Category Archives: Notes on Music

The philosophy of music: or the music of philosophy ?

Notes on Music

Open Day: despatches from the front-line

Leave a comment
Cathedral
In-spiring future students...

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 Pianos by Steve Reich, anyone ?!

Arts and the Consumer, Notes on Music

The nation’s favourite aria: the results

Leave a comment

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 winner ? When I am laid in earth, from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

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 ?

Arts and the Consumer, Notes on Music

Gareth Malone: for the people or for television ?

Leave a comment

I can’t help it: Gareth Malone’s series of ‘music for the masses by numbers’ programmes drives me nuts.

What do you think: is it still driven by the desire to educate and widen people’s musical experiences, or by the desire to make good televsion ?

My article about it has been published to Bachtrack this morning: read it here, and join the debate!

Keeping It Real: reviews., Notes on Music

BBC opera season: review published on-line

Leave a comment
Writing
Mightier than the sword...

I’m delighted to say that a review of the BBC’s current opera season, penned by your humble servant, has just been published on Bachtrack, a classical music listings website.

Bachtrack draws information about concerts and performances from all over the world together, to be the definitive site that brings together every aspect of classical music into a single place.

Click here to read the review.

Notes on Music

The Dame on SuBo, Boccelli and singing without microphones

Leave a comment

Opera prima donna Dame Kiri Te Kanawa has reacted rather dismissively to the SuBo phenomenon in an interview in the Radio Times.

Dame Kiri Te KanawaAs an article in The Daily Mail reveals, the Dame believes Susan Boyle’s achievements are not worth talking about, saying she is ‘not interested’ in talking about Boyle’s success.

‘I’m doing something classical, not whizz-bang. Whizz-bang disappears. It goes ‘whizz’ and then ‘bang’.

”You insult me by even wanting to bring it into this conversation. I’m not interested.’

It’s refreshing to find someone who is unafraid to meet the topic of cross-over classical artists and television song-contest winners achieving success in the same sphere as international classical performers, such as Dame Kiri or Luciano Pavarotti, head-on. Then again, when your career and your vocal instrument are as stratospherically brilliant as Dame Kiri’s, you probably have the right to discourse with such frankness on an industry in which you’ve been a international star since 1968.

She’s not afraid to distinguish between artists such as herself, Renee Fleming and Angela Gherorgiu, and those such as Katherine Jenkins and Andrea Bocelli – the former being performers who sing “glorious, serious, grand opera without microphones. There aren’t many of us.”

Ouch. But true, though.

Notes on Music

Emotion on tap: the appeal of film music.

Leave a comment

Whilst listening to the University Concert Band performing a suite from the score to the film Gladiator at a recent concert, I was struck anew by the allure that film music has for me. On browsing through my array of CDs later on, I realised that a large part of my listening library is devoted to film scores, from the spooky Classicism of Hannibal to the robust menace of Gladiator and Jurassic Park, the ethereal mystery of Solaris or the innocent jollity of Amelie.

What is it about film music that appeals ? On reflection, I suspect it might be the immediacy of the emotion it conjures, the instant creation of a mood or effect. Unlike traditional classical music, film scores don’t rely on musical form and architecture in the same way as, say, a symphony or a piano sonata. Film music, at least non-diagetic film music, is used because a director wants to enhance the emotion of a particular scene, and the music has to respond immediately. There is no room for traditional forms such as sonata form – exposition, development, recapitulation – which is all about presenting ideas, developing them, setting up tonal or harmonic relationships, and then providing a resolution in a coda. Think of the menace of the creeping semi-tone in Jaws, or the shrieking strings in Bernard Hermann’s music to Psycho: the effect is immediate.

Of course, diagetic music can do this as well: I’m thinking of that scene in Riidley Scott’s beautiful Hannibal, where the sound of the theme from Bach’s glorious Goldberg Variations seeps into the soundtrack, and the camera tracks across the room to reveal Lecter himself playing the piece as he muses on the letter he has just written to Starling. The piece is a favourite of Lecter’s, as we know from The Silence of the Lambs when he plays it on a tape-recorder in the prison-cage. The beauty of Bach’s melody stands in stark contrast to the environment in which it appears: Lecter’s private residence, or the cage-prison, and the figure of Lecter himself. (This video of Gould performing the Aria uncannily mirrors something of the tracking effect Scott uses in the film: I wonder if he’d seen it ?).

So what film music looms large in your library, and why ?

(Audio excerpts from preview tracks at LastFM).