About Music

I have been playing in a trio at one or two local homes for the elderly and disabled, learning a lot from this, particularly in gaining performance experience. To be able to play for an entirely uncritical audience removes a lot of the pressure that creates nerves and enables focusing on playing and communicating. Conversely, however, when you perform it is essential to feel that an audience is responding and in a classical environment this usually means that they sit quietly while you play, then applaud, at least politely, when you finish. For the trio neither of these necessarily applies and that can be disconcerting.

In these circumstances, you learn that even to evoke a small response from a person suffering from dementia can be an indication of the effect that music has. Quite literally it has the ability to take a fractured personality and make it whole again. Listeners with quite advanced stages of mental degeneration can become animated, self aware and can remember the music we are playing that they may have heard many years before. We've played sessions that we call 'Memory Music' to great effect.

 

This experience, amongst others, was why a couple of years ago I set off on a musical expedition to find out more about the way classical music is appreciated. This has changed over the years, particularly in recent times, coinciding with discoveries about how the brain responds to music. This project became a bit of an obsession and has resulted in a book, Ramblings About Music and the Mind, or, simply, About Music. It's an exploration of the borders between the art and science of music.

I'd like your help with the next stage: if you think you might be interested in the content, which ranges free and wide from music and Pythagoras in Ancient Greece to the contemporary music technologies of today, there is a synopsis at www.billanderton.uk. There is also a short questionnaire with the synopsis which will provide me with some valuable feedback. I'd be grateful if you can take a few minutes to have your say and email this to me.

Contemporary Music Project

The Contemporary Music Project (CMP) website was becoming a collection of items of general interest, news items and reviews, confused and mixed up with my personal stuff, teaching work, compositions and writings. As each of these areas has become quite substantial in its own right and to avoid confusion between the two, they are now separated. The CMP has become an independent magazine-style website www.contemporarymusicproject.org, and my personal work has been removed to a new domain, www.billanderton.uk.

The CMP is soon to be relaunched under its new brief, so if any of my friends and contacts in the music biz. would like to send me your news items, events and suggestions for features relevant to new music, I'd be happy to help with publicising them for you.  Watch this space for further developments.

On a personal level, the Ramblings About Music (and the Brain) project has been a preoccupation for some time and I now have a manuscript ready for publication, so if you are a commissioning editor and would like first dibs on this, let me know and I can send some samples to you. Basically, it is a collection of all the musical trivia that has interested my over the years, formed into a cohesive whole seeking out the spirit of music and set against the background of a long-distance walk along the Welsh-English border. There is a fuller description on my website.

Comedy Cuts

I wasn't back home quite as late as expected from the KOKO and the Bonzo's gig last Friday, but it was still pretty late, especially considering I had to be up for conducting our local orchestra first thing in the morning. The lack of sleep did not, to quote Wooster, make me exactly disgruntled in the morning but I was far from gruntled.  Worth it, though.

I described the venue in my last blog and I can add a little to this now. When you enter through the foyer of the KOKO, you find yourself not in the theatre pit but straight onto the upper balcony, a disorienting experience. In other words the stage is buried well below ground level. It's a proper 'Muppet' theatre with its rows of ornate boxes adorning the walls layered right up into the gods. The Bonzos were accompanied by their own version of Statler and Waldorf. At this gig the odd couple of disagreeable old men were more akin to a tribute act for the surrealist duo Gilbert and George, making their weird artistic comedy contributions throughout the show.

There is a long line of comedy acts leading to the Bonzos beginning in the days of old-time music hall and threading its way through to the Temperance Seven, the New Vaudeville Band and on to the Beatles pastiche band, the Rutles, created by Eric Idle and Neil Innes in the 1970s, who were supporting.

While driving home afterwards and reflecting on the great show I'd witnessed, I was reminded of a couple of acts whose memory is worth resurrecting. The first of these is Spike Jones (1911-1965) whose band of musicians were, like the Bonzos, highly skilled, unruly and rebellious but, perhaps unlike the Bonzos, were rehearsed down to the finest detail of comedy timing, the whole show being well supported by the USA TV networks. Spike's madcap musical comedy is well worth taking on board and you won't have heard Tchaikovsky like this before.

The other comic musician was a household celebrity still remembered by many but who may now not recall the reason for recognising his name. The Danish Victor Borge (1909-2000) achieved widespread fame in the USA and Europe as a classical pianist who single-handed took the pomposity and elitism of classical music and reduced it to tatters. Musical skill and comedy timing are used by Victor Borge as the blade that slashes at the classical bubble and boy does it let rip. He clearly provided inspiration for Morecambe and Wise's musical sketches, including the one with Andre Preview, and made his own notorious appearance on the infamous Muppet Show. But then which celebrity of any note didn't.

KOKO The Club

Remember Coco the Clown?  I wonder if he ever performed at Camden's KOKO Club. Actually, the KOKO is in Mornington Crescent and when chatting about this amazing venue with one of my friends he exclaimed, "Is Mornington Crescent a real place? I thought it was made up as part of that pointless game in 'I Haven't A Clue'".  Well, yes, it's a real place with shops, a London tube station all of its very own and the KOKO Club. I've been there before for Wilko Johnson's so-called last tour, a great night and there's another coming up with the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, or what's left of them. What's left includes Bob Kerr of Woopee Band fame who I used to love hearing and watching in the '70s, complete with mad-cap instruments and magic tricks on stage.

There's a long long tradition of comedy popular and rock music and the Bonzos were a major part of it. Remember before them the New Vaudeville Band?; remember Vivien Stanshall's Kenny-Everett-forerunner radio show? Rember the Urban Spaceman (baby, I've got speed)? Anyway, the sun had got his hat on when I visited the KOKO last week just to reconnoitre and solve parking problems, getting to and from the venue and out of London again, etc., when the Bonzo's anniversary gig happens in April.

What an appropriate place for this event. The KOKO, now a venue showcasing live modern music, used to be Camden Palace, a variety theatre that was one of the largest such venues in London, opening over a hundred years ago in 1900 and even hosting operatic performances. Now it is one of the few remaining relatively independent music venues, which are becoming rare throughout the country. So, if you can do anything to support such places as the KOKO, there may be a venue near you, then please do so. Look at the fab architecture in the pic. The dark grey bit at the front has just been bolted on to the main building behind.