Australian organ music

Below the jump is an article I wrote earlier in the year for Organ Australia.  I've agreed to undertake a series of articles on the contents of The Southern Cross Collection, an anthology of organ pieces by local composers that arose out of a competition the Society of Organists (Victoria) held in 2008.  It was my privilege to play the first performance of the piece under review here.  This article was the first installment in the series; I'll be posting the second installment in a couple of weeks' time, when the June Organ Australia is out.

How to make plainchant work in a church service

One of the conversations that keeps coming up whenever I play for a funeral in a church is the frustration that so many clergy feel about the quality of the music in their regular services.

To take a random example, a perennial discussion I seem to get sucked into is that seemingly endless collective tantrum that is Catholic parish music.  I have long concluded that it would be better to stop thrashing such a dead horse -- the view that congregations must always sing something, anything at practically every Sunday mass.  This view usually cites various documents in the abstract without actually dealing with what the very items recommend, or demand.

About twelve months ago I was invited to attend a music committee meeting in one of the Catholic parishes where I occasionally play for mass.  An earnest gathering was warned by the music coordinator that something must be done to settle a steady repertoire of hymnody for the parish, sufficient to allow a reliable range of default music for the congregation.  This was after I remarked that the selection I saw on one week in the month seemed a bit narrow and failed to take account of the season.  I suggested that it might be more worthwhile to concentrate on singing the mass itself, rather than getting side tracked by hymnody.

These conversations, which are well-meant and arise out of sincere motives, miss the point.  So many Catholics cite "Vatican 2" in the abstract to say that things must be the way they are (which is to say, the Council Fathers seemingly decided music must henceforth be inadequate, always and everywhere).  Even a cursory glance at the documents of that Council, not to mention a host of other writings from the preceding century, suggests that the current hymn sandwich approach is far from ideal.  Looking further afield, Anglican music hasn't fallen over anywhere as spectacularly in the last 50 years, even where the Novus Ordo reigns supreme.  It would be better for Catholics to start with their own tradition if they want to find a way out of the rut of solemn low mass.

I'd like to focus here for a few paragraphs on introducing movements of the ordinary.  I have introduced movements of plainchant masses at each of the parishes where I have worked over the last few years.  Admittedly, I've phased them in during Advent and Lent, leading to the impression that they were a penance(!), but after they'd been mastered they became part of the ferial sound world as well.  This might help to explain my modus operandi.

My approach has rested on two pillars.  First, there needs to be a competent cantor, or a small group, that can lead the singing.  So many parishes spend valuable resources flying in cantors, who range in ability from cranks to geniuses.  It would be better to have three or four people who could collectively carry it off.  As a small group gets more confident, individuals become more willing to do short solos.  Better yet, a small group that makes a good sound, clearly enjoys the work they're doing and operates in a welcoming and affirming way, they will soon become a larger group.  Singers attract more singers.

Secondly, the chant really must be accompanied using the organ.  It is better to teach by ear, capitalising on the inherent call-and-response structure of items such as the Kyrie and Agnus Dei as a starting point.  The Sanctus can always be introduced using the echo method as well.  After a couple of weeks these short movements are usually part of the furniture enough to just jump straight in.  When two or three settings of these shorter movements have been mastered, only then is it time to move on with a Gloria or Credo to complete a cycle of mass movements.

There are several very fine collections of accompaniments for the ordinary of the mass, many of them available for free download.  Some useful resources can be found here and here.  Most congregants feel too exposed singing without some accompaniment.  In an Anglican parish, the simpler mass chants work well when approached this way, although they must be used in adapted forms to accommodate singing in English.  There are resources on the web that provide chant adapted to English words.  Pre-existing accompaniments can be adapted to fit these quite readily.

If music must be handed out, let it be transcribed into modern notation.  Purists might baulk, but the congregation must not be left floundering with a foreign style of notation if they are expected to join in.


Every time I get stuck in a discussion about Catholic parish music, I suggest this.  The response is invariable -- too hard, nobody wants to sing chant, and the organist isn't good enough to accompany it.  The fact is that some chants are harder than others, but, for example, Mass XI offers a straightforward setting that most people get to like fairly rapidly.  You don't have to start with the most difficult chants at the outset.  Most people outside the church think that plainchant is what we sing, and that's a factor that seems to be pretty blind to denominational differences.  And if your organist can hack their (mostly un-rhythmic, largely anti-musical) way through four hymns and selected movements of the parish's default mass setting, they might get something out of learning how to accompany chant.  Who knows, they may even enjoy it while improving their game...

What a day!

Saturday was a big day.  Let's call it a tale of two concert halls.

I played for a graduation at the Melbourne Town Hall, which was great fun.

I enjoy this instrument, because every time you come back to it, there's something else to find.  Moreover, of all the electric and pneumatic actions I've dealt with down the last few years, this would have to be the most responsive.

There have been some amazingly silly squabbles about this instrument in the Melbourne organ scene.  The heritage people think the rebuild / refurbishment / whatever of 2001 was a complete disaster that resulted in the destruction of the original Hill, Norman & Beard instrument of 1927.  Be that as it may, I don't think a narrowly regulated restoration would have enhanced the organ's integrity as a musical instrument.  What really galls me is that some people on this side of the argument refuse to even attend concerts here, as if their presence would somehow register as endorsement of the work.  It really tells more about their estimation of themselves than the quality of the instrument.  I could go on, but...

The graduation finished -- and that with a bang, or at least the Widor Toccata -- I whizzed up the hill to East Melbourne to attend the first concert of the year with the Australian Youth Choir at the Dallas Brooks Centre.  I've been working for the AYC this year, and it's been quite an experience.  It's a very big organization at the national level, and Victoria has a very large choir.  The concert went off very well; a few parents from my rehearsal centre said hi as they passed me in the foyer on the way to collect their bundles of joy.

I've never been in the auditorium of the Dallas Brooks Centre before, although I was given a guided tour of the lodge rooms about a glacial age or two ago.  The room is surprisingly intimate, although the decor is showing its age.  There's been talk of the building being demolished, but no sign of any imminent work in that direction.  I think it would be a pity if it was taken down, as the building is quite distinctive on the outside and not entirely without its charms on the inside.

After all those weeks of telling the younger choristers that they should pay attention to good stage deportment, it was quite good to see that some of it had sunk in!  Some of the choristers I work with noticed me sitting nearby and waved frantically to get my attention.  Apart from that, they were a picture of innocence and tranquility.

The concert over, I repaired to the nearby fleshpots of Victoria Street, Richmond, for a well-earned Vietnamese soup.

Of Quires and Places where they sing

I ran an information session for the prospective children/youth choir at All Saints, Preston, today.  I've been spruiking this in the parish for a couple of months now, so it was good to see a few people from the congregation at the session.  The vicar attended, even though he had been celebrating at one of the other centres in the parish, and no doubt would have preferred to spend the hour in his garden or under a blanket in front of the television (it was a very crisp morning!).

There were about a dozen young people in attendance, with eight potential choristers.  So much energy!  It was great fun, though.

Below the jump, I've put the text of the booklet I put together for the parents and other adults attending the session.  If there's anyone out there reading this who is thinking about setting up a childrens choir from scratch, perhaps this might be of some use.  I am a great believer in making sure the structure of a presentation like this is clear; people respond much more receptively if they can see that the program will be well organized.

I'm really grateful for help from some parishioners who've volunteered to do some of the administrative work: relatively small but important things like getting attendance registration sheets filled in, general copying and folding -- the sort of thing that can consume so much energy when they have to be accomplished simultaneously.  There are so many things that require attention at the start of a big project like this, and so many maintenance tasks once it gets off the ground.  You'll see the office bearers listed at the bottom of the section below.

Each of the children who attended the session and put their name on the attendance list will be receiving a personal letter in the next day or two, inviting them to join the choir.  Rehearsals will begin in a couple of weeks' time.

Upcoming recital -- “A Little Bit of This, a Little Bit of That...”

3pm, Sunday 6 June 2010

St Gabriel’s Catholic Church, Reservoir

Programme

Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah – George F. Handel, tr. Théodore Dubois

An Air composed for Holsworthy Church Bells – Samuel Sebastian Wesley

Prelude and “St Anne” Fugue in E-flat [BWV 552] – Johann Sebastian Bach
Canon (Op. 56, No. 1)
Sketch in C Major (Op. 58, No. 2) – Robert Schumann
Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann – Edmund T. Chipp
Fantasia Chromatica, Study for Double Pedal -- Otto Olsson
Toccata from Symphony No. 5 in f minor (Op. 42, No. 1) -- Charles-Marie Widor

Entry: $5.00 at the door (no booking required)

Entry includes afternoon tea.

Music for Sunday 30 May 2010

Trinity Sunday is a marvelous feast from a musical perspective.  So many fantastic hymns, so little time in the feast.  Not to mention a good quantity of organ music exploring trinitarian themes; Bach's E-flat prelude and fugue is a firm favorite of mine that seems to make better sense of the doctrine than many sermons I've heard.  How exactly can you put a definite statement about something as inherently mysterious as the nature of the godhead into words, when by definition it lies beyond language?  This is perhaps where musical expressions like the E-flat prelude and fugue offers clarity, built out of harmonious relationships of counterpoint, style and form.  I played it in a competition a couple of years ago, and someone in the audience told me that the piece concluded at 3.33pm exactly.  You couldn't plan these things if you wanted to.

The readings for the week are linked here.

The mass setting will be Michael Dudman's Parish Eucharist (Together in Song, 756)

Hymns for the week are as follows:

Introit: Holy, holy, holy! Lord God almighty [132]
For the Psalm: O Lord, our God, how wonderful your name in all the earth [4]
Gradual: We give immortal praise [118]
Offertory: The God of Abraham praise [125]
Communion: Eternal Father, strong to save [138]

Sadly, St Patrick's Breastplate is off the menu this year.  Such a splendid hymn, but not as well-known as it should be.

Organ music at All Saints will be:

Prelude: Gloria tibi Trinitas -- J.P. Sweelinck
Postlude: "St Anne" Fugue [BWV 552] -- J.S. Bach

I'm getting into late recital preparations mode -- the concert at St Gabriel's Reservoir is at 3pm on Sunday 6 June.  If you happen to be in the area, please do come and have a listen.

Organ concerts

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage an audience.  There's a tape of one of my performances in the last couple of years where my aunt was taking care of the recording device.  She kindly informed the person sitting next to her that I have always been a showoff, right in the middle of a soft passage.  I always suspected that aunt might be a little careless around a live microphone -- now I know...

I've played a lot of organ recitals in places devoid of atmosphere, where the opportunity to breathe some life into the programme through a commentary would have made all the difference.  After all, I spend many hours learning and perfecting the repertoire; part of the process is finding out how a piece fits into the scheme of a composer's creative life, and how it relates to what else was going on.  There's plenty of material to share with the audience, which if delivered with a dash of enthusiasm will draw them into a deeper engagement with the experience.  They might even be prepared to do it again sometime.

I've been to some amazing concerts, where the music did the talking.  Equally, I've been to concerts where the written commentary was enough to provide the signposts for the audience.  I think the bottom line is that musicians are in the communications business, a fact that often goes astray among organists.  If people in the audience don't feel some level of personal connection with the performer, then they're unlikely to find even the best programme, played with the greatest skill and expertise, just a bit dry and unappetizing.

This is where my Ph.D. work is starting to intersect with my default operations as a musician.  My method has been narrative history and biography, storytelling methods par excellence.  Equally, I find that the great pieces of the organ repertoire need to be introduced to audiences anew; it's no good talking about the technicalities of period registration or performance practice if it only has the effect of making the music even more esoteric.  It's surprising how often these subjects are broached in small-town organ recitals, seldom to the benefit of the music.

So, my aim in solo organ recitals is to bring the audience on a little journey via storytelling.  I think the only way to make organ recitals viable to new audiences is to provide spoken commentary that has a firm dash of spice, emphasizing the humanity of the composers and pointing to how this makes their music relevant to listeners in the here and now.

Why textbooks matter

I've spent the last four years or so looking at music textbooks published from the middle of the nineteenth century up to recent times.  I get strange looks in cafes, on the tram or train, or just about anywhere someone is curious about what I'm reading and the cover turns up something obscure, like Ebenzer Prout's Harmony: its Theory and Practice.  If you look at the list of recent reading in the sidebar, you'll see the odd archaic music treatise pop up from time to time.

I admit to being a second hand bookshop tragic.  I also admit to a boundless interest in how people hear music, and what they think they're listening to.  This connects up to my wider habit of watching how people relate to one another, and in observing how they connect up with the institutions in which they find themselves, be they the corporate world, government departments, universities and schools or churches (the latter can be very fascinating, so long as you are out of the firing zone!).  So this is what sits behind my interest in reading dusty old volumes about disciplines such as harmony, counterpoint, canon and fugue and so on.  They are documents not only of teaching methods (a relationship-based business, if ever there was one) but they also deal with the cognitive furniture of what the authors thought their readers should pay attention to, and how it is to be understood.

I think the big change in textbooks during the last 200 years or so is the shift from treating of harmony in an applied sense -- such as realising figured basses and working with cantus firmus exercises -- to harmony in a more complicated, as Taruskin would suggest, literate sense.  Thus, with books such as C.P.E. Bach's Essay on the True Art of the Clavier and Rameau's Traite de l'Harmony, we get a more descriptive approach: to make an effective modulation, it is widely accepted to do this, to build up a fantasia, great artists do the following, and so on.  Of course, this isn't the whole picture of these treatises, but rather, just a simplified outline of the outcomes they were pursuing.

By the time we get to the 1870s, there's more concern for dealing with music as a literary art.  So we get the odd quote from symphonies by Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn, or the occasional suggestion that the pupil might go off and look at a song by Schubert.  This is at the peak of the Musikwissenschaft movement, which brought us the vast selection of monumental editions that are so indispensable for a music student these days; indeed, we're on a new trope of that movement with the shift of so many of these editions to the web via the Sibley Library and IMSLP/Petrucci library.  German textbooks show this influence quite early, where we find quotes of substantial slabs of music from Bach to Beethoven in authors such as Ludwig Bussler.

For me, the key figure in English textbooks is Ebenezer Prout (1835-1909).  We know his name more from his edition of Handel's Messiah (which almost certainly helped to keep Novello afloat for a century or more), and that rather unfortunate rhyme attributed to Hubert Parry, and to be sung to the words of Bach's great g-minor organ fugue [BWV 541]:

Old Ebenzer Prout
Is a very clever man
But he can't write fugues
Like John Sebastian

But he can't write fugues
Like John Sebastian

Prout's reputation as a teacher has been eclipsed by the subsequent turn against anything to do with Victorianism during the Edwardian and early Georgian periods; fair enough, given the monumental quality of Victorian culture.  Prout's music is almost completely forgotten, and his reputation as a composer is difficult to gauge from what is accessible to scholars at present.  His compositional activities probably didn't win him a place as one of the leading lights of the English musical renaissance, although his work as a critic was certainly influential in defining the movement.

Yet Prout's industriousness as an author of textbooks is difficult to ignore, play down and dismiss.  It is all the more remarkable given that his father was actively opposed to Prout taking up a musical career.  Prout's studies were almost entirely self-directed, in an age that still had space to admire the auto-didact (contrast to these days, where a Ph.D. has almost become de rigeur for entry into some parts of the workforce).  Over little more than a remarkable decade, starting in 1889, Prout published no fewer than seven important textbooks, beginning with Harmony.  What makes these books stand out is the sheer quantity of music quoted in score, a veritable encyclopedia of musical techniques demonstrated in application, and drawing on music that could reasonably be expected to be encountered in his readers' personal music-making and concert-going.  Prout quotes from Palestrina to Parry; his textbooks were absolutely up-to-date.

Of course, there were concerns over what Prout's ideas about harmony meant.  Being based on a hybrid of theories put forward by Alfred Day and Herman von Helmholtz, Prout ultimately argued that composers choose the intervals that allow them to make beautiful sounds.  The aesthetical principle, as Prout termed it, ultimately overruled the science of acoustics when it comes to the creative process.  Creativity in music, be it composing on paper or improvising in a disciplined way, involves a certain level of cognition, but it can't be boiled down to the application of an algorithm.  The upshot for Prout's use of compound chords as the basis of his overtone system was that some imperfectly tuned intervals had to be allowed in, because they aren't perceived as out of tune in the practical application of harmony.  In a revised edition of Harmony, Prout ultimately jettisoned the scientific basis of his harmony theory and admitted that the aesthetical principle was all that really matters.

Moreover, Prout only gave figured bass exercises for his pupil-reader to use for learning about harmony.  Fair enough; to have done something else would have left his books without a market.  Figured bass was such an engrained feature of English music teaching that it would have been foolhardy not to include it.

So this is a nutshell thought of why I think music textbooks are important as historical documents, and why Ebenezer Prout is a figure of considerable fascination to me.  It's all about how we think about music, where the ideas have come from, and where they may yet take us.  As Prout himself put it:

Truth is many sided; and no writer on harmony is justified in saying that his views are the only correct ones, and that all others are wrong.

Music for Sunday 23 May 2010

This week it is Pentecost.  Happy birthday to the Church, as the saying goes.  How many churches around the world will be bedecked with red balloons this week?

Sunday is something of an anniversary for me, as it will be 12 months since I first played at All Saints.  I was deputizing for a colleague who was himself undertaking a locum, and quickly found myself recruited.  The rest is history.



The readings for the week are linked here.


The mass setting for the week is Philip Mathias' Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757).

Hymns for the week are as follows (all numbers refer to Together in Song):

Introit: Come, Holy Spirit, our souls inspire [396]
For the Psalm: Send forth your Spirit, O Lord [65]
Gradual: Come thou Holy Spirit [tune, 212]
Offertory: Come down, O Love divine [398]
Communion: Holy Spirit, come confirm us [413]

The choir will be singing the communion chant from the American Gradual this week.  They've really come along very well, given that plainchant only came into the repertoire during this past Lent.

Organ music at All Saints will be:

Prelude: Veni Creator Spiritus -- Hieronymus Praetorius
Postlude: Fugue [BWV 540] -- J.S. Bach

Making your customers feel like patrons

We need a musical Jacques Derrida to decode the way in which ambient music is selectively used in our culture to achieve the desired mood in targeted consumers. We need to know why it is that certain kinds of music are appropriate for precision environments where money is to exchange hands—how the choice of that music unlocks the urge to consume. Why does a given social gathering point—a store or a restaurant or any other kind of place where people congregate and become potential spenders—fit with a given style of music? Or even a given tempo, as in mm=120 for all Gap and Banana Republic stores?

 This is from one of John Adams' recent blog entries.  I highly recommend giving it a full read, here.

Schumann Quotes

Schumann was a typical Teuton in his introspective disposition, his mystic imaginings, his depth of earnestness.  The rhythmic side of music did not appeal to him with anything like the elastic, nervous intensity with which it excited a Pole [Chopin], but rather with the solemnity and orderliness of a German waltz.  His natural sphere was rather the type of  music which belongs to the reflective mind; and the types of thought, both emotional and noble, which appeal to a cultivated intellectualist.  As it was not intended to make music his life's occupation, his education in the art was not as complete and thorough as that of many other composers; but it brought him into closer contact with the expression of human feeling in poetic forms and in general literature, and forced him to take an unconventional view of his art.

...

Schumann, like Beethoven, revels in a mass of sound.  But his sound is far more sensuous and chromatic.  He loved to use all the pedal that was possible, and had but little objection to hearing all the notes of the scale sounding at once...Chopin's style has coloured almost all pianoforte music since his time, in respect of the manner and treatment of the instrument; and many successful composers are content merely to reproduce his individualities in a diluted form.  But Schumann has exerted more influence in respect of matter and treatment of design.  With him the substance is of much greater significance, and he reaches to much greater depths of genuine feeling.  There must necessarily be varieties of music to suit all sorts of different types of mind and organisation, and Chopin and Schumann are both better adapted to cultivated and poetic natures than to simple unsophisticated dispositions...There are natures copious enough to have full sympathy with the dreamers as well as the workers; but as a rule the world is divided between the two...But as illustrating the profusion of sensations, the poetic sensibility, and even the luxury and intellectuality, the passion and the eagerness of modern life, Chopin and Schumann between them cover the ground more completely than all the rest of modern pianoforte composers put together.

Hubert Parry, The Art of Music (London: Kegan Paul, 1901), 300-03.

Music for Sunday 16 May 2010

Well, here's where we start to bid Easter farewell for another year.  This week is the Sunday after Ascension, although it will probably be kept as Ascension Day.

Readings for the week are linked here.

Hymns are:

Introit: Hail the day that sees him rise [369]
For the psalm: The Lord is king, the most high over all the earth [55]
Gradual: Let all be one in mind and heart [247]
Offertory: Lord Christ, at your first Eucharist you prayed [521]
Communion: Here we adore you, hidden Saviour, Lord [500]

Organ music at All Saints:

Prelude: Canon (Op. 58, No. 1) -- Robert Schumann
Postlude: Toccata in F [BWV 540] -- J.S. Bach

Upcoming recital

I'm playing a recital at St Gabriel's Catholic Church, Reservoir, on Sunday 6 June, 3.00pm.

For those interested in the programme, here's the draft order of things:

An Air composed for Holsworthy Church Bells -- Samuel Sebastian Wesley
Toccata and Fugue in F [BWV 540] -- J.S. Bach
Canon (Op. 56, No. 1)

Sketch in C Major (Op. 58, No. 2) -- Robert Schumann
Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann -- Edmund T. Chipp
Fugue on B A C H (Op. 60, No. 1) -- R. Schumann
Fantasia Chromatica, Study for Double Pedal -- Otto Olsson
Toccata from Symphony No. 5 in f minor (Op. 42, No. 1) -- Charles-Marie Widor

It's a kind of pot-pourri programme that has a couple of the birthday boys of the year in the mix.

I'm about to head off to that part of the world, so hopefully a photo or two will be forthcoming later on.

More thoughts about Schumann

I found this article by Jessica Duchen the other day.

Because I've been working on a few of Schumann's organ pieces in preparation for recitals later in the year, there's been a few thoughts percolating about how these pieces relate to where he'd arrived as a composer in 1845.  This will be the subject of a couple of more extended essays on here in the coming weeks, and ultimately a submission to Organ Australia (so if you're a subscriber, you will have seen it here first).  Because there's so little in the way of sustained writing on Schumann's organ music (well, pedal piano music, but what's a small change of medium between friends?!), I'm hoping to make the blog version of this essay a bit of a multimedia exercise.

My view of Schumann's move towards composing with more recondite techniques is that it comprises a watershed in his musical diction.  He did slow things down, think a bit more deeply and plan his strategies out before committing to paper.  The point that Duchen raises is that this led to innovation in Schumann's music, and that it influenced the way Clara Schumann proceeded as the self-appointed gatekeeper of her husband's legacy.  That the violin concerto disappeared from sight for 80 years speaks volumes on this point.

There is quite a bit of literature to fight through before I make any extended comments, so stay tuned.

Of Quires and Places where they sing

I've been busy promoting an information session for a new childrens choir in Preston.

The information session will be on Sunday 30 May, 11.30am-12.30pm.

I'm looking for children aged 7-10 years.  In exchange for singing on Sunday mornings during term, choir members will receive free music tuition.

The choir will be using the Voice for Life training scheme.  It is an excellent basis for a choral program, and can be used effectively with both children and adults.

This will constitute a new development within the parish, which has had a small adult choir for a long time.  The group is fairly small, and natural attrition is looming fast.  I'm very fortunate that most of the existing choir members support the venture, not least because running these things as a one-man-band can be a perilous business.


It's important to do something that is not already available in the area.  There are plenty of community choirs that cater to adults within the immediate neighborhood, but nothing outside schools for children without traveling out of the area.  I'm hoping some of the children already in the parish will join up, and that there will be a few from outside the immediate parish community.

So, dear reader, if you know anyone in the area with children aged 7 to 10 years (or even up to 14 years), the letter to send them is below the jump!

Monday morning washup

It's been a busy weekend.

Saturdays are always about tidying up the unfinished business of the week; I spent a good part of the day tidying up the bookshelf and generally attempting to restore order around the desk.

Sunday was the usual morning routine, followed by a trip to the outer suburbs to turn pages for an organ recital.  Here's some photos of the church, St Francis in the Fields, Mooroolbark.

Exterior

Interior

Yours truly

Getting some practice in for the recital here on 8 August 2010 at 2.30pm...

Contact me

If you would like to get in touch with me, please leave a comment here and I will get back to you.


Please include an email address in your comment, as this will ensure you receive a response.  Comments are not posted to this thread, so your email address will not be available for public viewing here.

How organists see weddings

A wedding at St Mary Star of the Sea, West Melbourne.  Seen through the 'periscope' atop the organ console, which you can see in the picture below.

Angry lady redux II

There is a small set of letters in today's Age about the Deveny affair.  If these are a representative sample of what crossed the letter editor's desk, then the issue is more or less done with.

I'm mystified why anyone would think Deveny represented a positive role model for young women -- or young people in general, come to that.  She seemed incapable of arguing substantively without lapsing into fallacy; her columns were at their best when she was spinning a yarn.  Perhaps the latter is what makes her a role model...

Angry lady redux

There's been a small wave of commentary on Catherine Deveny's removal from The Age.

It turns out that the decision to terminate Deveny's column came after The Age had run a top of the webpage story -- effectively publicizing the Logies commentary.  Of course, many readers were incensed and commented in that vein.  This led to what has been characterized as a summary sacking.

On Crikey, Bernard Keane argues that Deveny is just the first media commentator to get caught in a new-age paradox created by twitter.

On Pure Poison, Jeremy Sear recounts the story over The Age's initial coverage of the comments.

A personal defence of Deveny has been made by Ben Pobjie.  It's worth a read.

Daniel Burt wonders what the world is coming to.  At least a couple of his readers have a fair idea.

Sophie Cunningham wonders why Deveny got the sack for making the sort of risible comments one might hear from Andrew Bolt (who remains -- much to many a reasonable person's chagrin -- firmly ensconced at the Herald-Sun).

Amoir raises some interesting points.  If you want a clear explanation of the Andrew Bolt Paradox alluded to above, this is where you'll find it.

Finally, at least so far, Jonathon Green argues that The Age's editor might have overreacted.

A common thread in defence of Deveny is that her Twitter comments are independent from her columns for The Age.  I would tend to disagree, because Twitter has formed an acknowledged part of Deveny's writing process.  This is a new development; while Twitter has certainly been a platform for breaking news, it remains much more than a pad for landing scoops.  People think out loud on Twitter -- in much the same way that people have always thought out loud in public bars, in some cases leading to hotel brawls.  More pertinently, Deveny has been indelibly associated with The Age for some years now.  Yes, The Age was clearly in the wrong to bring attention to Deveny's Logies commentary in the first place; it is yet another example of an editorial decision someone will regret for some time to come (or remember fondly as the stroke that brought Deveny down).  It is a little casuistic to argue that The Age cannot claim some sort of interest in Deveny's Twittering when it is her association with the broadsheet that has given her an authoritative platform in the first place.  No-one would have had the remotest interest in her ramblings otherwise.

The fall of the angry lady

"If you're an idiot in real life you'll be an idiot on Twitter, and everyone will know it regardless."

Never a truer word written about the brave new world of social media.

I have been an occasional follower of Catherine Deveny's columns in The Age since she took over from Pamela Bone a few years ago.  Deveny is a stand-up comedian, professional writer and general misanthrope.  Sometimes the latter activity gives rise to witty insights, frequently it just brings a rise.  At the beginning, Deveny assured readers that they could look forward to a continuation of Bone's frequently thought-provoking columns on a variety of topics.  It soon became clear that a lot of Deveny's columns took their departure from some mighty chips upon the shoulder.

Just lately, Deveny's columns have had some recurring themes.

Her biggest saw has been the arrival of bellicose atheism -- which she supported from a position of determinedly lapsed Catholicism.  The evils of organized religion know no boundaries, and no space for decency or goodness can be allowed to obscure the essential depravity of religion: it's really just a concentrated form of the Dawkins view that religion rots the brain.  The leitmotiv for Deveny in her column is how important it is to shield her kids from this dangerous influence.  One of her recent comedy shows bore the title "GOD IS BULLSHIT: THAT'S THE GOOD NEWS???"  The choice line from this was quoted in a review:

ATHEISTS aren't arrogant — we're smug.

Needless to say, a number of people I know are burning out beehives by the dozen praying for a traditionally-shaped priestly vocation in the rising generation of that family.

Then there was the rant about ANZAC day.  This is an annual fixture in the world of the opinion pages, and forms a part of a larger cycle that takes in Christmas, Easter, Budget season (state and federal), Cup day and various festivals dedicated to sport, fashion, food, laughter and so on.  Deveny's efforts this year were particularly abhorent.  Yes, war is a terrible and pointless affair -- too frequently promoted by those who will never see the reality of broken bodies, who will never hear the whirr of flying bullets, who will never know the horror of watching the person next to you disappear.  Wilfrid Owen was right: war is the old lie that underpins a certain type of nationalism.  There is a certain naivety to the Australian attitude that sees Gallipoli as some sort of a triumph that sealed the idea of national identity, even if the military operation was a shambles.  There is a geniune problem with that attitude; nothing is gained by telling the innocent you think they're morons, even if you can demonstrate that their views are misguided.  I don't think much is gained by trying to develop a moral equivalence argument about shaky grounds for nationalism and the reality of domestic violence.

But Deveny's fall was a typically Australian one: making imprudent comments on Twitter about the Logies.  This annual festival of the sons and daughters of the small screen is probably the most important event for the television-watching public in this part of the world.

Twitter has played an important and acknowledged part in the development of Deveny's columns over the last twelve months or so.  Ranging from the rants on familiar tropes to genuine attempts to pull an idea together, I have no doubt that this is part of the preparation of what she describes as cooking "a meal for close friends."

It can hardly be claimed that Deveny lived up to the promise she made at the outset; her columns have only rarely reached the rigorous perspective of Pamela Bone (here's an example of Bone's work).  This is not to say that Deveny doesn't seek to offer a dissenting perspective, to challenge our comfortable ideas about the political way of the world.  I don't doubt that's at the bottom of some of what she does.  But on the religion question -- in which Deveny is entitled to her views -- I wonder if she might end up seeking a church funeral on similar grounds to Bone?  Deveny's brand of foul dismissiveness ought to be read as an excessive response to something that stirs the heart at a fundamental level.  One gets the feeling that the columnist is picking up a personal fight with boxing gloves bare knuckles rather than the world of ideas.  It's all fine and good to aspire to be a polemical firebrand, but you have to remember that most of your audience will be decidedly cooler about being on the receiving end.  There are more effective ways of challenging people at the level of ideas than the rhetorical equivalent of being an obnoxious neighbour.

So, the angry lady has fallen.  You can see the comment, coverage and attached comments (mostly "ding-dong the witch is dead" stuff) here, here, here, here, and here.  Catherine's personal website is here, and includes an archive of her writings.

Something from the bicentennial birthday boy

Here is a canon for pedal piano by Robert Schumann, who would be 200 this year, had he lived past the comparatively tender age of forty-six.







This was the palette cleanser at a concert I played last November in Mooroolbark, a far and distant suburb of Melbourne.  The title of the programme was "Under the Influence," highlighting the ways in which composers in the nineteenth century found themselves reflecting the discovery of Bach as a major composer.

The Opus 56 Studies in the form of Canon, Op. 58 Skizzen and Op. 60 Fugen uber B A C H all date from 1845, and constitute something of a watershed in Schumann's compositional methods.  Having returned from a personally disastrous tour to Russia with his wife, the great pianist Clara Schumann, the couple settled down by working their way through Cherubini's Cours de Contrepoint, one of the key manuals on counterpoint.  The result was a transformation in this most radical of composers; Schumann went from composing in a very stream-of-consciousness manner to developing his rhetorical strategies in advance.  Sadly, his illness got in the way, so it's impossible to say where he might have ended up.  It's sufficient to say that his drift towards a more conservative view of the future of music in the face of the Zukunfstmusik movement was well established in his critical writings by this stage, so I wonder if he might well have been seen as a relic if he had remained active another ten or fifteen years.

Update: more on portative organs

I just posted this about an image of St Cecilia carrying a three-manual portative organ.

Just in case anybody actually reads this, here's a quick survey of why that image is a bit fanciful!

Portative organs are just what the name suggests: portable, able to be carried about.  There are plenty of old images of portative organs being used during processions and the like (ostensibly to keep singing in pitch), and of course, the instrument is legion in the iconography of St Cecilia.

This is an historical reconstruction of a portative organ.  You'll note that it's pretty small, having a compass of 15 notes.  My guess is that this would be a 1' rank of pipes, meaning that the lowest pitch is roughly equal to the c above middle c on the piano. The keys are very short; you wouldn't be getting into huge amounts of rapid passagework if you had this strapped over your shoulder and without help to pump the bellows on the back of the pipe rack.


Here's a "period image:"

The Ghent Altarpiece contains an image of a larger organ.  The detail in the painting has allowed modern builders to reconstruct the organ pictured there.

Music for Sunday 9 May 2010

The Easter season is now beginning to get a bit long in the tooth -- I saw a Catholic priest with traditionalist sympathies complaining in his blog recently about how the Easter season has suffered from new liturgical perspectives.  Feasting is meant to go on for the full fifty days, apparently. I suppose there's only so much seasonally-sanctioned gluttony one person can take.

This Sunday used to be known as Rogation Sunday.  In the last parish I worked for, this was the week for beating the bounds -- or at least making a lot of noise while walking around the block.  It was the closest that staid bunch of suburban Anglo-Catholics get to making a public scene, and when they do it, it can be a very fine thing indeed.  What a pity so few Australian parishes see the point in it.

Another token of the season passing is that the choir has started work on Factus est repente, the communion chant for Pentecost.  I'm using the edition from the American Gradual again, although it's a bit worrying that once things move on into the green part of the year that there's a large part of the cycle still missing from that collection.

Still, this week is where we're at.

Links to the readings can be found here.

We're using Anglican Chant for the psalm.  The setting is a nice D major chant from the Cathedral Psalter by Sir John Stainer, but using the Liturgical Psalter (1977) for the text.  It's much more sympathetic as a singing translation than the inclusive language version of 1995.  Purists might say that the differences are negligible, but there's enough trickiness about it to warrant using the earlier version.

The setting is Philip Mathias's Christ Church Mass.

Hymns for the week are as follows.

Introit: Sing, all creation [61]
Gradual: Christ is made the sure foundation [432]
Offertory: O thou who camest from above [572 ii]
Communion: We plough the fields, and scatter [130]

I mentioned Rogationtide -- the last hymn is a tip of the hat to that.

Organ music at All Saints, well, here's the best guess at what it'll be at this stage:

Prelude: Fantasia Chromatica -- Otto Olsson
Postlude: Fugue [BWV 540] -- J.S. Bach

A curious case of organological iconography

Here's a nice window I saw in Bristol a couple of years ago.  Being a musician, I am a mildly keen collector of images of St Cecilia -- she being the patron saint of the poverty-afflicted!

I always get a kick out of gothic revival images of St Cecilia, because these are about the most common image of a woman making music that you'll find in churches of a certain period.  They are part of a wider pictorial discourse about the place of music in the construction of femininity.

A wider reason for this fascination is the intersection between iconography and the technological transformation of the organ in England during the second half of the nineteenth century.  The instruments got bigger -- this is why we nowadays regard an instrument with two or three manuals and about 20 stops as a modest affair rather than a major feat of engineering.

Now, look at the picture again.  The portative organ clearly has three manuals.  Here's a closeup:

I wonder if the parish organist was putting his case for more stops (you know the old line about organists and horses wanting more stops, don't you?  Boom-boom...).  As a matter of fact, the church where I found this window has a very fine two-manual instrument; I doubt whether there's space for a further division within the organ chamber.

There's a little bit more about portative organs here.

Silence, and silence

Today I decided to go and do some work at the State Library of Victoria, one of the great libraries of the world.  I have known this place through research, leisure, sadness, joy and just about every other feeling that crosses the heart of an intense young man for over 20 years.  It has long been my favorite intellectual playground!




The glory of the library is the Latrobe Reading Room, high up in the dome.

The library was established at the same time as the University of Melbourne -- the other institution that has shaped me.  The foundation stones of the buildings were laid on the same day, 3 July 1854, and both owe their inspiration to the first Governor of Victoria, Charles Joseph Latrobe (although he had been replaced by the hapless Governor Hotham by laying day), and the first Chief Justice, Sir Redmond Barry.  Barry was probably the most important cultural figure in Melbourne between the 1840s and 1880s, although he is remembered chiefly as the judge who sentenced the bushranger Ned Kelly to death.

Now, the coincidence of the two institutions -- library and university -- is something that a lot of people tend to miss.  They exist in the same constellation of ideas about civic culture and social progress abroad in the British world during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.  Changes in the structure of working life had led to a greater amount of leisure among the working classes, and industrial development had transformed ideas of social mobility.  The good use of leisure, and the valorisation of social mobility are the key drivers of the civic educational culture that compelled Latrobe and Barry to establish these vital institutions in Melbourne.

The key revolutionary idea behind the State Library in its first half-century was the availability of the books to all readers.  It has never been a lending library, like your average run-of-the-mill suburban library.  Regardless of class and social status, education through self-driven discovery was the key charism of the library; opening hours were structured to allow the lower classes to have access to the collections, and attempts to secure Sunday closing met with severe opposition.  There were even efforts to make sure that the collection travelled out of Melbourne, by providing a primitive sort of mobile library service to districts that did not yet have a local library.  This library was truly the peoples' university, at least the only place of education that laid the welcome mat out for the inquisitive.  The nearest rival in this regard was "Dr" Edward Cole's Book Arcade, a truly remarkable oasis of utopianism in Melbourne in its day.

Now, back to the reading room and the title of this post.  When I first knew the Latrobe Reading Room, it was a tired and worn out space that had the amiable atmosphere of a long-established gentlemens' club.  The skylights in dome had long been covered over, following problems with them not being consistently weather-proof.  This was back when one still had to fill out carbon forms to order a book from the stacks.  The dome was a haven of silence, apart from the necessary murmurs that echo across a space like this.  Generations of novelists, historians and other cultural types have benefited from the evocative atmosphere.  This has been a womb to many imaginations.  This room was a haven to me when I needed to make headway on some of the chapters of my thesis.  A whole string of conference and seminar papers have been conceived, incubated, written, edited, revised and finally turned out in this room.

The reading room was closed for building work in 1999, part of a fourteen-year programme of works that dramatically improved the library from its former dreariness.  By the time the dome reopened in 2003, a whole world of technological change had become normal -- iPods, the advance of laptops as a standard part of the scholarly outfit, the advent of third generation internet and so on.  These are wonderful things, but I wonder what they have done to our appreciation of silence.

The idea that the State Library should provide a haven of peace and silence can be argued on the same grounds that Norman Lebrecht recently put forward in response to heckling at a couple of concerts in Wigmore Hall.  Libraries should be places of shared silence, where we respect the space we each need for the flights of imagination that make learning possible.  Others have made a similar point about the State Library here, and here.

Today, I walked around the dome three times to find a space where I was not going to find myself sitting near a pulsing iPod. In that process I ran across seven sets of loud people talking, either to others in the room or on a mobile phone.  These people had earbuds hanging around their necks, and a laptop in front of them.

Since I sat down, I have endured four intrusively loud conversations in my immediate vicinity.  One was arranging dinner (it's after 5pm).  Another was pining for the person on the other end in the mushy language of modern eroticism, delivered by means of webcam on MSN (she kept wanting the other person to stop switching off their webcam).  The third was sending a coffee order through on the phone to a friend across the road (it was takeaway, delivered to a room where food and drink are banned).  The remaining one was raking over their latest domestic brawl in graphic detail.  A fifth conversation just opened -- two girls comparing notes on a boy they've both known in the biblical sense quite recently.

I know we live in an intensively interconnected world.  I know that technology has allowed this interconnectedness to be embedded in the way we live our waking hours.

I wonder if our awareness of others as mediated by the phone or internet communications blinds us to the the basics of courtesy to others.  Silence is not oppressive when yours is in the service of another's concentration.  The place needn't be like some horror story enacted by prim but plump lady librarians, but it would be nice if the main sound one heard from the other side of the room was something other than the hubbub of people comparing notes about a party they went to at the weekend.


Not all silence is oppressive.   There are different types of silence.  The silence I have always associated with the dome is the amiable type, built around my respect for your need for the space that only silence can give you.  This silence is about respecting boundaries, sharing a space that offers sanctuary.  This is the sort of silence that can truly be regarded as a basic human need: the silence that allows you and me to think on the large scale, to feed that thinking with the resources to hand, and to respond to these things by a creative act.

The omnipresence of entertainment devices -- mobile phones, mp3 players, social networking on the computer -- has yet to catch up with this idea that silence is a basic human need.  Our interconnected world seems to regard silence as a vacuum: the iPod fills the void.  How can you think deeply about something when you've got what amounts sensory overload going on in the ears?  Technology may have allowed us to expand our musical taste, stay more closely in touch with each other and hastened the pace at which we achieve some things, but the human mind is as much in need of time and space as ever.