Thomasina’s last waltz

Listening in the dark

Tonight was International Earth Hour (8 to 9 pm). And somehow I managed to forget, despite declaring on Facebook my intention to "attend". I guess I can catch up with a private gesture of my own tomorrow, but I'm sorry I missed the chance to see the city in relative darkness.

Also on tonight – and not attended because I heard it on Wednesday – was an SSO concert at the Sydney Opera House. The Opera House's solution to observing the spirit of earth hour without leaving its patrons to stumble about in the dark and possibly do themselves an injury is to switch off the lights that illuminate the shells, while leaving the usual foyer and auditorium lighting in place.

Not that turning the lights off, or at least dimming them, for a performance is such a crazy idea.

Tonight would have been the perfect opportunity for an orchestra to program Ross Edwards' Yarrageh, tellingly subtitled "Nocturne for solo percussion and orchestra". Furthermore, Edwards specifies in the score that the hall lighting be as dim as possible, with the musicians using stand lights. The question he asks is:

What happens in a concert hall designed for the performance of European art music when the lights are turned low and the music is mostly very quiet and still, with no feeling of movement towards climaxes or, indeed, of going anywhere in particular?

In other words, he's after what he calls a "nocturnal" mode of listening – the kind of listening where we become less concerned with "keeping track" of conventional structures and more concerned with the "uniqueness and mysteriousness of each passing moment".

Yarrageh wasn't on the program this week, but there was a fantastic piece called Monh by another Australian composer, Georges Lentz (or "George Lenz" as some subeditor at the Sydney Morning Herald decided he should be called).

Monh happens to mean "stars", and based on my experience of hearing another Lentz piece in 2006 (Ngangkar, also meaning "stars") I'd have said that this, too, would be perfect music for listening in the dark. Lentz also seems to be seeking to give an impression of quietness, stillness and the mystery of each passing moment, and although his music doesn't lack direction or climax, these things occur on a different scale. But hearing Monh performed on Wednesday (with the wonderfully compelling viola soloist Tabea Zimmermann) I found I couldn't shut my eyes: there is simply too much that is fascinating to watch.

Programming

Link: American Bach Soloists - Jeffrey Thomas, music director.

If there's one thing worse than programming by committee it's programming by audience survey. It's almost tempting to cast a vote from the other side of the planet out of sheer impishness.

Go ahead, pick your favourite Bach cantatas (there are 19 listed from the ABS recording catalogue but you can nominate up to three others)... Former ABS soloists are listed for voting too, with the likes of Catherine Bott, Christine Brandes, Dan Taylor, Benjamin Butterfield and Tom Meglioranza, whose blog drew this little exercise to my attention.

As always, my concern about seeking audience opinion when programming is that most people are going to pick the cantatas (or whatever) that they've already heard before, and/or most recently. Even if they are perfectly willing to discover other, unfamiliar, Bach cantatas, if you're asking them to vote then they will (on the good citizenship model) without fail choose the known quantity. This is natural. But it doesn't make for good programming advice. And, ironically, it doesn't necessarily give the voter what they ultimately want from the concert presenter, which is to be introduced to new things that they will enjoy.

In this particular case, it must be pointed out, the ABS are planning a 20th anniversary season, and to the degree that the voting focuses attention on cantatas that they've already recorded and artists they've engaged before it must be assumed there is a retrospective method in the otherwise madness.

When battered by chatter…

clipped from abriefmessage.com Socialist writer and textile artist William Morris said, “You can't have art without resistance in the materials.” Blessed and burdened with the most malleable medium in human history, we are overwhelmed by a surfeit of dross, battered by chatter. There are benefits to gain by adding, in the form of constraints, some resistance to the materials.

This comes from A Brief Message.com, where every post is limited to 200 words or fewer (they say "less" but it's still a cool concept). Constraints – real or self-imposed – stimulate creativity.

Discretion is the better part of valour

clipped from www.dressaday.com The art of courage and discretion is a clarion cry for individuality, a turning away from slavish adherence to every fashion or beauty trend. Courage and discretion go hand in hand: the courage to dare to be yourself, the discretion not to overdo; the courage to do something unusual, the discretion to temper it.

Anne Fogarty (among other things the author of Wife Dressing: The Fine Art of Being a Well-Dressed Wife, 1959) expounds on this wise old saying. She is talking of clothing and personal style, but really it's advice that could go anywhere.

Disclaimer: I am not a wife.

Peer pressure

Mob Rule | Futility Closet

http://www.futili...

When Charles Lamb's farce Mr. H failed disastrously on opening night, he joined in the hissing — because, he said, he was "so damnably afraid of being taken for the author."

TLS review of Elgar: An anniversary portrait

Testing TypePad QuickPost bookmarklet (now there's a mouthful), and yes I realise the quoted portion of the article is on the long side.

Link: The hopes and glories of Edward Elgar Hugh Wood TLS.

It is with some relief that one turns to Elgar: An anniversary portrait. There is no editorial apparatus (Nicholas Kenyon provides a sensible introduction): nothing is given a date, nor its source revealed. But Hans Keller’s voice from the past is welcome. In “Elgar the Progressive” he examines the main theme of the Introduction and Allegro for Strings, which leads on to a discussion of pentatonicism in Elgar and how it relates to his “Englishness”. Most of the articles deal with the music itself. One which doesn’t nevertheless gives a useful piece of background. David Cannadine is a professional historian who is obviously also an intelligent and sensitive music-lover. His careful, reasonable study of Elgar’s upbringing, his place in Worcester society and later in London, and the influence of both places in forming his eventual political stance is well summed up:

"the composer often accused of being a vulgar, chauvinistic jingoist and a crude, unthinking imperialist turns out, on close examination, to have been, among many other things, something of a mid-Victorian liberal internationalist. This is hardly what might have been expected of someone who was the product of Tory, lower-middle-class, little-England Worcester, but Elgar was always a more complex and multi-layered figure than he at first sight appeared."

A short, rather personal, modest and honest article by Stephen Hough on “Elgar the Catholic” has all the virtues lacking from the equivalent attempt in Edward Elgar and His World. Christopher Kent then shows how the Serenade for Strings was developed from its sketches, and from an earlier string work of 1888, of which only the first movement so far has been recovered. He also discusses passages in The Kingdom and the First Symphony. This is genuine musicology, inhabiting its proper province.

A particular strength of the book is the way in which it rescues Elgar from the attentions of the musicologists and mercifully hands him over to his interpreters. Outstanding among these is Mark Elder, in conversation with Richard Morrison, who discloses a late, slow-burning but intense attraction to Elgar’s music and much experience in conducting it, in the course of which really grasping “this strange quirky mixture . . . of inner self-belief but also of a huge neurosis about nobody understanding his music” – which must be one of the best two-line descriptions of Elgar’s personality ever written. Elder has fascinating things to say about Elgar’s improvisatory habits as a recording conductor, and the diverse readings which sprang from them. Tasmin Little writes compellingly of the Violin Concerto and is full of practical suggestions about its performance, together with warnings of the toll its extreme length can take on a performer’s (and an audience’s) stamina. She mentions a cut that used to be made in the finale: but she doesn’t think that it works. Andrew Keener writes about Jacqueline du Pré’s recordings of the Cello Concerto. It is refreshing, after much emotional writing about this joyously instinctive and at present somewhat undervalued artist, to have many music examples which demonstrate how du Pré handled specific phrases.

Elgar has been getting some attention...
(Part of a longer review covering five different studies and collections of essays.)

Easter Sunday

Yesterday I came across this disturbing piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail. Rev. Gretta Vosper, a minister of Canada's United Church, has decided to remove all mention of Jesus Christ, God and so on from the services; no one prays; and apparently no one is saved (at least not through Jesus' death and resurrection). For Rev. Vosper it's important to shed "no-longer credible myths, doctrines and dogmas". These are replaced with cosy things such as the "renewal of optimism and the human spirit". The 18th-century hymn Jesus Christ Has Risen Today is "vosperised" so that the congregation sings "Glorious hope has risen today". She has written a book, With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is more Important than What We Believe. And no I haven't read it, but the title is alarming enough. First there's the suggestion that God is somehow optional [in the Christian church]. Then there's this idea that the "way we live", which going by the news article seems to translate as participating in community love and giving people fresh starts and new chances and working out for yourself what is holy and sacred (all couched in very human-centred terms), is more important that "what we believe", i.e. faith.

One commenter (a self-professed non-church-goer) says "Put good living back into faith? What a terrific idea. It's not for the meek of heart. It's for those courageous enough to live by the rules and to make the world a better place NOW!!! not wait around for heaven and the judges score."

Two problems with that: Rev. Vosper isn't so much suggesting putting good living back into faith (which might otherwise be a commendable thing) as replacing faith altogether (she wants to get rid of all that messy and unpalatable "theological detritus" — stuff like the resurrection and salvation). The other problem is that mankind, being fallen and all that, has proven consistently and reliably unsuccessful at being "courageous enough to live by the rules and to make the world a better place", which may just be why God had to send his Son. (A third problem is this misbegotten idea of the heavenly "score card". A fourth problem is the tricky matter of the rules themselves.) C.S. Lewis says all this more eloquently and persuasively in Mere Christianity and more entertainingly in The Screwtape Letters.

Another commenter declares that he would love to go to a church with "wholesome fellowship and all the singing and uplifting (genuine) morale boosting" without the "divisive, anachronistic teachings". Oh, and he also loves the "ambience of churches", just not the "fairy tales" designed to frighten and manipulate. I guess a nice club with lots of music and some beautiful architecture would suit him well. Some kind of concert subscription, perhaps?

As for me, well I'm a sucker for great music and fantastic ambience too (my Easter was spent at the vigil at Christ Church St Laurence: bells and smells and more frocks than David Jones, as they say, not to mention one of the best choirs in the country). But without faith the whole thing would be empty and meaningless and completely without power.

Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia. Alleluia.

Do you fight real duels?

Yes. We fight serious and deadly duels. The challenge can come at any time from these our mortal enemies: Ego! Falsehood! Prejudice! Compromise! Vanity! Cowardice! and Ignorance!

Our weapons of defence against these are: Self-control! Truthfulness! Understanding! Firmness! Humility! Bravery! and Knowledge!

I discovered this when I took up fencing in 2001. It's a reasonable, if somewhat romantic, question. And this answer comes from what appears to be one of the few schools that teach classical, or historical, fencing as opposed to Olympic fencing. The main difference being that Olympic fencing is basically a sport, and if you were to follow its techniques and principles in a real duel you would surely be killed, whereas classical fencing is a martial art, such as would have been practised by young men centuries ago as they equipped themselves for self defence and general aggression.

Do you fight real duels?

clipped from www.martinez-destreza.com Yes. We fight serious and deadly duels. The challenge can come at any time from these our mortal enemies: Ego! Falsehood! Prejudice! Compromise! Vanity! Cowardice! and Ignorance! Our weapons of defence against these are: Self-control! Truthfulness! Understanding! Firmness! Humility! Bravery! and Knowledge!

I discovered this when I took up fencing in 2001. A reasonable, if somewhat romantic, question. And this answer comes from what appears to be one of the few schools that teach classical, or historical, fencing as opposed to Olympic fencing. The main difference being that Olympic fencing is basically a sport, and if you were to follow its techniques and principles in a real duel you would surely be killed, whereas classical fencing is a martial art, such as would have been practised by young men centuries ago as they equipped themselves for self defence and general aggression.

Under wraps

Apple's new Sydney store.

The other night they closed part of George Street in order to install the biggest panes of plate glass I've ever seen.

Here's the piece that appeared in the SMH last year. And a full set of drawings and plans here. The address is 77 King Street, but the grand entrance and facade quite clearly faces George Street.

Under wraps

Apple's new Sydney store.

The other night they closed part of George Street in order to install the biggest panes of plate glass I've ever seen.

George and King

George St looking north

Vox Hunt: I Saw the Sign

Show us a sign.

Breafast Briefing

The briefest kind of breakfast briefing you can find – just begin omitting those time-consuming consonants.

Irony

My real reason for posting this pic (one of my favourite T-shirts for when I'm in an ironical mood) is to draw attention to Remo General Store's generous free T-shirt offer for new custOMERs. Click on the link under IRRESISTIBLE, up top on the left.