I’d like to add another Sibelian Similarity: this time, by saxophonist Wayne Shorter, one-time sideman with Miles Davis and sax player with the great fusion band, Weather Report.
The melodic line from the theme to ‘Port of Entry’ on Weather Report’s live album from 1980, Night Passage, has always reminded me of the beginning of the trombone theme from Sibelius’ great Seventh Symphony.
(The sax theme enters at 25”.)
And the Sibelius theme:
(The theme itself starts at 5’ 25’’).
With a difference in the third note (and obviously in the rhythmic design), the shape articulated by the first gesture of the melody is similar in both cases:
Thematic comparison
Was Wayne Shorter, like Monty Norman, a secret Sibelius fan as well ?
The fictional warrior-race from the iconic sci-fi series Star Trek is famed for its guttural, consonant-rich language that sounds as aggressive as its speakers are to behold, as you can hear in a video by the language’s creator, Marc Okrand, which has been sent to the Klingon’s home-planet.
You can view moments from the opera and an interview with key figures involved in the project on the BBC site here.
Whether it can compete with Shakespeare’s famous soliloquy from Hamlet, ‘To be or not to be,’ as it appears in the original Klingon, remains to be seen.
Whatever next: ‘Dancing with Wookies on Ice ?’ I think I need to go and lie down now…
In a recent article, composer Jonathan Harvey proposes abandoning the idea of conventional audience behaviour at concert halls, in a bid to attract younger audiences.
I’ve written previously about expected audience behaviour, as it’s important to make music accessible to everyone without burying it beneath all manner of stultifying conventions that will almost certainly put people off, especially younger audiences who are potentially the Ticket-buyers of Tomorrow. The almost religious state of obeisance required to sit still and attentively through classical repertoire is alien to those who attend jazz gigs and rock concerts. Clap in the wrong place during a symphony, and you’re greeted with icy stares or patronising glances: clap after a particularly fine instrumental improvisation at a jazz gig, the musicians will nod their thanks.
Harvey advocates amplifying music in performance, standard practice in rock and jazz gigs but greeted with a sharp intake of breath at classical concerts.
“There is a big divide between amplified and non-amplified music. The future must bring things that are considered blasphemous, like amplifying classical music in an atmosphere where people can come and go … and certainly leave in the middle of a movement if they feel like it.”
Leave in the middle if they feel like it ? Blasphemous indeed, perhaps – to some. But precisely this premise was part of Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson – written in 1976, the opera lasts for around five hours, and consists of nine scenes linked by short interludes known as ‘Knee Plays;’ there is no plot, and the audience members are free to enter and leave when they wish.
Harvey has composed in the electro-acoustic field as well as traditional choral and instrumental works: Le Tombeau de Messiaen is composed for piano and tape; Mortuos Plango, Vivos Vocos whizzes the tenor bell of Winchester Cathedral and voice of a boy soprano (Harvey’s son) around in space, whilst Speakingsportrays the birth, development and establishment of language and is written for orchestra and live electronics. His choral compositions range from the dancing Virgo Virginum to the beguiling mesmerism of The Angels.
There is of course a divide between audiences for classical concert repertoire and jazz and rock lovers: but as composers such as Mark-Anthony Turnage and Tansy Davies are proving, it’s not an insurmountable one. (Frank Zappa’s The Yellow Shark, anyone ?) And if you go to a concert given by groups like Icebreaker or to hear music by Steve Reich, amplification is almost de rigeur.
Harvey makes the prediction that “if orchestras and conductors hang on to the orthodox method of performance they will end up playing to empty halls.” Whilst one hopes fervently that this will not be the case, there is surely some room to accommodate new ways of listening to music, in a way that will attract younger audiences: isn’t there ?
Ah, the thorny question: how does music mean ? Can it have external meaning, or does meaning derive solely from its internal content – harmony, tonality, the working out of ideas ? Does it – indeed, can it – express ideas, emotions, characters, or does it simply ask the listener to follow the unfolding events, the order of ideas and the relationships between them ?
Leonard Bernstein offers some thoughts in a lecture from Harvard:
As he says: ”Music does possess the power of expressivity (sic).” Whether, like Stravinsky, you feel that music is “by its very nature, powerless to express anything at all” (1) (Stravinsky was talking about his so-called ‘white’ music at the time, such as the ballet Apollon Musagete: Variation de Calliope for strings), or that music conjures its meaning from associations brought by the listener (i.e. previous experiences of similar chords and keys), music certainly has the power to move listeners. A listener with a half-decent wealth of listening experience perhaps comes to a piece with all that listening and its commensurate baggage: one melodic shape reminds them of another piece they’ve heard, a particular sonority or chord reminds them of another piece in which they’ve heard it, or a tonality is associated with a certain mood or frame of mind.
'The Lute Player,' Caravaggio
Bernstein distinguishes between ‘what music expresses’ and ‘how music expresses it’ by talking about metaphor, music as a language rich in metaphor, ‘meaning beyond the literal.’
Leonard B. Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music defines two types of listener: those for whom musical meaning “lies exclusively within the work itself, in the perception of the relationships set forth within the musical work of art” and those for whom music also “communicates meanings which in some way to the extramusical world of concepts, actions, emotional states and character.” Meyer calls the former ‘absolutists’ and the latter ‘referentialists.’ (2)
Or perhaps you have a foot in both camps: a piece of music has its internal order, its sequence of events with its conflicts and resolutions, that it articulates and which the listener may follow; but it also taps into a listener’s previous experience and associated personal meanings ? Meyer declares that they “are not mutually exclusive: that they can and do co-exist in one and the same piece of music.”
Absolutist or referentialist: which one are you ?
—————
1 Stravinsky, I, (1975), An Autobiography, Calder & Boyars: 163
2 Meyer, L (1963), Emotion and Meaning in Music, University of Chicago: 1
Oh, wow. As Alex Ross points out in a recent post on The Rest is Noise, critics in the media are gradually picking up on the idea that Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Hammered Out, premiered at the BBC Proms last week (discussed in a previous post here), has more than a nodding reference to Beyoncé.
Ring of truth ? Beyonce Knowles
Some bright spark has superimposed Beyoncé’s hit Single Ladies, released in the UK in February last year, onto the first three minutes of video footage of the Turnage piece on YouTube, and it’s hard not to be convinced. Brass riffs imitate vocal lines, chords on the piano and strings are following patterns in the pop song: even the speed David Robertson takes the piece at is the same. Turnage is a confessed jazz and pop enthusiast as well as being a ‘classical’ composer (if the term can be said to have any meaning these days).
In an interview about the piece, Turnage acknowledged several pop references, but also mentioned secret ones that he would prefer listeners to discover for themselves. This seems to be one of them.
I’m already overwhelmed by the Autumn music events calendar: and it hasn’t even begun.
The Eden-Stell Guitar Duo
The new Music brochure has just been published on-line, including details of the forthcoming free Lunchtime Concert Series, the Scholars’ Festival Lunchtime Concert as part of the Canterbury International Festival, and concerts by the Chamber Choir and University Chorus and Symphony Orchestra: not to mention the Jazz @ 5 series and a festive Carols Round the Tree.
The Lunchtime Concert features music from remote parts of Africa with the vibrant Kasai Masai; a programme including Bach and Rodrigo from the Eden-Stell Guitar Duo; and a seasonal concert from the Choristers of Canterbury Cathedral in December.
The popular Jazz @ 5 series returns to the Gulbenkian Foyer Stage with jazz, cabaret and showtunes and one or two surprises.
Kasai Masai
There’s also an seasonal concert by candelight by the Chamber Choir to mark the beginning of Advent, and the term finishes in epic style with works by Dvorak and Verdi in the December choral and orchestral concert.
Something for everyone in our busiest diary yet: click here to see the on-line calendar or here to download the PDF, and get the dates in your diaries now!
United across centuries: weird composer Erik Satie and Brit pop group Take That. Surely not ?
But yes. In Satie’s ballet-realiste Parade from 1917, three Actor-Managers set up a side-show outside their tent, in an effort to attract an audience to see their show. Sadly, their efforts prove in vain: the spectacle outside the tent becomes the main attraction, and no-one is enticed in to see the proper performance inside.
You can hear this sense of desperate futility in the episode of the Chinese Magician, where the jollity of the music and the whistling in the percussion are overwhelmed by ponderous orchestration and repetition leading nowhere. At the end of the piece, exhausted by their futile efforts, the characters slump to the ground in defeat.
This sense of desperation is also captured to great effect in the video to Take That’s Said It All, released in 2009, where all the energy and antics of the clowns cannot move the audience, because the tent is empty. There’s no-one there to appreciate their manic efforts: as with the Satie, the main focus of the show, the audience, is absent, and the characters can only act out their performances with a sense of forlorn hope.
Shot in muted and washed-out colours, thereby depriving them even of the imposed jollity of their colourful outfits, there are some beautiful sequences; there’s a sense of resignation about them as they dress for what they know will be a pointless show. Clowns are rescued from the ludicrous nature of their garb and their slapstick antics through audience laughter, redeemed through the mirth they create for others. There’s none of that here: no redemption for them at all.
In both works, futility is elevated to the status of art, and circus characters, whose very existence is to entertain, end up deprived of their ability to do so. The same sentiment expressed over a distance of over ninety years in two very different cultures.
The two Proms from Friday night both employed the piano not as a percussion instrument, but as a weaver of illusions.
In the first concert, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet gave a dazzling performance of Ravel’s often brooding Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, written between 1929-30, in which the piano part is so carefully constructed that, if you’d missed the title of the piece, you could be forgiven for not realising it was written for a single hand. Rather like the single instrumental voice in Bach’s solo partitas for cello and for violin, the single part executes both melody and accompaniment in a way which convinces the ear that there’s another part also involved. Ravel built the piano part so carefully that, when an arrangement was made for both hands, it actually destroyed the careful balancing and textural placing that Ravel had so diligently organised.
The second, late-night Prom saw a very different piano concerto, Morton Feldman’s Piano and Orchestra of 1975, in which the piano explores distilled vertical sonorities, often at times either blending into or emerging out of the accompanying orchestral texture. John Tilbury’s delicately-balanced reading made the piano seem as though it were dripping dabs of colour into the surrounding air. Unlike the traditional concerto, which pitches the solo instrument against the orchestra and includes a solo cadenza to display the virtuosity of the instrument, here piano and orchestra are united in a sonic exploration, defeating time by eschewing the traditional three-movement structure and using instead a slow-moving, metre-less feel over a single movement. The sense of time pausing, of contemplative reflection and of the slow examination of ideas from several perspectives are concepts another Frenchman would have recognised – Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies achieve something similar in condensed form.
Working towards the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Debussy talked of composing for the piano a ‘music without hammers.’ The piano is essentially a percussion instrument: rather than strings being bowed or plucked, they are struck with hammers, and you can’t get more percussive than that. It was Debussy who began the idea of treating the piano contrary to its essentially percussive nature, and Feldman’s piece stands in the tradition Debussy began nearly a century earlier.
Two concerts, using the piano to weave two very different illusions: one to overcome the absence of a right-hand (I avoid the word ‘missing,’as the concerto certainly doesn’t suffer from the absence of the upper hand), and one to pretend the piano isn’t a piano at all. Would Debussy have approved of Ravel’s piano concerto, had he lived to hear it ? I feel certain he would have approved of the Feldman.
(You can hear the concerts for a week on-line on BBC iPlayer, and the concerts will be repeated on Radio 3 later next week).
Because it does. Doesn't it ? Blogging about extra-curricular musical life at the University of Kent.
I’ve 
United across centuries: weird composer Erik Satie and Brit pop group Take That. Surely not ?
This sense of desperation is also captured to great effect in the video to Take That’s 