Not exactly a Studio Saturday

Out of the studio and into the advent fair! In addition to the ready-to-go leftovers from the MSF benefit sale in April, I made a few small, inexpensive items - microwaveable handwarmers and little notebooks.

Setting up at All Saints, Highgate -

 Ready to go, thanks to the transport (and company) provided by Gill Harding -

Six hours later, taking down -

Lovely venue - the sun shone, what a bonus! - with food and coffee and live music -

The Georgian Choir sometimes has concerts in the church, I'll be looking out for those - love the harmonies (the Georgian scale is based on the fifth rather than the octave).

My only purchase was a lovely blue jug, made by Alastair McKay -

On arriving home I was so jazzed up from the day that I immediately tackled The Back Wall, which has long since needed a sort-out. It took a mere three hours to rearrange the piles of books and magazines and the vases and those "saved for best" bottles of wine, and to bring the rickety bamboo shelf down from upstairs, and hoover and dust, and discover things that needed "throw or keep, and if so, where" decisions....

... and to clear the coffee table!

But OH MY, the difference it makes to sit in a room with (mostly) cleared surfaces! (It all started with the desk, which has been an oasis of calm for a few months now.)

These times and places of calmness come and go, but - do yourself a favour - clear a surface ...  

Poetry Thursday - train songs

Coming across these photos, taken at my local station (Crouch Hill, on the Gospel Oak to Barking line of the London Overground, four trains an hour in each direction, and a variable number of freight trains) on a sunny morning in late May, I thought there surely will be a semi-famous poem about a freight train....

Train train train 

Page 1 of an online search, though, came up with Wikipedia's List of Train Songs - "about 1,000 songs by artists worldwide, alphabetized by song title" - both recorded and, pre-recording-era, printed.

Spinning at random, the mouse wheel stopped at Different Trains by Steve Reich (b.1936). Listen - and catch the screened footage accompanying the performance - here.

"Reich's work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of historical themes as well as themes from his Jewish heritage, notably Different Trains."

Another spin of the wheel, and a click or two - we arrive at The Traditional Ballad Today, in which is the song that has been going through my head -

DESCRIPTION: "Freight train, freight train, run so fast/Please don't tell what train I'm on/So they won't know where I've gone." Rest of song gives singer's wishes for her burial "at the foot of old Chestnut Street."
AUTHOR: Elizabeth Cotten
EARLIEST DATE: 1952 (composed c. 1905?)
'
Its author recorded it, and so did Pete Seeger (and some others). The entry adds a note:

Though not folk in origin, it was so widely recorded in the Sixties that it did seem briefly to go into oral tradition, though I suspect it's nearly dead as a folk song by now. 

The popularity of the song seems to have been due partly to its use as a fingerpicking exercise. It is ironic to note that Elizabeth Cotten herself was left-handed, but instead of playing a left-handed guitar, she played a right-handed guitar flipped 180 degrees (i.e. she had her left hand on the fretboard, but with the bass strings on top and the treble on the bottom). So effectively none of the people imitating her style are actually imitating her technique.

Here she is, along with the lyrics for the folk song - I remember a line that went "...as long as I keep travelling on" - that must have been in another version.

Freight train, freight train, run so fast
Freight train, freight train, run so fast
Please don't tell what train I'm on
They won't know what route I'm going

When I'm dead and in my grave
No more good times here I crave
Place the stones at my head and feet
And tell them all I've gone to sleep

When I die, oh bury me deep
Down at the end of old Chestnut Street
So I can hear old Number Nine
As she comes rolling by

When I die, oh bury me deep
Down at the end of old Chestnut Street
Place the stones at my head and feet
And tell them all I've gone to sleep

Freight train, freight train, run so fast
Freight train, freight train, run so fast
Please don't tell what train I'm on
They won't know what route I'm going

As for the semi-famous poem about a freight train ... any suggestions?

Poetry Thursday - Thule, the period of cosmography

Thule, the period of cosmographie,
Doth vaunt of Hecla whose sulphureous fire
Doth melt the frozen clime and thaw the sky;
Trinacrian Etna’s flames ascend not higher.
These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I,
Whose heart with fear doth freeze, with love doth fry.

The Andalusian merchant, that returns
Laden with cochineal and china dishes
Reports in Spain how strangely Fogo burns
Amidst an ocean full of flying fishes.
These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I,
Whose heart with fear doth freeze, with love doth fry.

(Anonymous; found in Poems of Science, which has been on my shelves since 1984, when I met one of the authors)

The words sound so wonderful, even without knowing what they mean (Trinacrian Etna??). Attempting to finally "understand" this poem, which I've sort of known about since taking an interest in madrigals back in the balmy 1970s, I found this succinct explanation on the Paris Review site:

This anonymous love lyric about the polar regions was set to a madrigal by the composer Thomas Weelkes in 1600. Four hundred years ago, poets had the luxury of looking at the horizon and marveling at what might lie beyond it. We’ve since lost that hopeful curiosity about the external world. The natural wonder of volcanic eruption is now classified as a natural disaster, and the once romantic Andalusian merchant is now seen as a capitalist pig. Having run out of physical space, exploration has turned inward. Thule is now the period of an interior cosmography. We go there not as heroes, but as a collection of anonymous users. 

The point of the poem—and I think it endures—is that the commonplace grime and dirt of our own feelings is still more powerful and exciting than the Thule of either cosmography.

But more useful was Ruth Padel's expose of the poem (here), which looks at its musical setting and explains some of the wording - why "period", for example ... it came to mean "farthest limit", and Thule came to mean anywhere in the frozen north.

In 1597 Hecla, a volcano in Iceland, erupted for more than six months. Fogo is another volcano, in the Cape Verde islands, off Senegal ... or might it be Tierra del Fuego?

Padel writes:

What this madrigal breathed was a right to the elsewhere, claimed by a culture where everyone was grabbing at places and artefacts that had been written about but not seen. An over-the-rainbow period (“period” in the temporal sense), of making the foreign your own imaginatively and commercially; when blue dishes and scarlet dye were suddenly chromatic in the visual sense; when fabulousness did not stay on the page, or far-off in Thule, but came alive in English words and music.

Many versions of the madrigal are on youtube; try this one, it has a comparatively good sound quality ... but even so the words are difficult to make out!

DrawingTuesday - Brunei Gallery

The current exhibition is "Celebrating Art and Music" (till 24 June). First, a wander round...

Dancer (stencil?)

Burmese harps

A scene from the Ramayana (paint on cotton) - Prince Rama
is defeating the ogre in a fierce battle

Musical instruments

What caught my eye, with a view to the "gridded" theme for JQs, was this screen ... and I struggled with it ...

 So drawing the kora was a relief. An ethnographical film made in the Gambia in 1970, at the start of the Super 8 era, by Roderic Knight was playing in the background, showing how a kora was made and how its making fitted into village life in terms of it having a "godmother" and a celebration when it was finished.

Janet B found the large harp wouldn't fit on just the one page -

 Najlaa fitted smaller instruments on smaller pages -

 Judith's pages held large metal sculptures of dancers (by Sokari Douglas Camp) -

 Whereas Carol went out in the Japanese roof garden -

 and Michelle too had a gardenish theme, with a frottage composition -

Extracurricular activity: Janet B has been drawing at the vet school again -

Polar bear

Musical encounters with the Berlin Phil

On New Year's Eve I took myself to the cinema for a "new to me" experience, the live transmission of a concert, the Berlin Philharmonic's new year concert - transmitted simultaneously to cinemas in many parts of the world. It turns out that the orchestra has a resident poet, who introduced the proceedings, recited his new year's poem in German and English, and during the piano-moving entertained us with a great chunk of Edith Sitwell's words to William Walton's Facade, quite amazing but not really translatable into German - though he provided an impression of its nonsensicality. As a sort of linguistic mirror-act, introducing the Dvorak pieces he launched into a Bohemian accent such as Dvorak might have spoken in (I was chuffed that my German was good enough to follow it) AND then did a comparable distortion in English translation, really quite unexpected and amazing,

On his retirement from the horn section, the orchestra made Klaus Wallendorf its "one and only resident poet for life". The ceremonial presentation can be seen here, and at the end of that clip is one of his concoctions, a song that contains the names of 19 Tokyo subway stations, written after an evening of Japanese hospitality. (See the youtube version here.)

(via)

The horn players got quite a look in - another, Sarah Willis, interviewed the pianist (Daniil Trifonov) before the concert. It being new year, and Berlin, they ended the interview by having a glass of champagne and eating ... doughnuts!


Was it Sarah Willis, then, who organised and encouraged the Gartenschlauchorchester that we saw at the Berlin Phil's open day in June 2015? By gum, it was - she's on the left -

If you'd like to watch the live transmissions of the orchestra's concerts in the comfort of your own home, a year's subscription to the digital concert hall costs 149 Euros - a saving not only in ticket prices, but in the tedium of having to travel to the concert venue. That covers more than 40 live concerts (in HD) every season. Bargain! And if it's inconvenient to watch live, you can watch from the archive. (My father would have loved this - he had a huge collection of music DVDs and Blue Ray disks - and that, rather than tv, was the entertainment of an evening. My mother, less so ... she did a lot of knitting...)

The orchestra's website is worth a visit, eg for the (short) trailers of the movies,  for the many (longer) interviews with musicians, and for the history of the concert hall.

And if horns are right up your street, the "Ho, Ho, Horn" Christmas concert can be seen online, free - https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/23819

While at that open day in June 2015, we were lucky enough to hear the orchestra, for free - though getting a seat was a bit of a scrum, ganz unordentlich, rather un-German. We sat in the balcony on the right... happy memories ...

(via)

"The pictures are better on radio"

It's interesting to see radio being "made", and the Why Music? weekend was a great chance to be in the audience for some interesting programmes. Radio 3 was broadcasting live from the Wellcome Collection all weekend, and all the programmes can be found on the iPlayer (if you're in the UK) for a few weeks - the clips are available internationally, I believe.

The studio in the foyer. With the headphones, you could listen live throughout the building

My first stint as an audience member was at "Playing with Patterns" - the way composers have worked patterns and mathematics from nature into their music, from Bach and Mozart to Messiaen and Berg. Here we are in the Reading Room, waiting for the presenter and performers to arrive and oust the photographer -

Later that day, the lecture theatre was packed for "The Psychiatrist at the Keyboard" - Dr Richard Kogan showing how mental illness shaped the works of Robert Schumann and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Leaning on the piano, he spoke without notes, and every now and then sat down and played without notes - for two hours, which passed in a flash. Well worth a listen.

The lecture theatre was packed again to hear sound recordist Chris Watson in "The Sounds of Nature", which included not just natural sounds but a live cellist duetting with a recorded nightingale. (But his favourite birdsong is ... the blackbird.)

As we waited for our live events to begin, we caught the tail end of the previous programme - yet more fascinating listening to be had.

How about "Shaping the Brain" - the ways in which music can influence - even mould - the brain from a neurological and social perspective, to discover how our musical tastes, education and preferences shape more than just our social lives.

Or "Why Music" - Author Philip Ball asks why music is such a universal human trait. How do we recognise music, where does it come from, and how does it affect us so deeply? Philip Ball speaks to scientists and musicians from around the world, including Tecumseh Fitch, Joe Stilgoe, Aniruddh Patel, Robert Zatorre, Laurel Trainor, and Daniel Levitin to explore these questions and some of the insights provided by neuroscience and evolutionary theory.

Or "The Listening Brain" - the benefits of listening to and performing music ... plus ... how and why the brain responds to music, and how musical experience shapes the brain.

Or "Music as Medicine" - the many issues, recent discoveries and theories around music and health, including how music helps both physical and mental wellbeing, and the health problems encountered by musicians.

And more ... at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02zjcpx, "for 30 days" (until 26 October).

Two open days

"Tage der offenen Tur" seems to happen at various times at various venues, unlike the annual Open House in London. For the organisation, it's a PR exercise (and potential fundraiser) - for the public, a day out to somewhere that's normally closed to them.

Such as the construction site that's going to be the reconstructed Schloss, to open in 2019 -

Impressive entrance - to come

Vast inner courtyards

That 18th-century look

Making and moving sculptures

Original photos and plans

The Schloss dome will echo the dome of the Dom nearby

Even some costumed Prussians wandering around

At the end of WW2 the Schloss was burned out but structurally sound, and could have been restored, but it was in the East Zone and was designated a symbol of Prussian militarism. In 1950 it was dynamited, to be replaced by a Staatsrat (built 1964) and the Palast der Republik (1973-6), which was closed to the public due to asbestos in 1990; purification was completed in 2003, and then it was torn down (2006-8).

Much debate has accompanied all this - and a wonderful publicity stunt. Says wikipedia, " In 1993, [the Friends of the Palace] pulled off a further remarkable achievement, erecting a canvas mockup of a portion of the Stadtschloss facades in 1: 1 scale on the world's largest scaffolding assembly. Privately funded by donations and sponsorship it stood for a year and half, and is considered to be what turned public and official opinion in favour of reconstruction." Peter Schneider, in Berlin Now, says "the artful tromp l'oeil also contributed to the overall idealization. Thanks to its canvas alter ego, which reacted to every gust of wind, the bombastic Schloss gained a lightness the original never had."

When the Schloss is finished, the Dahlem museums will move in, as will the history of science department of Humboldt University, which is nearby.

Part two of the day (Sunday 18 June) came about by chance - on our way to a museum in the Kulturforum we noticed that the Philharmonie also had an open house. And very participatory it was, with the audience participating in singing, waltzing, breakdancing, and of course, activities for kids, the audience of the future.

Musicians and other "official bods" wore red shirts

Simon Halsey supervised the choral singing, including a bit of Carmina Burana

The impromptu Gartenschlauchorchester joined the horn players for a short concert

Another short concert by the Berlin Phil's 12 cellos - tango music

Waiting for the full orchestra - a packed hall for the last concert of the day

Seeing/hearing the Berlin Philharmonic (everyone including Sir Simon in red shirts), has got to be one of the highlights of our time here. 

The open day, it was announced, had 12,000 visitors, and the tombola [missed that] raised 8,000 euros towards a trip to Taiwan.

Mock-up

Work towards the show is all-consuming. I went to college yesterday to put up the mock-boxes and see what they'll look like in the room. They'll be made of MDF and painted white and will be defined more by their shadows than their materials. One will hold the "library of mangled bits" and the other the "blue distance" piece. "The long piece" (which has a title: Little by little, day by day) will cascade from the top of the screen and roll out a little way on the floor. 

People who happened to be around at college gave me good ideas - to put the "balls" on the floor, and to have the Blue Distance box "in a quiet place on its own". Thomas suggested a plinth for the balls, only about 10cm high rather than the floor - and to move the Blue Distance box beyond the seat, where I'll be sitting making the memory ball for several hours a day. (What have I got myself into??)

So I've made a list of materials for him to order, and once they're put together and painted we'll be good to go ... another set of decisions made. Whew, all the decisions...!!

Which leaves just a few books for the "library" to finish (decisions on covers, titles...) and the "reflective writing" to retrieve from this blog. Nearly there! Six days to go with the work that will be in the show. After that, the work for the shop. 

Something for the ears

While doing the daily stitching I've been catching up on radio programmes on the BBC iPlayer, and stumbled on an excellent item about teenage abusive relationships, "Bruising Silence". As it's on Radio 1, there's a lot of musical content of a sort I don't usually encounter, so it's a bit out of my comfort zone to listen to it. This is definitely an issue that needs to be treated in the media that reach teenagers, and something that people of every age should be aware of. On the lighter side, until Sunday 19th you can listen-again to a programme (from Radio 2) about the history of doo-wop music, Street Corner Soul, first broadcast in 2007; or catch the rest of the series on Sundays at 8pm.

John Cage - scores and quotes

"At all costs inspiration must be avoided which is to say act in such a way that inspiration doesn’t come up as an alternative but exists eternally. Then of course it is theater and music disappears entirely into the realm of art where it knows it belongs. Art silence is not real silence and the difference is continuity versus interpenetration. This is also."

"And what is your purpose in writing music? I do not deal in purposes; I deal with sounds."

"The only structure which permits of natural activity is one so flexible as not to be a structure; I write in order to hear; never do I hear and then write what I hear. Inspiration is not a special occasion."

In Atlas Eclipticalis, events contain from one to ten notes, divided randomly into two groups. Pitches are notated clearly, though in a somewhat unusual way. The size of the notes, determine their amplitudes. Durations are notated above the events.

Tempo is not given: the conductor determines the duration of each system.
Cage used the Atlas Eclipticalis 1950.0 (an atlas of the stars published in 1958 by Antonín Becvár (1901-1965), a Czech astronomer), superimposing musical staves over the star-charts in this atlas. Brightness of the stars is being translated into the size of the notes in the composition. (text and image from here)

"Fontana Mix" is from here, which has a wonderful collection of scores from composers such as Ligati, Varese, Stockhausen, Cornelius Cardew, as well as lists of classifications of sounds by Cage, Russolo, and Stockhausen.

"Chess Pieces" disappeared into a private collection shortly after 1944 and resurfaced in 2005. "As a painting, the collaged, juxtaposed chaos of the notes contrasts with the order of the grid" reminiscent "of the cut-up technique William Burroughs and the Beats' applied to books and printed texts a few years later."