The Art of Choking

My musical month has revolved around events common to many of us, not least the Jubilee celebrations. There have also been the usual assortment of more personal experiences, one or two of which I'd like to share now. A couple of radio items caught my ear. The first was a "Thought For The Day" considering the amount of training and concentrated effort that goes into making a top athlete. Even with everything in place, it sometimes happens that an athlete will then "choke" on the day, will lose focus, rhythm, concentration. The reason may be simply trying too hard, allowing the chattering uncertainties of the mind to get in the way of the body's instinctive ability, programmed in by long months of training.  Now simply substitute "music" for "athletics" and "practice" for "training" and the equivalence is complete. The solution to choking, according to "Thought For The Day", is to let go and allow an inner grace to hold sway.

The athletic theme was taken up by another R4 programme describing how athletes use music as an integral part of training, for warming up, for working out and for event preparation. Rhythm plays a major part in this, the magic 120-140 beats per minute holding the key.  Red Bull have this year sponsored the composition of a piece of music written, or should I say designed, for all the different components in the training and performance potential of one of our top Olympic athletes.

The Great Animal Orchestra

I like diversity in music and I also enjoy writing about it when I can take one or two completely diverse musical experiences or ideas and then attempt to weld them into something interesting and coherent. This blog's content is inspired by 1. A hobo wandering around the USA in the 1930s  2. A sound recordist of environmental sounds around the world and 3. A rock guitarist's collaboration with a contemporary composer. What brought these themes together was a walk in the spring of the North Yorkshire moors. I took an unscheduled break in early April and visited my sister and her husband who live in Middlesbrough, my home town. When young, I couldn't wait to get away from the place, now I enjoy all of my return visits. My brother-in-law is a keen walker and we always take time out for exploring. When I walk I can chatter, listen to the sounds around me and allow my thoughts to sort themselves out.

The said hobo is - or was - Harry Partch, a renegade musician who sought inspiration for his music from everything he heard around him. What he heard and wanted to reproduce couldn't be done on classical orchestral instruments so he set himself the task of inventing and building the instruments on which to play his music. I received for review a CD set called Bitter Music (Bridge) and expected this to be a recording of some of Partch's music. However, it turned out not to be this but was a spoken recording of his diaries as he bummed his way round America, hitching lifts and dossing with the other vagrants. The composer's narrative was illustrated with musical incidents and brief slices of incidental music scored to quotes from fellow travellers.

Super Strings

After banging on a bit that the Ancient Greeks used music as a means to understanding how the universe works, my attention was grabbed by a contemporary equivalent. It appears that the fundamental structure of matter is no longer considered to be particular, but, going even more microscopic than the particle level, consists of tiny bits of string. It's not relevant to ask what these strings are made from as they are fundamental - they consist of themselves and that's it. These strings oscillate and like the strings on a violin create the equivalent of different notes.  Each of these resonant modes makes a different type of subatomic particle, the building blocks of matter.  It would seem that those super strings oscillate and create a music that holds the whole damn universe together. Speaking as a musician, how cool is that. Is this why music is intuitively of fundamental importance? Without it the world would collapse.

The New Music Hubs

There are a couple of topics I'd like to air, well, three, come to think of it. The first of these is that I have never been able to come to terms with the description of music as "classical". It's perfectly OK, if you want to go into the historical ins and outs of music's development in the western world, but if someone asks, "What sort of music are you interested in?" and you give the answer, "Classical", then this answer has immediately and often been consigned by the questioner to a genre that lies buried in the past, and is continually dug up and practised by a few boring intellectuals, who guard their precious music with a passion that pushes it into the realms of exclusivity and musical elitism. This is, by the by, nonsense, but there is an unfortunate element of truth here. Without laboriously having to explain every time the question is asked that the word can cover everything from early music to contemporary, taking in Baroque, romanticism, serialism, neo-classicism, minimalism and any number of other -isms on the way, how do you convey width and breadth with the term, "classical", which smacks of a narrow specialism in cobwebs and Ancient Greece?