The old site was inspired by the black & white of ECM sleeves; the new design is based on the cover of Song. The two worlds will come into alignment next month when the Dowland Project records a new album including DP versions of some of the songs in Song (they won’t be like you’ve heard them anywhere else) and if all goes well the album will appear around the time of the paperback sometime next year.

The old blog posts will vanish into to the ether along with the old format, apart from the page about the painter Ernest Walbourn (my wife Penny’s grandfather). There will be a first new post with book news and details of upcoming gigs and recordings as usual.

So this is a fond farewll to those who’ve followed and subscribed until now – and huge thanks to those who’ve commented over the years. But do check out the more colourful version – and get in touch to tell me what you think.

As the last line in Song says: onward and upwards!

John

Great to be back in Spain with the Alternative History team last week (photo courtesy of Bruna Espar, to whom huge thanks for hospitality and chauffering!). El  Castillo de Peñíscola is where El Cid and more recently Game of Thrones were filmed and it’s a stunning setting for concerts. We were overtaken by a storm while we were doing our sound check and the audience was hastily crammed into a wonderfully resonant hall. They were issued with cardboard fans as it was so hot inside (I’ve never seen so many fans at one of our gigs). As well as renaissance music alongside Tony Banks and Sting the programme included John Paul Jones’ exquisite ‘Cradle Song’ which we hope to record in Italy next year. We’ve just launched a teaser YouTube video which we recorded in Madrid last year. We’re on Instagram, but our account with Mr Musk has bitten the dusk.

SONG

When I arrived home a big box of Song was waiting for me. It looks magnificent, with its glorious Luke Bird jacket (Yale and ECM may differ over colour, but they share a love of the product as artifact). When the new version of this site goes live shortly I hope there will be a review or two. The bookshelf is growing:

Yale University Press is a big supporter of independent bookshops, but it would be daft of me not to point out that you can pre-order Song on Amazon ahead of the August 22nd publication date for £16.33 which is a bonkers price. But make sure it has the errata slip for page 281…

THE SWINGLES, STEVE & EDIE AND ETHEL MERMAN

For many years in the last century I dined out on the fact that I had once danced with legendary Hollywood star Ethel Merman in a long-forgotten TV show. It got to be so long ago that it became almost mythical, so much so that I began to think I’d made it up. It turns out that it might have really happened. Former Swingle Olive Simpson sent us a link to a Cole Porter compilation on YouTube, and around 15 minutes in there we are, Swingling away some of Ward’s Cole Porter arrangements. Ethel Merman was incredibly impressive and treated us just like normal human beings (which, in many ways, we weren’t). The bits I remember, apart from the dancing (though my actual dancing doesn’t seem to have made the final cut) were Ethel M singing ear-breakingly loud only centimetres from my face, and my nearly not getting to the sessions at all. I had an old Marina that didn’t like the wet and would come to a stop if it rained too hard. The heavens opened on the way to Elstree Studios and I had to shelter the car under a railway bridge until it felt dry enough to restart. No mobile phones, stomach in knots, huge relief when I finally got there…we were very young.

Can you hear me?

Like many young singers still, in my tenorial youth I often did ad hoc work with the BBC Singers. I’d been a fulltime member for six months when I first moved to London (it was called the BBC Chorus then) and the lovely manager Stanley Pine kept many of us in work when we took the leap into freelancing. During a rehearsal break one day, my fellow tenor Bob Chilcott was enthusing about an estate agent in Huntindon called Ekins, Dilley and Handley. He had a more colourful name for it so it stuck in my head and Penny and I checked it out one day. A few months later we bought our first house, thanks to a chance encounter with Bob, who went on to join the King’s Singers and then leave them to become a fulltime composer. He had an early hit with his wonderfully soulful arrangement of Billy Joel’s ‘And so it goes’. I first heard it in Tampere, where it was a favourite for many years.

Last month we were both in Tampere again, me as a guest of the festival, and Bob serving on the ensemble jury that I used to chair. He also gave a presentation of his work, which clearly had an inspirational effect on those of us who were there. He played a lovely children’s Christmas piece which would be perfect for the choir my granddaughters sing in. A couple of nights ago, together with Alice and Ned, I was pressganged into singing with the choir, and one of the pieces the children did on their own was Bob’s heart-rending ‘Can you hear me?’ It’s written from the point of view of a deaf child, and the children sign while singing. Seeing Emily and Grace signing away so eloquently was incredibly moving. Thanks Bob…

Alternative History

The Alternative History Quartet will be doing From Byrd to Sting (the promoter’s title, not mine) at Castillo de Papa Luna in Peñíscola on August 9^th.

Spain has really been our home since we came together (thankyou Ariel Abramovich). Last year we videoed two live recording sessions in Madrid (Moeran’s River God Song and Warlock’s Corpus Christi Carol). We’re planning on making  another album in Spain next year (it’ll include previously unrecorded piece by John Paul Jones,  Tony Banks, Gavin Bryars and Peter Erskine). In the meantime, we have a short video of extracts from John Paul’s Cradle Song in preparation.

Song: a History in 12 Parts

Publication is scheduled for August 22^nd (Stockhausen’s birthday, incidentally). This is what the cover will look like:

Yale have produced by far the most arresting cover of any of my books! ECM is still aiming to record a new Dowland Project album in October, and I hope the release (in black & white, obvs) will coincide with the paperback sometime next year. Anna Maria Friman and Ariel Abramovich will guest, alongside Jacob Heringman, John Surman and Milos Valent.

Kultursommer Reinland-Pfalz

One of my favourite gigs over many years has been the Kultursommer Rheinland-Pfalz series of concerts in medieval churches. My last visit was as a fourth voice in Trio Mediaeval’s Machaut in Cyprus project, and I’ll be returning to the Via Mediaeval with a programme of rarely heard sacred Trouvère songs with harpist Leah Stuttard on September 31^st in the Mönchsaal im Kloster, Klingenmünster. This will be my first attempt at a completely new repertoire, so fingers crossed…

Trio Mediaeval

The Trio’s new recording, An Old Hall Lady Mass, which I co-produced with Morten Lindberg, is out to the usual chorus of stunning reviews.

]]> https://www.john-potter.co.uk/blog/2023/07/17/return-to-normal/feed/ 0 https://www.john-potter.co.uk/blog/2023/06/20/are-you-awake-count-magnus/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=are-you-awake-count-magnus https://www.john-potter.co.uk/blog/2023/06/20/are-you-awake-count-magnus/#respond Tue, 20 Jun 2023 10:23:40 +0000 https://www.john-potter.co.uk/blog/?p=8723 If you were a chorister at King’s Cambridge in the late fifties or early sixties you would sometimes have been entertained to tea after Sunday evensong by the ancient and be-whiskered Fellow known to us as Scho. A group of four or five of us would climb the stairs to his rooms in College, and he would ply us with Bath Buns and doughnuts (‘dough bubbells’) from Fitzbillies. In the winter months, as his sitting room got darker and darker, he would reach for his 1904 volume of  M R James  ghost stories. We got to know most of them over the years, but if Scho gave us a choice we always went for Count Magnus. Scho was a magisterial reader, a voice from the 19^th century, lost in the magic produced by the eminent Provost of Kings a generation or two before. Nothing compared with Scho’s rhetorical whispering of ‘Are you awake, Count Magnus? Are you asleep Count Magnus?’ as the locks dropped one by one onto the floor of the De la Gardie mausoleum and one who should be sleeping began to stir. He made our hair stand on end.

In Sweden a couple of weeks ago I was exploring the magnificent Varnhems Abbey between the rehearsal and concert and came across this:

It gave me quite a turn. There were the De la Gardies in all their glory, and there was Magnus himself, not the scourge of peasants throughout the land after all, apparently:

And not in a separate mausoleum, but in the abbey itself:

There he is. No sign of the locks…

It was nearly midsummer, the same balmy evening sunlight that James’ hero enjoyed, but the ghosts of Scho, Magnus and Montague James faded as I sang my way through Latvian, Estonian, Spanish and English music that evening with Anna Maria Friman and the choir of Gothenburg Baroque. Though I was a bit startled by an extra pic that I didn’t know I’d taken when I came to look at my phone…

Next week I’m off to Sweden for concerts in Göteborg Baroque’s Valla Baroque series. On Saturday 10^th  Serikon will be doing our Sankta Birgitta’s resor programme in Skara domkyrka, and the next day at the Varnams kyrka Anna Maria Friman and I will be directing (not really the right word…maybe enabling…) the Festival Chorus for a programme of Arvo Pärt, Rytis Mažulis and Byrd.

I then go on to Finland where I’m delighted to be a guest of the Tampere Vocal Music Festival, this year directed by Kari Turunen whom I first met at a Hilliard Summer School many years ago (and whose fascinating PhD thesis on Palestrina I examined more recently). I hope to see many old friends as well as hearing an amazing programme of concerts and the choir and ensemble contests. I’ll then be coming home via Mainz to celebrate a significant birthday of my great friend Werner Schüßler. It was Werner who was responsible for getting the Hilliard Summer Schools to Germany, and there have been many great musical connections between York and Rheinland-Pfalz ever since.

Two big events happen in July: my book for Yale University Press Song: a History in 12 Parts goes to press (it will hit the shelves on August 22^nd) and in Malton on the 15^th I’ll be joining Ned, Alice and my granddaughters Emily and Grace in a concert by Emily’s & Grace’s choir – almost certainly the most fun concert of the year.

Any Alternative History fans in Spain may like to know that Anna, Ariel, Jake and I will be in the castle at Peñíscola on August 9^th, celebrating the Byrd anniversary alongside Josquin, John Paul Jones, Tony Banks and Sting.

More soon on all this, and (hopefully…) a complete re-hash of this site to coincide with the publication of the book.

I have very fond memories of my ten years or so as a lecturer at the University of York. The student life cycle is only three years for undergrads, a year or two longer for post grads, and staff come and go, so everyone eventually spirals off into history. I’m very pleased to say that The 24, the chamber choir I started around 15 years ago is still powering away, currently under my successor Robert Hollingworth. On May31st I’ll be joining them in the Lyons. Or rather, Jacob Heringman and I will be performing Jake’s intabulations of music by the enigmatic Peter Pope, while The 24 will include several of the same pieces sung as Pope wrote them.

If that sounds a bit weird it’s because the Peter Pope story is itself bizarre in the extreme. He was born in 1917 and went to the RCM as a student of John Ireland (one of the few that Ireland actually got on with) before moving to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. He was one of only two British composers (the other was Lennox Berkeley) to be commissioned by the Princess de Polignac, thereby joining an elite group that included Stravinsky, Poulenc and Manuel de Falla. During WW2 as a conscientious objector he served in Italy with the ambulance corps, where he became firm friends with a member of The Brethren, an extreme Protestant sect. He returned to England after the war intending to resume composing, and after a Wigmore Hall recital of his works Augener wanted to offer him a publishing contract. But Pope and his wife had by then also joined The Brethren, who insisted he decline the contract and burn all of his music. For decades his voice was silenced until he escaped the clutches of the sect and resumed composing in the 1970s as though nothing had happened. Music had, of course, in the meantime gone on without him; his friend Lennox Berkeley and Benjamin Britten (whom the Princess de Polignac had also wanted to commission) had flourished as Pope languished. At his death in 1991 Peter Pope left a substantial legacy of choral music and song, all in manuscript and in a style trapped in compositional amber.

Fast forward to the Alternative History quartet, which performs choral music and songs intabulated for voices and lutes, as any vocal music would have been in the 16^th century and earlier. One of the strands of our repertoire imagines that the early music movement began in the 1920s, a world where all those composers obsessed with renaissance poets wrote for lutes instead of piano and would have expected their choral music to be realised as lute song. In the spirit of the early music revival we rediscover forgotten composers, and at this point our imagined world coincides with the real one in Jacob Heringman’s arrangements of Pope’s songs and choral music. These can exist in many forms, and the quartet regularly performs them with soprano Anna Maria Friman and Ariel Abramovich (lute) as well as Jake and me. The concert on the 31^st is probably the first time that several of Peter Pope’s partsongs will have been performed, and as well as hearing a previously unknown 20^th century composer the audience will discover what would have happened to his music if he had lived four hundred years ago. Bonkers, I know…but that’s alternative history for you.

Eons ago I was enjoying life as a prep school teacher in Worcester and singing in the cathedral choir under the legendary Christopher Robinson. I knew it wouldn’t last and that I would eventually make the decision to try my luck as a fulltime singer. The decision was really made for me when I saw an advertisement for the BBC Chorus, as it then was. I took the plunge and have never looked back.

I only stayed the minimum six months, after which I felt confident enough to go completely freelance. But the Singers, as they became, often needed to augment the numbers, and the adhoc work  was often all that kept me (and dozens of other young hopefuls) alive. If things got desperate we would ring the singers’ wonderful manager Stanley Pine for a chat, and the lovely Stanley, knowing how things  were, would put enough work in the diary to carry us over. When I left the Swingles, and again after leaving Electric Phoenix, Stanley stepped in and kept me alive, just as he did for so many of my contemporaries.

I met singers who became friends for life in the Maida Vale canteen (the site of Pierre Boulez’ only known joke, overheard in the queue, about fish and fingers). We were perhaps less energetic and less nakedly ambitious than some of our fellow singers. Thanks to Stanley we didn’t need to audition for the professional freelance choirs which were often run by charismatic egomaniac entrepreneurs and were much more like hard work.

There are two very sad elements to the Singers’ demise. The most obvious is the staggering lack of faith in a national choir, admired all over the planet. But there are  also the human consequences, not just for the fulltime choir members, but for the adhoc freelancers starting a career already challenged by the twin aftershocks of Covid and Brexit. Put all this in the context of a flourishing conservatoire system that continues to turn out limitless numbers of brilliant singers and you can see the crisis coming not far down the road.

I owe a great debt to the BBC Singers, and their demise is a symptom of huge changes in the music profession. The Singers’ plight has at least brought home to the public that there’s more to singing than opera, which so often seems to grab the headlines. If we’re looking for positives, we should celebrate the continuing success of British vocal ensembles. It’s not always easy, but the most enterprising will find a way.

When you finish a book several things happen. The most banal is actually submitting it – a simple click cementing thousands of hours of work. A bizarre thing is about to happen to it – someone’s going to read it. It’s been all about the writing for as long as you can remember, and now it’s about the reading. At first there’s a terrific feeling of relief. You haven’t finished it – nobody ever finishes a book – but it’s time to stop, you’ve reached the point where you think it’s probably coherent and you need to let go. And of course, it’s not the end but rather the beginning of a process that if all goes well ends up with a real book in your hands sometime later. The next stage is the second draft…or possibly more…

Before I embarked on Song for Yale I had just finished a chapter for a forthcoming book on Gavin Bryars, whose 80^th birthday is today. I first met Gavin decades ago at an SPNM Composers’ Weekend, when he gave a lecture on the Mona Lisa – from her point of view as a painting being constantly gazed upon.  Some years later I joined the Hilliard Ensemble and the group commissioned Glorious Hill (at the suggestion of Paul Hillier, who like me was by then a big fan). Many more works followed, including a raft of pieces when he was composer in residence at one of our Cambridge summer schools, and the Cadman Requiem with Fretwork. He wrote madrigals for us and for Red Byrd and my student group at York. The Laude also originated in a Hilliard connection. I’d found an LP of the Cortona manuscript while on a Hilliard trip to Palermo.  Trio Mediaeval subsequently included a couple of them on their first album, and when Gavin asked me to recommend a soprano for his own ensemble I sent him the Trio CD. Anna Maria Friman then joined the group, and so began Gavin’s now decades-long re-imagining of the Cortona ms.

There have been other wonderful highlights – most recently the haunting Winestead, and before that Nothing Like the Sun, his RSC/Opera North commission which yielded Sonnet 125, one of my favourite Bryars pieces.  Jacob Heringman arranged it for the voices and lutes of our Alternative History Quartet and we first performed it in the UK at the NCEM in York. As we neared the sublime postlude a  man got up from the audience and advanced on the stage as we played on. The composer, for it was he, sat down at the piano and joined us for the postlude. Magic.

All of the 100 or so pieces Gavin has written for me have been a joy to sing, even if some of the more extreme flights of fancy (Ohone…) are now best left to someone with proper high notes. He’s also taken me beyond my comfort zone on a number of occasions. I got to conduct Cadman Requiem at York – my student choir The 24 plus Gavin’s ensemble with the composer on bass, and I’ve sometimes played keyboard in Jesus’ Blood. There can’t be many Grade IV pianists who’ve played with the Lithuanian Symphony Orchestra.

Kahn & Averill should finally publish the Bryars book later this year. It’s had the usual delays that befall any edited book, but in typically Bryars pataphysical fashion it’s meant that I’ve been able to update my contribution with three revised drafts – he just won’t stop writing.

Happy Birthday Gavin!

In the meantime, a wonderful book has arrived from a friend of mine. I know Ivo Magherini as a Slovenian instrument maker, though he’s actually an Italian citizen who calls himself an Istrian. We first met in Bremen around 1990 – Ivo had just moved there and I was commuting once a month from Essex to the Akademie für alte Musik. We re-connected years later when I started to work with Ariel Abramovich, who plays several of Ivo’s lutes. The three of us have often got together at gigs in Slovenia, Italy and Spain and even the UK. When I mentioned to Ivo that I was thinking of getting a medieval harp he said I’ll send you my 16^th century copy when I’ve finished it; it’s later than you want but you never know… And one day it arrived, a stunning realisation of a historical instrument which opened up all sorts of repertoire possibilities (Landini, self-accompanied – it would be revolutionary).

But I couldn’t play it, at least not well enough to do justice to Ivo’s exquisite workmanship. It’s now found a home with a proper harpist in France.

But I digress…I had no idea Ivo was putting together a collection of his photographs of a street in the Rome suburb of Ostia Lido in the late 1970s before it was redeveloped. I first visited Ostia Antica at around the time he took the photographs, maybe20 years before we met. Blinded by antiquity I knew nothing of the 20^th century development on the coast just a kilometre or two away. Ivo’s photographs are an incredibly touching record of a vanishing world – in many ways as distant from us now as Roman Ostia – that period when time stands still between the old life and its brutal replacement. In contrast to the monumental Roman remains, deserted for a millennium, the remaining inhabitants of via dell’Appagliatore still survive amidst the poverty and decay even as the bulldozers arrive.

Just as we performers do it because we have to, Ivo didn’t envisage his book as a commercial entity. I don’t suppose many of the people captured by his camera would be familiar with his lutes, but his photographs speak to that common humanity that links singers, players, instrument makers, photographers, all of us. If you’d like a copy, get in touch.

photo: Heribert Riesenhuber

Covid and Brexit have not been kind to the Dowland Project but after two failed attempts we’ll be roaring back into action near Mainz at St Stephanus Spiesheim on Tuesday 20^th (ein Konzert des Internationalen Musikfestivals des Wörrstädter Landes).  It’s been a miracle of organisation and we’re greatly looking forward to taking another leap or two into the musical unknown. It will be great to see old German friends again (and a big thankyou to Werner Schüssler for inviting us). The programme? Well, I’ve nearly finished my new book for Yale, 12 Songs: a History and Guide so my head is spinning with possibilities. There will be some old stuff too, and we’ve never yet done a gig when the virtuosity of Messrs Surman, Valent and Heringman hasn’t come close to corpsing me before end of one of their more spectacular flights of fancy.

The next day Werner and I start a three day ensemble course in Saulheim. We always have a fantastic time coaching together (in English (me), German and Geordie (Werner).

After that it’s back to the book, which is due for delivery on December 1st. At the moment I’m on track, and will have more to say about the whole project as we get into the editing process.