Lilburn blows it

Well, if I was beginning to reconsider my stance on Douglas Lilburn's music, he's just blown it by the selection that's being broadcast this morning on the Concert programme.

I've just listened to his setting for baritone and viola of a poem called Warning of Winter, by Ursula Bethell. Now I have a bit of a feeling for this poem because I also wrote a setting of it - you can hear it here being sung by tenor Brent Read, for whom it was written. I was listening to Lilburn's moaning/groaning version - the viola moaning along in the background - as sung by Paul Whelan, and it was only after he'd been singing for a bit that I realised it was the same poem. It took some time, because not only was the setting utterly different, but Whelan's words weren't particularly clear, I'm afraid.

The other two songs in this group by Lilburn are a little better, but the combination of viola and voice doesn't grab me, perhaps because there's not a sense of musical assonance between the two. It's a very dry kind of combination. (Gillian Whitehead uses similar sorts of non-assonance groupings with some of her songs - she seems to have a particular penchant for writing for voice and bassoon, with piano sometimes also included.)

Besides this batch, there were also some of Lilburn's electronic pieces. Piece being the operative word. Like a few of his piano pieces they're minimalist, having almost no length. The pieces in question were: God Save, and Cicadas, Oscillators & Treefrogs. They were 'realised' in the electronic music studios at Victoria University, Wellington. God Save consists of a smatterings and mutterings of God Save the Queen; the other piece requires intent listening to hear anything much at all.

Thank goodness the Concert programme has been playing some of his other work. I don't think Lilburn broke much new ground with his electronic stuff, or did himself any favours as a composer, just as Stravinsky seemed to go off into a cul-de-sac when he got into serial music. (Does anyone listen to Stravinsky's serial music?)

Changing photo

I've changed the photo over to the side, but I'm wondering if it doesn't make me look more disreputable rather than less. Need a hair cut and beard trim, I think.

Things have been a bit quiet on the blog front this week: it's been fairly busy in other areas, such as rehearsing for the play, so sitting down to type posts hasn't been getting high priority. Plus I've been slightly side-tracked by Facebook, which I apparently joined some time ago but had forgotten about. Anyway, I've added a few friends, mostly rellies and people from church (who seem to be on it in droves) and a couple of my singing friends: Brent Read and Claire Barton. Also came across Nathan Reilly, who used to be in our church, but whom I first got to know when he was involved in the Opera Alive group. He's a great stage performer, sings and dances and is going to be in CATS up in Hamilton sometime soon, playing Rum Tum Tugger.
As I was saying to him, I find CATS an odd piece: no plot, virtually no story, just a host of characters who pop in and out at random, do their bit and then vanish for a while, or become part of the general ensemble. Surprisingly enough it's effective when performed, but you rather wonder why Lloyd Webber didn't look to bring a storyline into it.

Robert Nye, poem and song

Still working my way along on the composing front. In preparation for the concert I'd like to do at some point in the next year, I've now got four piano pieces ready (all four of which are going to be played at a concert presented by someone else next weekend), and three songs. Not a large body of work as yet, but it's a beginning. Make that four songs - I wrote another the other day which isn't part of the group of songs I'm working on.
I'd been reading Alec Guinness' A Commonplace Book, which was published posthumously, and came across a poem by Robert Nye, called The Cockerel. The first time I read it, an approach to making it into a song came straight into my head, and stuck there - something that's rather unusual with poems, for me. So the tune that I've written is pretty close to my original idea, though of course it's been shifted around a bit to make it singable! It's the sort of song my friend Brent Read would do well, so I'll have to suggest it to him.
It would be great to think that all this writing would increase the amount in my savings account, but on the basis of the income from my last concert, I can't see that happening in a hurry. Admittedly I made a profit from my last concert, which was a nice surprise, but it was hardly enough to keep me functioning without doing real work.

A change or two

I had my computer away from home for a couple of days while it had a good clean out, and had a new and much larger hard drive installed. I wasn't entirely bereft, as the laptop we'd used while we were overseas was happy to come back into service for a while, but it's more comfortable sitting at my desk and working on the 'normal' computer, I must say.
Of course, it's had all its innards sorted, and consequently things that would normally be sitting here aren't, and I'm having to reload things that I never gave a second thought to up until a few days ago.
Sibelius isn't quite working, which is a pain. I can't get the Kontakt Gold disk to reload as yet, although no doubt I'll suss it out in due course.
Meantime I've started writing some songs, hopefully in preparation for the concert I'd like to have at the end of the year. The poems are by Peter Olds, a local poet, whom I used to see in the bookshop fairly regularly: he was more a customer of my offsider who ran the secondhand side of things, but we still had some contact.
The poems are about Dunedin, too, which is good. They're fairly short - think the first song barely makes a minute in length (as opposed to the whopping nine minute job I wrote for Brent Read for the last concert).
I'll also going to mention that I spent twenty minutes on our one and only piece of fitness equipment the other night: walked and ran on the treadmill, and felt good. I'm getting a bit concerned about feeling as though I don't have any muscles when I go running for the traffic lights. Sometimes it's like my legs are just too tired to be bo