An introductory reading by local writer Philip Pullman was an appropriate introduction to the “Dusk to Dawn” concert, one of the last in this year’s Oxford Chamber Music Festival (themed “Fairytales and Fantasy”). The collision of a light-hearted surface with darker undertones was not just in Pullman’s retelling of the Grimm stories, but pervaded Artistic Director Priya Mitchell’s programming. An eclectic combination ranging from Beethoven to Tabakova, the evening featured a cluster of talented performers from across Europe. As the lights dimmed, the opening artist Natacha Kudritskaya held the audience in a prolonged silence before embarking upon Ravel’s virtuoso suite.

Read my full review here.

Arnold Schoenberg: Pélleas und Melisande, op.5 (1903)

For the uninitiated dodecaphony is a music term relating to the twelve notes we use in Western music… the basis of my blog 12 Notes & The Truth!

In the 1920′s Composer Arnold Schoenberg set out to compose music through a process that obliterated the systems we are/were used to hearing. Serialism is the name of the movement in which all twelve notes must be used before any are repeated. Creating no key centers in the composition and lack of melody and harmony as we are used to hearing.

The following puzzle is a take on dedecaphony. A Sudoku matrix set up where each note can only be used only once, horizontally, diagonally and in each of the 12 boxes of the matrix.

In essence there is no difference than converting a regular Sudoku puzzle to be 12 x 12 instead of the traditional 9 x 9. Where the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 are replaced by the 12 notes in our chromatic scale A, Bb, B, C, Db, D, Eb, E, F, Gb, G, Ab. Once completed, a composer would take any of the rows horizontal or vertical and compose using those notes.
Complete Serialism proved to be a little restrictive and many composers have used this technique as a guideline rather than a steadfast rule.

Here is the puzzle. I haven’t worked it so cant guarantee its solve-ability. Have fun if you are so inclined!

This music wasn’t written to be scary or Halloween-ish although not a bad way to transition into October with this piece.

This is real music listen with open ears and an open mind!

Arnold Schoenberg’s, “Piano Concerto op. 42 (Excerpt)”

Enjoy!

Schoenberg came from Vienna and he began his career as a composer as the heir to the hyper-romanticism of Wagner and Mahler. Wanting to make music even more intellectual, he came up with the idea of making “atonal” or “antitonal” music. In that type of music the composer rejects all notions of key, meter, and traditional harmony. One of the best example of this is Pierrot Lunaire in which Schönberg made strict notations that the singer was supposed to utter each syllable at the appropriate pitch, but not string them together as a song. The words for the “songs” come from seven poems about madness by a Belgian symbolist poet (Albert Giraud). Fun stuff. But at the time, it suited my mood perfectly.

When my daughters were pre-teens about 13 years ago, I put on a copy of Pierrot Lunaire after dinner while we were sitting around having dessert. In about 2 minutes everyone had cleared away and I found myself alone. This music is challenging at best but I could see it somehow summing up the zeitgeist of a continent poised to rush off into that most insane waste of human life, World War I. Still, there seemed to be a lesson here. I found myself alone listening to this piece of music. What an un-human thing to do to music–make it so intellectually remote that it serves to separate rather than bring people together.

Still, I think it is interesting exercise to listen to it–once.

Wikipedia Entry on Pierrot Lunaire

Download MP3 or buy CD of Pierrot lunaire on Amazon

Coming up soon, operamission is plowing forth with our ‘from the composer to the audience’ mission by presenting Arnold Schoenberg’s melodrama Pierrot Lunaire on the eve of the 100th anniversary of its premiere (Berlin, 16 October 1912). Mezzo-soprano Jennifer Berkebile returns to perform this intriguing and elusive master work, while cellist Fred Sherry and the Smithsonian’s Kenneth Slowik will hold an interactive conversation with the work and the performers. This is a one-time event, an amazing assembly of insight, talent, and interplay, hosted by the wonderful curators at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, aka NYPL’s Lincoln Center branch – Bruno Walter Auditorium.

Please share this digital postcard, and keep reading for more events of the season…

operamission is hosting a Cabaret Song Composition Contest, open to all Composers and Singers on Twitter, click here to read all about it, and don’t forget the hashtag – #newcabaret.

Anyone can join Twitter. It’s free, and it takes five minutes to set it all up. If you don’t get it, tweet your questions!

This ongoing event will result in our winter cabaret slot – two Thursdays, January 3 & 10, 2013 – at the Gershwin Hotel. Please check back for more details.

Also we are pleased to announce the dates in our next installment of Handel’s Operas with baroque orchestra. Extremely proud of our 2012 production of Almira being called “one of the best local Handel productions in years,” we continue the series with the North American premiere of Handel’s Rodrigo, HWV 5 (the music for numbers 2-4, also from Hamburg, have sadly been lost), his first Italian opera, written in Rome and premiered in Florence in 1707. (The alternate title for Rodrigo is ‘Vincer se stesso è la maggior vittoria,’ which translates as “to conquer oneself is the greatest victory.”)

In the Spring of 2013, Jeff Caldwell rejoins Jennifer Peterson in leading a superb cast:

We’re all very excited. Here is a nice synopsis from the Handel House Museum in London. Stay tuned for ticket information.

The dates are: Tuesday May 21, Thursday May 23, and Saturday May 25, 2013, 7:30 PM at the Gershwin Hotel.

We will also be continuing our #artsongjam evenings, upon vehement request. The next one is set for Tuesday, October 16, 2013, at the Gershwin Hotel (7 E. 27th St, NYC), 8:00 PM, $10 cover, and I like Schubert.

Feel free to share the Press Release for the 2012-2013 season, and thank you for supporting operamission!

Nici muzica nu este mai prejos. Şi nu mă gândesc la Stravinsky sau la Schoenberg, ci la minunatele compoziţii ale lui Erik Satie, pe care le găsesc de fiecare dată la fel de melancolice şi liniştitoare. Satie e unul dintre numeroasele motive pentru care mă gândesc adesea dacă nu cumva m-am născut prea târziu.

In 1921 Arnold Schoenberg declares that because of him German music will continue to dominate the world for the next hundred years.  Twelve years later he is forced to leave Germany forever.  After the war, in America, laden with honors, he is still convinced that his work will be celebrated forever.  He faults Igor Stravisnky for paying too much attention to his contemporaries and disregarding the judgement of the future.  He expects posterity to be his most reliable ally.  In a scathing letter to Thomas Mann he looks to the period “after two or three hundred years,” when it will finally become clear which of the two was the greater, Mann or he!  Schoenberg dies in 1951.  For the next two decades his work is hailed as the greatest of the century, venerated by the most brilliant of the young composers, who declare themselves his disciples; but thereafter it recedes from both concert halls and memory.  Who plays it nowadays, at the turn of this century? Who looks to him?  No, I don’t mean to make foolish fun of his presumptuousness and say he overestimated himself.  A thousand times no!  Schoenberg did not overestimate himself.  He overestimated the future.

Did he commit an error of thinking?  No.  His thinking was correct, but he was living in spheres that were too lofty.  He was conversing with the greatest Germans, with Bach and Goethe and Brahms and Mahler, but , however intelligent they might be, conversations carried on in the higher stratospheres of the mind are always myopic about what goes on, with no reason or logic, down below: two great armies are battling to the death over sacred causes; but some minuscule plague bacterium comes along and lays them both low.

Schoenberg was aware that the bacterium existed.  As early as 1930 he wrote: “Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless”; it “force-feeds us music … regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it,” with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises.

Radio was the tiny stream it all began with.  Then came other technical means for reproducing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river.  If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, “regardless whether we want to hear it,” it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don’t know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can’t tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying.

Schoenberg saw the bacterium, he was aware of the danger, but deep inside he did not grant it much importance.  As I said, he was living in the very lofty spheres of the mind, and pride kept him from taking seriously an enemy so small, so vulgar, so repugnant, so contemptible.  The only great adversary worthy of him, the sublime rival whom he battled with verve and severity, was Igor Stravinsky.  That was the music he charged at, sword flashing, to win the favor of the future.

But the future was a river, a flood of notes where composers’ corpses drifted among the fallen leaves and torn-away branches.  One day Schoenberg’s dead body, bobbing about in the raging waves, collided with Stravinsky’s, and in a shamefaced late-day reconciliation the two of them journeyed on together toward nothingness (toward the nothingness of music that is absolute din).

- Milan Kundera, Ignorance, 2000

Yorkshire Saxophone Choir were performing at the Piece Hall this afternoon so made my way over to Halifax late morning. Never mind late morning, it was the late night that was the problem, having arrived home at 2.00am after yesterday’s Prom performance and eventually turned in at 3.30am! The Piece Hall is an impressive outdoor venue – a courtyard surrounded by three levels of small shops. This was where ‘Pieces’ (a unit of measurement) of cloth from the local mills were traded, and the Georgian building is the only one of its kind remaining. Today it would be pieces of music rather than pieces of fabric that would be on display!

The weather was much kinder to us than at our last appearance at the venue, inadvisably in winter, when it had rained and rained. However, the last day of the Olympics today will certainly have had an impact on audience numbers! We played an entertaining and varied selection of original ‘Pieces’ and arrangements for saxophone ensemble and our two sets just flew by, which is always a good sign! A strange weekend of extremes – last night singing a major classical work in London’s Royal Albert Hall to a sell-out audience of 5000; today playing pop, jazz and contemporary music in an outdoor venue in Yorkshire to an audience of, well, let’s just say fewer than 5000! All part of the magical journey that is music, and both events equally enjoyable in their own way.

Tuned in to tonight’s Prom, Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, in a magnificent performance by BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Chorus, BBC Singers et al, conducted by Jukka-Pekka Saraste. Having performed the great work a long time ago – way back before Old Life, which is going back a bit – I was surprised to recognise the cue and even remember some of the words and music, joining in remotely from the privacy of my own home!

Hello there! For Sunday, we have collected 29 free events taking place in and around London. Here are some ideas:

• it’s the last day of the Olympic Games today and you can go and see (and cheer) for free, the men who will participate in the Marathon Race (11am-1pm London). Click here for a map of the route of the race
• if you like gospel music and you would fancy trying your vocal cords on it there is a free all day workshop with Andrea Encinas (Chingford Day Dance Festival). You can attend for half day (10am-1pm or 2pm-4pm) or whole day. No experience needed
• free musical introduction to Schoenberg’s epic cantata “Gurrelieder” with Andrew McGregor and musicians from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Singers (Royal College of Music, 6.15pm)
• at National Theatre, there is another free activity for those interested in music: suitable for families and children 6+, you will have the opportunity to examine exotic musical instruments like a kalimba, a cascabel and a Shekere from the collection of the musical instruments of the National Theatre (3pm-5pm)
• for children (aged 7+) there is a storytelling (“Wise Words”) performance (12 noon – 1pm) by Jan Blake and Pete Chand. A free storytelling workshop follows
• at 12 noon there is a free performance related to the golden age of the silent movies (repeated at 2pm and 4pm)
• free outdoor show “Project 3Sixty” with freerunning, biking, acrobatics and live 3D-projection-mapping. Watch this video from a past performance (National Theatre Square, 1pm).

• at the National Gallery (various times) there are free workshops (life drawing and mini-model making – suitable for children 5+ years) and storytelling sessions (suitable for children 2-5 years)
• if you are still there at 4pm, there is a free 10-minute talk/introduction to Reynolds’s painting “Lady Cockburn and her Three Eldest Sons” (Room 34)

View of Medicine Man exhibition – Image Credit: Rama Knight/Wellcome Images

• at 2.30pm, at Wellcome Collection there will be a guided tour related to medicine and health (historical objects)
• free, ticketed, guided tour exploring more about Southbank Centre’s roots, architecture and some memorable moments in its 60-year history (daily 11.30am & 2.30pm until 9 September 2012)
• the daily free guided tours of the Victoria and Albert Museum (highly recommended) and the National Gallery ones (two extra of the latter will be in French: at 12 noon & 2pm) are a good option too.

Have a fantastic Sunday!

To get the full list of events and all their details for Sunday, 12 August 2012, or to make plans for any future dates please scroll down to the calendar and click on the event(s) you are interested in.

Follow us on Twitter for short texts about free shows and events in London or like us on Facebook. If you have any comments or suggestions please e-mail us at: LondonFreeShows@gmail.com

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Iranian nuclear facilities were recently attacked by malware.  The malicious software, of unknown origin, pumped AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’ through the infected computers’ speakers.

It’s probably fair to say that the annual United Nations General Assembly is generally considered to be a bit of a yawn-fest.  This year though a concert called ‘Global Festival‘ is being held concurrently with the UNGA.  Neil Young and Crazy Horse, the Foo Fighters, Band of Horses and the Black Keys are playing, with the aim of raising funds for various causes including polio eradication, which is facing a $500 million shortfall.  The concert doesn’t raise funds through ticket prices: there are none.  Instead, patrons must earn their ticket by completing actions recommended by various global organisations, such as signing petitions and writing letters.

Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan decided to let the world know that he takes his cues from Springsteen this week.  His speech was widely panned for being dorky and embarrassing, but nonetheless praised for being tactically clever.  It both effectively conveyed a message (Swan and the Labor Party are pro-worker and, like Catwoman and Bane in the latest Batman flick, anti-billionaire) and managed to garner significant coverage despite the stiff, Olympic, competition.

Opinion

Russian female punk group Pussy Riot have been making many a headline over the past couple of weeks because the trial of three of its members has started.  They even have Anthony Kiedis getting political.  If you’re wondering, they have officially been charged with ‘hooliganism’.  Foreign Policy gets a bit overexcited and claims Pussy Riot (who seem to be singularly lacking in musical talent, even for a punk band, just by the way) has “perhaps given punk rock a future as a global force for justice and freedom”.  They reckon that – until Pussy Riot – the “high-water mark of punk’s geopolitical relevance” was Crass’s 1982 song critical of the Falklands War, ‘How Does it Feel to be the Mother of 1000 Dead?’ and subsequent production of a hoax tape, widely believed at the time to be a conversation between Thatcher and Reagan.

The shooting of six American Sikhs in Wisconsin earlier this month is a reminder that punk can also be a vehicle for those with less progressive views.  The shooter was a “frustrated neo-nazi” and leader of a racist punk band.  The same is of course true of any genre.  I always associate hip-hop with progressive, leftist politics because that was its major theme when Australian hip-hop got good in Sydney and Melbourne in the early 2000s.  Here in Mongolia though, the country’s most prominent rapper is proudly xenophobic, frequently rhyming against China and the Chinese.

Inside Story has a brief article on politically and religiously motivated repression of music.  The author draws a distinction between musicians victimised for the content of their music (Pinochet’s exeuction of musician Victor Jara) and for the form of their music.  Apparently the Nazis could not abide twelve-tone music – the form devised by Austrian Arnold Schoenberg.

First of all, I’m not about to argue for which is better. I believe both are valid and have their own time and place. But at times I will see a comment on YouTube where someone says they don’t like atonal music, and then there will be a reply comment that insults their level of intelligence in some way and tells them to go back to their Jonas Brothers or something.

I’ve noticed is that for some reason, atonal music tends to carry this reputation of being a “more intelligent” kind of music. The first problem with that is that you’ll get a lot of less experienced composers that will write atonal music that isn’t very good and then discount any criticisms against it by saying that if you don’t like it, then you just understand it. If you ever find yourself in such a predicament, then a good response would be, then could you please help me understand it?

Arnold Schoenberg once said something like if you don’t like a piece of music after listening to it once, then listen ten more times. If you still don’t like it, then listen to it ten more times. I disagree. If you don’t like it, then great. Another thing he said that I almost agree with is that if it’s art, then it’s not for all; if it’s for all, then it isn’t art. The only true part of that last quote is that composers don’t always write music that is meant to be liked by everyone. So don’t feel unintelligent if you don’t like it.

Tonal music can be just as “intelligent”. Greatness or intelligence level doesn’t depend on tonality alone. There are a million other factors involved. The music becomes “more intelligent” when as many of those factors are considered by the composer when the composer wrote it.

There are some interesting ironies involved with this runaway success, though. Boulez was, early in his career, well known for his rhetorical firebrand on contemporary music issues. The angry young man of postwar modernism, with his staunch defence of monolithic musical [Structures] of total serialism has, it would seem, become canonised. Canonised, that is, in the sense that Barenboim’s selection of his works form the musical repertoire that will be popularly held to best define the composer, much in the same way as Beethoven, Boulez’s musical partner in this series, has become best known for the nine works also heard this week.

Interestingly though, it is not those monolithic works that stand as part of this canon, but rather Boulez’s more fluid, visceral (even accessible?) works that followed from his dogmatic insistence on the supremacy of serialism. This is with the exception of the monumental, epoch defining Le marteau sans maître. Not paired with Beethoven’s equally monumental and epoch defining Ninth Symphony, nor conducted by maestro Barenboim, however. Rather, it is placed in an untelevised late-night concert alongside Beethoven’s somewhat less monumental Piano Quintet. An almost a terrific feat of programming falls at the last hurdle.

Boulez once declared that compositionally, the (equally feared) Schoenberg was dead. For whatever reason this was, Schoenberg’s gradual acceptance into the concert repertoire surely illustrates the hallmark of a composer who (metaphorically, please) has ceased to compose. It is no longer unusual to hear the lushly Romantic Verklaerte Nacht in concert, nor the expressionist Five Pieces for Orchestra, or even the serialism of the Variations for orchestra. All pieces that were heard alongside Beethoven’s Piano Concertos under Barenboim two years ago (and which Tom Service tried to encourage listeners to give a chance).

As in Schoenberg’s case then, perhaps this fruitful pairing of two composers is one of the final nails in the coffin of the power of Boulez, and even of musical modernism generally, to shock. Which is no bad thing. I like to think of it as the beginning of a more pleasant afterlife in which these fantastic works are judged on their own musical merits (even if they can’t yet stand toe-to-toe with Beethoven’s mighty Ninth). Fingers crossed.

No, I am training myself for the orgy of going out of an evening (and often the afternoon and late morning too) that is my annual trip to the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe.  At my age, a little preparation is important before any major period of exertion – even if most of that exertion is sitting down, there is still the whole issue of being up past my normal bed-time.

Luckily, Cambridge is here to help, with this last week seeing the start of the excellent Cambridge Summer Musical Festival and also playing host to the Cambridge Comedy Festival.  As a result there have been plenty of nights out for the author – and even my car has seen some action given the rather wet evenings that were very much the norm until the summer arrived on Saturday (not sure how long its planning to stay, but I’m trying to be Zen about it and live in the moment).  This has had an impact on blogging activity and I trust you are suitably grateful at the reduction in output.

My musical highlights, other than a surfeit of Bach with Floriligeum, would be the guitarist Stewart French and the pianist Karim Said.  In the case of Mr French, it is partly the solidarity one feels for a fellow Oxford mathematician, but more seeing a classical guitarist up-close brought home to me just how difficult an instrument it must be to play well (and play it well he certainly did).  It looks to be absolutely agony for the fingers of the right hand at least, though perhaps years of practice would help with that.  He also showed that the guitar is not a bad substitute for the harpsichord – which makes a certain sense as they are both plucked string instruments – and is a darn site cheaper and, as a further bonus, a guitar already lies within my possession.  Only 10,000 hours of serious application (well, according to one M Gladwell, Esq.) stands between me and one of my earlier blogged dreams!  The even more youthful Mr Said has performed the minor miracle of making me re-consider my dislike of the later Schoenberg (yet another shibboleth shattered) with his excellent introductory talk prior to performance of the Opus 25 Suite for Piano.   That piece would certainly bear a second listen, and I fear may act as a gateway drug to Opus 26 and beyond.

Comedy-wise, I’ve tried to see new acts given the extremely reasonable prices of the CCF – £10 for 2 acts (even if they are practising material for Auld Reekie) strikes me as a jolly good deal in this day and age.  My top recommendation would be “The Trap”, a three-man sketch team (collective?) – I’d never heard of them until last week, when I caught a 30 minute sketch show they had done for Radio 2 on the iPlayer (thanks to a couple of recommendations I saw on Twitter) which was far better than the vast majority of radio sketch fodder.  I tried to see if they would be on in Edinburgh – but no sign in my Fringe brochure (though they are appearing!) – and then I spotted that they were a late replacement for another act at the CCF.  Serendipity: more than a dodgy film from the early noughties!  ”Bad Musical”, the live show I was lucky enough to catch, was an absolute scream – some very clever wordplay and silliness galore.  Searching the web it would seem that they are far from new, and have appeared in several examples of radio fun I’ve enjoyed over the last decade which just goes to show what a very poor witness I would make if ever called upon to testify (though some of their names do seem slightly familiar).

So, I feel my going-out “muscles” are now becoming well-conditioned ready for the fray.  Based on last year, I probably ought to do something about beefing up my ankles – we don’t want a repeat of last year’s swelling incident.  Perhaps it’s time to trying brushing my teeth whilst standing on one leg again  - well, it seems to be that or playing around with a giant rubber band according to the fount of knowledge that is the internet – if you hear a crash, you’ll know things have not gone entirely to plan…

Schoenberg and Words: The Modernist Years (Border Crossings) United Kingdom (UK)

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