Cheltenham Music Festival 2017: Love Songs

by 5:4

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Chris L

It sounds like RRP would be better off (quite literally – Lord knows how much it’ll have netted him by now!) sticking to the day job – on the strength of last Thursday night’s gig in Manchester, I’d say that’s where his true vocation lies…

Chris L

The de gustibus principle prevents me from making the obvious rejoinder about whose loss that might be…! 😉

I will, however, point out that there’s (luckily, by the sound of things!) a great deal more to AF than just RRP’s contribution (there tend to be c.8 of them at any given moment, after all), and that they lean far more towards electronica/dance than rock these days, if that helps to pique your interest in any way.

Chris L

My work here is almost done! Before I leave you alone, though, [aims pistol at foot] IMHO Reflektor is lyrically the weakest of the four albums released to date and you’d be much better off with its predecessor, The Suburbs…but [wavers over whether to pull trigger] that is just MHO…

Chris L

Fair enough; if their stuff doesn’t do it for you, it doesn’t do it for you, and I’m glad that you graciously gave it a chance. Have you had an opportunity to listen to that Jane Weaver album as well?

Chris L

Now then, you see, there was something that I felt sure you’d lap up hungrily! Your refusal to be bound by “genre” in your critical responses is indeed admirable, but I can see how the very unpredictability it engenders must have driven your more “tribal” school peers nuts…

Chris L

By the way, I notice that you gave Radiohead’s latest effort the lowest mark of any of the albums in your “complete list of ratings”. I’ve just been listening to it again, and…I’m tempted to agree. The first two tracks and the last two are wonderful (True Love Waits contains one of the most heartrending vocals Yorke has ever recorded, IMHO), but too much of the rest is “generic Radiohead”, with glimpses of greatness (while still present) too few and far between. Definitely their weakest post-Pablo Honey album, taken as a whole.

Daniel Pett

As much as I agree with your sentiment, Matthews’ and Howard’s comments are still understandable. Interesting to see you enjoyed Muhly’s piece so much. I’ll test his comment by serenading my heart’s desire with Sequenza 6 and see if it works.

Daniel Pett

Taken out of their context, their comments don’t seem to suggest that the love song is ‘intimately’ bound up in older musical aesthetics, more that it’s more commonly associated with such aesthetics but to use that as an excuse is, as you say, stupid. If such an association, however unfounded or weak it may be, didn’t exists, a concert of new commissions that are all love songs might not have the novel (but not trivial) appeal that I thought it did. I would have gone if I had been free.

I’d love to know of any other contemporary love songs that you can suggest. The only pieces that come to mind are opera arias, Nyman’s 8 Lust songs and Turangalila, although you could hardly call that contemporary.

Daniel Pett

Thanks for such a wide ranging list.

If there’s a composer whom I’d wish Howard to commission a love song from, it would be Ferneyhough, mainly to see the kind of programme note he’d write.

William Howard

May I pitch in here, to say how grateful I am to you for writing about my Cheltenham concert last Sunday. I am also grateful for any debate that arises from my commissioning project, but I am surprised to be accused of claiming that expressions of love belong exclusively to the Romantic Era. In the introduction that you quote from, I wrote: ‘Love songs can be found, of course, in music across the world and across the centuries, but the idea of songs without words for piano conjures up an image of something belonging far more to the nineteenth century than to the twenty-first’. Could you be a bit more specific about why you feel that statement is ‘the rankest, fallacious nonsense’, given that I am talking about a particular genre of piano music, not about love music in general? If there is a repertoire of contemporary piano pieces out there that can be described as ‘love songs’ maybe you could point me in the right direction. Google hasn’t taken me much further than Richard Clayderman….

I am glad to hear about the Ensemble Recherche album that you mention, which, although not a solo piano album, does feature love songs without words. It seems that the Ensemble’s mission statement is quite unequivocal. The ‘product description’ goes as follows:

‘During preparations for their 25th anniversary in 2010, the ensemble recherche came to the conclusion that there are no love songs anymore!’ So they requested such pieces for the celebration from various composer friends.’ I wonder what you make of their claim…

My own project to commission a large number of piano ‘love songs’ from living composers (which, incidentally, took me hundreds of unpaid hours of fundraising and administration before I started learning them all) is in fact motivated by a desire to show that composers DO write about love these days. It is an attempt to open a door for people (I have met many) who believe that contemporary music doesn’t engage the emotions. As a performer I have been involved in over 100 commissions and have spent over 35 years trying to bring contemporary music to a wider audience. Suggestions of how I can do this better would be welcome, but please don’t attribute views to me that I don’t actually hold!

Chris L

Sorry, me again. It strikes me that the “offending” choice of words above is “…belonging…to…”, which may not have been intended to imply that the song without words for piano should be considered an exclusively 19th-century phenomenon, but certainly can be read that way; and that if this were replaced with something much more clearly value-neutral, such as “…associated…with…” (which in fact paraphrases you, Simon), the essential sense of William’s statement would be preserved without giving rise to grounds for dispute.

[…] pieces: a 2011 arrangement of Purcell’s Chacony in G minor (which i loved), Camille: a short lovesong for solo piano (which i found charming), and his hour-long choral work Path of Miracles (which pretty much blew me […]

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