A Random piece from G K Chesterton

The other night I opened Maisie Ward’s book, Return to Chesterton, at random, and came across this rather fiendish piece of verse.

A CURSE IN FREE VERSE

(This is the only rhyme admitted: otherwise the enchanting lyric is all that the most fastidious fashionable taste could require):

I CURSE PARADOX
I curse the contradictory inconsistencies of the Modern Mind:
I curse and curse and curse…

Those who dogmatise about the folly of dogma:
Those who moralise about the non-existence of morals:
Those who say people are too stupid to educate their children
But not too stupid to educate each other’s:
Those who say we can be certain of nothing.
Because we are so certain of all the exploded evolutionary hypotheses
That show we can be certain of nothing…
But what are all these inconsistencies –
Compared with the conduct of Those Who
Deliberately call Their House Christmas Cottage,
And then go away from it at Christmas?

I hate those who wage and win twenty unjust wars
And then say “The World now requires Peace”,
Who then make a League for Peace and use it to make another War:
I hate those who intemperately denounce Beer and call it Temperance;
Those who deny what science says about Cancer
And what Christianity says about Calvary
And Call the Contradiction Christian Science.
I hate those who want to Rise out of Barbarism
By running about naked and grubbing up roots and herbs;
But what are all these aversions….?
Compared with the blighting horror and hatred
With which I regard
THOSE WHO DELIBERATELY CALL THEIR HOUSE CHRISTMAS COTTAGE,
AND THEN GO AWAY FROM IT AT CHRISTMAS?

(The Poet is removed, cursing….)


This ‘poem’ turns up on page 178 of the hardcover edition, and is one of many bits and pieces in the book, poems and prose that Chesterton either never published or which had been published in ephemera, like newspapers. The interesting thing is that it still makes some very valid points – particularly the bit about parents who are ‘too stupid’ to educate their own children, something our own Government seems convinced of.

Stations of the Cross

Paul Fromberg, whom I mentioned in my last post, sent me a link to a blog he has, where some of his art work is displayed.
There are only two 'works' on there: one a mural and the other the Stations of the Cross. The Stations are a Roman Catholic way of focusing on Jesus and the crucifixion story, and all manner of artists have produced wonderful versions of these 14 'stations.' Paul has taken various photos and other graphic media and woven them together with text from the Scriptures to produce some very powerful images. Unfortunately, when enlarged they don't quite fit on my screen (I'm sure there's a way to deal with that), but you need to see the larger version to appreciate the detail.
Check them out!

Art/Christianity/Crossmans/Fromberg

I mentioned our church in the last post, and was reminded that the artists Wallace Crossman and his wife, who paints under the name of Rosalie Gillies, also go there. I’ve probably mentioned before that we have three of their works: one largish picture by Wallace and two by Rosalie. I say this not to boast, just to state the facts!
Wallace and Rosalie are the parents of children who also have artistic streaks; one daughter whose name for the moment escapes me, sculpts in Oamaru stone, and one of the sons, Bruce Crossman, who lives in Australia, is a successful composer.
Like his parents, Bruce is a Christian. On one site, there’s this statement: Bruce Crossman sees his music as an expression of the inner life (spiritual and emotional) in combination with a conscious intellectualism, which aims to express a ‘life essence’ to an audience.
There’s an even more focused statement on another site: I see the spiritual essence in my own work as an expression of a Christian faith whereby composition becomes a deep-felt emotion and spiritual sensibility linking heaven and earth.
Bruce’s music is barely known in New Zealand, his home country. Sometimes you just have to go outside your usual world to be heard. I’m one of the many New Zealanders who’s never heard his work. Years ago, when my wife and I were helping Wally and Rosalie with some interior decorating, Wally showed me the stage designs he’d done for an opera that Bruce had written. I don’t know if the opera’s ever been produced.
On the other hand, Wally’s designs for last year’s Narnia stage production (Prince Caspian) were well received.
All this is a typical bit of rambling. It’s that time of night. The time when the air tools its way into your brain and makes logical progression a little difficult. Anyway, it’s good to commend the Crossmans to you as artists and Christians, a combination I know from experience isn’t always the easiest.
In a book I’m reading at the moment (Take This Bread, by Sara Miles) another Christian artist is mentioned – Paul Fromberg. Miles writes, ‘Paul’s interest in religious architecture, liturgy and art was not just academic, but passionately spiritual, and it put him at odds with the church.’
The church isn’t always at odds with artists, as Christianity itself isn’t, but there are often times when the artist himself or herself is at odds with the church, or with Christianity. But trying to figure out how to be an artist in the context of Christianity is often difficult: the artist can be torn between doing works of justice and mercy and good, and doing art, which so often seems to bring nothing of ‘value’ to the world; it doesn’t alleviate suffering, it doesn’t feed the poor. How can it be valuable? Jesus never mentions art and neither does Paul.
I’m not going to go into the great debate about art and Christianity that all artists, I’m sure, have to work through. Suffice, at the moment, to say that some artists – the Crossmans, for example – seem to be more at home within the two worlds than others (me, or Paul Fromberg).

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.

Richard Dawkins in a swimsuit

I've been coming across a bunch of references to Richard Dawkins on the Net lately, including several videos on You Tube. In some of them he makes an ass of himself; in others he certainly shows his intelligence, but still seems to miss the point of much of what other people are trying to say. In one he makes a surprisingly crude joke, which has some bloke standing off to the side of the conference table rocking with laughter. This bloke seems to be wandering around in a rather ad hoc manner, so don't ask me what he's actually doing there.
In another video he's apparently stumped by a question asked by a girl off-screen. Seems that it may be a hoax, but it certainly makes Dawkins behave really oddly!
In fact, there are so many Dawkins videos around just now, that you rather wonder if he isn't the man of the hour; some are from tv interviews, some from discussion panels, one from a documentary in which he interviews a very aggressive white Muslim and is then puzzled by the bloke's reaction (!), one is a very odd thing that ends up with Dawkins blowing himself and the lecture room up after 'proving' that he won't. I don't quite get the point of this, as it seems to shoot itself in the foot somehow!
All we need now is Dawkins in a swimsuit, I guess, and we'll just about have run the gamut.

He's such a nice man; yes, he really is - he really, really is! Just look at that smile....

A promotion!

I mentioned a play I was doing a few posts back, and that I was giving some of the girls extra coaching as the director wasn’t. The director is a great lady, but she’s been a bit distracted during these rehearsals: her father’s very unwell, her son’s wife has just had a baby, and she’s also working towards yet another production (!)
In the end I offered to assist in the direction of the scenes she’s in (she’s acting as well as directing) and she was very happy for me to do so (she has no ego, this lady!). Before I knew it I had become assistant director and am now virtually directing the play in its entirety. That’s fine, although I’m not good on the technical side of things: lighting, music, etc. However, we’re managing, and the play’s starting to take some shape at last.
I have about twenty lines in the play: half of them in one short scene, and the rest scattered over other bits. The two young leads have a lot more lines between them, but even their scenes are very piecemeal, in that they appear and state something and disappear, or else have what seem to be several ‘scenes’ squashed together without any obvious breaks. It’s an odd play, and not one that any of us would be keen to tackle again, I suspect (although at least we’d know the pitfalls second time around!)

The photo is of James Still, the author of the play.

Satyagraha

Yesterday, I turned the radio on and was greeted with one of the chorus sections of Satyagraha, the opera by Philip Glass. The male chorus was energetically poking the same chord at our ears over and over, while the orchestra (sounding as though it consisted mostly of flutes) waffled in the background, playing the same phrase endlessly. When the chorus finally stopped their minimalist mutterings, a soloist took over, and waffled on in the same way…endlessly.
Later on, after the interval, (which was the most entertaining part of the broadcast), two women same the same two phrases at an equal pacing constantly, continually landing up on the same chord.
Monotony unbounded.
In the end I looked up Satyagraha and monotony and bored on Google, and came up with a review of the production that I was listening to. It’s by Andrew Byrne, who obviously attends the Met regularly. His enthusiasm for opera is evident in his other reviews, but the following extract shows the Satyagraha didn’t quite make the cut:
The ‘music’ of Satyagraha is nothing if not repetitive. All composers repeat their music yet this must break all bounds for cutting and pasting in music. One single semi-quaver note on the word ‘ha’ was sung 80 times at one stage - I was so bored that I started counting, like sheep in the night! And this monotony went on for what seemed like 20 minutes: ‘ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha’ 8, 16, 32 or more times in half or quarter notes separated by arpeggios of 4 crochets. If this is a useful, pleasant or beautiful musical device, and I am not sure that it is, then only a mighty ego in a composer could think that repeating it with only the slightest chromatic modulations over 100 times would be musical, tasteful or indeed, tolerable. I found it boring and unimaginative. Many patrons near me slept during much of the performance.
Amazingly, plenty of other people write about the opera with enthusiasm. Maybe they were so struck by the production, with its giant puppets and slow-motion movement that they didn’t notice the music too much. There’s no production to get in the way of listening on the radio. Mr Glass’ music has to stand on its own dubious merits.

John Gray - philosopher

I’ve just been reading an article in the NZ Listener from a couple of weeks ago about the philosopher, John Gray. I’m going to quote a few paragraphs and comment on them.

[John] Gray thinks we’re doomed. His latest book, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, argues that creeds that presume humankind can remake society are holdovers of Christian apocalyptic thinking – the illusion that a harmonious world will follow from an event of mass destruction that eliminates conflict. With the Enlightenment, the yearning to see human history as progressing towards a goal became secular rather than religious.

Gray isn’t anti-religion as a later quote will show. However, I think he’s mistaken in believing that Christians ever thought the world as it is would become harmonious. It will take God himself to recreate the world to bring about harmony.

Gray professes that secular ideologies – from Marxism and Nazism to extreme forms of liberalism and conservatism – contain this repressed religious inheritance. By believing that paradise on Earth can be created by force, the utopian mind justifies mass bloodshed.

Christian religion never believed that the a paradise on Earth could be created by force.

History doesn’t necessarily bear out Gray’s belief that utopianism is inevitably destructive. He argues that campaigns are not utopian if they potentially can be realised. But many historical strides, like abolishing slavery, would at one time have seemed as implausible as democratising Iraq.

Was the abolishing of slavery a Utopian idea? I think the writer of the article - Ben Naparstek - is mistaken in saying this.

The idea of using mass terror to refashion the world was absent in the medieval period, Gray says, and emerged only with the French Revolution. He sees al Qaeda as an inheritor of the same post-Enlightenment revolutionary tradition as communism, nazism and neoconservatism.
It’s interesting to see someone actually putting the blame for some of the worst atrocities of the last few centuries where it belongs; on the so-called Enlightenment.

He conjectures that the invasion of Iraq sounded the death knell for secular utopianism. “Iraq practically precludes another large-scale experiment along those lines.

And one final (long) quote:

Gray says his harshest detractors are “evangelical humanists”, hostile to his beliefs that secular movements renew Christian patterns of thought and that 20th-century tyrannies were by-products of Enlightenment ideology. “They’ve said things like, ‘Well, the Enlightenment can’t have any role in these episodes because the Enlightenment is pluralistic and tolerant’, which reminds me of those gormless Christians who say, ‘Christianity couldn’t have any role in the Inquisition because it’s a religion of love.’”

The role of atheism in Maoist and Stalinist totalitarianism is rarely acknowledged, says Gray. “Mao launched his attack on Tibet with the slogan ‘religion is poison’.”

Though not a believer, Gray excoriates the recent fad for books attacking religion by the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Michel Onfray. “The difference between religious believers and secular rationalists is that religious believers are used to questioning their myths, whereas secular rationalists think their myths are literally true. I advocate an attitude of scepticism and critical distance from all these powerful belief systems.”

This seems to me to be the wisest thing said about Hitchens, Dawkins and the like in quite some time.

The Insatiable Moon

A number of years ago, a Baptist minister by the name of Mike Riddell wrote a novel called The Insatiable Moon. It had a rather full-scale sex scene in it, the sort of thing that could trouble certain hearts - and did. (In fact, the scene is comparatively mild by some standards.) The end result was that Mike resigned from his Baptist ministry, and went onto write several other books and at least one play.
I used to meet Mike in my bookshop, and got to know him a little. He's a great fellow, affable, with a lovely sense of humour. I read almost all his books, I think, including The Insatiable Moon, and I enjoy his writing.
Before he left Dunedin he was already talking about making a movie out of his most well-known novel, and below you'll find a kind of pre-production promo. At this point it looks as though the script might be done, the director's in place, the main character is cast, and there's some sort of production team. Beyond that, I don't know how much more is on the way.

Manolo Carrasco

We saw Manolo Carrasco in Valencia - our only experience in a bullring. I've just found a promo video of him, playing a grand on a beach.



Note the flashy long white coat, the flying fingers, the man on the horse and the woman dancing on the sand - all very erotic! Yet surprisingly innocent in the context of the show. It's as if all the elements of the erotic were somehow subsumed into the dance and the music.

More on McDougall

I have this idea in the back of my head that recently I saw a Ewan McDougall painting that showed he could actually paint – instead of plastering his canvasses with riots of colour and crazy stick creatures. (You just about need two video cards to cope.) Now I love colour in painting, and McDougall’s paintings would appeal enormously to me if the colour actually conveyed something besides a cheap pun and the same old configurations of images.
If the painting I saw the other day really was a McDougall, then I think he’s wasting his talents, and for any artist of calibre to do this is a crying shame. (Check out the quote from Matthew Arnold in this post to see what I mean.)
You can catch up with a whole swathe of McDougall paintings here – and see a picture of the man himself at work.

More on Structure

I talked about structure a few posts back, and my difficulties with it, especially when writing instrumental music or novels.
Listening to the radio this morning, I was struck by a comment made a Villa Lobos, the Brazilian composer. The person discussing the composer’s life and music said that there was a lack of technique in some areas of his writing because he was basically self-taught. This meant that some of his music is good structurally and tends, when not so passionately written that it takes off by itself, to rely on repeated chordal riffs or an improvisatory approach. (Would you believe my Spellchecker didn’t recognise, chordal, riffs or improvisatory – obviously the new hard drive has lost the dictionary of words peculiar to me.)
There’s nothing wrong with an improvisatory approach: jazz musicians use it all the time, though they often have a basic framework of a particular song to improvise over. And repeated chord progressions, of course, are a staple of all music. The interesting thing is that Villa Lobos’ music has survived, in spite of his lack of technique in the structure department.
So maybe there’s hope for me.
I see there's a good deal of discussion on the Net about four-act structure; in fact, there's a good deal of discussion about everything to do with writing on the Net - it's one of the perennial topics.
What amuses me is that there are more people out there teaching how to write than actually writing, I suspect. Or rather, there are any number of teachers who don't appear to have actually done that much in practical, actual work. I dread to bring in the old saying, them what can, do, them what can't, teach, but I suspect it applies enormously to the writing scene. After all, wannabe writers will read everything they can lay their hands on to improve their writing. And some of these so-called top writers are happy to make loads of money out of books on 'how to write' than little money on books they've actually written.
Here's Blake Snyder in conversation with Therese Walsh: So I found tons and tons of things in categorizing and putting these stories in different genres that were amazing. I was watching a lot of monster movies—I call them Monster in the House movies—and I suddenly go, “Wow, the same character in every one of these stories.” I call him the half-man. This is someone who’s had an interaction with the monster before and come away damaged, and they all die on page 75! And so when I was going through this I watched The Ring, and Brian Cox plays that half-man character (Richard Morgan), and he dies on page 75. When I saw I that I said, “Oh, it’s Robert Shaw (Quint) in Jaws, it’s Ian Holm (Ash) in Alien.” And there’s a purpose for it, there’s a reason for it, and if your story doesn’t have it, it’s less satisfying.
Up until the moment Snyder says, 'if your story doesn't have it, it's less satisfying', he's making sense, but at that point he's telling us that the only way for your story to work is to copy what everyone else has done in movies that have worked. Just because those particular movies have worked, I think, doesn't mean that a pile of movies that have someone killed on page 75 (and what is page 75 anyway - surely he isn't serious about making the same thing happen always at the same point?) will also work.
The illusion in Hollywood is that just because something worked once, twice, thrice before, it will work until all energy is drained out of the idea. Nope, it won't. Believe it or not, the customers actually like original stuff; they like to see stories where the unexpected happens. Of course, they like to see stories where, with relief, the hero beats the baddie, the girl gets the boy. But if the getting to that point is always the same, then it quickly becomes tedious.
Great writing will always transcend genres, plots, categories.
Snyder goes on to talk about Michael Clayton not making as much money as it should have, because the publicists didn't get the 'primal' in the story. Mr Snyder has the film Michael Clayton categorised, of course (as Institulionalised), with 'patterns all over it'. But as he then goes on to say, it didn't quite do what he expected; one of the characters should have gone this way, and they didn't. It didn't follow his formula.
Precisely. Great movies, writing, music are all about not following the formula, or about using the formula for your own ends.
Too many of these gurus want to turn everything into something that everyone can sit down and do. It just doesn't work like that.

Music and Insurance

I’m writing this while I listen to the soundtrack music from Cast a Giant Shadow by Elmer Bernstein. It’s wonderfully evocative stuff, even more so because we used a couple of the earlier tracks from it when we did the play, The Diary of Anne Frank, a couple of years ago. The melancholy music set the tone for the play from the word go, and I’m sure was helpful in putting the cast in the right mood. Even now I have that sense of being back in the wings waiting for the play to start, listening to this music.
I’m not sure, if I was a director of a play, whether I’d do well in getting the right kind of music for it. Even though I’m a musician, I don’t seem to have quite the instinct for what’s appropriate. The director of Anne Frank asked me to suggest some music for the play when we were still in rehearsal, and she hated all the stuff I thought was right! Admittedly some of it was Shostakovich, who isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it was certainly Jewish in tone.

Apropos not at all of the above, I see that insurance companies have a new racket going: encouraging expectant parents to insure against the possibility that their baby may have defects. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking there’s something slightly immoral about this idea. Certainly extra cash might not go amiss if your child turned out to have Downs Syndrome, or such, but to start insuring against that a year or more before you have a baby somehow sets my teeth on edge. Even if it does make sense financially.
I know it’s not uncommon to insure children, yet I remember being faintly surprised when someone told me that the child insurance had paid for the headstone after his boy was accidentally killed.
In spite of having had five kids I never gave the notion of insuring them a thought. There are just some things that don’t seem right to insure. Perhaps I’m totally wrong here.

Alec Guinness

A Commonplace Book, by Alec Guinness, which I discovered by accident the other day at the library, is a wonderful collection of quotes, odd dreams, poems, comments, wit, and a delight in life. There are plenty of wise sayings amongst them but in spite of that a few of the slight less wise ones took my fancy:

The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions. Samuel Butler.
Guinness comments: I am tempted to add: the first two diminish with age and only the last is rigid.

Guinness tells a little story:
On our return from church:
Lapsed Catholic: 'Have a nice mass?'
Self wanted to reply: 'Oh, you know, the same old thing. The Real Presence at the altar, body, blood, soul, divinity of Christ, as usual.'

A quote from Sydney Smith, writing in the Edinburgh Review, in an article called, Catholics.
Little or nothing is to be expected from the shame of deferring what is is so wicked and perilous to defer. Profligacy in taking office is so extreme, that we have no doubt public men may be found, who, in half a century, would postpone all remedies for a pestilence, if the preservation of their places depended upon the propagation of the virus.

A quote from Matthew Arnold: It is a sad thing to see a man who has been frittered away piecemeal by petty distractions, and who has never done his best. But it is still sadder to see a man who has done his best, who has reached his utmost limits - and finds his work a failure, and himself far less than he had imagined himself.

There are several other bits I'd like to quote - I'll just have to find them again!

On Retreat

I’ve just spent the last night and most of today at a Retreat organised by a couple of the leaders from my church. It was a fairly quiet affair, with only nine participants, but it was well worth going to. I used to do fairly regular retreats just on my own, and need to keep doing more. There’s nothing quite like a day away from the norm, especially if it takes place at some beautiful spot - even if it’s near a beach. (I usually try and make sure my retreats are.)
Anyway, I took with me an old notebook which had Retreat Vision on the cover, and thought I’d fill up some of the blank pages. Turned out that the book had been begun in 1997, and it was interesting reading back through some of the notes I’d made in those long-ago retreat times.
But what I want to mention here now is that there are a couple of quotes from books in the notes, and one of these comes from a book on Colin McCahon that I was reading at the time.
The book’s title is Colin McCahon Artist, by Gordon Brown, and in chapter 4, page 28, Toss Woollaston, (the poster at the side relates to him), another famous NZ artist is quoted as writing: The Spirit that creates Nature and Art is God…an artist must lose his dependence on his optical vision in order to find his spiritual vision, and then paint his picture, carve his sculpture, and it will be authentic art.
I made a note at the time that the whole chapter has great relevance to ‘Christian’ art. I must check the book out again!

Getting the fingers back in order

When I came back from England, in December, I felt as though I hadn't played the piano for years. My fingers were stiff from lack of practice, and my forearms would ache if I did anything too strenuous.
I hadn't played, virtually, for six months. There was a short stint when we stayed at a house where there was a piano, and where I played a single piece of Bach I'd found in a secondhand shop in the middle of nowhere, but apart from that I did nothing.
The great advantage of writing some music (since I've come home) and then having to basically work hard at learning to play the pieces has been that my fingers and muscles are back to normal. In fact, when I played the first three pieces at a concert a few weekends back, I was still just a bit under par. Coming back to the same pieces after having worked solidly on the latest piece I've been composing, they seem like a breeze. This most recent one must be tougher than I thought!
I've just been offered an opportunity to play all four of them in a month's time. That'll keep me working at them. It's always a bonus to have some incentive to practice.

Years ago, when I was first in England, I spent the first few years constantly playing, either because I was involved with the London Opera Centre, or because I was composing a good deal. However, I took a turn away from music for a while, and went into residential child care. Pianos were few and far between. (I'd sold my piano to a flatmate who never actually paid me for it.) But I couldn't stay away from music completely, and discovered that the large children's home where I was working had a grand piano (that was never played) in one of their halls. One night I dragged some Beethoven out, and went and tried the piano out. It was a great feeling to be playing again, and though I didn't do much playing over the next couple of years, because I never had access to a piano, I knew from then on that I couldn't give the piano up completely.
I would have been foolish to. I had a gift - even if it wasn't concert level - and it would have been an insult to God, my creator, to have thrown the gift away completely. Thankfully, I didn't, and as soon as I got back to New Zealand, I was once again in the thick of playing for the local opera companies and such.

Structure

One of the things about any kind of work I create that always bugs me is structure. Only with songs do I get less hassled, because the words give the thing a kind of structure. Even then, there’s the concern that the song maybe doesn’t have any sort of climax, or anything to hold it together musically.
When it comes to straight piano pieces, however, I find structure not at all straightforward. I suppose the problem in part is that each piece has its own structure, or has a structure similar to the old classical models, but doesn’t necessarily follow them to the T.
Structure has been drummed into our creative heads as something that the rest of the thing builds on, but with music I find that more often than not the structure comes out of the work I do on the piece. Sometimes that works fine; sometimes not.
It’s even worse when it comes to writing something with words, like a novel. No matter how I work out outlines and plan and dig and delve into what each scene means and where it fits, the structure as a whole still seems like a scaffolding that’s continually about to fall down. I wouldn’t trust any workers on it, that’s for sure!
Perhaps the problem is that structure is fine, but like editing, it isn’t something that should take priority. Once you’ve written the thing, you have to look it over and see whether it holds together. If it does and the structure doesn’t appear to be quite like anything else around, then maybe you’ve inadvertently created a new structure. Just don’t try and give it a name, or set out its requirements. There’s every possibility you’ll never use that particular structure again.
No doubt the pundits will disagree with me. Three Acts, we’re told, when it comes to screenplays and novels. (Even though the novels that they quote don’t in fact seem to fit comfortably into anything like the structure they’re proclaiming.) Form, when it comes to music, and the more classical the better. Form when it comes to poetry, and you’d better be able to identify it.
But poems tend to write themselves often, sometimes in a formal way, sometimes not. Music starts with ideas, with rhythms, with faint tissues of somethings that eventually work themselves into a bigger shape. And novels often start out in the middle and work backwards and forwards until you’ve discovered where they really ought to start and finish.
Certainly I appreciate shape; I appreciate form in poetry more than total looseness; I appreciate form in music. But proclaiming that the old forms can’t be surmounted by new forms (which may seem to have less shape when put up against the old) is just traditionalism. What did Tevye say? Traditions, traditions. Without our traditions our lives would be as shaky as, as... as a fiddler on the roof! But he came to realise that traditions don’t last forever, and the fiddler seemed to manage to play up on the roof in spite of shakiness.
All this is a very long preamble to some comments I came across today on structure:

"There was a structure there for sure, but it was composed very non-linearly. I think the structure started to really come together towards the end. We started feeling like, 'Ok, this is what it is!' The early part of the film kind of discombobulates you… for twenty-two minutes into the film there’s no narrative. It just bounces around, you’re in New York, you’re in Nashville, you’re in San Francisco, you’re in Portland, it just shakes your head around and then the narrative hits at twenty minutes. It’s actually a four-act structure. Which is totally not the way you’re supposed to do it… and it totally works.
Aaron Rose, the director of an independent film called "Beautiful Losers," in an interview on The Filmlot.

Headline

There seems to me to be something just a little odd about the headline below - it appeared in the ODT this morning in conjunction with an article about the Draft Annual Plan Hearings.

SILENT MAJORITY OFFERS MUCH AT HEARING

These ain't flip flops!

I don't normally talk about footwear on this blog, at least not intentionally, but in line with its random nature, I'm going to take the opportunity to do so.
So be warned: this post has nothing to do with music. Well, not at this point, anyway. (Except that I'm still listening to The Wandering Gyre - sorry, the Widening Gyre (!) It's that Anthony Ritchie symphony I mentioned a couple of posts ago.
Anyway, back to footwear. I've just come across a site on the Net where they claim to be advertising flip flops. Flip flops, as any genuine Kiwi of a little vintage will know, are the Kiwi equivalent of jandals (or thongs, as they were also called - except that thongs are now what they call those dreadful skimpy bits of underwear that people who like to expose their rear-ends when they bend over always seem to wear).
I mean, does the thing in the picture in the upper left look anything like a flip flop to you? Well, it might if you're under 25, but to real people this ain't a flip flop. This is a scuff - even the site the picture comes from says it's a scuff. And it's used for climbing around bits of rock - if you're into that sort of thing. A genuine flip flop would give you absolutely no protection when climbing rocks. You'd bash your toe (s) within the first couple of minutes.
I should know about flip flops. My wife wore them constantly for years - hardly even wore anything else. (Although she, being English, called them jandals - and they were quite good for threatening recalcitrant children who wouldn't go to bed(!))

While we're on the subject of feet and their adjoining legs, I thought I might as well add this delightful picture of my legs encased in slippers. Slippers with paint on them, to show that I actually do other things beside blogging, sometimes!

Widening Gyre

I've just started listening to the Concert Programme's podcast for May. It's Anthony Ritchie's The Widening Gyre, performed by the Christchurch Symphony, under Marc Taddei.
Here's a little of what's said about it:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…”

The poem suggests that a gyre (a revolution or rotation) will bring about a ‘second coming’ of an important historical figure, and the dawn of a new millennium (the gyre is represented by a rolling, sliding timpani sound). Yeats’ vision is pessimistic, however: he sees the coming of a ‘rough beast’ who might be equated with certain infamous historical figures from the twentieth century.

I know a small amount of Ritchie's music, and attended the premiere performance of the piece he did in collaboration with George Griffiths, for the Otago 150th Anniversary: From the Southern Marches. I was so impressed with that I bought the CD when it finally came out, something I only rarely do.
I also went to The God Boy. I'd been asked to assist with the rehearsals as a repetiteur, but it would have meant taking two or three weeks off work, which I couldn't really do - and the music looked as though it needed more concentration that my mind was really up to anyway. I don't much enjoy repetiteuring work these days; I've never enjoyed following a conductor at the best of times (!)
Repetiteuring now feels a bit like some kind of exam time, and I've had enough exams for this life. I don't mind coaching a singer, because then you've got some rapport. But conductors always have a good deal on their mind besides the repetiteur and you can't afford too many mistakes. It puts them off. Getting out of sync with them puts them off (you) even more.
Talking of exams, I just remembered, in one of those lateral thinking moments, that yesterday at church, when we were doing the lunches, we didn't wear exam gloves. That's a relief. I always find they smell more than the food!
I meant to say I enjoyed The God Boy, though it takes a fair effort of mind to focus on a modern opera for a couple of hours. Ritchie doesn't eschew melody, which is a relief, but even in spite of his melodic lines, attending an opera for the first time, without any real means of preparing oneself for the music, is quite a task for the brain. There's only so much the brain can take in, and opera's don't give the listener much room for a bit or R & R.

Getting to grips with a composition

Over the weekend I took another crack at one of the piano pieces I'd started a few weeks back and then abandoned. Chopped it around, and tidied it up, and added stuff to it, and it's making some progress. Still not quite kicking off, somehow, but it's early days yet.
Haven't got a title for it, not even a working title, so maybe that's what I need to get the juices moving on it. Maybe because it's feeling nameless it's cooperating less.
Since I had the new harddrive installed on the computer the screen resolution has changed again, and the default size print is small. Maybe not that small, although that's sometimes how it feels. Might have to get magnifiers of some sort: the kind that swing down off the top of the monitor and make everything twice as big. It's the same problem at work for a number of the web pages. They come up smaller than is comfortable, as does Word. I put Word up to a default 150% which makes it real easy to read, and click + on the web pages, which generally improves any that are uncomfortable to read. The worst is the NZ Stats page. Its default font is diabolically tiny!

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.

Great Expectations

I watched David Lean's version of Great Expectations on DVD, last night. The DVD presented the film in an excellent condition, and it was a joy to watch.

Lean's film is one of his earliest, and all the better for it. (From Lawrence of Arabia onwards, his films became long-winded and had the filmic version of verbosity. I talk about it in this article.)
It tells Dickens' wonderful story with economy, but doesn't stint on details (although one surprising omission is the murder of Mrs Jo (Gargery); in the film she just dies rather suddenly.)

And the photography is wonderful, atmospheric and equally detailed. The cast are top-notch, and John Mills, who ages from around 18 to his late twenties was actually 38 at the time it was filmed. I'd never have guessed it. Jean Simmons is superb as the man-hating Estella; unfortunately, even though Simmons could have played the older version of Estella with ease, the 'adult' role is given to Valerie Hobson, who's rather lacklustre by comparison.

Hobson apart, the rest of the cast has that wonderful Dickensian feeling about them that only the British can portray.

I reckon it's more than fifty years since I last saw this movie; and it's stood up to the test of time easily. In fact, it's been voted as one of the top ten films of all time on some list.

That's Simmons with Martita Hunt in the picture on the top right: as you can see, even at 17 she was mature enough to play an adult. 32-year-old Alec Guinness plays Herbert Pocket in the other photo: he was also supposed to be a teenager at this point.

The Director

There are two sisters acting in the play I'm currently involved with (And Then They Came For Me). One of them, who played Anne Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank, in which I had the role of Mr Dussel, the dentist, now plays Young Eva, the main character. The other sister plays Anne Frank (!), who though she has a smaller role, is still significant in this play.

I've been a bit concerned that the girls haven't been getting too much coaching in how to work their lines, so I suggested to their mother a couple of weeks ago that perhaps I could take them through the play and look at some better ways of dealing with the lines. Because I've been directed by this lady in the past (in the Narnia plays we've done) she was quite happy for me to do this.

So the two girls came round to the house and we worked through their roles, line by line, trying to see how best to put across the stuff.

I got an email later from their mother, full of enthusiasm for what had been achieved. I confessed to her that I must be a 'closet director'. She had no hesitation in agreeing!

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

Checking up on the stats

I’ve mentioned the articles I’ve got on Triond before in these posts, so I probably don’t have to explain again that it’s one of these sites that you write for and leave your articles on in perpetuity – or at least for as long as the Internet lasts. And the incentive to do so is that they pay you. A modest sum, to be sure, but there are no strings attached – like having to have $50 or $100 on your account before they’ll fork anything out.
Anyway, I’ve now had articles on there since 7th November, 2006, and the current list numbers some 74 pieces.
I was curious to see which ones had been viewed most often, and since Triond helpfully provides such information, I can tell you that a piece called A Future Without Plastic has had just under 600 reads, which may not sound much, but is still more views than any of the posts on this blog have ever had.
Second in line is another ‘green’ piece: The End of Petroleum. This one is considerably behind the first in having only 517 views. Then we have another big drop (partly because the piece appeared five months later) to 349 views on Where Are the Willy Wonka Children? I always find it hard to believe that this one has had anywhere near that number of views; it seems a fairly innocuous topic to me. Plainly celebrity is more important than I thought.
Even more absurd, in a way, is the fourth: How to Wake Up, which is a jokey piece on getting out of bed in the morning. Why this should have been a hit I don’t know. It's also just about the youngest of my pieces on Triond.
The problem, as you can see, is that if I was trying to gauge what to write about so that people would be encouraged to come back again and again, I’d be struggling on the basis of these first four. And number five doesn’t help balance things up: Ten Places in Britain You Might Not Want to Move To.
Okay, I understand that people seem to like lists, but this is actually the first of the top five to have focus on a list. So that doesn’t help much either.
We’re now down into the views in the 200s, with New Zealand Factoids. Not the name I gave the piece, incidentally. I don’t know why they changed it from New Zealand Facts, as it's the only time they've ever done it!
This is followed by Possums and Prostates. Good grief. Here’s a medical piece that got almost no views for weeks on end and then suddenly took off. Perhaps some prostate sufferers discovered it.
Animals, Collectively, is another one of those tidbit types of writing, in which I talk about the collective names for certain animals. Again, hardly rip-roaring stuff, but that hasn't stopped it being popular.
With 150 views we get to World’s Steepest Street Not Always the Easiest to Live On. This was popular when it first arrived – perhaps because of the ‘World’s Steepest’ element – which is maybe why it’s up there with the first ten.
And the 10th place goes to Classical Music Isn’t Always Classical, which was an attempt to explain that we often call music Classical when it isn’t in the least bit ‘classical,’ just serious – or ‘fine,’ as they now say on our Concert Program.
So there you go. What' s interesting about the top-viewed list is that it doesn't entirely connect to the top earners. Eight of the top viewers are on the top earners page, but not necessarily in the same order. Two articles, The Need for Electricity, and A Green Roof Over My Head (both environmental items, so maybe there's something to be said for that area after all) managed to sneak into the top earners, with the electricity item coming third.

Powerless

Spent Friday and Saturday night playing on and off at the Presbyterian Synod AGM. This involved several stints of playing hymns and other worship music for the various services that were held during the evening and day, as well as accompanying two or three singers (singing together) as entertainment during the meal, and presenting the world premiere of the three piano pieces I’ve written this year.

Playing these in public didn’t add anything to my savings accounts as yet, but at least it gave me a chance to test the water on the pieces and the general reaction was good. I found it harder to play them at this event, because the piano was one of those old uprights that had been put on large castors – the better to move it, my dear. However this meant that the pedals were way off the floor, and I needed a couple of chairs to sit at the thing, which didn’t give me the sort of security I have when playing on the wide piano stool at home. I wasn’t very happy with the performances, but several people came and talked about them with enthusiasm, so that was good.

It was a bit of a night: just as we were about to sing the ‘grace’ before the meal (we were still in the church at this point), the lights went out with a great bang. Seems that one of the three phases to the church complex had gone, and the only lighting was in the kitchen and large hall area outside it. This was fine, except that the dining room was in darkness, and some of the kitchen equipment had gone out as well. Dinner got delayed, so I finished up playing before the meal instead of after the main course, which was more satisfactory from my point of view.

We had the meal by candlelight, which was pleasant (although it made it a bit hard to see what you were eating). The lights were suddenly restored towards the end of the mains. There’d been a different and briefer bit of ‘excitement’ at the Brass Band Contest I played at last weekend. The cornet player was just heading towards a climax of one section when there was a bang and a light bulb fell from the theatre’s flies onto the stage where we were performing, missing us both, but giving us both a bit of a start. Seasoned pros that we are, we carried on playing.

Playing musical chairs

My sister-in-law in the UK lost her job while we over there visiting last year. She was one of dozens of people working in the sub-prime mortgage area, which, as far as I could work out, found ways of getting the banks to give mortgages to bankrupts and other people with bad credit histories.
Of course the people paid through the nose for these bad credit loans, which were often for mortgages for 100% of the property. Sometimes banks would even give more than 100% of the property’s value. An absurd situation that was destined for a fall.
However, people are still able to access mortgages and loans and all manner of credit in spite of their past. Is this a good thing? It might be for someone who’s inadvertently fallen on hard times, and who’s struggling to get back on their feet. But as a general thing that’s available for all and sundry, I’m not so sure it’s healthy, and I suspect there will be many more tears before bedtime.
One site – whose logo is shown below – specialise in accessing a variety of ‘bad credit offers’ as they call them, and giving people the option of which one to go for. I guess it’s a way of doing business, but I feel concerned about it as a long term solution.

When I was young banks were very cautious about giving loans to people wanting to buy their first home. Getting a mortgage was a major undertaking. And then along came mortgage consultants and the like, and banks started falling head over heels to provide cheaper mortgages and bigger mortgages and mortgages with polka dots on. Suddenly the customers could do no wrong, and the banks couldn’t wait to give them money.
Now of course, with house prices falling again after a massive boom, some of these people are suffering because they’re having to repay mortgages on houses that have lost considerable value. It’s pretty scary really.
Don’t get me wrong, banks should be open about giving mortgages. That’s part of their core business. They should be as helpful as possible. But where they’ve gone wrong is encouraging people to mortgage themselves way over their heads, for homes that the people often can’t really afford.
Equally, many young people don’t want to start small and build up: they want top quality homes now. So the faults are on both sides, though perhaps not equally.
So what has all this got to do with music or the arts or anything creative? I guess you could say it's a form of playing musical chairs, or being creative with money that doesn't exist. If you were of a mind.

Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare

I finished Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare in a few days; it’s an easy read, and, like the best of Bryson, tells some good stories.
But it seems to take as its starting point the ‘fact’ that we know almost nothing about Shakespeare, and consequently, Bryson has nothing to tell. He does tell us about Shakespeare’s world, about some of his plays, about his theatres, about his contemporaries, but by claiming throughout that we know almost nothing about Shakespeare himself, Shakespeare comes out of the book like some sort of shadow or ghost.
It’s disappointing. A couple of years ago I read In Search of Shakespeare by Michael Wood. From that book I gleaned a remarkable amount about Shakespeare. Now Bryson says that no one knows enough to tell us anything, which is all rather a let down. He quotes lots of people who claim to know everything, but who are more speculators than fact-mongers.
The interesting thing is that he doesn’t include Wood in his reasonably extensive bibliography, even though Wood’s book was certainly around by the time Bryson wrote his book. Furthermore, Wood’s book was a companion (a very good companion) to a tv series.
I’m not alone in thinking that Bryson’s book is a bit of a fizzer. Check out Patricia Maunder’s review.

Anatomy of a Story

I got a book out of the library yesterday, The Anatomy of Story, 22 steps to becoming a master storyteller, by someone called John Truby.

It’s very readable, but it doesn’t offer anything new. The 22 steps (which at one point he admits could be less or more) are supposed to replace the old three-act approach, which they do, to a point. However, the steps themselves are written up in several other books I have on writing that I already have on my shelves, and quite honestly, I can’t see Mr Truby actually using them in working through the sheer slog of writing a novel or a screenplay.

Construction and structure are to me the biggest difficulties in writing a major work. Some geniuses were able to get away with virtually ignoring both of them – Dickens is a prime example, especially in his earlier work (later on he produces even greater novels that are much better constructed) – but without a good sense of both it’s hard for a first-time novelist to get moving. Some people seem to have an innate gift for it. Others, like me, are better at other aspects of writing.

The problem with Truby’s book is that he gives examples of screenplays and books that supposedly follow his rules, yet, when you look at his analyses of the actual works, you find that only a few do. What really got me was when he analysed Joyce’s Ulysses, and tried to make out that it followed his approach. It’s plain from the analysis that it certainly doesn’t. Films like Tootsie and a few others he quotes, may do, but they seem almost to be the exception. His constant bringing in of The Godfather actually undermines his case, since the ‘hero’ in that film doesn’t have any change of attitude (except perhaps to get worse) and to state that it’s Michael’s wife who changes, is to defeat everything Truby has written up to that point.

I was enthused when I began the book. By the time I’d skimmed through most of it, I was disappointed. It really doesn’t cut the mustard.

Incidentally, the single work Truby is noted for, apart from this book, is a television episode which he wrote nearly twenty years ago.

Songs in disguise

Just had an interesting conversation on the phone with one John Archer, who contacted me because he'd seen an old war poem on my site. It turns out that the version I posted, which I'd got from old papers belonging to my mother, is just one of many, and a quite young version as well.

The songs tend to have a dug-out as a link, but not always. In the earlier versions there are shanties and the like, rather than dug-outs. It's amazing how folk/popular songs tend to keep alive under a variety of different disguises.

John's posted a draft page on his site, so I'm not sure whether it's there for public display yet. However, it gives a number of different versions of the poem/song, and shows how its roots lay in old Negro songs from the Civil War period.

John's site is well worth visiting. He's obviously put a lot of effort into collecting songs, particularly New Zealand ones, and being a work in progress, it's going to be a place to keep on visiting.

Blogging about a blog

Just a bit of promotion here. In my day job, I've begun a blog (I've probably already mentioned it here, but at the moment can't be bothered to go back and check). It's focused on resource material (in a very wide sense) for people in ministry (and also for those who are just interested in what's new and what's happening in the Christian scene).

I'd like to get it better known than it is at the moment, so open up those wood shutters, loose those venetian blinds, pull the curtains, open the windows and let everyone know. Of course you can do it! Otherwise I'm going to have to start leaving anonymous comments on it myself to prove that there really is someone reading it.

Success at the Provincials

Down to Invercargill today to play for three bandspeople (two men and a young woman) who were playing solos in the Provincial Competitions.

The two men had the Championship Air Varie to themselves, so both won (I'm just not sure which came first and which second, as they were being a bit coy about it).

The young lady had already won her slow melody by the time I arrived (she had to start at the ungodly hour of nine am, and I would have had to leave home about 6.30 to get there, so I didn't go for that one), and she went on and got a second for her air varie in the afternoon.

I didn't wait for the results of the men's slow melody - it would have taken almost another hour - so at this point I don't know how they got on.

My wife came with me and we shared the driving (two and a half hours each way). As usual on longer trips we listened to some stories on cassette: this time, four short stories by John Mortimer about Horace Rumpole, and one short story by Agatha Christie, which was more of a romance than a mystery - and was extraordinarily dated. Charming, all the same.

Words don't cut it

NZ Trio violinist Justine Cormack says the best way to listen to music is with an open mind and body so you can experience it without judgment and be taken to places that you may not expect.

Oh, dear. Did she really say that? Perhaps she just needs to play and not pronounce. An open mind I can understand, but what the heck is an open body? And do I want to be taken to places I don’t expect when I listening to music? (Only if no one is looking, perhaps.)

Today, I had a bit of a discussion with the art gallery owner who runs the gallery next door to where I work. We often seem to wind up with a bit of verbal fencing, but she was a bit peeved because a customer had obviously come in, seen a Ewan McDougall painting and claimed that her grandchild could do just as well. ‘Ah, but could she get that much money for it?’ asked the gallery owner.

A fair enough question on one hand, but perhaps not really the point. I don’t think much of McDougall’s paintings at all. I suspect he churns them out at the drop of a hat because he can, and because people will pay for them. He’s the flavour of the month and probably needs to add to his old age pension while he’s still able.

Personally if I see another one of his badly drawn stick figures with their garish colours and the invariable penis, I think I’ll put my foot through it. The fact that people buy his stuff says nothing about the quality of his paintings. Especially if they’re buying his stuff as an investment.

The gallery owner and I sparred a little about What is Art? She threw out something about it being what one person likes and another doesn’t, but I think she was being sarcastic at that point. It was hard to tell as she muttered a lot – probably in reaction to having her McDougal insulted! Or else it was all just word games.

Rather like the statement on music that Cormack came out with.

For me there is far too much spoken about music that’s just waffle, just as there is about art. I listen to music; I look at art. I use my critical faculties in both cases, and I allow my emotions free rein. But beyond saying I like or don’t much like some music and some art, I try to refrain from describing either. Words just don’t cut it really.

Watch your health!

Just watched Irresistible, a film made in Australia with Susan Sarandon, Sam Neill and Emily Blunt. A neat piece of suspense, if a little unable to overcome its improbabilities. Neill comes across as the least believable of the three, even though he has the easiest part. It’s almost as if he isn’t really bothering too much. Sarandon as always is strong and detailed in her playing of someone who might need to up their health insurance, while Emily Blunt does her best with a role that seems odd from the outset. The great thing about Sarandon is that she can let you know depths in the character without uttering a word. It’s a pity she has to deal with some melodrama here, since she actually invests the character with considerable personality.

Also watched The Last King of Scotland a few days ago. Forest Whitaker is superb in the role of Idi Amin, and James McAvoy (miles away from the last time I saw him as Mr Tumnus) plays the fictional character of a doctor who becomes Amin’s right hand man – when it suits Amin. McAvoy’s Dr Garrigan is a young man who appears to have it all together when it comes to healing the sick, but who is quite amoral in his dealings with people outside of his doctoring. He appears to be wise, but the film is about him actually learning wisdom, at great cost to himself ultimately, and at the expense of several other people’s lives. It’s a film to watch more than once, if you can bear the brutality of the world Amin inhabits (although the brutality is kept to a minimum, visually, until the very end; otherwise it’s mostly hinted at in cutaway shots).

Claire Barton's final exam

Claire Barton performed for her final exam tonight at Marama Hall, accompanied by Terence Dennis.
Among her achievements the least important would be her four changes of costume. That certainly gave her a bit of time to breathe between songs.
But her major achievement was performing a challenging programme, with music by Monteverdi and Handel, Rossini, Saint-Saens, Gounod, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. The Stravinsky was one of the rhythmic solos from Oedipus Rex, which I haven’t heard in a long time. I have the music on vinyl, but nothing to play the vinyl on, unfortunately.
Claire and I go back a fair way: I must have begun playing for her when she was still in her early teens (though don’t quote me on that), and played right through until she went to Varsity – a point at which all the good singers abandon us ‘lay accompanists’ and go on to use either fellow students or staff. Which I suppose means we have to go back and work through another bunch of newcomers…!
What I’ve always liked about Claire is her steadfastness, her reliability. She’ll know her music, she’ll perform it well, she’ll be rushing around doing fourteen other things, but she still get the job done on the day.
She was the backbone of Opera Alive for a while, and was always fun to have in the cast. I can remember one particular time when we had a very tall gent in the group – in one of the songs Claire was happy to contrast her small stature against his. Another memory of her is doing a wonderful job on a duet with a girl whose name escapes me at the moment (she was also a longstanding member of Opera Alive). They did, I know him so well, the duet from Chess, and it did it with tremendous feeling.

Not too taxing

I’m practicing with a couple of bandsmen at the moment for the Provincial Comps in Invercargill. None of the pieces are too taxing, though I do need to keep working on them, all the same.

Invercargill is about three plus hours from here, so it’s a bit of a hike to go for just four accompaniments. My wife is going to come with me, and we’ll probably have to set off very early; things start at ten, though possibly we won’t be.

When we go anywhere like this we always take some travel supplies, like the famous hot flask and cups and sandwiches and fruit and enough supplies to keep us going for the day. My wife doesn’t like to spend more money when travelling than necessary!

I’d proposed going down the night before and staying over, but she’s not keen. Invercargill isn’t that exciting even though it’s improved considerably over the last few years.

Get your theology right - it always helps.

In the Auckland City paper, there was an article published on the 19th March, 2008, called Easter embraces host of views.

This was an Easter exhibition with a non-sectarian approach; in fact, the more you read the articles it seems to be that it was a secular approach to Easter. The general lack of understanding by the artists – at least those who were quoted – showed there was little Christian viewpoint at hand.

For example:

Each artist was assigned a station. Hamish Tocher drew what is usually the last station, the resurrection – although this exhibition includes the entombment as the 15th station. Mr Tocher said he enjoyed the experience, having spent the last few years studying Catholic paintings. He is not religious but is interested in the history of art.
‘Colin McCahon did the Stations of the Cross in his paintings,’ he says, ‘and other New Zealand artists have too. It’s a Kiwi medium, not just a Christian one.’

The last station is the resurrection? I don’t think the resurrection has ever been in the Stations of the Cross. And then to add a 15th, the ‘entombment’ makes a bit of nonsense of having the previous one as the resurrection. Apparently, in this theology, Jesus rose before he was buried. Curious.

So the Stations of the Cross is somehow a Kiwi medium, just because McCahon and others have used the stations as a basis for art. Gee, what do they teach these artists at Art School?