Words are not enough

Stravinsky once said that music was powerless to express anything at all. Leaving aside the niceties of whether a rising scale can at least represent something hopeful or aspiring, his music, like so much music, does nonetheless have the capacity to express the spirit of an age. Since this is a much vaguer undertaking than trying to depict a concrete verbal image in sound — like bird song, or a drunken man, or climbing a ladder — it is surprising how successful composers have been at it. Unwittingly successful, I guess, since how would you deliberately set about writing a...

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Always a Luddite

I have just inherited my College’s collection of long-playing records, now redundant, with permission to retain, give away, otherwise dispose of if and as possible. The cumbrous piles, gradually easing into categories, have littered my rooms all summer; their dispersal is piecemeal and slow.

Put together with love and knowledge from the late-Sixties on, the collection eventually totalled some 300 records. But are they so redundant? Though the universal triumph of the CD has swept away the LP as surely as the LP superseded the 78 rpm, the jury has crept back to reconsider questions of quality and fidelity.

The...

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Best place to be

Someone somewhere recently asked me in a public forum whether I would prefer to be a singer, the conductor or a member of the audience at the concerts we give. He himself was of the opinion that he would rather be a singer, saying that the music we do is so complicated that only someone on the inside of it can appreciate exactly what the composer has achieved. If he’s right, the audience don’t stand a chance.

I rushed to my own defence, saying that the guy out front has the best of all worlds, as one would expect if...

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Web exclusive: Bestival the spectacular

Festivals, like Marmite, you either love them or hate them. My last festival, in July, was Latitude in Norfolk, which has been described as the "Waitrose of Festivals". When I was tracking down tickets for the Isle of Wight's Bestival, a friend, Laura, who lives on the island and is an experienced festival go-er, described it as "a more traditional festival - and magical". I was intrigued.
    
Laura and I arrived late Friday evening, and were greeted by a spectacular sunset. It was warm and strangers smiled. From the top of the hill we looked...

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Worth the Price

A long drive mitigated by congenial and erudite company, through bosomy green hills under what felt like permanent soft mizzling rain, from one choice little festival on the Welsh borders, Presteigne, to another altogether more remote — Machynlleth, close to the coast, a tiny town (for all that a Welsh king once located his court there), where, in a converted nonconformist chapel, surprising and rewarding events take place.

Not so the first I attended, a recital of poetry and song occasioned by the first world war, trudging through well-worn trenches and pastoral hankerings, the recitation shambling, the singing insensitive, the...

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Writing matters

All my adult life I have wondered how people write about music, and how their efforts are received by the public. It has always struck me as being an uncertain business, more miss than hit, and more miss than writing about other artistic endeavours. It seems to be more difficult for a writer to find an individual voice, a convincing prose style, when talking about music than when discussing painting or architecture, or even when writing across the arts. By and large the public have responded to this sense of uncertainty by putting music on one side: not by giving...

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