fri 29/03/2024

My Summer Reading: Percussionist Colin Currie | reviews, news & interviews

My Summer Reading: Percussionist Colin Currie

My Summer Reading: Percussionist Colin Currie

The trailblazing musician picks his top summer reads

Third in line to share their summer reading selection with theartsdesk is Colin Currie (b 1976), the leading percussionist of his generation. A driving force behind new percussion repertoire for more than a decade, in 2000 Currie was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist Award for his inspirational role in contemporary music and is in the unique position of being the only instrumentalist to enjoy close collaborative relationships with many of the leading composers of today, notably Rautavaara, Steve Reich and Elliott Carter

His latest CD release, which features Jennifer Higdon's Percussion Concerto conducted by Marin Alsop with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, won a Grammy Award in 2010 and his recording of the world premiere of the Rautavaara Percussion Concerto will be released in spring 2012 on Ondine.

 The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak which I have nearly finished. Jumping between the 13th-century Middle East and present-day Massachusetts, this unusual and arresting novel weaves magical words on love and spirituality. It's delightful and vividly realised.

[Excerpt from The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak (Viking Books)]

Forty2Birds were singing outside her kitchen window on that balmy day in spring. Afterward Ella replayed the scene in her mind so many times that, rather than a fragment from the past, it felt like an ongoing moment still happening somewhere out there in the universe. There they were, sitting around the table, having a late family lunch on a Saturday afternoon. Her husband was filling his plate with fried chicken legs, his favourite food. Avi was playing his knife and fork like drumsticks while his twin, Orly, was trying to calculate how many bites of which food she could eat so as not to ruin her diet of 650 calories a day. Jeanette, who was a freshman at Mount Holyoke College nearby, seemed lost in her thoughts as she spread cream cheese on another slice of bread. Also at the table sat Aunt Esther, who had stopped by to drop off one of her famous marble cakes and then stayed on for lunch. Ella had a lot of work to do afterward but she was not ready to leave the table just yet. Lately they didn’t have too many shared family meals and she saw this as a golden chance for everyone to reconnect.

"Esther, did Ella give you the good news?” David asked suddenly. “She found a great job.”

Though Ella had graduated with a degree in English literature and loved fiction, she hadn’t done much in the field after college, other than editing small pieces for women’s magazines, attending a few book clubs and occasionally writing book reviews for some local papers. That was all. There was a time when she’d aspired to become a prominent book critic, but then she simply accepted that life had carried her elsewhere, turning her into an industrious housewife with three kids and endless domestic responsibilities.

Not that she complained. Being the mother, the wife, the dog walker, and the housekeeper kept her busy enough. She didn’t have to be the breadwinner on top of all these. Though none of her feminist friends from Smith College approved of her choice, she was satisfied to be a stay-at-home mom and grateful that she and her husband could afford it. Besides, she had never abandoned her passion for books and still considered herself a voracious reader.

2. What are you intending to read before the end of the summer and why?

 I'd like to crack on with Alex Ross's next book Listen to This, having greatly enjoyed The Rest is Noise, and once again listen along in tandem with the music in question.

[Excerpt from Listen to This by Alex Ross (Fourth Estate)]

ListenI hate “classical music”: not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today. It banishes into limbo the work of thousands of active composers who have to explain to otherwise well-informed people what it is that they do for a living. The phrase is a masterpiece of negative publicity, a tour de force of anti-hype. I wish there were another name. I envy jazz people who speak simply of “the music". Some jazz aficionados also call their art “America’s classical music”, and I propose a trade: they can have “classical”, I’ll take “the music”.

For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority. Consider other names in circulation: “art” music, “serious” music, “great” music, “good” music. Yes, the music can be great and serious, but greatness and seriousness are not its defining characteristics. It can also be stupid, vulgar and insane. Composers are artists, not etiquette columnists; they have the right to express any emotion, any state of mind. They have been betrayed by well-meaning acolytes who believe that the music should be marketed as a luxury good, one that replaces an inferior popular product. These guardians say in effect, “The music you love is trash. Listen instead to our great, arty music.” They are making little headway with the unconverted because they have forgotten to define the music as something worth loving. Music is too personal a medium to support an absolute hierarchy of values. The best music is the music that persuades us that there is no other music in the world.

When people hear “classical”, they think “dead”. The music is described in terms of its distance from the present, its difference from the mass. No wonder that stories of its imminent demise are commonplace. Newspapers recite a familiar litany of problems: record companies are curtailing their classical divisions; orchestras are facing deficits; the music is barely taught in public schools, almost invisible in the media, ignored or mocked by Hollywood. Yet the same story was told 40, 60, 80 years ago. Stereo Review wrote in 1969, “Fewer classical records are being sold because people are dying… Today’s dying classical market is what it is because 15 years ago no one attempted to instil a love for classical music in the then impressionable children who have today become the market.” The conductor Alfred Wallenstein wrote in 1950, “The economic crisis confronting the American symphony orchestra is becoming increasingly acute.” The German critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt wrote in 1926, “Concerts are poorly attended and budget deficits grow from year to year.” Laments over the decline or death of the art appear as far back as the 14th century, when the sensuous melodies of Ars Nova were thought to signal the end of civilisation. The pianist Charles Rosen has sagely observed, “The death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition.”

3. What are you planning to read next?

 I recently read Troubles by J G Farrell and am about to pick up his The Siege of Krishnapur. His characterisation and zest for language are eccentric and hilarious, reminding me somewhat of William Golding in his sea trilogy mode, perhaps my favourite omnibus of all time.

[Excerpt from The Siege of Krishnapur by J G Farrell (Phoenix)]

SiegeAnyone who has never visited Krishnapur, and who approaches from the east, is likely to think he has reached the end of his journey a few miles sooner than he expected. While still some distance from Krishnapur he begins to ascend a shallow ridge. From here he will see what appears to be a town in the heat distorted distance. He will see the white glitter of the walls and roofs and a handsome cove of trees, perhaps even the dome of what might be a temple. Round about there will be the unending plain still, exactly as it has been for many miles back, a dreary ocean of bald earth, in the immensity of which an occasional field of sugar cane or mustard is utterly lost.

The surprising thing is that this plain is not quite deserted, as one might expect. As he crosses it towards the white walls in the distance, the traveller may notice an occasional figure way out somewhere between the road and the horizon, a man walking with a burden on his head in one direction or another… even though, at least to the eye of a stranger, within the limit of the horizon there does not appear to be anywhere worth walking to, unless perhaps to that distant town he has spotted; one part looks quite as good as another. But if you look closely and shield your eyes from the glare you will make out tiny villages here and there, difficult to see because they are made of the same mud as the plain they came from; and no doubt they melt back into it again during the rainy season, for there is no lime in these parts, no clay or shale that you can burn into bricks, no substance hard enough to resist the seasons over the years.

Sometimes the village crouches in a grove of bamboo and possesses a frightful pond with a water buffalo or two: more often there is just a well to be worked from dawn till dusk by the same two men and two bullocks every single day in their lives. But whether there is a pond or not hardly matters to a traveller; in either case there is no comfort here, nothing that a European might recognise as civilisation. All the more reason for him to press on, therefore, towards those distant white walls which are clearly made of bricks. Bricks are undoubtedly an essential ingredient of civilisation; one gets nowhere at all without them.

Comments

Colin Currie's recital in Presteigne in 2008 was one of the most extraordinary and spellbinding concerts I've ever attended. This year's Presteigne Festival starts next week.

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