Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Intro to Classical Music course at the Idler - where, when and why

 

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.

 

 

 

Introduction to Classical Music - an eight-week course

Early_c20th_shostakovitch

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.

 

 

 

 

Classical music crash course - postlude

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.

Classical music crash course - glossary

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 the
dominant its closest relative, on the fifth of the scale. Relative minor is
the closest minor key to a major-key tonic, starting on the sixth of the
scale.
Pedal point: a device used towards the end of a piece when a note is held
to anchor the harmony; usually in the bass, and usually on the dominant.
Fugue: From the Latin fuga, its name describes how one voice chases another
in an imitative way, in this musical form based on imitation.
Polyphony:– music in many parts which act independently.
Stretto:– in a fugue, when a theme enters before the previous one has
finished in another part.

Classical era: c1750 to 1820

Essential 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.
Compound duple time:– 6/8. Two beats in a bar, subdivided into three within
each beat.
Cadence:– two closing chords, like an Amen.
Sonata form:– the arrangement of an opening movement into three sections of
a musical argument: exposition, development and recapitulation.
Codetta:– a short passage that rounds a section off.

Romantic era: c1820-1910

Essential elements? The rise of the artist; combining music with other
arts; celebrating nature and individual nationhood; pushing the sound world
of opera and orchestra to the limit, and doing the same with the tonal
system.

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 of
approaches emerging, some radical and others conservative: expressionism,
neo-classicism, serialism, electronic composition, modernism,
post-modernism, minimalism, post-minimalism …...

Terms:

Timbre: – the quality of a note produced by a musical instrument.
Bitonal:– having more than one tonal centre.
Ostinato: – a repeated rhythmic figure.
Diatonic: – based round a tonal centre.
Serialism: – a procedure that orders the 12 notes of a chromatic scale as the
basis for a piece of music; also known as twelve-tone composition.

Classical music crash course at the Idler

New 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,
illustrate some salient moments, and provide a glossary of key terms. This
symposium will give you a clear understanding of the essential elements of
music in each era; after it, you'll be able to listen to music with fresh
ears and greater understanding. Think of it as an overture to a Classic
Discovery
lecture series later in the year, which will explore classical
music in more detail in a six-week course.

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.

JS Bach's St John Passion - reflections

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).

Leading us through the drama are the solo singers, or "concertists", although they have more than just one role to play. The bass soloist for example has not only the words of Jesus to sing, but also the arias and choruses; – that much is clear from Bach's original intentions in the original manuscript part. Quite a challenge for a solo singer to switch personas in this way, and even more so for the chorus to be an out-of control mob baying for Jesus to be crucified one moment, and grieving contemporary Christians the next (as in the transition from no 21d "Kreuzige!" and no 21f "Wir haben ein Gesetz" to the radiant chorale no 22 "Durch dein Gefängnis, Gottes Sohn." But that doesn't mean that we should duck the issue by asking soloists to sit out the chorus sections, or for chorales to be played rather than sung for the sake of dramatic convenience, as was the case in a recent Passion staging. On the contrary, – this shift in perspectives between third and first person, and between the Passion story and the present, is one of the things that make this Passion narrative so startling and vivid, and so relevant to today.

If I'm emphasising the drama at the expense of the music here, that's because it's clear to me what should take priority. Everyone know what a supreme musical craftsman Bach was, but the standout feature of the St John Passion isn't the music at all;– it's the way he puts his astonishing musical skills entirely at the service of the Passion story. This is a gripping, at times terrifying, narrative -– for me the way Bach illuminates the account in John's Gospel of Jesus's betrayal, trial, crucifixion and death is more vivid than any other musical work before or since.

The performance of JS Bach's St John Passion takes place at 8pm on Sunday 16th of October. I''ll be joining forces with the West London Bach Consort and Players,– veterans of our complete Bach cantata cycle which ran from 1997-2010. Once again it will be a privilege to work with an excellent team of vocal soloists, instrumentalists and ensemble singers,– each of them giving their services for no fee, to raise money for a deserving local charity:– the Upper Room.

A few days before the concert I'm hosting two Classic Discovery evenings which take a close look at the St John Passion, and reflecting further on the spiritual qualities of the work and its exceptional dramatic power. These take place at 8pm on Wednesday 12th October in the Parish Hall of St Anne's Church Kew Green, and at 8pm on Thursday 13th October in the Michael Room, St Michael and All Angels Church, Chiswick, London W4 1TT. Tickets are £10:– pay on the door.

Click here to download:
Bach St John Passion Poster.pdf (1.86 MB)
(download)

A Leighton 'Music' on Tuesday July 12

Leighton_house

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.

The evening takes place at Leighton House on Tuesday July 12 2011 from
7.00pm to 10.00pm; the music starts at 7:30pm. Tickets are £35.00 including
refreshments. To book tickets, call 020 7471 9153 or email
noe.auvelius@rbkc.gov.uk. The online ticket link is here:
https://www.wegottickets.com/event/124282

Leighton House Museum, 12 Holland Park Road, London W14 8LZ