To infinity and beyond
Lots of buzz this week, and not just the music. Photo sessions for new publicity – all dressed up in shmantzy Cruise gear – look out for our new brochure. Getting our new high tech ear plugs fitted – £170 a shot from a nice lady flown up from Harley Street to do it for us – ker-ching, thank you. (In April, the new noise regs kick in – goodness knows how these are going to impact on our profession.) Monday was 'Discovering Music'. We had Heather at her cimbalom playing Kodaly's Hary Janos, and chatting to Charles Hazlewood about all what and how the cimbalom does it. Best not to ask, it's awfully complicated, with strings laid out in the wrong order and there are even strings that double up for two or three different pitches at once!? Piano tuners run screaming from the building and no composer in his or her right mind would write for it without initiation into the arcane knowledge. Stravinsky and Boulez are the most famous non-Magyars to have done so......and the Chieftans. This is all a big pity, because it's a wonderful beast, which the Hungarians have made their national instrument. The accordion faces the same sorts of problems, except you don't need a gas guzzler to lug it around. Talking about gas, you should hear some of the noises that the accordion does. Once you get out from under the very extensive and soothing shadow of Jimmy Shand, the huge expressive and dramatic range of the accordion can be fully revealed. Get a taster at our 'Hear and Now' gig. Rolf Hind has written an accordion part in his piano concerto, for oor ain James Crabb (who had to move to Denmark to get out from under that shadow). Well now, a whole week of squeaky gate modern music might not be the first thing you'd want to get excited about, or even read about, let alone spend money to come along to hear (wrong, this concert is free). But stay with me, hear me out, this is going to be one of my long ones.
Some of you, the very mature ones among you, might remember Anthony Hopkins' long running radio series 'Talking about music'. I was brought up on those talks, and he was my favourite lecturer at College. He never let on in advance what his topic was going to be, precisely because he always wanted to surprise and delight exactly those people who'd already decided they didn't want to be surprised and delighted. There's my beef – openness. Squeaky gate concerts are always going to be a bran tub, you'll not know what you're going to get; and I've done plenty in my time that I wouldn't want to do again (or "step in" again, as Beecham said of Stockhausen's music). We've got three piano soloists on Saturday. That's different for a start, and our piano tuner is locked in the building. Rolf Hind is playing his own piano concerto, which the ´óÏó´«Ã½ commissioned. He calls it a concerto but insists that it's not – his part is just one item in a bazaar of instruments. We have often been stunned by Rolf's playing of contemporary stuff – he does things to the piano that you wouldn't want to try at home, and certainly not in front of the children. For this piece, Maya-Sesha, the piano strings are 'prepared' with blu-tac, ping pong balls and wooden solitaire balls – and that's just for starters. It opens with a sort of dawn prelude, then takes us to a teeming, overwhelmingly noisy Indian street scene, which all gradually subsides towards an ethereal quiet ending. 'Maya' is all that noise and biz that we choose to call life, but many religions and philosophies call illusion. 'Sesha' is what is left after all that temporal non-reality has dissipated – the eternal essence, or whatever. I hear you yawn? Maybe you're too young. In India, thousands of men of my age give up all material things, home, family etc, and become sanyasin; they wander off as mendicants, dressed only in ash! and search for the enduring essentials of life. I'm not about to do that, in our Scottish climate my essentials wouldn't endure. The music strips away inessentials. All the violins are sent home. Except for four who are discreetly tucked away at the back. The violas are with us, but towards the end they all put their instruments down and a couple of them continue quietly singing and whistling; it's such a relief when they stop playing the damn things. Even the oboes put their instruments down and graduate to the unworldly soothing sounds of recorders. The cellos are left out front, well out in front. That's good. The accordion, a soprano sax, and a high clarinet all feature in the clamour of the street scene, along with a dustbin lid, thunder sheet, klaxons, and sundry unexpected noises. The accordion reminds me of the small harmonium used in Qawwali music, that's the ecstatic Sufi music that you can hear going on all night in Islamic communities, and the soprano sax could be the high melismatic chanting of the Qawwali singer. Here, it is all heard through the traffic din. (Rolf doesn't own these ideas, they're mine.) The essence of Qawwali music is that we are participants, not observers, and we should open ourselves to the singer who then can carry us, if we want, into trance, carry us on waves of extraordinary intensity, intensity that is alien in our buttoned up culture. Or at the very least, we should want to let him carry us into contemplation of 'the other'. Who knows? That 'other' could be an ecstatic experience of the inexpressible richness of life – though you might need to loosen a button or two to get there. As we move from Maya into Sesha things quieten down; you'll hear pitch-less gasps and gentle thumping noises from the accordion, a rowdy percussionist is left twirling a bull roarer, a pure innocent child-like sound, an utterly unsophisticated pink plastic tube that sounds out those natural harmonics that the ancients called the 'music of the spheres'. The piano strings are gently brushed and at then at the very end a gizmo is left on a piano string that causes it to ring, ring on continuously and evenly, on and on, and on. Aum! The eternal sound. At the play through, before I started loading all this philosophical stuff onto the music, I just wanted that sound to go on and never stop – it was beautiful, and none of us had any idea how it was being made.
Soothing Classics at Seven this concert is not. But there's nothing obscure or inaccessible in it. For sure, it's modern music; but if you're open and participate by listening in to the music I can promise that you'll be surprised and delighted. And anyway, if it's soothing that you want, then that soothing is far more profound and satisfying if it comes after some sort of cathartic experience – the first pint after you come down off the mountain is by far the best! The non-piano piece in the programme is Julian Anderson's Stations of the Sun. I don't know the 'story' of this piece yet, but it is well established music, accessible, colourful, cosmological (as seems to be appropriate for this programme), and I'll give my unquestioning vote to any composer who has set Emily Dickinson's I'm nobody. I want to use up my space by writing about the other piano concerto in the programme. This is by Detlev Glanert, another long term friend of our orchestra, and it's for two pianos. Once again, this is not intractably modern, you needn't know anything about the piece to be able to enjoy its sound world, you can enjoy the virtuosity of the pianists and orchestral players, and it flows on through slow, fast, dramatic, thoughtful episodes like any conventional piece. But, and I am not aware of this being planned into the programme, there's a deeply engaging and thoughtful sub-text to this concerto that can take you to the same world as Rolf's piece – if you want. Each section of Detlev's concerto is inspired by the pictures and names of geological features on Mars. Wow! I hear you groan? These features have all been "named" after ancient Greek and Roman myths. You can see the pictures on the NASA website and read up on the myths on Wikipedia, you could even enjoy rolling your mouth around names like Nirgal Vallis, Noctis Labyrinthus, Gigas Sulci, Tithonium Chasma and others. That's all the superficial and transient stuff. The eternal question here is, "How do you name something that you haven't experienced?" Surely, that naming would be a meaningless exercise? Imagine a Martian gazing out towards far off Earth and dreaming up a name for the Glasgow area. Would he give it the name of a far off Martian myth, redolent with poetry and mystery? If he did, how would that naming harmonize with the truth as we know it here, and is there such a thing as objective truth? Would that naming just be illusion and fantasy – maya? Maybe he'd call it 'Dear Green Place', which is what 'Glasgow' means in Gaelic. And how truthful would that be? That's the key. That's the trouble. We surge ahead, we name things, we slap labels on them, and then we've forever prevented ourselves from seeing the real truth in that very thing. In naming, we've blinded ourselves. In the concerto, one piano makes statements, the other goes on to challenge those statements. As if echoing back from Mars?
So what? Is this stuff important? Is it going to get me through the concert? Is it going to help me choose what to eat, or work out how I'm going to get out of debt and pay my children's university fees? But you forget; I've given all of that up and I'm wandering around dressed in ash, carrying a begging bowl for my food. Actually, at the end of the day, if you didn't care a monkey's for any of this music, there's enough brain meat in this programme to stave off your mental dotage, or drive you demented – if you want. And all for free. What are you open to?
Anthony Sayer
