Painting With Music

As a composer, I've developed some (to me!) interesting abilities, ideas and techniques. I'm beginning to know what I'm comfortable with and what is out of my comfort zone. Sweeping musical statements I can do but they don't come naturally. Harmonic progression I can do, but takes work. And the need to 'change key' to maintain interest is an unwanted compositional distraction. I have absorbed a whole variety of compositional facets: counterpoint, fugue, serialism, minimalism, form, phrasing, harmony, discord, sequence, repetition...  In addition, in working with groups of musicians, chamber strings, woodwind, brass, full orchestra, I've absorbed some ability to orchestrate, to choose an effective combinations of instruments for a given circumstance.

 The result that emerged is a liking for 'painting with music', by which I mean making brush strokes of short musical statements and joining them up within a context that frames them to make a whole. A brush stroke can be anything from a single note or chord to a run of semitones, from a random sequence of notes to a carefully constructed phrase, a piece of counterpoint, a scale.

 The first project using this newly-found musical canvas is a series of four meditations on haikus by Japanese masters and I chose one for each season. Here is Winter: https://youtu.be/GadT1gS5b2g
 

 The process is, first, to choose a subject and then to use that subject to suggest the atmosphere, the instrumentation and also to make some imaginative connections, for example, dividing the composition into three parts, one for each line of the music, or choosing an instrument for specific facets, like the flute for frost. These imaginative connections are somewhat arbitrary but make the music express its subject matter. Thereafter, it's a case of making those brush strokes and seeing - or rather listening to - what happens.

I apply as much theory about what could work as I can, particularly where harmony is concerned, also rhythmic phrasing, but then come endless repetitions of listening hard and making vital adjustmens to what sounds right. Somehow, the brain, which after all is the music-maker, recognises the right note and the wrong one as much for the composer as for the listener. Listen to Snow's Falling! and judge for yourself.

At its extreme, this painting-with-music can become a Jackson Pollock-esque creation of happenstance musical patterns ('stochastic' is the term used for random events, loved by experimental composers of the 1960s and 70s, John Cage springing to mind). But my method uses chance and design on the palette, alongside all the other musical colours.

Falling into this use of visual language to describe music is fascinating for a multitude of reasons.

It is difficult for a listener to cotton on to a new piece of music at the first listening, especially if it contains any challenges, but by suggesting or accompanying it with an image or images is a sure way of leading the listener in. Again, Snow's Falling! is an example, the simple image holds attention while the music plays on, weaving its detail into a coherent whole. We are used to background sound tracks creating atmosphere. Here, the opposite occurs, an image re-enforces the music's atmosphere.

 Even without the video, the haiku is enough, conjuring a strong image. These haikus are ideal subject matter as their essence is to take a particular subject, one we can all recognise from personal experience, and incorporate into it an awareness of the universal. It is a small hook and bait to catch a much greater truth.

The history of the visual arts has an equivalent in music and there are some clear equivalences that can be made in describing the development of either genre, Impressionism (Renoir, Monet/Debussy, Ravel), for example, or, in the case of my four seasons meditations, abstract expressionism, although, of course, all music is abstract.

This reminds me of a short book, Fear of Music, by David Stubbs, subtitled, 'Why people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen'. Its thesis is that art galleries have no problem attracting audiences for abstract art, while music struggles to find an audience for contemporary music. Using this thread, the book follows the phases of 20th-century art together with those of music happening at the same time. Recommended!

If you would like to hear the other three haiku meditations, go to  www.billanderton.uk/compositions.html.

Review: A Very Nice Composer

It's a delight to discover a 'new' composer, the irony being that this composer's lack of fame was directly attributed to his lack of 'newness': Carl Reinecke (1824-1910, born in Altona, Hamburg, then under Danish rule).

Carl Reinecke Symphonies 1 & 3; Plus, music from the opera, 'King Manfred'. Munchner Ründfunkorchester, c., Henry Raudales. CPO

A man who avoided anything brash, outspoken, outlandish, he was cast in the mold of an upholder of the classical tradition. For a considerable part of his prodigious career, this went well, but by the end - as iconoclasts Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler took to the stage - this did not continue, his music then cast as academic and stuck in the classical groove.

Reinecke's orchestral music is superbly crafted with no consequent lack of passion, grace, force and expression. If you enjoy a great symphony, try the two found on this CD. Always feeling in the shadow of other musical greats and geniuses, Reinecke humbly dedicated himself to the service of music, as conductor, director, composer and author, the pinnacle of his career taking place in Leipzig at the Gewandhaus and Conservatory, where as a shy Danish boy he sought out the musical director, Felix Mendelssohn. Reinecke eventually became head of the finest orchestra of his day at the Gewandhaus.

 For some reason he offended Johannes Brahms who wrote of his third symphony, "Everything is so coarse and ill-bred!" Clear nonsense and damaging. To make way for the new, Reinecke was sidelined, but his considerable repertoire is waiting to be fully rediscovered and appreciated as, to quote another reviewer, "His works are distinguished by nobility and form, melodic euphony and ingenious artistic construction."

From Monteverdi to Modernism

My usual attraction is to go for contrast, which is, incidentally, a basic requirement of musical expression, soft to loud, slow to quick, low to high, etc. Here are two recent recordings that exemplify contrast.

Christopher Rouse, Symphony 5, Supplica & Concerto for Orchestra. Nashville Symphony, c. Giancarlo Guerrero. Naxos American Classics

American contemporary music is neither inhibited nor inaccessible. Rouse (1949 - 2019, my exact contemporary) and one time student of the fabulous George Crumb is where symphonic music's mantle rests today - his music a constant stream of contrasts, most notably from loud and frenetic, to quiet serenity, the transformation from one to the other often stark. Always present is the sense of being carried along, as by an automotive, the journey ever continuous. There is a highly attractive balance in his music between uncomfortable discord and soothing harmony and this is probably what made Rouse one of the most performed living composers during his lifetime. That's the symphony in a nutshell; the piece Supplica belongs to Rouse's serene world, while the Concerto for Orchestra is a tour de force for each orchestra section, each of which takes the role of 'soloist'. The USA is not a well nation today on many levels, but its music suggests an underlying strata of promise for the future.

Monteverdi, Complete Madrigals, Delitiae Musicae, c. Marco Longhini. Naxos. 15 discs; 15 'books'

Here is a veritable feast of madrigal music, secular song, whose expression reached its peak with the works of Monteverdi (1567-1643). His First Book of Madrigals for Five Voices was published in Venice in 1587 at the age of nineteen. These 'youthful compositions' formed the seed for later works that would change the art of composition for ever. The madrigal, here in Monteverdi charged with high-voltage sexual desire, delight and pain, was a quest to transform poetry into music. It became the highest form of refinement and cultural expression patronised by the courts and their followers:

This hand set the snare, this

loveliest of hands laid it midst flowers and grass,

and this hand took my heart and placed it

with such haste amid a thousand burning flames.

that I hold it captive here,

vengeance, Love, vengeance.

Thoughts and Reviews of Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky

Sergei Prokofiev, Suites from the Gambler & The Tale of the Stone Flower. Lahti Symphony Orchestra, c. Dima Slobodeniouk. BIS

Symphonies 3 & 6. Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, c. Pietari Inkinen. SWR Music



Imagine that, as a composer, your next composition could be judged by the authorities as inappropriate for the public and that the result of this would be your removal, imprisonment or even execution. 'The Terror' was the name for these circumstances under the Soviet dictator, Stalin.

Then, the two composers at the pinnacle of Soviet era music were Shostakovitch and Prokofiev. Prokofiev was the more cosmopolitan and of the two and spent enough time in exile, in Paris and New York, to imbibe the atmosphere and compositional styles of the first half of the twentieth century. Later, Prokofiev was to return to Russia at which point his passport was never returned to him.

He was the great painter of portraits, musically and psychologically speaking, those of the portraits he 'painted' being right in your face. Don't expect soothing music when coming to Prokofiev for the first time, but do expect brilliant percussion, brass and rhythmic thrills. Then, out of the orchestral mayhem will emerge Prokofiev's lyrical beauty, the ballet Tale of the Stone Flower giving full vent to this side of his character.

In 1915, before The Terror was an issue for Russians, Prokofiev composed The Gambler, an opera based on the characters of Dostoevsky's novel of the same name. This suite of music from the opera is four portraits of its characters, the composer's expression unfettered. By the time we arrive at his sixth symphony after the conclusion of World War II, his character, personality and body had been worn down by age and the constant threat of humiliation and removal if he, like others, did not tow the party dictation. Music should be accessible for the masses and should not involve the modernist tendancy towards dissonance, described as 'formalistic'. When the sixth was premiered, all seemed to be fine. A few weeks later, in January 1948, Prokofiev, along with others, including Shostakovitch, were humiliated and denounced for formalistic tendencies and performances of this great symphony were silenced.

Listen to it - any uncomfortable dissonance is hard to find. Key centres that are hard to pin down, yes, but dissonance? Right at the end, a most spectacularly defiant dissonant chord resolves, dissolves, into the final chord - a bright, optimistic D major.

Stalin's and Prokofiev's funerals were on the same day, 9th March, 1953. Prokofiev's coffin was carried through Moscow's streets, its barers struggling against the tide of people moving in the opposite direction towards the funeral of his aweful nemesis.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, All-Night Vigil; Sacred Choral Works. Latvian Radio Choir, c. Sigvards Klava

And now, music to soothe a troubled mind, The All-Night Vigil was described by Tchaikovsky as 'An essay in harmonisation of liturgical chants'. That sounds academic; the result is not. A significant clue to give insight into what lies behind this spiritual music is in the composer's attitude to religion. He loved to be in a church, loved the poetic forms of expression that religion spawned, but had no sympathy for its dogma. He wrote to a friend, 'I, like you, have come to believe that if there is a future life, it is only in the sense that matter is preserved, and that in a pantheistic view of the eternity of nature I am merely one microscopic phenomenon.'

The music is harmonically satisfying and follows the various styles of practice in the Russian Orthodox Church which the composer studied carefully, adding, subtly, harmonic movement of his own.

In the above mentioned correspondence, Tchaikovsky speaks of standing in the shadows of some ancient little church filled with the smoke of incense, meditating deep into himself and searching for the answers to eternal questions, then awoken from thoughfulness when the choir sings, "Since my youth many passions have made war against me."