X-Factor

I am not a great fan of Reality TV or talent shows. Indeed, programmes like Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here are more likely to get me declaiming about the end of civilisation! Still, I have watched Strictly Come Dancing with pleasure…. well, how I’d love to do ballroom dancing myself. Anyway, this year I have become very keen on X-Factor. I became hooked after sitting down bored one afternoon, watching the highlights of last year’s competition, and being bowled over by the progress of Alexandra Burke (I love her new single, by the way). I know it’s contrived but it is entertaining. And I’ve no time for those who criticise it in the name of “real music” (what, like Sting!!) The auditions, of course, are a kind of ridiculously fascinating freakshow. Oh, to think that there are so many fantastically deluded people in this land! My favourite was the old woman with her dog (Simon Cowell: It’s not a duet, it’s just you, isn’t it? The dog doesn’t really sing. Woman: He was singing! I heard him!) But I also had a soft spot for the man with a mournful face who sang in the most peculiarly expressive but incomprehensible voice, somehow strangled. Now we are down to the last six. I was sad to see Rachel go – unlike everybody else I liked her. I thought Miss Frank would last longer – but perhaps that was a blessing in disguise because I preferred them when they were still a bit rough round the edges and they were becoming too smooth. I can’t stand John & Edward. Who is voting for them? Has everyone forgotten their behaviour earlier on (when they sang over another contestant ruining her chances)? Their incompetent dancing, their embarrassing rapping, their camp costumes, their idiotic permanent grins, their infernally creepy perkiness – I hate it all. They are like a cross between the Midwich Cuckoos and the Hitler Youth. The weedy-voiced Lloyd should have been voted off weeks ago. Olly is very attractive – but too bland for my taste. Joe is terribly sweet – I so much want to mother him – and I like his voice. I agree, though, with the judge who said he would be more suited to musical theatre than pop. I think it is between Danyl and Stacey as to who is the best singer. I don’t know what people have against Danyl – I have voted for him most rounds. He has a good, expressive voice – his big notes make me gooey inside. And I love Stacey – such a genuine character and so gauche in manner. Yet when she sings – and with such a lovely voice – she is transformed. She would be a worthy winner of this unreal fairy-tale competition. But I suspect Olly is going to get it.

More search strings

I know, I know – this is the typical lazy bloggers’ fall-back. I will write some new posts soon. Promise.

In the meantime: ridiculous searches which have brought people to this site. I’m always astonished at how bizarre so many of them are. But I have to confess they do rather irritate me – because it makes me feel like the majority of visitors alight here by chance and then click away within seconds as there is nothing to satisfy their ill-conceived search enquiries.

• there are the rushing waves mountains of molecules
• munch on satin panty box
• desmond morris roadmap to sex
• beautiful hungarian man
• what does the phrase “full on” mean
• stephanie hates circular logic
• latex hobble skirts
• portraits of dying women dada
• lauren bacall engagement ring
• book mutant traitress
• stefanie reptile transgender
• wordpress hedonism thigh
• ludicrous t-girl youtube
• sophisticated elegant naked ladies silk
• fotos childer ianomami
• advertiser newspapers talk about panda’s face in food by aaron macdonald
• as the barriers in the head get broken down, the noise buff becomes a kind of hip vegetable.
• crossdresser sitting and tapping heels
• kate fox irony loft conversions
• how many myths are their about the alphabet
• sequinned nipples
• dying from affixation definition
• you like the phrase. “i respect that”

Some favourite disco

I love disco.

1) Risco Connection – Ain’t No Stopping Us Now. A Jamaican extended remix of the McFadden & Whitehead classic. The song itself is dispatched pretty quickly and we are left with a loping bass-line, a chugging reggae rhythm on the guitar, latin-y drums and pans, and soaring over it all the most fabulous strings. This is the sexiest track ever!

2) Sparkle – Handsome Man. Mixed by Larry Levan and about scoping a… handsome man, this also has a slight Caribbean feel.

3) Air Power – Welcome to the Disco. Ten minutes more of gloriously swooping strings.

4) Aquarian Dream – Fantasy. Produced by Norman Connors, a short, sharp, punchy track.

5) Loleatta Holloway – Love Sensation. One of the great divas of the disco era. This song has been sampled on a hundred house tracks (most notoriously, perhaps by Black Box on Ride on Time). This is the Tom Moulton mix. Sheer ecstasy.

6) Inner Life – Moment of my Life. Another track on Salsoul and featuring another great diva, Jocelyn Brown.

7) Musique – Glide. A Patrick Adams production – sort of deliriously drag-queeny in style!

8) Metropole – Miss Manhattan. A wonderful piece of Italo-Disco from 1981. I immediately fell in love with it a couple of years ago when I first heard it and it has probably been my most played track ever since. A gorgeous song, excellently orchestrated – and like all good disco its sound and atmosphere strikes a perfect balance between hedonism and melancholy.

9) The Fantastic Aleems – Hooked On Your Love. The deepest bass line, chunky guitars, soaring strings, Leroy Burgess’s sexy voice, feverish girl backing singers, and congas playing like butterfly kisses down your spine. Is there any better dance music?

10) Silver, Platinum and Gold – I Got a Thing. An incredibly powerful track sung by three very feisty women. Get ready to be blown away!

Now tell me disco was all a load of kitsch!!

Proms 2009

So, another year of Promming is over. I only made it to 7 or 8 concerts this year – circumstances forced me to miss Argerich playing Prokofiev and Ravel for instance. But the ones I did make it to were all wonderfully enjoyable.

It is curious, then, to be reminded that the Culture Secretary last year dismissed the Proms as elitist and irrelevant and alienating to people of “different backgrounds”. What nonsense! The audience at a typical Prom concert is far more heterogeneous than most – there are many more young people for a start: I have often found myself queuing between what were clearly music students and those who have never been to a classical concert before in their lives. There are tourists and people who have come straight from work. Most dress casually, though some dress up. A few appear outlandish – there was one character who stood beside me at one concert in a huge black Victorian dress. When there was no music playing he wore what looked like an executioner’s hood over his head! I confess I found him rather creepy and I wish he had chosen somewhere else to stand… But generally, the informality of the Proms is one of its great attractions.

Anyway, the first concert I went to was Prom 2 on July 18th given by the Gabrieli Consort & Players conducted by Paul McCreesh with a large choir and soloists and a performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. For a piece based on Genesis and Paradise Lost it is a very jolly work – a product of the Rationalist 18th century with its depiction of an innocent world before Original Sin. It was disappointing that they used an English translation – it’s not like anyone is unfamiliar with the story! The performance, though, was glorious, the choruses fleet and golden, the massed period instruments sounding sumptuous. I left the Albert Hall glowing.

Next was Prom 9, a concert of 20th century British music given by the BBC Philharmonic under Vassily Sinaisky. I confess I have been one of those who’ve readily dismissed this kind of thing as “cowpat music” – but I have been giving it a chance lately. This concert definitely made a good case. It began with E. J. Moeran’s Symphony in g minor, an atmospheric if rather bleak work inspired, apparently, by the landscape of County Kerry and Norfolk. Redolent of Sibelius it is nonetheless an original work – one wonders, though, whether it will always be described, and damned with faint praise, as “interesting.” After that we had Gerald Finzi’s Grand Fantasia and Toccata for piano and orchestra played by Leon McCawley. I’d never heard this before and it was great fun. A very energetic work reminiscent perhaps of Busoni with its faux-Bachian counterpoint, Lisztian pyrotechnics and hints of Bartokian modernism. Finally, Elgar’s Symphony No.2, full of restrained passion, barely-concealed nostalgia and melancholy, the whole coming to a climax of calm resignation.

I was back the following night for Prom 10 and a fascinating concert of French and Japanese music from the Orchestre National de Lyon conducted by Jun Märkl. It began with a performance of Takemitsu’s Ceremonial: An Autumn Ode. The lights were dimmed around the lonely figure of Mayumi Miyata playing the sho, a kind of ancient Japanese mouth-organ, the long, slow notes eerie and ethereal as they insinuated themselves around the great expanse of the Royal Albert Hall. In the middle section of the work focus switches to the orchestra with dreamy strings and evocative woodwinds before returning to the solo sho and its meditations. Wonderfully strange! This was followed by Caplet’s gorgeously orchestrated version of Pagodes from Debussy’s piano suite Estampes and a vigorous performance of Ravel’s colourfully beguiling Rapsodie Espagnole. There was more Takemitsu after an interval, the densely impressionistic Green. Then Akiko Suwanai came on stage as the soloist in Sarasate’s brilliant Concert Fantasy on Themes from Carmen and Ravel’s demoniacally virtuosic Tzigane. Suwanai has a clean, flawless technique – too perfect, perhaps, for these two works? I would have preferred playing that was, well, dirtier, sleazier, more improvisatory and dangerous. Following a second interval there was a new work by Toshio Hosokawa entitled Cloud and Light and the return of Mayumi Miyata and her sho. An atmospheric piece of pulsating harmonies. The concert concluded with Debussy’s La mer.

A week later I was at Prom 20 for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The concert began with the music for Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, the ballet created by Diaghilev for Massine, in the complete version for orchestra and three vocalists. The score was based on 18th century manuscripts attributed to Pergolesi – but the final outcome, with its piquant orchestration and spiky rhythms, is pure Stravinsky. Darkly humorous, it is very entertaining. It was followed by Schumann’s Piano Concerto, one of my favourite pieces, played by Nicholas Angelich. The performance was perfectly acceptable – the first movement could have been more firmly characterised, though, and should have been more Romantic, and the slow movement was a little too understated, but the finale had great dash and liveliness. Then we heard Mendelssohn’s 5th Symphony, the Reformation. A more serious-sounding work than the Scottish or Italian Symphonies this was a powerful and convincing interpretation with the great chorale Ein Feste Burg ringing out magnificently at the end.

Next was the event I was looking forward to most this season – Multiple Pianos Day! First was Prom 32 given by the Britten Sinfonia under Ludovic Morlot. They began with a languorous orchestration, strangely enough, of Fauré’s Dolly suite for piano duet. Then Katia and Marielle Labeque came on stage for a lazy Sunday afternoon performance of Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos K365 – a bit too relaxed, perhaps? After the interval there was a première – of Left Light by Anna Meredith. Single isolated sounds build up to an enormous climax. I found it an immediately attractive piece but I wonder whether it would bear much repeated listening? The Labeque sisters reappeared for an electrifying dispatch of Lutoslawski’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini. Breathtaking. And, as always, I am so envious of the stylish jackets the Labeques wear in concert. Finally, there was Saint-Saens’ ever-popular Carnival of the Animals played in sparkling fashion by Lidija and Sanja Bizjak. I don’t think I’ve listened to Carnival of the Animals for years – it’s one of those pieces so hackneyed one avoids them on purpose. Unheard for so long it now appears fresh once more. The concert over I crossed the road into Hyde Park and sat under a tree to eat my packed lunch or rather tea before returning to the Albert Hall to queue up for the evening’s Prom 33. This was given by the London Sinfonietta conducted by Edward Gardner. They began with Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique in the version for four pianos, a battery of percussion and laptop. As so often the noise was toned down and restrained but the work still retains its modernist charm. That was followed by the tedious Grand Pianola Music by John Adams. The long first section is pure kitsch, sweet and syrupy, the second bombastic, presumably some kind of ironic joke. At the end I applauded with gratitude that it was finally over. After the interval a work with real, meaningful content, one of the masterpieces of 20th century music I believe, Bartok’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion. The complex interplay between the four instrumentalists is at times demonic and exciting, at times mesmerising and magical. And then the climax of the day, the folky primitivism of Stravinsky’s Les Noces given a very spirited performance.

I turned up for Prom 40 – which included Beethoven’s 9th Symphony – but the queue for the Gallery was so terribly long even an hour before the doors opened that I suspected I would not get in so I went home. The queue was even longer the following Friday for Prom 48 – but at least I was at the front of it this time! The first Prom I went to – about five years ago? – was given by the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, the group of young Arab and Israeli musicians formed by the conductor Daniel Barenboim. And now I was to hear them again in a very assured and beautiful concert – if rather short and marred by a lot of noise in the audience. It began with Liszt’s symphonic poem Les Préludes – as gorgeous and convincing a performance as I’ve heard, I think. Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde was just as impressive. And after the interval a vivid rendition of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique with quite incredible bell sounds before the Dies irae.

Life and lack of cash got in the way of my attending any more concerts until Prom 69. This was given by the venerable Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly. In the first half they performed Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No.1 with Saleem Abboud Ashkar at the piano. A lively, classical performance with some lovely moments in the slow movement. Of course this orchestra will forever be linked to the memory of Mendelssohn. In the second half, Deryck Cooke’s completion of Mahler’s Symphony No.10. I’ve never actually heard the whole thing before and it was a revelation. What can I say? Moving and profound music yet sketchy and tentative, too. Nostalgic and forward-looking at the same time. Applause was prolonged – and rightly so.

Russian chamber music

I’ve been listening to a lot of passionate, melancholy and melodic chamber music by Russian composers these past few months.

1) All of I knew of Alexander Alyabiev until recently was that he composed a famous song called The Nightingale. Well, it appears he led an eventful life in the first half of the nineteenth century – a soldier, who distinguished himself in the Napoleonic Campaign, and inveterate gambler he was sent to Siberia for many years after being wrongfully accused of murder. Anyway, not long ago I discovered a recording of chamber music made by Emil Gilels and members of the Beethoven Quartet. From it here is the Adagio of Alyabiev’s Piano Trio in a minor.

2) Mikhail Glinka, more or less a contemporary of Alyabiev, is, of course, far better known. I particularly enjoy his delightfully tuneful Grand Piano Sextet in E flat. This is the Allegro as played by Mikhail Pletnev and Ensemble.

3) Alexander Borodin was by profession a chemist who made several important discoveries. His musical output is therefore small – but of high quality. Here is the playful Scherzo with a beautifully lyrical middle-section from his Piano Quintet in c minor.

4) Anton Rubinstein was undoubtedly the giant of Russian music – perhaps the finest pianist of the nineteenth century after Liszt, he was said to physically resemble Beethoven and certainly possessed something of the same titanic power in his personality and playing, and his influence on other pianists and composers was enormous. Even though I have heard much of Rubinstein’s piano music I don’t think I would ever have guessed he was the composer of this Quintet for Piano and Wind Instruments in F Op.55. From it here is the lovely slow movement, Andante.

5) I have a great fondness for some of the works of Sergei Lyapunov, especially his very passionate Sextet for Piano and Strings in b flat minor Op.63. This is the Scherzo.

6) The chamber music of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov are not nearly as familiar as his orchestral music or opera. Well, the Quintet for Piano and Wind Instruments in B flat is just as colourful and as originally scored. This is the utterly charming finale, Allegretto.

7) Alexander Glazunov’s seven String Quartets are still new works for me. This is the tunefully contrapuntal first movement, Andante – Allegro, of the Fifth Quartet in d minor Op.70 played by the Shostakovich Quartet.

8) Alexander Grechaninov’s Piano Trio in c minor Op.38 is a gorgeously romantic piece which should be better-known. Here is the first movement, Allegro passionato.

9) It appears that Sergei Taneyev is often dismissed as an uninspired academic composer. How anyone can think that after hearing some of the chamber music is quite beyond me. What could be more impassioned yet tightly argued and intricate? Take this Allegro brillante from the Piano Quartet in E Op.20…

10) Rachmaninov’s first Trio Elegiaque in g minor, imbued with a deep melancholy, is one of my favourite works of that composer.

Fifteen books

There’s a meme going round called Fifteen Books in Fifteen Minutes – I encountered it yesterday at Bird of Paradox. You are supposed to list fifteen books that will always stay in your mind – and not take more than fifteen minutes to recall them. Well, I started but then I decided I don’t want to do that exactly so I revised it slightly to something more interesting (to my mind, anyway). I wondered, what if you, dear reader, were here with me in my little room? What fifteen books, from my depleted library, would I be pressing you to read?

So, here are my Fifteen Books I Would Be Keen to Lend:

1) Well, one would be a book that appears on the list at Bird of Paradox: Whipping Girl by Julia Serano. While there are many books on trans subjects Whipping Girl stands head and shoulders above them all. This provoking, critically acute collection of essays possesses the estimable virtue of being both engagingly personal and intellectually stimulating.

2) There are many books, too, about the development of the PC and the birth of the internet. My favourite is The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop. At the heart of the book is an affectionate biography of the genius J.C.R. Licklider whose vision of the extending and enabling possibilities of computing seemed to have propelled so many innovations and whose managerial abilities were central to making those visions come true. Better than any other book on the subject it comprehensively portrays the central personalities, conveys the most important ideas, and captures the excitement of technological advance without neglecting the part played by contingency, fallibility and inertia.

3) There are more concise summations of the various fallacies of reasoning than Historians’ Fallacies by David Hackett Fischer – but none more complete or illustrated so devastatingly. Fischer exhaustively surveys the faults of argumentation in a wide range of academic history – his examples, though, can be applied to any of the humanities and to discussion and argument in general. A wise and witty work.

4) Nietzsche and Hegel have one thing in common, at least. They have both suffered from curious reception histories which have resulted in their philosophies being saddled with the most preposterous misinterpretations. To some extent a certain blame for misunderstanding might be attached to the literary hyperbole of the one and the dense jargon of the other. Still, one might expect scholars to be, well, scholarly. With these two philosophers, however, they rarely are. That’s why I recommend the selection of essays edited by John Stewart entitled The Hegel Myths and Legends. That Hegel believed that the Rational is Actual and the Actual is Rational; that Hegel denied the Law of Contradiction; that Hegel promulgated the dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis; that Hegel proved a priori that there could only be seven planets (without realising that an eighth, Uranus, had just been discovered!): all these commonplace claims, and more, are effectively skewered and demonstrated to be false. I particularly enjoy Walter Kaufmann’s splendid and complete destruction of Karl Popper’s miserably inadequate critique of Hegel in The Open Society - the only thing to rival it is Medawar on Chardin!

5) The Good European by David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates might be superficially dismissed as a coffee-table book about Nietzsche. It is a biography of the philosopher concentrating on his travels through Germany, Switzerland, Italy and the French Riviera and illustrating his work-sites, the places where he thought and wrote, with archive pictures and wonderful photographs taken by the authors and accompanied by quotations from letters and other writings. I love this book! How I should like one day to follow its path…

6) A couple of years ago I was given The Art of Looking Sideways by designer Alan Fletcher for Christmas. It is described by its author as a cabinet of curiosities. Is there a richer, more inspirational book? It is packed full of pictures, illustrations, photographs, quotations, information, and ideas, all superbly presented. Fabulous is the only word that will do.

7) My favourite cookbooks are those by Nigel Slater – I like that fairly simple but sensuous, rather masculine, robustly-flavoured kind of cooking. Appetite is the one I would recommend. Yummy.

8) I recently read Patrick Hamilton’s splendid novel Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky. Set in the West End of London between the wars it is in three parts telling the stories of each of the main characters: the waiter Bob, who is madly in love with Jenny, a prostitute who doesn’t love him back but takes his money anyway, and Ella, a barmaid who unrequitedly loves Bob but is pursued by the loathsome Mr Eccles. The story comes to a devastating but very understated conclusion. It is an ominous tale of very ordinary, lonely people trying to survive in a harsh, uncaring, hopeless world. Hamilton spares no-one – he is merciless on their vanities, delusions, flaws, absurdities – yet you end up feeling nothing but pity and understanding for the central characters. He is sharp and funny, too, on the language, the clichés, the manners and the class system of the world he describes.

9) The stories of Jorge Luis Borges are, no doubt, well-known. Less familiar, but equally delectable, is The Book of Imaginary Beings, a compilation of tiny essays made with Margarita Guerrero. Here we are told of The Catoblepas, The Peryton, and the Lunar Hare among many others. Fascinating.

10) I think the funniest novel I ever read was The Serial by Cyra McFadden, a satire of post-hippy 1970s types and mores. Is the satire blunted or sharpened by the fact that what was once confined to a comfortable elite in Marin County – New Age religion, psychobabble, fad diets, alternative health and so on and on – is now commonplace? Well, I see where it’s coming from, I just don’t know where it’s at. But, like, I can get behind that, you know? It’s a process and you just have to flow with it.

11) A very different kind of satire is Extinction by Thomas Bernhard. The narrator receives a telegram informing him that his parents and brother have been killed – he then rants for over three hundred pages about his family, his home town and his country (Austria). His hatred and scorn know no bounds. It is righteously and darkly funny. And it’s a lot better than I’m making it sound.

12) I’ve just borrowed George Perec’s A Void (that’s the one written without using the letter e) from the local library. From my library I would lend his W or The Memory of Childhood. Autobiographical fragments about growing up during the Second World War are interspersed with a story concerning a strange island apparently dedicated to sport and the Olympian ideal. What really happens on the island is slowly revealed and movingly linked to the horrors of that war.

13) If I lent out Ocean of Sound by David Toop I’d have to include the gorgeous double-CD that accompanied it. The book opens with Debussy’s discovery of Javanese music at the Paris Exposition in 1889 and travels from AMM and the Aphex Twin through Stockhausen and Sun Ra to Lee Perry and Brian Eno and the Yanomami Indians and the humpback whale and the sound sculptures of Max Eastley and… well, you get the picture. It is a survey of ambient sound in the twentieth century and its association with altered states, landscapes, and atmospheres. Always stimulating.

14) As should be obvious to anyone who reads this pillowbook I adore the piano. Pianoforte by Dieter Hildebrandt is the perfect introduction to the instrument (in the classical world). The English translation is rather portentously subtitled A Social History of the Piano – it is no such thing; the German is Der Roman des Klaviers. The book, as Anthony Burgess points out, is a novel and one whose hero is Franz Liszt. It is full of the most delightful and interesting details, anecdotes and stories about pianists, pianos and piano music in the nineteenth century.

15) Perhaps I should end with a book from my shelves which is currently on loan – Luis has my copy of Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Alethea Hayter. It is a book both gothic and scholarly describing the effects of opium and profound influence of the drug over so many of the writers of the Romantic era.

Baroque transcriptions

Well, my last compilation had Baroque keyboard music played “straight”, more or less, on the piano. Now I want to survey some transcriptions – same era, same instrument, but rather more elaborated.

1) Ottorino Respighi “freely” transcribed a number of lute pieces from the 16th and 17th centuries as a set of suites for orchestra and then arranged them for piano in his collection Antiche Danza ed Arie. This is the very attractive, jaunty and modern-sounding Bergamasca by Bernardo Gianoncelli.

2) Leopold Godowsky made a number of transcriptions of Baroque music for his collection entitled Renaissance. As usual with Godowsky inner voices and piquant harmonies have been added. Here is his version of a Courante by Jean-Baptiste Lully.

3) Sergei Prokofiev was more likely to transcribe his own music than those of other composers. He did make this rather serene but austere (and only partial) transcription of Dietrich Buxtehude’s organ Prelude and Fugue in D.

4) Bela Bartok made a number of transcriptions of Italian Baroque keyboard music to play at his own piano recitals. He is sparer with virtuosic flourishes and additions than some of his contemporaries but still converts the music into a modern pianistic style. This is his transcription of Michelangelo Rossi’s Toccata No.2 in a minor.

5) Here is Percy Grainger’s brilliant and lyrical ramble through John Dowland’s song Now, O Now, I Needs Must Part. Utterly anachronistic – but surely marvellous and enchanting?

6) Moritz Moszkowski was another virtuoso pianist of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century who, like so many at the time, enjoyed making transcriptions to play at concerts. Handel’s aria Lascia ch’io pianga from Rinaldo, music of a simple but sublime unadorned beauty, might have seemed an unlikely candidate for such a transcription. It’s lovely, though…

7) Rachmaninov transcribed three movements from Bach’s Violin Partita No.3 in E BWV 1006. They are cheeky little arrangements almost expressly designed to irritate the purist. The alterations are delightful, though, even if the final result is as much Rachmaninov as it is Bach. This is the Prelude.

8) In my Baroque Piano compilation I included a harpsichord piece of Jean-Philippe Rameau played fairly straight by Robert Casadesus although in a pianistic style with many a Romantic nuance. Here is a much more extravagant and impressionistic transcription of Le rappel des oiseaux made by Ignaz Freidman with double notes galore.

9) Enrique Granados transcribed twenty-odd of the Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti making them more pianistic (according to the taste of the early twentieth century) – doubling notes, adapting harmonies, adding phrasing and dynamics. This is his version of the Sonata K102 – slower but more decorative than the original.

10) Well, we can’t have Baroque transcriptions for the piano without something by Ferruccio Busoni. Here is one of my favourites: the magnificent and resounding organ Prelude and Fugue in D BWV532 played here by Emil Gilels. I remember very clearly the first time I heard this piece. It was sometime in the latter half of the 1990s. It was early autumn and my parents were on holiday and I was using their house to study because it was so peaceful. I had spent the day making notes for my thesis. As the afternoon wore on I put on a new CD that had arrived that morning from Amazon – a Busoni recital by Geoffrey Tozer. The final work was this Prelude and Fugue transcription. I got up from the table and stood in the kitchen in the twilight and stared out into the garden. There’s something so ecstatic and profoundly right about the fugue that tears rolled down my cheeks. They were tears of joy at being alive.

Baroque piano

It has become something of an article of faith that classical music should be performed on the instruments for which they were intended – for only then, it is argued, can the music be played in the correct manner and style and only then will it sound right. Pianists in particular, however, have long been interested in appropriating music written for the harpsichord or clavichord. It cannot be denied that the effect is very different. One might even talk, in some cases, of re-creation. Yet when the results are beautiful does it matter? I appreciate authenticity – but authenticity does not trump art. Anyway, I find it difficult to believe that any Baroque composer would be opposed to such transcriptions in principle considering how central the practice was to many at that time.

1) So, first, here is Girolamo Frescobaldi’s Toccata No.1 played by Francesco Tristano Schlimé.

2) Next a subtle and profound Pavan (MB15) by Orlando Gibbons played on the piano by Daniel Ben-Pienaar.

3) Glenn Gould made a famous recording of early keyboard music which in the very anachronistic manner of its performance somehow brings the music to life. From that record this is William Byrd’s First Pavan and Gailliard.

4) The Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti have long attracted pianists – they are irresistibly charming, varied, and beautiful. There are innumerable recordings – from them I have chosen the Sonata in b minor K87 in a very late recording made by Vladimir Horowitz. It is a performance which demonstrates perfectly how the piano brings out the melodic line and with it the almost vocal expressivity of this music.

5) Jean-Philippe Rameau’s piece for harpsichord, Le rappel des oiseaux used to be a great favourite with concert pianists. Here it is played with great delicacy by Robert Casadesus.

6) It is often thought that the keyboard music of French composers like Rameau and the Couperins was particularly resistant to being played on the piano. It is true that the music makes great use of the peculiarities of the harpsichord and that it is very difficult to transfer the ornamentation, for instance, to the piano in an effective way. But listen to Angela Hewitt playing Les Ombres Errantes by Francois Couperin. Is it not lovely?

7) Raymond Lewenthal made a fascinating LP once of Toccatas by various composers up to the present (including one by the pianist himself). The first on his programme was this brilliant little Toccata in g minor by Azzolino Bernardino della Ciaja.

8) Antonio Soler may well have been taught by Scarlatti – his many sonatas are as touching and playful as the older composer’s. Here is one in c sharp minor played by Alicia De Larrocha.

9) The Portuguese Carlos Seixas was similarly influenced by Scarlatti in his hundred or so sonatas. This, though, is a short and emotional Menuet in f minor played most movingly by Maria Grinberg.

10) Giovanni Battista Pescetti’s Sonata in c minor in an early recording by Clara Haskil.

11) Does it matter on which keyboard instrument you play Handel’s fabulous Chaconne in G (HWV435)? The harpsichord might be first choice but a version for piano only adds to and illuminates such music – don’t you think? Here it is played by Murray Perahia.

12) Of course it is not surprising that it is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach which pianists have plundered most. However necessary and important it is that we seek out aesthetically-correct and historically-informed performances, however fascinating and beautiful those performances might be, how could we live without Bach on the piano? To my mind it would be a needless form of asceticism to deny oneself such riches. I have been listening to a lot of the wonderful French pianist Marcelle Meyer lately – she recorded a great deal of Rameau, Couperin, Scarlatti and Bach. Here to end with is her heavenly playing of Bach’s Caprice from the Partita No.2.

Onwards

So, with those scraps from the old pillowbook I have re-posted everything I wanted to preserve. From now on all will be shiny and new :)

Scraps from the old pillowbook

A few random bits and pieces…

1) I was just reading Freiya’s blog The Other Side of the World and something she wrote yesterday about watching television struck a nerve: “its funny but when you’re on your own there seems less incentive to watch it. I never realised how much of a social thing watching television is“. I agree entirely. Back in the ’80s I used to watch Dynasty, Dallas, the Brookside Omnibus, and I always watched them with friends. That was the fun, discussing the actors, their characters, their clothes, their ridiculous situations, tearing them apart, making jokes and arch comments and so on. Dynasty, for example: you could always tell who was supposed to be gay – they would always be wearing, for some reason, the most tastelessly appalling chunky sweaters. Spotting that sort of thing and laughing about it with others – that was the entertainment. When I came back home I stayed at my parents for a few months before moving into my flat. So during the first week I sat down with them to watch the soaps and as usual started talking at once. I was immediately shushed: “Now I missed what so-and-so said!” I was astonished. Was I supposed to sit there in silence and actually watch the programme? But it’s rubbish. My father doesn’t even like me talking through the football – I can’t keep my mouth shut, though, I’ll burst! It feels so unnatural just to sit there and say nothing. When I moved into my flat it was too sad to watch the soaps on my own. So I gave them up.

2) I really need to learn how to touch-type. I can type pretty fast but I make tons of mistakes. And I have to look at the keyboard mostly. I have played all those games which are supposed to help increase your speed and accuracy like Typespeed and gtypist and I can do quite well at them. The trouble is that they simply make you better at doing what you already do. Your bad habits are confirmed and reinforced. Most of my faults arise from the fact that I am left-handed. So, for one thing, my left hand covers most of the keyboard. More seriously, my left hand reacts more quickly than my right so I notice that most of my spelling mistakes at the keyboard are the result of the left hand being faster than the right. The worst thing, though, is that your hands become accustomed to making particular movements. So, when I come to type “its”, for example, I almost always type “it’s” – not because I don’t know the difference (I certainly do and would never make a mistake when writing) but because my fingers automatically make the movements for it’s. When I learnt how to write at school we were forced to do a lot of apparently meaningless exercises – lines and lines of a’s and b’s and so on. I’m sure the purpose was to make writing an automatic business that you don’t (or at least shouldn’t) have to think about consciously. I need to learn typing the same way. The problem, of course, is that it is very difficult to go back to being a beginner at something you can apparently already do. I have thought the solution was to change to using a Dvorak layout – except, as someone pointed out, it leaves you eventually unable to use other people’s keyboards effectively.

3) I followed a link once from Tranniefesto to a site called Gaping Void. The writer of this blog asked people to submit mini-manifestos. One of them, contributed by somebody called Seth Godin, was the purest tosh. This point in particular had me gnashing my teeth: “Everyone is a marketer, even people and organizations that don’t market. They’re just marketers who are doing it poorly.” What a dismal philosophy that is! If I thought for a moment that was true I’d go out and hang myself. How dead do you have to be inside to really believe that everyone is engaged all the time in “selling themselves”? This is the kind of silly statement made by those apologists for capitalism who don’t understand that it is, for good or evil, an historical phenomenon. It’s the product of certain particular conditions. It hasn’t always existed and won’t always exist in the future. Human nature, therefore, is not coterminous with homo oeconomicus

[From my responses to comments] Whatever you want to call it, selling, marketing, it’s personal relations mediated by money – it’s not an inevitable or necessary part of human life. It’s pure capitalist ideology to pretend otherwise. I’m rather disturbed, actually, by the way you conflate reputation and brand. The latter is surely a reified form of what the former used to be?

I’m not arguing with you that marketing is sometimes necessary and appropriate in particular circumstances. But Seth Godin was making a generalisation – that marketing is what we all do all the time. That I do object to. Human beings aren’t naturally and fundamentally commodities – Godin’s statement implies that we are.

You seem to be generalising the word “marketing” – like Godin does – to cover any activity in which one person is influenced by the action of another. Do you really mean that? Do you really believe all human relationships are mediated by money? Do you not at least dream that there might be the possibility of contact that is not reduced to the concept of selling something for a profit? No, it’s a dismal and hateful ideology Godin has and I reject it…

4) This summer [of 2007] has had a few highlights – such as my sailing trip with my boyfriend – but otherwise it has been a dreary season for me. The oppressively hot weather finished me off. I wilted under the heat. I couldn’t be bothered to do anything so I became bored. Feeling bored all the time I became frustrated and depressed. Now summer is just about over and I’m feeling much better for it. This is my favourite time of year (just as twilight is my favourite time of day). There is a mellow and melancholy atmosphere which suits me well and there is the first slight chill in the air to presage autumn. September always feels like a new beginning – it is the proper month for making plans. I have spent so long at school and college that I tend to keep to the academic year. How pointless is it to celebrate the new year on January 1st when one is normally in the midst of things?

5) The weekend with my friends was very refreshing – good company, good food, good wine. One thing struck me, though, when a couple more friends came round for Sunday lunch. At all these kind of gatherings I am always the one who ends up playing with the children. I wonder why? Well, the children don’t jump on any of the other adults or drag them off to play football or have balloon fights or help with puzzles. Do they detect something about us? When I mentioned it, one of my friends said she thought it was because I wasn’t afraid to make fool of myself. Children may be naive and lack knowledge of the world but they are often astute in piercing the masks and pretences of adults

6) Late yesterday afternoon I went over to the local shops for some cooking chocolate and some vanilla so I could make a chocolate Impossible Pie. In front of me in the queue at the till was a boy and a girl of 18 or 19. They were joined by another boy. He seemed to be in a very jovial mood. Here is part of the conversation: “… it was so funny… we had him down on the ground in the underpass and Carl was stomping on his head… ha ha… I’ve seen people cry but this was just… it was fucking hilarious, man, ha ha.” It’s not the violence exactly which shocked me. No, it was the normality of it. This boy felt perfectly at ease telling his story out loud in a crowded shop. And he really did think it was the funniest thing ever to see this other boy cry his eyes out because his head was being stomped – I mean, his eyes were glistening with pleasure. And they were still laughing five minutes later when I walked out of the shop…

7) It was my mother’s birthday today and my father took us out for dinner. Now, around these parts finding somewhere decent to eat is difficult enough so when a restaurant opens that actually garners something of a reputation… Well. So, this evening we made our way to The Fox in Willian. We sat for a while in the rather well-scrubbed bar and munched on home-made crisps. When we were led to our table we were served with a few slices of bread and oil. For my first course I had, and I quote from the menu, Confit chicken rillettes bound in a tarragon creme fraiche, crispy Parma ham, pink grapefruit and citrus compote. It wasn’t bad at all, very nice indeed, but it lacked something and I couldn’t help but look a little enviously at my father’s pigeon breast on a beetroot mash. The main course, however, was almost perfect. Char grilled marinated lamb chops with caraway greens, garlic and rosemary parmentier potatoes and port and mint syrup. Accompanied by a piquant and peppery Chianti it was gorgeous and succulent. I followed it with ice-cream and a rather rich brandy. I don’t often eat like this so you can imagine I came away very satisfied…

8) Ruth Brandon’s Surreal Lives: The Surrealists 1917-1945 is an entertaining book and quite interesting, but rather journalistic in style and ultimately disappointing. She observes perfectly correctly at the beginning that the Surrealist movement was primarily a literary movement. It’s a shame, therefore, that she wastes so much time on that preposterous old fraud Salvador Dali. In fact she ends up seeing surrealism as either descending into Daliesque shock-spectacle and commercialism or being subsumed into New York Abstract art. There is no mention of post-surrealist groups like Lettrism, Cobra or the Situationist International. There is little mention of the spread of surrealist ideas around the world. A more absorbing book might have situated the Breton circle more firmly within the general artistic and intellectual milieux of between-the-wars France. I certainly find some of the more tangential figures – Leiris and Bataille to name but two – rather more fascinating than many of the second-rate poets and hangers-on of the legitimate group. Even with the concentration on Breton much seems to be overlooked. A vitally important part of Surrealism was the attempt to overcome the boundaries between art and life for instance and for discussion of that we must still go to Maurice Nadeau, it would seem.

9) This time last year I was reading quite a bit of Haruki Murakami: Norwegian Wood, Sputnik Sweetheart, South of the Border, West of the Sun, Dance Dance Dance, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. Romantic, evocative, cool, compelling, enchanting, mysterious tales of estrangement, memory, loss and desire. I like the style of writing which is at once poetic and colloquial. Murakami’s world is an easy one to get lost in – so much so that reading anyone else seemed an unwelcome intrusion. In the end I felt I had to drag myself away forcibly from it.

10) I’ve just finished watching How William Shatner Changed The World on Channel 5 and very entertaining it was too, although it lost its way somewhere around the middle of the show. William Shatner was his usual witty, ridiculous self. The programme proposed the idea that Star Trek’s vision of the future actually influenced scientific progress of the last few decades. Absurd? Not really. Since our earliest days important things have often appeared first as play. Anyway, it’s a thesis which has more promise so far as the original series is concerned because it is certainly possible to argue convincingly that there was a close connection between technological innovation in the 1960s and popular culture. The computer itself might have been the tool of the military-industrial complex – but we surely wouldn’t have the PC without a lot of old hippy ideals (and GNU/Linux might be seen as the latest manifestation of that counter-cultural impulse). Technology mixed with freedom could be a heady brew. It was amusing to note that Star Trek became less popular the more a pessimistic, irrationalist, anti-scientific animus took hold in the late 80s and early 90s.

I have to confess I was not really a fan of Star Trek in any of its incarnations. Well, the original had a certain charm – but it was a guilty pleasure (like eating white chocolate). In fact I don’t like any television science fiction – or many films. I’ve never understood the appeal of Star Wars or any space opera or fantasy. I like my sci-fi hard.

11) As soon as I started using a computer I enjoyed playing games (starting with Star Trek in 1978). But for a long while they were just arcade games and that sort of thing. Then, around 1999, 2000 my brother gave me Settlers III Gold Edition for my birthday. I quickly became addicted. I loved watching all the little people run around building things and fighting each other. I soon moved on to Red Alert and Starcraft and Age of Empires. Although I tried other genres I always came back to Real-Time Strategy. Starcraft was my favourite – so perfectly balanced and with a story that was actually interesting.

But then I discovered the Total War series. I was a little late coming to Shogun but I got enough of a taste to buy Medieval Total War as soon as it came out. For me that was the best game ever. I loved the scope of the game, the fact that it demanded real decisions regarding economics and diplomacy and real strategy when it came to battles, the fact that every game was unpredictable and different. Every major character in the game had a personality that could influence one’s failure or success. I remember one game, for instance, where every one of my Kings was either a loon or a coward – I could not prevent the gradual decline, the unhappiness of the population, the constant revolt of the generals. But there were other games where a great general would appear at just the opportune moment to enable me to seize real power. I became reasonably good at it, too. I could play a one-province state like Denmark or Aragon on the hardest level – and win.

I was very enthusiastic when Rome: Total War came out but I agreed with those who said it was dumbed-down from Medieval . In fact, I preferred to play the Total Realism mod. Then, I suddenly stopped playing. I haven’t played a computer game – other than arcade games – for nearly three years now. I suppose it was just a phase. But great fun while it lasted…

12) In olden times it was believed that one’s health, both mental and physical, was determined by the balance of the four humours that supposedly lurked in the blood. If one of the humours became “burnt”, then the balance would be upset too far and melancholy adust would be the result. Over the centuries melancholy was reduced from a permanent disposition towards madness or genius to a temporary mood, a feeling of sadness without cause. Well, none of this has the slightest relationship to truth… and yet, it does have a certain psychological appeal. Every few weeks it seems as though my veins become filled with poison, some dark ink colouring my emotions. There is no external reason why I should feel sad, touchy, tearful and yet I do. It may not be an imbalance of humours but I would not be surprised to learn that there is some physical factor involved. A fortnight later it is as though there were a tonic flowing through my veins and I am alert and curious and full of smiles. This cycle of moods is, I stress, quite independent of events in life which rightfully induce happiness or depression – it’s an underlying swell and fall. Oh well, at least the swings aren’t as violent as they were in my twenties.

13) I have always been a little suspicious of Wikipedia, notwithstanding that I use it often enough. The trouble is, the very first entry I ever looked up was that for Friedrich Nietzsche, the one subject for which I can claim to have some knowledge. I was appalled. Every sentence was incorrect if not idiotic. I was tempted to rewrite the whole thing myself until I realised there was nothing to prevent some ill-read student overwriting me. Still, I have to admit that the quality of the Nietzsche entry has improved over the years: where once it was a disgrace now it is merely sophomoric. I think most people with any real knowledge of philosophy would sooner direct the curious to the Stanford Encyclopedia. The standard of writing is much higher, each entry being written by an acknowledged expert, and is well worth the reading. The main article on Nietzsche by Robert Wicks is acceptable and has a good bibliography. There is also an excellent article on Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Philosophy by the always brilliant Brian Leiter. To repeat, so far as philosophy is concerned, the Stanford Encyclopedia is much to be preferred over Wikipedia.

For me, perhaps the greatest intellectual resource freely available on the internet is the Dictionary of the History of Ideas. What a wonderful thing it is. Originally published in 1973-74 it is, as the preface has it, “a culminating work in a tradition that had been energized by the fight against fascism. It was a tradition committed to the pursuit of disinterested scholarship in the academic sphere and to free expression of thought in the political sphere”. The articles were written by such luminaries in their field as Isaiah Berlin, George Boas, Owen Chadwick, Mircea Eliade, Sidney Hook, Claude Palisca, John Plamenatz, Arnaldo Momigliano, R.C. Lewontin, Judith Shklar, and many others. Browsing randomly through the entries we find fascinating articles on Biological Homologies and Analogies, Man-Machine from the Greeks to the Computer, Harmony or Rapture in Music, Cosmic Fall, Game Theory. Enough to keep anyone occupied… for months, for years.

14) Non-Photography Day is the idea of one Becca Bland and her defence as presented in a BBC News article is a catalogue of various New Age idiocies. The whole argument is constructed around a series of simplistic binary oppositions: mediation is bad, the immediate is good; the partial is bad, the whole is good; technology is bad, the natural is good; appearance is bad, essence is good; representation is bad, the real is good, and so on. “Experience life in an unmediated fashion”, she writes. Perhaps she would like to explain how that can be done. Is an unmediated experience possible? In the first place, what is involved in having an experience? Surely it implies all kinds of mediations? I suspect Becca Bland has never read Hegel. She continues, you should experience life “without anything in front of your eyes”. She means, of course, without holding a camera in front of them – and yet, how do you see anything in an unmediated fashion with your eyes? You don’t see the thing itself: light hits your eyes, is focused through the lens, is collected and manipulated on the retina, is converted into electrical nervous impulses to be reassembled and interpreted by the brain. Mediation after mediation!

Then we are urged to “Live in the moment”. Admirable advice, I’m sure. New Age types, however, always assume such a thing is simple, we just have to throw off the shackles of civilisation and it is done. They invariably speak of freedom as though it were already achieved. The ancient philosophers, too, believed that we should live in the moment – but they tended to relate such an approach to life to the knowledge of death and thought it could only be achieved after the intense practice of what Pierre Hadot called spiritual exercises. Nowadays, in a world devoted to immediate satisfaction, phrases like “live in the moment” belong to the language and ideology of advertisers.

And so on…

15) I thought Non-Photography Day was a tiresome gesture and now I’ve just discovered that two days ago it was No Music Day. This was the idea of Bill Drummond who apparently started it back in 2005. Last year he wrote a manifesto in The Observer entitled Silence is Golden – or for at least one day of the year it is. It’s not very convincing. In the first place Drummond shows too much concern with novelty for its own sake. As though the chief interest of music lies in hearing something you’ve never heard before. I don’t deny that can provide an exciting experience. It’s a mistake, though, to identify pleasure in music with the satisfying of an urge for novelty because, as Drummond, indicates, the novelty always wears off. Sooner or later you become jaded. I couldn’t help thinking, too, that the desire to not listen to any music for a day was just another way of satisfying that urge for novelty. Secondly, I detect in Drummond’s article the hint of a common tendency among those who don’t really like music as such. What they really like are the things that music reminds them of, the things in life which are so often accompanied by music. As a middle-aged man he will never again have a first kiss – likewise no music will ever mean so much as that which did form the background of his first kiss. I can sympathise with much of what Drummond says but music is more than either commodity or soundtrack. So, I won’t be celebrating a No Music Day this year or any other year. I suspect anyone who sings or plays an instrument is aware that music is inseparable from silence. There is no need for gimmicks.

First posted on various dates during 2006 & 2007