J.S. Bach - Vor deinen Thron tret' ich - BWV 668

Here is another of Bach's organ chorale preludes, transcribed for and played on the guitar.

'Vor deinen Thron tret' ich' (Before your throne I now appear) has an interesting story behind it, and although I'm not really in a position to properly explain or analyse the music or its history, I can at least give some notes that help explain what's going on.

BWV 668 is a chorale prelude, meaning that it is a piece of instrumental music which takes as its main thematic material an existing song. In this case the original music that the piece is based upon is a hymn entitled 'Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein', which was originally written by Paul Eber in the 16th century. The source melody (or cantus firmus) was composed by Louis Bourgeois, also in the 16th century. Bach had previously arranged this hymn as BWV 431, as below:



If you listen there, you'll note that there are four main melodies, each separated by a fermata (pause). It is these four which become the source for BWV 668.

Reasonably early in his career, Bach created an organ chorale prelude from this piece, BWV 641, under the original title 'Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein' which I have previously transcribed below:



and as played in the original:



What Bach does with BWV 641 is create an accompaniment which is based upon the melodies of the original hymn, but then adds an ornate cantabile melodic line over the top, which I'm sure you'll agree is rather exquisite.

'Vor deinen Thron tret' ich' actually exists in two different versions. BWV668 is included in the 18 Great Chorale Preludes, and actually consists of a fragment (about two thirds) of the entire composition, copied out by someone other than Bach. BWV668a is the same piece, complete, with slight differences, which was included (under the title 'Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein') in the original publication of Art of Fugue, published after Bach's death in 1751.

There is a story that was perpetuated by Bach's son CPE Bach, that his father dictated the chorale directly from his deathbed. This is now considered to be rather flamboyant myth-making, which gave the piece the nickname 'The Deathbed Chorale'. What is actually now understood to be the case is that BWV668a was a piece that was just lying around (Bach was an inveterate re-worker of old material), which Bach decided to put more work into as he lay dying, meaning that although it was not composed out of nowhere, it was still the very last thing that he worked on, and thus a significant artistic statement.



Musically it's really quite complex. It is built in four sections, all composed from fragments of the original hymn melody, diminished, inverted and contrapuntally developed. These lead into statements of the cantus firmus, clearly taken from BWV 641, albeit with the ornaments and floridity removed, before each time the all but one of the voices drop out for another development section. There's a certain plodding quality to the rhythm, which is pretty uneventful, but the level of harmonic interest is high. This regular and systemic feeling is common to some of Bach's large fugues, and perhaps has a certain mood in common with Beethoven's 'Heiliger Dankgesang', another piece closely linked with illness, which also builds slowly and methodically out of simple contrapuntal blocks.

As for the guitar, it's actually quite interesting how snugly it fits onto the instrument. The piece is in G major, and didn't require transposition to be playable (unlike BWV 641, which needed to be moved to D major). G major on the guitar works reasonably well if the 6th string is tuned to D, which means that a low D (the dominant) can be played open beneath the lowest G on the instrument (which thus occurs at the 5th fret). Very few notes, if any, had to be omitted, although there are problems caused by the occurrence of tones on the organ sustained over multiple bars - on occasion these have been rendered as repeated notes. The sections in four parts are particularly satisfying, although the fact that they are so readily playable on the guitar is perhaps down to the lack of rhythmic variety, rather than any particular skill on my part.

J.S.Bach - Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein - guitar

It's been half a year since I recorded anything, which surprised me when I realised it. I've been playing in the background, trying to keep practicing, when I can fit it into the gaps between 'real' work and life. I certainly haven't transcribed anything recently, but the other day, when working on 'Ich Ruf' zu dir, herr Jesu Christ', which has been regularly transcribed by others, I had a first listen to the full set of Bach Chorale Preludes, and one in particular just jumped out at me.

'Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein' (When we are in our greatest distress) BWV641 is unique amongst these organ works for its highly ornamented melody, giving it a most cantabile quality, indeed the steadiness of the accompaniment gives me the impression slightly of an operatic recitativo. To me it has a lot in common with the Andante from solo violin sonata BWV1003, with their slow pulses and achingly sad major tonality, and of course, when played on the organ, it has an unmistakably funereal air, and as the highly church-like final cadence fades out I always half expect a minister or priest to commence with a solemn eulogy.

Musically it never strays far from home, only briefly making its way out into the dominant and relative minor keys, but it has certainly hints of that same modal feeling which makes music like the Heiliger Dankgesang so very very powerful, and I'm I can hear hints of the suspensions which mean 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen' makes my hair stand on end every single time.

I swapped the key from G into D, as you so often have to do with the guitar, but I was most surprised to find that the melody was thus reasonably comfortably brought into the range of the instrument. The pedal line only required a few octave jumps to fit, and luckily the important descending melodies didn't have to be broken across octaves. The inner voices required a bit more tweaking - long held notes don't really make sense on a plucked instrument, so the recitativo aspect is more pronounced, and occasionally the voices had to be swapped. It's also not that easy; four part harmony on a guitar never is, even at a slow tempo, so there are the usual scrapes, pauses and mistakes that come from being an amateur. But it's a most exquisite piece of music, and I'm pleased that it can be played on the guitar without too much fuss.

Some notes on Bach.

If it’s alright with you I’d like to share some notes on Bach.

There are a few little interesting historical anomalies that mean that there’s something really rather interesting about playing J.S. Bach on the guitar. The first is the fact that the guitar is a classical instrument which only really became ‘serious’ in the 20th century, meaning that its repertoire is a) distinctly limited, and b) mostly rather lightweight, decorative stuff, even at its peak only rising to a kind of banal romantic whimsy. This has led to the guitar being a predominantly solo instrument: not being part of the romantic orchestra and not having many significant ensemble parts written for it, guitarists generally perform alone, like pianists. Furthermore, if the performer finds the general repertoire uninteresting, then they are forced to play transcriptions of works for other instruments; this has become an integral part of playing the instrument, which my amateur attempts at Chopin’s preludes attest to.

As far as Bach is concerned, there are two things we might note; one of which is that as a Baroque composer, the instrumentation of his works are somewhat malleable- there were far more different instruments in common usage back then, and a great many works are orchestrated for whichever musicians happened to be at court at that time. Furthermore, there are a number of instruments which are somewhat unclear - the mystery five stringed cello from BWV1012 for example, or the debate as to whether or not Bach even wrote music for the lute, or rather the gut-stringed harpsichord called a lautenwerk that he certainly owned a couple of. It seems that there is a certain ‘interchangeability’ to Bach’s music, where, especially with its famous logical consistency, not to mention his own habit of transcribing, it lends itself to being moved from instrument to instrument.

So with this in mind, I’ve recently been playing Bach almost exclusively (bearing in mind any playing at all has to fit in the cracks between Job 1, Job 2, freelance work, not dying, and all the other things I regularly struggle with), and have alighted upon a ‘core’ selection of works to play. Yet another auspicious aspect of Bach’s music is his writing for solo instruments, for so long dismissed as mere studies, but then so unbelievably influential over new music in the 20th century. It is these that form the basis of what I’ve been playing.

Lute Suites BWV995-1000

As I mentioned above, the suites for lute were almost certainly not written for the actual lute, and are actually keyboard music with a lighter polyphonic texture than usual, and I generally play the transcriptions for guitar by Jerry Willard.

BWV 995 is Bach’s own transcription of Cello Suite 5, BWV1011 with added voices, and so I consider it part of that work.

BWV996 is a Suite in E minor, with some very challenging three and four part writing, with the initial Presto and final Gigue really impressive.

BWV997, another suite, is most notable for a long, powerful minor-key fugue.

BWV998 is the serene Prelude, Fugue and Allegro, a beautifully majestic mini-suite which is an absolute joy to play, especially the fugue and its slow build-up of its three parts.

BWV999&1000 are a prelude (akin to a minor key version of the prelude of BWV1007) and a fugue that is based upon the violin fugue from BWV1001, one which was a favourite piece of Julian Bream.

As well as all these, BWV1006a is Bach’s own elaboration of 1006 for the lute, which is best played in place of 1006.

Violin Sonatas and Partitas BWV1001-1006

Where the lute suites are often richly polyphonic, the violin works are much more varied - a great number of them are composed of single lines, where all harmony is implied, while on the other hand, there are a number of pieces which utilise all four strings on the violin, giving serious polyphony. I generally play Tadashi Sasaki’s transcriptions, which maintain all the original keys.

BWV1001 in G minor has an incredible prelude, all ornament and lugubrious harmony, a real joy to play, including just the most exquisite deceptive cadence near the end. It’s followed by a fugue, a siciliana and a solid presto.

BWV1002 is rather long, and contrasts a series of dance movements with Doubles in single lines.

BWV1003 was transcribed by Bach himself for the harpsichord, and so there is a version of much thicker texture and ornaments that the performer can pick and choose from. This sonata is completely dominated by the Andante, a piece of unbelievable spiritual calmness and power, one which Bach actually made worse by elaborating it for the keyboard. I was lucky to hear this played by Frank Peter Zimmerman as an encore this summer at the proms, Mein Gott!

BWV1004 is the D minor partita, which is most famous for the Chaconne, which completely dwarfs all of the movements preceding it, for good reason: without hyperbole, it’s one of the most incredible achievements in all music, grandiose, tortured, passionate, sweeping, emphatic.

BWV1005 is another sonata, with a gigantic fugue as its second movement. What is most exciting about this one though, I would say, is the faltering, heartbeat-like prelude, building from near silence into glorious, churning, four-part grandeur.

The prelude of BWV1006 is a guitar favourite, and for good reason. Its effervescent, joyous, rolling rhythm creates a wonderful web of sound that is ideally suited to the guitar, and as I’ve mentioned, there is a ready-made Bach transcription for multi-stringed instrument. In my opinion, however, the rest of the suite can’t really match up to it, despite its charm.

Suites for unaccompanied cello BWV1007-1012

It’s a little bit harder to do these ones justice, such hallowed works, inextricably tied to Casals and his grainy, over-romantic resurrection of what were once simply practicing etudes. The least polyphonic of Bach’s solo instrumental works (not counting the flute partita), they are also the most awkward to transcribe. Unlike the violin works, which can literally be played off the stave in the original without edits, the cello suites have to be completely transposed in order to fit the guitar. Furthermore, decisions have to be made as to how to treat the texture of the pieces - the guitar, charming though it is, simply cannot compete with the cello in the power of a single line, and so the suites can sound naked in a lot of places if they are not dressed up. However, that opens cans of worms about how much tinkering one is allowed to do to the beauty of the original. I’ve encountered a variety of approaches, and I think it depends upon what each of the suites demands in its own logic.

Everyone knows BWV1007! It’s got to be one of Bach’s most famous pieces, recognisable from a million recordings, the background of a innumerable films and so on. I play a transcription by John Duarte, which has become a classic in its own right. He fills the texture out considerably, making for quite rich and challenging pieces, which I think suits the jovial nature of this suite.

BWV1008 is the opposite - sparse, melancholic and vulnerable, to me it sounds better with its nudity emphasised. I haven’t found a satisfactory transcription of this one, so I’m working on my own at the moment, which I’ll probably continue editing as time goes on.

BWV1009 also has a satisfying edition transcribed by Duarte, with slightly less added texture but still a rich and open sonority is achieved.

BWV1010 is proving slightly tricky. The transcription I’m working with happens to be in the same key as BWV1009, and despite me not playing one after the other, I feel that they ought not to be structured in this way. I’ll have to have a further think about this one.


As I mentioned previously, Bach himself filled out BWV1011 into BWV995, and this is excellent help in deciding how to go about playing the others. This is the home of the sarabande, that timeless single melody which sounds like it could easily have been Webern. It’s hard to achieve the same gravitas on a guitar, but it’s worth trying.

And of course, BWV1012, the mighty end to the suites. This is particularly challenging, featuring quite a lot of passages of incredible speed and difficulty, written as it was for the mystery five-string cello (which some believe might have been more like a viola!). Again, I have no decent transcription to work with, so I’m editing it myself. The highlight just has to be the overwhelming, titanic prelude.

So overall that’s eighty-three movements and almost five and a half hours of music to play through (I haven't included the flute partita because I don't know if I can be bothered at the moment). It’s very comforting music; in turbulent times, both worldly and personally, there’s something steady and firm about Bach’s formality, his a-historicism and pre-modern sensibility, that seems like the right thing for me now. I’m still working on transcriptions but I have much less time for that now. We’ll see what happens, but I’m quite keen, if I get bored of this regime, to start really working on some of the more modern C20th guitar works, of which there’s reassuringly quite a lot. On the other hand I have some transcriptions of Bach's keyboard music (including some quite infamous Well Tempered Clavier transcriptions) which if I'm feeling very confident about I may try to work on in future.

The International Anthem

I have created a new international anthem, to be played at all public events, everywhere, from now on.

Mahler - Kindertotenlieder 1/5

It's about time I tried to squeeze one of these out.

Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, (Songs on the Death of Children), have to be the apotheosis of a certain  conception of Romanticism in music; there's probably nothing out there more bleak, more morose, more histrionic, perhaps no more extreme example of the quintessentially romantic intertwining of natural phenomena and emotional states. But at the same time, it is also one of the first proper stirrings of musical modernism, with its introduction of the stripped down chamber orchestra at the very height of the trend towards musical gigantism, and its frequently barren, wandering counterpoint laying the seeds of the second Viennese school's sound world and texture.

Composed between 1901-04, there are five songs in the cycle, settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert, on the death of his own child. The one that I have transcribed here is the first, "Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgeh'n", with the text as follows:

Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgehn,
Als sei kein Unglück die Nacht geschehn!
Das Unglück geschah nur mir allein!
Die Sonne, sie scheinet allgemein!

Du mußt nicht die Nacht in dir verschränken,
Mußt sie ins ew'ge Licht versenken!
Ein Lämplein verlosch in meinem Zelt!
Heil sei dem Freudenlicht der Welt!

Which translates as:

Now the sun will rise as brightly
as if no misfortune had occurred in the night.
The misfortune has fallen on me alone.
The sun - it shines for everyone. 

You must not keep the night inside you;
you must immerse it in eternal light.
A little light has been extinguished in my household;
Light of joy in the world, be welcome.

(from here) 

The music itself is of remarkable contrast, beginning with a weightless counterpoint in diminished harmony, before chromatic rises and falls lead to an emphatic D minor. There are the usual Mahlerian major to minor modulations, and a more lush, textured section with a typically romantic arpeggiated harp part. The climax is a tempestuous passage which slips sideways between chords before dropping back with resignation into the main theme.

Transcribing it for the guitar is both simple and bloody difficult. The fact that the piece is in D minor means that it's well suited to the instrument's own sonority, and didn't require transposing. However, in order for the piece to make sense on its own, and also perhaps to abstract it a little from its more 19th century connections, I have also decided to render the vocal line as part of the transcription. In the more spartan passages this is not really a problem, but in the more complex section this adds a whole extra voice on what is already quite a tricky passage, with at least three independent voices requiring expression. You can hear that it's not exactly easy to achieve, although as usual a more skilled player than I could probably get more out of it.  As with many transcriptions there are points that require artificial harmonics, in this piece more so than usual, and getting the guitar to do justice to the dynamic range of the piece is not easy either. That said, I'm quite pleased that it has been possible to play the piece without chopping huge amounts of sound from it, so it's at least a small success.

As you can imagine, the undecided straddling of the romantic and modernist views of the world appeals to me greatly, so I hope you find that I haven't butchered it too much.

Chopin - Prélude op.28 no.13 in F sharp

Another installment in one of my slowly moving background projects.

This is perhaps the most sentimental of the préludes: if we're being a little harsh we must admit that it's pretty saccharine. However, it is not without interest; the slippery chromatics in the base are satisfyingly complex, the major key cousin of the super-chromatic étude op.10 no.6, while the trio features two somewhat jazzy II-V-I progressions with a delicate stress on the major seventh in the melody.  Furthermore, the trio features some interesting modal harmony, which sounds surprisingly modern if listened to closely.

The transcription presents a couple of challenges; the chromatic line at times fits perfectly under the hand and at others is rather uncomfortable, and as it is played mostly on the lowest strings you can hear that I've had trouble preventing squeaks and creaks as the left hand voicing shifts around. There are also a couple of polyrhythms, one is 5 over 6: a challenge to achieve in both hands at once. In the trio, the ornamental melodies necessitate leaving a rest where the piano's left hand part should be, and overall it should be played far more smoothly than I've achieved here. Lastly, the high notes in the last few bars are played as artificial harmonics, which presents its own little challenges, although is in keeping with the way it's played on the piano.

Only time will tell if I ever get the chance to finish these all off, it'll probably take at least a few years and who knows what will be happening then. There are ten done, there's a good few that are written but need to be thoroughly practised, and we'll see if I can make rudimentary recordings as we go along. I'm pretty shy about showing the transcriptions themselves, but maybe at some point I'd like an expert to have a look at them.

Anyway, more architectural stuff to come...

Chopin - Prélude No.21 in B flat, op.28

Another prélude; this time the slinky and oceanic No.21.

This is the ninth I've 'finished'. I think the transcriptions themselves are alright, but obviously my technique isn't really up to scratch for some of them, and it's doubtful whether any of the super-difficult ones (no.5, no8, no.16 (!!!), no.24) will ever be possible for me to play. I'll keep going though, see how far I can get.



Hope these are enjoyable in some way.

Raining in Neukölln.

I was recently in Berlin after an old friend's wedding (see what I was telling you about yesterday?), and found myself, after returning from a long long weekend, lying in a friend's flat in Neukölln listening to the rain absolutely hammering against the windows. I made a short recording out on the terrace proper, and about a month later I've made a little sonic something out of it.

It's pretty simple, perhaps sketch-like, but I've gone for a decidedly Germanic style, both in terms of rhythm and also in terms of the suggested harmonies.

Nachtmusik

Struggling along with musical things.



I've previously transcribed a small section of Beethoven's Heiliger Dankgesang, which as you probably already know was put to great use by Keiller in 'London'.

But Keiller also used Brahm's Alto Rhapsody in the film, indeed, it's the very first piece of music one encounters in the film, staring across from London Bridge towards Tower Bridge, with the Celine-baiting "It is a journey to the end of the world" as the opening line. Music for Keiller frequently seems to be used with very specific meanings, the 'convalesence' of the Beethoven presumably corresponding to the cure for the 'malady' of London (as well as the script's specific reference to convalescence when Robinson first comes back out after the Tory victory), while one can draw parallels between Robinson in Space's analytical study of the aesthetics of British capitalism and the desperate job-seeker music from Kuhle Wampe.
And then the Alto Rhapsody crops up again in Keiller's exhibition at the Tate (which I CANNOT RECOMMEND ENOUGH), with a pair of headphones allowing you to listen to Kathleen Ferrier singing Goethe's tale of peripatetic woe while also looking at an image of the lichen which may or may not be a silhouette of the great German polymath.
As you can imagine, it was buzzing around in my head for a while, so I thought that I'd try to get a little bit of it down, so here are the first few bars or so. One could probably keep going but there is never enough time...




And then Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died. As someone said, perhaps the very last 'great' voice that there will be. One shouldn't be too sad - he lifted the hearts of millions and lived to a very grand old age, but I felt moved enough to quickly bash out a little Schubert song - 'An die Musik', with the final line "Du holde Kunst, Ich danke dir dafür!"




And also a little sketch I made using the sound of people milling about and drinking outside my flat, with a quasi-late romantic dressing. I'm not sure where something like this leads to, but perhaps it's the beginnings of an attempt to understand the difference between the quotidian and the romantic, with particular regard to the different poles of artistic satisfaction and metaphysical dread. Or something.

A Song for Europe

What have I done?

What have I done recently then?

I wrote a review of François Dallegret's exhibition at the Architectural Association for BD. It's here, although paywalled. Dallegret is perhaps the lost member of the late 60s / early 70s utopian bunch of architects, too idiosyncratic to pin down and probably not ambitious enough to end up as powerful as the rest of them.

I also wrote a review for the Architect's Journal of the book 'RUINS' from the series 'documents of contemporary art', which is here. It's funny, the book that I have coming out soon deals with three of the themes of these books quite heavily - first they did ARCHIVES, then FAILURE and now RUINS. I'm not entirely sure what to make of that really, perhaps the book is coming out too late for the wave of interest but then it was written what feels like a ridiculously long time ago, so who knows. One mustn't expect too much anyway... Still, read the book - it's ace, well worth it.

More of my short journalistic work is in this month's ICON, where I write various pieces about Herzog & de Meuron, Ma Yansong, and Coop Himmelb(l)au. 

I went to Zagreb, which was great. I gave a talk about the ArcelorMittalOrbit sculpture, which I've written about on here quite a few times before. I was speaking as part of this event, along with Mark and Owen, who both gave very interesting talks, despite me still not being able to muster a toss about Pulp... Zagreb was a fascinating place, where I met some very lovely people, and it is also blessed with some incredible architecture. I also saw the funniest thing that I've seen in a long long time, which I hope I can share with you sometime soon.

On matters music/hobby related, two more Chopin preludes:

Chopin - Prelude No.7 in A - guitar by entschwindet und vergeht
Chopin - Prelude No.20 in C minor - guitar by entschwindet und vergeht

Oh well...

Strauss, R - Morgen!

Strauss, R. - Morgen! op.27 - guitar by entschwindet und vergeht

Und morgen wird die Sonne wieder scheinen

und auf dem Wege, den ich gehen werde,

wird uns, die Glücklichen sie wieder einen

inmitten dieser sonnenatmenden Erde…

und zu dem Strand, dem weiten, wogenblauen,

werden wir still und langsam niedersteigen,

stumm werden wir uns in die Augen schauen,

und auf uns sinkt des Glückes stummes Schweigen... 

And tomorrow the sun will shine again

and on the way that I will go,

will she us, the happy ones, again unite

amidst this sun-breathing earth,

and to the beach, wide, wave-blue

will we still and slowly descend

silently we will look in each other's eyes

and upon us sinks the mute silence of happiness

(between you and me, it's been quite a tricky month...)

London Bridge, 1st November

For various reasons, the 1st of November 2011 was not the sort of day one wishes to go through. As part of this horrid spin I had occasion to walk across London Bridge along with the lord knows how many other thousands pass across as it as well, perhaps a six figure number. Before reaching the bridge however, I had to walk through the bus station, which as I have mentioned before, is in the process of a slow demolition and replacement, its roof being torn apart in one place, propped up in another, almost intact in small sections. And as I walked under it it on this damp November morning it was hard not to see it as some kind of allegory.

Along with the space frame, those pointed and strange lanterns over the rooflights are other details that we're unlikely to see again once the current generation of 40-odd year old buildings are demolished and forgotten. One has to admit that they do not make for a pleasant sight, ungainly, savage almost, like awkward teeth. But they have a purpose and they also strangely work as well, with a rhythm that compliments the spindles of the frames below. Indeed, at this late stage in their life they create a strange mimetic effect with the additional grey steel support truss on the underside of the roof.

The roof is truncated & incomplete, but in a strange reversal it begins to give the impression that it is poised in the process of expansion, just waiting to be extended out to accommodate some kind of growth. It seems both to be on its way up, but also on its way down, and we know what that means: the ruin.

Ruin. You might say: who built that? You might also say: who destroyed that?

-Victor Hugo, on the barricades of 1848

And then not only the secondary structure of the trusses that hold the roof up for now, but also an extra structure of scaffolding. This leads to a frankly ridiculous profusion of vector-like members, spiderish and confusing, fragile in appearance. There's nothing pretty about it, yet seeing it like this allows us to appreciate the effect that engineering architecture first had upon people - its very lack of weight and expressive detail made it troubling and ugly to nearly all who saw it. It wasn't long of course that we learned the engineering aesthetic of rationality and became masters of it, somewhat numbing it, but when we see a scruffy mess like this we can catch a glimpse in ourselves of that original reaction.

A couple of days ago I recorded a brief clip of Beethoven, a piece which has been on my mind a lot recently. You might remember that the 'Heiliger Dankgesang' features prominently in Patrick Keiller's film 'London', and indeed there are a number of shots from the film that focus on the commuters in and around London Bridge and the station. There is of course a melancholy eye that you can place onto a scene like this, whereby the thousands of nameless people streaming out of the door make it seem as if the city itself were taking a deep sighing breath. Caught in this stream one gets a sense of the countless bodies who have wafted across the Thames for work over the last millenia, and London becomes some kind of sad entity in itself. The fragile yearning in the Beethovian counterpoint is a perfect match for the sense of disappearance inherent to the wash of commuters, endlessly repeated with slowly changing actors. But here, under the drab sky we are reminded that nothing repeats without change, and we see a building belonging to one era being crushed beneath the brute weight of its replacement, the Shard.

Beethoven - Heiliger Dankgesang

Beethoven - Heiliger Dankgesang, op.132 (fragment) - guitar by entschwindet und vergeht
Here is another fragment of music for you. This is a portion of Beethoven's 'Heiliger Dankgesang', or song of holy thanks. It's a magnificent example of modal writing, with barely any accidentals in the long exalted passages from which my little transcription comes, and an all-over mood of almost unbearably serene melancholy.

If you're not already familiar with it you might actually recognise the piece from its use in Keiller's 'London', where it bestows the drabness of quotidian London with an exquisite shimmer of yearning.

Totenfragment

Strauss, R - Im Abendrot (fragment) by entschwindet und vergeht

Here's the introduction to Richard Strauss' "Im Abendrot" (At Sunset), one of the Vier Letzte Lieder.

Chopin - Prelude No.22 in G minor

Chopin - Prelude No.22 in G minor by entschwindet und vergeht

Another of Chopin's Preludes given the once over by my clumsy fingers. This one is nasty, brutish and short, with a usually thundering bass melody (in octaves on the piano) being played stacatto entirely by the thumb, with the other fingers left to render the syncopated, angular chords draped over the top. I must say it's quite fun to bash the guitar around a bit in a way that isn't normally done, but I suppose that to play this piece properly requires a bit more precision than I've got, what with my miniscule practise regime these days.

Rain Song

Rain Song by entschwindet und vergeht
Digging around on my clogged hard drive I found this recording that I once made. A few years back I experimented for a while with a technique whereby through a process of filtering, certain specific frequencies could be extracted from a source recording, without affecting their timbre. Sounds that had a wide range of frequencies and yet some rhythm and texture were best for this, and the rain was especially useful. This was all pre-hauntology, but the idea was quite similar - melodies could be found that were like ghosts within an existing sound, and the pieces sometimes automatically sounded like faint human voices. Unfortunately this was a very time consuming technique, involving the filtering of individual harmonic frequencies for each note, and overall I had better things to be doing. But here's one for you, created from the sound of the rain during a thunderstorm, I think sometime in 2009.

Romanticising the Riots

Romanticising the Riots by entschwindet und vergeht
You might have noticed that there were some riots recently. I don't really have much to add to the hundreds if not thousands of analyses that have already been contributed, apart from the observation that they all have some element of truth to them.

One of the riots took place right outside my house in "London's Fashionable East End", and as well as going outside to have a look at what was burning (along with a sizable cross-section of the local population), I also, as you'd expect from a pretentious hipster, made an audio recording of the helicopters that were thundering around outside, of which I counted at least four.

Now, it's not as if I couldn't have just left it at that, and had myself an interesting little Chris Watson style audio recording, but I felt it necessary to somehow transfigure it slightly, and the result is the audio that you can listen to here. The helicopters have been combined with a recording of Strauss' 'Im Abendrot' ('At Sunset'), one of his Four Last Songs.

Why? Well, there could be a number of reasons. On the one hand it's a sly gesture towards Stockhausen's 'Helicopter Quartet', but that's by the by. It's also a kind of aleatoric duet - listen to how the doppler effect of one of the helicopters perfectly accompanies the slide from the major to the relative minor! But then it's perhaps about the artistic gesture as such, the impotence, or failure, of any artwork to genuinely transfigure the structure of the world into which it's inserted. The high-romanticism here functions as a phantasmagoric fragment of a world that is not always in the process of collapsing, a fiction that is always drowned out by the harsh sounds of the world in which it is heard. Or, to put it another way, high-camp futility is the mood I'm going for.

Apropos of nothing, two classic stride pianists taking on classic romanticism. Lambert playing Wagner, & Tatum playing Chopin.

and from side to side

and from side to side by entschwindet und vergeht