Film development for the Pianist of Willesden Lane

A few months ago I interviewed the amazing Mona Golabek, whose one-woman show The Pianist of Willesden Lane was subsequently a smash hit at the St James Theatre. The pianist turned actress tells the story of her mother, Lisa Jura, who after travelling from Vienna to Britain on the Kindertransport, which saved her from the Nazis, pursued her dream of becoming a pianist despite all. (The piece is here.) Now news has arrived that the book on which Mona's show was based, The Children of Willesden Lane, written by Mona with Lee Cohen, is up for movie development at BBC Films. Watch this space.

Hearing the Ottomans in London: a guest post by Professor Rachel Beckles Willson

Musician and researcher Rachel Beckles Willson, Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, is about to launch a new project tracing the different musical traditions in which this exquisite instrument plays a central role, and the stories of migration that go with it. I asked her to tell us all about it... JD

Hearing the Ottomans in London

“So tell me, which singer does she aspire to be?”

“Almost all the famous singers. But always with the same voice, the same makam, and interpreted in exactly the same way.”

“That means she is a true original! It’s solved. Unique and new. Pay attention here! I mean new, new in capital letters! For when it’s a matter of the new, there’s no need for any other talent. Now we need only choose which direction to take: folk music or classical Turkish music, or folk music with a hint of alafranga, or perhaps alafranga with a hint of folk?” (The Time Regulation Institute, trans. Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, Penguin Books 2013.)

Rachel Beckles Willson (oud) and Nilufar Habibian (quanun) in concert

Music threads through the novels of Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar in a tapestry of love, ambition, nostalgia and ambivalence. For a society newly ruled by clocks, radios, and popular song from Europe, what use were Ottoman repertoire and classical modes (makam)? Tanpinar’s protagonist bemoans his sister-in-law’s disregard for tradition (‘she knows nothing about music’) whereas his friend dismisses it: ‘Today who would ever think of trying to distinguish the Isfahan from the Acemasiran?, he asks.

While in Europe, classical music institutions flourished beyond the collapse of empire following WWI, in Ataturk’s Turkey, the centuries-old repertoire of the Ottoman courts and dervish houses was sidelined in favour of music that could embody the new Republic. In Greece the situation was similar: the focus fell on music that could express essentially European qualities of the modern state.

But the last decades of the 20^th century saw a new growth of interest in Ottoman music, and public support emerged as well. So much so, in fact, that one can now study classical Ottoman repertories in Turkey, Greece, Germany, Holland, France and beyond. There are printed scores, recordings, theory books, teachers… and of course there are many concert performances.

On 13 April, one of London’s most beautiful salons, Music at 22 Mansfield Street, is hosting an evening of Ottoman classical music.

The concert will begin with some of the earliest Ottoman pieces of all, several of which are attributed to Persian musicians at the court of Selim I (1512-1520). We draw the music from scores prepared by Wojciech Bobowski (1610-1675), a Polish slave-musician and translator who converted to Islam and took the name Ali Ufki; and Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723), the Moldavian Prince, musician and man of letters who lived in exile in Constantinople from 1687 to 1710. Their scores and other remarkable notated sources reveal the continuous development of Ottoman musical styles from around 1630 right through to the present day.

Our programme then moves on into the late 19^th century and shifts south to present the tradition in the Egyptian Nahda (Renaissance). We exchange kemencheh for violin to demonstrate the flamboyant Arabization that was part of that development. We also present Egyptian settings of Andalusian poetry, muwashshahat, along with a range of more recent music from Turkey, Armenia and Iraq.

At the heart of the concert is the oud, which is the predecessor of the European lute and reminds us of Europe’s debt to Al Andalus, the Muslim rule of southern Spain, Portugal and parts of France 711-1492. The oud itself is still played throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and increasingly widely in Europe and North America. I first discovered it by chance while I was researching western style music education among Arab communities of Palestine and Israel. I was increasingly captivated by the sound of the oud, its beauty, and by the way it could transform a social event, triggering laughter, song or tears – or all three of these.

I bought an oud in East Jerusalem, hoping my Arab friends would play it when visiting me back in London. But I found myself trying to play myself, initially grappling with the Iraqi tradition, then slipping into the music of Egypt, Turkey and Crete. A couple of years further on I started to integrate oud with my professional life, drawing it into undergraduate teaching and research. Gradually I’ve found myself performing in public again, many years after leaving my career as a pianist behind.

In the London concert on 13 April I am joined by several brilliant musicians (their origins combine Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestine and Turkey) to launch a website that is part of my current research [www.oudmigrations.com]. The website illustrates how ouds can be keys to unlocking stories of migration, and how they offer us fresh perspectives on the ever-changing relationships between Europe, Asia, and North America. The UK’s oldest oud was sent as a gift from the Khedive of Egypt to the South Kensington Museum in 1867. But Europe’s oldest surviving oud probably arrived in Brussels from Alexandria 28 years earlier, ordered by a Belgian researcher.

Several writers will be contributing to oudmigrations.com, so there will be stories from a range of places and in a range of voices. Please visit to watch the project develop. More details about the concert will be posted there shortly.

13 April 2016, 19.30 (welcome drinks served from 19.00).
22 Mansfield Street, London W1G 9NR.

All the artists are giving their services free, ticket prices cover costs only.
Tickets:
Welcome drink and concert: £20 (students and under-18s £10)
Welcome drink and concert, drinks and canapés after: £30 (students and under-18s £20) Book by email – boas22m AT btinternet.com

Rachel Beckles Willson

Listening to different spaces

A hard-hitting interview with the composer Olga Neuwirth has appeared in VAN magazine in which the distinguished composer tears the patriarchal structures of the classical music world into little bits and pieces. (The interview took place in November last year and has been translated, in what the magazine says is abridged form.)

It is also fairly horrific to discover that on one occasion an opera commission together with the author Elfriede Jelinek was cancelled, and the reasons Neuwirth alleges were behind this. Jelinek subsequently won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Here's a taste of Neuwirth's work: this piece is all about listening to different spaces...



Neuwirth also asks in this interview where those people who now speak up against sexism in the industry were 25 years ago, when she'd already started doing so.

That got me thinking. Where were we? Why are we late starters? Why were we listening to different spaces then?

Well, some of us were pretty young and green, for a start. I was in a junior post, learning how magazines were put together. I got my first music journalism job on The Strad when I was 24 and I had not the first clue about the structures and traditions of the music business. I was resistant to the notion that music was a business at all. Until a year earlier I'd spent three to five hours a day practising the piano, and I was still licking wounds that resulted from that dreamectomy. My mother had cancer and her illness hung over our family like a sword of Damocles. I had other preoccupations, too, as one does at 25, and was basically trying to find my feet, do my job and learn my way around the industry in which I'd landed.

My elder sister was the family feminist and activist. She was a lecturer in French history and politics, at that time at Bath University (she subsequently moved to Sussex). Although she sometimes berated me for my head-in-the-clouds devotion to music, I somehow imbibed the sensation that feminism was her patch and that should I turn in that direction I would never in a thousand years be able to live up to her standards and her expectations.

I'd found the male-dominated aspects of my university sometimes unpleasant, arrogant and intimidating, but I was there and determined to do my own thing - or so I thought. Actually I buried ideas of composition lessons within three weeks of going "up", having spotted how unwelcome a girl composer would be... but the crucial point is that it didn't occur to me that one could challenge this. Surely one didn't need to, not in 1985?!? A woman was prime minister: that proved a woman could now do anything. Ours was the first generation that thought we could have it all. Even so, I did not experience a single lesson with a woman at that university in three years. Unless I'm very much mistaken, the only women teaching in that music faculty were one ethnomusicologist and a brilliant composer (a Schoenberg expert) who was doing a doctorate. It was just how it was. I certainly had daydreams of sneaking down to the faculty by night and spraying on some graffiti, or smashing a window or two, but a) that was for other reasons, and b) I'd never have dared.

Still, I think the sorry underlying truth was probably the syndrome I see in many young women today. They've made it, so why can't others? What's the problem? I am fairly sure that at 25 that's how I must have seen things. It never occurred to me that I'd be overlooked because I was a woman; I applied for jobs and got them, so pas de problème...

What happened? I spent 20 more years in the business. My sister died of cancer, aged 45, and I realised that life is short, short, short. I began writing for the Independent. If I'd approached a national newspaper wanting to write about sexism in the music industry as an importunate upstart of 25, I reckon I'd have been laughed out of town. Then I interviewed Pierre Boulez. He said you can't sit in front of a situation you see is wrong without wanting to do something to change it, and I realised he was right. It wasn't long after that that I found myself sitting in front of something that I felt was very wrong and I decided to do something at least to raise awareness of it, because now I could.

The floodgates of consciousness have opened all around us now and it has been heartening to see the industry's decision-makers responding: festivals from baroque to contemporary programming music by women, International Women's Day taken very seriously on Radio 3 (now we need to address the rest of the year too), the launching of awards for women in the creative industries under the auspices of the Southbank Centre's WOW festival. The argument has widened to consider diversity as a whole, and necessarily so. Chineke! has got off to a flying start, and now Sound and Music is taking direct action to address the lack of diversity in new music "because it's 2016" - here's what they're doing and how and why.

Of course Neuwirth is right: it would have been good if more people had spoken up 25 years ago. But we can't change the past. With any luck, though, we can make some impact upon the present and future.

(Meanwhile, anyone who still requires proof of the ugly nature of misogyny in the music world need only go to the reader comments thread following a Slipped Disc post about Khatia Buniatishvili - some of the views expressed below the line are nauseating. I'm not linking to it - find it yourself if you wish.)

A home in music: Streetwise Opera does the Passion

Don't miss this on BBC4 this evening at 7pm. The Sixteen joined forces with Streetwise Opera, the charity that works with the UK's homeless, to stage Bach's St Matthew Passion in Campfield Market, Manchester, last night, directed by Penny Woolcock. They introduce it in this film for The Guardian, and while the BBC is screening a one-hour version tonight you can see the whole premiere on the G's site from Monday.

"The whole of civilisation is founded on art," one of the homeless participants reminds us.

Do stop it with the "sweet"...

I've reviewed Anna Beer's book Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music for today's Sunday Times. It's a great read, exploring the lives and times of eight remarkable people who were significant both to their day and beyond: Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi, Marianna Martines, Clara Schumann, Fanny Hensel, Lili Boulanger and Elizabeth Maconchy. The whole review is here. (There's a paywall. Which, let's face it, is probably the only way forward.)

The only thing I really didn't like was the title: "sweet airs" is exactly the sort of nonsense that women who compose have had to face across century after century and not far off "tinkling prettily" (a term I've seen applied to two very different composers whose works, had they been by men, would probably have been lauded instead for their Bergian expressivity or their contrapuntal rigour). Perhaps in this case it was picked for irony...