RR takes refuge

I didn’t watch the inauguration. I wanted affirmation I suspected I wouldn’t find at this ceremonial event. Something as far away as possible from the Orange Monster and all he represented.

Something elegiac, tranquil and contemplative, then? The knave of Ely Cathedral, Constable’s Hay Wain, Alec Guinness at his most ironic reading Sir Brian has a Battleaxe, the photo Occasional Speeder took of her parents drinking Glühwein (mit Rhum – yes, that’s how they spelled it) at Cologne Christmas market.

All just a bit too passive. But since the Monster himself was active it would have to be a different type of action: creative, unifying and stirring.

I found it on Sabine’s blog Interim Arrangements. There’s a sea-shanty festival doing the rounds which I have unforgivably ignored. Sabine is honouring it. I’m glad I didn’t miss Leave Her Johnny by The Long Johns.

You would have thought social-distancing would have killed the choir stone dead. Not so. Technology has risen to the occasion. People in distant locations get in front of their webcam-equipped computer monitors and sing solo versions of an agreed song; through electronic necromancy the voices are combined and lo! A choir! Some genius has overcome the system’s delays and damn me, it’s a good choir.

But the sea shanty makes its own contribution. It doesn’t demand hyper-trained voices and the range is usually fairly narrow. So it’s not music generated by an elite; rather a musical democracy. And there’s an unpopular word at the former White House.

The call-and-response structure of the shanty, together with its overlapping lines, generate enormous energy. Suppressing all memories of past lies and narcissism.

Perhaps there was an attempted riot. I wouldn’t know.

A bend in the road?

Learning to sing has helped prepare me for death. That might suggest singing and/or learning to sing are forms of ecstasy; they aren’t. Both require concentration, attention to detail, repetition, and recognising I’m out of tune (horrible). Obviously that’s not ecstasy.

Unlike writing, singing involves my physical bits and my mental bits. This comforts me given my physical bits are reduced to not much else. Will I sing as I die? No. The sounds won’t satisfy me and they’ll be unimprovable. Others may be dying nearby and music should be a good thing.

A side-effect is I know more about music’s effects. V and I did solitary work on Clara Schumann’s Liebst du um Schőnheit. Both arrived independently at a wonderful musical interval supporting the German word jedes; we discussed it, you might say, ecstatically. Knowing how it had happened.

Two weeks ago I heard Eric Clapton (just a vague name) playing a duet based on Moon River. Two things struck me: Clapton’s inadequate voice and his far from inadequate improvisation. Improvisation often elaborates; Clapton reduced the tune to its bare bones and they were lovely.

I know nothing about pop/rock. Should I? I emailed my daughters, asking their opinion about Clapton. To some extent both shared my view. Professional Bleeder went further: sent me twelve pop/rock tracks she regards as classics. Would my new view of music help probe their quality?

I played Guns ‘n’ Roses Sweet Child just once, I was short of time. I will play it again. After three-minutes, the group embarked on a voice concerto: a single voice against all the instruments, each playing separate themes, distinct and inventive. Allowing for sound levels, it resembled a string quartet. Often the most demanding form of classical music.

More follows.

Secular, I fear

Everybody gets table presents here at Castle Robinson. Wrapping them is VR's special job, signalled by the opening tenor arias of Handel's Messiah (Comfort ye my my people, followed by the more celebratory Ev'ry valley shall be exalted). Drink gets drunk and this prepares us all for the life-reinforcing trumpets and great, great drumming that kicks off Bach's Weinachtsoratorium - a moment when I, an atheist, briefly wonder whether there might be something to be said for a revealed religion. After all, look what it did for Johann Sebastian. But then the choir roars out and I am reminded that all this wonderful noise has, of course, been created by "the people who dwell in the shadow of death". Mortals, in fact.

Music is like travelling free by TGV, drinking champagne and watching an unending riverside panoply consisting of the Rhine, the Seine, the Thames and the point at which the Allegheny meets the Monongahela to form the Ohio.

Family stuff

Email to our elder daughter

I know Mum has already emailed saying last night's Walkure was streets better than our boxed set, even though both were put on at the NY Met and used that same shifting-planks set.

I have never been more absorbed by opera. Acts 2 and 3 just slid by and I was completely unaware of my bum. Act 1 is comparatively humdrum; Siegmund and Sieglinde fall in love and are threatened by Sieglinde's husband, Hunding. But the following acts are about big matters, the nature and dilemma of authority, the slow realisation of Wotan's obligation towards his neglected wife Fricka (fat as a medicine ball but with a voice and an expressiveness to die for), the clash of being a boss and Wotan's love for his daughter Brunnhilde, disobedience by Brunnhilde but driven by a love for what she knows to be her father's secret wishes. Finally Brunnhilde's terrible punishment. These things are complicated and require lots of dialogue. But not a word was superfluous and great music roils and bellows in support. Much of this is credit to Wagner but all the performers were deeply in tune with what he wanted to say.

I was halfway there with our boxed-set Walkure. Last night took me way beyond, a perfect demonstration of what voices and instruments can do. Perhaps I suspected why - if subconsciously - learning to sing would have unexpected as well as expected benefits. Music that tangible thing.

The tickets were a good idea raised to the power of n (where n is a very large number). Thanks.

Dad

A book and a bit of Wagner

Opening Bars, previously sub-titled A Late-life Musical Adventure, is now available through Amazon - see the right-hand side of my home page. If you can run to £6.95  I'd appreciate a line or two in Amazon's review facility as proof that someone other than I and my publisher have read it

As most of you will know it's about music, specifically singing. But it's also about changing course in old age. At the time lessons seemed like pure whimsy, now singing has taken over my life and V thinks I've made good progress. Certainly I can now enjoy the sound of my own voice, although presently I'm grounded by a surly cough.

It doesn't have to be singing. To be seized as I have been is to say a fig for growing old and incompetent. It's just that singing is a physical, aesthetic and intellectual pursuit, thus body and mind get a work-out. I'm quietly proud I had the moxie.


BUT I DO have other interests, as my Christmas prezzies show. Wine continues to fascinate and I wouldn't be the man I am if my trousers didn't stay up. These braces are swanky and may encourage me to wear them outside my shirt.

Christmas was raucous in the extreme with a full house for two nights. To ensure Professional Bleeder slept in comfort we bought an inflatable mattress with its own built-in pump. Deflation - an often forgotten chore - is done in just over a minute.

PB heard her first opera (Britten's Turn of the Screw) with us a couple of years ago. Now she has 23 of them under her belt. Last night we watched Das Rheingold, three more to complete Wagner's Ring cycle.

Salt tears

Good on yer, Igor. Now his hair is fashionably short and he's bearded

I cried, yes I did.

Russian-born pianist, Igor Levit, played LvB's Third Piano Concerto at the start of the BBC's long-established series of summer music concerts, The Proms.

Then an unscripted encore: Liszt's transcription of the Ode to Joy theme from LvB's Ninth Symphony. Also known as the EU Anthem. Seems he feels that the European Union - created to stop european countries from fighting each other - was a cause worth celebrating.

As The Guardian headline said: Proms get political. Describes the piece as "a worldwide musical symbol of assertive unity".

Look, I know I'm a bit of a bastard, certainly cruel (as my previous post shows) but if I hadn't cried at that when would I ever cry?

A recording of the concert is available on the BBC's radio I-player service, alas only accessible to UK residents. You'll have to listen first to the Third Piano Concerto but you wouldn't mind that, would you? Link below.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08xyvdw/bbc-proms-2017-first-night-of-the-proms-part-1

Salt tears, I assure you.

Difficult, transient, worth it

Not a Cardiff contestant, just someone who's arrived

When were you happiest? The Guardian regularly asks celebrities. Many say "Now" for that’s the point when all one’s happy moments may be reviewed.

A stricter answer is trickier. Continuous happiness, without the brain reminding you of life's sorrows, is of very short duration. I might for instance cite my second date with VR (the first was blind, a more complex event) and on average that may be true. But there must have been self-doubt, embarrassment, the usual suspects. Anyone who claims unremitting happiness for, say, two hours must be fibbing.

The point arose as I watched BBC 4's TV coverage of Cardiff World Singer of The Year, a thirty-year-old international competition for youngish but established voices. Several had been guided by older acquaintances and the consensus was "Enjoy yourself." No doubt, but no performance is perfect and all contestants would remember their faults.

I sing and my faults (ie, unhappinesses) are multitudinous and ever present. But during my last lesson - for four or five seconds - I can, hand on heart, say I was truly happy. Yet again V and I were singing the Mozart duet and for one remarkable moment I was able to disengage and identify the sound we were making together. What happened next created the happiness.

Recognising the "rightness" of that combined sound I surged into a delicately controlled enthusiasm for the piece itself, music I have always loved. Very briefly I was able to simultaneously mobilise brain, heart and throat in a better understanding of the Mozart and to risk an interpretation. Not just singing; singing which contained a response to singing. Not perfect but better. Goodness caught on the wing.

Split infinitive? Never blindly follow rules, occasionally they’re meant to be broken.

Union

Door-to-door carol-singing is rare these days, a victim of uncharitable pragmatism.  Sung warnings gave way to a bell tinkle or a knock which had to be answered, leaving the resident face to face with a pair of ill-tuned teenagers in effect begging:

We wish you a merry Christmas,
We wish you a merry Christmas,
etc.

Now both bell and knock are ignored in the pious hope it's not the police.

For those who pursue the old tradition I am available as a soloist with a repertory of one. The tune is familiar and the libretto's sentiments are unchanged. But there is a political twist, intended as an indirect fraternity with those who recently suffered in Berlin.

CLICK HERE

Above, as a more direct gesture, daughter Occasional Speeder gazes out from our Cologne appartment at the twin spires of the cathedral which overlooks another innocent Christmas market.  

Acceptance, gloom, anti-gloom

The mini-adventure didn't happen - medical matters intervened. Never mind; old age teaches us to be philosophical.

Less easy to be philosophical about Alzheimer-stricken brother Nick (the best dressed one in the centre). At his "home" I  presented him with a pot plant - a strange, unbrotherly thing to do. I emphasised how his yacht Takista had invigorated my latter years. Mentioned sailing north at night with the Cote d'Aquitaine to starboard. As I spoke I saw flashes of recognition, then shared his suffering as he tried  to dredge up responses from a mind shot to hell by disease. As if we were alone on an alien and uncongenial planet.

Sir Hugh and I drove away looking for lunch in the Yorkshire Dales. Came upon the village of Leyburn, where the centre was devoted to a heaving mass of shiny car roofs. Two hundred beetle carapaces? Drove on, depressed.

Back at Sir Hugh's house I drank gin, wine and Scotch knowing there'd be a price to pay. Somehow Proust cropped up in talk; Sir Hugh has read A La Recherche (he has the necessary doggedness) and told me he enjoyed it. This cheered me.

Spent the following afternoon with Ron and Frances at their house in the tiny Lakes village of Mungrisdale. Ron and I started out on the same Bradford newspapers at the same time. He went on to write about Everest attempts, yachting, rock climbing, sub-aqua stuff and choral singing, travelling the world betimes. Frances has an honours degree in music from the Open University. Time after time I was conversationally outgunned. Parked outside was Ron's 600 cc metallic red Honda but happily there was no spare crash helmet. Instead I played the first line of God Save The Queen on Frances's harpsichord.

Driving home today I managed to transfer from the M6 motorway to the M5 motoway without being mired in a traffic jam. Almost a miracle. 

Johann via John

With books I am a non-sentimentalist. To hell with incunabula, with morocco-bound spines, with gold-leaf print, with hand-illuminated manuscripts, with silly typefaces. I never fondle books or have orgasms about their jackets. I want to take books with me to the bath and, if disaster occurs (it hasn’t yet), I’ll wring them out and resume reading. The egregious Beatles once hymned the paperback writer; to a harpsichord continuo, and with less fuss, I align myself with the herd - I don't celebrate being a paperback reader, I just get on with it. Talk contents to me, never The Folio Society.

All of which takes me - in a metaphor I am adapting for this post - to the year 1900 or thereabouts. The stirrings of quantum mechanics started about then after which, say the hacks and Grub Street mealie-grubs, Newtonian physics was cast into darkness. Not true, of course. Since few of us are intellectually affected by the concerns of theoretical physics, the Newtonian sort continues to work just fine.

And I too must make room for a special case within my Paperbacks Are Best principle; the 1% exception. Certain books, all non-fiction, deserve their hardback status chez Robinson. They will never be read in the bath because they are too heavy. Their modest sales mean they are unlikely to reappear as paperbacks. I want them around as large visible reminders of what they say

One such arrived at Christmas, a gift from VR. An orchestral conductor, in his prime, still internationally renowned, describes the love of his life. It's longish (628 pp), has footnotes, and, I fear, has an OTT title. But it's factual and relentlessly impassioned. It breaks the general rule about paperbacks. It encourages me to sip. 

It gets you right there

I know I promised Kitchen Draining Racks and they’re there, I promise, nestling in my frontal lobes, utterly fascinating. But last night’s TV programme on how music affects us must come first.

A dullish academic in Sweden listed several results (Happier, Calmer, even Angrier) but not, I’m glad to say, Collapsed With Laughter. I’ve never believed music, as opposed to song lyrics, can make us laugh, whatever po-faced advocates of the Bach double violin concerto and that wearisome Haydn symphony say.

But I do find myself agreeing with the vicar of a London church saying of funeral services: when the first hymn starts, that’s when people feel it’s OK to cry. Which was to some extent reinforced with a clip from the London Olympics when Scottish singer, Emeli Sandé (above), sang Abide With Me unaccompanied. “Good lyrics”, she observed and I bethought myself how tune and words combine:

Swift to its close, ebbs out life’s little day

Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away

The programme was uneven and gave too much time to those with hobbyhorses. But two things stood out.

● Kindergarten children sitting on their mother’s lap (she wearing sound-blocking earphones to prevent the transmission of  her own reactions) responding instinctively to a quite complex piece of posh music, kicking their feet and in one case also thrusting the chest forward contrapuntally.

● In a home for the ghosts of people suffering from dementia a keyboardist plays an exceptional version of A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square and there are signs on those remote, cut-off faces that it’s getting through.

VR’s sister died last year and asked for a hymn recording without “others joining in”. We applauded her typically pawky choice. But she was gone and we needed catharsis.

Music's role. Cool Kid's list

Is music important? Most would say no, compared with warmth, food and reciprocated emotion.

Since no one has satisfactorily defined the nature of music I think there’s a case to be made. Think of how a bugle playing The Last Post enhances the Remembrance ceremony. How music makes weddings less lugubrious.

(Parenthetical note. A hymn sung at the da Ponte wedding – held in church at the insistence of my atheistic mother-in-law – predicted a rather rocky future ride:

Be thou my guardian and my guide
And hear me when I call;
Let not my slippery footsteps slide
And hold me lest I fall.

Slippery footsteps, forsooth.

The American national anthem precedes major league baseball games. A music-less funeral would ignore latent inner feelings. Bands send soldiers off to war. “Walk on, walk on” at Liverpool. Unimportant?

NEWS (edited by LdP) FROM COOL KID The boyfriend of grand-daughter Ysabelle. Astonished me by revealing he read Works Well regularly. He too now has a job – Yeh! Here’s his pop list.

(The list was contracted to) songs I like and I feel are different from average music both in terms of style and subject. I'm pretty sure you won't like some of them (.. ANY of them…)

Scroobius Pip. Angles. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkvWOAJeZmM
The King Blues. Five bottles of shampoo. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaSMiuvs6uw&feature=related)
Missing Andy. Dave (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOujMyOM0BY)
Noah and The Whale. L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbGUEelmzxo)
Mikill Pane. Summer in the City. (This guy will be popular very soon). (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfHhGZQnjb4&feature=relmfu)
Bright Eyes. Love I don't have to love. (One of my favourite bands). (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuXkhE0VMcw
Bo Burnham. Art is Dead. (Musical comedian). (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo9pU1q8sy8)
Tim Minchin. White Wine in the Sun. (Musical comedian. Serious song which represents my feelings about Christmas quite well). (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCNvZqpa-7Q)
Scroobius Pip vs Dan Le Sac. Letter from God. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KnGNOiFll4)
Ed Sheeran. Small Bump. (The most popular artist on this list; unusual musical subject).(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9S349Zmu5E)

Scroobius Pip: interesting artist; sings/raps about topics unusual for mainstream music. Also recommend his Magicians Assistant.

This has taken me about three hours to compile. Hope these songs provide some (proof) that not all young people listen to the same autotuned rubbish regularly in the charts.

I’ll do my best, Cool Kid. It may take some time. LdP.