Hug a musician...

Courtesy Pixabay

I've been re-typing my old journals so that I have a digital copy on the Cloud. In one entry dating from January 1993, I mention that we'd cleared out some clutter from our bedroom. We decided to get rid of a poster we'd had for some time because it was fading badly and become hard to read. 

I'd copied the words into the journal entry, but couldn't read the author's name, at the time. The words are probably reasonably well-known, though I'm not sure that the author, Kenneth Gisoms is. The only thing that seems to come up in relation to his name are the words that appeared on the poster, which all relate to music, and which are both humorous and wise. It's possible that the order of the statements I have here isn't as in the original. 

Furthermore, the statements may have been collected together by Gisoms: the first one appears to be by Aldous Huxley.

• After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
• Music is indivisible. The dualism of feeling and thinking must be resolved to a state of unity in which one thinks with the heart and feels with the brain.
• Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
• The entire pleasure of music consists in creating illusions, and commonsense is the greatest enemy of musical appreciation.
• What gives music its universal appeal is the very fact that it is at the same time the most subtle and intangible and the most primitive of all arts…it can make a dog howl and silence a crying baby.
• The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music. They should be taught to love it instead.
• Too many people are trying to justify the precision with which organised musical sound is produced rather than the energy with which it is manipulated. By concentrating on precision, one arrives at technique; but by concentrating on technique, one does not arrive at precision. Melody is the gold thread running through the maze of tones by which the ear is guided and the heart reached.
• People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the piano happens to be open; because they want to become millionaires; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.
• Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas one has no time to write down.
• The public today must pay its debt to the great composers of the past by supporting the living creators of the present.
• All human activity must pass through its periods of rise, ripeness and decline; and music has been to a certain extent the fortunate in that it is the last of the great arts to suffer this general expense.
• You cannot have critics with standards; you can only have music with standards which critics may observe.
• Time is to the musician what space is to the painter.
• Psychologists have found that music does things whether you like it or not. Fast tempos invariably race your pulse, respiration and blood pressure. Slow music lowers them.
• Music hath charms to sooth the savage breast, soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
• Good musicians execute their music, but bad ones murder it.
• Some musicians take pains with music, others give them.
• We can look away from pictures, but we cannot listen away from sounds.
• It is not necessary to understand music, it is only necessary to enjoy it.
• Of all the arts, music is practiced most.
• Music is a kind of counting, performed by the mind, without knowing that it is counting.
• The hardest thing in the world is to start an orchestra, and the next hardest to stop it.
• There should be music in every house, except the one next door.
• The more you love music, the more music you love.
• Hug a musician, they never get to dance.

The ODT Big Night In

The Otago Daily Times' Big Night In concert took place last night in the Forsyth Barr Stadium here in Dunedin.   It must have cost the ODT an arm and a leg - several legs, in fact - and they certainly didn't stint on the costs.  In fact they're talking of having one every year.

It had a great cast of NZ national and local singers: big names, and up-and-coming names.   And a huge crowd turned out, with many seats filled, and the playing area in the centre packed with families.   Kids had a ball: they were free to come and go in safety, and danced and ran and jumped and did all sorts of other normal kid things.

We had seats in the West stand, directly opposite the stage, which meant that any performers on the stage looked like ants, some in white suits (the ensemble of singers) and some in black suits (the male singers) and some in various coloured clothes (the female singers and dancers).   I can't believe how far away the stage seemed to be.  Pity those up in the very top of either the West stand or the South stand.  They would have felt miles away from anything. 

Fortunately there was a large screen above the stage area which showed things in relative close-up.   We got a reasonable idea of what was going on on stage from this.

However, we had a much worse idea of what was being sung - or even spoken.   For some reason the amplication in the stadium just didn't cut it.  It was loud certainly, but it was blurred, somehow.   Unless you knew the song being sung, it was hard to figure out any words, and regrettably, all the marvellous orchestrations (we knew they were marvellous because we could see that aspect on the screen) went by the board because there was so little detail coming across in the sound system.   It was a bit like being partially deaf: everything kind of rolled into one blodge.   I know there were lots of high notes, because obviously all the singers felt this was the only they'd really get across to the audience in a place of this size, but other notes just dribbled away. 

It didn't help, of course, that people in the audience treated the whole concert side of things as an occasion to talk happily to their neighbours, or to point out people they knew, or a host of other things.  The buzz from the audience was continual, and none of the performers got complete quiet from the crowd.   I guess this isn't surprising in this kind of a setting, and perhaps the performers didn't expect anything else, but for me they eventually became a kind of wallpaper to the whole affair. 

Two young singers came on early in the programme: Sequoia Cunningham and Kawiti Watford.   I've heard the latter in the Town Hall and he filled the place easily.   Here he sang Figaro's aria from The Marriage of Figaro.   It sounded as though he knew what he was doing, but there was little clarity because of the sound system.  Terence Dennis, who was obviously playing his heart out on the piano - because we could see his fingers zipping around the keys - could only be heard when Watford wasn't singing.

Sequoia Cunningham sounded great, but her accompanist on the piano was almost inaudible too.  However, she has a big future ahead of her - that I could tell from her singing of Schubert's Ave Maria.

There were all sorts of other artists: a friend of mine on trombone in the orchestra (and some other familiar Dunedin faces there too); a bunch of dancers who did a lot of rolling around on the floor, but seldom got completely in to the picture on the screen; an ensemble of singers (with another friend of mine in it); bagpipers, Highland dancers, the Glee group (with the daughter of friends in it), the children's choir (with two kids I know in it) the Mayor and the Publishers of the ODT and Malcolm Farry, who worked hard to get the Stadium off the ground.  Lots of talent.  What a pity it just all seemed so far away and blurry....

Now that the exam is over

Over on one of my other blogs, Webitz.net, I've been celebrating the fact that geocities.com, the huge conglomerate of websites put together by enthusiastic amateurs like me, and then dumped from the Internet without much warning by Yahoo, has not only been rescued by reocites.com, but also ASCII and OoCities. Great job, guys!

Now that my exam is over, and the course finished, I can relax a bit and start reading books that aren't related to NZ history again. I've been reading one called Bottled and Sold - the story behind our obsession with bottled water, by Peter Gleick. It's interesting but a bit repetitious, so I may...not...finish...it...yet. On the other hand I finally started reading Half the Sky today, which I bought a month or more ago and couldn't allow myself to get into because of the study. It's an in-your-face look at the way women are treated around the world, not just in terms of forced prostitution, but slavery in general, and abuse of every kinds (and I mean abuse: beatings, eyes gouged out, having acid thrown at them and much more).

I did read some other non-study books over the last few months (impossible for me not to do so). One was a biography of Georgette Heyer, the historical romance novelist. My mother had practically every book she wrote, I think, and I've read some of them in the past myself. She was an excellent writer, a great humorist, and a somewhat indomitable human being. I also started reading the biography of jazz pianist Mike Nock called Serious Fun. It started off very interestingly but has become a bit of a list of who played with whom and who was taking drugs at the time and which album they recorded while they were together for a few months and so on. I'm supposed to review it, so I'll have to give it some more house room yet.

I haven't consciously heard a lot of Nock's music, as it happens. I know his name well, and I've no doubt heard tracks on which he's been playing in passing (usually on one of those jazz programmes on the Concert FM, or whatever it's currently called), but I've never really sat down and listened. Hmm. I got a CD out of the library the other day and was surprised at how dull it was. Nock's left hand went on and on playing the same thing, while his right hand wandered around with no apparent idea where it was going. That was the first two tracks. After that my mind had switched off and I didn't hear what came next. I gave the CD another go a day or so later, and the same thing happened.

I'll have to try a different album. It's unlikely that his reputation stands or falls on that particular CD.

And the other thing I'm doing, of course, is getting on with writing the music for the musical. The stuff I'd already written has been buzzing around in my brain every time I stopped thinking about anything else, so I need to get on and write some more (or go mad). I've been orchestrating some of the music I wrote a while back and it's been good to hear it - particularly now that I'm actually hearing what it's like rather than what my two dud speakers on the computer claimed it sounded like. A bit of adjustment on the Sibelius program itself, and the use of earphones, made a huge difference.

I've just noticed that there's some way to record music via a microphone using Sibelius. Once it's recorded and Sibelius has transcribed it, you can edit it - make it look like it should! I hope it's better than the scanning program Sibelius uses: I've given up on that because it's more work trying to edit than just transcribing the stuff straight into the computer in the first place. It doesn't seem to work any better with this latest version of Sibelius than it did with the old one. Of course, it possibly doesn't help that most music people want me to transcribe is elderly, often torn, scribbled over and various other things. But even clean copies don't seem to go too well.

It doesn't look as though I installed the microphone (audio score lite) program. Maybe I'll get onto that some time - although the way I write music doesn't really lend itself to that much. Still it may prove more of a bonus than I think!

By the way, the exam went far more smoothly than I expected, I felt pretty good about it, and hopefully the examiner will too. But three hours of typing took a fair amount of concentration (I can't even begin to imagine writing for three hours) and my bum also got tired of sitting in the same spot for so long. There were only two of us disabled people in the room - I don't know what was wrong with the young woman who was also doing an exam (probably a different one to me) - and there were two supervisors! All very friendly. Because there were so few of us we started a quarter of an hour early. Better than sitting around nervously.

Things seen at the speed of sound

The ‘colour sculptures’ in following video were created by stretching a balloon over a speaker to form a membrane. A few drops of paint were then placed in the centre of the balloon and a single sharp note was played through the speaker, causing the paint to erupt for just a fraction of a second. Just a few centimetres high, the sculptures are ordinarily invisible to the human eye. However, when filmed in HD with macro lenses at 5,400 frames per second, the physical sound wave is captured in intricate detail.

This video, and still photo advertising, is part of an advertising campaign for the PIXMA colour printer in the UK. [Thanks to Duncan McLeod of the Inspiration Room for pointing me towards this - he's also 'unearthed' of a number of other videos we've put on this blog.]

Orson Welles - Citizen Kane

Let's mention this early in the piece before I get carried away on my main topic. The best eye cream for dark circles is a subject I know nothing about, but that doesn't stop me writing a little. I'd be a bit surprised if cream could remove dark circles, but someone obviously thinks it can, and says so. So there.

I've been reading a book by a couple of Frenchmen called Orson Wells at Work. (It's a Phaidon publication, so there are heaps of photographs, and the weight of the book is such that you can't read it except by lying it on a table.)

I've read a Welles biography in the past and it struck me that he was both talented to the max - and chaotic to the same degree. Whether it was that he just took on far too much continually, with expectations that he'd finish everything (he rarely did), he left behind him not just a legacy of some superb movies but a sense of actors, technicians and others who both loved and hated him because he was so unreliable. He was reliable unto himself, but that isn't quite the way the world works for the rest of us.

The consequence of his chaos was that some great movies were never finished (Don Quixote is the best known example, but there were several others), some movies that would have been greater were undercut by producers who couldn't stand the strain of waiting for him to finish his work (or were running out of money, something Welles himself did constantly), and Welles was also forced to act in a number of second-rate movies (especially in Europe, where he lived in a kind of self-imposed exile for many years) instead of in movies in which he could have been brilliant.

The book goes into detail about the production not only of the better known movies, but of all the others that didn't quite survive Welles' approach to work. As he grew older he filmed in a more and more haphazard way - haphazard to the rest of us; Welles knew exactly what he was doing at all times, and film he might shoot in three different countries is put together (as in Othello, for example) as though it was all shot in one location. Often the actors would never do the reverse shot of a scene - Welles would use a double in a different country (often with a different crew) and finish the scene that way. He would dub all sorts of actors, famous and not famous - often with his own voice! When the producers complained that the audience would never understand the Scottish accents he'd got his cast to use in Macbeth, he dubbed practically the entire film again, using not only his own voice, but in some cases the voice of one cast member for another. He treated the film and the sound tracks and the music score as items to be set against each other, rather then necessarily fitted together as they were originally intended. Thus a composer might find that his carefully crafted score, timed to the second, would be chopped and cut and splattered across the film in bits. It worked, but it wasn't quite what the composer thought would happen.

Anyway, as a result of reading this book, I had another look at Citizen Kane, which I've had on DVD for a while but not got around to seeing again. It remains extraordinary. Okay, 'Rosebud,' the thing everyone is trying to discover throughout the movie, is a bit of a McGuffin in that in the end it barely matters what it was - it's only a hook to hang the story on. And it may not help to know the 'secret' of Rosebud. Knowing that takes away a bit of the suspense. But there's so much else to admire, that this is a small matter.

The fact that this movie was achieved by a young man of 24, who'd had little experience of making movies (the one he began with RKO before this was never completed) is astonishing. Even today, after nearly seventy years, it stands up strong and solid, with little sense about it that it's a product of its time. In fact, it isn't a product of its time. It was so far ahead of its time that it took other movies years to catch up.

I'd forgotten the extent of the production values in it: this is no cheap wet-behind-the-ears production. It gets the full Hollywood treatment, with massive sets and crowds of people, and heaps of 'stuff' throughout (all part of Kane's extravagance). And then there's Welles' performance in the middle of it (matched by several others of the Mercury Players who were brought into movies for the first time). Even in the 'newsreel' at the beginning of the film, we see him age back and forth from youngish to mature to old, and he does it without a sense that he's performing as a young man, trying to be old. He just does it. The make-up is there, but it's the movement that's right. In the scene late in the movie when he smashes up his departed wife's boudoir, it isn't a young man going hammer and tongs at destruction: it's an old man. He struggles to lift certain things, gets caught up in a power cord, has to have more than one attempt at pulling things off the wall, has to exert effort in order to achieve what he wants. A young man would sail around the room with ease. This man can't.

In this film Welles hasn't got into his later approach of general chaos: here the script is well-organised, the dialogue is actually spoken by the actors and things work as they would in a 'normal' movie. Except that all the time Welles is trying out stuff: when the reporter goes to read Thackford's diary about Kane in the former's monumental library, everything is overwhelming: the space, the thick walls, the huge doors, and so on.

The scene when Kane's second wife is debuting at the opera is justly famous for the apparent slide of the camera up away from the stage into the flies and finally up to where a couple of stagehands are standing (telling each other that the singer stinks). Welles is like Hitchcock, always experimenting to see what he can get away with, what he can try that will be out there, beyond what everyone else has done. We've become so used to so many of the things that were innovations in Citizen Kane that when we see the film afresh we don't recognise them as innovations. But they were. And the Phaidon book brings them to the fore in considerable detail.

The Tennis Player's Grunt

Does anyone else wonder at the sound top tennis players make when they're hitting the ball these days? My wife says it's always happened and we can only hear it now because the players are miked, but I have my doubts. I think it's become a faddy thing to make a great grunt that sounds like a diaphragmic expletive every time you hit the ball. To me, adding that extra noise must add to the energy involved in hitting the thing. Why not just shut up and get on with the job?
I also wonder if there isn't a sexual element in this: tennis stars are so full of their own status and glory that many fans 'adore' them. You wonder if the noise isn't a hint of the sound the fans would hear in the bedroom if they were lucky enough to be there. Or am I going over the top here?
It might be something you'd accept from men - a great heaving grunt. But when the women do it as well, it makes me want to switch off the sound and watch them hit the ball in silence.