October 1705. Bach, at just 20 years a church organist in Arnstadt, applies to his superiors for a month’s leave to hear the music of Dietrich BuxtehuOctober 1705. Bach, at just 20 years a church organist in Arnstadt, applies to his superiors for a month’s leave to hear the music of Dietrich Buxtehude in Lübeck, 250 miles (400 km) to the north. His purpose, he told them, was “to comprehend one thing and another about his [Buxtehude’s] art�.
One autumn three centuries later the writer Horatio Clare followed some of Bach’s footsteps for a BBC Radio 3 series called Bach Walks (first broadcast as five programmes in 2017), this time to “learn something� of Bach, the man and his art. In company with a producer-director and a sound recordist he attempted to catch a flavour of what it must have been like for the energetic and ambitious young composer travelling on foot up the Old Salt Road, moving from south of the Harz Mountains northwards to near the Baltic Sea.
Two artists, then, one taking as close as was possible to the other’s path from one rather conservative culture to a more cosmopolitan environment: would it be possible for Clare to learn something more than the bald facts of Bach’s going and for the listener (and, now, reader) to learn from the writer’s experience?
Something of His Art is based on five days Clare spent walking sections of what is surmised to be Sebastian Bach’s route, the audio from each day of providing the basis for five separate 30-minute programmes wedded to the concept of ‘slow radio�. The six chapters largely parallel those walks as the trio travel through fields and woods, cross the Harz highlands via the Brocken summit, and pass through settlements and towns.
By degrees a nature walk, retailings of historical snippets, speculations on Bach’s experiences, hopes and musical lessons, and reflections of Clare’s responses to Bach’s compositions, this nonfiction novella � just a hundred pages in the paperback edition � is the literary equivalent of that slow-radio series. By recording all that he sees, hears, feels, smells and, at times, tastes, Clare invites the reader to be his surrogate and, by extention, to get a feel of what the composer may have experienced.
Reading this, as I did, during the same month Bach and Clare journeyed through the same countryside, being alert myself to similar birdsong and some of the same scents, listening to recordings Bach’s music as I often do, and rehearsing, playing and singing Baroque music in the run-up to seasonal concerts, gave Something of His Art even more relevance, especially knowing that Bach was intending to enjoy the Advent services and concerts Buxtehude was wont to put on in Lübeck.
I personally found this a delight on so many levels. Clare is a prose poet, and his descriptions of his surroundings vividly conveyed the physicality of the walks in sensitive and evocative language. He also anchored us to the present, drawing comparisons with life three centuries ago and throwing in anecdotes about the companionship the writer, the director and the sound engineer enjoyed. The notion of their having a foot in both the past and the present was echoed in many ways, not least in the physical representations of the composer they encounter at journey’s start and end: the jaunty statue of a relaxed young Bach in Arnstadt and the modern plaque in Lübeck’s rebuilt Marienkirche depicting Dietrich Buxtehude and his acolyte in symbolic form.
And, because this slim volume has the composer as focus, there is discussion of Bach’s actual music � his organ pieces, cantatas, chorales, instrumental works and more � presented by an author who, though coming relatively late to the classical repertoire, had found the cello suites in particular of profound comfort whenever depression visited him:
The music seems by turn wise and melancholy, ruefully amused sometimes, and philosophical, both accepting and longing. […] Something like a breeze moves the listener, a breeze both invisible and tangible, like the white space between the black printed words of a poem, where all the truth and certainty lie, in convictions which we hold and know but can never fully express.
It seems very appropriate that the man who wrote such wonderful music should be celebrated by another individual who not only appreciated the music but found it echoed in the sights, sounds, textures, scents and food of the landscape the musician travelled through � the music of the senses, as it were....more
The ultimate origin of Paradise is a walled enclosure, an enclosed space where one can cultivate plants and enjoy the delights of running water. SinceThe ultimate origin of Paradise is a walled enclosure, an enclosed space where one can cultivate plants and enjoy the delights of running water. Since its Iranian beginnings five or six centuries before the birth of Christ it has accumulated so much symbolism, associations and expectations but that image of the walled garden has remained a constant, whether in the guise of parkland or as the smallest suburban plot. How much do we all, gardeners or not, see it as a place of peace, of repose, as a piece of heaven on earth!
But that walled garden concept is never so tightly bounded as by the confines of our own skull, within the folds of our brains: "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space," as Hamlet said, and that idea of a garden at once expansive and yet contained is at the heart of Sarah Singleton's haunting novel.
We first meet young Thomas Kurt Reiter at his grandmother's funeral. Wandering around her garden afterwards he comes across a wooden box placed on a sundial. A curious stranger called Blake leads him through what the man terms the grandmother's 'secret' garden before violently attacking a stranger playing a violin by the grave of Thomas's grandmother. Thomas is naturally confused by what has happened, and even more astonished to later hear from his grandmother's lawyer that when he is fourteen he is to be apprenticed to Mr Constantine, a London chemist and herbalist. All this sets the scene for Singleton's mysterious Gothick fantasy, all against a backdrop of Victorian England -- all freezing cold and mists -- to which is added a touch of the supernatural (with a revenant) and clandestine guilds.
It is only when Thomas is apprenticed that he learns about the Guild of Medical Herbalists, an ancient organisation which has recently been revived. When he discovers that his grandmother was a member it soon becomes clear that she was murdered by poison, and that each of the current members are being targeted. But how, and by whom? The answers begin in his grandmother's oak chest, in which resides the wooden box that Thomas found earlier on the sundial.
Here then is the confluence of Time and Space. Time, prefigured by that sundial, is effectively stopped in the various gardens that Thomas visits, where seasons remain constant though the planting may show signs of neglect. Space, on the other hand, is subsumed within the objects contained not only in Thomas' box but also the others that he comes to know of, these objects becoming virtual black holes where reality is sucked in and distorted before being spat out.
Their guardian gardeners also may have suggestive names: Blake is naturally with Albion, Constantine takes control of Tadmor (capital of the ancient Palmyran Empire, rival to Rome and possibly a spur to the founding of Constantinople) while the mellifluous forenames of Ernestina, Augusta and Louisa perhaps recall Octavia Hill, one of the founders of the National Trust. I should also add the young and enigmatic Maud (about whom I'd like to have known more) who, as well as recalling Ophelia in Shakespeare's play, also takes her name from the poem (and song) 'Come into the garden, Maud, | For the black bat Night has flown...'
Thomas Kurt Reiter is an interesting young man whose names seem to allude to aspects of his character. Various figures called Thomas (Tam Lin, Thomas the Rhymer, Tam o' Shanter) were supposed to have visited Fairyland; his curt mannerisms, so much a barrier to him being an attractive protagonist, may account for his middle name; and we're told that Reiter, which in German means 'rider', is as a surname "locational, derived from places called Reit or Reith (with an original meaning of 'clearing')" and thus another indication of a cultivated space.
So much for hidden depths in Singleton's fantasy; does it stand up on its own merits? The Poison Garden works cleverly across genres -- part murder mystery, ghost story, Gothick romance and fairytale -- keeping the reader intrigued and guessing. Then there are larger than life characters (though I found the female figures less convincing than the strongly delineated males), most with secrets of their own, not all of whom survive and whose demise we might regret. There is also a strong sense of atmosphere (the story is set in the middle of the 19th century, with Dickensian overtones) which is well maintained through to the end.
So, much to admire here, though Thomas remains as much of an enigma in the closing chapter as he did in the first: what's the significance of his German background? why does his immediate family cease to figure in the narrative? and what's his burning motivation beyond the solving of the mystery of the gardens of Eden? I was not totally engaged with him but, on the plus side, I was buoyed up and gripped by the action.
One little postscript: as well as the historical Guild of Medical Herbalists, a wonderful concept of the author's, Sarah Singleton acknowledges the existence of the and its 'learned' historian . The interested browser can explore these sites and their many links to its history, members, both printed and recorded music, and international conferences. With its fascinating subject matter, practices and motto (nullus funus sine fidula: "no funeral without a fiddle") wouldn't it be marvellous to believe that it actually existed?
The ninth edition of The Oxford Companion to Music, first published in 1955 and still under the control of the original editor, is authoritative, idioThe ninth edition of The Oxford Companion to Music, first published in 1955 and still under the control of the original editor, is authoritative, idiosyncratic and certainly of its time. A typical example of Percy Scholes� writing style can be seen in the Preface to the original edition of 1938: Following this preface will be found the long list of the many who have tried to save the author from, at least, the faults of his own ignorance or inadvertence, but should the reader chance to discover that the author is anywhere insufficiently saved he should not take it that the blame necessarily falls on those enumerated in the list.
A footnote helpfully tells us that In the present edition this long list, with its many additional names from the seven intervening editions, has been merely summarised. This circumloquacious tendency may appear to explain the nearly twelve hundred pages of this hardback, but in truth they are packed with detailed information and references. The detail includes entries on composers, styles, genres, countries, foreign musical terms, instruments, synopses of operas and much else. Interwoven are close on two hundred monochrome plates illustrating different themes, using old prints, photographs and diagrams.
The text is, naturally for its time, opinionated. The article on Jazz for example, while reasonably well-balanced in its analysis, can still offer displays of prejudice that one hopes would not nowadays appear in an authoritative work of this nature: There was much that a cultured musician could enjoy in [Swing Music] were it not that the jazz convention still demanded a great deal of deliberate out-of-tune playing and of sour or harsh tone.
While largely superseded by seventy-five years of research and the general availability of internet resources, it’s still useful for its historical take on once-contentious issues, for obscure composers who rarely feature elsewhere now, and for its lovely composer portraits by Oswald Barrett (‘Batt�) of Bach and Schubert, Brahms and Liszt, Mozart and many more. The vigorous portrait of Beethoven ‘in middle life� which now hangs in the Royal Academy of Music features as a frontispiece, the only one of the pictures in full colour and completed by the artist eight years before his death in 1945 at the early age of 53. When, as a teenager, I was given this volume by my parents the Batt illustrations struck me forcibly, particularly this one of Beethoven: Barrett aimed to research this composer ‘until I filtered out the very essence of the man and arrived at an aspect which must have been some phase of his existence as a human being, without any superimposed romance, legend or imagination. Then on top of this comes psychology…�
A relic of a bygone era when one man (and it usually was a man) could claim to be the repository of all useful information and opinion on any given topic without too much recourse to advisors and committees, the overarching principles of the one-volume ninth edition are to be found in the most recent incarnation of the Companion, according to the most recent editor, Alison Latham: ‘to be wide-ranging, to be complete in itself, and to be intended for a broad spectrum of readers�. However, ‘it become clear�, she says, ’that one person could not now be expected to command the breadth of knowledge and interest that allowed music historians of an earlier generation to cover the topic as comprehensively as had Scholes.�
At least Scholes� verbosity had been retained. But it could also be said that the present reviewer, with a corresponding love of verbosity, is also a relic of a bygone era.
The late Charles Rosen, who died in 2012 aged 85, is remembered as both pianist and writer, and Piano Notes is in large part a personal response to thThe late Charles Rosen, who died in 2012 aged 85, is remembered as both pianist and writer, and Piano Notes is in large part a personal response to the art and pleasure of keyboard playing. I found this a wonderful book, full of enthusiasm, experience, expertise, knowledge and humour, and it helps that this reviewer largely shares the writer’s philosophy (though, sadly, not the experience, expertise and knowledge). The first couple of chapters are a little hard going, even for someone like me with an admittedly meagre piano background, but the remainder of the book flows easily and is greatly enjoyable for both pianists and the general reader.
An abiding notion that I associate with this book is Rosen’s assertion that an assiduous pianist can sight-read their way through most of the solo classical repertoire in just a few years. Though I did wonder how feasible this is I of course bow to his professional opinion; after all he has recorded much of that repertoire, from Bach to Schoenberg and from Brahms to Stravinsky and Boulez. Above all I love the sense of continuity of tradition reaching back to his teachers and beyond that to Liszt, and I rejoice that I’ve had lessons with someone who had lessons with him. This is a book that I may find I have to re-read every so often to get the most out of it.
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