‘I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.’
So said John Cage (1912-1992), the American composer and cultural icon, whose birth centenary was celebrated this year. Revered by many as one of the fathers of post-war experimentalism, Cage also managed to unite otherwise opposing traditionalists and avant-gardists who, together, scorned his music for its conceptual nature and lack of technical rigour; he was, said his one-time teacher Arnold Schoenberg, ‘not a composer, but an inventor - of genius’.
Perhaps, then, it says something intriguing about classical music in the UK today that Cage is often treated as a kind of honorary national treasure and that he, in his centenary year, has been subsumed into what has become a real industry of cultural nostalgia. For we are, it seems, completely in thrall to the past; not only through an obsession with anniversaries (not to mention jubilees) but - much more tendentiously in classical music culture - through a seemingly unshakeable focus on music from distant eras rather than that of our own time; hence, in this end-of-year piece, notwithstanding my focus on events around 20th Century and contemporary composers, I find myself in an ironic position that Cage would no doubt have smiled at - in effect, looking back at what we chose to look back at during 2012.
That said, as individuals and as a society, we need to be able to celebrate and to mourn; to pause and consider where we stand in relation to events. And anniversaries are also a way of gauging relative cultural value in terms of who we choose to remember and how; alas, for instance, the centenary of Cage’s brilliant but lesser-known compatriot, the experimentalist Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997), seems to have been passed over entirely in Wales - along with celebrations of Schoenberg’s own seminal work of music theatre Pierrot lunaire - whilst the 150-year birth anniversaries of Claude Debussy and Frederick Delius that enthralled BBC Proms and other audiences elsewhere in the UK were also given less attention here (albeit thankfully in the latter case - notwithstanding the advocacy of Tasmin Little and Julian Lloyd-Webber with his Violin and Cello Concertos respectively at July’s Fishguard International Music Festival).
Regarding Cage, it was the Bangor New Music and Gregynog Festivals which, most notably in Wales, chose to mark his life and work with concerts in March and June respectively. In Bangor, a selection of his earlier pieces was combined with other works inspired by the Fluxus movement to which he was central. More imaginatively, at Gregynog’s National Museum of Wales concert, the experimental harpist Rhodri Davies revealed surprising links between Venice, Cage (his piece Sounds of Venice) and the Gregynog’s founders (one hundred years since they first started collecting paintings of Venice by Whistler, Monet and Sickert). Cage would, one suspects, have relished both occasions.
Closer to home, but on quite another aesthetic planet, lies the music of Pembrokeshire-born composer Daniel Jones (1912-93) who would also have turned one hundred this year. Jones may lack international stature - and his music is yet to truly touch a nerve at home, falling in the cracks between traditional and modernist - but his was an important and substantial Welsh voice, including thirteen symphonies and eight string quartets, the last unfinished at his death. Between them, BBC National Orchestra of Wales and July’s Gower Festival (for whom he was long-standing Festival President) sought to bring his music to wider attention in 2012; the former adding performances of his Cello Concerto and Five Pieces for Orchestra to that of his 12th Symphony in 2011, and the latter programming his Quartet No. 7 alongside choral music and a talk/documentary screening. Hopefully, 2014 will see further programming of his music as part of another, more promising centenary celebration; that of his close friend and collaborator Dylan Thomas.
Thankfully, there is a music festival in Wales that has a policy of celebrating the birthdays of composers while they are actually still with us: the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, founded in 1969 and, since 1992, run as a major international “festival of living composers” by Welsh composer John Metcalf. 2012 was significant for the festival, as it moved from its customary early autumn slot to the spring, this year featuring the music of Philip Glass, who turned 75, and - much more interestingly - Per Nørgård at 80.
Whilst Glass needs little introduction as one of the best-known living composers in the world (to mark his birthday, the original, 1976 Metropolitan Opera production of his seminal Einstein on the Beach was reconstructed at the London Barbican this May), Nørgård deserves a far wider audience than he has had hitherto as the most influential and important Danish composer since Carl Nielsen. Conductor Sergiu Celibidache has ventured that ‘only the mind of a new time in the new millennium will be able to understand the scope of Nørgård’s music’ and this may well turn out to be true; in any event, BBC NOW, the virtuosic Ars Nova Copenhagen and equally impressive young Ensemble Midtvest gave Vale Festival performances of both large and small-scale works to deserved acclaim ahead of the UK premiere of Nørgård’s 7th Symphony at the Proms (his 8th - already written this summer - will premiere, along with his 11th String Quartet, in the UK next March at the Barbican).
Metcalf should be congratulated; both for these successes and for another international coup this year with the first ever visit to the UK by Soloists of Traditional Chinese Instruments, with further focus on the music of contemporary Chinese composer Qigang Chen (who happens, like Glass and Nørgård, also to have lived and studied in Paris). In this respect - and made poignant by the large and supportive presence of Ensemble Midtvest’s ‘friends’ group, who travelled all the way from Denmark to attend their concerts - his Festival was especially thought-provoking this year as to the importance of not only bearing witness to new work, but of embracing and participating in the wider-level cultural shifts and changes that those works can signify.
Sadly though, 2012 saw the passing of another era with the recent deaths of two major 20th Century figures, both radicals in their own way and both mavericks latterly embraced by the establishment; the self-exiled German, Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012) and remarkably long-lived New Yorker, Elliott Carter (1908-2012). Perhaps it is too soon to expect concert tributes by year end, but it was, at least, a fitting coincidence that a Welsh National Opera concert in Cardiff should happen to have featured sections of Henze’s Requiem alongside Mozart’s but three weeks after Henze’s death.
Certainly, it would be good to see further tributes to Carter and Henze in the coming year - and, more widely, both to increase our national engagement with contemporary musical events of international significance and, indeed, to generate such events from home soil by encouraging more of a focus on new works. Perhaps we should look to two new key appointments to deliver in that regard, with the dynamic, young Thomas Søndergård having embarked upon a four-year contract as new Principal Conductor of BBC NOW, whilst the internationally distinguished opera director David Pountney is about to launch his first new production as Artistic Director and CEO of Welsh National Opera.
Søndergård has won accolades for championing new work and the music of fellow Scandinavians from Jean Sibelius and Carl Nielsen to Magnus Lindberg - which three he did in 2012 or will in 2013 - perform in Wales. It would be fantastic if he were to follow Metcalf’s lead in programming Nørgård - but, as Principal of Wales’s national orchestra, it would certainly be fitting for him personally to contribute to BBC NOW’s various initiatives encouraging contemporary Welsh composers as other, less senior conductors already do; Grant Llewellyn, for instance, did sterling and inspiring work in November at the helm for BBC NOW’s Welsh Panorama at Hoddinott Hall, which featured a whopping seven lesser-known composers both from and living in Wales - including the current BBC NOW Resident Composer, Mark Bowden.
On the operatic front, it is ironic that Pountney’s year of coming into post at WNO should have seen yet another new staging of an old war-horse in the form of La Bohème, as he is on record around the millenium as stating,
‘the future of opera for me is not about how many performances of La Bohème there will be in the next century, nor about whether this Bohème is dressed up as something else. It is about which stories we would like to tell in our new century, and what music we will tell them with, and which audience we will find to listen to our stories ... I am talking about new work’.
Thankfully, Pountney’s first new production as director is promisingly ambitious and signals a commitment to more exciting, challenging fare than the Puccini: Alban Berg’s 1930s opera Lulu (to be staged next February), is not only a masterpiece of 20th Century theatre, but represents a milestone in operatic social and political critique - and has, shockingly, never been staged in Wales. Looking to the future, Pountney certainly has contemporary opera on the agenda, with a series of five starting with Jonathan Harvey’s Wagner Dream next summer. [Sad news at time of writing - Harvey died on 5th December aged 77, having lost his battle with motor neurone disease]. But when - or if - WNO will venture to put new work by Welsh composers onto its main stage remains to be seen.
Wales is, after all, not short of talent; this year alone, Lynne Plowman scored great success with her third opera, The Face in the Mirror, for WNO’s educational arm, WNO Max, and has won a prestigious Arts Council of Wales Creative Wales award for 2012-13. Likewise, the enterprising Music Theatre Wales toured coming man Huw Watkins’s chamber opera In the Locked Room alongside Scot Stuart MacRae’s Ghost Patrol in a joint project with Scottish Opera to notable acclaim.
From where will the major new voices of the future appear if the opportunities for inspirational engagement at top level remain elusive? Of Welsh-born composers, Paul Mealor has undoubtedly achieved greatest international and popular success this year, with his Jubilate! Jubilee! for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee building on the success of his 2011 Royal Wedding piece Ubi Caritas - and serving as a reminder that, of all the art forms, it is music through which anniversaries and significant dates in general are most movingly celebrated. But none of the thirteen composers commissioned for the Flotilla on the Thames were Welsh. And Bryn Terfel’s Bryn Fest at London’s South Bank in July may have showcased the usual choral suspects, but he promoted precious little by way of new classical music beyond the ubiquitous (and musically conservative) Karl Jenkins.
So, as we look back on the Welsh classical music scene in 2012, there is much to celebrate and to ponder - but it is concern for the present and for the future which we must ultimately carry into the New Year; for it is, alas, the ongoing, swingeing cuts to arts budgets and the erosion of music education nation-wide that could turn out to have the most decisive and far-reaching effect of 2012. In instrumental tuition alone, it was reported in 2011 that £500k had been cut from budgets for school music lessons across Wales since a report called for a better service - and that Powys County Council has a shameful zero budget for instrumental tuition. When Newcastle City Council recently cut its arts budget by 100% there was great outcry within England, so where is the the outcry here in the ‘Land of Song’? Or are we so focused upon the past that we allow a drift backwards into musical mediocrity and parochialism? Cage would, one suspects, truly be frightened at such a prospect for, rather than a choice between new and old ideas in classical music, it seems we could choose, even more starkly, to be left with few ideas at all.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 14/12/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/look-back-in-apathy-anniversaries-icons-and-the-new-in-welsh-classical-music-2012/
About Me
- steph power
- Twitter: @spower_steph, Wales, United Kingdom
- composer, poet, critic, essayist
Sunday 16 December 2012
Friday 30 November 2012
Concert Review: Welsh National Opera Chorus and Orchestra: St David's Hall, Cardiff, 16th November 2012
Mozart: Masonic Funeral Music
Henze: Movements from the Requiem: Introitus / Agnus Dei / Sanctus
Mozart: Requiem
Conductor: Christoph Poppen
Soprano: Elizabeth Watts / Mezzo: Máire Flavin / Tenor: Andrew Tortise / Bass baritone: Gary Griffiths / Trumpet: Dean Wright / Piano: Simon Phillippo
When tonight’s concert programme was devised months ago, there could have been no inkling how prescient it would turn out to be with the death, on October 27th, of Hans Werner Henze at the age of 86. At once, an early appetizer to Welsh National Opera’s forthcoming Spring 2014 production of Henze’s opera Boulevard Solitude (1952) became a poignant memorial to a leading composer of the late Twentieth Century - and one of the most important to have emerged from the ashes of Hitler’s Germany.
In his 1998 autobiography, Bohemian Fifths, Henze described hearing Mozart on the radio as an adolescent, traumatised by Nazi brutality, in words that encapsulate what he himself went on to aspire to as a composer and a man:
‘It seemed to me as though here was a composer who, lovingly and knowingly, had evolved beyond the music that typified his time and country ... Against the cultural background of his age, Mozart opened up a whole new world of emotion in which ... feelings such as femininity and desire, tenderness and love ... are just as important as frivolousness and danger, risk-taking, death and despair in the form of aggression and masculinity ... It is music of and for humanity.’
Indeed, he wrote that:
‘My goal was Mozart, beauty, perfection, a new form of truth - a truth that pays no heed to the Zeitgeist and that triumphs over death itself’.
How far Henze achieved his loftier artistic ambitions remains open to question, but his life-long social and political commitment and sheer maverick endeavour are demonstrable; tonight’s moving rendition of three sections from his Requiem felt especially apposite alongside a refreshingly spirited Mozart’s, whose seminal final statement was, of course, left unfinished upon that composer’s untimely death in 1791 aged just 35 (not to mention unsatisfyingly - if quickly - completed by his pupil Franz Süssmayr).
Perhaps now, as we emerge from a period of de-politicised post-modernism - in which notions of truth seemed to get submerged to an unhealthy degree by relativist equivocation - Henze’s more polemically abrasive, overtly left-wing music might stand reappraisal. At any rate, the luminous performance here tonight demonstrated the emotional power of which he was capable in more lyrical mode, without forsaking the opportunity for direct social allusion. Choosing to omit the Latin text in favour of solo instrumentalists for a series of nine ‘sacred concertos’ (and reordering the liturgical sequence), the unreligious Henze nonetheless intended his Requiem to stand not only as a secular ‘act of brotherly love’ for Michael Vyner, erstwhile Artistic Director of the London Sinfonietta, but ‘for all the many other people in the world who have died before their time’ and as a paene for human suffering. In its entirety, the work is overlong and texturally unrelenting without compensating clear direction, but the combination here of opening and closing Introitus and Sanctus with the sixth movement Agnus Dei opened an, at times, exquisite window on his intensely felt musical world. Special praise must go to conductor Poppen and the superbly evocative soloists Simon Phillipo and Dean Wright, as well as the echoing trumpeters placed in the auditorium.
If Henze was a latter-day romantic who took pains to deny his romanticism, the story of Mozart’s Requiem, his short life and tragic last days, have famously been subject to all sorts of romantic speculation of the fictional variety. Thankfully, tonight’s performance did not, as can so often happen, over-milk the pathos (nor did it - as Richard Taruskin has so eloquently noted of many a supposed “authentic” performance - ‘embalm [Mozart] in “historical” timbres’); instead, Poppen and his committed ensemble succeeded in demonstrating the work’s undoubted power through clear and thoughtfully-modulated enthusiasm rather than a straining towards the mythic or unduly mystical.
Having come to symbolise the painful quenching of young genius in popular imagination, the Requiem itself, retrospectively - and more prosaically - looks back to older, Baroque settings of the Latin mass, whilst opening the way to newer, more operatic approaches to liturgical form; that said, it is a largely choral work and, of tonight’s soloists, it was the soprano alone, Elizabeth Watts, who took true expressive flight. The chorus themselves were mostly magnificent and sang with gusto, albeit with lower voices veering towards harshness in some louder passages such as the opening of the Rex tremendae.
Both tonight’s composers were preoccupied by death at times - as are we all necessarily. More importantly, they both actively sought the artistic freedom without which life itself can fall into the metaphoric but by no means petty deaths of inertia and apathy. Mozart’s loosely freethinking Catholicism was supplemented by a (yet) more mysterious commitment to brotherhood in the form of Freemasonry; a connection which inspired the brief but intense Masonic Funeral Music in memory of two dead brethren, and which proved an excellent introduction tonight.
Henze swam perhaps more obviously against contemporary prevailing tides with his open homosexuality and Marxism; exiling himself not only from his German homeland in horror at war atrocities, but musically, post-war, against what he quickly construed as an authoritarian modernist orthodoxy, epitomised by hard-line peers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. Despite later returning as a prodigal son to Germany to work, he never quite managed to reconcile himself on political grounds to being the natural successor of a German tradition stretching back to Mozart and beyond. Time will tell if upholders of that tradition will embrace him - that is, to the limited extent they embrace any post-war composer - by continuing to programme his vast body of works in familiar genres; from symphonies and ballets, to operas, string quartets, chamber and vocal music - and, indeed, his Requiem.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 30/11/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/welsh-national-opera-chorus-and-orchestra/
Henze: Movements from the Requiem: Introitus / Agnus Dei / Sanctus
Mozart: Requiem
Conductor: Christoph Poppen
Soprano: Elizabeth Watts / Mezzo: Máire Flavin / Tenor: Andrew Tortise / Bass baritone: Gary Griffiths / Trumpet: Dean Wright / Piano: Simon Phillippo
When tonight’s concert programme was devised months ago, there could have been no inkling how prescient it would turn out to be with the death, on October 27th, of Hans Werner Henze at the age of 86. At once, an early appetizer to Welsh National Opera’s forthcoming Spring 2014 production of Henze’s opera Boulevard Solitude (1952) became a poignant memorial to a leading composer of the late Twentieth Century - and one of the most important to have emerged from the ashes of Hitler’s Germany.
In his 1998 autobiography, Bohemian Fifths, Henze described hearing Mozart on the radio as an adolescent, traumatised by Nazi brutality, in words that encapsulate what he himself went on to aspire to as a composer and a man:
‘It seemed to me as though here was a composer who, lovingly and knowingly, had evolved beyond the music that typified his time and country ... Against the cultural background of his age, Mozart opened up a whole new world of emotion in which ... feelings such as femininity and desire, tenderness and love ... are just as important as frivolousness and danger, risk-taking, death and despair in the form of aggression and masculinity ... It is music of and for humanity.’
Indeed, he wrote that:
‘My goal was Mozart, beauty, perfection, a new form of truth - a truth that pays no heed to the Zeitgeist and that triumphs over death itself’.
How far Henze achieved his loftier artistic ambitions remains open to question, but his life-long social and political commitment and sheer maverick endeavour are demonstrable; tonight’s moving rendition of three sections from his Requiem felt especially apposite alongside a refreshingly spirited Mozart’s, whose seminal final statement was, of course, left unfinished upon that composer’s untimely death in 1791 aged just 35 (not to mention unsatisfyingly - if quickly - completed by his pupil Franz Süssmayr).
Perhaps now, as we emerge from a period of de-politicised post-modernism - in which notions of truth seemed to get submerged to an unhealthy degree by relativist equivocation - Henze’s more polemically abrasive, overtly left-wing music might stand reappraisal. At any rate, the luminous performance here tonight demonstrated the emotional power of which he was capable in more lyrical mode, without forsaking the opportunity for direct social allusion. Choosing to omit the Latin text in favour of solo instrumentalists for a series of nine ‘sacred concertos’ (and reordering the liturgical sequence), the unreligious Henze nonetheless intended his Requiem to stand not only as a secular ‘act of brotherly love’ for Michael Vyner, erstwhile Artistic Director of the London Sinfonietta, but ‘for all the many other people in the world who have died before their time’ and as a paene for human suffering. In its entirety, the work is overlong and texturally unrelenting without compensating clear direction, but the combination here of opening and closing Introitus and Sanctus with the sixth movement Agnus Dei opened an, at times, exquisite window on his intensely felt musical world. Special praise must go to conductor Poppen and the superbly evocative soloists Simon Phillipo and Dean Wright, as well as the echoing trumpeters placed in the auditorium.
If Henze was a latter-day romantic who took pains to deny his romanticism, the story of Mozart’s Requiem, his short life and tragic last days, have famously been subject to all sorts of romantic speculation of the fictional variety. Thankfully, tonight’s performance did not, as can so often happen, over-milk the pathos (nor did it - as Richard Taruskin has so eloquently noted of many a supposed “authentic” performance - ‘embalm [Mozart] in “historical” timbres’); instead, Poppen and his committed ensemble succeeded in demonstrating the work’s undoubted power through clear and thoughtfully-modulated enthusiasm rather than a straining towards the mythic or unduly mystical.
Having come to symbolise the painful quenching of young genius in popular imagination, the Requiem itself, retrospectively - and more prosaically - looks back to older, Baroque settings of the Latin mass, whilst opening the way to newer, more operatic approaches to liturgical form; that said, it is a largely choral work and, of tonight’s soloists, it was the soprano alone, Elizabeth Watts, who took true expressive flight. The chorus themselves were mostly magnificent and sang with gusto, albeit with lower voices veering towards harshness in some louder passages such as the opening of the Rex tremendae.
Both tonight’s composers were preoccupied by death at times - as are we all necessarily. More importantly, they both actively sought the artistic freedom without which life itself can fall into the metaphoric but by no means petty deaths of inertia and apathy. Mozart’s loosely freethinking Catholicism was supplemented by a (yet) more mysterious commitment to brotherhood in the form of Freemasonry; a connection which inspired the brief but intense Masonic Funeral Music in memory of two dead brethren, and which proved an excellent introduction tonight.
Henze swam perhaps more obviously against contemporary prevailing tides with his open homosexuality and Marxism; exiling himself not only from his German homeland in horror at war atrocities, but musically, post-war, against what he quickly construed as an authoritarian modernist orthodoxy, epitomised by hard-line peers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. Despite later returning as a prodigal son to Germany to work, he never quite managed to reconcile himself on political grounds to being the natural successor of a German tradition stretching back to Mozart and beyond. Time will tell if upholders of that tradition will embrace him - that is, to the limited extent they embrace any post-war composer - by continuing to programme his vast body of works in familiar genres; from symphonies and ballets, to operas, string quartets, chamber and vocal music - and, indeed, his Requiem.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 30/11/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/welsh-national-opera-chorus-and-orchestra/
Sunday 18 November 2012
Opera Review: Music Theatre Wales double-bill: Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, 2nd November 2012
Huw Watkins composer / David Harsent librettist: In the Locked Room
Stuart MacRae composer / Louise Welsh librettist: Ghost Patrol
Conductor: Michael Rafferty
Directors: Michael McCarthy (In the Locked Room)
Matthew Richardson (Ghost Patrol)
Cast: Paul Currievici / Jane Harrington / Ruby Hayes / James McOran-Campbell /
Nicholas Sharratt / Håkan Vramso / Louise Winter
‘Grand’ opera seems to be enjoying somewhat of a renaissance as big-hitting companies like London’s Royal Opera House and the New York Metropolitan seek international audiences through televised transmission of live shows and work to refute charges of elitism with productions aimed squarely at the ‘common man and woman’. The star charisma of singers and conductors, the spectacle and sheer romance of it all, seem to be gaining them new audiences eager for live action, familiar stories and emotional catharsis. But what of the more ‘difficult’, less popular repertoire? And - more to the point - what of new, contemporary opera? How do today’s composers approach a genre so weighty with tradition?
Huw Watkins and Stuart MacRae have both been nurtured by companies sensitive to the challenges encountered by composers new to opera. Watkins has worked with Music Theatre Wales in various ways since 2004, whilst MacRae has come though Scottish Opera’s pioneering Five:15; a project first conceived in 2008 for five composers writing fifteen-minute works. It takes time and experience for any composer to find an authentic musical voice (if they do), but opera brings additional, unique demands and the many, subtle aspects of theatre production must, at times, seem a minefield. First and foremost, though, composers must decide what it is they want to say and how they want to say it.
Tonight’s programme was most thought-provoking in that regard. It presented Watkins’s In the Locked Room and MacRae’s Ghost Patrol as a touring double-bill of new, complementary works marking an innovative collaboration; that between two companies taking artistic control of an opera apiece within a joint production utilising two teams, with different composers, directors and casts working independently but alongside each other. Neither composer knew what the other was writing and the results give an intriguing comparative snap-shot of operatic thinking from two very different composers from the same generation.
From a performance perspective, the pairing was highly successful and the two companies should be congratulated. The operas sat well together and made for a meaty, tightly produced night of musical theatre. Praise is due to the impressive, well-matched casts who, together with the Music Theatre Wales Ensemble, performed with consistent excellence under conductor Michael Rafferty’s confident baton. The ensemble and instrumental writing was fluent overall; Watkins displaying his usual skilled craftsmanship and ear for beauty, with MacRae adding occasional electronics to an imaginative and distinctive, if sometimes overfussy, acoustic mix. Neither really soared vocally but the balance was good, with nothing unduly taxing for the singers, whilst the mises-en-scène offered effective vehicles for the largely plausible stage action (notwithstanding Watkins’s problematic ‘fantasy’ poet appearances). Whereas In the Locked Room could happily have been lengthened, giving the narrative room to breathe, Ghost Patrol was overlong, needing compression to tighten the drama, which sagged after an energetic start. A closer look at the drama in each case, however, leads to some less comfortable, wider questions.
The subjects of the two operas are very different despite aspects of plot in common; each revolving around a love triangle which ends tragically, with female leads left pregnant but bereft. In the Watkins, Ella’s fantasies darkly engulf her unhappy world after the object of her obsession - a typically tortured poet - apparently commits suicide, whilst a more external conflict leads to the mutual killing of haunted ex-army comrades Sam and Alisdair in the MacRae. So far, so operatic perhaps. But it is precisely the conventionality of plot and dramatic approach that was striking tonight as, in both works, a desire to explore universal themes - albeit in strongly contrasting ways - similarly lapsed into romantic and social clichè.
Whereas In the Locked Room had more literary, formal strength - perhaps benefiting from librettist David Harsent’s veteran experience (credits including Harrison Birtwistle’s internationally-acclaimed The Minotaur) - MacRae and librettist Louise Welsh showed greater theatrical vitality in Ghost Patrol. But they too were thwarted by the notorious difficulty of creating internally congruent operatic characters that nonetheless retain the essential flaws and contradictions that give them human cogency. This difficulty is partly due to the inherent absurdity of opera; dialogue that is sung rather than spoken invokes a level of surreality from the outset. Ultimately, deeper layers must either be carried, or thrown into relief, by the music - but neither score here contained the theatrical instinct or dramatic subtlety to flesh-out characters borne of stereotype; indeed, Watkins seemed trapped by his very idiom, which was Britten-esque to the point of saturation.
Both operas inhabited a simplistic, binary moral world in which oppositions framed in deeply conventional terms - good-bad, military-civilian, male-female and art-business - shaped the story. Again - so far, so operatic perhaps. But here there was little, if any, of the requisite underlying psychological depth or social critique. Positioning women as victims may be so time-honoured as to constitute operatic fetish, but the unquestioning narrative reliance on this in both works was disquieting. Watkins portrayed an insipid, entirely self-absorbed world in which Ella slips passively into solipsism and the only energy is displayed by her materialist, banker husband. MacRae’s Vicki pleads with her typically sensitive/macho ex-soldiers to ‘leave the war behind’, but this becomes just one of several empty homilies; repetition of which increase as the opera goes on, and which lends the conclusion a morose fatalism: ‘only the dead see the end of war’. Along the way, some obvious imagery (remembrance poppies for ‘blood on your hands’) fails to develop aspects of class, militarism or politics, which might have added dramatic depth.
Certainly, Watkins and MacRae more than fulfilled their remit for this admirable joint project, and the sheer professionalism of their work testifies to their success on many levels, not to mention the careful nurturing of Music Theatre Wales and Scottish Opera. If tonight’s two works beg reappraisal of what opera - and writing opera - means today, that too should rightly be deemed positive. In any case, mute observation or mere wringing of the hands at personal and social tragedy is surely disengenuous post, say, Britten’s The Turn of the Screw or Berg’s Wozzeck - which were, after all, written a long, or very long, time ago. There is no reason why an opera composer should write with direct psychological or social - let alone political - intent. But writing an opera - a genre culturally charged by its very nature and history - cannot help but be an act of social as well as dramatic engagement, whatever the narrative or setting. It will be intriguing to see where Watkins and MacRae go operatically from here; how - or whether - they develop their feel for theatre, and to what they next choose to give music-dramatic voice. Hopefully they will get the opportunity to do so.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 17/11/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/music-theatre-wales-chamber-opera-double-bill/
Stuart MacRae composer / Louise Welsh librettist: Ghost Patrol
Conductor: Michael Rafferty
Directors: Michael McCarthy (In the Locked Room)
Matthew Richardson (Ghost Patrol)
Cast: Paul Currievici / Jane Harrington / Ruby Hayes / James McOran-Campbell /
Nicholas Sharratt / Håkan Vramso / Louise Winter
‘Grand’ opera seems to be enjoying somewhat of a renaissance as big-hitting companies like London’s Royal Opera House and the New York Metropolitan seek international audiences through televised transmission of live shows and work to refute charges of elitism with productions aimed squarely at the ‘common man and woman’. The star charisma of singers and conductors, the spectacle and sheer romance of it all, seem to be gaining them new audiences eager for live action, familiar stories and emotional catharsis. But what of the more ‘difficult’, less popular repertoire? And - more to the point - what of new, contemporary opera? How do today’s composers approach a genre so weighty with tradition?
Huw Watkins and Stuart MacRae have both been nurtured by companies sensitive to the challenges encountered by composers new to opera. Watkins has worked with Music Theatre Wales in various ways since 2004, whilst MacRae has come though Scottish Opera’s pioneering Five:15; a project first conceived in 2008 for five composers writing fifteen-minute works. It takes time and experience for any composer to find an authentic musical voice (if they do), but opera brings additional, unique demands and the many, subtle aspects of theatre production must, at times, seem a minefield. First and foremost, though, composers must decide what it is they want to say and how they want to say it.
Tonight’s programme was most thought-provoking in that regard. It presented Watkins’s In the Locked Room and MacRae’s Ghost Patrol as a touring double-bill of new, complementary works marking an innovative collaboration; that between two companies taking artistic control of an opera apiece within a joint production utilising two teams, with different composers, directors and casts working independently but alongside each other. Neither composer knew what the other was writing and the results give an intriguing comparative snap-shot of operatic thinking from two very different composers from the same generation.
From a performance perspective, the pairing was highly successful and the two companies should be congratulated. The operas sat well together and made for a meaty, tightly produced night of musical theatre. Praise is due to the impressive, well-matched casts who, together with the Music Theatre Wales Ensemble, performed with consistent excellence under conductor Michael Rafferty’s confident baton. The ensemble and instrumental writing was fluent overall; Watkins displaying his usual skilled craftsmanship and ear for beauty, with MacRae adding occasional electronics to an imaginative and distinctive, if sometimes overfussy, acoustic mix. Neither really soared vocally but the balance was good, with nothing unduly taxing for the singers, whilst the mises-en-scène offered effective vehicles for the largely plausible stage action (notwithstanding Watkins’s problematic ‘fantasy’ poet appearances). Whereas In the Locked Room could happily have been lengthened, giving the narrative room to breathe, Ghost Patrol was overlong, needing compression to tighten the drama, which sagged after an energetic start. A closer look at the drama in each case, however, leads to some less comfortable, wider questions.
The subjects of the two operas are very different despite aspects of plot in common; each revolving around a love triangle which ends tragically, with female leads left pregnant but bereft. In the Watkins, Ella’s fantasies darkly engulf her unhappy world after the object of her obsession - a typically tortured poet - apparently commits suicide, whilst a more external conflict leads to the mutual killing of haunted ex-army comrades Sam and Alisdair in the MacRae. So far, so operatic perhaps. But it is precisely the conventionality of plot and dramatic approach that was striking tonight as, in both works, a desire to explore universal themes - albeit in strongly contrasting ways - similarly lapsed into romantic and social clichè.
Whereas In the Locked Room had more literary, formal strength - perhaps benefiting from librettist David Harsent’s veteran experience (credits including Harrison Birtwistle’s internationally-acclaimed The Minotaur) - MacRae and librettist Louise Welsh showed greater theatrical vitality in Ghost Patrol. But they too were thwarted by the notorious difficulty of creating internally congruent operatic characters that nonetheless retain the essential flaws and contradictions that give them human cogency. This difficulty is partly due to the inherent absurdity of opera; dialogue that is sung rather than spoken invokes a level of surreality from the outset. Ultimately, deeper layers must either be carried, or thrown into relief, by the music - but neither score here contained the theatrical instinct or dramatic subtlety to flesh-out characters borne of stereotype; indeed, Watkins seemed trapped by his very idiom, which was Britten-esque to the point of saturation.
Both operas inhabited a simplistic, binary moral world in which oppositions framed in deeply conventional terms - good-bad, military-civilian, male-female and art-business - shaped the story. Again - so far, so operatic perhaps. But here there was little, if any, of the requisite underlying psychological depth or social critique. Positioning women as victims may be so time-honoured as to constitute operatic fetish, but the unquestioning narrative reliance on this in both works was disquieting. Watkins portrayed an insipid, entirely self-absorbed world in which Ella slips passively into solipsism and the only energy is displayed by her materialist, banker husband. MacRae’s Vicki pleads with her typically sensitive/macho ex-soldiers to ‘leave the war behind’, but this becomes just one of several empty homilies; repetition of which increase as the opera goes on, and which lends the conclusion a morose fatalism: ‘only the dead see the end of war’. Along the way, some obvious imagery (remembrance poppies for ‘blood on your hands’) fails to develop aspects of class, militarism or politics, which might have added dramatic depth.
Certainly, Watkins and MacRae more than fulfilled their remit for this admirable joint project, and the sheer professionalism of their work testifies to their success on many levels, not to mention the careful nurturing of Music Theatre Wales and Scottish Opera. If tonight’s two works beg reappraisal of what opera - and writing opera - means today, that too should rightly be deemed positive. In any case, mute observation or mere wringing of the hands at personal and social tragedy is surely disengenuous post, say, Britten’s The Turn of the Screw or Berg’s Wozzeck - which were, after all, written a long, or very long, time ago. There is no reason why an opera composer should write with direct psychological or social - let alone political - intent. But writing an opera - a genre culturally charged by its very nature and history - cannot help but be an act of social as well as dramatic engagement, whatever the narrative or setting. It will be intriguing to see where Watkins and MacRae go operatically from here; how - or whether - they develop their feel for theatre, and to what they next choose to give music-dramatic voice. Hopefully they will get the opportunity to do so.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 17/11/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/music-theatre-wales-chamber-opera-double-bill/
Saturday 3 November 2012
Concert Review: BBC National Orchestra of Wales St David’s Hall, Cardiff 12th October 2012
Magnus Lindberg - EXPO
Grieg - Four Songs: To Brune Øjne / Jeg Elsker Dig / En Svane / Våren
R. Strauss - Three Songs: Muttertänderlei / Meinem Kinder / Cäcilie
- Till Eulenspiegel’s lustige Streiche
Sibelius - Symphony No. 5
Conductor - Thomas Søndergård
Soprano - Inger Dam-Jensen
The appointment of a new Principal Conductor to a major orchestra is a big event with far-reaching ramifications for the musicians concerned and their audience; a fact hardly lost on Danish conductor Thomas Søndergård, to whom the baton was officially passed, as it were, on October 12th from Thierry Fischer, outgoing Principal at the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Søndergård’s choice of repertoire for this, inaugural concert revealed aspirations for his four-year tenure on both personal and orchestral levels. But it was the opening piece that threw down the gauntlet in more than one regard.
EXPO, a short, flamboyant showcase of orchestral virtuosity by Finn Magnus Lindberg, was commissioned in 2009 to celebrate the inauguration of another, similarly youthful conductor at another orchestra; Alan Gilbert at the New York Philharmonic. It’s inclusion here drew bold comparison between that event and tonight’s concert in Cardiff - perhaps overly bold, given that a bright start gave way to workmanlike performances in key ensuing items. However, the piece also signaled Søndergård’s welcome intent to perform not only works by fellow Scandinavians, but contemporary music alongside older, more familiar repertoire. EXPO fulfilled both criteria and was used here to play a fun, if somewhat unsubtle, national card as a link with Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5 in the second half; a piece nonetheless worlds away in tone and seriousness of intent, and the most ambitious item on tonight’s programme.
But before that came less challenging fare from Edvard Grieg and Richard Strauss; firstly, in a series of orchestral songs also designed to please followers (at least, those with long memories) of the Cardiff Singer of the World competition, won in 1993 by tonight’s Danish soloist, soprano Inger Dam-Jensen. Grieg was, of course, also a Scandinavian composer and the first to achieve wider fame outside his native Norway - although his music is still snubbed by some who persist in the condescending belief that only proven symphonists can earn the right to ‘major composer’ status. Where Grieg excelled was as a miniaturist and writer of deceptively simple songs (he, like Strauss, was married to a soprano), and the set of four on offer tonight were delivered with grace and sensitivity; the first, To Brune Øjne Op. 5 No.1, delicately orchestrated by Barry-based composer Christopher Painter. A more full-bloodied, dramatic approach from soloist and orchestra alike would have enlivened the three Strauss songs which followed; these were somewhat fey and underwhelming, but nicely wrought for all that, with Dam-Jensen and orchestra finding comfortable rapport.
Strauss, too, had musical detractors and initially had difficulty earning respect as a composer, but for wholly different reasons; in his case, an advanced and, to some, shocking chromaticism begot a reputation as an enfant terrible. With the tone poem Till Eulenspiegel - his fifth in a genre he developed with extravagant artistry - he stuck out his tongue at critics who could not, after all, ignore it’s dazzling feats of invention, wit and colour. How far Søndergård himself may or may not identify with the anti-hero prankster of the folk tale from which the piece springs is open to question (notwithstanding his cheeky-chappy exhortation to the audience’s ‘beautiful faces’ to stay for a post-concert interview). But tonight’s performance could certainly have been more rudely characterful. This is not a piece with which to tread carefully and, although the orchestra clearly enjoyed themselves once warmed up - the Strauss eventually picking up where Lindberg’s virtuosic energy left off - it needed a more insolent relish.
It was, in part, interpretation of another tone poem which brought Søndergård critical acclaim upon his BBCNOW debut in 2009; then with Sibelius’s En Saga. Tonight, he upped the ante considerably in tackling the Finn’s profound and problematic Symphony No. 5. It is not the harmonic or rhythmic language Sibelius employs that makes this and other of his key works so difficult to bring off, nor any specific aspect of instrumentation or technique; indeed, at the time Sibelius wrote and then revised the 5th Symphony during and after World War I, his tonal idiom appeared, on the surface, positively backward-sounding beside the atonal experiments of Central European contemporaries. However, this and other of his major scores have often baffled those who seek in vain therein for conformity to prevailing Austro-German symphonic models. Furthermore, Sibelius is not simply a proto-Romantic, inspired by national identity and lonely Northern wilderness (although this can also be true), but his organic formal and harmonic processes are so subtly radical as to constitute a unique, modernist development in themselves. It is nonsense, therefore, and not just simplistic to assume that a Scandinavian must be able to perform Sibelius convincingly just because he or she is Scandinavian, for this ignores the extent to which Sibelius’s unique sound springs from purely musical procedures rather than nationalist sentiment.
Søndergård’s interpretation on this occasion showed a great deal of promise but was far from polished or convincing overall; much of the formal expansion and contraction of the first movement, for instance, was marred by a feeling of its being bolted together - both in terms of the movement’s span and the instrumental sections, as woodwind, brass and strings sounded at times completely disparate rather than fragments of one voice, now emerging from, now dissolving into the disquieting orchestral texture. Such waves occur throughout the work, in which the three movements are themselves different stages within one, extraordinary whole. But, despite Søndergård’s often brisk pacing, there were long passages where momentum flagged, becoming ploddy and lacking the tension so needed to ensure the forwards propulsion that should paradoxically emerge from Sibelius’s continual collapsing inwards. Key climactic brass passages (notably the so-called ‘swan theme’ that emerges fully at last in the third movement) were strangely muted - although some passages and certain of the trickier transitions had verve and spirit, showing flashes of what could be accomplished given greater depth and broader, longer-range sculpting.
Søndergård will surely continue to hone his Sibelius 5, both with BBCNOW and elsewhere - and it is good news generally that Sibelius’s true stature continues increasingly to be recognised. On the other hand, Sibelius is performed and recorded a great deal nowadays, in stark contrast to an exact contemporary of his who also produced major symphonies - and who, by chance, was actually Danish. So, whilst it was inevitable that considerations of popularity would shape tonight’s inaugural programme, it is nonetheless a pity that we will have to wait until next April to hear Søndergård’s interpretation of his fellow countryman’s important but little known Symphony No. 5 - composer of which being the troubled but brilliant Carl Nielsen.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 2/11/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/bbc%20national%20orchestra%20of%20wales.html
Grieg - Four Songs: To Brune Øjne / Jeg Elsker Dig / En Svane / Våren
R. Strauss - Three Songs: Muttertänderlei / Meinem Kinder / Cäcilie
- Till Eulenspiegel’s lustige Streiche
Sibelius - Symphony No. 5
Conductor - Thomas Søndergård
Soprano - Inger Dam-Jensen
The appointment of a new Principal Conductor to a major orchestra is a big event with far-reaching ramifications for the musicians concerned and their audience; a fact hardly lost on Danish conductor Thomas Søndergård, to whom the baton was officially passed, as it were, on October 12th from Thierry Fischer, outgoing Principal at the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Søndergård’s choice of repertoire for this, inaugural concert revealed aspirations for his four-year tenure on both personal and orchestral levels. But it was the opening piece that threw down the gauntlet in more than one regard.
EXPO, a short, flamboyant showcase of orchestral virtuosity by Finn Magnus Lindberg, was commissioned in 2009 to celebrate the inauguration of another, similarly youthful conductor at another orchestra; Alan Gilbert at the New York Philharmonic. It’s inclusion here drew bold comparison between that event and tonight’s concert in Cardiff - perhaps overly bold, given that a bright start gave way to workmanlike performances in key ensuing items. However, the piece also signaled Søndergård’s welcome intent to perform not only works by fellow Scandinavians, but contemporary music alongside older, more familiar repertoire. EXPO fulfilled both criteria and was used here to play a fun, if somewhat unsubtle, national card as a link with Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5 in the second half; a piece nonetheless worlds away in tone and seriousness of intent, and the most ambitious item on tonight’s programme.
But before that came less challenging fare from Edvard Grieg and Richard Strauss; firstly, in a series of orchestral songs also designed to please followers (at least, those with long memories) of the Cardiff Singer of the World competition, won in 1993 by tonight’s Danish soloist, soprano Inger Dam-Jensen. Grieg was, of course, also a Scandinavian composer and the first to achieve wider fame outside his native Norway - although his music is still snubbed by some who persist in the condescending belief that only proven symphonists can earn the right to ‘major composer’ status. Where Grieg excelled was as a miniaturist and writer of deceptively simple songs (he, like Strauss, was married to a soprano), and the set of four on offer tonight were delivered with grace and sensitivity; the first, To Brune Øjne Op. 5 No.1, delicately orchestrated by Barry-based composer Christopher Painter. A more full-bloodied, dramatic approach from soloist and orchestra alike would have enlivened the three Strauss songs which followed; these were somewhat fey and underwhelming, but nicely wrought for all that, with Dam-Jensen and orchestra finding comfortable rapport.
Strauss, too, had musical detractors and initially had difficulty earning respect as a composer, but for wholly different reasons; in his case, an advanced and, to some, shocking chromaticism begot a reputation as an enfant terrible. With the tone poem Till Eulenspiegel - his fifth in a genre he developed with extravagant artistry - he stuck out his tongue at critics who could not, after all, ignore it’s dazzling feats of invention, wit and colour. How far Søndergård himself may or may not identify with the anti-hero prankster of the folk tale from which the piece springs is open to question (notwithstanding his cheeky-chappy exhortation to the audience’s ‘beautiful faces’ to stay for a post-concert interview). But tonight’s performance could certainly have been more rudely characterful. This is not a piece with which to tread carefully and, although the orchestra clearly enjoyed themselves once warmed up - the Strauss eventually picking up where Lindberg’s virtuosic energy left off - it needed a more insolent relish.
It was, in part, interpretation of another tone poem which brought Søndergård critical acclaim upon his BBCNOW debut in 2009; then with Sibelius’s En Saga. Tonight, he upped the ante considerably in tackling the Finn’s profound and problematic Symphony No. 5. It is not the harmonic or rhythmic language Sibelius employs that makes this and other of his key works so difficult to bring off, nor any specific aspect of instrumentation or technique; indeed, at the time Sibelius wrote and then revised the 5th Symphony during and after World War I, his tonal idiom appeared, on the surface, positively backward-sounding beside the atonal experiments of Central European contemporaries. However, this and other of his major scores have often baffled those who seek in vain therein for conformity to prevailing Austro-German symphonic models. Furthermore, Sibelius is not simply a proto-Romantic, inspired by national identity and lonely Northern wilderness (although this can also be true), but his organic formal and harmonic processes are so subtly radical as to constitute a unique, modernist development in themselves. It is nonsense, therefore, and not just simplistic to assume that a Scandinavian must be able to perform Sibelius convincingly just because he or she is Scandinavian, for this ignores the extent to which Sibelius’s unique sound springs from purely musical procedures rather than nationalist sentiment.
Søndergård’s interpretation on this occasion showed a great deal of promise but was far from polished or convincing overall; much of the formal expansion and contraction of the first movement, for instance, was marred by a feeling of its being bolted together - both in terms of the movement’s span and the instrumental sections, as woodwind, brass and strings sounded at times completely disparate rather than fragments of one voice, now emerging from, now dissolving into the disquieting orchestral texture. Such waves occur throughout the work, in which the three movements are themselves different stages within one, extraordinary whole. But, despite Søndergård’s often brisk pacing, there were long passages where momentum flagged, becoming ploddy and lacking the tension so needed to ensure the forwards propulsion that should paradoxically emerge from Sibelius’s continual collapsing inwards. Key climactic brass passages (notably the so-called ‘swan theme’ that emerges fully at last in the third movement) were strangely muted - although some passages and certain of the trickier transitions had verve and spirit, showing flashes of what could be accomplished given greater depth and broader, longer-range sculpting.
Søndergård will surely continue to hone his Sibelius 5, both with BBCNOW and elsewhere - and it is good news generally that Sibelius’s true stature continues increasingly to be recognised. On the other hand, Sibelius is performed and recorded a great deal nowadays, in stark contrast to an exact contemporary of his who also produced major symphonies - and who, by chance, was actually Danish. So, whilst it was inevitable that considerations of popularity would shape tonight’s inaugural programme, it is nonetheless a pity that we will have to wait until next April to hear Søndergård’s interpretation of his fellow countryman’s important but little known Symphony No. 5 - composer of which being the troubled but brilliant Carl Nielsen.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 2/11/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/bbc%20national%20orchestra%20of%20wales.html
Concert Review: Music Theatre Wales Ensemble, Dora Stoutzker Hall, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, 4th October 2012
Huw Watkins - Four Inventions (2009)
Mark David Boden - Between Waking and Dreams (2012)
Stuart MacRae - Equilibrium (2008)
Huw Watkins - Speak Seven Seas (2011)
Salvatore Sciarrino - Lo Spazio Inverso (1984)
Mark-Anthony Turnage - Grazioso! (2009)
Miranda Fulleylove (violin), Yuko Inoue (viola), Daisy Vatalaro (‘cello), Jo Shaw (flute/piccolo), Scott Lygate (clarinets), Julian Warburton (percussion), Huw Watkins (piano/celeste), Michael Rafferty (conductor).
Since the early days of opera, when Claudio Monteverdi and his Renaissance contemporaries first staged a type of secular music drama with characters that mostly sang rather than spoke, the question of what kind of an art-form opera is and what it seeks to do has elicited passionate and differing responses. But what constitutes the bedrock of the art-form has never been seriously doubted - and that is, music. Not theatre nor visual spectacle, not staged narrative nor even libretto, but musical sound; the dramatic combination of voice and instrumental ensemble expressing human emotion and telling human stories. The acting of roles and paraphernalia of staging have always been important, but secondary to the music itself which carries the drama - even in Richard Wagner’s supposedly totalised Gesamtkunstwerk, in which he aimed to elevate the visual, the poetic and the musical into a new kind of integrated art-form beyond any one of the three alone.
At the heart, then, of Music Theatre Wales, as with all opera companies, lies music and the composers who write it. What characterises MTW is that, not only is it one of the UK’s leading touring companies, but it is also one of the few demonstrating an ongoing commitment to the development of opera as a contemporary art-form through the commissioning of new works by living composers, rather than the re-staging of familiar, established repertoire from the past. This concert at the Dora Stoutzker Hall was an opportunity to meet two such composers, whose work MTW is currently touring as a double-bill across the UK in collaboration with Scottish Opera; Welsh-born Huw Watkins (In the Locked Room, librettist David Harsent) and Scot Stuart MacRae (Ghost Patrol, librettist Louise Welsh).
Stripping back, as it were, to bare, musical bones away from the operatic stage, this event featured members of MTW’s Ensemble, offering an introduction to the chamber, concert music of these two contrasting composers and three others with whom MTW have already or will in future enjoy operatic collaboration; Boden, Sciarrino and Turnage. It also marked the inauguration of a three-year partnership between MTW and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation) which aims, in the words of MTW Joint-Artistic Director Michael McCarthy, “to expand the appetite and understanding of contemporary opera in Cardiff” and “build a platform of professional knowledge and experience for future performers, musicians, writers and composers”. So, an important event, which also sought, in part, to open a dialogue concerning the different but not necessarily unrelated disciplines of composing for theatre and composing for the concert platform; which latter - at least in terms of contemporary music - ironically appears so much harder for audiences to engage with in the absence of additional theatrical inducement.
Three of the composers (Watkins, Boden and MacRae) were present to talk about their work. Of these, perhaps inevitably given the current tour, it was MacRae and Watkins who made the more overt links to their operas. MacRae described how his mini viola concerto Equilibrium pitted soloist against quintet in a dramatic dialogue directly informed by his operatic writing; here, with a gradual paring down of contrast, play and imitation to find balance in repose. The work offered a proliferation of dynamic ideas and intriguing landscapes, ably navigated by conductor Rafferty and with some excellent playing. A greater sense of risk would have enhanced the drama which, nonetheless, had subtlety as well as punch.
Watkins opened both halves, given star billing for his deserved renown as a pianist. His Four Inventions for piano solo were a concise, brilliant display but it was his piano trio Speak Seven Seas which referenced his opera, for which it was a study. Both the opera and the trio have sea settings, the title here coming from Dylan Thomas’s Author’s Prologue; but this was no Four Sea Interludes-type extraction from the opera, despite clear stylistic parallels with Benjamin Britten. Rather, the trio takes the opera’s opening material in a different musical direction; employing an ebb and flow of changing moods - with some beautifully-crafted writing - to rise to the challenge of composing a piece of substantial duration (13-14 minutes) in just one movement.
The three remaining pieces were idiomatic showcases bearing no direct relation to their composer’s operatic writing. Boden’s Between Waking and Dreams was largely effective in its exploration of contrasting textures, inspired by a poem by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, which describes the tranquillity of air travel above the clouds and its antithesis in the mêlée enjoined upon landing, whilst the closing Grazioso! displayed Turnage’s trademark rude percussive health and sharp orchestration, with moments of surprising tenderness.
But before that came the clear highlight of the evening. The largely self-taught Sciarrino (b1947) is a prolific Italian composer whose importance has yet to be recognised in the UK. His Lo Spazio Inverso of 1984 was by far the oldest work on the programme but sounded the freshest and most striking, drawing the best from an ensemble that was everywhere superb. This was music of gossamer and depth; not at all fragile but appearing so in its hushed exploration of “sound at the edge of breath” as McCarthy put it - and with some astonishingly relaxed but controlled playing from clarinettist Scott Lygate. Deceptively simple yet profound, and inspiring eager anticipation of MTW’s 2013 UK premiere of Sciarrino’s 1998 opera Luci mie Traditrici (roughly, My Betraying Light). Yet another major forthcoming event, this will hopefully continue to prove MTW’s ability to draw large and enthusiastic audiences for superbly produced contemporary opera. Perhaps another challenge for the company’s ensemble might be to buck another cultural trend and discover how to do the same for some richly rewarding but relatively ignored contemporary music in the concert hall.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 19/10/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/music%20theatre%20wales%20ensemble.html
Mark David Boden - Between Waking and Dreams (2012)
Stuart MacRae - Equilibrium (2008)
Huw Watkins - Speak Seven Seas (2011)
Salvatore Sciarrino - Lo Spazio Inverso (1984)
Mark-Anthony Turnage - Grazioso! (2009)
Miranda Fulleylove (violin), Yuko Inoue (viola), Daisy Vatalaro (‘cello), Jo Shaw (flute/piccolo), Scott Lygate (clarinets), Julian Warburton (percussion), Huw Watkins (piano/celeste), Michael Rafferty (conductor).
Since the early days of opera, when Claudio Monteverdi and his Renaissance contemporaries first staged a type of secular music drama with characters that mostly sang rather than spoke, the question of what kind of an art-form opera is and what it seeks to do has elicited passionate and differing responses. But what constitutes the bedrock of the art-form has never been seriously doubted - and that is, music. Not theatre nor visual spectacle, not staged narrative nor even libretto, but musical sound; the dramatic combination of voice and instrumental ensemble expressing human emotion and telling human stories. The acting of roles and paraphernalia of staging have always been important, but secondary to the music itself which carries the drama - even in Richard Wagner’s supposedly totalised Gesamtkunstwerk, in which he aimed to elevate the visual, the poetic and the musical into a new kind of integrated art-form beyond any one of the three alone.
At the heart, then, of Music Theatre Wales, as with all opera companies, lies music and the composers who write it. What characterises MTW is that, not only is it one of the UK’s leading touring companies, but it is also one of the few demonstrating an ongoing commitment to the development of opera as a contemporary art-form through the commissioning of new works by living composers, rather than the re-staging of familiar, established repertoire from the past. This concert at the Dora Stoutzker Hall was an opportunity to meet two such composers, whose work MTW is currently touring as a double-bill across the UK in collaboration with Scottish Opera; Welsh-born Huw Watkins (In the Locked Room, librettist David Harsent) and Scot Stuart MacRae (Ghost Patrol, librettist Louise Welsh).
Stripping back, as it were, to bare, musical bones away from the operatic stage, this event featured members of MTW’s Ensemble, offering an introduction to the chamber, concert music of these two contrasting composers and three others with whom MTW have already or will in future enjoy operatic collaboration; Boden, Sciarrino and Turnage. It also marked the inauguration of a three-year partnership between MTW and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation) which aims, in the words of MTW Joint-Artistic Director Michael McCarthy, “to expand the appetite and understanding of contemporary opera in Cardiff” and “build a platform of professional knowledge and experience for future performers, musicians, writers and composers”. So, an important event, which also sought, in part, to open a dialogue concerning the different but not necessarily unrelated disciplines of composing for theatre and composing for the concert platform; which latter - at least in terms of contemporary music - ironically appears so much harder for audiences to engage with in the absence of additional theatrical inducement.
Three of the composers (Watkins, Boden and MacRae) were present to talk about their work. Of these, perhaps inevitably given the current tour, it was MacRae and Watkins who made the more overt links to their operas. MacRae described how his mini viola concerto Equilibrium pitted soloist against quintet in a dramatic dialogue directly informed by his operatic writing; here, with a gradual paring down of contrast, play and imitation to find balance in repose. The work offered a proliferation of dynamic ideas and intriguing landscapes, ably navigated by conductor Rafferty and with some excellent playing. A greater sense of risk would have enhanced the drama which, nonetheless, had subtlety as well as punch.
Watkins opened both halves, given star billing for his deserved renown as a pianist. His Four Inventions for piano solo were a concise, brilliant display but it was his piano trio Speak Seven Seas which referenced his opera, for which it was a study. Both the opera and the trio have sea settings, the title here coming from Dylan Thomas’s Author’s Prologue; but this was no Four Sea Interludes-type extraction from the opera, despite clear stylistic parallels with Benjamin Britten. Rather, the trio takes the opera’s opening material in a different musical direction; employing an ebb and flow of changing moods - with some beautifully-crafted writing - to rise to the challenge of composing a piece of substantial duration (13-14 minutes) in just one movement.
The three remaining pieces were idiomatic showcases bearing no direct relation to their composer’s operatic writing. Boden’s Between Waking and Dreams was largely effective in its exploration of contrasting textures, inspired by a poem by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, which describes the tranquillity of air travel above the clouds and its antithesis in the mêlée enjoined upon landing, whilst the closing Grazioso! displayed Turnage’s trademark rude percussive health and sharp orchestration, with moments of surprising tenderness.
But before that came the clear highlight of the evening. The largely self-taught Sciarrino (b1947) is a prolific Italian composer whose importance has yet to be recognised in the UK. His Lo Spazio Inverso of 1984 was by far the oldest work on the programme but sounded the freshest and most striking, drawing the best from an ensemble that was everywhere superb. This was music of gossamer and depth; not at all fragile but appearing so in its hushed exploration of “sound at the edge of breath” as McCarthy put it - and with some astonishingly relaxed but controlled playing from clarinettist Scott Lygate. Deceptively simple yet profound, and inspiring eager anticipation of MTW’s 2013 UK premiere of Sciarrino’s 1998 opera Luci mie Traditrici (roughly, My Betraying Light). Yet another major forthcoming event, this will hopefully continue to prove MTW’s ability to draw large and enthusiastic audiences for superbly produced contemporary opera. Perhaps another challenge for the company’s ensemble might be to buck another cultural trend and discover how to do the same for some richly rewarding but relatively ignored contemporary music in the concert hall.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 19/10/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/music%20theatre%20wales%20ensemble.html
Book Review: Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras, Tom Service, Faber 2012
Music as Alchemy is writer and broadcaster Tom Service’s first book. In it, he describes a series of encounters with six conductors and their principal orchestras within the context of his beliefs about the transformational power of symphonic music. Chapter by chapter, he narrates his listening experiences of each conductor-orchestra combination over a period of rehearsals and performances in a chatty style aimed at the general reader and classical music listener. Informal interviews with the conductors and sundry orchestral players provide further access to this traditionally exclusive world whilst a smattering of information about the orchestras and repertoire in development paints a basic background picture.
The book’s purpose is to unpick the apparent ‘magic’ of these particular ‘great’ conductors; what they do and how they do it, described in poetic rather than technical terms. Perhaps it might more accurately have been sub-titled ‘My Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras’ as it revolves around Service personally; focusing on his subjective thoughts and feelings about his chosen conductor-orchestra pairings. His approach is to consider each in turn, observing part of a typical orchestral schedule as a fly-on-the-wall and marveling at the gulf between conventionally taught conducting technique (he himself once studied the ‘Canford Method’) and the arcane gestures which form part of the unique arsenal of every ‘great’ conductor. He discusses charisma and body language; how each conductor handles the orchestra musically and psychologically, how they view their leadership role and how the orchestra responds artistically and individually before assessing the musical results from the perspective of a largely enraptured, if not always entirely convinced, listener.
Disappointingly, Music as Alchemy glosses over issues of social and artistic relevance at a time when many orchestras world-wide are struggling to find funding in a climate of savage cuts to the arts. Rather, Service chooses to re-explore territory which is historically controversial in its own right - the relationship between a conductor and ‘his’ orchestra being notoriously tension-laden - but he does so in almost entirely positive terms; content to put "a happy family" spin on the ensembles concerned (to use Iván Fischer’s description of his Budapest Festival Orchestra), whilst adopting the rarefied, Romantic position that the ‘music itself’ and musical values are autonomous. Throughout, Service sticks to an idealised view of symphonic culture despite acknowledging that “conducting is about collaboration, politics and society”. Nowhere, for example, does he consider the controversial ‘museum’ aspect of a classical music culture in which a proliferation of orchestras depend on ritualistic performances of the same, familiar works from the past to ever-shrinking niche audiences of ever-increasing average age. The result is a text which props up the symphonic establishment with virtually PR zeal.
Moreover, the masculine emphasis on ‘his’ orchestra is a given in this survey, as Service’s roster of ‘great’ conductors are all men, even as he notes that increasingly well-known maestros such as Marin Alsop and Susanna Mälkki are no longer merely described as ‘women conductors’. Indeed, it is a very select, European few who gain inclusion here: from Valery Gergiev, Mariss Jansons and Jonathan Nott to Simon Rattle, Fischer and Claudio Abbado. Service justifies his choice on the less than convincing grounds that a) material is readily available on other candidates such as Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez (when Rattle, for example, has had huge exposure) and b) the sheer amount of space needed to do justice to more conductors. Clearly, lines had to be drawn regarding both the numbers and quality of conductors included - particularly in view of the personal nature of the book and focus on perceived ‘great’ (as opposed to ‘mediocre’?) conductors - but the loosely-written chapters could comfortably have been reduced in length for the sake of broader geo-cultural scope.
Service is careful to note that the days of the tyrannical, megastar maestros such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Arturo Toscanini and Herbert von Karajan are over; that, these days, a healthier, more democratic culture of mutual respect prevails. But his conductors are presented as superstars nonetheless; they, their musicians and even the music itself are lionised as culture heroes in terms that downright stretch credulity. For instance, he writes that Abbado
“needs his musicians to make music, to interpret his gestures, but more than that ... he needs their faith. Abbado’s body language is only translatable into sound because the musicians in the Lucerne Festival Orchestra believe that’s possible ... that Abbado’s gestures communicate everything they need to know about how to play Berlioz or Bruckner ... The fact that they know Abbado trusts them and has chosen them ... means they can safely go further into the music and their musicality than they could otherwise and Abbado himself is pushed to explore the extremes of what’s possible because he knows there are no limitations imposed by institutional politics or personal conflicts. That’s part of the secret of the musical miracle manufactured in Lucerne.”
Such heady stuff typifies Service’s idealisation of the orchestral environment and hints at his reification of the aesthetic experience. Throughout, he talks about music in universalised terms separate from society and ‘real life’, writing, for instance, of a performance of Gustav Mahler’s 6th Symphony that:
“Having looked at the music’s terror and fear and premonitions of death squarely in the face, it was possible to return to the world drained but renewed.”
Yet, at the same time, he describes music in exalted emotional terms as, for instance, in a performance of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique:
“We all became Berlioz’s doomed protagonist that night, wracked by obsessive love, experiencing moments of sensual joy and pastoral calm and then going through the fires of hallucinogenic hell until the ultimate extinguishment of our collective ego in the final moments...”
Emotional transport is often central to the hearing of extraordinary music and the impetus to share the effects of it on oneself is matched only by the paradoxical impossibility of doing so through the medium of words; Service is brave indeed to try and is clearly a knowledgeable as well as passionate advocate. But the difficulty here is that his grandiose, quasi-spiritual descriptions infantilise both the experience and his readers; moreover, he skirts uncomfortably close to condoning a kind of artistic submission and escapism despite his intention to encourage the opposite and, indeed, to de-mythologise the orchestral world. Submission to the composer via the score, submission to the conductor, to the collective entity of the orchestra and to the performative moment and a kind of ‘great mystery’ are all ultimately lauded as a means of giving up the self in order to transcend the self through ‘great’ music. Such utopian ideals of social or individual harmony are all very well, but it is arguable to what extent music sets out to achieve that - even if such healing transformation is possible in purely musical terms; a question which continues to resound, alas, all too clearly as we see in the chapter on the Berlin Philharmonic, in which Service recounts that orchestra’s shameful allegiance to the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.
Ultimately, it is not enough to suggest, as Service does, that transported listening amounts to active participation in the artistic experience; for that, one also needs a good deal more critical engagement than is offered by Music as Alchemy, for all that Service is not always won over by some of the music-making he describes. His book may open the door a crack for those completely unfamiliar with the workings of such cultural monoliths - and it certainly offers a view into an unfortunately wide-spread, romanticised mode of thinking about classical music and its performance. Nonetheless, it is a missed opportunity to gain deeper insight into the contemporary symphonic world at a time of increased global musical reach, yet urgent social and artistic challenge.
This is a longer version of a book review posted on Wales Arts Review 19/10/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/music%20as%20alchemy%20-%20journeys%20with%20great%20conductors%20and%20their%20orchestras%20%20by%20tom%20service.html
The book’s purpose is to unpick the apparent ‘magic’ of these particular ‘great’ conductors; what they do and how they do it, described in poetic rather than technical terms. Perhaps it might more accurately have been sub-titled ‘My Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras’ as it revolves around Service personally; focusing on his subjective thoughts and feelings about his chosen conductor-orchestra pairings. His approach is to consider each in turn, observing part of a typical orchestral schedule as a fly-on-the-wall and marveling at the gulf between conventionally taught conducting technique (he himself once studied the ‘Canford Method’) and the arcane gestures which form part of the unique arsenal of every ‘great’ conductor. He discusses charisma and body language; how each conductor handles the orchestra musically and psychologically, how they view their leadership role and how the orchestra responds artistically and individually before assessing the musical results from the perspective of a largely enraptured, if not always entirely convinced, listener.
Disappointingly, Music as Alchemy glosses over issues of social and artistic relevance at a time when many orchestras world-wide are struggling to find funding in a climate of savage cuts to the arts. Rather, Service chooses to re-explore territory which is historically controversial in its own right - the relationship between a conductor and ‘his’ orchestra being notoriously tension-laden - but he does so in almost entirely positive terms; content to put "a happy family" spin on the ensembles concerned (to use Iván Fischer’s description of his Budapest Festival Orchestra), whilst adopting the rarefied, Romantic position that the ‘music itself’ and musical values are autonomous. Throughout, Service sticks to an idealised view of symphonic culture despite acknowledging that “conducting is about collaboration, politics and society”. Nowhere, for example, does he consider the controversial ‘museum’ aspect of a classical music culture in which a proliferation of orchestras depend on ritualistic performances of the same, familiar works from the past to ever-shrinking niche audiences of ever-increasing average age. The result is a text which props up the symphonic establishment with virtually PR zeal.
Moreover, the masculine emphasis on ‘his’ orchestra is a given in this survey, as Service’s roster of ‘great’ conductors are all men, even as he notes that increasingly well-known maestros such as Marin Alsop and Susanna Mälkki are no longer merely described as ‘women conductors’. Indeed, it is a very select, European few who gain inclusion here: from Valery Gergiev, Mariss Jansons and Jonathan Nott to Simon Rattle, Fischer and Claudio Abbado. Service justifies his choice on the less than convincing grounds that a) material is readily available on other candidates such as Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez (when Rattle, for example, has had huge exposure) and b) the sheer amount of space needed to do justice to more conductors. Clearly, lines had to be drawn regarding both the numbers and quality of conductors included - particularly in view of the personal nature of the book and focus on perceived ‘great’ (as opposed to ‘mediocre’?) conductors - but the loosely-written chapters could comfortably have been reduced in length for the sake of broader geo-cultural scope.
Service is careful to note that the days of the tyrannical, megastar maestros such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Arturo Toscanini and Herbert von Karajan are over; that, these days, a healthier, more democratic culture of mutual respect prevails. But his conductors are presented as superstars nonetheless; they, their musicians and even the music itself are lionised as culture heroes in terms that downright stretch credulity. For instance, he writes that Abbado
“needs his musicians to make music, to interpret his gestures, but more than that ... he needs their faith. Abbado’s body language is only translatable into sound because the musicians in the Lucerne Festival Orchestra believe that’s possible ... that Abbado’s gestures communicate everything they need to know about how to play Berlioz or Bruckner ... The fact that they know Abbado trusts them and has chosen them ... means they can safely go further into the music and their musicality than they could otherwise and Abbado himself is pushed to explore the extremes of what’s possible because he knows there are no limitations imposed by institutional politics or personal conflicts. That’s part of the secret of the musical miracle manufactured in Lucerne.”
Such heady stuff typifies Service’s idealisation of the orchestral environment and hints at his reification of the aesthetic experience. Throughout, he talks about music in universalised terms separate from society and ‘real life’, writing, for instance, of a performance of Gustav Mahler’s 6th Symphony that:
“Having looked at the music’s terror and fear and premonitions of death squarely in the face, it was possible to return to the world drained but renewed.”
Yet, at the same time, he describes music in exalted emotional terms as, for instance, in a performance of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique:
“We all became Berlioz’s doomed protagonist that night, wracked by obsessive love, experiencing moments of sensual joy and pastoral calm and then going through the fires of hallucinogenic hell until the ultimate extinguishment of our collective ego in the final moments...”
Emotional transport is often central to the hearing of extraordinary music and the impetus to share the effects of it on oneself is matched only by the paradoxical impossibility of doing so through the medium of words; Service is brave indeed to try and is clearly a knowledgeable as well as passionate advocate. But the difficulty here is that his grandiose, quasi-spiritual descriptions infantilise both the experience and his readers; moreover, he skirts uncomfortably close to condoning a kind of artistic submission and escapism despite his intention to encourage the opposite and, indeed, to de-mythologise the orchestral world. Submission to the composer via the score, submission to the conductor, to the collective entity of the orchestra and to the performative moment and a kind of ‘great mystery’ are all ultimately lauded as a means of giving up the self in order to transcend the self through ‘great’ music. Such utopian ideals of social or individual harmony are all very well, but it is arguable to what extent music sets out to achieve that - even if such healing transformation is possible in purely musical terms; a question which continues to resound, alas, all too clearly as we see in the chapter on the Berlin Philharmonic, in which Service recounts that orchestra’s shameful allegiance to the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.
Ultimately, it is not enough to suggest, as Service does, that transported listening amounts to active participation in the artistic experience; for that, one also needs a good deal more critical engagement than is offered by Music as Alchemy, for all that Service is not always won over by some of the music-making he describes. His book may open the door a crack for those completely unfamiliar with the workings of such cultural monoliths - and it certainly offers a view into an unfortunately wide-spread, romanticised mode of thinking about classical music and its performance. Nonetheless, it is a missed opportunity to gain deeper insight into the contemporary symphonic world at a time of increased global musical reach, yet urgent social and artistic challenge.
This is a longer version of a book review posted on Wales Arts Review 19/10/12:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/music%20as%20alchemy%20-%20journeys%20with%20great%20conductors%20and%20their%20orchestras%20%20by%20tom%20service.html
Friday 5 October 2012
Book Review: Lutyens, Maconchy, Williams and Twentieth-Century British Music: A Blest Trio of Sirens - Rhiannon Mathias (Ashgate, 2012)
Rhiannon Mathias’s book aims to bring to wider attention three 20th Century composers who continue to suffer varying degrees of unjustifiable neglect. Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983), Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) and Grace Williams (1906-1977) have very little in common musically, but were contemporary, pioneering students at the Royal College of Music in the 1920s; each, however, going on to experience difficulties as a woman in gaining professional recognition despite their acknowledged talents. Mathias argues that, although ‘these women were rightly held in high esteem in the musical world’, they never quite got the opportunities or recognition they deserved, and her survey is intended to help end at last the continuing lack of public awareness of their music and their important contributions to British 20th Century musical life.
Clearly, their gender has been central to their neglect. Mathias points to crude and pervasive sexism from the ‘20s and later, typified by critic and composer Cecil Gray’s paraphrasing of Dr Johnson’s infamous dictum: ‘Sir, a woman’s composing is like a dog walking on its hind legs; it is not done well but you are surprised to see it done at all’. Alas, such attitudes have been slow to change within the classical music establishment; as recently as the mid-1980s, I myself heard the then Artistic Director of the London Sinfonietta Michael Vyner opining (not to mention whining) on national radio that ‘women can’t compose’. So - and despite her book striking a somewhat awkward balance between sociological study, biographical survey and musical analysis - Mathias is to be applauded for opening a wider debate by putting in plain terms gender issues that ultimately concern not just these three composers, but which go to the heart of musical culture well beyond the narrow enclaves of historical musicology.
Moreover, Mathias rightly contextualises the gender prejudices experienced by all three within a broader parochialism that largely prevailed throughout their lives (and, it could be argued, in many regards still exists today). She shows how attitudes within British musical institutions tended to reflect a cultural insecurity and snobbery, veering from a conservative horror of contemporary music on the one hand, to a self-conscious obedience to fashion on the other - and taking in a sentimentalised nationalism along the way. Williams, for instance, lamented that ‘when people see my...folk song arrangements and Fantasias...it is so easy for them to forget that I also write full scale serious works’. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, Lutyens - an important pioneer of much-maligned and misunderstood serial techniques in Britain - was first perceived as too ‘advanced’, then too ‘behind’ vis-à-vis European compositional developments. Meanwhile, Maconchy simply suffered from a lack of ‘modishness - for saying the right things to the right person, or for being in the right place at the right time’ , as the composer (and, coincidentally, her daughter) Nicola LeFanu put it.
This raises all sorts of important, still wider issues about how we decide - and, indeed, about who gets to decide - questions of what constitutes cultural and artistic value in society, and thence to shape the practice, distribution and history of art itself. Mathias steers well away from deeper probing of this kind and is careful even to avoid comparative musical judgements, writing in a very neutral prose and giving the three composers distinctly equal consideration. What she does do is manage to discuss a large amount of music amidst a wealth of background information, interlacing monographs of each composer within three historical periods; Part I 1926-1935 narrating student experiences, whilst Part II 1935-1955 and Part III 1955-1994 consider each composer in turn, surveying key works within their respective biographical frameworks. This approach serves well for the introduction she intended - so it is a pity that Ashgate’s ungenerous Index hardly does justice to her painstaking research and is, moreover, unforgivable in a volume priced for institutional libraries.
But there is a difficulty lurking within Mathias’s book, which no amount of diplomatic treading and balanced musical and biographical attention can circumvent, and which remains an issue for anyone daring to broach considerations of gender bias in music; and that is the thorny problem of how one gets away from the tiresome pidgeon-holing of women composers as ‘women composers’ when one has chosen to write a book that groups three composers together on the basis that they are...women composers - however sympathetic and sensitive the angle.
Of the three, arguably, the one who detested such pidgeon-holing the most - or, at any rate, the one who protested the loudest and in the ripest language to anyone who did it to her - was Lutyens; she who happened at her best - arguably again - to have composed by far the most interesting and influential music. However, what Lutyens would no doubt have appreciated about this book, is Mathias’s determination to discuss her music rather than her famously acid persona, which has hitherto inevitably proved the greater talking point. Notwithstanding feminist quibbles, for that reason alone, Mathias’s survey deserves to be widely read. Not only that, but she succeeds in placing Williams in a wider, British - as well as a Welsh - context and mounts a serious challenge of the music-historical ‘backwater’ category to which Maconchy in particular, but all three to varying extent, have unjustifiably been consigned for too long.
Published by Wales Arts Review 2/11/12
http://www.walesartsreview.org/lutyens,%20maconchy,%20williams%20and%20twentieth-century%20british%20music%20-%20a%20blest%20trio%20of%20sirens%20by%20rhiannon%20mathias.html
Clearly, their gender has been central to their neglect. Mathias points to crude and pervasive sexism from the ‘20s and later, typified by critic and composer Cecil Gray’s paraphrasing of Dr Johnson’s infamous dictum: ‘Sir, a woman’s composing is like a dog walking on its hind legs; it is not done well but you are surprised to see it done at all’. Alas, such attitudes have been slow to change within the classical music establishment; as recently as the mid-1980s, I myself heard the then Artistic Director of the London Sinfonietta Michael Vyner opining (not to mention whining) on national radio that ‘women can’t compose’. So - and despite her book striking a somewhat awkward balance between sociological study, biographical survey and musical analysis - Mathias is to be applauded for opening a wider debate by putting in plain terms gender issues that ultimately concern not just these three composers, but which go to the heart of musical culture well beyond the narrow enclaves of historical musicology.
Moreover, Mathias rightly contextualises the gender prejudices experienced by all three within a broader parochialism that largely prevailed throughout their lives (and, it could be argued, in many regards still exists today). She shows how attitudes within British musical institutions tended to reflect a cultural insecurity and snobbery, veering from a conservative horror of contemporary music on the one hand, to a self-conscious obedience to fashion on the other - and taking in a sentimentalised nationalism along the way. Williams, for instance, lamented that ‘when people see my...folk song arrangements and Fantasias...it is so easy for them to forget that I also write full scale serious works’. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, Lutyens - an important pioneer of much-maligned and misunderstood serial techniques in Britain - was first perceived as too ‘advanced’, then too ‘behind’ vis-à-vis European compositional developments. Meanwhile, Maconchy simply suffered from a lack of ‘modishness - for saying the right things to the right person, or for being in the right place at the right time’ , as the composer (and, coincidentally, her daughter) Nicola LeFanu put it.
This raises all sorts of important, still wider issues about how we decide - and, indeed, about who gets to decide - questions of what constitutes cultural and artistic value in society, and thence to shape the practice, distribution and history of art itself. Mathias steers well away from deeper probing of this kind and is careful even to avoid comparative musical judgements, writing in a very neutral prose and giving the three composers distinctly equal consideration. What she does do is manage to discuss a large amount of music amidst a wealth of background information, interlacing monographs of each composer within three historical periods; Part I 1926-1935 narrating student experiences, whilst Part II 1935-1955 and Part III 1955-1994 consider each composer in turn, surveying key works within their respective biographical frameworks. This approach serves well for the introduction she intended - so it is a pity that Ashgate’s ungenerous Index hardly does justice to her painstaking research and is, moreover, unforgivable in a volume priced for institutional libraries.
But there is a difficulty lurking within Mathias’s book, which no amount of diplomatic treading and balanced musical and biographical attention can circumvent, and which remains an issue for anyone daring to broach considerations of gender bias in music; and that is the thorny problem of how one gets away from the tiresome pidgeon-holing of women composers as ‘women composers’ when one has chosen to write a book that groups three composers together on the basis that they are...women composers - however sympathetic and sensitive the angle.
Of the three, arguably, the one who detested such pidgeon-holing the most - or, at any rate, the one who protested the loudest and in the ripest language to anyone who did it to her - was Lutyens; she who happened at her best - arguably again - to have composed by far the most interesting and influential music. However, what Lutyens would no doubt have appreciated about this book, is Mathias’s determination to discuss her music rather than her famously acid persona, which has hitherto inevitably proved the greater talking point. Notwithstanding feminist quibbles, for that reason alone, Mathias’s survey deserves to be widely read. Not only that, but she succeeds in placing Williams in a wider, British - as well as a Welsh - context and mounts a serious challenge of the music-historical ‘backwater’ category to which Maconchy in particular, but all three to varying extent, have unjustifiably been consigned for too long.
Published by Wales Arts Review 2/11/12
http://www.walesartsreview.org/lutyens,%20maconchy,%20williams%20and%20twentieth-century%20british%20music%20-%20a%20blest%20trio%20of%20sirens%20by%20rhiannon%20mathias.html
Interview with Composer Lynne Plowman
Composer Lynne Plowman’s operas have won critical acclaim. Her fourth premieres at the Brighton Festival next spring and she is a recipient of an Arts Council of Wales 2012-13 Creative Wales award. The following conversation will be published in Issue 1 of the new Cyfansoddwyr Cymru/Composers of Wales Quarterly of which I am Contributing Editor:
Can you tell me about your current, fourth operatic project?
It’s for Glyndebourne. We are creating an interactive pirates opera for a children’s and family audience [with Martin Riley, librettist of Lynne’s previous operas - Ed]. It’s very fast-paced, with sword fighting, slapstick and spoken theatre underscored by the band, who are on stage and in character; quite anarchic, with an ‘end-of-the-pier’ comedy and a dark edge. The audience dresses up as pirates and the performing space is a pub where they come for a drink; they take part, singing along in places and interacting with the characters. At one point children come up to conduct the band.
This opera is for a professional cast whereas the previous one was for young people to perform. That was The Face in the Mirror for Welsh National Opera Max and written for WNO’s Singing Club, a chorus of 10-15 year olds. But it was for an adult audience and probably the most serious piece of work Martin and I have made, being based on the Second World War.
Your music - including your concert music - is strikingly direct.
Yes, it’s really important for me that the music communicates directly to the audience. But I work so intuitively it takes me a long time so one of the things I’d like to do with the ACW Creative Wales award is to speed up my creative process.
Does that intuitiveness account for some of the freshness and vitality of your work? Your piece Hall of Mirrors, for Piano Circus, was described as “irrepressibly eclectic”. What do you think about that?
I like to use existing musical ideas. By using little moments of pastiche, you can instantly sum up a place or a time or an atmosphere which speaks beyond the music. That’s how music functions theatrically, so I suppose that comes into my concert music too. Six pianos is such a bonkers combination of instruments! So I came up with pianists from six different times and places, throwing them together in a melting pot of fragments. That’s how that piece patchwork-ed itself together.
Is that how you work - in patchwork - or do you develop ideas from a to b?
It depends on the piece. With opera the music has to serve the drama so in some ways it’s written from the beginning to the end although I’ll pick out certain moments to write the music for separately. Concert pieces are more of a jigsaw; I’ll create sections then play with the structure. I find it easier to write long pieces of music than short ones because it’s much freer somehow.
With Martin, do you work together, producing libretto and music simultaneously?
It starts with us together, coming up with the idea and the scenario, then he writes a first draft of the libretto. But section by section so I start writing the music before he’s finished. Once I start composing, I find there are sections where the music leads and I make decisions about what’s going to be spoken, what’s going to be sung, where there might be a song. Then I ask for re-writes so there’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing!
We have a lot of joint experience of the audience we’re writing for. We understand how bright children are - that they don’t need to be written down for - and how, if a ten year old enjoys this piece, so will an adult. The music has to tell the story well and if it does that then it’s successful - and kids don’t have those musical prejudices that we acquire as grown-ups; if you get a scrunchy chord that’s fine, that’s the sound.
So how will you take this into your orchestral experiments?
Well this will be a challenge - the idea of Creative Wales is to take myself out of my comfort zone and gather techniques. I’m not intending to write a finished piece but to make orchestral sketches exploring different harmonic and orchestration sound-worlds. I’m not so concerned about structure
because I feel confident with that but I want to push my harmonic and textural languages. And that’s why I’ve chosen to use full symphony orchestra. I probably won’t use the whole orchestra for each of the sketches, but I’ve got that unlimited canvas to work with.
How will the project work?
There’ll be a closed workshop next September with BBCNoW. We’ll record the session, then I can use the material in a piece at a later stage. When I’ve finished the pirates opera, I’ll take some time to do some listening, thinking and reading, then the sketches will gradually emerge. I don’t know what musical direction that’s going to take me in! But if you stand still as a composer it stops being creative and starts becoming a production line, which I don’t want! I think it’s so important for artists to have that breathing space so I feel really lucky that we have this funding scheme in Wales.
Many thanks Lynne.
www.lynneplowman.co.uk
Can you tell me about your current, fourth operatic project?
It’s for Glyndebourne. We are creating an interactive pirates opera for a children’s and family audience [with Martin Riley, librettist of Lynne’s previous operas - Ed]. It’s very fast-paced, with sword fighting, slapstick and spoken theatre underscored by the band, who are on stage and in character; quite anarchic, with an ‘end-of-the-pier’ comedy and a dark edge. The audience dresses up as pirates and the performing space is a pub where they come for a drink; they take part, singing along in places and interacting with the characters. At one point children come up to conduct the band.
This opera is for a professional cast whereas the previous one was for young people to perform. That was The Face in the Mirror for Welsh National Opera Max and written for WNO’s Singing Club, a chorus of 10-15 year olds. But it was for an adult audience and probably the most serious piece of work Martin and I have made, being based on the Second World War.
Your music - including your concert music - is strikingly direct.
Yes, it’s really important for me that the music communicates directly to the audience. But I work so intuitively it takes me a long time so one of the things I’d like to do with the ACW Creative Wales award is to speed up my creative process.
Does that intuitiveness account for some of the freshness and vitality of your work? Your piece Hall of Mirrors, for Piano Circus, was described as “irrepressibly eclectic”. What do you think about that?
I like to use existing musical ideas. By using little moments of pastiche, you can instantly sum up a place or a time or an atmosphere which speaks beyond the music. That’s how music functions theatrically, so I suppose that comes into my concert music too. Six pianos is such a bonkers combination of instruments! So I came up with pianists from six different times and places, throwing them together in a melting pot of fragments. That’s how that piece patchwork-ed itself together.
Is that how you work - in patchwork - or do you develop ideas from a to b?
It depends on the piece. With opera the music has to serve the drama so in some ways it’s written from the beginning to the end although I’ll pick out certain moments to write the music for separately. Concert pieces are more of a jigsaw; I’ll create sections then play with the structure. I find it easier to write long pieces of music than short ones because it’s much freer somehow.
With Martin, do you work together, producing libretto and music simultaneously?
It starts with us together, coming up with the idea and the scenario, then he writes a first draft of the libretto. But section by section so I start writing the music before he’s finished. Once I start composing, I find there are sections where the music leads and I make decisions about what’s going to be spoken, what’s going to be sung, where there might be a song. Then I ask for re-writes so there’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing!
We have a lot of joint experience of the audience we’re writing for. We understand how bright children are - that they don’t need to be written down for - and how, if a ten year old enjoys this piece, so will an adult. The music has to tell the story well and if it does that then it’s successful - and kids don’t have those musical prejudices that we acquire as grown-ups; if you get a scrunchy chord that’s fine, that’s the sound.
So how will you take this into your orchestral experiments?
Well this will be a challenge - the idea of Creative Wales is to take myself out of my comfort zone and gather techniques. I’m not intending to write a finished piece but to make orchestral sketches exploring different harmonic and orchestration sound-worlds. I’m not so concerned about structure
because I feel confident with that but I want to push my harmonic and textural languages. And that’s why I’ve chosen to use full symphony orchestra. I probably won’t use the whole orchestra for each of the sketches, but I’ve got that unlimited canvas to work with.
How will the project work?
There’ll be a closed workshop next September with BBCNoW. We’ll record the session, then I can use the material in a piece at a later stage. When I’ve finished the pirates opera, I’ll take some time to do some listening, thinking and reading, then the sketches will gradually emerge. I don’t know what musical direction that’s going to take me in! But if you stand still as a composer it stops being creative and starts becoming a production line, which I don’t want! I think it’s so important for artists to have that breathing space so I feel really lucky that we have this funding scheme in Wales.
Many thanks Lynne.
www.lynneplowman.co.uk
Monday 9 July 2012
TOURISTS
Tourists II
There's a poor eagle looking lost up at the farm by the fords.
He's not lost, he belongs to Charlie who lives there.
Oh, but he looked all lost.
He's not lost, he belongs to Charlie who lives there. Did you see the ID rings?
Ooh yes, but he looked all lost. Who did you say he belonged to?
Charlie.
Where?
There, by the fords.
Oh, but he looked all lost. Thanks for clearing that up.
Think nothing of it.
Tourists I
Today a silver car
slowed by the house.
An arm reached out of the
driver's window, taking
snapshots.
Of what?
Whose life?
What possible trophy,
what triumphant proof of
existence might thus have
been obtained?
Without stopping, the
car slid gently past,
occupants obscured by
branches dappled across the
windscreen.
Friday 25 May 2012
resolve
patience
awareness catching shallow breath tense
muscle of hiatus the transition moment
pinned expanded stretched
refracted
sharp edges of a hot sun glaring squeezing
light to closely angled corners filling
space as well as time with scrutiny with
pressure under day by day duress of
waiting
stillness
bright colours buzzing speculation in the ear the
when and how of next step inconclusive in
abeyance in no hurry to reveal itself or simply
happen
purpose nonetheless enshrined in lists of
things to do in squinting at the sky and
holding out for news of change to
hear of better things to
come
awareness catching shallow breath tense
muscle of hiatus the transition moment
pinned expanded stretched
refracted
sharp edges of a hot sun glaring squeezing
light to closely angled corners filling
space as well as time with scrutiny with
pressure under day by day duress of
waiting
stillness
bright colours buzzing speculation in the ear the
when and how of next step inconclusive in
abeyance in no hurry to reveal itself or simply
happen
purpose nonetheless enshrined in lists of
things to do in squinting at the sky and
holding out for news of change to
hear of better things to
come
Saturday 19 May 2012
"Symphony": Music Appreciation for Middle England
The closing focus of BBC4’s recently repeated series Symphony is on Dmitri Shostakovich’s 9th. Written in 1945, it incensed the authorities with its sardonic, untriumphalist character contrary to the great outpouring they are said to have expected as Soviet riposte to Ludwig van Beethoven’s monumental 9th Choral Symphony at the end of World War II. There is ongoing speculation about Shostakovich’s two-fingered gesture and at whom it may have been aimed (if it was such a gesture, consciously aimed or otherwise). But it is hardly likely that, as suggested here, he intended the 9th to be a ‘goodbye’ to the ‘great symphonic tradition in Germany’ which had ‘come to an end’. There are many cultural assumptions embedded in this statement, which interprets music history along very particular lines. Even so, German composers did continue to write symphonies after the war (Hans Werner Henze alone produced ten between 1947 and 2000). Moreover, Shostakovich himself wrote a further six symphonies, completing his 15th in 1971 and thereby refuting any supposed death of the symphony itself despite the series’s abrupt halt at 1945 with murky hints of ‘new forms’. So why might Symphony choose to ignore post-war and contemporary composers, despite the genre’s continuing importance today (Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies being just three, high-profile contemporary symphonic composers)? We might answer this by exploring some ways in which the series is a product of those very cultural assumptions contained within the statement about Shostakovich and the German tradition.
An initial perusal of Symphony reveals little investigation in any generic or formal sense; rather, we are taken on a journey through the symphonic canon of works from an imagined start to finish through biographical and historical surveys of the ‘great composers’ and some of the better-known ‘great masterpieces’ they composed. As cultural sightseers, we visit places of interest including museums preserving a totemised bric-a-brac of daily life alongside venerated autograph scores. We see many gravestones and hear many eulogies; conductors, musicologists, curators and living composers (although whether themselves symphonists we are never told), offer glowing descriptions of these past, iconic figures and their music. We hear numerous symphonic extracts, performed as tantalising sound-bites in a dramatic narrative charting the apparent progress of the symphony through the ages. Glimpses are shown of the workings of the orchestra. Yet more emphasis is placed on the role of the conductor as interpreter supreme. This is high gloss, ‘high culture’, stripped of nuance and meaningful critique; beautifully presented, but hollowed out for a passive, unquestioning audience.
This might seem harshly dismissive of what is, on one level, a fun and informative entertainment programme. But the very blandness of Symphony arises from its particular ideology; a smoothly unchallenging approach to music history which raises concerns about the place of classical music in society today. There is ongoing questioning as to why classical music has become a museum culture largely comprising ritualistic performances of familiar works from the past to ever-shrinking niche audiences of ever-increasing average age*. This series not only fails to address any of these issues, but is itself a product of the museum culture, pandering to an archetypically genteel classical music audience and inviting others to join through a kind of highbrow marketing. By constructing a narrative within the blinkered confines of post-imperial Home Counties values, Symphony merely succeeds in reinforcing cultural myths about symphonic music. Alas, in so doing, it confirms the reality that classical music today is simply - beyond a tiny minority interest and bar the occasional, fleeting exception - no longer a part of serious cultural discourse or debate.
Myths of Genius and Transcendence
The cultural myth most central to the series and, indeed, to most thinking about classical music, is a continued acceptance of Romantic assumptions about ‘genius’ and the transcendence of art as expressed through the ‘work’. According to this view, the work itself becomes a cultural icon; it is lifted through the ‘vision’ of its creator from its localised, historical context to attain independent universality and timelessness. The composer himself becomes a god-like figure (this is a masculine ideal, which may help to explain why so few women have been given the opportunity to write symphonies), imbued with super-human intellect and emotional sensitivity; often a brooding, difficult personality at odds with society and certainly ahead of his time. It is the job of the listener to seek to understand the vision of the composer; not necessarily through the acquisition of technical, formalist knowledge (although this helps), but ultimately through a combination of emotional sympathy and spiritual aspiration.
These notions are inherited from a combination of post-Enlightenment thinking about the importance of creative freedom and emotional self-expression with what amounts to a cult-like worship of Beethoven. Whilst they may be pertinent to many 19th Century European composers, therefore, they are anachronistic when applied to music written before (certainly mid) Beethoven and questionable as a contemporary cultural ideal. In the 19th Century, such thinking was applied to the music of the time or very recent past, whereas today it exists largely as a form of rose-tinted nostalgia for ‘great composers’ and works from more distant eras. So it is not surprising that Symphony should avoid contemporary music because descriptions of ‘genius’ and ‘transcendence’ applied to living composers - whilst they certainly occur - can begin to feel socially inappropriate. Such discomfort might risk the museum culture in turn by throwing a more critical light on those very notions of genius revealing them to be, in fact, a particular ideology; a distinct set of values regarding not just ideas about ‘greatness’ - which, strangely, never quite gets defined - but relying on particular assumptions about the very nature of music and creativity.
Nonetheless, Symphony adopts Romantic values wholesale, even applying them to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Haydn to whom such concepts would have been entirely alien. Mozart, we are told in the first programme (tellingly named Genesis and Genius), was so in thrall to a symphonic ideal that he felt ‘inspired’ to ‘give something to the form’ through his last three symphonies. What he might have given beyond his ‘palate of emotional intensity’ is not, alas, made clear. Likewise Haydn, whose life and music are described in terms of ‘epic journeys’, is said to have ‘taken the idea of what the symphony could be further and further down the path’. This assertion is based on his deepening self-expression as symphonic music increasingly appealed to individual as well as to public reception. Might such ‘expressiveness’ be what is meant by the ‘idea’ of the symphony? We are left with no way of knowing, let alone what it might mean to take the symphony down some path. It would have been intriguing to explore this in light of the later point that Richard Wagner was an essentially symphonic ‘composer of ideas’ (albeit almost exclusively utilising opera or Gesmantkunstwerk) but this latter is merely given as information, leaving us really none the wiser.
Indeed, little of substance is said about symphonic composing. We are told that the symphony is generally a work with four (or so) movements of contrasting character and an allusion is made to the use of sonata form in opening movements as taking a motif on a ‘journey’. There are points made regarding orchestration and some time is spent distinguishing absolute from programmatic music in the form of the symphonic poem. But throughout, the commentary is shallow and ultimately reliant on the audience having a fair degree of pre-knowledge; a newcomer to classical music would surely be lost among the superlatives. For all the featured composers are lavished with quasi-Romantic phrases which, as well as being value-laden, actually tell us nothing about the composers’ work beyond its being in some way ‘great’. Music may be notoriously difficult to describe in words but this does not deter the Symphony team, who litter the commentary with effusive descriptions like so much verbal confetti. By the time we get to the ‘incredible visionary’ Charles Ives, the devotional tone is so pervasive that his being said to be ‘so ahead of his time, his music still isn’t known today’, amounts to more of the same dreary adulation.
The Myth of History as Progress
In the series’s march forward through the ages, we see another cultural myth central to Symphony’s narrative; that is the presentation of music history as progress. The history of the symphony is described as the relentless advance of Enlightenment ideals through Europe and beyond in a gathering crescendo of modernity from Haydn’s post-French Revolution London Symphonies to Shostakovich’s 9th at the end of World War II. As already noted, this amounts to the authoritative view of Western music history familiar to ‘educated’ listeners. However, not only does this narrative constitute a particular interpretation of history rather than being fact as presented here, but it also presupposes some deep contradictions; not least, in relation to the music itself. Every composer discussed is said to have been pushing the symphony ‘forward’, ‘turning the page of symphonic history’, and ‘breaking rules’ (although these ‘rules’ are never explained, let alone how they are broken). Certainly, each of the featured composers develops a profoundly individual voice and, of course, approaches to and methods of symphonic writing change over time and according to fashion. But the implication that history is, therefore, in some way causal or goal-directed entails huge ideological leaps.
In any case, there lies a problem in the towering figure of Beethoven, around whom both the series and received music history, pivots (the second episode is the only one of the four to bear a single composer’s name, Beethoven and Beyond). If Beethoven is the ‘indisputable hero’ against whom all other composers are measured, what does it mean for later composers to be nonetheless ‘developing’ the symphony, ‘taking it forward’ ‘beyond’ Beethoven and becoming ‘great’ in their own right? Progress, it seems, is something to be strived for but which is, ultimately, unattainable. With this paradox we arrive firmly at post-Enlightenment, Romantic ideals, but with the disturbing addendum that no composer has managed - or, by implication, ever will manage - to surpass Beethoven’s nine symphonies as these continue to be held as the utopian pinnacle of Western musical achievement. It turns out that a strong belief underlying current mainstream music-history is actually a contradiction; for, on the one hand, Romantic ideals are still held to be supreme but, on the other, they have failed and, moreover, must fail. Musical ‘progress’ has not been, and cannot be, made and the age of the ‘great’ composer is, therefore, dead. In light of this conundrum, it is perhaps not so surprising that a museum culture obsessed with the past should have taken hold regarding classical music.
More problematic is a question regarding Romantic ideas of the transcendent work: for how can a symphony be at once a timeless masterpiece and yet continually surpassed in greatness by later works by the same composer (a point made most vociferously in the series about the symphonies of Sibelius)? Unless, that is, some masterpieces are more masterful than others. These contradictions are, clearly, difficult to reconcile but Symphony merely presents us with swathes of interpretation on the familiar yet ludicrous sliding-scale of genius; a system of indefinable value judgements based on arcane and culturally out-moded criteria. That late-Romantic composers such as Johannes Brahms were intimidated by Beethoven coming from behind with the ‘tramp of a giant’ is no reason for us to continue to view music history, or to judge musical ‘greatness’, through that particular lens. Similarly, the fact that many composers after Beethoven (like Hector Berlioz) idolised him, is no reason for contemporary discourse about classical music still to be dominated by the cult of personality as demonstrated, alas, by this very series.
The Twentieth Century Neglected
Nevertheless, it is instructive to note some personalities absent from the narrative as this throws further light on Symphony’s cultural bias and returns us to the series’s lack of exploration of recent and contemporary music. For, as well as ignoring post-war music entirely, the programme avoids any mention of key modernists from the first half of the Twentieth Century beyond a curt dismissal of the avant-garde. The contention in programme four, Revolution and Rebirth, is that composers writing in late-Romantic idioms such as Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams were ‘actually more important than the avant-garde because they were saying very important things about modernity to a large audience’. This opens an intriguing line of enquiry which, however, remains unexplored, as are the implied assumptions about value and modernity. Elgar and Vaughan Williams undoubtedly were - and remain - important but not all modernists rejected the symphony by any means. Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, for instance, wrote chamber symphonies and a symphony respectively that were very much taken to be saying something important about modernity which continues to reverberate today. But if audience size is the real arbiter of importance, it seems downright odd also to ignore Igor Stravinsky, whose several symphonies placed issues of modernity (as well as specific aspects of modernism) before very large audiences, including via the gramophone, which technological advance the programme rightly deems important.
What cultural value-system might be lurking here to explain the total absence of these and other major Twentieth Century figures (like Carl Nielsen and Serge Prokofiev) from Symphony? A look at the preceding, third episode, New Nations and New Worlds, might offer a clue. For here we discover that it is nationalism that supposedly propelled the symphony from Austria and Germany across late-Romantic Europe, forward into the Twentieth Century and across the Atlantic to the USA. Before we examine this particular narrative more closely, it is worth noting that, whatever aims the many, contrasting avant-garde composers may have had, they were certainly not nationalist in any Romantic sense. So it is, perhaps, unsurprising that they should be excluded from this particular version of history regardless of their actual contribution as symphonic composers.
European Nationalism and Germanic Decline
Looking more closely at the third episode and issues of nationalism, it is true that many Romantic composers sought to establish an individual style that also reflected the music of their birth country. Antonín Dvořák was one such, but it is questionable how far Jean Sibelius continued to be nationalist beyond his youth as distinct from getting stuck with the label; indeed, in terms of his overall career, Sibelius might more accurately be described as a modernist. What is clear, however, is that nationalism has long been a catch-all term to describe music (symphonic or otherwise) which incorporates features of indigenous folk or popular music. Music, that is, of any nation besides Austria or Germany. Because, in keeping with music-historical orthodoxy, the central pillar of the musical establishment as described in Symphony is assumed to be Austro-German (and, incidentally, ‘serious’ as distinct from ‘popular’). Indeed we are told with astonishing assurance that ‘German music was international’. What might this actually mean?
Similar to the phenomenon of individual composers being subject to comparison with Beethoven, in today’s symphonic cultural museum, past Austro-German ‘tradition’ is still taken to be the cultural norm against which other nations are viewed. The resulting double-standards are breath-taking. When Franz Schubert or Brahms, say, are shown to utilise indigenous folk or popular music, their motivation is rarely described in terms of nationalist sentiment. But when Dvořák, Vaughan Williams or Aaron Copland do the same, the talk instantly focuses on ‘national identity’, representations of ‘native soil’ and ‘popularisation’. That such blatantly unbalanced cultural analysis should still be a feature of Western classical music thinking - post-modernism notwithstanding - is an irony that would surely not be lost on those symphonic nationalists who attempted to establish their music in its own right and to challenge the constant comparisons to hegemonic Austro-German ideals that they themselves suffered.
Let us return, then, in the light of these uncomfortable issues around nationalism, to the notion of symphonic decline from the fourth episode with which we started. If the ‘great symphonic tradition in Germany’ is held to have ‘come to an end’ around 1945, it appears we should take this to indicate the loss of some supposedly international cultural custodian. An awful lot of ‘keening’ is described in this final episode, from Shostakovich bassoons to Vaughan Williams bugles and Elgarian oboes. The implication beyond the actual horrors of death and war is clear (as if this were not enough) in a larger sense of cultural decline absolutely at odds with the ‘rebirth’ of the title which, in any case, is never seen actually to materialise. Might this loss of German tradition and ensuing downward slide reveal another underlying reason to end the series at 1945 as if the symphony itself stops there? One would hope not as the implied reliance on Germanic culture to lead the way would be distasteful to say the least. Even within the series’s own dubious terms, further mileage could have been made of the Revolution and Rebirth title with a post-war shift of focus to the Soviet Bloc and refugees from there, if only to bring the narrative closer to the present day. For a clear and continued commitment to the symphony as a genre was palpable post-war in Communist countries such as Poland, to name just one example; there, coming after Karol Szymanowski, with Witold Lutosławski, Krzysztof Penderecki and Andrzej Panufnik.
A great deal more could - and probably should - be said about Symphony as the smooth jolliness of its tone is a cover for so much blithe parochialism. To say the series misses an opportunity is a huge understatement - and not only to discuss contemporary composers and works. For the prevailing museum culture must be overcome if classical music is to re-gain relevance in wider contemporary life as a living art form. Indeed, a contemporary perspective of the symphony as a living genre could have been made a base from which to present a history; by all means including a review of orthodox notions of music-history, but described as such and placed in a framework of critical exploration. The irony of setting so much store by historical interpretation of the unquestioning type we see in Symphony is that it ultimately falls foul of the very issue discussed in episode two with regard to wildly contrasting uses of Beethoven’s 9th (firstly in Nazi Germany, then later at the fall of the Berlin Wall and lastly as an honouring of victims of 9/11); and that is propaganda. There is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ history, and this is as true of music-history as any other. This series demonstrates that how we view history tells us more about who we are in the present than the past times to which we refer. As such, beneath the glossy exterior, it paints a sadly impoverished picture of mainstream classical music culture today.
* See, for example, Lydia Goehr’s enormously influential: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music published by OUP 2007
An initial perusal of Symphony reveals little investigation in any generic or formal sense; rather, we are taken on a journey through the symphonic canon of works from an imagined start to finish through biographical and historical surveys of the ‘great composers’ and some of the better-known ‘great masterpieces’ they composed. As cultural sightseers, we visit places of interest including museums preserving a totemised bric-a-brac of daily life alongside venerated autograph scores. We see many gravestones and hear many eulogies; conductors, musicologists, curators and living composers (although whether themselves symphonists we are never told), offer glowing descriptions of these past, iconic figures and their music. We hear numerous symphonic extracts, performed as tantalising sound-bites in a dramatic narrative charting the apparent progress of the symphony through the ages. Glimpses are shown of the workings of the orchestra. Yet more emphasis is placed on the role of the conductor as interpreter supreme. This is high gloss, ‘high culture’, stripped of nuance and meaningful critique; beautifully presented, but hollowed out for a passive, unquestioning audience.
This might seem harshly dismissive of what is, on one level, a fun and informative entertainment programme. But the very blandness of Symphony arises from its particular ideology; a smoothly unchallenging approach to music history which raises concerns about the place of classical music in society today. There is ongoing questioning as to why classical music has become a museum culture largely comprising ritualistic performances of familiar works from the past to ever-shrinking niche audiences of ever-increasing average age*. This series not only fails to address any of these issues, but is itself a product of the museum culture, pandering to an archetypically genteel classical music audience and inviting others to join through a kind of highbrow marketing. By constructing a narrative within the blinkered confines of post-imperial Home Counties values, Symphony merely succeeds in reinforcing cultural myths about symphonic music. Alas, in so doing, it confirms the reality that classical music today is simply - beyond a tiny minority interest and bar the occasional, fleeting exception - no longer a part of serious cultural discourse or debate.
Myths of Genius and Transcendence
The cultural myth most central to the series and, indeed, to most thinking about classical music, is a continued acceptance of Romantic assumptions about ‘genius’ and the transcendence of art as expressed through the ‘work’. According to this view, the work itself becomes a cultural icon; it is lifted through the ‘vision’ of its creator from its localised, historical context to attain independent universality and timelessness. The composer himself becomes a god-like figure (this is a masculine ideal, which may help to explain why so few women have been given the opportunity to write symphonies), imbued with super-human intellect and emotional sensitivity; often a brooding, difficult personality at odds with society and certainly ahead of his time. It is the job of the listener to seek to understand the vision of the composer; not necessarily through the acquisition of technical, formalist knowledge (although this helps), but ultimately through a combination of emotional sympathy and spiritual aspiration.
These notions are inherited from a combination of post-Enlightenment thinking about the importance of creative freedom and emotional self-expression with what amounts to a cult-like worship of Beethoven. Whilst they may be pertinent to many 19th Century European composers, therefore, they are anachronistic when applied to music written before (certainly mid) Beethoven and questionable as a contemporary cultural ideal. In the 19th Century, such thinking was applied to the music of the time or very recent past, whereas today it exists largely as a form of rose-tinted nostalgia for ‘great composers’ and works from more distant eras. So it is not surprising that Symphony should avoid contemporary music because descriptions of ‘genius’ and ‘transcendence’ applied to living composers - whilst they certainly occur - can begin to feel socially inappropriate. Such discomfort might risk the museum culture in turn by throwing a more critical light on those very notions of genius revealing them to be, in fact, a particular ideology; a distinct set of values regarding not just ideas about ‘greatness’ - which, strangely, never quite gets defined - but relying on particular assumptions about the very nature of music and creativity.
Nonetheless, Symphony adopts Romantic values wholesale, even applying them to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Haydn to whom such concepts would have been entirely alien. Mozart, we are told in the first programme (tellingly named Genesis and Genius), was so in thrall to a symphonic ideal that he felt ‘inspired’ to ‘give something to the form’ through his last three symphonies. What he might have given beyond his ‘palate of emotional intensity’ is not, alas, made clear. Likewise Haydn, whose life and music are described in terms of ‘epic journeys’, is said to have ‘taken the idea of what the symphony could be further and further down the path’. This assertion is based on his deepening self-expression as symphonic music increasingly appealed to individual as well as to public reception. Might such ‘expressiveness’ be what is meant by the ‘idea’ of the symphony? We are left with no way of knowing, let alone what it might mean to take the symphony down some path. It would have been intriguing to explore this in light of the later point that Richard Wagner was an essentially symphonic ‘composer of ideas’ (albeit almost exclusively utilising opera or Gesmantkunstwerk) but this latter is merely given as information, leaving us really none the wiser.
Indeed, little of substance is said about symphonic composing. We are told that the symphony is generally a work with four (or so) movements of contrasting character and an allusion is made to the use of sonata form in opening movements as taking a motif on a ‘journey’. There are points made regarding orchestration and some time is spent distinguishing absolute from programmatic music in the form of the symphonic poem. But throughout, the commentary is shallow and ultimately reliant on the audience having a fair degree of pre-knowledge; a newcomer to classical music would surely be lost among the superlatives. For all the featured composers are lavished with quasi-Romantic phrases which, as well as being value-laden, actually tell us nothing about the composers’ work beyond its being in some way ‘great’. Music may be notoriously difficult to describe in words but this does not deter the Symphony team, who litter the commentary with effusive descriptions like so much verbal confetti. By the time we get to the ‘incredible visionary’ Charles Ives, the devotional tone is so pervasive that his being said to be ‘so ahead of his time, his music still isn’t known today’, amounts to more of the same dreary adulation.
The Myth of History as Progress
In the series’s march forward through the ages, we see another cultural myth central to Symphony’s narrative; that is the presentation of music history as progress. The history of the symphony is described as the relentless advance of Enlightenment ideals through Europe and beyond in a gathering crescendo of modernity from Haydn’s post-French Revolution London Symphonies to Shostakovich’s 9th at the end of World War II. As already noted, this amounts to the authoritative view of Western music history familiar to ‘educated’ listeners. However, not only does this narrative constitute a particular interpretation of history rather than being fact as presented here, but it also presupposes some deep contradictions; not least, in relation to the music itself. Every composer discussed is said to have been pushing the symphony ‘forward’, ‘turning the page of symphonic history’, and ‘breaking rules’ (although these ‘rules’ are never explained, let alone how they are broken). Certainly, each of the featured composers develops a profoundly individual voice and, of course, approaches to and methods of symphonic writing change over time and according to fashion. But the implication that history is, therefore, in some way causal or goal-directed entails huge ideological leaps.
In any case, there lies a problem in the towering figure of Beethoven, around whom both the series and received music history, pivots (the second episode is the only one of the four to bear a single composer’s name, Beethoven and Beyond). If Beethoven is the ‘indisputable hero’ against whom all other composers are measured, what does it mean for later composers to be nonetheless ‘developing’ the symphony, ‘taking it forward’ ‘beyond’ Beethoven and becoming ‘great’ in their own right? Progress, it seems, is something to be strived for but which is, ultimately, unattainable. With this paradox we arrive firmly at post-Enlightenment, Romantic ideals, but with the disturbing addendum that no composer has managed - or, by implication, ever will manage - to surpass Beethoven’s nine symphonies as these continue to be held as the utopian pinnacle of Western musical achievement. It turns out that a strong belief underlying current mainstream music-history is actually a contradiction; for, on the one hand, Romantic ideals are still held to be supreme but, on the other, they have failed and, moreover, must fail. Musical ‘progress’ has not been, and cannot be, made and the age of the ‘great’ composer is, therefore, dead. In light of this conundrum, it is perhaps not so surprising that a museum culture obsessed with the past should have taken hold regarding classical music.
More problematic is a question regarding Romantic ideas of the transcendent work: for how can a symphony be at once a timeless masterpiece and yet continually surpassed in greatness by later works by the same composer (a point made most vociferously in the series about the symphonies of Sibelius)? Unless, that is, some masterpieces are more masterful than others. These contradictions are, clearly, difficult to reconcile but Symphony merely presents us with swathes of interpretation on the familiar yet ludicrous sliding-scale of genius; a system of indefinable value judgements based on arcane and culturally out-moded criteria. That late-Romantic composers such as Johannes Brahms were intimidated by Beethoven coming from behind with the ‘tramp of a giant’ is no reason for us to continue to view music history, or to judge musical ‘greatness’, through that particular lens. Similarly, the fact that many composers after Beethoven (like Hector Berlioz) idolised him, is no reason for contemporary discourse about classical music still to be dominated by the cult of personality as demonstrated, alas, by this very series.
The Twentieth Century Neglected
Nevertheless, it is instructive to note some personalities absent from the narrative as this throws further light on Symphony’s cultural bias and returns us to the series’s lack of exploration of recent and contemporary music. For, as well as ignoring post-war music entirely, the programme avoids any mention of key modernists from the first half of the Twentieth Century beyond a curt dismissal of the avant-garde. The contention in programme four, Revolution and Rebirth, is that composers writing in late-Romantic idioms such as Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams were ‘actually more important than the avant-garde because they were saying very important things about modernity to a large audience’. This opens an intriguing line of enquiry which, however, remains unexplored, as are the implied assumptions about value and modernity. Elgar and Vaughan Williams undoubtedly were - and remain - important but not all modernists rejected the symphony by any means. Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, for instance, wrote chamber symphonies and a symphony respectively that were very much taken to be saying something important about modernity which continues to reverberate today. But if audience size is the real arbiter of importance, it seems downright odd also to ignore Igor Stravinsky, whose several symphonies placed issues of modernity (as well as specific aspects of modernism) before very large audiences, including via the gramophone, which technological advance the programme rightly deems important.
What cultural value-system might be lurking here to explain the total absence of these and other major Twentieth Century figures (like Carl Nielsen and Serge Prokofiev) from Symphony? A look at the preceding, third episode, New Nations and New Worlds, might offer a clue. For here we discover that it is nationalism that supposedly propelled the symphony from Austria and Germany across late-Romantic Europe, forward into the Twentieth Century and across the Atlantic to the USA. Before we examine this particular narrative more closely, it is worth noting that, whatever aims the many, contrasting avant-garde composers may have had, they were certainly not nationalist in any Romantic sense. So it is, perhaps, unsurprising that they should be excluded from this particular version of history regardless of their actual contribution as symphonic composers.
European Nationalism and Germanic Decline
Looking more closely at the third episode and issues of nationalism, it is true that many Romantic composers sought to establish an individual style that also reflected the music of their birth country. Antonín Dvořák was one such, but it is questionable how far Jean Sibelius continued to be nationalist beyond his youth as distinct from getting stuck with the label; indeed, in terms of his overall career, Sibelius might more accurately be described as a modernist. What is clear, however, is that nationalism has long been a catch-all term to describe music (symphonic or otherwise) which incorporates features of indigenous folk or popular music. Music, that is, of any nation besides Austria or Germany. Because, in keeping with music-historical orthodoxy, the central pillar of the musical establishment as described in Symphony is assumed to be Austro-German (and, incidentally, ‘serious’ as distinct from ‘popular’). Indeed we are told with astonishing assurance that ‘German music was international’. What might this actually mean?
Similar to the phenomenon of individual composers being subject to comparison with Beethoven, in today’s symphonic cultural museum, past Austro-German ‘tradition’ is still taken to be the cultural norm against which other nations are viewed. The resulting double-standards are breath-taking. When Franz Schubert or Brahms, say, are shown to utilise indigenous folk or popular music, their motivation is rarely described in terms of nationalist sentiment. But when Dvořák, Vaughan Williams or Aaron Copland do the same, the talk instantly focuses on ‘national identity’, representations of ‘native soil’ and ‘popularisation’. That such blatantly unbalanced cultural analysis should still be a feature of Western classical music thinking - post-modernism notwithstanding - is an irony that would surely not be lost on those symphonic nationalists who attempted to establish their music in its own right and to challenge the constant comparisons to hegemonic Austro-German ideals that they themselves suffered.
Let us return, then, in the light of these uncomfortable issues around nationalism, to the notion of symphonic decline from the fourth episode with which we started. If the ‘great symphonic tradition in Germany’ is held to have ‘come to an end’ around 1945, it appears we should take this to indicate the loss of some supposedly international cultural custodian. An awful lot of ‘keening’ is described in this final episode, from Shostakovich bassoons to Vaughan Williams bugles and Elgarian oboes. The implication beyond the actual horrors of death and war is clear (as if this were not enough) in a larger sense of cultural decline absolutely at odds with the ‘rebirth’ of the title which, in any case, is never seen actually to materialise. Might this loss of German tradition and ensuing downward slide reveal another underlying reason to end the series at 1945 as if the symphony itself stops there? One would hope not as the implied reliance on Germanic culture to lead the way would be distasteful to say the least. Even within the series’s own dubious terms, further mileage could have been made of the Revolution and Rebirth title with a post-war shift of focus to the Soviet Bloc and refugees from there, if only to bring the narrative closer to the present day. For a clear and continued commitment to the symphony as a genre was palpable post-war in Communist countries such as Poland, to name just one example; there, coming after Karol Szymanowski, with Witold Lutosławski, Krzysztof Penderecki and Andrzej Panufnik.
A great deal more could - and probably should - be said about Symphony as the smooth jolliness of its tone is a cover for so much blithe parochialism. To say the series misses an opportunity is a huge understatement - and not only to discuss contemporary composers and works. For the prevailing museum culture must be overcome if classical music is to re-gain relevance in wider contemporary life as a living art form. Indeed, a contemporary perspective of the symphony as a living genre could have been made a base from which to present a history; by all means including a review of orthodox notions of music-history, but described as such and placed in a framework of critical exploration. The irony of setting so much store by historical interpretation of the unquestioning type we see in Symphony is that it ultimately falls foul of the very issue discussed in episode two with regard to wildly contrasting uses of Beethoven’s 9th (firstly in Nazi Germany, then later at the fall of the Berlin Wall and lastly as an honouring of victims of 9/11); and that is propaganda. There is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ history, and this is as true of music-history as any other. This series demonstrates that how we view history tells us more about who we are in the present than the past times to which we refer. As such, beneath the glossy exterior, it paints a sadly impoverished picture of mainstream classical music culture today.
* See, for example, Lydia Goehr’s enormously influential: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music published by OUP 2007
Tuesday 24 April 2012
Response to Weekend Magazine Gay Special: Guardian 21/4/12
It is hard to know quite who the ‘Gay special’ edition of last Saturday’s Guardian Weekend Magazine was aimed at. Evidently it was felt at the newspaper that a focus on gay culture and gay people was required but why and for whom was not made clear by the resulting publication, which was a kind of ‘rough guide’ verging on titillation for the straight, liberal mainstream. With some bravado, the magazine offered a 'life and style’ perspective on ‘everything gay, from comedy and fashion to family and politics’. Whilst this was never likely to amount to more than a cultural snap-shot it was, however, crudely done and, in places, ill-judged.
Overall, it seemed an exercise in box-ticking that pulled out all the clichés. An interview with Alan Carr supplied the obligatory celebrity tv comic (with the added frisson of his being criticised in some gay quarters for being ‘too’ camp). There was a serious article which purported to be about gay parenting but which was actually about the legal difficulties around international surrogacy affecting straight as well as gay parents (amended online on 23rd April to clarify that the British couple reported as using a Ukrainian surrogacy service were not actually gay).
A sad first-person portrait of a man struggling to reconcile his homosexuality with his Christian beliefs contrasted with an article investigating the apparently contradictory phenomenon of gay (male) Tories; the lame conclusion here being that - shock - Tories can be as diverse as gays! Alongside the pop psychology, careful gender and political balance was ensured through an otherwise banal Q and A with Labour MP Angela Eagle, whilst further entertainment was provided with a ‘special’ gay version of the familiar Weekend Blind Date which was, however, no less inane than usual.
Inevitably, there were shots of gay fashion icons (‘gay’ apparently equaling ‘fashion’ in popular parlance; at least, regarding gay men) and photographs of witty protesters’ slogans were on hand to reassure that gay activism has a cuddlier side. But, veering to a sharply different tone, perhaps the creepiest offering was a confessional article on lesbian lust which, by casting the author in a predatory light, unfortunately only served to showcase that particular lesbian stereotype.
How much more nuanced and genuinely thought-provoking about contemporary gay life were pieces from other mainstream media outlets that same weekend. In the Times (Saturday) Matthew Parris considered the fluidity of male sexuality against a backdrop of bisexual taboo whilst in Sunday’s Observer, Barbara Ellen questioned the pressure on gay women pop singers to present themselves as bisexual rather than be openly lesbian. Both these pieces engaged with issues of sexual politics in a way which, unlike the Guardian’s patronising offering, presupposed a readership capable of subtle thinking. By all means, let’s have a lighthearted look at gay culture - but can we please find a way of doing so which doesn’t marginalise and over-simplify what is a hugely diverse LGBT community at a time when calls for equal rights (regarding marriage, for example) are revealing continued homophobia in many quarters?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/series/weekend-magazine-gay-special
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/ (subscription viewing only)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/22/barbara-ellen-lesbian-popstars-very-rare?INTCMP=SRCH
http://philosovariant.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/what-does-gay-mean.html
Overall, it seemed an exercise in box-ticking that pulled out all the clichés. An interview with Alan Carr supplied the obligatory celebrity tv comic (with the added frisson of his being criticised in some gay quarters for being ‘too’ camp). There was a serious article which purported to be about gay parenting but which was actually about the legal difficulties around international surrogacy affecting straight as well as gay parents (amended online on 23rd April to clarify that the British couple reported as using a Ukrainian surrogacy service were not actually gay).
A sad first-person portrait of a man struggling to reconcile his homosexuality with his Christian beliefs contrasted with an article investigating the apparently contradictory phenomenon of gay (male) Tories; the lame conclusion here being that - shock - Tories can be as diverse as gays! Alongside the pop psychology, careful gender and political balance was ensured through an otherwise banal Q and A with Labour MP Angela Eagle, whilst further entertainment was provided with a ‘special’ gay version of the familiar Weekend Blind Date which was, however, no less inane than usual.
Inevitably, there were shots of gay fashion icons (‘gay’ apparently equaling ‘fashion’ in popular parlance; at least, regarding gay men) and photographs of witty protesters’ slogans were on hand to reassure that gay activism has a cuddlier side. But, veering to a sharply different tone, perhaps the creepiest offering was a confessional article on lesbian lust which, by casting the author in a predatory light, unfortunately only served to showcase that particular lesbian stereotype.
How much more nuanced and genuinely thought-provoking about contemporary gay life were pieces from other mainstream media outlets that same weekend. In the Times (Saturday) Matthew Parris considered the fluidity of male sexuality against a backdrop of bisexual taboo whilst in Sunday’s Observer, Barbara Ellen questioned the pressure on gay women pop singers to present themselves as bisexual rather than be openly lesbian. Both these pieces engaged with issues of sexual politics in a way which, unlike the Guardian’s patronising offering, presupposed a readership capable of subtle thinking. By all means, let’s have a lighthearted look at gay culture - but can we please find a way of doing so which doesn’t marginalise and over-simplify what is a hugely diverse LGBT community at a time when calls for equal rights (regarding marriage, for example) are revealing continued homophobia in many quarters?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/series/weekend-magazine-gay-special
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/ (subscription viewing only)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/22/barbara-ellen-lesbian-popstars-very-rare?INTCMP=SRCH
http://philosovariant.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/what-does-gay-mean.html
Monday 9 April 2012
Letter to Eleanor Mills re "Cuddling Schoolboys Kiss Homophobia Goodbye", Sunday Times 8/4/12
I read your column about the decline of homophobia amongst teenage boys in yesterday's Sunday Times with great interest but some dismay. I would love to believe that you are right in suggesting that we have come from "homo-hysteria to homo-acceptance in a quarter of a century" but, alas, I think you are looking at the issue through very rose-tinted spectacles. The increased tactility you describe amongst some teenage boys is clearly a good thing and might indeed be indicative of positive changes in acceptable masculine behaviour among those groups - but I would suggest this is not as indicative of wider changes in attitude towards LGBT people as you might hope.
Mark McCormack's study is only based on three secondary schools in one town and Ruth Hunt of Stonewall has therefore urged caution with regard to his findings:
"I think it matches what we know in that some schools which are good on this are very, very good. But plenty are not......we still see many schools with significant problems."
Indeed, the youth support charity Allsorts found in a 2010 survey of Brighton schools that 16% of bullied primary school children and 23% of bullied secondary school children reported that the bullying was homophobic in nature. Of LGBT pupils, half reported they had been subject to homophobic bullying. Allsorts spokesperson Jess Ward commented regarding McCormack's study: "It is definitely not our experience, I'm afraid. It remains the second-highest reason children give for bullying." The problem is greater still in Wales, where a 2009 Welsh assembly Government survey found that by far the most prevalent from of bullying in Welsh schools was homophobic. I am sure you will recall the recent tragic suicide of 15 year old Dominic Crouch after homophobic bullying. Sadly, suicide rates for LGBT teens are far higher than for other groups; Dominic wasn't even gay, but subject to gay abuse nonetheless.
Regarding the negative use of the word "gay", do please read my article (published in Planet magazine 205 in February and available to read here: http://philosovariant.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/what-does-gay-mean.html) for a very different view of this change in the language.
http://philosovariant.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/what-does-gay-mean.html
Mark McCormack's study is only based on three secondary schools in one town and Ruth Hunt of Stonewall has therefore urged caution with regard to his findings:
"I think it matches what we know in that some schools which are good on this are very, very good. But plenty are not......we still see many schools with significant problems."
Indeed, the youth support charity Allsorts found in a 2010 survey of Brighton schools that 16% of bullied primary school children and 23% of bullied secondary school children reported that the bullying was homophobic in nature. Of LGBT pupils, half reported they had been subject to homophobic bullying. Allsorts spokesperson Jess Ward commented regarding McCormack's study: "It is definitely not our experience, I'm afraid. It remains the second-highest reason children give for bullying." The problem is greater still in Wales, where a 2009 Welsh assembly Government survey found that by far the most prevalent from of bullying in Welsh schools was homophobic. I am sure you will recall the recent tragic suicide of 15 year old Dominic Crouch after homophobic bullying. Sadly, suicide rates for LGBT teens are far higher than for other groups; Dominic wasn't even gay, but subject to gay abuse nonetheless.
Regarding the negative use of the word "gay", do please read my article (published in Planet magazine 205 in February and available to read here: http://philosovariant.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/what-does-gay-mean.html) for a very different view of this change in the language.
http://philosovariant.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/what-does-gay-mean.html
Monday 19 March 2012
Owl
‘Too much, too much’
Cries the owl behind my head.
Stopping and starting, a
Whole gathering of owls,
Hooting and squeaking as I play
Spot the branch,
Swiveling my head into the
Dark aroma of night.
I sit back down and that
One, insistent voice
Starts up again behind me.
It seems I
Haven’t yet got the message.
Cries the owl behind my head.
Stopping and starting, a
Whole gathering of owls,
Hooting and squeaking as I play
Spot the branch,
Swiveling my head into the
Dark aroma of night.
I sit back down and that
One, insistent voice
Starts up again behind me.
It seems I
Haven’t yet got the message.
Form
Rivulets of sound become matter.
A repeat signals something new -
Time relived as the
Day drains into evening.
Fluid, precise
Exuberant, poised.
All tactics in a
Game of waiting.
A change of key heralds development -
Time spun forwards backwards to a
Recapitulation which will
Come and then go.
A repeat signals something new -
Time relived as the
Day drains into evening.
Fluid, precise
Exuberant, poised.
All tactics in a
Game of waiting.
A change of key heralds development -
Time spun forwards backwards to a
Recapitulation which will
Come and then go.
Saturday 17 March 2012
Beyond Lehman Sisters: New Feminism and Economic Collapse
It is hardly news that only a tiny handful of the world’s economic and business leaders are women and that the glass ceiling remains a real obstacle to their promotion. Many women therefore welcomed Christine Lagarde’s quip when, as French Finance Minister, a year after the global banking collapse of 2008, she suggested that the crisis would have looked very different if Lehman Brothers investment bank had been run by Lehman Sisters. Her remark triggered renewed debate about gender inequality in the financial sector and struck a chord in all areas of the workplace at a time of intense criticism of reckless corporate behaviour. Since then, in an ironic aside to Lagarde’s subsequent appointment as Head of the International Monetary Fund, yet darker aspects of the male-dominance culture within the corridors of fiscal power have been highlighted by the scandals attending the downfall of previous Head Dominic Strauss-Kahn (not to mention the serious allegations of sex crime). The need for reform is both clear and urgent. So how far has the ongoing debate got to the root of gender inequality in business and, beyond, to the root of global economic crisis? The answer is not very far. But the reasons for that lie as much within the terms of the debate itself as within the huge complexities of the issue and the difficulties of enacting reform.
Much of the response to Lagarde’s suggestion has been to take it at face value and pursue those questions directly pertaining to the comment itself; the most obvious being whether she is right. Would it really make a difference to corporate behaviour if more women were at the helm? If so, why? What forms might this difference take? Can we be certain any difference would be positive? Positive for whom exactly? Are we talking in purely economic terms of business performance or, more widely, about the role of business and employment in society? Whatever the starting point, the issues very quickly become multiple, complex and far-reaching. Even so, things would appear simple at base for the statistics documenting the lack of women in business are dire; a mere 15% of directors in FTSE100 companies are women despite growing evidence of improved market success for those companies with a greater female presence in the boardroom. To take just one study, a four-year, 2009 US analysis of Fortune 500 companies found that returns were much higher on equity (53%), sales (42%) and invested capital (66%) for those with most women in top management teams compared to those dominated by men. Echoing other surveys, the results were strongest in those companies with at least three women on the board of directors. So it seems clear that encouraging women up the corporate ladder is vital to improving society’s fiscal health - if not to saving its very economic core from potential meltdown.
But there is a growing and uncomfortable sense of deja-vu about the debate, not least because it is failing to address deeper systemic issues. As opinions polarise around Lagarde’s remark and how to tackle the often misogynist cronyism of the old boys’ network, a crass kind of dualistic thinking has re-emerged around gender issues on all sides of the debate in which women are seen only in comparison to men. Indeed, Lagarde’s very comment is predicated upon such binary thinking for, however challenging it may be to the financial establishment to raise issues of gender from within its very heart, and, however controversial her grounds may be for a favourable comparison of female behaviour to male within that predominantly male environment, she is nonetheless advocating nothing more radical than a call for more women to hold positions of corporate power. In a way reminiscent of the identity politics of the ‘80s and ‘90s, she has invited discussion of the role of women in business in terms of how far women are included and represented and in terms of the particular skills they might bring to the table. But, in mainstream circles at least, that discussion does not extend to a feminist critique of Western capitalism itself, despite the system being one in which women, usually participating as unpaid, cheap or cheaper labour, are very much poorer, second class citizens. (Even those women lucky enough to be in full-time employment can expect to earn 16.4% less than their male counterparts, while all women aged 40 earn 27% less than men of the same age according to a 2010 study by the Equality and Human Rights Commission; a statistic sadly demonstrating a very unfavourable comparison of women’s position to that of men’s).
In its current form, the Western capitalist system is not just failing financially, but it is also increasingly dysfunctional at a cultural level; for, whilst lip-service is paid to the supposed mobility of the free-market, in reality, the system is designed in such a way that profit inevitably comes at the expense of social equality both here in the UK and abroad through, for example, morally-dubious foreign outsourcing practices. Indeed, the structure and behaviour of corporations and financial markets is increasingly revealed to run counter to democratic ideals and basic principles of socio-economic justice. The very urgency of the renewed gender debate is testimony to the failure of previous feminist campaigns in business and politics that may well have changed some attitudes towards women for the better and opened some doors for them in the process, but which have been unable to effect systemic reform and are now foundering on the rocks of economic globalisation and collapse.
Naomi Klein is one commentator who might urge us not to miss the economic wood for the trees at this time of global financial crisis. Ten years ago, in her hard-hitting de-construction of corporate culture “No Logo”, Klein argued that an obsession with identity politics prevented activists of the late ‘80s and ‘90s from noticing the ingress of a far greater threat to freedom and equality; identity branding. She contested that, as activists indulged in self-referential turf-fights over the representation and visibility of gays, women and ethnic minorities, they lost sight of the bigger economic picture; they simply did not notice when powerful corporations, already switched on to the youth marketing goldmine of ‘cool’, began actively to appropriate notions of diversity as marketing tools (those infamous Benetton ads appearing to challenge racial stereotypes, for example). Indeed, a corporate coup d’etat took place under the activists’ very noses in which companies successfully exploited global markets in new ways by means of cynical appeal to oppressed groups, utilising the very language of social activism (Nike, for example, promoting sports shoes as objects of female and black freedom and status). In Klein’s words: “identity politics weren’t fighting the system, or even subverting it. When it came to the vast new industry of corporate branding, they were feeding it.”
Today - and right on cue it seems, amidst claims of a supposed ‘90s cultural revival - a new wave of identity politics is cresting as brand-worship has become ubiquitous on every social and cultural level despite rising unemployment, the outstripping of wages by inflation and increasing chasms between rich and poor, the West and developing nations. Governments are adopting punitive austerity programmes and slashing public spending in moves that target their most vulnerable citizens but which are so far failing to halt the collapse of the Eurozone and global financial systems following the credit crunch. Against this backdrop, heated debates are taking place in the UK about everything from Scandinavian-style boardroom quotas for women to new trends in oxymoronic Tory feminism as the Conservative party tries to stop the haemorrhage of its hard-hit female support base. But the toxic legacies of Thatcherite financial deregulation and profit-worship with which we are now faced serve as an ironic reminder that greater involvement by women at management level hardly guarantees greater long-term economic stability, nor does it ensure financial justice for those women and men in the West and the developing world who are paying the highest price for an increasingly sociopathic Western capitalism. Seen from this perspective, current speculation about whether women might, for example, be more or less prone than men to indulge in risky business ventures is not only based on banal gender stereotype, but would ultimately appear to be beside the point.
As the reality and consequences of economic collapse hit home, substantive, not just symbolic, reform is now urgent. It is more vital than ever to become aware of the bigger economic picture and to take action in light of its problems. Whilst battles to do away with glass ceilings and bring about changes in the gender balance of financial institutions are undoubtedly crucial, they can equally be used as a convenient red herring to distract from the wider, more fundamental need to effect deep, systemic reform in the way capitalist structures operate; the urgency of which calls for real, feminist vision from women - and men - experts within the business world. Of course, some form of identity politics need not be incompatible with a broader focus on economic reform but that is the point; the debate needs to take conscious account of the failure of concepts such as ‘trickle-down’, with the unwarranted faith in market success eventually to provide social and economic progress for all. If we truly aspire to notions of democracy and freedom, then ways must be found to establish real principles of equal opportunity and equal access at the heart of our socio-economic system, not merely as desperate add-ons in an attempt to find some kind of panacea to financial and social disaster. As a society, that will entail not just a willingness to tackle the behaviour of powerful corporations that are currently failing to run the system even in their own interests, but to take a good, hard look at our monetary values and undertake a cultural reassessment of how we define ourselves as women and men within the financial landscape. We now need to decide what roles we choose to accept as gendered individuals within a financial system that so plainly affects not just our own but the socio-economic well-being of other women, men and children across the globe.
Published on Interactive Ecology 17th March 2012: paper.li/saphyreblue/1306436290
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