Sunday Feature -The Shorthand of Emotion

[Guest]

Leo Tolstoy and the Russian composers of his day.
Reading the details of this i'm fascinated by, 'At university, he was inspired by friends who had a passion for music to play the piano and he wrote a waltz. He even thought he might become a composer.'


What other writers might have become composers, and vice versa?





{If anyone was fortunate enough to record this show, Sunday Feature -The Shorthand of Emotion - email me please}

[french frank]

Leo Tolstoy and the Russian composers of his day.
Reading the details of this i'm fascinated by, 'At university, he was inspired by friends who had a passion for music to play the piano and he wrote a waltz. He even thought he might become a composer.'

What other writers might have become composers, and vice versa?

{If anyone was fortunate enough to record this show, Sunday Feature -The Shorthand of Emotion - email me please}

Hello, Sally, and welcome.

Pity you didn't post this a few hours ago - it would still have been on the iPlayer - but someone may have recorded it.

Anthony Burgess is one writer who composed all his life and took his music very seriously.

[vinteuil]

... and there's always ETA Hoffmann...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._T._A._Hoffmann

[Sally]

Thank you for the red carpet Monseigneur Frank.

Anthony Burgess and ETA Hoffman, delighted to have these avenues to explore.

Being ever obvious, Erik Satie was a delightful writer (I recommend 'Satie seen through his letters' by Ornella Volta) this web of thread makes me want to ask for interesting auto/biographies of composers/musicians. Maybe go down some really dirty streets, a la Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe.

So who do you know?

[french frank]

So who do you know?

Berlioz springs to mind immediately. I first heard about his memoirs through R3's Berlioz Day some years back. Very lively reading.

[vinteuil]

Erik Satie was a delightful writer ... this web of thread makes me want to ask for interesting auto/biographies of composers/musicians. ...

So who do you know?

well, one of my faves wd be Berlioz - his Memoirs are marvellous (tho' if you're looking for the truth of Berlioz's life they shd be supplemented by David Cairns's doorstop of a biography... ) - Berlioz was also a vivid music critic - his Les Grotesques de la Musique is a hoot (his description of clarinettists not knowing how to play transposing instruments - "The right to play in F in a Symphony in D" - is a gem... )

EDIT - snap! wrote this while FF was also commending Berlioz...

[Sally]

You guys and Berlioz . . .
(I discovered you can read his memoirs on Google Books, gratitude to you both, French Frank and Vinteuil.)

[umslopogaas]

It seems that Anthony Burgess thought highly of his musical compositions, but the world up to now hasnt agreed with him. I've a recent biography of Burgess ('Anthony Burgess' by Roger Lewis, 2002), a rather sour picture: I wonder how anyone who apparently thought so little of his subject should bother with the effort of writing four hundred pages about him. There are several index references to Burgess's music, but the text gives it short shrift. For example: "Burgess was not popular amongst his fellow musicians [several names I've never heard of] - because he told them off if they missed a cue and he insisted on prolonging his own solo passages with riffs derived from Debussy." [its not clear what instrument he played, he is said to have shown an interest in the bagpipes, but Debussyian riffs on the bagpipes sounds rather improbable to me].

In the next para, the author really sticks the knife in: "He fancied his chances as being Kurt Weill, John Philip Sousa, Richard Rogers, Franz Schubert and Sir Edward Elgar rolled into one. But he didnt even reach the level of Bruce Montgomery (who published improbable thrillers as Edmund Crispin), the Oxford composer who began so promisingly and declined very fast, abandoning opera and oratorio projects to write the score for 'Doctor in the House' and 'Carry on Constable. Burgess's full orchestral scores and incidental music for 'Will!', the Shakespeare film [and several others] and so on , were met with embarrassed coughs. Lord Grade did humour him once, however, by commissioning a song for Barbra Streisand. It was finally decided 'that she had better not' sing it, otherwise her career would suffer such a setback, she'd be in Brooklyn again hoofing for throw-money and babysitting for Jay Landesman." [who?]

All in all, not a promising verdict, though we do learn that 'Edmund Crispin' is another author who also composed.

Further on there is more, in a long letter from John Parker, a wartime colleague. Parker admits that he is not a musician, but notes: "I went along to this premiere performance of your symphony. Really, John, I could not understand it, it simply seemed to me a cacophony of discords, but it didnt seem to bother you, although I felt so sorry for you when the reception was very mixed, very low-key in fact. But good luck to you, and obviously you enjoyed doing it, and I was in no position whatever to criticise, because, frankly, I did not know enough about music to know whether it was good, bad or indifferent, it just sounded cacophonous [more followed, not quoted]."

All in all, it sounds as if he should have stuck to literature. I've read some of his novels, by no means all, and they vary in their impact. I havent enjoyed the dystopic ones much, but 'The Malayan Trilogy' is tremendous fun, especially 'Time for a Tiger': Nabby Adams is one of the great comic creations.