Inspiration - in the Words of the Greatest Composers

By Chris Billingham 

“The idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Night time is for sleeping”   - Britten 

An unusual approach to the creative process, Benjamin Britten had a rigid routine of a 9 to 5 working day, much like an office job. Some suggest that this is reflected in his music, and that there are moments which demonstrate a lack of inspiration. As discussed previously I write creatively, and like many I find it difficult to understand Britten’s view on how this process works. Inspirations comes to people in a number of ways, but it is not something than can be “turned off” – awake or asleep. 

Puccini appears to share this opinion: 

“Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man’s faculties”  - Puccini 

Describing inspiration in this way suggests it can appear out of nowhere and take hold of you; a perspective much more widely held than Britten’s approach. History would suggest many composers have found this to be the case. A famous example is Elgar, who is said to have written the main theme for his cello concerto on a napkin after waking up from dental surgery. However, what if inspiration didn’t just appear in an awakening? Can you force creativity? Or even take it from existing works? Stravinsky suggests that: 

“Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal” - Stravinsky 

While most composers would no doubt argue that you should never directly copy another’s work, the concept of taking ideas from one another is one that has, whether you agree with it or not, been present throughout musical history, whether it’s the classical music world discussing Handel and other Baroque composers stealing from each other or rock fans accusing Noel Gallagher of copying The Beatles. Andrew Lloyd Webber is a current composer who has been widely accused of this in many of his best-known works.

Whether a piece is original or inspired by another, it will only become its own piece of art with determination from the composer. Looking across writings from various composers, this determination can come from a number of places. Whether it’s an artist wanting to reach their full potential: 

“A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one” - Shostakovich

A sense of urgency:

“Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity” - Rossini 

Or an artist who understands that you have to keep working on your craft beyond mere repetition:

“Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets" - Beethoven

Beethoven’s words don’t come as a surprise; he is famous for his meticulous personality when it came to both music and his day-to-day activities. He is said to have counted out precisely 60 coffee beans every time he had a cup of coffee. While others probably wouldn’t have let their approach to musicianship affect their drinking habits, many agreed that inspiration can only flourish when it is combined with hard work, with Brahms commenting that: 

“Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind” - Brahms 

Indeed, Tchaikovsky notes that: 

“Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy” - Tchaikovsky

Is it fair to say that Britten was lazy when he suggested that he would only compose during the daytime, in what are essentially office hours? In some people’s opinions perhaps, however the method whereby one finds inspiration is entirely personal. I should probably stop shaking my head whenever I see that quotation; creativity is something individual and it matters less how a composer finds it, but how they utilise it. After all: 

"Imagination creates reality" - Wagner 

To find out more about Southern Sinfonia; click here to visit our website, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. 

A Year with Southern Sinfonia

James Chater (left) - Photo: Richard Johnson

By James Chater 

As July draws ever closer and the 2013-14 season reaches its conclusion, so too does my time with Southern Sinfonia. The year has passed in what feels like the blink of an eye and in the Autumn I will take up my place to read music at Oxford University, armed with every musician’s indispensable set of skills, namely; the high speed assembly of music stands and the preparation of an entire orchestra’s worth of tea and coffee using two kettles. A year with Southern Sinfonia has done far more than just further my musical education.

Upon arriving with the orchestra, last July, a fresh-faced school leaver, I was totally unsure of what to expect from the year. One thing I didn’t expect, however, was accusation of neo-Nazism. Arriving home one day near the start of September, I found a rather flustered-looking father briskly come to the door to quiz me about a worrying email he found on my laptop. A quick explanation that the email entitled ‘SS Plan’ pertained to Southern Sinfonia and not a covert cult smoothed things over. Ironically though, I would say that this is one priceless skill that I have picked up over the year; the ability to navigate an awkward conversation. Whether it is a concertgoer, a vicar of a church the orchestra has descended upon for a weekend or the musicians themselves (all well-intentioned, it goes without saying!), more so than ever I feel accustomed to steering through with only minor scratches. This being said, the diversity of people I have met, from world-famous conductors and musicians, to orchestral managers and vergers has been one of the most rewarding and exciting parts of my experience. The insights that these people have to offer in terms of their perception of the music you are listening to have only served to heighten my appreciation.

The Romance of Brahms meets Britain's Britten rehearsals 

Perhaps my favourite event over the past year was our first subscription concert of the season, ‘The romance of Brahms meets Britain’s Britten’. Not only was the music absolutely breathtaking (igniting in fact, a year long obsession with Brahms), but this was also my first opportunity to see how the inner cogs of an arts organisation turn slowly but surely to produce a truly memorable event. As a school student, you are blissfully unaware of the innumerable twists and turns that the planning of such a concert entails. Before, I would swan up to the hall on the day and play away, but this time was much different. The wonderful world of posters, tickets, flyering, logistics, photocopies of music, bowings were all thrust upon the team, and suddenly I became all too aware of the technicalities of such a concert. Needless to say, in true Southern Sinfonia style, the concert itself came to pass with minimal difficulty, apart from David Hill’s pesky shoe sole (there’s always one), which conveniently decided to detach itself moments before the evening began, leaving him to conduct shoe-less. Don’t say we don’t like a first here at Southern Sinfonia.

The wonderful world of posters!

On a purely selfish level, what this year has done has really put my (and I am loathed to say this cliché) passion for music into a new and sharper focus. Before, music was something that had a very limited context for me, perhaps to be expected, coming from a boarding-school environment. Yet, when you are able to see first-hand what music can do, in terms of education, in the joy that it brings audiences, and the undying love of music in those audiences, it gives me a great sense of affirmation that what I am going to be studying over the next three years has some real gravitas and longevity.

I could elaborate much further on all the benefits of my internship with the SS Team, but I fear it would be of Wagnerian length (oh, one more thing then – a deft eye for musical puns and analogies!). It just leaves me to thank everyone at SS HQ and all those associated for giving me such a wonderful and rewarding experience. I wait with bated breath until my return as guest blogger…

We are so pleased and fortunate to have had James with us this year. He has been a real asset (not just thanks to his ninja-like stand skills!) and it has been wonderful to get to know him over the season. We are very proud that he achieved his dream of going to Oxford, and are looking forward to hearing about his stories and successes.

We will very much miss his ability to make amazing coffee, though – apparently there’s some secret to do with microwaving milk...

-Julia Hudson, Assistant General Manager 

Click here to purchase tickets to our next Café Concert with harpist Olivia Jageurs and actor Alex Knox on Friday 20th June.

To find out about further Southern Sinfonia concerts click here to visit our website. You can also find out more through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram!

Finding your feet in the arts - come & work with Southern Sinfonia!

By Julia Hudson

As many of you will have noted, we are advertising for an Intern. Although not the most glamorous job title, we are looking for a gap year student, graduate or someone looking to start their journey in the world of arts management. While, inevitably, they will prove their worth by a deft music stand manoeuvre at a critical moment, we hope that they will also learn a great deal by working with us for a season.

Quiet coffee moment before rehearsal at Greenwich

Now on the other side of the proverbial table, I feel able to comment on the usefulness of such a position because I started off my career in a similar position. Working in artist management with some concerts and festivals thrown in, I received enough money to cover approximately half an M&S sandwich a day and never worked so diligently in my life. I lived for six months with a very generous family of friends and commuted with the besuited bankers, spending a couple of evenings a week tutoring a lovely AS-level student to make some extra cash. At work, I learned extremely rapidly about everything from how to use (and clean) one of those complex-looking coffee machines to the ins and outs of contracts and A1 forms (don’t ask). The six months flew by, in a whirl of after-work drinks, concerts in some of the most prestigious venues in London – where the artist afterwards hugged and thanked you for booking his taxi there – and a mind-alteringly improved understanding of Microsoft Word.

Most crucially, I learned a great deal. Having already worked in a different sector, I thought I knew how to be organised, how to respond to emails and how to get the most out of a day at my desk. But here were new challenges – working towards others’ proclivities and timetables, answering the phone and the door (often simultaneously) and remembering that a lack of attention to detail could mean a ferry for twelve singers heading in the reverse direction to that which it was intended. Behind the glamorous veneer of concerts, recitals and festivals, there is an underworld of less exciting overseas travel logistics, tax, VAT, contracts, percentages and electronic diary management, which is time-consuming and often complex. In the orchestral world, the challenges vary slightly but still include tight schedules and similarly tight spaces in cathedrals, social media, publicity, printing, cataloguing and a wide range of admin tasks. It's a eye-opening introduction into something most of us never contemplated.

Typical concert-day rehearsal, in Bath Abbey

Most importantly, though, you’ll be learning constantly – surrounded by an experienced team of orchestral managers (ours also travel the world with artists as varied as Neville Marriner, Michael Buble and the Monteverdi Choir), our projects manager Natasha who is also one of our wonderful oboists (see her post here) and many more, your journey will be an informative and enjoyable one. Highlights for me include days spent in some of the most beautiful buildings our country has to offer, working with professional musicians, the local community and schoolchildren all in the same day, and trying to find extra chairs for our recent sold-out concert – I hope you find your own.

Our 13-14 intern James celebrating a place at Oxford with MD Kay

Southern Sinfonia is offering a three days per week, ten month voluntary placement in its small Administration and Management team. Based in Newbury, Berkshire, the Administration and Management internship offers the opportunity to gain experience of how a world-class and busy team works, in the areas of orchestral management, education and participation, artistic planning and administration. The successful candidate will work within the main office, music library and in venues throughout the South of England, working closely with a number of colleagues and musicians across the organisation. To apply, email julia@southernsinfonia.co.uk for a job description.

An orchestra from the comfort of your garden chair - did you know plants make music?

By James Chater 

Photograph: © TFL from the London Transport Museum Collection

If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise… No, not bears picnicking, but something perhaps as equally far-fetched. Plants that make music.

To me, the RHS Chelsea Flower Show means one thing; being subjected to an hour-long programme every evening for a week about gardens. Unfortunately, I can’t get much more excited about it than that, despite my mother’s consistently enthused accounts of the many wonderful gardens she has seen during the day. However, this time she returned with an anecdote that didn’t cause me to reach hurriedly for my noise-cancelling headphones. The anecdote was about a stall she had seen where an array of plants were, thanks to a complicated looking contraption, creating music. Music is an art that has associations with many other arts, social sciences and general hobbies but, I must admit, I had never seen horticulture as one of them. Sceptically, I began to investigate and was pleasantly surprised by the large quantity of information on a field of research I had never encountered.

The research has been centred in the Italian ‘eco-village’ of Damanhur. In 1979, 11 ‘Damanhurians’ founded the self-titled ‘Federation of Damanhur’, in an Italian mountain range 30 miles from Turin in 1979. Today, the site is known as the location of the ‘Temples of Humankind’, an enormous temple made up of several halls some 100ft beneath the mountain. It was constructed in complete secrecy from the Italian government, and without heavy construction machinery. It has to be seen to be believed. Since 1979, a team of scientists has been working to ascertain whether it is possible to communicate with plants, and whether the communication can be through the medium of music. One fascinating experiment has given real traction to the idea that plants can in fact communicate with each other. 

Capiscum Annuum

Until now it has been thought that the ways in which plants communicate was through chemical or magnetic means, but the team at Damanhur have shown that they may be able to through sound as well, just at a frequency inaudible to humans. 

“In the experiment, Capsicum annuum (chili pepper) seeds isolated in a black box that blocked all possible chemical and magnetic communication, germinated slowly when there were no other plants nearby; they did so at a normal speed if they were near other Capsicums, and did so rapidly if they were near basil plants, known to be their natural ally. Growth was even faster if there were fennel plants nearby, since fennel is antagonistic to Capsicum plants, releasing chemicals that would slow their growth. Fennel seemed to signal its presence with a kind of acoustic communication. If it was put in a plastic box that blocked all forms of chemical communication, nearby Capsicum plants were spurred into growing much faster than normal.”

How then are these sounds made audible? Electrodes are attached to the roots and the leaves, through which vibrations are sent as a MIDI signal to a synthesiser, which then plays the notes. Differences in electric potential within the roots and leaves cause changes in pitch and rhythm. The result is quite extraordinary.

However, the question that arises is whether, even if the plant creates these sounds, it necessarily becomes music. If they are sounds that are the result of a biological change in the plant’s surroundings, there isn’t much that differentiates it from human speech; it is functional. Not many people would label a conversation as music, apart from maybe John Cage. In a sense, to be called music, there needs to be evidence that the plant makes these sounds spontaneously, ‘for fun’, if you will.

Photograph: © NOTCOT

Damanhur has the answer… “Countless tests and re-workings of the basic technology have refined this device [the device which changes the signals into sound]. These forty years of experimentation seem to tell us that plants realise that it is they who are determining the sequence of notes emitted by the device, and therefore they modulate it intentionally. They do not just react to stimuli from their surroundings but can be ‘trained’ to use the device increasingly well, to respond to the human voice or to someone playing an instrument. Plants ‘remember’ their training, and over time learn to interact in an ever more sophisticated way with their audience.”

So there you have it, a brief introduction to the musical world of plants. I have only scratched the surface here, and if you would like to find out more there is a whole website dedicated to this field of research, an album compiled by Damanhur of different plants’ ‘songs’, and even the opportunity to go and see the ‘plant concerts’ first-hand. The device that creates the sounds is even on sale to the general public. So forget Beethoven, you could soon be conducting your very own orchestra from the comfort of your garden chair.

Southern Sinfonia is very excited about the final of our Newbury Young Musician of the Year Competition; click here to find out more and purchase tickets. 

To find out about other upcoming events, click here to visit our website, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. 

‘That way lies the death of opera’ - does this medium depend on more than voice?

By Julia Hudson 

There’s really only one topic I can choose to blog about this week, and it’s one that has been reverberating through the classical music world and implicating critic and performer alike.  Glyndebourne mezzo soprano Tara Erraught was criticised in a series of reviews of Der Rosenkavalier, in which she made her debut this weekend. Not for her singing, however, but for her appearance. Criticisms included the attestation by Andrew Clark of the Financial Times that she is “a chubby bundle of puppy-fat”, while Richard Morrison of the Times called her "unbelievable, unsightly and unappealing".

Many singers have responded; noting that all these critics were male, Jennifer Johnston suggested that “clearly overt sexism is rife” while mezzo soprano Alice Coote wrote an open letter to opera critics, in which she said that "we cannot people our operatic stages with singers that above all are believable visually or sexually attractive to our critics. That way lies the death of opera. It is not about lights, it is not about costumes, it's not about sets, it's not even about sex or stature. It is ALL about the human voice. Critics, I beg you: Be kind to young singers - you may change the trajectory of their lives and career if you wound them with your words."

It goes without saying that, as a member of the fairer sex just a year younger than Miss Erraught, I find any suggestion of casual sexism appalling. I recognize the value of the movement against it, entitled “Everyday Sexism”, and I feel saddened that such occasions are still present in the modern day. However, I cannot go so far as to agree with Alice Coote wholeheartedly.

"Have we arrived at a point where opera is no longer about singing but about the physiques and looks of the singers, specifically the female singers?" Jennifer Johnston wrote in an opinion column for the Guardian. This would be a tragedy; the notion of image and ‘the way things appear’ permeate every aspect of the media increasingly, and all art forms are affected. Some for the better; the cinema transmission of opera and the flexibility of technology are opening up the world of classical music to new audiences, but some, as here, for the worse. However, does Alice Coote go too far, when she suggests that opera is “ALL about the human voice”? Given the substantial budget of Glyndebourne and comparable companies, and the wonderful effects the sets, lights and costumes have on the audience, I would suggest that the effectiveness of opera as a medium goes beyond merely the sound of the voice. Even concert performance, a field with which we at Southern Sinfonia are even more familiar, is subject to this; our rehearsals sound lovely, but there’s a reason we wear white tie and long black dresses for most of our bookings, and that some of our most stunning performances take place in the most beautiful cathedrals in the world.

I visit Glyndebourne every year (they do a wonderful under 30’s £30 ticket offer) and year before last I was bowled over by a production of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortileges. An opera I knew well thanks to a university production, I was transported into a magical world where everything was scaled up to emphasise the small, overwhelmed nature of the little boy (another mezzo in a ‘male’ role). It goes without saying that the singing was wonderful, but the enormous chair and the oversized squirrels undoubtedly contributed tremendously to the overall spectacle. Without the production, I could have listened to the music in the comfort of my own home.

There is a huge disparity between ‘believability’ and ‘sexual attractiveness’, and it could be said that Coote is unfair to suggest that critics are starting to look before they hear. Believability is relevant to any performer, and most from the acting profession would agree that it is crucial to the success of a production. However, for me it is an expressive face, a sense that the performer has immersed themselves into the role, and an emotional connection – in opera, these come from a wonderful voice, yes, but also a commitment to acting the role, both visually and orally. Most would agree that, today, it is not enough to stand on a stage and sing the notes, and I applaud this development, particularly as opera is arguably the most multidimensional art form, involving singing, acting, dancing, poetry and staging.

Credit: Christian Kaufmann

Retuning to this week, however, perhaps by being more specific Rupert Christiansen’s comment in the Telegraph is slightly more helpful. "There is no doubt of the talent of this young Irish mezzo, but she is dumpy of stature and... her costuming makes her resemble something between Heidi and Just William." It already asks a certain amount of a modern audience, used to the best CGI and computer-aided transformations, to remember that a woman with long hair and a skirt is actually meant to be a man in period dress. A woman diminutive in height (and I speak from experience, although I would prefer not to be termed ‘dumpy’) probably doesn’t make a very convincing man. Surely, then, a more suitable critique would be of the production, and the costuming, as Rupert Christiansen has (almost) done, rather than the singer? It appears to me that Tara Erraught has merely arrived in Sussex and delivered an “outstanding” performance. Above all, this is what must be applauded – as it undoubtedly was, and will be for the rest of the season. 

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