I enjoyed hearing a new interpretation of Judith Weir's early choral work Missa del Cid this evening in a fine performance by the BBC Singers conducted by Owain Park. It was written , I guess , when Judy was half her present age. For me it posed the question has Weir's subsequent music lived up to her early vitality and promise?
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Do you want only pro-Weir comments? I don't want to sound an unwelcome note. -
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Threads go the way posters want them to go, regardless of what topic starters intend! Reading between the lines, I's guess the OP had his doubts.Originally posted by smittims View PostIt isn't given us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world.Comment
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No!Originally posted by smittims View Post
My feelings are that Judith has settled into a comfortable 'groove' and that her recent works do little to enhance her reputation. That saddens me.Comment
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As so often these days I wonder if I'd better have said nothing
. I don't like to see a thread started but go unanswered, but on reflection my opinions about JW's music are less to do with its intrinsic quality or her development than with the frequency of its broadcast compared with that of other composers which seems to me to be much better in quality and almost totally neglected by Radio 3.
I have listened conscientiously to her music for many years. I never heard any vitality or promise in it. But so many people speak highly of it that I felt I ought to listen before criticising. As I've said before (sorry to harp on this but new readers may not have seen it) I'm sure she is very skilful and knowledgeable and can write a well-constructed score, but I can find nothing in it to make me want to hear it again or even keep listening to the end, except out of a sense of duty, and I would love to know just why Radio3 managers and producers think it is so much better than the music of , say
Alan Rawsthorne
Havergal Brian
Arnold Cooke
Priaulx Rainier
Elisabeth Lutyens
to broadcast so much of it and so little (or none) of theirs .
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I'm certainly aware of your oft-averred lack of sympathy for one of my favourite living composers, but saying that your criticism is "less to do with its intrinsic quality", while asserting in the same phrase that other composers seem to you "much better in quality" is guaranteed to get a reaction from people who like and appreciate her music!Originally posted by smittims View PostAs so often these days I wonder if I'd better have said nothing. I don't like to see a thread started but go unanswered, but on reflection my opinions about JW's music are less to do with its intrinsic quality or her development than with the frequency of its broadcast compared with that of other composers which seems to me to be much better in quality and almost totally neglected by Radio 3.
I have listened conscientiously to her music for many years. I never heard any vitality or promise in it. But so many people speak highly of it that I felt I ought to listen before criticising. As I've said before (sorry to harp on this but new readers may not have seen it) I'm sure she is very skilful and knowledgeable and can write a well-constructed score, but I can find nothing in it to make me want to hear it again or even keep listening to the end, except out of a sense of duty, and I would love to know just why Radio3 managers and producers think it is so much better than the music of , say ...[list omitted]
It's your loss, smittims, as we always say. Just one proper listen to one of her major operas - libretto in hand - ought to be enough to convince you that here is a composer with an individual voice, who knows how to create vibrant music theatre and generally produces the goods. Her very personal sense of humour - wacky, whimsical, anti-establishment yet other-worldly - is her music's main distinguishing feature, and the season it appeals to me so strongly.
Her neglect, following the appallingly bad production of Miss Fortune at the Royal Opera, after which the critical fraternity stuck the knife in, seems to me a devastating indictment of today's paltry musical establishment, happy to valorise dead foreign composers of all stripes, at the expense of an excellent one who - happily - is still with us. It's all part of the curse of Master of the Music, I expect. The accolade had the same withering effect on Malcolm Williamson.Comment
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I remember when we first heard JW's music on Radio 3. My dad (b.1908) and I had been keen followers of new music for a good decade by that stage. He would, slightly shamefacedly, tape record anything "20th century", having gone through Radio Times with a red biro marking up what looked likely to fit into that category, and carefully make provision in terms of available tape space. Remember, back in those days Radio Times would put expected timings by each work listed. Whenever I visited home he would gleefully announce the large number of new and not-so-new music he had recorded waiting for me, and couldn't wait to get the machine running; it was still very much that time when "new" was synonymous with timely, relevant, exciting and with any luck challenging, But then came a point where we both began to notice a fall-off in innovative inspiration among upcoming composers, Judith Weir being one of them. "If this is to be the future" Dad said one day, "I don't hold out much hope for the future of modern music". And this was in the early 1970s, when Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies, Stockhausen, Berio and a new host of postwar composers were still coming up with the goods, a few born around or soon after World War II with whom one could identify generationally, while appreciating those of my generation, and that of my parents and grandparents, who had endured the lessons of poverty, reaction and war.
I think that may more generally help "set" our generation's feelings with regard to the gathering decline of Radio 3. Unless you happened to engage one way or another in the radical political ethos around culture at that time - the whole high/low culture dichotomy that could provide a comfort blanket for aesthetic retreat - you might be found wanting confronting the multilayered factors at play and fall easy prey to populist assertions of "elitism" being flung in your direction!Comment
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An interesting post, and I know many for whom the high/low soupy melange fostered by the likes of Warhol has been a turn off - art music has always been ripe for exploitation of snobs, who actually welcome this whole "elitist" side show.Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post
As for politics, I think it's very helpful indeed to look at Judith Weir and her music through the Scots Nationalist lens. She's a musical equivalent to Alasdair Gray et al. on the literary side, in creating a renewed voice for Scotland, majoring on its urban/cosmic layers, rather than chiming in with the old kilts-and-tartan tropes. The political layer of her work is, I think, more important to understanding it than any feminist or LGBT affiliations - which may be why the left finds her as uncomfortable as the right. She is her own woman.Comment
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Two useful posts there which I hope others will read. Master Jaques, I think you may have given me a clue there, in saying that 'her very personal sense of humour... is her music's main distinguishing charateristic.' Maybe I just don't get the joke. After all, I never thought 'Monty Python ' was at all funny .
S-A, I loved your recollections of 'Radio Days'. In my case it was a dayglo-green highlighter pen. Alas, both it and the Radio Times are long-redundant for me now, such has been the decline and fall of Radio 3.Comment
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JW's humour is a bit 'Pythonesque', I suppose, in its cosmic-comic elements. The enigmatic 'fun' element is certainly key to my admiration, to be sure; and (as with all things humourous) it won't be to all tastes. But like her work or not, she's a skilful composer who knows how to get the result she wants.Originally posted by smittims View Post
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Well, I agree with that. But if we were to add up the number of broadcasts of her music over the last ten years and compare the total with that for the composers I listed, I think we'd find that 'neglect' is hardly the word to apply to her good fortune. I still cannot understand why she is so much played and they so ignored. But perhaps this is part of another thread.Comment
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