Orchestral Feng Shui

The Chinese call it Feng Shui. It's the art of "placement", of organising a work, leisure or home space so that the greatest benefit to the inhabitants is achieved. If the feng shui is right, health, wealth and happiness ensue. This traditional oriental art form has become debased in modern times by turning it into a pseudo-science.  Place a mirror on a south-facing wall and not facing an entrance and money will pour in. Clearly, if there is anything in feng shui, it doesn't work like that.

The converse approach is unscientific but more feasible. This is feng shui using your intuition, your feelings.  When you walk into a room, a hall, an office, a garden, you immediately have a sensation of whether it "feels right" and that is, clearly, in the main, down to the way surrounding objects have been arranged, how passage from one side to the other is achieved, how the lighting and colours, the interior design, have been formulated. If an office or a living room "feels right", then its function becomes much more productive or comfortable to be in.

That is all preamble to point out that the same principles can apply equally to a concert environment, to the concert hall. The atmosphere created by the hall space can greatly affect the experience of the audience, almost independently from the quality of performance that an audience may witness. A poor performance will never be perceived as great, but a great one can be ruined by poor feng shui. When our orchestra performs, I'm always aware of the hall that we are in, as a musician particularly the acoustics, but there are other factors as well, some more flexible than others. The lighting, for example, can be the single most effective way to create the right mood and that may or may not be controllable, depending on the venue's facilities.

Healing With Music

During the weekend of the recent London riots, I was sitting using my laptop with three browser tabs open, one following the Twitter comments, one with live pictures of burning and looting filmed by a BBC News helicopter and the other listening to a prom, Nielsen's Fourth Symphony, "The Inextinguishable". The music was stirring and fitted the images and frantic twitterings well.  This wasn't just a form of voyeurism on my part as one of my daughters lives in Tottenham. Maybe, I mused, what the police riot vans needed was a sound system so that they could bombard the threatening, angry crowds with soothing ambient music. Fantasy but, who knows, it might work. Music can certainly affect the way our emotions react, particularly in a crowd situation.

A few days ago I attended a workshop. This was something off the beaten track for me and was stimulating and enjoyable from a musical point of view. It was about the affect that music has on us, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Part of the day was spent listening to extracts of "favourite" music that the participants had brought along and shared with the group. We each had an opportunity to comment on how we responded to these musical extracts. The responses were quite remarkable but not unexpected considering how wide a variety of musical tastes exists even with a small group of people, in this case about ten of us.

Alchemy - The Final Score: First Rehearsal

I've heard the piece played back by my laptop, but hearing a composition live for the first time is a unique experience. The effect that it has is unpredictable, despite familiarity with the score. There is, therefore, an element of chance about it all and that I do not fear. What arises depends on the written notes, but that is only a start. Who turns up to a rehearsal and how they play the music, not knowing themselves what to expect, makes the potent magic potion. In addition, I simply do want this element of chance and the coincidence of circumstances to inform the outcome.

Including rhythmic impro. and unpredictable gaps of silence could create a sort of hothouse, encouraging growth. That's alchemy. It's all to do with process. The end result will be success or failure or something inbetween, but, hey, who cares, it's the process that's the driving force and the way the contributing musicians interact that makes it live.  The conclusion is completely secondary to the amazing process that leads up to it.

The Year

"The Year" was the title of a series of radio programmes broadcast on Radio 3 at the turn of the millennium. There were 100 of them, each covering the music of a single year during the twentieth century, describing significant new pieces of music and setting them in a social and historical context. I recorded quite a few on cassette tapes and still dip into them. I look round in horror to discover that more than ten years have gone by since making those recordings and that cassette tapes are defunct and mp3 downloads, iplayers and Kindles rule.  What will it be like ten years from now?

I've been able to witness a gradual change in the Newent Orchestra over that period of time, particularly in recent years when the membership and concert audiences have grown. The growth in membership has reached a point where a long-standing rehearsal venue at Upleadon has become too small and the orchestra will begin its next season by moving rehearsals to a new venue, the Newent Centre, close to the town's main thoroughfare. The orchestra has played there in years before my time so this is a move that means the orchestra is coming home.