In my first year at Edinburgh University I was involved in the student production of Mozart’s opera, ‘The Marriage of Figaro’. The cast sang in English, as I recall (the opera is originally in Italian). It contains some of the most wonderful music and, from my position in the orchestra (I played clarinet), I watched each night as the drama played out. Mozart loved the clarinet – a relatively new invention in his day – and he gives it some lovely melodies.
I knew the guy playing the continuo part, an older student called Gareth Wilson, and he would excitedly point out the sublime, exquisite harmonies with which Mozart tells Da Ponte’s story of class struggle and love. The words ‘sublime’ and ‘exquisite’, if not invented for the purpose of describing Mozart’s art, surely found their calling when he began to write his music.
My other excitement about this particular staging is that my fellow Edinburgh music graduate and fellow Northerner, Emma Morwood (pictured), is playing the lead female role of Susanna. You know those people who just stand out from the crowd and draw people in with their warmth, good-nature, and sense of humour? Emma was one of those at university and she lit up the music faculty 🙂
DUBLIN May 7+8, DUNDALK May 11, SLIGO May 13, GALWAY May 15, DERRY May 20, CARLOW May 22, TALLAGHT May 25, THURLES May 28, TRALEE May 30, BRAY June 2
Tickets: €18-€30. Booking fee may apply.
A few weeks ago I did a recording for one of my fellow tenors in New Dublin Voices, jazz pianist Stephen Kenny. He has formed a duo with a Finnish singer called Milla Mamia and they needed a demo so they could advertise. I used my Zoom H4 recorder in my kitchen to make the recordings. Firstly, Milla and Stephen did the song and I took a direct stereo output from my Nord Stage piano. Then, I was able to have Milla listen back to that piano track through headphones and sing into the Zoom’s built-in stereo microphones. I then did some editing to do in Audacity, the final stage of which was adding reverb to Milla’s voice.
One of the songs they recorded was ‘The Rainbow Connection’ by Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher. This song was pipped for a Grammy in 1979, the year Kermit the Frog sang it in The Muppet Movie. It’s been covered by many people since then (check out the list on Wikipedia’s entry for the song) but I couldn’t find one I liked as much as Milla & Stephen’s. Actual tears!
Kermit is, of course, the benchmark 🙂 I love the attention to detail – the way his hand moves on the chord changes and he strums the correct pattern. Genius puppetry.
The rules were that the piece had to be for SATB with a small amount of divisi permitted. The text also had to be Irish, preferably. I found a great poem by James Joyce (whose poetry I didn’t know at all) called ‘I Hear An Army’ and fell in love with it, despite being warned that permission to use Joyce’s work is hard to get. I actually still haven’t heard back from the copyright holder…fingers crossed. I think it comes out of copyright in six years anyway, by which time I *might* be happy with the piece! My composition professor in university, Nigel Osborne, encouraged me to use comtemporary poets’ work but there is something to be said for not having to worry about copyright. Assuming the publisher/poet is nice, though, it’s still nothing to be put off by, really. You’ll probably have to pay a bit to use the text and write emails and talk to people, but that helps one feel like a proper composer. Which is half the battle.
John Adams also has a few things to say about composition workshops on his (also beautifully designed) site…
I’ll say more about this in another post…
Two videos to finish. I have to return some instruments that I borrowed for some ‘Introduction to Musical Instruments’ sessions I did the other day for some lovely kids in Chapelizod. I brought along my piano (“…but you said it was a keyboard…” “Yes, yes, you’re right, it *is* a keyboard. It sounds like a piano, though, doesn’t it?” “Sort of…”), guitar, clarinet, drum, shaker, some violins, some chime bars, some lovely bass chime bars and we had a marvellous time playing all those and talking about them and all the other, far more interesting things that they thought of that second. Kids are great 🙂
First video is of Conor O’Brien (whose band, Villagers, are about to release their debut album) singing on Jools Holland. I think he’s a very very good performer and songwriter. I saw him play a solo set last summer and I was hooked. Enjoy 🙂
Second video is of the lovely Kristin Chenoweth singing ‘The Girl in 14G’. I was rehearsing this song with Suzanne McDonnell for her recital on Tuesday week. Fun piece and another great performance. Quick gripe: the recital may have to be in the afternoon, not the evening as it has been in previous years. Why? Because of the work-to-rule that the unionised university employees are following. It means that family and friends don’t get to come and the students play to an empty hall. Brilliant.
I just found this video for OK Go’s song, ‘This Too Shall Pass’, via Graham Linehan’s feast of a blog, ‘Why That’s Delightful’. There’s something about the surprise elements of this video (and the other, amazing domino-machine one) that takes my breath away. For some reason, too, the song itself appealed to me much more in the context of the marching band video than it did in the domino one. Live performance…especially when we can see those lovely glockenspiel breaks…and the gradual expansion of the cast (creating, like in the domino video, a continual sense of delight). Great stuff. Truly important, bar-raising art for an internet age of living, loving human beings.
Read the band’s guitarist’s piece in the NY Times, too, about the short-sightedness of record companies. Specifically EMI in this case. If we enjoy watching videos on YouTube, and we love music, then we should know about this stuff.
I was introduced to the Mouth Off! podcast this week, an intoxicating mix of gushing enthusiasm, Americanisms that would make a Dublin Southside teenager blush, and great contemporary acapella music. I loved it and will definitely be listening again.
They reviewed The Swingle Singers’ latest album, ‘Ferris Wheel’, and I was all for buying it but couldn’t find it on iTunes. One of their recommendations I did find, though, was Riltons Vänner. Check out this sexy, slick slice of singing:
I accompanied Suzanne McDonnell today at her mid-term performance exam at Dundalk IT. She did really well and I was happy that we did a good set. She opened with a solo piece by Morton Feldman called ‘Only’ and then I joined her for the rest: Antonio Carlos Jobim’s ‘Chovendo na roseira’, Erykah Badu’s ‘Green Eyes’, and a bluesy original called ‘Play Me’.
The three other students who did their exams today all did great pieces. First up was Cathal Johnston, a trad. harmonica player, who did one of my favourite tunes, O’Carolan’s ‘Sà Bheag, Sà Mhór’, amongst others. Another soprano, Siobhain Murphy, did Sondheim’s ‘Green Finch and Linnet Bird’ – Johanna’s song about captivity from Sweeney Todd – and three of Britten’s ‘Cabaret Songs’ (all settings of Britten’s friend W.H. Auden): ‘Oh tell me the truth about love’, ‘Funeral Blues’, and ‘Johnny’. Finally Mark Nutley did Edward Gregson’s Tuba Concerto which I really enjoyed. A great gig!
I’ve been working on choral pieces which I’ll do a seperate blog post about. My friend Jonny Boyle let me know about an SATB carol competition being judged by Bob Chilcott and James Macmillan. Macmillan is one of my absolute favourite composers, so it would be a real thrill to have him judge something I’d written. The search is on for a Christmas/winter text…
Wind turbine at Dundalk IT - taken with Hipstamatic iPhone app
I want to compose music. Well, I do compose music, rather, I want to grasp the sense of vocation that speaks through the hard-won wisdom of these writers.
Last night a good friend of mine listened to a rough recording of my latest piece in a noisy pub, her hands cupped around her earbudded pinnae, her body hunched over my iPhone. She was able to give me some really good feedback and to help me towards fixing some of the problems with the piece; as was her friend, whose non-musical language was really insightful.
So much of what I was thinking about was echoed and expanded by the Guardian article and I think I’ll be reading it over and over during the next while.
My friend Jonny posted this as his facebok status about an hour ago:
POISONED BY MACDONALDS BLUES went to macd’s for a wispa mcflurry now im running to the toilet in a hurry went to macd’s, got me a big mac spent the next day flat on my back went to macd’s for a diet coke outta my way im gonna boke went to macd’s, got me some fries now i feel like im gonna die i aint ever goin back to eat that food although i hear the big tasty is quite good i got those poisoned by macdonalds blues
My friend Brian recommended The Low Anthem to me a few weeks ago and lent me ‘Oh My God, Charlie Darwin’. It’s a mix of beautiful and barnstorming folk and I hadn’t even listened to the whole thing when I noticed, entered, and WON! a ticket competition in the last edition of Le Cool. Le Cool is a great e-zine that highlights interesting things happening in the city* every week. Or, as they more eloquently put it, “a free weekly cultural agenda and alternative city guide”. It works really well on the iPhone, too, with the pages sliding over to the side.
The gig was in Vicar Street, having been moved from Whelan’s due to a large demand for tickets. The whole ground floor of Vicar Street was packed with 20s/30s cool people and older cool people. There were beards and checked shirts in abundance. We had our customary Jameson & Cokes in the bar. I thought it was more of a longneck beer night, but Brian has a predilection for that particular combo which wouldn’t be staved off and I joined him for auld lang syne. It’s a while since we saw each other and so we managed to miss the support act but we wandered into the main venue shortly after nine and contemplated where it would be best to stand. Having found the perfect spot that managed to suit our very different physicalities, we awaited the band’s arrival on stage. Tom Waits played over the PA system…
Photo taken using Hipstamatic iPhone app
At about twenty-five past nine they came on, looking just right. The lead singer said they’d be playing three types of songs: songs from ‘Oh My God, Charlie Darwin’, some new songs they’d been working on for the past six weeks, and some old American songs. I’m afraid I didn’t even bother trying to keep a setlist because I don’t know any of the titles and figured I’d have a hard time finding the names of two-thirds of the set anyway. Plus, it’s pretty nerdy to be tapping away on the iPhone during the gig!
It was all pretty chilled out for the first handful of songs and we were treated to the beautiful array of sounds they had brought to play for us: an old reed organ sat on the left of the stage; an upright bass, an electric guitar (Fender Mustang, maybe…?), a less-than-full-size acoustic; a lovely bits-and-pieces drum kit which comprised a proper marching bass drum, a snare drum, high hi-hats that wobbled about satisfyingly when they were played, and two great-sounding cymbals. In one of the early songs, a home-made shaker was produced. The girl interested me most (yeah, yeah, settle down…) as she played clarinet, bass guitar, electric guitar, sang, and played a set of crotales with a bow. Generally doing the kind of multi-instrumental shenanigans that I do 🙂 Her clarinet tone was lovely and I really liked the way she played – using a wide vibrato for the slower, more sonorous songs, rising up on her toes slightly for the higher notes, not shying away from some lovely high lines up at the top end of the instrument’s register… In one of the last songs she and the reed organ player did some sweet harmonies, the sounds blending beautifully, as you’d expect.
When they let rip (on tracks like ‘The Horizon Is A Beltway’), we were riveted for a completely different reason. I was really drawn in by their committed, raw performances. One of the stand-out songs was something about whiskey and women driving you insane (sorry, rubbish not to have a title, I know…!) and on each climax of the chorus they held a chord for *just* a bit longer, the girl going up to the next harmony until they literally couldn’t hold it any more. It’s this kind of thing that makes a live performance trump a recording every time. (If the artists are prepared to take those risks…)
Another lovely moment was in a song where three of the four musicians played wind instruments: the girl’s clarinet being augmented by another and also by a brass band-style horn (i.e. not a French horn). On the last horn break the singer took out two phones (he’d tried to explain this to us, but we didn’t really get it until he did it). He called one with the other and put them on speaker, whistling into them, causing feedback. It made a ghostly, theremin-like noise throughout the crowd (some people had copped on what to do…).
This person got some really good footage from up near the stage. On this song, ‘This God Damn House’, you can hear that lovely clarinet vibrato and then the mobile phone thing from 3’56”.
Here’s a clip of ‘Cage The Songbird’ that I recorded. You can hear the bowed crotales well from about 0’22”.
jay wilson :: music 