Ahhhh: with only a week to go until the BBC Proms season begins, it’s time to start getting excited. With every concert broadcast on Radio 3, and some of them televised on BBC4 (mainly) and BBC2, it’s possible to enjoy Prom season even if you’re not living in, or planning to go to, London.
On the beat: Sir Henry Wood
If the excitement’s almost too much, then you can alleviate it slightly by browsing the new BBC Proms Archive, a veritable treasure-trove of information, covering every single Prom performance since Sir Henry Wood first stepped up to the podium in 1895. That’s 115 years’ worth of music-making, catalogued for users to explore.
I’m sure cultural historians are drooling at the prospect of being able to discern listening trends, composer popularity and how tastes in music have changed over the years; viewers can trace how often a work has been performed, who is the most-often performed composer (answer: Wagner – personal acquaintances of mine will know my reaction to that!), and see how the vogue for particular pieces and composers has ebbed and flowed over the years.
It’s one way of distracting yourself from the excitement of waiting for this year’s season to get underway, especially since England’s departure from the World Cup.
In the meantime, vintage footage of Sir Henry Wood in action to tide you over until a week on Friday.
Another hot day last Friday saw us travelling to Tim Ronalds Architects in London to discuss plans for the seating in the new Colyer-Fergusson centre for Music Performance, as well as to see early incarnations of the model of the new building.
This is a truly exciting moment: when the two-dimensional paper plans begin to translate into a three-dimensional representation of the building, and you start to get an idea of what the all the plans, meetings and discussions have actually been driving towards.
Model of the foyer with performance stage
The model of the foyer, with its small performance stage, viewing balcony, social area and lobby (pictured left) gives a real sense of the interior which will greet visitors as they arrive. Musicians on the small foyer stage will be at the focus of the reception area, and viewers on the balcony will be really involved with the performance. The social area in the corner will be a suitable place to listen to music, catch up with e-mails (or up-date your Facebook status on your phone!) whilst waiting for rehearsals and concerts in the main hall to begin.
The glass wall running the length of the foyer’s external east wall will offer enticing views to passers-by and those walking up to the building, of small chamber music performances on the foyer’s stage or audiences congregating before entering the hall itself.
Early designs for the concert-hall (pictured below) also show the great flexibility that the space will afford: without the modelling of seating, you get a great sense of the performance space itself, with the surrounding balcony.
Model of the hall
More photos of the finished model will follow in the next few weeks, but to whet your appetite, here’s a brief selection of photos from Friday’s early stages.
Call me what you will, but I believe there’s an inherent snobbery about how concert audiences are expected to behave.
In the sacred cathedral that has become the Modern Concert Hall, audience members are expected to adopt an almost religious state of silent obeisance before The Music: they must enter the hall with trepidation and awe, with veneration in their hearts, and are expected to listen in a state almost bordering on ecstasy. Not until the end are they permitted to move a muscle, at which point they are then permitted to clap politely – nay,enthusiastically (although not too much of course) – and, if at a jazz gig or a promenade-type concert, they are occasionally allowed to whoop.
Now don’t get me wrong: I understand that listening to music is a deeply personal experience, and I can get as annoyed as anyone by inconsiderate or rude behaviour from someone in the same audience as myself. But if someone has been so moved by a piece that they feel the need to express this, why shouldn’t they ? I have a fantastic live recording of a performance of Walton’s First Symphonyby the National Orchestra of Wales at the Albert Hall; for anyone who doesn’t know this piece, the first movement is of such epic proportions (it’s about fifteen minutes long) that it seems like a whole work in itself. It has pounding rhythms, stirring melodies, and a relentless energy that drives the music to a tremendous climax in a fierce final gesture, punctuated by timpani. In the recording, a smattering of enthusiastic applause breaks out spontaneously at the movement’s conclusion amongst some of the audience who just can’t help themselves: the music is so rousing, it just demands a response.
Yet the Apostles of the Sacred Mysteries of the Concert Hall frown upon those who don’t know any better than to actually clap between individual movements, rather than waiting until the piece is finished. The slight rustling of a programme attracts fierce stares.
But perhaps it’s a cultural thing: after all, the etiquette of modern concert audiences is relatively recent. Until the end of the nineteenth century, audience behaviour was completely different; people went to be seen as much as to see the concert: it was a social occasion at which they talked, ate, and drank during a performance. Modern rules were laid down, according to Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise, by the composer-conductor Gustav Mahler, who instilled in audiences the ideas of complete, attentive silence and no applause until the end of a piece.
And some semblance of the old culture still survives: Italian opera-goers give standing ovations (or vehement boos) after a particular singer has given a great (or disastrous) rendition of an aria. In the middle of an opera. It’s an accepted, even expected, part of the performance experience. Conductors will pause at the end of arias where they know this will happen, even if the music is supposed to carry straight on. The audience are expected to voice their reaction during a piece.
As long as their response isn’t disruptive, I don’t mind if someone is so moved by their experience that they applaud between movements. People go to concerts to be moved, to be emotionally engaged.
I was talking to a colleague over a lugubrious coffee recently – it happens – and we came to the conclusion that broadcasting music can be a dangerous thing. You see, when programmes such as Radio 3 play music, there’s a dangerous assumption that what’s being broadcast is automatically good, simply because it is being played on the radio. Lazy listeners to Radio 3 and Classic FM can easily assume that what they are hearing must be of a suitable standard, otherwise it wouldn’t be aired.
Are you listening ?
The same danger lurks around the printed word: readers assume that, if something is typed, or printed, it Must Be So. Newspapers have an aura of omniscience as a result of this. Wikipedia seems to thrive on this assumption, and how many people have taken Wikipedia’s information as factually correct, when it often isn’t ?
I’ve heard some pretty terrible performers on the radio: soloists with otherwise eminent, reputable period-instrument ensembles, whose performing I wouldn’t even sit through if they turned up at the local community hall. There’s a sense that the performance is condoned by the broadcasting company in the act of putting the music on the air: as though the act of broadcasting confers some seal of approval on it.
As listeners, we need to be wary of accepting that performances we hear on the radio, or sometimes see on television, are acceptable (I hesitate to use the word ‘good’ here, as the judgement of one person may not be that of another: but we can all at least (I hope) distinguish between performers who are in tune, or engaging, and those that simply are not). We are often too passive as cultural consumers, reaching readily for newspaper reviews to tell us what concerts are ‘worth’ attending, what art exhibitions are ‘worth’ visiting, what films are ‘worth’ seeing.
It’s time we listened (and watched) more pro-actively; time we stopped believing in the benign, assumed sanctioning by radio and television of mediocre, even bad music-making, and started making cultural decisions for ourselves.
Writing from the front-line: it’s Saturday morning, 11 o’clock, and we’re present at the University of Kent Open Day, having begun at 9 o’clock.
We’re wireless, and able to show visitors for the first time the department website and the blog straight away. The Director of Music is industriously working her way through a jumbo-bag of Rowntrees’ Pick ‘n Mix, and I’m taking the opportunity, in a brief lull in the morning, to report on how it’s going.
It’s been different this year, as visitors have registered in advance to come today: here at the Music at Kent stand, we’ve had a steady stream of visitors enquiring about making music. People have come from Chelmsford, King’s Lynn, Frome in Somerset, Slough, Camberley, Peterborough, Sissinghurst, Bournemouth, and even my hometowns of Worthing and Lancing, Sussex. We’ve also had international visitors, including one from Luxembourg!
It’s now 1pm, and I still haven’t managed to publish this to the blog: it’s been extremely busy this morning and it’s now lunch: I’m sure they’ll all now arrive as we decide to open our sandwiches: it usually happens… We’re about to avail ourselves of the bounteous foodstuffs provided by hospitality, so there’ll definitely be a queue form as I broach the sandwich cartons. I’ll publish this now – finally.
2.20pm: quite a few pianists, singers and brass players making enquiries: I wonder who won the BBC Young Musician of the Year about twelve years ago, when they were making decisions about which instrument they were going to take up ? Two trombonists, two tenor-horn players, a cornet player and a trumpeter: interesting…
3.30pm: with half an hour to go, there’s a lull in the thronging masses: I suspect Uruguay-South Korea or Petzschner-Nadal is commanding people’s attention now. People are still coming through the doors, though, and we’ve had a busy and productive day on the Music stand. If these enquiries translate into successful student applications and Music Scholarship students, the standard of music-making in 2011-12 will be very high indeed, and we’ll have to run several orchestras, a brass group, several choirs and a ensemble comprised entirely of pianists as well as the regular ensembles: Six Pianosby Steve Reich, anyone ?!
With World Cup season in full swing (love it or hate it), time to reflect on the links between classical music and its love-affair with the beautiful game.
Last Friday, we heard the interior of the proposed Colyer-Fergusson centre for Music Performance.
Immersed in the sound... listening at Arup Acoustics
Not literally, alas: but virtually. Rising with the lark (actually, before the lark: I had to shoo him out of bed), and then up to London to meet with project members from the University and representatives of Tim Ronalds Architects and Carr and Angier Theatre Consultants at the London offices of Arup Acoustics, where acousticians were modelling the sonic interior of the building.
Sitting in the centre of a small sound-booth, we were presented with various ensembles – orchestra, choir, string quartet, brass ensemble, solo singer and continuo – recorded anechoically, and then heard their performances realised in a virtual sonic model of the new building’s interior.
The great strength of the proposed building is that it is a flexible performance space. It will be able to change in order to accommodate a diverse range of performing ensembles, from full symphony orchestra and chorus to chamber choirs, big bands, string and brass ensembles., We explored the various permutations of the variable acoustics – fully reverberant, then with varying degrees of the acoustic drapes being set to render the acoustic gradually less reverberant – with different ensemble set-ups, and assessed the differening impacts of the acoustic settings on each.
Potentially, the sonic space created by the hall, and the varying acoustic properties offered by the variable acoustics, are fantastic, and afford a wide array of opportunities for ensemble music-making, ranging from the large scale to the intimate, each with a suitable (almost bespoke) acoustic environment. The nature of the reverberation within the hall will be able to be altered to suit the different types of rehearsing and performing, tailored to meet the demands of the varying ensembles using the space.
It is unquestionably a fantastic space for music-making, and we are highly excited. We’ll keep you posted as further developments unfold: keep your ear to the ground.
Radio 3 has just concluded a poll to try and find the Nation’s Favourite Aria, and the results are in.
Puccini’s Nessun dorma doesn’t appear, although he is present through E lucevan le stelle from Tosca. There are no arias by Rossini or Verdi. Mozart appears three times, and there’s even an aria from Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt.
All but one of the arias (if you count Che faro senza Eurydice as a trouser-role) are for soprano or mezzo-soprano. There’s no beseeching tenors singing Che gelida manina or lamenting over flowers in La fleur que tu m’avais jetée, no baritones exhorting us to join the army in Non più andrai.
As Rupert Christiansen remarked in The Telegraph, the prevailing mood is one of doom and gloom among the choices: ‘everyone is either dying, praying or hopelessly in love.’
The question remains: is a poll conducted amongst Radio 3 listeners truly representative of the nation’s choices ? Radio 3’s site does have a caveat: “this is not a representative poll and the figures do not purport to represent public opinion as a whole on this issue.” What results would the same poll have yielded if it had been done by Classic FM ?
What’s your favourite: did it make the list ?
Because it does. Doesn't it ? Blogging about extra-curricular musical life at the University of Kent.
