Pointillisme — impressionism by numbers
Pointillisme — impressionism by numbers: stand back, let the dots join up all by themselves, and the image judders into focus whatever the subject or lack of.
In a month of volatile mobility I can offer no more than a stipple of blobs, musical moments snatched at or accidentally impinging, as Alice grabs at the marmalade, or thinks of Mabel, in the plunge down the chute that precipitates her Adventures.
Mine come mainly at the arbitrary press of a knob into the daily tapestry of Radio Three, less loose-woven than usual these past weeks in its concentration of epic sagas — Wagner’s Ring complete on one day, and the cardboard city of Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies and 15 quartets that cannot be so rapidly and neatly dispatched (in this his centenary year he is wasting still more time and space than he does anyway, perennially).
With both, you know instantaneously whose noise it is. Some very good composers don’t declare their identity at once unless one knows the piece, and some very bad ones — usually Liszt — are readily recognisable, however unfamiliar. (When in doubt, it’s usually Saint-Saëns.) The inexhaustible roll of sound produced by Wagner and Shostakovich is uniform however variegated, and in isolation, if one’s not in the mood, can induce revulsion rather than delight. Whereas unpredictable snatches can be wonderfully suggestive, perhaps the more so for the very absence of opening or close. One such came from another of the month’s broadcast epics: a fugue from Book I of Bach’s 48 on the piano, quite especially beautiful, broad and singing in every voice — I nearly cut myself while shaving. ‘Damn! Wrong again! Angela Hewitt isn’t just a diligent schoolmarm!’ Maybe not; but the pianist was Daniel Barenboim, conductor of the one-day Ring, whose very non-cantabile speaking voice has also been to the fore in his Reith Questions and Answers.
Other pointilliste impressions have included dipping in and out of Richard Rodney Bennett in and around his 70th birthday. Here one would never guess the composer unless told! He does all the voices, from colourless Anglicana to highly tinted Berg, Britten, Ravel, Henze (and not forgetting Billy Mayerl and Cole Porter), with flawless facture, fluent and featureless. The same surely goes for Louis Spohr, ‘this week’s composer’ during the month: bland noodlings of an utterly musical man without a shadow. Here the most stirring moments in a series of sporadic samplings were the astonishing bubbles and athletics of the horn in his octet. I’d never realised that a horn could do such things — it’s enough to give one ideas!
Amidst a current season of Alice-like nightmares traversing endless corridors of superb locked Establishment doors, just one — the Reform Club’s — opened to a handsome live event in its handsome library (succulent in a colour scheme of chocolate, liver, broccoli and gold) — a harpsichord recital concluding with a brand-new fandango by Bayan Northcott, whose elegance of timbre and texture also got me a-thinking.
The endless nightmare Corridors of Impotence, or their joyless alternative, endless hours of churning insomnia, can sometimes be diverted by the all-night music broadcasting. And when its standard fare — forgotten Bulgarian rhapsodists, Estonian partsongs, dusty polyphony from Renaissance Romania, the tinny underbelly of the German baroque, lost 19th-century nationalists, or early modernists who took back the latest from Paris c.1923 to their rural fastnesses — fails to disperse the dark thoughts, one can always revert to counting sheep; or, rather, compiling lists, patterns, rhyming dictionaries, alliterative antinomies.
Last night, for instance: let’s explore the wacky world of G! Since this purports to be a music column I’ll pass by the countries, cities, rivers, islands, birds, beasts and flowers, colours, foodstuffs, Christian names, abstract nouns, poets, painters, politicians and fixate upon composers. Grétry, Gade, Gottschalk, Glazunov… God, what a crummy lot! Can’t we pull out of the fourth rank? Ginastera, Glass, Goldschmidt, Gorecki, Gubaidulina, Peter Gast (held by Nietzsche to be, with Bizet, the cure for the ‘disease’ of Wagner)? Giordano, Gurney, Grann?…No, no, no, worser and worser. Fail better? Gounod, Glinka, Gluck, Grieg, Goehr? Nice! Something’s coming! Aha! Gibbons — that’s more like it! — Grainger, Gershwin, Gesualdo, Gabrieli. At last! Calibre!
But still not asleep. Let’s try operas. Supposing that only the Gs were left, could one sustain life on Götterdämmerung, The Gondoliers, Guillaume Tell, Gloriana, Guntram, Gianni Schicchi? Throw in Goyescas, Giovanna d’Arco, and Guercoeur, a couple of Gamblers, Gawain, Genoveva, Gwendoline and The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein. Still not enough? Cheat: Peter Grimes, Boris Godunov, Don Giovanni. Dream up (if only one could sleep) some ought-to-be’s from living composers who still might. Henze’s Gormenghast, Birtwistle’s Grendel, Adams’s Gorbachev in Glasnost, Knussen’s Gargantua, Goehr’s Gandhi in the Ganges, MacMillan’s Gorbals, Maxwell Davies’s Garry Glitter, Adés’s triptych of one-acters Glenda, Gertie and Gloria, Benjamin’s Goldfinger, Weir’s Goldilocks, Andriessen’s Goose-girl and Gander, Bennett’s Gigi, Corigliano’s Gigolo, Stockhausen’s month-long Galaxy; and who’s for Germaine Greer and the Gender-Benders? And de Gaulle?
Or cheat another way — Glulu, Gladiola auf Glaxco, die Googleflöte…Or try to cease your funning and dream again (but the next dream yields a lurid harvest of mixed operatic crimes passionnelles — Don José stabbing Carmen, the lover choked to death by the husband in Puccini’s Tabarro; Goland scything Pelléas down and tearing in a crazed pursuit of Mélisande — in which the music is all from Albéniz’ Iberia cycle, and I play all the roles).
Next month, the world of L. This one could run and run.
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