Make it harder, not easier

Twelve lines of text ought to be easy to learn – you’d think. But the first twelve lines of Ephesians chapter 3 – equating to the first seven verses – have proved very hard for my memory to retain.

Considering this, however, I remembered that when I was memorizing music more frequently, in the last couple of years, twelve bars of a fugue by J S Bach took me infinitely longer to get to grips with than twelve bars of a jazz-style piece by Christopher Norton. The Bach was much more complex, making it the equivalent of an abstract text, whereas the jazz piece, while enjoyable to learn, was more straightforward musically.

Last part of a Bach Fugue

Anyway, hacking away at the task of memorizing yesterday I gave myself some additional images to remember for the first three or four lines, since these were the ones that were particularly obstinate in terms of staying with me.

Then I managed to recite the lines backwards line by line. This made my brain claim it was going into overload, but I assured it that it wasn’t.

I still felt I needed something extra to hang onto. 

In our kitchen, where I do most of my memorizing in the mornings, there’s a large clock that was given to my mother many years ago. It has no numbers; instead it has pictures of cats – twelve different ones. Originally, on the hour, a cat would meow, but we all got fed up with the awful sound and switched it off.

A cat clock similar to ours

Yesterday, I recited the twelve lines while working from the cat equivalent of one to twelve. And when I could do that, I went backwards, from twelve to one. The cats aren’t distinguishable enough for my brain to say something like: on the Persian sitting at four, I recite line four, or on the Manx sitting at nine I recite line nine. I just have to think in my head that I’m looking at a cat picture that represents the number four or nine and hopefully line four or nine is there, ready to be recited.

If this seems over the top, it isn’t. When it comes to memory, the brain prefers difficult to easy. Things learned easily tend to be forgotten far sooner than things that are learned with considerable effort.

The authors of the book Make it Stick talk about how a test was done on two groups of baseball players. One group was thrown the same kind of ball over and over – such as a curveball - and of course, they got better at it as time went on. In fact these were already top players, so getting better for them was a considerable achievement.

The second group was thrown a different kind of ball every time, and initially they fumbled and missed, hitting some and not others. But as time went on, even though they were thrown a different ball each time, overall they improved more than the other guys. With the first group, once their brains knew that they’d get a certain ball they relaxed, and didn’t continue to be alert to changes. The second group was continually alert because they didn’t know what they’d get, and so they improved in regard to all the balls that were thrown.

There’s something about the brain that delights in difficulty. If you want to memorise something, then make it harder for the brain, not easier.

Memorizing music

I don't seem to have written about a book I discovered last year called By Heart: the art of memorizing music, by Paul Cienniwa. (Memorizing the spelling of his name is a bit of an achievement in itself!)

This has been the most helpful book I've come across in a long time, in terms not only of memorising music but also of memorising text such as poems and sections of Scripture, something I've done for a long time.

I've memorised music in the past - a long time ago, in fact - but nothing ever seemed to stick for long. With the help of this book, I've been able not only to memorise several pieces (none of them long, but that's not the point; you need to start somewhere), but also retain them. Yes, you have to do a bit of revising when you come back to them after a month or three, but you have to do this with text as well, at least until it's so embedded in your brain that you'll never forget it.

I've just revisited the pieces I learned this year, three by Christopher Norton from his Rock Preludes book, and three Preludes by Bach, ones that I've known for decades, since I first learned any Bach, but have never memorised. I had to start from scratch on each of them, because even though I could play them fairly well, I had no real idea of what notes I was playing. Which is the case for many musicians who rely on sightreading to get themselves through the day.

One of the Bach Preludes, number XV from the first set of 24, has always delighted me. I don't know what it is about it, but there a some bars that just feel like a taste of heaven - to me. No doubt there are bars in other Preludes that do the same for other pianists. Anyway, having revised this today to the point where I could comfortably play it again, I played it with my eyes shut. I have a feeling that I read in Cienniwa's book that he doesn't recommend this, but I can't find a reference to it. He does say that printed music gets in the way of your communication with your audience. I remember that.

However, I played through the piece, eyes shut, and found that instead of seeing notes on the page, I was visualising where I was on the piano and what my fingers were doing. This may not be unusual, and in fact, when I've gone back to the printed music after having learned a piece the notes often seem not quite where they are in my head anymore. It's the same with text. Once it's learned it becomes part of something in your head, and you visualise it differently in the brain.

At my advanced age it's great to be able to sit down and play something without the music in front of me. It's an achievement after all these years of feeling that I just couldn't memorise, and an encouragement to go on and memorise other music. I began one of Prokofiev's sonatas a few months back, but struggled greatly with it. I think I got about two pages into it before I had to give up. However, I've begun a work that's just as long in the last couple of weeks: Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Though it appears simple at first sight, he seldom does the same thing twice: harmonies change on repeats, and not only do the time signatures shift, but even within those time signatures, there are shifts of the main beats.

I've got the first section mostly under my belt, the one where the main theme is introduced, and have begun the second. It might take all of next year, but I'd like to get it so that I can play it from memory, even if it's only for my own satisfaction.

Eroica concert

Late this afternoon we went to the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra's Eroica concert, with Holly Matheson conducting. A bit of name-dropping here. When our children were still children, Holly and her family lived nearby. Holly was in the same school class as one of our boys, and my oldest girl was friendly with one of Holly's older sisters.

In the years since, Holly has gradually built up her musical CV and has conducted a number of orchestras not only here in her home town of Dunedin, but also overseas. I hadn't seen her on the podium previously, so it was good to catch her in action, as it were.

She has a kind of balletic style, often up on her toes, and with plenty of movement in her work, often showing by her gestures the kind of feel she wants from the orchestra. This was especially evident in the Bach, where she and the orchestra often seemed to move as one.

The concert this afternoon, which started at five - five was probably once a very fashionable time of day, but seems a bit odd in the New Zealand context - included two performances from Amalia Hall, violinist. She's also a New Zealander. Hall performed Bach's 1st Violin Concerto (accompanied only by the strings and David Burchell on harpsichord), and Saint-Saens' Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. Both well-known pieces, and beautifully played, especially the second. (The tuning of the strings in the Bach seemed just a little edgy, but perhaps because it was the first piece for the evening, the orchestra was feeling its way.)

Between these two items were two rather undistinguished selections - or so it seemed to me. The first was Purcell's Suite for Strings, a collection of short pieces without any of Purcell's distinctive flavour. The second was a kind of also-ran piece: Paisiello's Overture to The Barber of Seville. This opera in its day was more popular than Rossini's version, but has gradually been superseded. If the overture is anything to go by, it's not surprising.

The only work in the second half was Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. The name relates to the fact that originally the symphony was dedicated to Napoleon, a man Beethoven much admired during the time he was writing the piece. However, after Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor, Beethoven scratched out the dedication. The symphony isn't 'heroic' in any sense, though the second movement, a funeral march, could easily be seen as connecting to the funeral of some great person. There are various interpretations of the symphony, but a listener needs to take it on its own merits, which are many.

It was interesting to hear a live performance of it with a relatively small orchestra. All the wind parts were there, of course (including the three horns who have a delightful section to themselves in the third movement), but the strings were somewhat small in number: six firsts, four or five seconds, three or four violas (from where I was sitting it wasn't easy to gauge the exact numbers), four cellos and two basses. This is possibly not a small number in relation to the original performances of the piece, but we're used to large forces of strings in modern performances. The upside of this was that the detail from the wind and brass came across clearly, and there were many things that seemed unfamiliar, because they're usually absorbed by the big string sound. The downside was that the strings had to work hard to produce enough tone for the bigger moments.

All in all, however, an enjoyable concert, and a delight to see Holly at work.

Not quite racking the brain

Just looking through my clippings and came across this interesting paragraph about computers and artificial intelligence:

Who would have imagined that the computer’s earliest achievements would be in the domain of logical analysis, a capacity once held to be what made us most different from everything else on the planet? That it could fly a plane and guide a missile before it could ride a bike? That it could create plausible preludes in the style of Bach before it could make plausible small talk? That it could translate before it could paraphrase? That it could spin half-discernible essays on postmodern theory before it could be shown a chair and say, as most toddlers can, “chair”?

This extract comes from a delightful article in The Atlantic, was written by Brian Christian, and mostly focuses on the Turing Test.  Mr Turing has been in the news a bit recently, because there's now some question as to whether he committed suicide, or died accidentally...or (shock, horror!) was murdered.  Always the conspiracy arises at some point.  

I started out checking the clippings for references to bikes, and was reminded that Turing was a cyclist: ...in the first week of June each year he would get a bad attack of hay fever, and he would cycle to the office wearing a service gas mask to keep the pollen off. His bicycle had a fault: the chain would come off at regular intervals. Instead of having it mended he would count the number of times the pedals went round and would get off the bicycle in time to adjust the chain by hand. 

And why was I looking for references to bikes?  Well, I was actually looking to see if I had anything about bike rack for cars - but I didn't.  Never mind, it led me back to a couple of interesting spots, and that's always following up on a Tuesday morning. 

Masterpiece

The King's Singers performing Masterpiece in which a range of famous composers get their share of the limelight, with their names being used as the words of the song.   The ensemble work here is terrific, and the humour delightful. 

Red, and Rothko

I went to see the pensioner, John Bach, in John Logan's play Red last night, at the Fortune Theatre.  I mention Bach's age only because I see that he's just one year younger than me.  The physical and mental challenge of his role in Red would be a challenge to any actor, let alone someone who's verging on 66.

Red would have to be one of the best plays I've seen at the Dunedin's Fortune Theatre, not just because the play itself is great, but because of the energy and focus and interplay between the two actors who inhabit the stage for the entire ninety minutes duration.  Neither of them gets more than a minute's break.  The other actor, the much younger Cameron Douglas, is more than a match for Bach's many years of experience in the theatre, movies and television.  He has the advantage, perhaps, of playing someone close to his own age, so can identify with the young man's thinking and behaviour.  Nevertheless, the role requires considerable work, and never lets him off lightly.

Red explores everything that can occur between two artists of different ages: experience, philosophy, the old giving way to the new, the thought of death when life seems abundant, the contemplative versus the active, the selling-out of the soul; whether art is for all time or merely to be hung on the walls of an expensive restaurant - and ignored.  And why we should produce art at all...

There are wonderful moments of confrontation, with either one or other of the actors going full blast at his counterpart.  There are some wonderful moments when a mere look changes how you feel about one of the actors.  There are sudden moments of humour.  And there are sections of deep emotion, especially when the young man, known only as Ken (and never actually called by name during the play, as far as I can recall) gradually reveals the horror of the day he woke up to find his parents had been murdered in their beds.

Rothko, by contrast, barely mentions his past: he throws off a horror moment in his own life as something he's not sure whether he actually remembers or has just been told about.  His Jewish name has been discarded long before.  We know nothing about his private life outside the studio, so it's ironic that Ken angrily tells him at one point that Rothko knows nothing about his life outside the studio, and isn't interested in finding out.  The two men exist inside the room.  We know of only two other characters: both of them are spoken to on the telephone (which never rings), and the first of these, the one Ken is conversing with briefly in one scene, is anonymous.

And the room is wonderful: it threatens to spill out into the audience; it's untidy, yet it's always being tidied; its walls are covered with paintings from the series of murals Rothko is painting (or canvases in various states of preparation) - and there's another one we never see that's hanging on the 'fourth wall'.  The sink down in one corner is the sort of sink you see in a mechanic's workshop: except that this one is covered in paint that will no longer wash off.  In that curious and slightly unusable space that the Fortune is 'blessed' with (to the audience's left) there are shelves stuffed with items that are ignored, forgotten.  There are high windows way above the reach of the actors through which light barely penetrates (Rothko doesn't like natural light); there is pale ceiling lighting in the room, and there are lamps that shine throughout one or two scenes on the enormous prepared canvas at the back of the stage, a canvas that the actors actually prepare in tandem at one point, working under and over and in front and behind each other in a passionate and energetic sloshing on of yet more red paint.  No doubt Peter King, the set designer, had ideas from other productions of the play to work from, but he's converted the Fortune stage into something that no longer seems a stage, and done it marvellously.  

The play is based on events in Rothko's life though the character of Ken is fictional.  

Items of Interest

Two articles on the same page of yesterday's Otago Daily Times caught my attention.  One from the regular column giving some history on people buried in local cemeteries.   This week it featured Otago Harbour's first pilot, the aptly named Richard Driver.  He was one of the area's earliest European residents, although when he was a young man he almost didn't survive an attack by local Maori when he and several of his fellow crew-members stepped onto what is now known as Murdering Beach.  Fortunately he was saved by Motoitoi, the daughter of Kahutia: she threw her father's cloak over Driver and soon after married him.
This is where my interest in the story rose: he had three daughters by Motoitoi, and, after she died, a son by his Maori housekeeper.  That's four children.  In 1849 he married a 17-year-old called Elizabeth Robertson.  She bore him three more children, and then seven more who were all born dead.  That's fourteen children in effect, with Elizabeth being pregnant ten times up to that point.  Once they shifted from the area they lived in, she bore him eight more children.  Thus she was pregnant eighteen times.  He was the father, to all intents and purposes, of 22 children, beating J S Bach by one.  (Though far more of Bach's children actually survived.)

He produced 15 living children - it's not surprising that the writer notes: their descendants today number many hundreds. 


The second article begins: A baby's cries are tuned to trigger a uniquely fast response from adults, research has shown.  Scientists compared volunteers' reaction times while listening to babies crying, the sounds of adults in distress, and birdsong.   Right.  We all respond quickly to birdsong.   The study's leader noted that it is almost impossible to ignore crying babies on planes and the discomfort it arouses.   Well, well, there's a finding for you.

So far this would have been all right - it's basically yet another study that tells us what we already know, but that's hardly uncommon.   Innumerable studies are done to show us that what we know is what we know.  However, the sentence that niggled me (because of the sheer lack of any scientific basis) was this: Evolution has decided that it is a good thing for us to look after our young, and there is something in the acoustic properties of babies' cries that evokes a very basic response that appears to be hardwired in ancient parts of our brains. 


I don't think 'evolution' (which is a person or thing) has ever decided to do anything.  Nor, from my understanding, do we have 'more ancient parts' in our brains.  This is literary science, the kind that tells stories about research but doesn't actually base these stories on anything factual.   It's metaphor, not science. Science is based on experiments that can be replicated not just once, but over and over.   There is no experiment that can show evolution ever 'deciding' to do something.   This is typical of the idea that pervades science: that evolution can be regarded as being responsible for anything and everything, without anyone actually showing this to be the case.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

A long job

Founded in 2005, the J. S. Bach-Stiftung is in the process of performing Bach's complete vocal works -- an endeavour that will take until 2030 to complete. Every month, one of the over 200 cantatas is performed in Trogen, Switzerland. Recorded on DVD, the concerts are rounded out by introductory workshops and reflections on the music and text. The ensemble "Schola Seconda Pratica" and vocal soloists are conducted by Rudolf Lutz.

[Or, in the rather more appealing Google translation: The JS Bach Foundation has, to within about 25 years, the entire vocal work by Johann Sebastian Bach. Each month, played in Appenzell Trogen one of the more than 200 cantatas by Bach. All concerts, workshops and reflections appear on DVD, and the texts in book form.]

Here's a sample: it's Cantata BWV 185 - Barmherziges Herze der ewigen Liebe [Merciful Heart of Eternal Love]

Psalms, Preludes and Fugues

Years ago I remember reading that the famous cello player Pablo Casals used to start his daily practice routine off with what you might call a meditative period: he would play a Bach Prelude and Fugue (on the piano) before he began to practice on his cello.

It always struck me that it was somewhat like reading a Psalm each morning, something I've done fairly regularly for years. The Psalms, even after countless readings, always have something fresh to say, something that triggers a response in the spirit and gets the mind working beyond the mundane.

Over a period of about three months I read Kathleen Norris' Amazing Grace. It's a book in which each (short) chapter focuses on a particular 'Church' word - the sorts of words we use in everyday Christian life. Why I mention her is because time and again she writes how the Psalms have been one of her mainstays in her Christian life, and how one or more are read aloud daily in the Benedictine monasteries she's visited on many occasions.

Bach's Preludes and Fugues can play a similar role in a musician's life. If we were, like Casals, to play one of each every day, we'd find we were running the gamut of (spiritual) emotions in a way that was similar to the way we run through them in the Psalms. Bach goes from joyous exuberance (some of the Preludes, in particular, seem to have fallen out of heaven and onto the page) to anguish to deep meditation (those Fugues that seem to go on in an endlessly inventive way for pages) to sheer wonder at the mathematical genius of the way some of the Fugues offer a theme, turn it upside down, inside out, back to front and still provide beautiful music.

A good way to start the day would be to reflectively read a Psalm, and then go off to the piano and play a Prelude and Fugue. The soul would be all the better for it.

Holocaust survivor

Short video (about 12 minutes) relating to the oldest Holocaust survivor in the world. At 106 she's still playing Bach and Beethoven on her piano, and receiving regular visitors....



This is the Official Trailer for a new documentary short about the oldest Holocaust survivor in the world Alice Herz-Sommer. If you want to see the finished film early next year please email: dancingunderthegallows@gmail.com

Directed by Oscar winning director Malcolm Clarke
Produced by Nick Reed, Malcolm Clarke, Chris Branch, Larry Abramson, Jasmine Daghighian

Interpreting

The serious artist is one who is up to the elbows in the stuff of God's world. (pg 68: Performer as Priest and Prophet).

I've mentioned this book on more than one occasion in this blog, and may well do again before I've finished reading it. In the chapter I've just read the authors talk about Schoenberg's unfinished opera, Moses and Aaron, in which the composer sees Moses as the creative artist, and Aaron as the interpreter - for good or bad. (In Aaron's case, quite often bad.)

It's an interesting approach to the story, and possibly not one with which everyone will agree. Composers need performers - unless, of course, like Stockhausen and some others, they cut out the performing 'middlemen' and do everything themselves. Some composers are performers - yours truly, for one - and can be counted on to interpret their own music according to the composer's wishes. Except that I find I play my own pieces differently every time I touch them. Does that make me a 'good' interpreter or not? I'm always hearing that such and such an artist was a consummate interpreter of Mozart, Bach or Brahms (as the case might be); but what does that actually mean? That they played the pieces so wonderfully that everybody thinks that's how they should be played?

For a time Wanda Landowska was considered to be the epitome in terms of interpreting Bach. Then along came Glenn Gould, and everybody thought he was the epitome in terms of interpreting Bach. And, of course, he's now been supplanted by someone else.

So were those earlier interpreters interpreting wrongly? Don't think so. To me a piece of music is like the script of a play. Yes, there are certain things you must do: play all the notes, aim to be consistent with the composer's intentions in terms of dynamics, make sure that you have a good idea of what style such a piece might be played in. But that's pretty much where it all ends. After that, you're the performer (rather than the 'interpreter') and you present to the listeners the piece of music. You're a conduit between the composer and the audience, but you're not a conduit that brings nothing of yourself to the piece. If you can keep yourself out of the way you'll be doing extraordinarily well, I think.

Epiphanies

I've just been reading Jeffrey Overstreet's Through a Glass Darkly in which he talks about the way in which even the least likely movies can cause an epiphany in someone's life. It reminded me of a paragraph from the book, A Romance on Three Legs, which I talked about in an earlier post.

For some people, [Glenn] Gould's playing enabled them to hear new things. Others, including those who had no special affinity for classical music, reported feeling an intuitive connection to the music when they first heard Gould playing. Bruno Monsaingeon, a French filmmaker and violinist, was in a record store in Moscow in the late 1960s when he chance upon a couple of recordings by Gould, whose playing was unfamiliar to him. When the filmmaker listened to the records, he likened the experience to a religious epiphany, as if a voice were saying, 'Follow me.' Monsaingeon would devote the next two decades of his life to making films about Gould.
A heart surgeon in London encouraged every patient to listen to Gould's recordings of Bach before he operated. A UPS driver in Roanoke, Virginia, told a Gould scholar about the moment when a few phrases of the Goldberg Variations came over the truck's radio station and she instinctively began to reach for the dial to change to a different station. But she was turning a corner and needed both hands on the wheel, so the music continued. And continued - transforming her into a life-long devotee of Gould's work.

Elsewhere in the book it talks about a man hearing the music on his car radio, insisting on his wife pulling over and listening to the whole 45 minutes or so, before he would allow her to drive on.

The quote above is from the Prologue to the book, and the photo is of Bruno Monsaingeon.

More hitting the top spots

‘How to crowl in a right way’ – this search request from a country that spells ‘did you mean’ as ‘Tarkoititko’. Interestingly enough, when you put ‘tarkoititko’ in Google, along with Mike Crowl, it asks: did you mean Tarkoitetaan? Whatever language it is, it’s subtle! More to the point, the original request brought up this blog at the top. Must be a week for it!
Google is brilliant at finding what you want, but it’s also brilliant at finding things that are so far from what you want that you wonder how it got there. Still, that’s the way search engines function, pretty much.
Somebody else was looking for my old friend, Arnold Bachop, the tenor. Just doing that brought up this blog twice, in first and second place, and then another post of mine on my older website.
Someone else wants to know about the waterfall scene in Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty For Me. I certainly don’t mention it anywhere in the post I wrote on that film, even though we came third in the Google stakes on that one. In fact, I don’t remember a waterfall scene in the movie at all.
Veno’s Lighting Cough Bottles was the next search query, and we came in number two on that, for once actually having all the words in the search query actually turn up in the same post! To my surprise the same thing happens with the query: Diana Crowl music. Google thought the best thing on offer was my post on Gerald Finzi, in which all three of those words appear, but which probably has nothing to do with what the searcher wanted.
We drop down the list in regard to a query about Generation C, but we’re still in the top ten. Somehow we go to the top of the list again with ‘I hate to sit up straight’ – a query that boggles the mind as to why you’d want to say such a thing to Google in the first place. (Actually in this instance they said it to AOL search. AOL search – who are they? Perhaps AOL had been telling one of its customers to sit up straight? It’s the sort of restrictive thing they’re into, I think.)
To my amazement I’m in the top ten for ‘dating for everyone’, something that I’d hardly have thought to have written about, but apparently did, as I also did about religious jeans. How do I get into these sidetracks?
Back to number four for Franklin Taylor, that irritant to my Mozart playing. He was the editor of the edition of Mozart sonatas I’m currently playing from, and does some unbelievably silly things in terms of adding expression marks. Still, he was working in a period when the editors seemed to think they knew best about everything, including how Mozart would have added expression marks if he’d had the time. I remember reading Albert Schweitzer’s book on J S Bach. He was just as bad, complaining that Bach hadn’t done this, had done that and shouldn’t have, and so on. Schweitzer might have been a fairly clever chappie, but at 25 or so, he was hardly a match for the genius of J S B. Guess that’s the arrogance of youth.
Another composer turns up in the HitTail lists (that’s what I’m checking at the moment, in case you hadn’t figured it out). It’s our old friend Gareth Farr. The searcher apparently thought his name was double-barrelled: Gareth-Farr. Unfortunately that would leave Gareth without a first name, and what would his friends call him then?
And nearly last on our list tonight is yet another composer, this time, John Adams, he of the minimalist music. He whom I haven’t quite given room enough to grow accustomed to yet. And may still do so!
Finally, we get back to another request for crawling spelt as crowling. This time it’s ‘crowls in the water’. Well, we had Crowls in the water this morning, because both my wife and I had a bath. Does that count?

Franklin Taylor

I have an edition of Mozart’s sonatas edited by Franklin Taylor – edited in 1906, in fact, though my copy isn’t that old.
It’s curious that Mr Taylor tells us that Mozart seldom wrote anything more than f (forte) or p (piano) in terms of expression marks, and yet he then litters the music with Franklin Taylor interpretations, most of which are odd, to say the least. Fps, (fortepianos) which are quite inconsistent with the music; louds and softs where we don’t need them. It’s as if he felt he had to contribute something to the edition, or thought the pages looked bare without expression marks everywhere.
I appreciate his laying out of the trills and appoggiaturas, because those aren’t always easy to work out on the spot, but we could have done without his attempts to interpret the way the music should be played. Mozart, it seems to me, like Bach, is perfectly interpretable on the basis of just playing the music – at least once you’ve had a few years’ worth of playing behind you.

Dumbing down the culture

I fear that the leveling tendency of Reformed aesthetics has brought about a “dumbing down” of discernment and cultural engagement. And that, without question, is a loss. We’ve spent so much time valuing popular culture, it has come at the expense of the riches of “high” culture. We’ve devoted so much ink and energy to convincing students that God shows up in the frames of American Beauty or the lyrics of Johnny Cash that they’ve stopped looking for him in the genius of Bach’s motets or the romance of Rossetti’s poetry.

James K.A. Smith
“Dumbing down discernment?” in catapult magazine

David Scheel

I booked to see David Scheel on Friday, and my wife and I went to see him perform tonight at the Fortune Theatre. He'd been dubbed the 'next Victor Borge', which sounded promising, and the idea of someone playing Bach in one hand while playing Lloyd Webber in the other appealed.
Alas, Mr Scheel was either not on his mettle tonight, or else isn't anywhere near as good as claimed.
The jokes were okay, but some of them have been around a long time and some of them took a long time in the telling, and yes, he played Bach and Lloyd Webber in separate hands within the same piece, but not simultaneously, as far as my ears could tell. There's no doubt he can play if he wants, but in fact he fudged a good deal of his playing tonight, and seemed out of practice in terms of actual sharp on the spot playing. Often he'd whiz through pieces as though he was in some sort of hurry - or perhaps he's just played them far too many times.
Perhaps he wasn't well: he kept wiping his eyes with a large white handkerchief.
Victor Borge eventually became the victim of his own routines: he'd played them all so many times that there was no sparkle or life left. When I first saw him, as a child, he was superb. When I came across him again many years later, a lot of the light had gone.
This seems to me to be the problem with an artist who lets his routine become stale. Borge's humour was way out in left field when it first arrived, but there seemed to be a limited amount of it. Perhaps he grew disgusted at wasting his talent.
Scheel isn't Borge - he hasn't the fire and the dash and the energy that distinguished Borge. He can be funny, even on the piano, but too often resorts to lifting his eyebrows when he's given the 'funny' line, as though to indicate to the audience: now is the time to laugh. Fortunately he had an audience who laughed quite a lot, so my glum feelings about him certainly don't matter.
I was just a bit niggled at being presented with something that was only just above the amateur level.
Anyway, he won't be worried: he has a hectic concert tour ahead of him and plenty of concerts behind. He's obviously making plenty of money out of his talents. But even my wife noticed the lumpy piano-playing, and that's not a good sign.

Sarah Grace - and a bit about my music

Via my old 'friend' Jurgen Wolff (in the mostly Internet sense - though I have actually met him), I came across a blog written by Sarah Grace.

Sarah writes longish posts (although I guess I should check out the length of some of mine) and talks a lot about the joys and woes of being a writer. She's also a Christian, and discusses that in some of her posts too.

The post that Jurgen pointed me to was 10 lessons I've learned from both running and writing. A neat post, full of good comparisons.

I began writing another piano piece during the Easter break. I'd begun two other pieces, one of which was going well and then fizzed; the second seemed a great idea when I improvised round the piano with the main idea in it, but somehow there seemed to be too many options when I came to write it, and at the moment it's just sitting going nowhere, with only a page of music.

The one that's nearly finished, however, took off from the start. I'd had this idea of naming the pieces with some reference to a famous composer: the first is called Someone's Knocking - is it Beethoven? The title only arrived after the piece was part way done. The second started out with Bach in mind from the beginning, and is called, Bach does the Housework.

The most recent one, however, missed out on having a composer in the title. I was working through it, going fairly well, and suddenly had a kind of moment when I thought, this has something to do with a cornet/trumpet player. Opted in the end for the cornet player, and so it's called, The Cornet Player goes on Holiday. Having that in mind gave me a real impetus to keep moving on it. I wanted to write something that was lighter in tone rather than heavy, and the holiday element kept me focused.

I'm not a composer who's good on structure, as I think I've mentioned before, and I'm better composing a piece that's four to six pages long than a symphony. (Much better, in fact - there ain't no Crowl symphonies.) With music I find that I just have to sit down and start and see what happens. The structure usually sorts itself out in the end, but composing is a bit of a journey for me. (Like writing, really, though I tend to see the overall structure of written things better than composed ones.) If the journey goes well, I'll finish a piece easily. If it doesn't seem to get out of the gates of the town, then it may stay there for a very long time.

Practicing not quite enough...

I haven’t been playing much music while I’ve been on holiday. Partly it’s a matter of having had much less access to a piano, and partly it’s laziness. Where we’re staying at present there’s a piano, and I’ve been working on a Bach piece, the Italian Concerto. (At least I think that’s what it is: I have this great ability to ‘know’ something until I come to try and write it down correctly.)

I was just reading one of my old posts again, about trying to play the first sonata by Michael Tippett. Compared to the Tippett, the Bach is a breeze, although I still have a few sticky patches to contend with. It’s not helping that my fingers aren’t feeling at all flexible at the moment; typing on the computer isn’t a substitute for playing the piano, even though you’re using the same digits.

Wilfred Mellers on Handel

Yet because Handel is a very great, not merely representative, composer, authenticity is not essential to the performance of his music, as it now seems to be to that of Telemann or Couperin. Great works of art, which are those most likely to survive, are also those most likely to over-ride the ephemeral; which is why they may be re-interpreted in terms of a later age, so long as that age has the courage of its convictions.

Bach and the Dance of God, by Wilfred Mellers, appendix, page 308.

I noted this quote down originally in the 1980s. Much later, probably a couple of years ago, I came across this book in the library when I was having a bit of a thing about Bach. Having completely forgotten I’d read it, I was amazed to find some pencil notes in it that I knew I’d written. There was no mistaking my handwriting. Furthermore, instead of finding Mellers to be the last word on Bach, he seemed to be rather silly the second time around!

The New Log Cabin

When I was a kid, people went on holidays in cribs (or baches in the North Island). These were often rough and ready places, often built by the not-necessarily proficient owners, and were usually near a beach or a river. There would invariably be bunks, and more people than room, but we’d all squash in together and have a great time. When we left, the floor would be covered in sand from endless trips to the beach, and the tattered paperbacks that lived in the crib all year round would have been read over again.
Cribs/baches these days have gone to the other extreme. Many of them are purpose-built at great expense and some of them rival the owners’ houses in town. When you have people on tv talking about the way they planned out their ‘crib’ with an architect (an architect?!) and ensured it faced the sun and was open to the view and each child had his own room (which comes fully-equipped with everything we didn’t have on our holidays) you have to wonder what sort of vacation takes place in these buildings. To make them cost-effective, you’d need to live in them half the year round.
The same thing is obviously taking place in the States. The old log cabin of yore, which was put together as best the builder knew how, is now replaced by extravaganza luxury log cabins. Here’s what the people on the Pigeon Forge cabin rental site tell us is available in their cabins: floor to ceiling stone stacked fireplace and a fully equipped kitchen. In the master bedroom there's not only a king-sized bed, but a bedside fireplace, a Jacuzzi in the corner, and a separate bathroom with a walk-in shower. A separate bathroom! We used to wash in a tub – or outside under the tank. And the toilet was way down the back of the section in a little hut that housed the famous – and smelly - long-drop. Ah, them were the days!