Alan Coady’s Musical Blog

I don’t normally watch BBC’s Young Musician of the Year – not because I don’t enjoy watching talented young people perform, but more because I find the competitive element a little distasteful. While I acknowledge that many a great career has been launched this way, I’d rather just enjoy the performance. This is now possible thanks to the BBC providing video footage. The videos contain far more of each soloist’s programme than broadcast time could possibly allow. May I recommend this fine performance by Jadran Duncumb on guitar. Once there, you’ll be able to navigate your way around the other performances and interviews.

In last night’s edition of Horizon, entitled How Your Memory Works, neuroscientist Dr. Donna Addis of Harvard University showed MRI scans highlighting similarities in brain activity when volunteers were either reflecting upon the past or imagining the future. It would appear that these two areas are sufficiently related to provide an axis of time along which we enjoy freedom of movement. As if to corroborate the findings, one of programme’s other subjects, suffering from considerable memory impairment, turned out to have little vision of the future.

Of all the time arts (music, performance poetry, dance, mime, film, theatre, animation) instrumental music is perhaps the one which relies most heavily upon this axis, as narrative thrust cannot be helped along by language, image, location etc. I should imagine, awareness of the axis is heightened when one progresses from appreciation to performance and, perhaps, eventually to musical arrangement & composition. Midway through a crescendo, for example, a performer ought to have some idea of the beginning and end volumes. The feeling of inevitability wrought by composers into the arrival of the big tune is often organically achieved by seeds sown earlier in the work and (unconsciously) noted by the listener. Beethoven and Sibelius are both famed for their rigorous attention to this aspect of form.

Does the study of music simply employ this axis or is it able to enhance it in any way? If indeed possible, is enhancement necessarily a good thing? Would it be possible to prove music’s role in this area? Is there any current research into this area?

Why should religious music be of interest to our largely secular society? BBC 4’s Sacred Music, presented by Simon Russel Beale, visited Notre Dame de Paris to show how two innovations of the 12^th Century Notre Dame School underpin what has since come to be known as western classical music.

Members of early music specialist choir, The Sixteen and their director Harry Christophers, demonstrated music’s journey from homophonic (Int 2 concept) plainchant (H Music concept) to polyphony (Int 2 concept). Their lively, committed performances, which maximised the acoustics of Notre Dame’s Gothic architecture made it possible to believe that contemporary listeners would have experienced something of the vitality of the Punk revolution in the 1970s. This fresh approach was pioneered by Léonin and developed by his successor Pérotin.

Aside from the obvious connectivity between music and architecture, the links between music and science (notably physics) were explored. Composers, deciding which notes would best fit those already present in the setting of the plainchant would choose intervals (an Int 2 concept), in order, from the harmonic series i.e. 8ve, 5th & 4^th. Although the triad had not yet become the building block of Western harmony, the foundations of the genre had been laid.

Musicologist, Helen Deeming, enthusiastically outlined the possibilities afforded by the second innovation of the time, the development of musical notation. Although the words of the liturgy were written, the associated music was taught by rote and memorised. This meant that, were a new setting to be sent to another cathedral city, a singer, familiar with the music, would have to tag along to coach the choir. Now, the music could be sent and realised from afar.

There remain three more episodes of this promising series. Here are links to details of all episodes, an overview of the series and a reflection on the place of sacred music in a secular world.

Overview of the series

The four episodes: The Gothic Revolution; Palestrina And The Popes; Tallis, Byrd and The Tudors; Bach And The Lutheran Legacy

Richard Langham Smith, Head of Music at the Open University, writes eloquently on Sacred Music in a Secular World.

It’s not often you get a glimpse into - far less a listen to - pre-history. Michael Wood’s The Story of India (BBC4 this evening - sadly not available on iPlayer) visited Brahmin priests in Kerala taking young trainees through vocal preparations for a 12-day celebration of Agni - the god of fire. The prayers being passed on pre-date language and possibly music, as experts could find no matching analogue. The nearest comparison was with birdsong. It was certainly very interesting to see and hear a few moments of these normally secret teaching sessions.It is claimed that what is being notated cannot be notated. I found this difficult to understand, feeling that a mix of pitch, duration and phonetics must be able to be transcribed - after all Janacek notated the melodies of the Czech language and Messiaen notated birdsong. However, weighing in with the heavy hand of invasive research, however tempting, is scarcely a sensitive response to the privileged invitation.

More on this topic in paragraph 11 of this link.

The human voice - the primal instrument - how many of us know how it works? We can’t really see it in action and it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly why people should sound so different and so distinctive. If you have a spare 4 mins in the next 4 days, then I can’t recommend highly enough a passage from a programme put together by David Howard, professor of music technology at the University of York. He interviews Christella Antoni, a speech and language therapist who not only explains how various singers achieve their particular sound but also provides very convincing impressions of Katie Melua, Barbara Streisand, Ella Firzgerald, Anastasia & Ethel Merman.

Click on the programme link above and scroll forward to 14:53

I wish you better luck with the BBC iPlayer than I’ve been having this evening.