Preparation, procrastination, perspective
There have been parts of this year (and will be many more) where life has to fit around Project 48. But equally there are other times when it reverses – when Project 48 has to fit around life… and the last few weeks have certainly fallen into the latter category!
One of the highlights of my creative year is always the New Paths Festival, which Roland and I founded back in 2016. As Artistic Director I dream up and shape the programming of each event – within a hopefully coherent whole – and have the privilege of drawing together a brilliant team to carry it all out. And I also end up playing in almost everything! Although I’ve been fortunate through Project 48 to have been performing to live audiences from the very moment that was allowed this year, those performances had all been solo playing. And so New Paths was a luxurious, exhilarating, grounding, recalibrating week of glorious ensemble music-making – normally as natural to me as breathing and eating, but so sorely missed over the last year and more. I played piano quintets by Amy Beach and Antonin Dvorak, piano trios by Schubert and Higdon, sonatas by Copland and Barber, two of Britten’s canticles plus his Winter Words, a whole host of other songs and shorter instrumental works, a sixteen-minute solo world premiere by Stephen McNeff, and the small matter of the piano duet version of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring! Extraordinarily we were very little hampered by the pandemic and ‘pingdemic’, and an intense, soulful, life-affirming few days was had all round.
It’s been fascinating, following on from the festival (and the necessary recovery time afterwards…!), returning to the 48. I initially found it hard to get going on this music again: it was only a few weeks since I’d last performed it, but with so much having happened in the intervening time, it felt hard to remember how deeply I’d previously connected with this music, or even how to go about playing something so different from the worlds I’d just been inhabiting. The gear change was a real challenge. And it felt tough working out where even to start with practising it all! Strangely I found this aspect harder now than when I was first learning the music. Of course, in the end, the answer is always: just start.
Having crossed that initial hurdle, I have to say it has – of course – been a complete joy immersing myself in this astonishing music again. It feels different for the break, on several levels. There’s a line in my biography that says I ‘take inspiration from the range of musicians I work with’. This is in my biography because it’s true – but I’ve been so reminded how much it’s true! My head, my imagination, my inner ear are so full of ideas from the other musicians I’ve been able to work with again – I imagine how one or other of them might play a phrase, or approach a challenge, or throw caution to the wind. I hear their ideas, their style, their generosity, their tone, their shaping, their personality, their energy. It’s helped me clock properly what a musically lonely time it’s been, for me and for everyone! But what a treat to have that store of inspiration brimming over again. Having been playing collaboratively again, I feel that my ears are more alert – I’m listening better – they’re doing the ears’ equivalent of blinking into the sunshine after a long winter! And as a result I’m hearing new things in Bach’s music all the time.
When you make a journey for the first time, you perceive it in certain ways; if you then begin to make it every day, you notice different things, and feel the pace of it differently. It usually seems shorter, more manageable, sometimes longer and unspectacular. If you come back to making that journey after a break, it differs again: it’s at once wonderfully familiar and refreshingly novel. Details are noticed afresh, but also the fundamental understanding of the scope of the whole journey is more complete, more instinctive. That’s roughly where I’m at with this music at the moment – and it’s a hugely enjoyable place to be! Someone overhearing my practice commented that these preludes and fugues are old friends now – yes they are, in the best way.
So much of our job in preparing music for performance is not working out exactly how we’ll play – exactly what tempo we’ll take or how we’ll shape every note – because if we did that, the music could never live in the moment. We’d just be reproducing something premeditated. Rather, I think our job is to calculate the parameters within which the music can work successfully. What is the range of speeds I can play this at, and it have enough direction, but enough space? What is the slowest that the line can be maintained, what is the fastest these notes can be clear? If I play this phrase stronger, I know that the section over the page will have to ease off, to make sense of the shapes that come after it; if I play it lighter the emphasis will swap around, which also works, so long as I build the momentum towards the penultimate line. If I play this bar too loudly, I’m stuffed – there’s nothing left to do with the next phrase. If I do put this ornament here, that limits my options in the next bar, but it makes sense if I’ve set up the pattern in a certain way. And so on and so on. There’s almost never only one way of doing it. But there are ways that will work less convincingly, as well as a range of ways that work equally well. Every small decision in the moment has consequences for the next small decision, and for the larger shapes and drama of the music. So practice is very much about experimenting – for which it helps massively to come back to music with a fresh perspective!
In the next couple of weeks I’m playing in West Sussex (six short performances across two days), Suffolk (four slightly longer performances across two days), South Yorkshire (four performances within one day – the first time I do the whole 48 in one day!), Oxfordshire (five performances across five days), Nottinghamshire (three performances across three days – but only half of the 48 as I’m back to this county later in the year). And there’s a short livestream performance too (10am on Sunday 1st August). So the pacing of each of these will be very different, for me and for the audiences. The venues range from house to cathedral. So the spaces will be very different – resonance, distance to the audience, atmosphere. And the running orders are different for almost all of these performances. So the context of each note, and the options available to me, set up by the series of decisions I’ve taken in the previous pages and minutes each time, will vary wonderfully. If I’ve done my job in preparation, I’ll know what my range of options is, how fast or slow or mad or solemn or quiet I can risk being at any moment without falling off the edge or losing the structure of what I’m trying to say with the music. And then I can just let my imagination run free, inventing and exploring in the moment.
That’s the plan!
Footnote 1 – place your bets now as to the chances of the next few weeks being unhampered by covid, isolation, pings, etc! I’m very grateful finally to have had my second jab… but I’ve heard so many horror stories of friends and colleagues being caught out and projects being abandoned part way though. Fingers crossed for minimal disruption!
Footnote 2 – the other, more prosaic, reason the music feels so wonderfully different at the moment is that I’ve rearranged my music room, moving furniture and contents around. If in doubt, have a re-org – it’s surprisingly inspiring!