Physical Address
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Pteacher Bettina Varwig wants to make us move – and hear, and listen, but mostly move. A Cambridge University academic says that today’s old audience is “asked to stop our breathing, the pounding, the feeling of bodies at the door”. In concert halls we are told not to move or make noise, defeating all the things that make us human. Whatever you do, don’t let what your body tells you when faced with a piece like Bach’s St John Passion, how the music touches the mind and messes with your sinful heart. You must listen in silence, you cannot sigh or cry or clap your hands in the wrong place, even if it is what your whole body tells you to do to express the physical and spiritual pain that the music is causing you.
Varwig dreams of another world. His research it’s about how audiences in the 1700s and 1900s responded to music. “When you read about the impact of music on audiences in Bach’s time, the references are amazing in their body,” he says. “Songs splashed in their stomachs, and their hearts skipped a beat, it tastes like vinegar in your throat.”
His research has found abundant evidence of listeners feeling the physical and spiritual effects of music. “Philosophers, musicologists, theologians, religious writers, poets, anatomists, physicians and listeners have described music as moving, destructive, painful, terrifying, healing and miraculous,” Varwig said.
“Song can soften your heart, pierce your brain, make your teeth chatter and quiver, bind your chest as if it were tied with strings, or sweeten you with the sweetness of honey. It can enter your body through the pores of your skin and spread among people. It can cause melancholic disease or remove the plague.”
He is a member of the Royal Academy of Music, a violinist Margaret the Immaculate and tenor Nicholas MulroyVarwig put this theory into a two-day work on Bach’s St John Passion. The idea was not to plan a show or record, but to create a workshop where musicians were invited to let the music take them wherever they wanted.
They weren’t told to dance, play bow down, kneel down, shake or sway to the strains of Bach – but that’s what happened. One of the highlights for me is how the pain of the tenor aria “Ach, mein Sinn” is heightened through what Faultless called the “disturbing intensity” of their performance, where the emotional connection between singer and player was the most important. And there is an “unbearable”, as Faultless explained, struggle with the music and meaning of another tenor aria, “Erwäge, wie sein blutgefärbter Rücken” (“Think how stained his blood was”); the singer and the musicians kneel, supplicating to heaven with outstretched hands, listening to each other more and more deeply than the modern musical theater allows.
This type of listening did not end in the 19th century: Hector Berliozwho was trained as a doctor, explained listening Beethoven’s Op 131 quartet and the pursuit of life in 1829: “Little by little, a heavy weight seemed to scratch my chest as in a nightmare, I felt my hair tremble, my teeth chatter, all my muscles clash.”
The Promenade concerts, which began in 1895 at the Queen’s Hall in London, were so named because the audience could move around, but especially as the 1900s progressed, the silence and silence of the audience became a characteristic of classical music, which was characterized by Stendhal, Rossini’s biographerat a Paris opera in 1824: “What will be the result of this immovable silence and unceasing attention?”
Many musical works lose much of their power without our bodies, from our chattering teeth to melancholic illness to our bowels. Varwig says that he has “a fascinating vision where the amount of physical and emotional interaction between the performers and the audience becomes the norm in the world of classical music”.
For musicians, this work was revolutionary. “We found ourselves performing songs that we know very well in different ways,” says Faultless. We were free to be with Bach’s music, free to move, breathe together and respond to the energy of the story through our own being… (It felt) immediate, coherent and transformative. “
Varwig added: “I find it very interesting when the emotion between the singer and the audience is so prevalent in classical music.” This is a bold and brilliant idea. There is work to be done: let’s move!
Starmer’s mood music
Keir Starmer, the former piper, has decided to leave the Prime Minister’s office: a two-bar queue awaits the political musician whose group of converts dwindles every month of his presidency.
But there are other songs to follow: Starmer is the only leader of a political party or Prime Minister. quoting Shostakovich in a conference speech; The only PM since Edward Heath to say true love for Beethoven’s symphonies; and he is a politician who talks about the importance of music education, having seen its benefits for himself.
Yet we haven’t seen a change in putting music at the heart of Starmer’s curriculum in two short years, and there hasn’t been a major boost in Arts Council England’s music funding – instead. But moral music is important, and the feeling that Starmer was happy and understood why music education was important is something you have to believe his successor will take. Andy Burnham was culture secretary in Gordon Brown’s government, we know he’s a huge Everton fan. and he likes Mr. Smith and Mr. Pogue. It’s good to have those passions, Andy, but maybe spread the love of the music culture as a whole, and who knows? Perhaps a new era of music education restoration is upon us. The rising sun, and all that jazz.
This week, Tom has been listening: and Orsino Ensemble’s 2021 album Belle Époquewind and piano music from late 19th and early 20th century France. The playing of Adam Walker and his Orsino players is miraculous, in everything from Chaminade to Saint-Saëns. The opening piece, Albert Roussel’s Divertissement, is a gem: the characters that pianist Pavel Kolesnikov combines with the wind players in a few minutes are amazing. Listen Spotify | | Apple Music Classical
