Thomasina’s last waltz

Catherine the Great’s Lament

You wouldn’t believe what goes on in my court: Gambling. Harassment. A ghost. Multiple suicides. And I don’t even get a #walkon ! #opera702

That’s The Queen of Spades by the way. In the middle of Act II Catherine the Great arrives at a grand masked ball. Music is sung in greeting, but the scene ends before we actually see her on stage. Curtain.

Opera Australia and ABC 702 Sydney are running an operaplot style competition at the moment, hashtag #opera702. The prize is a walk-on part in Consumptive Courtesan by the Cove in March, which has prompted me to put a particular spin on my entries: each one has to convey the plot from a mute or walk-on cameo character’s perspective. Or in the case of The Queen of Spades, a character who doesn’t even get to walk on.

The problem with this approach is that it rather limits the number of operas that can be plotted, which is probably a good thing. Operaplotting can be addictive.

My other entries…

2 girls: trafficked. Pasha: spurned. Lover: to the rescue. Ruse: get my master drunk. Result: noble outcome. Me: I’m mute #walkon 
The Abduction from the Seraglio 

Door 1 red. Door 2 orange. Door 3 gold. Door 4 aqua. Door 5 white. Door 6 dark. Door 7 silver. Bartók and the Technicolor #walkon
Bluebeard’s Castle

I’m the deaf old servant, so while Figaro thwarts one marriage & facilitates another, I just get to #walkon and say “Eh?”
The Barber of Seville

I may have a stab at Lulu, so to speak, but after that I think I’m done. 

Calligraphy porn

Or perhaps I should call it “Feathers, skin and gut”

Those who know me really well know that I think one of the most exquisitely sensual sounds in the world is the scratch of a quill scribing on vellum. And as I’ve pointed out before, clearly Peter Greenaway thinks it’s pretty special too. (Sadly, the video clip from Prospero’s Books that I’d previously linked to is no longer available, but try the beginning of this one.)

Now, thanks to Austin Radcliffe at Things Organized Neatly, I have another piece of calligraphy porn for my collection. No scratching in this one, but Bach ain’t bad.

 

Coincidentally, this gorgeous video turns out to be part of a campaign for Jumpstart Jr., a Dutch foundation which loans gut-string violins and cellos to gifted and ambitious young musicians dedicated to historical performance. (Australian cellist Catherine Jones is one of the beneficiaries.) Their slogan is “No gut, no glory” – I like it!

In which I rant against the local broadsheet’s refusal to print foreign characters

At the instigation of a certain Sébastien, I am posting here a Heckler complaint that I submitted to the Sydney Morning Herald a few years ago. It was rejected; it must have been – as I feared – unprintable.

This Heckler is unprintable. Not because it is offensive or in poor taste but because my rant is typographically inclined.

The observant will have noticed that the Sydney Morning Herald routinely drops foreign accents from any word or name that may require them. This is evidently a style policy on the part of the paper – exactly why it is so completely mystifies me. We’re talking about a modern newspaper with sophisticated page layout technology, a paper with an online presence (where on rare occasions the accents have appeared), a paper that can print in full colour and which can accommodate the application of annoying promotional sticky notes to the front. But give it an umlaut or a circumflex and it shudders and recoils and the offending accent is dropped forthwith.

I am not concerned about foreign words that have been anglicised. In Australian English a premiere is a premiere, even without the grave on the second “e”. A fete need not have a circumflex, so long as there is fairy floss and a sausage sizzle. But there are words that become ambiguous when the accent is removed, and – more important – there are many names that are simply misspelled and may well be mispronounced without their accents.

We live in an international world and foreign names are all around us, within the Australian community itself as well as further afield. What a discourtesy we do to others when we cannot take the trouble to accommodate a special character in their names. And how insular it makes us appear.

I follow the Sydney Morning Herald arts pages, which regularly mention performers from Finland, Germany, Norway, France and other countries with interesting characters in their alphabets. In the Herald Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä loses both the umlauts from his surname, changing the pronunciation completely not to mention the name itself. (Is there a Vanska in the Finnish phone book? Perhaps.) Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk appears as “Mork” without the crossed “o” (historically a ligature of “o” and “e”), to the same effect. With the Herald as your guide you’d be forgiven for thinking that a certain Swedish trumpeter’s name was pronounced “harken” rather than “horken” – all because the style guide won’t permit the “aa” ligature in Håken Hardenberger.

Were the French baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure (no accent, rhymes with “four”) still alive and singing Fauré (with an acute accent, rhymes with “foray”) the Sydney Morning Herald would no doubt be in a pickle. Or is that ‘dans le pétrin’? – acute accent on the “e”, of course.

 

Operaplot 2011: Butterfly Fan Art

The operaplot madness this year includes a fan art category. So I’m abandoning my customary wordie cleverness to pay tribute to the best operaplot of all with inks and aquarelles on watercolour paper.

Operaplot by @primalamusica, art by @frindley

Postscript…

If this Pinkerton looks rather more like a ballet dancer than an opera singer it’s because earlier this evening I allowed myself to get all weepy at the Australian Ballet’s Madame Butterfly.

Trolls

Since I’m immersed in all things Peer Gynt…

The first is a trick for Mac users.
1. In System Preferences > Speech > Text to Speech, set the System Voice to Cellos.
2. In TextEdit, type the following:

We are nasty little trolls, little trolls, little trolls,
We are nasty little trolls and we are after you!

3. Select the text then choose: Edit > Speech > Start Speaking

Don’t own a Mac? It sounds like Steve Jobs should be paying Grieg royalties…

Nasty Little Trolls

This next item from a quartet of Sibelius Academy-trained cellists is suitably savage (adjust volume to taste):

 

The Six Stages of a Nickname

This year my orchestra is playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C major, K467. The concerto has a nickname but it’s not Mozart’s, and it rankles a lot of musical people who’d like to see it disappear. (The nickname not the concerto.)

I was reminded of this today, and so I offer you the Six Stages of a Nickname

1. Non-Name
Ein klavier konzert

2. Appropriation
Keep in mind that it wasn’t some obscure, languishing work that film-maker Bo Widerberg adopted for his soundtrack in 1967.

3. Nickname
At first, when the film is current, smart concert and record marketers tack on the name as a label for the concerto. As is generally well-known, any abstract work with a nickname (authentic or not) has an easier path to audience affections and recognition. This is proven yet again.

4. Shifting Fashion
The source film dates and makes its way to a dusty “Classics” shelf at the video shop. The nick-named concerto remains a concert staple, partly because of its inherent strengths (it was always going to be popular in the repertoire), partly because of the residual audience familiarity built up and then exploited via use of the nickname.

5. Role Reversal, or Perhaps Perplexity

(a) The situation reverses: instead of audiences hearing the music in the film and seeking it out in concerts and recordings, they instead encounter the nickname via the music and read its explanation in program and liner notes. They just might at some point, out of curiosity, rent the movie. (I did. Eventually.) The nicknamed concerto has, quite incidentally, become a promotion for an old film.

(b) Then, with the further passage of time (sooner in some parts of the world than others), it transpires that very few know the origin of the nickname at all. Perhaps – and why not! – they assume the nickname refers to a dedicatee, like Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartets.

6. Rejection
Increasingly – and this is surely a sign of the times – the nickname is being rejected. In the 1980s we were urged to grin and bear it (the nickname is very handy and it’s here to stay). Thirty years later concert promoters and record labels are less and less likely to list the nickname in any way that grants it legitimacy. My orchestra, for example, no longer includes the nickname as part of the concerto’s title in its repertoire index or publicity listings. On the other hand, we’d be nuts to deny a famous label to which a good portion of the concert audience still responds. So the nickname is mentioned in passing in the brochure copy, and will certainly warrant a fleeting reference somewhere in the program notes.

My thoughts: first, nicknames are mighty useful and, whether we like it or not, they have a demonstrable effect on the reception of the music. Mozart’s contemporaries knew that, and there are plenty of 18th-century works that were given nicknames by the public or by canny publishers. Second, there’s no shortage of nicknames whose origins are irrelevant or uncertain or forgotten – ‘La passione’, for example – but we still use them. On those grounds, maybe we’re too harsh on this legacy from the 1960s. All the same, I’d like to see it fade away.

By the way, our soloist this year hasn’t seen Elvira Madigan. He’s not sure he really wants to!

Thumper's rule for work

Years ago I came across “Thumper’s 70:20:10 rule for work”. The original website no longer exists and it’s not clear what the source was in any case. But as best I can tell, it’s a parody-variant on a ratio that’s often trotted out for corporate/business learning.

Enough background. Here’s how it goes:

Work is…

70% psychological (keeping it together mentally),
20% logistical (moving things about in a timely fashion), and
10% tactical (jumping out of the way of other people as they stress themselves out)

A period piece

At work we’re about to move premises, which has inspired a flurry of decluttering. (Although not perhaps quite as much a flurry as the organisers of the move would like.) This kind of behaviour is infectious, and has prompted some decluttering at home as well. The other motivation was the arrival of Richard Taruskin’s five-volume History of Western Music for Oxford, which made me realise that I needed to clear some shelves or buy some shelves.

I’ve not been as successful as I’d like, mainly because it’s too easy to be distracted by oddities unearthed. Like this number from 1968:

They don’t publish Teach Yourself books like they used to…

Some gems:

“It helps not at all towards a true understanding of his music  to be told that Mr. X is a serialist with neo-Romantic leanings, that he was born in Argentina, that he lives in Clapham Junction.”

“It is a characteristic of our age to take to pieces, to analyse. Yet what is remarkable is not that so much contemporary music is not understood, but that the listener should feel the necessity to understand it. No art exists primarily to be understood; it exists to be admired: to be a source of beauty, not of knowledge.”

And a quotation from Milton Babbitt’s 1964 description of Stravinsky’s Movements:

‘This compositional variety is mediated by a highly redundant set structure a second-order all-combinatorial set, each set form is hexachordally equivalent to or totally disjunct from fifteen other set forms, so that one-third of all the available set forms belong to a collection of sets which are hexachordally aggregrate forming, that is, hexachordally identical.’

You’ll be pleased to know that Mr Routh gives Mr Babbitt the benefit of the doubt. (And in fairness the source is an academic journal.) All the same, he’s right to point out how unhelpful this sort of thing is to anyone seeking to understand Stravinsky’s purpose.

Postscript…

And the composers? That’s always telling. Routh begins with Busoni and Debussy, followed by: Stravinsky, Messiaen, the Second Viennese School, electronic music and later serialism, Vaughan Williams and Tippett as well as “the English scene”, Ives, Copland and Varèse (and “the American scene”). The really interesting bits remain the appendices, setting out programming patterns for the BBC and selected British orchestras in the mid-1960s.

She wasn’t making it up, you know

“Our own Mrs Prendergast has kindly volunteered to give us a talk – for free, which I think is wonderful of her – on how to make patchwork quilts out of old skirts. The reason for this is that the last speaker of the season is going to be excessively expensive (but I’m sure it’s going to be worth it) – we’re going to have a Vogue expert to speak to us about how to make skirts out of old patchwork quilts.”
Anna Russell, from “Introduction to the Concert, by the Women’s Club President”

 

Adolfo evening dress (1967), recycled from a late 19th-century crazy patchwork quilt. More information here.

Postcript…
And yes, I should have bought a polarising filter a long time ago.

Cheese and composers

Last week The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Evening Standard trotted out a Reader’s Digest survey of 1516 people, proclaiming in turn that “Bocconcini cheese balls” were mistaken for classical music, that Britons are therefore “clueless about classical music”, and – here I’m really puzzled – that “Britons pick cheese balls as top composer”.

Why let the truth get in the way of a good headline? (And what more would I expect from a publication that makes a plural of rubato? But I digress.)

Apparently 4% (that’s 60.64 people) identified Bocconcini as a composer.

But what exactly does that establish?

96% recognised that bocconcini is a cheese. (Not a cheese ball, incidentally.) This has to be a good thing, for the state of a nation’s cuisine if nothing else.

And 4% quite possibly confused the cheese with the composer Giovanni Battista Bononcini, “perhaps one of the most underrated composers of the early-mid 18th century”. Which suggests that at some point they’ve actually heard of the composer. Given his astonishing obscurity, that’s no mean feat.

Send in the live-twitterers

Previously on Thomasina…
“This isn’t to say that someone who undertakes to live-tweet a performance might not have a role to play. But it is a role.”

Assuming it could be done with courtesy, why would you set out to tweet a performance in real time?

As a form of personal note-taking? – Pen and paper is actually much quicker and less disruptive to all, including the note-taker.

As a way of sharing an experience and discussing it with others? – Sure, but then why not at interval or afterwards, which is when we normally gather our ideas and share them with others.

As a form of citizen reportage? – Well… there just might be something in that.

The other day, @DarrynKing (real name, Darryn King; profession, entertainment journalist) live-tweeted the Sydney production of West Side Story (hashtag #wss). If you go look at these tweets – which is easier said than done since it was on 15 July and twitter is the most ephemeral of media – you don’t get the sense of them coming from an average Joe in the audience. At one point Darryn was talking of wearing all black and lurking in the wings, or even tweeting from the pit. (Sometimes these things boil down to where you can get decent reception.)

He was very well-prepared. And over the two-and-a-half hours the #wss feed included backstage insights, commentary on the performance, slang definitions, pop quizzes drawn from the lyrics, wry plot summaries, musical observations, witty expressions of enthusiasm, meta moments (“If Tony had Twitter he’d be like ‘Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria’”) and even some good advice (“Don’t do it, Maria. Let this endless cycle of violence and great dance numbers come to an end”).

For someone to live-tweet a show and come up with something worth following, a few things are needed: access (not everyone gets to sit in on the general rehearsal, or find a corner in an orchestra pit, or watch the performers warm up before the show); some fairly thorough knowledge and preparation; and skill in rapidly formulating an entertaining commentary that will make sense to someone who isn’t there.

You could be describing the requirements of a traditional arts critic. Or a radio sports commentator.

And what does anyone get out of it? Right now it’s novel, so there’s a public relations benefit. When (if?) live-tweeting becomes commonplace – in the way that arts criticism or cricket on the radio is commonplace – then it will simply become another way of sharing a performance beyond the doors of the auditorium and giving a taste of the event in real time to those who can’t or won’t be there. Time will tell whether twitter is a good medium for this, and whether the effort will be worth it.

What does the live-twitterer get out of it? Potentially a great deal: knowledge, awareness, access, insight, and all the benefits that come from choosing to focus on a performance with the specific purpose of communicating its details and flavour to others.

But the exercise also represents a lot of work – it’s far more than a few idle tweets from a good night out. As I said, you could be describing the experience of a critic, or the broadcast presenter, or the operator of the camera for a webstream, or the surtitle operator. The live-twitterer will, by necessity, be deeply involved in what’s going on, but they won’t necessarily be sharing in the experience the creators intend for the audience.

They’re not free to simply put down their mobile device, forget about reporting, and weep or laugh or listen in awe. They’re playing a role.

Postscript…

Darryn has posted his own reactions to the experience, which I chose not to read before writing my own post.  This was interesting: “That’s the thing. The live tweet itself turned into performance, and arguably my performance, for much of it, was more important than the performance taking place onstage. Heck, I could have written much of what I did listening to the cast recording at home (somewhat more comfortably). But that wouldn’t have been nearly as fun, would it? If it worked, it was the idea, of the illusion, of shared experience that made it work.”

Live-tweeting and getting into the gig

My corner of the twittersphere has been abuzz this morning. The topics fleeting by: the lamentable editorial omission of any musical representatives from the weekend’s article on twitter in the arts, the state of arts journalism generally and its apparent promotional/PR focus, and tweeting during performances.

It would take me hours to compress my thoughts on tweeting during performances into 140 characters (or even 280) and I don’t have the time. So…

First, this isn’t about the arts using twitter outside the performance time/space or using it as part of the performance – that’s another story, and at times quite an entertaining one. (#operaplot anybody?)

It’s about the matter of audience members tweeting during theatrical and concert performances.

And I’ll be honest. I actually can’t do it. Not while the performance is going on.

I do tweet during interval as well as immediately before/after performances. At concerts I’m often doing that in a vaguely official capacity as @sso_notes. Very occasionally (mostly during long stage moves) I’ve tweeted between pieces.

Here’s my rationale: I only tweet at those points in the performance where it would be undistracting, and natural, to talk.

But it’s not really good manners that motivates me so much as pure selfishness. I simply don’t want to miss anything. And if what I’m doing is likely to mildly distract someone nearby, then it’s absolutely certain that I am, myself, being distracted to be the point that I will have missed a minute or two of the performance – a minute or two that can’t be reclaimed.

As everyone is finally beginning to realise, multitasking is a furphy. Even for girls. In a concert there’s usually so much to pay attention to and to hold in memory that I’m lucky if I can scribble an illegible word on my program in the darkness. Plays/operas/ballets are much the same. If someone tells me they can look at a screen, formulate and type a concise idea for public consumption and remain fully aware of what’s going on during those 50 to 120 seconds, I will happily tell them they’re deluded. Of course, if the performance is really boring…but let’s not go there. 

Actually, let’s do go there. Because my ideal performance in the concert hall or theatre is one that's so compelling and engrossing, so riveting, that it doesn’t even occur to me to tweet while it’s taking place. If my mind is wandering in the direction of epigrammatic things to tweet about the performance then that’s a very bad sign for the performance.

I’ve also tried tweeting during verbal presentations (e.g. during TEDxSydney and during my orchestra’s pre-concert talks). This is slightly easier. Perhaps all those years of taking notes during university lectures taught me something, and a well-constructed verbal presentation usually incorporates sufficient repetition, exploration and summary of ideas that there are opportunities to “take notes” in one way or another.

But I think there’s another difference: when I tweet from a talk I’m mostly tweeting content, an idea I’ve just heard, a pithy quote. It’s more like transcription. If I were to attempt to tweet during a musical/theatrical performance I’d be tweeting my own response/reactions/assessments. That’s a more distracting activity which, in some ways, takes you out of the receptive mode that a performance demands of you and into a critical one. Criticism is a marvellous thing, but if you’re not really receiving because you’re trying to write and publish a critique in the moment then…?

In any case, it’s been my experience that people have far more interesting things to say about a performance when it’s had even a short while to sink in. For example, for (too) many years my ballet subscription placed me immediately in front of a trio of ladies who insisted on verbalising their reactions during the performances. “Hasn’t she got lovely arms,” was a typical comment. Or, my favourite, “He’s very manly looking, isn’t he?” They drove me to distraction and were the targets of more than a few glares in the darkness. But if you happened to eavesdrop on them between acts it was a different story: the level of the observations immediately jumped.

Anyhow, I’m going to leave this post with the wise words of youth. Just recently my nephew went to hear Karnivool in concert, and he wrote about it afterwards. Nice pictures too. Here’s the telling line:

I feel like I probably spent too much time taking photos and not enough time getting into the gig (you live and learn I guess), but regardless I still enjoyed myself a hell of a lot.

Substitute “live-tweeting” for “taking photos” and I think you’ve got it. You won’t enjoy yourself less, but there’s a good possibility that you won’t be “getting into the gig” to the extent you would’ve liked.

Shuttercrossing: you’ve got mail

On Monday my first Shuttercal postcards arrived.

 
They took about two days from time of ordering to the postmark date, and another ten days to arrive from the United States. Quality is nice, too, even if the mailing process means they end up with faint orange barcodes printed across the front. Any message on the back is printed in a fairly small font, so there’s room for quite a bit of news if you’re so inclined. My conclusion? Definitely an option for postcrossing as well as casual greetings.

Shuttercrossing: postcards from your photos

Ever since Avant Card began doing business in the early 1990s, I’ve been collecting postcards, mostly of the promotional variety. I pick them up if they’re clever, or funny, or beautiful, or if they’re about something I’m interested in. I like them best when they have space to write on the back – somehow they feel more like the real thing.

But there came a point – it might have been when I was packing for the fourth long-distance move in my life – when several shoeboxes of postcards seemed excessive. And then, 1218 days ago, I discovered Postcrossing. The site explains it pretty well – basically it’s a fun way to get rid of spare postcards while actually using them for their stated purpose by sending them to random people in other countries. Of course, I receive postcards in return, so this isn’t really a way of banishing clutter. But at least the collecting seems less pointless.

My other enthusiasm is Shuttercal, the calendar-based daily photo project site. (You can check out my most recent photo over there on the right.)

And now the two enthusiasms are combined. Shuttercal is offering a postcard printing-and-postage service: select a photo from your own calendar, write a message, enter an address and the finished postcard is printed and mailed for you, anywhere in the world (USD2.90). It’s brand new, so I can’t report on the results yet, but the idea certainly appeals.

Oh, and no need to point out that this won’t help me get rid of my postcards either…

I’d like to propose a toast…

All the hoo-ha about Men at Work’s “Down Under” and its reference to the “Kookaburra” round has reminded me of another flute riff.

Listen carefully at 2'01".

Whose publisher will be suing orchestrator Jonathan Tunick, and which symphony has been quoted?

A [long] postscript…

Although I didn’t follow the Kookaburra/Down Under case especially thoroughly or with anything approaching legal expertise, I read enough to find the result disturbing.

First, many musical people didn’t notice the similarity until it was pointed out to them – I know I didn’t. One of the reasons for this is that the melodic idea in question is fragmented and combined with other motifs, another is that it’s so fleeting. [Sorry Dr Ford, the reason school children don’t sing “Kookaburra” at the tempo of “Down Under” has nothing to do with their “age and ability” and everything to do with their good musical instincts – the round would be ridiculous and unsatisfying if sung that fast.]

Another, much more important, reason for the melodic similarity passing unnoticed is that the harmonic context is quite different. Not only is there a change from major to minor tonality [which is not the same as  transposing something to a new key in the same mode, even a mug like me without perfect pitch can hear that], but the chords in relation to the home key and the harmonic rhythm in relation to the melody are different in each case. We do hear and recognise themes in their harmonic contexts.

Of course, just because a quotation remains largely unnoticed at first, including (it seems) by its performers, doesn’t make it more or less right. I recognise that. My point is that the melodic similarity went unnoticed because the motif was so radically changed in the process of incorporating it into the song, apparently to the extent that the creator of the riff didn’t register at first what he’d done.  So at what point does copying stop and originality begin?

For example, the first six notes of opening theme  in Mahler’s Blumine follow the same contour (in the same key) as the big tune in the finale of Brahms’ First Symphony (about 8 minutes in). So is that theft? Was Mahler even aware of the similarity before they pointed it out on Spicks and Specks? (Possibly not, although some have proposed this as a reason for him removing the movement from his own first symphony before it was published.) Should Simrock have sued? At least one of my colleagues dismisses the similarity as an inconsequential coincidence, yet it’s much closer than the similarity between “Kookaburra” and the “Down Under” flute riff.

A better comparison, perhaps, is Stravinsky, who used the music hall tune “Elle avait un' jambe en bois” in Petrushka, mistakenly thinking it was a folk tune in the public domain. He ended up having to pay a royalty to Mr Emile Spencer every time Petrushka was performed. But that seems fair: Stravinsky uses the tune in full and in a recognisable way. You could say he appropriates it. I’m not sure you could say that of Men at Work and “Kookaburra”.

My completely inexpert response is that a tiny quotation (tiny in absolute terms, not the proportional terms the lawyers are using†) that is so thoroughly reworked and adapted into the fabric of a song becomes a fresh idea of its own. Any relationship to the original – to the extent that this is conscious or even recognised – is one of tribute, not theft. A quotation like this in no way diminishes or detracts from the original nor does it establish itself as a replacement for the original song (which might then have deprived the copyright owner of income). That’s why the decision seems to me both unfair and a blow to creativity.

† Part of the problem in the Kookaburra/Down Under case is that what would have been 4 per cent if quoted from a typical pop song (and maybe 0.05 per cent of a 19th-century symphony), turns out to be 25 per cent of a four-bar singing round. Suddenly four beats of music is a “substantial” as well as substantive portion.

A post postscript…

Did anyone else notice that iTunes is selling “Down Under” for AU$2.19 while all the other songs on the Men at Work albums are the regular AU$1.69? Curious.

New Year Madness

In music two things lead to insanity:

La Follia…

And Benjamin Franklin’s glass armonica…

Wishing you a happy new year! 

Beethoven numbers and the mind of the people

I was responding to a comment from yesterday’s post and was reminded of the Omniscient Mussel’s exercise in Beethoven numbers. What had begun as an informal personality test (the speedy, musical alternative to the Myer-Briggs) became the source for a statistically invalid but entertaining assessment of the popularity of Beethoven symphonies. (This was in response to a post from Ben, the Classical Convert, who had been examining the view frequencies of Karajan’s Beethoven symphonies on YouTube.)

At question in yesterday’s discussion was the ascendency of Beethoven 9 and whether it would score the No.1 spot.

My reaction was “please no!” For all that I recognise the importance and significance of this particular Beethoven symphony, it’s not one that I ever feel the urge to listen to and I would be unlikely to pay to hear it in a concert. (The Seventh, on the other hand, I find irresistible; it appeals to my sensibilities and ways of responding to music. My Beethoven number, incidentally, is 736521489, allowing for small shifts in the internal rankings.)

As you’ll glean from my comment on Miss Mussel’s post, I suspect that we have a self-fulfilling prophecy going on with the Ninth. Concert promoters would perhaps like the Ninth to be “the one”, and so we’ve all been complicit in building a mythology around it. But I suspect that many in regular concert audiences actually prefer other Beethoven symphonies more, and I’m quite certain that most musicians prefer other Beethoven symphonies more (not because they’re jaded but because the other symphonies give greater satisfaction).

That said, in ABC Classic FM’s original Classic 100 (any genre) Beethoven 9 was the top ranked of any of the symphonies, at No.3. The Pastoral came next at No.6, after that the Eroica and the Fifth, way down at No.40 and No.42; the highest ranked non-Beethoven symphony was Mahler 5 at No.43. (Apparently we don’t like symphonies all that much.)

If this were our guide, then the top ten in the Classic 100 Symphony should be Beethoven 9, 3, 6, 3, 5, Mahler 5, Saint-Saëns’ Symphony with Organ, Dvořák’s New World Symphony, Mahler 2, and Mahler 8 and at No.10 Beethoven 7, would be the runner up and making the chances of my favourite reaching No.1 very slim indeed.

But interesting things can happen. At No.1 in that original survey was Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto – a well-deserved accolade for a sublime piece of music. The adagio from this concerto was also the top ranked “favourite Mozart moment” (or rather, “Which moment of Mozart’s music can’t you live without?” as the question was put). So you’d reasonably expect the Mozart Clarinet Concerto to be at the top – or at least in the top five – of the Classic 100 Concerto. Not so. The leaders there were Beethoven’s Emperor, Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Bruch’s Violin Concerto No.1 (he wrote others, you know) and Elgar’s Cello Concerto. The poor Mozart Clarinet Concerto had been relegated to No.6, which wasn’t all that surprising unless you knew of its earlier triumphs.

And this is what makes me think that Beethoven 9’s original success won’t necessarily carry over to the Classic 100 Symphony. What listeners choose when they’re asked to focus on a particular genre may be quite different from their generalised favourite “piece of music” or “musical moment”. Perhaps narrowing things down, and comparing apples with apples, encourages us to be more objective, slightly less concerned with what simply moves our spirit or gives us pleasure (what we like) and slightly more concerned with concepts of “greatness” and the intrinsic value or importance of a work. Clearly what turned up as simply our favourite piece of music didn’t do so well when we make it part of a comparison of concertos. And perhaps the iconic and mythological power of the “Ode to Joy” – which is what I suspect many people were really voting for in that first survey – similarly won’t stand the test as we pronounce upon our favourite symphonies.

At least, says Thomasina wickedly, I hope not!

(An astute twitterer from the Melbourne choir scene has come to the conclusion that Beethoven’s Ninth will not be the No.1 symphony, since the MSO Chorus has not been booked for the concert in which the top symphony will be performed live in its entirety. This seems like a pretty smart as well as appealing conclusion.)

Chicken Elbow

I don’t know what you call it, but I call it “chicken elbow” – the roughened scaliness that crops up on the elbow of your non-dominant arm when you’ve been spending too much time sitting at a desk with books and proofs. (I don’t think you acquire it from leaning on the arms of seats in concert halls; if that’s a culprit it’s a lesser one.)

Anyway, I have it. And the source of my chicken elbow is also the reason I posted only twice last month and just six times the month before. Too much work and not enough play makes Thomasina a dull blogger, but she’s going to work harder at playing and see what comes of it.

Meanwhile, a dash through the past 36 days.

I had the pleasure of interviewing some of the participants in a concert being given by another orchestra, one an old colleague from Cleveland and the other a visiting director. The visiting director, in particular, was an absolute joy to talk to. He has a wonderful way of putting musical matters into words and of characterising sound. There was too much to use, but some of the results turn up in a program book and in a short audio feature that you can find here. 

Yet another orchestra needed program notes for a “Night in Vienna” style concert. I love and thoroughly approve of these sorts of concerts, believing Johann Strauss II to be, in many ways, the superior article to Richard. (What’s the saying? “If Strauss then Johann, if Richard then Wagner.” Must have driven the composer of Der Rosenkavalier wild to hear that bandied about.) Except this particular concert kept changing. I finished the essay only to discover that some Mozart had crept into the program when I wasn’t looking and bits of Kalman had sidled out. Nothing for it but to cook up a new lead and write a new essay… I will add, for those who might find themselves writing on a similar theme, that the Marco Polo recordings of the complete works of the “right” Strauss are a mighty useful resource. The performances are ordinary, but the liner notes are extraordinarily thorough. Even I can’t imagine getting that nerdy over four-minute polkas, but one man’s obsession is this girl’s lifesaver, so I can’t complain.

There were concerts every week, sometimes more than one. The highlights were Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who brought Haydn fully alive as I’d expected him to and gave me the illusion that I really like Bruckner (also as expected). Actually, I don’t dislike Bruckner, but he falls into the same category as opera: I don’t want to hear his music on recordings, but I’m always game for a live performance. All the same, I came away confirmed in my view that Haydn is the more satisfying composer. The following week Yannick was back, again, to conduct Shostakovich’s first cello concerto and Saint-Saëns’ symphony-with-organ. By the way, I can assure the speculating reviewer [alas, I can no longer link to the piece, SMH having removed it] that Han-Na Chang’s sound easily projected to where I was sitting – rear circle, on account of the popularity of the program.

[On a side note, at least for now, bloggers planning to post reference links to my orchestra’s event pages from the past (where the past can include yesterday) should take a copy of the url before the concert takes place. The beautiful new website no longer allows you to navigate to past concerts in the way you might expect, although the past program books continue to live here.]

A tricky bit of scheduling saw me catch a reverse half show in the form of an Australia Ensemble concert, beginning with Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro. This is a favourite piece, despite the fact that as a student I turned the main flute tune into a kind of tone-colour exercise that I would play in every key down the chromatic scale. A year of this did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm, and may have even improved my tonal range.

My orchestra “launched” its season on 21 August, not with a small function for VIPs as it has in recent years, nor with an event for its audience as some other orchestras do, but with the release of thousands of orange-hued booklets into the wild and some press articles, which kindly paid attention to the highlights and didn’t chastise us for any neglectfulness. (Whether such kindliness is a good thing for the art form in the long run is a whole ’nother post. Not going there.) From my perspective the most distinctive thing about the 2010 brochure, which on the surface looks much like the 2009 brochure, was that we stopped trying to be all things to all people. By which I mean, forgive the marketing speak, it no longer had to be an “acquisitions” brochure for non-subscribers as well as a brochure for renewing subscribers and the most avid of our single-ticket buyers. So I had some fun describing concerts in ways that occasionally stepped outside the box or which took a wry sideways glance at the conventions of concert brochure copy. And it took me most of June and July, but generally I was successful in sidestepping the most unhelpful and boring of the clichés.

There was the week-from-hell in which two interlopers joined the regular program book schedule: elaborate designed-from-the-ground-up programs for Kiri Te Kanawa and Star Trek. Two more different productions playing on alternating evenings you cannot imagine, but at least some of my colleagues had fun dressing up for Star Trek. I liked the idea a lot, but not enough to buy a ticket. Perhaps the 20 minutes I’d had to spend on the phone with a typesetter, changing every reference to a Star Trek ship from USS to U.S.S. and ensuring that each ship’s name was also italicised put me off. (Official trademark requirement, apparently, and I thought I was pedantic.)

A challenging month was lightened by the presence of the 2009 AYO Music Presentation Fellow, who was spending four weeks discovering first-hand how words and music and orchestras interact as well as how program books make it into print. This particular training program is very close to my heart, since it was the inaugural fellowship, back in 1995, that gave me an all-important foot in the door to orchestras, concert programming and the whole words about music thing. Back then AYO (or Youth Music Australia as it was) had money to burn: my fellowship lasted three months and took me to three cities and various parts of the ABC and several orchestras. Nowadays, four to six weeks is the norm, but it’s still a hugely valuable program as well as an important avenue for talent-spotting. Sadly, too many of the young talents seem more interested in burrowing further into academia than in getting their hands dirty with real music-making, the putting on of concerts and writing for real people. The most pragmatic advice I was ever given – once, in Wales, when I let slip that I was toying with the idea of postgraduate research – was this: “That’s all very well, but an orchestra needs you to know which Sibelius symphonies go down well with audiences and why, and how many harps and timpani are needed for the Symphonie fantastique.” (At that stage I was up on the instrumentation for Berlioz but had been avoiding Sibelius.)

The end of the month saw a fascinating program marred by a confusion somewhere along the line (the paper trail suggests where) as to which Haydn sonata in A flat the pianist was going to play. The link in the previous sentence suggests one thing, but the reality was quite different. No sprightly minuet but a rather soulful slow movement and every sign – to anyone reading the newly written program note – that we’d been advised of the wrong piece. (It was in fact Landon 31, Hob.XVI:46.) Some noticed, but not as many as you’d hope for in an alert and observant audience. This was depressing but not all that surprising. It’s disturbing how easy it is to be reading one thing and listening to another while happily entertaining the most startling of disconnects. And I was reminded of this in more ways than one.

This month, CityMusic Cleveland presents the premiere of a piece for string quartet and chamber orchestra by Christos Hatzis, a Canadian composer, and my orchestra premieres its sole major commission for the year in the form of a horn concerto. Also this week, it sounds like there will be some very interesting things to see and hear in the SOH Concert Hall as the next stage of acoustic trials comes into play. More important, though, Thomasina has a spring holiday planned. And she will get rid of the chicken elbow.

It's a miracle

I don’t read Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. The sensationalist approach would probably be quite amusing, but the writing is usually so bad that I simply can’t watch. That said, when the compulsive reader is grabbing a slice of raisin toast in the office kitchen and sees a tabloid newspaper sitting on the counter, chances are she’s going to look.

And so I can report that in its edition for Friday 10 July 2009, on the front page no less, The Daily Telegraph used the word “decimated” correctly.

I suspect they didn’t mean to, the headline “Flu Wipeout” suggests quite the opposite intention. But that is what happened.

“The NSW workforce is being decimated by swine flu with predictions it could wipe out more than half of all workers.”

“Health experts predict every worker will be sick with the flu at least twice over the next three months, with 10 per cent of the state’s work force currently off sick.”

Ye gods! Ten per cent off sick. The workforce (or work force, the subbies seem to be hedging their bets on that one) is indeed decimated.

[I’m not so keen on the health experts’ prediction though. I’ve had the flu only once in my life and it was terrifying. Twice in three months is more than I want to contemplate.]

Vision of the pianist in a multimedia age

Imogen Cooper’s recital earlier this week has prompted me to dig something out of the archives from 1997. It was based on an interview with Imogen and written up as one of those thought-provoking ‘interludes’ for the program book, although the presenting organisation didn’t end up publishing it – I may write about that some other time.

The piece is showing its age, both in style and content. Its subject – the use of the ‘keyboard cam’ in selected SSO piano recitals – turned out to be short-lived, perhaps because more often than not the pianists in the series didn’t agree to its use. (One response: “I would resist such a thing until my feet were in the grave.”) But the general theme – music presentation, extra-musical additions to concerts, communication – lives on.

Last year [1996] Jon Kimura Parker gave a piano recital here in the Sydney Town Hall. If you were there you would have noticed a large screen above the stage and a tiny video camera focused on the piano keyboard. Regardless of your seat, you would have been treated to an ‘A-reserve’ view of Kimura Parker’s hands, courtesy of ‘keyboard cam’.

We’ve been accustomed to surtitles at the opera for a while now. Patrons of Opera in the Park are no strangers to the use of large screens. And, as was pointed out in the daily press a few weeks after Kimura Parker’s recital, sports and pop concert audiences now take videos and big screens for granted.

Did we like it? One listener thanked the Sydney Symphony for ‘de-fossilising the piano recital’. She will be disappointed, but not petrified, to find no screen this evening [a recital by Imogen Cooper]. The same listener guessed – probably rightly – that ‘most of the audience at piano recitals are piano students and lapsed pianists’ who ‘want to see The Hands’. (You can recognise them: they all sit on the left-hand side of the hall.)

A screen might allow those students and lapsed pianists to observe the minutiae of a performer’s technique – if such things are to be gleaned from a split-second glimpse. But a screen could also be a distraction; the sight of disembodied hands carrying out their pianistic wizardry might just tear us away from the performer, even the performance.

‘It’s difficult for me to imagine,’ says this evening’s soloist Imogen Cooper, ‘quite what one gathers from being able to see a pianist’s hands. I imagine there may be some very good amateur pianists who want to suss out a few fingerings and things like that.’

‘Or maybe it’s part of the body language.’ she says, ‘But to me the carriage of the shoulders, the head, and the expression on the face – which you can see just as well from the other side of the hall – speaks just as much.’

Certainly all of us, as listeners, hear with our eyes as well as out ears. And from the early 19th century – when pianists such as Liszt turned the piano side on to the audience and seating began to be set out in rows facing the stage – pianists have been using body language to help listeners understand the message of the music. But early recitals were often sprinkled with chamber music and vocal items; concerts nowadays are increasingly more specialised, our programs more focused. ‘When there is only the pianist for the whole evening,’ says Cooper, ‘the visual aspect does in fact matter a great deal. But I think the artist should be able to carry that themselves. I don’t think projecting the hands on a screen actually helps that.’

Even so, giant screens seem to be moving from the stadium to the concert hall. ‘Dare I say,’ ventures Cooper, ‘it’s this slightly American concept that one medium is never enough. You have to have two at the same time and, if possible, three. And if there could have been flashing lights too, no doubt that will come up one of these days.’

Perhaps it’s a symptom of the multimedia age; perhaps it’s more basic than that. ‘It’s as if,’ says Cooper, ‘we haven’t got the concentration span – which I suppose for some people is true – to focus on one thing without being amused by something else at the same time. Probably the youngest generation coming up, for the most part, don’t have a very good attention span and have not had a very good introduction to classical music. They are simply bored if they have to sit and listen to something.’

But let’s return to Kimura Parker. He had performed with a keyboard cam in concerts elsewhere and he took the time to explain his thoughts on the new gadgetry. He also took the time to introduce the music he played. The question could be asked: which was it that really helped us to listen more carefully? The keyboard cam? Or the spoken introductions?

For Cooper communication wins out over gadgetry every time. ‘Not only are you introducing the works from your own experience,’ says Cooper, ‘but anybody in the audience can see that you’re not only a wonderful disembodied being that can play, but that you can talk and laugh, and in some ways you use the same language as them – literally.’

Play me, I'm yours!

The 2009 Sydney Festival began only today, I’ve yet to venture into the city, and already I have discovered its highlight. I will look no further for something that has inspired and amused me and warmed the cockles of my heart, while drawing me in as a participant.

This morning took me on an errand to Parramatta [to collect my first ever pair of sunglasses – another story]. As I left the station on the less busy and relatively undeveloped north side I spotted a piano on the footpath, a chair conveniently chained to the leg.

“Play Me, I’m Yours.” Well, I was always very good at following instructions – no need to ask twice. Unfortunately three years without an instrument to hand meant that the only thing I could retrieve from my muscle memory was the rondeau and first couplet from Couperin’s Baricades mistérieuses. So this received an airing, with only one uninterested passerby to make me feel self-conscious.

A URL on the front of the case leads to more information about this festival project. It’s been done before (Birmingham) and Luke Jerram is the artist behind the idea.

And it’s a good one. Or at least, it’s an idea that I like a lot. I felt the tiniest twinge at the element of “vandalism” involved (and apparently we’re invited to decorate the pianos as well) and, later, some concern over the condition of these street instruments as the weeks progress. But for the most part my reaction was complete and utter delight. Here was a piano for the playing! It wasn’t locked; it didn’t have a politely printed Do Not Touch notice on it; it wasn’t occupied by a hired cocktail pianist.

Only the other night, while listening to neighbours two doors down sing what might have been Turkish folk songs to the accompaniment of some mandolin-like instrument, I was musing on how sad it was that so few people nowadays sing and make their own music in informal and social situations. This sort of artistic project, which encourages precisely that kind of musical behaviour, makes me think that perhaps all is not lost.

Moving on… near Parramatta Town Hall I spotted another piano – this one with two kiddies playing and smiling. Evidently, if I’d had the time, I could have found eight more. On Monday I intend to seek out the one at Circular Quay, the one in front of the MCA, and maybe the one at Sydney Hospital. About 20 pianos have been installed in and around the CBD; placing one somewhere at the Sydney Opera House seems both redundant and beautifully subversive.

Note to self: must get a piano.

Not all brass players do crosswords during the rests

The other day when I was writing about the SSO tour scrapbook I kept something back.

This particular clipping with its conductor caricature wasn’t simply interesting in itself, but held the serendipitous solution to a little mystery that’s been bugging me for years. A decade actually.

When I was working at Symphony Australia, the librarian unearthed an oddity in a set of parts. It was unsigned and unlabelled, and since none of my older-and-wiser colleagues were able to identify it, I kept a scan in case of, well… the wholly unanticipated possibility that one day I’d be able to work it out.

The front is ordinary enough – a loose horn part for an aria from Rigoletto.

Side two got interesting…

The scrapbook clipping suggests it’s very likely if not completely certain that this “Questa o quella” caricature was by the multi-talented Napier Dunn (1938–2005) – he ended up trading orchestras for newspaper cartooning in his native South Africa. He also made music cartoons in a slightly Hoffnung-esque mode.

But who’s the conductor? And the tenor?

This is still uncertain, although the identity of the artist helps narrow things down. Dunn played in the SSO for 14 months during a period that included late 1967 – let’s make a window of 1966 to 1968. According to the historical records, the SSO doesn’t appear to have performed this aria during that time. But before that Dunn played with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and here, at least, there is a possible performance from 1965.  That would make the conductor Rudolf Pekárek and the tenor “Sidney Paterson” (or “Sidney Patterson” perhaps). 

Of course, it’s possible that this particular aria wasn’t on the program at all, and that the music was simply on the stand as part of a set. That makes the historical performance records less helpful and would require going through an imaginatively assembled list of possibilities, beginning with other arias from Rigoletto – not something I have time to do. 

Meanwhile, feel free to chip in with other possible artists active in Australia during the late 1960s.

The SSO in Tasmania (1967)

Some colleagues are soon to move offices, so this morning I was a gleeful assistant in their attempt to winnow a large collection of books. Also rescued along the way, a period piece in the form of a scrapbook:

Sydney Symphony Orchestra: Launceston – Hobart, 1967

The news clippings from the Launceston Examiner trace a little saga that I suspect wouldn’t make the press today, whether for lack of media interest or orchestras’ desire generally to keep such things under wraps.

It begins on 1 August 1967 with news that a concert in Launceston’s Albert Hall is scheduled for 20 November and that a capacity house of 2000 will cover the expenses of the visit, but that the city must put up a guarantee of $4000 to insure the orchestra [the ABC] against a loss. $860 had been raised so far.

5 August: Further guarantees were promised but the city still needed to raise $2500 to prevent the visit being called off. A five-day reprieve had been granted. As before, various donors and the amounts pledged are named.

8 August: “The Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s visit to Launceston will be called off or confirmed this afternoon.” The Mayor has issued a last minute plea and personally solicited about 200 business houses.

9 August: A second reprieve/extension has been granted, with just $600 in pledges left to raise. “Ald. Pryor [the Mayor] said the orchestra expenses for the visit to Launceston would be $5000. A ‘very conservative’ estimate of $1000 was put on ticket sales. Launceston had to guarantee the remaining $4000 before the orchestra would commit itself. He said: ‘But the Albert Hall holds 1600 and at an average of $2 a ticket[!] the guarantors will not lose anywhere near the money they put up.’”

All comes through, and by the end of the month the two programs in Hobart and one in Launceston are confirmed. The freight includes three tonnes of instruments and equipment and the 87 musicians are scheduled to fly out of Sydney on the TAA T-Jet shown above.

Then begin the inevitable mini-features in The Examiner and the Hobart Mercury, mostly about members of the orchestra: the nine women, including Lois Simpson (who, “following her husband’s [John Painter’s] retirement as principal cellist of the orchestra…took his place in it”) and principal harp June Loney, who had spent the previous season studying in Cleveland with the great Alice Chalifoux. One of Lois’s young pupils, Nathan Waks, had recently reached the finals of the ABC Concerto Competition.

Helen Bainton (viola) had just published Facing the Music. Other personalities: Neville Amadio, Gordon Watson (piano soloist), Ronald Cragg (principal viola, pictured in his violin-making workshop), John Robertson (principal trumpet), and the youthful Donald Hazelwood – “top executive of the splendid body of musicians scheduled to play in Tasmania in the third week of next month”. Don is photographed with Anne, Roy (6), Jane (8) and Sooty the kitten in a billy cart made by Don himself (“Concert Master is a Handyman”).

One feature in The Mercury makes the leap from Monteverdi’s scratch band c.1600 to the six Australian symphony orchestras in one fell paragraph break. There’s orchestral history for you. Under the heading “Long queues for vacant seats” we’re told that the SSO’s subscription base of more than 10,000 attend 50 performances (five series of 10 programs each) annually. “This represents five completely sold-out houses for each concert at the Sydney Town Hall, and people queue in hundreds each year for any seats that become vacant.” Furthermore, 6000-plus under 25s were attending the Youth Concerts. Those were the days.

The Mercury profiles Miss June Rees, “Australia’s only woman concert manager”, who had been a foundation member of the Sydney Symphony Youth Concerts Committee and had made her way from copy and script writing in commercial radio to record library work to Hobart’s orchestral manager.

The ABC’s purchase of four Wagner tubas for the SSO makes Hobart news, even though the Tasmanian audiences won’t get to hear them.

The Mercury’s “for Women” tells of the charms of music: mainly to do with SSO musicians finding love within the ranks. Chief among the “family men” must be violinist Tony Bonetti, who is pictured with his family orchestra of wife and six children, ranging in age from 5 to 15 – all string players.

Some of the SSO musicians hail from Tasmania, such as Brian Duke [a cellist who, incidentally, appears to have been as avid a collector of program books as Thomasina, his comprehensive 50-year bound collection having been spotted earlier this year in an estate auction and snaffled for the SSO]. Duke’s story is the finding of a prized early Georgian table piano in a Hobart secondhand shop.

Then the concerts…and the reviews…

20 November 

Albert Hall, Launceston

John Hopkins | Gordon Watson, piano

Berlioz Roman Carnival – “probably fun to play as well as hear”

Britten Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes – “apt musical equivalents of sensations”

Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No.4 – “apart from a slight lag in time by the soloist…left little room for criticism”

Beethoven Symphony No.7 – “a performance never equalled before in Tasmania…never faltering in the exuberant dance rhythm or failing to catch the distant solemnity of the second movement”

Apparently Albert Hall’s reputation as a cold venue resulted in few women bothering with evening dress “as such an occasion demanded”. But Mrs Andrew Sinclair “teamed a blouse of tomato chiffon with unusual fluted sleeves with a black and white checked hostess skirt”. (The descriptions of attire in The Examiner’s “Women’s World” go on for columns.)

(Two days later the event was declared a “big success”, with the guarantors assured of receiving between 45 and 60 per cent of their pledges back.)

20 and 21 November – free children’s matinees

Albert Hall, Launceston; City Hall, Hobart

John Hopkins

Berlioz Roman Carnival

Britten Four Sea Interludes

Sculthorpe Sun Music IV

Beethoven Symphony No.7

Sculthorpe is Launceston-born: a neat choice. Bear in mind, too, that Sun Music IV would have been brand new: Willem van Otterloo and the MSO had premiered it just six months before. How exciting is that? And smart, no doubt, to play it to the open-eared kiddies in a concert where Hopkins could explain what it was all about.

21 November

a repeat of the 20 November evening program, in City Hall

The performance of the National Anthem was “a triumph and a brilliant prologue” wrote the staff reporter at The Mercury, and by the end Hopkins was recalled to the stage five times. But Beethoven was at fault, it seems, for not giving his symphony a more attractive title: “It is perhaps a pity that musical tradition dictates that titles of the works of the masters should include reference to the key—titles frightening enough anyone unversed in musical techniques. Here was the presentation of a wealth of orchestral harmony — a fruitful source of material for modern songwriters — that should have been heard by many more Tasmanians because of its sheer quality. A more attractive title might have brought them.”

The Britten was “a sort of formless music dictated by the moods of the sea”, but at least his titles weren’t faulted. “It was a terrific performance in which all sections of the orchestra come together in a tremendous cacophony of the sound and fury of the storm.”

22 November

City Hall, Hobart

Thomas Matthews

SSO and TSO combined

Bach orch. Leo Weiner Toccata in C

Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis

Strauss Don Juan

Franck Symphony in D minor

Nice to hear of a string work being performed not by reduced “chamber” forces (as would be most likely for a strings-only work at the SSO nowadays) but by a generously full body of strings. 

Another thing to note about these touring programs: a generosity of music (80 to 85 minutes of music in each one). And that’s not counting the national anthem.

Of course, you can’t please all the people all of the time, and there are six signatures at the bottom of a letter to The Mercury (28 November 1967) complaining that – while the Berlioz, Britten and Strauss were appropriate in giving “the Tasmanian public a unique opportunity to hear works…beyond the limited resources of the TSO” – the “magnificent array of orchestral finery” went to waste in the Beethoven and Franck, since neither was scored for a large orchestra and both had been performed by the TSO under Matthews. Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition with 114 musicians would have been more appropriate, they write. “Surely, if such an opportunity presents itself again, the ABC will overcome the problems of limited rehearsal time and present us with a programme equal to the occasion.”

I’ve documented this at length because ultimately the responsible thing to do with a scrapbook such as this is to entrust it to the appropriate archive, where it will languish until some eager researcher unearths it. But it seems a shame for its charm and historical insight to be completely lost to view.

They're here

A few years ago Moleskine stopped making the line of notebook they called the volant. These were thinner than the regular notebooks and had a soft cover, but unlike the cahier line, which survived, they had a “moleskine” cover rather than craft card.

I use volants for the library – they’re perfect for jotting down call numbers of books or CDs before I head to the shelves. “Bibliography” books is how I think of them, although I’ve rarely gone back to consult old entries. Thinness and flexibility are the main virtues: a girl can shove them in a jeans pocket while prowling the stacks. I write in present tense because I had a few hoarded away when the line was cut, and then earlier this year, just as I was halfway through my last one, they were reintroduced. In pretty two-tone colour sets as well as the old black:

I left the “green” set well alone. Lime and sickly yellow is how I’d describe them. But pink will be appreciated by someone I know, and the blue and navy pair just seemed right given the bluestocking use to which I’ll put them.

The news, however, is that they’re here. Today was the first time I’d seen them for sale in Australia, despite haunting the usual suppliers in a half-hearted way for the past few months. UTS Co-op on Broadway, and the price is good if you’re a member.

Mare's nest

Malcolm Gladwell, I’m disappointed in you:

Here’s a sample question, from the verbal analogies section. “Teeth is to Hen as Nest is to ?” If you want to know the answer, I’m afraid I have no idea.
Outliers (2008), page 71

On air

I spend so much time in the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall and so little time in the Opera Theatre that the sight of this about a week-and-a-half ago caught me by surprise.

As far as I’m aware, there aren’t similar signs in the Concert Hall foyer. This one pictured is on the exterior skin of the Opera Theatre, just before you go up the stairs to the doors for the dress circle.

It struck me as ironic, since there is infinitely more live broadcasting going on from the Concert Hall in any given year than from the Opera Theatre. It reminds me, too, of how the ABC insisted*, during the construction process, on the larger performance space under the western shells being assigned to its activities (i.e. a concert hall for the SSO). In fact, until relatively recently the Concert Hall was known in ABC radio as “Studio 227”.

*The SOH’s history online puts it this way: “At the behest of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) the NSW Government changed the proposed larger opera hall into the concert hall because at the time, [orchestral] concerts, managed by the ABC, were more popular and drew larger audiences than opera.”

You Can on a Cannon

In 1995 the pass-code for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra photocopier was “1812”. There are probably only three other people on staff who remember this.

One day in the life of a season brochure

Bell Shakespeare launched its 2009 season on a Thursday. On the Friday I was walking in an inner west “village” shopping strip and saw a copy the brochure in the street-side garbage bin. The shortest life cycle for a season brochure I’ve ever directly witnessed.

I’m sure there was some perfectly innocuous reason for its being disposed of and one could speculate about that forever.  I’m going with “fell from owner’s bag, subsequently tossed in bin by some uninterested but environmentally conscious passer-by”.

Meanwhile, it made me think, soberly, of all the angst and effort that’s invested in a season brochure: the years of careful and imaginative artistic planning; the creative work of writing and designing the publication itself; striving to accurately and enticingly convey artistic vision as well as the personality of the performances and the character of the experience. It can take months. People lose sleep and weight over these things. There are tears and heated discussions – and joy too.

When it’s all over, these brochures stay on desks and shelves for 16-plus months – a continual source of reference, a reminder of what we’re all here for. Our fans, our subscribers, often collect them season by season, even referring to back issues (I’m not making this up!).

And sometimes they end up in the bin.

Seven multiplied…

Prima la musica has extended a voluntary tag to the Seven Things About Me meme, the rules of which are noted at Score Desk. As I understand it, the facts are intended to be a combination of the random and the weird.

1. Childhood ambitions and their inspirations: pirate (Treasure Island), submarine captain (Navy open day), pilot (too many Biggles books).

2. Irises. Always. Nothing but.

3. Recorder, viola, harpsichord – instruments on which I never had lessons but which I somehow found myself playing. Viola was the first instrument that I played on the stage of the Sydney Opera House.

4. Musical theatre. My first musical love. There was a time when I could sing all the songs from just about any musical you cared to name. There are still times when I’d rather hear Sondheim than Mahler. [I’ll drink to that.]

5. Fifteen. The number of years I collected and devoured concert and theatre programs before realising that someone must be paid to write and edit these things. And normally I’m so quick off the mark…

6. My handwriting? I taught myself as a kid. From a little book Dad owned called Good Handwriting and How to Acquire It (1954). I share with Winsome Evans the view that it is simple courtesy to write in an æsthetically pleasing hand, and with the Chinese and Japanese the idea that calligraphy is an essential item in the scholar's toolbox. Oh, and I'm a typography nerd.

7. I think the most exquisite sound in the world is the scratch of a quill scribing on vellum. Clearly Peter Greenaway thinks it’s pretty special too:

Update: the above YouTube clip is no longer available, but the beginning of this one will do.

I join the cowards of the world by also suggesting that, if the whim takes you, you may consider yourself tagged. Don't have a blog? Make a facebook Note instead.

Life Amplified to the power of three

The conversation at work the other day went something like this:

Th: Want to look at the Opera Australia brochure?
[Holds up the 2009 brochure]

[Harried Colleague looks blankly at it]
HC: Why would I want to look at that?

Th: It's next year's…

HC: Oh, is it next year's? It looks like this year's.

[Indeed it does]

[And rather like the one from the year before that]

I'm all for consistency of "branding" (dreadful word, but it's the technical term the marketers use), the template is a pretty one, and no one adores the "Life Amplified" slogan more than I do. I've never come across a better encapsulation of the essence of opera – it just seems so apt.

But when people who hang around in the realm of music mistake one year's brochure for another then something's wrong. Perhaps Opera Australia could take a leaf from the book of those who design magazine covers. (Keep a consistent masthead, sure, but stimulate the reader's desire for the new issue with a truly distinctive colour scheme and imagery.) Do they really want to give people the impression that it's the same-old same-old that they're "amplifying"? 

Perhaps in 2010 they can ask the designers to break out the cool tones? Emerald green, maybe? Or Chinese blue?

W is for…

W is for Wordie, the place for lovers of language and players with words. It is, as we say, "Like flickr, but without the photos".
On Wordie referring to a tissue as a Kleenex is antonomasia, and if you find yourself mooing or miaowing involuntarily you can always call in sick on account of your aboiement. This is the site where pseudonyms go in search of retronyms or simply check out the fun lists, create their own, feed on the comments and join the debate. In all, a highly addictive weirdness league.

Pedants's corner

Link: Twitter / Wordie: pedants's corner battle roy....

This is what happens when one raises the thorny matter of the apostrophe (or not) in an apparently attributive noun... Glad to see that an Antipodean is on my side.

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.

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.

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.