Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A composer who co-founded the Portsmouth Sinfonia and is known for works like The Sinking of the Titanic.
On the island
Eight records
My Foolish HeartFavourite
for me it's just one of the most perfect pieces of chamber music jazz and incredibly elegant playing.
Propellerheads featuring Shirley Bassey
I thought it was just the most stunning performance I'd ever seen, and I applauded her for choosing to work with these young lads. I thought it was fantastic.
The Lord Is Listening to Ya, Hallelujah
Carla is someone I've known for many years and is an incredibly interesting performer and composer, one of those very rare things, a jazz composer and a woman jazz composer to Boot, who writes incredibly inventive and very, very witty music.
It's a radiophonic piece produced by Glenn Gould from what was called the Solitude trilogy... right at the end the central character, a man called Wally... is talking about the idea of North and at this moment Gould adds underneath the ending of Sibelia's Fifth Symphony and it's a supreme moment.
Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)
for me Tom is just one of the great voices of the century. In a way an extraordinary voice, not unlike Tiny Tim's being an extraordinary voice, but the other end of the spectrum, the the gruff end of the spectrum.
it's just fantastic to hear this nineteenth century romantic repertory with all its chromatic harmonies sung so accurately and beautifully by early music specialists.
Parsifal: Act I (Transition Music)
Orchestra and Chorus of the Welsh National Opera, conducted by Reginald Goodall
I worked out that this is incredibly slow performance, and I could actually hear the performance twice in each direction as I was flying on Aeroflot across Siberia.
this one is there for personal and family reasons... the ensemble also includes my daughters Ziela and Orlanda and Ziela happens to be playing on my mother's cello so it's a kinda and I'm playing bass on it so it's like a kind of a family album.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:31How did [The Sinking of the Titanic] come about?
I'd been impressed by the reported behaviour of the ship's orchestra, the eight musicians, and the way they conducted themselves in the last especially the last five minutes of the ship's um sinking. They just went on playing... and according to the wireless operator that he didn't hear them stop playing. And so I conjectured, well, what happens if they keep on playing under the water?
Presenter asks
13:30What was it about [John Cage] that you were listening to then and thinking, 'This is great, this is what I want'?
the piece which first impressed me was a piece called Four Minutes 33 Seconds, which was completely silent. So, in a sense, I wasn't really listening to that, I was just sort of enjoying the idea of it. And I was more aware of Cage's ideas than his music initially... it was his approach to composition, the idea of working by chance operations, of sort of freeing himself from the act of composition.
Presenter asks
16:49How did [the Portsmouth Sinfonia] come about?
It actually wasn't a musical joke, uh it was incredibly funny, and it wasn't intended to be funny, it was just that uh a byproduct to the fact we played so badly was that it was incredibly it was hilarious to listen to... I was teaching at Portsmouth and working with fine arts students and we decided one day to have a sort of Opportunes in Knox concert where all the different people in the college would do an act and we put together this orchestra
The keepsakes
The book
Science and Civilisation in China
Joseph Needham
It's a book I've never read. But it's [by] a man I admire immensely, ... It's a stunning piece of optimism.
The luxury
A few years ago I had a very bad back injury, and the only thing I could sit in was this extraordinary Scandinavian device, ... it's the most perfect, orthopedically correct way of sleeping.
Presenter asks
21:23How did you come by [the recording of the tramp's voice used in Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet]?
a friend was making a film about uh tramps, about people living rough in in London... And in the course of this uh he obviously recorded a number of people... some parts of these uh recordings he didn't use, so he gave me the outtick... I listened to them rather than just simply wipe them first. And in the middle of this, I heard this man sing this fragment, and I was very struck by it.
Presenter asks
24:06How did you get together with [Tom Waits for the re-release of Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet]?
he got in touch with me first in the 80s when he was touring in this country... And then when I decided to make this new version of Jesus Blood... It occurred to me at one point, well, everything so far has been accompanying the tramp, accompanying the singing. Maybe at some point someone should join in. And then it occurred to me Tom's voice is the closest to that of the old man in terms of having this kind of lived in quality... And so I approached Tom and he agreed to do it.
“composers use all sorts of things to get themselves going and to to develop ideas and it doesn't really matter whether listeners have them or not.”
“when sitting down and composing, I could imagine things and think of things that would never occur to me in the white heat of improvisation.”
“one of the great things about Cage as an exemplar, as a teacher, is that nobody who spent any time with Cage sounds like him. So that he, in a way, he gives you permission to be your own man.”
“being in a a state of solitude is something which a composer does all the time”