Bringing the music back

Wigmore Hall

It’s a landmark moment. This week, Wigmore Hall re-opens for live concerts. Although live-streamed ‘behind closed doors’, it signifies the start on a long road to normality, a journey back to the music making and listening that we all took for granted just a few months ago. 

Music festivals, concert halls, churches and other places of performance are now girding themselves for the painstaking task of assessing all the risks of each step forward; from a soloist on a platform and a sound engineer, to a small consort, to an orchestra - even, praise be, to an actual, live audience.

There are going to be plenty of risks assessments, deep cleans, health warnings, new procedures and a lot of worry before we get there. But the journey is one to be taken with enthusiasm and imagination. 

For many musicians, whose livelihoods have been so suddenly interrupted, performing online has become an unexpected necessity. It doesn’t suit everybody. But not being able to perform isn’t just about not earning a living: it’s about not properly living at all. It’s about not being able to express yourself; not fulfilling your purpose. I’ve talked to players who speak of the frustration and emptiness when all the music around them is just on the pages of books and on their music stands, not vibrating and flowing from their instruments and voices.

Of course, there have been some wonderful innovations. Virtual choirs, already popularised for one-off events, have sprung up everywhere. And even entire orchestras have worked together online, such as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s Bach, the Universe and Everything concerts. Each participant submits a home recording, and these are knitted together by an editor. This requires considerable technical effort, and a lot of time, quite apart from the precision and commitment of every musician involved. It’s surprising just how good some of these are. 

But for the most part, for the vast majority of musicians, working freelance, probably doing their best to keep up some teaching commitments by video, and juggling other responsibilities in lockdown like childcare, such collective enterprises are rare or impractical. To perform, they have had to manage on their own (or as a couple), overcoming whatever technical and acoustical limitations they find in their situation, and being increasingly resourceful with social media - for some, a new venture. They have streamed videos on Facebook and YouTube, linked to them from Twitter, and channelled them on Instagram. It was all possible before, but instead of an entertaining promotional outlet, it’s become the only way of reaching an audience. 

And to them all, I say thank you, and well done. Thank you for having the courage to take an often unfamiliar path, to try out new technology with all the testing and unexpected problems it involves, and to share your talents in a new and challenging spotlight. 

I’ve really enjoyed seeing and hearing musicians who have previously performed in the concert series I manage, Music at King Charles. For example, violinist Ken Aiso has been broadcasting daily 15-minute recitals from home. Steven Devine has explored new repertoire. Members of Eboracum Baroque have made solo videos. And Cantabile,the London Quartet, have recorded songs from their four homes. 

All this is fabulous, and it’s encouraged me to take my concert series online over the summer, to give artists like these an opportunity to perform, and also to talk about what they’ve been up to and share their lockdown journeys.

But it’s not the way it should be. As well as enjoying their music, I’ve found myself spending less time with CDs and the radio and more on YouTube watching live concert recordings, such as the wonderful and inexhaustibly refreshing Netherlands Bach Society’s complete Bach project. 

Because I miss it. I miss the air of expectation and chatter front of house. The last-minute adjustments backstage. The nervousness. The smiles between players when something they’ve rehearsed works out or when someone is mischievous. The scrape of chairs, opening of instrument cases, tunings, polishings, page-turns, deep breaths, sweat and concentration. And above all, the silence, the noise and the elation of an audience. 

And this is why I think that, rather than just listening to recordings and waiting for normal concerts to resume, we need to explore the journey back to normality, back to the heights of expression and collective music-making, alongside our musicians; recognising the difficulties it involves, giving opportunities to them to describe through whatever performances they can manage how music continues to stretch and challenge them, and share the unexpected solace and delight to be found in these chance encounters with music and the people who are keeping it alive for us while we wait for its full reawakening.

See also: Reflections on online concerts

From sleep and from damnation

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), poet, broadcaster, journalist and lay theologian, most famous now for his Father Brown stories, was accepted into the Catholic church in 1922. But he was an enthusiastic Anglican when he wrote the hymn "O God of earth and altar" and saw it published in the first edition of the English Hymnal in 1906. Vaughan Williams set it to his new arrangement of the folk melody King’s Lynn. 

Given current events, it’s interesting to reflect that there was also a General Election that year, 1906. This was the famous ‘Liberal Landslide’, toppling an unpopular Conservative and Unionist government at a time of growing concern over social inequality. Suffragette protests were becoming more militant and the Labour Party was gaining ground.

Chesterton himself saw himself as a socialist, and said “not being a Socialist was a perfectly ghastly thing. It meant being a small-headed and sneering snob, who grumbled at the rates and the working-classes.”

His words in the hymn are densely scathing, and don’t sound like a normal hymn at all, so it’s perhaps surprising it was included in the new hymn book. But they must have struck a chord in 1906, as they do now. I’m sure we can all think of recent examples of “easy speeches that comfort cruel men”. But Chesterton is not critical only of the pride of earthly rulers. He directs the hymn to “us all” who are in danger of drifting and sleeping. For me, this hymn says that humility, like charity, begins at home, and complacency is just another form of pride.

O God of earth and altar,
Bow down and hear our cry,
Our earthly rulers falter,
Our people drift and die;
The walls of gold entomb us,
The swords of scorn divide,
Take not thy thunder from us,
But take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches,
From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches
That comfort cruel men,
From sale and profanation
Of honour and the sword,
From sleep and from damnation,
Deliver us, good Lord.

Tie in a living tether
The prince and priest and thrall,
Bind all our lives together,
Smite us and save us all;
In ire and exultation
Aflame with faith, and free,
Lift up a living nation,
A single sword to thee.

In the round: getting the BBC in 360

How new cameras, production techniques and technology are putting viewers right in the picture at the BBC. 

The most disruptive technology we have seen for a generation" is how the BBC BlueRoom team described Virtual Reality and 360 degree video when they reported back from the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last January. 

It's important to distinguish between VR and 360 video. While the gaming industry is excited about VR - which puts you 'inside' an artificial environment - broadcasters are waking up to the idea that viewers can also be put in the middle of the action of real action on film, via 360 degree video.  

Viewed on a headset, you can feel in the same situation as the camera. But even on a flat screen, 360 video provides a new way of interacting with an event; you can scroll around to see different aspects of what's been filmed. You just need to look at YouTube to see some examples of what's out there.

BBC Television sees 360 video (as opposed to VR) as an imminent area of strategic interest. The BlueRoom's report says that "the technology is now sufficiently mature that the BBC needs to give active consideration to which genres and programme types could benefit from 360, and which would not". 

The work has begun, as you can see at the test platform BBC Taster. Most notably, you can find yourself on the Strictly dancefloor, or diving with whales with the Natural History Unit's team.

Zillah Watson, Editor BBC R&D, has been busy advising journalists keen to give 360 a go. Check out the BBC News Labs site for the first film from last June from the migrant 'jungle' camp in Calais, and a tour of Westminster. 

"The composition of the shot brings up different questions each time you go to cover a story" she says. "If it gives the viewer a better sense of the location and the space, then for a news story it could really enhance the narrative."   

Even Radio is getting in on the act. At Radio 1Xtra, the Radio Visualisation team thought there could be a ready audience for the new technology among their typically youthful and diverse audience. The "rap battle" they filmed in the round, Fire in the Booth, has so far clocked 400 thousand views. [Beware the strong language in this clip.] 

Head of Technology for Radio, Paul Morgan, says there are many lessons still to be learned. "The basic set-up is six GoPro cameras on a tripod, and 'sticher' software to run the images together . It works pretty well, but it's best not to have too much action at a 'join' and lighting is key". 

Paul sees the next step as working out how to improve sound, to get it coming from the right place, wherever you turn. Expect to hear more about binaural audio, which locates the sound more realistically 'external' to you rather than in the ear, and object-based audio "which will be massive for Radio in the next few years anyway". 

The editorial questions raised by VR are only just beginning. How much should we guide the viewer? What material works better? 

"We have to keep an open mind about how the audience will react and how interactive people expect the experience to be" says Paul Morgan. "We could just place a camera in the middle of a talk studio so you can see people's reactions as well as the speaker, but will the off-stage business just be distracting?"

"Workflow tools are developing fast in the 360 space too." says Andy Corp of BBC Engineering, TV. "Manufacturers are moving quickly to develop the tools needed to stitch, manipulate and get the most of 360 cameras. For high-end 360 productions it may still be necessary to use specialist graphics software and operators, but it's increasingly feasible for a self-op producer to create 360 content which is of a good standard."  

Incorporating 360 video into the production chain isn't going to happen overnight, but it's going to be a fascinating journey.

Concert Review: Merry Opera Messiah

On the evening of Saturday 9^th April, a girl dressed in a grey hoodie slouched into the church and scowled at the people she saw. Some them she probably already knew, but she didn’t care for any of them. They included a nervous and nerdy young man, an aggressive yuppie, a young widow, a rather prudish woman and seven others. One of the men picked up a score of Handel’s Messiah that he found, and started to sing.

This was the start of the Merry Opera Company’s performance of Messiah, a staged version produced by John Ramster, which came to King Charles as part of a tour that also took them to the University Church in Oxford, St James Piccadilly and other churches around England this spring. And it was astonishing. In the course of the evening, we watched the characters, all played by professional opera singers, interact with each other as they sang and listened, walked around the church, and shared out the solos and choruses, sometimes with two or more singers exchanging phrases in the same aria. Through their gestures and action they expressed their individual stories, and they all changed through the evening, shrugging off their various inner demons to become a united group which absolutely thundered out the final chorus.

This was a wonderful and moving performance, which without any of the acting would still have been magnificent. But watching the music brought to life in individual and very human emotions took it to a new level. The organ provided all of the accompaniment and was played supremely well by the virtuoso Chad Kelly. There were tears in the audience and a standing ovation at the end.

Performed at the Church of King Charles the Martyr, Tunbridge Wells

Coleridge and the patriotism of the English Romantics

Notes after reading the excellent biography of Coleridge by Richard Holmes.

In his forties, when he was settling down after a fraught and often misunderstood life, Coleridge wrote about his youthful pantheistic beliefs in a beautiful sonnet, ‘To Nature’:

It may indeed by phantasy, when I
Essay to draw from all created things
Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings;
And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie
Lessons of love and earnest piety.
So let it be; and if the wide world rings
In mock of this belief, it brings
Not fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity.
So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,
And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields
Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee,
Thee only God! And thou shalt not despise
Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice.

He was known as a great metaphysical writer. To his contemporaries, this generally meant that he was incomprehensible, for which he was mocked cruelly by Hazlitt and others in the press, as he recognises in the poem. What he tried to do in his writing, however, was to make sense of the new Romantic movement that he played a part in during his collaboration with Wordsworth twenty years earlier, in the context of the rise also of science.

He was criticised variously for being too radical and for not being radical enough (potent accusations in the turbulent years of the Napoleonic Wars and the economically depressed years afterwards in England that led to the Great Reform Bill of 1831), because he was ambitious for change without revolution. He wanted to promote a better society based on better education and better moral understanding; a society where industrialisation (then booming) would be humane and not merely rational and profit-seeking. However, he shied away from party politics, and taught that an proper understanding of history, philosophy and literature (epitomised in Shakespeare, who, in his view, captured the human soul) would make men not only ‘civilised’ but also ‘cultivated’, and this cultivation entailed for him a sense of one’s place and duty to one’s fellow men and to God.

Significantly, then, he was tenaciously religious. It might seem to modern readers that radical thinkers after the Enlightenment can hardly have avoided scepticism, but Coleridge was quite typical of his time in expressing a ‘common-sense’ and one might say ‘grounded’ idea of the importance of theology and belief in God, partly as a deliberately patriotic, anti-French sentiment. As they saw it, the French Revolution, and all the chaos and disaster that followed was, after all, a result of rampant empiricism which elevated man’s rational nature above his moral being. One of the reasons that Shakespeare became so popular for the Romantics was the fact that his imagination was so unconstrained and so very ‘un-French’.

The Romantic celebration of nature as something morally empowered, which had its origins in the ‘Gothic’ eighteenth century, was driven in large part by this patriotism, as well as by a reaction against the ‘dark, satanic mills of the industrial revolution. (Coleridge met the ageing and impoverished William Blake once and was moved by the experience.) But it was also a quasi-scientific attempt to identify what ‘was’ the Imagination – could it be defined and described, and how far could it be exercised? Somehow, it seemed to open the way to an understanding of the soul and what the meaning of man could be, especially in relation to the world he found himself in and was so dramatically shaping.

Fear, greed and inertia

I've often heard it said that our aversion to change is something instinctive, even natural.

Our brains have evolved from those of more primitive animals who needed most of all to detect threats in order to survive. Now, we use them creatively, proactively; but vestiges remain of the basic defensive mechanisms.

A quick Google search comes up with, for example, this article, "Accommodating new behaviours".

Even when our basic needs or instincts don't over-ride pure intellectual decision-making, they are always there in the background, as part of our thinking.

It's not worth over-doing, but as a very quick check that a communication will be acted on, I've found myself asking "fear or greed?" At the most basic level, every message appeals to one or both - what is there to gain or lose? It's the "what's in it for me?" test.

Am I being a bit hard on people? What about curiosity, loyalty, or a desire to help? Don't people respond to messages in these ways?

I think the answer is 'yes, but not as much'. And let's chuck in another one: laziness.

But communicators know that inertia is just as useful a guide to building campaigns as fear or greed: make the message as easy as possible to consume; publish it at point of use so it's less of a problem if they forget it; wrap it up with other messages or into a story so it's more memorable; or make it the default option and just say they have the option of changing.

I have to admit, I'm just as lazy, fearful and greedy as the next person. But at least that means I have a ready-made subject on which to test any communication - myself.

Light, music and theology

Extracted from my programme notes

It was inevitable that Dante would describe his journey through Paradise to a vision of the Trinity in terms of light and harmony. Classical philosophy had been interpreted from a Christian point of view in increasing detail for hundreds of years by the fifteenth century, most significantly by the teaching of Boethius and St Augustine. It was a commonplace understanding that heavenly perfection was characterised by the purity of mathematical proportion and luminosity. So Dante’s Paradise is flooded with light, the light that emanates from the highest heaven, is dimly perceptible even on earth, and gains intensity the nearer it is to its source. "La luce divina e penetrante per l’universo secundo ch’e degno" (Paradise XXXI:22) - the divine light penetrates the universe according to degree.

Light was therefore seen as the most noble of natural phenomena because it gave an insight into the perfection of the cosmos. Similarly, proportion, or concordance, was considered to be the loftiest aesthetic principle in the arts and architecture. And in music, the beauty (or the truth) of a work was determined by its use of the mathematically purest intervals - the octave, the fifth and the fourth. Thus, in his De Musica, St Augustine argues that music properly understood is a science, as opposed to the "art" of unintellectual, vulgar performances.

Hence also the enthusiasm Medieval thinkers had for the Pythagorean idea of the music of the spheres. Consonance in music signified perfection, the celestial harmony, and each of the planetary spheres sung its own note as it revolved around the earth. Light and the unison in music were the essence of true beauty, as they fulfilled man’s longing for the ultimate concord, the reconciliation of the multiple into one.