In his diary, Sibelius noted the inspiration for the grand theme in his Fifth Symphony: "Today I saw 16 swans. God, what beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a silver ribbon."
Sergei Prokofiev in New York, 1918
"My chief virtue (or if you like, defect) has been a tireless lifelong search for an original, individual musical idiom. I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices"
Sergei Prokofiev
Mendelssohn's portrait shown to public
 The portrait has never been displayed to the public |
A rare portrait of the composer Felix Mendelssohn is to go on public view in Scotland, almost two centuries after it was painted.
The portrait - by Thomas Duncan - was painted in Scotland in 1829, during Mendelssohn's first tour of the UK. It was during the Scottish leg of that tour that he composed his famous Hebrides Overture.
The painting will go on display at St John's Cathedral in Oban as part of the Mendelssohn on Mull festival.
It was bought by the current owner's grandfather in 1917.
The family, who wish to remain anonymous because of security fears about the painting, said their grandfather, who was returning home from the Somme after being injured, bought the painting for £3.
It has been in their family in Scotland since then.
Closing concert
Earlier this year they contacted the organisers of the festival - which will celebrate the composer's Scottish connections - to offer the portrait for display.
The work will be shown as part of the closing concert at the cathedral on 4 July.
The London auction house, Sotheby's, has already authenticated the work but it is hoped further investigation of an inscription on the back will offer more detail about the portrait's history.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8002923.stm
Why Bolivian baroque rocks
San Ignacio's baroque ensemble performs at home and abroad
With the Bible in one hand and a flute in the other, Jesuit missionaries played a unique role in bringing not only Roman Catholicism to South America but also baroque music.
And in the nearly 250 years since the Jesuits were expelled from the region, it seems the tradition of baroque is still thriving.
The musical legacy is tangible in the small town of San Ignacio de Moxos, located in the middle of the Amazon rainforest where the heat is sweltering, the roads muddy and the mosquitoes are huge.
Raquel Maldonado
Director, San Ignacio School of Music
Director, San Ignacio School of Music
Today, among the shoeless children sucking on tangerines, there are indigenous youngsters carrying violins, cellos and flutes.
This place was one of the very last Jesuit missions in South America, and home to thousands of local people. As well as religion, the Jesuits also taught European music and how to make instruments, such as the cello, harp and violin.
After the Spanish expelled the Jesuits in 1767, the indigenous population preserved the music and re-wrote the scores with lyrics in their own language.
Yet it was not until a few years ago that much of this music came to wider notice, when a cache of 10,000 baroque music scores were found in a number of mission churches. They have now been restored and archived by the local music school.
"Religion and music helped each other survive to the present day. The instruments, the dances survived thanks to the path opened up by the Jesuits; it is deeply embedded among the local indigenous people," explains Raquel Maldonado, director of the San Ignacio School of Music.
"Basically, European baroque was taken by indigenous people, who then made it their own, this is what now identifies us"
Edgar Vela
Music teacher
Music teacher
"Musical scores were copied numerous times," she says.
Inspired by a Basque nun, the local indigenous population has now created a school. As well as schoolrooms, there is a concert hall built with murals depicting monks playing instruments and local people copying them.
The school is thriving, with some 200 students.
"We teach and play the music that is still alive here, 'missional baroque' as we call it," says Edgar Vela, a very talented violinist and one of the school's teachers.
"Basically, European Baroque was taken by indigenous people, who then made it their own, and it is what now identifies us."
There is a natural, joyful allure to this native Bolivian baroque and the school's San Ignacio ensemble has become famous, travelling all over Latin America and Europe.
As Celsa Callau, a soprano and soloist at the ensemble explains, it was important for the music to "go native".
"If this music managed to survive it is because we are isolated, in the middle of the jungle," she says.
"Moxos has always been off the beaten track, so we were free of slavery, of the white people. That is why this music has been preserved and why it is still alive - and we will keep it alive."
Cultural empowerment
The pride in their music is evident and spans the whole ensemble, whose members are all indigenous.
 Local people's identity is bound up with the music |
In Bolivia, one of Latin America's poorest countries, the indigenous people were for centuries an under-class banished to the margins of society.
In recent years, however, they appear increasingly to be finding a voice, political as well as cultural.
"This [musical] project is not about trying to colonise the indigenous people... that is a thing of the past. Also, it is not about baroque... it is about giving importance to the local music, so the local people can identify with this music," says Raquel Maldonado.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8206836.stm
Making music to Rothko's murals
One of Jim Aitchison's 'sound maps' based on a Rothko painting
Thousands of people have visited Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals since they went on display in London last September.
While they have brought a visual and intellectual treat to all, few would have paused in Tate Modern's cathedral-like setting to consider how the modern-day masterpieces may sound.
But to composer Jim Aitchison - a Henry Moore fellow at the Royal Academy of Music - thinking about how a piece of art may sound is second nature.
He "re-imagines" contemporary and historical artworks as notations of sound, and creates a musical score based on the expressive and structural content of the piece.
The Tate asked Aitchison to respond musically to its Rothko exhibition - something he admits was "daunting".
"The paintings are fundamentally simple shapes but they have all sorts of complex resonances which Rothko obviously wants us to take in"
Jim Aitchison
"It was an unbelievable opportunity, but I was initially a little reticent," he says. "I had a very short time frame and because it's just the biggest thing I could have imagined having to do.
"Rothko is the most significant 20th Century artist and no-one is going to take that challenge lightly. I was pretty terrified!"
When writing a musical score for a painting or sculpture, Mr Aitchison uses the artwork itself as a visual reference for his music.
He looks at the shape and form to create "sound maps" - drawing the picture onto manuscript paper and placing musical notes on top.
"I was pretty stuck with Rothko," Mr Aitchison admits. "I went to see the show and afterwards I sat in the cafe thinking 'what on earth am I going to do?'
"I absent-mindedly drew out some of the shapes onto manuscript paper and began sticking notes in the corners and something seemed to click.
"The simplicity of that was really important. The paintings are fundamentally simple shapes but they have all sorts of complex resonances which Rothko obviously wants us to take in."
Murals from Tate Modern's iconic Rothko Room were reunited with nine other works from Japan for the exhibition.
The vast murals were originally commissioned for The Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York, but were never installed. They are among the most enigmatic in contemporary art.
Dramatic brushstrokes
Rothko constructed their striking surfaces by overlapping matt and translucent paints, depth was created by allowing the underlayers to shine through.
Mr Aitchison had to consider Rothko's rhythmic composition, dramatic brushstrokes, and the oppressive resonance of the paintings when composing his piece.
"I can think of hundreds of pieces of music that would already fit the ambience, and I went into the exhibition with a lot of pieces of music in my mind," explains Mr Aitchison.
"I thought 'oh my goodness the opening of Wagner's Parsifal would go with that, or Charles Ives's Unanswered Question, or this piece or that piece'.
 Jim Aitchison has previously worked with Anthony Gormley |
"I had banish all of those pieces to the back of my mind and try and start afresh.
"The paintings are so powerful. I spent a lot of time there to try and get a sense of the emotional terrain I feel they are trying to convey to me."
Mr Aitchison has previously worked with other artists, including Turner Prize-winning sculptor Anthony Gormley.
That collaboration culminated in a 45-minute piece of music, performed in Gormley's central London studio.
'Iconic and terrifying'
"The Angel of the North figures very strongly in that piece," Mr Aitchison explained.
"I didn't want to go anywhere near it because it is so iconic and terrifying, but I went to see it and was so overwhelmed I thought I just had to go for it.
"I had to find a way of translating some of the ways Anthony works into sound. His Domain Field pieces are made of matrices of T-shapes - bits of metal welded together - so I made my own musical matrices based on T-shapes.
"But you can't do it as an exact translation, it has to be more of an illusion rather than a direct, crude mechanical transfer of dimensions."
While some people with a rare form of synaesthesia - a condition where senses intermingle - can "hear" what they see, Mr Aitchison believes it is something we can all tap into.
"We are all totally familiar and used to experiencing aspects of visual culture with sound," he says.
"We all watch films and there are very few films that don't have a soundtrack. In that sense it should be something that we are all potentially totally comfortable with.
"If you are open to it, music can enhance your experience of the artwork."
The Kreutzer Quartet will perform Mr Aitchison's score at the Tate Modern on Monday evening. The Rothko exhibition continues at Tate Modern until 1 February.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/7847356.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/7847356.stm
Composer's Neanderthal recreation
Neanderthals may even have been there at the origins of music
A musical experience with a difference is being previewed at the National Museum Wales in Cardiff - an attempt to recreate the sound of the Neanderthals.
Jazz composer Simon Thorne was given the task of creating the "soundscape" to provide a musical backdrop to some of the ancient exhibits on display.
The musician says the work is "probably the most unusual" he has undertaken.
There has been strong interest in the composition and it will go on a separate live tour later in the year.
Neanderthal man existed side by side with early homo sapiens before becoming extinct some 30,000 years ago.
Despite having a reputation for lacking intelligence, recent research suggests the neanderthals were a lot more resourceful and innovative than was first thought.
Thorne said: "Given that Neanderthal's man brain was about the same size as ours, and much of our brain is given over to language, then you can assume they probably had language too.
"Every culture has language and music, so we can probably assume that they had some kind of music too."
His 75-minute composition was commissioned by National Museum Wales to provide a musical illustration for the palaeolithic section of its exhibition Origins of Early Wales.
These Neanderthal exhibits have helped inspire Simon Thorne's work
He said he was the first to admit that knowing exactly what Neanderthal music would have sounded like is impossible.
"It's a ridiculous notion to suggest we could ever know the precise role that music played in the lives of the Neanderthals, but imagining it has been a fascinating experience."
The composer has also researched the era extensively and been inspired by two books - Prof Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals and David Lewis Williams's The Mind in the Cave.
Prof Mithen will be at the museum launch and, in conversation with Mr Thorne, will talk about the role music may have played in the lives of the Neanderthals.
The Reading University academic, whose research centres on the evolution of human language and musical ability, said Thorne's work was "a fantastic go at evoking the sense of prehistory of our human ancestry".
He added: "He is trying to create the whole sense of being there at that time."
Instinctively creative
As well as the music, a specially commissioned film will help transport those present into a neanderthal cave.
The score from Simon Thorne's work
It will go on tour, complete with four singers, stone instruments and a video project to Harlech, Cardigan, Milford Haven and Swansea at the end of March, and already Mr Thorne has had "great interest" in his experiment from the British Museum.
He said the project had given him an insight into our own communication.
"We as human beings are instinctively creative," he said.
"We can't not be - we have to invent things and who's to say Neanderthal man did not invent the beginnings of music?"
"We use language for words, to communicate. But how do we learn language? If you look at babies and the noise they make, they learn to make singing noises before they learn to speak."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/7874415.stm
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