Climbing Music

It's all Cornelius Cardew's fault that I wrote a piece of music in my head on the way home on the bus from Gloucester today. You heard it here first. It stems from his scratch orchestra for making contemporary music accessible to amateur musicians. The piece I heard about is called "The Great Learning" and I thought to myself, I could do that with variations. My original bit is to play an orchestra as if it was a single musical instrument. A "soloist" stands in front of the orchestra-as-instrument like a conductor, but instead of conducting a score he/she improvises on the orchestral instrument within the compass of some set rules. Those set rules turn this experiment into a particular piece of music but one which will sound different every time it is played.  OK, this is how it works for what I'll call "Climbing Music". Every member of the orchestra waits until the soloist points at them and then they begin to play the key note of a scale, e.g., a low G in the key of G major. They continue to play it until the soloist points at them again and then they move to the next note in the scale, A, etc. When each player reaches the leading note, F sharp, their next one will be back to the low G.

The effect should be of a gradual musical hill climb with shifting harmonics, harmonies and dischords partially under the soloists control but largely open to chance. To make it more interesting (and this is what Cardew did), another rule is that if a player gets bored playing a note, they can move on to the next one without being "triggered" by the soloist, but they can only do this if they are moving in unison with another player. I'm going to try this out on some unsuspecting group of musicians. Hopefully, the musical hill climb will end naturally and spontaneously at some point. Anyone like to be there at the premiere?

So, What's New?

I have a feeling that things in contemporary music are changing.  A great chunk of what was written and published in the last 100 years has been somewhat difficult to get to grips with, either because composers weren't necessarily writing with the desire to captivate an audience or were pushing the barriers of convention to the extent that the music became incomprehensible. It seems to me that attitudes to all this are shifting. I may be wrong and my objectivity may be somewhat clouded but I detect that contemporary music is gaining ground and it is surely an inevitable process that what is new and shocking becomes at some point accepted and conventional. There are three particular events that have prompted this and all are to do with the way that the BBC is able only now to look back and make clear sense of - and present clearly - music's progress through the 20th century and into our own.

Musical Spheres

I've been enjoying Howard Goodall's TV series on the history of music. It's his personal view and it inspired me to take a look at what my own might be. Coinciding with this, I had to summarise in ten minutes a talk that I've been preparing for the WI called "Musical Spheres" which explores the way that music has been regarded by philosophers in the past. The challenge was to squeeze this overview, which ranges from ancient Babylon to contemporary times, into a few brief minutes and without any off-putting technical terms. When contemplating this task, the Reduced Shakespeare Company came to mind.  Here is the result.

The Old (and Young) Person's Guide to the Orchestra

Here's a theme and variations, with apologies to Benjamin Britten.   The theme is a rondo, which will keep recurring: an orchestral musician must primarily develop the ability to listen to and respond to what the other instrument sections are doing. This is more important than all the rest, tuning, dynamics, timing, etc.  It doesn't mean that these aren't important, but the player who is hearing what their role is in relation to the whole orchestra will almost automatically play in tune, in time and at the right dynamic. It is a fact that if you were to audition for a professional orchestra, it is not the individuals with the highest technical ability that would necessarily get the job, but the ones who can play as a part of the orchestra.