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The revival of historical instruments
No full textDuring the past thirty years or so, historical performance in theory and practice has truly established itself as a vibrant part of the orchestral scene. Period instruments are routinely encountered in the concert hall from San Francisco to Budapest and from Toronto to Rio de Janeiro; indeed, they have become virtually obligatory in substantial areas of the orchestral repertory. There is now a widespread interest in recreating the original sounds and styles of a composer's own time and in acquiring appropriate instruments and technique. Meanwhile, the entire focus of such endeavours has been subject to stimulating discussion and argument. It cannot be denied that artistic life today makes demands which are decidedly unhistorical; for example, the microphone introduces a set of parameters which would have been unthinkable in previous generations. Furthermore, air travel has wrought such changes that we do not have the option to turn back the clock. Nevertheless, examination of a variety of primary sources, complementing tradition and intuition, enables earlier styles of performance to be explored; for, as Roger Norrington has remarked, ‘a relationship with the past needs to be founded on truth as well as sympathy, concern as well as exploitation, information as well as guesswork’
Hans Keller: music and psychology: from Vienna to London, 1939-52
No full textFor three or four decades after the Second World War, musical thinking in Britain was dominated by psychology. Yet, ironically, there has never been an account of exactly what is entailed. Among the earliest of the musical Freudians was Hans Keller (1919-85), an émigré from Vienna who later became a charismatic figure at the BBC and a trenchant commentator on a host of issues (including football). He arrived in London soon after the Kristallnacht of1938, and from then until 1952 (a watershed year in his development as a critic) collaborated with leading sociologists an psychoanalysts in studies of politics, society, gender and sex. He also devised new ways of writing about music, inspired by a love for Mozart and Britten (notably Peter Grimes, The Rape of Lucretia, The Little Sweep and Albert Herring).
The Fruit of Keller's activity forms the subject of this book, the first thorough and informed exploration of how a psychoanalytical musical criticism may be grounded in individual and small-group psychology. For his case studies Keller drew on composers, performers, listeners and critics; and for his general topics he turned to opera, film music, creative character, genius, aesthetics and the issues of everyday musical life. The writing is impressive for its novelty, its insights, and the communicative clarity of its prose. The book includes a large number of aphorisms, two stories and a one-act play on British anti-Semitism. Most of the writings appear here in print for the first time and are drawn from papers held in the Hans Keller Archive at the University Library in Cambridge
Moving beyond motion: metaphors for changing sound
No full textThis article argues that music offers experiences of change that are at odds with our common understanding of time. Specifically, I question the widespread belief that onward motion is a condition of musical temporality. I approach this issue through metaphor theory, which tends to argue for the necessity of metaphorical experiences of time and music in terms of motion. I argue that music's changing sound evokes a variety of bodily metaphors; motion is not ever-present, but intermingles with metaphors of heat, light, weight, tension and so on. Works by Ligeti, Carter, Kurtág and Saariaho are discussed as case studies
Book review: 'The art of stealing time' by Louis Andriessen, ed. Mirjam Zegers, trans. Clare Yates, and 'The music of Louis Andriessen' ed. Maja Trochimczyk
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Debussy: Rodrigue et Chimène
No full textFirst edition of unpublished opera by Debussy completed, edited, and reconstructed by Richard Langham Smith
A conversation with Harrison Birtwistle
No full textI met with Harrison Birtwistle in early February 2000. Our main topic of conversation was the Nine Movements for String Quartet, but we also touched upon other recent works. Birtwistle had been working that week on settings of the poetry of Lorinne Niedecker for soprano and cello, and he referred to them more than once in the course of our discussion. The Last Supper had also been recently completed – ‘every last note’, as the composer commented with evident relish. An informal parting exchange on this latest music theatre work revealed that it promised a move away from the relative conventionality of The Second Mrs Kong: Birtwistle was keen to point out that, in contrast to Gawain and Mrs Kong, he had avoided calling the work an opera, preferring instead the label ‘dramatic tableaux’. One of the respects in which the piece differs from these earlier works of the 1990s is in its treatment of the performing space. By placing loudspeakers around the whole auditorium, so that sound is projected at the audience from all sides, and by bringing individual instrumentalists up out of the orchestral pit to comment upon the action from the edges of the stage, The Last Supper reintroduces into the theatre the sort of rethinking of performance configurations that is so characteristic of Birtwistle’s instrumental music
Francis Poulenc outre-Manche: séjours, concerts, réception [Francis Poulenc across the Channel: sojourns, concerts, and reception]
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