Setting out my stall for the Classical Music Introduction course at the Idler - it takes place at the Idler Academy, 81 Westbourne Park Road, London W2 5QH, over eight Tuesday evenings from 13th March to 8th May 2012 (excluding 10th March). Lectures begin at 7pm and end at 8:30pm. You can book for the whole course or for individual sessions. Click here for more details. And here's my opening exordium:
Welcome to this course which will fill a gap in the understanding of classical music. The initial reason I put it together is that there are many people out there – including many of my friends – who are interested in knowing more about classical music but don’t know where to start; it being such a vast subject with thousands of composers, works, and hundreds of technical terms used to describe these pieces that no-one ever stops to explain. Allegretto, anyone? This course is meant for them, people who feel comfortable discussing the latest Booker prize-winning novel, analysing a new film release, taking a view on a recent development in contemporary architecture, and indeed talking about the merits of a new album, but for whom classical music remains a frustratingly closed book.
This is also a course for those in the know about classical music – people who have become familiar with classical music for the best possible reasons; they have sung in choirs, played an instrument, or fallen in love with a work on CD, and would like to find out more. People in this situation encounter a different problem. Much of the reference material concerning classical music in our day and age deals in great detail with subjects, in the belief that adding as much material as possible is an aid to understanding. I believe it is not. To give just one example: wanting to double-check my facts about modes – more of which later – I turned to the latest edition of the leading classical music reference tome. It has 85 pages of entries on that one subject, but it still didn’t answer my question in a clear, easily-accessible way. Much of contemporary writing is like this; it caters for the scholar rather than for the practical musician or intelligent music lover who is interested in discovering more and entitled to do so. It is that kind of information that this course seeks to present in a clear way, allowing a firm grasp of the fundamentals of classical music; encouraging connections to be made from one era to another, and setting listeners up to go off and find out more in-depth knowledge about the aspects of the course which have specifically interested them.
Classical music is about passion – it’s passion that drives us to find out more about music after hearing one of the greatest works ever written, or after hearing or taking part in a performance, concert or gig which captured a glimpse, however fleeting, of something sublime. But classical music is also about ideas – ideas concerning music itself, or the ideas in other art forms it interacts with or ideas current in the context of the era that produced it. The way that themes are written down, developed, combined with other ideas, extended and worked into a large-scale musical edifice – as in a symphony by Brahms, for example – has clear parallels with architecture, for example. During the course of the last thousand years music has played its part in politics too, however reluctantly; it has been pressed into service by totalitarian regimes, and proposed as a force of good by more benign ones. Some of the greatest composers – such as Johann Sebastian Bach - have viewed music as a craft, others – such as Mahler – as a vehicle for some of their most personal struggles, failures and victories. It has reflected some of the most potent ideas in literature and art by sharing and developing ideas from those other mediums. And last but not least, music has been at the heart of religious worship since time immemorial, as well as well as acting as a reluctant bit-part player in some of its most divisive struggles. What unites these different approaches is the interplay between passion and ideas, the heart and the head. Great classical music engages both.
Aimed at intelligent adults who are looking for a way in to the greatness of classical music, my eight-week course gets under way at the Idler Academy on Tuesday 13th March. It covers a thousand years of classical music, taking us from the Medieval and Renaissance periods through Baroque, Classical, Romantic and twentieth-century right up to the present day.
Here's what one kind audience member wrote after the taster evening in January: “I thoroughly enjoyed the talk in the intimate setting of Idler. Had you booked say Wigmore Hall I wouldn’t have come!” Mrs E.P
Quite honestly, many of my friends and acquaintances avoid classical music because they don't know much about it and feel excluded from what's going on. So this course sets out to change all that. We'll be looking at what role music played in each era, and how composers went about the process of shaping their works. I'll bring my trusty iPod and docking station along to play recorded examples by way of illustration. Find out more about what's in each lecture here.
This course will give you a clear understanding of the essential elements of music in each era, and will enable you to listen to classical music with fresh ears and greater understanding. I'll provide a glossary of key terms, along with a suggested list of recordings to explore and events to attend.
The Introduction to Classical Music series takes place at the Idler Academy, 81 Westbourne Park Road, London W2 5QH. It runs on Tuesday evenings from 13th March to 8th May 2012 (excluding 10th March). Lectures begin at 7pm and end at 8:30pm. You can book for the whole course or for individual session. The price is £192 for eight weeks (20% off) or £30 per lesson; it includes wine and nibbles. To book, ring the Idler Academy on 0207 221 5908 or reserve places online here.
To everyone who squeezed into the Idler Academy for the Classical music crash course last night, it was good to meet you and thanks for your rapt attention and interesting questions ... Scroll down on this blog for a closer look at the glossary of terms relevant to each era. Since many of you expressed interest, I'm hatching a plan for a full-blown Classical music lecture series at the Idler Academy, each of them examining a musical era in much more detail than last night, which was a mere taster. This might get going as soon as the next few weeks, but I'll keep you posted with a post here as the plan crystallises. In the meantime, if you have any feedback or queries, or if you'd to put your email address on the mailing list, do drop me a line here. And here's a reminder of what it was all about.
For my Classical music crash course at the Idler Academy I''ve prepared a
quick glossary of the four key periods I''m covering, with a brief overview
and definitions of five key terms that are relevant to each. Enjoy!
Baroque music: c1607 to 1750
Essential elements? Dance-like feel behind much of the music; rhythmic drive; often still a polyphonic approach to composing; some extremely expressive music, with flamboyant vocal writing and extraordinary poetry; craftsmanship rather than self-expression.
Terms: Tonic, dominant and relative minor: the tonic is the home key, and theEssential elements? Balance and beauty; clear, elegant discussion of musical
ideas, avoiding extremes; plenty of conventions, often subtly contravened.
Terms:
Chamber music: music with one instrument per part.Terms:
Programme music: music that's designed to tell a story or paint a picture
(as opposed to absolute music).
Gesamtkunstwerk: Wagner''s idea of bringing several disciplines together to
make a perfect, all-embracing art form.
Thematic transformation: transmogrifying a musical theme during the course
of a musical drama.
Leitmotiv: in a dramatic context, a recurring musical theme that's always
associated with a particular character or idea; aka idée fixe.
Tone poem or symphonic poem: a piece of narrative programme music painted on an orchestral canvas.
C20th era:
Essential elements? Music being pushed to the brink and a whole variety ofNew Year, new grasp of sonata form and retrograde inversion? I'm getting
together with the Idler Academy in Notting Hill to present a crash course in
classical music on Thursday 12th January. It's aimed at intelligent adults
who are looking for a way in to the greatness of classical music. I'll be
tackling four key areas of classical music Baroque, Classical, Romantic
and twentieth-century in the course of the evening, and focussing on a
major work from each. And I've had fun picking these! :
JS Bach: Prelude & Fugue in C major (Well-Tempered
Clavier Book 1)
Mozart: B flat String Quartet K458, "the Hunt"
Mahler: Symphony no 1
Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps/Rite of Spring
I'll look at the cultural context in each case, analyse the music,Classical Music Crash Course starts at 6.30pm for 7pm on Thursday evening 12 January 2012, at The Idler Academy, 81 Westbourne Park Road, London W2 5QH. Tel: 0207 221 5908. It costs £30, including wine and nibbles. To book click here. And to ask me any questions about it for example, "why on earth didn't you choose Schoenberg's Variations op 31?" click here.
In the build-up to my first St John Passion (downloadable poster below), I've been reflecting on the essence of this extraordinary piece, and how best to do justice to the score. The St Matthew, which we're performing as part of our long-running Bach project this coming February, is the more expansive account of the Passion story - and, to be honest, up until now it's been my preferred
Passion of the two. So what does the St John have going for it? The answer to that is that it's intensely dramatic; there's acres of Evangelical recitative, punctuated by stunning outbursts from the chorus, variously in the guises of chief priests, Jews and Roman soldiers. So key to getting it
right will be the pacing of the narrative, which it seems to me should maintain its momentum right up to the moment of Jesus's death on the Cross (no.31).
I rarely play chamber music, and rarely wear tails. But am resolved to do
both more often after a memorable evening with La Folia, playing Schubert's
Trout Quintet. The one on the end, grinning? C'est moi
During the 1880s and 1890s, Leighton's 'musics' as they became known were a
high point of the London social and cultural calendar. They were effectively
salons, combining music and art within a beautiful setting, namely Lord
Leighton's own studio on the edge of Holland Park in Kensington. What made
them remarkable was that some of the very finest nineteenth century
musicians took part, including violinist Joseph Joachim, cellist Alfred
Piatti and pianist Charles Hallé not to mention Leighton himself, who sang
with a light and charming tenor voice. There was a real sense of the
creative arts reaching across to each other all in the informal and
intimate atmosphere of Leighton's studio, with his work in progress all
around them. Fast forward to the present day, and Leighton House has asked me to curate
and present an Aesthetic Concert, inspired by the wonderful repertoire and
great artists that took part in the 'musics' in Lord Leighton's day. The
programme includes Schubert's great piano trio in B flat, one of Handel's
violin sonatas, and some of Leighton's favourite songs by Gordigiani,
Schubert and Maud Valérie White. Richard Edgar-Wilson steps into Lord
Leighton's shoes as the tenor for the evening, with Kathryn Parry (violin),
Joely Koos (cello) and Simon Marlow at the piano.
Esperanza Spalding's Chamber Music Society at the Barbican Centre on Friday 8th April 2011 - pre-concert interview
(download)
