Top 6 - Pop Songwriters

 Prompted by the thought, below, that Smokey Robinson is clearly one of them - for The Tracks of My Tears, A Heart like Mine and all that first Miracles album, The Tears of a Clown.

One of the more modest things that Bob Dylan ever did was say that Smokey was the real poet. Somehow capable of sounding both joyous and forlorn at the same time, he is gracious enough in defeat when betting Berry Gordy that Marvin Gaye did I Heard It Through the Grapevine before Gladys Knight when he didn't.

It would make for an easy job here just to list all the Motown songwriters and it wouldn't be too far wrong, it just might look a bit partisan but Holland-Dozier-Holland are essential for all that they did for the Supremes, continuing beyond Motown with Band of Gold but having been, as I understand it, a production line within the Hit Factory with one doing words, one music and one arrangements, more or less. Profound purists might prefer the troubadour types who authentically sang songs they wrote themselves over their own chords on acoustic guitar or piano but it doesn't have to be like that. All one wants is a good record however it is contrived.

Before going any further, Stephin Merritt's agonizingly dark songs of romance come from a recipe of his own with a pop sensibility undermined by ironies that make them art without us concerning ourselves about sincerity.

And, thus, Burt Bacharach whose work gave Cilla and Dionne their timeless masterpieces until one finds that he wrote much of the 60's soundtrack that didn't come from the Beatles or Detroit. Anyone Who Had a Heart, Walk On By, I Say a Little Prayer and even up to On My Own by Patti Labelle with Michael MacDonald straining to keep up.

It's been all blokes so far and although it's not impossible that songwriting comes as part of the male DNA, it's equally likely that the top jobs in the Golden Age of pop music were taken up by men as some sort of droit de seigneur. One of Burt's marriages was to Carole Bayer Sager and it comes as some surprise that what could have been quite a competitive relationship lasted nine years. While not really allowed by the rules of the game to mention near misses, Joni Mitchell is under serious consideration as I write but it almost does her a disservice to call her 'pop'. A Case of You almost gets her in on its own and Dory Previn is special, not revisited enough for many years. But the answer is Carole King who, having dealt with with Neil Sedaka in Oh, Neil, and a similar nine-year stretch with a songwriting husband, went on to write her Tapestry album, Oh, No, Not My Baby, One Fine Day and, yes, sometimes I also 'stayed in bed all morning just to pass the time'.

And so, we arrive in this situation every time. Five places thrown away like confetti but to those you can't take it back from. And Odyssey If You're Looking for a Way Out is on the wireless - Stop, stop pretending, it must be whoever wrote that, especially if they wrote the other Odyssey masterpieces.

I'm not having Lennon-McCartney who don't belong on the same list of poets as those above. Not Jagger-Richards, either, who did good work but most of which was posturing. I'd love it to be George Michael, it is Gregory Isaacs if measured by how many of his records I ever bought and, depending on how much Al Green wrote of his best songs it could be him.

It's a dubious business, song writing credits. Wasn't there a story that Col. Tom Parker inserted himself as co-author of Elvis B sides, that got the same royalty as the hit A side.

No, it's not his fault that he chose such a tremendous song to do a version of that his best track wasn't one he wrote himself when he did Wild is the Wind on Station to Station.  

It's obviously David Bowie, more talented than all the Beatles put together, notwithstanding that they all outstayed their welcome but you can't take away from them what was safely on the record, as it were. 

Music, Silence, Invisible Football and the Mathematical Impossibility of Coincidence

 In the end, I didn't wish Rose Tremain's Music & Silence any longer. Beautifully written, sustaining its faux C17th manner and surely the richest of her books that I've read so far, I still came away wondering if it needed to be all of its 450 pages. Not that I can say which bits of it should be edited out to reduce it and perhaps it was all necessary to its many overlapping themes. 

Whereas I find that some characters tend towards music, others prefer silence. Peter Claire is the gorgeous lutenist employed by Christian IV of Denmark where the real, more famous John Dowland gets a bad press. Kirsten, the second wife of the king, can't stand music. Claire is separated from her maid, Emilia, by court manoeuvres. The dirty business of ambition and politics tears apart what one would like to think could be an ideal world of sublime music and love. It is significant that as Claire is sold back to England and Charles I for an exorbitant amount that will fund several failing projects in Denmark, the novel ends not on any happier denouement than Kirsten's 'confusion' and distemper.

I end up about 92% convinced by it. Perhaps it is slightly too ambitious or maybe it was me that was too ambitious, thinking I'd 'get' it in all its complexities in one go. I suspect it's brilliant. But, rather than expect to much of Rose Tremain by going to the next- different again- Rose Tremain novel found in Chichester Oxfam in the week, I'll save that.

Maybe it's time for the Proust biography, hoping it will bring back A la recherche which, when I read it six years ago in lockdown, I credited as the greatest novel of all time but which now, a failing memory being more of a frustration than an actual handicap, I can't bring to mind in any detail.

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I don't watch much football these days. I look at the scores sometimes and know roughly where the teams I retain any vestigial allegiance to are in the league. But since Notts County were on telly, I thought I'd have a look and stuck with it, probably staying with it for longer than I would have if we could have seen what was happening.

How absurd to only watch something when you can't see it. 

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But, in some odd sort of compensation, I was at a bus stop on Thursday evening alongside an actor who is playing Charles Dickens in the New Theatre Royal tomorrow night so, okay then, let's give that a go. 

Also one of the Southsea Shakespeare Actors, Tim and I had plenty to share about the authorship question, Shakespeare biography and Brexit. This is a personal best Remarkable Bus Ride to put alongside the train journey back from London earlier this year when I found myself sitting opposite Sara Deborah, the violinist I'd written about only a couple of weeks earlier. 

I don't really believe in coincidences. They are mathematically inevitable. And, anyway, it appears that public transport is packed out with artspersons of interest.

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Achieving the 1000 tracks at DGBooks Radio is still some way off but rather than trawl through Bowie, Al Green, The Magnetic Fields and all in search of the next best things not yet on there, thanks to Tony Blackburn for playing Mary Wells. I didn't know about that. It goes straight in.

 

If that's not Smokey Robinson, nothing is. I feel Top 6 Pop Songwriters coming on. I only need five others.  

Connor Heraghty in Chichester

 Connor Heraghty, Chichester Cathedral, Nov 2

Radio 3 Unwind and Classic FM's Calm Classics of a late evening offer nothing but such pieces as Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, first movement. It might not have been how he intended his Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 2, to be commodified, though. It's a tremendous piece of music, so popular in its day that it began to annoy him, but it was a prelude to further music without which - to risk being overly fastidious- it isn't complete. 

In the 1970's I heard the most radical interpretation of the piece ever with the craziest tempi. And then I realized my mother had played the LP at 45rpm when putting it onto the cassette. Gladly, Connor Heraghty's approach was more orthodox, its scintillating beauty suspending the cathedral audience in its spell. Some restraint was carried forward into the Allegretto before the rolling urgency of the Presto. 

But today's unique selling point was the visual presentation of artwork by the Brazilian artist, Elizabeth Dorazio, on the big screen, Everything is an Illusion. The monochrome mysteries that had accompanied the early parts of the sonata gave way to planets, maps and terrain seen from above. Some might say 'thought provoking' but then they would need to say what thoughts had been provoked. Many things to many different people, probably, and it can be a good idea not to interpret 'modern art' too specifically.

Connor had begun with the bright colours of Impressões seresteiras by Villa-Lobos with equally vibrant plant life art that invited comparison with Frida Kahlo, its abundance likely to have come from the rainforest.

Two Preludes by Rachmaninov were different again, and from each other. Op. 23 no. 4 was a lush adagio while an installation of a vast waterfall canvas was erected in the rainforest nearby super-imposed ruined cathedral architecture and then Op. 3 no. 2 was sombre and more desolate but becoming more imposing over some more dense foliage. Whether there were insects to be seen in these leaves might have depended on one's imagination or capacity for voluntary hallucination.

Cláudio Santoro's music will be investigated further with some priority after the two Prelúdio in which the pale light provided an almost uncanny prelude to Erik Satie's haunted Gnoissienne no. 1. Delicately modulated by Connor's immaculate intonation, it showed what the Chichester Yamaha is capable of because I'm not sure all pianos could do that. The hushed wonder and disquiet, ending with pictures of galaxies and deep space, made for possibly the most memorable three minutes of music I've heard this year having begun with the advantage of being a favourite piece of mine for fifty years.

To finish, the visuals were sub-aquatic - coral reefs and exotic fish- with Debussy's L'isle joyeuse from the Modernist part of his oeuvre, densely rhythmic almost to the point of becoming arrhythmic to make for a vivid finale.

Such abundance is initially difficult to assimilate into themes and meanings but one might begin to risk an interpretation by taking on that very idea. Perhaps one part of what it meant was to contemplate that richness of life on earth in its tiny place in the universe and thus be  led to ecological and environmental concerns, which are major enough and crucial, but it would be too narrow to say that's what it was all about. It could mean what you want it to mean without being shackled to one commentary so after all that, and having had it pointed out that Everything is an Illusion, I'm not saying anything beyond that it will stay in the memory and if you ever see this show advertised anywhere that you can get to you should go.   

Top 6 - Douglas Dunn

The loss of Douglas Dunn further reduces my list of living poets to follow. I'm not saying there aren't any young talents out there worth having but I don't know who they are and I'm not sure that they 'do' poetry like they used to when there was plenty to be had, like in the 1990's.

For one as highly respected as Dunn, it came as a bit of a surprise that my little recap of his books revealed an obvious standout poem for me when one might expect several to be difficult to pick between. The People Before is among the most admirable poems by anybody of his generation, atmospheric, evocative and genuinely doing things with the language. If Terry Street, his first book, and Elegies, his best known, are given more attention, it is in Northlight, in 1988, that he was at his best. Terry Street must have been a striking debut but I can't help but find in it some traces of Larkin's attitude towards a 'cut-price crowd'. If the Young Women in Rollers mock his taste for Mozart and the third programme they are only giving as good as they get.

Love-making by Candlelight is another that puts domesticity and emotional attachment into a longer, historical perspective quite beautifully. The River Through the City is a sinister impression of dark implications that would also belong in any anthology of its period. 

After which one remembers how much Re-reading Katherine Mansfield's 'Bliss and Other Stories' was to be admired at the time, or when I first saw it not very much later, and it has retained its disarming charm. Quite why that didn't make it into the Selected Poems 1964-1983 would be for that book's editors to explain.

Reading Pascal in the Lowlands, which did, is full of undisclosed empathy for a stranger's similar but different loss to that that is central to Elegies. 

It became almost a convention in this Top 6 feature that, when faced with any number of candidates for the last available place, I'd choose a sort of 'wild card' that might not be a more obvious choice. Sandra's Mobile is no frivolous encore piece, though. It's in for its last line which I'm sure was published before I tried the same formula that I'd seen Simon Armitage use. Whether Douglas took the idea from anyone before him, I don't know. 

Six is a demanding limit for a list of anything of any depth and it's unlikely that many readers would have the same half dozen as me. It was always a rule- sometimes broken- that only six things should be mentioned and near misses couldn't be smuggled in by devious means or legerdemain.

-- 

By all means, let's open it all up again- it's never been closed- and ask if anybody else would like to contribute a Top 6. Of absolutely anything. Places, sports people, television, maybe scientists. But tracks by Queen, golfers, meat or wars might struggle to gain acceptance. If you don't know me by now, you will never, never, never know me.  

Wittgenstein 3 and other stories

 Education doesn't stop when one finishes school or university. By now I almost think that's when it starts and one can spend the rest of one's life undoing the damage of what one's been taught. I'm not being all Marxist or independent in thinking that. The Marxists and free-thinkers at my low grade university were as hidebound, restricted and formulaic in their thinking as were the royalists, Tories and traditionalists at my grammar school.

I got to the end of Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein last week. A paragon example of the genre with what seems exactly the right amount of detail, of balance between the life and the work and vividly conveying all their difficulties. The portrait on the cover is of a disturbed man, possibly on the brink of madness, whose intellect was apparently so far beyond that of the next best that it made no sense to them.

The book changed my view of Wittgenstein from that of a potential hero whose philosophy had realized that philosophy reduced everything to word games because language is something we are trapped in to someone who thought there must be something beyond all that fiddle and, throughout it all, relied on God and religion.

All the long, transient years of discussion and writing and forever revising that writing, coming from the mathematics of Frege, logic, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, led him only to despair - being already from a family of suicides- and while his life is a gripping story and he clearly could be an engaging personality in the right company, he's nothing like a hero to me any more.   

Sartre had his moments but got it wrong. I will always want to think that Derrida's demolition of almost everything we ever thought had possibilities. I'd say Camus was my preferred philosopher except that was about his fourth job and I'd rather have him among my very favourite novelists.

Philosophy is bad for you. Endlessly endless. The glimpses I've had of it make me think the chimera of glamour that can be caused by music, poetry and painting at their best is the best we can do.

I could have proceeded to the biography of Proust I found in Chichester Oxfam but maybe I've learnt from Joe Bugner's example and don't want to go in with top class heavyweights one after the other. So I returned to Rose Tremain and Music & Silence, different again from the others of hers I've read but just as equally a beautiful thing. One can enjoy the writing without knowing where the various threads are going to lead us but one has reason to hope it might be a better place than where Wittgenstein's intensity led him to.

In four of her books now, Rose Tremain has been a pleasure to read, just for the sake of reading. They are four apparently quite different books but similar in the way the get inside 'love' and the way it consumes those who find it in a high-grade iteration. There are also the obstacles to it which are either circumstances or other people and it often needs to be clandestine or something apart from conventionally recognized relationships.

Set in 1629-30, in the reign of Christian IV of Denmark, one needs some idea of how much is true and how much fiction in historical novels. It is a bit unsatisfactory, at least in theory, but when it makes for such good writing that reservation diminishes to almost nothing. There's a whole lot more Tremain to go and I will be back in the market for some of it because it looks as if she belongs in the top echelon of contemporary novelists and, so far so good, she's done nothing but impress so far.

Chichester Symphony Orchestra in Chichester

 Chichester Symphony Orchestra with Tim Rumsey, Chichester Cathedral, October 27

So, where would we place Camille Saint-Saëns in the great panoply of Western Classical Music, should we ever feel the need? Perhaps not quite in the Premiership alongside Bach, Mozart and Beethoven but playing attractively in the next division with his Carnival of the Animals, Danse Macabre and the distinction of being one of those composers who found himself recycled into a pop song in the hit parade- If I Had Words by Scott Fitzgerald and Yvonne Keeley that plundered the Organ Symphony.

Tuneful, then, and possibly more like somebody from a generation earlier than his closer contemporaries because, living until 1921, music had moved on a bit by then if not always for the better. 

The CSO and Tim Rumsey have appeared separately and together in the cathedral's lunchtime series and it's good to see the partnership continue. The Piano Concerto no. 5, op. 103, began by mixing twinkling piano with lushness on both the keys and from the orchestra before the Allegro Animato became more involved and emotional. The grand gestures that opened the Andante second movement went via a smoother melodic line that was passed from the strings, through the piano to oboe before some more unsettling, disquieting feelings that might have been wintry but could equally have described the shifting sands that make the concerto 'Egyptian'. Like the first, though, it was to thaw, melt and resolve itself into a dew. But the Allegro finale did nothing of the sort.

 

My homework beforehand had found Saint-Saëns compared with Liszt which was a comparison I wouldn't have made. But I can hear it now. Tim had only been warming up with various bits of dazzle, it transpired. Let loose on the spectacular ending, the overflowing, powerful surge with the fullness of sound from a CSO that turned up with reinforcements, approached the thrilling, diabolic excess that is properly Lisztian. All vim and blitz, it brought some of the audience to their feet and left me surprised and somewhat the wiser that the composer of that serenely gliding swan music could also do that.

Few would dispute Schubert's Premiership status, who once had Radio 3 devote a week to playing all his music. The portentous brass and timpani that opened the Rosamunde Overture gave way to some of his signature lightness of touch in the strings and woodwind but an overture is a sort of wake-up call anticipating a story to come. Thus the orchestra raised some rousing tempi before the long, built-up sort of climax that Beethoven wouldn't have been ashamed of.

It's always a bonus when you're not told what an encore is because you can have a quiz. If Tim's jazzy extra hadn't been Gershwin I'd have eaten my hat. It was called Let's Kiss and Make Up and I'm not due at the trilby shop tomorrow.

Melanie White in the Menuhin Room

 Melanie White, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, Oct 24

While we all know what a flute is and what it does, how many pieces for it can some of us non-flautists think of? L'après-midi d'un faune, another chance to mention Everyone's a Fruit and Nutcase and some Suites by Bach. I must try harder. Gladly, Melanie White had some pieces to introduce us to. We shall not live by piano and violin alone.

I had been betting without Annie's Song, not having been aware the programme was in celebration of James Galway but not thinking of John Denver as part of the 'classical' canon either. Karen Kingsley's immense contribution to local music continued with her rippling piano accompaniment to a tune that seemed to be everywhere in the 1970's. After that the show mixed in further 'easier' listening with more technically challenging pieces.

The Concertino by Chaminade included soaring heights in its mercurial changes with some post cadenza lyricism leading to a flamboyant finish.

Gluck's Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Orfeo ed Euridice was one I should have thought of and was a welcome reminder of a great composer not often heard in lunchtime affairs because they are not usually opera but its pacific classicism provided a prompt to put his music on the CD machine again soon.

The 'big ticket' item was Reinecke's Undine Sonata, a highly involved drama with an onrush of emotion in its third movement and Karen very much an equal partner rather than a supporting role. Again, there was counterpoint to be had between the two instruments in the traditional Spanish Love Song in which the love was mostly a solitary longing.

But, having thought the Gluck would stand as my highlight, along came Il pastore svizzero by Francesco Morlacchi, a theme and variations of open air gaiety and circus acrobatics in both woodwind and piano parts. You can never quite tell which bits will turn out most successfully but this stole in and stole the show at the same time.

Referring back to James Galway - and how many other musicians played both in the Berlin Philharmonic and on Top of the Pops, the finale had to be Danny Boy. If I'm not sure how much I like Annie's Song, the unadorned, moving simplicity of that fine composer, Trad's, eternal composition is one that never fails to convince.

Melanie said she had received any number of suggestions from fellow flautists when wondering what she might play. Those that she selected provided a rich and varied insight into what her instrument is capable of. It is still necessarily best at doing its floaty, lightsome thing but there is more to it than that.