21 May 2002
Shostakovich Ho!
Well, the SSO's Shostakovich project was truly an inspiration - an incredible experience, especially the 4th Symphony, which presented such a volume of sound that I felt if I'd jumped up I could have surfed to the stage on it. All praise to conductor Alexander Lezarev, the orchestra, and particularly to whoever thought of the whole thing - let's hope it's not a once-off. It's put me into a full-on Shostakovich mood, which has manifested itself in a number of ways, not least in the purchase of a recording of his incomplete comic opera The Gamblers which was written to the text of a play by Gogol with the intention of not cutting any of it... ambitious, not to say the least!
At the end of April, I finished a new piece for flute and piano, a foolish little piece called [mostly] moto perpetuo. It's very frivolous and silly, but seems to be going down quite well among the few who have heard it. It's receiving its first official airing at a private concert on 1 June, so I hope to be able to include a recording of it on the scores & recordings page of this site soon. The rest of the year is looking quite busy from a composition perspective - I've been asked to put forward proposals for a couple of films and have had a couple of new pieces commissioned for a concert series planned for November for counter-tenor and piano, which I'm very much looking forward to.
Nothing else particularly exciting happening at the moment - I'm a trifle late with my tax return, and 3 BASes behind where I should be, so sorting through that & trying to fathom the intricacies of MYOB have been high on the priority list. The time has come too, for Aubade Music Services to change its name - unfortunately the name Aubade has been trademarked, so I can't use it any longer. The plus with this will be that this site will hopefully soon have its own domain name. Proper directional redirects, etc. will of course be put in place at this address though, so you'll still be able to find it.
I am presently reading through Constant Lambert's Music Ho!, which I've only read sections of before. He has some really fascinating observations - some of which quite peculiar from our perspective, but fascinating for being the viewpoint of someone living in the 1930s. His comments on the proliferation of "synthetic" music (i.e. from radios and gramophone recordings) are particularly revealing, as is his view of Stravinsky's latest compositional fad of neo-classicism. He is particularly sensitive to the artistic possibilities of the cinema as an artistic form and makes comparison between the pastiche of the neoclassists and the montage technique pioneered by filmmakers such as Eisenstein - coming to the conclusion that a number of composers of the era ought instead to have been filmmakers!
