Moral Maze - British Places : Better Represented By Classical Music Than Other Forms

[teamsaint]

That is making the assumption that bagpipes are Scottish - yes Scotland adopted and probably adapted them but depenging on what you read they could be Egyptian or Greek in origin. I attended a mediaeval fair in Madiera this year which featured a pipe band - so where did that tradition come from?

I knew that Stuart Adamson was Scottish and that some bagpipes are, and drawing the same conclusion that most other people would/did . Nothing more or less really.
Confidence is not of course the same as correctness .

Especially since in 1978, world music hadn't been invented .

[teamsaint]

Yes - that's happened to me, too (but I don't think ever in respect of geographical location - always from technical/aesthetic considerations). But isn't someone then still stuck with the point that there are features common to both the Mexican Huapango and the Czech Furiant, so they're left with the composer's stated intentions about the Music, rather than the Music itself when listening to Umpah Umpah Umpah Oompapa Oompapa ?


Ah! - apologies; I thought that was what you were saying, that an already existing enjoyment can be enhanced by this extra bit of information. (To be fair to myself, I don't see how one can "add to enjoyment" if there ain't no enjoyment in t'first place! You meant something like "create [the beginnings of] enjoyment, then?)

Probably fair distinction about enjoyment, that I may have not made clear enough in the middle of a working day .

Re the intentions, well that is a fair point too, when musical features may be very similar to each other. But stated intention and musical feature are connected. So if Dvorak says " Furiant" but gives us something that sounds like a Polka( random example) there is a problem. The words point us in a direction of understanding.....in the way that calling something ...."blues" indicates something that might not accord entirely with what some people think of as The Blues, but may contain some element of what those people understand that term to mean.

[Richard Tarleton]

I attended a mediaeval fair in Madiera this year which featured a pipe band - so where did that tradition come from?

Northern Portugal and/or Galicia (NW Spain)

Bagpipes to be found across European mountain regions....Berlioz....

[MrGongGong]

I've never been to an Italian festival
but this might be getting close to the sound?
BCMG did a cracking version of this a few years ago where we wandered about in the middle eating Amaretti biscuits

[french frank]

[Bagpipes to be found across European mountain regions....

Not to mention the Northumbrian pipes and the cornemuse of Brittany.

[Lat-Literal]

I would just like to apologise to everyone for yesterday re some of my contributions. It all became a little ludicrous - even I could see it - and what annoys me is that I didn't take what were some half-decent ideas forward very well. Consequently I am surprised and grateful that many people have propelled it for which thank you and also for your toleration/kindness.

I know the Scottish indie thing keeps cropping up but the immense irritation equals we like them lots! At the root of it, I always try to by my best although more often than not fail!

The obvious question would be along the lines of "Oratorio or Penny Lane?" The less obvious one is whether the main groundbreaking here was its dedication to a northern city.

Paul McCartney - Liverpool Oratorio - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWKWCQUoaGE

Will now read the contributions in full.

[Lat-Literal]

To be able to test this scientifically, we'd need a great piece of music linked to a place but which no-one knew, and which didn't have a title, which one could approach with a completely innocent ear. Britten...Aldeburgh...the sea...seems straightforward. A coastline which, like the music, I know very well. But if I were to hear the Four Sea Interludes for the first time, without being told the title, or what it was from, would I be able to tell it was about Suffolk, or even the sea? Why not Lincolnshire, or Northumberland, or the Lake District, or the Somerset Levels? It's only about Aldeburgh (or the Borough) because Britten says it is. Likewise, take a piece like Cockaigne (a piece I can't stand, as it happens). It's words that give us those mental images which are impossible to shake off. (Same with birds - cuckoo and quail fairly straightforward, but lark? Being of a perhaps overly-literal cast of mind, I don't think I'd have said "Ah, skylark" on, er, hearing the first skylark of spring ascending . And I'm a serious birder.)

Music is abstract. I can think of lots of music where the the country or region can be identified, but as often as not it's because unmistakeable folk tunes, or rhythms, have been incorporated in it (S. Spain, Hungary....). All too often we read or hear the title before we hear the music....Britten...Venice....La Serenissima....basically it's just shimmery music.

Yes - very good points RT.

Any depiction in Britten's music of Aldeburgh/Suffolk is assisted by knowledge of the association. Ditto, I think, RVW and England although the concept is broader - specific conceptually and yet generalized. Lark - well, yes, it equals bird equals melody equals soaring equals the human spirit and so the list might go on. Being in essence Meredith's - well, he died on Box Hill so there is a link there between Box Hill and Leith Hill, a relatively short passage geographically from death to living as it were perhaps in comparison with the long journey of troops to Europe for a very quick ending. I personally see the "lark" in the piece in a language sense. Not as in "having a lark" as such which is a very English atmospheric but that's at least a part of it. Flippancy. The flippancy of war and in that way possibly darkly ironic. I doubt that the complexities involved would have suited a dove or that the latter in most instances has been anything other than a whitewash purification. This does in the contrast give the lark some force. We will be more on music vs words before this thread is out. You mention Elgar. Yes - but there is also Holst. Holst in Hammersmith to take just one example. I like it but I am not at all sure it really conveys. Even then, planets were easier because they were spatial.

[vinteuil]

Not to mention the Northumbrian pipes...

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... actually I did in my #20 above which started this particular bagpipe line.

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[Lat-Literal]

That's understanding "place" rather generously, dovers! Is there anything particularly Elizabethan Mancunian, or Durhamesque about the Music? (And is there a nationalistic difference between the Music Dowland wrote in England and that he wrote in Denmark?)

There's also, Delius - born in Bradford to German parents, lived in Florida and Norway before settling in France, where he wrote a work called Paris! (Mind you, I was baffled by Fritz/Fred's larger-scale structures for years - having lived with the Bradford weather for over twenty years, it all now makes perfect sense.)

The hardest thing about Delius is Bradford.

He unravels from a blended summer impressionism that one would like to believe in as English, turns from German into French and French into scarlet all of which have to be taken on board and ultimately can be, just, but you know, it is the earlier unexpected negro and the orange grove that really enhances it. A shading of the yellow and green then later Beecham and the crazy night escapade toward Limpsfield. Not geographically evocative - any of it - but it's so many things about unusual, distinctive placing. As Trump might say, so, so strong.

[LeMartinPecheur]

Slightly off-topic (British Places) but I see we've already got to Portugal, Spain and Italy...

I've always loved the story of a visitor to Ainola walking with Sibelius in the grounds and suddenly bringing a passage of S's music (part of a symphony IIRC) to mind. On being told of this Sibelius said they were actually on the spot where he'd conceived it.

Love the story - just wish I knew whether to find it deeply significant or merely a sweet coincidence...

Anyone have any similar stories to 'help my unbelief'??

[french frank]

Yes, you did . It was sooo long ago …

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... actually I did in my #20 above which started this particular bagpipe line.

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[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The hardest thing about Delius is Bradford.

And I do think that this reveals the fundamental flaw about many discussions about "English" Music - it's always Wiltshire, or the Cotswolds that's being evoked, and from a sepia world pre-1914 (and which, as has been very eloquently pointed out in a book I've recently been reading on the subject, in turn colours recent reception and expectations of that work, so that the highly original Music of a composer like George Butterworth becomes an elegy for a lost world, rather than the first steps into a new one). Can we hear a Geordie accent in Avison's Music? Is his Music any less/more "English" than that of Capel Bond?

Why might it seem strange to hear someone say that they can feel the cobbles of Melton Terrace under their feet when they listen to the Delius Double Concerto, but somehow its become a cliché to "hear" composers as distinct as Elgar and RVW as being "quintessentially English"?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Well, I've mentioned Wiltshire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3I7JMkK6bI

[Lat-Literal]

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... I suppose 'place' can sometimes be identified organologically - if we hear Northumbrian pipes, Spanish clarin real organ stops, the shakuhachi, a Taskin harpsichord - there is then an ability to 'locate' a piece geographically.

But geography seems to me a pretty trivial distraction in the enjoyment and understanding of music ...

Yes, this is the one that especially commands a response, plus french frank's follow-up.

It's interesting!

Is it that there is scope for discussing the technical almost before that idea was commonly available?

I'm hinting here at any possible alignments with, and access to, 2017, commercialism et al?

I come it from an angle - the moon and the stars "hometown down" - but I'm not instinctively anti.

Science and art?

When is Portugal Portugal?

[MrGongGong]

So going back to your start

Because we all know the romanticism that is attached

I present this

and this place