Ordinary fool

It's good to see struggling musicians making use of the latest direct marketing techniques. Gene might write libretti for a day job, but he also writes a very persuasive press release, as you can see from this email I received recently. The capital letters really help to convey what a great opportunity this is. Make sure you follow the link and listen to the samples:

From: "GENE TYBURN" <tyburn4@cox.net>
Date: 20 February 2006 04:51:42 GMT
Subject: A NEW VERY LYRICAL WORK IN ENGLISH. ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

DEAR MARK.....WE HAVE A NEW LYRICAL OPERA FOR YOUR COUNTRY TO READ AND HEARD THE SCENES FROM OUR OPERA OF ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. JUST GO TO OUR SITE  [TYBURNOPERAS.COM] ON THE WEB AND DOWNLOAD REALPLAYER READ AND LISTEN TO A GREAT NEW LYRICAL WORK IN ENGLISH..

OTHER WORKS TO BE COMMING ON LINE SOON IS MACBETH. CONTACT ME AT GENEOTYBURN@YAHOO.COM WHEN YOU REALIZE IT IS A GREAT NEW LYRICAL WORK THAT WILL BRING NEW AUDIENCE INTO THE OPERA HOUSE ....INSTEAD OF REJECTING THEM AS THE SAME OLD CHESTNUTS IN ITALIAN AND FRENCH DO.. THIS IS DYNAMIC WORK IN ENGLISH THAT WILL MAKE YOU SOME MONEY ...NOW WOULDNT THAT BE A CHANGE.

YOURS SINCERELY
GENE TYBURN

Cracker and I go back to a summer in 1991. Warwick found him first. They worked together in a music store. Cracker wanted to play a Rickenbacker; he and Warwick started hacking out tunes in the back room. I joined in, making things worse and better in equal amounts. The three of us made a band. Fingerhands didn't last long but there are relics. Terrible relics.

By accident I watched the Mercury Prize on Channel Four tonight. Brilliant. A whole bunch of great artists, with Antony and the Johnsons emerging as the winner. If you haven't heard this track yet, watch and listen. I'd be interested to know what you think.

Over the next little while I'm going to post compositions I wrote during my years as a music student at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Listening back over these 10-year-old pieces I hear some incompetent rubbish and some promising starts. Unfortunately the former go on too long, and the latter are all too brief.

This first piece is entitled The Hare's Breath. This was the first composition exercise of mine ever to be played, back in 1992. I was a first year student. I played in rock bands and wrote songs, but I really wanted to write "proper" music "properly". I turned up to my first lecture thinking I would be very happy if, after three years, I could write something half as good as the string arrangement for Eleanor Rigby. I left the lecture reeling from an extensive comparison of Beethoven's use of motif in his Fifth Symphony and Schoenberg's 12-note theory. I wondered what I'd let myself in for.

We had to write, and organise performances of, three major composition assignments every year. Starting ambitiously, I wanted to write a whole piano concerto. I tried to put pen to paper... OK, maybe just one movement. Hmmm... still nothing. Then I heard that the New Zealand String Quartet were resident, and would play student compositions. Aha! Tunes began to emerge. For some reason I started thinking about the parable of The Hare and the Tortoise. Sometimes I felt like the tortoise, sometimes the hare. Alternating between dogged persistance and haphazard complacency I managed to finish the composition in time for the performance workshop. However, as you will hear in the unintentionally sparse, slidey middle section, my race to the finish line resulted in some missing parts. To their credit, the professionals of the NZSQ played on regardless and without laughter.

Listening to it now, I'm dubious about the supposed connection between my piece and the story of The Hare and the Tortoise. The title was a fairly late addition, and I think I was only trying to avoid calling this piece Exercise in Strings No. 1, or something equally overblown. The piece is in three sections. First, a pastoral scene where the hare's tune is interrupted by odd little waltzy interjections. Second, we hear the tortoise's theme (yep, there's a missing part). Third, we hear the race, where the music of the hare and tortoise are woven together. The piece concludes in a strangely ominous fashion as if there's a moral to the brief sorry tale. The only moral I can think of is "don't let kids loose with pen and manuscript paper".

In the post-performance feedback session one lecturer suggested that the tortoise's determined theme sounded like Money, Money, Money by Abba. A friend of mine generously commented on how much he enjoyed the bi-tonal pizzicato plinks during the race sequence. I already knew enough not to ask, "What does bi-tonal mean?" and instead I just accepted the statement as an appropriate acknowledgement of my unstudied genius.

So, in all it's glory here is my first ever performed composition: The Hare's Breath (4.57MB). This recording dates from May 1992 and was made in the Adam Concert Room at Victoria University, Wellington. Thanks to the members of the New Zealand String Quartet for playing through it, and to Roy for recording it.

P.S. Whaddya know... this piece's ominous ending sounds just a little like the ending of Eleanor Rigby.

My hobby is musical directing, conducting if you like. I direct a vocal ensemble called Prophono (the name could be construed as mock Latin for "for sound" I suppose). If you're anywhere near London on Tuesday June 7th then I'd like to invite you to come along to a fun evening of English music in St Patrick's Catholic Church on Soho Square. It'll be fairly short (an hour and a quarter or so), leaving plenty of time afterwards for a pint in one of the local Soho taverns. The show is baby, family, friend and work colleague friendly. It's also fairly pocket friendly at £4. I'd love to see you there! Here's the press release and the full programme details. Oh God, I'm singing too.

My social life has picked up a little now that I'm conducting a new choir here in London. Already there are a core of us who regularly head off after rehearsals to the Prince Arthur (a local recommended by the St Mary's priest, Father Rob Wickham). A couple of the guys asked me how I became a conductor. After a few jokes about the sort of qualifications you'd need to go riding around in a Routemaster clipping tickets, I told my story.

My mother played the clarinet and some piano. My father was a manager for the national orchestra (when it was the NZBC orchestra) and a fine whistler. Back in those days the orchestra thought it was a good idea to introduce visiting international stars to a good New Zealand-style home-cooked meal. My Mum still tells stories about the times Janet Baker or Vladimir Ashkenazy came around to our place for dinner. Janet Baker, as Mum tells it, would take off her shoes and run her toes through our sheepskin rug with great delight, not realising there was a petrified housewife in the kitchen cooking up TVP for the rich and famous.

All that was before I was born. There are no stories of a passing Glenn Gould predicting great things for me having heard me playing Für Elise between courses of fondue. Like most kids I played a little of this and that, badly, for a few weeks before casting the unfortunate instrument aside. I think I tried violin and piano. Then, for some unknown reason at around the age of 17, I picked up the electric bass guitar. In collusion with my brother and a few misfit friends, I played in some pretty awful bands and wrote and recorded some fairly diabolical songs. I realised I didn't want to be awful forever, so I decided I should learn how to compose. There was no School of Rock so I had to go to university. They didn't teach me much about writing pop hits, but I found out a lot about classical music. I loved it anyway. I took up composing seriously—serious music you understand—and I wrote a lot of string quartets. Part of me was sad though because I liked performing but I couldn't really play any classical instruments. What was I to do? I realised that back in my band days I had been the one bossing everyone around, getting my way with music, for better or worse. The answer was obvious. I took up conducting.

My first conductorial dabblings were during my university studies. I took a conducting course where we got to wave our arms at our fellow students. As it turned out, Nicola was among them, and this is how we first met. My first real choir was the Upper Hutt Choral Society. They were desperate for a musical director. Later I started conducting the Wellington Capital Boys' Choir. Screaming boys. I had a lucky break and became conductor of the Festival Singers of Wellington. The singers were good and we sang lots of masses and hymns. Through that I had the opportunity to work with orchestras, performing Handel, Beethoven and so on. I liked that. Then, with Mandy Wong, I started a professional singing group called Cantiamo con Gioia, made up of off-season opera chorus singers. We performed at Civic functions, in Te Papa, and in the Wellington Botanic Gardens during the Summer City programme. Still not content, I started conducting the Schola Sacra choir in Wanganui, travelling up on the bus once a week. Schola Sacra were quite good too, and together we recorded items for Praise Be, and a CD called Pohutukawa Carols. Also in Wanganui, I helped set up an orchestra, the aptly named Wanganui Sinfonietta. Wanganui was “well worth the journey” in many ways, not least of which being the wonderful late night conversations I had with so many choir members. Every Tuesday night I was billeted with a different choir member. Over many bottles of wine I made some firm friends.

I was busy. In some ways I was pleased to give it all up at the end of 2002 when Nicola and I left New Zealand for the UK. However, I found an application form for a conducting course in Bulgaria. I applied, and Nicola and I went. That trip was something else. Musically speaking though, that was it for a whole year. I'd had enough... or so I thought. Now, here I am in London working with a new group of singers, making some sweet choir music once more. All the singers are students of Louisa Langston, Nicola's singing teacher. It's a real privilige to work with 100% training singers. This week the choir will perform for Louisa for the first time and I think she will be very proud. I think the choir will be proud of themselves too. If they're not, I could always pick up one of these and take up the other kind of conducting.

* My mother played in an orchestra in Hawera with Ross Pople. Ross was a prodigy and went on to become a well respected conductor and recording artist here in London. I saw him conducting here recently and went and said hello backstage. Who said nobody famous comes from a small town?

I've kept this pretty quiet until now, but tonight I get back in touch with the music-making side of me that I have missed since I returned from Bulgaria last year. The most generous excuse I have for this hiatus is that I'd reached a certain level of incompetence, and had the good sense to quit while I was ahead. I guess my good sense has deserted me.

Perhaps I should explain my background to anyone who doesn't know about my pretensions as a conductor, and who hasn't guessed them from the title of my blog. I trained as a composer and conductor at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Before I left New Zealand in 2002 I was conducting two adult choirs: the Festival Singers of Wellington, and Wanganui's Schola Sacra. On top of that, with MW and a few friends from the Wellington Opera Chorus, I set up a professional vocal ensemble called Cantiamo con Gioia. I worked a little with orchestral ensembles too, creating the Wanganui Sinfonietta, and conducting the odd symphony in Wellington with a mercenary band called the Wellington Classical Players. I even conducted a boys' choir, but you can see how well that went here! [Note: this link is via Yahoo! My friend MXJ thinks I show excessive Google bias.] Every week at rehearsal I could stand up in front of a captive choir or orchestra and inflict Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, Benjamin Britten's Five Flower Songs, or some ridiculous warm-up exercise with no discernable physiological or pedagogical value. Come performance time I could force everyone to sell tickets. Then I could gad about in tails in front of politely applauding audiences. Sometimes we learned a thing or two. Sometimes we made good music. Sometimes we had a really good time.

Now, here in London, it's all going to start again. Nicola told her Danish singing teacher Louisa that I had been a conductor once. Apparently "once" was enough. Now Louisa thinks I can offer some of her less experienced students the opportunity to sing in a choir. Louisa says she has an eclectic mix of lawyers, students, policemen and tomboys who are terrified, but very keen all the same. I'm going to start with some easy pieces that some of you will recognise: a plainchant Intonent Hodie about St Nicolas, the patron saint of travel (my poor charges are about to go on a bit of a journey aren't they?), Henry VIIIth's Passetyme Wythe Goode Companye (I sure hope so—no beheadings here please), Stainer's God So Loved The World, Stravinsky's Ave Maria and Praetorius' round Viva la Musica!. That should be enough for one night.

We rehearse two hours a week from 7:30pm, Thursdays, in St Mary's, Eversholt Street, next to Euston Station. We have a hall to practice in, and we can also use the big, acoustically friendly church. Tonight we will practice for an hour and a half, and then sing our pieces in a mini-concert to ourselves in the church. I can't wait to see the look on their faces when they hear the beautiful music they are making come back to them from the walls of the church. However incompetent I fear I may be, it's exciting to be back making music again.