classical music on YouTube

From time to time it’s recommended that I get to learn a particular piece by watching a video of it in performance on YouTube. I’ve tried this but it doesn’t really work for me, for various reasons. One is that I tend to get distracted by the visuals and pay less attention to what I hear than if it were sound only. The sound also tends to be of poor quality.

But the real problem I have is that inevitably I see the comments, and these are all too often inane denials of the beauty and value of the piece of music in the video. It’s saddening to read such dismissive comments on a particularly fine composition, given without any reasoning. And this happened most recently to me with Berlioz! I haven’t dared try looking to see what the commenters have to say about some of my favourite bits of the 20th-century repertoire …

In my experience online reviewers of books (on Amazon, say, or the Visual Bookshelf application in Facebook) at least say what it is they dislike about the work in question and have apparently engaged the brain before typing. Why is YouTube different? I suppose it is because the book reviewer has at least put in the effort to read the book, or a significant part of it. The YouTube reviewer has just looked at a few minutes of video.

Looking at YouTube again, there seems to be a way of displaying only very positive comments which is perhaps what I need, the drawback being that I lose comments which are less than very positive, but intelligently so.

Facebook events

I have recently set up my next performance as a Facebook event. It’s the Grande Messe des Morts by Berlioz in Colston Hall, Bristol, on Saturday February 13th at 7.30 p.m., performed by the South West Festival Chorus and Birmingham Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Jason Thornton with Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts as tenor soloist and Gavin Carr as chorus master.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=319863580358&ref=mf
http://www.colstonhall.org/whatson/Event1260

I can invite my Facebook friends to this event, and they can in turn invite others; it’s completely open. But the facility to browse events is essentially useless. The most focussed you can get is to browse all musical concerts, and of course there are a multitude of those. It used to be possible (say) to see ‘What’s on in Bristol’ on a given night and be shown a list of public Facebook events in that place that night but you can’t do this now (I suspect it went when networks were dropped). I once created minor trouble by setting up an event which had admission by pre-booked ticket to an invited audience, in order to find out who else was going to it. Tickets weren’t checked on the door, and several people came along having found out via Facebook about the distinguished performers and got in free. I’m not terribly sorry about this, as there was space enough for everyone.

Returning to my Berlioz concert, the event doesn’t show up on Facebook searches. This means I can’t tell members of the choir how to get hold of it and advertise it to Facebook friends – only those who are my FB friends, or who have been invited by them, are going to come across the page. This strikes me as a serious flaw.

an apology to commenters

I was recently contacted by someone who’d tried and failed to post a comment on one of my blog articles. It turned out that his blog had, for no very obvious reason, been classified as spam. As I haven’t had any previous false positives for spam here before, I was no longer bothering to check the spam queue for them. To my knowledge no other messages have failed to get through, but I had noticed that I’d received few comments recently.

When you post a comment you should see the article you’re replying to, existing comments, and your comment, with a note that your comment will appear after moderation.* If you don’t get that (and, of course, you’re not a spammer) then it’s worth emailing me saying which article you were replying to and I’ll investigate.

I use the Akismet plugin to catch spam and, as I say, until now it’s been very good at doing so. I will look at the spam queue from time to time though, just in case. Unfortunately, I can’t tell on what grounds a particular message is designated as spam, or adjust the software myself in any way, except for removing the plugin which would flood me with spam. The software lives on WordPress’s server; this blog used to be kept on a server local to me but the volume of spam directed at it put a strain on it as it was not intended for high traffic.

* I admit most non-spam comments exactly as submitted. There have been a few genuine comments which I have not let through, or which I have withdrawn, if they have seemed to cross the line from fair comment into unsupported and unverifiable attacks on particular people or organisations. Merely disagreeing with me is a different matter. I once edited an otherwise unobjectionable comment to remove a personal telephone number.

getting classical ringtones

My daughter now has a mobile phone and wants a piece of classical music to use as a ringtone. I’ve been looking at various sites but found the selection rather limited, unless you go for a converted MP3 file from a site like this. I don’t have much confidence that the result would make a good ringtone, or indeed that the phone could handle ringtones in true tone format (it came with minimal documentation). The best selection I’ve found so far is at Boosey and Hawkes, though it’s still not very extensive. (To give an example: the Strauss family are represented only by the Blue Danube and Radetsky March.) Have I missed something?

I can of course write one for her and turn it into a MIDI file, using the process described here.

Meanwhile, I’m very sorry that Contemporary Classical Internet Radio has apparently gone off air. I used to listen to it quite regularly when online (except when it was playing Xenakis).

booking St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey

I’ve been making enquiries about taking a visiting choir to sing services at St. Paul’s or Westminster Abbey. We used to be regular visitors, and indeed the Abbey and St. Paul’s would sometimes turn to us if they found they needed a visiting choir for forthcoming services. But we haven’t been for a few years now, so I’m restarting the process.

I don’t know how the choir applied originally to sing, but the process at both places is now more formal than elsewhere, with forms to fill in, and in the case of St. Paul’s an optional recommendation from someone well-known in the world of church music is requested. This is a little hard for us to supply; when we visit cathedrals, the director of music is inevitably usually away, and we are heard by the cathedral clergy but not by the music professionals.

I sense that there are now rather more choirs in this market than before. While not all of them can take over a remote cathedral for a week, a day or two in central London is easy to manage and desirable, so there is more competition. I will report back on the outcome of our applications.

the singing revival

There’s been a lot of media interest recently in a national revival in singing. How has this affected me? When you look at where this revival is taking place, it’s mostly in the unauditioned sector, and though this isn’t where I usually operate, it may have an impact on choirs such as the South West Festival Chorus or on ‘come and sing’ day events, which I do sometimes join. I’d like to think also that if more people are trying out their voices, that more basses and tenors might be discovered. They’re out there; I once heard a College director of music say that he could hear that some of the men who read lessons in his chapel would have excellent voices, if only they thought of trying singing.

Rather surprising in the light of this is that competition for singers in Bath has apparently got hotter in recent years, with some choirs having difficulty getting members to be sufficiently committed to them. One is planning to wind up in 2010.

Is it that there are more choirs competing for the same singers? (as for example happened in Bristol a few years ago, causing the demise of the Brandon Hill Singers.) The only newcomers on the scene are Chorus Angelorum and A Handful of Singers, both of which only perform occasionally (neither to my knowledge gave a concert this last autumn).

I suspect that the shortage of singers may be in the lower voices as sopranos are almost invariably the strongest section (I used to be in one choir in Bath where this was the case, and left realising that my own contribution didn’t count for very much).

I wonder also whether choirs are requiring more commitment, and perhaps people are just busier, and so individual singers who might once have sung in two are now confining themselves to one, thereby reducing the pool available. I’m not sure this is a bad thing, having seen the effects of a large overlap between choirs in the previous place I lived in (it effectively excluded too many competent singers from singing in a small choir at all).

2009 and 2010’s resolutions

I have to admit that 2009 was a quieter year than I’d have liked on the vocal front. There were some highlights: I revisited Spem in Alium for the first time in a long while, and though between New Year and October I made fewer and shorter Cathedral visits than usual, there were some very worthwhile ones including amongst other things a first opportunity to sing Howells’ canticles in B minor. The year wasn’t devoid of solo opportunities either and I thought I was generally singing well.

I did get opportunities to perform music by all four of the main anniversary composers. It will seems strange turning on the car radio on the way to piano lessons on Thursday afternoons in 2010 and not hearing a Handel opera.

Among the disappointments were being asked to note a concert date in my diary and then not being told I wasn’t needed for it, and the audition which was cancelled the day before it was due to happen because the vacancy had disappeared. I also thought I’d been dropped from a couple of Cathedral-going choirs when messages from them stopped arriving, but I’m happy to say that I was wrong in both cases.

It was a rather better year for concert-going though, particularly with opportunities to hear some of the Philharmonia’s Vienna – City of Dreams series in London, which did not disappoint.

I think 2010 will rather be what I make of it. I can’t see any obvious opportunities to do anything different from what I’ve done in 2009, but you never know what will come up during the year. I have to regard the Bath Festival Chorus as a thing of the past as it hasn’t performed since 2005 (though according to its musical director’s web page it still exists!) Likewise I can’t see myself ever being called up from the dep list for the Lord Mayor’s Chapel unless there is a change of regime there. One thing I can promise is that this blog will continue. I realise that recently my postings has been almost exclusively accounts of performances I’ve been in or attended, and I shall try to introduce a wider variety of musical topics.

Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Cross-posted from my other public blog, The Pixellated Bookshelf.

I’m not going to attempt a systematic review, as those can be found elsewhere and in any case I’m unfamiliar with some of the territory Ross covers in his survey of 20th-century classical music.

In the areas I do know about, I found Ross to be accurate and to emphasise more or less what I consider to be important. The index is very thorough in its coverage of persons, including (for example) references to composers’ relatives, though it is less complete when it comes to concepts.

Ross is not ashamed to relate music to composers’ biographies or even to their physical appearance, and the text is full of pertinent anecdotes. Nevertheless, there are detailed descriptions of notable works, more from the earlier part of the century. A website with audio extracts of works referred to in the text can be found here.

One controversial position is that the author is convinced that Sibelius’ 8th symphony was destroyed in a complete or near-complete state, though I believe the evidence for this is unclear.

Although he is English, Ross has worked in New York for some years, and the USA accordingly features prominently. This does not just mean that American composers are dealt with at length; Mahler’s stay in New York is described in detail and one is told a lot about the history of American public-service broadcasting but there is little reference to the BBC, or to British composers other than Benjamin Britten. I don’t necessarily think this bias is a bad thing, as I learnt much about (for example) the origins of American minimalism.

Ross focuses on innovators, at the expense of more conservative composers such as Puccini and Rachmaninov, who tend to get pushed to the sidelines of his narrative, although they’re certainly part of 20th-century classical music history. Perhaps similarly, he can make 20th-century music seem more different to what preceded that it actually is, for example in its degree of political commitment.

Maybe my next reading should be Mann’s Doctor Faustus, which provides a structuring undertext to the whole work.

# ISBN-10: 1841154768
# ISBN-13: 978-1841154763

Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland

I don’t feel that the Advent/Christmas season has properly started unless I’ve played a CD that I was given a few years ago. It contains Bach’s Advent cantatas BWV36, BWV61 and BWV62 nicely performed by Collegium Vocale Gent and Philippe Herreweghe plus soloists. (Harmonia Mundi HMC901605)

All three cantatas feature the chorale Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland in various arrangements. This isn’t quite the usual four-square Lutheran chorale melody; the flattened seventh three notes in, the non-standard cadence at the end of the second line and the repetition of the first line as the last one betray its ultimate origin in a plainchant melody. One of the points of interest of the CD is following the ways Bach eases over these irregularities, for example by sharpening the seventh or making the penultimate note of the second line an inessential one.

There’s a discussion of the melody with a number of quotations from Bach on the Bach cantatas site. Past visitors to Taizé might associate it with the Lord’s Prayer (in one of Bach’s harmonisations!)

in the gallery – or not?

I went to hear Bath Minerva Choir conducted by Gavin Carr perform their seasonal concert, An English Christmas, in St Swithin’s Church, Walcot. This was the first time I’d been to a concert in this church (I gather that they have only started to happen recently, after a change of clergy and a refurbishment of the building). It has a pleasant acoustic though not a very resonant one. Performers also included soprano and baritone soloists and members of the Bath Phil (I’m a bit short on details, as the programmes had all gone by the time I arrived).

The concert sold out and by the time I got my ticket from the Bath Festivals box office I was told that it was for a seat in the gallery, and so I could not buy a second ticket for one of the children. (I suppose the parapet in the gallery must be lower at St Swithin’s than in the galleries at Christ Church Bath or St Mary’s Bathwick, where children are permitted). When I arrived though I found that the seats were totally unreserved and we could have both sat in the body of the church. However, I’m not sure our children would have lasted the course as the concert went on for nearly three hours!

The programme included several familiar pieces such as A Ceremony of Carols (in the SATB version), Finzi’s In Terra Pax and Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on Christmas Carols. To give the choir a rest, the strings played Britten’s Simple Symphony. I can never hear the scherzo of this without being reminded of the theme from The Archers. The lengthy slow movement seems slightly out of place and perhaps betrays the work’s origin in some unrelated juvenile pieces. The programme ended with a selection of carol arrangements, including a couple by the conductor’s brother, interspersed with four congregational carols.

I thought this was one of the more successful Christmas concerts I’ve been to. I normally give them a miss because they can get into a muddle about whether they are a concert or a service, or become bogged down if they involve readings, because the readers feel they need to take up a significant amount of time. Despite the length of the programme, this concert seemed to fly by.

Another event to mention: my husband went to a concert performance of Otello with Colin Davis and the LSO at the Barbican, which he enjoyed. I don’t think his opinion varied very much from those of the reviewers, so I’ll post some links here: Independent, Telegraph, Guardian, The Classical Source.