The Renaissance Choir in Southsea

The Renaissance Choir, Byrd Song, Holy Spirit, Southsea, Jul 8 

It's been gratifying how much attention William Byrd has been accorded during this centenary year, 400 years almost to the day since he died. There are plenty of us who have long regarded him as a 'major' composer, certainly among the greatest born in England, but he's not quite the household name that Mozart and Beethoven are. I don't think we hear the term 'Early Music' as often as we used to, as if there had once been a cut-off point before Bach before which Western classical music was somehow juvenilia.

The Renaissance Choir can generally be relied on to include him in. He is their staple diet but they don't limit themselves to the Renaissance section of the menu, like a wine bar that serves gin, beer and maybe mineral water as well, if you must.

I can't help but associate any 'modern' items on Renaissance Choir agendas with Peter Gambie's biographical note confessing to a 1970's devotion to experimental electronic music. I remember it well. For some of my generation we almost had to begin with Van der Graaf Generator and find our way to Josquin DesPrez. But it's possible to come to the conclusion that music is a wider church than self-styled experimentalists who consider themselves maverick, renegade and new would like to think. In every generation they come and go with worthwhile contributions lasting the distance into posterity and aberrations failing to. The point about experiments is that many of them don't work and so there's no reason to keep them so why there are still vestiges of the spirit of Frank Zappa left reconditely secreted away as if they were worth preserving, I don't know.

John Cage was one of the good guys, though, and his Four² was a major reason for attending this concert, which I would have done anyway, and entirely proved its point as the Holy Spirit audience listened closely to its austere shifts with all due awe and respect, not unlike that in the Rothko Room in the Tate Modern. Religion isn't the only thing that creates such a charge although I admit it leaves me dumbstruck.

You would have to hope to find the Byrd on your desert island for long term preference but tonight was Cage Night for me.

Eric Whitacre came good with some choice dissonance in Sleep after I was sceptical about This Marriage in Wells Cathedral. Both halves were punctuated by solo spots of folk music that brought back memories of other 70's enthusiasms, like Steeleye Span.

Of course, the choir were tremendous. That was never in doubt. That's an assumption we start from, like a priori knowledge, not a conclusion we arrive at. The programme was billed as, Two hours of dream-time music to chill out to, to relax you and to take you to a calmer place in your mind. Their discs, both in design and content, reinforce the impression of a New Age commodity but one wouldn't want it to go too far in that direction. I don't think William Byrd or John Cage would have wanted to be such a thing.

 

However, this is not intended as a 'review' as such, just in case anybody thought anything found under the 'music' label here was strictly ever that in the first place.

I've made a list of adjectives commonly used here to describe concerts and it amounts to about 35. Surely music is bigger than that. After all this time it occurs to me that I'm ticking any approximately appropriate words on a checklist. So, perhaps from hereon in, with one or two exceptions, these pieces will reflect on 'matters arising' or whatever comes to mind. 

I didn't make any notes this evening, for the first time in years. I didn't even take a pen or the envelope the gas bill had come in to scribble notes onto that I'd later struggle to decipher. I barely knew what to do with my hands. The two parts of me that were engaged were the ears. I wasn't even desperately rifling through the thesaurus in my head in the hope of finding 'le mot juste'. I sat with my friend, Andrew McVittie, pianist and impressario, whose privilege that was on this occasion.

It's hardly for me to relate the story in Elvis Costello's memoirs about when he headlined a gig in Australia and had Bob Dylan on just before him. Dylan, for once, went on and delivered a perfect set of pristine Greatest Hits rather than the mangled, perverse reworkings he usually served up and, as Elvis went on, he said to him,

There you go, I've warmed them up for you.

 

I'm as delighted to indulge myself as much as Dylan liked to. I'm like one of those people who's always there now, like Stephen Spender was somehow included as a significant poet because he knew Auden. I won't have to write any more poems or concert reviews and in due course it will be forgotten that I ever did.

Oh, look, people might say, that's David Green over there.

Who's he? What did he ever do?

I'm not sure. It's definitely him, though.