Sketches and manuscripts.

Playing from printed music can sometimes be an anonymous experience. Black and white staves covered with uniformly round circles, neatly arched slurs and pin-point-perfect dots. Enough to make anyone forget that a human being once put pen to paper or that written scores form only a small part of the creation of a musical performance. In the written tradition of classical music, scores are invaluable, if far from infalliable musicological sources. Thus, for both performers and scholars, the unveiling of the Julliard School of Music's swish new web-site that makes a vast store of manuscripts, scores and sketches available for free online, is a noteworthy moment.

p.s. take a look here at The Rest is Noise, a blog by the music critic of The New Yorker for more details.

From Pont de la Guillotiere

 

From Pont de la Guillotiere

 

Lyon, Lugdunum, light, lumière, lune, l'eau.

Into a world of dreams.

A century or so ago (in 1892 to be exact) Belgian born Maurice Maeterlink wrote his symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande. Maeterlink's work exploring doomed love inspired the "magnifiques pages de Fauré, Sibelius et Schoenberg" and the entire opera's worth of pages by Debussy which in turn shape Lyon auditorium's recently announced 2007-08 season. The season's concert programme is full of colour (Falla and Tchaikosky); nineteenth-century splendour (Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner; the all important pinch of succesful sentimentality (Rachmaninov) and, bien sûr, lots of French offerings (Debussy, Ravel, Faure, Ibert, Offenbach, Dukas,Saint-Saens,Bizet, Poulenc, Messiean, Dalbavie, Dutilluex). Think I'll have to pop back to Lyon once in a while!

Very Important facts, figures, events and equations.

Did you know that in 2006:
1. the comic book was the third best-selling book genre in France?
2. more than 40.5 million comic books were sold here?
3. and 4130 new comic books were published; that's about 11 a day?

Twisted logic: Surely the most famous comic books are the Adventures of Asterix. If you were asked to name a Gaul, Asterix would probably be the first name to trip off the tongue. Under the name of Lugdunum, Lyon used to be the capital of Gaul. Therefore it is completely logical that next weekend Lyon will be host to the second "Festival de la Bande Dessinnee" (aka comic book festival/aka lots of adults bonding with their inner children).

Anything goes: In France, any subject can be turned into a BD... My firm favourite for incongruity between form and content is the comic book version of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu...

 

Storms on the rampage

Forget crying, last night Lyon was throwing a full-blown temper tantrum. Storms have been rumbling up and down the two rivers for the last few weeks, but yesterday the thick clouds hurled out lightning bolts and explosions of thunder almost every few seconds. Sulking, crying, slamming doors, turning lights on and off, hammering fists against brick walls, throwing things around, shouting and screaming: this 5am fit ticked all the temper tantrum boxes. You've honestly never heard anthing like it.

Place des Jacobins

 

A city kaleidoscope.

Extraordinary Voyages

"Travel enables us to enrich our lives with new experiences, to enjoy and to be educated, to learn respect for foreign cultures, to establish friendships, and above all to contribute to international cooperation and peace throughout the world.”

Thought for the day from Jules Verne.

From under the umbrella

Last night, I saw the City crying
Cracked windows poured falling stars
And the streets were paved with mirrors.
















The penultimate stanza from "Last night, I saw the City breathing" by Andrew Fusek Peters, who is apparently the tallest poet in Britain. For what seems like weeks now my current city, Lyon, has been crying with droplets and spoonfuls and bucketfuls of rain. No cracked windows, but car headlights reflected and fragmented by the thin sheets of water covering the road suggest streets paved with mirrors; or canvases spattered with paint distilled from glass.

If you can't beat'em, join'em.

A while ago I posted a link to Tommy Hewitt Jones's latest YouTube organ stunt, promising to follow up the post with a few more choice details about his crazy musical antics. One pet project that's been in the pipelines for a while goes by the name of 'On the Facebook' (ofen referred to as the Facebook Song), a song currently sitting at no. 10 in the iTunes pop album chart, and at no. 55 in the iTunes pop singles chart. Not bad for a morsel created over a year ago by two Cambridge muso students filling time between (or, how shocking, maybe even during) lectures and supervisions. A light-hearted poke at the social-networking site that has swept through universities in the West, the song is short and sweet and the video runs rampage around Cambridge, featuring famous landmarks and students not quite managing to lip-synch. Already, tenth place on iTunes is pretty impressive, but only complete domination will do, and Tommy HJ and Pete Foggitt (co-creator) are egging people on to download themselves a copy of this boppy little number so that (and I quote Tommy) it can become "the SILLIEST NUMBER ONE EVER". And let's be honest, it wouldn't be a number one for any other reason (apart from maybe manipulation/management of online resources). Sitting here in my room in France, silliness suddenly seems like a peculiarly English quality. Monty Python; Green Wing; jelly: all united by the English tendency to take delight in doing silly things, saying silly words and eating silly food. Previously a facebook-song sceptic, this new advertising twist has done the trick for me and I've forked out my 79p in aid of the promotion of general silliness. Why not do the same?



A direct link to the iTunes store can be found here.

You can watch the highly amusing Anglia TV feature on the song here.

Join our Facebook Song group here.

If music be the food of love, play on.

Some friends and I are giving an informal concert tonight. Beethoven, Piazolla, Quilter, Purcell and Brahms. You can't get much more mismatched than that, but sometimes unprogrammed concert programmes work surprisingly well. In any case, as Purcell's song says (which we are performing), if music be the food of love, sing on till I am fill'd with joy. Music and food on a summer evening in France. Sing on.

Public faces

 

 

Saw this in Lyon the other day. Seems some politicians never learn when to stop campaigning.

Musical names...

Recently I read an article discussing the motives that compel people to legally change their names. Many reasons were listed, often variations on a theme of trying to fit in to or stand out from a new culture, but there were of course those who wished to change their name because it was simply too silly to live with. I started to think about all those names I have encountered which one might well be tempted to dispense with. Dougal McDougal wins the prize for ridiculousness as a result of repetition; I'm still wondering what opinion of their child's character Joanna Lumley's parents had (non-celebrity version) and someone clearly didn't think through giving Master Hamburger the first name of Andrew. Nineteenth-century English organist Reginald Goss-Custard is a firm favourite, as is Verdi Waddington (also an organist, and presumably a wannabee Italian opera composer). For sheer style, the prize has to go to I. F. Brilliant (first name Ira, founder of a invaluable centre for Beethoven scholarship). After cogitating, ruminating and digesting (cue Lloyd Grossman) this gourmet feast of names, what have I concluded? Unusual names, well I'm all for them. Unfortunate names? Well, quotationspage.com helpfully informs me that American humorist Evan Esar (?!) once said: "A signature always reveals a man's character - and sometimes even his name." So for those blighted with overly-meaningful names, all I can say, is better get working on that illegible signature.

G8 summit 2007 - N.Sarkozy drunk

The French president after a long discussion with Vladimir Putin. I guess they weren't drinking water...

Richly coloured skeins of silk...

 

From Stevens's moody costumes "of blue and yellow, sky and sun"; from his belts, knots, sashes and seams; from his "half pales of red" and "half pales of green", from all these words now to colour itself: to glowing skeins of silk wound, then woven; to the weft and warp of radiant squares and squarves. To Lyon's hidden opulence.

Credences of Summer

The personae of summer play the characters
Of an inhuman author, who meditates
With the gold bugs, in blue meadows, late at night.
He does not hear his characters talk. He sees
Them mottled, in the moodiest costumes,

Of blue and yellow, sky and sun, belted
And knotted, sashed and seamed, half pales of red,
Half pales of green, appropriate habit for
The huge decorum, the manner of the time,
Part of the mottled mood of summer's whole,

In which the characters speak because they want
To speak, the fat, the roseate characters,
Free, for a moment, from malice and sudden cry,
Complete in a completed scene, speaking
Their parts as in a youthful happiness.

The closing stanzas of Wallace Steven's Credences of Summer. John Banville began his reading for the Villa Gillet's Assises Internationales du Roman with this poem. Thought I'd share.

Being Jim Inconnu...

For the past five days I've been living a double life. In body I'm still Becca, but in mobile phone spirit, I'm known as Jim. Jim is a young Frenchman, blessed with at least two friends (Jessica and Kentin), and is a master of a mind-boggling species of French texting lingo. (If by a bizarre twist of fate you are reading this Jim, "CC Jim sa va alor koi 2 neuf?") What else can I tell you about Jim? Well, his mobile sim card gave up the ghost recently, perhaps as a result of carelessly letting his phone fall into a puddle. Several of his friends are probably still pacing their rooms urgently, trying to fathom the recent un-breaking of Jim's voice, his sudden alteration of accent, and his demonstration of a complete lack of knowledge of any of the weekend's complicated social plans laid by the means of intricate coded messages sent on Friday: "Kes ce ke tu fé?", "tu v vendredi soir", "sllt jimmy c mar jo comen vat u?". Ever since I read Daphne Du Maurier's The Scapegoat, in which an unsuspecting English traveller meets his French doppleganger (Let's add in a drop of German to spice things up further) and swaps his cold English life for that of a French aristocrat-with-a-chateau (don't be too jealous of him, there are of course Dark Secrets awaiting), I've been fascinated by the idea of swapping identities and by the possibilities of becoming someone else or of bumping into my exact likeness. Luckily, given that I'm female and English, Jim Inconnu is not my long-lost identical other, and rest assured I didn't attempt to steal his identity. Nevertheless finding myself looking through an inadvertantly opened window into someone else's life, as a result of the uniquely twenty-first century occurence of a phone company sending out two sim cards to the wrong addresses, reminds me of those more implausible situations. As if by magic, I had a new set of friends and a new phone number. After five days I started to become strangely attached to all these unknown people. Reality TV by mobile phone? Sadly, my window into someone else's world has closed now. A shame, as I'd very much like to know (as my Latin teacher used to say) the meaning of "C gus i fo" and "Alor ma geul y remarche". Answers accepted by text only.

Hi Mum :)

The blogging equivalent of being on stage and waving at someone you know in the audience: Happy Mother's Day Mum! (N.B. This is neither a belated nor scarily early greeting: today is Mother's Day in France.) And very appropriately, earlier today I rehearsed Ravel's Mother Goose Suite (Ma Mère l'oye) for a concert on Wednesday. To misquote the Royal Mail, I played this and thought of you.... (All say "ah".) OK, I'll stop waving now and get on with the performance.

The Rake's Progress

Off to see Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress tonight at Lyon's Opera House. Producer Robert Lepage's idea to set the opera in 1950s America sounds promising (Stravinsky composed this, his final opera, between 1947-51 around a decade after he arrived in America); am already intrigued by the comic strip version of the plot, created by Denis Chapon and published by the Opera de Lyon, and indeed am equally intrigued (and slightly bemused) by the website for the production: (http://www.opera-lyon.
com/rakesprogress/index.html - you can also find the pdf version of the comic book (BD) here). Reviews so far have been glowing - Le Monde described the production as "virtuose, poetique", Le Soir as "Éblouissant". I'll make sure to choose an equally good expand-your-French-vocabulary adjective to sum up what I think of it. Watch this space.