Bernard Hughes

Late night line-up

Bernard Hughes — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 16:21:08 +0000

I’ve been avoiding this year’s Proms on principle – the principle that there’s not been anything very tempting on. But I was enticed out by yesterday’s late night mix of English and American Experimentalism, and there was lots to enjoy in the performances by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov.

John Cage’s First Construction in Metal is a classic, but one rarely heard live. It is a bit of a jolt to realise that the piece is 71 years old, but its gamelan-like soundworld still sounds fresh, even if it is rhythmically a bit four-square. This was a an early example of Cage structuring his music according to a rigid, pre-ordained durational plan, an idea he took to full fruition in the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, in which the music feels less constrained by the rhythmic template. For all the sound and fury of the opening, the most effective moments were where the thundersheets had a break and stillness and even silence were thrown into the mix.

The Earwig

Cornelius Cardew, figurehead of English Experimentalism, was represented by an early orchestral work Bun no.1, the graduation piece from his studies with Petrassi in Rome. It is unfortunate when the title is the best thing about a piece, but that was the case with this overcooked parade of up-to-the-minute (in 1964) orchestral textures, lacking any coherence or sense of direction.

Lento is Howard Skempton’s most successful work, a study in consonance and restrained orchestration. Although it could be uncharitably described as Vaughan Williams without the quavers, it does have a warmth which makes it loveable. Not to the person sitting in front of me, who was disgusted by what she seemed to regard as Skempton’s weakness in writing a piece which has become so successful. ‘I guess he did it for the royalties, and good luck to him’ is definitely unfair, let alone uncharitable, as it is difficult to imagine a less cynical composer. Lento does what most Skempton pieces do, and had the good fortune to hit box-office gold. No sour grapes required.

I do like it when the highlight is saved until last, as it was here. John Tilbury was the soloist in Morton Feldman’s Piano and Orchestra. As always with Feldman, very little happens, and it happens slowly. But what does happen has enough to maintain the listener’s interest, unpredictable and yet reassuringly right, monumental yet humble, and engrossing from moment to moment in a way the Cardew just wasn’t. John Tilbury’s sound was radiant and in subtle balance with the orchestra and, however late the hour, for a few minutes time slowed down, and everyone in the hall slowed down with it.

This article first appeared at soundandmusic.org. See all postings by The Earwig.

Bouncing cheques

Bernard Hughes — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 20:36:47 +0000

Some composers seem like a better idea than they turn out to be. Like bouncing cheques they make promises they can’t live up to. They may sound like interesting characters, the ideas behind the music may intrigue – and yet the pieces themselves itself fails to live up to expectation.

Take Xenakis. Fascinating character with an extraordinary biography. One of the most startling innovative compositional ideas of the century, that of basing musical forms on fractal mathematics. And yet the musical sounds are so unappealing, ugly even, as to send me away to seek other avenues of pleasure.

The Earwig

Or there is Frank Zappa. Counter-cultural icon. Expert negotiator of the streams of avant-garde rock and avant-garde ‘classical’. Fearless, utterly self-assured and an original, individual voice. But also a bit of a humourless bore whose music doesn’t hesitate to outstay its welcome. I wish I liked it. I was ready to like it. I gave it a chance – but the chance is gone.

Or take Gerald Barry, Terry Riley, Wolfgang Rihm. Please. There are many good reasons to like them all, except that their music fails the one test: I don’t like the noise it makes.

This article first appeared at soundandmusic.org. See all postings by The Earwig.

Alternative histories

Bernard Hughes — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:35:49 +0000

Arnold Schoenberg was born in 1874 and died in 1951 at the age of 77. George Gershwin was born in 1898 and died in 1937 at the age of 38. What if it had been the other way round?

What if Schoenberg had died in 1912 and Gershwin lived until 1975? Would the history of 20th century music been completely different?

We would still know the name of Schoenberg. There would still be Pierrot Lunaire, Verklärte Nacht, Erwartung, Gurrelieder, the Chamber Symphony, the Second Quartet, the Five Orchestral Pieces, the Three Pieces and Six Little Pieces for piano. That’s still quite a legacy.

The Earwig

But there would, of course, have been no serialism.

Or at least, there would have been no Schoenbergian serialism. Ernst Krenek arrived at a similar idea independently, and Webern might well have ended up in a similar place, but it would not have been the system it was and, more importantly, it would not have had the figurehead that Schoenberg was.

The character of Schoenberg had a lot to do with the emergence of serialism as a modernist orthodoxy, and a conservative shibboleth. He was, more or less willingly, simultaneously a poster boy for his supporters and a whipping boy for his opponents, and it’s hard to see who else might have assumed that role.

Would this imaginary switch have meant that post-war Darmstadt modernism would not have happened? With Gershwin as a tonal-music figurehead and a space where Schoenberg should have been, would history have been different? I’m not so sure.

There were a whole number of circumstances which need to be factored into the story of the rise of serialism and the avant-garde. The politics of two world wars, the rise of Soviet communism and the fear of it in the US, modernist literature, art and architecture – all these strands came together to make history happen as it did, and they would still have done without Schoenberg. If Schoenberg hadn’t existed, someone would have invented him.

A longer-lived Gershwin is more difficult to imagine. Would he have been like Stravinsky, composing into old age, or would he have dried up, like Sibelius? Who knows. Would Gershwin have been the vibrant torch-bearer for a popular classical music which would have seen off the forces of modernism? I doubt it. But would he have been a major figure in American music for as long as he lived? For certain.

This article first appeared at soundandmusic.org. See all postings by The Earwig.

Radio 3 feature

Bernard Hughes — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 07:04:22 +0000

You can hear Bernard speaking about his work with the BBC Singers as part of an interval feature on Radio 3, broadcast on 13 June. Follow this link and fast-forward to 27 minutes in.

Lost in space

Bernard Hughes — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:18:32 +0000

To the Barbican on Saturday with a young companion in tow for the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group’s children’s concert Serenade for a Satellite. The concert, presented (a bit diffidently) by composer Peter Wiegold, was a multi-media affair with a big screen, onstage mixing desk and the vague theme of ‘space’. But, like much of the music, the theme was too diffuse to make a real impact. There were pieces about satellites, constellations, the moon – any one of which would have been enough material to base the whole event around. Together they were a bit of miscellany.

The Earwig

The visuals were the highlight, credited to ‘theatre-maker’ Graeme Miller. The stage was set up as a kind of Apollo mission control room, with two co-presenters in white shirts and ties filming events as they went, their pictures mixed live with space footage on the big screen. They also contributed ‘space facts’ between pieces which sat slightly uncomfortably alongside music more interested in exploring the numinous and ethereal than the concrete and statistical. Some effects were very striking: a camera looking up through a glass of water as an Alka-Seltzer tablet dispersed into eerie constellations, and a camera attached to a balloon spinning above the stage.

Unfortunately the visuals often showed more originality than the music, which was mostly floaty, flutey, squeaky type of stuff. Some pieces had improvisatory elements, but you couldn’t have told which just by listening. The BCMG players can clearly improvise lines in the BCMG ‘house style’, almost obviating the need for composers. The most striking piece was Param Vir’s Constellations, the only one to combine a full sonic range and a vigorous energetic profile. Of the rest nothing really stood out, except for Berio’s O King, which is great but just seemed out of place.

Overall, the concert left me disappointed, coming over as a combination of a Royal Institution Christmas lecture, groovy art installation and well-meaning but slightly chaotic science lesson. I noticed more engrossed parents than children; I don’t know how many junior converts to contemporary music will have emerged at the end. My son declared it ‘alright’ but afterwards could only remember things he’d seen. For all the attention to detail the project seemed to lack confidence in itself, and have a hole in the middle where the music should have taken charge.

This article first appeared at soundandmusic.org. See all postings by The Earwig.

Farts and Longing

Bernard Hughes — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 13:08:10 +0000

Of all the books, essays and articles I have read on music history, the most insightful piece is not by an academic, but is a twenty page short story called ‘Farts and Longing’ from the 1995 collection The Music, by James Hamilton-Paterson.

It recounts a meeting between the author and Wolfgang Mozart, reincarnated as a Nigerian doctor, who offers a corrective to the received perspectives of Mozart’s life. The story suggests that modern readings of Mozart’s milieu are hampered by us being ‘foreign strangers’. For all our efforts to understand, based on the evidence available to us, all our cultural assumptions will necessarily be ’slightly off-centre, the tone always slightly skewed. That was sort of it, I suppose, but at the same time it wasn’t it by miles.‘

The Earwig

The lens through which Hamilton-Paterson chooses to look at Mozart’s life is the unlikely and deliberately provocative aspect of smell. As his ‘Mozart’ says: ‘Isn’t there a craze for historical accuracy? Historians dig out records of ordinary folk… Historical novelists try for evermore vibrant realism. They’re all on the track of the authentic: what people did, how they did it, what they saw, what they read, what they listened to, what they ate and what they wore. Yet practically nobody knows the first thing about what they smelt.’

Why does this matter?

He says ‘I can now see how intimately smells are bound up with history… Smell had yet to become pathologised or politicised, whichever you prefer. Germs weren’t known about. Pasteur’s discoveries lay a hundred years in the future.’ It wasn’t until well after Mozart’s death that the middle-classes used smell to distance themselves from the proletariat. ‘Suddenly they developed these acutely sensitive noses for smells they never used to mind and which the masses still didn’t seem to notice.’ After that ‘more than a century went by before we were handed all that analytical stuff about coprophilia and masochism. Shit had changed its meaning by then.’

This is fascinating enough territory, but Hamilton-Paterson then makes a creative leap to connect the history of smell with Mozart the working musician. ‘Last night I vividly remembered what it was like, sitting there, sitting there writing music for hours, usually cold, the table all gritty with sand… I’d open my legs and crack a long bubbly one and let the smell come drifting up over the edge of the table and inhale it like incense. It was my smell, it came from within, exactly as the music did. They both came from me and no-one else. They were inseparable, part of my power.’

What a brilliant way of using an everyday experience to offer us all an insight into the creative instinct of the greatest of artists. ‘Farts are the music of creativeness, the divine wind.’ Just so. Inspiration is like farting. And can even sound like farting: ‘I wrote them into my music. The opening of the C major symphony? The one they call the Jupiter? That was a cracker. Barp! Brrrarp! BrrrARP!’

Hamilton-Paterson picks up on how Mozart’s love of scatology, evident in his letters and centre-stage in Peter Shaffer’s portrayal of him in Amadeus, became the basis of a diagnosis of Tourette’s Syndrome in the British Medical Journal in 1983. He examines the tone of superior disappointment with which musicologists and medics alike compare Mozart’s sublime musical output with his ‘coarse’ and ‘immature’ personality. ‘Mozart’ (and behind him, Hamilton-Paterson) is appalled above all by the ignorance these positions betray: ‘So unimaginative, too, as well as impertinent.’ Mozart becomes an object of condescension, hi’s private family letters, full of private references and word-play, become symptoms. ‘Have you never felt such energy you wanted to skip and run and turn somersaults? So did I. I used to leap-frog over chairs. More fool me. It wasn’t the innocent pleasure I thought it was, it was Tourette’s…’

‘Mozart’ objects to the ‘maiden-aunt’ tone of commentary on his personality. ‘When I say these idiots are ignorant I really mean it. They have no idea what things were like then, over two hundred years ago and counting.’ Our desire to see Mozart as a revolutionary reflects our view of his society rather than his. ‘They see my rebelliousness as political. They think I was a closet radical… I wasn’t anything of the kind. I and most of my friends were Masons, for heaven’s sake. I was very conservative, like my family… I feared God and had nothing against Royalty per se. What we despised were the hypocrites who sometimes wore archbishop’s vestments.’

In that society ‘life was completely stratified. Social levels were elaborately drawn, constantly reinforced by custom and protocol and verbal formulae.’ And this in part explains the tone of his off-duty language. ‘Faced with the hermetic and flouncy social hierarchy of court life… we gave vent to our feelings by going to the opposite extreme in private. While off-duty we naturally sang canons in dialect to words like “Lick my arse really good and clean”… And of course we mocked formal occasions by giving after-dinner speeches about excrement. It wasn’t childish, it was damn well life-saving, believe me.’

I love the way Hamilton-Paterson blows the cobwebs out of our perceptions of Mozart, pleading for a more nuanced and empathetic reading through the absurd, magic-realist means of a re-incarnated Mozart drinking lager in a modern beach bar. He articulates his polemic against an unimaginative view of the past by summoning his subject out of his time into a baffling modern world.

So Hamilton-Paterson’s Mozart is more sympathetically imaginative than other portrayals, but is he more authentic? On the one hand, plainly not: it’s a fiction, deliberately combative, contrarian, unconstrained by needing academic citation for his arguments. But in another way the novelist’s freedom to invent can take him closer to ‘the authentic’ than the historian, whose scrupulous reliance on evidence is supposed to be the surest route.

Hamilton-Paterson’s invents a Mozart whose grumpiness, free association, self-aggrandisement and wit may be no nearer the ‘real man’ than Peter Shaffer’s giggling lech, or Emily Anderson’s regrettable potty-mouth. But what his act of invention tells us is very instructive.

In looking at figures from the past we should not overlook imagination, not often thought of as an academic virtue. ‘Kind of’ understanding the past is as bad as missing the point completely. Assuming we are wiser, more thoughtful, more intelligent, more anything than ‘they’ were ‘then’ is always to doom us to failure. We need to bear in mind Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns’. We can be sympathetic to aspects of historical lives to which we can relate, but there are others we know nothing about: they were so obvious to people then they didn’t need stating but so obscure to us now we don’t realise they were there. Like Mozart’s feelings about the smell of his world.

The more confident we we get in feeling we have an understanding of lives in the past the more vulnerable our position becomes. The more we remember we ‘have no idea what things were like then’ the better we stay on our guard; the more we use our imagination, the better we remember the ‘great composers’ were people before they became research projects. They ate lunch, brushed their hair, thought about sex and picked their bums on the same day they wrote great music. Lose sight of this and we lose sight of the humanity we share with them.

Finalist in international prize

Bernard Hughes — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 08:50:15 +0000

Bernard Hughes has been named as a prize-winning finalist in the international Peter and the Wolf competition in Yekaterinbrug, Russia for Not Now, Bernard, a piece for narrator and orchestra. The winner of this prestigious award will be announced on Sunday 11 April.

Composing and being a composer

Bernard Hughes — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 18:55:47 +0000

There is a quirk about the way we speak about different types of illness. Siri Hustvedt points out in her memoir The Shaking Woman:

‘No one says “I am cancer” or even “I am cancerous”, despite the fact that there is no intruding virus or bacteria. One has cancer. Neurological and psychiatric illnesses are different, however, because they attack the very source of what one imagines is one’s self. “He’s an epileptic” doesn’t sound strange to us. In the psychiatric ward, the patients often say, “Well, you see, I’m bipolar” or “I’m a schizophrenic”. The illness and the self are fully identified.’

The Earwig

This is a striking observation. And although composing music is not an illness, there is a similar identification between what a composer does and what a composer is. Being ‘a composer’ is an identity, freighted with associations and implications beyond the simple act of writing music. A composer (who is typically male) is unworldly and probably unkempt, perhaps personally abrasive or at least blunt, he is somehow elevated and lives in a mental sphere above that of day-to-day life. Even composers who differ are in some way beholden to, or at least in dialogue with, this characterisation. Schoenberg, for example, revelled in being a prophetic seer while John Cage set out to be a un-egotistical pragmatist.

This composer archetype goes back to Beethoven – or, more accurately, to myth-making in the years after his death. Beethoven’s deafness helped in removing him from world of his contemporaries, establishing him as a visionary seeking eternal truths in defiance of bodily frailty, shaking his fist at the thunderstorm. Ahistorical nonsense, most of it. Beethoven’s negotiations with publishers, for example, show a shrewd businessman with an eye for the main chance, not a hopeless dreamer. But where details like this blur the myth they are just ignored in the greater cause. And the myth has been successful, forging the popular image of the composer in the same way as the (self-)mythologising of Albert Einstein constructed the ‘mad professor’ archetypical scientist.

But beyond the imagery, for many being a composer is a calling rather than a rational career choice. I might cook food because I’m hungry, but Heston Blumenthal is a chef, and his plates of food are the results of his being a chef. Similarly, it is possible to write music without being ‘a composer’, which is a vocation, a condition of living. And a composer’s music is merely a symptom of his condition.

Which brings us back to the disease metaphor. Many sufferers of mental conditions such a bipolar disorder – Stephen Fry is a famous example – say they would not want to be cured, as they cannot imagine what they would be like as individuals without the illness. Maybe it is impossible to disentangle personality and condition; eliminate the disease and – the fear is – something essential would go with it. But would composers like to be ‘cured’ of the desire to compose? I don’t see any sign of it. Old composers don’t retire, they just get a little quavery. Elliott Carter is 101, has been a ’sufferer’ for 81 years – and I’ve never seen him without a smile on his face.

But sometimes the sense of identity can get too blurred. Many years ago I took part in a University Challenge-style quiz on Radio 3. At the beginning of the programme both teams had to introduce themselves, saying their name, home town and course of study. Faced by the two equally appropriate formations (i) ‘My name is Bernard from London and I am studying composition’ and (ii) ‘My name is Bernard from London and I am a composer’ I panicked in the face of a live microphone and heard myself plumping for an unfortunate third option: ‘My name is Bernard from London and I am a composition’.

I can still hear the laughter echoing down the years.

This article first appeared at soundandmusic.org. See all postings by The Earwig.

Partial Rihmmersion

Bernard Hughes — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:25:45 +0000

I have been sheepish for a while about my ignorance of the music of Wolfgang Rihm. Last weekend’s ‘Total Immersion’ festival was the perfect opportunity to put it right. But I couldn’t go. So I am having to rely instead on the coverage on Hear and Now – three consecutive weeks of programmes – to Rihmmerse myself as best I can.

Rihm’s sheer fecundity makes him slightly forbidding: where to start with a catalogue of over 400 pieces? The first Hear and Now started with the gripping and startling Schwarzer und roter Tanz for orchestra and the eccentric film-music – or music-with-film – Bild (eine Chiffre).

The Earwig

The 2006 cello concerto Konzert in einem Satz was given an impassioned and persuasive reading by Stephen Isserlis. More referential than Bild, more expressively wide-ranging than Schwarzer und rooter Tanz, this is a fine piece.

The programme’s finale was the immense Concerto ‘Séraphin’, another UK premiere. It is a complex and rebarbative work which, in this version, explores the soloistic skills of the London Sinfonietta over the course of 55 minutes. Admirably played though it was, Concerto ‘Séraphin’ is a challenging and not immediately rewarding listen.

The programme was presented by the quick-witted Tom Service and the composer Julian Anderson, whose contributions were both erudite and coloured by a clear personal enthusiasm for Rihm’s music. His delivery and manner are redolent of an old-fashioned, didactic, Radio 3 style – which I don’t mean as a criticism. It was complemented well by Tom Service’s fresher style. At times, such as around 1′08″ when discussing the best way to listen to the music they got into old-style ‘music appreciation’ territory, and it was slightly embarrassing.

But I am looking forward to the remaining episodes; even if I suspect that Rihm will not emerge as a favourite composer, he is certainly important and worth hearing.

This article first appeared at soundandmusic.org. See all postings by The Earwig.

New website

Bernard Hughes — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:34:25 +0000

Welcome to my re-vamped website. The site will be kept up to date with news of forthcoming performances and broadcasts, with links to relevant sites. Please get in touch with any comments, questions or suggestions.