The Museum

Back in April, the centennial anniversary of the ill-fated voyage of S.S. Titanic put Southampton, if temporarily, at the centre of the world's attention. Unsurprisingly, myself and other friends and family members were most readily involved in musical contributions to the commemorations, not least the massive performance of A Sea Symphony in the docks on the actual anniversary of the sailing.  A more lasting result of all this was that the much-awaited SeaCity Museum opened its doors to visitors, finally furnishing the city with a maritime museum of suitable dimensions for it's historical significance. And today, I finally got around to making a visit - with the intention of publishing a review here, of course.

As much as anything else, the creation of such an attraction represents the city council finally getting off their backsides and actually making something happen with regards to getting some tourist footfall (and income) into the town, although it's a pity that, as has happened before, the (now defunct) Tory administration were claiming credit for it all when in fact the project was initiated during the years of a hung council.  There was a debacle on a national scale during the planning stage when the council tried to sell paintings and a sculpture from the city art gallery to fund the project, and only backed down when the Tate found some legal clause forbidding them from doing so (massive public opposition is much easier to ignore these days). An added contrivance is that all Southampton addresses are generously being sent a free ticket, except that to use it you have to visit together as a household, can only visit outside school holidays in 2012 and not during the first six days of opening. In other words, if you want to take your whole family, you have to have a free Saturday or Sunday or else an inset day which you take off work, and you won't be the first to get in. Typically for the ID Era, they'll also want proof of residence, so if you have a family of three and were hoping to sneak in Aunty Mabel from Whitstable when she came to visit, sorry, forget it; she'll have to pay.

Still, it's a huge leap forward from the little maritime museum that preceded it, housed in a medieval wool house opposite the ferry terminal.  It was interesting, filled with models of ships and bits of anchors and compasses and other delightful nautical clutter, but hopelessly outdated and greatly under-representing the port. Although the inside of the new museum is bespoke, only a little actual new building needed to take place.  The building housing the galleries was built in the 1930s as part of the Civic Centre, and used to contain the law courts and the police station as well as an elegantly thin tower with a four-face clock at the top.  In a wonderful gesture towards the city's heritage, the clock bells chime the first phrase of Southampton resident Isaac Watts' hymn O God, Our Help In Ages Past on the hour. The coppers moved out into a rather Orwellian monolith overlooking the docks in 2010 and since then the entire East Wing has been refreshed and refitted to contain the exhibition halls. The only bit of construction needed was a rather more angular gallery at the north end, replacing some flowerbeds with a series of triangular sections concertinaed into one another, presumably to suggest waves, sails or the bow of an ocean liner. This also forms the shape of the museum's logo, which looks like an upside-down factory with a chimney. They've at least tried a little to blend it into the existing structure with a nice façade of Portland Stone and some smoked glass.

Let's go inside...

The entrance lobby sets out the tone of the museum.  It's not huge, with today just a single attendant behind the ticket desk and a single staircase and lift to the first floor.  The wing is listed, and a lot of interest is in seeing how they've managed to change the building's function whilst maintaining the heritage features, something which has been done rather well. Other than the contemporary block-colour and sans serif style of inserted walls, the original Portland stone and marble is the main interior texture of the building.  The ceiling vaults of the upstairs atrium have a pleasing decorative pattern to them, and the signs directing entrances to the courtrooms have been retained.  One side of the floor, formerly Court Three, is on the general history of Southampton, and seems like a sensible place to begin. The false roof has been left open in places to show the ornate painted wood panelling of the original court, and one can see the coat of arms at the far end too. Space does not permit a full description of every exhibit in the room, suffice to say there were sections on most periods of history from neolithic to modern, and appropriate artifacts.  Beyond this room was a smaller one containing a huge model of the Queen Mary (from the old museum) and a series of displays on various immigrations to and through the city - more artistic than informative, it has to be said, preferring representative objects over things like statistics.

Unsurprisingly, the other half of the exhibition space is given over to the Titanic.  There was an immediate focus on the actual people on the ship rather than the vessel itself - it wasn't built or registered here, after all - and especially the crew, who were mostly Southamptoners.  This was done through following the situation of five individuals on the ship, from Captain Smith to a fireman, through the various stages of the voyage and sinking.  Notable were the wall listing all the items taken on board the ship at Southampton (did you know they carried horse hair and opium?) and the wireless operator's room.  The main part of local interest was the room dealing with the survivors. The floor was the now-famous map of 1912 Southampton with every residence that lost a crew member marked in red.  I also liked that the other courtroom had been used as a space explaining the Titanic disaster enquiry, still left as a court with jury benches, dock and judge's seat. Downstairs, in the new pointy-roofed bit was a special exhibition (presumably the first of many) on the legacy of the Titanic and the public's lasting fascination with it.  There was an interesting wall comparing five films from the 20th century about the ship, and another with a huge variety of objects essentially cashing in on the name, from beer to dolls.  Other areas dealt with the unanswered questions about the voyage - was the ship going too fast, could the lookouts see enough, and the morality of exploring the wreck. One wonders what future exhibitions might occupy this space.

Things to like:

 

The interactive stuff 

This was all very well-done, chiefly because all the touchscreens and videos were generally used for the most appropriate purpose, showing and explaining things that couldn't be done so well using static displays and information panels.  Some were more child-orientated than others (drive sail the Titanic using a real wheel and telegraph! Rub the screen to 'dig' for buried Saxon treasure!) but all were educational.  There were some other nice touches too, like the 'stained glass window' that was actually a subtly moving projection (watch long enough and you could see the bird dislodge an apple from the tree which fell on the medieval trader's foot) and the Roman video. I personally liked the circular table with an overview map, which cycled round every period of the city's history every ten minutes and allowed several different people at a time to zoom into the relevant areas and read little hotspots of information.

Size and content

 

I ended up spending about as much time in there as I wanted to spend (in fact I could have stayed longer but it was closing), which I count as a success bearing in mind I'm the sort of visitor who sets out intending  to read all the information and look at all the objects.  Everything in there was also interesting, relevant and objectively presented (although interestingly, a companion on this visit noted perhaps a slight left-of-centre tone, particularly the focus on ordinary working people and several mentions of trade union involvement, both of which accurately reflect the town's political direction for most of its modern history).  That said, see criticisms below.

Looks 

 

The conversion from law courts to museum has been carried out with great sensitivity to the building and as a result the whole place looks great.  One of the interesting features, which the architects may or may not have been aware of is the feeling, of being in a transient space, as if one is able to observe the different stages of history just by being there, and there is certainly no sense of having hidden or thrown out the previous function of the building - indeed, it is purposely left on show in places.  Full marks to the builders.

And a few things for improvement:

 

A bit perfunctory in places.

 

Although the exhibits manage to cover a fair chunk of Southampton's history, there are some significant omissions. At no point was it actually explained why the area became a port in the first place, nothing on the actual operation of the docks or the liner trade, nothing on other aspects of transport (the railway, the airport and flying boats), and nothing on important periods such as the Georgian spa industry or the Blitz. One appreciates that space was a little limited, and that the conservators had to pick and choose, but with the potential of interactive features physical room need not have been a hindrance in this respect. In particular, the business of the port operations would surely have been a publicity opportunity that an organisation such as ABP would have seized upon, yet there was no mention of the modern container port.  In a similar vein, several things that were featured were inadequately explained. Had I not some knowledge of early modern history I feel I would have been mystified as to who the Huguenots were and why they were fleeing from France - and even then it would have been nice to read more than a single excerpt from the digitised account book belonging to the businesswoman named Judith. Why the Romans and Saxons actually settled in this area was also barely explained.  Some of the Titanic section also felt a bit padded-out - display cases spaced just a bit further apart than they might have been, not quite enough detail. The only exception was the economic background to the era and its crew, which I didn't know about previously.

It's tempting to say that this was solely due to budget constraints: this is all we could afford; is a museum worth it when we have to cut front-line services, that sort of thing; but it is also perhaps symptomatic of a more general modern tendency to assume that people have short attention spans and won't appreciate detailed descriptions or masses of stuff to look at.  I don't think that's a good way of setting out on an entity like this - surely a good museum is one which caters for many people with different levels of interest about different things, each one of whom who will want to see some things in great detail but skip over others?  A museum should also be a starting-point for further private research into areas of particular interest, and as such ought to at least introduce as much as possible to the visitor.

English only

 

Given the international nature of the city - and the fact that this is a key feature of all the bits about immigration - it seems surprising that there was not a single sign, map, or other piece of information in anything other than English.  The city council publish documents in nearly every tongue under the sun, and rightly so when there are so many languages being spoken here, but not at the museum. One would at least have expected French and Polish. 

Would I recommend a visit? I would say yes, but not to expect the experience to be on same scale as the maritime museums in Liverpool or Belfast. It is more of an afternoon visit than a whole day's attraction. One thing I can't really judge is how interesting a non-Southampton visitor would find it  - I was not particularly impressed by Bristol's municipal museum recently due to finding it too 'localist' - and in fact also thought many of the same other criticisms about that as I have with SeaCity. The general impression of the place was that it was more concerned with people than systems or physical things, which might be less appealing to the outside visitor. However, the widespread appeal of the Titanic should at least provide a good level of familiarity.

Composition

I'm fully aware I've not been doing much blogging recently. And I've also left in limbo how A Child of the Snows turned out. The two are related:

Well, it is at least finished. Why was this not announced in a blaze of fireworks and publicity? Because it's also sort-of not finished. It's probably going to need re-orchestrating or arranging for a smaller chorus and the baritone part possibly to become a tenor one.  To cut a long story short, it's not the piece that's going to be performed this Christmas. There are various reasons for this, chief amongst which it's turned out rather difficult for an amateur choral society, even a good one, and it's also a bit on the long side, nudging twenty-seven minutes when the brief was for around twenty. Happily, I have had guarantees that it will be performed next year, but only when a group of experienced singers and an ensemble that can rehearse in advance (that was the other thing: the instrumental parts just weren't something you could put together in an afternoon) are recruited. 

This left the Andover choir in a bit of a fix - they suddenly didn't have half their concert programme. Obviously the entirely sensible thing for me to do was to write something else in less than a month, which, considering it would have to be as long as ACOTS should have been, and I have a day job, is a perfectly reasonable undertaking and not at all a ridiculously short timescale to do this in.

So I cheated. Five minutes could be taken up with a Christmas carol I'd written last year for a competition. Conductor likes it, few minor revisions, sorted.  It's also unaccompanied, so no messing around arranging an organ or orchestra part either.  The rest of the time would involve an entirely new piece, a setting of the Regina coeli, which is what I'm working on now. Again here I cheat a little. The model for the work is Mozart's noted setting (made at the precocious age of sixteen...), using his division of the text into four movements, similar length and forces (sop solo and chorus) and imitating several of the melodic shapes he uses. With the mantra 'amateur choir, not much orchestral rehearsal' impressed on me, I decided to model the four sections broadly on the structure of a classical symphony. It's a little more complicated than that in practice, as the first movement is a sonatina form but which does not use the usual 18th-century key plan; the second a 'Beethoven scherzo' with alternating fast and slow sections, the third most like a Handel aria for solo soprano and the finale short and frenetic, like the end of the Ravel piano concerto.  Added to the mix is my 'public style' of harmonic writing which is completely unlike most of ACOTS - tonal with some fourths-based stuff, short sections rather than long wandering evolutions, and sounding somewhere between Poulenc, Prokofiev and contemporary post-minimalist composers (Jonathan Dove, John Adams, possibly MacMillan).  My aim, as usual, is to reinvent old forms into something a little more inventive and contemporary whilst not being particularly difficult to sing. The choral writing sets out to be tonal and traditional in the use of voice-leading and harmony most of the time, with a few more interesting twists remaining, I hope, within the bounds of practicality. The result is a work that I hope can be described as 'likeable' - it is certainly very conservative for my output and is designed to appeal to those it is being written for, as well as fitting into the other works in the concert.

At the time of writing I've completed seven minutes in three weeks (all of the first and third movements, including string orchestra parts) and have the other two fairly well thought out. To be honest, I quite like the pressure of having to get something done in a short space of time, and one can hardly protest at the effort required given the historical precedents. Handel and Mozart could write whole operas and oratorios in a few weeks, and even a more individual piece such as Shostakovich's Fifth was completed in less than two months.  Ten minutes for choir and strings shouldn't actually be a lengthy process, given sufficient motivation and experience.

As a closing thought, I often think about trying to record precisely how long it takes to compose a piece. When I set a benchmark (generally seven minutes a month for a full orchestral score: this is based on The Sun Rising taking 3-4 months and ACOTS 5-6) this doesn't really represent working flat out, but rather the amount of spare time set aside from doing other jobs. Of course, thinking about a piece away from the piano and the computer is part of the process and, as Stravinsky claimed, 'the real composer thinks about work the whole time; he is not always conscious of it, but he is aware of it later when he knows what to do'; time which is hard to record.  A stopwatch kept on the desk for weeks and set going whenever a musical thought presents itself would be a difficult thing to maintain, so I have to estimate.

A plea

Please don't bother to practice.

That envelope that you were handed the other day, you know, the brown one with your name and instrument written on the outside? Or perhaps it was posted and you found it on the doormat? It must be the music for that concert you were asked to play in next month.  Beethoven - or perhaps it was Brahms? Anyway, it was only sent because the librarian needed to clear some space on his table and didn't want to have to carry all the parts with him on the day. You're just looking after it for him, no need to open it until you get there.  It's an easy fifty quid gig; just roll up, play a bit and get home in time for last orders. You'll able to sight-read it on the day, you're good at that.

Please don't bother to practice. You've played this particular piece before, even if it was a couple of years ago when you were one of the older ones in the youth orchestra, and, well, there wasn't much that seemed hard in it then.  Saturday after Saturday you would play through it, slowly at first to give the new players a chance to learn the notes, stopping and starting. It was a bit boring really, but it went alright in the concert, you all got to the end without stopping and your grandparents said how good you all were. Anyway, you've heard this since on the radio (well, that famous slow movement), so you know how it goes.

Please don't bother to practice. You're far too busy - working or writing essays or whatever else you need time to do. You literally don't have a minute of free time, especially with orchestra taking up a whole evening every week. Obviously you've got to catch Jeremy Kyle and Eastenders on iPlayer once in a while, and 'go out' on Friday, but nobody likes a Johnny-no-mates who locks himself in a practice room every evening instead of having fun. You certainly haven't got time to go all the way through this symphony, that's what rehearsals are for.

Please don't bother to practice.  It's only a contemporary piece by some bloke you've never heard of and probably never will again, and it sounds awful. This guy - oh no, wait, it's actually by a woman composer - doesn't deserve any time spent getting his work right (that's if what clearly are random bashings on the piano actually count as work), she only writes like this because she can't think of any nice tunes.  Besides, how could anyone expect you to count all those weird rhythms and funny bars? Not like Beethoven and Mozart, now they're proper composers, they wouldn't change time signature every three seconds or write all those high notes, would they? The audience won't notice whether it's right or wrong anyway, it's just a load of noise. Honestly, just not worth wasting your time on.

Please don't bother to practice. You're stuck at the back of the section, nobody cares what you do really, it's just a bit of a laugh this orchestra thing. And if there's any hard bits, well, just make it up or miss it out. Everyone else seems to be able to do it, they can cover for you when it gets high up or there's lots of fast notes.  Admittedly, it sometimes feels like the conductor's looking at you when he shouts 'Don't rush!' or 'I can't hear the solo!' but, well, he's got to look like he's taking this seriously, hasn't he?' Sometimes you wish you could play all the twiddly bits perfectly like the leader can, but if you'd wanted to be as good as him you'd have got there by now, wouldn't you?

To the ends of the earth

Yesterday I was able to travel to London and go to the Science Museum. Whilst such an undertaking may seem ill-advised on a Saturday in school holidays, I needed to visit now because it was my only chance to see Universe of Sound: The Planets, an exhibition featuring Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia performing Holst's eponymous suite, as well as a new commission from Joby Talbot entitled Stars, Systems, Worlds, Infinity.  All this was intended to demonstrate the workings of the symphony orchestra and its constituent instruments, and as such each section of the orchestra has its own curtained 'chamber' with the surround sound and video matched to give the impression of sitting amongst the players at that location.

I'd initially been alerted to its existence by a friend who is working as a guide at the exhibition, and who was very pleased to see me there. It turned out I'd fortuitously arrived during a lull in visitors (apparently it can become quite busy with families, and indeed the installation was extended by a month to cope with visitor numbers) and was able to try my hand at percussion in Mars and Venus, playing along to the suite.  This is harder than it might seem even for a seasoned performer, not least counting tens of bars in rests or held rolls and then coming off at the right moment (snare drum technique is also not nearly as intuitive as it looks). Anticipating that many visitors will not necessarily read music, there are helpful video screens in which players from the orchestra explain what you need to do and guide you in with the help of some Guitar Hero-style graphics.  I gave the tam-tam a resounding whack and then played some gentle glockenspiel notes before my guide showed me over to the conducting pods. 'These are really cool' he explained, demonstrating how the motion sensors would detect my hand movements as I followed the beats on the 'conductors-eye' screen. The simulator is limited to controlling volume and showing accuracy of beating; the music will continue even if you stop and there is no way to control tempo or interpretation.  (I suspect no current technology is sophisticated enough to interpret the nuances of a conductor's direction in the way human players do, and indeed the facial and non-beating gestures I made were pointless). But it is a good way of demonstrating what the conductor must do.

Even as somebody who regularly plays in several orchestras there was a great deal of interest in walking round to a different section to my own, and hearing the sound of the orchestra from another point - wind, brass, organ.  The curators had helpfully put out the instrumental parts in their respective chambers for those who could read them, so I would spend each Planet following what I though was most interesting - harps in Saturn, upper strings in Uranus, horns in the Talbot piece.  Possibly the most interesting part was a split-screen showing variously the horn, bassoon, trumpet, violin and timpanist.  Below them was a continuous commentary of their thoughts as they were playing the piece (presumably transcribed from listening through afterwards).  This included a little banter over virtuosic passages, but also fascinating insights into the actual business of performing the music - the trumpeter explaining how the repeated notes in Mars became uncomfortable to play by the end, the violinist explaining how he watches both the conductor and the leader at once, the timpanist counting rests and the conductor watching his stick. The most touching was the principal horn trying to articulate what it was like to play the solo that opens Venus, how she just let herself play it and trusted she had judged the acoustic of the room and the other players that followed her.  It was a wonderfully intimate moment to see the other players responding appreciatively and her satisfaction at performing what was essentially just four notes, but notes of such significance which had been entrusted to her.  Next to this screen was another showing Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting and, in a similar vein, his thoughts on the music and its merits.  'In two minutes he has changed the character utterly' he mused, a little after the aforementioned horn solos in The Bringer of Peace.  Also insights into the business of conducting: 'Muti used to watch for the brass players' embouchure to place the downbeat - sometimes the conductor is led by the orchestra'; 'what makes the rhythm avoid becoming repetitive is that he is always changing what is happening around it...sometimes it's 3+2 and sometimes 2+3...you have to be very controlled and not get carried away by the excitement of the music'. Best of all; 'the sound of the symphony orchestra...something you cannot get from anything else' and 'People who don't really listen to classical music, don't know much about the orchestra - they still know The Planets'.

I must have spent nearly two hours - two complete performances of all the music - in the gallery and eventually left back through the clocks and hourglasses to eat lunch. I was very pleased to discover that although a little out of the way on the first floor, the installation is right above the main ground floor gallery which is open to the roof, and so Holst was being broadcast right over all the cars and steam locomotives and rockets where most of the museum's visitors were.  Whilst one might, being critical, wonder what a piece of music based on astrology is doing in a science museum, I am tempted to include this brief summary of the exhibition in my 'myth of elitism' series, as it is yet another laudable method of opening up to the public the joy and wonder of classical music and the amazing worlds of sound created by the orchestra.  The Planets, although overplayed in parts (I'm thinking especially Mars and Jupiter), deserves the fame it has achieved, and has always been a favourite piece of mine, particularly Neptune with its glittering textures, chilling dissonances and that extraordinary use of voices (something I pay homage to in A Child of the Snows, and which also featured in the Talbot piece). I hope Holst's music, for all his later misgivings about its popularity, will continue to bring many more souls under the spell of the orchestra.

Having picked up some reduced-price chamber music from Chappells (I wanted a score of Holst, but they only had big ones which were overpriced) I then raced home and got back in enough time to see the Olympic Torch being carried through my city. Yes, it was historic. Yes, we all briefly felt part of something big, proud that our largely unremarkable town was a small part of a huge event. But I have to say I will remember the exhibition with more affection than the minutes spent on a street corner, with all the vapid sponsors' stooges faking a party in the drizzle and finally a man with a surprisingly small gold stick running past in few seconds. For all its ceremony, the Olympic relay felt ordinary and mundane; Holst, by contrast, seemed otherworldly and transcendental, filled with wonder and fascination. Better still, it is more accessible. One does not have to wait in the rain or fight through a crowd to experience the music, it is available to anyone as long as there are ears to hear it. That, surely, is the more lasting and generous legacy?

A Child of the Snows: Between the beginning of the end and the end

I have allowed myself two indulgences on this project in the past week:

The first was to purchase a new laptop, a ThinkPad Z60t. I say new, it was reconditioned because the things are about £1500 off the shelf and tend only to go to business users. But besides being durable and having the genius little red tracking button (like a second track pad, but better), it has the most important feature of being able to run Sibelius and associated peripherals without breaking sweat. It's also a widescreen dimension monitor which suits Panorama view very well. What this means practically is that I can now write wherever I have space to sit down, and can also take my work to the piano instead of having to make trips back and forth to try things out.  Another advantage is the ability to flip open the screen and demonstrate or edit my work for another party at an instant, without having to hope their version of Sib is compatible or create a pdf on a pen drive. Admittedly working on the laptop is slightly slower due to the lack of a numeric keypad and mouse, but it's still going to speed things up overall.

The second is that's I've started on the vocal score's piano reduction. The main reasons for this are that the cantata is so close to completion anyway that I might as well do it as a form of proofreading, a phone call from the director to check on progress impressed on me that the vocal score was more urgent than the full score (still a month before the deadline though) and shoudl time get very short the remaining instrumental passages can be written as piano score and copied out into orchestration later. Despite the relative complexity of the score (there are some places where every string line has a different rhythm, although others are as simple as held chords) progress seems to be very quick, indeed in less than three hours today (an average evening's work) I have done over 100 bars, one sixth of the piece.  This too is being done in Sibelius, based on some earlier sketches and hand-written 'tryouts' to allow copy-pasting of lines into the piano staves, then each section tested and revised at the piano.

All that remains to write now is to link up the fragments of oboe solo, three small linking passages between sections and to decide how the piece ends.  The overture is done and refined, the link between verses 1 and 2 is finally sorted (I think) and so is the climax of the piece.  As things stand the piece is now 622 bars and 25 minutes long - perhaps another 20 bars left to write?

A Child of the Snows: progress update

It's getting there.  This week I have made several important 'links' between sub-sections and revised them accordingly as well as working toward the very end.  It's becoming increasingly clear to me that one of the most important skills for a composer is being able to leave things out or cast them aside.  Berlioz sums this up exactly: 'it is wonderfully easy to compose, but it is so hard to let the crumbs fall under the table'.  One writes bars that sound fantastic on their own but cannot be integrated into the work without compromising it.  Mostly this is due to misdirection or tautology. One example stands out in the last few days' work.  I'd written a very tense climax in part of the cantata where the Field poem talks of Calvary, with the 'French Overture' dotted rhythms to the fore, but however I tried to tweak it, it somehow didn't seem right - the potential seemed to be being hampered by something. I must have played around with different notes for half an hour and abandoned it to work on another passage before later on the solution became apparent - chop something out. Lo and behold, when I played it back I could see immediately what was wrong: two bars were both providing exactly the same function and by 'stepping back down the mountain' in this way were destroying the tension leading to the full outburst. With two bars removed the orchestra now bursts out of the choir's peak to rush downwards in near-unison and into a winding-down passage introducing the next verse.  Solved.

More of the orchestral accompaniment is getting written too. I had a slight reality-check when I made an experimental passage of piano reduction and realised that I've put a somewhat greater degree of both counterpoint and dissonance into the parts than I'd anticipated.  It's not a problem as such; I just surprised myself given that I'd always intended this to piece be on the conservative side stylistically.

It's about now that I also start getting into strange mind games about the finished article. Will it work? - will it be too difficult? - will there be bars I hate but can't see any other way of doing? - does it all sound coherent? One starts analysing the work trying to find positive points as if one is preparing a defence of a thesis: look, here's a chord combining two motifs, here's an interesting bit of counterpoint, that verse is just the right length, isn't it? Often a thought that turns away excessive self-criticism is that I am still in the early stages of my output, there will be other, greater pieces to come, so don't worry too much if this one isn't a consulate masterpiece. But still, try to make it good. But don't try and do everything in it at once, there will be other opportunities.

Anyway, I think I'm still on course to finish the cantata by the end of the next month. Just the last few lines of text to go, the introduction, the solo and some linking passages to go now. Oh, and work out how to end it...

Wallpapering

I tend to change my PC's desktop background (known colloquially as 'wallpaper') about every month. Almost always the image is a picture I've snapped on a recent trip, having got into the habit of trying to take a shot or two that contains a large area of the same colour suitable for displaying icons and a calender on top of. However, recently I had the nice idea to create a series of Great Composer wallpapers which could be easily made from 'found' objects on the internet (a la Berio) and knocked up in an hour or two using fairly simple tools in a graphics programme. Here I'm going to show you how it's done, should you wish to copy the concept yourself or just are curious.

The basic idea consists of using a portrait of the composer, their signature and a suitable excerpt of their music. All of these objects could be found from open-source websites, chiefly Wikipedia and IMSLP, and then with a little bit of experimentation arranged to fill the screen space. Depending on the images used and direction the portrait faces, there is scope for some variation with the composition.  The program I used for the project was Paint.NET, a free open-source raster graphics program that was initially developed by Microsoft as a replacement for the standard Windows Paint but then dropped and left in the hands of a community of internet users. It would be an excellent program even if it were payware - it does nearly everything that Photoshop or Coral Draw will, although if you want vector graphics you'll have to get the equally excellent Inkscape. The reason for not using this instead (vector graphics, should you be curious, are a system whereby the pixels become infinitely small as you zoom in and so images don't get blurred) is partly that file sizes will be much larger and that I have a much greater level of proficiency on Paint.NET. Also, it has a number of plugins included that we will be using for this project.

Setting up/Portrait:

The first stage is to set up the canvas for the wallpaper.  As I'm creating this background for a standard 17" flatscreen monitor, I will be using a resolution of 1024x468 pixels, so I create a new document in Paint.NET and alter the canvas size to these dimensions (choose Image - Canvas Size).  (If you are unsure how big your screen is, right click on your desktop, choose 'Properties' and look at the 'Settings' tab. There will be a slider half-way down which will show your current resolution - most likely this is already at 1024x468).  The next thing is to choose a subject for our wallpaper. The composer I settled on was Haydn: definitely one of the 'greats'; and with several portraits to choose from available in high-resolution. As we need to show both the portrait and some music, I intended to divide the space about half-and-half. This also means that when our background is 'in situ', desktop icons can all fit over one side or the other depending on what offers the best contrast and visibility. A little searching on Wikipedia Commons brought me to the Thomas Hardy portrait which I copied and pasted into Paint, and then resized to fit just the head into the frame.

At this point we need to introduce a new concept which is one of the best features of Paint.NET and similar programs: layers. In ordinary MS Paint, everything is on the same layer and only one colour can be displayed as 'on top'. If you draw over something, it disappears. Cut an area out and you cut down to the background. But with Paint.NET, we can have multiple layers of a drawing superimposed on top of each other. This means you can draw a background and then create another layer (or several) on top, on which you can draw, move, cut, paste and alter anything without affecting the layer(s) below or above.  We're going to exploit this feature in making our wallpaper.

The Haydn portrait I've just copy-pasted will sit on top of a background layer, which we'll create in a minute. What we need to do first is to 'cut out' his head so we can add a background to avoid an untidy difference between the square portrait and the rest of the screen (I experimented with stretching the painting's background to fill the space, and the result was some way from satisfactory).  There is no easy way of doing this other than to get out the eraser tool and carefully go round the edge of the wig and features with a small tip size. My tip is to release the mouse frequently; this means if you make a mistake and have to hit 'undo' you'll only lose a small amount of correct erasing.

The result of somewhat painstaking work with the Eraser tool.

I decided to leave 'Papa' Haydn's hand and pen in, as it makes a nice touch and would have looked a little odd otherwise.  I have also left in the painted background behind him as this serves our purpose quite well already.  Once all this is complete, I name the layer 'Portrait' or something similar for clarity (select the layer and choose 'Layer Properties' from the small menu at the bottom of the Layers window) and save. We're not quite finished with this layer yet, but for now let's move on to creating the background.

Background:

Create a new layer from the window and name it 'Background'. Then - and this is important - move it down using the arrows to below the portrait layer we already have. Anything we draw in this new layer will be visible only where the portrait layer is transparent - the chequered space in the screenshot above. (This is possible due to the file having something called an 'alpha layer', but we don't need to worry too much about the workings of this for our current project).  Rather than a single colour background, I wanted something slightly mottled that matched the oil paint of the portrait. To get this, in the background layer I stretched a rectangle over the entire canvas (make sure it's set to 'Draw filled shape' at the top when the polygon tool is selected) and then in the visible area scribbled a load of wiggles over it in green, brown and tan.  Making sure only this background layer was selected, I then used the Gaussian Blur tool (Effects-Blurs-Gaussian Blur) on this layer in two separate passes, turning up the blur radius until the wiggles were very subtle. I also ran the 'Oil Painting' effect on this layer, although I'm not sure how much difference this actually made after all the blurring.  The finished effect is very subtle but looks much more classy than a plain colour.

The next thing to do is to return to the portrait layer and run another plugin from the Blurs tab called 'Feather'. It may appear at first glance that this has done nothing, but look again at the edges with the background layer displayed. They will have been blurred outwards a little, removing the 'hard' join between layers. We're done with the portrait layer now.

Music:

Create another new layer and name it 'Music'. It needs to be moved down between the two existing layers - it will be on top of the background but beneath the portrait. At this point I needed to choose a suitable excerpt form the literature to represent the composer. I settled on a passage almost immediately - The Heavens are Telling from The Creation, which is possibly his most famous and masterly work.  I decided just to use the vocal lines rather than including the orchestral accompaniment, but this is a personal judgement.  The staves can be captured by taking a screen shot of the vocal score from IMSLP and pasting it into a new document. To get the music to sit on top of the background we're going to need to cut out all the spaces. Trim using the 'Crop to selection' tool and then get to work with the Magic Wand tool to remove anything that isn't ink. The Wand selects any area bounded by the same colour and will allow us to erase the 'holes' between ledger lines and notes far neater than we could ever do by hand.  Again, there is no quick way of doing this: we're going to have to just keep clicking until all the white on the page is removed and we can see the chequers of the alpha layer.

Having done this, there was one little addition I wanted to make: the score only showed the words in English, and I rather wanted to have the German text as well. Apart from personal satisfaction and an acknowledgement of Haydn's nationality, this would also better make the staves fill the space. The German text was copied from another score and then typed in Paint.NET using the text tool, getting the font as close as possible to the existing type. I also put it into italics just to be on the safe side. Unfortunately the program's text editor does not not seem to have any provision for special characters, so to get the umlauts in 'erzählen' and 'Hände' I had to manually draw pairs of dots and position them over the letters. They've come out rather faint but they're there. I also had to move the existing staves to fit the new lines of text in. This was done by moving all the text to a new drawing, then very carefully selecting each part with the lasso tool and copy-pasting it into a new layer.  I then moved this selection up a few pixels and copy-pasted the German text (already aligned with the notes) into the layer before manoeuvring the whole lot in position so it was aligned above the rest of the staves. This was done separately for each voice until I had four layers which could be merged back into one (we'll cover merging at the end). The only problem that now remained was to fill in the gaps in the stave brace: this was done by selecting the existing area and stretching it over the gap from each side like elastic. Done!

Having added the additional text, the lines of the staves were manoeuvred back into position.

As the wallpaper has a dark background we need a light image on top. To do this for the music I selected the image and used the 'Invert colours' tool to turn the black to white, then copy-pasted the whole lot back over to the 'Music' layer of the original file. I also reduced the transparency of this layer a little and added a very slight blur to avoid the harsh contrast created by sharp pure white. It serves as a sort of 'semi-background' and also seems to match the colour of Haydn's wig...

The result is very satisfactory. I enlarged the layer and moved it across to position the music tucked slightly behind the portrait - again personal taste.  The inclusion of the line 'The wonder of his work/displays the firmament' seems particularly fitting, and I would like to think this could be seen as alluding to the mastery of Haydn's music as well as the creation text. All that remains now is to place Haydn's signature and dates in a new 'Text' layer. The signature (there are two different Haydn signatures, I chose the one with his initials in) was found on IMSLP and adapted in much the same way as the music: white background cut out using Magic Wand, then the colours inverted and moved into position at the bottom left on Joe's shoulder . The name and dates were done in Paint.NET's own text tool and positioned top right.

Finishing:

The final stage is to make this into a usable picture file by flattening it. If we've been saving our work regularly, as wise precautions advise, the default file type will be one with a .pdn extension. This is Paint.NET's own file format, one which supports the layering we've been using. However, we can't use a file like this as a normal picture because no other program can actually display a Paint. NET file with layers, so we need to change it into a .png, .jpeg, .gif or similar format.  To do so, we need to merge all the layers together into one. Paint.NET makes this easy for us by including a 'Merge layers down' tool in the Layers window, but first we need to double-check what goes on top of what and move them up or down if necessary. The order of layers in the window should be Text- Portrait- Music-Background. Starting with the top layer, hit the 'Merge down' button and the two layers will combine into one. When you've finished, the drawing will be a single-layer image that can be saved in any picture format. I would recommend using a png or a jpeg to keep the file size down, but check the quality is turned up to maximum. I saved it as 'Haydn desktop'.

All that remains is to navigate to the new file, right-click and choose 'Set as Desktop Background'. Give the cogs a moment or two to whirr and you should have Haydn sitting as your background screen.

The finished article in use.

A few concluding thoughts:

• This concept is highly versatile as long as one has a portrait image and another work example to use. It could easily be adapted for any figure or object of history. As mentioned, there is scope for variation of the basic idea: the portrait could be bigger, smaller, face the other way, the signature could be elsewhere, different fonts, etc.
• Oil paintings will probably produce a more satisfactory result than colour photographs, as they are easier to merge with other colours and avoid overly sharp edges when cut around.
• Using a fairly dark colour scheme seems to have worked well with the bright icons and calendar that sit on top of it. All are still legible and easy to locate, one of the design principles of desktop wallpaper.
• Be aware that with a system tray at the bottom of the screen, some of the image will be obscured. Luckily, this doesn't seem to create any adverse effect in this case.
• The next one of these will probably be Mozart. I plan to offer these as free downloads from this blog once I have a small collection.