My silent piece came later

'To Whom It May Concern: the white paintings came first: my silent piece came later.' John Cage writes in Silence about Robert Rauschenberg who died on May 12, 2008. My photo of Rauschenberg in front of his White Paintings comes from an article about about the artist and Cage on Emvergeoning. Read more about cleaning the ears of the musically educated here.
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The colour of music

Useful article in this week's New Statesman on the Eye Music: Kandinsky, Klee and All That Jazz exhibition that I wrote about here a couple of weeks back.

Now playing - A Colour Symphony by Sir Arthur Bliss, with Vernon Handley conducting the Ulster Orchestra. This 1922 work is a musical bridge between the pageantry of Elgar and the progressiveness of Stravinsky and Milhaud. There are four movements, Purple - Andante maestoso, Red - Allegro vivace, Blue - Gently flowing, and finally, Green - Moderato.

Sir Arthur Bliss held that most royal of musical titles, Master of the Queen's Music. He is remembered as an English composer, and is unlikely to feature on Sequenza21. But he was in fact half-American (on his father’s side), and America played an important part in his life and career. In 1923 Bliss went with his father to the United States, and was active there as a conductor, pianist, lecturer and writer. During the time he was in the US his music was played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Monteux and the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. He met Trudy Hoffmann in California and married her in 1925, and returned to England the following year.

A Colour Symphony was composed the year before the composer travelled to America, and the work was a major success on both sides of the Atlantic. But both this work, and the composer's reputation, have faded into obscurity in the intervening years. Today Bliss is usually remembered for his score for the 1936 film based on H.G. Wells' novel The Shape Of Things To Come. That is unfair. His music deserves to be heard more often, particularly A Colour Symphony and Music For Strings. As they say on Amazon.com, if you bought Tippett's Concerto for Double String Orchestra you will like Bliss' Music for Strings.

Wonderful playing from the Ulster Orchestra under Tod Handley in A Colour Symphony. Read more about that fine orchestra here.
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If you will build it he will come

Doris Salcedo's new installation Shibboleth (above) at the Tate Modern looks set to become contemporary art's 4' 33". There is huge media coverage and massive interest from people who don't normally 'do' modern art. The only question is how long will the queues be?

Isn't there a lesson for contemporary music?

The installation doesn't have a cheesy introductory talk. It isn't surrounded by gilt framed Old Masters to soften the shock. The creator is the wrong side of 40. It isn't tucked away in a ghetto space. There are no worries about letters of complaint. It didn't need blogs to talk it up. It isn't even being given away free on the internet.

Doris Salcedo and Tate Modern built it. And the audience will come.

More interesting views on promoting contemporary music in today's Guardian letters. Picture credit Tate Modern. Before anyone shouts 'equality', the headline quote is from the 1989 film Field of Dreams, and is correct. It is often misquoted as 'If you will build it they will come'. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Towards an era of objective art

The photographs here were all taken by me at the 2007 EASTinternational. This is an open submission biennial exhibition held at Norwich Gallery and the Norwich School of Art and Design.


Each EASTinternational is selected by invited curators and artists, and the exhibition has provided a launch pad for many new artists to emerge onto the national and international stage. This year's exhibition is selected by British artist and curator Matthew Higgs and French performance artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, and shows the work of twenty-seven artists from Europe, North America and Britain.


The main part of the exhibition is presented in Norwich School of Art and Design. This riverside building dates from 1899, and teaching rooms are cleared at the end of the academic year to create the impressive presentation spaces seen in the photos. EASTinternational is part of Contemporary Art Norwich which runs until August 31 2007.

Other Contemporary Art Norwich projects include a new temporary light and sound installation by Simon Fenoulhet at Wymondham Abbey. The ambient sounds are by John Hardy Music, and a microphone in the Abbey's ruined East Tower allows the listeners to interact with the lighting in a similar way to Helen Ottoway's sound installation at last year's Norwich Festival. Full event details from the CAN website.

The curators of this year's EASTinternational provide food for thought when they suggest we are entering a period where history and documentary are replacing art as fiction. Their quote from Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe applies just as much to contemporary music as it does to the visual arts: “All eras in a state of decline and dissolution are subjective; on the other hand all progressive eras have an objective tendency.”


Take this path to see art in a public space in Norwich, and this one to see performance art in Suffolk.
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Brain music

Art works in public spaces, and my photos show 'Homage to Thomas Browne', a site-specific artwork that was installed here in Norwich last week. The controversial installation was created by the French husband and wife team of Anne and Patrick Poirier, and there is a musical connection. William Alwyn's Fifth Symphony was first performed in Norwich, and is dedicated to the memory of Sir Thomas Browne, with each section of the symphony headed by a quotation from Browne's best known work, Urn Burial.


Physician, philosopher, botanist and writer Sir Thomas Browne lived in Norwich, close to the site of the sculpture, from 1636 to his death in 1682. Among the authors influenced by Browne's writings are R.D. Laing, W.G. Sebald, E.M. Forster, and Jorge Luis Borges. Browne's major works are notable for their extensive references to America less than 150 years after Christopher Columbus' voyages of discovery.

In 1658 Browne published his Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial. Inspired by Bronze Age burials in Norfolk this discourse reflected on funerary customs of the world, and touched on a 21st century preoccupation, the transitory nature of earthly fame and reputation. Among the writers expressing admiration for Urn Burial were John Cowper Powys, James Joyce and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the same year Browne published The Garden of Cyrus which examines the quincunx, a five-pointed diamond shape which he believed existed throughout nature.


This quincunx pattern determines the geometry of the artwork, with the marble eye and brain, which are seen in my photos, forming two of the points of the diamond. The work comprises twenty pieces of sculpture and twenty-two lights, and the sculptures are designed to be sat on, touched and used as furniture. Anne and Patrick Poirier are internationally renown both for their gallery installations and their public works, and they have also worked with composers of electronic music.


Composer William Alwyn was born in 1905, and lived in Blythburgh, near Aldeburgh, from 1960 until his death in 1985 . His musical style was a unique mix of romanticism and modernism, he used dissonance extensively and developed his own Indian inspired alternative to serialism which divided the twelve semitones of the scale into two groups.

Alwyn's Fifth Symphony was commissioned by the Arts Council for the 1973 Norfolk & Norwich Triennial Festival, where it was premiered with Alwyn conducting. Although the symphony is dedicated to Sir Thomas Browne and quotations from Urn Burial are used in the score the work is not programmatic. It compresses the traditional four-movement into a concise one-movement work lasting just 16 minutes.

We are very fortunate to have Anne and Partick Poirier's 'Homage to Thomas Browne' here in Norwich, and we are also fortunate to have a first-class recording of Alwyn's Fifth Symphony in the catalogue. It is available in Richard Hickox and the London Symphony Orchestra's 3 CD set (audio samples available via that link) of Alwyn's complete symphonies on Chandos. Producer Brian Couzens captures remarkably vivid sound in All Saints Tooting. This Chandos Alwyn set is highly recommended, as is the Lyrita recording of his opera Miss Julie. For budget buyers, Naxos also have Alwyn's symphonies in their catalogue, and their new release of his chamber music and songs has been well reviewed.


Now follow this path for more evidence that art works.
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The most interesting thing in life ...

'In art what is interesting is the structure of evolution, the direction things take. You can talk about beginning, development and end in many ways but in my view the idea of development is the most interesting thing in life' ~ Elliott Carter, Literary works. Italian. [le traduzioni dei saggi di questo volume sono di] autori vari ; a cura di Enzo Restagno. Torino, EDT/Musica 1989.

Now read about a standing ovation for Elliott Carter
Sorry, the score isn't Elliott Carter, the painting is Le Violin rouge, vers 1948 by the Fauvist Raoul Dufy. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Iggily buff

'Iggily buff' by Vanessa Pooley, bronze 16" long. Do visit the artist's website and blog.

I don't write about women composers or women artists, just as I don't write about men composers or men artists. But this is the first in a sequence of three posts featuring very interesting artists and composers, and by a coincidence they are all women.

Now read how the eternal feminine follows the musical path
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Alban Berg - you can't call that music

Today's big art story is that Prince Charles is joining great 20th century artists Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, and Francis Bacon as the designer of a label for a Château Mouton Rothschild wine vintage. You can view their labels by opening those preceeding artist links, the Royal artwork is above, and Charles' label for the 2004 vintage is here. This story would really have made the late John Drummond laugh, as the following anecdote explains:

I have always found the Prince's lack of interest in anything to do with the arts in our time depressing, since all his opinions get so widely reported. It seems to me that he has had unrivalled opportunities to get to understand the twentieth century, but he has rejected it without hesitation. Both Denys Lasdun and Colin St John Wilson of the British Library, found work hard to get in the UK in the aftermath of the Prince's criticisms.

I cannot believe it is a proper use of royal patronage to increase unemployment among architects. And it is the same with music. Having listened together at a Bath Festival concert to a superb performance of Alban Berg's String Quartet, written in 1910, the Prince turned to me and said, 'Well you can't call that music, but I suppose you would John.' 'And so should you, sir,' I repled defiantly. We had quite an argument, and later that evening he told our host that he liked me but unfortunately I was wrong about everything.

* View all the Chateau Mouton Rothschild labels here.

For more on the Royal taste in music read That's Harrison Birtwistle, - quick, let's hide.
Extract from John Drummond's autobiography Tainted by Experience, published by Faber, ISBN 0571200540. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

David Hockney's 'Private Passions'

David Hockney's creative genius embraces the performing, as well as the visual, arts. His first stage commission was for a production of Jarry's Ubu Roi at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1966. In 1974 he designed his first opera, the highly acclaimed Rake's Progress by Stravinsky for Glyndebourne. A second collaboration with Glyndebourne followed, on Mozart's Magic Flute (below) in 1978. I remember sitting in the audience that year wearing the de rigeur Glyndebourne uniform of dinner jacket, Hockney was in the row behind wearing a tee shirt and a non-matching pair of old trainers.

Other notable stage commissions included triple bills of Satie, Poulenc and Ravel (Parade, Les Mamelles de Tiresias and L'enfant et les sortilèges) and Stravinsky (Le Rossignol, Le Sacré du Printemps and Oedipus Rex) in 1981 for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde for the Los Angeles Music Centre, Puccini's Turandot in San Francisco and Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten at Covent Garden.

Given such a brilliant involvement with the performing arts it is not surprising that David Hockney's selection of musical 'Private Passions,' selected for the BBC Radio 3 programme of the same name, is an enchanting selection of magical moments from the theatre:

* Richard Strauss, 'Falcon Aria' (from Die Frau ohne Schatten, Act II), René Kollo (Emperor)/ Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra / Wolfgang Sawallisch EMI CDC 749077-2
* Mozart, 'Bald prangt, den Morgen zu verkunden' (from The Magic Flute), Lucia Popp (Pamina) / Tolz Boys' Choir / Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra / Bernard Haitink EMI CDC 747953-2
* Ravel, 'Five o'clock Foxtrot' (from L'enfant et les sortilèges), Jocelyne Taillon (Chinese cup), Philip Langridge (Teapot) / London Symphony Orchestra / André Previn EMI CDC 747169-2
* Stavinsky, 'Song of the Nightingale' (from Le rossignol), Phylis Bryn-Julson (Nightingale), Neil Howlett (Emperor) / BBC Symphony Orcestra / Pierre Boulez Erato 2292-45627-2
* Wagner, Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, Philharmonia / Wilhelm Furtwängler EMI CDC 747322-2
* Bartók, String Quartet No. 2 (second movement, Allegro molto capriccioso), Takás Quartet Hungaraton HCD 12502-2

And here is something of a scoop. A Hockney exhibition is opening tomorrow (17th November) at the Gilbert Collection, Somerset House, London. There are no less than thirty-six new paintings in the exhibition created to be viewed as a single group titled Midsummer: East Yorkshire 2004. They are watercolours, and represent a significant development from Hockney's previous style. As the title indicates all the watercolours are of Yorkshire painted a new 'pastoral' style, and represent a return to Hockney's roots. But these new paintings are certainly not an exercise in nostalgia, more an 'Indian Summer' paralleling the late burst of creativity from Richard Strauss that resulted in masterpieces such as Metamorphosen, the Oboe Concerto, and of course the sublime Four Last Songs. Understandably artists and their agents are neurotic about copyright. There is a low res image of one of the new watercolours, Roads and Cornfields: East Yorkshire on Sue Bond PRs web site, and I am taking the liberty of deep linking to - not copying - it (above) with full acknowledgement of ownership and copyright. Other watercolours from the new exhibition can be viewed via this link.

Programme broadcast on 30th September 1995.
Listen to the latest BBC Radio 3 Private Passions programme with this link.
Information reproduced from Private Passions by Michael Berkeley, published by Faber ISBN 0-571-22884- 4
Image credits - ownership and copyright acknowledged:
Header - 'Peter getting out of Nick's pool', David Hockney 1967 - Liverpool Museum
Magic Flute design for Glyndebourne - Stage Image
Roads and Cornfields: East Yorkshire - Sue Bond PR
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