#tom service

[nonesuchrecords]

“A musician who renews every tradition she touches, from banjos to fiddling to bluegrass to classical and now to opera,” BBC Radio 3 Music Matters presenter Tom Service says of his guest Rhiannon Giddens. They talk about her opera with Michael Abels, Omar, which just won the Pulitzer Prize, and her upcoming album, You’re the One, due August 18. You can hear their conversation here.

[lone-rhapsodist]

‘Searching for a solution that would connect his emotional, musical and spiritual lives together, Pärt, at a loss for inspiration, went outside into the snow one morning and asked the cleaner: "What should a composer do?" "Well, he should love every note," was the reply. "No professor had ever told me something like that," Pärt said, and this single sentence crystallised his thinking. He realised that to really love every note, to really understand the connections between even a tiny handful of musical pitches, could be the source of lifetime of composition and contemplation.’

-- Tom Service, Composer Arvo Pärt: Behind the beard (The Guardian, 6/1/2011)

[nonesuchrecords]

"He's someone who has the gift to turn complex music and ideas into dazzlingly communicative performances and prose," BBC Radio 3's Saturday Morning host Tom Service says of his guest, Jeremy Denk, "in his fascinating memoir, Every Good Boy Does Fine ... and above all in his approach to all the music he plays, from Bach partitas to Mozart concertos to Charles Ives." You can hear their conversation as well as music from his 2021 album of Mozart piano concertos with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra—"fantastic embodiments of his freedom as a performer"—and an exclusive first play from his upcoming Ives album from 39 minutes in here.

[nonesuchrecords]

Steve Reich’s 1988 piece Different Trains is the subject of this week's episode of BBC Radio 3's The Listening Service. Host Tom Service shares music from Kronos Quartet's 1988 Nonesuch recording of the piece, which won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition, and talks with author/journalist Jonathan Freedland about creating such art that addresses the Holocaust. You can hear the episode here.

[nonesuchrecords]

Jeremy Denk is on BBC Radio 3's The Listening Service. He joins host Tom Service at the Hay Festival for an exploration of the cadenza, with examples from Freddie Mercury, John Coltrane, and Denk's own Mozart Piano Concertos album with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra—as well a live performance for the show. You can hear it here.

[nonesuchrecords]

"At its heart, the reason I started music is because I just loved it so much," Caroline Shaw tells Tom Service on BBC Radio 3's Music Matters. "It hits you in that little place in your gut where it's like nothing else matters. I just want to keep making the thing that keeps me going." You can hear their conversation here.

[mrdirtybear]

BBC Radio 3 presenter Tom Service, presenter of ‘The Listening Service’ looking cooler than usual whilst listening to Rachmaninov from here.

[dothemusicblog]

Tinglesmiths / Classics For Pleasure

About a week ago, I watched a short film of the Radio 3 presenter Tom Service listening to the final few minutes of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. The clip is part of a BBC ‘iWonder’ guide entitled ‘What Are The ‘Tingles’ We Feel When Listening To Music’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zx6sfg8). As the music plays, Service tries to explain the effect it is having on his brain and body. Elsewhere in the guide, there is a list of the kinds of physiological changes the body can undergo when listening to music which moves us: ‘Skin conductance increases, your hair might stand on end, the heart speeds up, body temperature decreases, we breathe faster. Tingles - or chills - happen at the highest moments of musical pleasure.’ The author assumes that everyone has experienced tingles when listening to music. I certainly have, and have often heard others talk about music which sends a shiver down the spine. I’ve never before stopped to consider when or how the tingles affect me, though.

Unlike Tom Service, the Immolation Scene from the end of the Ring Cycle has never triggered tingles for me, even though this is music I find very powerful. It tends not to be this kind of sustained, crowning conclusion which does it for me. Rather, moments of tranquility - however brief - seem more likely to set me off:

(From around 7’30” onwards)

The passage of glittering horn and harp serenity towards the end of the first movement of La Mer is one such moment. As often seems to be the case, the tingle starts in the few seconds just before this section, as I look forward to the music I particularly love. In this next example, the chill-inducing serene moment follows several minutes of louder, more tortured music:

(From around 27′50″ onwards)

While the La Mer excerpt tends to trigger just one ‘pulse’ of tingles, here the effect can continue past ‘Noe From The Waters’ into the tenor’s ethereal ‘Novissima Hora Est.’ (1)

This next clip seems to belong in another category:

In the opening bars of this slow movement, the music unfolds gradually, naturally, like a time-lapse film of a blooming flower (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjCzPp-MK48). Here, I can feel the tingle build, and finally ‘boil over’ at the gentle mini-climax at 28”. This kind of ‘blooming’ opening is common in early choral music, where voices often enter one by one. This fabulous 8-voice piece from the Eton Choirbook doesn’t quite work like that, but I include it here because it ‘triggered’ me a couple of days ago:

I could continue with further examples, which may or may not do anything for you. For instance, the steady tread of the opening of Schumann’s 2nd Symphony chilled me yesterday (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O58OkBRLek - does this belong in another tingle category altogether?), as did Purcell’s two-minute composed crescendo ‘Hear My Prayer, O Lord’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdayjljz_Sw). All of this may give the impression that I’m a finely-tuned tingle machine, primed to go off at the drop of a B flat. I’m sure I’m not - sometimes the tingles come and sometimes they don’t. The pieces mentioned above don’t always have the desired effect; they are just examples with a decent success rate. 

Curiously, I honestly can’t remember experiencing tingles in a concert hall. Perhaps I tend to feel inhibited. I’m aware that, at ‘peak tingle’ moments at home, I want to move my head and body, probably in a way that would annoy fellow concertgoers (see here: http://www.sinfinimusic.com/uk/features/other-features/gillian-moore-southbank-centre-alternative-classical-concert-etiquette-rules-september-2015). This does, though, point up the modern-day oddness of much of my classical listening. Playing these YouTube clips at home now, I’m wearing noise-cancelling headphones (which seem to heighten the tingles), and have access to around a thousand years of music at the touch of a few buttons. Standing back a little, the idea of travelling through time, quickly and easily searching for my next pleasurable tingle fix is pretty staggering. With this in mind, it was interesting to listen to the interview with Professor Lawrence Parsons in the ‘iWonder’ guide. Parsons, a professor of cognitive neuroscience, suggests that: ‘Modern day people can sit in a room by themselves and think that they’re having a personal experience but they’re not. They forget that some group of people or somebody made that music and they’re implicitly still involved with that.... they’re simulating a social event with musicians.’ To try to see and hear my wallfuls of CDs as a vast, endlessly complex web of composers, performers and listeners drawing on shared experiences, rather than as rows of discrete objects to be taken down, compared and returned to the shelf is a potentially rewarding challenge to me as a frequent, sometimes unthinking listener.  

BUT/AND,

as well as leading me to consider what’s involved in the creation, performance and reception of my listening diet (music from farm to fork), this whole tingle exercise seems to invite a more emotional response to music, which can make me feel uncomfortable. This is partly down to personality, but is also, I think, a consequence of an academic background in music. When I AM listening hard, my brain is constantly searching for patterns, returning themes, modulations, unusual bits of orchestration, and so on. A lot of people can point out (or at least feel) these things, but years of practice tends to move them into the foreground. The academic emphasis on nuts and bolts is understandable - as I was once taught, schools and colleges deal in the observable, the provable and the teachable (a thesis entitled ‘Brahms Gives Me Goosebumps And I Don’t Know Or Care Why’ is probably a non-starter). It’s interesting, though, to reflect on the idea of developing a greater flexibility in my listening, perhaps to avoid the diminishing returns of becoming set in my musical ways. Sitting with a score, ears wide open, will always fascinate me. For the next little while, though, I might try to lower the emotional barriers, have a bit of a wallow, and enjoy a few more tingles.

(Part 2: http://dothemusicblog.tumblr.com/post/130690178689/tinglesmiths-ii-footnote-confession)