Wednesday 31 August 2011

'A Midsummer Night's Dream', Benjamin Britten

This wasn't where I was going to start. It's not early or very recent, it doesn't produce the Proustian rush of memory that some songs do. But it is important to me and it is beautiful and it is the opera that makes all the duff ones worthwhile as far as I'm concerned.

I'm still dubious about opera, partly because I can't really appreciate or understand all the effort that goes into producing it. I very much enjoy being told a story but for me the music is normally pretty, ha ha, incidental.

What I have found is that the more productions I see of a particular piece, the more important and memorable the music becomes - partly just through reinforcement, partly because I am concentrating less on who is stabbing who and partly because it is the bit that doesn't change between versions. The opera I have seen done most often is Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

It's my favourite too. It benefits greatly from Shakespeare's play, inheriting a familiar story, strong characters and a beautiful, compelling English libretto that mixes mortal wit and passion with eldritch poetry. As an opera it has other advantages. Opera isn't reality - people are singing for God's sake - and it suffers when forced to portray the humdrum. Dream not only takes us, the mortal audience, into an escapist love story, it shows us a whole new fantasy world order where the realms of Athens and Faerie intertwine under the trees. And Britten's music wonderfully evokes this fantastical setting. The opening, a sliding sinewy chorus of twisting branches and swaying boughs, brings the forest to life immediately and pushes us deep within.

My favourite part, the extract I have chosen, as it were, Kirsty, is from the beginning of Act III where the lovers awake from the muddled madness of the previous night, calmed and remedied. It is the emotional catharsis of the piece, the resolution of the drama. In the play, this scene features quite a blustery piece of exposition, with Demetrius explaining to the Duke that everything has been fixed. But the opera shows us the emotional journey. One small line from the play is taken and magnified, echoing around the lovers, first as realisation, then as growing wonder and finally, unifying and mutual bliss, as they each declare their chosen partner "mine own and not mine own".

Out of context it might seem a disturbing or sceptical analysis of a relationship, dwelling on ideas of possession and ownership. But really it's a beautiful, arresting thought, hinting at the mysterious and inexplicable alchemy that binds us to another and them to us. The act of falling in love is often a solitary, internal process, beset by doubts - this moment in the opera shows us the transcendent, wonderful instant of reciprocity, when the jewel we have found sings back our own thoughts.

For all that, the piece, and the moment, is not without its problems - both the play and opera ask that we conveniently forget that Demetrius preferred Hermia to Helena before the Fairies chemically overrode his desires and one might be left hoping, for his sake, that the effect is permanent. I've a hankering, now I think about it, to see a production where Demetrius visibly and knowingly resigns himself to the narrative inevitability, not coerced by magic, but submitting to the needs of the many.

But of course, to us as much as to the Faeries, these mortal lives and loves are mere playthings and, at the end, the four lovers are paired correctly to our satisfaction.

All is well and as it should be.

Music

I'm not at all musical. Living, as I do, surrounded my professional musicians, this has become something of a mantra. I consider myself to be a civilian.

But I am musical, of course, in the sense that I have spent my life absorbing it, as we all do. I listen, I hum, I mull, I (God help me) might even do a little dance if nobody's looking.

And of course I am aware, as we all are, that there are songs, pieces of music that prise us open and leave us vulnerable or exuberant or bewitched. When they materialise from the depths of a playlist I become transfixed, transported... but, agh, I am invariably alone when this happens and thoughts, if not shared, either wither or fester. And if I write them down here, it doesn't feel so much like I am talking to myself, which is an important consideration too.

Rather than limit myself to the paltry eight tracks that are allowed by the fabled Desert Island Discs ("Yes Kirsty, my luxury item is the Internet.."), I'm going to start jotting down the important ones as they occur to me. Where possible, I'll include links to Spotify, which you can get for free in the US and UK. Sometimes I'll be trying to safeguard a powerful memory against accidental deletion, sometimes I'll just want to share something special, or rant momentarily.

I won't loftily dangle the promise of esoteric gems and eclectic range before you - there'll be a depressing amount of '90s Britpop I expect - but hopefully what I can do is demonstrate my own connection with each piece, the thing which makes it mine. I don't know where we'll end up, but it'll be more than eight and less than everything.

(You're probably not allowed to take the Internet, but someone (Nick Hornby?) took his iPod. My luxury item would actually be Salisbury Cathedral, which poses other problems I suppose..)

Tuesday 30 August 2011

Sometimes I feel like this...

For good or ill, Captain Haddock was always the character with whom I identified most in the Tintin books.


(Hergé's Red Rackham's Treasure is brilliant and well worth a read, even if the ending is a little.. lacklustre. It's available to buy here.)

Saturday 13 August 2011

A Sense of Place

If History is not what happened, but what you can remember, then Geography is not where things are, but where you left them.

A good thing about the US is that towns and cities stay where they're put. Atlanta, Georgia; Lincoln, Nebraska; Denver, Colorado. You may not be able to point to them on a map, but that doesn't mean that you don't instinctively know where they are, and they prove to be very reliable. Sadly, this is not true of many other places around the world. They've obviously drifted, or meandered off while nobody was looking, like members of your family on a shopping trip. And there is a hard-core cadre of distinctly unhelpful places, proper wrong'uns, who've been bugging me for years.

Why on (Google) Earth, for example, is Billericay in Essex with Basildon and Chelmsford when it should obviously be in Ireland? And Staines, which should be in Essex of course, turns out to be in Middlesex, across the other side of London!

Why do Dungeness and, good grief, the Isle of Sheppey, persist in being in Kent when the western coast of Scotland is clearly where they both yearn to be? It's maddening. (But I have to share with you that there is a tiny place north of Dungeness called Lydd on Sea - if that's not overweening ambition I don't know what is..)

Britain seems to be full of mis-places. Tring in Hertfordshire is another place that sounds like it wants to be in Ireland, as is - of course - County Durham.

Small fry, you may think: British idiosyncrasy. Well, how about a whole country? Oh yes, where's Suriname then? Not in West Africa, tucked up in the Gold Coast. No, not in South East Asia either. It's in South America of all places. What is it doing there?

Perhaps I'm just showing my ignorance, but sometimes geography is deliberately unhelpful. Why Bologna and Boulogne? Is it really necessary for them to be so similar? And FOR CRYING OUT LOUD have you seen how many Guineas there are? It's bordering on obsessive. No wonder the post is always getting lost.

Until this can all be sorted out I suppose I'll just have to muddle through. Now please excuse me - I need to GoogleMap my car keys...

Wednesday 10 August 2011

Shouldn't I be doing something more useful? Like checking Facebook?

Sigh, and there's sooo much more..

Coupon Code

Consecutive Vowels

Convincing

Mutual

Starlight

Conditional Risk


XKCD

There are hundreds of wonderful cartoons over at XKCD; a mixture of wit, romance, wisdom and adventure where sometimes simple images capture complex ideas and emotions.

When I find one I adore, I'm going to embed it here, just so I can find it more easily next time. Please remember that all the credit belongs to Randall Munroe at XKCD.com.

Here's a couple of the ones I've fallen in love with so far.

Alternative Energy Revolution

Wasteland

2009 Called

Flying Cars

Friday 5 August 2011

Narrative is all.

Storify is a website that allows you to write your own by collating nuggets of the internet. Here's one I made which amused me...