Happy old year

Just to see the old year out, here's an out-take from the hothouse studios. I was messing around with some samples just now. Noir-ish ambience, deserted street, guy in a trilby stopping to light cigarette...

Burt Bugarach

"Lord, we don't need another mountain, there are mountains and hillsides enough to climb....to last us until the end of time". Presumably we will be allowed to climb up Bugarach once again, the mountain having been the centre of attention of the world's media this past week. The danger of the mountain exploding and the emergence of the green lizard people's spacecraft has now passed, at least temporarily. My friend Andrew in Newcastle has suggested the village now celebrate the dawn of this post-apocalyptic era with a festival of easy-listening music.

I went up there last night to see what was happening. Stopped by bored but good-natured gendarmes I was allowed through the road checkpoint. The journalists and TV crews have by far outnumbered the population of the village. Bugarach folk were not much in evidence. Desperate last-minute interviews with anyone willing to talk about why they'd come and what they thought about the end of the world. A few alien-spotters who had come to party in the wind and drizzle. As I walked around the backstreets to record the ambient sounds of this momentous non-event, it was really pretty quiet.

Travels in the North

...is the title of a little travel journal I found in a 2nd hand bookstore in Derbyshire. I knew of the author Karel Capek (1890-1938) because if his dystopian visions of the future (such as War with the Newts), a world with mass production, weapons of mass destruction, peopled by recalcitrant androids and robots (he is credited with inventing the word robot around 1920). But this book was quite different, and curiously absorbing, even if you don't much care frozen wastelands of the Far North. The author "travelled north beyond the arctic circle because he wanted to see at last the lands of his boyish dreams, and of his life-long friends, Kiergaard, Jacobsen, and the others, and also because of the silvery cool birch trees, the aconites, the moss, and the sparkling waters appeal to him strongly." It's full of eccentric characters, ecstatic descriptions of rock formations, icebergs, scant vegetation, and funny anecdotes.

Something he alludes to is the silence of the far north. Having just returned from Helsinki after a little tour of concerts of contemporary Finnish music with soprano Janneke Moes, I was struck too about how quiet everything is. Even in the city. It's a bit of a cliché about the Finns but you sense the silence of everyone's personal space more than the city soundscape. I get the impression of a very filtered listening experience going on. The sound environment is a superficial layer, blotted out...
There are lots of interesting sounds to be heard all around Helsinki. Here is a little remix of a jazz song written for Janneke, words by Teemu Suuntamaa - his English translation of his own poem, but he speaks a few words of the Finnish original, and some seabirds recorded early one morning...

War, Warlock, gongs and silence

With the last 1st World War veterans dying last year (both aged 110) I wonder if Armistice Day silence will pass into history. The artist Jonty Semper assembled all the 2-minute silences from the BBC archives from 1929 to 2000. This is what this year's sounded like from the Hothouse compound...

I was practising the accompaniment to a song by Peter Warlock this morning, My Own Country, words by Hilaire Belloc. The poem is regarded as patriotic, and Belloc was a supporter of the British involvement in the 'great' war, becoming a military correspondent, making several trips to the Western Front. He used to exaggerate the extent of German casualties and made inaccurate estimates as to when the war would be over. But there could be another message - I wondered if this could be an anti-war poem, the narrator being the homecoming of the ghost of a dead British soldier.

My own country

I shall go without companions,
And with nothing in my hand;
I shall pass through many places
That I cannot understand
Until I come to my own country,
Which is a pleasant land.

The trees that grow in my own country
Are the beech tree and the yew;
Many stand together,
And some stand few.
In the month of May in my own country
All the woods are new.

When I get to my own country
I shall lie down and sleep;
I shall watch in the valleys
The long flocks of sheep,
And then I shall dream, for ever and all,
A good dream and deep.

It's interesting that Philip Heseltine, aka Peter Warlock (he adopted this pseudonym because of his interest in the occult) was a notorious drunkard and hell-raiser, but found the time to write acres of extraordinarily haunting and original music (apart from the Capriol Suite, which is the only work he's remembered for), 150 art songs, and lush complex instrumental works during his short life. 

This time last year I was teaching a gamelan course at the Birmingham Conservatoire. On that day 11/11/11 the students collectively composed this piece during the morning session...

Borah

When I was a student and preparing a concerto to play with the university orchestra in my 2nd year, I was on the receiving end of a hit-and-run driver on a dark country lane near York University. My bike was a right-off but I survived with just a few bruises and a broken right collar bone. A couple of months strapped into a bolt upright position and my arm in a sling. Which is why I ended changing the proposed programme and preparing the Ravel concerto for the left hand. Long after I was back to normal I was still fascinated by the figure of one-handed pianist Paul Wittgenstein and the great legacy of left-hand repertoire he commissioned or arranged himself. Being a left-hander (cack-handed, southpaw, molly-dooker, scrammy...) I was looking into all the handedness and brain hemisphere research at that time. Then I came across an incredible solo piano album by Borah Bergman, one side of which was just improvisations for the left hand (though from the density of the notes and ideas, you'd never have guessed). A few years later I ended up as his student for a few months in NYC, dividing my time between the Creative Music Studio in upstate New York, and the city. I wrote a couple of articles about him for the music press. A man obsessed with practicing he even carried a sawn-off dummy keyboard in a bag so he could train his left hand while riding the subway! He could play fantastic bebop at breakneck speed in a Bud Powell style, normally or with hands crossed so that left hand playing the improvised line, while at the same time explaining where his torrential, jagged form of free jazz had its roots. The most original jazz pianist I ever heard, and one of the great musicians of our time died on October 18th 2012 age 85.
A small dedication from my most recent recording session with cellist Stan Adler.

6s and 7s #5

I've worked at the Esperaza school of music since 2007. Sadly this year it closes its doors to the hundred students who used it because of funding problems and the mairies of Couiza and Espéraza are not interested in raising their miserly contributions. Merci Monsieur Hortala! Merci Monsieur Torrent! Children of your municipalities will now do without music lessons.
There was something strange, a feeling of time suspended, about spending long hours in that classroom and the half-hourly procession of young pianists.

6s and 7s #4

Emails have started arriving about forthcoming Carnival meetings. Both Kate and I have been with one particular band, Les Droles ever since its inception 6 years ago but have decided to hang up the twirly sticks and masks - all costing too much money... and time. Long meetings discussing minutiae very seriously, like what are we going to eat? and drink at each café on the big day?? Perhaps instead we will go out as goudils - the independent carnivaliers, dressed grotesquely, who follow behind the musicians and generally amuse, annoy or frighten the public.
The source material of no.4 are the chants, shouts and dancing on the table in the cavernous gymnasium with a few hundred other carnival lunatics on the day of all bands La Journée de toutes les bandes 7th March 2010.
I should be posting some Pergolesi instead - I've just accompanied the Chorale Populaire de Limoux in the Musée du Piano on their 1921 Steinway grand in a performance of the Stabat Mater.