Nowhere do we love to plan as in the arts: funding plans, audience development plans, putting together productions and programmes years in the making… So trying to assemble a concert series or festival over the last year with no plan has been the stuff of nightmares for us arts administrators.

It goes without saying that we’re at the mercy of a pandemic that doesn’t care for plans or deadlines. But we’re also at the mercy of a government that has, largely, not bothered to present us with a plan until now.

And a funny plan it is: the opening up of society seems to me a strange combination of painfully slow, cautious moves, together with unbridled optimism. Beer gardens and outdoor sports can take place from 29 March, but no open-air theatre before 17 May. And then a total rollback of all legal limits, with full capacity stadiums on 21 June. We’re even offering to host the Euros!

It’s no real surprise to see that once again the arts are low down the list of our soon-to-be freedoms. Yet again I wonder: is a shop, in which people wander around, pick up and handle goods, any safer than a socially-distanced concert hall? Are gyms really safer than cinemas? (The cinema was a place for voluntary social-distancing before any of us had even heard of coronavirus.) It’s in the very DNA of the arts, an industry of planners, to make sure venues are welcoming and safe for audiences. In the less-restricted summer months of 2020, I felt safer in the theatres and galleries than I did in the pubs and restaurants.

And the idea that on 21 June we can suddenly start packing out theatres and concert halls again seems a fool’s game. Whilst I absolutely believe that audiences are bursting to see live art again, they’re still going to need some easing in, as they adjust to simply being around people once again. Full capacities by later in the autumn would seem to be more manageable, and in the meantime this means extending support and funding opportunities for the sector. I’ll be awaiting next week’s budget with interest.

Lateral flow tests for audiences also raises big question marks. Funnelling thousands of people into a venue is challenging enough without waiting for test results that currently take up to 30 minutes. Unless the technology was to drastically improve, it simply isn’t practical, and that’s before the ethical issues and questions of liability.

As we slowly accelerate towards the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s worth taking a moment just to think about how we approach this grand reopening. In the arts particularly, there has been much talk of ‘building back better’, with promises of a renewed focus on arts education, fostering local audiences, and supporting home-grown talent. It will be interesting to see, as venues and festivals jostle for artists, audiences and funding, how much of this is heeded over the coming months and years.

During the weeks in which impending doom got closer and closer, it was the too-big-to-fail organisations that dominated the coverage: the National Theatre, Southbank Centre, Royal Albert Hall, and the Royal Opera House. These are the “crown jewels” that the government’s package will most likely prioritize and there are now major fears in the arts world that these behemoths, as during normal times, will soak up a great proportion of the funding, whilst freelancers and small fringe venues will fall through the cracks.

Not much has been said about “the little guys”: small venues that receive little to no funding, touring theatres and opera companies of no fixed abode; and music ensembles that perform the length and breadth of the UK, supporting thousands of freelance artists. These are the organisations that reach the audiences who don’t have regular access to the aforementioned “crown jewels”; audiences which, largely, are outside of London.

I work for one such organization, The Marian Consort, a vocal ensemble. We have no set home or venue. We have a tiny management (a part-time General Manager, an Artistic Director, and some trustees). Our artists are all freelancers, we employ upwards of forty each year. We commission composers and artists, employ freelance videographers and recording engineers. We receive no regular public funding, but rely on performance fees, occasional funding from trusts, foundations, and individual patrons. Through our performance, education, and digital work, we reach about 1.5 million people every year. We’re one of the myriad performing arts companies that make up a vibrant arts and culture scene that has been put on ice for best part of four months.

Back in March, our first taste of what was to come in lockdown came on the morning of a concert. I was called to say our concert that evening was to be cancelled. Back then it seemed a little extreme, almost silly, to cancel. Surely this was overkill? The promoter, very generously, agreed to honour the fee.

By the end of the week though, it was no laughing matter; cancellations came thick and fast. Late March wee were meant to release a new album and begin a tour of the programme to Edinburgh, Cambridge, Japan (itself a week-long tour, three years in the making), and Somerset. We’ve been fortunate that the majority of our concerts have been rescheduled for 2021.

Our latest album, Singing in Secret, consisted of music written by William Byrd in the final part of his life, in which he pondered and celebrated his Catholic faith behind closed doors amid a climate of oppression and executions. The title (innocently chosen back in 2019) spookily mirrored the situation we found ourselves in, and the music offered real solace to our listeners. For me personally, his meditation Infelix ego was a talisman through those initial worrying weeks of isolation (alongside Mahler, Dua Lipa, and Simon & Garfunkel).

Since the initial shock and worry of losing tens of thousands of pounds of income, the vast majority of which goes directly to our freelance artists, we have mounted a successful fundraising campaign. We were fortunate to be one of 2,182 organisations to receive emergency funding from the quick-thinking Arts Council England, awarding grants of up to £35,000 to be spent by October. Thanks to another substantial grant, we’re in a safe financial position – for now.

This funding has provided resources with which we can offer our freelance artists much-needed work as we launch our first digital season. This is work for the short term however; we will perform in Switzerland in October, where lockdown measures started to be relaxed back in early May, but we still have little sense of when live performances can resume here in the UK. The government package will help, but we’re by no means out of the woods yet. There will still be venues closed, redundancies made. What the cultural landscape will look like come 2022, aside from the biggest outlets, is anyone’s guess.

The outpouring of art online has been inspiring, morale-boosting, and I’m sure for many artists and audience members, the only thing that’s kept them sane. Ironically, my number one lockdown performance was Igor Levit’s 15-hour performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations, a work which calls for the same page of music to be performed 840 times, which pushes the performer as far from sane as one can get. This was a performance that lost nothing but gained much by being transmitted digitally: we saw his anguish and sweat, frustration and delirium in HD; the bird’s eye view of a growing white sea of A4 sheets, each tossed on to the floor on completion, with the remaining stack seemingly never shrinking. It was a real piece of cinema.

Many large organisations have enjoyed success online. The National Theatre secured huge viewing figures for full productions streamed on YouTube. A few smaller, forward-thinking organisations that were thinking about digital before lockdown provided brilliant online offerings, such as Breach Theatre’s It’s True, It’s True, It’s True, and Manchester Collective’s online programme. Programmes that have cost thousands, even millions of pounds to make, have been available to watch for free (although, of course, many viewers have chosen to donate).

The accessibility is brilliant. But what this is doing to the public’s perception of the value of art is not brilliant. It is of a piece with the way engagement with streaming platforms has proved inequitable for artists and ensembles. Since 2015, The Marian Consort has been streamed nearly 300,000 times on Spotify. Royalties from this have totalled about £1000. Perhaps it’s too late to reverse the culture, but we must try. Artists and small organisations are beginning to build momentum around a campaign to tackle this incredibly unfair system, and we must continue to put pressure on DCMS to engage with the issue.

On the flip side, much of the online content put out in lockdown revealed an industry that was woefully ill-equipped to produce work digitally. And as I’m seeing other managers and impresarios say that people are tired of watching things on screen, it’s clear many are simply waiting to return to life as it was. They are unwilling to invest in digital capability and the creative and audience-building opportunities it presents.

So, what is The Marian Consort doing? Well, we’re experimenting in our own small way, to see if we can create a model that works and encourage people to pay for the arts online. Our digital season launches on 30 July, and we’ll be offering six 50-minute programmes, centred around our music, and collaborating with poets, actors, academics, artists, filmmakers, and musicians. Each programme will cost you less than a fiver.

Alongside this we’ll be offering plenty of extras for free: podcasts, short videos, interviews, articles, and a series of visual arts commissions. The first of these comes from Kivu Ruhorahoza, a filmmaker and visual artist based in Rwanda. We’ve tried hard to ensure we’re offering something different, something that is made for the platform, and something with broad appeal.

And in the future, we want to build this into our normal activity. When we tour a concert to five different cities, we’ll film it and create a digital version with its own creative integrity that we can disseminate to reach audiences all over, even if we’re not with them physically. It is crucial, though, that it is made for the platform; whatever goes online is competing with Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, Instagram. So, in the same way we make opera for an opera house, or chamber music for a recital hall, performances for online have to be created for online, and draw on the wealth of creative opportunity it offers.

Whether live or digital, classical music needs to live more dangerously. We need to make the case for the intrinsic value of the music more strongly. We need, more than anything, to widen our audience base.

How do we do this? One priority should be commissioning more new music from a much wider and diverse range of artists. We must show audiences, and particularly young audiences, that this is a living, breathing art form, and that anyone can be a part of it. The Marian Consort was founded to perform old music; now, one of our top priorities moving forward is to commission more, building on the twelve works we’ve helped bring into the world so far. Next year we’ll bring three more.

Another priority should be to really question formats and venues. Our traditional concert venues can feel more akin to a sacred space than a stage for creativity and experimentation. The audiences we need to reach often feel intimidated. I’m not suggesting we tear them down, but we must put music into galleries, clubs, pubs, parks, warehouses, care homes, hospitals, and schools far more than we are currently. Discussion on the airwaves, in columns, and online suggests that much of the industry is beginning to recognise this, although as much out of present necessity for large and outdoor spaces as out of desire. Critics and arts leaders herald (the brilliant and hard-working) Multi-Story Orchestra, so-called for presenting classical music in carparks, as if it’s at the cutting edge of audience development: it will be 10 years old next year, and by no means the first to leave the concert hall behind with great results.

Music education is of greatest importance. While state support for music education continues to seep away, it’s down to us more than ever to step into the breach. Whilst I believe the state should be supporting education with cash, we can’t wait around for this to happen if we want a next generation of artists. For organisations like mine, education work is often treated as a bolt-on, secondary to the performance, and budget-permitting. We’ve set ourselves the target by 2023 of ensuring 65% of performances have an educational element attached, but this doesn’t really tackle the problem. What’s needed is more embedded, long-term relationships between artists, venues/festivals, and schools, with regular and varied opportunities for young people to learn and perform.

One project we’re particularly proud of combined many of the elements I’ve talked about. In commissioning composer Gabriel Jackson to create a new work for us, we asked him to write a part that could be sung by a children’s choir alongside us on stage. We performed the piece ten times throughout 2018 in Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Wales, joining with children’s choirs to do workshops, rehearse and perform. It’s not every day that a child performs in a world premiere. Gavin, ten years old, said “I learnt that music can be fun and brings people together.” Brady, also ten, said “Thank you for visiting our school – I loved it so much. I really hope you can come again.”

This work is going to be difficult. We’re going to have to change our priorities and our measures of success. I’m making more work for people like myself and stretching budgets further than ever before. But I sincerely believe it will result in a culture of healthier and happier artists, working in a more interesting and prosperous classical music scene, reaching bigger audiences both live and online.

James Hardie is General Manager of The Marian Consort

The Marian Consort’s digital season launches on Thursday 30 July with Byrd Song. Find out more details here: https://www.marianconsort.co.uk/news/digital-season/

Indeed one of the things this book illuminates brilliantly was the influence of Gustav Mahler’s PR man, Emil Gutmann, whose impressive puppetry leading up to the premiere of the Eighth almost threatened to out-do the performance itself. Gutmann successfully managed to summon critics from all over Europe and America to Munich (a snub to Paris and Vienna). He twisted the arms of editors to preview the festival, and plastered the city with posters, and leaked scores to music-lovers. Gutmann had given himself the job of filling the 3,200-capacity Musik-Festhalle twice over; such tactics were necessary.

Johnson does well to dispel some of the tall tales that surround these now legendary cultural moments (like the “riot” that greeted the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913, which has been famously overblown). But while he does well to question received wisdom in parts, in others he does not. There is a mistrust of Mahler’s wife, Alma (“always worth asking if there is any hidden agenda behind what she says”, “But was this the blow of fate Alma leads us to believe?”) which is never sufficiently explained. Johnson even goes as far as to apportion blame to Alma for Gustav’s eventual death: “Mahler’s determination to plunge himself into a hugely demanding work schedule no doubt contributed to his decline, but even that could be seen as symptomatic of a desire to escape the inner torment cause by Alma’s affair with Gropius.” It appears this prevailing mistrust is inherited from previous commentators. Late in the book, Johnson cites her “guilty emotional confusion”, but little other evidence is provided.

Alma did indeed deceive Mahler, embarking on an affair with the architect Walter Gropius (whom she later married and had a daughter with), but not before Gustav effectively abandoned her himself. She became a “work widow”, sidelined while Gustav tended to his work as conductor and composer. Ahead of their marriage, he forced Alma to give up her own career as a composer.

Johnson’s retelling of the relationship between Gustav, Alma and Walter Gropius is done thrillingly, and at times heart-wrenchingly. And generally-speaking, the book is well-structured. It has an almost symphonic pacing to it. The bustle and excitement of the first performance sets the scene, before an insightful summary on the background of the symphonic form that Mahler chose as the form of his magnum opus, as well as a taut and very readable analysis of the music and text itself.

A lengthy chapter on “Questions of Identity” is a real highlight, grappling with Mahler’s complicated identity as “the Austrian, the German, the Outsider, and the Jew”, compellingly relating each to the composition of the symphony itself. Mahler was very aware of his Jewishness in an increasingly anti-semitic society. Johnson tells of him tragically asking Alma to “police his gestures, in case anyone thought he was being too Jewish”, and offers a moving aside to Arnold Schoenberg’s own struggles with anti-semitism.

As part of this fascinating discourse, Johnson also restores much-needed weight to discussion of universality and power in regard to musical works. Today such terms are bandied around by writers, artists, and orchestra marketing departments freely. “Nowadays Mahler’s assertion to Sibelius that ‘the symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything’ is usually quoted without consideration of how it might have sounded then, in 1910. By that time the German word Welt (‘world’) had acquired a new, more ominous significance…This was the Age of Empire, when the major world powers competed with each other to occupy as much of the world as possible, and to access its economic resources.”

Unfortunately, it’s after this impressive chapter that the structure becomes somewhat scatty. A section dedicated to Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony, while interesting in itself, seems more focused on its completion by various scholars, a process which took place long after Mahler’s death in 1911. It’s full of conjecture that adds little to the striking portrait already painted by Johnson.

He goes on to talk about Mahler’s famous meeting with Freud: “Mahler, he [Freud] said, was looking for his mother, his Ewig-Weibliche [eternal feminine], in every woman.His mother had been fragile, worn down by the cares of tending to a large family, and by the deaths of several children. Unconsciously, Freud had apparently told him, Mahler wanted his wife to be the same.”

Johnson then goes on: “Imagine for a moment though, if by means of some kind of historical time-shift, Mahler had been able to consult Jung instead of Freud.” A nice idea, but his brief look at Jung’s challenges to Freud’s theories are not translated in any meaningful way back to Mahler’s emotional state.

Regardless of the psychoanalysis, the image of Gustav Mahler that emerges from this book is of a man that spent his whole life as an outsider who longed to fit in, to be loved, and often contradicted himself to achieve these ends. He was sometimes pathetically needy: “Mahler demanded, like a child terrified of the dark, that the door connecting them be left open.” He bombarded Alma with expensive gifts and filled hotel suites with roses, dedicating the Eighth symphony to her (having never dedicated any of his previous works).

Did he ever attain what he sought? Perhaps for one moment, that moment being the first performance of the Eighth itself. “Thunderous waves of applause swept from the hall to the platform” and the press raved: “Mahler stood revealed simply as a ‘magus’, a kind of black magician. How different it all was from the dubious, cultish mass devotion manifested at Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival – this was truly visionary.” Gustav won back Alma after her dalliance with Gropius (“There are few aphrodisiacs more powerful than public success”), and they paraded back to the hotel victorious, where “the adulation pressed on them like flood waters.”

But even then Mahler had bowed to contradiction. Was it really the work it was slated to be by Gutmann’s sensationalist marketing campaign? As Johnson points out, Mahler had never chosen or even endorsed the nicknames his earlier symphonies had picked up (“Titan”, “Resurrection”, “Tragic”), and while he recoiled slightly at the campaign (“The whole thing, he moaned, was turning into ‘a catastrophic Barnum and Bailey show’”) he made no effort to quell the hype around the “Thousand”.

Ultimately any greatness was short-lived; Mahler died less than a year later aged fifty.

These contradictions within Mahler that Johnson paints so vividly and humanely do not detract from the colossus that is the Eighth, however. As Johnson rightly points out by way of Nietszche, “One must have chaos inside oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star.” Johnson’s book does great service to both the “chaos” and the “star”.

The perfect song to weep and wallow to. It’s been my earworm of the last few days after it popped up on the BBC’s new adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People. The song first aired to a similarly angsty scene in The O.C. in 2005, and then of course there was Shia LaBeouf’s SNL skit…

For a mega hit, it defies all predictability. If anything, it’s closer to a 16th-century a cappella madrigal than a Dido chart-topper. There’s no backing, no drum beat, no hook, no real verse-chorus structure. It’s just Heap’s own voice, tuned and manipulated by a vocoder, a device invented in 1938 as a communication device, and used by groups like Kraftwerk in the 1970s, finding an artistic use for an antiquated piece of kit. So as a piece of technology in the 2000s, when Heap wrote this song, it was positively pre-historic.

But that’s what gives the song such a distinctive, haunting sound. This veneer of synthetic, alien sound masks the fragility of the naked voice, somehow making it even more affecting. Everyone can relate to that stage of losing someone when you put on an artificially brave face, but feel on the verge of crumbling.

She told the Guardian in an interview soon after, “One night the computer died on me and I wanted to leave the studio having done something positive. I just played the first thing that came out of my head, and four and a half minutes later everything was there.” Perhaps it would be nice to think there’s more toil behind this song. But at the same time it captures Heap so well, as the multi-skilled performer and producer.  Everything in this song is her.

Listen on YouTube

Today’s choice is a tiny jewel of a song from the turn of the 16th century. A lament to leaving Innsbruck (a city in modern day Austria), the author of the words is unknown, but they were thankfully immortalised by Heinrich Issac, who set them to music.

Isaac was a Netherlandish composer whose career took him across Europe, working for Habsburgs in Austria and Medicis in Florence, and even performing for Pope Alexander VI in September 1492.

But it was after this, whilst in the employ of Maximilian I, that this little German song likely comes from, or at least was inspired by. Maximilian was Holy Roman Emperor from 1508 until 1519, and was a patron to many artists including Albrecht Dürer, commissioning huge works in tribute to him and his military victories. There is a Triumphal Arch of woodcuts, epic poems, a chivalric novel, and musical works that quote him by name.

But this song is a million miles away from that puffed up world of art as propaganda. It’s sublimely simply yet so evocative. It seems to strike that chord of loss and longing so perfectly.

I won’t try and capture it – just listen.

Innsbruck, I must leave you;
I will go my way
to foreign lands.
My joy has been taken away from me,
that I cannot achieve
while being abroad.

I must now bear great sorrow
that I can only share
with my dearest.
Oh love, hold poor me
and in your heart compassion
that I must part from you.

My consolation: above all other women,
I will forever be yours,
always faithful, in true honour.
And now, may God protect you,
keep you in perfect virtue,
until I shall return.

Listen on Spotify

Lamar is one of several starry guests on the album, with Anderson .Paak and Busta Rhymes also making appearances. Such talent would threaten to steal the limelight guesting on the album of a lesser rapper, but not Rapsody. Rather it’s tracks of pure Rapdsody like “Chrome” that shine brightest on the album.

Rapsody is cool and assured lyrically, her words sitting on the back of the beat. There are moments of powerful story-telling in “U Used 2 Love Me”, and she packs a real punch in “You Should Know”: “I’m a hero, don’t be stressin’ the zeroes and the commas / Lookin’ anacondas, know they comin’ with apples and oranges / Satan playin’ me, I ain’t Adam unless we talkin’ ’bout bombin’ / Over Baghdad”. Complex flows are greeted by memorable, soulful choruses.

It’s still unfortunately something of a rarity for a woman MC like Rapsody to attain the visibility she now enjoys in a genre and industry dominated by men, in which sexist language and misogyny still seems to rule the charts. But Rapsody carries the torch comfortably, whilst clearly bowing to those who came before her: she starts the album not with her own voice, but sampling Aretha Franklin’s “(To Be) Young, Gifted, and Black”.

The influence of other titans like Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, and Mos Def is plain to hear, but it never sounds dated; nor does it cheaply use contemporary trends or ticks. Laila’s Wisdom will go down as a timeless body of work.

Listen on Spotify 

Yesterday we had Vivaldi’s music of the earth; today music of the spheres. Terry Riley’s Sun Rings samples recordings made in outer space by NASA’s Voyager I and II. Combined with his own music written for the Kronos Quartet, the result is an 80-minute voyage that strives to capture our place within the bigger picture.

Terry Riley, born in California in 1935, was a pioneer of minimalism (along with other composers like Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and La Monte Young). His best-known work is simply called ‘In C’ consisting of 53 phrases. That’s pretty much the only specification, though; the rest is cooly undetermined. It can be performed by any number of musicians, and there’s no time limit.

He’s since out-grown such a simplistic classification, however, and his vast range of influences – everything from LSD to John Coltrane, Indian classical music to John Cage – are brought to the surface in a work like Sun Rings.

The work opens with “Overture”, which places us definitively in space, meshing all kinds of beeps and echoes, whistles and scratches, while a sampled voice discusses electromagnetic waves. Into this celestial soundscape Riley places the Kronos Quartet, who journey though “Planet Elf Sindoori”, “The Electronc Cyclotron Frequency Parlour”, and Venus Upstream”.

“One Earth, One People, One Love” is a moving finale. A space traveller asks “Do you really know where you are at this point in time and space and in reality and existence?” Swirling, warping sounds fly past, while the cello engages in a lengthy meditative solo, seemingly questioning, testing, its own existence.

If you need something right now to remind you there’s life out there beyond your own four walls, give Riley a try.

Listen on Spotify

It’s #EarthDay, so what better way to celebrate Mother Nature than with the most famous musical evocation of her, The Four Seasons by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi.

The Four Seasons is comprised of four violin concertos, each written in typical 18th-century Italianate manner, with two fast movements sandwiching a slow one. Each concerto represents one of the four seasons – Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Vivaldi, nicknamed the Red Priest on account of his hair, was unbelievably prolific, writing more than 500 concertos, leading to the dig that they all sound the same. Nevertheless, these four have stood the test of time, and include some of the most recognisable and popular music ever written.

The Four Seasons is an example of programme music, which is to say it represents extramusical details, taken in this case from a collection of sonnets (possibly also penned by Vivaldi). The first stanza sets the scene:

Springtime is upon us.

The birds celebrate her return with festive song,

and murmuring streams are

softly caressed by the breezes.

Thunderstorms, those heralds of Spring, roar,

casting their dark mantle over heaven,

Then they die away to silence,

and the birds take up their charming songs once more.

The soloist takes on bird song through trilling, chirping figurations, and undulating strings breeze by, before the storm takes hold in spectacular form, scales forking down from on high.

Vivaldi asks for stunning virtuosity from the violin soloist throughout the four concertos, using all manner of effects to paint pastoral scenes before your very ears. Peasants dance, flies buzz, and teeth chatter, all on the four strings of the fiddle. Working within very established parameters, though, Vivaldi somehow still creates something wonderfully thrilling, that never, ever gets old.

Listen on Spotify

Despite it now being considered the crowning achievement of Brahms’ chamber works, it took him a number of attempts for this startling work to reach its final form. Originally written for five stringed instruments, he then transcribed it for two pianos, before finally resolving on piano, two violins, viola and cello, following much correspondence and encouragement from Clara Schumann (pianist, composer, and wife of Robert) and Hermann Levi (a conductor and friend of Richard Wagner).

But it was worth the hard graft. The resultant marriage of forces provide percussiveness from the piano and gutsy strings, that together propel this work along. It’s hard to imagine it was ever conceived otherwise.

The work begins with a plaintive unison statement that suggests contentment, but it soon becomes possessed as a piano motif snaps away, and the movement races off in its devilish grip. A spiralling motion that moves down step by step seems to swirl us towards the depths of the instruments’ most murky textures. The same chromatic rushes return towards the end of the final movement, as modulations become more frantic, and we plunge headfirst to the finish.

Nowhere is the pounding piano more effective than the third movement, a Scherzo, where it provides a demonic, driving motion using a monotone hunting horn call. The start of the final movement is the most desolate moment of the whole work, with some heart-wrenching harmonies. But after this first section, force seems irresistible, and violence once again takes hold.

The influence of Franz Schubert is plain to hear, both in terms of the structure and instrumentation of the work as a whole (recalling as it does Schubert’s own String Quintet in C major), but also in the powerful outbursts that bubble over to wrestle control of more lyrical moments. Darkness overrides the work in many forms; as tragedy, as hopelessness, and as a snarling, bloodthirsty dog.

Listen on Spotify 

“Nautilus”, the opening track, takes no prisoners. Tempering raw electronic surges with classical techniques, Meredith is the master of the build up. Using a fairly formulaic design—adding instruments and dividing notes for more densely populated phrases teeming with cross-rhythms—it regardless yields staggering climaxes every time, which then come to such an abrupt end one is left feeling quite dumbfounded.

As she says in her NPR Tiny Desk Concert performance, Meredith has “the voice of a five-year-old boy”. But it is also disarming, as in “Something Helpful”, hearing a voice so natural and unaffected in contrast to the souped-up electronic power pulsating beneath much of her music. Praise must go to drummer Sam Wilson, whose balmy tenor comes to the fore in “Dowager”, a beautiful, pared-back number.

Elsewhere there’s silky, shimmering cello in “Honeyed Words”, Steve Reichian throbbings, and Nirvana-esque headbangers.

The stylistic gambit of the album is staggering. But it’s not such a surprise when you take into account the breadth of Meredith’s other work. Big multi-media commissions for the BBC Proms, an opera, a concerto for beatboxer and orchestra, and countless smaller works for chamber musicians and electronics. She’s also since branched into writing music for film and television, including Bo Burnham’s highly acclaimed Eighth Grade.

Meredith’s is music to put a smile on your face and have you stomping around the kitchen. The way to end the week, and start the weekend. Make it an occasion!

Listen on Spotify

It was a period of uncertainty, strained alliances, and tactical marriages, so it’s little surprise the song ‘L’homme armé’ was so prevalent, the text of which goes:

The armed man should be feared.
Everywhere it has been proclaimed
That each man shall arm himself
With a coat of iron mail.
The armed man should be feared.

It was a secular song that Ockeghem used as the basis for a Mass setting to be sung in a cathedral, church, or at court. This might seem like a rather improper starting point for the Catholic Mass, but in a period of crusade (it’s suggested by some the “armed man” is the Turk), Christianity was rather more robust in its messaging back then. And before reforms to music in the Catholic church made in the 16th century, composers mixed and matched with all manner of profane materials. The Song of Songs, a veritable encyclopaedia of sexual desire, was a firm favourite.

“L’homme armé” was almost as popular, being set over over forty times for the Mass alone by many composers. It’s in the Dorian Mode (which, you’ll notice if you’ve been keeping up with this series religiously, is the same as ‘Scarborough Fair’), which gives it this rather stark, otherworldly aura. He winds these long, ethereal lines around the “L’homme armé” tune which is quoted throughout, that seem to go on for eternity like an endless horizon.

Ockeghem was a master of his craft. Celebrated during his lifetime, he received greater extolment at the end of it. A large number of tributes in the form of poems and songs were written, including by Erasmus, Molinet, and Josquin. Despite the 500 or so years since it was written, it sounds just as fresh today.

Listen on Spotify

His Opus 33 collection of six quartets, written in 1781 and nicknamed the Russian Quartets (so-called for their dedication to Grand Duke Paul of Russia) are as merry and carefree as they come. Haydn gets up to extra high jinks in the second of the collection, a four-movement work dubbed ‘The Joke’ on account of its teasing final movement.

The quartet opens with a classic example of Haydn’s sheer inventiveness, with almost the entire movement stemming from the jovial opening idea. The dialogue between the instruments is sophisticated and taut, but never not dazzlingly simple and beautifully proportioned.

A more rustic Scherzo movement follows, with folk dance foot-stomps elevated with Haydn’s customary grace. The slow movement allows a brief moment of stillness and contemplation from the otherwise fizzing exchanges, with a lamenting duet between the viola and cello, then repeated by the two violins.

So what’s the gag? At the very end of the final movement, when the principal theme returns, it’s full of hesitations, each longer than the last. In what could be the musical equivalent of a modern day ‘dad joke’ from Papa Haydn, it sounds like the quartet aren’t quite sure if they’ve reached the end, with the final phrase more of a whispered question to each other.

Haydn apparently crafted this stuttering ending to win a bet that the could catch out rude audience members talking before the music stopped. Hilarious, no?

Listen to the Borodin Quartet play Haydn

As with many traditional English songs, its provenance is complicated and multifarious. The lyrics can be traced back as far as 1670 to a Scottish song called the Elfin Knight, in which a woman is threatened with abduction by an elf should she fail to complete an impossible set of tasks. From there it evolved from ear to ear. The famous refrain “Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme” is suggested to actually be a corruption of “every rose grows merry in time”.

After Paul Simon head Carthy perform it in London, he and Garfunkel then adapted it some more, interpolating an earlier song of their own, Canticle. As the song crossed the pond it’s interesting to note that for a long time the American duo didn’t admit to Carthy’s influence on the composition, nor its centuries-old heritage as a traditional English song.

The very distinctive folkish sound and overriding sense of melancholy come from the song being in the Dorian Mode. The specific arrangement of pitches belonging to the Dorian Mode lead to it sounding bleak and homeless.

Bearing in mind their authorial denial, Simon and Garfunkel still make a beguiling song even more beautiful and delicate. The plucked guitar accompaniment sets a sparse landscape. Notes from chimes fall like raindrops, and the harpsichord embellishments embroider the scene like dappled sunlight.

Martin Carthy’s version of Scarborough Fair

Simon and Garfunkel’s Scarborough Fair/Canticle

Maundy Thursday of Holy Week is responsible for inspiring some of the most emotionally powerful and iconic works of art ever made, chief amongst them Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. But there are countless incredible musical depictions to choose from too, not least Carlo Gesualdo’s setting of the Tenebrae Responsories.

Gesualdo is as famous for his music and he is infamous for murdering his wife and her lover. He was born in 1560, his mother a niece of Pope Pius IV who died when Gesualdo was only seven years old. He was then sent off to join the Jesuits in Rome, but when his older brother Luigi died, he returned home to become the next Prince of Venosa, marrying his first cousin Maria d’Avalos shortly after. She soon began an affair, which Gesualdo brought to a gruesome end after news of it spread, murdering them both in bed having caught them in flagrante.

Many have romanticised the link between his horrific act of murder and his tortured-sounding music. It has certainly intrigued many, and inspired plays, operas, musical works, and films, including Werner Herzog’s weird documentary, Death for Five Voices.

For a Prince, Gesualdo was a prolific composer, writing six books of madrigals, a form which typically sets secular texts about love, death, pain, and suffering to intricate and elaborate musical textures. He applied this same approach to sacred works (madrigali spirituali), so there is a freeness in the structure that allows for incredible levels of expression that he wouldn’t have gotten away with had he been writing as an employed composer. Comparing his settings of the Tenebrae Responsories to those of his contemporaries writing for the church, his use of jarring dissonance and juxtaposed harmonies as he expresses Jesus’s passion, is incredibly striking.

Gesualdo’s music is amongst the most shocking in the whole canon of Western art music. His word-painting is more vivid and his harmonic shifts more twisted and uncomfortable than any composer’s for another 300 years. It’s infinitely rich, intoxicating music, and it wouldn’t do to listen to it every day, much like you wouldn’t eat foie gras with truffles for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But if you are to listen to it once, make it today.

Listen on Spotify

As we get deeper into Holy Week, it’s time to plunder some of the musical jewels that have come down to us; works that capture the pure drama of this most miraculous story.

One such treasure is The Mystery Sonatas by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber. Written for violin and keyboard (usually a harpsichord or chamber organ), the sonatas follow the 15 Mysteries of the Rosary, a form of Catholic prayer that can be performed using rosary beads. At the top of each sonata in the score is a small copper-plate engraving of the scene to which it corresponds.

Biber was a composer and violinist born in 1644 in Bohemia, now the Czech Republic. He eventually settled in Salzburg, where two divergent musical traditions from Italy and Germany collided. His bonkers compositions were the result, like his Salzburg Mass for 53 different parts to celebrate the 1100th anniversary of the Archbishopric of Salzburg, which is the largest-scale piece of sacred music from the Baroque era. The score was found in 1870 at a greengrocer’s in the Austrian town, next on the pile to wrap fruit and veg.

Biber also pioneered a technique called scordatura, which translates as “mistuning”. Rather than having the violin strings tuned all the way through to the notes G-D-A-E as is typical, Biber sets each of the 16 sonatas with different tuning. Sonata 2 is tuned A-E-A-E, Sonata 3 is B-F sharp-B-D, and so on. Of particular note is Sonata 11, “The Resurrection”: Biber asks for the middle two strings to physically crossover, making the sign of the crucifix.

This is more than simply trickery or virtuosity though. It serves to heighten the emotional power of the music for both player and listener. As we journey through, the tone of the instrument changes with each new tuning. More resonant, transparent tunings are used for The Annunciation, The Visitation, The Beatification of the Virgin. Tighter, rasping tunings are used for Christ on the Mount of Olives and The Crown of Thorns, and manoeuvrings for the violinist become more difficult and strained.

To conclude the set, Biber wrote a monumental Passacaglia, which uses a repeating pattern quoted from a hymn to the Guardian Angel as its foundation. It’s a work of incredible power and virtuosity, and is a great representation of the coming together of Italian virtuosity and German polyphonic tradition, as the violin takes on multiple voices simultaneously.

Besides a dedication to Biber’s employer, what or when The Mystery Sonatas were actually written for remains unanswered. To be played in one go multiple violins or violinists are needed on account of the tunings. Such performances are rare, but bring the work to life with all the multi-sensory Catholic theatre it requires. Luckily, recordings of this piece of devotional music drama exist, and it makes perfect listening for this Holy Week.

Listen to Andrew Manze and Richard Egarr perform the Mystery Sonatas on Spotify

Playboi Carti released his self-titled mixtape in 2017. After that singles came in dribs and drabs, following much anticipation from fans who followed his trajectory from SoundCloud rapper (purely releasing tracks on the internet) to guesting with some of rap’s biggest artists.

His tracks are minimal, and not more so when it comes to lyrics. Labelled a “mumble rapper” (so-called for obvious reasons of unintelligibility), he’s not so focussed on rhyme and flow as, say, Kendrick Lamar (who released his Pulitzer Prize-winning DAMN. on the same day back). When he does rap it sounds almost too laidback, like he really is freestyling over the track with little thought for what comes out. Instead, making use of much repetition, together with extraneous off-beat sounds, lyrics act as rhythmic punctuation to propel his songs along. So, when A$AP Rocky turns up to rap in “New Choppa”, he threatens to steal the show.

But less is more. He isn’t in a hurry to needlessly fill space, and lets the instrumentals breathe. Take “Yah Mean”, with its ambient backing made up of just two chords that don’t try any harder than absolutely necessary. Or “Location”, which opens the album, but sounds more like a winding-down number. It has this spacey, ethereal loop that goes round and round, sliding audaciously between keys without a word of warning.

It’s a minimal approach, but Carti manages to create pretty lush soundscapes, which is what matters. It’s the vibe that rules. Even in more energetic numbers, it’s mere spots of lyric and beat that make up the overall texture, as in “Magnolia”. It’s the highlight of the album, and probably most complex compositionally, but sounds like it was thrown off in a one go.

Running throughout the album are these fragments of sound and splinters of beat that alone would barely constitute a backing track. But with Carti’s nonchalant interjections, it somehow comes together in this woozy, care-free mixtape.

Listen on Spotify

What would you rather during lockdown: a lover or heroin? Well, you can imagine both with “Golden Brown”, an aural Rorschach test from 1981.

The song appears on La Folie, The Stranglers’ sixth studio album, and one that marked a resurgence for the group after a period of duds and commercial flops. BBC Radio 2, having had little to do with punk bands historically, made it single of the week at the time (perhaps in wilful ignorance of its alternative subject matter).

The first hit, though, right between the ears is the harpsichord; what is this baroque instrument doing in a punk song? Who knows, but it seems to work. Then you’re thrown off-kilter by the cockeyed composition of changing time signatures: three bars of 3 beats, followed by one of 4 beats, on top of which the harpsichord is playing in a totally different meter. The tuning sits in a stinky quagmire between E and E flat.

The lyrics, just three short verses, saunter over the top, and the wonderful guitar solo twists and turns like a plume of smoke. Altogether it conjures up a heady, intoxicating mix of key and time and timbre.

The music video too is something of a curio, filmed in London’s Leighton House Museum, an extraordinary building of Middle Eastern influences filled with colourful tile-work and gilded domes and arches. The Stranglers alternate guises between a group of explorer-dilletantes, and a rabble of unkempt tuxedoed musicians who look not to have slept for days (actually, perhaps the latter isn’t dress-up…). Interpolated is footage of the Pyramids and Great Sphinx of Giza, Mir-i-Arab Madrasah in Bukhara, the Shah Mosque in Isfahan, Feluccas sailing and slow-motion camel racing.

The lifeless, doped-up, dead-behind-the-eyes musicians are captivating in their own way, though. The double bass player teetering about, the total blankness of the lead singer, and the maniacal harpsichord operator. There’s the same feeling of morbid fascination as when you see someone, off their head, stumbling about. If this song was about a lover, it sure was a funny relationship.

Listen on Spotify 

Dua Lipa shot to fame with her self-titled debut album in 2017, and has since picked up armfuls of awards and guest appeared on some of the biggest pop hits of the last few years. The British singer’s second album, originally due to be released today but leaked a fortnight ago, has been in the works since 2018. She recorded over 60 tracks in the studio, but only 11 made the final track list, totalling a lean 37 minutes.

Keeping good to her word, the pangs of nostalgia come thick and fast. Despite born in 1995, Dua Lipa’s self-confessed influences come from the eighties and nineties, with liberal sprinklings of Madonna, Kyle Minogue, Spice Girls, and Matthew Wilder. There’s more than a hint of INXS’s “Need You Tonight” in Lipa’s “Break My Heart”, and an almost umbilical link to Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” (Dua Lipa too has made a dancercise video to go along with it). There’s even some bass lines (“Don’t Start Now”) that wouldn’t be out of place in a Herbie Hancock number from the sixties or seventies.

But there’s plenty of “future” too, and Dua Lipa’s indefatigable character shines through her vocals and lyrics. The title track is bursting with semi-rapped sass, as is “Levitating”, and she’s got a solid dance floor belter in “Love Again”. There’s slinky chromaticism in “Good in Bed”, and let’s not let a great bit of cowbell in the delightfully funky “Pretty Please” go without note.

The whole album is unfailingly upbeat until the final song, a rather bittersweet reminder of reality that catches you off-guard: “It’s second nature to walk home before the sun goes down / And put your keys between your knuckles when there’s boys around.” Singing over a stripped-back string accompaniment, it’s really quite a poignant, stop-dancing-and-listen tonic after 10 good-time songs. Unfortunately the lyrics descend into the banal (“If you’re offended by this song…”), but it’s nonetheless a rousing and thoughtful anthem to conclude with.

So is it a game changer? No. But that doesn’t stop it being a lot of fun, which was Dua Lipa’s aim from day one. And she’s clearly brimming with confidence, standing happily on her own two feet; collaborations with Nile Rodgers, Mark Ronson and Pharrell Williams, all failed to make the final track list.

So grab a “Snowball” (I’m told that’s an eighties drink), get together with your girls on Zoom, and have a dance with Dua. You deserve it.

Listen on Spotify

Around 400 years ago, English composer William Byrd (1540-1623) faced a similar quandary. A devout Catholic living in post-Reformation England, a time when papists were beheaded, burnt alive, or strung up, Byrd was unable to celebrate his faith in public. And while he was a favourite of Elizabeth I (she granted a publishing license to only two composers, Thomas Tallis being the other), some of his artistic output, namely Latin-texted music, was only safe to be performed in secret.

But Byrd and other Catholics defied the gruesome warnings and continued to celebrate the mass, and make music, behind closed doors. Sir John Petre, a fellow recusant and patron of the composer, held clandestine services in his home Ingateston Hall. He also sheltered persecuted Catholics – two priest holes were discovered in the Tudor house.

However careful they were, though, danger remained real: a priest was arrested, having in his possession a copy of Byrd’s Gradualia. A publisher who printed a pro-Catholic text (which Byrd set to music) had his ears cut off. A priest present at one clandestine meeting in Berkshire, which we know Byrd attended, was executed shortly after.

And yet despite what must have been a constant anxiety, Byrd was able to write some of his greatest works. He composed three masterful settings of the Mass, and two volumes of Gradualia containing 109 pieces, including some of the Renaissance’s most radiant examples of polyphony (a term for music involving multiple simultaneous lines of independent melody).

He found solace in the struggle of fellow Catholics and composers that had gone before him, such as Girolamo Savonarola. A preacher and one-time de facto ruler of Florence, he was eventually hanged and burnt in the Piazza della Signora in 1498. During captivity he wrote Infelix ego (“I am wretched”), which Byrd later set to music. The result is a thirteen-minute odyssey from destitution and misery, through soul-searching and repentance, ending with the promise of salvation: “you alone are my hope, you alone are my refuge”.

In the same work, Byrd also quotes Josquin des Prez ( c.1450 -1521), a composer employed by Duke Ercole I of Ferrara, the latter a friend and supporter of Savonarola. Byrd uses music from des Prez’s Miserere (“Have mercy”), directly aligning himself with this master of the Franco-Flemish school and paragon of polyphonic perfection.

The Marian Consort, a UK-based vocal ensemble, has just released a new album dedicated to Byrd’s clandestine Catholic music, appositely titled “Singing in Secret”. The emotional turmoil Byrd felt is sublimely communicated through his music, and the lean performing forces capture the cloistered intimacy the composer himself experienced. Whether 1620 or 2020, this is music to soothe the savage breast.

James Hardie is General Manager of The Marian Consort

Listen to Singing in Secret on Spotify

When Procul Harum burst on to the scene in 1967 with their debut single — an unholy concoction of Johann Sebastian Bach, Soul, and Geoffrey Chaucer — they surely didn’t expect it to sit atop the charts for six weeks. And yet the weird sound world and mysterious lyrics captured imaginations, and helped pave the way for prog rock for years to come.

The jazzy crematorium vibes of the opening solo, reminiscent of Bach’s famous Air on the G string, gives way to Gary Brooker’s soulful voice. Endless conjunctions in the lyrics muddle us along, while the repeating bass line strikes on with Bachian purpose, yet with no destination in sight. The original 1967 version comes to an end with the instrumental fading out, suggesting the bass line will cycle on in perpetuity…

The glissando (achieved by sliding down and then up the organ keys) that announces the chorus, a pitstop of sorts, is so striking and joyful, yet the lyrics remain cooly nebulous. Much has been made of a link with “The Miller’s Tale” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a bawdy story of adolescent sex (although co-writer Keith Reid later claimed to have never read a line of Chaucer in his life). The titular phrase that concludes the chorus was apparently overheard at a party, and became the germ of the hit. Otherwise, clues and interpretations vary wildly.

The song made the headlines again in 2006 after a long legal battle with regards to the authorship of the iconic hammond organ solo. The case saw Matthew Fisher, who played with the band from 1967-1969, give a rendition of the organ solo in court, explaining the compositional process to a roomful of legal professionals. Lucky people; many diehard fans would kill for such an opportunity to get an insight to a song that remains shrouded in mystery.

Fisher said: ”I’d been listening to Bach for eight years, I was an expert when it came to Bach … he [Brooker] would have been playing something that he thought sounded like Bach, but I honestly don’t remember him playing anything that impressed me in the least.” Ouch.

Whoever wrote it, Procul Harum’s first song remains its most popular, having sold over 10 million copies. It was named 57th best song of all time, according to Rolling Stone magazine. Fifty-three years on, we’re not much closer to understanding what it all means, but it shines on, a puzzling work of alchemy.

Listen on Spotify