MTeach class, week 5

From now to the end of semester, the MTeach students and I will be exploring the music of different twentieth and twenty-first century composers. Today we explored Shostakovich.

For me, Shostakovich is immensely approachable as a composer. For one thing, he is very well documented, with a lot of footage and quotes available that features people who knew him and worked with him, and heard his music performed. If you haven’t seen it before, Shostakovich against Stalin – the War Symphonies, is a must-see documentary that really depicts the times in which he lived and worked. I love it. I probably watch it every year. The interviews and archival footage are interspersed with performance footage of the symphonies by Valery Gergiev conducting the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. If you don’t know Shostakovich’s music, this film is an excellent way in.

He was a composer of his times, and justly celebrated, in a way that we don’t see these days in the ‘western art music’ world. He wrote about current events in a way that his audience connected with very directly. His use of musical symbols (quotes, rhythmic figures assigned specific meanings, melodic fragments) is in dispute between scholars, but his musical vocabulary is certainly a rich one to mine for workshop starting points.

I have led several composing projects based on Shostakovich’s music. My main points are to:

• identify a current event or topic about which the group feels strongly, to depict in the composition
• Develop ‘word-songs’ (following Shostakovich’s example with his ‘name-song’, D.SCH) as the main melodic material and mode to stick to for harmonies
• Choose several rhythmic figures or cells from Shostakovich’s music to incorporate into these pieces.

I find that this is enough to get some really interesting music happening. It did today – even limited to mostly tuned percussion instruments, each group created highly individual pieces of music. The group chose the current controversy over the photographer Bill Henson as their composition focus. They developed word-songs on words like ‘dirt’, ‘art’, ‘pervert’ and ‘photos’. Some of the small-group pieces sounded more ‘Shostakovich-y’ than others, but that’s fine. We are not looking to imitate him wholesale, rather, the intention is to create strong listening pathways into his music for all the participants.

Storms, movies, rain… La Dolce Vita in Rome

Today a storm passed over Rome. Lightning, thunder, and lots of rain. Great. (Except that I wasn’t closeted away in some nice sheltered spot, I was out in the street, trying to be a Good Tourist.

My umbrella (the latest effort) of course turned scared at the first sign of serious rain. Spokes started to wrench themselves from their pathetic cotton confines (needlework attaching them to the waterproof fabric). The fabric started to show signs of strain. The whole thing kept turning inside out, and is now kind of warped. Odd, isn’t it. Seems like a design fault. The umbrella doesn’t cope well with rain.

So I did what any smart tourist would do, I headed for the nearest cinema that shows films in the original language, and spent the early part of the evening watching a movie.

Not a lot of choice, of course. Some of the films screening looked interesting, but their Original Language wasn’t English. I’d probably be okay with the Italian subtitles, but it would be a lot more work.

I watched… Leoni per agnelli (Lions for Lambs). Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise. Bit of an anti-war, preachy movie that was very, very talky. Tom Cruise plays a highly unlikeable Senator determined to provide a new strategy for winning the war in Afghanistan. He asks things like, “Do you want to win the war on terror? Simple question. Yes or No.” In his loud American, preppy voice. Typecasting. I can’t bear Tom Cruise.

Meryle Streep plays a fluttery, yet apparently hard-hitting journalist, who has been invited to the meeting by Cruise who wants her to write an article about his new strategy. An exclusive. Basically, the article would be government propaganda. Streep remembers the heady, idealistic days of journalism in the 1960s and the time of the Vietnam War. She carries a huge guilt burden about the way her network has sold out to ratings, and the way her profession has also sold out in order to stay in favour with people in power.

Robert Redford plays an earnest professor type, trying to inspire one of his brightest students to stop being an apathetic dick and BE SOMETHING. His whole part in the film consists of a meeting taking place between him and the student, who is a smart-alek, over-privileged, highly-annoying young man, filled with smart-arse cynicism about politics and government. This is all highly emotive stuff, this meeting. Incredibly earnest and do-goody and preachy.

All of this is interspersed with scenes about two of Redford’s former brightest students, who enlisted in the army and are now taking part in Cruise’s big new strategy, which is clearly a disaster waiting to unfold.

Didn’t catch who wrote the soundtrack but it was horribly cliched and cheesy. At one point Redford says to his student (in a moment of passionate appeal), ” Rome is burning, son”, and while he says it we hear a growing string tremolo in the background, gradually increasing in volume. Good Lord deliver us, please, from such cinematic banality.

You are probably getting the impression that I didn’t like this film. You would be right. I thought it was horribly base in the way it delivered its messages, it was in a way its own kind of light-weight propaganda, it felt like it was someone’s baby (Redford’s?) that they personally had pushed to get made. Maybe, in the mid-West of America, and in an America heading towards an election, there need to be films like this, maybe it is this kind of film that gets people thinking a bit more about the decisions our leaders make about things like going to war.

But for me, it was cliched, heavy-handed, earnest and preachy, laid on way too thick, with a trowel or a blunt instrument (cricket bat?). I couldn’t help but compare it to Sophie Scholl, the last similarly talk-heavy movie I saw. That film was vastly superior. It was mind-blowing, in fact. She was mind-blowing. The clarity and poise and intelligence with which she responded to her interviewer was utterly compelling.

Perhaps Lions for Lambs could have been similarly compelling. Maybe however, that is not the film it is supposed to be, nor the audience it is intended for. I would say that I am definitely not part of the target demographic.

Anyway, back to Rome. Tomorrow I will go to Porta Portese, the street market that stretches as far as the eye can see in all directions, that is held every Sunday. Hopefully the weather will be kinder and calmer. And SB returns tomorrow – yay!

Day after that, I am definitely on the plane. Homeward bound, I shall be.

Friday night films

Tonight, after a tiring last day of term at Language School, I took myself off to the movies to see Forbidden Lie$, Anna Broinowski’s documentary about Norma Khouri, who wrote the “non-fiction” bestseller Forbidden Love. I really liked this film. It is a snappy, clever documentary in the way the story is told. She uses some techniques I really liked, of playing back interview footage to characters in her story, to get further reactions from them. It was an effective device or symbol for all the onion skin layers that she (Anna Broinowski) thought she was unpeeling, only to learn she was being conned along with everyone else. Go see it. It’s excellent, intriguing film-making, and a very fascinating central character.

I meant to post about the film I saw last week too. I went with two girlfriends to see the Peter  Whitehead film, The Fall. Whitehead is a cult 1960s film-maker, a retrospective of his work has been playing in the city, and I was interested to see this film, which was described in the various publicity as his best.

Hmmm. I felt underwhelmed, I have to say. It starts off nicely vague and undetermined, lots of abstract shots, fast-paced street footage, and some vainly-placed shots of our director looking moody/thoughtful/arty/pensive.  There was definitely some interesting material. It is set in New York against a background of anti-war protests, and student sit-ins at Columbia University.

To start with, as my friend H said, we were happy to indulge him. Hey, it was a Friday night at the end of a long week. We were not a demanding audience. A few shots of cool clothes and images of New York at that time – all makes for a good night at the cinema.  But after one particularly gruesome scene involving an axe (“America’s finest”), a piano and a live bird, during which I covered my eyes, I felt far less generous. It is one thing to make a comment on the hypocrisy of those war-mongering, fear-driven times, it is another to do so using a living creature. Arrogant sod. It was pretty sickening stuff, I thought.

My friends had seen another of his films the week before, which they said had been completely different – lighter, sillier, more playful, more frivolous. Set in London. Carnaby Street.

Moving on… Here are a couple of things we enjoyed laughing about after the film:

Things we learned from this film: that there was some truly dire experimental theatre going on at that time.

Favourite quote: “The hippies are armed!”

In praise of struggle…

I’m thinking today about struggle and good art. The collaboration with the theatre company that the Orchestra’s outreach program is working with is one of the most challenging things I have done, artistically. It has hit a couple of snags recently. That’s mild language – in fact, in the last 8 days we have had two major dramas and each time, I feel myself sigh a bit more heavily inside.

The director and I spoke today and vented some frustrations – not towards each other, but towards these snags (as I shall call them). Her more than me – I had the advantage of a couple of days’ stewing time, and a visit to the Japanese Bath House yesterday evening to help me calm down and take my mind off it all. We both agree it could well be an amazing show that we are in the middle of creating, and we both feel that in a way, these challenges that keep arising are part of that amazing-ness. They are the grit that is forcing us to keep digging away at the material that we devise, to be demanding of it, and challenge it.

We need the musicians to feel this too though, and to keep trusting us.

Musical Alphabets

I’m exploring Musical Alphabets at the moment with two of my classes. ‘Alphabets’ meaning a bank of sound-options, which can be put together in different orders, to spell out new words, and thus make new melodies and patterns.

Middle Primary students are working with a dance-alphabet. Each letter of the alphabet gets assigned a particular movement (for example, letter A is the right hand flung high in the air). So far we are up to the letter P. It can be slow going as each letter has to be memorised by the students, and some find that easier than others.

With the letters A-P now created, there are already quite a few words and sentences we can create. My plan is to divide them into pairs (or groups of three), ask each group to choose a word or phrase to dance, and to practise performing that dance over and over again.

We’ll be able to build up a big ensemble piece that might involve groups/pairs performing on their own, everyone performing their own phrase all at the same time, maybe everyone doing a unison word (as a kind of chorus), and if anyone is up for it, longer solos.