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Met is 9,999 pipes, 155 years old and 21m long. You can see it, but not always hear it, at every London prom. I’m talking about Willis in the Royal Albert Halll, which is happening this weekend Sunday morning with French composer Olivier Latry.
With his Bach program, Latry’s music represents the foundation of organ music, music that has been heard in cathedrals and concert halls for many years. It will be good in the body to shake the house on Sunday morning, but my guarantees will not be enough to convince the fans who are not fit to stop being lazy on Sunday morning and go to South Kensington.
There are many skeptics among us – and no judgment here! The world of social actors can feel like a closed and unapproachable space, incomprehensible machinery and liturgical codification that deny creativity and connection to the audience. This is changing in this generation, thanks to players like Latry and global publicity Anna Lapwoodand a generation of experimental musicians (the latter) who are using the flute as their medium of discovery and wonder.
The organ is a miraculous instrument with a history of thousands of years – there was water bodies in ancient Greecethe parent of behemoths like the seven-story high-rise and 28,762 pipes of the instrument in Wanamaker’s shop in Philadelphia – the world’s largest functioning organ.
Pipe organs may sound loud to the ears but can produce a much larger sonic range. House like Royal Albert Hall they were designed around their organs: the structures were built to be their sound chambers. Limbs can exceed the limits of a person’s breath or bent arms; they are able to imitate and create the sound of the musical universe, from the abyss that sounds like an ice cube exploding, to produce low frequencies that sound like vibration rather than sound, to the heights of birdsong and shimmering sonic filigree.
In Halberstadt, Germany, John Cage’s Organ²/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible) is still close to the beginning of the project which is planned for 639 years: it started in 2001 and is planned to end in 2640, and another change of note is coming on 5 August this year. Jonny Greenwood‘s X Years of Reverb (where X = the number of years that the organ or the venue has existed) is only eight hours, created for two musicians on one instrument, a piece written, he says, “disrupting and restoring all the music, words and sounds that fill the air / soaked in the walls of the place where this music is played, it can be made from cloth. settled in just eight hours”. James McVinnie and Eliza McCarthy play a Greenwood piece at Manchester Cathedral in January, celebrating 605 years of the instrument’s sound.
And there are many musicians today who are pushing the experimental limits of the instrument. Kali Maloneobsession with it started when he was a flute tuner. The American singer has created albums that take old songs and old-fashioned musical ideas and turn them into amazing musical beats.
Kali is inspired by Ellen Arkbroa pioneer from Sweden who uses the organ as a portal to explore arcane realms and elemental music; when Anna von Hausswolff he has made the organ the basis of a musical language that ranges from avant-pop to experimentalism.
Another example of the founders of today’s pipes for you: Claire M Singer, whose music and music, often referred to Scotland, place, and history. the shape of the drones organ in slow motion and the visual appearance. The musician makes the time of music happy, infinite, releasing “all the music and sounds that have been filling the air”, as Greenwood says – but not, you hear, in the houses that have these instruments, but across all the mountains and cosmoses.
The organ takes you to a musical delight. Try it: start with Latry as your home remedy. He will be happy.
Men Germany, pianist Igor Levit collaborated with rapper Danger Dan on an anti-fascist single No Fear. Their scheduled performances are over ZDFThe TV show Die Anstalt was canceled at the last minute this week. Broadcasting instead was a a minute long shot of a bare piano and microphone (starting at 47 minutes) at the place where the song was to be played.
The groups of Die Anstalt were distinguished by a decision such as Danger Dan and Igor Levit only, and seems to explain how radio silence was not “a technical problem, but a political one”. A German public broadcaster says that Keine Angst’s lyrics were against program guidelines; and the hosts explain the contradictions, but “we are in ZDF, but against ZDF”, they say; tried to get Levit and Danger Dan reinstated, but lost; and he goes on to discuss – and read – the controversial lyrics, putting them in the context of some unexamined critical music, and explaining that the plan was to show the work and discuss his frustrations immediately with Levit and Danger Dan afterwards.
The word a There is no fear (approx English translation), among other things, is a series of instructions on how to organize anti-Fascist protests and – much to the dismay of the publisher – the song ends with an expression of sympathy for left-wing activists who have been convicted of anti-rightist violence. Levit and Danger Dan organized their own concert and tour last night, The No Fear Altand the single racked up over a million views and counting on YouTube and Spotify.
Levit’s collaboration with Danger Dan is the most recent example of his work and his political views and music, in which he refuses to separate music – from Beethoven, Shostakovich and Frederic Rzewski (his differences in the Chilean protest music, People United Will Never Give Up) from a political point of view, and the role it has always played in cultural change. In Germany, controversy over censorshipand how culture and politics combat the rise of the right wing, continues.
This week Tom has been listening: Nicholas Collon’s debut album is at the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra as their main conductor. It was released in 2022, and begins with Sibelius’s seventh symphony. This is about as bold a statement as you can get, offering a new interpretation of one of Finn’s best features. Collon does not do this intentional iconoclasm: he finds his depth in the sound space: the polyphony string near the beginning of the symphony, as Sibelius rewrites Palestrina, has a strange quality of stopping time that is fascinating.
