It’s about time i did some blogging. Tonight’s theme is things that I am reading, or have read recently. Gee, that’ll really get em in won’t it? Ok, let’s start with a picture:

Ha-ha! Yesterday, this was making me laugh all afternoon. The joke being that generally, pieces of music are written in particular keys, which are generally named alphabetically from A to G. H is “off the scale”, it’s like turning the volume up to 11. Naturally, there’s a perfectly understandable explanation for why JS Bach wrote this prelude and fugue in “H”. H is german for B. Clearly this is the short story. There is a longer one in the ancient oxford companion to music, but it is not the story I want to be telling you tonight. There is half a bottle of red in front of me. I’m going to pour myself another glass of wine.

I recently got excited again about JS Bach, which is why I took myself off yesterday to Da Capo to purchase book II of his 48 Preludes and Fugues. Quite a few of his Goldberg variations appeared in Nigel Kellaway’s Sleepers Wake! Wachet Auf! which I saw at the carriageworks a little while ago. (oh I’ve seen some wonderful stuff there this year! It’s all really exciting. I wish more of my friends would take a leap of faith and come with me. I want all my favourite performers to play to full houses every night. If only for the karma! Sometimes I think nobody’s interested in art/ performance any more. I’ve become quite used to going to odd performance type things on my own, and I’ve been pretty lucky, I generally know someone there, and it’s always a joy to catch up with other odd types. However small audiences always make me wish I’d badgered my friends a little harder about coming to see this or that.)

Yes! I finally get to see Nigel perform in the flesh! Oh joy, oh rapture, oh blissful piano trio playing Bach and Nigel’s jazzy variations on it. Oh goody, baroque variations, my favourite, I’m listening out for the twiddles and embellishements, to see if they play their trills correctly, trills and ornaments and appogiaturas. At uni, Winsome Evans taught us to be discerning. You can see her in action here.

Nigel is doing the very performance that I want to be doing. Exploring fascinating themes like -in this instance- memory and loss, and how they relate to life, artistic practice & performance, combining them with beautiful music, beautiful imagery, grand elegant elegaic camp gestures and a somewhat fraught performer/ audience relationship. He rouses on us more than once. Quite rightly so; I came here tonight expecting to love every minute of it and I’m taken aback when he attacks us with “Don’t you know how difficult it is to do this?” Of course I bloody know, if it were easier I’d have been doing it long ago. But then he’s charming again, and I follow, nose first til I nearly fall off the seat.

From the program notes:

“1955, Glenn Gould playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations…He recorded this music at the age of 20something, just a few months before I myself was born… November 1955. Ah! Now that comes out of the bue! Let’s be exact here! The 9th of November 1955. Hey! that’s what birthdays are for…a confirmation: I became… I am…still…I think.”

Fifty years later, in 2005, I found myself in a chilly autumnla berlin for a coupe of weeks’ between gigs in France and Nuremberg. … I was camping in a quite affordable though very hip hotel facing the east side of a few remnants of “the wall”. Day and night the cafe/bar played an alarmingly eclectic mix of music - Verdi sequing into reggae, Frank Sinatra, Hip hop, old Eagles and Stones standards, Broadway musicals (the good and the bad!), Roy Orbison, Richard Strauss, Bessie Smith, heavy metal, Barbra Streisand, German electro-funk, Gregorian chant, The Clash, Bob Dylan and Marlene Dietrich, Salsa, Schubert string quartets…

Over breakfast and then late every night I sat alone in that bar with a book of blank manuscript, an Urtext keyboard score of JS Bach’s Goldberg variations open on the table, and every detail of Glenn Gould’s 1955 tempi and phrasings clearly etched into my memory. The bar was always noisy - a cacophony of young Berliners socialising and much older music that I recognised all too well. This was a great environment in which to contemplate memory and knowledge, and to sketch the variations you hear this evening. They reflect my own early studies in a particularly French school of pianism and sound. And I decided immediately that I would write for that late 18th century Germanic (almost Frederician”) invention - the piano trio.

These variations refer to an early 20th century French neo-classicism, as explored by composers like Ravel and Stravinsky and then, later, by exploratory and jazz luminaries like John Cage and Dave Brubeck.

My inventions are still redolently “Bach”, but distracted by other histories - as though remembered in a state of “half sleep… half wake”.

- Nigel Kellaway, Composer.

In Berlin hey? I’ve been reading about Berlin. Stasiland, by Anna Funder. The author has collected stories from people who lived behind the wall: people who were part of the Stasi - the GDR secret police, informants for the Stasi, people whose lives were irrevocably fucked up by the Stasi. It’s an engaging read, and I’ve just spent the last half hour flicking through the book looking for paragraphs to confirm this, but i think you need to read the whole book together. Anna describes one of the themes that sustains her book:

I can’t see it but I know that just near there, on the site of the old Palace of the Prussian emperors pulled down by the Communists, is the parliament building of the GDR, the Palast der Republik. It is brown and plastic-looking, full of asbestos, and all shut up. It is not clear whether the fence around it is to protect it from people who would like to express what they thought of the regime, or to protect the people from the Palast, for health reasons. The structure is one long rectangular metal frame, made up of smaller rectangles of brown-tinted mirror glass. When you look at it you can’t see in. Instead the outside world and everything in it is reflected in a bent and brown way. In there, dreams were turned into worlds, decisions made, announcements applauded, backs slapped. In there could be a whole other world, time could warp and you could disappear.

Like so many things here, no-one can decide whether to make the Palast der Republik into a memorial warning from the past, or to get rid of it altogether and go into the future unburdened of everything, except the risk of doing it all again. Nearby, Hitler’s bunker has been uncovered in building works. No-one could decided about that either - a memorial could become a shrine for neo-Nazis, but to erase it altogether might signal forgetting or denial. In the end the bunker was reburied just as it was. The mayor said, perhaps in another fifty years people would be able to decide what to do. To remember or forget - which is healthier? To demolish it or to fence it off? To dig it up, or leave it lie in the ground?

Did I learn nothing from my venerable institution?
p50, Funder, Anna. Stasiland, Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, 2002.

Now, in my honest self reflexive blogging style, I am too tired to continue my ambitious epic post, I have finished the bottle, and I have to get up at stupid o’clock for work tomorrow. I will continue this thread at a time more convenient than the present.

Whoa - one last thing: the Berlin Wall came down on the 9th Novemeber 1989 - Nigel’s birthday. A nice touch of synchronicity, or something.

Nigh-night.