2012 – A MUSICAL SPACE ODYSSEY

A lunchtime series of five presentations by the acclaimed musician, author and teacher Jeremy Siepmann

WHAT THE SERIES IS ABOUT

• The series, grounded in the realm of human expression, lays out the basic elements underlying all musical types and structures, not just western classical music, in order to reveal the sources of music’s unrivalled capacity to reflect the entire range of human emotional and spiritual experience.


• The miracles of tone, time and colour are explored and illustrated by numerous and often unusual musical excerpts and examples.


• On the basis of these and associated discoveries, the voyage then proceeds to the vital topic of interpretation and on to the more contentious issue of musical criticism, before finishing with a celebration of universality unmatched by any other art.


• The series, leavened with humour and spiced with exoticism, is addressed not only to advanced students of music but to ALL music lovers and to those who wish to deepen, and widen, their listening experience. No previous musical knowledge required.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT TO GET FROM THIS SERIES

• A better understanding of the key components of music and how these combine to express the universality of human experience.


• A preliminary or further understanding of the ways in which music ‘speaks’, using a symbolic language that transcends the limits of nationality or region.


• An insight into music as a game – more, as a game of suspense.


• Keys to enjoying the sheer fun of music.


• New insights into the nature and limits (if there are any) of interpretation, from the simplest folk tune to the most complex modern score.


• A glimpse into the nature (and abuses) of musical criticism – and a confrontation with the unavoidable subjectivity of musical response.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

• First and foremost all music lovers, and those who would like to be. No technical or instrumental knowledge is necessary, and professional jargon will be largely shunned.


• The key requirement, however, is an eager pair of ears and willingness to be exposed to a surprising, unusual and challenging view of what music is and what music does.


• Advanced students of music, music teachers and music critics will find a great deal of interest in the fresh way the course approaches themes and topics that appear to be familiar but lend themselves to re-examination.

THE SERIES IN DETAIL

DAY ONE   Monday 8th Oct. 2012 Time: 11:00 to 13:30 (with an intermission between 12:00 to 12:30) Venue: Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall

TONE

1. In the Beginning

• In the vibrations of a single tone we shall discover the source of every aspect of music: melody, harmony, rhythm, colour, tempo, rhythm, polyphony, even metre and the phenomenon of metrical dissonance.


• In the hidden vocabulary of a single note we find a perfect, audible, living symbol for virtually every physical manifestation of our inner, non-verbal life, from despair to joy. Music’s power to reflect those universal experiences that bind us all together is unsurpassed, transcending, if only temporarily, the differences that separate us.

2. Kitten on the Keys

• Chord of Chords: In the dawning of the first overtones, we encounter the unique phenomenon of the triad. Beyond this, we explore the theoretically infinite division of tone, demonstrated both in the ubiquitous half-tones of Western tradition, and in the microtones central to the great Classical musics of China, India, Indonesia and Islam.


• The Magic of Scales: In the order of overtones – a natural phenomenon - we witness the birth (and explore the nature) of scales, finding in some the dynamic, suspense-manipulating, narrative properties that give music its unsurpassed entertainment value. From the same source we discover why all music is a kind of game.

Musical illustrations to include Zez Confrey’s feline virtuoso, Bach C major Prelude from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier, plus Chinese, Indian and Arabic ‘classical’ music, and traditional music from China, Africa, Scotland and America (jazz and otherwise) .

DAY TWO Tuesday 9th Oct. 2012 Time: 11:00 to 13:30 (with an intermission between 12:00 to 12:30) Venue: Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall

TIME

1. The Long and the Short of It :

• Rhythm in time; rhythm as time. We look at the power of time to transform rhythmic identity, and investigate the nature of syncopation.


• Same notes, two completely different tunes. And it’s all just a matter of time.


• Time patterns emerge as a direct consequence of speech patterns


• In the ticking of a metronome we confront the spectre of eternity


• In the grouping of notes we find an antidote, through the ordering of time and the phenomenon of rhythmic polyphony


• The Rudiments and Nature of Musical Structure. Its roots in time

2. Old Wives and Sacred Cows: The origins, uses and manifold abuses of metre

• Metre in Speech: a study in essential flexibility


• Metre in Music: Where does it come from? How is it communicated?


• How melody alone can undermine and even change the ‘official’ metre


• Establishing metre without first beats


• The nature and manipulation of rhythmic energy: Hemiola


• The holy trinity of metre: Upbeat, Beat and Afterbeat


• The largely unmined vitality of metre


• Metre as Function


• Metre and Philosophy

Musical illustrations to include Gershwin, Gregorian chant, Nigerian Talking Drum, a Haydn String Quartet, a Schubert Ecossaise, Strauss’s Emperor Waltz and a Bach fugue subject

DAY THREE Wednesday 10th Oct. 2012 Time: 11:00 to 13:30 (with an intermission between 12:00 to 12:30) Venue: Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall

COLOUR

1. The Roots of Coincidence: We encounter the miracle of polyphony (and the wonders of polyphonic melody). In the presence of dissonance we search (at first progressively in vain) for the Grail of Consonance.

• Dissonance Defined: not so easy


• The Myths of Prejudice


• Dissonance as the Soul of Beauty


• Dissonance as the Source of Movement


• Dissonance as the Engine of Narrative


• Dissonance as an Agent of Tone Colour


• Polyphony for One: The Role of Memory in Musical 3-D


• Rapture in a Single Line – except it’s not a single line. It only looks that way
  

2. Wringing the Blues :

• Timbre (tone colour) is found to be an acoustical miracle – but a musical luxury.


• Painting by Numbers: A Study in Fractions: the mathematical basis of tone colour


• The Sensuality of Tone Colour


• Colour as an Agent of Clarity


• Colour as an Agent of Atmosphere


• The role and nature of temperament and their reflection in the art of tuning – itself an art of colour

Musical illustrations to include Turkmenian duct flutes, Alessandro Lotti’s Crucifixus à 10, the Saraband from Bach’s C minor Partita, Handel’s Sosarme, Debussy’s Pagodas and Prelude à l’apres-midi d’un faune, Bernstein’s West Side Story, Parisian car horns, Florence Foster Jenkins in Mozart’s ‘Queen of the Night' aria, Cowell’s The Banshee and other, more conventional, illustrations

DAY FOUR Thursday 11th Oct. 2012 Time: 11:00 to 13:30 (with an intermission between 12:00 to 12:30) Venue: Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall

INTERPRETATION

1. ‘Who, What?’, to paraphrase Marx (“Who, whom?”). Definition and Tools

• What the Composer Wanted: a speculative quest.


• Conventional notation: a primitive and inadequate tool


• Beyond the Composer (and before): How Notes Work


• The Uses of Silence


• Beyond the Page: The Realisation of Latent Rhythms – an essential aspect of interpretation that remains invisible


• Relativity vs Absolutism – a fixed match

2. The Interpreter as Storyteller

• Music as Prose: Music and conversation. Music as conversation. Dialogue and development


• The difference between a story and a plot


• Language as the mirror, and the model, of music


• Music as Poetry: the creation and realisation of atmosphere, mood and emotion, from the playful to the profound


• Music as Portraiture: the crucial delineation of character, from the individual to the national


• How Context Alters Content
  

Musical illustrations to include Bach Two-part Invention No.1 in C, Beethoven’s piano sonatas Op.7 and Op.10 nos.2 & 3, Schubert’s Klavierstück No.2

DAY FIVE Friday 12th Oct. 2012 Time: 11:00 to 13:30 (with an intermission between 12:00 to 12:30) Venue: Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall

CRITICISM AND TRANSCENDENCE

1. Guardians and Parasites

• Do we really need critics? What is a critic? What a critic ought to be? What must a critic be (even if most aren’t)?


• Resurrection: an entertaining and enlightening, though brief, parade of masterworks 'slaughtered' by the critics since the inception of the breed


• Composer as Critics: do they have an edge, or just an axe?


• The limits (or ultimate irrelevance) of authority. Sviatoslav Richter boxes the compass

2. Passion and Dispassion

• The questionable virtues of objectivity. The uses and abuses of history. The corrupting lens of fashion. The folly of definitive thought


• An ethical code for music critics

3. Music as Philosophy

• Music, being non-verbal and non-specific, is largely confined to the world of the abstract. How, then, if at all, can it reflect, and even expound, philosophy?


• Music as allegory

4. Music, Joy and the Unity of Human Experience

• Why do some works effectively die while others achieve what appears to be immortality (one never knows, it’s always too early to tell!)? What determines a work’s success, often independently of critical opinion. Why and how does music transcend even its greatest makers? Dimensions of universality. Music’s infinity of truths. Its inexhaustible joys.

Musical illustrations to include excerpts from Beethoven late quartets, Wagner’s ‘Ring’, excerpts from Mahler, Ives’s The Unanswered Question and Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’