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    • Music No Object

    By Nicholas | February 24, 2011

    After a long pause of two years what better way to return to this blog than with texts which I wrote back in 1998 as part of a book project which is far from dead. The book was to be called “Music No Object” and the object of the exercise was to show how improvisation has helped to preserve essential musical values that have for long been under threat of intellectual extinction. Here is a first helping:

    1.         The world of “serious” music continues to exist under the influence of attitudes that came into being centuries ago. Many an individual composer, performer or impresario has sought to develop new and more open or creative relationships between those who provide and those who enjoy music, and yet these efforts have usually only had a limited or local impact because of the strength of underlying cultural influences.

    2.         Any attempt to develop genuinely new and more fruitful paths for the future may very well involve an examination of these underlying attitudes and an attempt to trace their true origins. It is my belief that much which we consider as differentiating our modern artistic world from that of the nineteenth century can be more usefully seen as an extension of the latter – often an exposition, as it were, of the negative side of  the same picture.

    3.         In order to see this more clearly it is useful, I believe, to cast a glance at some of the intellectual developments in the German-speaking world of the 1790s, which constituted perhaps a revolution as big in the cultural sphere as was the French Revolution in the political sphere. And just as we may now be witnessing (in the context of the European Union) the realisation, however imperfectly, of political dreams that came to the surface in that era, so perhaps we may now be in a position to consider some possibilities in the cultural field which were articulated in that same period but which, under the impact of other more enticing developments, have lain more or less dormant ever since.


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    Official Website under reconstruction

    By Nicholas | March 21, 2009

    The link to my “official website” is not fully functional at present. The website, beautifully designed by Rui Soares Esteves and his partner Pedro Ramos, went offline. I am hoping to restore full functionality soon, complete with sound samples, articles, poetry etc.


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    God Homeland Revolution - and Hamlet

    By Nicholas | March 11, 2009

    On Saturday I will be playing the complete music from my latest CD in Montijo, with texts read by André Gago, in the first of a series of “Hamlet Concerts”. But the first two months of this year were filled with something very different, the preparations for a Portuguese Music theatre piece entitled “Deus Patria Revolução”, created by composer Luís Bragança Gil and writer Luisa Costa Gomes, which brought together, and frequently combined or superimposed, Fascist and Revolutionary songs, marches and hymns, and much besides, from the last fifty years of Portugal’s history. The intention was ironic and largely comic, and the reactions of the public at the first performances at the end of February in the Belém Cultural Centre were, on the whole, very enthusiastic. I was responsible for much of the transcription work, which became a fascinating journey into what was for me largely unknown territory. Four excellent soloists, Alexandra Moura, Inês Madeira, Fernando Guimarães and Rui Baeta, and a choir of eight singers (Voces Caelestes) were joined by an unusual and very creative group of instrumentalists (Orquestra Aldrabófona) consisting of clarinet, trumpet/acordeon, trombone, guitar, doublebass and percussion, with myself at the piano. Pictured here with Fernando Guimarães is Inês Madeira in a memorable performance as the seductive and independent “other woman”.

     

    photo by Mario Sabino Sousa


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    Seasons greetings

    By Nicholas | December 23, 2008

    Wishing all a wonderful Christmas season, and a truly positive New Year in which to discover our truth - however different it may be than what we have imagined.

    Somehow I believe that even a star killed by clichés
    recovers its light in the blank void of somewhere.
    It sort of reminds me of where I am going
    even though I only vaguely remember that place… (Zayra Yves)


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    Radio Interview

    By Nicholas | December 22, 2008

    In November I was interviewed by Manuela Paraiso of Radio Europa (Lisboa), to talk about my CD “Hamlet” and about my work in general. The interview is in Portuguese and divided into two parts, both of them accompanied by music selected from my improvisations. Here are the links:

    Part 1

    Part 2


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    Performer & composer, viewed sideways

    By Nicholas | October 25, 2008

    Since my last post I gave a performance in France of the pieces from “Hamlet”, and have developed a new chapter in my teaching to coincide with our move to the brand new building of the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa, in Benfica. I am now researching the question of interior listening in the context of 3 different classes - those of improvisation, aural training for singers, and score reading. At the same time I am beginning a new group experiment in improvisation for instrumentalists.

    Here, after a long pause, are the two other texts from 1999 of which I spoke in my last post.

    2. NOT THE SAME PIECE

    When a musician sits and plays a piece of Schubert
    it is not the same piece which Schubert wrote.
    When he wrote it, it was not an object but a process,
    through which he gave feeling to the world;
    but with the passage of time it became an object,
    the object of manipulation.

    Feeling is universal - it belongs to us all.
    Schubert speaks for us all,
    and if we attribute certain feelings to Schubert
    it is because we are afraid to own them ourselves,
    preferring to handle them through the filter of history.

    Is it possible for a player to play without manipulation?
    That depends on his motivation.
    His sincerity must match Schubert’s sincerity,
    and then maybe Schubert can help him to express himself.

    3. ART THE DICTATOR

    Art is the dictator when the dead artist rules.
    When the dead artist rules, there can be no question.
    There can be no question so one must obey.
    The reward of obedience is beauty.
    Beauty without obedience is false.
    Beauty belongs to the dead artist.
    Beauty belongs to the past.
    The present is ugly because we are ugly.
    The present is ugly because it is the present.
    The past was beautiful.
    We do not deserve the past.
    That is why we are living now.

    The living artist seeks self-worth.
    He knows the dead artist rules.
    So naturally he must rule too.
    He rules through his art.
    So his art is dead before it is born.
    Anything else would be questionable.
    Beauty is questionable.
    Questions are dangerous.
    Answers are dangerous.
    Answers imply understanding.
    To be understood is to be vulnerable.
    It is better to die first.

    © 1999 Devil’s Advocate


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    My new CD “Hamlet” and some thoughts about the listener

    By Nicholas | July 6, 2008

    I finally had the launching of my latest CD “Hamlet – 11 improvisations for piano”, on the 28th of June at the Fábrica do Braço de Prata in Lisbon, organised by André Gago and Teatro Instável, the producer of the CD and of the original performances of the play for which my music was created (a 12th track on the CD consists of music for flutes by Armin Pircher, which I used as the music for the mime in the original production).

    My friend the composer Luís Tinoco kindly agreed to make a presentation of my work, beginning with an overview of the different forms of improvisation practised these days, in an attempt to put my form of improvisation (which he saw as a little different from the others) in some sort of context. He then confronted me with some questions on the process by which the music came to be, and I linked my answers to a performance of several of the pieces, with the help of my careful transcriptions.

    Five days later, quite by chance, I had the opportunity of playing some of the CD again in the same room, as part of a festival, “Festa Paradoxal”, organised by Luisa Costa Gomes. I was also involved in a totally improvised collaboration with an exceptional young actress, Sara Carinhas, who read a selection of very unusual texts, taken from writings of Gertrude Stein and two Portuguese authors, to my musical accompaniment. It was a brief but rare pleasure, echoing in some way the end of the text below.

    In thinking in advance what I might say to explain the process whereby the music of the CD came to be, and how I manage to play the music again, I unearthed some texts written by me in 1999 as a preparation for a live improvisation recital I gave at that time. These short texts actually say very little about my work, but try to cast a light on my attitude to the role of the three protagonists (the improviser must be all three simultaneously) in any musical performance – the composer, the interpreter and the listener – in a very provocative way, which is why the last of the three is signed “Devil’s Advocate”. Here is the first:

    1. Music belongs to the listener

    If the listener owns the music
    then all is changed.
    If the listener owns the music
    he knows his rights.

    But he must also recognise
    the rights of every other;
    and everyone can accept
    what the other knows as true.

    He can say “I accept
    your truth as true for you
    but retain my truth
    as true for me…

    We agree not to differ
    but rather to expand
    our understanding of what
    the TRUTH may be.

    We agree to believe
    that the TRUTH is far bigger
    than anything
    that anyONE can see.”

    Art need not be a battleground
    where people lose self-worth
    but rather a marvellous labyrinth
    where souls can meet on earth.


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    Passion and fireworks (and a great fall)

    By Nicholas | May 11, 2008

    “If you have three minutes to spare and yearn to replace noise with peace, jarring discord with blissful harmony and ugliness with beauty, visit Love’s Sanctuary, where Zayra and Nicholas will invite you into a refuge that clears your mind and changes the colours of your day.” Ken H.

    Music by its nature invites all kinds of experiments in synchronization. Ballet and dance is one area, film another; and of course the cartoons of Walt Disney are a kind of fusion of the two. My last videos, which bring together three separate artistic expressions into one offering, are another, very gratifying, exercise. I have also tried my hand at synchronizing an incomplete musical score to a silent film from 1921 for which it was written; but as the only complete extant orchestral part was for the double-bass this required much detective work.

    Last December I was offered the unusual task of synchronizing fireworks to music; but in this case I was told when they needed to be set off. My task was first to mark these points in the score, and then with a steady hand to push the button at the right moments in the live music (played by the Orquestra do Algarve conducted by Cesário Costa). The occasion was the celebration of the European Community’s Treaty of Lisbon, and the place was the area by the river which had held Lisbon’s Expo ’98. I was placed with the technicians in a stand some way in front of the orchestra, around which the public were moving freely.

    At a certain moment I was hailed in English, and turned to see a man in a wheelchair beckoning to me to approach him. I was then subjected to a very lively grilling on all that was going on, peppered with very amusing observations, to which I responded in kind. I then discovered that all this information was to be used for a book that would describe this man’s extraordinary solo travels in a wheelchair to the extremes of Europe – he had already been in Russia and to the northern extreme in Norway, and was now about to visit the western extreme just along the coast at Cabo da Roca. It was a remarkable meeting, leaving me with the feeling of something precious – a passionate attitude to life that causes one to wonder why the rest of us are half asleep by contrast. That meeting is as vivid to me now as all the magical show of music and fireworks which followed shortly afterwards.

    This precious sense of passion in life has come to me again in the last few weeks from a different source, in the form of teachings by another man committed to waking us all up – Dõv Baron. His insights into our psychology and the mechanics of desire and manifestation, what he calls our quantum resonance fields, are designed to kick-start the most reluctant and stagnant soul into a new relation with his surroundings. Here is a link to a sample called “Searching for significance: what gets you out of bed?”

    The name of the man in the wheelchair is Ken Haley (it is he who wrote the commentary to my video at the beginning of this post) – click here to hear him reading a chapter from his previous book, Emails from the Edge. He and Dõv Baron have a striking past experience in common. They both fell from a great height some 17 years ago, and survived the physical torture of a broken body by sheer passionate will. In Ken’s case it was a suicide attempt in the wake of his experiences as a frontline journalist in the Middle East, which has left him as a paraplegic. In the case of Dõv it was a fall of 120 feet while climbing, which apparently shattered the bones in his face. Both were clearly passionate people before their fall, but one cannot help feeling that their (literally) shattering experience must have revealed to them with much more intensity just how precious life is. Can we hear them beckoning to us?


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    Love’s Sanctuary

    By Nicholas | April 26, 2008

    My latest video adventure, entitled Love’s Sanctuary and uploaded to YouTube and other sites a few days ago, seems to give the effect, even more than my last, of a seamless integration of poetry, painting and music. Perhaps this is because of the effortless stream of emotion of the music, or the subject matter of Zayra Yves’ poem. Or perhaps there is a clearer logic to the choice of paintings. Whatever it is, there is present some latent power of synaesthesia which has the potential to affect people somewhat like the touch described by Zayra in her poem:

    “Part of me thought it was overblown
    how you might just touch me
    in one minute to change life as I knew it…”

    There may be those who find it too easy, or the music too banal (in 2001 I myself cut this piece from the sequence to which it belongs, and which forms the CD called Night Sky). But the experience of making it brings home forcibly to me the power of combining the different arts and senses, and underlines just how much lack of communication between creative spirits (or limited technical resources) may have straitjacketed the imagination in the past, and just how much more room for experiment and adventure exists within easy reach. (For full screen click here)

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    Poems, poets and ‘Pilgrim hitchhiking…’ (multimedia video)

    By Nicholas | April 7, 2008

    In January I was studying with my son the life and poetry of that extraordinary multiple personality, Fernando Pessoa. For my son it was in preparation for a Portuguese exam, but for me this was a timely excuse to penetrate further the multi-faceted world of a man who wrote under many different names (the chief ‘heteronyms’ being Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro Campos) and believed in his ‘fictional’ identities more than in his ‘real’ self.

    I was at the same time unknowingly preparing myself to discover the work of a new poet – Zayra Yves, whose creative ‘melting-pot’ confronts our sense of identity in a profound, but utterly different, way.

    Most of us have an urge to try and fix the boundaries of the identity we call ‘I’, and so the notion of having several identities is at the least strange, if not downright disturbing. In my case I had struggled long ago with what were, for me, the conflicting creative impulses of composer and improviser, to the extent of leaving my home country to discover where my loyalties truly lay.

    Pessoa boldly turns these conflicting impulses into a major creative resource, by which poetry, theatre and fiction are made to meet on the stage of his life. His equivalent of the composer might be Ricardo Reis or Fernando Pessoa himself, while the improviser in him is clearly Campos – being the identity he says he assumes when he feels the impulse to write before knowing what he wishes to say. (André Gago used the poems of Campos to telling effect last week in his new show Hamlet, Heterónimos e Pessoas, with music by Carlos Barreto).

    Quite by coincidence I received an invitation, also in January, to accompany the Lisboa Cantat Choir (directed by Jorge Alves, assisted by Clara Coelho) with soloists Raquel Alão and Manuel Rebelo, in 2 performances of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony, a glorious setting of poetry by Walt Whitman for soloists and choir. Now Walt Whitman’s work is a prime inspiration for the Odes of Campos (one of which is dedicated to him), and the music of the Sea Symphony combines with his poetry in a tremendous outpouring of spiritual and physical joy. For me it was an unforgettable occasion, - truly wonderful to see that a choir of this kind in Lisbon could respond to the challenge of this English choral masterpiece – and also because I remember being at a godfather’s wedding in Chelsea in 1955 at which Vaughan Williams was also present (I later received support for my composing from the RVW Trust which was set up by him).

    Now the composer in me is tempted by the idea of bringing Campos’ poetry to life in music – for choir and for solo voice; but in the case of Zayra Yves it was the improviser in me who felt the urge to contact her with a proposal for collaboration, believing as I do in the power of different arts in combination to express the melting-pot of our creativity. The first result of this is the video I created yesterday using her own recording of her poem ‘Pilgrim Hitchhiking on the Road of Life’, accompanied by an improvisation of mine entitled ‘Hidden Flame’, and illustrated with paintings and photographs of my friend the artist Anthony Christian. (For full screen click here)

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