Nachtmusik

Struggling along with musical things.



I've previously transcribed a small section of Beethoven's Heiliger Dankgesang, which as you probably already know was put to great use by Keiller in 'London'.

But Keiller also used Brahm's Alto Rhapsody in the film, indeed, it's the very first piece of music one encounters in the film, staring across from London Bridge towards Tower Bridge, with the Celine-baiting "It is a journey to the end of the world" as the opening line. Music for Keiller frequently seems to be used with very specific meanings, the 'convalesence' of the Beethoven presumably corresponding to the cure for the 'malady' of London (as well as the script's specific reference to convalescence when Robinson first comes back out after the Tory victory), while one can draw parallels between Robinson in Space's analytical study of the aesthetics of British capitalism and the desperate job-seeker music from Kuhle Wampe.
And then the Alto Rhapsody crops up again in Keiller's exhibition at the Tate (which I CANNOT RECOMMEND ENOUGH), with a pair of headphones allowing you to listen to Kathleen Ferrier singing Goethe's tale of peripatetic woe while also looking at an image of the lichen which may or may not be a silhouette of the great German polymath.
As you can imagine, it was buzzing around in my head for a while, so I thought that I'd try to get a little bit of it down, so here are the first few bars or so. One could probably keep going but there is never enough time...




And then Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died. As someone said, perhaps the very last 'great' voice that there will be. One shouldn't be too sad - he lifted the hearts of millions and lived to a very grand old age, but I felt moved enough to quickly bash out a little Schubert song - 'An die Musik', with the final line "Du holde Kunst, Ich danke dir dafür!"




And also a little sketch I made using the sound of people milling about and drinking outside my flat, with a quasi-late romantic dressing. I'm not sure where something like this leads to, but perhaps it's the beginnings of an attempt to understand the difference between the quotidian and the romantic, with particular regard to the different poles of artistic satisfaction and metaphysical dread. Or something.

A wee update.

Here are a few things that I've done / been up to recently:

If you've ever come round this way at all in the last two years (TWO YEARS! I know...) you might be aware that I'm 'architecture correspondent' for ICON magazine. Well; issue 101 is out now and in there you'll find the usual roundup of what's new in architecture, in this case a crystalline sports complex in China and a strange japanese bridge structure that pretends to be a massive version of a traditional east-asian timber joint detail. Further in however, and there's a full-length interview with Shiguru Ban, discussing the varying strands to his career and his attitude to architecture in general. It's worth reading just to get a sense of the way that Ban manages to conceptually spin the plates of structural experimenter, fashionable designer, recycling advocate, disaster relief specialist and so on...

I've got a few articles, reviews, lectures in the pipeline. I'll try to remember to let you know about them when they turn up, try to get the muddy, near-ossified juices of self-promotion flowing.

In quieter moments I've been engaging in musical activities, when time allows. In the last week or two this has thrown up the following little ditties:

A Cat's Skeleton by entschwindet und vergeht
This is a little sketch I made, featuring a little clip from the cheery kitchen sink/apocalypse TV drama 'Threads' from 1984. I guess the fact that the clip shows a crackly vhs recording of a BBC children's educational programme being played to post-nuclear holocaust weans puts this very much into the venerable tradition of hauntoyadayada.

Schubert - 'Wehmut' D.772 by entschwindet und vergeht
Slightly more serious here, I've transcribed and recorded a guitar version of Schubert's lied 'Wehmut' (melancholy), which is a typically 'Sturm und Drang' kind of a piece, although significant here because the poem, by Matthaus von Collin, goes a little something like this:

Wenn ich durch Wald und Fluren geh',

Es wird mir dann so wohl und weh

In unruhvoller Brust.

So wohl, so weh, wenn ich die Au

In ihrer Schönheit Fülle schau',

Und all die Frühlingslust.

Denn was im Winde tönend weht,

Was aufgetürmt gen Himmel steht,

Und auch der Mensch, so hold vertraut

Mit all der Schönheit, die er schaut,

Entschwindet, und vergeht.

Say my name, say my name...

close the gate behind you.