Joanna MacGregor Crosses Tonal Grounds

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aria, Ástor Piazzolla, Brighton, Buenos Aires, Cold War, comedy, Couperin, Django Bates, English Channel, Four for Tango, fugue, godfather, harmony, Harrison Birtwistle, Joanna MacGregor, Kathy Evans, Leipzig, London, mafia, Melbourne, Messiaen, Metropolis New Music Festival, Musical Toys, Old Testament, opera, ornamentation, piano, Pierre Boulez, prelude, Rapunzel, Royal Academy of Music, Shostakovich, Sofia Gubaidulina, SoundCircus, Steinway & Sons, Talvin Singh, The Sydney Morning Herald, Tiger Mother, toccata, tragedy, trill

Joanna MacGregor

Pianist Joanna MacGregor heads, Rapunzel-like, to the top of a tower and stares out across to where the pebbled lips of the coastline kiss the slate blue waters of the English Channel. Here she will stay for hours, because this is where she keeps her Steinway; safely out of earshot “which is really important for the neighbors.” You’d think in the seaside town of Brighton that the locals would be queuing up to hear her perform on a daily basis (without having to shell out), but clearly MacGregor is as anxious as the rest of us when it comes to maintaining diplomatic relations with the residents in her street.

She is busy preparing for her latest globetrotting tour, which will take in Portugal and New Zealand, before she arrives in Melbourne for the Metropolis New Music Festival. It might be a celebration of the contemporary, but of course MacGregor will be playing Bach – almost three hundred years dead but still sounding deliciously “modern.” The innovative pianist might be known for casting her net wide in search of distinctive collaborations, but Bach is never far behind. The ”new music” part comes from the presence of Shostakovich, Messiaen and English composer Harrison Birtwistle, whose pieces are interwoven throughout the program.

Like a giddy journey in a time-machine through collisions of era and continent, her concert program begins in Germany during the Baroque period before heading east to a chilly Soviet Union followed by a hook turn through France, then back to a thawed-out Russia via Britain. She finishes in Buenos Aires with Four, for Tango from the master of the bandoneon, Astor Piazzolla.”Yes, I suppose it is quite a journey,” she laughs. “I hadn’t really thought of it that way.”

It all starts with a handful of Bach’s now-famous preludes and fugues – the Old Testament of keyboard repertoire – made up of forty-eight short pieces in every key imaginable, from which she segues into Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues. But don’t be deceived by the somewhat pedagogical title. Wrapped up in each of these little pieces, only a few minutes long, is an entire musical world in microcosm where fiery toccatas, ceremonial entrances, operatic arias meet comic moments and tragic dramas.

How Shostakovich, who found Bach “boring,” came to emulate his iconic keyboard work is, says MacGregor, a classic Cold War tale. Sent against his will as a cultural ambassador to Leipzig in 1950, the composer found himself morosely sitting on the jury of the first international Bach Competition. But his ears pricked up when a Russian pianist sat down and played from The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93), as the Bach collection is known. Impressed, he returned to Moscow and penned twenty-four of his own. “It’s interesting how the two hundred years between the composers completely dissolves when you play them,” says MacGregor. “I do a little trick at the end when I play two Shostakovich fugues, one after the other, and then finish with Bach. By then the audience shouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

Maybe, but when it comes to the crunch, which does she prefer? “Bach,” she says without missing a beat. “He’s the main man. With a lot of Western music it all goes back to Bach. All the harmonic progressions and techniques are absolutely watertight. You can’t get away from him. He’s like a godfather in a mafia way. He’s just there and present in everything.”

In keeping with this year’s festival theme, the natural world, she has selected a number of works that revolve around birds. Hot on the heels of the winged medley comes works by Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, innocently entitled Musical Toys, which, she says, like the best fairy tales, are a perfect mix of enchantment and fear.

MacGregor has spent her life nudging classical music into new territories and has collaborated with the likes of jazz musician and composer Django Bates, Talvin Singh, the father of modern Asian electronic music, and the French pianist, composer and writer, Pierre Boulez. In line with her determination to dismantle musical barriers, she also runs her own record label, SoundCircus.

Her drive towards the eclectic and intuitive modus operandi comes, perhaps, from not having been hot-housed as a child. Despite being the daughter of a piano teacher, MacGregor says she never felt pressure to practice; there were no Tiger Mother schedules to uphold. “Playing for me is as natural as breathing. To be a musician, you have to have a desire to listen and explore music. If you are one of those kids who are forced to practice you end up utterly miserable.” At the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she is head of piano, there are only a handful of students who have been hot-housed. “What you are looking for in young people . . . is this absolute natural response and enthusiasm and ebullience when they hear music, rather than cracking the whip.”

It is time for MacGregor to head back up the tower to revisit those tonal universes of the preludes and fugues or to recapture the trills and ornamental chirrups of Couperin’s birds. She does so with a cheerful heart. “It’s all so enjoyable, I can’t think of anything better.”

Kathy Evans – The Sydney Morning Herald

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That Bond Sound

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Academy Award, Airport, Alfred Newman, Alfred Tennyson, American Beauty, Aston Martin, brass, Burt Bacharach, cantata, cantus firmus, Charlie Chaplin, City Lights, Cold War, Condé Nast, CounterPunch, Daniel Craig, David Yearsley, film music, flute, guitar, Hollywood, James Bond, Javier Bardem, Joey Newman, John Barry, Judi Dench, London, Marvin Hamlisch, Mass in B minor, Monty Norman, mute, Oscar Award, Paris, Pierce Brosnan, Randy Newman, Sam Mendes, Shanghai, Silence of the Lambs, Skyfall, soundtrack, St. Gervais, Thomas Newman, Toy Story 3, trombone, WALL-E, Walt Disney

While the greatest musical dynasties ruled over vast empires of the imagination, their geographic domains were small. The Couperins held the organist post at the church of St. Gervais in Paris for nearly two hundred years from middle of the seventeenth century to well into the nineteenth. For a still longer period legions of Bach relations spread out through the Lutheran heartland of central Germany like industrious musical beavers. Churches, court chapels, schools: these were the modest and often confining venues where the Bachs practiced their craft.

The reach of these august families is dwarfed by that of the most influential of all musical lines – the Newmans of Hollywood. Not yet extending across as many generations as the clans just mentioned, this movie-music dynasty rules the multiplex and therefore the world.

Whereas the most august of the Couperins and Bachs produced some of the monuments the Baroque, from elegant and profound keyboard pieces to monumental vocal works, the Newmans have given the world countless soundtracks and orchestrated even more. J. S. Bach produced more than two hundred cantatas in a handful of years, but the greatest of the Newmans – Alfred the Indefatigable – was still more prolific. This Newman’s career spanned Hollywood’s Golden Age, from City Lights of 1931 (Chaplin himself wrote the score; Newman was his music director) to the star-studded flames of Airport released in 1970, the year of the composer’s death. What is the majesty of the Mass in B minor (BWV 232) as against Newman’s most familiar (and perhaps shortest) piece – the Twentieth Century Fox fanfare, that proudest signal of America’s enduring moving-picture pride and the ultimate Pavlovian cue to moviegoers that two-hours of generally mindless escapism will immediately ensue? Just look at the Academy Award tally: Newman forty Nominations and nine Oscars; Bach zero. (True, the latter should have posthumously gotten the bullet-headed statuette for his laudable work on Silence of the Lambs.)

The next generation of Newmans is at the height of its powers. Nephew Randy approaches seventy and has twenty Academy award nominations to his credit; he’s won only twice, and not for scores, but rather for original songs. When he received the award in 2011 for his song for Toy Story 3 he joked that he was so often at the nominee dinner that the Academy had named a chicken dish after him. Busy in TV and video games and with a few less-than-distinguished features to his credit, Joey Newman represents the third generation of this film composing dynasty. He chose to take his mother’s family name for obvious reasons.

Alfred’s son Thomas Newman was born in 1955, educated at Yale, and already has ten Academy Award nominations, though in line with the low Newman family winning percentage he has yet to win the foolish thing. In a faintly just universe, his 2008 score for the Disney feel-bad-but-then-feel-good-in-spite-of-the-environemtnal-apocalypse WALL-E would have received the award. But no awards in this or any other universe are as arbitrary as the Oscar.

The first forty-five minutes of WALL-E follow the ceaseless diligence of an endearing binocular-eyed robot on a lifeless planet earth reduced to a landfill by human wastefulness. Since the first half of the movie is completely without dialogue, vast sonic space is cleared for Newman’s soundtrack. He makes the most of the opportunity to demonstrate a command of orchestral sonority as nuanced and imaginative as that of his father. The robot’s sense of wonder at the arrival of a spaceship is captured with the shimmering strings and oscillating harmonies beloved of film composers, but here enlivened with winking references to classics like Bizet’s Habanera and maybe even that very same Alfred Newman Fox fanfare. The younger Newman has a great sense of timing, one that must of necessity follow the dictates of the on-screen action. But his score bravely follows its own musical logic as well. No one sends out rushes of sound to collide with silence more dramatically than Newman. Even his rests make sense, something that cannot be said for many a soundtrack.

In his father’s era, the ability to allude to a wider repertory was also vital to film composers, but nowadays the poaching of elements from disparate musical styles is a prerequisite for success in a gourmandizing culture that starts pawing through the fridge for left-overs of yesterday’s feast before the plates heaped with today’s faddish fare have even been cleared from the table. The scene in which WALL-E goes on a first date with a sleek, white and apparently female robot steps around its own maudlin ooze thanks to Newman’s scoring of the encounter with a smoky shuffle and close-harmony doo-waps. Newman supplies the needed comic effect by surrounding an earnest android suitor and airy super model with the sonic haze of a retro 1970s lounge. But even here Newman does not drown in his own irony, but instead splashes happily about on its surface; among other life rings, it’s ardent Bacharach violins that keep the music afloat.

Ease with both the symphonic tradition and world music have equipped Thomas Newman to take up his latest and most ambitious mission: a James Bond soundtrack. Other illustrious film composers, Marvin Hamlisch and John Barry have preceded him. Barry rendered service to eleven of the Bond films, that is nearly half of the current total of twenty-three. Although Barry didn’t compose the theme song (that was done by Monty Norman), he did provide its distinctive sound – the dissonant brass chords, the lecherously distorted guitar riff, the slinky flutes, the bawdy trombones with plunger mutes. That immediately defined the martini swilling, dinner jacket-wearing toff flying around the world keeping its casinos, bars, and beaches safe for democracy. Here was a sound that conveyed chutzpah and cunning and encouraged, even more quickly than one of those martinis, the necessary suspension of disbelief in order to swoon before his literally lady-killing cool.

Each new Bond actor and each new Bond film is now accompanied by pr-driven talk of transformation. The pugilistic face of Daniel Craig certainly helps present an agent who’s been a few times around the bloc, both East and West. Craig’s status as a bona fide A-list leading man helps too. That the auteur Sam Mendes is in the director’s chair – or more frequently helicopter – lends class to the project: Mendes is a fellow Brit who came to Hollywood from the London theatre-world and with his first feature film, American Beauty of 1999, landed one of those Oscar I somehow keep referring to. Newman’s percussion-driven score for the movie was also nominated. American Beauty was pretentious and ponderous, and the music did nothing to relieve the suffocating aura of self-seriousness.

But the Mendes-Newman team certainly provides the kind of prestige that the hoary Bond franchise thinks it needs to trudge on in the post-Cold War era. Before we are even oriented in Skyfall and the sweaty danger of a hot-spot, third world locale in which it opens we get two shock chords which are meant to jolt the audience into knowing immediately that Bond is back and that the he’s still got it. With the sparsest of sonic means, Newman and Mendes literally trumpet their pledge that the brand is intact. Over the subsequent two hours kinetic chases using various kinds of vehicles – from motorcycles to subway cars – are separated from one another with set-piece speeches in which distinguished British actors pontificate about the lasting value of the old human methods of intelligence and espionage that are threatened with obsolescence in the digital age. These intervals of soporific calm are even more boring than they otherwise would because of the absence of music. At least there’s bad-guy Javier Bardem to have some campy fun with his lines. When Dame [!] Judi Dench’s M begins quoting Tennyson before a parliamentary panel, the Bond corporation might as well be appearing in creative bankruptcy court.

When allowed to, Newman’s score tries its best to keep this rambling wreck on the road. After that salvo of vintage chords from his predecessor Barry, Newman is given space after the credits to show his majestic talent by weaving in the sinuous and instantly recognizable Bond chromatic thread into expansive orchestral textures of his own. In Newman’s hands the Bondian motive becomes a kind of cantus firmus; he sneaks it in in one spot and brandishes it like a rocket-launcher in another. With each stop on Bond’s Condé Nast itinerary, Newman amps things with global rhythms, from the techno hustle in the dazzling nocturnal neon of modern Shanghai to the beach drums of what might be Bali. Newman keeps things moving along, but when, like Bond, his hands are tied and his music silenced you feel the movie slump forward in its chair.

The producers think the easiest way to cut him free is with the old gags: I suspect the Broccoli heiress (Barbara) and her half brother Michael Wilson are responsible for bringing the Aston Martin with machine guns hidden in the fender out of mothballs so 007 can road-trip it back to his ancestral manse called Skyfall with M, evil ex-agent Mr. Silver (Barden) close on their heals with an army of cinematic cannon fodder.

As soon as we see that silver sports car the soundtrack reverts to Barry’s Bond music in all its big band glory. This knowing ploy is meant to let is in on the irony of infinite regression: Craig playing the new Bond playing the old Bond. But it’s all been done before: the Aston Martin and the blaring brass have been de-mothballed for at least a couple installments from the Pierce Brosnan interregnum. That Newman is made in Skyfall to reheat the Barry’s classic material is hardly a humiliation – especially at the kind of fees Newman likely pulled in for his work. But it becomes immediately clear that what began with the fresh treatment of overused musical themes, ends in a rout of the new. It is telling that the soundtrack is the first to hoist the white flag of surrender to the imperatives of the brand. In the random darkness of this untethered romp, the music piped in from the past allows one to close the eyes, lean back, and think of an England that doesn’t even qualify as myth.

David Yearsley – CounterPunch

Eurovision: A Unique European Contribution to World Culture

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ABBA, Buranovskiye Babushki, Cold War, dance, Engelbert Humperdinck, Eurovision Song Contest, Father Ted, kitsch, live broadcasting, microwave, popular music, Riverdance, satellite, Simon Taylor, singing contest, Volvo

Europe is proud of its cultural heritage, whether it’s the Renaissance, beautiful icons in Ukrainian churches, Shakespeare, Bach or Truffaut. But perhaps Europe’s greatest contribution to world culture is the Eurovision Song Contest. If you’ve never seen this, you should watch it. Once. If you have seen it, your opinion will probably depend on your nationality. Essentially amused and dismissive in the west of Europe and apparently passionate and serious in the east.

The Eurovision Song Contest originated in a combination of technology and post-war national friendship. Before satellites, microwave transmission held out the possibility of live transmission of events across national boundaries. The Eurovision system was set up to trial international live broadcasting (partly on the back of cold war technology designed to survive nuclear war, but let’s not dwell on that). And the Swiss leadership of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) thought it would be a nice symbol of European friendship in the 1950s, to stage an international singing contest. The first was held in 1956 in Switzerland, with only seven countries (the Swiss won). The final on 26 May 2012 in Baku, Azerbaijan will feature forty-two countries. Armenia is not participating, owing to its troubled relationship with Azerbaijan, nor is Poland for some reason.

So the “Euro”vision song contest has nothing to do with the euro currency, or the European Union, or increasingly any historic conception of what is Europe. You can argue that Iceland and Russia are European, plus the various Former Soviet Union states. But nobody thinks Turkey is European, let alone Israel. And Morocco? Qatar has recently expressed interest in joining. The Lebanon used to be a member but withdrew over the matter of broadcasting the Israeli song.

The idea of a light entertainment contest that showed what Europeans have in common (poor taste perhaps) has exploded into a gigantic, colourful, absurd and kitsch demonstration of national differences, but in a mostly good-natured way. The number of countries hugely increased because of the end of the Soviet Union and the fragmentation of Yugoslavia. (The fragmentation continues: Scotland and Kosovo have both unsuccessfully asked to be included.) Viewers in the 1970s had probably never heard of Moldova or Bosnia and Herzogovina. Now the event is a glorious geography lesson.

Britain has a rather smug, ironic view of the whole thing, despite having won it five times (equal second place with France and for some reason Luxembourg). The undisputed winners are Ireland, with seven wins. The winner hosts the event and it was rumoured that the Irish broadcaster RTE was running up such huge bills hosting it that they tried to make sure Ireland stopped winning (there is an excellent “Father Ted” episode about this). The wonderful Riverdance show, which overnight modernised Ireland, originated as an interval entertainment during one of these performances and rapidly went on to be a global success, mainly because it was so much better than the Song Contest itself.

Britain’s condescending attitude arises from its massively successful commercial popular music industry, second only to the US in size and far larger on a per capita basis. On this basis the UK ought to win every year. But the Eurovision song is not designed to appeal to the people who download music. It’s meant to be more inclusive, appealing to a wider audience that includes your grandparents. So the winning song is normally atrocious and the winners vanish from public view soon afterwards. (A rare but dramatic example to the contrary is ABBA, who went on to become one of the most popular entertainment acts of the late twentieth century and Sweden’s biggest exporter, ahead of Volvo).

Britain’s entry in 2012 is the 1960s crooner Engelbert Humperdinck who, despite being named after a minor nineteenth century German composer, was born Arnold Dorsey and grew up near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, the official home of Stilton cheese (honestly, I’m not making this up). The brilliant idea of choosing someone so old, and sure to appeal to the older voters, was frustrated when Russia entered the Buranovskiye Babushki, which includes a woman even older than Englebert.

The friendly European solidarity theme has been eclipsed in recent years by overt reminders of nationalist solidarity and tension. Don’t expect Greece to vote for the German song for example. Do expect the former Soviet republics to vote for each other. As for Greece, Cyprus and Turkey, best not to think about that. The Eurovision Song Contest is therefore a reminder to the world of how strange Europe is: the most divided, fragmented continent with an extraordinary patchwork quilt of independent sovereign nations, whose influence still reaches far beyond its original borders, and which still more or less hangs together. There is something positive in that, even when you’re wincing at the latest contribution from Luxembourg.

Simon Taylor – Behind Blue Eyes

Eisenach at the Crossroads

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Berlin, Berlin Wall, bicycle, bike path, Cold War, cycling, Eastern Bloc, Eisenach, German border, German Democratic Republic, Iron Curtain, Iron Curtain Trail, Martin Luther, Plattenbau, St. George Church, Thuringia, Via Regia, Wartburg

For nearly a thousand years, the east-west Via Regia (King’s Road) had passed through Eisenach, thereby attracting merchants, pilgrims and invading armies as they traveled between Ukraine and Spain, but when in 1961 the German Democratic Republic’s border with West Germany was fortified with land mines, watchtowers and high fences, west-bound travelers suddenly found themselves facing an 800-mile long and 3-mile wide death trap. Eisenach’s minimally safe distance from the border, connection with historical figures (Martin Luther’s refuge at Wartburg Castle and Bach’s baptism at St. George Church) and industrial capacity allowed the little city to survive, but, at first, life in Eisenach under the new regime was a struggle as both a housing shortage and air pollution were intensified by the influx of thousands of refugees from former German territories. Crowding and environmental concerns were gradually eased as officials systematically replaced derelict sections of the Old City with new Plattenbau housing developments, and by the time that the Berlin Wall was dismantled in 1989, Eisenach was hosting two million Eastern Bloc visitors every year.

Now that Germany has been reunited, Eisenach finds itself back at the midpoint of the German segment of the Via Regia and, surprisingly, discovers that it is benefitting from its proximity to the former border zone between the two Germanies. The substantially north-south swath of land that had cut indiscriminately across pristine farmland, beautiful villages and dense forests filled with wildlife has been transformed into a green belt featuring a challenging bike path called the Iron Curtain Trail. Once again Eisenach and the state of Thuringia, the geographical center of Germany and homeland of the Bach clan, are ready to welcome all visitors.

In Memoriam: Wes Blomster

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Berlin Wall, Cold War, Eastern Bloc, German Democratic Republic, Hanns Eisler, Iron Curtain, national anthem, Risen from Ruins, Second World War, Song of the Germans, Theodor Adorno, University of Colorado, Wes Blomster

Since Wes passed away earlier this year, much has been written about his role as a music critic, and I, too, as both a performer and concert patron, have eagerly read each of his reviews with great interest, but my earliest and fondest memories of him are from the early seventies when I was a German student of his at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Forty years ago the Cold War was raging, and the instruction that my classmates and I received from Wes had more to do with the role that Germany had played, and was continuing to play, in our middle-American lives than the mechanics of the German language. News reports were arriving from Europe almost daily, and Wes was certain that we needed to improve our understanding of history before we could appreciate the importance of these current events.

For me, a music major, Wes’s lessons on the politics of music were a revelation. First we examined the disdain that Theodor Adorno felt for the German Democratic Republic’s transformation of Bach into a “neutralized cultural monument” in 1950 during the bicentennial commemoration of the composer’s death. Then we considered how Oscar-nominee Hanns Eisler had been scrutinized two years earlier by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, deported, and subsequently celebrated in East Germany as the composer of its new national anthem, Risen from Ruins. Finally we analyzed the original 1841 text of the West German national anthem, The Song of the Germans, so that we might understand why, after the Second World War, it was only legal to sing its third verse.

This sample syllabus reveals that Wes Blomster contributed greatly to all of our University educations by serving as a professor of the humanities and the social sciences as well as a Professor of German.

I received an additional gift from Wes, one that he conferred on me the last time we spoke: an enthusiasm for taking an inquisitive world view whenever possible, whatever the discipline or topic of discussion.