Wednesday 2 October 2013

The Rite of Spring as Reawakening - The Ballet Joffrey Reenact A Powerful 20th Century Pagan Ritual





Dance is perhaps the earliest and most potent form of magical ritual. The body has its own knowing and its own power; the highest spiritual power and wisdom are contained in the darkest and warmest depths of our physical form. In our very genes perhaps, or even deeper in physical forces as yet unknown to science and deriving life from the core of the Earth itself.

The first 3 minutes of the video above are famous introductory music, after which something revolutionary occurs. Do dip in, even if modern classical music or dance are not your 'thing'. It is worth it.

From 1911-1913 three of the world's greatest geniuses united to change culture and as it proved, modern society for ever. They were Russian: Russia has always had more than its fair share of geniuses. Commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev, the composer Stravinsky, the choreographer Nijinsky and the artist Roerich collaborated on the ballet The Rite of Spring which caused a riot on its performance in May 1913.

As indicated by the title, this was a balletic presentation of a pagan ritual. There was great interest in ancient Russian paganism at this time - Roerich's paintings and ethnographic investigations had made him an expert in this field and the natural choice for stage and costume designer.

Stravinsky's score changed classical music for ever and indirectly affected all later music. In short, Stravinsky invented modern 'atonal' music; for the first time, music made deliberate, systematic use of discord, harshness and volume. But the real mystery of Stravinsky's score is that it is utterly rhythmic. The whole of Christian classical tradition had been based on harmony and melody, with rhythm taking a subsidiary and essentially 'polite' role. And while rhythm lived on in dance music like the Waltz, or in military bands, Stravinsky - seemingly out of nowhere - rediscovered the raw power of rhythm. His use of percussion and cross-rhythm and irregular metre brought classical music back to contact with the ancient shamanic powers preserved in African music. In fact whether Stravinsky knew this or not, the Russian or Mongolian term 'shaman' was to become a global signifier of the primal magic of the drum. Stravinsky restored the groin and legs to classical music.

So, Stravinsky's score was utterly shocking to the culture of 1913. Yet is was so influential - by far the most innovative piece in the history of classical music - that it merely sounds beautiful and classic 100 years later. Our ears have grown used to the balance of harmony and discord and to the power of cross rhythm. Stravinsky's sensibility was normalised through hundreds of lesser classical composers trying to be 'shocking', through Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, through film soundtracks, and a subtle influence on Jazz and avant-garde Rock.

The great dancer and choreographer Nijinksy did something even more extraordinary. Faced with the challenge of choreographing a pagan ritual, he had to throw away the pretty European ballet of the French schools and reinvent ritualistic dance. In doing this, he returned to primitive Russian forms of folk dance. These will have been just as shocking to audiences as Stravinsky's music. Instead of the fluid but etiolated ballerina, seemingly lifeless below the belly, Nijinsky had his dancers perform jerking violent movements and archaic circle dances emphasising contact with the earth and sky. The finale of the Rite where the maiden dances herself to death as a sacrifice is an extraordinary tour de force unlikely to be equalled.

Yet this vital aspect of the Rite was largely forgotten until 1987 when the Ballet Joffrey, having obtained access to reconstructions of Nijinsky's original choreography, performed the first true recreation of the Rite of Spring since its initial performances. Fortunately, a film of this production is available on YouTube and it is absolutely essential viewing for all musicians and magicians, and doubtless is fascinating if extraordinary for dancers.



The third contributor is probably the most overlooked. Nikolai Roerich is best known in esoteric circles. He toured the world painting a vast number of outstandingly beautiful canvasses, focusing on mountain-scapes and spiritual subjects, particularly of Tibet and India. His love of ancient spirituality and landscape inspired him to a comprehensive detailed stage design encompassing every detail. One of the joys of the Ballet Joffrey's reconstructions is the recreation of Roerich's original costumes - some of which can be seen represented in paintings like that above. Nikolai Roerich and his wife Helena were cocreators of a new form of Yoga - Agni Yoga - which they claimed was received from the Mahatma Morya. And primal spiritual power and beauty course through Roerich's paintings and the communications Helena receive.

Most religion of recent millennia, and most magic, has been overly 'polite'. Music and dance have been exiled to the low arts of the dance hall or the rites of the underprivileged. Yet that is where power and release lie.

Students or followers or pagan religions; those enthusiastic about the ancient mysteries of Atlantis or Lemuria; devotees of Green spirituality. Watch this: for this is where the powers of your movement were unleashed. Everything turns on whether these liberated forces destroy civilisation or, making peace with their younger successors like thought and individuality, join in wholeness and reconciliation.




Tuesday 23 July 2013

Ruthlessness or Weakness - Which is Which?

True power never crucifies others. True strength would rather take a burden on itself than put one on another in moral weakness. But it is a hard road. Do not seek power if your contentment and flattering self-image is the most important thing in your life!

It is a cliche to say that bullies are cowards. It's not really true, though it may make a traumatised child feel better briefly, while mummy says it (along with other implausible slogans about 'words can never hurt me'), before they go back to school for another day's torment. But it is almost true from one perspective. Let's see:

There is no doubt that we live in a post-Christian era. For two thousand years, Christians were exhorted to 'turn the other cheek', love those that hate them, and generally allow themselves to be crucified and beaten up. True, the majority of people throughout history never followed this code, except for a few genuine saints or pious simpletons and a very small number of people so spiritually strong and superior that they had no need to retaliate. However, we were at least expected to feel guilty for our 'sins', our failure to keep the code. We had something to confess, not just to avoid legal reprisal, but through our conscience.

This was a huge potential advance - let's be honest - on the prior 'pagan' codes of Europe which enshrined concepts like vengeance and blood money and where the individual was entirely under tribal ethics. (It is amusing watching contemporary pagans trying to meld revivalist old-time religions with Christian Sunday School morals, but that is another story). But unfortunately the way Jesus' virtue was taught frequently made it a guilt-inducing mind game a true curse on the human spirit

From the 19th Century onwards, thinkers like Nietzche have both responded to and promoted a post-Christian ethos, glorifying strength, individuality and usually materialism. Despite Left-wing vanity, this is no preserve of capitalism or Thatcherism: indeed, the Left distinguished themselves by their ruthlessness perhaps even more than the Right in the 20th Century.

The playground victim finally realises that the fairy tales of meekness and niceness are lies - unless he gets 'teacher' or the 'system' on the bullies. Much of society is a matter of creating the biggest bully of all - the armed State. And after all, the peace loving monks of the Middle Ages could never have survived unless there were others who valued them and were willing to defend their lives with sword and spear. Gandhi's non-violent resistance could only have worked in a Christian imperialist context - imagine Gandhi in Tianaman Square or Soviet Russia!

For we live in the age of the torn out heart; we are all brains with robot bodies, fighting each other viciously yet meaninglessly and sometimes smiling and claiming that we love society! Or is that a bit cynical? No, because those who talk about love and freedom virtually always end up enforcing it either with social pressure or (internationally) with missiles.

As my readers will know, I take social temperatures from ordinary, banal events. For example, in politics, in commerce and personally, nobody apologises anymore. And why should they - nowadays apology is an admission of guilt. You may get sued; or in a relationship, you may get boxed in a corner as 'the offender', your sins endlessly paraded and used against you. So keep that ego good and hard. Call it an 'error of judgement' and don't apologise to the other creep!

BUT - I just can't live that way. I am the idiot who in past personal relationships, spoke better of my partners than they deserved, preserved their honour, while they did the opposite. The fool who gave endless chances; who will never cut someone dead or shut them out.

I can be ruthless with myself and unfliching in destroying parts of my life that are dead, leaving the burning remains of part of my past with nary a backwards glance. But never with people. Never say never is an ethic worth fighting for. To miss that final opportunity to put things straight, to finish on a note of harmony, to think how the other person feels. In short to forgive. To honour the days spent together - days that can never be taken back, the very fabric of your life and soul.

Is it just a musician thing, the need to move through discord to harmony? Or an inner knowledge that what is not resolved in this life must be paid for double in the next?

To return to the bully or sociopath. He can move quickly, seldom slowed down by qualms of conscience; when he is finished with you having either got what he wanted or having failed, he is finished. You no longer exist in his world. Like an impatient tourist asking for directions and then cutting off the person who stopped to help them, the sociopath only treats people as objects. Only his feelings matter and they are not so much feelings as willed intentions. He rises to the top of his profession amassing wealth and power...for a while...and to the detriment of everyone else.

We live in the age of the sociopath. Now that the sentimental falsehood of 'gentle Jesus meek and mild' is believed only by the deeply naive and only taught by the simple or the cynical, we must learn to see patience, obedience, kindness, forgiveness and so on as what the Latin word virtue actually means - i.e. strength. Be gentle through great power, not weakness.

So I challenge you spiritual athletes: dare every day to risk losing face; be gratuitously vulnerable, but not in an attention seeking or egotistical way. Never avoid reconciliation out of cold hearted pride or cowardice. Think of those who have left your life, with kindness. Pick up the phone. Try again, for the hundredth time, to make peace a reality.

And you will realise that your soul is being built by this practice, memory and emotion unfrozen feeling by feeling. And you will realise that your self-image is a ropy pack of lies at best! This gives humour which in turn gives indomitable spiritual power and initiative.

Neither a masochistic saint nor a Nietzchean ubermensch, you will form the first fruits of the true Aquarian humanity, kind out of strength and character, not weakness and fear. 

Go on Go on Go on!

Saturday 6 July 2013

Killed by Attitude - Who Are You To Tell Me What To Do? said the angry fool

You see it in people's hostile, frozen faces. You see it in the way they walk and the way they shout into mobile phones as if they were arguing with their 'voices' in a lunatic asylum. Above all, you see it in a thousand Facebook memes. The endless psychotic aggression masking the paper-thin ego, that will not be told anything by anyone. "Who are YOU to tell ME what to do"? "What's it to YOU"? "You've got not right to judge me". It's a great trick that allows rage-filled people to vent and make others the problem. "What are you, some kind of Nazi"?

Next time you see an inspirational quote saying "just be who you are and f*** anyone who tells you differently" recycled in a thousand different forms, consider: what kind of society would we live in if everyone gave this attitude to everyone else all the time? Actually, it's not hard, because since the invention of the walkman in the 1980s and then the mobile phone, large numbers of people act as if they were disconnected from their fellow humans. The stance is "there is no such thing as a public place; you are in my music room, my office, my boudoir; if your meal in this restaurant is being spoiled by my kids running around, tough: I owe nothing to anyone, and if you've got a problem with that...f*** you"!!!

I travel on the London Underground every day. Frequently people sneeze and splutter. They can't be bothered to cover their mouths, because they are fiddling with an electronic device or reading a paper. London tubes are so crowded that if someone with Ebola ever boards a train, many thousands would probably be wiped out in short order, because...no one has the right to expect others to act in accordance with the germ theory of disease.

I'm writing with humour and a touch of anger, but I have to remember that all communication is 'viral'. If I rant into the void and I am doing exactly the same thing: venting, arguing with myself, displaying sociopathic lack of contact with my world. Electronic communication easily dehumanises people - the talk to voices in their head, which is why disgusting rudeness breaks out so quickly online. So greetings, sojourner, and welcome!

There was a recent news story about a shop assistant who refused to serve a customer who was talking away into their mobile phone. I always cringe when I see this common situation - the dehumanisation, the rude humiliation caused to a person serving a customer who obviously feels they are too important, in too much of a hurry to even look the assistant in the eye let alone share courteous exchange. "Just serve me and let me get on with my busy conversation and my busy life, like any other robot in my virtual life". In a cafe the other week I saw a couple on a date - the unprepossessing man was ignoring the pretty  girl while he fiddled with his phone for a good 15 minutes. I have seen a person with two mobile phones cut off a conversation with a person in front of them to start a long conversation on their phone, and then cut that person off when the second mobile rang. If someone can't see the insanity of this, I am not sure how I could explain it.

I have been in houses where the television is always on so that nobody can look at or speak with anyone else - the god of television rules all. Of course, fundamentally, we have all been programmed like lab rats to respond to stimuli. Flashing lights, bleeping phones, buzzing devices. You see people's muscles constantly twitching like malfunctioning robots, their hands hovering around their phones like some kind of addict. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.

I blame religious education for this! What, my dwindling readership cries - surely that is a mad leap too far! Well, it all comes down to how Jesus was portrayed in 19th and 20th Century cheap 'Sunday school' theology. That Jesus is the ultimate petulant adolescent - criticising the Pharisees, calling everyone a hypocrite, telling people not to 'judge' and getting away with it! This image is inordinately attractive to angry preadolescents, especially boys - as youngsters we all know that all the adults are hypocrites and "who are they to judge me"! It goes down well with those who feel they have no power but would dearly love to wield power over others. The typical rebel or angry young man who one day will become the Pharisee to be hated by the next generation.

When Nonconformist Christiantity mutated into insipid liberalism and nanny Socialism so typical of the Guardian reading classes, this idea that you mustn't 'judge' anyone remained - though what it actually means is quite another matter and most people have never thought about it. What it usually means to those who snarl it is, 'I am going to do what I want and nobody is allowed to say anything against it, in fact the kind of people that might dare say something are thus proved automatically bad'. Because everyone being self-centred is virtuous, and the only real sin is asking others to limit their selfishness and show some consideration.

This developed apace in the 1960s with the Hippy emphasis on 'doing your own thing'. The unworkable but common idea that we should all think mainly of ourselves and let everyone else do the same, in the fantasy a compassionate society will come about by magic, can only lead to one kind of 'society' - a society that doesn't really exist.

But Jesus was no petulant Middle Class egotist playing at selling Socialist Worker (and I have met a few of that type over the years). His teachings about Justice and God's Law are tough medicine and one can't even begin to understand the power of his challenge to worldly authority unless one has tried a thousand times harder to live a moral and socially aware life than most of our angry toddlers ever have. We can't become as a little child until we have grown up; until then we are just - childish. And without enough adults around, the human race doesn't stand much of a chance.

So if you don't like what I've just said...f*** you!!
Only joking, my very best wishes. Learn from all things and know for yourselves. But above all, don't be too proud to hold out for courtesy.

Wednesday 29 May 2013

Darling Kore - Or, Discovering Greek Myth In A Folk Song

Many of my favourite musicians were signed to Chris Blackwell's Island label. Among several I will mention the Incredible String Band and Nick Drake. Chris Blackwell was a visionary in promoting singer-songwriters at the time this musical movement was flourishing. The Beatles had popularised the idea that pop artists should write their own songs; Bob Dylan had shown that pop song could be a kind of lyrical poetry informed by folk tradition and pervaded with political and visionary meaning. Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and a thousand others then brought intimate acoustic music to a mass audience. One of the best of Island's acts in the early 1970s happens to have been my uncle Bryn Haworth, a fine guitarist and a slide guitar virtuoso who combined a solo career with a busy second strand as an in-demand session-man.

As a result I was lucky to hear some fine music as a young boy and also gained a lifelong love for the mandolin which Bryn occasionally played when not wailing the blues. One song I'm sure I liked at a young age was Bryn's countryish version of the traditional song Darling Cory, arranged in a gutsy country/folk stomp with low-strung guitars, banjo and Fairport Convention as the backing band! (Dave Mattacks' drums are particularly recognisable). Hearing this song again 30 years later I was struck by something I have observed over and over again with durable songs, particularly folk songs that stick in the imagination, as if one had always known them. As that wonderful information resource Wikipedia says, Darling Cory "is a well-known song about love, loss and moonshine". It exists in various versions. The final verse, in Bryn's version, goes
"Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow
Dig a hole down in the ground
Gonna take my darlin' Cory
Gonna lay her body down
Now she roams in the mountains
And the valley down below
The devil took my darlin' Cory
And he will not let her go
I hear him singing...singing

Students of Greek mythology will know why I almost fell over listening to this again. There is an ancient story, versions of which appear in many old tales, of a young girl who is abducted by the Lord of the Underworld. In other words, she dies. The story was already ancient by the time of ancient Greece, but in the most famous Greek version of the tale, Perspephone, the daughter of the Earth Mother Demeter, is abducted by Hades or Pluto who comes up into the meadow through a cleft in the ground and steals here away. Demeter grieves and thus the Earth stops producing food. Although Persephone was later rescued, she ate pomegranate in the Underworld which meant she had partaken of its substance. The result is that it was decreed she must spend half the year above ground and half the year below. This is why the Earth has seasons of growth and withering, birth and death.

Persephone's other name is Kore meaning Maiden. Kore is pronounced much like Cory, and attributes of Hades the Lord of the Underworld were transferred to the later Christian conception of the devil (which did not really exist in Judaism in the same way). Translating ancient Greek myth into country idiom, the Devil really did take Darling Kore away!

The story of a process of corruption which leads to a beautiful young girl being snatched away whether the Greek Kore or Darling Cory in the 20th Century folk song will not cease to haunt the imagination. Another famous example from Greek myth is that of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus was the great musician of Ancient Greece, the original singer-songwriter guitarist, the lyre player whose music so enchanted listeners that stones moved and animals became mild. Orpheus' bride Eurydice danced through a meadow on their wedding day, but she died after stepping on a serpent. (You will remember that the serpent and the woman's foot are also linked in the Bible). Orpheus descended to the very Underworld, charmed and moved even its grim rulers and almost brought Eurydice back to life. There are multiple versions of the legend, but in the one made famous by Virgil, Orpheus made the mistake of looking back to check Eurydice was behind him, on the very brink of the return to the Underworld, and so she slipped away and this time forever.

Some early Christians were also devotees of Orpheus and there is iconography why shows the composite Orpheus-Christ motif, appropriate to the beautiful singer and mover of hearts who descended to the Underworld.

My uncle Bryn has been a born-again Christian for his entire solo career which doubtless has meant that people judge his music on these grounds. Being a Christian is not necessarily a 'career move' in the world of rock and roll! But music is a spiritual calling with its own laws. To judge the Spirit with the mind is folly, for 'the heart has reasons which the reason does not understand' - and this goes for all forms of prejudice which close the ears and the heart to the single letters of the Word revealed throughout the World. Song has its own logic which comes directly from the Spirit. Never trust an angry wordsman over one whose voice rings true. New truth comes to light with time but there are also stories that have always been told, will always be told. The journey through the Underworld through death and rebirth is one, and I will describe another song about this in a future blog, called The Cruel Mother.

The Song is Eternal and Everywhere. But do we know the Singer?

Things that make my blood boil: Anti-semitism

At the instigation of a friend this morning, I've been reflecting on the poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen and, as sometimes happened, inspiration led to anger. In my professional life I work in politics. I am a public policy officer for a church, which means that I campaign on social justice issues. This never ceases to amaze me as I am an eccentric Christian with a deep distrust of the political system and of institutional religion, basically a kind of Green, New Age christian anarchist. With an anarchist's ingrained mistrust of party political rhetoric I find it hard to be self-righteous as it is so obvious that the more confident people are, the more likely they are to be wrong and the more agressively righteous and self-congratulatory, the more likely they are to be a danger to humanity. I know my feelings are very often *just* my feelings and I cannot prove I am right; I can only invite you into discussion with me.

I am not very politically-correct! One reason for this is that I notice that people who are always policing others' morals and accusing others of being 'racist' etc are very often horrible people personally, and those who go on about how much they hate 'fascists' are usually deeply supressive people who say derogatory things about the working classes in private and do not believe in democracy. I have observed this too often to believe it's a coincidence. Of course equality and social justice are infinitely worth fighting for, but just as it is often those with psychological flaws that end up ruling because of their desire to dominate, it is, ahem, not unknown for those working out their psychological problems through politics to end up as social justice campaigners. And to circulate political memes on Facebook. Legislating for 'good behaviour', policing people's thoughts and insisting that people are punished for not being nice are sad signs of a lack of faith in love and people's natural goodness. These are people who long for centralised power with which to control people's actions.

But in my line of work, not much is said about anti-semitism. One of the bizarre but often demonstrated reasons for this seems to be that not a few on the Left have a visceral dislike of Jewish people. This is covered over by the self-righteousness of 'I am a left liberal, no one is allowed to accuse *me* of racism. That is the weapon *I* use to attack *others* and silence them with'! Such people often attempt to court Muslim good-will while indulging their anti-semitic inclinations, without seeing that the problems faced by Muslims are those that have been faced by Jewish people. Often it doesn't take long for generalised discussion of 'Jews' to lead to disturbing comments about wealthy banking elites, international conspiracies, and before you know it you are listening to the (fake) Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other neo-medieval horrors.

Anti-semitism! To me it is the most inexplicable virus of the mind in human history. Left-wingers often misuse the word 'prejudice': for the grievances and dangerous grudges between different kinds of people are often not prejudice, but rather the raw anger of the unsophisticated, bad feeling, the desire for vengeance and redress that must eventually turn into reconciliation. But anti-semitism is - apart from its wrong-headed bigotry that has become genocide on a scale of millions and is never to be forgotten - a genuine prejudice. Europe has been served by Jewish people far more than it has served them. So this is a sign of a kind of madness beyond even malice as ordinarily understood.

The very religion of Europe's last 2000 years is a Jewish revelation - or heresy depending who you ask. And yet the history of Christianity is the history of marginalising the Jewish background to Christianity. Spiritual Christianity is incomprehensible without the Kabbalah and indeed the Talmud and Midrash. To get a genuine feeling for Jesus, listen to the Canadian Jewish (Buddhist!) poet Leonard Cohen, especially songs like Suzanne. Or read the mystical writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan, an Indian Sufi combining Eastern and Semitic inspiration and remember the deep shared roots of Judaism and Islam. You will find more of the spirit of Jesus there than in the professed spiritual leadership of North Europe or America. Thus will the Abrahamic faiths find reconciliation to the blessing of the whole world.

So many of the world's greatest musicians, writers, philosophers, scientists and mystics have been Jewish. In fact for my money the most talented people in the Western world have been Russians and Jews, with Russian Jews absurdly over-represented!

I do not want to talk about Nazism. But I do want to reflect on why certain people project their own soul-failings onto Jewish people. Firstly Christians: there have always been a healthy proportion of guilt-mongering, self-righteous Christians. After Hitler's holocaust, Christendom was never again going to be complacent about its 'righteousness', its assumed privilege to make others wrong, or its unacknowleged anti-semitism. So campaigning against Israel and Zionism all too easily becomes a psychological mechanism - see, Jewish people are bad (or 'bad too'); I can get away with saying this and *they* can stop making me feel guilty for being a Christian. A classic example of self-important ego inflation and megalomania being at the roots of guilt. For all Israel's problems, Jewish people have observed that Christians are particularly quick to criticise Israel for things they tolerate in other countries or indeed in their own lands. This is true.


Then there are the conspiracy theorists - ironically this trope of far-right fundamentalist paranoia has been adopted by many the Left and again it is a guilt-compensation mechanism that obscures the truth. For the truth is that a wealthy elite does indeed run the world: but it is ludicrous to suggest this has anything to do with a 'Jewish' conspiracy. Rather, materialism and power run the show, with the implicit collusion of those who use unadmitted anti-semitism to avoid seeing that is people just like them who rule the world, with a rather similar psychology indeed. It is easier to speak of Jews or paranoid delusions of 'reptilian shape-shifters' than to admit that one is envious of the global elite that control the world. And also to admit that while moaning about the Bilderberg Group, they are personally the best off and most privileged genereration that has ever lived. How easy to revive conspiracy theory: much easier than helping the poor or putting oneself to any inconvenience, or admitting that one *likes* the status quo and feels guilty.

Various archetypes and images have been projected onto Jewish people throughout history. Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew is one - but then as Jesus said 'Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay hid head'. The Jewish people before, during and after Jesus life, have generally been denied a place to lay their head. The cliched insults hurled at Jewish people - words like cunning, avaricious, insular - are actually distinguishing marks of humanity, intelligence and culture misconstrued through envy and bad faith. Those in denial of humanity or filled with self-hatred insult Judaism to insult themselves. Those who love humanity will always give the Jews special recognition for what they have given humanity. Egypt, Babylon, Ancient Greece have fallen, but the Jewish people have preserved their culture, their wisdom within their own unique identity.

Yet of all archetypes we see in Jewish history, Job stands out. Afflicted, tested, tormented, abandoned, he never loses faith nor yet does he deny a jot of his reality. Humanity is Job. And we ache for our fallen brothers and sisters, those who have fallen before reaching the Promised Land. And we love our fellow humans with whom we rejoice and suffer, live and die in this corporeal world. This compassion is spiritual yet deeply somatic, of blood, bones and skin. Our heart faints within us in expectation.

"But the skylight is like skin for a drum I'll never mend
and all the rain falls down amen
on the works of last year's man"
Leonard Cohen, Last Year's Man

Shalom.

Friday 10 May 2013

A Concert That Changed My Life Forever - Carl Nielsen's Fifth Symphony

I have never really recovered from a concert I heard in my teenage years. I hope I never will. In a world where the media mostly report war, political lies or drivel about vacuous celebrities, I think it's important to remember that there is such a thing as excellence. There are emotions such as wonder, selflessness and bliss. There are scientists, artists, explorers and mystics who catch moments of greatness, luminous and evanescent like motes of dust in a sunbeam. Like dandelion seeds floating unseen in the void. Like stars floating in the radiant darkness, blown by the lips of the Unseen. There is music that is worth living for, even dying for.

Because I ended up playing the Double-Bass, which led to playing in youth orchestras, my mother (bless her) often took me to concerts at the Barbican music hall which had and has excellent acoustics. I was lucky that I didn't own many records, which meant I frequently heard great pieces of music for the first time played by world-class orchestras. This is a rare privilege in our over-saturated age of canned music.

One evening around 1987 my mum booked a concert  featuring two 20th Century composers I had never heard of. In the first half was a strange, unsettlingly modern piece by the Hungarian composer Ligeti. At that age, I had no knowledge of 'modern' classical music, i.e. atonal or challenging sounds without melody or Romanticism. The Ligeti was ok: I didn't really get it, but my ears felt refreshed by listening to something different from the normal cliched popular favourites. We decided to give Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) ago, never having heard of him.

45 minutes later, I staggered out of the concert hall not quite able to describe what had just happened. My mother noted that she saw grown men in tears, but that they looked like 'nice men'. A couple of days later I went and bought a book about Nielsen by the leading British composer Robert Simpson, which was deeply reflective and introduced me to the idea that one can write about music as a philosophy, a code and even a reason for living. Nielsen had had this effect on Simpson - and, as I later discovered, on Sir Simon Rattle as a young boy. He is just unclassifiable - modern music as it should have been.

The 14 year old boy felt the hush descend on the audience, then a wavering, oscillating violin line. Interesting. Mysterious wind chords twined around each other. Lower strings entered, and by now we were in a new sound world. Far from strident dissonance or manipulative effects, I was hearing pure sound, pure harmony. I was enthralled. The music flowed on, utterly gripping and full of tense drama. Suddenly the mood moved towards a change to a sinister war march. The music sounded Russian, gripping, as if the composer both hated war and felt its excitement and remorseless imperative. The intensity faded and then...the most exquisite and joyful polyphony, calm, invincible and mighty, as I later read in Robert Simpson, an impossible fusion of the perfect structure of Bach and the dramatic power of Beethoven. But it had a joy and conviction all of its own. Suddenly the tension builds as the dark and sinister tendrils of music re-entered.

And then something unimaginable. The snare drum, which had played military rolls before, suddenly started improvising, deafeningly loud over the joyous, glorious and sad music. An out and out war between the massed orchestra and the snare drum led to a chaos where the drum and the orchestra were destroying yet mysteriously enhancing each other. Finally the drum was carried along with the sun radiant melody as the music died away into a wistful, desolately victorious clarinet solo, full of warmth and loneliness. It sounded like one DNA strand of music had evolved into a beautiful tree of music, fractally showing the original shoot. 

Then the second movement - in a different and bright key, full of wildly free energy, moving somewhere, forward to more glorious melody (including - to my surprise the theme tune from Star Wars, which John Williams evidently pinched from Nielsen) leading through a chilly, arch and fiendishly virtuosic section of Bach like fugal writing. Once again the tension and excitement built to the final section where I realised that I and the entire audience were utterly transfixed, floating in an altered state and held to the music until the impossibly glorious happy-sad fanfares of brass finished this unique 2 movement symphony in a blaze of light.

Over the next few days, I experienced various emotions. One was a barely articulate realisation that this symphony was about something - that its triumph included pain, that life was beyond trivial feelings of pleasant and unpleasant. Another was that this was obviously the greatest symphony of the 20th Century and why was Nielsen not better known - my first education in the inadequacies of popular and critical judgement. Later it became obvious that this was a direct response to World War One and that the gunfire like snare drum evoked the senseless horror of that war, without the usual nafness of programmatic music. When I began to study Nielsen, I realised how he used emergent tonality - rather than sticking to one key, his later music developed from one tonal centre to others, giving his music a unique sense of dynamism. He was also vastly proficient in the older techniques of polyphony and counterpoint and by blending these with his own innovations he proved that there were other ways forward for classical music than the willful ugliness and posturing of much atonal music.

I was lucky that one of my school teachers happened to have a large collection of Classical vinyl and lent me what turns out to have been one of the great recordings of Nielsen's Fifth Symphony - Paavo Berglund's 1970s recording with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. I have listened to this piece many times over the succeeding 25 years and every time I still have the same reaction. Most music has an element of self-consciousness - we get clicked out of the zone by a mannerism, a sense that the player or writer is 'doing' something. It is very rare for 40 minutes of music to grip the listener from start to finish. This isn't entertainment - it is the actual, raw force of life beyond sentiment. It is life which is, as Nielsen said, inextinguishable.

My other musical revelation of that year was discovering The Beatles. An old cassette of Abbey Road lying around the house - and like Nielsen, whether you liked their songs or not, the pure sound of their music was amazing. The Avatar light of Here Comes The Sun; the dark black hole inferno of I Want You / She's So Heavy. I later realised there is a direct line between the great Classical composers who reintroduced folk modes in the early 20th Century like Nielsen, Bartok and Vaughan Williams and the 1960s phenomenon of (particularly)  British folk-pop-rock. It revolves around the interval of the 7th. Come back to my blog at a later date to hear more about my discoveries and how they relate to Eastern music.

Friday 12 April 2013

Classical Music or Death - on hearing Francis Poulenc

Last night I went to a wonderful concert of music by the French composer Poulenc at London's Southwark Cathedral. I'll come back to the concert later, but what I really want to talk about is the pervasive effect of music in modern society. And what has been lost.

Classical music is the best thing that Western civilisation has produced - above all, it is the finest flowering of Christianity, from medieval monastic plainchant to Bach to the astonishing Francis Poulenc. For real Christianity is less about theological dogmas than about sound - The Word made Flesh worshipped through ringing sound, the choir of voices united in worship, the ecstasy of soaring to heaven on transcendent tone. In fact this goes back to the roots of European civilisation in the mysteries of Apollo and Orpheus, which is why Christ was often compared with Orpheus, the sacred musician who can charm and move all things with the music of his lyre.

Yet in England music, like so many other things, has been made a subject of class war. I owe almost everything in my life to the lucky coincidence that led to me taking up a musical instrument and discovering classical music. I have played rock and pop in my musical past, but my favourite kinds of music are folk and classical (and jazz which in many ways is an African American form of classical music). My blood boils at the idea that privileged snobbery and militant class hatred often combine to deprive British people of this wonderful, life saving gift of music. Pop music has its place, but there is just no argument - classical music is better, more important.

Listening to harmonious music positively affects the brain, and not just the brain but the soul as a whole. Learning a genuine musical instrument that makes a real sound is one of the best things a person can do for their happiness and spiritual development. Not all children take to music lessons, and forcing piano lessons on children may do more harm than good, but parents give an incalculable gift in offering the opportunity of a musical education, especially if its based on joy rather than pushy ambition.

And here's the appalling truth. Everyday, we are soaked in disharmonious vibrations. You see people listening to angry music with jarring beats, which makes them angrier. Their bodies twitch, their heart rates race. Cars play music so loud that windows rattle. Commuters with headphones on listening to music that insulates them from the ugly city - yet they become disconnected and allow the city to become even uglier.

We underrate music. It gets 'under the skin', especially repetitious music; it changes your moods, the cycles of your nervous system, your hormonal secretions. Indian yoga uses Mantra, the repetition of sacred sounds that attune yogis to divine vibrations. Many traditional peoples use drumbeats to induce trance - and because so much of modern pop music is rooted in African American traditions, rhythmic, repetitive beats with an ancient link to trance and magic have become part of our global listening experience.

Repetition and devotion to spiritual beings through changing our neurology are natural parts of our human heritage. But they can be abused. From military music used to create the desire for war to jingles to worm into consumers' brains and make them buy things they don't need. And above all the endless message of pop music - be a materialist individual, saying 'fuck you' to anyone that challenges your selfishness.

Modern pop music is mostly either repetitive and moronically hypnotic, or it is jagged paranoid and expresses and furthers urban alienation; and of course bland love songs - which are really sex songs - abound. It is hardly surprising that large numbers of people have almost no attention span, no ability to concentrate and dwindling empathy. If more people learned a musical instrument and learned to listen, crime would decrease and people's happiness and even productivity would increase. More importantly, they would be free - we are either dancing to our own tune, or being moved like marionettes on strings by the covert forces that choose what vibrations our society will be flooded in.

As a generally miserable teenager, I was lucky to play some amazing classical music in youth orchestras. One piece that changed my life was Francis Poulenc's organ concerto. Poulenc (1899-1963) was a French composer of that generation that blended modern music of the French tradition with the new atonal tendencies, as well as jazz, which had a European centre in 1920s Paris. His mercurial temperament, wonderful gift for melody, sensibility affected by his homosexuality and his rediscovery of his Catholic faith combine to make his works endlessly surprising, satisfying and refreshing, full of an endearing humour. Sometimes, as with the organ concerto, there is also tragedy and an soul-filled elegeic mood that more boring and serious composers with heavy souls cannot approach.

The City of London Symphonia conducted by Stephen Layton, did a grand job. Opening with Poulenc's engaging Les Animaux Modeles, the organ concerto closed the first half, a thrilling ride despite the challenge posed by the acoustics of Southwark Cathedral. The second half was opened by Ravel's Pavane pour une infante defunte, played with stately elegance before closing with the astonishing Gloria and the astonishing and beautiful soprano Elizabeth Watts.

We have become too addicted to music that makes a statement or is a narcotic for the disintegrating contemporary psyche - usually the statement is full of ego, ambition and a kind of soulless concentration on form. Witness the ruthless perfection of the dance routines that accompany contemporary pop videos. Listening to Poulenc last night my heart ached for all that Europe has lost, destroyed by the combined forces of Fascism and Communism which in fact won World War 2 and from whose reign we struggle to escape. The roots of Europe are our folk tradition, our good paganism, our good Christianity and our commitment to a society which balances the needs of the individual with the good of the community.

It is time to clean out our ears, open our hearts and refresh our souls.