Canterbury Deal and Hythe Visits

It has been a long day with a couple of mystery shops, a car showroom and a cobblers, and an exit poll in the evening in Hythe. But it is worth it in terms of the fees i have got which is over a ton for all three.

Whilst in Canterbury, i picked up some cheap paperback books from The Chaucer Bookshop.




Elisabeth Luytens was one of the most radical British composers of her generation.



The final book is a journey through the middle ages.

Elisabeth Luytens String Quartet No. 6

So for my after midnight choice of music here is a string quartet from the compose Elisabeth Luytens.

Daughter of the famous architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, Elisabeth Lutyens used her own method of serial (12-tone) composition to create individual, psychologically powerful music.

Determined to be a composer from the age of 9, Elisabeth Lutyens went to Paris in 1922 to study at the Ècole Normale de Musique in Paris. On her return to London, she studied composition and the viola at the Royal College of Music from 1926-30.

Critical of the "overblown" music of Mahler, Bruckner and Elgar, she collaborated with fellow RCM students Iris Lemare and Anne MacNaughton to mount a series of modern music concerts which featured first performances by new composers such as Benjamin Britten, Alan Rawsthorne and Elizabeth Maconchy. Some of Lutyens' own works were also performed, but she withdrew these later because they were "too conservative".

In 1933, Lutyens married the singer Ian Glennie, by whom she had 3 children, but in 1938 she left Glennie for the conductor, Edward Clark. For much of this period, Lutyens had been working in near isolation, since her music had little affinity with prevailing trends in Britain. For example, her Concerto for Nine Instruments (1939) employed a 14-note series which she had worked out for herself. These and other pieces have been described as "extraordinary achievements, demonstrating a completely personal serial style and very original structures".

However, at that time her work was not looked on favourably by the musical authorities at the BBC, although she was praised by the pioneering British serial composer Humphrey Searle, a former pupil of the Austrian serialist Anton Webern. In 1947, she scored a success among the avant garde with a setting of Rimbaud's poem O Saisons, O Chateaux, which had been turned down as "unsingable" by the BBC. Lutyens' bohemian lifestyle was equally unconventional, and there were many parties at Clark's flat in Fitzroy Street, where the alcoholic poet Dylan Thomas was briefly a lodger.

As the music of Webern and Alban Berg became better known in this country, recognition gradually came Lutyens' way with such works as the Wittgenstein Motet (1952) and Music for Orchestra 1 (1955). She nevertheless had to earn her bread and butter by writing film scores, which she did with characteristic energy and professionalism. Her film music career began in 1944 with an item in a 1944 RAF newsreel, and included feature films such as Don't Bother to Knock (1960). She also had a close association with Hammer films, which found her 12-tone system to their taste in numerous movies, including Dr Terror's House of Horrors, The Skull (1965) and The Terrornauts (1967) -- and of course, that deathless classic, "The Earth Dies Screaming."

Lutyens was known and respected as a creative artist for whom compromise was impossible. She was also a provocative and inspiring teacher who gave herself unstintingly to her pupils. Her output was large and varied, and the importance of her contribution to the country's musical life was recognised in 1969, when she was made a Commander of the British Empire.

Elisabeth Luytens - String Quartet No. 6

Enjoy

Multitasking

All three reports from yesterday now have been done , put online, cleaned and other domestic chores, had lunch, just a quick TV dinner, and now can settle down to either some reading, listening to music or both, and do other things in tandem. So i want to know,, how much multitasking can you do?

Luytens String Trio

Another piece of music from the woefully neglected Elisabeth Luytens her String Trio from 1964.

"String Trio, iii: Poco presto" by Endymion


Composed for, and premiered by, the Oromonte Trio at the ICA in 1964, the String Trio is something of an extreme even in Lutyens' output in its demands on performer and listener alike -- just as Webern's String Trio, Op. 20 marked an extreme in his. Lutyens associated the Webern with her first encounters with Edward Clark, and evidently strove for a comparably self-transcendent achievement. The first of her five movements is already a complex mosaic of compressed gestures and glancing nuances. The second distills a mood of restless stasis in just 12 pianissimo bars. The fat third is a test of ensemble playing as the three instruments alternately phrase together then fly apart, while the curiously sauntering, intermezzo-like fourth is a test of continuity. Then, as the fifth movement announces itself in a jagged recitative, one begins to sense another model behind Webern. Along with Debusy and Webern Lutyens named Beethoven as her third favorite composer.

After a few bars hesitation, her finale launches itself in a fierce dialectic of jagged figures mitigated only by a sparser trio section at its centre. As a sometime string player herself, Lutyens must have intended a sense of struggling for the impossible. Where have we heard this kind of struggle before? Lutyens finale is not a little like a Webernian miniaturization of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge.

Hece this is the book i shall be reading over the holiday period.

Gig Problem

I usually do my DJ gig on the last Wednesday of each month, and it just so happens that for this month the last Wednesday is New Years Eve, but i shall be with my extant family, Bro and his wife, Graeme and his wife, GC and Lesley at Bellota for a meal that evening. Oh how unfortunate or not. Will have to contact Eamon tomorrow at the Northern Lights for a re-jig, and ideally I would like to do the Tuesday before or the weekend that follows it.

Picture Dump

Some pics i took last week but unable to load up until i created some more disc space on the LJ site.

( Pics here )

Time to catch up on some radio programmes.

Book 97 - Samuel Selvon "Lonely Londoners"

Samuel Selvon "Lonely Londoners" (Penguin Modern Classics)

This story of a loosely-associated group of West Indian immigrants in London is a fast and entertaining, but ultimately thought-provoking, read. Selvon makes a sympathetic portrait of the troubles that immigrants from the colonies face, written in an episodic manner that uses Trinidadian slang and irregular sentence structures. The dialect the book is written in is easy to get used to and really added to the narrative.

I was very interested to read this book as "another side" of the famous emergent youth culture of the time. The second world war and postwar austerity hang heavy over the story (several characters are veterans), but as the characters cruise the streets of London ("liming") looking for girls and good times, there are some lighter moments as well. However, Selvon concludes by hinting that all their hearty camaraderie masks a pain that can never be assuaged.

In some ways the book reads similar to such works as Alan Sillitoe's "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" and John Braine's "Room at the Top," which critique the conformity and starkness of postwar Britain. ("The Lonely Londoners" predates both those books, interestingly.)

The deep sadness at the heart of the book isn't that different from that which afflicts Arthur Seaton or Joe Lampton, though it's exacerbated by overt racism and prejudice. In the end, the "lonely" Londoners' pain is both specific to their time and place and universally human: the fear of our own powerlessness in the face of time:

"The old Moses, standing on the banks of the Thames. Sometimes he think he see some sort of profound realisation in his life, as if all that happen to him was experience that make him a better man, as if now he could draw apart from any hustling and just sit down and watch other people fight to live. Under the kiff-kiff laughter, behind the ballad and the episode, the what-happening, the summer-is-hearts, he could see a great aimlessness, a great restless, swaying movement that leaving you standing in the same spot.


This is a marvelous book, that shows how cold and unforgiving London can be, and how the diversity of the city can also shine through