Hiya!
So I realized on the train today that the title for my British entries is a bit of a misnomer. I’ve been called away from London as much as I’ve been in London, if not more. London has been my trampoline, I’ve bounced away and fallen back. This obviously needs some further elucidation, so here we go...
6/16:
In my last entry, I mentioned the possibility of sitting in on a recording session of one of Michael Finnissy’s pieces. This possibility became a reality on Saturday, a reality which was unreal in how fabulous it was! I got up quite early on Saturday morning and made my way to Victoria Station via the Tower of London, which I had not gotten the chance to see the last time I was in London. I only saw the outside, due to how early I went, but still it was cool to see.
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| Talk about a strange juxtaposition of old and new! |
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| Rule Britannia |
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| Tower entrance, with Trebuchet |
From Victoria, I caught a train from London to Shoreham-by-Sea, southwest in England. The ride down took about 2 hours and was absolutely gorgeous! I tried to take one or two pictures on the way down, but I’m not sure how well some of them translated due to too much motion.
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| Outbound from London |
Arriving at the Shoreham-by-Sea station, Michael had arranged for someone to give me a lift to the Steynning (the town in which he lives) Civic Center where the recording would take place. By the time I got to the Steynning CC, it was only about 9:30 AM (my days in London have been getting progressively earlier...). There was a bit of time before the Kreutzer Quartet and Roderick the pianist were to arrive, so I took the opportunity to hoof it around the quiet country town of Steynning to take some pictures. Not wanting to venture too far, my destination was the church right across from the SCC, which was I guess typical for European town churches, but is still very striking and beautiful. There aren’t many churches in the US that are nearly as old as the ones in England, so I think they are very notable.
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| Steynning alseep |
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| Churchyard |
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| Steynning Church |
Fast forward about thirty minutes, the Kreutzers and Roderick arrive. At this point, time begins both to speed up and to slow down, as we spent the next 6 hours (for the people involved in the recording it was 8!) in the SCC working on Michael’s piece. The composition they were recording is a really fascinating one. It is Finnissy’s completion of Edvard Grieg’s unfinished Piano Quintet (Piano + String Quartet); Grieg wrote the first 235 measures, essentially all of the main thematic material of the piece, which Finnissy no doubt took as a challenge to develop. I think it is a sign of Finnissy’s skill as a composer that he was able to adapt Grieg’s piece and to expand on it in a way which was both stylistically appropriate, convincing of what Grieg might do, but also creative, intricate, and beautiful. It is quite different than many of Finnissy’s other works, and not representative at all of his personal style, but it is a testament to his talent and craft that he can embody so well and consistently the dramatic character required for each piece.
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| The Kreutzer Quartet (candid) |
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| Hopefully Roderick will not find this picture. In my effort to not be obnoxious and impose my blog-photo-taking on these excellent performers I only took a few candid photos, which meant people weren't looking directly at me and were engaged in other activities. So here's Mihailo (left, Violin 2 in the Kreutzer Quartet) and Roderick (right) |
My nominal function at this recording session was page-turning for Roderick the pianist. Most of the time, I wasn’t even needed, but I am so grateful that I was allowed to sit in. Though I may not have been needed, I certainly needed that recording session. It was such a pure joy to watch and listen to the Kreuzters, Roderick, Michael, and (forgive me, because I just don’t remember his name) the recording engineer all work together to bring the piece to life. There was frank discussion, there were a few flubs, there were some “no that’s wrong”s and some “that’s absolutely brilliant!”s, and there was a lot of joking around and good humor. For sitting for upwards of 6 hours and playing the same music sometimes eight times in a row, it was staggering how relaxed and consistently enthusiastic the whole group was. For me it was wonderful to be in a space where something was happening that I hope I can exactly reproduce in my own career down the line: making music as both a social and an artistic endeavor. I think I may have even brought up the ‘dirty’ word, myself, ‘career,’ because it seemed like all of these people would have been doing this sort of thing even if it hadn’t been their form of employment. Absolutely amazing to watch and listen to. The SCC space was fantastic, hardwood floors that you could feel vibrating under your feet (I could, I had to take off my shoes to eliminate extraneous noise) in the faster and more tumultuous sections it was a really visceral experience.
I had booked a ticket to a concert of Maurice Ravel’s solo piano music before I left for England (and before I even knew if I was going to be meeting with Michael) for 7:30 PM in London on Saturday. Because of this, I had to leave early (and was quite sad to do so, despite my excitement about the event I was going to!), and so at 4:15ish, I walked out into Steynning to catch the bus back to the Shoreham-by-Sea station. I took a few more pictures of the town of Steynning, for which ‘quaint’ may in fact be the perfect adjective. There is something about countryside England which just does not exist in America, which, I have to say, is a bit of a shame. But it was a shame to have to leave at all, though I was eagerly anticipating the Ravel concert.
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| Steynning's Church Street, en attendant le bus |
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| Down the other side of Church Street |
Steve Osborn was the pianist, a Scottish musician who recently recorded Ravel’s complete solo piano works with the Hyperion label (a label whose CDs I’ve always enjoyed) and would be playing a good chunk of Ravel’s solo piano works that evening. I would say the program was about half of Ravel’s solo piano music, and all of the pieces were very substantial, both in duration and in technical exigencies. He played Menuet Antique (~6:30), Miroirs (~30:00), [intermission] Valses Nobles et Sentimentales (~15:00), and finally Le Tombeau de Couperin (~24:00). It was a very good performance, though I was surprised and didn’t always agree with his choices of where to use the pedal and how to sustain (or not) certain ideas. But it was good to hear another interpretation, even if I didn’t always agree with it, because it enlarges my own perspective on the music. He also played some passages which are often very atmospheric with a lot of direction and brought out melodic lines within them that sustained one’s attention through ambiguous sections. My favorite part of the concert, though, was the encore. Osborn had ‘officially finished’ the program with the Toccata from Le Tombeau de Couperin, which ends in a blaze of virtuosic glory (and he actually sort of messed up the ending, oops! but the energy was there, and I can’t really blame him, it was a lot of challenging music to take on in one concert). His encore, then, was not one’s typical, flashy, light-hearted encore piece, he played a solo piano arrangement of a movement from Ravel’s Ma Mere l’Oie (Mother Goose Suite), originally composed for two pianos and turned into a ballet by the composer; the movement was Petit Poucet (Tom Thumb). I thought his performance was magical, so sensitive and delicate, it truly captured that quality of the ‘miniature’ which some biographers and musicologists have remarked upon in Ravel’s music and personality - and his height! It might be a little presumptuous to say that he wrote to scale, but only in the sense that a Swiss watch (Ravel’s father was a Swiss inventor, and Stravinsky pinned the ‘watchman’ epithet on Ravel) has many small but intricate and beautiful parts.
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| Where the performance took place, a very small intimate space with not enough lighting for adequate picture-taking... |
Anyway, enough gushing, the recording session was amazing, the concert encore was amazing, Ravel is a genius. What’s new.
My experience today was.
6/17:
As I may have mentioned before (how many times have I said that, now?), I made it an aspiration if not an outright goal to go see the Lake District parks, an area about half-way up England and encompassing a large area of really beautiful landscape. Sadly, my original plan was prevented by the prohibitive ticket prices to get up to one of the Lake District stations. About 88 pounds! More than I could afford certainly for a daytrip, so instead I went with plan B, and a good plan B at that! Instead of the site of inspiration for a whole generation of British poets, I went to one of the oldest 'inspired' sites in England, Stonehenge! I also considered going to Stonehenge taking care of the unfinished business of my trip to London with my grandmother, mother and sisters in 2000. The big hoof-and-mouth scare was going on at that time, so we were warned away from Stonehenge and didn’t get to go.
I seem to be getting up earlier and earlier these mornings. I don’t know whether it’s being in the city or the mattress or something, but this morning I rose and shone at 4:30 AM. Sort of heinous when you stop and think about it. But I felt fine and have been pretty alert all day. After fighting to see if I could find a cheaper fare to the Lake District, I gave it up and purchased a ticket to Salisbury (from Waterloo station), the nearest town to Stonehenge, and then headed (this is around 5:30 AM) down to the Tube station. I figured that since I was already up, I might as well walk around Hyde Park, as I didn’t end up doing that yesterday, and then when it got closer to my time of department I would take the one or two stops down to Waterloo station. I had forgotten, however, that it was a Sunday, a day in which the Tube schedule is notoriously unpredictable. What I should have predicted, though, but didn’t, was that the Tube would also open up later than during the week. Many of the stations I passed didn’t open until 6:45 AM or 7:15 AM. Undeterred, I decided I would walk from where I’ve been staying south towards Waterloo, taking the Tube once stations opened. It was actually quite lovely having the city all to myself in a way. I live in one of the older sections of the city, and passed through Soho en route, the architecture was lovely, and I think the temperature was been wonderful too. It has also not rained since the evening I came into town, which I find quite remarkable. For a country infamous for being rainy all the time, my sojourn has had fabulous weather. Around Leicester Square (a good 4 or 5 stops from the stop nearest my hostel), the stations finally opened up and I proceeded (must faster) to Waterloo station.
My train left at about 8:15 and arrived a minute or two before 10:00 in Salisbury, a beautiful small town with an enormous cathedral (we’ll get to that later on). The way to get to Stonehenge it seems (it’s nestled in the fork in a major British highway - it’s sort of strange how close the road actually gets to the monuments, you would think that in constructing the roads, the civil engineers would have tried to give Stonehenge a wider berth) is by bus tour...
Stonehenge, funnily enough, is positioned at the split of two main British highways (rather, the highways were built around Stonehenge, but surprisingly close to Stonehenge...). The way to get to it is from the nearby town of Salisbury (I took Waterloo to Salisbury, about 2 hours) on one of the bus tours, which was surprisingly informative - I was a little skeptical because the brochures for Stonehenge tours had all been on the vague and superstitious side: "come experience the mysteries of the stones..." - it's amazing to see how much ancient architecture is extant in the towns near to Stonehenge, let alone Stonehenge itself.
Stonehenge was amazing. Were there lots of people there? Yes. Were most of them more concerned with taking pictures of themselves in front of Stonehenge rather than actually looking at Stonehenge? Probably, but I found it a very moving experience. One thing which I found unique was that, unlike a lot of other culturally significant tourist-heavy areas, Stonehenge was, obviously, not enclosed. Unlike trying to see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, Michelangelo’s David in Florence or the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the lack of any objects off of which to bounce sound resulted in the general noise level even of all of the tourists to be muted, almost a little distant (the wind helped with that too). It was sort of cool, the individualistic experience which the entirely flat landscape permitted even to large groups of people. And I think the monuments are just incredible. A man I conversed with on the train down was correct in saying that the stones are smaller than most pictures make them, but they’re still huge. And to repeat all of the brochures, no one knows why Stonehenge was built, but it’s an amazing and abiding example of creativity. The bus-tour recording called it the birth of architecture, which may or may not be true, but in either case, it wasn’t exactly the birth of practical architecture. More like one of the birthplaces of aesthetic design. And it’s still around. I just find it staggering that it has lasted this long. Stones which have outlived entire civilizations...
I also had a funny thought at one point. All of the brochures, as I said before make a point of saying “we don’t know what Stonehenge was meant for, as an astronomical observatory or the place of a sacred ritual...” I imagined for a moment a brochure from the year 4000 saying something about the circle of roping around Stonehenge and the trampled circle of grass circumscribing it, “archaeologists have been unable to discern the reason why so many people came to walk around this monument, perhaps it was part of some sacred ritual...” Speculating on ritual, we have created our own.
On the other side of one of the roads which passes by Stonehenge was a wide, open field, which people were free to walk in. There were a few Stonehenge related mounds (actually, they might have predated Stonehenge) which people could climb and sit on. I took the opportunity to (almost) lose myself in the beauty of the British countryside. I’m very excited to post pictures I took, because I found the setting of Stonehenge as breathtaking as the actual stones.
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| Not much point of captions here, Stonehenge from various angles and lightings. |
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| The field across from Stonehenge, I had a good romp in it! |
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| Pictures which can speak for themselves, |
Continuing the bus tour back around to the city of Salisbury, I felt I needed a bit of a pick-me-up. The morning walk, the train ride, seeing Stonehenge, and the extended walk in the countryside, wore me out a little, so I decided I would try to get a cream-tea (tea with scones and clotted cream, when in Rome...) to revive me. Sadly, the place I went to was out of scones (inconceivable!), so I settled for an absolutely delicious second: Treacle Tart with custard. I’d never had Treacle Tart before and I still don’t know exactly what is in it, but it was very sweet, the custard flavor balanced perfectly with it and I found myself actually eating as little as I could each time in order to savor it as long as I could.
Ironically, I found that sitting down and giving my legs a rest drained most of my remaining energy. I explored the town a little more, but wasn’t up for any other major adventure for the day.
I did, however, stop by Salisbury’s cathedral, which has one of the largest church spires in England (apparently it weighs something like 1800 tons, unbelievable...). When I post them, I hope you’ll enjoy the pictures, the architecture was beautiful. Sadly, the lighting inside made interior photos blurry, but the exterior photos are quite good and I suppose they’ll have to do.
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| Treacle Tart! |
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| A topiary in the middle of town! |
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| An arch on the way to the cathedral |
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| The cathedral! |
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One of the local houses near Salisbury cathedral
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| Another nearby house |
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| Salisbury cathedral one last time |
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| On the way back to the train station |
I caught the train back into London and have returned to base-camp for my final day in this city and in this marvelous country. While one might term this trip something of a ‘working vacation,’ I think it has been essential to the growth I’ve been hoping this studying abroad will allow, and I can’t wait to allow it to sink in a little bit back in Malmo, to steep, if that’s an apt analogy (how could it not be in England?)
More to report on Tuesday, and photos, I hope tomorrow!
Goodnight!
-Trey
