Praeterita

Something I realised recently: music can be incredibly complex, but basically it is either loud or quiet, high or low, fast or slow, and degrees in between. Listening to and playing music for more than 30 years has led me, perhaps unconsciously, to that awareness. And it's as true for so-called classical music, with its elaborate structures and harmonies, as it is for the harmonically much more simple forms of popular music. Hardly an earth-shattering epiphany, but it probably explains why certain kinds of music that I used to find harder to listen to, like Benjamin Britten, now give me a lot of pleasure. Another reason why I now love the music of some composers that I once found incomprehensible: the voice. Looking back, I realise that I always loved opera long before I became absorbed by instrumental music. Even when I listened mainly to people like Prince, Bob Dylan, The Smiths, or Robert Johnson, what I responded to most was not the tunes or the instrumentals so much as th...

This week I have been reading a biography of the British composer Benjamin Britten, whose music finally clicked for me a few years ago after I saw the Met Opera's production of "Peter Grimes". For British people of a certain age, it's difficult to think of Britten without interference from Dudley Moore's wicked parody, where he plays a Britten-style arrangement of 'Little Miss Moffet' and sings it like Peter Pears. Pears was Britten's lover for many decades, and a singer who performed in the premieres of many of Britten's works. Carpenter's biography is very good on the dynamics of their relationship, its ups and downs, and ins and outs, as it were. The portrait he paints of Britten is of a musical genius who could be pretty ruthless, collaborating with librettists, organisers of the Aldeburgh festival, and other musicians for years, and then suddenly dropping them or firing them with no second thoughts. But it's clear that Carpenter lik...