Tag Writing

On Being a Patron of the Arts

Graeme Hall Leave a comment

Like many people I might daydream over what I would do if I won the lottery, or if I suddenly came into an inheritance from a long lost rich uncle. Neither is likely given that I don’t play the lottery and I’m pretty sure that there are no golden apples hanging from the branches of my family tree, but still, I can dream. There are the obvious things: a nicer house, perhaps a villa in Cap d’Ail, the Ferrari (or two), expensive holidays, but what do you do when you’ve ticked off the predictable extravagancies? Well, I know what I’d do – I’d commission pieces of music. I’d become a patron of the arts.

For some reason, music lends itself to patronage particularly well. I’ve never heard of anyone commissioning an author out of altruism. Alas. Plays perhaps are different. Like music, theatre is a performing art and theatres will commission writers, but even then I’m not sure how often a play is paid for by someone with no direct interest. Paintings and sculptures may be commissioned, but that’s more of a retail purchase. The person paying gets the picture.

But my heroes/heroines are people like the Princesse de Polignac (aka Winnaretta Singer), who used her sewing machine wealth to commission music from the likes of Stravinsky, Satie and Poulenc, and Paul Sacher, the Swiss conductor and pharmaceutical billionaire whose fortune gave birth to pieces from Bartok and Stravinsky to Benjamin Britten and Elliot Carter.

Winnaretta Singer (self-portrait)

And once, just once (so far, anyway) I joined this illustrious company. This was back in the 1990s. I was working in Hong Kong with a good salary for the first time in my life, and through a friend of mine, Pippa Hyde, I commissioned a work from the percussionist and composer James Wood. The result was Jodo, a music theatre piece for soprano, percussion and electronics premiered in Oxford in 1999 with Kuniko Kato, the brilliant Japanese percussionist for whom it was written, and the soprano Sarah Leonard. I was always a great admirer of Sarah Leonard and was very sad to hear of her death last year.

The programme from 1999 signed by the composer and performers.
Sarah Leonard.

Looking back from a distance of over 26 years, what do I remember about that 1999 premiere? Not a lot, to be honest. I remember being nervous in the company of James Wood, not wanting to make a fool of myself (and in turn embarrass Pippa), but what did I make of the music? I think I was a little underwhelmed. It seemed a strange piece. It is based on a short story by Yukio Mishima, The Priest of Shiga Temple and his Love, a peculiar story that tells of an aged priest who has renounced earthly pleasures in favour of Jodo – the “Pure Land” of a Buddhist heaven. I hope I may be forgiven for terminology that is no doubt completely incorrect in Buddhist theology, but I don’t know how else to express the concept. All is well until one day he catches a glimpse of the Great Imperial Concubine and her beauty shatters his convictions. Mishima tells of the emotional and spiritual anguish of both the priest and the imperial concubine, but the story itself ends ambiguously. In 1999 I struggled and had difficulty coming to grips with the theology behind the Pure Land. Today I feel a little different. I now appreciate the story’s open-ended nature and ambiguities, though it’s still a very elusive piece of writing that is hard to grasp. Just when I think I understand it, it slips from my hands.

After that 1999 concert, Jodo faded from my memory. I know it was performed in Japan in 2005, but now, finally, it has been recorded, with Kuniko Kato again and Anja Petersen, who sang the part that Sarah Leonard created, and released by Sargasso. Of course I bought it straightaway.

So what do I think of it now? I think it’s fabulous. There is some particularly beautiful electronics created at IRCAM. Describing the Pure Land, Mishima tells of instruments “which play by themselves without ever being touched” and of a “myriad other hundred-jewelled birds…raising their melodious voices in praise of the Buddha.” It’s not difficult to hear how this has inspired the composer. Kuniko Kato plays a variety of both Japanese and Western percussion as the priest, including brilliantly virtuosic drum and marimba sections. Anja Petersen’s high soprano alternates between cold haughtiness and doubt.

I don’t know whether I will ever get the chance to hear Jodo live again, but I now feel very proud that in my small way I helped this music come into existence.

Reading the World: Books in Translation

Graeme Hall Leave a comment

Whenever we are spending time at our home in France I enjoy browsing the bookshops, and in Nice there are at least three good independents that I know of. Not that I buy many books when I’m there because my French isn’t really good enough. I can just about manage a crime novel if I’m prepared to take my time with it and have a dictionary to hand. Books with a lot of dialogue are easier for me than anything with long, convoluted sentences. Proust is a no-no.

But what always strikes me is the range of general fiction that is available in translation. Particularly books translated from English to French. And it’s not just the classics – Austen, Dickens and so on – but many recently published books, from contemporary literary fiction to more mainstream writers, and plenty of genre fiction: crime, SF/Fantasy, romance and YA. All this is laid out on tables for easy browsing, not hidden away in a special section on the third floor. I even have a friend in England whose first novel was published in its French translation before it came out in the UK.

This is a remarkable openness to foreign literature, all the more impressive (perhaps even surprising?) coming from a country that is justly proud – and indeed protective – of its own culture, and I wonder whether in the UK we have the same interest in writing from other languages? To a degree perhaps, certainly Murakami and Knausgaard are easy to find in Waterstones, but less celebrated writers? Genre writers? No doubt there are others that I’ve missed, but apart from the piles of increasingly derivative Scandi noir, I’m not so sure. Where is the French science fiction or the Portuguese crime?

If in the UK mainstream publishers and retailers hesitate to offer books in translation, what we do have instead are some excellent small indies that specialise in bringing the best writing from wherever to Anglophone readers. Pushkin Press and nordisk books (the lower case is not a typo) are two examples, but one that I would like to celebrate here is Peirene Press. Over the last few years, they’ve introduced me to novels by writers from Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Chile, Egypt, France, Sweden and Norway. You can buy their books individually, but what I appreciate is their subscription model where for a single annual payment I get three books a year. I don’t think I save much (if anything) this way, but what it means is that I read books I probably would never have considered buying normally.

I’ve just finished Imagine Breaking Everything (Imagina que rompes todo) by the Colombian writer Lina Munar Guevara, beautifully translated by Ellen Jones. Link here Peirene Press – award-winning independent publisher. This tells the story of the 18-year-old Melissa and a weekend she spends with her slightly estranged mother.  Melissa is hoping to graduate from high school and go to college (there are complications) and is such a well-written character. She is deeply flawed and prone to acts of violence – and we learn why, it’s not really her fault – but her honesty and self-awareness mean that we root for her nevertheless. She is also very funny. There is terrific writing from Lina Munar Guevara; one sentence in particular impressed me in the way that in a mere six words the reader is very cleverly told a key (and quite unexpected) plot point. I was left gasping in admiration for the skill with which that was done – but of course I can’t tell you more. Too much of a spoiler!

There’s nothing like literature to show you other people’s lives, we all know that, but it is even more the case with books in translation. Perhaps I don’t need to know what it is like to be a young woman in Bogotá and what daily life is like in a less than salubrious suburb, but my life is richer for having spent time in Melissa’s company.

I hope she did make it to college in the end.

On Silence

Graeme Hall Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking a lot about silence lately.

Of course, as John Cage taught us, absolute silence does not exist so perhaps I need to define my terms, but silence as we commonly understand it, extreme quietness perhaps, seems to be something that most people appear anxious to avoid, almost as if they were afraid of it and feel the need to keep it at bay with empty talk, banalities that blanket the sound of time’s wing’d chariot. Restaurants – even the finest Michelin-starred establishments – play background music, train journeys are accompanied by the modern scourge of music from phones (I’ve even seen people doing that on country walks). On a recent trip to London one woman talked at (not to) her companion for three hours straight (and how did her friend feel about that?).

What is it that people are so afraid of? Their own thoughts? Do they equate, if only subconsciously, silence with emptiness? The void? The silence of the grave?

Fernand Knopff, Silence, 1890

I love silence, quietness at least, though I appreciate that this does nothing for my social life, and I am certainly no fun at parties. But silence gives space to reflect and consider, and it’s no surprise that most religious traditions recognise the value of time spent in silence. I love the way it comes in different guises, quite different from each other: the silence of late at night is the sound of the day’s energy dissipating, while the quiet of dawn – depending on the amount of birdsong! – is pregnant with possibilities. The silence of the new, the day as yet untarnished, not yet spoilt by the inanities of modern life.

It was Debussy who said that the music lies in the space between the notes. An elusive comment for sure, much like his music, but consider the tension that rests in the air between the final chords of Sibelius 5 – and the fact that they are irregularly spaced only adds to the effect – or countless examples where composers leave brief pauses. Think of a piece as well-known as the slow movement from Dvorak 9. Don’t simply listen for the famous tune, listen for the silences that are coloured by the notes that come before and after. The silence is never empty, but is shaped by what surrounds it. It is a positive absence of notes that makes it musical material in its own right.

Silence in literature is an even more complex – and paradoxical – issue than it is in music. Silence on the stage is a standard effect – Pinter being only the most famous – but how do we talk about silence in novels? Characters may be silent, and silence (hesitations, ellipses) can be a key part of writing good dialogue – and what a character doesn’t say is often more important than what they do – but can fiction itself be silent, and not merely quiet as in understated? The French writer Pascal Quignard says that “The book is a piece of silence in the hands of the reader.” I like that. I also like Graham Swift’s echo of Debussy when he wrote that “the spaces between and around words can have their unspoken resonances”. I feel sure I’m going to come back to this.

So, a plea for more silence – or at least quiet – in the world. Enjoy the aesthetic qualities of silence itself and how it is shaped by and shapes in return the world around it.

And remember Wittgenstein: whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent.