Tom Roper's Weblog

Passions

If you came here looking for a post on erotic passions, I suggest you look elsewhere. I am using the word in its oldest sense, derived from the Greek πασχω, I suffer. For while I am a militant atheist, for the next week or so I shall be listening to a lot of sacred music, culminating in one of the Bach Passion on Friday. If I tell you that I shall be listening to Gesualdo's Tenebrae responses, settings of the Lamentations by Palestrina, Lassus, Victoria, Couperin and, best of all, Tallis, you may think I have fallen to late-onset religious mania. But there is something about listening to these works at their appointed time int he liturgical calendar that adds to the experience, and it is not necessary to give credence to flying spaghetti monsters, parthenogenesis, transubstantiation or any other hocus-pocus, to be moved by them. I think of it as like drinking a fine wine sur place.

When I first heard Bach it was the Matthew Passion that gripped me, with the dramatic intensity of Peter's denial, the mob's demands that Barrabas be released and Jesus be crucified, the veil of the temple being rent in twain, to name three. And it was a revelation to find the chorale, the hymn that we sang at school and knew as, 'O sacred head, sore wounded', appear in so many different and subtle ways. I laid my hands on a volume of Bach chorales from the library and would play them on the old upright piano in my bedroom; I found them well-suited for my self-taught piano technique. Later I discovered that the John Passion is even more beautiful. I think that's the one I will play on Friday. I have it in the version conducted by John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists

My night of metal hell

The ancients believed that the mother pelican fed her young by piercing her breast with her bill, and feeding them on her blood. This archetype of parental self-sacrifice is often cited chez Roper, but never with greater justification than last night when I took daughter, daughter's friend, and daughter's friend's boyfriend to Brixton to see Papa Roach, helpfully described by Time Out as 'triple-platinum nu-metal titans[...playing a] bellowing brand of emotionally bruised post-grunge".

We missed the first support act, and arrived in time for the second, whose name escapes me. Apart from some curious haircuts, the chief point of interest here was their desperation to ingratiate themselves with the audience. Sycophantically, Chicagoans to a man, they professed to love all things English, including football, which stretched belief. The greatest sycophancy was that, in every intro, they prostrated themselves before the headline act, promising us how good Papa Roach would be, how much they looked up to them, and so on and so forth. Is this a contractual requirement, imposed by Papa Roach on their support acts? Or a transparent attempt to improve their own reception by attaching themselves in the mind of the audience to the headline act they had come to see? An act of homage or abasement? Musically, they were loud.

After some fumbling by roadies, Papa Roach themselves took the stage. They are led by a diminutive young man, not handsome by any means, and one wonders at the psychological motives of a short man who decides to make a living yelling at crowds from a stage. They play in a genre that was empty and dated decades ago.

He flattered the audience relentlessly: "you're [expletive deleted] awesome', 'you [expletive deleted] rock' and so on ad nauseam. The music itself, crude and derivative, could have been made at more or less any point in the past forty years. Am I over-optimistic in expecting an art form to develop, to hope for intelligence and wit in music? For most of these fans, it is its very lack of development, its stagnation, that is its great virtue. As for the misogynistic and stereotypical lyrics, listen, if you must to Hollywood Whore for an example.

Throughout fans and the band would raise their fingers, in all seriousness, in the Italian sign for a cuckold, adopted by metal fans without any knowledge of its iconographical roots. With the passage of time, one might hope that it would now be used with playful, ironic intent. Not a bit of it.

I knew the end must be near when the traditional drum solo allowed the rest of the band to leave the stage for a fag. To maintain my sanity, I tweeted as best I could. In a venue which nears O2's name, the very people who collect a king's ransom for my iPhone every month, you would think, bestir themselves to put in a wifi network, or at least a decent G3 signal.

Then again, I must not be curmudgeonly. Daughter, daughter's friend, and daughter's friend's boyfriend enjoyed themselves and so, too, did the rest of the audience.

Man goes to festival shock

I went, for what I think must have been the tenth year, to the Tolpuddle Festival last weekend. The world is well served by blog posts in which middle-aged men recount the interesting things that happened at festivals, but here's my version:

I met Jean Bonnin, the author of A Certain Experience of the Impossilbe; I intend to read it forthwith
My Tom Paine t--shirt (advertising Tom Paine Ale, made by Harveys of Lewes, who, being brewers, are perhaps not tottaly in sympathy with the trade union movement: good beer, bad politics) attracted some comment
I held forth on a open mic session about school libraries and gave the Campaign for the Book a plug
I was the only man to correctly identified the original of a song played by Not Made in China: Police Car by Larry Wallis. An irrelevant fact: the Pink Fairies played at my school dance in what must have been 1971, but I think that was before Wallis joined them.

Handel on the piano

To the gentleman who e-mailed Radio 3 this morning to complain about the presenter playing a recording of some Handel played on a piano as part of Handel week:

Dear Sir,

You understand nothing of the national culture, one of its chief components being Handel played on the piano, badly, by infants' school music mistresses at the beginning and end of assembly. This has nothing to do with authentic or inauthentic performance, but is a precious childhood memory. And Handel's music seems to have survived the treatment rather well.

With best wishes,

Genre/Form Thesaurus for Music

I saw this on Catalogablog

News from the Library of Congress.

In November 2008, the Library of Congress Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate approved a Timeline and Plan for the Next Five Library of Congress Genre/Form Projects. In accordance with that timeline, the Policy and Standards Division (PSD) is beginning to develop a genre/form thesaurus for music. LC’s Music Division and other interested groups are collaborating with PSD in this effort.

Information about the project, including tentative lists of genre/form terms and terms denoting medium of performance, may be linked to from PSD’s genre/form web page.

[From Genre/Form Thesaurus for Music]

How fascinating, but how complex to try to order the fluctuations of musical fashion. I hope they will find room from thrash-skiffle, the form pioneered by Brighton's Curst Sons

Cornelius Cardew

'What do we remember about Cornelius Cardew?' asks Richard Gott in an article about the composer in the London Review of Books, reviewing the 1000 page biography, Cornelius Cardew: a life unfinished, by John Tilbury.

What do I remember? I was an annoyingly precocious child with a strong interest in music, though without the talent to make anything of it, and so I first came upon him in the pages of the Musical Times, to which i graduated when too old for Look and Learn, and where he seems to have been a frequent writer. The piece I remember was a manifesto or a criticism/self-criticism about the Scratch Orchestra, which I think later appeared in a collection of his writings with the snappy title Stockhausen serves Imperialism. I remember also hearing a performance of excerpts from the Great Learning, his settings of Confucius, on Radio 3, though not the whole of that nine-hour work. At one point the choir were required to pebbles on the floor. It was curious that China, the country Cardew was to admire so much, in 1974 embarked on a major campaign against Confucian philosophy, under the slogan 'criticise Lin Piao and Confucius'.

Cardew's music changed abruptly when he joined an ultra-left sect called the Communist Party of England Marxist Leninist . Quite what Cardew was doing in this gallery is hard to understand. His considerable intellect must have found their doctrinaire and over-literal application of the line of Peking Review to British conditions ridiculous. The group, long defunct, was run by a Canadian and distinguished themselves by habit of picking fights with the police at every opportunity, notably at an anti-national Front demonstration in Red Lion Square in 1974, when a young student, Kevin Gately, died. This tendency led many to speculate whether they were not in fact police provocateurs.

My last encounter with Cardew was at a National Union of Students conference in the mid-1970s. I cannot remember whether it was Blackpool or Llandudno, or one of the other seaside towns where the union would meet twice a year. These conferences were crazy; it was not unusual for sessions to last until midnight by which time any political judgement delegates might have had in the morning was long gone under the influence of booze and other mind-altering substances. Cardew's group, Peoples' Liberation Music, played late one night after the close of conference, and I went along out of curiosity. I remember little about the band except that they played a number of Irish rebel songs, and a toe-tapping number, whose refrain went:

Five fingers, five fingers, five fingers make one fist
Death to the British monopoly capitalists.

The sentiments were sound, their lyrical and musical expression infantile.

Grove on Pink Floyd

There is endless fun to be had browsing Grove Music Online. Prompted by some email discussions of Rick Wright's death with the erudite and witty Guy Robinson, I looked up the entry on the Floyd. It ends with the savagely accurate observation, 'although Gilmour's ringing guitar and their songs' generally slow pace help their style retain its identity, it has long since lost its psychedelic and experimental edge, acting as a voice for a middle-aged, financially successful British audience for whom it evokes exciting memories'.

Torelli, Torelli and Torelli

Research in Grove (now Oxford Music Online) to find out more about the composer of the trumpet concerto that stayed with me for so long finds, as is so often the case, more than one composer of that name. The composer in question is Giuseppe Torelli, 1658-1709, born in Verona, whose early career was spent in Bologna. In 1696 he moved, perhaps spending some time in Berlin, and certainly some in Vienna and Ansbach. He returned to Bologna in 1700, where he lived and worked until his death.

But there are also two earlier Gasparo Torellis, one fl 1593-1613 and another fl 1602, to say nothing of a stage designer, Giacomo, 1608-1678. I wonder which surname has the most entries in Grove? The smart money would be on Bach, but I might be surprised.

CYCO

I heard a piece of music on the radio that I had not heard for forty years, Torelli's Trumpet Concerto. It is a commonplace piece of baroque writing for the trumpet, but the opening figure, played first by the orchestra and then by the soloist, has stayed in my head ever since I first heard it played by a tall fair-haired trumpeter whose name I forget by the Cambridge Youth Chamber Orchestra (CYCO) in 1967 or 1968, in St Edmunds Church, Cambridge.

CYCO, pronounced like the Hitchcock film, was an orchestra of Cambridge school musicians, led by university music students. I remember Stephen Bonner and Donald Judge, into whose rooms in Magdalen we would squeeze ourselves for rehearsals; sometimes we rehearsed in rooms on Thompsons Lane.

Unlike the Cambridgeshire Schools Holiday Orchestra which, under Ludovick Stewart's leadership, was open to all comers, CYCO membership was exclusive. I played the clarinet, though was taught the psaltery for a piece of Donald's composition, which we performed in St Marks on Barton Road. I remember playing Leopold Mozart's Toy Symphony at a Magdalen May Ball supper: instead of throwing bread rolls at us, the audience were surprisingly attentive. I once inflicted a composition of my own on the wind players, who struggled through it with tolerance.

Songs my father used to sing: number 1

My mention of the song Constantinople, which turned out to be by Paul Whiteman and his orchestra, c. 1928, reminded me of more songs that my father would sing. He was prone to song while driving, while walking the dog Simon until the beast's death when I was still quite young, or when walking en famille, particulary if he thought our pace was slackening . Examples:

What a surprise for the Duce
Sleepy time down South
T'ain't no sin to take off your skin (And dance around in your bones)
More to follow