes warned us that he began as a composer of “Busonian neo-classicism”. I thought this piece was not at all neo-classical, but also certainly not in the category of up-town modernist complexity. The first part comprised an ever-present walking treble line of odd intervals by the violin, sequences of uneven lengths and different intervals not quite repeated exactly, with various waves of piano arising and decaying around this. The particular odd intervals – tritones, sevenths – brought immediately to my mind some music of Australian composer Larry Sitsky, who studied with Egon Petri (1881-1962), who in turn was a student of Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924). The emotional waves of this first part were very stark. Would I have thought of Sibelius and the forests of the North if I had not known the composer was Finnish? I don’t know.
The transition between the second and third parts was slow and beautiful, and very moving, and the effects PK produced were simply stunning. At one point, low trembling notes on the G string sounded like a breathy flute being played. And a series of repeated patterns combining trills and vibrata on different fingers of the left hand, was very impressive. Not at all clear how these effects were produced, but the independent but co-ordinated action of the left-hand fingers would have required long practice to achieve. Perhaps the effect was partly due to rapid changes of speed and pressure on the bow, also.
It was a privilege to be in the presence of such superb music played by these two virtuosos.
Here is another review of the same concert, by an anonymous blogger. Following the review, the blogger cites PK’s recording of Vivalid’s Four Seasons, as “restrained”. I wonder if he or she was actually listening! We’ve had 60 years of elegant, effete and twee recordings of The Seasons, so we know what restrained with regard to this music means. PK’s treatment is rustic and earthy and full-blooded, as if the entire ensemble had been taken outside and roughed-up in the mud of the farmyard, and the complete opposite of restrained! A simply superb interpretation, original, fresh and compelling. Your milage certainly can vary, as people say.
Mathematics in Britain
From the music critic of The Times, writing in 1952 (issue of 2 May 1952, page 8, column 6, review of The Background of Music, by H. Lowery, published in 1952 by Hutchinson):
At Redbrick [University] they treat mathematics as an instrument of technology; at Cambridge they regard it as an ally of physics and an approach to philosophy; at Oxford they think of it as an art in itself having affinities with counterpoint and dancing.”
Quoted (incorrectly) by Ida Winifred Busbridge, in a 1974 history of mathematics at Oxford University, here. (Note that Busbridge writes “music” instead of “counterpoint”.)
Oxford University was a strong supporter of Catholicism in Elizabeth I’s time (eg, it was home to Thomas Campion), while Cambridge and the Fens, due to their proximity to the Netherlands, was the centre for an extreme Protestant sect, called the Family of Love, or the Familists. Elizabeth I’s religious policy often sought to find a middle ground between these two extremes. These religious differences persisted, so that Oxford was again, in the mid 19th-century, a centre of Catholic, and, within the Anglican Church, Anglo-Catholic (“High Church”) ideas. The Redbrick Universities (Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Victoria University of Manchester, etc), mostly founded in the North and Midlands of England in the late 19th century or early 20th century, were the result of money-raising campaigns by local business people and civic worthies, who were often of a Nonconformist or Jewish religious background. The name Redbrick arose from novels written by a professor of Spanish at the University of Liverpool, Edgar Peers, about a fictional northern university modeled on Liverpool.
I don’t think the distinct differences between Nonconformist, Protestant and Catholic world views could be better expressed than those here between the philosophies of mathematics of Redbrick, Cambridge and Oxford: Nonconformism as pragmatic utilitarianism; Protestantism as serious reflection on life’s higher ends; and Catholicism as enjoyment of life and its pleasures!
Brass in Perth
Brisbane Excelsior Brass Band have won the 2013 A-Grade Australian National Band Championships, held in Perth, WA, last week. Congratulations to all!
According to this band contest archive, Excelsior have previously won the national championship in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2010. Some members of the band performed last year in a concert in Tyalgum, NSW, which I reported here, and in a concert two years ago in Bundamba to celebrate 125 years of the Salvation Army in Ipswich, Qld.
Composers concat
While making lists of artists whose work speaks to me, here’s my list of classical composers likewise. Of course, I don’t necessarily like everything these composers wrote.
- Johann Adam Reincken (1643-1722)
- Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
- Johan Helmich Roman (1694-1758)
- Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
- Michael Haydn (1737-1806)
- Johann Baptist Vanhal (1739-1813)
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
- Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842)
- Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
- Johann Hummel (1778-1837)
- Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
- Louise Farrenc (1804-1875)
- Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847)
- Juan Chrisostomo Arriaga (1806-1826)
- Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
- Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
- William Sterndale Bennett (1816-1875)
- Neils Gade (1817-1890)
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)
- Antoni Stolpe (1851-1872)
- Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
- Alfred Hill (1869-1960)
- Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
- Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
- Colin McPhee (1900-1964)
- Aram Khachaturian (1903–1978)
- Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
- John Cage (1912-1992)
- Jim Penberthy (1917-1999)
- Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001)
- Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006)
- Morton Feldman (1926-1987)
- Peter Sculthorpe (1929-2014)
- Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996)
- Richard Meale (1932-2009)
- Terry Riley (1935- )
- Steve Reich (1936- )
- Philip Glass (1937- )
- Louis Andriessen (1939- )
- Michael Nyman (1944- )
- Barry Conyngham (1944- )
- John Adams (1947- )
- Akira Nishimura (1953- )
- Cecilie Ore (1954- )
- Pascal Dusapin (1955- )
- Andrew McGuiness
- Christophe Bertrand (1981-2010).
The alert reader will notice the absence of Richard Wagner. This is deliberate.