musical musings

i think i know what it is about work by writers / musicians as diverse as Hopkins, TS Eliot, Beethoven and Brahms that has such a hold on me. It's the sense of deeply-felt emotion held consciously in check, harnessed to form. Emotion that serves the art, not the other way round.

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Today all i want is clean, clear piano music by, of all people, Mozart. Never having been a Mozart fan, (in fact, most of my life i've loathed his music), i was surprised to find a sudden craving to hear the pearly sounds of a Mozart piano piece played well, surfacing this morning as i was doing my work. Of course, i've just given away the only Mozart piano CD i've ever owned. So much for sudden inexplicable, unfulfillable cravings.
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spring sonata

i don't suppose there's anyone reading this blog who can play the violin part of Beethoven's Sonata in F for Violin and Piano, Op. 24, also known as 'Spring Sonata'?
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nocturne

i like this. Not least because it's a poem about music, and not just any music, but piano music. And about what music can, and cannot, do.


Piano Solo

Years after my mother chose emptiness
at night I’d hear her at the piano
planting chords, waiting for them
to grow into something.

She never advanced from childhood
lessons. She’d crackle flat a dry page
of Bartok or Anna Magdalena
and make the house’s spine grow cold.

That was all her hesitant handfuls
conjured – misery, a lonely beginner
always beginning again, a weather
of notes I wished would pass.

They trickled onto my sheets
in the dark, each drop telling
how sad a woman could feel
even to have lost what made her sad.

(Henry Shukman, from Doctor No's Garden, Cape, 2002)
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the streets of london

Look Ma! No digital camera!

These beautiful black-and-white photos of London were taken with a pinhole camera, which is about as primitive as you can get as far as cameras go. The shots were taken along the surface of the 14-mile loop that is the London Underground's Circle Line.

Check out the rest of the site too. i haven't looked at much of it, but the latest entry dated 19 June featured a bunch of crazy architects herding sheep through London.

Looking at these photos made me realise that i'm no longer homesick for London. Well. It has been 7 years. It's time i moved on.
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it must be the cannabis

The fact that i find this so darned side-splittingly funny is probably a sign of some sort of mental imbalance caused by the general lack of amusement and sparkle in my so-called life right now.

Blame it on the cannabis.
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beam me up, scotty

i'm getting tired of sonorous harmonies. What i want now is music that is sharp, piquant, jarring, music that will jolt my senses to life again. The trouble with music of that sort, though, is that it often sounds better live than it does on recordings. At least, that has been my experience. Or perhaps that's just an excuse for my own laziness and impatience: understanding that sort of music takes time, effort, and concentration, but i rarely have that luxury when listening to recordings because i usually listen to CDs as a backdrop to whatever else i may be doing at the time. So i find that the only time interesting new music actually sounds good to me is when i'm really listening to it with undivided attention, and of course that only happens when i'm attending a live performance.

What i'd really like now is to attend a good live performance of something like Stravinsky's Firebird Suite or even that Poulenc Sonata for Two Pianos i heard a few weeks ago.

Quick, someone. Find me a good live performance of something suitably sharp, piquant and jarring, anywhere in the world, and teleport me to it, like, right now.
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new dead composer

So i've finally been converted to Sibelius, after owning a collection comprising some of his symphonies and other random orchestral music for over a year. All thanks to my annual culling of my CD collection - during which i finally got round to actually listening to the rest of the double-CD set besides Finlandia.

i am currently in love with the pizzicato bass line of the 2nd movement of his 3rd Symphony.

Sorry folks, but i just have to gush about this. And there's no one i know who would know much about his music - hence the use of this blogspace as a general dumping ground for much much tautologous over-enthusiastic enthusing.

Everyone - go listen to Sibelius so that we can gush about his work together!

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