Morfydd Owen: A Life in Pictures
It is the second time in recent months that my selected book is a remembrance volume. For Myra Hess, the remembering was in words, each chapter a defined vignette from someone who knew her, an encapsulation of a facet of her character. This month’s book, Rhian Davies‘s bilingual pictorial biography of Morfydd Owen, is a narrative that offers context and illumination for a life of which we actually know very little.
I always feel that a book like this is a labour of love of the best kind. Both the research and the selection of the material, and then the aligning of it into the story presented to us, not only takes time and effort but a willingness to engage in an act of imagination that is also an act of responsibility.
The book begins with a biography of Owen, as well as an explanation of the investigation, its limitations, and the blossoming after the introduction was written, when new relatives of Owens were found and contacted. That these relatives were so late in coming forward is both a result of the privateness of Owen herself and of the at times unhelpful ways in which Wales used to record its genealogy. I remember well my sister searching for our Welsh roots and becoming frustrated at the number of dead ends she found, rather in contrast to the scrupulous records kept in Scotland (Wales was surprisingly squeamish about illegitimate children).
The visual records contained in the book comes in many forms, from certificates and ledger entries to programmes, photos of landscapes and buildings, and of course photos of people including Owen herself. Some of these photos are the stuff of which the Owen legend is made – as Davies says, they are “as much responsible for manufacturing Morfydd’s myth within Welsh culture as have stories of her colourful exploits amongst the Bohemians of Hampstead.” Davis draws attention to small details such as Owen’s inability to smile in later photos, and the change of parting in her hair after her marriage. While these may seem like small points, they are poignant in face of the mystery that surrounds Owen’s choice of husband and her tragically early death. Even as a very young child she faced the camera full on, her expressive eyes making contact with the viewer on the other side of the piece of paper that is the photo. One cannot hold Morfydd Owen’s gaze without feeling the challenge behind it. It is one of the things that makes me wonder about the sentimental label that has been given to some of her music; there is nothing sentimental in those eyes.
I also enjoy the contextual people that Davies has added to the Owens story. My particular interest, unsurprisingly, is in the programmes, especially the Royal Academy of Music programmes, and the students who performed Owen’s work. These names include May Purcell, a soprano who went on to have a successful career around the UK, singing a variety of genres from music hall to oratorio; William Michael, later to be described in a review as “a robust tenor with an unaffected style”, and Philip Lévi, a rather well-known pianist whose style is at one point gloriously described as “analogous to etching.” It all points to a vibrant and extensive musical community of which Owen was an integral part. even more does it highlight the tragedy of how her musical life shrank after her marriage to Ernest Jones. It is also a reminder of the extraordinary roll-call of students who frequented the academy in the early years of the 20th century. I could easily be diverted by the many other names on the programmes printed here but for now I will content myself with following the threads of those performing Owen. (I am also taken with the pictures of the newly opened Academy building on Marylebone Road - exactly the same benches sit outside my teaching room as are still there. I am rather honoured to think that I may sit where Owen herself sat.)
While the book is not one to be read cover to cover, I find myself returning to it time after time, dipping at random into its pages to see which picture takes my eye this time. Even my Welsh students, coming from choirs and institutions in Wales, have performed her little, and know even less of her life. When I show them the book, it fascinates me how different pages catch their attention. It shows how multi-faceted Owen’s story is; her music is even more so.
Evelyn Glennie: good vibrations
Evelyn Glennie has written two autobiographical tomes, so It is perhaps slightly contrary of me to use the much earlier volume here. How much do we want to measured against our younger selves, and what we thought important then?
Glennie’s early book, though, is an irrepressibly headlong flight through her beginning decades. Good Vibrations is the story of an absolute conviction of who Glennie wanted to be musically, and the ways in which she got there. The idea of a solo percussionist may not be as odd to us now (especially in light of the latest BBC Young Musician Of the Year winner - edited*), but in the 80s, mired as the classical world then was in a certain concert-life tradition, the idea was more than laughable. Glennie mentions accordion in her book as another instrument that has struggled to break into the solo recital arena; even in the early 2000s, I remember well the conversation I had with an accordionist who had just applied to an extremely well-known international competition, only to be told that they should withdraw their application as no one would be willing to sit through an entire recital of accordion music. And of course, we have also had several decades of Glennie herself driving the understanding that percussion can speak to us as widely and sensitively as does the more mainstream piano or strings. Thus we read the book with a chasm of tradition already between us and the printed page, and it is wonderful to think how our musical worlds have opened up.
It is perhaps this extra interval in the tides of society that means that I was surprised to learn that Glennie’s elder brother was “frustrated by what he called [Glennie’s] ‘non-natural’ use of words” in the book. I enjoy the forward tilt of the writing, not least because I recognize the pace of life in the alma mater we share. Glennie’s studies fill the majority of the book, given the little time that has elapsed between leaving the Academy and writing the book. It’s a very different picture on the surface – a student hostel in South London, wardens – but the tapestry of people and performances remains the same.
Inevitably, perhaps, Glennie devotes a fair bit of space to talking about what listening is, and her relationship with music. Her later book will delve into this even deeper, but here, already, there is much that is fascinating. Many years ago, on a trip to WOMAD, the festival of World music that then took place in Reading, I was trying to listen to a Chinese instrumentalist who had had the misfortune to be situated next to the drumming workshop tent. I was becoming more and more irritated at the sound pollution emanating from the enthusiastic children beside us, until my companion smiled at me and said, “You don’t have to listen with just your ears.” It was a salutary lesson that I have tried to live with since, sometimes more successfully than others. I certainly learned that listening as a skill in which I had little multi-sensory experience, something I took especially into my primary school teaching. I’m often aware that children listen with their whole body, something we tend to train out of them as they get older; it’s a shame that we don’t train that full body experience to focus completely and exclusively on the music being performed. Glennie’s attitude to silence in music perhaps sums this up best:
“Silence in music is very important to me – leaving space between the phrases without feeling the need to cover it by lifting a stick, for example, so that the audience is distracted from experiencing the silence by movement. When I perform I consciously use this space in different ways. It’s sometimes nice for the audience to have a moment at the beginning or end of a piece to prepare themselves for what is going to come or to reflect on what they have heard before they clap or rush on to something else. […] That silence is so important.”
I’ve chosen a video of Glennie improvising on drums here. It feels to me to sum up her ways of listening.
Myra Hess By Her Friends: edited by Denise Lassimonne
My father was an inveterate collector of recordings of pianists. He was born in the 1920s (we have very long generations in my family), so most of these are on record – from 78s to LPs – although in his later years, he reluctantly acquired a few cassette tapes and CDs. His reluctance was not particularly because of his wariness for more modern technology, but rather because the Golden Age pianists he loved so much were still only available for gramophone.
Of course, much has been written about both the unique sound quality of records, an the ritual of playing them. I remember the sound system tucked away in the corner of the living room, a resplendent oak-veneer cabinet that we children were not permitted to touch, lest we destroy needles, mechanism or worst of all, the records themselves. A small corner of me still feels somehow illicit and daring when I place an LP on my own player.
What this did, though, was to make me realise, even as a small child, that this was music that mattered, that was worthy of one’s time and attention. Myra Hess was a particular favourite for my father, in fact one of his top two – the other was Solomon, who he saw live on the pianist’s New Zealand tour in 1954, an experience that forever remained a treasured highlight of his life. Hess’s status at the top of the pyramid was partly what she played, given my father’s love of Beethoven and Brahms, but also because of how she played. He loved the strength of her contact with the keys, her attention to structure, the warmth and solidity of her sound. And it was also because he clearly admired her as a person.
A volume such as Denise Lassimonne’s collection of recollections from the friends of Myra Hess, written in memoriam, is never going to be a deep probe into the psyche of a performer. It is an act of friendship, a way of keeping the connection alive; it must be read as this. It is a mix of the personal and the musical, summoning an era already losing its currency when the book was published in 1966. The list of contributors is an illustrious one, from Irene Scharrer in her opening essay on Hess as a child, through such persons as Sir Adrian Boult and Joyce Grenfell, to W.K.C. Guthrie’s address as Public Orator of Cambridge University on the conferment of Hess’s honorary doctorate. This last is splendidly given in both Latin and English, as is still tradition; Myra Hess’s response noting that she is among the first women to receive this honour is not without a trace of steel. Denise Lassimonne herself, having lived with their mutual teacher Tobias Matthay for some time, contributes a chapter on the relationship between Hess and Matthay, or “Punkey”, as she called him. Matthay, from all the literature on him, was clearly an extraordinary and holistic teacher, something demonstrated through this paragraph:
“Punkey bequeathed another precious legacy to his pupils. Whenever he was with us in the artists’ room, his last injunction before we stepped onto the platform was ‘Enjoy the music!’ That inspired phrase saved us from many possibly disasters; and Myra used to say that when she suffered from nerves, as all great artists do, she would repeat to herself the magic words and a lifeline was cast and clung to, enabling her to throw herself into the very centre of the music shedding all nervousness in waste land.”
Another chapter that is a highlight for me is Howard Ferguson’s description of the National Gallery Concerts and their inception. It touches on the immense amount of work that had to be done behind the scenes for these to continue, programming, performers, and the occasional scramble to relocate in the face of bombing. Only once did the concerts take place outside the Gallery, when a time-bomb landed in the building; another time, the concert was moved to a far-flung room when a bomb was discovered in wreckage nearby. The concerts took place over exactly six and a half years – 1,698 concerts in total – to audiences ranging from the royal family to families to servicemen on leave. While the programming was very much of its time – Ferguson speaks of the series “presenting the complete literature of first-rate chamber music” – the extent of Hess’s achievement cannot be overestimated.
Hess’s response to the Public Orator of Cambridge reminds me of Lena Ashwell’s plea, and hope, for change thirty years earlier, after WWI. And again, her words feel timely, as yet again we slide perilously close to resuming the comfortable mantles of earlier musical times, and ignore the doorway to change:
“Since Elizabethan days there has probably never been such a demand for serious music as there is today. Not only in England but all over the world it is evident that this demand cannot be satisfied by the conventional series of concerts, which financially are beyond the great majority of people. Yet how important it is that a way should be found to enlarge the scope of public music-making. In times as unsettled as our own, music can have a profound influence for good. It is unfettered by the barrier of words, and therefore it is one of the great forces that can bring people together in mind and spirit.
How is this consummation to be achieved? At the moment it is difficult to give the answer. We must hope that the forces of habit and prejudice in the musical world will gradually give way to a more enlightened view of our present needs. This reformation may take time; but perhaps it will come about in the same happy way in which this University has found it possible to reconcile tradition with the claims of emancipated womanhood.”
Elizabeth Poston Centenary, 2005: Contributed Articles and Personal Letters
In the early years of the twentieth century, three Eliz/sabeths were born in England within 21 months of each other. These three would become three of Britain’s most illustrious composers. They share an uncompromising conception of the value of music and a complete immersion in the life it demands, but cover an enormously diverse range of musical language and aesthetic.
Elizabeth Poston is the oldest of the three, born in October 1905. Next was Elisabeth Lutyens in July 1906, followed by Elizabeth Maconchy, born March 1907.
These composers could not be more different; and in their differences, they highlight just how extraordinary the talent of women composers was even then, at a time that is now ignored, or worse, seen as overstated. How many people know that one of the most famous carols for which King’s College Choir Cambridge is known is by a woman?
The woman in question, Elizabeth Poston, is the subject of this month’s book, a collection of conference papers centred around the enigmatic composer and her environment. It was not a music conference, but one organised by The Friends of Forster Country, founded to preserve both natural and cultural heritage of the land of which Poston’s life was a fundamental part. Many of the papers are light touch, reminiscences rather than in-depth scholarship. One author is frank about the amount that must be conjectured about the immensely private Poston, especially around her wartime work for the BBC. Nevertheless, the touching warmth throughout, both in the way that the writers speak of Poston personally, and in the way they use language, conjures a vibrant image of both composer and milieu. Because Poston lived in E.M. Forster’s old house, their two stories are inextricably entwined. This is not to say that Forster acted as a requisite male lens for Poston, though at times the narrative being offered around Poston does veer dangerously close to being overshadowed by the more famous figure. What it does, however, is underline an aesthetic, the way in which the bygone era of Forster’s novels found a lingering tendril in Poston and her output. An extract from the offering of the German au-pair who lived with Poston and her mother for a year in the early 1960s vividly sums up much about Poston’s musical past and present. Ruth Brunner writes:
“Miss Poston was working really hard to get a living out of her work. Looking back, I realise that she must have been working on several songbooks at different stages. I often woke up late at night hearing her play the piano, trying out different harmonies. She was then working on The Penguin Book of Christmas Carols, first published in 1965 and also I believe on Baby’s Song Book […]. On the inside of the cover of [Baby’s Song Book] are sketches of two pairs of hands on a piano keyboard, one a grown up’s and the other a child’s laid on top. Mrs Poston told me that that was the way her daughter, at a very early age, wanted to play the piano.”
The papers are lifted verbatim from the conference, without adjusting then for a written medium; the book is a patchwork quilt rather than a narrative. The first half are the papers, the second, writings from Poston’s own pen. Poston was not only a composer but also a writer by profession, and her way with words is wonderfully descriptive as well as often scalpel-sharp. She has a skill for confronting what she sees as prejudice and/or reactionism quietly but with precision. Her letter to Diana Sparkes on 5 April 1967 is a case in point:
“I have been bombarded with requests to write a work for girls which would give them the same chances and enlarge the repertory in the same direction as the Britten Ceremony of Carols does for boys – i.e. to get right away from the conventional clichés meted out to girls, with a subject that clicks and an old/new outlook.
[…]
NOW, here’s an idea. I am looking around for a companion piece, i.e. a text on which to write one. Why not POTS AND PANS? in itself a splendid title and an ideal subject for females!”
Poston is rather ignored in the literature on English music, her considerable influence often being condensed into two or three sentences, at best. Perhaps this is a result of her adherence to a musical aesthetic that matched the gentility of the immediate world she inhabited, quite different from the language of Maconchy and Lutyens; perhaps it was also because of her withdrawal from more (physically) public musical spheres. Yet she remained active in radio and television, as well as acting as president of the Women’s Society of Musicians from 1955-1961. Her output encompasses around 300 works, from the violin sonata and solo songs from her time at the Royal Academy of Music in the 1920s, to the choral works and arrangements of the 1980s (John Alabaster’s biographical catalogue is a sterling piece of work). This small volume opens a window onto an enigmatic figure who deserves more, not least for an underlying philosophy that feels like a shaft of light in the turmoil of today’s world:
“As we […] look at life from within or without, as we struggle on with the immense complexities of its problems, it still behoves us to go back to the beginning – stop talking, and simply stand still and love a sound or a sight or a thought, a bird maybe, or a daisy or a dandelion in green grass.”
Modern Troubadours: Lena Ashwell
When I read of the women who were studying at the Royal Academy of Music around the turn of the nineteenth century, I am always struck by the breadth of musical activity that resulted from their years of study. Alongside the singers known for opera such as Isabel Jay and Margaret Hughes, there is the music hall star Denise Orme, the folk-oriented Jean Sterling MacKinlay, and the rather risqué Margaret Cooper, who wrote her own songs. The pianists of the Tobias Matthay school such as Myra Hess and Irene Scharrer sat alongside the famous ragtime pianist Winifred Atwell. And of course there was Lena Ashwell, who studied singing at the Academy before switching to acting, on the famous advice of Ellen Terry in 1890, who wrote:
“When she stood up to read the speech from Richard II she was nervous, but courageously stood her ground. She began slowly, and with a most ‘fetching’ voice, to think out the words. You saw her think them, heard her speak them. It was so different from the intelligent elocution the good recitation, but bad impersonation of the others! […] ‘She has to work,’ I wrote in my diary that day. ‘Her life must be given to it.’”
Lena Ashwell is a fascinating figure altogether, who went on, of course, to organise the concert parties that entertained troops and prisoners both at home and abroad during WWI. This book is her account of those years. It is a testament to Ashwell’s relationship with words; her ability to communicate, her love for threading words together into rhythm and description is evident everywhere. Ashwell is a storyteller. One can feel the passion, the chaos, the frustration and exhaustion, the stillness and wonder of men grasping this moment of true life that is being offered them. For Ashwell is also a passionate philosopher, one who believes, even in the midst of the horror she sees, that music matters, that is gives us a reason for living.
This seems to me incredibly important right now, in the current global climate. When students come and ask me why they continue to don a costume and sing a story from a hundred years ago, or why they should still care if their top note has spin, or why the rehearsal conversations with their pianist still matter, it is Ashwell’s writing that gives me faith that this more than matters:
“When sending over a new concert party to France, I implored the artists to remember and to note things of interest, and to write me descriptions of what was happening to them; and almost every time I was disappointed, because when they wrote or spoke they could only mention meals and journeys, what they had had to eat, and the number of concerts they had been able to give. The reason was not dulness of soul or greediness of body, but that the whole experience was so overwhelming, so moving, so terrible that one’s littleness was stunned and could not find expression. It is easier to describe a little tennis-party at a country vicarage than seeing a world in arms suffering, wounded, muddy, weary, smiling, and tortured; try to
express, try to give even a small impression that is beyond description.
[…]
But we could find no words or tongue to express the suffering of our hearts, the aching sympathy, to see great battalions moving up to the line, and welcome a few men back, to have a concert interrupted with the sudden roll- call of the men who were to join their regiments at once, to see the men respond to their names and go out and up the line, to hear a whole massed audience singing as their last experience before going up to the blood and horror, “Lead, kindly Light “; these are not experiences which can be described, they cut too deep into the soul. When in some chorus, “The long trail, the trail that leads to home,” thousands of voices would give some expression to the deep sentiment of the British for “roses,” for “flowers,” for “Home,” for “Flo,” one’s whole body shook and trembled in response, and one wondered if the music of the spheres, the great invisible choirs, were perhaps giving voice through these human hearts to the eternal desire for beauty and goodness. ”
Ashwell goes further in her manifesto. There were, or course, many rules and strictures on who could go where, and it was a constant and delicate balancing act to construct a permissible concert party. (For example, a wife was not permitted in France if her husband was serving there – “And sometimes when we had made satisfactory arrangements for a special delightful party, all plans would have to be rearranged by the discovery of a husband in France, or that a fine artist was not entirely British, that a forgotten or carefully concealed German ancestor might appear, and then farewell to any prospect of a permit.”). Even more important, though, was money, for Ashwell was determined that every performer should be paid commensurate to their contribution. Not only were these people skilled in their area, she felt, not only did they have the everyday bills and expenses that everyone did, but also many of them were having to pay out to keep their civilian career afloat. Ashwell herself was paying rent on a theatre she wasn’t using, partly because she was still under contract, but even more so that she would have a base to which she could return after the war. Ashwell worked tirelessly to raise enough to pay all her performers for their work; she wanted not a single unpaid member in the concert and theatre parties who went out. (Some supporting roles would be filled by volunteers from the places visited.)
I am also struck by her story of the attempted name takeover by the YMCA. Ashwell was glad to have the backing of this organisation, who helped her in the relentless negotiating and dealing she had to do with government organisations. She refused, however, to allow them to rename her venture the YMCA Concert Parties. Performers were overlooked far too much, she felt, and removing the name of a performer from the name just helped make them ever more invisible, and she stood her ground on this, despite her stance souring relations between the two sides of the project:
“I look back with regret that any difference of opinion should have altered the pleasant relationship of that early time. The difficulties which ended in somewhat strained
relations between us were based on the desire of Mr. McCowan and the Y.M.C.A. to make the entertainments Y.M.C.A. I am not usually very obstinate, because my natural instinct, when a disagreement arises, is to “clear out” as soon as possible ; but on this point I insisted, that all the entertainments should remain “Lena Ashwell.” The arguments were most reasonable from the Y.M.C.A. point of view, that an organisation was bigger than a name, that the Y.M.C.A. could include every method of helping
mankind, and so on. I had every sympathy with them, but my whole object from the beginning had been the demonstrating that the arts were essentially and vitally necessary to human beings, as necessary as the Red Cross, and I could not see why the professional musician or actor should be submerged in the Y.M.C.A. organisation; one would not expect surgeons or nurses or doctors to be called Y.M.C.A., and I always considered my name merely as a label to signify that all the people concerned in the work were professionals. Undoubtedly the entertainment work became extremely powerful, and to a non-professional it must have seemed very pig-headed to insist upon the professional standing, but then Christian organisations have not been treated with the indifference and contempt that the music and drama of this country have suffered under.”
The book continues through the years and the countries of the war, from France to Egypt and the Middle East, from 1940-1945. The parties started with concerts given in hospitals and barracks tucked well back from the action, advancing ever closer to the front until Ashwell was permitted to send (all-male) parties to the Front itself, performing to men that the musicians knew were being sent out the next day to die. It was emotionally and physically gruelling work and those taking part in these tours were given extra recovery time in between travels. Ashwell started theatre parties as well, learning as she went not to underestimate the ability of her audiences to appreciate the great literature of the English language. There are moments of humour that flash through the fairly sombre narrative. There is also, overall, a well-justified sense of pride in what Ashwell achieved. The tension between the official approval of and desire for the concert parties and their reluctance actually to put money into the venture is where Ashwell finishes the book. Her polemic on the low place of the arts in our social hierarchy, and the lack of funding for something that is so intrinsic to our experience, resounds still:
“We have lost our way in civilisation. The Churches would not use the artist or help him or support him. The State will not acknowledge anything of importance except the business man, the efficient worker in supplying industry. Intellect is the god of man, and it was a significant truth that the writer of Proverbs insisted on, when he pointed out that the demand of the Creator was for the heart of man. The heart is the place of life, emotion, feeling ; the intellect is to control and guide this living force. Without vision the people perish, and Art is the beginning of vision, the early steps, the little light appearing like the will-o’-the- wisp in the surrounding darkness.
Let us use the gifts we have been given, and together with the importance of the intellect show an equal encouragement for the expressions of the heart. For those whose
religious limitations make them turn from the theatre, let them consider the words of the great mystic, Jacob Behmen: “Art is really the tool and instrument of God, wherewith the Divine wisdom worketh and laboureth. Why should I despise it?””
Sometimes we take a long time to learn the lessons of the past.
To Dirty for the Windmill: Caryl Brahms
Most biographies of Caryl Brahms mention the fact that she was a student at the Royal Academy of Music; or that she was “educated” there. It might feel rather a stretch to include Brahms in the back catalogue of Royal Academy of Music students, given her own feelings of ignominy around her truncated studentship – she rarely mentioned her time – but nevertheless, a student she was, and her months at the Academy were part and parcel of the colourful and extremely varied background that influenced her writing. Certainly she never strayed far from music as an art. (And just because I am a pedant, it’s worth pointing out that until 1990, students didn’t “graduate” from the Academy in any case – they were awarded medals for attaining a certain level after a year or more.)
Too Dirty for the Windmill is a suitably multi-faceted volume. It’s autobiographical, but not an autobiography, at least in the sensibly time-ordered, informative sense of the mainstream genre. It is written as a life-under-construction, as Caroline Heilbrun’s living in advance of writing. Ned Sherrin, one of Brahms’s collaborators, has collected fragments of her writing, and fashioned it into what feels almost like a posthumous interview.
After a first chapter covering Brahms’s early life, Sherrin divides the book into projects rather than time spans, although maintaining a loose sense of chronology. Thus, her collaborations with S.J. Simon and Ned Sherrin himself are covered in one, as is her criticism and nonfiction writing. Wikipedia starts by saying that Caryl Brahms was “an English critic, novelist, and journalist specialising in the theatre and ballet. She also wrote film, radio and television scripts.” This does little justice to the breath of her accomplishments. Rather like an actor who can take on parts, disappearing into the character rather than acting as themselves in another costume, Brahms could match her context with her language. However, she did not always take the arts entirely as seriously as some might have wished; Hoffmann’s obeisance to Beethoven’s sublime passed her by, as this 1952 review laments:
“Newcomers to the ballet, in search of expert guidance, could do no better than read A Seat at the Ballet by Caryl Brahms […]. After explaining how ballet is a synthesis of music, choreography, painting and interpretation, Miss Brahms proceeds to give analytical descriptions of the great classical ballets and other works in the current repertoire of companies likely to be seen in London and the provinces. There are times when the author’s facetious style is ill-suited to the valuable information she wishes to impart, but enthusiasts should derive more enjoyment from the ballet after reading this attempt to disentangle the subject from its mysteries.”
This is not to say that she did not recognise the enormous importance of the arts in human existence. Even in the most satirical of her writing, one cannot mistake her passion and deep commitment. This is one such example, written “when she joined the large gallery of people connected with the arts to be painted by John Bratby”:
“Have you ever felt like an onion in the process of being peeled? Layer after layer of your hidden self exposed as the white rings are forcibly unfurled? You haven’t? Then you cannot have been painted by John Bratby, the lay-it-on-thick painter – in the civil sense – and so your experience of life will be a little less rich for that reason.
‘Would you say that Christ had charisma?’ was one of the questions shot at me while he applied a thumbful of orange paint to the canvas, when I underwent a four-hour analysis by paint and painter called ‘sitting to him’.
[…]
[Bratby] was to become unpopular with the mother-in-law of his first marriage – a sorely-tried lady, one assumes – by ‘borrowing’ her groceries and spiriting them away to paint. His painting in the thick, ‘the unnatural look of vigour in a painting’, made it imperative to demand an extra allowance of artist’s material.”
Brahms, of course, wrote both nonfiction and novels, two very different ways of writing for any author. At times these blurred, as in her imagined rewriting of the life of Mrs Siddons, but most fell either into criticism, such as her books on Gilbert and Sullivan, Chekov, and the ballet, or on the other side, into the genre of crime fiction. This latter type of writing began with A Bullet in the Ballet, written as one of her eleven-book partnership with S. J. Simon: “Skid [Brahms’s nickname for Simon] took over the detection and the love scenes, and I did the ballet bits. Together we wrote the narrative.”
It’s interesting to see how many women at this time chose to write detective novels. I see Virginia Woolf’s “woman’s sentence” as a common thread in these books, one that books by men do not share – a thread with the needle still attached, sharp, bright and true in aim. Patricia Wentworth, Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Caryl Brahms, Carolyn Heilbrun, to name but a few of my favourites. What is it about the delight of constructing then unpicking this kind of puzzle, not to mention the pleasure in a bit of vicarious rage, that taboo emotion for women?
The fragmentation of the writing feels real here. It’s a book to come to and from, rather as Brahms herself did in the act of creativity. We hear Brahms in her own words, though in an ordering of Sherrin’s choosing – and much to his credit, he understands the necessary control this exerts, writing in what amounts to a dedication to his writing partner, “Dear Caryl, I hope the ‘heavy hand of Ned’ does not lie too leaden across your memories…”
To All My Darlings: Patricia Neate
When I sit at my work computer tapping away at emails under the screen banner reminding me of the two-year retention policy, I sometimes briefly imagine the plight of a historical researcher from 100 years hence. The facial expression is invariably glum, as this poor (imaginary) researcher sifts through the meagre offerings that escaped the GDPR blanket, in search of some piece of information that might help fill a gap in their own particular scholarly jigsaw.
Protection of privacy, desperately essential as it is, does have this downside. Fortunately, it was not the case for a historian like Patricia Neate, chronicling the life of a nineteenth-century family prolific in their letter-writing and scrupulous in their archiving. It is a skilful feat of organisation, to produce an comprehensible narrative from such a Gordian knot. Not only does Neate have to contend with a sprawling family, all with interconnected stories, but also with the issues that arise from complications such as the use of the same names across family branches and generations.
The family under the microscope here is two generations of the Macirones, a nineteenth-century family with influence in music, politics, art, the military and more. The story is fuller than for many because of the physical separation of the members for so long, and is told mainly through the viewpoints of the “loving trio” of siblings – Clara the musician, Emily the artist and George Augustus the engineer. Neate has attempted to do justice to many stories. The result is not always clear, especially given the name issue, though Neate does her sterling best to differentiate between all the Georges and Mary Anns and Claras. The family tree at the beginning of the book does get consulted frequently! But I enjoy the “messiness”; there is a realism to it that captures some of the feel of what life must have been like.
Neate’s book is as much about the epistolary relationship itself as it is about the people wielding the pens. The preface tells us the story of her access to the letters, the serendipitous discovery of the well-kept bundles in the writing desk belonging to her husband, a direct descendant, and she has kindly and generously created a website that contains every letter in her transcription. This is well worth noting, given that the letters run into the hundreds.
There are many extraordinary stories amongst the members of the Macirone family, both the public stories and the private. An account such as the swashbuckling adventures of Colonel Macirone is riveting stuff, with much of it played out in the public eye; I wish we had as much material on the much more private but just as extraordinary feats of the two women who were his concurrent wives, and who brought up families and contended with social inspection for decades, including after the colonel’s death. This emphasis on the public face of the family has its finale in the sad little obituary that Clara earned at the end of her extraordinarily full and influential musical life: “the last surviving daughter of George Macirone esq. and niece of Colonel Francis and Mrs Macirone”.
OOf course, my interest in mainly in Clara and her musical life. While several chapters are dedicated to her extraordinary musical life (see last week’s blog entry for just a taste of this), it feels as though she features less than other members of her immediate family. Perhaps this is a direct result of her enormous financial responsibilities; for so much of her young adulthood the whole family seems to have been dependent almost entirely on her income. What an enormous burden for a young woman, to have the lives of four adults and one teenager incumbent upon her. And what a tribute to Clara – and a dent in the common assumption that women were historically absent from the music scene – that she managed it. There are mentions in sister Emily’s letters of Clara not having time to write, or of Clara’s exhaustion and need for a holiday. Emily seems to have been more aware than the others of the burden on Clara, perhaps because the sisters lived together, right up until Emily’s death in 1866. Certainly, however, it easy to see how fundamental to Clara’s very being music was, and how intrinsically connected she was to the London music scene and beyond. An 1846 letter from Emily to her mother combines the recognition of Clara as a professional woman with a little insight into what made her so sought after:
“I trust that when dear Herr Pischek comes to London and Clara has a concert that she will make an effect, for she has been practising so very hard that her touch is immensely improved, and as light and pearly as possible. I am glad that we go to the country as she longs for some change of air. The expression ‘pearly touch’ is not mine but Mr Horne’s… She had scarcely played ten bars before he said to me, “How did your sister get that pearly touch of hers?””
Clara’s time at the Royal Academy of Music was a joyous one, with so much promise; it is our own incapacity to recognise the importance of everyday musical connections that colours our recognition of her musical worth. The Royal Academy of Music was there to teach productive and busy musicians, and Clara Macirone was well aware of the need for her own practical success:
“More I see, more I feel that neither Minnie nor I must, for Mamma’s sake as well as our own, lose a minute in trying to get on to be independent… Why then do we work?… To help Mamma, to give ourselves the future advantage, mental and social, of independence, the present invigorating one of labour, to give a good example, to do our duty. God help us to do that, and fame and wealth may go elsewhere for all we care.”
As a whole, the book is a wonderful window on the colourful reality of these lives. The letters themselves are liberally quoted from; all the correspondents have an adroit pen, with a surprisingly modern and ironic humour sparkling from between what was, even for the era, an at-times overly-conventional morality. There are many pictures throughout the book, many not published before, and many from the brush of Emily. Landscape and architecture also abound, well-chosen for the atmosphere they lend the book; I have always had a fascination for the experience of nineteenth-century London, the multitude of cities it was (and still is) for so many different ways of living in it. At times some of the detail seems to me to be lingered upon too much, losing my attention as letter after letter unpacks some small corner. But I am, of course, a biased reader, hungry for glimpses of my own particular heroine, seizing these and fitting them into a picture that is becoming more important and fascinating the more I learn. There will be more of Clara Macirone, in these pages, but much more importantly, on the concert platform. I’m really looking forward to getting to know her better, and this book was a fundamental inspiration for that.
A Street in Genoa bear San Mattio, Emily Macirone 1866
Travels of Anna Bishop in Mexico
This week’s book reflection concentrates on something of an oddity. First, a little background must be offered.
The nineteenth-century Royal Academy of Music was not a stranger to scandal, from the resignation of the first principal, William Crotch, after he kissed a female student on the forehead, to the financial indifference of the 1870s that almost closed the place down. The biggest notoriety, however, must go to the triangle of Anna Bishop, Henry Bishop and Nicholas Bochsa, whose story is well-known and can be found elsewhere on the internet. Briefly, though, soprano Anna Rivière married her 23-year senior teacher Henry Bishop in 1831, staying with him for seven years and three children before running off with the Academy’s harp teacher, Nicholas Bochsa. They stayed together until Bochsa’s death in 1856, touring the world to great adulation, made possible by the press’s stout ignoring of their private life – Anna remained Anna Bishop, wife of RAM professor Henry Bishop, until Henry’s death in 1855. After the first flurry of reports on this, one of the greatest scandals of the day, Bishop and Bochsa left on a world tour that would stay the pens of British journalists. It was the first of many such tours that would in effect restore the musical reputations of the pair to such a degree that their unforgivable actions would eventually be forgotten. Certainly it is clear that Bishop’s strength and talent must have been phenomenal. How many musicians would be in a shipwreck from which they had to flee on a lifeboat to an unpopulated island, remaining there for several weeks before being rescued, then as soon as making landfall in Guam, take barely enough time for a deep breath before resuming their world tour?
That’s a rather breathless and reductive description of Anna Bishop’s life, but it isn’t by any means the first. This month’s book is an 1849 account of one particular tour to Mexico. The author remains anonymous, and even by nineteenth-century potboiler standards, deals in a luridly purple prose that can be both ludicrous and embarrassing in equal measure. Unfortunately, this does nothing to hide the writer’s contempt of anything non-British, non-Protestant, non-male.
Why, then, have I chosen to present a book so crude in its bigotry?
This book demonstrates a hierarchy that can still be seen in some mainstream music-making today. Here, that hierarchy is overt; today it is often more subtle, so more easily overlooked, but it is still there. For the author of the 1849 publication, Mexicans, the non-Europeans, inhabit the bottom of this hierarchy, with contempt and double standards being completely overt. He uses his story as an excuse for a travelogue, with vast tracts given over to his amateur psychoanalysis of the “native” psyche. The music, too, suffers from an assumption of a simplicity in the folk music that can be easily dismissed; here is the idea of a music that speaks directly to a physical and sensory response and is thus entirely opposed to Hanslick’s hegemonic notion of the critical listener, or Aaron Copland’s gifted listener.
Bochsa is next in this hierarchy, being both foreign and a harpist. He does not come off well from the outset, being labelled “eccentric” and “portly” within the first two pages. It is notable that boys were not offered harp lessons in the early decades of the Academy, Bochsa being there to teach the girls, who had a quite different schedule to keep. Bochsa, of course, could get away with playing this most feminine of instruments, as he was French, and thus seen as being removed from the British sense of masculinity. There is also more than a faint whiff throughout much of the concurrent literature of the idea that this foreigner had “stolen” a fair English maid against her will – in this book, on the whole, he is referred to as Bishop’s teacher, rather than her lover, despite the relationship being of a ten-year duration by this time. (Anna and Henry Bishop never divorced, and when Anna remarried after the deaths of both Bochsa and Henry, this allowed much of the press to write Bochsa out of her history entirely.)
Anna Bishop appears to occupy the top of the hierarchy here, with her purity of being and of sound, her demure aspect, but even in the apparently unadulterated praise of her many feminine and (secondly) musical qualities, there is an underlying contempt for her womanhood. Her intelligence is laughingly dismissed, her love of clothes highlighted as an amusing difficulty for the travelling party – if only they did not have to deal with Madame Bishop’s enormous pile of luggage! Only through highlighting her ascribed femininity – which must include these little foibles of the female mind – do her actions as a touring musician and as a Victorian woman become acceptable. Yet few other singers were as sought after, or had such a range of opera roles. Her grasp of languages was apparently second to none, while her curiosity about and facility in learning new repertoire meant that she could take on contracts at short notice. One full chapter of the book is dedicated to her desire to learn a song in Mexican, from her search for the right piece, through her coaching, to her purchase of national costume to lend veracity to her performance.
Alongside this hierarchy of people, there is a musical one emerging, one that underpins what would become concert life as we might recognise it, at least throughout the late 20th century. We can see the divide between public and private swinging in favour of public taking pole position. When an opera rehearsal is breached by the paying public, who feel that they have the right of entry, Bochsa is said to be outraged. This is a private matter, unlike in the salons of the continent he has left, and doors should remain locked. European concert etiquette is being imposed, thereby beginning to conflate the music itself with its manner of performance – the same language is employed as in Europe, and assumptions of who an audience is (is allowed to be), and how they must behave, as well as the performers, is inherent in these turns of phrase. If dilettantes turn up to a soirèe in which the piano is standing in for orchestras as it did in so many nineteenth-century European drawing rooms, or crowds attend Norma and sing along with familiar melodies, we know immediately who, and what, is being evoked.
The book is not all in this vein. In between these diatribes, there are some wonderful descriptions of music-making, of scenery passed through, of experiences ranging from travels in various types of vehicle to visiting shops and cock-pits. The concluding cholera epidemic strikes a modern chord. It’s also interesting to remember how last-minute many performances were, and how caught up in the administration therefore the performers had to be – both Bishop and Bochsa negotiated with theatres, local orchestral musicians, costumiers and more, especially if audience demand offered the opportunity for extra engagements. And in between the stilted lines of narrative, one can gain a sense of what made Bishop so popular and long-lasting in her career:
“[S]he sang several little extra morceaux, … making in all about fifteen pieces that evening, though, so remarkable is her ease of execution, the last note came forth as clear and effortless as the first. The secret of this faculty, in fact, lies in her studiously avoiding that unpleasant defect in other prime donne – that of sudden screams on high notes (which are not only harsh, but abuse the vocal powers and fatigue them to no purpose), leaving the other notes to scramble for themselves and get out of the scrape as they can.”
Music's Handmaid: Harriet Cohen
The pianist Harriet Cohen has had a mixed press since her lifetime. She was a star of the classical music world in the early twentieth century, and we owe much of the pianistic output of British composers at the time to her direct influence. If one searches for her on Google, the first page of results demonstrates this perfectly. Alongside the descriptions of her as “distinguished”, and “internationally acclaimed”, there are other threads, including the adjective “alluring”, calling her “the piano-witch” (a nickname that was indeed conferred upon her), and the rather backhanded description of the Cohen-Bach album as a series of pieces by “12 of the composers who most admired her (or her playing).”
Like so many of the women who have already featured on these pages, her reputation has been overtaken by her association with a famous man (as I remarked about Helen Perkin, the man who is “the male composer who confers recognition on [her] name by his patronage […] but which then means we don’t ‘see’ the rest of her life”), particularly as this was a romantic liaison that always seems to be seen to add several layers of complexity to the issue of creative authority.
I actually came to know Cohen first through her writings, long before the age of YouTube and other means of easily accessing historical recordings. Music’s Handmaid was the first book of hers that I read, and I was immediately fascinated by the opening paragraph:
“I have often been asked why it is that I, who have devoted so much of my time to making known the beauty of early keyboard music, choose also to include in my programmes so many modern pianoforte works. Behind this question lies the often expressed opinion that modern composers are destructive of all that loveliness which the sixteenth and seventeenth-century music contains.”
The book is divided into two sections, the first titled “The Composer”, and the second “The Performer.” A large part of the first chapter takes the form of several dialogues - or rather, fierce argument - between opposing medieval and renaissance musicians. The first is between two fourteenth-century composer-theorists; Johannes de Mauris (now more commonly spelled Muris), arguing for conservatism, and Philippe de Vitry, on the side of innovation. It is a gentle revelation of just how musically knowledgeable and literate Cohen was, both in the choice of these two medieval thinkers and writers, and in the reasoning she puts into their mouths (later she will quote from Tristan Tzara’s Dada manifesto of 1918, demonstrating the astonishing breadth of her expertise). While of course she is firmly in de Vitry’s camp, she is sympathetic to the reservations of de Mauris, and does not fall into the trap of caricaturing him, although she has him raise his voice on at least one occasion, and in the end he “stamps out, muttering ‘cacophonous stuff! Modern Music indeed!”
Thus, it’s easy to see that Cohen is concerned with answering this opening question, from the inside out as it were. She demonstrates her belief that these old composers are innovative with musical techniques in exactly the same way as ‘modern’ composers, finding new routes into harmony and form. She is insistent, however, that all new technique must be “the servant of emotion”, and several composers catch the full force of her disapproval. Poor Stravinsky is dismissed as “a pre-Russian, a Scythian” – I am not sure here why this is a bad thing, given Herodotus’s claim that the warriors of this tribe were “invincible and unapproachable”, but sidelined he is, along with Schoenberg, who according to Cohen, discloses “an absolutely non-musical kind of interest, which if persevered in could only lead to barren intellectualism.” It is an interesting insight into what matters to Cohen at the keyboard, and the idea of “an expression of feeling” is paramount. Cohen clearly sees this as synonymous with the idea of sincerity; she is wary of music that, for her, appears to hide behind innovation and dazzlingly new ways of writing – composers that confuse ‘idiom’ with ‘idiosyncrasy’, to use her own words.
The second half of the book is devoted to unpicking some of the repertoire for which Cohen was well-known, starting with Elizabethan composers, and moving from there through Bach, Mozart, Chopin and Brahms, to de Falla and Bax. It is a detailed account of how Cohen translates the scores of specific pieces – “the secret of how to approach and how to prepare and master the technique of a piece will be found in that piece. There is no need to bring anything to it from outside” – and as such, is much more about Cohen herself than it is about the pieces of which she writes, something of which she is clearly well aware. For me as a real fan of Cohen’s Bach playing, unidiomatic as many modern ears might find it, her commentary on the first prelude and fugue sheds considerable light on her tempo and pedalling decisions. Rhythm is clearly a priority at all times, being much of the focus of every chapter in this section. And it is surprising to read of just how small her hands were, with a ninth only being possible if she put the thumb down first.
While it’s great that we talk about women’s lives, putting their biographies under the microscope, it often seems to me that many writers in the world of general music scholarship forget to do the same to their music making. This is of course especially difficult for performers, whose musicianship, especially pre-recording is at best ephemeral, and at worst invisible. Cohen presents a wonderful opportunity through the existence of both her word and her sound. This book enables us to insert a scalpel between the limpid world of Cohen-at-the-keyboard and the at-times deafening chaos of the narrative often drawn as her life story. She shines a light on a bygone performance practice, a past aesthetic for which we should be nostalgic.
Here she is playing some of the Elizabethan music for which she was so well-known at the time.
Children’s Music Books from 40 years ago: A walk down Nostalgia Lane
I am in nostalgic mode this month, in the books I am reflecting on. This is possibly an outcome of the nightly ritual of reading books from my childhood to my 9yo son. Many of these were read to me by my mother. I would often beg for just a little more, just one more chapter, and often she would oblige. Currently my son and I are partway through Redcap Runs Away by Rhoda Power, first published in 1952, a mix of history and music that just suits his interests. Redcap, the sweet-voiced smith’s boy, runs away with the minstrels in search of his flame-haired uncle. It’s a gentle view of the feudal system with its accompanying hardships, and in the end love of family wins out over Redcap’s love of singing. On the way, we learn much about medieval life and the music in it. I remember well my delight at learning the tune of the Boarshead Carol a few years after making its acquaintance in this book, and even at university, echoes of the story resounded in the Medieval and Renaissance module.
I was a hungry reader. We lived in a small city in New Zealand with a large library; it covered two floors of an enormous building, with the children’s section taking up two whole rooms. The fiction books decorated the walls, while the nonfiction was on free-standing shelves in the middle. The amount of choice at times paralysed me, but I read widely. Novels and biographies were my first choice, though I realise just how many of my favourite books were about music. I used to go upstairs to borrow song collections from the adult section, taking them home to learn enthusiastically - my sister still laughs at the memory of my frequent renditions of favourites such as The Man-Eating Shark:
“The most chivalrous fish in the ocean,
To ladies forbearing and mild,
Though his record be dark
Is the man-eating shark -
Who will eat neither woman nor child.”
And then I would descend the stairs again to prowl the shelves of the children’s section. I was only permitted eight books each time, and choosing was an agony of pleasure and pain. Which ones were safest to leave in the hope that they would still be there the following week? Did I want to read comfortable familiars, or branch out into new territory?
I wonder what happened to all those old books when the library and its collections were updated? I used to love hunting through the “cancelled” book box, buying up titles that still grace my bookshelves. Several favourites at different times of my life are in the pile ready to be read to my son when their turn comes.
Music books often made up the majority of my selection. I enjoyed the Opal Wheeler fictionalized accounts of composer childhoods, with excerpts from their works dotting the pages. Brahms turned up in the cancelled book box, and I played the Intermezzo op.117/1 over and over. (Later I would play it for my Grade 8 exam, a choice fueled almost entirely by that earlier acquaintance.) The Lark in the Morn and The Lark on the Wing by Elfrida Vipont, the story of a Quaker girl who must choose the kind of singer she wants to be, introduced me to Schubert through An die Musik.
The one for the youngest reader that I recall was The Wood Street Group, by Mabel Esther Allan. I never really got into her more magical, older books, but this one I read more than once. It’s the story of a group of children who are bored enough in the miserable cold of a British midwinter to start their own band, making their own instruments where necessary and eventually staging a concert for their appreciative families. How I wished I could persuade my friends to do the same! I imagined gathering in our garage with pipe, drum and ukulele; sadly it was not to be, and I had to wait until I had the captive audience of a primary school music class before I could fulfil my ambition in some way.
Another book, rather more exotic to my Antipodean sensibilities, was Seraph In A Box by Robina Beckles Willson. This is the second of three books about Sarah and Alistair, the slightly complex back story having been set up in the first book of the trilogy, Pineapple Palace. It is the story of a glass harmonica, an instrument that I fear went over my uncomprehending head, but the intrigue around the sinister man on the motorcycle, and the letter in the hand of Leopold Mozart, kept me reading. Eventually that information, so lightly offered in the core of the storytelling, was filed away in my memory, and when I finally heard the Mozart Adagio that is the music of the story, Beckles Willson’s book was a warm pillar of understanding in my listening.
But there were two books that I read again and again, perhaps betraying my pianistic soul early on. The first was Prelude by Clare H. Abrahall, a romanticised account of the early years of Australian pianist Eileen Joyce, and the less-than-ideal circumstances from which she came. Eileen’s long, bare legs play a prominent role, a symbol of her freedom in the Australian countryside, and a foil to the sparkling fingerwork on the piano. But there was enough music, the beckoning lights of London kept me gripped, and it’s also worth noting that Abrahall knew Joyce personally, persuading the pianist to recount her story, and accompanying her on tours around the globe.
My favourite book, the one that was read while I dreamed of glory, was Kitty Barne’s She Shall Have Music. Barne was a favourite author anyway, and I read many of her books. But this one came from a place of deep identification on the part of Barne, who had studied music at the Royal College of Music, before having to give it up when surgery caused deafness in her left ear. When I look back on it with my adult eyes, I am quite horrified by some of the experiences that the central character undergoes. The public assassination of her musicality in her first competition makes me shudder, as does the rather savage portrayal of her first teacher’s attempt at an overdone Bohemian musicality. But as a child I devoured the experiences of Karen, the heroine, from her first hunting for the notes of Drink To Me Only on Aunt Anne’s stiff piano, through the ups and downs of terrible technique and scale regimes, to the triumph of the scholarship at the London Institute of Music. I wished I could entertain my friends the way Karen could, and I wished I could soak myself in music all day every day. All these book fed my love of music, almost as much as the music itself:
“‘Now play us something properly,’ shouted a girl who was a music-lover herself.
‘go on, but for goodness’ sake don’t given them any of your high-brow stuff,’ hissed Judy in her ear. Karen was coming off splendidly; she mustn’t be allowed to spoil it.
So Karen gave the ‘Rocket’ – nothing high-brow about that. A scream with the back of her hand scraping up the keyboard – that was the rocket going off. Seven singing notes for the stars. Thunder in the bass with a loud pedal down for the applause. It was a great success and she tried something more.
‘Listen. This is a dancing bear.’ She played the passage where he lumbers in, out of the Haydn symphony that Aunt Anne always called ‘The Bear’.
They laughed at that. ‘Jolly good,’ said the head girl, and Karen’s spirits began to bubble.”
The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, by Ruth Wajnryb
“My research and this book are about silence – the many faces and meanings of silence, the communicative power of silence as it fills the pauses and cracks and crannies of our discourse, of our relationships and of our lives. And I suppose too, though I dislike the word, the pathology of silence. It rests on a pragmaticist’s approach to silence which obliges meaning to be drawn from context. Just as words do not carry their meanings around them but are infused by their context, so too the meaning of silence is infused by its context and draws its meaning from there.”
Once a year in the MMus class at the Royal Academy of Music, we ask both teachers and students in the class to bring a piece of writing that they love. It can be on anything, not necessarily music; the only stipulations are that it must be non-fiction, and you must bring it because you love the use of language, the way the author uses words and syntax and grammar to weave the linguistic tapestry on the page.
It is always wonderful to see the extraordinary range that comes to class. We’ve had writings on computer games, Shakespeare, history, sociology, and even, occasionally, music itself (!). I have discovered many a new author through the enthusiasm and love shown by students for the things they read. I too have brought many examples throughout the years - Pina Bausch is one recollection - but recently I have alighted on one particular book that ticks so many boxes, including the one of pure love for the written word, that I can’t bring myself to choose something different. It’s Ruth Wajnryb’s deep exploration of “how tragedy shapes talk”, simpy titled The Silence.
I discovered Wajnryb’s book fifteen years ago, when I was in that stage of my PhD of searching for the right language to describe my findings. I had been looking at songs by three mid nineteenth-century German women, and what struck me was not so much the phrasing, but the way in which that phrasing encapsulated silences that felt deliberate. I knew what I was seeing in the music before me, but I could not find the way to demonstrate verbally how fundamental I believed it to be in constructing a performance practice.
I can’t remember now how I found Wajnryb. I don’t think it was even as part of my research, but simply a book I picked up elsewhere. And within a page, I was gripped, in part by the writing, but also in part by a sense of recognition on a personal level. Wajnryb is a linguist, and the book is ostensibly a linguistic textbook. But it is far more than that, and Wajnryb writes for a far wider audience than her fellow academics. She starts from her own painful and poignant story of growing up in a family scarred by the Holocaust, of being a descendant of those who witnessed the atrocity firsthand. Her emphasis is on the second generation – she tells the story of Susan, whose only link to her ancestors is a photo of her grandmother knitting: “Susan’s statement, ‘I know that she liked knitting’, in fact speaks volumes, but not about her grandmother and not about knitting. It speaks about what is not known by one generation and what has not been said by another[…]” Wajnryb’s search for meaning is in the gaps in the stories handed down to her, for handed down they are, despite not being verbal. Wajnryb talks of “fragments and echoes”, of learning “to probe the gap between what is said and what is meant”. The history with which she is working is, as she says, indeed unspeakable, too large and too terrible to find adequate words. The shutters on the cover of the book say it all. We know there is a room within, one that has a description that we can fashion, but the barriers are there, though perhaps so much part of our lives that we barely see them. Wajnryb finds correspondences in other types of trauma, drawing large lessons in communication within all relationships. While there are differences in “nature and function”, she writes, the silences contain a “regrouping and reconstructing” of a story, and carry their own messages. Wajnryb’s willingness to confront silence in this way, and to allow it to be itself, rather than to try and replace it with verbalized language, was what struck me as so powerful, and gave me the tools I needed for the equally non-verbal silences in the music I was trying to understand.
One of Wajnryb’s points is that silence isn’t necessarily solely external suppression, although it often is, but often has a self-imposed element in the face of a seemingly insurmountable task. Such silence often tells a different story to the one offered by people who are comfortable with being verbally explicit. I am reminded of Virginia Woolf’s definition of a man’s sentence, as one where “‘Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.’ That is a man’s sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest. It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman’s use.” This seems to me to be not about the literal structure of the sentence, or even surface content, but rather to be a conscious rejection of Bloom’s concepts of influence, of the idea that women carry the same anxieties and experience as men do, not just in the everyday world, but also creatively. Success and habit, at least habit unbroken by other demands on the creator, are often not indigenous to women in the same way as they are to men, and thus the inflection within the language, and the context from which meaning is drawn, is very different.
The concentration on a second generation was also a drawing point here. Many of the women composers we tend to put under the spotlight are not pioneers, despite our attempt to make them so. Our constant reinvention of the woman-composer wheel may seem superficially to celebrate women, but we run the risk of negating the struggle for everydayness. Sometimes it’s harder to allow someone to be seen as one of the crowd, to accept that someone is part of us, then to crown them with superlatives, such as “transcending barriers”, or “unique”, or “stand-out”, all words I’ve read recently on historical women.
Wajnryb’s language itself is beautiful and lyrical. I am captivated anew with every reading. Her description of what research is and why it matters is woven in with the personal and the statistical; I find fresh insight with every reading. I close with one of her personal anecdotes, one of the many that knit her narrative together in the courageously personal way that lends such authenticity to her book, and is a model to us all. Her three-year-old daughter has found a photo of her grandmother, Wajnryb’s mother, and has asked where she is. Wajnryb explains that she died two-and-a-half years previously, but Laura refuses to accept this explanation:
“Later in the same day, as I passed the shelf where the picture frame stood, I moved it up to adult height, thinking Laura wouldn’t notice, and that would be the end of the matter. A cowardly, evasive act, I conceded, and one that backfired. The next time Laura passed by the shelf, she noticed the photo had been moved to a higher shelf. With a slick, imperative tone in her voice, she said, ‘Bring it down here!’
Compliantly, silently, I did as I was bid and she added, ‘And now, leave it there!’ She ran off, tossing over her shoulder as if it were an afterthought or a Greek chorus, ‘That my mum’s mum. She not dead.’
[…]
A few days later she passed the same shelf where the photo was, as ordered, at her eye level. She was smugly pleased about this. She picked up the frame again, possessively. As if aware of her mysterious power to ‘work’ this conversation to her own ends, she caught my eye and said, ‘She your mum, look. She not dead, Mum.’ I fought the impulse to remain silent. I looked about for an answer that would in the circumstances, some sort of compromise between her three-year-old reality and mine. ‘Yes, Laura, that’s my mum. She’s not dead. Not in the photo.’”
Little Lady With a Big Drum by Elayne Jones
“Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind..”
Virginia Woolf’s description of the way in which memory works is a fine description of Elayne Jones’s book, Little Lady With A Big Drum. It has been advertised as “the official autobiography” of percussionist Jones. It has also been described as “the story of one woman’s remarkable life and career in her own words; a journey from meager beginnings as a self-described ‘skinny little girl from Harlem,’ to the highest echelons of classical music; with a musical talent and personal drive that enabled her to transcend racial and gender barriers.”
Let’s unpick both of these descriptions a bit, particularly the language used here. For a start, I am uneasy about the ‘transcend’ rhetoric. This is the story of the first black, female percussionist in a well-known American orchestra. Jones is forthright in describing the obstacles she encountered from the very beginning of her acquaintance with the piano at age six, and the political occupies the foreground of her story much of the time, not least because of her involvement in many initiatives, and her determination to make music available to as many as possible. Access is a horribly overused and misunderstood word, but this is exactly what drives her. She loves the music that weaves itself through her life and wants everyone to have the opportunity to experience it from the inside out. She is very clear – it’s not a matter that somehow, if you’re talented enough, all those pesky barriers won’t matter, and if you didn’t succeed, you just weren’t good enough after all. It’s about having good teachers from the very beginning, and ensemble opportunities, and exposure to good playing and music through listening to concerts and gigs. And it’s about being heard on your own merits, rather than through the warping effects of bias and corruption. I am also wary of these ‘highest echelons’ – what is it about certain classical institutions that allows them the cultural authority accorded by such a description? What exactly is the ‘excellence’ that is assumed of these places? Elayne Jones, in her long career, was timpanist of the New York City Opera, the American Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Opera Orchestra. She freelanced across a wide variety of genres from jazz to music theatre to classical, gave workshops and lectures, taught percussion. Which bits of that extraordinary richness of music-making is permitted to call itself the ‘highest echelons’, and which aren’t?
Thus, Jones’s book is the story of a not-so-historical era that still underpins how much of the classical music world still operates. It is the story of systems and hierarchies, and how they are so often seen as more important than the wonderful, glorious music about which Jones herself is so passionate. It is her own story, indeed an autobiography, but what is that? There have been many explorations of the white-and-male-dominated idea of what an autobiography really is, with the assumption of a teleological structure that maps to a subject’s external chronology. There is little sense that this strict adherence to the idea of time passing is what is important for Jones, or indeed at times even her own position in her own story; I am much more put in mind of Audre Lorde’s finding meaning in recognising difference; of Adrienne Rich’s careful combination of personal grounding and theoretical observation; of Maya Angelou’s examination of “some of the ways love heals and helps a person to climb impossible heights and rise from immeasurable depths”, and Carolyn Heilbrun’s search for autobiography in the actual living of a life, in all its chaos and incoherence - all ways of making our personal narrative interact with the people and places and ways of thinking that are the things that shape us.
There is an integrity to this way of writing, a veracity that is pulled out into the open by an unashamed adherence to it. It gives a hierarchy to Jones’s story; it’s very easy to see what is important to her. It is also because one gets the feeling that much of her life is private to her, or so engrained, so much part of her, that she would be surprised if someone asked for words to fit it. She does not explicitly speak of her divorce, although she reflects on the reasons for it in her customarily frank yet humanitarian and empathetic way. And there is surprisingly little musical detail, especially in the later sections,. Jones does recount being asked why she wants “to play music by white men”, a question she avoids to a large extent. This falls into the category of so obvious that it doesn’t need saying – Jones loves this music – but still, I’d like to know if she sees gaps in the repertoire – if she wants music by black composers, female composers (she once shared a dormitory at Tanglewood with composer Julia Perry, though they remained acquaintances rather than friends). She does touch on the technical complexities of her life as a percussionist, and one particular description delighted me as a non-drummer:
“Timpanists must tune the instrument, hear the notes they need either by having absolute pitch, or knowing the music well enough to use relative pitch for chordal structure […] while singing and tuning the note at the same time, I must keep the count of where I am […] I am kept extremely busy and for the most part I am all alone like swimming in a sea of sharks waiting to devour me.”
At the same time, in the midst of this contextualised way of writing, there is also a sense of the fragmented experience that belongs to us all. Jones is clear that this can only be a snapshot, no matter how wide-angle. Her experience as a black musician in NYC was already different from those of black musicians in the South. Her confrontation of issues arising from the collision of motherhood and creativity is also particularly foregrounded here. She writes about this act of juggling, the expectation of the world that if women are brash enough to think they can do both, that the conflicts and mess must be kept hidden. (There is a meme currently doing the rounds of social media, that says “We expect women to work like they don't have children and raise children as if they don't work”. There is more than a grain of truth here.)
The whole book could have done with a good edit. There are repetitions, sometimes literal, typos and misspellings (Aaron Copland’s name being one example). But that’s my English teacher grandmother channelling herself through me, and I’ll put that part of me back in its box.
This book should be required reading for anyone engaging in classical music through outreach, concert-giving, education, or any of the other ways that music reaches people. Despite Jones thinking that racism is here to stay, she writes with hope, and with such humanitarian empathy.
As she says, “Dreams motivate us to do better, whether they are real or not.”
Elayne Jones plays timpani in this 1953 recording of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 5.
One Hundred Miracles: A Memoir of Music and Survival by Zuzana Růžičková
Zuzana Růžičková was one of the great harpsichordists of the twentieth century. This book is the account of a woman whose life began in pre-war Prague, with an idyllic, music- and love-filled childhood, who suffered under the horror of the Nazi-inflicted tortures of the camps, fought Communist rule to keep a life filled with music, and finally, saw the advent of a new era with the fall of the Communist regime. The book is told in her own words, written from transcripts of many interviews that author Wendy Holden conducted with the harpsichordist during the last years of her life.
The act of transcription is one that comes under a great deal of scrutiny in music. At times it is viewed warily, as something that can only detract from the original; at others, it is seen as a way of inflecting an original with new ideas. Holden here takes on the role of the musical transcriber, constructing a narrative that allows Růžičková’s voice to maintain its personality, while walking a careful line between the oral reminiscences with which she is working and the printed version she must offer the reader. As part of this process, she has chosen a rather chaotic non-chronology – she begins in 1960, on a tour of the Ukraine, Soviet Union and Poland, and from there jumps back and forth between Růžičková’s pre-war childhood, her experiences under Communist rule, and her terrible ordeal in the camps. After the initial surprise, this tactic works surprisingly well, with the effect of a keyboard suite rather than a sonata, in keeping with Růžičková’s saturation in the Baroque.
Many reviews have highlighted Růžičková’s focus on Bach, her passionately joyous way of describing his music, her reverence and respect for the spiritual messages she hears in Bach’s structures:
“[A]s the melodies begin to build, in my mind I imagine a building. I know where the highs and lows are. Bach’s modulation moves me forward like corridors. I absolutely know where and when to turn the corner. I instinctively know how it is built. I understand the architecture and where it is heading – the corridors leading to rooms; stairs leading to upper levels, and ultimately to a final melody that completes the structure perfectly.”
Bach’s music is a ribbon throughout the book, clearly helping (in her own mind) to save Růžičková, bearing her through her terrible experiences by its sublimity and power. Yet for me, the music feels secondary to the story here - the velvet in which the jewel of the narrative sits. It is so intrinsic to Ruzicková herself that it does not need to be highlighted. Who focuses the narrative spotlight on the wonder of oxygen? Besides, if one believes that music exists in the acts of doing and listening, then it is Růžičková herself who is the protector of both herself and of Bach. Bach, in all his greatness, cannot live without those who turn the score into the sounds that transport our souls. even the composer Stravinsky once wrote that notes on a page are but potential music, waiting to be actualised through performance. We need people, if this music is to be heard.
In the way of oral tradition, there is a mythology being constructed. Zuzana cannot take her music with her to Terezín, so she writes out Bach’s Sarabande from his E Minor English Suite on a piece of paper, carefully stowing it in her pocket. When she and her mother are being loaded onto the trains bearing them towards the camp, they are separated by the guards. Within the maelstrom, in her despair Zuzana inadvertently lets go of the scrap of paper. Her mother catches it and runs for Zuzana’s train, wanting to return the scrap of hope to her daughter.
“Desperate, I reached for my mother only to be pushed aside as others from behind me stretched out and snatched hold of her coat. Hoisted upwards by her shoulders, arms and lapels – anything they could grab – my dear, sweet Mummy was pulled unceremoniously into the back of the truck with me, her hands outstretched and her expression as astonished as mine.
Stunned, I looked back at the mayhem she’d created as guards chased after her, shouting and waving their rifles. Numb, I watched as the fragment of Bach’s sweet sarabande that had almost certainly saved her life flew up into the air to swirl and dance triumphantly in the inky darkness.”
Thus in the end it is the mother who is pulled into the train, not Bach, who swirls away on an eddy of air. He has been the sacrifice for the life of Zuzana’s mother. It is a moment that encapsulates how we are supposed to read Bach within Růžičková’s life; but rather than reading it with Bach as the centre, I read it as a defining moment of what is at the core of Růžičková herself. People will always come first. In the words of fellow harpsichordist Valda Ameling, who would work with Zuzana much later, she was always “a human being first, and a musician second.”
The book is put together by a biographer rather than a musician, and so a couple of musical inaccuracies have slipped through unnoticed (e.g. Brahms did not write a violin sonata in F major). It may also be petty of me, given the reminiscence narrative style, to notice the occasional grammatical error, in particular the use of nominative rather than accusative pronouns, that slipped through the editing process. Nevertheless, these minor details do not detract from a book that is a testament of faith and dedication. The sight of Beethoven’s ninth symphony being performed under the swastika flag for Hitler’s birthday in 1942 shows the ways in which the power of music lies in the hands of the musicians who make it, not intrinsically within the notes themselves. In today’s political climate, it is a timely reminder. Throughout her entire life, Růžičková made a stand on the other side of morality, finding the transcendent core of music. "My only hope,” she says at the end of the book, “is that when I die, people might say that I lived a good life and put some beauty back into the world with my music.”
