Sound and Music

Historians, like novelists, are in the business of telling stories. But one of the most difficult things about telling stories is knowing when the story starts. How can you write about a war without delving into the run-up to it? And what about the lead-in to the run-up? How far back do you go? A biography usually needs some account of the parents of the subject - but grandparents as well?

Composers can't afford to have thin skins, or they might get their vanity pricked. As William Walton once found at the hands of Lord Berners.
 

On Wednesday night the Purcell Room hosted a concert to mark 10 years of Chamber Music 2000, the scheme started by the Schubert Ensemble to commission and propagate new chamber music for student ensembles.

Music, like all performed arts, relies on an unspoken contract between performer and audience that pretends everything is happening spontaneously.

Is Classical Music Marginalised in the Cultural Conversation?
 

I am not normally an ‘early adopter’ of technology, but I became part of a small fraternity when I started using the music notation software Sibelius in early 1997. At the time you had to buy a special Acorn computer to run it as it was not available on other platforms.

I’m re-arranging my CDs, and trying to think of a non-alphabetical system.
 
Borges wrote of a (fictional) Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which all animals are divided into the following categories:

I watched BBC4’s For Art’s Sake: The Story of the Ballets Russes on Friday night. The company, created and sustained until his death by the impressario Sergei Diaghilev, was central to the story not only of ballet, but of music and theatrical design, in the last century.

Erik Satie emerged every morning from his tiny rented room in Arceuil, on the outskirts of Paris, dressed exquisitely in a velvet suit of which he owned an identical dozen, bought in the early 1890s with an inheritance. His dapper appearance was matched in his correspondence – even the most trivial note written in flawless copperplate, and in his painstaking music notation.

I have never played in, or conducted, the Rite of Spring and never expect to, but this week I did the next best thing - the Philharmonia Orchestra's Re-Rite installation in London.