Two recent conversations have caused me to remember an interview between Christopher Hampson & his long-term notator Caroline Palmer about his ballet Canciones that  I transcribed and posted on the web 12 years ago (see full interview here). If you were around, you may remember that at the last moment, he had to pull the intended score by Manuel de Falla and replace it with something else, because of an issue over rights. It seems like 12 minutes ago.  At the time, I thought the following tale was quite funny – with the passage of time, it seems really rather sad…

CH: I know that people use videos, but a good example of why not to use a video is…

CP: (laughs) Do we have to go down this route?!

CH: We do, because a good example of why not to use a video is that there is one version, which is a rehearsal tape of the Manuel de Falla version

CP: The only one

CH: The only tape, and you know, I just love it dearly because it’s what it was what it was meant to be. I went round, and took Caroline out for her birthday, which… I don’t know if I’ll do again [laughter], because half way through the last section, the jota, she’d taped Lorraine Kelly, GMTV…

CP: Over it…

CH: … interviewing someone from Coronation Street over it. But you know, because the notation is there, that puts my mind at ease.

One of my favourite landmarks by the Thames

To the Peacock Theatre yesterday afternoon to see ENB school’s performance. Well, to be honest, mainly to see my friend Chris Hampson’s new piece for the men, Flow. I always have to remind myself how young these dancers are. When they graduate, musicians can get away with being a bit teenagery, geeky and badly dressed with a slouch even though they can play the oboe rather well, but dancers have to be fully finished human beings as part of what they do, and hell, were they good yesterday.

A single moment stands out and haunts me from the whole show. It was in Ernst Meisner’s joyous piece done to the Rachmaninov two-piano suites. Surrounded by Stravinsky, John Adams & Bach, Rachmaninov on two pianos could have sounded a bit arch and fruity but it didn’t, because the choreography rode the waves of the music so you felt like you were surfing it, not watching it. The single moment in question was when a line of dancers formed stage right, and in unison, turned their heads to watch an imaginary object pass overhead. The ‘imaginary something’ was a musical phrase. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in a ballet, so simple it hurt.

There was something similar in Chris (Hampson’s) piece to the Bach C minor double piano (violin) concerto.  A simple flowing arm movement found the music in the music in a hundred ways, and in the slow movement, the soloist turns his head slowly to the back, then looks quickly to the front when the solo instrument enters, as if he has suddenly ‘seen’ the music.  A security guard in the audience was so taken with what he had seen that I saw him in the lobby trying out the recurring arm movement in different ways, amazed at what it felt like to move to music. Actually, that didn’t happen, I dreamed it last night, but that’s how intoxicating it was to watch.

I’d never really got into John Adams’ music before seeing Hallelujah Junction at the Linbury, which I loved, and Christopher Tudor’s piece to another Adams’ score made me realise this is my kind of music. Just wish there’d been more of it.

It’s no reflection on Michael Corder’s choreography, which is always  musical and sensitive (and the dancers did it excellently), that his piece to Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks annoyed me. It’s not him, it’s Stravinsky, or rather ‘Stravinsky’ (as Taruskin might put it). I’m bored with ‘Stravinsky’, bored with the fawning ideology that presents him as the natural progression of music in the twentieth century, from which there can be no rhythmic going back. I spent the piece trying to work out what annoyed me about it, and concluded that the trouble with music that is consistently unpredictable is that it’s also consistently forgettable. The metrical ambiguity and change and melodic fragmentation leaves you with nothing but a series of passing snapshots, like watching a crowd in an electric storm at night.  It’s not even that I particularly dislike the music, it’s just  more analogous to a painting than to a dance. It has texture and flashes of colour, but no temporal quality. You can only stand as an observer and take in a moment at a time and then pass to the next one.

And so to Giselle Act II, which was the second half of the programme. Again, nothing against the dancers who did brilliantly, and I think the concept of doing a whole Act of a classic is great. But oh lord, this  Giselle of all things needs to be taken apart like an old sports car and put together from scratch.  It’s presented as a classic ballet blanc when even in 1841 it was nearer to Phantom of the Opera or Wicked. Giselle is the gothic ballet par excellence, so has enormous resonance for an era obsessed with  Twilight, but this production  glosses over that in a schoolmarmy, worthy way so that ironically, all the life really is taken out of it – the true corpse is the ballet, not Giselle the person.

There’s also something about listening to a recording of the music (complete with reverberant acoustics that suggest a concert hall a hundred times larger than the Peacock) that gives an auditory  unity to the score which ruins the surprise and melodrama of it.  I’ve  just been re-reading Marian Smith’s excellent Ballet & Opera in the Age of Giselle, and her argument based on utterly convincing evidence, is that we miss the point if we don’t understand how much Giselle borrows from the methods of opera.  The score is in many places made up of recitative-like interjections and abrupt changes suggesting verbal drama, but once it’s been engineered and passed through a sound system, and in the absence of life in the form of an orchestra or conductor it is flattened and straightened out into an acoustic sausage that is 80% sawdust. And what on earth is that darn fugue doing in the middle of this production? There are those wilis, being all 19th century and weird and gothic, when suddenly they do a kind of  Mark Morris style celebration in the forest to a fugue that is surely the most pointless episode in the history of ballet.

But that’s a side issue, a symptom probably of being in the middle of writing a dissertation on relationships between voice, gesture, music & communication. You notice these things when you look for them. In total, it was a magnificent afternoon, and I was in awe of the dancers’ extraordinary abilities and commitment. It’s for this that I’ve preferred spending my life in the dance world rather than music.

This has nothing to do with the post, but in the spirit of Mendelssohn, it expresses something about the poetic content

Hello world, happy new year.

Though I say it myself, I rather liked my Advent Calendar of 2008. It’s nicely ironic that I should have begun it with ‘Solving Musical Problems’, because as it turned out, that’s exactly what I continued to do for most of the calendar.  One of the reasons I blog is because there are things that irritate me (both in the quotidian sense, and in the ‘sand that makes the pearl’ sense), and blogging is a way of working out those problems on virtual paper. Teachers acknowledge that you learn by teaching, and by the same token, I find it easier to solve problems when I share them with even an imaginary reading public.

My favourite post was the one about music that is too musical, because I surprised even myself in being able to find an advocate in one so erudite as Raymond Monelle for a position that seemed so illogical – that  music that can be  too “musical”.

But I now find that the concept of ‘musical music’ in a perjorative sense is not as recondite as I thought. It turns out that Mendelssohn used the term (I wish I knew where). That’s nice, because elsewhere, I’ve said that it was Chris Hampson who made me appreciate Mendelssohn, and it seems they might well have had stuff to talk about.

I came across this in Susanne Langer’s Feeling and Form. It’s a shame that Langer is dismissed as a bit of a well-meaning also-ran as a philosopher these days, because there are bits of her work which are brilliant.

“If the procedures of the several arts were really analagous, a composer could only translate that form into its musical equivalent.[...] But a shad0w-like following of verse forms and literary concepts does not produce a musical organism. [...]Let Mendelssohn speak once more: “I can conceive music [for a poem] only if I can conceive a mood that produces it; mere artfully arranged sounds that aptly follow the accent of the words, forte on strong words and piano on mild ones, but without really expressing anything, I have never been able to understand.  Yet for this poem I can’t imagine any other kind of music than this – not intensive, integral, poetic, but accompanying, parallel, musical music; but I don’t like that sort.”

Langer, Feeling and Form (1953, p. 159)

“What Mendelssohn called ‘musical music’ is something independent of the poem, externally similar in structure, but manufactured out of entirely independent material to “match” the verses, which remain essentially unchanged by it.”  (ibid, p. 160). This isn’t the same thing as Monelle’s meaningless symphonism, but it’s another rather surprising view that music can be ‘over-musical’.  And it makes perfect sense. Well, it will do, after another glass of wine.

Boxing Day casting: Me, John, Hampson père, fils & mère.

To the Menier Chocolate Factory for dinner & Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music with Chris & parents and John from Atlanta.  I can’t remember ever walking out of a theatre feeling so thrilled and moved. It was a wonderful production, brilliant cast, in a theatre intimate enough that you can hear every word, and the sound design so good, you didn’t know it was there.

I didn’t realize how many songs from this show that I knew already, but I’d never heard them in context before, and the context makes a huge difference.   Hannah Waddingham’s performance of “Send in the Clowns” was one of the most moving bits of theatre I’ve ever seen (and I’m not easily moved), but the whole cast were strong and great to watch. Needless to say, Maureen Lipman as Madame Arnfeldt was heaven.

Thanks for a wonderful evening!

A game of musical statues. Can you spot the choreographer and dancers from Paris & Atlanta?

Following on from the theme of being put right by friends, this one concerns a 7-hour argument with Chris which ended up with me having to rethink space and time. Damn!

It all started with a section from Chris’s ballet Canciones, which had elements of flamenco in it. He was explaining how the dancers had to accent certain counts in a phrase of 12 – let’s say it’s 1, 5, 7, 8, 11. “What a bizarre way of explaining it”, I countered. “Why don’t you just teach them to do this?”, proceeding to copy the rhythmic pattern that resulted from the accents he’d just identified, and repeat it with (dare I say it) consummate ease.

“But it’s not the same” he said. “Yes it is”, I argued back, doing my pattern again.

“No it’s not – you’re viewing time like musicians do, as cyclical. But for a dancer, it’s not, it’s linear.”

Bearing in mind that the argument took 7 hours, I probably can’t do it justice here, but the point on which it hinged was that a dancer needed to know where they were and what they were doing on a particular count in a phrase, it wasn’t enough for that count to be a recurring point relative to a repeating cycle of beats. The argument took place on the little balcony at the back of my old flat in Mandrake Road, and I can’t think of problems in space and time without remembering what it felt like to thrash them out there. If you’ve got seven hours, I could go into more detail.

Oddly enough, this is another topic that made even more sense when I read Raymond Monelle’s The Sense of Music, in particular the stuff about Henri Bergson and his theory of duration.  And that’s saying something.