One subject, two takes

Just after I completed the Culter Mills project last year I met Amy Marletta who was working on the Arts Development project Artist In The Green. A visual artist from Glasgow, Amy had involved residents and business people of The Green, an inner-city area of Aberdeen, in a series of photographic portraits and written a song on basis of their memories of the area. Though the idea of writing a song on basis of people’s memories is similar to the one I took in the Culter Mills project, I felt that our approaches were subtly different.

Whether a community music or arts activity is approached from an artistic or community development perspective influences how the relationship between artist and participants is negotiated and developed. Lyn Gardner even goes as far as warning against projects in which artists dash in with their own agendas and needs without real reference to the community. In my experience, even if a community artist or musician has own ideas at the outset of a project, he or she is often also genuinely concerned with incorporating the ideas of participants. Rather, I’d like to think that the kind of impacts of the two approaches are different.  

In the Culter Mills and Parallel Lives projects my intention was to contribute to community relations, while my Whaling and Songs Of The Earth projects have been driven by my enthusiasm for music composition. When I engage people in the latter kind of projects, I hope to contribute to the participants’ personal development by contributing to their (artistic) skills and inviting them to reflect on interesting subjects. This is different from the community development objectives in for example the Culter Mills and Parallel Lives projects. Such community development involves bringing communities together through, as Alison Rooke and David Kendall suggest, dialogue, sharing, friendships and action. Though I felt that Amy’s approach differed only subtly from my own, I now realise her work mainly engaged people on an individual basis, thus contributing to their personal development whereas my approach aimed more at enhancing community relations. The community development objective often involves a degree of personal development among the participants, but the personal development objective not necessarily includes the improvement of community relations. 

There is merit in both approaches to community music. Though I prefer to use both takes on the subject, I think it is important to be clear about my objectives for specific projects. As I’m interested in developing my ideas about the impacts of community music and arts on participants and their communities, I’d love to hear from other community musicians and artists about the work they’re doing.

For other blogs on community music:
Authorship
Learning to sing together
More than music
On whose terms?
Why folk songs?
Community music - music for communities

Copyright text and image Petra Vergunst

More than music

Arts Development have asked me to set up a choir to follow up to the Parallel Lives project. I’m excited about this opportunity as it allows me to build upon previous work rather than starting all over again in a new setting. And the choir will not just be any choir. It will be an intergenerational choir, bringing children and adults in the community together. As the choir will be a community development project, the role of the actual singing and music making may, however, be less obvious.

 

Intergenerational work brings different generations together to build more cohesive communities. Young and old benefit from such meetings. In an intergenerational choir younger participants will have an opportunity to meet trustworthy adults who are willing to take time and show interest in them, nurturing their talents. Older singers may have an opportunity to feel valued and share their stories and memories. Like in the other community music projects I've been involved in, the choir will be an opportunity for different groups of people to meet each other and create a dialogue.

A few days ago I read Lyn Gardner’s blog in the Guardian about community theatre in London. She argues that community theatre is about process rather than product. This is no less true for a community choir. Singing together in an intergenerational choir can help children and adults to bond. In Torry, community members want the choir to provide an opportunity for children to meet people who can take on the role of grandparents. Everybody who has ever sung in a choir will have experienced the sheer joy of singing together. The choir can also help the singers to understand community relations. To produce a good sound, and thereby a better experience, all singers will have to carefully listen to the people around them, and – quite literally – sing from the same (hymn)sheet. Everyone’s contribution is important.

In the community choir I’m intending to sing a lot of Scottish folk songs. Folk songs tell about the events, experiences and feelings of the people who wrote them. They may be a starting point for the adult members the choir to talk about their lives and the community. The very fact that there is scope to add new songs to the repertoire means that younger members of the choir can return this favour by writing a song about their own lives.

So what role is there for music in an intergenerational community choir? I’d say that even though singing may not be an objective in itself, it will be important as a means to achieve the wider community development objectives of the choir. 

Copyright text Petra Vergunst

Unfolding

Midwinter. The bleak midwinter, as Rosetti wrote. Trees are in a meditative state after they celebrated another fruitful summer by orchestrating a mosaic of reds, oranges, greens, yellows and browns. No longer leaves dancing on the wind, but soon their buds will start to swell, preparing for yet another spring. The embodiment of spring for me is the unfolding of leaves of the sycamore. Each year, in the beginning of April, I witness the unfolding of their lobed leaves from an old stone bridge over a nearby burn. The burn, in full flow, is dipper territory. Upstream it is free to spill over into the low-lying wooded embankments. Old lichen-covered alder, elder, hazel, rowan and sycamore live entwined, welcoming a range of small birds. Only walkers can reach the bridge. From the bridge you look down on the lowest branches of the sycamore. The old tree takes several days to unfold its leaves, slowly stretching finger after finger until it welcomes you with an open hand. The translucent yellow green leaves emerge from pale red buds from which blossom develops as well. Soon the leaves will turn saturated green, keeping this colour until late summer. But for me contentment lies in the birth of spring, and this is but a fleeting moment.     

Copyright text and music Petra Vergunst

Social listening

Chamber music inspires me. As compared to a full orchestra I love the relative simplicity of only a few instruments playing together. But most of all the context in which chamber music was conceived and performed originally influences how I think about my own piano performances. In the 19^th century friends and family tended to play music together and for each other. Whether they played a song without words by Mendelssohn, one of Schubert’s Lieder or a violin sonata by Schumann, they took turns in making music.

This is a far cry from the way in which we appreciate chamber music nowadays. Rather than attending a formal concert by a professional musician in which each listener quietly appreciates the music, 19^th-century chamber music was performed by amateur musicians in people's living rooms. The appreciation of chamber music was highly social as those attending happily discussed the music and other issues. I’d like to think of this as social listening. What’s more, the distinction between performer and audience was blurred as musicians took turns in performing for each other.

What inspires me most of all, however, is the kind of music being played. To cater for the skilled amateurs who played chamber music, composers wrote chamber music in a less complex style. Personally I find the simple textures more powerful than the sometimes complex and virtuosic textures of music written for the concert stage. In concert stage music a lot of things tend to happen at once, requiring listening more than once to appreciate the full complexity of the music. The clarity of expression in for example Mendelssohn’s songs without words tends to move me much more - and right from the first time I hear it.

Taking inspiration from chamber music, I prefer to perform piano music that is easier to listen to, in informal settings where there is space for talking in between and during the music. On 6 December I’ll provide background music for an event celebrating art work in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and on 10 January I’ll play piano during a music-in-the-cafe session at Newton Dee.

Copyright text and image Petra Vergunst

Album leaves

I’d like to think of a performance as an album of stories, poems and images that we browse through, encountering a whole new imaginary world with every new piece played. The album then is an invitation to the listener to draw on his or her imagination to make sense of the music heard. 

Listeners to popular music do this intuitively. They express how the music effects them through dancing to, and singing along with, songs of their favourite artists and bands. The dancing and singing can literally be seen as a bodily expression of the memories and imagined worlds conjured up by the music. John Lennon actively invites his listeners to engage in such a process:

 Imagine all the people,

Living life in peace.

You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope some day you will join us

And the world will live as one.

The metaphor of a performance as an album of stories, poetry and images is an invitation to listen creatively. As a form of active listening in which the listener imagines worlds and ideas that are original and meaningful to him or her, creative listening can be transformative. The creative listener doesn’t necessarily have to be able to express the outcomes of his listening clearly, it may also entail a deep-felt experience. If the listener wishes to express the ideas and feelings conjured up by the music, he or she may do so in music, poetry or drawings. My own composition A Different World started out in this way as a response to Bach’s Two-Part Invention no 9. 

Can a performer in any way help audiences to listen creatively? I believe so. The performer can explicitly invite the listener to do so, but also create a context that triggers the listener’s imagination. Rather than a set-up that juxtaposes the performer and passive listener, listeners may gather around the performer in a venue full of poetry and paintings. A performer could even invite the listener to turn the pages of an album of stories, poems and images whilst listening to the music and ask the listener to contribute his or her own album leaves.

Copyright text and image Petra Vergunst

Composition

Last week I visited the exhibition by Elizabeth Blackadder at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. Her Japanese still life paintings, in which she spaces out objects and plays with repetition of form, provided a whole new perspective on the idea of composition. Blackadders’ Japanese paintings stand out because their composition is unusual, freed from Western conventions. What light does this shed on musical composition?

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Musical Terms, composition is the activity of composition and the result of that activity. As such it describes a process of construction, a creative putting together, a working out and carrying through of an initial conception or inspiration. Composition thus is a conscious process in which material is placed in relation to other material. What’s more, as it is a conscious process it is done with a pre-conceived idea in mind. Composition is not something done by musical composers only – painters, photographers and writers compose their material as well.

When we view a painting – say a Japanese still life by Blackadder – the way our eyes move through the painting is not predetermined. We may look at it from a distance to get a general impression, then step forward to look at some details. Detail is appreciated as part of the whole. In a musical composition, however, the listener doesn’t get the benefit of viewing the whole before hearing the detail. The musical journey takes the first-time listener into the unknown. What is heard can only be interpreted in terms of what has been heard before – not in relation to what is still to come.

Blackadder’s paintings point at another thing as well. In conventional still lifes all spaces seem to have a purpose. Blackadders’ still lifes celebrate the spaces-in-between as she explores how the components of her still lifes relate to each other. Painters and draughtman call this negative space. The musical equivalent would be silence. John Cage famously celebrated silence in his 4’33. Silences are not empty space, they may be filled with environmental sounds like in John Cage’s work, they may also be spaces in which what has gone lingers and what is to come is anticipated. In the same way as Blackadder’s spaces-in-between are an integral part of her still lifes, so silences should be an integral part of musical compositions. I, for one, am a composer who makes far too little use of the expressive qualities of silence.

So what does this mean for composers – of music? In addition to thinking about our musical material, the sequence in which we present it is important. New material will be interpreted only in terms of what has come before. The way in which we space material is important as well. A new idea emerging from a dense texture may be hidden from hearing, the same material following a silence will make much greater impact. In the Berceuse from his Escenas Romanticas, for example, Granados makes powerful use of the spaces-in-between by letting passages die away completely before starting the next passage quietly. This all sounds so simple, but how often do we actually consciously compose?

Links to blogs with own compositions:
Repetition (horn trio)
Unfolding (piano)
A different world (piano)
Silver (flute)
The home of the whale (choir)
Ebb and flow (piano)
The horncall (choir)
Charr Bothy (piano)

Copyright text and image Petra Vergunst

Songs of the earth

Ever since I came across Gustav’s Mahler’s orchestral song cycle Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) I felt I had to do something with it. Taking inspiration from Chinese verse, Mahler associates the earth with seasonal transformations, death and re-birth. A drinking song of earth’s despair versus youth and beauty. Since it was written in 1908, Das Lied von der Erde has been the starting point for work by other artists. The Scottish Clarinet Quartet, for example, used the title for a collaboration with photographer Terry Williams and composers Stephen Davismoon, David Fennessy, Sadie Harrison and Anna Meredith that resulted in four audiovisual images of the Isle of Skye. Das Lied von der Erde has inspired me as well. I’ll use the title for a project in which I express my connections with my local natural environment – the earth, one could say – in musical compositions.

My compositions Silver and A Different World both stem from my frequent rambles in the woodlands and along the fields around my Scottish home. Fleeting moments, telling encounters, and atmospheric hues have etched themselves in my mind. The rhythm of my feet heightens my attention and opens up my imagination. Creative writing helps me to identify how I may express these experiences in music.

Artist Reiko Goto writes that creativity is a process of changing our place, our culture, and its ecological context, resonating with Ai Wei Wei’s understanding of creativity as a transformative process. Working on Silver and A Different World I noticed that while originally local woodland inspired my compositions, my compositions eventually made me see these surroundings in new ways. Whereas Mahler used the words of Chinese thinkers a thousand years ago to express his feelings in Das Lied von der Erde, I express my own experiences in songs-without-words. One could even argue that my Songs of the Earth project is a form of artist-led inquiry, in which, as Mendelssohn said, the music can express feelings and understandings that may be difficult to capture in words.

Over the next few months I intend to continue expressing my connections to the natural surroundings of my home in music compositions. I am aware that I’m not the first artist to do so. The work of other artists may indeed be a body of work to compare and contrast my own experiences with, in turn helping me to develop my own approach.

Links to all blogs on the Songs Of The Earth project:
Repetition
Unfolding
Social listening
Album leaves
Composition
A different world
Silver

Copyright text and image Petra Vergunst