See that Bach. He's not the Messiah.

All of these people talking about Bach like he’s God’s left hand… you know what it is, right? He wrote the book on tempered keyboards. It’s like, before Bach, composers just did what they liked, any old scale will do and hey, if I want a harpsichord solo right now, I’ll have one. It’s the birth of the age of the enlightenment, innit, the time when art decided it was more important than religion, and science was the only game of truth in town…

Yeah, I like Bach in small doses, like a  Ricercar à 6 as part of a well-balanced menu. You know, maybe to cleanse the palate before I tuck into some meatier fare. Maybe some romance, maybe Three Pieces for Piano and String by Piazzolla. Give me some of that tango-influenced swing, baby, and hammer on the bass and piano like they are percussion.

You know what we forget so often? That classical music is a story. That the movement from polyphony, through opera to the massed orchestra of Mahler and then into Matthew Whiteside working to get his compositions out on the street: it is history made visible through flashes of lightning… or a rattle of thunder… and events like South Atlantic Crossings or Sound Thought tell the story from a different perspective. And the story is that people keep moving, only finding places now and again to stand and grasp at solid ground.

Those people who say Bach is special: they’re only talking loud and saying nothing. Without history, with context, it just some sounds. In a good sequence, but it is this sequence that matters. And it won’t stop with the last note.

In my dreams, I am talking to Plato, and when he is not talking about Aristotle being a total ass, he’s like: you gots to listen to the right kind of music man. All that rock’n’roll going to destroy your soul man and I know you thinks that’s cool…

But have you seen the state of the world lately? Sure, we didn’t treat the slaves and the foreigns right in fifth century Athens, but I didn’t see any nuclear bombs in the hands of a maniac when I went on my holiday to Syracuse. I’m not saying Donald Trump is stupider than Pericles, but I am saying that the worst thing Pericles could do is head-butt someone.

He did have one hell of a forehead.

Anyway, I don’t think Trump will bomb anyone. It just comes across as an ass-hat to show off in front of his new mates. Get him in the Oval-Office, and it’s going to be like the end of The Candidate all over again.

“What do we do now?”

“Well, The Donald, why don’t you take Little Donald to the opera? Music soothes the savage beast after all. From the way you’ve been carrying on, I don’t think you’ve had your hole lately. Abstract sounds sculpturing air into architectural orders might assuage that raging boner for death.”

It’s like having Thanos standing for election.

Gabriela Montero @ City Halls, Glasgow

The theme for Gabriela Montero's improvisational encore was not promising: an audience member suggested It Ain't Necessarily So from Porgy and Bess, only managing to sing a single line. Yet, after picking out the line on the piano, Montero launched into an improvisation that ignored the song's jazz influences (for the most part), and toured around the pianist's knowledge of classical, romantic and rag-time motifs.

Improvisation is more readily associated with jazz - Adorno, one of those Cultural Marxists who have ruined everything moaned that it gave the illusion of change without ever departing from the theme. It's a political reading (jazz is like a false consciousness, pretending to be radical but relying heavily on existing structures). Montero's deliberate inclusion of improvisation in the concert hall answers his rather disappointing complaint.

This improvisation was a handy spot of musical history - at least for a character like me, who has a relatively shonky grasp of the history of western orchestral music. Kicking off with something that sounded like Bach - ordered, trilling, serious and maybe a little too pleased with itself, Montero soon drifted into more expansive, lyrical and romantic territory. Yet, as Adorno says, she never lost the theme... and that is the point. Putting Gershwin through his paces, pointing out how recognisable moods and atmospheres define the style, Montero both reveals her skills and points out how music is determined by its references to other music.

That last phrase might not be clear - that it, I call a piece 'classical'

or 'romantic' because I recognise it in relation to other romantic pieces. 

Then she went rag-time on it. Syncopated beats, I believe. 

Most of the audience had fun recognising It's Ain't... re-emerging from her runs. I went into the fantasy land of semiotics and thought about how clever I am. That wasn't Montero's fault, but I am learning about this music stuff. 

Variatio 7. a 1 ô vero 2 Clav. al tempo di Giga: Tipping Point @ Sonica

Will future generations mistake Kathy Hinde's Tipping Point for a religious ritual? Consisting of six pairs of glass vessels containing water, it generates sound from the rising and falling of the water in each vessel (using gravity and a mechanism that shifts water between each vessel in the pair).

 
Placed in a darkened room, during the long hours it stands as an installation, the mechanisms randomly adjust the water level: Hinde also performs on the machinery, demonstrating the tones and how they shift and twist. It produces a hushed, darkened atmosphere, an Orphic cave that encourages a reverential meditation on water. 
  

The variation is in 6/8 meter, suggesting several possible Baroque dances. In 1974, when scholars discovered Bach's own copy of the first printing of the Goldberg Variations, they noted that over this variation Bach had added the heading al tempo di Giga. 

But the implications of this discovery for modern performance have turned out to be less clear than was at first assumed. In his book The Keyboard Music of J. S. Bach ^[5] the scholar and keyboardist David Schulenberg notes that the discovery "surprised twentieth-century commentators who supposed gigues were always fast and fleeting." 

However, "despite the Italian terminology [giga], this is a [less fleet] French gigue." Indeed, he notes, the dotted rhythmic pattern of this variation (pictured) is very similar to that of the gigue from Bach's second French suite and the gigue of the French Overture. This kind of gigue is known as a "Canary", based on the rhythm of a dance which originated from the Canary islands.

 Bach rendered into Jazz evokes improvisation, technical virtuosity and style... does this come closer to the spirit of Goldberg Variatio 7 than any number of classical recordings? Certainly, this version brings me closer to restful ease than the challenge of listening to, say,  the Glen Gould recording. Nice.

A time signature of 
6/8 means count 6 eighth 
notes to each bar. This is 
also a very often
-used time signature. You 
would count the beat: 1, 2, 
3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 
3, 4, 5, 6, and so 
on…

Now you will wonder why can’t 
you just reduce 6/8 
to 3/4? After all,
they add up to the same 
amount. One reason you 
might pick one time signa
ture versus the other 
is how the music is 
organized. 6/8 is 
grouped into 2 groups
of 3 eighth notes. 3/4 
time would be grouped in
to 3 groups of 2 eighth
notes. Depending on the
structure of the bassline
or song, it may make sense 
to group it one way in
stead of the other. So
6/8 feels more like two:
3/4 feels more like three.

Variatio 22. a 1 Clav. alla breve: I get By With a Little Help From My Friends

From Will's website:

When I’m gone, if people talk about me at all, they will probably talk about the piano.

That’s probably because, more than anything else, I am a piano player. I cannot recall not being able to play the piano and cannot imagine what it must be like to not be able to play the piano.

I do remember that I have always enjoyed reading between the lines and changing things, adding notes, altering rhythms, disrupting melodies, mutating harmonies and generally getting muddled up. Latterly, I have learned to call this improvisation.

I am an improvising pianist by make-up. I religiously practice Bach fugues, Beethoven sonatas and Brahms intermezzi, not with the intention of performing these great works (I simply don’t have the discipline to attempt this), but rather to feed a never-ending quest for musical vocabulary and depth in my own inventions.

My melting pot is brimming over with influence from Fats Waller stride, Sousa marches, Victorian parlour tunes, the Great American songbook, Gilbert and Sullivan, Methodist hymns, Beatles’ songs and so on.

I am not a jazz pianist; not by its contemporary definition anyway. Still, I do tell people I am a jazz pianist. Firstly I do this because I need to tell them something and secondly, because it hopefully gets up the nose of the jazz fraternity with their intellectualised, exclusive approach.

I enjoy words, and stories, and characters. I am drawn to the absurd and ridiculous. I respond to colossal upheaval with dismissive ease and react to the tiniest issues with incandescent rage. My storytelling, my verse, my shows and my blogs most likely reflect this.

Variatio 30. a 1 Clav. Quodlibet Pissed Up or Pissed Off

Jeremy Denk has a word....

Varario 25 a 2 Clav; Donne and Dusted

Variatio 2. a 1 Clav: Like Dancing Around Architecture...

Variatio 1. a 1 Clav: Take That and Party

Cut it out, Johann, I'm trying to be a tragic romantic poet over here. I liked it in the Aria, when it was all slow and sorry, like a voice gasping for breath before speaking softly. And now this: a jolly little tune that marches up and down the keyboard. 

There's a guy in the studio next door who is either rehearsing a gritty Glaswegian drama or having a serious row with the voices inside his head. I'm nursing a hangover (not so much from alcohol but at the shame of not getting into the Art School), and he keeps shouting at someone to fuck off. Meanwhile, Varatio 1 is rolling over and over like a clockwork machine. 

Apparently the player does cross-over hands and everything, like Liberace or Bobby Crush. According to Wikipedia, some critic says its a polonise, a dance which now gets illustrated with pictures of old people doing a conga line. And, yeah, it's got that forced jollity about it.

If you put it on repeat, it slowly drives you insane. After the restraint of the Aria, it's like opening a window and looking out to see thousands of cartoon characters performing task-based choreography. 

Here's a version on the harpsichord, which really gets that mechanical pulse... although the visuals could be a little migraine inducing.

Aria: Can Music Save My Mortal Soul?

When I am not behaving like a character from a Tom Wait's song, I'll run towards the past in vague hope of finding succour for my battered heart. The alternative is shaping my life as a bitter anecdote, which is funny for about as long as it takes to listen to the Aria  from the Goldberg Variations.

Funnily enough, my anecdotes usually go through thirty versions until returning to their original form (only now imbued with the soul-crushing misery of a mind that has been trying to use words to disguise a clear repeated motif of melancholic despair). And that is just like the Goldbergs. I am the J.S. Bach of romantic failure.

I associate Bach with the baroque - a twiddly, over-ornate and under-emotional era of music, in my dumb précis of the eighteenth century  - but The Goldberg Variations are more sly and tentative. The theme - an aria,  but without singing, just a solo keyboard - echoes the melancholy of the great miserabilists (Dowland, Children of God era SWANS), with the distinctive trills hesitant, and the melody picked up over a steady bass. 

In former Olympic weight-lifter Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka's interpretation (the one that is free on-line), it is as if the melody is being pushed reluctantly onwards by the almost aggressive bass.

Apparently, it is all about the bass: it's based on the sarabande, a dance that was banned in Spain and was popularised by dancing ladies with castanets. Check out this filth...

The Cottier Chamber Project

I tend to find the West End Festival (June) hard work: it is not so much curated as a series of different strands, making it very difficult to navigate. Fortunately, some of those strands are dynamic and coherent - which brings us to The Cottier Chamber Project.

Having said that, 43 events in 14 days makes it difficult to keep up...

The big thing with festivals is having a theme (I hear T in the Park is going with Deconstructing Liveness, while David Greig has got his own festival). The CCP is going for Identity, which is one of those nice post-modern ideas that is very open and fashionable. It can be all about personal identity (plus points for religious or racial) or social identity. The lunchtime series of JS Bach numbers (free, too) might shape up to create a picture of the Big Man's musical identity.

The identity of chamber music gets a nice twist - there's even music that I understand this time: tango, with Mr McFall's Chamber, Shostakovich's string quartets (my apprenticeship in ballet made his sound very familiar), some jazz (Martin Kershaw) and a bit of storytelling from Jenna and Bethany Reid, klezmer from Moishe's Bagel and folk from the  Alastair Savage Trio.

6 - 29 June 2014

Tickets will be on sale online from  or by telephone on 0333 666 3366 (9-7 Mon-Fri, 9-5 Sat) from 5th March 2014. In-person sales will take place at our box office in Hillhead Library, which will be open 9am-5pm Mon-Sat for the months of May and June.

Cottier’s Theatre: 93-95 Hyndland Street, Glasgow. G11 5PU
Hunterian Art Gallery: University of Glasgow, 82 Hillhead Street, Glasgow. G12 8QQ
St Silas Church: 69 Park Road, Glasgow. G4 9JE