Somewhat quiet on this particular front

Things have been very quiet on here of late, for a number of reasons. We were away on holiday for a week, and the weekend before that, my daughter and her son moved out of our house - after eight years occupancy of the first floor. Sad to see them go, since my grandson has pretty much grown up here, but they're not far away, and we'll see them fairly regularly, I guess.

In the weeks before that, and again this week, I've been repetiteuring for Opera Otago's production of The Christmas Carol, an operatic version by New Zealand composer, Philip Norman. This has been full-on, with rehearsals every day of the week. I'm also going to be one of four keyboard players during the performances (the original orchestral score has been rearranged for the four of us), so that's another thing that's had to be worked on. Good for my brain and for the fingers, which need to keep working otherwise they stiffen up, but tiring nevertheless.

Just today the Production Manager was looking for a person to work on the sound for the show. I suggested the guy who did the sound for Grimhilda! back in 2012. He was very good, and very helpful. I'd like to say he'd be able to use a Behringer x32 to do the work, but I doubt if that's going to be likely. It'll be some old machine that's been around the theatre scene for a few years, I suspect. The Behringer is a super-modern digital affair and has all the bells and whistles. The photograph below probably doesn't do it justice:

So who was Behringer, you ask? (As I did myself.) His full name was Uli Behringer and he founded his audio equipment company in 1989. Not that long ago in historic terms, but probably centuries in audio terms. His original company has now become of the leaders in the field, marketing in a wide variety of countries. Here's another interesting bit of information (since I know you're keen to learn everything you can from this post). Behringer has perfect pitch; hence the 'ear' on his company's logo. 

There you go!

You should pay no attention...

...to those 'famous' writers who claim to be able to tell you how to write, and this includes really famous writers like Hemingway, and Orwell, when they say, constantly, A short word is better than a longer word. 

Nope, a short word is not necessarily better than a longer word. The English language has a wealth of both short and long words, but the former are used on a daily basis and become far too familiar to the ear to appear in place of much more interesting ones...in writing.

I'm going to give you two examples of perfectly acceptable and reasonably bestselling writers who ignore this silly rule. Firstly Reginald Hill, the writer of oodles of Dalziel (pronounced Dee-L, just to be annoying) and Pascoe crime novels, as well as a bunch of other books. Hill was a great experimenter, and seemed to take no concern that his audience might not find his experimentations as interesting as he did. I've started three or four Hill novels, including D & P ones, and given them up because his particular experiment on those occasions didn't appeal at all.

But when he writes well, he is top quality. One of my favourites in the D & P series is Exit Lines, which I've read in print form, and listened to via an audio version. (The audio version is narrated with marvellously apt tone by Colin Buchanan.) This book is full of wonderful writing, and quite a few extravagant uses of large words.

Hill takes great delight in taking the mickey out of the dour policeman, Wield. For example:

'Back door,' said Wield. 'Glass panel broken. Key in lock. Hand through. Open. Easy.'

Sergeant Wield was in fine telegraphic style.  He also seemed to have been practising not moving his lips, so that the words came out of his slant and ugly face like a ritual chant through a primitive devil-mask.

Or:

Wield looked at the new acquisition and raised his eyebrows, producing an effect not unlike the vernal shifting of some Arctic landscape as the sun sets an ice-bound river flowing once more through a waste of snows.

There are some wonderful moments of innuendo: 

'Be careful what you say,' objected Headingly. 'He's regarded as a respected member of the community.' 

'We've all got things we regard as respected members,' said Pascoe, 'but we're in trouble if we start flashing them around in public.'

But I began this post because of the use of large words. There are two particular occasions in this book when Hill throws in a totally unnecessary large word or two. Unnecessary, but wonderfully effective. 

The sudden switch away from Pascoe [by Dalziel] took Headingly by surprise and he choked on his beer. This occasioned a usefully cunctatory bout of coughing, but the therapeutic blow Dalziel administered between his shoulder-blades extended this to the nearer shores of death.

Or:

A female voice was raised in a reboant cantillation of obscene abuse. 

Cunctatory means prone to delay, reboant means resounding or reverberating loudly, cantillation is a ritual chanting of readings from Scripture, but it's obviously applied beyond that context.

The other writer, Sebastian Faulks, shows his love of language to great effect in his stylistically-near-perfect rendering of a 'new' P G Wodehouse story featuring Bertie Wooster, and his inimitable manservant, Jeeves. The book is called Jeeves and the Wedding Bells. Jeeves, the character, has always been known for his love of the perfect word, long or short, especially when he's responding to his seemingly dimwitted master. He's no different in this book. 

Early in the book, Bertie asks him: 

'Tallish chap, eyes like a hawk?'

'There was a suggestion of the accipitrine, sir.' 

Accipitrine: relating to or denoting birds of a family that includes most diurnal birds of prey other than falcons, New World vultures, and the osprey.

On another occasion he tells Bertie: 'One suspects that the path of true love has encountered some anfractuosity.'  This word means having many twists and turns. 

So, next time you read some 'famous' writer telling you to avoid long words, tell him or her to pull their head in. 

Poor memories for weather

Last Sunday was a mild, pleasant day, one on which you could easily say, 'Winter is over,' or, as Solomon put it rather more poetically: 'For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth.'

Except that Solomon would have been wrong, as were two of our pastors that morning, who both got up and announced - one at some length - that Spring was begun. By mid-afternoon, the warmth had gone (rather than the Winter) and a nasty chill arose, and has continued on since. Today is blustery and wet, after drizzling most of yesterday. In other words, Winter has decided that it's not over and gone, and it has a fair bit more up its sleeve as yet. 

Which brings me to the question: how is it that people have such short memories when it comes to the weather? We'll have a wonderfully warm Summer followed by a lengthy mild Autumn, and a few weeks later people will be saying how miserable the Summer had been - just because Winter has arrived. 

We'll have a mild Winter, with no snow, and by Spring people are claiming it was the worst Winter ever...having conveniently forgotten the Winter of the previous year, in which it snowed ten times, 

Here in Dunedin when a bit of snow arrives everybody shuts up shop, especially the schools, who instantly proclaim a 'Snow Day', (hopefully they make it up later in the year.) When I was a kid, if it snowed, you walked to school, as I did one bitter morning. I arrived, rather late, only to be greeted with some derision by my classmates because I was allowed to stand shivering for a time in front of the one or two bar heater that the schoolroom possessed until some of the chill dissipated.

Nowadays no one would think of sending their little (or big) darlings out in the snow to walk to school. The fact that they stay home and play in the snow is neither here nor there. My mother used to talk about the Big Snow that settled in the city for I think several days, and when even the business district down at sea level was snowed in. Now that's a snowfall, and rare these days. 

In view of all this it's probably not surprising that Climate Change people get away with so much nonsense about increased flooding, severe weather, more tornadoes and the like. It's because people in general have such poor memories for weather conditions that the CC people can say what they want, and those with poor memories will believe them. If you want to know about weather go and ask a farmer. They're much more reliable. 

Jobs...

There are a bunch of jobs going at Triangle Direct Media, a successful ten-year operation that provides marketing online. Hopefully one of these jobs will update its website, something that is long overdue. The site is very slow, and you have to use several mouse clicks to do some processes.
Still, I can't complain. TDM has provided me with some modest income for quite a long time. In fact, I may have been writing for them for almost as long as they've been going!

If it's good enough for an expensive TV series

What I like about writing music is that you don't need to work out a plot. Of course you need some structure, but you don't need all the endless tinkering with action A so that it fits in with action B and so that it doesn't unravel action C, or leave unexplained loose-ends.

I'm still trying to finish The Disenchanted Wizard, which may soon be renamed The Disenchanted Author (though that doesn't have quite the same ring about it). I've probably said before in these blog posts that I always knew, somehow, that this would be a complicated story. I didn't know that it would be a story that required the author to lose much more of his hair than is compatible with keeping warm on top. My co-author/editor/jack-of-all-trades person keeps finding that having done something here causes problems there. I'm at the stage where I'd quite happily drive ahead and hope no one notices, but she doesn't work that way.

A typical publicity shot from Fortitude: note how
serious everyone looks. And cold. 

Apropos of that we've watched the first three episodes of Fortitude, a TV mystery series set on an island off the mainland of Iceland. The scenery is magnificent, especially if you like everything to be white or gray, and the cast are top notch. But even they must have some moments of bewilderment in regard to plot holes.

As so often happens with TV series, or even movies, you wonder why no one bothered to tidy up things that were left hanging. For instance, in Fortitude, a girl goes missing at one point early on. We weren't even sure which girl this was. It looked as though it might have been a child, because the story went from this girl getting her supplies from the supermarket pretty much onto what seemed to be a full-scale hunt for the missing person. Except that it wasn't the little girl, we eventually discovered (about an episode or two later). It was a woman, and she wasn't really missing anyway.

But what was weird about all this was the big missing-person-woman-hunt that was shown in one scene, with the main police character telling everyone 'We're paid to do this work, but you're not, so don't take risks.' Or something along those lines. People headed off with guns (because there are polar bears at large on this island - the first episode began with some poor fellow being eaten by one; yuk) and that was the last we heard about the woman-hunt. Next thing the police are back in their warm headquarters and the populace is back to their daily tasks, and the woman is apparently still missing but everyone seems to have forgotten this.

In another scene, the same policeman (who's a very dubious, and bullying, character) helicopters up the glacier with the search and rescue bloke (who spends more time making a fool of himself with a woman who isn't his wife than doing any search and rescue) in order to confront a couple of arrogant guys who've gone up there on snow-enabled-motorcycle-thingees. They confront them all right; the policeman takes the arrogant guy's handgun, leaves him his rifle (in case of polar bears, of course, because a handgun won't do any damage to a polar bear) and leaves them there on the glacier. Umm?

The handgun is then locked in a metal drawer in the policeman's office, and forgotten about. Until the arrogant guy turns up when everyone is conveniently out of the police station (there are at least four police people working there), breaks open the drawer (how he knows the gun is in there is something the writer never tells us), takes his gun and is off. The policeman never notices that his drawer has been broken into.

So with these sorts of things happening in highly expensive TV series why should bother me or my compatriot what happens to the plot holes in my book, which is basically costing nothing but my free time? I sometimes wonder.

*******
Update, 21.8.16 I decided to give up watching the rest of the series (we were about 2/3 of the way through) last night because it had become increasingly violent and sadistic. Fortitude is like hell on earth: brutality is the order of the day, along with ambiguous behaviour, adultery, rape, you name it. This is apart from the spooky stuff as a result of which two violent murders take place by people apparently under the influence of - something. I guess it's revealed eventually what's behind all this, but I don't think I can hang on to find out. I had a particularly nasty nightmare last night. No doubt Fortitude isn't entirely to blame, but I'm not going to feed the flames any further...!

Arts versus Sports

It's annoyed me for years that the Arts in our newspapers get such short shrift compared to Sport. Oh, yes, we have two pages (on the same day, Thursday) each week, given over to the Arts. But wait, Sport not only gets a minimum of three or four pages per day, but a complete and separate section of its own on a Friday. 

Reviews of concerts and theatre events each get a minimum number of words (300) and even some of those may be cut at the sub-editor's discretion, if they get a review at all. And sometimes the reviews are so late that they're no use to someone making up their mind whether to go to a show or not. The Taieri Musical Theatre production of Grease which took place last week from Thursday to Saturday, with four performance in all, got a review, but it didn't appear until Monday this week, after the show had closed. This isn't unusual. 

So I was immensely pleased to see someone else commenting on this issue in today's paper. 

Letter to the Editor in the Otago Daily Times, 28.7.16, page 20.

The ODT (7.7.16) reported in just 87 words the outstanding clean sweep by the New Zealand Youth choir at a recent international competition in Pardubice, Czech Republic. The choir won all four categories and the Grand Prix.

Imagine if this [had] been given an All Blacks’ victory treatment. Front page, with a picture, it would have included: every piece of music the choirs sang, how many points were awarded in each category, the judges’ comments, which choir members had sore throats or mild colds, biographical details of “new caps” in the choir and performance statistics for those who had been in the choir before, comments on their training and preparation, and reactions to the win from singing teachers and choral experts. The conductor would be a household name.

Dreaming, I know, as apparently we are far more interested in reading 500 words on the naming of the Russian Olympic athletic team.

Rosemary McBryde, 

Waitati. 

Expression marks

One of my jobs is to transcribe music onto Sibelius so that I can then shift the piece up or down a key or two. (In the old days, when music was still transcribed by hand, with a pen, this was a frustrating job, where you had to not only transcribe but also transpose at the same time.)

I've just done a three-page song which has only four expression marks for the pianist in it, and only one for the singer. There's an fp at the beginning, a couple of mfs and a crescendo mark for the pianist, and a crescendo mark for the singer. I suppose you could count a few odd staccatos and emphases marks as well, but they're fairly minor and hardly to be worried about.

Some songs I've transcribed have almost as many marks as this per bar, which makes the work of transcribing very tedious. It also means that the composer doesn't trust the singer and pianist to work out how to perform the song satisfactorily for themselves. Most experienced musicians and singers have a feel for how things should go, and don't need all this additional instruction. Most of it will be done instinctively, so for the composer to write it all out is just a bit pointless. Better for him or her to stick to the vital things, the changes of expression that aren't obvious from the music itself. 

It's a bit like a scriptwriter telling the actors in every line how they should say the words. Actors will ignore these things, unless, again, it's something that you wouldn't expect from the words themselves. Shakespeare never writes such stage directions, and actors manage perfectly well to interpret his lines. The very few directions he does give are exits and entrances, and the occasional curious one that you'd never gauge from the rest of the script. In fact a lot of his stage directions are written into the dialogue, as it were, and can be worked out from there. 

Compositions are similar to scripts for plays, I feel. While there are purists that claim to know how every note should be played, it's really up to the performer in the end, and the majority of composers will give performers plenty of leeway on this. A very few don't seem to feel that performers have the first idea about how music should be 'done', and clutter up the page with more instructions than any performer will pay attention to in a lifetime of performing the work.

Dance to the Music of Time

I've been reading A Buyer's Market over the weekend. It's the second book in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, that astonishing twelve-book series produced over twenty-four years. 

Wonderful writing, though seemingly without any kind of plot. So how does Powell keep the interest up? Sheer word power, pulling us along by making us willing to hear a very interesting person writing about his experiences and the people he meets. Apparently a number of things do come together in a kind of plot in the last three books, but that’s quite some way down the track yet. 

Though it’s helpful to have read the first book, which I have done but can’t remember in much detail, I don’t think it’s essential. By reading on Kindle I can at least refer back and see which characters are referenced in the first book. It doesn’t seem to make much difference really. Once you understand that the books are primarily about four main characters, then all the other stuff is secondary. The way people come alive in these books is marvelous. 

The book is compared by a number of people on Goodreads to Proust’s famous book (variously entitled in English as Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time; some prefer Proust, some Powell, some like both. Whatever the case, the vividness of the world created here is extraordinary. 

SeaChange

Back in the late nineties, we used to watch an Australian TV programme called SeaChange. It's about a woman, a big city lawyer, whose world collapses - her husband gets had up for fraud, her sister has had an affair with the aforesaid husband, and the partnership the woman is aiming for is given to another woman, one known not to be as smart.

In a moment of madness and as a reaction to all that's come upon her, she accepts a job as town magistrate in Pearl Bay, a little town where life is much slower, where everyone supposedly knows everyone (and all their business) and where she has to relearn what life is all about.

We remember enjoying the programme, though we probably never saw all of it, as used to happen before the days of DVDs and Netflix and the like. Anyway, suddenly, after all these years, SeaChange has turned up on Netflix, and we're getting the chance to watch every episode.

It turns out to be every bit as good as we remembered; in fact, probably better, given that it's survived the nearly two decades since it was first shown, and only very occasionally has any cringe factor. Sigrid Thornton, as the lawyer, is excellent, showing a marvellous gift for comedy, and gradually discovering the warmth in her personality that's been hidden under the hyper-lawyer's ruthlessness. David Wenham, who wasn't nearly as well known then as he is now, is the laid-back jack of all trades, the one with something of a broken past, the man who's mostly as wise as he thinks, and sometimes far more foolish than he expects.

The supporting cast is brilliant. Thornton's two children are played by the then 15 or 16-year-old Cassandra Magrath, with Kane McNay as her younger brother. He was about 14 when the series started, but was short and looked 11 or 12. Both are spot on. Many of the rest of the regular cast inhabit their roles in such a way that you come to accept that this is who they really are.

John Howard plays the obnoxious and devious businessman whose deals are always a little iffy, and who has the idea that he runs the place. His wife is played by Kerry Armstrong as a dithering, flustered woman under the heel (mostly) of her husband. From memory, I think she gets a chance to play the worm that turns in a very late episode in the three season series.

Tom Long plays the court clerk who knows enough about the law to keep the place running, and even more about the people who come in front of the magistrate. He saves her bacon on a number of occasions. Kevin Harrington is the local odd-job man (he mostly hasn't much idea of how to do anything useful); he isn't very bright, but each episode, after the first (I think) ends with him giving his equally not-so-bright son a bit of his wisdom. It's like an abbreviated version of the silly joke sequence that takes place at the end of The Vicar of Dibley, except that here it often says a great deal in a very simple way, showing that being down-to-earth is a virtue rather than a failing. His son (who's about the same age as the magistrate's boy and who's good friends with him) is played by Christopher Lyons. The warmth between these two actors is a delight.

Sometimes the townsfolk are more annoying than pleasant, sometimes they win the day, sometimes the magistrate manages to. Relationships come and go, and secrets arise from the past, but nothing ever disturbs the ebb and flow of the Bay for very long. People here have the ability to cope with the changing moods and ups and downs of life without too much drama.

Incidentally, the episode we watched tonight, the oddly-named Balls and Friggin' Good Luck was one of the top-rated episodes of all the three seasons. It's about a young man who commits suicide - no one wants to state that this was what actually happened, but the magistrate has to face the facts that this was likely to have been the case. In spite of its difficult subject matter, it has a great deal of warmth and gentleness.

Meanings eluding me

If you see a phrase in this post that seems to lack good English language logic, don't be surprised. The Internet is full of surprises, and the lack of proper English is just one of them, though probably one of the minor ones.

Fender Telecaster musicians friend is a phrase which I've been trying to get to grips with for the last five minutes, and I'm wondering if it's poetry of some sort. I know what a Fender Telecaster is: an electric guitar (the kind that tends to obliterate other instruments when it's played). It's been around since the 1950s, apparently, and has been continually improved from its original state as a 'masterpiece of design and functionality.'

I'm not sure that the phrase Fender Telecaster musicians friend is a masterpiece of design and functionality, and the missing apostrophe annoys. It might work in its present state if translated into a foreign language where such curiosities are the norm. Maybe.

So is it poetry? After all poetry is a place where oddities of the language appear frequently. I came across just such a one this morning:

The heavy bear who goes with me,   

A manifold honey to smear his face...

I've been puzzling since what 'a manifold honey' might be, or why the line seems so at odds with normal language. Often such lines come right after repeated readings of a poem, or after you've memorised it and it suddenly clarifies itself when you least expect it. (I find this with poems by Les Murray, often, although sometimes certain lines of his elude me entirely, lines such as 

.....No one here will be

a visitor gnawed by lifelong celebration.

I have a rough idea what it's about, in the context of the poem, but it's by no means straightforward. However, that's the sort of thing you've got to take with poetry; it inhabits a language world of its own, one in which it surprises you by juxtapositioning words that don't like sitting beside each other, or wrenching the grammar around in such a way that you can't figure out a verb from a noun.

So perhaps what I should do is jot Fender Telecaster musicians friend into a notebook or file, and keep it until one day it suddenly decides it's the basis of a poem. (Though I think I'll be obliged to include the apostrophe, or risk my sanity.)

Eroica concert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blame it on Ennui

This blog has been puzzling over why it's been pretty much ignored for some while...months, even. I'm not sure of the answer, except to say that on the whole blogging seems to have taken a back seat to...well, I'm not sure what.

This week I can account for: my wife wound up in the Emergency Dept of the hospital last Sunday with what turned out to be pneumonia (or 'pewmonia' as Mrs Map, in my book Grimhilda!, preferred to call it*). So she's been up and down, and more under the weather than on top of it for the last several days. And I had a bit of a funny health issue this week that reminded me of another of my books, Diary of a Prostate Wimp. Thankfully it turned out to be nothing serious, as far as I can tell. (This post isn't intended to be a plug for my books, by the way, although they are going at discount prices this month at Smashwords!)

So maybe I'm just over the blog thing. Maybe I'm writing too much elsewhere (I'm not sure where). Maybe I tend to mention things of interest on Twitter or Facebook and so they don't get mentioned here, as they would have done in the past.

Or maybe it's ennui. If all else fails, blame Ennui: he's got spine, he's got backbone, he can cope.

After that lengthy non-introduction, here's a slightly more positive note. There are three large sections to the book I'm currently writing: The Disenchanted Wizard. Finally, finally, I think the first and section sections are pretty much intact, give or take the occasional last minute tweaks. The third section, which I'm about to start to do more rewriting on, is structurally sound, and many things that are in it now will probably make it into the final book, in some form or other. So that's good news. This book has taken longer to write by about a year and a half than I expected. I always knew it would be a bit of a difficult fellow, but it's long since outlived my expectations on that score.

But I think once it's finished it will have been worth the wait. Time will tell...

*Thanks to the inventiveness of the original actress who played her in the stage version.

Smashwords Summer/Winter sale

July is Smashwords Summer/Winter sale month, and all three of my books are discounted for the month. Here's your chance to catch up on the two children's fantasy stories:

Grimhilda! a fantasy for children and their parents

The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret

and my non-fiction book: 

Diary of a Prostate Wimp

Just go to my profile page and you'll see the three titles listed towards the bottom of the page. Click on any of them and over to the right there's a discount box. And away you go!

Happy reading....

Music criticism

I'm reading Forbidden Music: the Jewish composers banned by the Nazis, by Michael Haas. It quotes a lot from early music critics, and two particular examples appealed to me:

On page 60, Julius Korngold (father of the film composer, Erich Korngold) writes about atonal music, in 1925.

The tonality traitors know well why they're against expression. They have to make a virtue out of necessity. Atonal cacophony negates sensual, melodic, emotional sensibility. We read in Alfred Einstein's Dictionary of Modern Music  that 'The atonal melody is fundamentally a purely mechanical product and presents us with a contradictio in adjecto - an absurdity, since the comprehending spirit is incapable of finding any coherent relationship between the individual notes. One cannot write music based purely on a negative principal.' Hence the flight into linear contrapuntal writing that lucus a non lucendo - cannot be correctly voiced - causing a flight from all relationships into the tonality death-zone: the Twelve-Tone Row; this in turn results in objective, soulless attempts at messing about with material; the psychological effects of pitch and tone themselves being raised as the postulate of 'new music.'

I first read that phrase the Twelve-Tone Row as the Twelve-Tone Death Row...

The above was directed to some extent at another music critic, Eduard Hanslick, who was also no slouch at making his opinions heard. Here he is discussing another composer, Karl Goldmark, and his opera Merlin. However, he sidetracks into some sniping at Wagner...(from page 59)

For all the musical independence that Goldmark has now acquired, it's apparent that in Merlin he still stands under the influence of Meyerbeer and even more obviously, Wagner...His musical expression is impregnated with Wagner essences, though Goldmark captures different perfumes from the ones that have been floating about for the last 30 years. Occasionally, though, he inhales too deeply. King Arthur reminds one with his spongy sentimentality of Koenig Heinrich and the Landgraf Hermann...The love-duet is inconceivable without the templates of Lohengrin and Tristan. One is further reminded of Wagner with his unnatural emphasis on the dramatic, the restless chromatic breaks, and the flooding enharmonic modulations....Yet the means by which the work is composed is quite different from Wagner. With Goldmark, the sung melody remains at the centre, despite the fact that it doesn't exactly flow in generous quantities, but at least it isn't allowed into stammering declamation, which swings back and forth over a melody being spun out endlessly in the orchestra. Where there is need of a lyrical oasis, Goldmark places these within the architectural forms which became the jewels of opera in the days before Wagner: choruses with knights and elves and women; even strophic songs, marches, and a well-organised ballet are offered.

Actors, lines, stillness

We went to the Regional performances of the Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival last night. And had forgotten how hard the seats are in the Otago Boys High School Auditorium, in spite of having spent Sunday after Sunday there for several years during services with Dunedin City Baptist, before it moved into its own home in Concord.  We've been to one of these regionals before, (as well as the National finals when they've been held in Dunedin) and enjoyed it. Last night seemed much more of a mixed bag than previously.

The first item of the evening, and one of the best, gave us Act 3 scene 1 from Henry IV, Part I. This was a fine fighting-talk piece with Hotspur pitting himself against the Mortimer family. It included music, and dialogue and singing in Welsh. A major achievement. I'd wondered if this was scripted, but I see from a copy of the play that all Shakespeare offers is: The lady speaks/sings in Welsh. So whatever she was saying was written for the performance. The only thing that undercut the value of the performance was that the young man playing Glendower made the mistake of assuming that because someone is old he has to be seen to be acting like someone who's nearly 100. Still he did better than the young man playing Lear in another scene. He was virtually bent over double, tottering along on his walking stick. Unlike most of the old people in the audience!

There were two King Lear pieces, both covering some of the same ground: the argument about how big a retinue Lear could bring with him when he stayed with his daughters. For some reason known only to the director (not a student - several of the pieces were student-directed) the first of these was done as a 'Mexican Day of the Dead' scene, presented in 'flashbacks' and thoroughly confusing the structure of the play. To anyone unfamiliar with the play it made no sense whatsoever; to anyone familiar with the play it took considerable effort to understand why on earth Mexico or the Day of the Dead had anything to do with it. Tacking an idea onto Shakespeare doesn't work unless the thing is integral to the text.

The other Lear, as I say, had a young man playing a Lear with considerable physical disabilities. It took several bits of scenes and ran them together. Again the result was confusion for the audience, I felt.

Probably the top performance of the evening was a small piece of Macbeth, with the speeches expanded out to fifteen minutes, even though in the play they'd probably only take about five. This involved three 'familiars' sinuously winding around a raised area in the middle of the stage, on which Hecate stood. (According to the programme she was also Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, but I don't know where that was worked in; maybe she spoke some of their lines.) In contrast to these unpleasantly evil creatures there were three old biddies in relatively modern dress who spoke no lines at all, but provided a variety of chirps and buzzes and short sounds as they picnicked at the front of the stage. These were often very funny, and had the style of what they were doing down pat. Towards the end of the scene the three 'familiars' turned out to be the three biddies' pets (like cats) and that was disturbing. Hecate meanwhile had turned around (and proved to be a talented young girl we know) and all of them kept repeating Fair is foul and foul is fair. It was very well done, though it left a very nasty taste in the mouth - as was probably intended. The witches in Macbeth are nothing if they're not vile.

In one of the five minute pieces Mark Antony discovered his wife was dead. For some reason this was played for laughs, and the young man playing Enobarbus managed to speak all his lines in a totally incomprehensible manner. Quite an achievement!  Taieri College did the play scene from Midsummer Night's Dream, emphasizing the crudity of the humour, and getting some laughs, but overall seeming to be more knockabout than funny. That was disappointing given that Taieri has quite a reputation for good work.

In another five minute job, from Two Gentlemen of Verona, two girls did an excellent job of the scene where Julia is encouraged by her maid to read Proteus' love letter and keeps putting it off. This was a delight, as was (a female) Petruchio wooing a decidedly modern Katharina. The girl playing Petruchio also directed it, and did much better than many of the student directors. (One of the girls in the Gentleman piece may have directed it too, but the programme for some reason claimed they were presenting a scene from The Merchant of Venice, which was a little confusing.)

We had two versions of Romeo and Juliet. In the first only the Nurse and Juliet appeared, stranded on the entire width and depth of the stage, with three chairs forming a spaced-out triangle. This was student-directed too, and had some good points, but the Juliet raged her way through much of the dialogue (it's the scene where the Nurse tells her Romeo is banished and Tybalt is dead) and her words couldn't be heard. Still she brought huge energy to the role, unlike the stillness that you often see in Juliet. The Nurse however floated around the stage with a distinct lack of energy; it was hard to tell whether she cared about Tybalt or Romeo or Juliet. Or anything! An odd way to play the role. It was as if Juliet and the Nurse had swapped characters.

The other R&J was very curious, not helped by having the curtain come across when it was only two-thirds of the way through! The Juliet was played by a solid, tall boy doing a falsetto. When the audience realised he was meant to be Juliet there was a surge of embarrassed laughter. A strange piece of casting. Romeo was a little fellow, as was Tybalt, and they were left shouting at each other across the distance of the stage, for no good reason. These three were supposed to be flashback characters. The 'real' Romeo and Juliet were in the tomb scene with her lying still and him bewailing her being dead, and then each killing themselves in due course. These two were good, but the other three seemed at odds with them in age and everything else, pretty much. There was supposed to be another Tybalt, according to the programme, but he never eventuated. !!

The other piece was from Twelfth Night, and played out the scene where Olivia first meets Viola disguised as a young man. Olivia was in what appeared to be her short nightie. Malvolio was dressed in ordinary modern clothes, and showed no embarrassment at being in what must have been Olivia's bedroom. Maria spent most of her time dusting imaginary furniture and saying nothing, and the girl playing Viola spoke her lines with a strange weightedness, as though there was no rhythm or bounce to them. I couldn't tell whether she had a naturally gruff voice or whether she was trying to be a boy being a girl.

As in so many of the student productions (and even some of those directed by teachers) there was a great deal of unnecessary movement in this piece, much wandering around the stage by the two leads, without any great purpose. (In one of the King Lear pieces, two 'soldiers' marched across the stage and back again four times, for no apparent reason.) Other actors would shuffle about on the spot, as though they couldn't just stand still. Movement needs to have a reason on stage, otherwise it's nothing. And sometimes it's just annoying. Merely shifting people around without purpose achieves nothing. Sometimes the student directors got it right and did a good job. Other times it looked as though they had no idea what to do with the actors - and no one told them, it seems, that actors can stand still on a stage, say their lines effectively, and the audience will be enthralled.

In the most recent play I did, Verdict, I had less than ten minutes on stage. My entrance required me to show that I was an arrogant blusterer: initially I took control of the centre and forced the main character to stay at one side. And then it was a matter of each of us shifting from one position to another as we played out the scene, the two characters assessing each other, constantly changing the balance of power, even when both of us were sitting. Even small movements, such as a turn of the head, or my crossing my legs as I sat, or a refusal to shake hands, were slotted in for maximum effect. The third person in the scene, who had no lines except at the beginning and the end, stayed in one place all the time, only her face showing her reactions, or occasionally a slight shifting of her body.

I don't note this to say that we are better actors than these young people, but just to point out how movement is part and parcel of character and of what's going on in the scene. I'm reminded how in J B Priestly's play, When We Are Married, I played a photographer who became increasingly drunk as the play went on. In my first scene I was allowed to wander around the room inspecting things on the mantelpiece or a table and so on, even though other characters were speaking. It showed that as a character I had an underlying restlessness, probably because I was ready for my next drink. By the time the last scene came, I was able to literally burst through the door into the room where most of the other actors were assembled, and take over the scene as I lolled across the stage, drunk.

A more disciplined approach to movement gives the actors a much better sense of why they're on the stage, why they're saying what they're saying.

Opera Otago's House Operas

I've been rehearsing with four young singers and two directors over the last two and a half weeks or so (with a few more days to go). Opera Otago is presenting two 'house operas' at Olveston on the 8th, 9th and 10th of April. It's going to be interesting to see if everything we've been rehearsing will actually work in the venue, which is not strictly speaking geared for opera, even small scale ones like these two.

They're an interesting pair, put together, I'm sure with both their similarities and contrasts in mind. The first in the programme is John Drummond's Dearest Maurice, a work that lasts around forty minutes. John is a well-known figure in Dunedin music circles, and has a good deal to do with Opera Otago over a number of years. (His son Jonathan conducted the premiere of my own children's musical, Grimhilda!, back in 2012). John has written several operas, but this is the only one I've had the opportunity to work closely on.

There are two characters, a young doctor, and a mysterious woman touring in the United States as a lady's companion. The third character, Maurice, never appears, but in spite of that brings the couple together. Unintentionally.

The other piece is better known, perhaps, having been presented by the Dunedin Opera Company at least once before. It's Menotti's The Telephone, in which that instrument plays an irritating and interrupting role in keeping the pair of lovers apart.

Both are romantic pieces, the former more serious in tone, the second lighter, with definite comedy running through it. In Drummond's piece, the tenor (Ben Madden) has the bigger role, not only being onstage for most of the time, but also very busy. The soprano (Ingrid Fomison-Nurse) has her own work, and some lovely duets. In the Menotti we have the reverse: the soprano (Julia Moss-Pearson) gets the majority of the singing, while the tenor (Harry Grigg) struggles - at times - to get a word in.

Musically Dearest Maurice swings between  enthusiastic, rowdy music and lush harmonies. Menotti's music is bright, sparkling, and often funny (something music isn't always good at). The soprano has several coloratura moments as well, while the piano frequently provides the 'voice' of one or other of the various people she encounters on the phone. Mixed with these are the warm melodies and harmonies Menotti is known for.

John Drummond is producing his own opera, and Claire Barton is producing The Telephone. The two operas are presented in the same programme, and each of the three shows starts at 6 pm. The whole presentation will take around an hour and a quarter.

Busy, busy....

Blogging has gone on the backburner because of a number of things. First was the ongoing efforts to finish my third children's book, The Disenchanted Wizard. And now that's gone on the backburner too!

Over the last month and a half I've been tied up playing first for Opera Otago's 60th Birthday Extravaganza Concert; I took over from the pianist who was originally hired because he himself got tied up with something else that caused him to weigh up his priorities. When that finished, just over a week ago, I went straight into rehearsals for two 'House Operas', short, one-act operas to be performed at Olveston, in just over a week's time.

The rehearsal period for these has been immensely short: around three weeks. I've had the music for several weeks, but had to practice and learn it at the same time as I was dealing with sixteen major items for the Extravaganza concert. Not only that, one of the operas was handwritten, and for my aging eyes, very difficult to read, so using the music programme, Sibelius, I put it on computer and printed out a readable copy. Which took several days, working a few hours at a time.

And then we've had some family ups and downs, as usual, and that takes energy, and we had to clear around the house because the scaffolders were coming to put up scaffolding so that the painters could paint the roof, and...

All in all it's been quite a couple of months, and though I've put some time into the book, it's been very inconsistent, and that's not ideal. There's been no blogging time at all, really, because I just haven't had the energy to keep at it!

Disenchanted Wizard makes progress...and the next project in line

Just found a post on my blog that was begun the other day and never completed. In fact I don't seem to have got beyond opening the page. So here was this good solid blank space just waiting for me to put some of my best thoughts in it.

Okay, it will accept second-best, third, fourth, etc.

Over the Christmas holiday period (which for me is as long or as short as I like, pretty much, being retired) I sent off a copy of the 'final' version of the my third children's book to my co-writer/editor/commentator/whatever and so far we've worked through the first eight chapters without the relationship busting up, or even showing signs of doing. (This hasn't always been the case with the books we've worked on.)

However, the first eight chapters have been written and rewritten and rewritten already, so it was a matter of making sure we were thoroughly satisfied with what was there. In one three-hour face-to-face session everything was pretty much ticked off, and that was after I'd already done a lot of further tidying up and reshuffling and all the other stuff that hopefully will comprise the book's first part.

From chapter nine up to twenty, however, it's going to be a different story. This section has already been completely rewritten after the first version was consigned to the dustbin of history. (What it is to have a co-person who insists 'You can do better.') However, we took a look at chapter nine the other day ('taking a look' consists of me thinking I've done my best and her replying with heaps of comments showing where I haven't done my best), and while it kept its framework and lots of its material, things had be shifted about, things had to be tidied up to make more sense, the irritable heroine had to be softened down a bit (otherwise, in spite of her status, she might have been replaced with a more amenable character) and so on.

Chapter nine has just been returned to me with further comments, but...and this is the good news...chapter ten is now under scrutiny. That sounds like progress!

In the periods while I've been waiting for chapters to turn up in my email again, with comments, I've been continuing to type up the letters I sent to my mother from London to Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1968-70, when I was studying at the London Opera Centre. The letters I've been doing over the last week or two are from a time when I'd finished at the Centre and was trying to make sense of what to do next, since in some respects I'd 'failed' the course. 'Failed' isn't the right word; it was more the point that I'd lost confidence in my abilities after coming from a place where I was a relatively big fish in a small pond, to the opposite status.

As I've typed these letters I've been posting edited versions online, on the Hannagan Family.blog. This began life as a place for our family to put on family news and history, and this has happened in a random way, but it's also proved worth using for these letters, which I began to post online back in in November 2012. They then wend their way through the months, those there's a gap at one point when other things took over. I'll have to go through and link them one to another, in order to make them readable.

However, I'm coming to the end of the original letters, and have been thinking for some time about forming them into a book, since a few people have found them interesting in their current, scattered format. So that's probably the next project after The Disenchanted Wizard finally makes gets himself sorted out.

Total Recall and Star Wars

We watched the remake of Total Recall a couple of nights ago. Colin Farrell does an excellent job, not just as an action hero, but as a man with  depth to his personality. I think I've seen the Arnold Schwarzenegger version, but can't remember anything about it. My gut feeling is that Farrell presents a much more interesting character than Schwarzenegger would have. The two women in the story, Kate Beckingsale, who plays Farrell's seemingly indestructible and villainous 'wife,' and Jessica Biel as his true love, are both equally good. Apart from the excellent acting and the tense action scenes, it's the design of the movie that stands out most: the hemmed-in feeling of an overcrowded city, the washed-out colours, the extraordinary structures and much more. 

In the end they whole thing is far-fetched to the max, but surprisingly survives its innumerable plot holes. By all accounts fans of the original movie were highly offended by this one; be that as it may, I think it stands up well as a decent action movie on its own. 

Last night we went and saw the latest Star Wars. Don't ask me what it's subtitle is: I long ago gave up trying to remember these, since they all seem similar. Wait, it's The Force Awakens. Okay. Spoilers follow...

Well, the first thing that can be said is that it's back to the original, almost faultless style. Gone is the super seriousness of the middle three prequels; the humour, action and storytelling are all on a par with the first episode. (Number IV, I think that actually means. Good grief.) Many of the original characters turn up (not until the very last scene in Hamill's case) but there are plenty of newcomers, not least a wonderful new droid, BB8. His name doesn't have quite the catchiness of R2D2, or CP3O, but he's full of charm, and beautifully presented, both vocally and in terms of his movement. Harrison Ford gets into his stride within a few moments of appearing, and Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca actually gets some decent moments for a change. Carrie Fisher plays a much matured Leia; she has a warmth that wasn't quite so evident in the early movies. 

But these actors are supporting artists really, in this movie, in spite of the fact that three of them get top billing. Bit odd, when you think that Mark Hamill has one scene, one in which he doesn't even speak. Daisy Ridley and John Boyega play the leads and swing through all kinds of emotions in the process. Whether they'll survive into the next episode is anyone's guess, but they deserve to: by the time the movie ends they're fully-fledged characters. 

Adam Driver plays Kilo Ren, the main baddie. (Kylo Ren? Many of Lucas' characters have oddball names that don't work for me: this is one of them, along with Poe Dameron, Maz Kanata, Unkar Plutt (Simon Pegg gets landed with this monstrosity), and Supreme Leader Snoke. Snoke? Is that really a name for a villain, apart from the difficulty of pronouncing it. Max von Sydow plays Lor San Tekka. Come on, George, give people names that sound like names, as you did with Han Solo, Luke Skywalker (a brilliant name) and Princess Leia. 

Maz Kanata, incidentally, is one of the more interesting characters amongst the smaller roles: played by a normal-sized human being - the Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong'o - she appears on screen as a pint-sized woman with enormous glasses almost set into her head, and a couple of slits for nostrils. Andy Serkis is in the cast too, though as usual he's unrecognisable. He plays the Supreme Leader who only appears as an immense hologram, his face beginning to disintegrate and his longevity obviously telling on his body. I don't know how he fits into the scheme of things, though no doubt there are hundreds of fans out there who could tell me. And presumably, being broadcast from somewhere else in the galaxy, he survives the holocaust near the end. 

The visual effects are endless, but remain within the realm of plausibility. The John Williams score is hugely varied, as always, with familiar themes appearing at appropriate times, and plenty of new ones. 

I went expecting to be underwhelmed, after the last three mostly awful pieces, but it's great to see the series back on form. 

PDP

pdp apparently stands for performance designed products. I'm not sure what a product not designed for performance would look like.Wouldn't that be a counterproductive, non-performance, undesign?

Don't ask me. I'm assuming that something that is performance designed means (a) it will actually work, which immediately makes it better than many products on the market today; (b) it will be produced to a decently high standard - I'm assuming that, of course, otherwise it would just be classified as a designed product, thus putting it in the same category as pretty much every other product on the planet.

The problem with acronyms, to change the subject somewhat, is that they don't mean the same thing to every person. Looking at Wikipedia on the subject of PDPs, for instance, you find that there are umpteen (well, maybe not umpteen; more like thirty) other interpretations of these three simple letters. I haven't got room to go into all these, though it might make an interesting post sometime, and anyway it's late at night and I need to go to bed.