This page contains my blogs from January 2017.  For more recent blogs, see my main page.  There is an index to all my blogs at the foot of the main page.

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Fog
30 January 2017

I have lived in Oxted for 28 years now. It is a nice little commuter town just a mile south of the ridge of the North Downs, which is visible from my house. And though three or four hundred residents (my estimate) do indeed commute from Oxted to London every working day, as I once did, there is also an active community, with cricket and football clubs, at least four churches, two main shopping streets, one large Morrison’s supermarket and three “local” supermarket branches, a library, a large and much oversubscribed health centre, two dentists’ practices, a theatre, a lovely cinema, and one of the largest secondary schools in the country, with over 2,000 pupils.

Oxted also has weather. We are quite a long way from the sea, so don’t benefit from its moderating effects on temperature, and I can recall half a dozen severe winters here, when there has been snow on the ground for at least a fortnight. To begin with it looks pretty, but after a while the kerbs, drives and pavements get churned up, the snow turns a dirty grey, and underfoot becomes icily treacherous.

This winter, happily, has not been too bad (so far). There has just been one day when snow lay on the ground; a day later, it had mostly melted. What we have had this year is fog, more so than I can remember for many years. On several mornings I have opened my bedroom curtains to see a grey pall over the trees, buildings and roads, not so thick as to obscure them completely but enough to drain all colour from the scene.

Of course Oxted, being a small town, generates enough heat to burn off the worst of the fog. Away from the town it thickens quickly, particularly if you drive up towards the Downs, as I did this morning. Every three or four weeks I make an expedition in my car to Sainsbury’s-on-the-Hill (Upper Warlingham) – I am not over-fond of Morrison’s and from time to time want to buy stuff that the smaller shops here don’t have. I drive up the narrow, steep, twisting road that climbs to the top of the ridge, which according to my ordnance map is something like 400 feet above the town. The weather there is quite often different from Oxted; I imagine that, apart from the difference in height, the ridge sometimes catches weather fronts that pass Oxted by. Today there was fog, and along the ridge it was thick.

Over the last 12 months or so I have done more local driving than in previous years (most of my driving, usually, is on the motorway between here and Stratford-on-Avon, or Manchester, or the Lake District) and something I have noticed is how it is much more common these days for drivers to turn on their headlights if the day is overcast. Not presumably, to help them see, but to be seen. A very few use sidelights only, but not many; and as an aid to being seen, those sidelights are pretty ineffective anyway.

What was remarkable today is how many cars I saw driving through the fog without any lights on at all. Perhaps the drivers were taken by surprise – the fog had thinned out by the time I reached Sainsbury’s-on-the-Hill, which is about four miles north of the line of the ridge. Perhaps, too, it is a matter of habit: they have learned to turn on their lights when the weather is gloomy, whether they gain any real benefit or not, but have not learned to do so in fog, perhaps because thick fog is quite unusual these days.

Mind you, this was not a real pea-souper, not like in the old days. One of my strongest early memories, so early that David probably does not share it and John was not even born at the time, is of driving home in a really thick fog. We (that is Mum, Dad, I and probably David) had been to visit Dad’s parents, who lived in the village of Banks near Southport. Our route home to south Liverpool went across the West Lancashire plain to Aintree, on the northern edge of the city, and then through the suburbs of Fazackerley and West Derby to Childwall, which was home. The route from Aintree followed Long Lane, to one side of which was a large munitions works. I knew just enough to be scared that the works might explode while we were passing.

Anyway, I have a clear memory of Dad slowing to a crawl on Long Lane, where the fog was especially thick: it really was not possible for him to see more than a few yards in front of the car. I remember the ghastly glare of the sodium street lights which did little to dissipate the fog. Those were the days of coal fires, whose smoke mingled with the fog to produce a true smog. Most drivers nowadays will never have experienced such conditions, which is perhaps another reasons for neglecting their headlights.

There is one other specific event which I can remember from my early childhood. I have a clear memory of being on the top deck of a Liverpool tram when it derailed on the hill at Paddington (yes, there is a Paddington in Liverpool as well as London). Mum used to take me on her shopping trips into the city centre, and it was always a thrill to go on the top deck of the tram or, later, bus so I could see ahead like the driver. I still enjoy sitting at the front of a tram or train whenever I can; sadly, modern trains do not have the front windows to look through, but I much enjoyed travelling on Metro line 1 in Paris two years ago, where the trains are driverless and there is a front window, even though all you can see is in tunnel. The Liverpool trams were closed in 1957, so this memory must go back to when I was no more than 3 or 4 years old.

I have other, vaguer memories from those trips into the city. Mum used to leave me in the charge of the lift men in Coopers, her favourite delicatessen, while she did her other shopping. I suppose no-one would ever do such a thing these days, but the lift men were much amused by my 3- or 4-year old precocity. Most of the building was offices or warehousing, and the lift was controlled with a handle; the lift men had to stop at exactly the right place so that people or trolleys did not have to negotiate a step. Alas, Coopers was closed many years ago. I have found a lovely description, which echoes many of my own memories, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/55681839@N07/8151800424.  There is also a nice picture at http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2875359.  You can see the tower which I think must have housed the lift winding gear.

When Mum had finished her shopping she used to give herself a little treat by visiting the Kardomah coffee house in Whitechapel, near the Philip Son & Nephew bookshop. I imagine she gained a taste for real coffee during her time in the USA. At 3 or 4 years old I was not very interested in coffee to drink, but the Kardomah used to have the most beautiful coffee cakes, filled and covered with coffee-flavoured buttercream and decorated with almond slices. I used to pester Mum for one of these cakes. She would scrape off the almonds, then I would eat the buttercream and (occasionally) some of the cake.

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Eight Songs for December
23 January 2017

All the songs are written for a four-part choir (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) and all but one have a piano accompaniment. I have tried to make them accessible to an average amateur choir and their likely audience, which means they are more tuneful and romantic, less dissonant and expressionist in quality, than some of my other music.

(1) Emmonsail Heath. This is a setting of John Clare’s sonnet Emmonsail’s Heath in Winter (https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/emmonsail-s-heath-in-winter). The poem begins “I love to see…” and it goes on to praise many aspects of a winter landscape. My setting is correspondingly romantic, opening with a big tune in F major from which all the music unfolds.

The structure of Clare’s sonnet is a bit unusual, with an unorthodox rhyme scheme and a break after the seventh line. (Most sonnets have a break, and often a poetic twist, after the eighth or the twelfth line.) In my setting the first seven lines are repeated. For the ninth line, “Where a black quagmire quakes..,” I managed to weave in some appropriately quaking music without breaking the overall mood. The opening music returns at the very end, in the coda for piano solo. The fair copy of this song is complete.

(2) Gone is the Glory. Where the first song praised the winter landscape, this one describes its bleakness and mourns the passing of summer. The poem is Ichabod by Robert Fuller Murray (https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ichabod-2). I had never previously heard of the poet, who was born in the USA in 1863, but moved with his family to Scotland at the age of six and lived there till his death in 1894.

The poem begins with the line “Gone is the glory from the hills,” which I have used as a refrain in my setting. The other main musical idea is a four-note rising phrase, with several other motifs repeated to add shape and coherence. The music is slow, broadly in E minor but written on the white notes of the piano alone, until June is mentioned in the final line when the harmony suddenly – and briefly – changes to F sharp major, giving (I hope!) a sudden glimpse of warmth. This is the one piece in the cycle intended to be sung a cappella. The contrast with the previous song is entirely intentional. I finished the fair copy of this piece earlier this week.

(3) To a Snowflake. This was the last of the eight songs to be composed, and uses a poem by the eccentric English poet Francis Thompson (https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-a-snowflake). Thompson is perhaps best known for his cricket poem At Lord’s which concludes with the line “O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!” Dad occasionally quoted this line, though I am not at all sure that he knew the whole poem. Anyway, To a Snowflake was suggested to me by my friend and fellow-singer David Cook, to whom I am very grateful.

My setting (in A major) is short, with quicksilver changes of mood and phrasing for both choir and accompanist which I suspect will make this one of the more difficult songs to perform. As in the previous song, the piece is given shape and coherence by the repetition of a number of musical motifs. At the date of writing, “To a Snowflake” exists only in first-draft form.

(4) The Christmas Gardener. This song uses the short (20 lines) lyric poem December by Dollie Radford (https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/december-36). Radford is another late-Victorian poet of whom I had never previously heard. I have changed the title of the poem to avoid confusion and to give a better idea of what the song is about.

John often criticises my music because “it doesn’t have any tunes.” I think that is unfair, but anyway in this song I set out to write a really long, flowing F major melody. The whole song has the simplest texture of the eight: the full choir sing together only for the middle four lines and for the final two. At present the song exists only as a partial first draft while I decide what, if any, accompaniment to provide for the middle section. It makes an excellent piece for piano solo too, which John says he likes.

(5) In a drear-nighted December. This song adopts a pessimistic poem by John Keats (https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/in-drear-nighted-december). The exact meaning of the poem is open to different interpretations. Does it “dramatize the constancy of things in nature while showing how differently the human heart behaves,” or show how “the worst part of suffering is often to remember a time when we were happy;” or (as I understand it) draw a contrast between nature’s power of renewal and the decline and loss that are inevitable in human life. Whatever the exact meaning, however, the melancholy mood is unmistakable.

My setting, in F sharp minor, is in 5/4 time, the unsteady beat being intended to echo the troubled sentiments. The poem is in three stanzas and I have given broadly the same music to each, except that I have made the third stanza more dissonant – more so than anywhere else in the eight songs – as the poem expesses an ultimate despair. This is the least finished of the eight, as I have been struggling to find the best music for the line “Writhed not at passed joy?” in the third stanza. For the moment this is another still at first-draft stage.

(6) This is the Month. When I first read this poem I did not realise that it is in fact the first four stanzas of a much longer poem by John Milton, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity. (https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/on-the-morning-of-christ-s-nativity). I have given it a setting rather like a hymn tune, except that there are subtle variations from one stanza to the next, reflecting the poem’s meaning and changes in its stress patterns.

When I had almost finished this piece I was mortified to discover that the first line of each of my stanzas is very close to a traditional church anthem, King James’ Air, which is a setting of the 23rd Psalm. However, my setting develops that simple tune into something a good deal more elaborate. Each stanza has seven lines and begins in D major, but after the first line goes through a rapid series of modulations, reaching A flat major at the end of the fourth line and then working its way back to D. The fair copy of this piece is almost complete.

(7) Winter Scenes. This uses a six-stanza poem, The Brilliancies of Winter, by Thomas Love Peacock. It comes from his short novel The Misfortunes of Elphin (the full text of which, including this poem, is at http://www.thomaslovepeacock.net/Elphin.html) and is supposedly the song of a bard at a Welsh medieval court. Peacock was a noted satirist and the poem has a pointed irony. It starts with conventional praise for winter but towards the end makes clear that winter’s great virtue is to be peaceful: “Spring to purple conflict calls / Swords that shine on winter’s walls.”

In my setting I have reversed the order of Peacock’s fourth and fifth stanzas, so the first hint of unease does not appear until the fifth. The song begins in E major and has one main tune for four of the stanzas, with contrasting music for the other two. The music reaches a climax in the final stanza, moving from 4/4 to 3/2 time, and ending in E minor to point the irony. This was the first of the eight songs to be written and I am currently revising and putting final touches to the fair copy.

(8) The Old Year. The final song in the cycle adopts another short poem by John Clare (https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-old-year). Clare is mostly known for his nature poetry, but he wrote many other meditative poems and this is one such, personifying the Old Year as a friend now departed when the New Year arrives. It thus seems a fitting last poem in a cycle about December.

My setting (in D minor) has a long piano introduction which sets out the tune in full, followed by three stanzas in the form of simple variations on that tune. With the exception of a short, more cheerful section in the second stanza, the pulse of the music is very weak and the time signatures change almost from one bar to the next, giving a drifting, contemplative effect. The music for this one has been completed for a while but has not yet been fair copied.

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December
20 January 2017

Back in summer 2014 the Hurst Green Singers (a local choir in which I sing tenor) performed John Rutter’s A Sprig of Thyme at our summer concert. A Sprig of Thyme is a suite of folk song arrangements, eleven short pieces in all, charming and fairly straightforward to sing.

Inspired by this, I thought I would try my hand at a choral suite of my own. Since I would be writing my own melodies and not adopting folk song, I needed to find a subject, to bring some kind of coherence to the set. I found it in a poetry anthology, the Methuen Book of Poems for Every Day, which I had bought some years previously to read to Mum when she was in the nursing home. It is for the most part a good anthology, ranging widely through the history of English literature, though I do think it odd that no fewer than six poems or lyrics by Sir Noel Coward are included: as many as Keats, two more than Tennyson, three more than Browning, four more than Blake, five more than Shakespeare.

Anyway, browsing through this book, I found that the final chapter of 31 poems for December included several which would be suitable for musical arrangement. So that gave me my theme. I would write a cycle of songs for choir on the general theme of December. It did not escape my mind that most choirs, including ours, hold a Christmas concert, but don’t necessarily want to sing only Christmas music or carols. A song cycle about December might just fit the bill nicely. This was towards the end of 2014, and my aspiration was to complete a set of six by the end of the following year.

Needless to say, I didn’t make it. By August 2015 or so I had decided to add another poem from a different source, which gave me an excuse to put my (self-imposed) deadline back to Easter 2016. By early 2016 I had found another poem, making eight, and the deadline slipped again, to the end of 2016.

Now it’s early 2017, and I still haven’t finished. No, let me qualify that. All eight pieces are now more or less complete, insofar as I could go to the piano and play them all through. But that is a very different thing from being written down. Judged by that criterion, one is actually complete; three more exist on paper but with a few gaps, including crucial details of phrasing, expression and so on (I always do those last). The remaining four exist, for now, only in my memory.

The physical act of writing music is quite laborious. I use Dad’s old fountain pen, the gold one, on A3 sheets of blank manuscript paper. These have been specially printed for me by Chichester Music Press, and are laid out in a suitable format for four voice parts with piano accompaniment. That means leaving enough space between the vocal parts to fit in the words, a larger space below the vocal parts but above the accompaniment, and a larger space again between lines of music. Twelve staves to a page. I previously tried writing on ordinary shop-bought A4 manuscript paper, but the end result was hopelessly cramped and confusing. My A3 pages can be reduced by photocopying to A4 size and, so long as I am careful, remain legible.

Before I make the fair copy, however, I go through one or two preliminary drafts. The first draft is a version on two staves, as if for piano solo, which I write down in pencil once my first ideas are formed. This draft may be erased and amended or rewritten several times. Then, particularly if the piece has a pattern of accompaniment which does not simply follow the vocal lines but steers its own path, I do a version on four staves with the accompaniment written out separately. Finally, I may sometimes try out a single line on a scrap A3 page to work out the spacing, so the blank line on the page is fully used without the notes being squeezed too close together or too spread out. Word lengths also have to be allowed for – if my writing is too squashed it will not be legible once the page is shrunk to A4.

When it comes to the fair copy, I take between ninety minutes and two hours to produce a single page. A page with no mistakes is a rare event, and to correct them I use small pieces of adhesive paper which I stick over the errors and write a corrected version on top. Occasionally a mistake is so large (this happens most often with errors of spacing) that I have to start the whole page over again. If I manage no more than one false start in 4 or 5 completed pages I am doing very well.

The reason I take all this trouble is very simple. If I want my music to be performed, it will need to be copied, and copies need to be legible. This is the process I followed for my one work that has been performed to date, The True Light, which HGS sang at our Christmas concert in 2015. No-one in the choir complained that my music was illegible. (Whether it was singable may be a different question.)

There are computer programmes which enable music to be typeset on a PC and printed out. They work very well so far as I know. The best known is Sibelius, which is now in its eighth version and proudly proclaims that it is “used by top composers.” Unfortunately Sibelius costs £500+. I suspect also that when it comes to assembling all the fiddly detail that goes into a line of music, a computer screen and touchpad or mouse may not be much more efficient than a fountain pen. Sibelius would address my problems with spacing, but £500 is a lot to pay for that.

I also have a feeling, which may be quite illogical, that the act of producing a fair copy is definitive, while a computer file is in a way provisional: it can be so easily amended. The physical process of first draft – second draft – fair copy reflects the process in my mind as the original idea crystallises into a finished work.

It may be that there is some unconscious imitation taking place. I have a clear memory from when I was a boy of watching my Dad at his desk, painstakingly fixing cardiogram plates on to plain cardboard and annotating them by hand, presumably to be copied for lecture notes, or for publication. He used fine-nibbed drawing pens (not the gold fountain pen which I have inherited) and he had the most beautiful handwriting, tiny but entirely legible. It is possible that he took some aesthetic pleasure from the process, just as I may be taking some unconscious pleasure, or at least satisfaction, from the fair copies of my music.

Anyway, that is why December is still not finished. I had been planning to write something about the music today, but that will have to wait till next time. [See above.]

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La-La Land
17 January 2017

Beware: spoilers

John will probably raise both his eyebrows when he sees that my first post here is about a movie: a commercial Hollywood movie, and a musical at that. He, of course, is notorious in the family for disdaining Hollywood and preferring obscure foreign films, preferably subtitled. As for me, I don’t go to the cinema to read.

But it’s true that I am not much of a cinema-goer, and in particular have (at least until recently) been sceptical about musicals as a genre. As a boy I enjoyed The Sound of Music; but since then, nothing until Georgina took me to see Les Misérables a couple of years ago. Now that is a good film, and showed me that it is possible to illuminate a good story with well-crafted music and excellent performances. We also went a little later to see Into the Woods, which has similar virtues and which I enjoyed equally well. Both are strongly recommended to anyone reading this who hasn’t already seen them.

Of course, both those films have top class composers: Claude-Michel Schönberg and Stephen Sondheim. To my mind a musical is only worth your time and attention if the music is first-rate; any less than that and it is just a distraction, exploitative and an excuse for incoherence.

Since then, Georgina and I have been to see a few other films, mostly at the Everyman cinema here in Oxted. This is what I believe is called a “boutique” cinema, owned not by one of the large chains but by a small local company and run by enthusiasts. Apart from commercial films, they get good audiences for one-off showings of live theatre and music from London and New York. The screen is a good size, the seats are comfortable and the audiences mostly well-behaved (no distracting mobile phones etc). True, John would be pretty disappointed by the range of films on offer, but for us it’s just fine.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, just before Christmas, Georgina indulged me by coming to see Star Wars: Rogue One. I don’t think it would have been her choice otherwise, but she knew I was keen. And so, by way of returning the favour, today we went to see La-La Land. Georgina likes musicals; it was my turn to indulge her; and I confess I was curious to see what all the awards and five-star reviews have been about.

I needn’t have worried. The first five minutes, a sequence staged improbably on a gridlocked freeway somewhere in LA, with the performers singing and dancing in, around and on top of the stranded cars, made me fear the worst. But after that the movie got better and better until the very end, where a sudden twist left a very bitter taste. Let’s just say that I like happy endings; and this is, after all, a Hollywood romance.

Most particularly, the music is excellent. It has been billed elsewhere as jazz, and so for the most part it is, though with a strong Latin flavour at times, and with a couple of show tunes in a classic Hollywood style to round it off. The male lead, played by Ryan Gosling, is a struggling jazz pianist who dreams of establishing his own jazz club. Gosling performs several numbers on screen; unless there has been some Rogue One-style digital trickery going on, with Gosling’s head and face superimposed on someone else’s image, it clearly is Gosling playing and not some anonymous stand-in. Apparently he had three months’ intensive tuition for the role, so kudos to him for that. Several other fine jazz musicians also perform their music on screen; indeed, the fear that jazz is dying, and the temptation to compromise into smoother fusion forms in order to retain an audience, is one of the key plot threads.

This is not a through-composed musical. There are several musical numbers to illustrate the burgeoning romance between Seb (Gosling) and Mia (Emma Stone), and a couple of recurrent tunes are put to very good use. But, apart from the romance, the plot is advanced mainly through dialogue, and there are a couple of very fine, intense scenes between Gosling and Stone as their characters’ separate aspirations, successes and setbacks start to pull them apart.

La-La Land has been compared to the classic musicals made by Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and in keeping with that tradition there are several numbers in which Gosling and Stone are required to dance and sing. It is quickly obvious that these are actors first, singers and dancers second; but the composer and choreographer have carefully matched their demands to the capabilities of their performers and the results are true to the characters and story. Some critics have complained that it would have been better to cast musical stars, top-class singers and dancers for whom acting is secondary, but I don’t agree. La-La Land is a romantic fantasy (very obviously so in some of the set-piece numbers) but it would not work if the characters were not convincing, and it is the acting which makes them so.

Indeed, the two stars are thoroughly put through their paces. Emma Stone is not required to play an instrument, but she bears the greater burden in the dancing, and her acting skills are put to fuller use. Gosling (in character) does not stray far beyond distracted, sulky or intense. Stone runs the full gamut of emotions, from devastated (when her one-woman show draws a tiny audience) to hyped (when she receives a callback after a first audition – though that one, too, turns to dust). She also has to act being an actress as she undergoes a series of painful auditions, in the course of which she demonstrates that she’s far too good to be appreciated by blasé Hollywood managers. Neither Gosling nor Stone is likely to earn a singing contract any time soon, but they hit their notes well enough. Alongside the two stars, the rest of the cast (apart from the musicians) fade into the background

I must say something about the ending, which has occasioned a good deal of comment elsewhere, and by which I was dismayed.

Five years have passed, and we find that Mia, now a successful TV star, is married with a young daughter. But it is not Seb that she has married. Her husband takes her out for an evening and they chance upon a jazz club (it is not a planned visit). They go in. It is Seb’s club, for his ambition too has been fulfilled. As he is about to perform on stage Seb see s Mia in the audience. He sits at the piano, waits for what seems an eternity, and starts to play a simple melody from earlier in the film when he and Mia were a couple – and this launches us into a final set-piece number in which we see, in the authentic Rogers/Astaire style, a montage of what-might-have-beens, apparently passing through Mia’s mind’s eye: a world in which she and Seb stayed together, the daughter is theirs, right up to that very moment except that it is Seb by her side.

I was dismayed by the story, not by the telling. This is a Hollywood musical, for goodness’ sake; it’s supposed to have a happy ending, not to undermine the audience’s expectations at the last minute. I felt as let down as in the last chapters of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin when the protagonists learn they have been needlessly apart for thirty years because of a mutual misunderstanding.

At the same time I admire the way the film is able both to have its cake and eat it: the final set-piece gives us a happy ending even if it is a might-have-been. And perhaps it is truer to the characters’ stories: they have each helped the other to conquer self-doubt and on to success, but at the cost of their relationship. This is a fantasy, but it is grounded too.