Tag contemporary music

Can (Good) Music Be Political?

Graeme Hall Leave a comment

The Hallé Orchestra in Manchester has just finished a series of concerts with the American composer John Adams conducting his own music. I’ve loved his music since I first came across Shaker Loops back in the mid-1980s, to the extent that my girlfriend Isobel and I travelled all over the country if there was a chance of hearing something of his live, and his music was so little known in the UK back then that those performances were often UK premieres: Grand Pianola Music (1985) at the Almeida Festival, Harmonium (Birmingham, 1987),  Harmonielehre (Huddersfield, 1987), and Nixon in China in Edinburgh (1988). It was a special time for those of us in the know, a small group of admirers who were in on a secret. In short, I’m a fan.

So, I wasn’t going to miss these concerts and they didn’t disappoint. The performance of Harmonium on the first evening was particularly special, but it was the main item in the final concert, Scheherazade.2, that triggered a series of thoughts. It’s a magnificent piece of music; a 50 minute “dramatic symphony” (Adams’ words) for violin and orchestra, played with astonishing virtuosity and commitment by its original dedicatee, the Canadian-American Leila Josefowicz, but it acted as a seed around which a number of pre-existing worries crystallised. There is a clue in the title. While in no way (I think) intended as a criticism of Rimsky-Korsakov, Adams takes a very different approach to the character of Scheherazade and the piece reflects his views of how women are treated in the present-day, in particular – though not exclusively – in those (many) societies where women are repressed.

And all that is very laudable, not something I would dream of criticising, but did it in any way affect how I heard the music? If I hadn’t read the programme note or heard Adams’ pre-concert talk, would I have realised that was what the music was about? I very much doubt it. And will it change the position of women in Afghanistan? Of course not. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it enormously simply as a large-scale symphony-concerto full of drama, emotion, and colour, but as social activism? Perhaps I’m being unfair on Adams. His view of a modern-day Scheherazade may simply have been a starting point, and the brilliance of Leila Josefowicz was another, leading to what first and foremost is a wonderful piece of music, but in the pre-concert talk he spoke approvingly of today’s composers for whom the non-musical themes of their work are of critical importance, citing as examples John Luther Adams and Gabriella Smith who write music focussed on environmental issues.

And that’s where I have my concerns. I can’t comment on Gabriella Smith as I am not familiar with her music (I shall have to explore it), but for me John Luther Adams comes nowhere close to his near namesake in the quality and interest of the music itself, and no matter how praiseworthy a composer’s extra-musical intentions may be, if the ideas behind the music become more important than the music itself, then something is wrong. Adams spoke about composers for whom content was more important than style, and while it’s great that current composers don’t feel constrained to write in any one style, the content must still be primarily musical content that is interesting and memorable.

But can classical music (for want of a better term) ever function as both an art and effective activism? I have my doubts. I struggle to think of many successful examples. Mozart? Perhaps Figaro a little – we forget today how radical Beaumarchais’ play was. Beethoven? Perhaps Fidelio. The finale of the ninth, possibly. But that’s all. Brahms, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov? Hardly. In the twentieth-century what pieces are there that successfully tackle societal and political (in the broadest sense of that word) issues and which have lasted in the repertoire? Tippett’s A Child of Our Time, Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Britten’s War Requiem, Shostakovich’s Babi Yar, Reich’s Different Trains? Perhaps there are others, but I don’t think there are many, and what these examples all share is that they have texts. (Looking at that list of pieces again, I also realise that four of the five works are a response to the consequencies of antisemitism, but that’s another topic for another day.)

As a writer and music lover I have a foot in both camps. I share Mahler’s view that music takes us to places that words alone cannot, and yet there are times also when words are necessary and the two work in combination. But even then, good motives are not enough to produce a great piece of music that will resonate over the decades.

Sleep (Revisited)

Graeme Hall Leave a comment

Five years ago I wrote about Max Richter’s eight-hour piece Sleep. It was being broadcast on Radio 3 and I’d taken the opportunity to listen to it through the night (in the spare room for the sake of marital harmony). I never imagined back then that I would have the chance to experience Sleep live, but finally last month I did, when Richter gave two performances in London’s Alexandra Palace to celebrate Sleep’s tenth anniversary.

I didn’t hesitate. Well, not quite, once I’d got over the shock of the ticket prices that offended my Yorkshire sensibility, I didn’t hesitate, after all would I ever get the chance again? It is such a challenge for the performers that I wonder for how many more years Richter will want to do it. A month later and I am still processing the experience, quite unlike anything else I have ever been to. What strikes me, though, is that looking back on what I said five years ago I would say much the same thing now, though all my emotions were stronger for being at a live performance.

For a start there is the sheer magic of the music; the heart is captured from the first piano chords, while Grace Davidson’s soprano is a thing of wonderous beauty. The time flows so quickly. I didn’t sleep – though many did – but I never wanted to. I wanted to experience the piece in its entirety. Ideally, the perfect way to do so would be to get into that liminal stage between sleep and wakefulness. Perhaps I managed that for a few hours between 1am and 4am when I experienced something quite remarkable: I felt an overwhelming, almost relgious, sense of love. It was as if the music itself was holding me in an embrace where nothing bad could possibly happen.

For the final hour or so I wanted not only to be awake but to leave my bed and join others who were standing and sitting close to the performers. All live music is a communal experience that you share with others, but there is something special about sharing the music with strangers you have spent the night with! There is something again almost religious, a secular all-night vigil, the sense of a journey coming to an end. Max Richter spoke a few words before the performance concluding by saying simply “See you on the other side”, and that is how it felt. We had passed through the perils and dangers of the night together.

At 6am I walked out into the daylight and a beautiful late summer morning with the sun just starting to strike the City. For once, for one short period of time,all was incredibly well with the world.

Farewell to an era

Graeme Hall Leave a comment

There’s a line in Robert Altman’s movie “A Prairie Home Companion” where Virginia Madsen – playing the angel Asphodel dressed in a white trench-coat – comforts a bereaved woman by reminding her that the death of an old man is not a tragedy.

I had to remind myself of those words last week with the death of Harrison Birtwistle. He was 87 and after a rich and fulfilling life his death was not a tragedy, and yet it seemed one to me. I felt as if a huge figure in my life had gone. His music was amongst the first that I came to know when I started exploring the world of contemporary music back in the late 1970s early 80s: Verses for Ensembles, Punch & Judy, The Triumph of Time and perhaps above all The Mask of Orpheus (how I adore that opera and how I hated the 2019 ENO production). Others can express better than I can the combination of intellectual rigour coupled with a physicality, a visceral quality that was all his own and yet with a lyrical aspect that was all too often overlooked.

But perhaps what hits home the most is that his death in many ways feels like the end of an era. Norman Lebrecht referred to “the death of Britain’s last great composer”, and while I am sure he was as usual being deliberately provocative, and I hope that he is wrong, there is a glimmer of truth in this and it’s not just in the UK. Birtwistle was of the generation that gave us Boulez, Ligeti, Xenakis and Berio, all now gone. I love the likes of Glass, Reich, Adams and Pärt, but let’s face it, they’re no spring chickens. I hope that it’s not just my advancing years speaking when I say that I don’t find their counterparts among today’s composers, talented though they may be. There are plenty of people writing fluent, enjoyable music, but few with any strong sense of identity and with such a strong personal voice.

I worry. I worry that this is a reflection of today’s world where there seems to be a reaction against high art, where elite is a dirty concept and shallow ideas rule over depth and intellect. So, I worry, but in the meantime all I can do is to enjoy the legacy that Birtwistle left for us.

Sleep. Perchance to listen.

Graeme Hall 2 Comments

Sleep. Perchance to dream.

There are of course plenty of pieces of music where sleep is an unintended, unwanted consequence, and let’s be honest it’s happened to all of us at one time or another, but with Max Richter’s eight-hour Sleep it is the objective. Described as an eight-hour lullaby when it was premiered in 2015 at the Wellcome Collection library in London – as part of an exhibition devoted to the science of sleep I recall – the audience had beds and sleeping bags. The recording of that premiere was broadcast again on BBC Radio 3 the night of Saturday into Easter Sunday morning, in response to lockdown-anxiety, and broadcast in many other countries over the same weekend. I knew more or less what to expect from the one hour extracts available on the from Sleep disc but I had never heard the whole piece, so that night I decamped to the spare bedroom (for the sake of marital harmony) with a Bluetooth speaker.

It is possible to read about how Max Richter worked with neuroscientist David Eagleman, to learn about how the music references sleep patterns, about how the pitch spectrum was chosen to bring the listener into a womb-like state, but that all falls away in the face of the sheer sensual beauty of the music. The subtle interplay between the live musicians (piano and keyboards, five string players, and the ethereal soprano of Grace Davidson) and electronics was such that at times I wasn’t even sure which I was listening to, and the transitions as one section segued into the next…blissful.

I didn’t want to fall asleep, so gorgeous was the music I wanted to keep listening, but after an hour or two I inevitably did and the music worked its way into my dreams. I woke a couple of times during the night and when I did I felt a sense of extreme contentment, lying in bed bathed in this magical sound world and knowing that other people across the country were doing just the same.

Sleep. Perchance to listen.

Avoiding ossification

Graeme Hall Leave a comment

A first post in my new blog. Sometimes I will be talking about music, sometimes writing, sometimes…who knows? This one though is definitely music.

This year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival has just come to an end. The 39th Festival no less. I first went to HCMF back in the mid-1980s when it was run by Richard Steinitz. One year there was a memorable visit by John Cage, another time a young John Adams. The likes of Xenakis, Berio and Birtwistle featured prominently, and I remember showing Arne Nordheim the way to the Town Hall one night when he was lost. Composers who I think of as being absolute masters of the late twentieth century. Then in 1993 I moved abroad not to return until 2010 and when I started going back to Huddersfield I found that it had changed. Or at least so it seemed.

Instead of the Big Names of contemporary music, composers likely to be featured by the BBC at the Proms for example, there was more of an emphasis on the extreme fringes of the avant-garde. Composers I had never even heard of such as Rebecca Saunders and Georg Friedrich Haas. Music that often lived in the space where contemporary classical music (for want of a better term) met experimental jazz and improvisation. And I have to admit that at first I was disappointed: Where were the heroes of my youth? And then, even more alarmingly, I started to worry that as I was growing older my tastes were starting to ossify. Although my wife thinks that I listen to “strange music”, it seemed to me that too many of the concerts were too strange even for me.

So, realising that perhaps the fault lay with me and not the music, I went to a lunchtime concert featuring the Australian group Elision and composers I didn’t know, and where I was (almost literally – it was very loud) blown away by Aaron Cassidy’s The wreck of former boundaries for 2 trumpets with clarinet, saxophone, trombone, contrabass, lap-steel guitar and multi-channel electronics. A composer who I had never heard of writing music of visceral power, played with stunning virtuosity by the two solo trumpets. Highly dissonant, and yet the spirit of free jazz (Ornette Coleman an influence on the music) never seemed too far away.

In short it was wonderful (as was Rebecca Saunders’ Skin in another concert) and it reminded me of the importance of taking a chance on things, and keeping open ears and an open mind. No matter how old you are.