RNIB Summer School Part 2

Here's some bits and bobs from the wonderful RNIB Summer School.

An excerpt from Kerry Firth's score of her piece, which explored a range of emotion in just a few short French phrases; James at the RNIB was fascinated at how Kerry (composer), myself (scribe) and Juliet Fraser (soprano, occasional scribe) worked together on generating this score:

Here's Kevin Satizabal and Ben Green with me at Handel House, where we had our first workshop day and where we explored the acoustic and theatrical properties of the space:

The opening of Zoe Moskal-Guy's setting of an Othello speech:

Michael Andrews, moi, the brilliant Sally-Anne Zimmerman from the RNIB, Juliet Fraser and Ben Green, over at the Salvation Army Church on Oxford Street (top lunches!); Juliet came over in the afternoon to workshop the pieces:

An extract from Michael's satirical piece on phone hacking... (with text by Ullrika Johnson):

RNIB Summer School!

I've just finished a wonderful 4-day week leading the RNIB/Handel House's annual Summer School for advanced composers. The brief was to write a piece for solo soprano (Juliet Fraser, co-founder of Exaudi), and the five diverse composers tackled the challenge (and it is one!) with aplomb. Having made them do body rhythms and Bobby McFerrin riffs, bombarded them with a diet of Meredith Monk, Georges Aperghis, Tansy Davies, with obligatory mentions of Berio's 'Sequenza III' every few minutes, our intrepid crew worked their socks off, with occasional rests for biscuits.

Two composers still managed to get my twin vetos of Wordsworth and Shakespeare in but made such leaps and bounds that I had to forgive them: Zoe took some long strides out of her usual rock song territory to write a meditative monologue-like song setting Othello; and Ben, in his own measuredly laconic words, dragged himself 'about 1,000 years into the future' with his powerfully angular, stuttery take on 'Surprised by Joy'. Elsewhere, we had an Aperghis/Berio-esque piece on the theme of temptation (in French) by Kerry, an examination of the inner turmoil of an international table tennis champion (complete with precisely-notated ping-pong ball sounds) by Kevin, and a satirical look at the phone-hacking scandal setting a quote by Ulrika Johnson by Michael. Ha ha! A more eclectic range of works you could not imagine, and they were embraced whole-heartedly and with impressive musicianship and quite genius ping-pong effects by Juliet on our last day.

It was fascinating for me to learn about each of our composers' methods of accessing and notating music, from the scarily-named JAWS programme, to highly enlarged screens and painstaking note-inputting, from voice-recording and transcribing to the version of Sibelius which speaks back to you. The patience with which some of our composers worked was highly inspiring. I'm looking forward to hearing Juliet perform these pieces on October 23rd at Handel House.

Handel rules at Desert Island Discs!

So Radio 4's hugely popular show, Desert Island Discs, granted their listeners' secret wish, asking them to choose their eight ultimate records. They presented the eight most popular votes in a special show which was dominated by popular classics, including, at no. 7 (and no surprise really), Handel's Messiah. So it was pipped by Vaughan Williams, Elgar and Beethoven, but the piece has also been THE top classical choice for the celebrity guests, actors Timothy Spall and Imelda Staunton among them.

So what are your 8 DID? And more importantly, what are MINE? (well, really, I thought you'd never ask...)

1) 'Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus' from Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messaien: heartbreakingly beautiful, tensely-harmonied, this made me weep when I heard a theremin and piano version!

2) Blue Valentine by Tom Waits: one of my favourite songs, for its contrast of grizzly-bear voice and glowing guitar, and for its masterful lyrics.

3) Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered sung by Ella Fitzgerald: Ella's voice is the best of the 20th century, and the lyrics pithily brilliant.

4) Where Did You Sleep Last Night? by Leadbelly, sung by Nirvana: A simple blues is turned into a vulnerable, violent version in Nirvana's live MTV Unplugged cover; Kurt Cobain rips his voice to bits on the last phrase and I shiver uncontrollably...

5) Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis by Vaughan Williams: a heart-swelling number with a sense of English history and landscape at its centre.

6) The Art Teacher by Rufus Wainwright: I had to choose something by Rufus, whose turn of phrase (both melodic and lyrical) makes him the successor to the jazz standard writers of the first half of the 20th century. This has a twist in the tale, an unusual subject and a lovely horn solo in the middle.

7) Just As The Tide Was Rolling by Eliza Carthy: I need to have a traditional folk song in there, and this has a gorgeous melancholy about it.

8) String Quartet no. 8 in Csharp minor 1st movement by Shostakovich: Its dark historical context makes the astonishing harmonic writing all the more powerful. I'll try and sneak in the 2nd movement too...

So, lots of brilliant words and wondrously-varied voices, a strange preference for string music and distinct lack of Handel. Whoops!

Boar, Pigeons, Maps (Pineapples?)

I had a lovely day with a young group associated with the RNIB last month. It's the first time I've worked with a whole group of visually-impaired participants, and was masses of fun. I tried out a new workshop idea: using the street sounds of Handel's London as inspiration for musical material, which I've used since then with other school groups as it seems to be a good starting point.. It's most amusing hearing kids' ideas for what they might have heard on the streets 270 (or so) years ago: from the evocative sounds of church bells, horses' hooves, rattling cartwheels to market cries, callers selling boar, pigeon, and apparently pineapples, at least according to King's College Junior School... it does make me realise I should probably do a bit more research on Handel's London, so I can answer with confidence a) how much a pound of apples would have cost and b) what the London newspaper was then. However, it made for a rich musical seam to mine for group composition, and the RNIB group performed their version at the end of the day to parents, complete with cantering horses, busking folk singers, groaning and pushing barrels down a hill and overlaid cries... here's a sample!
Handel House RNIB Music Day - Streets of Handel's London by Kerry Andrew Composer

Hear This!

Here are a couple of off-the-cuff recordings from recent workshops:

1) I had a jiggly bunch of 25 Year 3s from a French school; after their tour of Handel House with Claire they bounded into my room (well, Handel's room, but one day it will be mine...) to create some 'water music' in about 30 minutes. We started off by brainstorming types of water, then thinking of imaginative ways to describe them. In groups, the kids used first their voices to create a musical motif around their pair of words, then expanded that into simple percussion. Here's the result! Handel House workshop March 2011 Yr 3 Water Music by Kerry Andrew Composer

2) I had the first words-and-music-based session with the choral scholars at Marylebone C of E School, following their amazing work with the poet Evlynn Sharp. I had a strangely small number this week but they were excellent, coming up with three 'Love is like' sketches based on a couple of lines of their writing, which after about 40 minutes of group composition sounded like this: Opera Project 2011 Marylebone Love is Like... by Kerry Andrew Composer

Get Composing (Or Else)

Over the last couple of months I've done a fair bit of workshopping here at Handel House.

First up was a 3-session course for 8-12 year-olds in Sunday afternoons. The idea was that the lessons would be in formal composition (eg notation-based), aiming to address the lack of this sort of teaching in the classroom. I worked with 10 super-bright kids in creating solo pieces for their own instruments - the perfect starting point for new composers. We used non-musical ideas as a basis for musical inspiration, with a Kandinsky painting as a springboard (heartwarming kids' quote no. 1: 'Oh, I LOVE abstract art!' Show that to Jamie's Dream School...). The composers then chose their own inspirations, from Arabian jewelled eggs to different types of tea, and foxes and aliens to Japanese art. You can only do so much in the time, and it would be lovely to spend more time working closely with them, but the students did pretty well, and performed their miniatures to an appreciative crowd in the performance room last Sunday.

There have been a couple of stand-alone workshops, where I have had the challenge of teaching composition 14-18 year-olds who were a mix of music and non-music students. Confusingly, one class said they WEREN'T music students when they WERE, and no teacher corrected them. Some sort of identity crisis there... We did a mix of body percussion rhythms that we all put together and similar work to the Get Composing class. Here are a couple of images from this workshop:

Finally, we have kicked off a small Opera Project with a charming and frighteningly talented bunch of girls at Marylebone C of E School. Taking the themes of three arias from Handel's Rodelinda as a starting point, the girls have been writing their own texts based on love, revenge and nature, with a view to then creating unusual vocal pieces out of them. Evlynn Sharp, a wonderful poet and lecturer, has been bringing her uniquely calm, wordly and encouraging voice to the class and getting the most amazingly mature work out of the students. The sort that makes Claire, Learning and Events Officer, and I well up in the corner: I'm looking forward to seeing more work in a fortnight and taking it from there, whilst trying not to blub...

A new composer steps into the ring...

So, as one composer (Duncan McLeod) leaves the building, another opens the door and steps onto the creaky floorboards and hushed, serene rooms of the Handel House Museum...

Hello! I'm Kerry Andrew, crowned (I'm assuming I get a crown) Handel House Museum in London's new Composer in Residence for 2011. I'm a composer and performer working in contemporary classical music, choral music, folk, jazz, electronica, education, and oh, the list goes on. I'm going to be leading workshops at the House, running short and long term projects with schools and community groups and writing some original music for y'all as well. I'll be blogging as I go, but as it's only January and I haven't much to report as yet, I thought I'd lay down some Handel-themed things that have caught my eye this week:

1) En Travesti at Handel House!

An acquaintance of mine co-founded this unique group who explore gender equality and vocal ambiguity in vocal music. They'll be bringing their dangerous romanticism to Handel House on February 3rd.

2) Threads of Feeling at the Foundling Museum

I'm intrigued by the look of this exhibition: cloths brought by mothers bringing their babies to the Foundling Hospital as tokens to help identify them. This is the sort of thing that appeals to me as an artist: using these mementoes and the stories they tell as inspiration...

3) 'Hallelujah!' Flashmob in Shopping Mall!
Ah, you can't go wrong...