Tom Roper's Weblog

Composer(s) of the week

Too, too ecstatic-making. Richard Addinsell and Noel Coward: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/cotw/pip/00ytk/

Pigs in Scotland

Every librarian's favourite open access band are breaking new ground. Not only did a subset of the Bearded Pigs recently play London's famous Ridgmount Street, I now hear they have a date in Scotland planned, at the CILIP in Scotland conference in Peebles on the night of Tuesday 3 June. The moose or elk is to be reintroduced to Scotland: how will it coexist with Sus barbatus?

I cannot be there but should dearly love to hear them interpret my favourite Scottish song, Hamish Henderson's Freedom Come All Ye. I shall also miss their annual appearance at MLA, this year in Picago.

The author (right, with glass of malt) and Bruce the Almighty, HLG conference, Edinburgh, 2002

Indelicates: American Demo: Reverse Baldness, Change Your Life

I hesitate to review a CD. Like every other half-educated man of my age, I spent the early to mid 70s in thrall to the NME, believing that I too could write like Nick Kent or Charles Shaar Murray. Too many of us have fastened on the blog as a way to revive these ambitions in the evening of our lives. But I must say something about the brilliance of the Indelicates' American Demo. Milton is not often referred to in modern music; French symbolists are so much more en vogue. But American Demo proudly bears an epigraph from Satan's speech to the fallen angels:
'....Peace is despaired
For who can think submission? War then, war
Open or understood, must be resolved'
Paradise Lost Book 1 660-662

Epic is not a form often attempted by modern musicians, but the Indelicates' choice of Milton is significant. Martial, too, is present, in mordant satirical songs. I know many of these from the earlier downloadable versions and it is thrilling to hear them now in new, more polished arrangements; then there are also new pleasures: Unity Mitford, If Jeff Buckley had Lived, Heroin, America....
I wish I had seen them perform.

A footnote: a search for the passage from Paradise Lost found it on Google Books in a digitised volume Poetry from 1660 to 1780: Civil War, Restoration, Revolution, along with the sensitive and appropriate advertisement: Hair Restoration: Reverse Baldness. Change Your Life. Request a Free Quotation.

Bach cantatas

The next two of John Eliot Gardiner's Bach cantata cycle landed on my doormat today, on volume 27, the cantatas for Whit Tuesday, BWV 184 Erwünschtes Freudenlicht and BWV 175 Er rufet seinen Schafen mit Namen and those for Trinity Sunday, BWV 165 O heil'ges Geist- und Wasserbad, BWV 194 Höchsterwünschtes Freudenfest and BWV 129 Gelobet sei der Herr, mein Gott, recorded in St Magnus' Kirkwall, and volume 3, cantatas for Fourth and Fifth Sundays after Trinity, the first set, BWV 24 Ein ungefärbt Gemüte, BWV 185 Barmherziges Herze der ewigen Liebe and BWV 177 Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, recorded in Tewkesbury Abbey and the second BWV 71 Gott ist mein König, BWV 131 Aus der Tiefen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir, BWV 93 Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten, and BWV 88 Siehe, ich will viel Fischer aussenden from Blasiuskirche, Mühlhausen.
I well remember when BBC Radio 3 broadcast Bach cantatas every Sunday in the early 1970s, in the correct liturgical order. A teenager at the time, I was amazed at the richness and variety of these works. I have long wanted a complete set and these, with the Monteverdi Choir, performed on a Bach pilgrimage in 2000, are just the thing. I don't understand the order in which they're released.

Technorati Tags: bach, cantatas

Hail, bright Cecilia

It was only when a student asked me the date that I remembered that today is St Cecilia's day

Medea in opera

Nothing is so annoying as when a post that is maturing in one' s mind is pre-empted by someone else, as an idea for writing about Medea in opera, inspired the illustration I used for my review of the Cambridge Greek play, was by Andrew Huth in the Guardian. Oddly, he doesn't mention Charpentier's opera.

Fingerprinting

I've downloaded last.fm's fingerprinting tool, currently in beta. If I understand it correctly, it will scan my iTunes and take the metadata, mingle it with everybody else's, the end result being better than the sum of its parts.
This seems to me a thoroughly good idea. I have long been frustrated with the uselessness of the Gracenote database iTunes relies on. It frequently confuses artist and composer. To take an example, matching my CDs of Bach's Well-tempered Clavier performed by Davitt Moroney with Gracenote produces some entries that are fine, but some in which composer and performer are transposed. Only some track titles give title,  book  and number,  key and  BWV number. And so on....

A forensic use for iTunes

There are extraordinary goings-on in classical music, discussed at some length on this morning's CD Review on BBC Radio 3 . It is a technological detective story. Brian Ventura, put a CD of Lisztz's Transcendental Etudes, played by Joyce Hatto in his computer; the CDDB database iTunes uses decided it was by Lászlo Simon instead. He contacted the Gramophone, and tests were performed on recordings attributed to Hatto by Pristine Audio and Royal Holloway College's AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM). These demonstrated that the recording sold under Hatto's name on her husband W.H. Barrington-Coupe's Concert Artist/Fidelio label are not by her but by other pianists. Hatto died last year and, the public were told, had been ill with cancer since the 1970s, causing her withdrawal form performance until the late flowering that the Concert Artists recordings purported to document. Barrington-Coupe, who has yet to make a statement on the recordings, served a prison sentence for tax evasion, according to the Daily Telegraph.
See the Guardian's obituary at the time of her death, for an example of some of the praise lavished on her recordings.

Technorati Tags: joycehatto

Message in a ballad

I have always enjoyed Private Passions, the thinking man or woman's Desert Island Discs, in which the composer Michael Berkeley asks guests about their musical passions. I was very pleased to come across a copy of a book, anthologising guests' selections for all the series so far, and read it as I sat with my mother in hospital. There's now a new series and in today's programme David Gordon, Dean of Manchester medical school was interviewed. Gordon and Berkeley discussed the link between medicine and music, always interesting, and playing a Schoenberg arrangement of Johann Strauss the younger’s waltz Rosen aus dem Süden (Roses from the South), surprising for one hardly expects the austere and cerebral members of the Second Viennese School to trouble themselves with frivolous waltzes.
For the first time I can recall, a guest brought a scientific paper with him. Unfortunately the programme did not give any details, still less a citation, but the paper was about how important musical taste can be in forming relationships; that in itself is not surprising, everyone will remember the significance shared cultural tastes are in the early stages of relationships, and that is doubtless why patrons of internet dating sites go into such detail about their artistic, musical and literary favourites. The interesting thing about this research was that it demonstrated that these judgements were accurate: "observers were able to form consensual and accurate impressions on the basis of targets’ music preferences".
I believe this research to be the following paper:
Psychol Sci. 2006 Mar;17(3):236-42 Message in a ballad: the role of music preferences in interpersonal perception.
Rentfrow PJ, Gosling SD.
PDF here

What, I wonder, does my last.fm profile say about me?

Technorati Tags: internetdating, schoenberg, taste, waltz

Classical music blogs

The egregious Norman Lebrecht holds forth on classical music blogs in a piece in La Scena and the Evening Standard; unfortunately he aims some unwarranted accusations at the excellent On an Overgrown Path, who replies robustly.

Technorati Tags: normanlebrecht