Aficionados of black metal, drone metal, doom metal, “griefcore” and whatever other metal genres have sprung up in the last fifteen minutes might like to investigate Vasculum. The group/artist’s page has a few songs for download – I like it very much, but then I would.

The Vasculum manifesto is, apparently,

no audience engagement – no promotional engagement – no performance – no collaboration – no photographs – identity of no significance – location/eating habits of no significance – to be listened to at massive volume or not at all

It’s safe to assume that it’s music in the best tradition of one-man lo-fi black metal projects, I think, and puts me in mind of the likes of Xasthur and Leviathan. If anything Vasculum is (are?) a lot less refined and a lot more brutal. Listen here: http://vasculum.co.uk

Seeing Bavouzet perform Ravel’s Concerto pour la main gauche at the Proms last Friday was an immensely inspiring experience. His technical assurance was such that he made the flashier, more mercurial runs and fiendish final cadenza seem like a spontaneous outpouring.

I had some serious goose-bumps several times during Bavouzet’s performance, which more than made up for the lacklustre première of Arvo Part’s fourth symphony, which I’d be inclined to describe (at best) as inoffensive.

It’s only recently that I’ve seen other pianists perform works for the left hand in concert. The other was James Rhodes, in recital at the Guardian Hay Festival. There, James played the Blumenfeld Étude pour la main gauche in A flat – and, as was the case with Bavouzet, one really wouldn’t aware of it being a single-handed performance, were it not for the fact that both pianists at various points used their right arms to brace themselves against the side of the piano.

This element of posture interests me – I’m not sure (and perhaps James will be kind enough to comment on this if I prod him on Twitter) whether it’s deliberate or almost unconscious. You see, when I play pieces for the left hand alone, I tend to keep my right hand rather demurely anchored on my right knee.

Now, I’ve never noticed any extraordinary aches or pains while playing, for example, the Bach-Brahms Chaconne, but when I work on the Ravel – particularly the evil (for me)  jumps up and down the keyboard at the end of the first cadenza – I come away feeling a bit the worse for wear, particularly in my back muscles. It’s early days – I don’t have to have the piece learned until next spring – but I’d be interested if any of you who play pieces for left hand alone have any thoughts on the matter… does a gentle lean into the piano with the right arm help matters?

The bulk of the Liszt sonata is now (sort of) back in my fingers, but I’m facing a bit of a problem with available time.

If I’m lucky I manage to spend about an hour practising per day. This, clearly, is not enough to maintain a healthy repertoire, or to conquer a piece like the Liszt, so I’m breaking it down into manageable sections that can all be beaten into submission separately. Once they’re all subdued I shall try and stitch them together.

I’ve currently two main points of attack. The fugato section, about which I previously had a bit of a mental block, has proved to be straightforward to play, but easy for my fingers to forget, so there has been a lot of repetition of that around these parts. The prestissimo octaves towards the end of the piece have proved less daunting than I feared although it’s taken weeks of slow practise to get them to a respectable speed. I’m still not sure that they’re really coming out at a proper prestissimo – more of a panicky allegro moderato, I suspect… but still, they’re coming along quite nicely.

However, while I’ve been focusing on these bits so narrowly, I’ve found other sections that I’ve resurrected go back to rack and ruin. I think I need to organise my practise better so that I spend at least some time reminding my fingers how the whole thing goes.

I’d be very interested to know how other amateur players with limited time manage the challenges of learning larger works.

I’ve been working on the Liszt B minor Sonata for the first time since about 2000 or 2001. I wanted to demonstrate vaguely to my girlfriend that I used to be able to play the majority of it up to the hectic fugato section; when I did, so little of it was left readily-available in my fingers that I could barely struggle through the first few pages.

“This won’t do,” thought I.

So: the Schumann Symphonic Etudes have been put to bed for a while, along with Carter’s 90+, while I get the Liszt going again. Interestingly, getting it up and running again – in an albeit slightly shaky fashion – took me just four days. It just goes to show how long a piece can stay ingrained in your subconscious if you spend long enough learning it to start with.

Blogging has properly fallen by the wayside recently. Hey ho. Lots of good stuff going on in real life which tends to detract from time available for internet-type things.

I’ve been playing about with Spotify Premium and for the first time I’m starting to think that it’s a potential life-changer, even for an inveterate record collector like me. The joy of trying stuff out at high resolution with the off-line feature of the iPhone application is great.

Yesterday’s listening:

• Boulez – Le Marteau sans Maitre
• Can – Delay 1968
• Can – Monster Movie
• Neu! – Neu!2
• Burzum – Belus
• Boulez – Pli Selon Pli/Livre pour Cordes
• Billy Jenkins – First Aural Art Exhibition

The great thing is that I really didn’t like the Malcolm Mooney-era Can material, which I hadn’t heard before, nor Neu!2. And I didn’t have to pay for the individual discs in order to find that out. And it was legal (I never really got into the whole downloading thing).

Today:

• Burzum – Belus
• Billy Jenkins – First Aural Art Exhibition
• Wild Man Fischer – Pronounced Normal

The Burzum album is on heavy rotation. It’s possibly the best thing he’s recorded, and it utterly relentless.

I’ve been writing a small amount of verse, for the first time in years. Three of my most recent poems are up on the Year Zero Writers website:

• Two poems: These Days / Sphaeroid
• Untitled poem from the Higgs Boson Anthology

My intuition regarding Caténaires proved to be right – at least where my brain is concerned.

I’ve returned to Caténaires after letting it lie fallow for a while. Now, I’ve by no means mastered the other short Carter pieces that I’ve been looking at, but they’ve been ticking along quite nicely, and I’ve become comfortable with Carter’s idiom – whatever that might be.

Greater familiarity with his musical language has made it much easier to process – and memorise! – the stream of constant non-repeating semiquavers, to the point whereby I’m now reasonably confident I can get the whole piece under my fingers. Reassuringly, it’s also starting to feel like music rather than just a chain of notes.

It seems to have been very worthwhile to take a step back and do some preparatory study with slightly easier pieces. And I’ve got to know more of Carter’s works in the process.

Another interesting and pleasing side-effect of playing music as intellectually stimulating as Carter is that after an hour spent battling the irrational rhythms of something like 90+, a lot of more “normal” music doesn’t seem quite so difficult any more.

Where next? I’m looking forward to trying to play Berio (the Sequenza) or one of the Stockhausen Klavierstuecke. But I’ll get these Carter pieces sorted out first.

Last week, I played a concerto with an orchestra for the first time in 17 years: Haydn no. 11 in D, to be precise. It was immense fun – the orchestra is one that meets at my old school purely for the purposes of enjoyment. There are no public performances, and as a result the atmosphere is as relaxed as you might expect.

Apart from a very brief doodle on an upright piano, playing Cage’s In a Landscape to an audience that wasn’t at all prepared for it (although they did seem to enjoy it), that was my first “serious” performance on piano for at least five years, probably longer. And despite the fact that there wasn’t an audience, it was, I think, the first performance I had worked for since my university days.

Whilst being very enjoyable it made me reflect on a few things.

Going back to the piano after an absence of some years was one of the things that really helped my recovery from the depths of mental illness in 2007. At that point I was extremely rusty, yet for the first time in a very long time I was making music for the right reason – purely for the sake of enjoying the music itself.

So why had I neglected the piano so badly for all that time? I think my journeys down other musical blind alleyways – particularly my dalliance with folk music – came about due to a lack of confidence that manifested itself as a need to make a musical name for myself. Part of what brought me down was the realisation that I’d done exactly that – albeit in a pretty small way – and it didn’t mean anything to me. Hollow fame indeed.

So, returning to the piano really became a way of rebalancing my relationship with music itself. And it’s worked. I’m simply ecstatic to be playing music that I love. And I’m playing exactly what I want to, with no consideration for a potential audience. To quote the title of the much-misunderstood Milton Babbitt essay: “who cares if you listen?” I don’t. And not in an antagonistic, punk-rock way. I’d love to be able to persuade an audience that Feldman’s Palais de Mari is the best thing since sliced bread, but if I can’t, I won’t lose any sleep over it. I’ll play it anyway.

I’d just started tackling the first two Chopin Études from op.10 when I had surgery for a serious infection caused by a cat bite to my right index finger last February. The errant feline’s teeth punctured the flexor sheath, leaving my finger paralysed and allowing the infection to spread the length of the digit down into the hand. The surgery was successful, and I got to keep the finger, and the hand. Apparently the loss of a finger or the hand itself is not at all unheard-of in such circumstances.

After the surgery, it was by no means certain that I would get full function back. I had some very black moments in hospital – I was there for nearly a week – which I tried to dispel by researching left-hand-only repertoire. In fact, I haven’t actually regained full function, due to some tendon thickening that makes the finger feel slightly “woody”. There is noticeable nerve damage, too. Importantly, that damage doesn’t affect the fingertip, and the loss of function only really impairs my ability to curl the finger under into a fist. No great loss there.

It turned out that recovery was massively assisted by the piano – Claire the hand therapist told me to get back on the piano as soon as possible. The initial creakiness of the affected finger was heartbreaking. It was so stiff that something as physically undemanding as Pärt’s Für Alina was an enormous struggle. I don’t mind admitting that I cried with relief at the fact that I could play anything at all.

But I made damn sure it got moving, and went back to the Chopin op. 10 no. 1 Étude with a vengeance. Very slowly, and painfully, at first, of course. In the five weeks I was signed off work for recovery, very little seemed to matter apart from being able to play the piano again. I’m still tremendously grateful to the good people of the burns unit in Selly Oak hospital for the fact that I can.

You’ll excuse me, then, if I feel rather proud of last Wednesday’s excursion with the orchestra. I’ve got to the point where – possibly for the first time in my life – I’m actually rather happy with my playing; goodness knows there’s lots to work on – but work I shall. I’ve got the prospect of more concertos and a solo recital to look forward to.

Onwards!

Retrouvailles turned out to be a good starting point for addressing Carter’s piano music. Rhythmically, there’s nothing in it to defeat mere mortals, just sextuplet semiquavers, and triplet quavers divided into semis for different emphasis. Granted, some of these have rests in the middle, but its eminently possible to understand and hear these on sight.

So, off I went. To my surprise, I’ve managed to get the bulk of the piece learnt in about three weeks, spending between half an hour and an hour a day on it, although going back to the piano regularly to reinforce what I’d been doing.

As I got Retrouvailles under my fingers, I learned a few things that wasn’t expecting to learn from this piece.

Firstly, Carter is extremely expressive and lyrical. This is something that didn’t jump off the page at me to start with, especially when working slowly on the mildly intimidating flurries of notes.

The only experience I can relate this to is the moment I realised what a wonderful expansive melody the theme of the last movement of Webern’s Variations op. 27 has. As I said in my previous post, converts will be aware of this already, but Carter writes great tunes.

Secondly, it’s strangely memorable music; I’m lucky in that I don’t find memorisation too difficult, but in any case Retrouvailles worked its way into my head without my having to give it any real assistance.

As I played it from memory, I came to my final discovery. I realised that I had effectively stopped counting. In essence – rhythmically at least – I found myself playing Retrouvailles by ear. It was at this point that the spacing of Carter’s phrases started to feel completely natural.

And I wonder, especially with the more rhythmically-complex works, whether that isn’t the approach I need to take: learn how the rhythms sound, then stop counting. That would certainly tally with Joe’s comments, on my last post on the subject of Carter, about the first of the Diversions.

I’m now doing battle with the much harder 90+, and will be interested to see whether this approach works.

Anyone reading this blog who has come to it via my Twitter feed (@5357311) will almost certainly be aware of my ongoing struggle with the piano music of Elliott Carter, posted in the form of “535 vs. Carter match report[s]“. When I started work on Caténaires last year in earnest, I knew little else of Carter’s output, and had been drawn to the piece after hearing Pierre-Laurent Aimard give its première performance at the Proms in 2008. 12 pages of semiquavers at breakneck speed. “How hard can it be?” thought I.

Needless to say, I found Caténaires extraordinarily trying from the off. Yes, slow practise is the way to get round a piece like that – but the other problem was getting it to stick, even at a slow speed. It’s a little like playing Feldman at the speed of light, as there are patterns in there, but even when they repeat, they’re modified. In essence, what you have is a sequence of thousands of notes with very few triggers for memory. It really isn’t possible – for me, at least – to read a piece like that at the speed it needs to be played.

After several months of trudging through the first few pages, I bailed out. This wasn’t simple cowardice or frustration, I hasten to add, although I’d done my fair share of shaking my fist in a rage, furious with this pesky 100-year-old man whose brain was still evidently more musically agile than mine will ever be.

I decided, in a moment of rare clarity, that what was going wrong must be more than just a localised issue with Caténaires. I simply didn’t have a feel for whatever it was Carter was getting at. I resolved to do two things: listen to a representative sample of his work, and try to play an easier piece.

Ploughing through the string quartets, assorted piano works, and the Nonesuch box set, what I discovered was something that must already be blindingly obvious to anyone who is a devotee of the great man: there’s something unquantifiably and wonderfully right about Carter’s music. It might be fiendish, but it fizzes with energy and fun.

Inspired, I got hold of scores of the Two Diversions, 90+, and Retrouvailles, and selected the last of those as my first target, reasoning that it was short and looked as though its demands upon fingers and brain wouldn’t be too severe.

Thus began the start of a beautiful relationship…