Sitting in my garden studio practising at this time of the year is like working in an aviary. The eaves of the building are chock-full of nests and the combination of the chicks calling for food and all the garden birds carolling away makes a delightful din. Messiaen would have loved it. In quiet passages I can hear the chickens in the back garden too, particularly when one of them has laid an egg.
Reading through a book of harpsichord pieces by Rameau, a French contemporary of Bach, the other day, I realised that he’s a wonderful composer whose music I don’t know very well. And there, in the Pieces de Clavecin (Harpsichord Pieces) – which, in this edition comes fully equipped with an exceptionally flowery preface by Saint-Saens – I was thrilled to discover not only Le Rappel des Oiseaux (The Conference of the Birds) but also La Poule (The Chicken). The opening theme of this piece is a very lifelike imitation of a chicken (the only other piece of chicken music for keyboard which I can think of offhand is the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks in Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition). Just to be sure that we get the message, Rameau has helpfully written co co co co co co co dai over the first eight notes, which must be his best stab at the sound of an eighteenth-century French chicken. At least I fervently hope that it was Rameau and not some interfering editor.
Which all goes to show that programme music was alive and well in the early eighteenth century, in fact throughout the Baroque era. You’ve only got to think of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons for a famous example. Programme music is instrumental music which overtly references something – it can be more or less anything – which is extra-musical. As opposed to so-called ‘absolute music’ which supposedly has no connection to anything in the outside world. Well, as you can imagine, scholars have lively discussions on the distinction. Its use tailed off a bit in the Classical period but picked up with a vengeance in the 19th century – think of Richard Strauss’s tone poems for example, or Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.
Next weekend the Modulus Quartet will perform a piece of contemporary programme music – and in this case, the programme is provided by Yuri Gagarin’s first space flight in 1961. The concert, which combines live performance with lighting, projected film and animation, will be at 7 p.m. at the Hailsham Pavilion – like that inaugural space flight, the piece will last 108 minutes. You can find more details in the view events section.
I was researching the programme notes recently for a concert which will include the Heifetz transcriptions of songs from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess for violin and piano. Jascha Heifetz was an astounding Lithuanian-born violin virtuoso, who moved to the USA in 1917 to avoid the Russian revolution and set new standards in violin playing which many would argue have never been surpassed. Here’s a lovely letter which George Bernard Shaw wrote to him after his London debut:
‘If you provoke a jealous God by playing with such superhuman perfection, you will die
young. I earnestly advise you to play something badly every night before going to bed,
instead of saying your prayers. No mortal should presume to play so faultlessly.”
What I didn’t know is that in his later years he was also a pioneering environmentalist, joining his students at the University of Southern California to campaign for clean air and converting his Renault car to run on electricity – and that’s back in 1967! Which brings me back to Gagarin, whose space flight also inspired an early example of environmental awareness, by the sound of it – in his words, ‘orbiting earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is……let us preserve it and increase this beauty, not destroy it.’