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. 

 

Slightly Different Version

Not many poems appear here under the 'Poems' label these days, mainly because there aren't many. There isn't really anywhere else this can go, though, without being associated with 'Rainyday Woman' to which it is a sequel, for want of a better word, which is predicated on the idea of poetry being a sort of girlfriend. It makes less sense if you don't know that.

Doing other things instead of what one once did, with some detachment, is a sort of theme and it might recur again as long as I don't feel as if I'm being lured into a 'sequence'. The horror of the thought of anything quite as spuriously sophisticated as a 'sequence' is one of the several things that put some distance between me and me wanting to be a 'poet' in the first place.

Slightly Different Version

Sometimes I see her and we exchange looks

As if to say we loved each other once
Or thought we did. It’s difficult to say.
We have both moved on in the interim.

 

In the same way two wrongs don’t make a right
Two misfits do not make a perfect match
But I still think of her on rainy days
Or when reminded we once thought we were. 

 

So I wrap myself in Shostakovich,
Short change myself by cashing out a bet,
Work hard at being a dilettante,
The words are recycled, just like we are,
From what they were the last time I used them
But all of that is another story.

'The greatest literary biography of the century'

The top line on the back cover of my paperback James Joyce by Richard Ellman cites Anthony Burgess proclaiming it 'the greatest literary biography of the century'. Perhaps he thinks Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is better for being first-hand. Paperback is not the ideal format for something as heavy, as it isn't for the three volumes of Proust, but it piles enormous amounts in. One might think it exhaustive if one wasn't aware of more detail in the letters, the biographies of Nora and Lucia but a monumental writer can only be accounted for in such a monument. It might not be essential to know that in Zurich he made the acquaintance of the great musician, Busoni, and met Lenin in a cafe they both frequented but it makes one the more aware of the six degrees of separation. And then there is a huge cast of people only now known to history for their tiny cameo parts in this story.

Never deviating far from his method of tracing the life into the books, Ellman's main theme is to show how all of Joyce's writing was one big autobiography but he provides authoritative commentary on the books as art, too. Of Dubliners, it says,

The reviews were good enough; most of them found the stories cynical or pointless or both,

which would make for a good starting point to discuss for an essay. To be able to appear so but not be makes for 'art' and 'art' was what Joyce devoted himself to, possibly to the detriment of all else in his life.

The much less-known Giacomo Joyce is revealed to be a footnote prompted by a mutual infatuation with an English language pupil, Amalia Popper - no relation to Karl, apparently, that went no further but was important enough to be considered worthy of the effort. And anybody who wonders at the archaic nature of the Joyce poems might be interested in how Joyce,

could still succumb in verse to the Swinburnian allurements of sere, pale souls and the wan waves of time

with only traces of liniguistic invention to make them Joycean.

It has always been disappointing, since finding out, that The Dead is quite so derivative - from previous literary sources, not from Nora's past. That is what Modernism did, though, and being entirely original is not a pre-requisite of art. It is The Dead and Dubliners in general that make me admire Joyce's writing to the extent that I do. To what extent one admires Joyce as a person beyond being the author of his work is another question entirely.

Fumi Otsuki and Gisela Meyer at Lunchtime Live !

 Fumi Otsuki and Gisela Meyer, Portsmouth Cathedral, May 23

Being next up on my itinerary after the Shostakovich Viola Sonata last week was always going to be a big ask of anyone. As it happened, Fumi Otsuki and Gisela Meyer provided some soothing medicine to help with the recovery from such devastation. Back to the safety and protection of some Scandinavian Romanticism, we were not asked to look directly into forever.

Stenhammer's Violin Sonata, op. 19, is recognizably like Brahms, mellow and unperturbed and reaching some fine top register notes and Grieg's No. 2, op. 13, opening with crepuscular piano, worked with shorter phrases, more energy in Fumi's violin and decorative in Gisela's piano before delivering moments of drama.

But if Fumi is as yet not quite as well-known as a composer as the rest of those on his programme, his latest Piano Sonatina, no. 4, was in some ways of the most interest. It juxtaposes some pastiche Bach with C19th-style flow before a middle section is entirely different again- disembodied, edgy and uncertain like the soundtrack of a scary film. Gisela played it with immaculate timing and suspense before the final movement brought the disparate elements together. It will repay further hearings when made available, to be sure.

To finish, Elgar's Chanson de Nuit was smooth, valedictory and comfortable and completed the treatment and reassured me at least that one doesn't, and really can't, live at the extremities of human experience all the time. We get by with the help of our friends, some indulgence and such things as we need after gazing so intently into what we might not have been designed to understand.   

It was good to see Fumi's latest appearance on Portsmouth Cathedral's Lunchtime Live list so well attended which suggests that one can build something of a following by coming back regularly and it is to be hoped we will have the fifth sonatina to look forward to.

'Private Passions'

 I don't think I've made a Private Passions list yet, just in case I get invited onto Radio 3's version of Desert Island Discs. You get an hour and most people fit in 10 pieces of music. Being limited to 100 would be hard enough and so 10 means leaving out a lot of absolutely essential things.

It's among the 'Also appearing at' links above and is in some way an autobiography in music but it's for Radio 3 and so slanted towards the 'classical'. I'm not at all sure I've got the right three to represent pop music but what can you do.

--

I have very few early, pre-school memories but the most significant early musical memory is of Doris Day, Move Over Darling, on the wireless and it's become officially my first favourite record. Of course, The Beatles (yeah, yeah, yeah) and The Monkees and I was strangely aware of Jimi Hendrix and Simon Dupree while nobody could be unaware of Procul Harum but The Tremeloes, Silence is Golden, was also a favourite.

1971 was a crucial year in which I became devoted to the hit parade and while the likes of T. Rex and David Bowie led the pack of those hundreds of artists that were of interest, Lindisfarne and their Socialist firebrand poet, Alan Hull, were top of my personal charts, which were diligently compiled each week as a priority. But the first chart record I bought was by Mozart - the user-friendly version of Symphony no.40 by Waldo de los Rios- and so he was the first 'classical' infatuation. Three out of ten pieces here are from opera which is less due to me listening to opera 30% of the time than composers, I suspect, saving their best tunes for their staged dramas. And so, Soave sia il vento from Cosi Fan Tutte edges an all-but impossible verdict as to what to represent Mozart with.

Aged 13, my idea was that I wanted to find the weirdest available music and The Faust Tapes helped a lot with that but perhaps that led me to think that there was better yet to be had in contemporary classical music and also that pop music was trivial and so I devoted myself to taping Beethoven symphonies, and Shostakovich, very badly from my transistor radio. Most memorably the Shostakovich String Quartets nos. 3 and 8 but Spotify doesn't have the best bit of no. 3 so I gladly put in the Viola Sonata recently heard to such stunning effect.

Coming back from exile from pop music I was a changed person and Al Green's Greatest Hits defined the shift to something more credible than overblown 'rock' bands and I'm Still in Love with You is one of any number to feature one of the very greatest soul voices, Aretha notwithstanding.

1977 seemed at the time to redress pop music but it didn't last long. That particular 'new wave' brought Elvis Costello with it and suddenly the idea of breaking down barriers so that reggae could be mainstream. I certainly did not go along with the fashion for John Coltrane's uber-chic suffering at university but the likes of Gregory Isaacs, the anti-disco of Public Image Limited and the definitively disco Chic were all eminent players in my rapid turnover of preferred pop acts but all the time it was becoming clear that J.S. Bach was something else entirely and that the consternation I had felt at school, circa 1974, when our music teacher had told us he was 'better than Tchaikovsky', had been misplaced. The Well-Tempered Klavier is not only the most essential desert island commodity but something like one of humanity's greatest achievements.

But there might not have been quite the same Bach if there had not been Dietrich Buxtehude and, rather than his solemn Klag-Lied or anything so profound, the Trio Sonata BuxWV255 is joyful invention made out of next to nothing.

Far and away England's greatest composer was a German who wrote Italian music, we can't be having too much of a morbidly religiose programme and so even the Tallis Spem in Alium, amazing though it is, can't be found space for because Handel, who only does grandeur but always does it grandly, has to be in and Va tacito from Guilio Cesare compacts all the stately mannerism with as much strut and verve as he ever did anywhere.

But if there was ever a right answer to pop music it was the Tamla Motown hit factory and if any one act defined Motown it was Diana Ross & the Supremes and so, with apologies to Smokey Robinson, and by extension The Ronettes, Come See About Me is for some reason a more perfect product than Stop! in the Name of Love or even Miss Ross's solo heartbreaker, I'm Still Waiting.

A concert by Ensemble Clement Jannequin in Portsmouth Cathedral circa 1989 opened up the whole new world of Renaissance music previously labelled 'Early', subsequent concerts by the Tallis Scholars and The Sixteen, and another composer to squeeze into my Top 10, Josquin DesPrez, who never did it more succinctly or movingly than in his tribute to his precursor, Johannes Ockeghem.

Pop music included long-lasting devotions to R.E.M., the indie heroes of choice, the Jesus & Mary Chain and my interest was extended for some years by the luckiest break of all, being introduced to The Magnetic Fields and the darkly sentimental insouciance of Stephin Merritt's songwriting. One either 'gets' things or one doesn't and I absolutely did but otherwise pop music became for the most part a heritage thing and even a belief in 1971 or the 70's in general was modified into something earlier, somehow more seemingly innocent and fresh in the likes of Petula Clark.

The Magnetic Fields provided some of the best live pop gigs I ever saw because they were downbeat, ironic and gorgeous, not designed to generate undue hysteria. Classical concerts were always the preferred live performances and one for the very shortlist of those was a Prom of the Monteverdi Vespers with Carolyn Sampson by which one was utterly transfixed. 

No map of music, however briefly sketched, looks right without Monteverdi on it and I'm having to omit Bowie, Marc Bolan and Spem in Alium to accommodate him but Philippe Jaroussky is persuasive on the love duet, Pur ti miro from L'incoranazione di Poppea. 

The Shostakovich would make for a better finale, staring bleakly into eternity, but it was brought into the story earlier and so we end almost inadvertently sublime.

Hindemith Viola Music

 It's not going to be easy for who comes next after the devastating Shostakovich Viola Sonata by Katie Wilkinson. Such landmark concert experiences can lead further and where that has led is Paul Hindemith's music for viola, among which the Sonata in F major, op. 11 no. 4, played by Yuri Bashmet and Sviastoslav Richter has already stood up bravely in comparison with the Shostakovich.

Three CDs issued by Hyperion feature Lawrence Power playing, respectively solo, sonata and orchestral pieces and so they are duly on their way, one's education continually extends and a composer of who I knew very little gets a place on the shelves. 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 The trouble with Johnnie Walker's Sounds of the 70's was rarely better demonstrated than this afternoon. Absolutely top marks for Curtis Mayfield but Queen and now Sultans of Swing, that most dreadful dirge so beloved of guitar-heads.

Yes but, so what. But that is what the 70's were like. Memory becomes selective and lines up the T. Rex, Bowie, Chi-Lites, Chic and late Motown, not to mention Hurricane Smith but there was a lot of long hair and interminable self-indulgence. It has been a long process rather than a Damascene moment converting from the 70's to the 60's but that process is complete, notwithstanding that decades are only for convenience identified as those periods ending in 0's and, given the option, I'd have 1963 or 64 to 1972 or 73. I think that would cover it as best possible.

--

About Larkin 57 is out and about with the essay and poem in it. And there they go, released into the world to find their own way. There's no more I can do for them now.

Compare and contrast is the short cut to any 'critical' essay, providing any number of ways of putting two or more things into context in comparison with others. You can't miss, really, and I understand that that is what students ae given to do these days to help them on their way.

So, Larkin is downbeat and ironic, is he. Considered in isolation one would have to admit, no, not all the time because there was The Trees but you stick him up against Rosemary Tonks whose levels of dissatisfaction are more passionately expressed and he's clearly of a different temper and so both writers can be assessed against their opposites without either losing out in the process.

-- 

40 years is it, since John Betjeman died. Well done, BBC4 for a whole evening of him tonight.

Fair to say, I think, he was the subject of my first 'criticism' in print in the ill-fated Allusions magazine that was as much my fault as anybody's at Lancaster University in 1979. A very routine review of The Best of Betjeman wasn't the worst of it. What a mess it was. Don't ever blunder into editing a magazine unless you know what the aim of the project is and those who do it with think so, too.

A couple of subsequent such involvements weren't quite such disasters but it's a role best left to those with a talent for it.

Until having to go to a new record price a couple of years ago to secure Rosemary novels, a signed Collected Betjeman was the most I'd paid for a book. It's not a brilliant signature - quite late, one might think, or a bit hasty- but for all his retro refusal to be anything more than a quaint versifier, I'd have him rather than Ezra all day long.

--

Give Johnnie Walker his due, though. We've had Metal Guru and a feature on Diamond Dogs in the meantime and no show that has those two should have too much to apologize about. Bowie did take himself seriously sometimes but even that was somehow part of the act. Maybe we all need to be able to do that.