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September 30, 2009
Music and place
In this quiet room above the sea I've just played the fourth [Beethoven Piano Concerto] again. I know it now - every stitch of it - more intimately than I know Nancy [LD's wife]. I've got it in my bowels. Sort of empathy. I've been it, I act it, sleep it, shit it, sleep it - everything. And I can tell you that compared to it, the Emperor is a collection of musical platitudes written for a lavatory-paper musical box by a deaf mute. So There!Lawrence Durrell wrote those words in Corfu in 1935. I took the photo above at the Lac du Dur Chantecoq in the Champange-Ardenne region of France last week. During the three weeks we spent on campsites in remote locations in rural France I was struck, once again, when listening to my iPod as to how place affect the way music is heard. Just as light determines the way we see a landscape, so the aura of a place seems to change our perspective on a familiar piece of music.
The mystical relation between music and place is nothing new, and Britten's Aldeburgh is the best example of how intimately sound and geography are linked. In Buddhism it is called 'dependent arising' and is expressed by the formula, "When this arises that becomes". That arch-dabbler Herbert von Karajan experimented with Zen Buddhism and also had thought-provoking views on the mathematical relationship between the rhythm of music and natural phenomena such as heartbeat, which are in turn affected by place.
Last year I wrote about some an excting new initiative started by Antony Pitts of the Royal Academy of Music, London to map music and place, describing it as 'Google Earth for classical music'. Antony's project has now become part of a group working on musicDNA, an ambitious attempt to produce a multi-dimensional map of the musical universe. Today musicDNA has launched musicGPS for iPhone and iPod touch. Here is a screengrab followed by a description from their website:
Whenever you listen to music on your iPhone or iPod touch (OS 3.0) you can use musicGPS to keep a record of what you listened to, where and when. Open up musicGPS to browse and zoom in and out of your own timeline. And play any combination of tracks on your iPhone straight from musicGPS.Antony Pitts is a man of many parts, and I was very impressed by his recently released electro-acoustic collage In Memoriam which combines music by Ockeghem, Dufay, Obrecht, and Josquin with ambient sounds, children's songs, poetry, real stories and a new motet composed for the project by Antony. In Memoriam, which is available as an iTunes download for £4.49, is a direct descendant of Glenn Gould's contrapuntal radio experiments which resulted in the Solitude Trilogy created by Gould for CBS. These three sound portraits of the north of Canada were pioneering investigations into the relationship between sound and place. Which is where today's path started.
musicGPS records the soundtrack of your life™ - wherever you go. Discover what it was that caught your ear during a journey. See a map of where you’ve been and what you listened to and add a note or photo.
Now read about raindrops falling on Antony Pitts' chant.
My opening quote comes from Spirit of Place, Letters & Essays on Travel by Lawrence Durrell, published by Faber ISBN-13: 978-1569247228 and, you guessed it, out of print. A review iTunes download of In Memoriam was supplied at my request. Header photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2009. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 05:13 PM