Everyone loves a great, memorable tune. We're talking here not about just melody, but melody that can be elevated to being called a tune. Such things are usually tonal, regularly phrased, and featuring a melody-and-accompaniment texture, often chorale-like and generously orchestrated. They are instantly recognisable, make audiences feel good and can assure a composer a place in musical history. And yet they are also quite rare beasts. So why doesn't every composer write one?
Well, for a start, coming up with a really good Big Tune is potentially a laborious process. In a classic example of the symbiosis involved in composition, the effectiveness of the melody goes hand-in-hand with the skillful use of harmony - both must be devised simultaneously to compliment one another, Since a great number of Big Tunes are felt to arouse feelings of national pride or other gushing emotions, the achievement of sincerity in such an entity can only be achieved by a relatively narrow repertoire of gestures - for example starting with a stable harmony to establish gravitas, or later a move to the minor in one of the phrases, returning to the major as if in reassurance. On the most simple level it can be hard to consciously set out to 'write a Big Tune like the one in [piece x]' and avoid sounding like a pale imitation of it.
Second, the definition of a Big Tune will confine a composer to a relatively narrow musical style unless the music is deliberately a college or pot-pourri of different influences. Stravinsky couldn't simply introduce a four-square anthem into, say, Rite of Spring, as it would sound ridiculous in this context and be completely contrary to the aims of the music.
Structurally and technically speaking, they present several problems. Chief amongst these is that the attraction of the thing is its completeness - that is, the tune is a sixteen-bar entity which one can sing along to and which follows recognisable lines. This is fine if the tune is to be a thing-in-itself, but less so if it is to be used as part of a wider form such as a movement of a symphony. Percy Grainger's famous quip that 'the trouble with folk songs is that when you've played it once the only thing you can do is repeat it' rings true, for good tunes are awkward to do anything else with. The more memorable a tune is in itself, the more 'closed' an entity it is likely to be, probably ending with a nice neat cadence in the tonic. For use in a larger form, it usually comes to just too satisfying and complete an end, meaning that the music has to stop and re-start, and that there is a lack of tension around which to build the remainder of the piece. Apart from anything else it can be difficult to chop up the tune into smaller segments with which any development will be facilitated; particularly for the listener who, having been drawn to the piece by tune, will probably find the fragmented version less appealing than the initial whole. It is possible - the finales of Tchaikovsky's Fifth and Nielsen's Third, the first and last movements of Elgar's First and several parts of Dvorak's Ninth are famous examples that manage it by various means, mostly by following it with something contrasting and then eventually bringing the Big Tune back at the end to satisfy listeners. Sibelius pulls it off in Finlandia, in oh-so-Sibelian fashion building the preceding material from fragments of the theme, then juxtaposing the last note of it with the start of the next section (cleverly avoiding the stasis that would have resulted from bringing it to a close) and finally presenting only the first phrase of the melody in the coda. Even when the theme is allowed to run in the central section of the piece it is carefully varied in orchestration and not allowed to become sentimentalised.
Actually, Finlandia throws up a number of interesting avenues related to this topic. The work was originally introduced, in a slightly extended form, as the finale of the rather uninspiringly titled suite Music for the Press Celebrations. As the general feeling of the time was explicitly nationalistic, it is no surprise that the stirring tone poem quickly became performed on its own as an anthem of independence, and was as quickly banned by the Russians for this reason. With all this national feeling contained within, it was assumed that the work had been composed with the intent of being as 'Finnish' as possible and thus included national folk music. Sibelius had to repeatedly state that both the theme and the rest of the piece were categorically not based on any folk-songs. The assumption of this is quite telling. Folk music is not all melody and even rarer still the neat four-in-a-bar, major-key type (Finnish music often features five beats in the bar). Did the symphonic content making up the other 3/4 of the piece actually matter or would it have been enough to have just written the famous tune? Was the big tune even written as a crowd-pleaser or just for structural purposes in the first place? Sibelius went on to arrange the central theme for choir (twice, in fact) setting the patriotic 'Finland Awakes' and thus joining a tradition that continues to this day of putting words to likely tunes, appropriate or not.
And that brings us on to the English equivalent of Finlandia, and another issue with Big Tunes - they become appropriated for hymns, songs, 'crossover' cover versions, etc, regardless of the composer's personal beliefs or the original context of the cultural artefact - and also become overplayed. Having seen his suite become a rare hit amongst his output, Gustav Holst eventually grew to hate the incessant elevation of The Planets to the neglect of his other music (despite it justifiably being his best work) and in particular the setting of the famous melody in Jupiter to the text of I Vow To Thee, My Country and its subsequent use at every kind of pompous nationalistic occasion. Apart from the fact that the work is more concerned with astrological connotations from Indian mysticism than the fruits of the scientific advancements of the European Enlightenment, Holst was both a pacifist and an atheist and conspicuously from an immigrant background - Sweden via Latvia. He would have been either horrified by or, more likely, resigned to, today's appropriation of this melody by jingoistic military occasions and flag-waving nationalism, and the assumption that it was written by a Very British composer. Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No.1 and the 'Nimrod' movement of the Enigma Variations suffer much the same problems. Elgar was also born an outsider (a working-class Catholic, making the patriotic 'Land of Hope and Glory' text somewhat out of place) and the Enigma Variations written as a highly personal piece, albeit in a generally light vein. Worse, in such an extended work as this, everyone wants to hear the Big Tune to the exclusion of the rest of the piece, and because the particular excerpt is what is most readily associated with the composer, they are in danger of alienating audiences with anything that departs from this. Returning to an earlier example, if you only knew the tune from Finlandia, then Sibelius' final two symphonies and The Tempest music must sound mightily strange on a first hearing. Holst put off audiences simply by not re-writing The Planets in subsequent orchestral outings, a perfectly natural thing for a composer to do.
There are two happy upshots from all this. Film music manages to use the idea of the Big Tune more successfully, largely due to its role as accompaniment. If the audience needs to attach a particular recognisable theme to a character then this is a highly effective way to do it without having to worry about symphonic development (which would be too distracting for the medium). Indeed, the skillful writing of Leitmotif that works both as a film soundtrack and as concert excerpts is what constitutes the craft of John Williams and similar composers.
Secondly, it had been demonstrated on numerous occasions (in fact the majority of frequently-performed symphonic output) that it is not at all necessary to write a Big Tune in order to compose a first-rate piece that will not only be melodic but have audiences positively singing along. Haydn repeatedly proves that motivic writing can still sound tuneful and produce a technically stimulating work. Verdi writes almost totally melodically, yet actual four-square tunes as described above are confined to one or two choruses per opera, maximising their effectiveness in music that sets out to be crowd-pleasing (yet loses no integrity or intellectual appeal in the process).
Edit: Curiously, contemporary pop music, which is also generally populist (if not by definition), seems to be equally shy of using easily memorable Big Tunes. With a few notable exceptions, it is older popular styles which tend to be more melodic, possibly as a result of their shorter evolutionary path from blues and music-hall genres, and the notion of a hummable melody is clearly anathema to punk, rap, metal and other such styles.
Showing posts with label Elgar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elgar. Show all posts
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Thursday, July 21, 2011
What Happened in Hungary: Day Two
At midnight the bus is still trundling along the A3 at full speed, currently past Frankfurt Airport. I'm riding shotgun in the cab with another guest, keeping the driver awake on the last part of his shift. He appreciates the conversation and in return we learn a lot: the coach has a six hundred - litre fuel tank and is actually the team bus for the Harlequins Rugby side (this explains it's slightly familiar multicolour decoration). Our driver and us swap travel stories, with intermissions whilst he explains a few of the many extra controls and buttons laid in front of us not found on cars. It's something of a novelty to actually see where we're going, despite it being only 24 hours since I last drove but having faced backwards behind a dividing wall since. The traffic is light by now and most of the native drivers are taking advantage of the lack of any tangible speed limit, shooting past the lumbering coach in which the lights are dimmed and most occupants are sleeping.
The sat-nav beeps and an ersatz English voice makes several announcements. A few minutes later, the driver indicates, slowly eases off the power and brakes to a gentle halt in a rest area populated by trucks from all over Europe - French, Dutch, Slovak, Romanian - and a small toilet block. Looking a little overshadowed is a little Transit minibus with a UK license plate, in the coach company's colours. From here two new drivers will take us the rest of the way and drive us around in Hungary. There's time to do a running repair job on the ski box. One of the drivers climbs onto the roof of the minibus and out comes a roll of gaffa tape, to cheers from the orchestra. It's not a permanent fix, but it'll stop the rain getting in and puts the side light back in position. The mood is convivial: we ignore the slightly grim toilets and enjoy the opportunity to converse with people sitting in different areas of the bus. The Transit drives off, on a short hop to a Frankfurt hotel, to another cheer from the passengers. From here we'll have fresh drivers and cross Germany in the dark until the sun rises again somewhere near to, or even in, Austria. Back to our seats and onto the dark autobahn.
That's odd, we're stopping. We've only been going about twenty minutes but the bus has just pulled into a smaller lay-by. Bit of low conversation from the cab, but it's probably just that the emergency door isn't shut properly or they want to check the ski box lights are still working. We move off again a few moments later and proceed to rejoin the autobahn. Orange light from the indicator, back up to full speed. Some kilometres pass by without incident and I try to doze again.
And then suddenly, a very sharp tap on the brakes, much more forceful than before, somebody's wandered out of their lane close in front of us, perhaps, but the voices from the cab aren't swearing at a German driver, they're more panicked than that. Something is wrong, properly wrong; because now we're braking again, taking the next exit ramp, round a tight bend and up to some traffic lights onto a minor road, so it's not even something that can wait to the next service area. I'm holding the curtain open to see anything that can be seen: the bus turns left at the lights and onto a wide-ish street with buildings, then indicates once more, pulls slightly to the right and stops. Engine off. Lights off. Silence, apart from muffled voices and a car going the opposite way.
A few other people are starting to wake up, aware that Something Has Happened. I'm trying to work out firstly what; and second: where we are. My initial guess is the clutch cable or disk, because the coach seemed to be juddering when moving off the last couple of times; or perhaps the auto box is playing up, it's jammed or the computer changed down suddenly which would explain the sharp braking. But perhaps not, because we made several gear changes coming off the autobahn and it's been fine this far. Burst tyre? I'd have heard it go. The second question is a little easier to answer. We're obviously still in Germany, and quite near to Frankfurt, probably to the south-east, but in the dark I can't tell if we're in a small settlement or a larger town. There's a load of cherry-pickers outside a shop down the road, and I remember going past a VW dealer further up it, and some kind of car wash on the other side. Looking backwards outside the bus, I can see that we're in a lay-by with tourist information panels by the side, but by dim street lights am unable to make out the name of the town or the details of the map.
(It turns out that the problem was the alternator - or rather the lack of it. You may recall that people upstairs reported smoke and burning back in Belgium. I later learned that this was the belt that drives the alternator becoming caught or slipping, with the result that it burned out the alternator itself. Large buses, with their huge electricity consumption, have two backup alternators, but they weren't enough to keep everything going. By the time we were at Frankfurt, having had the DVD on and with lights, air conditioning and engine management systems all running as well as having just started up the huge motor, the electrics simply couldn't keep charging the battery fast enough and it was only a matter of time before something failed. This eventually happened in a particularly dramitic way - the sudden braking was actually the driver reacting, quite naturally, to the headlights suddenly going out! It hardly needs pointing out that this is a truly terrifying prospect for a bus with 50 passengers going at 100kph in the middle of the night. Mercifully, the co-driver quickly switched to emergency power which got us out of trouble for enough time to ditch. We can only conclude that it is a very good thing no fire broke out and that none of this happened whilst in the Eurotunnel).
The driver, who by this point has poked around the bus and consulted his colleague, climbs into the crew area and draws back the dividing curtain. His announcement to us is brief, and whilst I forget the exact text, the gist is that we will be stuck here for some time and the best thing to do would be to sleep whilst the relative quiet holds. Sleeping is not an easy achievement even with the removal of road noise and motion. The seats do not really recline and there is insufficient with for any but the smallest person to lie across two. I close my eyes but am far too restless, still full of the sensation of motion and passages of Elgar flooding around my mind. With the electrics out of service, and thus no heating, it also becomes quickly apparent how cold it is at night, even in summer. You will recall that, due to being rushed around whilst loading up, I stupidly neglected to have any kind of warm clothing in my hand luggage, and am now deeply regretting it. Companion lends me a blanket, which I'm highly grateful for, but it only just does the trick.
At 3am an engineer arrives and proceeds to confirm that the problem is serious (the implication is that, sadly,gaffa tape will be of little use). This sets in motion a series of frustrated communiqués which will last the next ten hours. The coach drivers contact the coach company who begin negotiations with, simultaneously; at least one German coach company; the drivers' pools of said companies; the nearest garage able to work on the make of coach; potential hotels in the area should we not get a replacement bus. We, charging phones on the coach's remaining battery power, attempt to keep contact with László, our contact in Hungary who contacts the hotel in Budapest; and, coming full circle, the drivers - who are being fed frustratingly vague excerpts from the various dramatic twists in the negotiations via head office - attempt to keep us informed what is being done to get us going again. If all that makes your head hurt, the result on the ground is that: on every alternate hour we are told that a German bus is at most an hour away. When the expected time of arrival has long since passed, we are told we will be getting another different bus to a hotel in the area whilst we find a bus to take us the rest of the way. Then, two hours later, the German bus is coming again - oh, no, we're definitely going to a hotel - yeah, that's what was going to happen, except they've now found a driver willing to take us to Hungary, except he was an hour away from us two hours ago. The night is punctuated by phone calls and repeatedly dashed hopes of a quick escape.
Fast forward to around midday. We've been here nine hours and already tensions are beginning to crack with the lack of developments. Bear in mind that we've also been in the same clothes and not had any chance to wash for a day and a half, and you can probably appreciate why at least one person nearly lost it. Still, we've learned that the name of the town is Aschaffenburg (twinned with Sopron in Hungary) and that the main source of food and toilets is a conveniently adjacent filling station of a company we don't have in England, whose staff have severely limited English to match my severely limited German. After joining everyone outside the bus during a rare half-hour of sunshine, I decide to take a walk with two friends and see if there is any food nearby other than the filling station. It decides to rain - in fact it decides to chuck it down with thunder and lightning right overhead - and we quickly discover there's not much in the way of eating in the neighbourhood. After plodding around for half an hour, sheltering under bus stops and taking five minutes to cross the road, we end up back at the same forecourt again. The only consolation is the purchase of the first (and only) schnitzel sandwich I've ever bought. I really want some hot food but have no idea where the next meal is coming from. Banana chips are keeping me alive.
Having to wait an indefinite period of time, coupled with a lack of sleep, starts to cultivate curious mind games. I keep trying to accept a pact with myself that if nothing has happened by a particular time, I shall find the station, withdraw, say, 100 euros, and get trains the rest of the way to Budapest. To pass the time, I start trying to work out how this might be done: presuming Aschaffenburg is only a local line, I assume I would have to take a regional train to Frankfurt, then if I'm lucky perhaps an express direct to Munich, then Vienna or Linz, and then another to Budapest. On the other hand, I'd probably have to leave the cello int he care of somebody staying on the buses. Car hire is probably out: way too far to take a German car all the way; I don't have any insurance documents and I'm far too tired for my first foray in a left-hand-drive vehicle on a de-restricted autobahn. A strange phenomenon, which the more psychologically inclined may be able to clarify, is that my capacity for forming short-term memories seemed noticeably diminished. I find I can't remember things that happened only a few minutes ago, (nor, more worryingly, which side of the road cars are coming from without a prompt) yet can still recall all my Hungarian and other deeply ingrained thoughts. Being in a semi-dream-like state starts to become normal.
There's another false alarm, but at 2.30 we finally achieve deliverance. A white, German-registered bus become visible on the roundabout at the end of the road, draws nearer and eventually pulls in unceremoniously behind the British one. It's a rather anticlimactic moment, given its significance. The new bus also has a ski box so we set about transferring as much luggage as we can into it. Loading the instruments and remaining bags into the underfloor area is not easy. Although the bus is parked off the main carriageway, gaining access to the luggage doors on the driver's side involves standing feet away from passing traffic, all whilst arranging unwieldy timps, cellos and whatnot into the hold space. I slam one of the doors shut and climb up to the seat Companion has saved for me. At 3pm we are finally under way and back on to the autobahn, approximately fourteen hours behind where we should be. It's a depressing though that, had all gone to plan, we would be about an hour away from Budapest at this moment. As such we now have to face a second full day travelling and, at an optimistic estimate, an arrival time of after midnight.
The new bus is a more normal single-decker and isn't half so accommodating as the original one. There are barely enough seats for us all, what with having to put the contrabass inside the bus, and not nearly as much legroom or potential sleeping positions. There's also no segregation of decks so the luxury of being in the quieter area is gone. Worse, we run into a traffic jam just half an hour after setting off, the type that are caused by tailgating so there's not actually any real obstacle up ahead, just stop-start traffic. I'm sure if I were well rested I'd appreciate the increasingly mountainous scenery more as we progress gradually across the huge expanse of Bavaria, but not at the moment. A rest stop approaching Nuremburg is welcome. The toilets charge, but are actually worth are actually worth paying 70 cents for as they have an interesting party piece when you flush - the seat revolves 360 degree to be sanitised and the towel dispensers are automatic, I can't help feeling that this fastidious level of cleanliness is undermined my the fact that were I in my car I would probably check the oil or some other unhygienic task immediately afterwards.
More road, most of it still two-lane. Some hours later we cross the Danube, the first of several times. Southern Germany rewards our persistence with a double rainbow as we near Passau, which provides a brief distraction from the situation in hand. It's a town I have a former house-sharing friend in, one foot either side of the river and indeed either side of the border, for we are close to Austria now. We make another (horribly short) stop and I finally get a hot meal - schnitzel and chips with almost the last of my Euros. More speculation about how long the journey time remains. We've got the whole of Austria and half of Hungary to go, several hundred kilometres. Once again, we plunge into the night.
Next time: I finally get to sleep, and then play the most nerve-racking concert ever
The sat-nav beeps and an ersatz English voice makes several announcements. A few minutes later, the driver indicates, slowly eases off the power and brakes to a gentle halt in a rest area populated by trucks from all over Europe - French, Dutch, Slovak, Romanian - and a small toilet block. Looking a little overshadowed is a little Transit minibus with a UK license plate, in the coach company's colours. From here two new drivers will take us the rest of the way and drive us around in Hungary. There's time to do a running repair job on the ski box. One of the drivers climbs onto the roof of the minibus and out comes a roll of gaffa tape, to cheers from the orchestra. It's not a permanent fix, but it'll stop the rain getting in and puts the side light back in position. The mood is convivial: we ignore the slightly grim toilets and enjoy the opportunity to converse with people sitting in different areas of the bus. The Transit drives off, on a short hop to a Frankfurt hotel, to another cheer from the passengers. From here we'll have fresh drivers and cross Germany in the dark until the sun rises again somewhere near to, or even in, Austria. Back to our seats and onto the dark autobahn.
That's odd, we're stopping. We've only been going about twenty minutes but the bus has just pulled into a smaller lay-by. Bit of low conversation from the cab, but it's probably just that the emergency door isn't shut properly or they want to check the ski box lights are still working. We move off again a few moments later and proceed to rejoin the autobahn. Orange light from the indicator, back up to full speed. Some kilometres pass by without incident and I try to doze again.
And then suddenly, a very sharp tap on the brakes, much more forceful than before, somebody's wandered out of their lane close in front of us, perhaps, but the voices from the cab aren't swearing at a German driver, they're more panicked than that. Something is wrong, properly wrong; because now we're braking again, taking the next exit ramp, round a tight bend and up to some traffic lights onto a minor road, so it's not even something that can wait to the next service area. I'm holding the curtain open to see anything that can be seen: the bus turns left at the lights and onto a wide-ish street with buildings, then indicates once more, pulls slightly to the right and stops. Engine off. Lights off. Silence, apart from muffled voices and a car going the opposite way.
A few other people are starting to wake up, aware that Something Has Happened. I'm trying to work out firstly what; and second: where we are. My initial guess is the clutch cable or disk, because the coach seemed to be juddering when moving off the last couple of times; or perhaps the auto box is playing up, it's jammed or the computer changed down suddenly which would explain the sharp braking. But perhaps not, because we made several gear changes coming off the autobahn and it's been fine this far. Burst tyre? I'd have heard it go. The second question is a little easier to answer. We're obviously still in Germany, and quite near to Frankfurt, probably to the south-east, but in the dark I can't tell if we're in a small settlement or a larger town. There's a load of cherry-pickers outside a shop down the road, and I remember going past a VW dealer further up it, and some kind of car wash on the other side. Looking backwards outside the bus, I can see that we're in a lay-by with tourist information panels by the side, but by dim street lights am unable to make out the name of the town or the details of the map.
(It turns out that the problem was the alternator - or rather the lack of it. You may recall that people upstairs reported smoke and burning back in Belgium. I later learned that this was the belt that drives the alternator becoming caught or slipping, with the result that it burned out the alternator itself. Large buses, with their huge electricity consumption, have two backup alternators, but they weren't enough to keep everything going. By the time we were at Frankfurt, having had the DVD on and with lights, air conditioning and engine management systems all running as well as having just started up the huge motor, the electrics simply couldn't keep charging the battery fast enough and it was only a matter of time before something failed. This eventually happened in a particularly dramitic way - the sudden braking was actually the driver reacting, quite naturally, to the headlights suddenly going out! It hardly needs pointing out that this is a truly terrifying prospect for a bus with 50 passengers going at 100kph in the middle of the night. Mercifully, the co-driver quickly switched to emergency power which got us out of trouble for enough time to ditch. We can only conclude that it is a very good thing no fire broke out and that none of this happened whilst in the Eurotunnel).
The driver, who by this point has poked around the bus and consulted his colleague, climbs into the crew area and draws back the dividing curtain. His announcement to us is brief, and whilst I forget the exact text, the gist is that we will be stuck here for some time and the best thing to do would be to sleep whilst the relative quiet holds. Sleeping is not an easy achievement even with the removal of road noise and motion. The seats do not really recline and there is insufficient with for any but the smallest person to lie across two. I close my eyes but am far too restless, still full of the sensation of motion and passages of Elgar flooding around my mind. With the electrics out of service, and thus no heating, it also becomes quickly apparent how cold it is at night, even in summer. You will recall that, due to being rushed around whilst loading up, I stupidly neglected to have any kind of warm clothing in my hand luggage, and am now deeply regretting it. Companion lends me a blanket, which I'm highly grateful for, but it only just does the trick.
At 3am an engineer arrives and proceeds to confirm that the problem is serious (the implication is that, sadly,gaffa tape will be of little use). This sets in motion a series of frustrated communiqués which will last the next ten hours. The coach drivers contact the coach company who begin negotiations with, simultaneously; at least one German coach company; the drivers' pools of said companies; the nearest garage able to work on the make of coach; potential hotels in the area should we not get a replacement bus. We, charging phones on the coach's remaining battery power, attempt to keep contact with László, our contact in Hungary who contacts the hotel in Budapest; and, coming full circle, the drivers - who are being fed frustratingly vague excerpts from the various dramatic twists in the negotiations via head office - attempt to keep us informed what is being done to get us going again. If all that makes your head hurt, the result on the ground is that: on every alternate hour we are told that a German bus is at most an hour away. When the expected time of arrival has long since passed, we are told we will be getting another different bus to a hotel in the area whilst we find a bus to take us the rest of the way. Then, two hours later, the German bus is coming again - oh, no, we're definitely going to a hotel - yeah, that's what was going to happen, except they've now found a driver willing to take us to Hungary, except he was an hour away from us two hours ago. The night is punctuated by phone calls and repeatedly dashed hopes of a quick escape.
Fast forward to around midday. We've been here nine hours and already tensions are beginning to crack with the lack of developments. Bear in mind that we've also been in the same clothes and not had any chance to wash for a day and a half, and you can probably appreciate why at least one person nearly lost it. Still, we've learned that the name of the town is Aschaffenburg (twinned with Sopron in Hungary) and that the main source of food and toilets is a conveniently adjacent filling station of a company we don't have in England, whose staff have severely limited English to match my severely limited German. After joining everyone outside the bus during a rare half-hour of sunshine, I decide to take a walk with two friends and see if there is any food nearby other than the filling station. It decides to rain - in fact it decides to chuck it down with thunder and lightning right overhead - and we quickly discover there's not much in the way of eating in the neighbourhood. After plodding around for half an hour, sheltering under bus stops and taking five minutes to cross the road, we end up back at the same forecourt again. The only consolation is the purchase of the first (and only) schnitzel sandwich I've ever bought. I really want some hot food but have no idea where the next meal is coming from. Banana chips are keeping me alive.
Having to wait an indefinite period of time, coupled with a lack of sleep, starts to cultivate curious mind games. I keep trying to accept a pact with myself that if nothing has happened by a particular time, I shall find the station, withdraw, say, 100 euros, and get trains the rest of the way to Budapest. To pass the time, I start trying to work out how this might be done: presuming Aschaffenburg is only a local line, I assume I would have to take a regional train to Frankfurt, then if I'm lucky perhaps an express direct to Munich, then Vienna or Linz, and then another to Budapest. On the other hand, I'd probably have to leave the cello int he care of somebody staying on the buses. Car hire is probably out: way too far to take a German car all the way; I don't have any insurance documents and I'm far too tired for my first foray in a left-hand-drive vehicle on a de-restricted autobahn. A strange phenomenon, which the more psychologically inclined may be able to clarify, is that my capacity for forming short-term memories seemed noticeably diminished. I find I can't remember things that happened only a few minutes ago, (nor, more worryingly, which side of the road cars are coming from without a prompt) yet can still recall all my Hungarian and other deeply ingrained thoughts. Being in a semi-dream-like state starts to become normal.
There's another false alarm, but at 2.30 we finally achieve deliverance. A white, German-registered bus become visible on the roundabout at the end of the road, draws nearer and eventually pulls in unceremoniously behind the British one. It's a rather anticlimactic moment, given its significance. The new bus also has a ski box so we set about transferring as much luggage as we can into it. Loading the instruments and remaining bags into the underfloor area is not easy. Although the bus is parked off the main carriageway, gaining access to the luggage doors on the driver's side involves standing feet away from passing traffic, all whilst arranging unwieldy timps, cellos and whatnot into the hold space. I slam one of the doors shut and climb up to the seat Companion has saved for me. At 3pm we are finally under way and back on to the autobahn, approximately fourteen hours behind where we should be. It's a depressing though that, had all gone to plan, we would be about an hour away from Budapest at this moment. As such we now have to face a second full day travelling and, at an optimistic estimate, an arrival time of after midnight.
The new bus is a more normal single-decker and isn't half so accommodating as the original one. There are barely enough seats for us all, what with having to put the contrabass inside the bus, and not nearly as much legroom or potential sleeping positions. There's also no segregation of decks so the luxury of being in the quieter area is gone. Worse, we run into a traffic jam just half an hour after setting off, the type that are caused by tailgating so there's not actually any real obstacle up ahead, just stop-start traffic. I'm sure if I were well rested I'd appreciate the increasingly mountainous scenery more as we progress gradually across the huge expanse of Bavaria, but not at the moment. A rest stop approaching Nuremburg is welcome. The toilets charge, but are actually worth are actually worth paying 70 cents for as they have an interesting party piece when you flush - the seat revolves 360 degree to be sanitised and the towel dispensers are automatic, I can't help feeling that this fastidious level of cleanliness is undermined my the fact that were I in my car I would probably check the oil or some other unhygienic task immediately afterwards.
More road, most of it still two-lane. Some hours later we cross the Danube, the first of several times. Southern Germany rewards our persistence with a double rainbow as we near Passau, which provides a brief distraction from the situation in hand. It's a town I have a former house-sharing friend in, one foot either side of the river and indeed either side of the border, for we are close to Austria now. We make another (horribly short) stop and I finally get a hot meal - schnitzel and chips with almost the last of my Euros. More speculation about how long the journey time remains. We've got the whole of Austria and half of Hungary to go, several hundred kilometres. Once again, we plunge into the night.
Next time: I finally get to sleep, and then play the most nerve-racking concert ever
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Damning with faint praise
Rather unremarkably, I was browsing the BBC News site yesterday. This is unremarkable due to this particular diaspora of silicon chips being set as my start page. Whenever Firefox loads, invariably the first thing I see is either David Cameron or Chris Moyles. These are not, admittedly, two of the people high on my list of 'faces I would ideally have pasted across my monitor immediatly following breakfast', but such is. Anyway, the point of the preamble is that on this occasion I came across this little story:
Elgar's Wolverhampton Wanderers striker anthem sung: A song by Sir Edward Elgar, which is believed to be one of the first football anthems, has been performed at a concert to raise funds for a church.
Now I probably should apologise for shoving an external link in the collective face of my readership when not even 200 words into a new blog, but I think this can be excused on the grounds of its musical specialism and the quirky-ness of the story in general. It's actually quite a touching piece detailing Britain's finest (and he IS, alright?) composer's loyal support of a particular soccer team who play in an orange-and-black home strip, resulting in a crowd-pleasing little ditty. I'm prepared to ignore the fact that the term 'football anthem' is used perhaps a little too literally here. But then I came across this paragraph:
Elgar, who was born in Broadheath, a village three miles from Worcester, is famous for a string of symphonies and concertos.
Well, not quite. In terms of completed works, Elgar wrote two symphonies, a violin concerto, and a cello concerto. He also left - but didn't complete - about half of the music for each of a Third symphony and a piano concerto, both of which have been completed (on his behalf) by Anthony Payne and Robert Walker respectively. So the grand total, depending on what your definition of an actual piece constitutes, is either 4, 5 or 6 symphonies and/or concerti. Hardly a 'string of', I'd venture. Haydn; yes, 104+ symphonies is a definately a string. Even Sibelius or Prokofiev, with a rather more modest seven apiece, could justifyably cash in their 'has done a string of' credentials. But not Elgar. One wonders why the author of this piece didn't pick up on a more suitable and incredibly obvious example, Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance marches, which form a definate 'string of' five (and a half, because yet again there's an unfinished one). Apart from anything else, the somewhat trivialising term 'string of', implying that the subject was rather unceremoniously churned out as a potboiler, suits these misleadingly jingoistic pieces rather better than symphonies that took two years to compose.
In other words, research fail. Hmm.
This sort of error might seem trivial, but it belies a general confusion over the practice of art music. Presumably the author of this piece was under the - generally correct - impression that all classical composers write symphonies and concertos, which are, admittedly, the dominant music forms in The Western Art Music Tradition. And there are a confusing myriad of forms, structures, genres and sub-genres which one cannot really expect a journalist to familiarise themself with the intricacies of, especially for the purpose of a minor regional news article. Why can't we just call everything classical a 'song', as folks are apt to do (ignoring the elephant in the room, which is instrumental music making up the majority of this tradition) and not worry about the nitty-gritty of sub-stratae?
On the other hand, it has the makings of a major error - imagine if the composer in question had been Palestrina, Faure or John Cage, none of whom even contemplated writing symphonies or concerti. And imagine if the article had actually applied the same logic to sports, citing Wolves' striker Steven Fletcher as a cricketer because, well, he plays with a ball, right? Even mis-attributing his on-field position would, presumably, unleash either howls of derision or the wrath of die-hard fans. With this in mind, I consider my foregoing complaint to be not only justified but distinctly mild-mannered. If you cannot do your research correctly, why not just play safe and describe Elgar as 'a leading British composer/birth and death dates/favourite flavour of Pringles'? He's not really that obscure a figure, especially considering his stint on the back of our second-highest denomination of paper money a few years ago. Everyone's heard of 'Land of 'ope and Glory'; it is not as if we are discussing Broadheath's 1857 pigeon-racing champion. Is it really that snobby and elitist to ask for a little knowledge of a venerable tradition which is actually quite deeply embedded in the national consciousness?
Anyway, to fob you off with another link, here's one of my favourite bloggers talking about other mis-attributions in music, although from a different tack.
Elgar's Wolverhampton Wanderers striker anthem sung: A song by Sir Edward Elgar, which is believed to be one of the first football anthems, has been performed at a concert to raise funds for a church.
Now I probably should apologise for shoving an external link in the collective face of my readership when not even 200 words into a new blog, but I think this can be excused on the grounds of its musical specialism and the quirky-ness of the story in general. It's actually quite a touching piece detailing Britain's finest (and he IS, alright?) composer's loyal support of a particular soccer team who play in an orange-and-black home strip, resulting in a crowd-pleasing little ditty. I'm prepared to ignore the fact that the term 'football anthem' is used perhaps a little too literally here. But then I came across this paragraph:
Elgar, who was born in Broadheath, a village three miles from Worcester, is famous for a string of symphonies and concertos.
Well, not quite. In terms of completed works, Elgar wrote two symphonies, a violin concerto, and a cello concerto. He also left - but didn't complete - about half of the music for each of a Third symphony and a piano concerto, both of which have been completed (on his behalf) by Anthony Payne and Robert Walker respectively. So the grand total, depending on what your definition of an actual piece constitutes, is either 4, 5 or 6 symphonies and/or concerti. Hardly a 'string of', I'd venture. Haydn; yes, 104+ symphonies is a definately a string. Even Sibelius or Prokofiev, with a rather more modest seven apiece, could justifyably cash in their 'has done a string of' credentials. But not Elgar. One wonders why the author of this piece didn't pick up on a more suitable and incredibly obvious example, Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance marches, which form a definate 'string of' five (and a half, because yet again there's an unfinished one). Apart from anything else, the somewhat trivialising term 'string of', implying that the subject was rather unceremoniously churned out as a potboiler, suits these misleadingly jingoistic pieces rather better than symphonies that took two years to compose.
In other words, research fail. Hmm.
This sort of error might seem trivial, but it belies a general confusion over the practice of art music. Presumably the author of this piece was under the - generally correct - impression that all classical composers write symphonies and concertos, which are, admittedly, the dominant music forms in The Western Art Music Tradition. And there are a confusing myriad of forms, structures, genres and sub-genres which one cannot really expect a journalist to familiarise themself with the intricacies of, especially for the purpose of a minor regional news article. Why can't we just call everything classical a 'song', as folks are apt to do (ignoring the elephant in the room, which is instrumental music making up the majority of this tradition) and not worry about the nitty-gritty of sub-stratae?
On the other hand, it has the makings of a major error - imagine if the composer in question had been Palestrina, Faure or John Cage, none of whom even contemplated writing symphonies or concerti. And imagine if the article had actually applied the same logic to sports, citing Wolves' striker Steven Fletcher as a cricketer because, well, he plays with a ball, right? Even mis-attributing his on-field position would, presumably, unleash either howls of derision or the wrath of die-hard fans. With this in mind, I consider my foregoing complaint to be not only justified but distinctly mild-mannered. If you cannot do your research correctly, why not just play safe and describe Elgar as 'a leading British composer/birth and death dates/favourite flavour of Pringles'? He's not really that obscure a figure, especially considering his stint on the back of our second-highest denomination of paper money a few years ago. Everyone's heard of 'Land of 'ope and Glory'; it is not as if we are discussing Broadheath's 1857 pigeon-racing champion. Is it really that snobby and elitist to ask for a little knowledge of a venerable tradition which is actually quite deeply embedded in the national consciousness?
Anyway, to fob you off with another link, here's one of my favourite bloggers talking about other mis-attributions in music, although from a different tack.
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