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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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    Transatlantic transcriptions & performers

    By Nicholas | March 21, 2008

    Today is Good Friday, the heaviest day in the Christian religious calendar, and I have spent much of it transcribing a piece called “Heaviness” - the first track on my latest CD ‘Hamlet’ (to be launched soon at the Fábrica do Braço de Prata, watch this space for details) - this music accompanied Hamlet’s first soliloquy in André Gago’s production last year (see previous post). At a launching it is normal to perform some of the music on the CD, but in my case I can only do this by transcribing the contents first, as all my CDs were recorded by a process of pure intuitive improvisation. Now transcription is very hard work, and I had always been against the idea of recording improvisations, let alone writing them down. But I was persuaded to try for the first time in July 2001 in New York by my friend Dante Anzolini, who thought others should have the chance of playing the music. In reality its prime use has been to allow me to play it again, and I have used these transcriptions for concerts ever since then.

    Dante and I were both working at the time with Bob Wilson and Philip Glass on their opera The White Raven (O Corvo Branco), for its very successful run at the Lincoln Center Festival. The one Portuguese singer still in the cast (the première had been at Expo 98 in Lisboa) was Ana Paula Russo, who gave a memorable performance as Queen. Here is a short video clip of her entrance (taken from the Madrid production in November 1998). For full screen click here.

    Ana Paula Russo’s most recent appearance was in another queenly part, as Mrs Morris in Terry Jones and Luis Tinoco’s ‘Evil Machines’ (three of the male members of that cast - João Merino, Fernando Guimarães and Marco Alves dos Santos - are currently performing in Paulo Matos’ mini-opera competition, along with Margarida Marrecos, Natasia Sibalic, and Inês Madeira). But the starring female role in this case went to Ana Quintans, who transformed her personality to an astonishing degree in her quest for liberation as the girl Nancy. In two weeks time it will be her turn to sing in New York, albeit in a very different musical context - at Carnegie Hall, with William Christie and Les Arts Florissants.

    Ana Quintans

     


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    Love is a letter…

    By Nicholas | March 11, 2008

    Here is another video, made by me on Sunday using music from my latest CD “Hamlet”, to be launched next month. I originally created this music for the Teatro Instavel production of Shakespeare’s play - which premièred at the Olga Cadaval Theatre, Sintra in February 2007 - and the piece called Loveletter (used for this video) accompanied Ophelia’s first appearance, when Hamlet’s letter to her was read by her father Polonius to the King. The play shows how the indirect expression of love may reveal deep underlying uncertainties with tragic consequences; centuries later Hamlet’s letter to Ophelia was used textually by Portugal’s most emblematic modern poet, Fernando Pessoa, to express his feelings towards a girl with the same name, with similarly unfortunate results for him (the connection between Hamlet and Pessoa will be explored by André Gago in a new show “Hamlet, Heterónimos, Pessoas” to be premièred on World Theatre Day during the residency of Teatro Instavel at the Malaposta Theatre). In my video love is firmly associated with bodily presence through the magnificent art and photography of Marian Fanny Christian. For full screen click here.

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    Portuguese music theatre - new horizons (and an extra video)

    By Nicholas | February 29, 2008

    The theme of my life this week seems to be opera. On Monday we went to see the dress rehearsal of an adaptation of Mozart’s Magic Flute for children (more on this in a later post) at the S. Carlos Theatre in Lisbon, and the following day the theatre contacted me to accompany rehearsals of two Rachmaninov operas, Aleko and Francesca da Rimini, next week. Then today my friend the actor/director Paulo Matos gave me the music of five mini-operas by five young Portuguese composers – Manuel Durão, Rafael Fraga, Gonçalo Gato, Hugo Ribeiro and Luis Soldado – which are the winning entries to go to the last round of an opera competition to be held in the S. Luiz Theatre in Lisbon at the end of March. These five compositions will now be rehearsed (with my support at the piano) and staged by Paulo, the competition’s creator, with young Portuguese singers accompanied by elements of the Youth Orchestra (Orquestra Sinfónica Juvenil), directed by Christopher Bochmann. Paulo’s idea with this competition is wholly in line with my subject, as he seeks to inspire not merely young composers but also aspiring librettists and, by extension, people involved in the other aspects of opera (costume, stage design, etc.). He also provides another showcase for the new generation of singers who are at last having chances to show their very considerable quality on stage.

    Something of a milestone in this respect was ‘Evil Machines’, a delightful musical fantasy written and directed by Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) with music by one of the bright stars of the Portuguese musical scene – Luis Tinoco. What they succeeded in creating together was something with all the fun of a musical (and the incomparable and penetrating humour for which Terry Jones is of course famous), but also some of the richness of an opera (the Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa was conducted by Cesário Costa); and in the process they inspired the cast of twelve (mostly young) singers to put their own unique touch to the show. On to the stage of the S. Luiz Theatre in January of this year sprang the most unlikely cast - of hoovers (including ‘possibly the world’s most powerful vacuum’ towering fifteen feet in the air), parking meters, wild cars, tumble-dryer, egg-whisk, alarm clock, telephone, cooker, remote control, petrol pump, aeroplane, motorbike and scooter. The human race was represented by Mrs Morris, the girl Nancy (named after Terry Jones’ dog), her mother, the inventor (good or evil or both?), a policeman and an employment officer. You can see more details of the cast and photos posted by two of the singers - Sara Braga Simões and João Oliveira.

    Finally, as an extra item, here is a video with two more unlikely characters, made by Marian Christian using Anthony Christian’s paintings and my music. I first met Mr and Mrs Frank 30 years ago! (For full screen click here)

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    The Girlfriend, a video by Marian Christian

    By Nicholas | February 22, 2008

    Well, it seems my video called the Artist and his Lover, posted last week, proved to be an inspiration. Anthony Christian’s wife Marian, who features in the video, was so taken by it that she decided to try her hand, and produced no less than five more. The one I have chosen is called The Girlfriend, and consists of the most beautiful photos (some nude) taken by Anthony of his former wife Susan, who was a huge inspiration to him both as a painter and as a photographer, in the 1970s.

    For full screen click here

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    The Artist and his Lover, a video with my music and Anthony Christian’s paintings

    By Nicholas | February 15, 2008

    Welcome! Here is a prime example of the combination of music, art and inspiration in the form of a video I just made to open this blog called “The Artist and his Lover”. The artist is Anthony Christian, and the paintings are his portraits in oils of himself and his artist wife Marian, while the middle section contains fantastic nude drawings created by the two together. The music is “Unexpected Calm”, from my CD Exteriors, recorded by a process of pure improvisation exactly seven years ago today. Enjoy!

    Watch full screen here

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