Chinoiserie
I had another of my vivid experiences last week (So many? What a happy boy I must be). I've been packing them in recently, notably while listening to Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble – stunning music, stunning imagination, stunning playing – ravishingly beautiful fusions of sounds. The global village – migration, the internet, cheap CD players, these are mixing us all together in one giant stew pot. Join me in the steam for a few minutes.
This week was always going to be a highlight of our season – Runnicles conducting MacMillan's 3rd Symphony and Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde – our principal conductor designate on his musical and geographical home territory – artistic honeymoon stuff. The MacMillan was new to me, but I had no doubt that it would pack a punch. It's subtitled Silence, an intriguing title for a notoriously noisy composer. His Triduum is the loudest and most searing music that I have ever played, all about Easter and the crucifixion. It was us who spring-boarded his career with the first performance of Confessions of Isabel Gowdie, all about burning at the stake. That piece is so loud, soul scourging even, that when we were playing it in Frankfurt we were greeted with howls of protest. Back to the play-through of the Symphony, and a few minutes into the piece the flute starts making Shakuhachi sounds, beautiful Japanese flute music, and then it hit me (this was the vivid experience), this Silence must be the novel by Shusaku Endo. This is MacMillan, it has to be. This is what he does. Knowing the book, I knew that things were going to get a lot louder. How many of you have been unfortunate enough to have read this novel? It's shattering, particularly if you're religious, or you've convinced yourself that you believe in God. MacMillan's Silence was commissioned and premiered in Japan, where MacMillan found that the audience knew the novel. A point I'm making here, of the many that I might rabbit on about, is to highlight the difference when music has a subtext that is so strong it might overbalance the music itself – and I knew from the first few bars that this music wouldn't be easily overbalanced. And, what if you aren't aware of that subtext? I wrote a bit about this when we were playing Martland's Babi Yar. I'd hazard a guess that I'm the only one in the orchestra to have read those books, Babi Yar and Silence – no credit in that, it's just symptomatic of the rather wiggly journey that has brought me to where I am now. Other folk read other books. As the play-through continued I began to feel a little isolated, sitting there grappling with the music, and being very sharply prodded in my vulnerable emotional underbelly. (Perhaps we should give ourselves a break and commission MacMillan to write a symphony about a trip to Tesco.) The priest in the novel, Rodrigues, is typical of many who went to Japan around 1600. They successfully established Christian churches but the state suddenly clamped down, persecuted them and tortured them to death, forcing many, including one of the leaders, to apostatize and recant. The church disappeared into a swamp of non-comprehension and alienation, from which, even now, it can hardly crawl out. It all sounds exotically unpleasant, remote, and 'over there'........well, back here we'd had a few centuries practising this sort of thing – on the Jews and Moslems, and by now Christians were achieving industrial scale results doing it to each other. Rodrigues would have heard of the great successes in the Americas, but he can be forgiven for not knowing that as many as 90% of the indigenous population hadn't survived the arrival of the benefits of Christianity and Spanish domination. Maybe the Japanese narrowly escaped the same fate. We're all still at it. And we're getting better at it. The scale of ethnic cleansing fuelled by religion seems to be rising exponentially. Since the WWII twenty million civilians (10,000 times 9/11) have perished through America's attempts to assert its moral superiority. Endo himself was a Catholic in a community that ostracized and mocked him. Rodrigues faces an awesome dilemma. As his flock protects him then they are brutally punished for doing so........he could save them by recanting.......and, anyway, why did he go there in the first place when, if he's really honest, he was actually seeking martyrdom (less fashionable now, at least in Christian circles....or is it?) just in order to gratify his own pride, a garland on his gravestone. After the Bali bombing, a survivor of the decimated Australian football team said of the bombers, "Why can't these guys just go to the pub, chill out, and leave us alone?" What use the flowers growing on my grave if the only folk who might enjoy them already got slaughtered because of me? God's answer to the bereaved? Silence. Or, "Stuff happens".
The context of the Mahler is also death. His 4 year old daughter had just died, and he himself had just been notified of his own death, in the diagnosis of a fatal heart condition. Anti Semitism had pushed him off the helm of the Vienna Opera and he had accepted a contract with the Opera in New York for a record breaking astronomic fee. All this in a period when great German theologians were demythologising the Bible, oriental thought was invading Europe and Freud with his pals were busy butchering sacred cows. All sorts of ideas were leaping up onto recently vacated pedestals. The stew pot was bubbling. Oriental art had been discovered by millions through the Great Exhibitions in Paris, and many composers were being fired up by it – Debussy writing gamelan music, Puccini meticulously researching Chinese instruments in order to get Turandot really authentic. Mahler sets great 8th century Chinese poems, in third hand translations, with a few of his own words fused into them. The poems seem to contemplate the futility of it all. What will be left when I'm gone? What was I for? What flowers will spring from my grave? The answer? Silence. The poems meditate on autumn and spring. Even spring is futile – just get drunk, which also happens to be how one of the poets managed to kill himself. Something in my own melancholy kicks in here. Something stirs in spring-time that triggers a deep restlessness in me – I yearn to move on. From behind the bushes of our collective unconscious I hear a whispering: "Move on, find new pastures, renew yourself......why haven't you let old things die"? We want to, but we daren't. The long final movement, 'Farewell', lingers, and lingers. It can't bear to part. It doesn't dare to depart. Some commentators say that as it finally arrives in C major, after a long Mahlerian hike, it resolves itself. But for me, it doesn't. A wrong note hangs in the air, even at the last chord. Nothing is resolved. The answer? Silence. Mahler shows us the world of nature with a poignancy hardly achieved by any other composer. I should confess that this is one piece of Mahler's in which his usually chafing neuroses don't rub too hard against my own. He alights on the idea of 'new life out of old' and changes the last poem to say how the blossom will, after all, keep returning after his death. Endo, through Rodrigues in the novel, takes a similar comfort. God remains silent. But is that the same silence that hovers in the air just before the breeze stirs the leaves, the silence surrounding a crocus just before it pierces the soil, or the silence we 'hear' just before the sound of the blossom opening? Mahler invokes silence with imperceptibly quiet notes, but MacMillan writes them, and they are hard to 'play' convincingly – how can we 'play' silence, especially if someone in the audience is having a bronchial attack at that very moment? Haydn pioneered 'composing' silences. Beethoven wrote some very long ones in his second cello sonata, and I've heard some great players flunk these – unable to cope with 'playing' the silence. John Cage wrote a piano piece that consists only of silence (Look out for the full orchestral version). Japanese music sets great store by the silence before a note, the breath on the mouthpiece of the Shakuhachi just before the note speaks. Mindfulness, in Buddhist meditation, starts only after you have come to rest, quietly aware of your breath as it strokes by your nostril. A Buddhist will contemplate long on their death, and then on their own dead body – fifty years after its death. What was I for? What stuff happened because of my being there? Did that final chord ever resolve? (Funny thing here: the last time we were to play this Mahler, Sir Alexander Gibson was due to conduct it, but he died just before the show. If Gibson left a mantle, then it is Runnicles who is carrying it. He was inspired to be a conductor by Gibson, and comes to us now with Gibson's charisma, operatic background and a quiver-full of his musical qualities.)
Had enough yet? This week we play music by Golijov (what a name), The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (what a title). This Argentinean composer fuses South American and eastern European Jewish music (not to mention some music for Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble). We also play his Last Round, a tango piece (tango is an African Andalucian fusion). And the piece by Gandolfi (what a name), The Garden of Cosmic Speculation (what a title) is inspired by a Scottish garden that is a horticultural and sculptural exploration of the imponderable mysteries of the Universe (not to mention sub-atomic particles). And, if that is not enough, at the end of the month we're all off to China. My stew pot bubbleth over.
Anthony Sayer
