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Dear customer,

Thank you for your booking. Please note that a surcharge will be added to your bill for any of the following requirements:

Performance of Pachelbel's Canon in D...........£20
Performance of Pachelbel's Canon in D truncated due to length of piece significantly exceeding time required to process down aisle and stand before alter, sparing couple and minister of religion present from having to twiddle thumbs whilst dry counterpoint works itself through................£30
Performance of Boccherini's Minuet in F..............£20
Performance of Beethoven's 'Fur Elise'  bagatelle............£20
Performance of (usually unfamiliar) pop song completely unsuited to ensemble/instrument(s) available, and which must be arranged prior to performance, making the best of a bad job........................£30
Piece/name of performer(s) spelt incorrectly or otherwise erroneously in programme/order of service............£10
Performance of All Things Bright and Beautiful as first hymn, as this shows a distinct lack of imagination.............£10
Venue's piano out of tune................£30
Venue's organ out of tune................£30
Use of recorded music for a piece I blatantly could have played...............£20
Accompanying of singer convinced their voice charms the birds from the trees, who in reality has only ever received feedback from close family members or other individuals too polite to break it to them that the death rattle of a chain-smoking porcupine is more melodious than their ill-tuned bellowing..............£40
Provision of seating too high/low/with arms/ otherwise unsuitable for a violoncello player...............£30
Provision of parking in muddy field resulting in inevitable application of soil to formerly spotless black car...................£20
Door locked after assurance via recent telephone call that it would be open..............£10
Timely invention of verbal response to comment(s) on how good/brave I am/we were,  managing to avoid outright impoliteness whilst making it clear that I/we kind of do this sort of thing for a living...............£20
Conversation with complete stranger on subject vaguely related to music.............£10
Conversation with complete stranger on subject not even vaguely related to music........£20
Either of the above when I really want to get home and consume steak and chips/watch The Killing/Southampton Football Club are leading Pompey 3-0..............................£35

Thank you for your custom.

Don't play it again, Sam

I get through a fair amount of piano music these days, with the various choirs, accompanying and other engagements I have.  Inevitably, one comes across things in piano music which are a little less than appropriate for the instrument, and so it's worth sharing a few to show that even the greats get it wrong sometimes.

At the risk of stating the obvious (which seems to be happening with increasing frequency on this blog), it is worth setting out clearly and briefly how the pianoforte works: The player presses down the keys and holds them there for the required duration of the note. This causes various components to move, releasing the damping mechanism and striking a hammer against the string(s), setting it ringing until the dampers are allowed to move back into place. What this means is that the only things the player can actually control are:

1. The velocity at which the key is initially struck, and thereby the volume and tone of the note;
2. The duration of the note;
3. Whether a pedal is used to add or reduce resonance.

And that's it! The player cannot control the note after it has been sounded, cannot alter the decay of the vibrating string, and cannot alter the volume in mid-pitch.  With all this in mind, let's take a look at a few examples of absent-minded piano writing.

The first is this, from Dvorák's otherwise delightful Sonatina, Op.100:

Now that's just stupid, isn't it? As we've explained above, the note cannot be altered once it has been struck. So to expect the player to suddenly reduce the volume or the piano's natural decay to drop suddenly but then level off to produce this effect is silly. I have tried suddenly releasing the pedal but the resulting change in volume is mostly wishful thinking. I suppose what Dvorák was trying to show was that the pianist should be sensitive to the violin's fp when playing the E minor chord, but the fact remains that they can see it in the violin part above, and the effect is unplayable.

Sibelius next, and this from his own transcription of Finlandia:

Now, this is not necessarily an error. A pianist can play repeated notes quite rapidly (viz. Rachmaninov's celebrated Op.23 No.5 prelude) but it is inadvisable to write this many in succession, and not as a four-finger chord, especially bearing in mind the tempo of this passage. What makes it particularly fair game to criticise this, however, is that less than twenty bars later he writes the eminently more sensible:

The texture in the orchestral score this is derived from (trumpets, heavy brass) is near-identical in both bars, so it's not even necessary to differentiate between contrasting timbres.  The second version also reproduces the slight variation between chords one would hear from an orchestral brass section. 


Actually, I am loath to lay into this too much, as it's an otherwise fantastic transcription and actually reveals many details which are often overlooked in orchestral performances of this work.  Particularly striking is the variety of articulation markings in the central 'big tune', which may seem slightly odd in view of the lovely, but bland, legato lines so often heard.  There are also some dissonances which add interesting passing colour, yet are hardly noticeable when orchestrated.  Most of all, apart from the above example, the transcription is gloriously pianistic.  Not a small number of the articulations just mentioned correspond perfectly with where the fingers might need to leave the note early in order for the hand to move, and correct balence in chords and accompaniment figures is easy to achieve. Watch a better performance than I can currently produce here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaogrOWfnb8 (and he nails the repeated semis three times!)

Finally, a variety of piano parts for various pop songs, 'musical theatre' and show numbers. A lot of this music features successive complex chords - that is, damn near everything has a seventh or ninth or sus 6 added to it, resulting in waves of modal tone clusters which have to be splodged with the right hand (the left hand, meanwhile, usually plays some variant on successive parallel fifths to give the chords some semblance of having a pitch centre). I'm sorry if this is all a bit subjective and value-judgement-y, but I play a fair bit of this music and apart from finding it rather derivative and sentimental, it seems to completely disregard the principles of harmony and chord progression found in most tonal music.  The constant addition of extra tones to chords and the copious amounts of pedal required means the music is often just a mush of the same notes in different combinations ('all the white keys, all the time!') and lacks the variation in tension between degrees of dissonance.

Most of all, this results in some highly un-pianistic flailing about in order to play every single chord, because it seems making the notes lie at least reasonably under the hands just will not do.  A number from Wicked I've been doing with somebody recently has actually been harder to learn than the Polonaise from the Goldberg Variations, because despite its speed and hand-crossings, the Bach falls under logical fingering patterns and uses only one note per hand at a time. I realise much of this music is guitar-based, and these chords probably present themselves as relatively elementary if you have six strings and frets, but the piano is also pretty common in pop and stage music and thus should be written for accordingly. The fact that sheet music includes chord symbols as well as a written-out realisation (note to self: future blog post on similarities between this an baroque continuo) doesn't really make it any easier to play, as I seem to spend as much time groping for Cm sus2 (no third) as I would for some blobs on the lines.

Just as an example, consider the following. I need four fingers to play the first chord, and it seems logical to use 1,2,3,4 on it in order to use 5 on the semiquaver that follows. But reaching the chord on beat 2 is problematic. I'm now stuck with lifting the hand over my weakest and shortest finger to play the chord, making it impossible to have the fingers ready for it and make a smooth transition. Using another finger would break the legato between the first chord and the semiquaver.  About the best I can do in performance is shown on the right:

If the extra A were omitted, I could move the hand easily and play three acceptably smooth chords. As it stands, I risk playing a wrong chord entirely, due to having to scramble to get the little finger out of the way, and grab the third chord as quickly as I can, whilst using the pedal exactly for the purpose I was told not to by my piano teacher. There is simply no good fingering here.

But I'm 'classically trained'. What do I know?

What Happened in Hungary: Day Four

 Welcome to Day Four. If you're new to this sprawling dissertation on our (admittedly by now somewhat epic) trip, you can also find Day One; Day Two; Day Three parts One and Two.

I have been running these entries based on a day starting at midnight, and at about that time I was on the inadequate red bus travelling back to the hotel. It had just been announced that there was a wedding going on there and that somehow the guests had requested that the brass section of the orchestra play at the reception. 'They're all completely drunk out of their minds, they won't give a damn what you actually play' we were told.  I really just wanted to sleep and so I snuck off to my room as soon as we got back.  I have to this day no idea what was going on downstairs as all I could hear was the odd very distant noise. Finally some quiet, and I'd feel much fresher in the morning and have the first proper sleep for about four days.

And then stuff properly went off the rails.

You know in a film where something really big like an avalanche or the first arrival of an alien invasion fleet happens? It's something of a stock dramatic device to have silence broken by a gradual crescendo of noise until it reaches an overwhelming climax. There are good musical examples of this in Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony and James MacMillan's Veni, Emmanuel. That is about as well as I can describe what happened next, except the source of the noise wasn't an orchestra in the way described above but an indefinite number of students going absolutely nuts - screaming like someone had been murdered (perhaps they had?), throwing the switches to blast music at volume levels I didn't realise were possible, running in all directions at once and swinging from what appeared to be perilously fragile ceiling beams. At 1 in the morning. In a public hotel.  What were they thinking?

Reader, I bollocked them. It could have been wittier and probably more concise but it was all I could manage and it got my grievances across.  And I think it was justified. I was really, really counting on sleeping well tonight because I knew my playing and my level of sociability were diminished already and it would only get worse, and I'd been really looking forward to it.  What is more remarkable is that in response they did not do one of the two things you'd expect; either mumble an apology and slink away, or else laugh and carry on. No, instead they actually tried to defend what they were doing. You read that correctly.  We're on tour, we only have a few days here, they rebutted, how dare you tell us it's wrong to go nuts and impose our selfish whims on everyone else. 

I want to just take a look at this a little more.  I simply couldn't believe what was happening was being perpetrated by people of such an advanced age. You would expect it on a youth orchestra tour (and yet I was never witness to anything like it on one) but these people were old enough to have their own houses and to drive and be really quite advanced academically - and besides, why weren't they so shattered that they hadn't dropped off to sleep half way up the stairs? How could the thought not have sloshed around with all the wine in their heads that this behaviour was fine at the party downstairs but monumentally not fine outside somebody else's room? Am I being at all unreasonable here?

As it happened, things were resolved fairly swiftly and amicably when one of the unfortunate individuals promptly apologised the next morning, and I did that terribly British thing of apologising back. I am pleased to say there was no further animosity between us for the rest of the tour, but in between eating so-so scrambled eggs and chocolate rolls I couldn't help looking around expecting to be rounded on and berated by other involved parties for my actions. Luckily, this never happened.

The morning's main news was that our English bus had now been fixed and was in Budapest (general rejoicing). The downside was that there was no way the drivers could legally work today what with all the hours they'd spent getting here overnight, so we had another Hungarian bus for the time being (it was late arriving).  At least it was bigger than yesterday's, with proper underfloor lockers to contain the instruments. Today we were heading to Eger, a small town in the east, to play another concert.  In an unexpected move, we set off not onto the motorway but into the centre of Budapest, and were given some minutes to explore the Hősök tere (Heroes' Square).  This is a large traffic circle with a central column at the centre and rear colonnades with bronzes depicting heroes of Magyar history.  I'd been here before but never taken any worthwhile pictures, so I was off the bus and looking over the place pretty quickly.  Already rival buskers playing inauthentic 'gypsy' music were engaged in a Mexican stand-off on different sides of the expanse of chequered paving. It turned out we would be back here tomorrow, so I shall spare you a lengthier description until then. There is nearly nowhere for a bus to wait at the side of the square and as a result we had several false alarms at locating it when we wished to depart. This was chiefly because every other bus in the area was also white and emblazoned with the same tour company's insignia. Eventually it came round the corner and we dragged less perceptive souls with us before they got swept onto the Spanish pensioners' coach and ended up in a nursing home in Seville.

We got on the way to Eger.  The bus was blissfully quiet, road noise aside.  Most people were asleep, or projecting to the world the appearance of sleep, and there was just occasionally the faintest murmur of conversation. Companion was alternating between Russian work and her mp3, and so I dug out mine and put on some Kodály to accompany the Hungarian countryside going by. Last time we were here, we played some of his music in every concert; his Dances of Galánta to be precise, and it's that that I listened to, along with the Peacock Variations. At a rest stop I kept getting asked how to work the coffee machine - as if by knowing the words kave and teat I was somehow also qualified to instruct the correct order for inserting coins and punching buttons! 

I had been anticipating that Eger would be a nice place - in fact beyond nice, a sort of amalgam of all the best bits of Central European towns; a castle, a yellow basilica (where our concert would be held), an equally historic Protestant church, cobbled streets, characteristic little houses - and to some extent I wasn't disappointed.  But by the time we quietly rolled up outside the basilica it was raining and we were given a rather short window of free time.  Due to the unexplained but still pleasant excursion at the start of the journey we were now at least an hour behind the original plan, which had reduced our sightseeing-and-lunch time to little more than an hour. Thus I could wave goodbye to any chance of exploring the castle, climbing the minaret, or having a thorough search through the shops for any wine matching a vintage on my list.  I therefore didn't waste time in trying to see what I could of the town (especially as it had switched to being dry now).  Companion and I made our way in the general direction of Dobó István ter, the town's main square (several big multi-figure statues abound here, celebrating Dobó's thorough hammering of the Turks during the siege of Eger) and to the entrance of the castle (not that impressive from down in the street, and I was never going to see the rest today).  After a little shunting back and forth along a cobbled street we somehow were joined by our Contrabassist and quickly reached a collective decision that if we wanted to eat at all it would have to be now.  I have learned on tours that however massive the evening meal is going to be, you should still grab as much as you can for lunch because, to put it bluntly, you don't actually know where your next food is coming from.  I thumbed through the Eger pages of my guidebook, and jolly quickly too to avoid them becoming sodden (it was raining again) before deciding on a pizza place a few streets away.

It turned out to be a pretty good call. Not laughably cheap (although Hungarian prices are way less than the UK) but still about 50Ft less than the cafés in the main square, and housed in a nice little - well, house - with wooden beams and pink plastered walls.  We sat in the upstairs room in which there were two other customers and perused the rather hefty menus. The page was in Hungarian, so I reached for my phrasebook to identify some unfamiliar words (admittedly that was most of them) before realising that there was an English translation. And, over the page, a French one. And German. And, flipping over the leaves, Italian/Spanish/Japanese. Judging by the two languages I could read, every page contained at least three unintentionally hilarious translations. And sadly, one of the greatest regrets in my entire life is that both my companions and I have forgotten all of them.

The food itself was welcome and delicious.  After making strategic use of the facilities (there were no toilets in the basilica) we dashed back, thinking we had only minutes to spare before the start of the rehearsal.  It turned out there was little need to run (actually, there was: it was threatening rain again). There was hardly anybody else around when I retrieved my instrument from the bus (many thanks to the driver for helping) and entered the basilica, so I put my things down and got out the camera. The interior was a splendid sight.  The yellow shade of the exterior was here turned into gold; both in the marble of the pillars and the ornate detailing of crosses, candelabras, the organ case, column finials.  The wide central space, rows of pews in the nave and two long transepts, was crowned with a magnificent dome which had been completely invisible from outside the building. This sat above a ring of large windows and was decorated with a tremendous artwork that can only be described as testament to some very stiff necks.  The other remarkable feature of the space was the resulting reverberation.  Obviously all churches have one, but this was truly huge.  'People have failed A-level Music Technology for adding that much reverb!' commented our Conductor after we'd sat down and let a chord gradually disappear into the frescoed colonnades.

You don't really need to hear about the rehearsal, boring stuff, so lets jump forward a little. There was an unexpected but welcome period between it and the concert, so most people went off exploring or sitting in bars or whatever they do. I joined a group who had been promised by our Fixer a tour of the underground chambers beneath the basilica, supposedly like a city, but when we arrived at the gate the guided tour had just gone and there would be no time to be on the next one.  Companion had gone off into the town so I decided to make the best of a bad job and explore some of what I hadn't seen earlier. I came across a plaque on a public building - in fact I'm sure it was the town hall - mentioning Zoltán Kodály, so I photographed it for translation later. A little further I came across one of Eger's most curious sights, a minaret which is all that remains of the Turkish occupation of the town.  Companion had climbed it and was at the top. I didn't have time - but of course! - and had to make do with her photos and description of what it was like to climb a dark and uneven spiral staircase with restricted headroom.

Our programme would be the same as yesterday minus the overture because of the Catholic Church getting silly over that kind of thing (I know a great story of a conductor who, in order to be allowed to perform Scheherazade, told a priest that the piece was about a nun!). There was a harmonium in the dressing-room which was eagerly played by all the proper organists and not me. Once again, the crowd that had gathered filled the whole cathedral. Ah yes, this brings me to...

Once again, we were conducted from memory, not just in the concert but in the rehearsal. Now, I was quite polite about the wisdom behind the score-memorisation in my last post, and whilst it was an impressive party trick, I've got to be honest that I am still yet to be convinced of its necessity for any reason.  Being more awake, I was both greatly more aware of the dangers inherent, and also that a reasonable number of the orchestra were at best unsettled and at worst actively hindered by this stunt. I have to be blunt about this, but I don't think our director was as knowledgeable of the music as he would have been with the score, and we could tell. We were constantly nervous, anticipating something unpredictable, possibly a mistake. Worse, some of the gestures were utterly inane. Entries were less confident.  Mine and others' workloads leading our sections were increased. On an interpretive level, there were possibilities of contrast and interest in the performance that were not explored. In a word, the main fault was to break a golden rule of conducting: the conductor's intentions must be clear, and especially so given the performance space. With the audience in, the reverb had been reduced to only (ha!) about six seconds and to expect us to hold everything together just on the basis of aural feedback was foolish.  It might have been a good plan with a pro orchestra, in a familiar acoustic, but to do it as it happened was to gamble a lot, and I'm not sure it was a gamble that paid off.

I know for a fact that there are videos of this concert posted on YouTube for all to see, yet having set out to try and keep our identities concealed, I lack the chutzpah to openly break cover by linking directly to them. But...dear readers, by now I think this within this blog you have all the search terms necessary to find them for yourselves and to judge our respective performances*. It is something of a shame that as far as I am aware, there is no footage of our encore, the Bartók, for there was a wonderful moment just as the strings' first chord enriched the clarinet solo where a small gasp of realisation and delight could be heard from every row of our audience. They clearly held the piece in the same regard as your author does.

The interior of the dome, Eger Basilica

After the music had finished we had to hurry to pack away in time for the Mass that was being held afterwards (it was a Sunday). I rescued Companion's seat blocks (many violists use a method of sitting more upright to avoid discomfort when playing for long periods) and all my things, in the process missing a group photo being taken on the steps. Funnily enough, so did at least two other of the guest players on the tour, although I am sure this was coincidental. I would have no time or opportunity to change out of my concert things.  We were back onto the bus and heading for somewhere called Szépasszony-völgy, which is usually translated as 'Valley of the Beautiful Women'.  The reasons for this rather flowery title will quickly become apparent, for the hollow on the edge of town was home to a vast number of wine cellars in which guests could sample, buy and then presumably sample some more beverages until suitably horizontal. I had been given some tips on which cellars offered the best (they are all numbered consecutively) but this turned out to be fruitless, for we were booked for a wine tasting at a cellar belonging to the interestingly named Kiss (pronounced Keesh and certainly nothing do to with black-and-white face paint). The cellar was a windowless vault tiled with subtly different shades of orange-white bricks, and have a small but well-stocked bar at the far end. The floor space was laid out with sturdy wooden tables and benches, and I can only describe it as the ideal venue to be sampling the fruit of the vine in. I sat with some people whose company and conversation I would appreciate and awaited what we would be offered.

Our fixer pointed out baskets on every table and, in so many words, urged us to eat some of the small savoury cakes placed within in order to prevent us getting inebriated too swiftly. Actually, I try never to drink on an empty stomach (it's decidedly uncomfortable) and was glad to top up the relative lack of hunger the pizza lunch was still providing. It was explained that we would be sampling six different wines from the region and this commenced with a crisp dry white, which I rather liked.  Next up was a red which was a blend of Merlot and Sauvignon, also OK but not to everyone's taste. The next wine was the one I'd been waiting for, the Egri Bikavér, which is usually translated as Eger Bull's Blood. As my guidebook described it, it is a 'dark, rich and dramatic wine' that is full of complexity. After this had been savoured came another mellower white, then a sweet red, of all things (I had never heard of such a concept before) and finished off with a sweet white.  And another little cake, why not, because I'd worked up a bit of an appetite by now.

Soon after we were given another full glass of 'whatever had been out favourite' (I'll take the Bull's Blood, if you don't mind) and the sales counter started doing a roaring trade.  I'd been banging on to anyone who would listen before the trip about the quality of Hungarian wines, so naturally I had to bring some back. They were astonishingly cheap compared to back home - less than £7 for a bottle of really very good Bikavér and about £4 for the nice white. These were safely secured in my bag and became my second-most valuable possession after the cello.

It was then time to go to another winery, except this one was in the country and at least part of the purpose of our visit was actually to eat as well as drink.  It had started to rain again in a very English sort of way, the sort that makes the inside of vehicles develop a layer of moisture that reveals every smeared smiley face anyone has every drawn on a bus window. We moved slowly down some rather rudimentary country roads out of the town, through fields and eventually turned up a  hill into the courtyard of the Korona borház. The building was of that continental type in which a massive shallow-angled roof covers a three-story chamber about fifty feet wide.  Next to it was a sort of covered outdoor grill area where I could see we would be given food (and hopefully soon).  It was now raining quite purposefully and thus I was quite glad to be shown inside a pair of large gates to the building.  This turned out to be a sort of loading bay; a dull square chamber empty apart from a further door and a trolley with full wine glasses on it, clearly for us. Why not, I thought - and then smelled the contents just in time.  It was a hideous stench, and I hastily drew away from what would surely have been the most awful vinegar I never tasted (you know, I'm sure that because my eyes are so bad my other senses have grown more perceptive to compensate...).  Several other people who hadn't been so quick and had sipped shared my opinion. Apparently this was a particular way of making the wine but it really didn't hold much appeal, even bearing in mind our tastes had been 'warmed up' at the other place.

What I naively assumed to be just welcome drinks then turned into a blow-by-blow account of the entirety of two winemaking processes. We were shown into a mysteriously-lit room full of large stainless steel pipes and huge urns with taps and gauges.  I feel I must here apologise to the proprietor, a small plump man with a meticulously manicured moustache (although can facial hair really be said to be manicured?) - firstly because I've declared some of his wine to be the vilest thing this side of Glee, and secondly because at any other occasion I would have listened with intense interest to his talk (via our fixer who was translating the 99% of Hungarian words I didn't know). I'm sorry, I was just too weary and right at the back of the crowd and got too easily distracted by taking arty-farty photos of the inside of the wine vats and such like. I have since read at length the mechanics of wine production, and jolly interesting it is too, but back then it just wasn't the time.  After all this, we were then shown into another long chamber which was the wine vault proper ( I imagined it to be hundreds of feet into the hillside by now) and whose rough brick walls were stacked with many, many barrels of various grape-based liquids. There was another complimentary glass of red (alright, not quite as good as the last one I had) and I suddenly became aware of a subtle but steady loss of inhibition amongst the group. This is significant.

We went back outside where it was a foul night; really pouring with rain. Luckily our barbecue was under cover and more luckily was ready to eat, as my stomach was really sucking on empty by now. I'm afraid I rather skipped normal British protocol for communal meals: I grabbed a bit of pork from the table and devoured it before queuing up properly. Actually it was all worth waiting for. A large pig had been despatched and roasted for us just this afternoon, and on top of that there were grilled bits of other farmyard friends, exotic salads, paprika sausages, casseroles and - ha-ha - more bottles of plonk.  I ended up with Companion who, if not nonplussed, was a little less plussed at the grub on offer (she's a vegetarian).  Shortly after, our Fixer, who was fast achieving legendary status, also joined us although I do not remember anything of our conversation. What was memorable was his singing. I don't remember a note of what he sang but it was clearly a folk song and was as remarkable in its elegant simplicity as the Bartók that was our encore.  Afterwards, a few non-playing members did some close harmony, as if to prove their musical credentials, then we all joined in singing Happy Birthday and by request a somewhat polytonal rendition of Yesterday to one of the winery's staff. This was all good and I lapped up the general conviviality.

It was then announced that the winery's shop was selling the delicious Merlot we had been guzzling at dinner. It was the same simple ploy the other place had used; fill up your customers with booze and then flog them some more, but actually it was so good and again so cheap that I didn't hesitate to grab a bottle, intending to save it for a very special occasion.  This now also joined as part of my second most precious possession after the cello.

I emerged from the shop delighted with my purchase. That delight lasted perhaps twenty seconds; firstly because I could see I was going to get wet running to get on the bus, and secondly because my comrades had suddenly completed their transformation into monkeys. Were this blog not publicly available and purporting to be family-friendly I'd almost certainly use a far stronger verb+noun to describe them: they'd been given a guided tour of the place and a ton of free wine, had a delicious meal and all the hospitality the owners could give, and now in return, they had decided to thank them by stealing wine glasses, tableware, baskets, bottles and anything else that wasn't tied to the floor, and vomiting over the driveway!  I think if anything has made a lasting impression on me today, it is that I can now see why the British are not only reviled but actively feared abroad for their lack of sobriety. The Turks besieging Eger had more respect for the culture they were invading (in fact the Ottoman Empire often instilled a far more tolerant and free society than the Christian ones they conquered). What must the rest of the world think of us?

Oh Lord, I'd have to share the bus with these people, and, unlike when there are drunken louts on the train, I couldn't even move to another carriage to avoid the unfolding havoc. I sat as far forward as possible where it was marginally quieter (only to the extent that the end of Mahler 1 is quieter than the end of Mahler 8), got out the mp3 and pretended to be asleep. Actually, this was reasonably successful and taught me a lot about how to deal with the strange Mr Hydes that had been decent people several hours ago. It is actually very easy to pretend to drunk people that you are in a similar state to them, and is another useful skill I seem to have cultivated by accident. When, inevitably, a mindless yob swaggered up and presented their unlovely presence over me, like a perverse policeman demanding to know why I wasn't as wild as them, I could firstly pretend I hadn't heard a word of their inane babble and then send them away with the twin excuses of headphones and closed eyes. I found that this was more effective if I launched into an equally inane monologue about how brilliantly amazing the piece I was listening to was (Mahler 7; and I wasn't listening at all of course - it would have been quieter were I sat next to a jet engine) meaning they couldn't get a word in edgeways and gave up fairly quickly. The journey was made even more tortuous by having to stop at each and every service stop for people to vomit. Imagine how I'd described the not-good ten minutes of last night, stretch it out to about two hours and you'll start to appreciate what it was like.

Somehow, eventually, mercifully, we got back to Békásmegyer and I hopped off the bus pretty sharpish. (Actually, compared to many people who were now finally starting to regret their revelry, anything was pretty sharpish). And now here's a remarkable thing: my roommate was as un-drunk as I was and hadn't stolen anything either. A sizeable proportion of other people were the same. So why did it sound as if the whole world was off its head? How could such a small number go so out of control and impose themselves on everybody else?

The only saving grace was that after all this, most people wanted to go to bed. Finally, tonight I slept well.

Next time: We run across a road, I eat many strange fishes, and things are decidedly better

*The town of Eger, or Eger Basilica, may be spelt 'Egerben' - this isn't a mistake, it's because Hungarian uses suffixes for prepositions, so in this case the word means 'in Eger'.

If you're gonna do it, do it right for me

As only a very few people in Britain have failed to notice, the Proms began this weekend. It's an event of such monumental importance that they don't even need to put it on the news -  everyone just knows it's happened. 

Owing to scheduling commitments, my reception of the First Night was intermittent.  I caught the interval feature and the first two movements of the Janacek whilst driving, and the first two items of the first half on iPlayer this morning (go on, watch it), but I have yet to witness what I have heard from rumours is a mind-blowing display of virtuosity from Benjamin Grosvenor. (Actually, I'm still more interested in Janacek than a Liszt concerto no matter who's playing it, but still).  I must laud the venerable BBC for continuing to broadcast every single concert on the radio and a now sizable selection on the telly. But if you sense a 'but' coming - that was it.  I already have a few gripes with the TV presentation, and actually it's a subject I've been meaning to get off my chest for a while now:

There's a new title sequence this season, with dancing pianos and new theme music. In fact the Proms as a whole has been given a makeover into a slightly indie-band retro-modern montage frame-of-mind.  Not to put too fine a point on it, it's not nearly as good as the old one, which had a more grown-up abstract quality and a nicely Stravinskian fanfare by Joby Talbot adapted-from-a-piece-by-Bliss. The slightly low-rent 'picture frames' of some famous conductorly and soloistic faces going by gives it the look of a rather naff 80s kids' TV show, not helped by the dancing violins and the graphics in general, which are barely above the level of a Year 8 Powerpoint presentation. The music is decent enough but not a huge improvement over Talbot et al.

Secondly, something which has started to creep into a lot of live classical music programming in the past few years: interviewing whether the moment is appropriate or not. This comes across as a a rather cheap counter-attack against the hackneyed 'classical music is elitist (and despite complaining so to the point of harassment we secretly want it to be continued to be perceived that way to make us look really 'with it' and PC)' lot.  The idea is that we in the cheap seats get to see that those brilliant musicians who have put years of study, practice and devotion into mastering some of the most difficult skills known to humanity are human after all, indeed basically the same as the rest of us. Yes, it might be interesting to know some trivia about the number of pipes on the Albert Hall organ or what household objects the percussionists have found to play in that contemporary piece.  But shoving a microphone in the face of the principal horn is never going to facilitate enough airtime for him to explain even slightly sufficiently how his instrument works and thus why sometimes splitting that top D# is unavoidable. Few questions posed seem to actually merit grabbing hold of a justifiably rather weary (but still attractive) young soprano and asking her 'how you fink it went' (as happened several times during this year's Cardiff Singer of the World) when her first language isn't English and what she really needs is a long drink and her paycheck.  She's done a stunning job with that Strauss, and the audience can hear it clearly enough in her performance.  Nothing more needs to be said or asked.  A memorable and much needed rebuke to this practice came out of the horrible dumbed-down Young Musician of the Year 2008, where, seconds after a concerto had finished, an over-exited young presenter lept at the competitor's mother and demanded 'So, how do you think he'll have felt about THAT performance then??!!' With timing bettered only by those in the very highest echelons of stand-up comedy, she replied, poker-faced 'I don't know - why don't you ask him?'  But surely the main objection to this should be coupled with the (again ever-increasing) habit of showing lots of backstage shots of formerly majestic performers now looking very normal under unflattering lights. It takes all the magic and mystery out of music performance, which is, fundamentally, a piece of theatre and so relies on illusion and monumentalising the performers. I don't suppose audiences would care to watch The Lord of the Rings and in between scenes see the guy playing the massive warrior orc take off his headpiece, chat to a cameraman and smoke a couple of Marlboro Lights, would they?, because it ruins the trick.  You can show the baritone being interviewed in his untidy flat or crammed in with everyone else on the tube, but just not in the middle of his magic show please, because it ruins everything. Isn't it enough for us just to enjoy the music?

Luckily; as I mentioned, I was driving around during the concert and caught a fair chunk of the interval feature on Radio 3. The station's not been immune to certain needless messings-around in the name of capturing a phantom 'young' audience whilst alienating your core loyal listeners, but it's still a million miles better than the shouty box.  The interval feature was on Janacek's beliefs, a perfect subject given that it is pertinent to the concert programme, short enough to fit into a twenty-minute slot yet wide enough to have plenty to say and scope for further exploration, and a quiet triumph for accessible intellectualism. Chalk one up for the radio. Also, Judith Weir's new opening fanfare did a very impressive job of being simultaneously contemporary, personal, accessible and uplifting. Chalk one up for music too.

Postscript: I've got a gig with my trio tomorrow night, which mean I will miss the live broadcast of Havergal Brian's gargantuan Gothic Symphony.  This I can live with. However, it transpires that a friend has got some returned tickets for the circle, which I would give at least one limb to get hold of were it not for prior commitment... (In a double blow, the lovely BBC have scheduled the final of The Apprentice in the middle of the Prom, too).  Such is.

Transportation

As everyone is aware, I am a cellist.  Inevitably, a frequent question I am asked is 'how do I transport the thing around'. Well...

...Oh, I should really tell you about the 'cello case itself, because it makes all this possible. It is called a Hiscox.  It is intentionally very tough. It needs to be, because inside is a very old and valuable possession that I rely on for part of my livelihood. Tower Bridge and Camilla Parker-Bowles aside, most objects more than a century and a half old are not called into regular working use, and that's because they risk being knocked about whilst in service. So it's made from carbon-honeycomb, with an impact-absorbent space between the core and the shell, and thus offers a significant degree of protection to the instrument...

The case has both handles and shoulder-straps. It's not an ideal shape to carry, but it is light enough (small instrument with carbon-fibre/plastic instead of metal bits, fairly lightweight case) that I can do about a mile with it with little discomfort.  You can also run a little if the train is late / large lorry is coming up fast.

A considerable proportion of my driving career (and before that, the parents') has been spent transporting the thing and its associated paraphernalia around the highways of southern England.  Naturally, it makes the purchase of any new vehicle an elaborate process, and I have many reliable accounts of lately overly-confident car salesmen being silenced when presented with the question 'ah, but will it fit the 'cello in the boot?*'.  My parents' usual strategy was to buy Vauxhalls, because the general consensus was that their larger models had a huge carrying capacity, and that this benevolence towards bearers of stringed instruments, antiques dealers and such like was a core tenet of the UK arm of General Motors' purpose on earth.  There are, of course, many other suitable vehicles - several Volvos, the estate VW Passat, and a Skoda have been championed by cellist friends and acquaintances in the past but we stuck bravely to the griffin-with-a-flag.  Obviously the commencement of my own driving lessons posed something of a problem, as there was no way on earth I'd get insured on the huge estate that was the family car of the time, and in any case I would need independent transport post-test.  But gadzooks! - a facelifted Corsa B turned out to be almost perfectly suited to carrying the cello, albeit across the back seat. This is one of two ways to carry the instrument in an undersized motor; the other is upright like a passenger.  Both are problematic methods in two-door models, yet many manage. Use of the seatbelt through suitable points on the case is advised.

However, I've just got rid of the Corsa, because I've think I've found possibly the most cello-friendly car in the world.  I suppose I must conclude that I am indebted to the chance actions of some anonymous designer - frameless glasses and all - for making the thing end up the way it is.  My guess is that automotive engineers probably start with the dimensions of the chassis, then come up with what would look good on top, then work out how everything fits inside.  With the exception of the Ford Transit van (surely one of the greatest pieces of design in the history of humanity) they seldom base the entire vehicle on a specific item that it has to contain. 

This makes all the more utterly remarkable the nigh-perfect match of a Hiscox cello case and the luggage compartment of a Mk.II Renault Megane Sport Tourer#.  The one goes flawlessly into the other.  And yes, I know there are plenty of cars with even more space at the back, but the problem then is that you have to start strategically positioning handy objects in order to stop the cello from crashing around through the bends. The Meg actually fits the cello, not just the other way round. The floor is also level with the tailgate, so you don't have to nurse it through some arcanely-shaped opening as if trying to steer an airship full of Ming vases under the Forth Bridge.  I should probably add that it looks stunning in gloss black, goes like a frog out of a frying pan and that, crucially, all the electrics seem to work. Lest my readership begin to suspect this is some kind of astro-turfing publicity on behalf of Renault (- for a model not produced for two years?) the quality of the interior plastics is noticeably inferior to the old Vauxhall, and it lacks the diesel's torque.

Trains aren't great, although I took the instrument at rush hour to central London for three years. Other passengers, trying to stand on one leg wedged against the window (you think I'm joking, but British trains can be that crowded - cheers for privatising them, Tories) are less than happy that you appear to be carrying what is a needless piece of luggage and thus taking up twice the amount of floor space you 'deserve' (because the British are very possessive and judgemental like that, mm).  Even on empty trains I feel conscious that putting it against the empty seat next to me may incur the ire of the conductor (and I've heard third-hand stories of bullying jobsworths trying to fine musicians for this, which we hope are fictitious) mostly because I'm young and don't have the right to do anything anyone older than me might not want me to.  I was shown pretty early on by a friend that the best thing to do is to unclip one of the shoulder straps, wind it round a hand-pole and clip it back before tightening it as much as possible. This will keep the flat-bottomed case upright in all but the most severe pointwork-induced turbulence. I recall this to be less effective on Jubilee, Metropolitan and Northern Line trains due to the relative lack of vertical poles in the carriages.

And now we come to the most entertaining part - air travel.  Various world powers from time to time feel the need to impress on citizens that 'something is being done about something' and, in a classic case of life imitating The Thick of It, find new things to ban from the cabin of commercial airliners. Musical instruments have been on the list, notably in 2007 after some nutters drove a Jeep into Glasgow airport in the deluded belief that the entire population of Western Europe would instantly convert to radical Islam as a result.  Clearly this was caused by professional musicians wanting to take their instruments to countries lacking a direct train service from Southampton Central, so cellos were instantly banned from planes. (This is the level of logic that helped the British conquer a third of the world and invent the hovercraft and the Thermos flask).  The British government soon discovered that picking a fight with militant intellectuals is unwise and under pressure from the MU and a mention in Mark Elder's Last Night speech at the years' Proms, backed down. That reset the alert level for taking the instrument on an airline from 'impossible' back down to 'bloody awkward'. If I don't wish to risk it in the hold - and I certainly don't - I have to book a seat in the cabin. Some airlines - and I will name Virgin Atlantic for setting a good example - will allow you a reduced fare for this, but Ryanair et al won't (in fact they will try and charge you for a violin).  Obviously a few of the check-in staff and many of the security goons don't realise this is not only possible, but allowed, and have to be sternly told so in order to maintain progress through the airport.  (This somehow always seems to work).  Some idiots also think that the strings are a possible weapon, so if this happens I lie and say that I cannot take them off the instrument until they break, which the cretin is invariably too ignorant to refute (I put spare strings in my luggage - they're too expensive to risk some security **** nicking them off me as his personal contribution to the War on Normal People).  Obviously the aisle of an Airbus is not wide enough to carry the thing down without bashing shins. And I spend the whole flight worrying about it going out of tune. And then it has to go through the airport at the other side so I get asked in Slovak what it is and how do I transport it. Also, try holding it whilst getting your bag off the carousel...


* That's the 'trunk' to my American readers.
# Pedants, it is spelt correctly. Renault, possibly in a move to internationalise the car, dropped the acute accent over the first 'e' on the second-generation Meg. Also, 'Sport Tourer' is just marketing-speak for an estate/station wagon - it's not a breathtakingly quick car.

On presentation

One thing a composer discovers after having achieved any degree of success (ie getting stuff performed) is that the process of editing and preparing parts takes nearly as long as writing the work itself.  That is to say, it should if done correctly.  This will stem from having a professional work ethic: performers need clear and  considerate parts, with the reward for spending hours making them so being they are more likely to appreciate your work after a smoother read-through. At the moment I am preparing a full set of orchestral parts for The Sun Rising, as well as making minor revisions to the piece before rehearsals start.  This involves (in no particular order):

- Deciding where to place rehearsal marks
- Adding cues
- Adding instrument changes (in this case percussion and between Oboe 2 and Cor)
- Removing collisions between objects
- Laying out parts to provide suitable page turns
- Checking transpositions
- Checking use of mutes/horn stopping
- Checking parts lie within an appropriate clef (viola/bassoon/cello/d.bass/trombones)
- Splitting wind and brass parts sharing a staff in the score to provide a separate part for each of the players
- Adding a second staff for sufficiently differing divisi passages within string sections


Why am I bothering to do all this?  Partly because the performance is the final of a competition and I want to give best possible impression of my work, but also because I have no desire to inflict on others what I have had to deal with myself over the years.  Sibelius is a very useful tool in many of the above tasks: it allows one to edit the parts without affecting the score, will check clefs, mutes and changes for you, and will transpose everything with one button.

I have many pet hates when it comes to poorly presented music.  Mainly these are things that have been devised by penny-pinching editors without any thought to the performer.  In orchestral music we have to read things very quickly, often sight reading on the afternoon of the performance, and untidy or unhelpful scores do no favours for anyone.  For my own instrument, copyists who are unfamiliar with or unwilling to use the tenor and treble clefs in high passages are particularly frustrating, especially those who clearly know of the conventions but use them inconsistently. In the violoncello part of Mahler's Ninth symphony, a bar is erroneously written in the bass clef, with every pitch consequently requiring several ledger-lines.  However, the next few bars jump into the treble, even though the range of this next passage is lower overall than the previous bar!  The fact that older 'arranged' parts or pieces that were originally for band may need to be played by other members of the ensemble offers no excuse, for those instruments most likely to be cued, the bassoon and trombone, also read the tenor clef.

Actually, excessive cues (mercifully found only in older parts, it seems) are nearly as bad as wrong clefs, due to the clutter caused by trying to fit the cello and the bassoon/viola/tuba or whatever other part on to one staff.  A cue is useful if there is likely to be any difficulty in the player knowing where to enter after a rest.  Printing another instrument's part in case it might just happen to be missing is not, especially as very few orchestras above school level will lack whatever it is shown in small font.  Older publishers also tend to have a particularly Puritanical outlook about using as little paper as possible for the part, which only adds to the lack of legibility.  I remember playing Liszt's Faust Symphony (a Kalmus reprint of a nineteenth-century lithograph plate; get it for free on IMSLP) which featured almost unimaginably squashed staves, with dynamics encroaching on neighbouring staves and thirty-two semiquavers forced into a bar less than an inch wide.  (The handwritten part of the Shostakovich symphony I was also doing at the time, of equal length, did not suffer from these problems and was well thought-out).  One can only suppose that musicians in previous ages were simply used to playing from poorly-printed copies - after all, even the most crudely engraved lithograph edition was probably neater than most copyists' pen and ink, and far quicker and cheaper to produce many copies of.  Blunders which can occasionally be found in surviving sets of parts from earlier centuries include chronic laziness, manifested as an absence of time and key signatures after the first line of a piece, or a complete absence of bar numbers and rehearsal marks.  Either that, or rehearsal marks are placed every ten bars rather than at places where is would be useful to re-start the piece from.  I also dislike jazz-style 'repeat bar', and worse, 'repeat two bars' signs (another symptom of 'note-cramming').

One particularly annoying convention relating my instrument only can be found in Dvorak, Bruckner and a few others, which was to write the cello part up an octave when it went into treble clef, a convention which is utterly pointless.  Apart from having suddenly to remember to transpose, the player often had to read as many ledger-lines above the treble staff as he would had the copyist kept the same notes in the bass clef!  Stern warnings against trying to revive this absurdity are printed in most good orchestration books, all of which I heartily endorse.

Modern editions, of course, are largely free from the problems endemic to fuzzy ink-and-blotting-paper technology.  A Barenreiter, Carus, Boosey (usually), Wiener Urtext or modern Brietkopf part is a thing of beauty prepared with due regard for the convenience of the performer.  And yet...despite the neatness of the laser-printed staves issues still arise. On one memorable occasion a symphony required the cello section to divide in two at the bottom of a page, during a passage in which we were fairly prominent.  For the uninitiated, orchestral strings share a stand between two players. In the cellos, the player on the right  (left in the first violins; left in the violas; left in the second violins unless they are sitting opposite the firsts) is always the one to turn the page.  This requires them to stop playing momentarily.  Similarly, when the section divides into two, the same player who turns the page takes the lower of the parts.  You can probably see where this is going.  Placing a page turn whilst the cello section was divisi resulted in the lower line dropping out entirely whilst those formally playing it reached to turn the page. The section could get around this by dividing the two lines between alternate desks, but it should not be necessary to do this (as it involves rehearsal-time-wasting discussion amongst the section).  If the publisher had simply pushed the staves away from the page turn in the overall layout, the problem would disappear.

Things which are simply inconsiderately composed, of course, are no fault of the publisher, and we shall deal with the multitude of sins from even the great composers in a future blog post.  In the meantime I shall return to trying to make orchestral player's lives slightly easier.

'Tis the season...

It's that time of year again, I'm afraid, and there's something I can't put off any longer. I have to make the same plea I always do: Please enjoy your Christmas music in moderation.

Don't get me wrong, I certainly don't hate Christmas music on principle; in fact there are some wonderfully atmospheric and well-composed songs, carols and oratorios which, on the whole, bear the test of time. I'd just like to not hear the same music on a continuous loop all day, every day, thanks.

I will admit to being particularly intolerant to excessive repetition in general, but there is (mercifully) no other occasion in the calender when the canon of agitated air molecules filling our ears is even half so strictly regulated. Easter, the other great once-primarily-religious-now-swallowed-up-in-a-frenzy-of-enforced-consumerism festival, has somehow never spawned any memorable tunes suitable for incessant reproduction (although there are Easter carols, and various hymns that get trotted out on the appropriate Sunday, but heard literally once a year). Bunnies, chocolate eggs and crucifixion seem so far to have failed to produce any musical treatment capable of capturing the public's attention. But come late (or even early) November, the diet of muzak emanating from shops, televisions and stereos turns wearily predictable. Even the otherwise beautiful Carols from Kings (which we have to watch, and then listen to the Christmas Day repeat in the car going up to visit the grandparents) is based around the same core of tunes, although happily with the addition of more underperformed items in between.

What is worse is that this season of goodwill towards men produces not only broken records but often a concerted attempt to make them as annoying and cliché-ridden as possible. As religion is a bit of a commercial no-no in this country, song lyrics tend to revisit vapid consumerist topics and/or sentimental mush - the more 'cringeable' the better. Proponents of the powerful pro-Christmas lobby have developed a method of shutting down any voices opposing this, namely to cry 'Scrooge!' at the slightest whiff of dissent. Whilst it can often be effective, this tactic, frankly, is avoiding the issue.

Before I give the impression I'm training the majority of my fire on commercial pop music, I'm sad to say that successive years of invariance in programming have all but regulated Messiah and Vivaldi's Gloria, not even a Christmas piece (and neither is two-thirds of Messiah, in fact) into the same category . Yes, I know you want to hear the Hallajujah Chorus again, because we've all forgotten how it goes in just twelve months. Yes, I understand that hearing a similar and possibly equally good work by either composer this year will not do, because that would go against tradition. My dislike (well, relatively speaking) of these pieces is simply a result of the fact that I've had to play their continuo parts year in, year out, often more than once a season.

Particular lowlights of the season include:

Away in a Manger: Now, I don't have children, so I cannot verify if seeing one's offspring singing this together with their peers in the nativity play would, in fact, move me sufficiently to value its creation. It is not, in my opinion, a very good tune, certainly not good enough to warrant three verses. Part of the problem is that the little angels learn the words syllabicly, so that the text of the carol ends up sounding something like 'Ahh-WAY-yin a-ah-main-jer no-OH crib-four-ra bed...' It also has a very dull bass line, which with the voice and instruments I play is understandably not a good tactic for trying to endear me to it.

Merry Christmas Everybody (Slade): Not actually a lot wrong with the song in itself, but, rather like Copland, marred by cheap imitations of it - in this case your mates 'singing' along to it post-pint. The end of the chorus glissandi-coupled-with-an-unexpected-move-to-chord-VI (ie the bit that goes 'It's only just begu-uu-uu-uuuuuun!') is particularly ill-advised for this sort of inebriated karaoke as very few are able to complete the manoeuvre with tuning unscathed. Generally the accuracy resembles that of attempting an Olympic ski slalom in a motorhome. That said, the sound of Noddy Holder crying aloft 'It's Christmassssss!' in the song's closing stages will give me sleepless nights forever.

Let it Snow: Isn't the opening little flute/glockenspiel duet just the most horribly twee phrase ever committed to vinyl? Perfectly formulated to send into a rage anyone who has just watched their decorations tumble mockingly to the floor, having spent twenty minutes on tip-toes up a ladder smothering them in dusty blu-tack.

Synthesised bells/chimes in pop songs: Inevitably heard as a descending scale in the tackyist pop offerings, in blissful ignorance of the fact that real church bells were often rung to announce war, pestilence and famine. Few crimes against music can match the tastelessness of this needless filigree...

...except, perhaps, (sometimes also synthesised) sleigh bells. We may all have enjoyed playing Leroy Anderson's Sleigh Ride in a junior school arrangement (could your trumpeter do that horse bit at the end either?), but the incessant ching-ching-ching in aforementioned pop songs with cheap production values is also an irritant the strength of industrial grout cleaner. Be very careful should anyone you meet think this is at all charming; they may also like Jedward and believe that Fearne Cotton would make an excellent elected representative. It goes without saying that 'Jingle Bells' is also something I would like not to ever know of again.

So please, be discerning and tasteful in your choice of seasonal soundtrack, and dig out something unusual and interesting to hear this year. And consider supporting the 'John Cage's 4'33" for No.1' campaign...

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.