Paul Hindemith and other stories

Some hints are more worth following up than others but on the whole it's best to give them a chance because you never know what you might find and, as was the case with the Magnetic Fields, you might end up with some new favourite music.

It's not a huge step from the chamber music of Shostakovich to the Hindemith Viola Sonatas, they'd be adjacent on the very complicated map of all music. On first hearing the obvious thing to say is how the solo viola is spare, austere and desolate whereas those with piano are more expansive but that wouldn't have to be the case. Such things as the solo partitas for violin by Bach or the Telemann Fantasias are wildly adventurous and adding piano doesn't have to make anything more decorative but it sounds like that's what Hindemith did, to the extent of sounding a bit like Brahms when giving it his best flourish. So, Hindemith viola music is the playlist for the time being and I'll see where we go from there. We might then see what else he did and how high he can get up the charts.

 

Related to which, here was a game invented to enjoy those long, sleepless hours of the night. Not sleeping's not a problem, Times Radio repeats are good enough company and there are other stations to move to if you've heard them too many times before.

By a process of free association, make up games between any two composers.

Mozart 5 Albinoni 1 was a bit of a mismatch but Dvorak v. Telemann makes for an interesting game.

Schubert 3 Robert Schumann 0.

Bruckner 0 Britten 2.

Ravel 2 Charpentier 2.

It leads inexorably towards the juvenile fixation with World Cups of which there is no need because it amounts to who gets beaten by Bach in the final. There could be some interesting match-ups, like Brahms-Schubert in the last 8, but one risks being left with a sense of futility and that one should have had something better to do.

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I remember Geoffrey Hill saying how his Collected Poems multiplied in size in his last years, having been a relatively frugal producer of poems for most of his time, and how it was in some way due to the form of the poems doing it for him.

I hope I'm not going to do that but I can almost see what he means. A further variation on the theme of Rainyday Woman, after Slightly Different Version, below, looks entirely possible after which the floodgates could open. I would despair of myself more than ever if they became a 'sequence' but they would follow, which is what a 'sequence' ought to do. One also needs to consider whether writing the same thing time and again makes one like Vivaldi, who more or less did, or if they would build into something nuanced like The Well-Tempered Klavier. 

Let's not pretend that that would be any sort of comparison but if the facility is there and it's enjoyable to do it surely can't do too much harm.

The work-in-progress is called Rainy Morning Man and perhaps each 14-line poem will bring something forward from a previous one, always in the context of poetry and the girlfriend being conflated.

It could be an ongoing project. I might stumble into being belatedly prolific. I must go back and see where I'd got to with that.