Sunday, May 2 2004
Planned to listen to sounds on the way to Manchester yesterday, but power-read The Book of Illusions instead. Completed it last night. This is rather remarkable.
Had one or two further thoughts about Afterglow but didn't look at it due to the reading. Managed to continue onwards a little into the Nick Drake biography. This is the third (or fourth?) time I've read it.
This morning's listening is Donovan's Fairytale album. Sunny Goodge Street is the best track by far, and it's clear to hear that this was one of Nick Drake's prime influences. And the electric guitar playing reminds me of someone else... Also listened to Richard Thompson's Mock Tudor.
Gradually thoughts are returning for the next King Crimson Musical Guide. Over the next couple of weeks, once energy has returned and Afterglow has left my thoughts, I can get on with this. Three books sit on top of the piano which have to be studied before cracking on with the job. Pacing myself with this because I know that once I begin life tends to be shelved and the project in hand takes over. In the Court of the Crimson King is a huge project.
This could be added to the appendices of the Musical Guide to In the Wake of Poseidon: The Devil's Triangle = the devil's trident = Poseidon's trident.
Nicholas and Rosanne think they've found a house in Tewkesbury and, today, Christopher and Helen are driving over from Leeds. Before they arrive the front hedge needs clipping.
Alison Wells sent details of the May Fest in which she's performing Seule.
'Cringeworthy' is a term I like to use with reference to the methods used by the 'industry' in relation to the methods used to market current flavours of the day. Invariably I get a feeling, when listening to music, whether it has something or doesn't have something. On one listening I gather information. This sense isn't always correct but 99 times out of 100 I've learnt that it's right. A Sunday weekly came in through the door just now and it's choc-full of cringeworthy items. Gone are the days when REAL musical matters were heralded over hairdo's, the amount of drugs/alcohol consumed/not consumed and all the other non-necesseties which (now) seem to be part and parcel of the star making machinery. Parental Advisory Material: I even see this on contemporary classical music CDs. The classical music world has resorted to this ploy. As someone recently said 'it's no longer just about the music.' And then we wonder why music is in the state it's in.
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Saturday, May 1 2004
Five and a half hours of back-to-back teaching. Posted parcels to various locations round the world. Listened to music of importance in the car. Went to see my mother, did shopping, came home and read more of Nick Drake biography. Strange dream last night...dark.
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Friday, April 30 2004
Wednesday's teaching at Liverpool was shattering. Six hours without a break. Only way to deal with it all. Began at 11-00 and finished at 17-00. I was exhausted yesterday, but manage to complete, photocopy and bind the score of Afterglow yesterday which can be sent to Abigail James today. It's to be performed at this summer's Corsham Festival. Next thing is to copy the flute part for Rowland Sutherland. The piece lasts 13 minutes altogether.
This morning's listening is The Cooper Temple Clause. The first track includes those little snare paradiddles (is that the spelling?) made famous by Michael Giles. Mellotron samples, too. This is quite nice music. The influence of Radiohead is there, but the textures and timbres are fuller, and melodically things are reminiscent of something and rather nice in their own way. So, all this nu-Prog - or what's being marketed as having a Prog connection - isn't old Prog. Why should it be? It's all very enjoyable to hear new bands make music.
Denise has invited me to play at the next Nick Drake tribute concert at Tanworth-in-Arden in August. Iain has also been in touch re this. Sounds good. I re-read a little of the Nick Drake biog last evening in the paperback version having found that Christopher had bought it.
Reading Richard Auter's The Book of Illusions. Auter is the author of Lulu on the Bridge which is only available as a screen play. Also got hold of a copy of Henry James' Portrait of a Lady.
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Wednesday, April 28 2004
Worked on the flute/guitar piece all day. Decided the title Afterglow is best. Added the words Reverie and Notturno to two of the movements. Not terms that I'd usually employ. This isn't the kind of piece I'd usually write. Almost there but with small details to add.
Listened to new premiere by Deidre Gribbin. One of the movements rather beautiful. Then thought about heart and body in contemporary music.
Read about absences of heart.
Denise has been in touch re ND tribute. Mark also wrote re Poseidon Musical Guide and Jacob Heringman re his new CD, the Siena Lute Book. Alison Smart also wrote about Artemis/Nerval.
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Tuesday, April 27 2004
Struggling with title of the new piece for flute and guitar. There are now three possibilities. One usually wins over the others. And it centres around a piece of folksong. Worked further on the piece yesterday and it needs more today.
Dreamt about Nick Drake again last night. Looked at my e-mails this morning and discovered Iain Cameron had sent an e-mail in which he mentions an ND tribute concert. In my dream Nick Drake lay in a hospital bed with loads of fans around him.
This morning Morton Feldman's Triadic Memories for solo piano is playing. This is very long piano piece in two sections lasting over 90 minutes. Why does it work? Because there is tension in the harmony and yet the music simply floats. It isn't particularly angular, loud, highly rhythmic or anything like that. Sections of octaves do give the music a sense of partitioning. It just drifts. It is very beautiful. It also has shape. It begins at the top of the piano and ends up, some 80 or so minutes later, at the bottom of the piano. It has a sense of purpose.
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Monday, April 26 2004
We walked up Rannerdale Knotts beside Crummock Water yesterday (A. Wainwright - Pictorial Guide to the Northern Fells - Book 6). The weather was sunny and very warm. Summer has finally arrived. The drive seemed to take for ages but the motorway was reasonably clear. Rannerdale Knotts has been called the Loughrigg of Buttermere. It's smaller than Loughrigg but, neverthless, a good walk. I listened further to the Polyphonic Spree on the way to the summit and on the summit. This is a concept album. It's about a 'day'. It continues to infuriate me. I think it's the false sense of happiness I pick up from it. The huge amount of major keys involved. The sort of squeaky cleanness which oozes out of every groove. It's a gospel album without the Gospel. It's post-existential-postmodern-post-sacred-post-everythingness. But I like it. I'm drawn in. And I don't want to be. Hanging Around the Day Part 1 (as opposed to part 2) is straight from Thunderclap Newman's Something in the Air. The articulation of the words is so appalling that I can't hear exactly what's being sung. There are no songs as such: each 'song' is a section of a longer untitled piece. There are 10 sections. But it's section 10 (A Long Day) which is the one that is so annoying that I will end up by eventually destroying this CD. And then we walked down to the Bridge Inn in Buttermere. By this time the PS had been removed from the CD player. I breathed again. Lots of mountains. And sparkling water. The sun in the garden was incredible. Drank orange juice. Was I 'following the day and reaching for the sun?' We walked back along the edge of Crummock. It was at this point that I put Fairport Conventions Liege and Lief on. And this is where the notion of authenticity, in its varying levels, clicked. Because the FC album isn't authentic either. But what it says is authentic and the means by which it is organised is. It's also to do with the notion of generational realities, how art - or what is taken for art - is consumed, marketed, giving the public what it wants, but because it doesn't know what it wants it gets what it's given. As Sue rightly observed, if you're out there on your own you've essentially got no chance of ever being noticed even though what you're doing may be incredible. So my philosophy is do what you do anyway regardless of the outcome because I don't believe 'artists' are responsible for what they create. And this may well have been the philosophy of the PS with whom I will try and come to terms. Case rested.
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Sunday, April 25 2004
After travelling back from Manchester yesterday the train stopped in Preston so I walked along Fisherdate to HMV and found The Beginning Stages of the Polyphonic Spree after reading about them. Apparently David Bowie likes them. It's not really possible to call this group of musicians a band because they're more like a huge orchestra/choir. I count 24 members on the CD cover, and they sing and play - anything from flutes, to French horns, to trombones and so on plus electric instruments...oh, and a Theremin. I think they've definitely been listening to McDonald & Giles, King Crimson, The Beach Boys and some of those Psychedelic bands of the late '60's (Beatles included), early Barclay James Harvest, The Fifth Dimension, It's A Beautiful Day, early Pink Floyd. And there's another influence which escapes me...it could be Moondog or, even, Ultimate Spinach. I can see why Bowie might be into them because it also reminds me of an adult Langley Schools Project. I don't hear much polyphony, but maybe it's just a good name. And they all sound so happy...anthemic songs and glee and sunny days and picnics and butterflies. But underneath there's something darker waiting in store, especially when false relations happen and IV turns to iv...very Beatlish! I can imagine what they're like 'live'. Personally, I don't know what to make of it, and this is an album that is just a little too easy to believe. Are they a bunch of neo-hippies, or a cult? Why do they dress in long flowing robes? I await their second album because I feel that there is staggering potential that the 'sections' of The Polyphonic Spree don't realise fully on this first album. But the more I listen through its irksome surface the more I like it and, at the same time, want to smash the CD to pieces. But I like Soldier Girl alot, mainly because it does some use some imitation (heterophony). But why do so many new bands employ parody/irony? Once bands had a sense of gravitas. One gets the impression that's no longer possible. Take what was and send it up seems to be today's philosophy. When I listen to Close to the Edge, for example, (I'm no big Yes fan) I am always amazed by the PLAYING. And that's the difference. Once upon a time people really concentrated on technique. Then along came technology and people found technique had become a secondary concern. And along came Post(bloody)modernism and people found that borrowing from the past was an easy (and fashionable) option. But of course, that's such a cynical view. Or is it something to do with the divide between those with a musical education as opposed to an artschool education? If I'd have been the age I am now when In the Court of the Crimson King was released I might have detected its many influences and forgotten it, which sort of proves the point that the zeitgeist affects us all. Nor do musicians work in a vacuum. So, Polyphonic Spree, get on with what you do and make music.
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Saturday, April 24 2004
Five and a half hours of one-to-one, back-to-back teaching. A shattering experience. Then went to see my mother. Kathy was there. Only able to utter words of one syllable. Knocked down.
Matt Seattle phoned last evening. Sounds as though his music's doing well. I think we all miss the days of DGM. Still, life goes on. History never, or seldom, repeats itself. If it does it's transformed from the original.
Remarkable dream: being shown around an Indian temple by someone. Very colourful windows. The man shows me how to bow. It's very ritualistic. We go round and round. End up in a small chapel. Nick Drake is in the shadows.
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Friday, April 23 2004
Yesterday managed to complete the piece(s). And now is the big-sit-on-it-and-wait-and-see-what-transforms-over-the-next-week. There is one thing for sure, and that I've had it with serial processes, but that doesn't mean to say there aren't processes at work.
Listening to The Coral's Nightfreak and the Sons of Becker as I write this. Popular music is born from subcultures, and all that goes with a subcultural ethos, and as I'm not really part of any subculture I'm probably missing the point. But as to the question whether or not this is Nu-Prog or not? It isn't Progressive as I understand it, but nor were Black Sabbath/Deep Purple and yet, in the '70's they were labelled as Progressive rock bands. Classical Prog is undoubtedly the Genesis stream and I'm sure that bands shouldn't simply aim at sounding like Yes. The question might be 'what are the musical definitions of Prog?' What makes one band Prog and another pure pop, although there are so many styles today that it isn't as easy to define. The thing about The Coral is that the music is certainly stylistically consistent, and structurally more consistent than a band like Yes - in other words, there aren't, or don't appear to be, a stream of juxtaposed/unrelated sections. This has the feel, sometimes, of Radiohead, certainly on a song like Keep Me Company, together with the madness of Zappa or Beefheart (not musical) and punk. Migraine also includes lots of tritones. Lovers Paradise imports a '60's music - Beatles/Kinks? So other musics are involved. I just wonder if Punk is probably the defining factor because in rock music Punk replaces jazz. Jazz seems to be a defining musical language in alternative popular music in the mid-late '60's. With Punk's removal of anything resembling elitism I wonder if jazz didn't have a place? One thing at the centre of all this is technology and the fact that music DOES require a consistency, or it suffers from the same misunderstanding as '70's Prog. Whatever the case I find The Coral's music rather inventive.
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Thursday, April 22 2004
Worked on the piece in the morning and evening. Now into #2. This is a song; #1 is riff-based; #3, chant-based. There is a slowing in the tempo throughout: fast, slow, slower. Like a car gradually braking...and braking...to nothing.
Went to Lancaster in the afternoon. Whilst in HMV there was music playing. I wandered around listening...and the music drew me in. Asked at the counter and found it was Ian Brown's Music of the Spheres. Bought it and playing it now. I like it. Easy to hear where Oasis came from. Interesting how everything is produced in the studio. A little like students who write everything at computers. Is there any harm in this? It's a little like saying we should use heads for maths but if a calculator is there it can be helpful. Also bought a mini-album by The Coral. This was following an article in Record Collector re new Prog.
Erik Voermans wrote to say his album is to be released on Basta. Good news!
Busy day today. Teaching endlessly and the piece as well.
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