Perth episode two: WE WON!

I've only got a short amount of time on the computer at Perth airport (our flight back to Melbourne has been delayed - boring!) so this is a short post about the overwhelming events of last night.

We came to Perth to perform in the Putting on an Act festival at PICA, seeing it as a good opportunity to showcase our work. After our performance on Friday night, we were told that we had been selected for the "best-of" program on Saturday night. It was amazing for us to have so many people enjoy and believe in our work, and we were stoked to have the opportunity to perform again. The only problem was, we had no harpsichord! I had organised the hire of a harpsichord from WAAPA, but received a phone call from them a few days ago telling me that there had been a double-booking, and the opera company was promised the instrument for Saturday night. I wasn't worried about that originally, as I didn't think that we'd be performing on the final night...

So there were many, many phone calls made yesterday to assorted members of the small early music fraternity in Perth, to no avail. At our 2:30pm sound-check we developed what we called the "plugged" version of the piece, with an electronic keyboard wired into the sound system and lots of reverb - very different from our restrained baroque-minimalism of the night before.

We were a bit anxious before the performance, having to deal with a different sound and completely different touch on my part. I normally listen a lot to the acoustics of my instrument as I play, and respond to the sound-waves coming from the strings. Not having any sound at all near me, and having to rely on what came from the overhead speakers had me a bit nervous.

Once I walked out on to the stage, though, and played the first few notes, I knew that it was going to be fine. The theatre was full, and the audience warm and enthusiastic. As soon as the last note died away we were greeted by a wall of clapping and cheering. I was overwhelmed by the response, and really moved that people loved our work so much.

Afterwards, it took us about 20 minutes to get to the bar to get a drink, we were continually stopped and congratulated by people who loved the combination of harpsichord and voice. Finally, red wine in hand, I relaxed for a moment, only to have us announced as the winners of the inaugural City of Perth Award for Most Innovative Act! The rest of the night was a bit of a blur of thank-yous, congratulations and posing for photographs...

Beautiful Rubble

Introducing... Beautiful Rubble! Drum roll please!

This is a duo I am one half of - together with the lovely Fernando. We've got a rudimentary myspace site here.

We've been invited to perform at Putting on an Act, at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, which is very exciting, and the first time we've presented our work as a stand-alone. We started working together a couple of years ago, and found that we fit together musically very well, and that it was easy for the two of us to come up with ideas and beginnings for songs.

I realised today that I am improvising all the time now, something that I could not do two years ago. All our songs have a basic structure, but the detail is improvised - there is a bass line or chord progression that is set, but everything else I am making up on the spot. I am very conscious of how far I still have to go in this area, but am proud of what I can do now, compared with a couple of years ago.

Music in Exile

Since I first heard it a year or so ago I have been fascinated by the music of Esteban Salas. Born in Cuba in 1725, he lived in Havana as a musician until 1762 when the English invaded. He was then transferred to a position as choir-master in the little cathedral in Santiago de Cuba, where he remained until his death in 1803.


From the CD liner notes:

"The image of Salas is one of angelic purity. The little troubles and tribulations which he experienced in his life enable us to envisage a simple, trusting soul, who since his youth had observed strict chastity, living like an ecclesiastic, in no way undeserving the tonsure. A true mystic, he had taken the vow of living in poverty, and he always dressed in black."
The compositions on this recording are carols for a small choir accompanied by a simple string orchestra. Heartfelt, simple, genuine and poignant, for me they summon up a sense of great distance and exile. The music seems less sophisticated, less polished, less worldly than European music of the time. There are no obvious "Cuban" influences, but elements of "that distant and isolated" country surrounded by sea have managed to creep in nonetheless.

There is something beautifully unpolished and genuine about the recording as well. Recorded in Cuba in the Dominican church of San Juan de Letran by a Cuban choir, there is a very particular quality about the voices - sometimes a little breathy, not quite together, but always honest and with conviction and integrity. Sometimes the sound of crickets can be heard in the background through the unglazed windows of the church.

Quite Possibly My Favourite Record Label

... currently is ECM, especially their New Series. Recently Readings had a sale on ECM albums and I indulged in


Anouar Brahem's Le Pas Du Chat Noir

Tord Gustavsen's Changing Places

and The Dowland Project's Care Charming Sleep.

Other albums that I love from this label include Rolf Lislevand's Nuove Musiche

... and of course Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert.

Play Things

Last night I went to hear my mates Fernando and Duncan (aka Play Things) play at the Rooftop Bar. I couldn't stay for long as I had to scoot to have dinner with my mum (it was mothers day after all!), but I absolutely fell in love with the venue, as well as the music. Next time I'll definitely take the lift rather than the 6 flights of stairs, but the climb was worth it.


I felt almost a sense of vertigo standing up there amongst the skyscrapers, thinking "this is my city".

Quiet Music Festival

I heard about the Quiet Music Festival today. It's being held on Sunday. Maybe I'll try and go.
I really like the idea of a festival "dedicated to the celebration of detail, timbre and musical expression", and I am glad there are people like Leo Dale in this world, who know that

The beauty and skill in slow, quiet music can be such that you suspend your breathing and you can almost hear colours and textures in it.

Concert photo

A photo of me and my fellow musos as we finish a performance at Wendy Jore's final Masters recital last Wednesday (that's me on the left, sitting at the harpsichord).

Ground Elastic Sound

Oh, the heat! The last few days have been absolutely tropical here in Melbourne town. But somehow we have survived, mostly.

Last night I endured the un-airconditioned stuffy mugginess (but visual splendour) of the Forum Theatre to hear Ground Elastic Sound, a concert presented by Melbourne composers' collective Dead Horse Productions.

First of all I was very impressed with the audience they attracted. There must have been between 200 and 300 people there, which for a presentation of new compositions is very impressive for this city. Their marketing campaign was excellent, and I think struck the right balance between a street aesthetic and a more intellectual avant-garde feel. It certainly seemed to attract the punters.

I was expecting that there would be some works which I would really enjoy and others which I would think were crap, to put it bluntly. But I was very pleasantly surprised. All seven pieces in the program I found engaging and enjoyable.

I loved how the concert opened with a Biddy Connor's Ground Elastic Sound Fanfare played by clarinet, trumpet, trombone and baritone saxophone standing in the aisles in the audience, and making their way to the stage during the piece, joined in the middle by a tenor saxophone entering from side stage.

For some reason I remember really enjoying Wally Gunn's Eleven Fifty-Five, although now I can't really remember the specifics of the piece. There was some beautiful string writing, and a particularly poignant moment between a string trio, horn and clarinet.

Kate Neal's Semaphore also struck me with its timeless timbre, taking its inspiration from T.S. Elliott's poem The Rock:

In the beginning, God created the world. Waste and Void.
Waste and Void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep...

The poem was presented before the performance of the music, in a video projection of Kate's hand writing the poem on a piece of paper, which was much more personal and engaging than merely projecting the typed text onto the screen.

I think the highlight of the concert for me was David Chisholm's Ikebana, performed by both a live and a pre-recorded string quartet. I loved the driving momentum of this work, with the constant contrapuntal interplay of the 'virtual' quartet with the live musicians onstage. David describes this work as

almost a renovation of Baroque threads, a reupholstering, perhaps, of a threadbare couch utilising modern materials and instincts.

The musicians were superb - fully commited to the music and playing with a lot of focus and feeling on an almost unbearably hot and humid night. So kudos to them.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself through about 90 minutes of new music - which is more than I can say for some concerts of 'old' classical music that I have been to! Congratulations to Wally and the rest of the Dead Horse Productions gang, and I look forward to their next gig...

Random acts of music

I saw a beautiful thing today.
Well, actually I heard it before I saw it.
On City Road, out the back of grey, humanless skyscrapers.
A waft of music on the air.
A burly security guard, in grey-blue pants and a shirt, a communication earpiece in his ear, huddled in the fire-escape,
Playing a mouthorgan.

The myth about beige cardigans

I am a musician. It makes sense for me to teach music, both financially and personally. Financially, I can earn almost twice as much per hour as I can doing most other things. Personally, it is good for me to be engaged with as much music as possible, and to "live" music. It is excellent to have to put my ideas about music into words, to find ways to explain musical concepts that I take for granted. And makes much more sense for me to earn my pennies doing something related to the career that I want to have.

So why have I been so reluctant to earn money by teaching? I realised the other day that I have a lot of resistance to the idea of being a "music teacher". Subconsciously I felt that music teachers are unattractive, lonely, boring people who wear beige cardigans (apologies to all music teachers for this terrible stereotype). I don't know why I had this image in my head, or where it came from. My music teachers have always been very vibrant and lovely people who would never go anywhere near beige!

Maybe I worry that I will become some kind of social outcast if I become a music teacher. Again, I don't know where all this baggage is coming from. Lots of very interesting, fascinating, friendly and sociable people teach in schools so what am I worried about? I'm not going to be some kind of gnome that hides in the music room and doesn't talk to anyone! And anyway, the purpose of working is to do just that - work. If friendships grow out of working relationships well so much the better, but that's not the purpose of working to earn a crust.

So I'm going to teach. I'm going to share the knowledge that I have gained in all the years of university and the life experience I have gained from, well, being alive. I want to inspire others and in turn open myself to inspiration and new inputs. I love music and it's time to share the love and blast any remotely beige ideas out the window!

Drops

I woke up to the beautiful sound of rain on my roof - rain that we haven't had since Christmas. There are big drops, little drips, pattering on the leaves and plants and drumming on the tin roof. I can almost feel the happiness of the plants, soaking it all up into their parched and yellowing stems.

I am reminded of the wonderful Score for a Hole in the Ground, which uses dripping water to create an incredible musical installation. I am completely in love with the concept of this piece - the gramaphone-like amplifier just sitting there in the woods, the way that people can just come across the piece unexpectedly, the fact that nature (the great creator?) is actually playing the piece now that it is out of human control.

Morning Coffee

In my dressing gown with the curtains shut, pretending I am hibernating.

For some reason I decided that the best music to listen to this morning was Beethoven's Violin Concerto. I really love the recording I have, with Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. It is somehow firm with a strong foundation, yet delicate without being wishy-washy. A few months ago, while listening to this recording, I began to notice the timpani, and the way they interact with the rest of the orchestra in this piece. Back in 1806, when this work was written, percussion instruments were still very much special effect instruments, and were often silent for much of the time, reserving their impact for moments of glory and drama. This piece, though, actually starts with a bar of solo timpani, which must have been quite bizzare for audiences at the first performance. Once I really started to listen to the timps I realised that they really underpin the whole first movement, with their little four-note, "bup-bup-bup-bah" motive. Who would have thunk that 20 minutes of music could grow out of four repeated notes?

So that is what I am listening to as I sit here in my slippers with my feet toasy warm drinking my coffee that is rapidly getting colder and less appetising.

L'Arpeggiata

I was pleased to read today (even though it is old news) that L'Arpeggiata will be releasing a new CD later this year - a collaboration with a flamenco guitarist. One of my all-time favourite records is their All'Improvviso - a fresh, beautifully-crafted, inspired and inspiring CD.

When I first heard this music, driving with a friend of mine to a gig in the country with my harpsichord bundled in the back of the station wagon, I realised how close many of the baroque musical forms are to folk music. Gigues, chaconnes, sarabandes - they all stated off as dances, that real people danced to. And they weren't the sedate affairs we have come to know from BBC period dramas. They would have worked up a sweat, the women's hair would have come loose, they would have drunk beer to refresh them and give them spirit for more dancing. Before I encountered All'Improvviso I had never thought that "classical" music could be this alive. These people play 16th and 17th century music with the same energy and vibrancy as the best folk musicians. In their hands this music is not dead, despite the fact that it originated 400 years ago. And they are not afraid to put their own stamp on the music - in fact, a lot of this CD is work composed and improvised by the group themselves. The very first track is a song by Lucilla Galeazzi about the house that she wants to have one day - full of music and friends. You can listen to it here

One of the most amazing things about this CD is the way they have worked with jazz clarinettist Gianluigi Trovesi. Let alone the fact that he is a jazz musician and the rest of the ensemble are trained in early music, the clarinet wasn't even invented until much later on. So it is a completely "foreign" sound for this music, or so one would think. Actually it doesn't stand out at all as out of place, but it certainly does stand out for it's amazingness!!

Anyway, I think this CD is ace :)

Why Genres are Crap

9 days ago, at about 4:30 in the afternoon, my thesis topic suddenly and irrevocably changed. I was planning to write something about improvisation in renaissance or baroque keyboard music, but was struggling to find a reason to research and write about that. As a joke I said maybe I should write a thesis entitled "Why Genres are Crap", and my excellent and insightful supervisor (yes, I know you're reading this!) suggested that maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all.

So for the last few days I've been thinking about the idea of genre in music, and the seemingly great rift between classical and popular music. At this point I have no idea how I am going to tackle this gigantic topic, and what will be my specific argument, but I am really interested in questions like:
Is genre useful or restrictive?
Does it mean that people focus more on the type of music rather than the artistry or merit or value or any of those things that make music beautiful?
Do we concentrate on the style at the expense of the substance?
Why do people listen to the music that they listen to?

Basically, I think that the division between 'popular' and 'art' (classical) music is pretty ridiculous. Musicians are constantly put in little genre pigeon-holes: classical, early music, country, pop, hip-hop, fusion... even 'cross-genre' is almost a genre in itself.

Obviously I have to come up with some swanky, uber-intelligent argument at some stage, but in the meantime I'm going to ramble and see what happens.

Stay tuned for some slightly more coherent and incisive... stuff...

In the meantime, I am glad that there are other people that are thinking along the same lines, though :)

Pop vs Classical?

Greg Sandow once again writes about the gulf between classical music audiences and concerts and the world of popular (for want of a better word) music. He mentions the ways different audiences respond to music:

Often orchestral music is very rhythmic. Why doesn’t the audience move (even a little) to the rhythm? Do orchestras preclude that, by sitting blankly onstage themselves?

I am not so sure that it is entirely about the music that they are playing, but perhaps more about the attitude and engagement of the performers and the general atmosphere of the performance. I am still formulating my ideas about this, and will try to write more about my thoughts soon.

But in the meantime, Sandow's post reminded me of something I heard about on the radio this morning, which was a concert by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, and supported by youth radio station Triple J. The ASO have a series this year called "The Edge", which

will seek out the sounds of contemporary culture fusing the music of the X and Y generations to the classical. The Edge will merge the forces of Triple J with ABC Classic FM, 1960’s French poet of jazz Serge Gainsbourg with Radiohead, Sigur Rós, Muse and Jeff Buckley. The emergent sounds will have its audience listening to music standing bravely on The Edge! These late-night, one hour concerts at the ASO’s Grainger Studio will be recorded for broadcast on Triple J Radio with the support of ABC Classic FM.

It will certainly be interesting to see what these concerts are like, and how they resonate with their target audiences.

The Struggle

Lyrics I heard on Triple J this morning:

"How long should an artist struggle before it's just not worth the hassle?"

Can't for the life of me remember the name of the song, or the artist, but it was suitably artistically angsty.

Classical music as event?

I've been enjoying a couple of lovely (and very chilly) days in the country. I hope you all had a good Easter break as well :)

To fill in the time until I have something original to write, I will point you in the direction of this post by Greg Sandow, who has some interesting things to say about music performance as an event...

Finally, from Sanja Petrovic came something quiet and lovely. Sanja, a pianist, said she’d been involved in a performance of Chopin nocturnes. Several pianists were involved. (Sanja, I hope I’m remembering this exactly right!) The concert began at 11 PM. The space was darkened. Candles were lit. Can you imagine a more beautiful—or more suitable—setting for the nocturnes? No need for program notes. No need to explain who Chopin was, or what a nocturne is, or what kind of unexpected modulations might occur in measure 32. No need, God help us, for any education (the very notion of which, I think, is killing classical music, but more on that in another post). The setting of the concert clarified anything that anyone would need to know. I wish I’d been there.

How to be an Expert

If I ever needed a kick in the pants to put in the hours of practice, it is now. I am painfully aware of the (seemingly massive) gap between what I want to do with music and where I am now. I have the desire, but do I have the dedication?

I found this post - How to be an Expert - at Creating Passionate Users today, and it is exactly what I needed to read. It has served as a reminder that it is possible, but I really need to knuckle down. I need to dedicate and commit myself fully. It's certainly not going to be quick and easy.

...The only thing standing between you-as-amateur and you-as-expert is dedication...

(via Watermark)

Shame, Fear and Performance

Last night, in class, we had an interesting discussion about the nature of performance, and the importance of being 'present' duing performance. One of the ideas that came up was about the difference between shame and fear, which are both feelings/emotions that can adversely affect performance. This was something I had not thought about in this way before. Shame is felt about something that happened in the past, whereas fear is worrying about something that may happen in the future. Neither of them are about the present moment, although if we allow ourselves to become involved with either, it can have a significant effect on the present. Being successful in performance involves being free of the past and the future, shame and fear, and focussing on the reality of the here and now. Of course, this is always much easier to say than to do!

Book Review: Authenticity in Music

At only 78 pages, this slim volume is not in the least bit intimidating, yet manages to explore in some detail the philosophy of authenticity in (mainly) Baroque music. Raymond Leppard, whose academic and performing credits are extensive, including a 14-year stint as the Music Director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, begins by illustrating the differences in approach to music reception or listening between today's globalized post-modern western society compared to the 19th and early 20th centuries' ideals of progress and improvement on the past. This is no more than a potted history, and is somewhat generalised, but is nonetheless a useful and I think necessary backdrop to a discussion about historical performance in today's world. I am not sure about his hypothesis that the atomic bomb was the big turning point where western culture abandoned the idea of progress in favour of the search for something deeper and more profound. Has this really led to the rise in popularity of early (Renaissance and Baroque) music, as a response to this search for purity and balance in a chaotic world? It's a nice theory, but I think it is perhaps a little too convenient. But then again, he only has a handful of pages for this development, and is certainly not pretending that he is presenting an in-depth exploration of the subject.

The second part of the book is a discussion and explanation of Leppard's own approach to interpreting and performing early music. He is not addressing the finicky little details of ornamentation and phrasing, but rather the general attitude and approach. He outlines the problems the musician has to grapple with: the incompleteness of the repertoire, inconsistent and often ambiguous notation, and great variation in advice regarding technique and interpretation, even in original sources. He points out the fact, simple but often overlooked, that, no matter how hard we try we can never replicate exactly the sound of the past. Even if we play Bach from Bach's manuscript on Bach's harpsichord in Bach's house using Bach's tuning system, we will still be playing and listening with ears and minds who have heard Mahler, Shoenberg and Franz Ferdinand.

The only way forward, Leppard concludes, is to find a middle ground between the pedantic pursuit of authentic purity and the communication with modern audiences. A compromise is needed, he writes, combining the knowledge about the past gained from academic study with a creative understanding of the spirit of music, and a focus on communication with the listener.

This book was very easy and enjoyable to read, and would hold interest for both listeners and performers. Leppard's style is conversational yet nuanced, and he includes musical examples to illustrate his points. I would have liked some suggestion for further reading, rather than the very brief notes at the end. Overall, though, I found this an interesting, thought-provoking book.