A Dance of God

Last month, we experienced a compulsory internet detox for ten days or so (thank you Gwave!) for reasons that were never disclosed.

I am very grateful to my friend Nigel Britto for informing me that the great Chinese-American cellist Yo-Yo Ma would be performing in Mumbai. This would in itself be a milestone concert, on his first-ever visit to India.

To top it all, he would be playing the entire set of six suites for unaccompanied cello (BWV 1007-1012) by that towering musical genius, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750).

And… get this… he would be playing them all (from memory, of course!) at one marathon concert, two-and-a-half-hours long, no interval!  Mumbai would be one of only 36 locations worldwide on Yo-Yo Ma’s “Bach Project”, where he would play all six suites “in one sitting”.

Music-lovers will know how rare cello recitals are in Goa. This is a reflection of the relative paucity of cello teaching here, something that Child’s Play India Foundation has been working hard to address. When cello recitals do happen, we’re lucky to get one movement from one of the Bach cello suites. So to have them all performed by certainly one of the greatest living cellists would be a momentous occasion.

As Ma describes it on his dedicated “Bach Project” website, it is a “journey” motivated not only by his six-decade long relationship with the music, but also by Bach’s ability to speak to our common humanity at a time when our civic conversation is so often focused on division.”

That struck a chord in me, as it should in all of us, whether in his country, or ours, and indeed in most of the world today, where exclusion and division unfortunately have so much greater currency and state, political and societal backing than inclusion and harmony.

It is noteworthy that Yo-Yo Ma, at sixty-three, is the exact same age that another great cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007) was when he in 1991 first “plucked up the courage” to record all the Bach cello suites (although Yo-Yo Ma did do it once before, in 1983).

Rostropovich too, in the DVD introduction admitted that he’d been “closely linked to them” all his life, with “nothing in the world more precious” to him. “These compositions always allow you to discover something new. Each day, each hour, each minute you reflect upon them, you reach deeper.”

There is something prayerful, spiritual even, that one experiences, when one plays or listens to them. English music critic, musicologist and composer Wilfred Mellers called it “Monophonic music in which a man has created a dance of God.”

With the internet still down, I had to call a friend in Mumbai who got us tickets. In the run-up to the concert, I read (and re-read) as much as I could about them. One fascinating book is the lovingly-written “The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals and the search for a Baroque Masterpiece” by Canadian musician and writer Eric Siblin.

A former pop music critic for the Montreal Gazette, he began a voyage of discovery after listening to a recital of the Cello suites, taking him to the backstreets of Barcelona, to interviews with master-cellists; to archives, festivals and conferences; and even to cello lessons – “all in pursuit of answers to the mysteries that continue to haunt the music more than 250 years after its composer’s death”, and around three centuries after the Suites were written (around 1717-1723).

Rostropovich said that “the hardest thing to achieve, in interpreting Bach, is the necessary equilibrium between human feelings, the heart which undoubtedly Bach possessed, and the serious and profound aspect of interpretation. Bach has no shallow or transitory emotions, no momentary anger, no bad words, no fleeting embraces. His emotions are on as vast a scale as Shakespeare’s. These are emotions common to all people on earth. We all weep when we suffer, we all know tears of joy. It’s these fundamental emotions that Bach transmits in his Suites. They demand more than a lightweight approach. But you can’t automatically disengage your heart from the music. This was the greatest problem I had to resolve in my interpretation.”

This absence of anger in Bach’s music is something I have often remarked upon as well. Perhaps this is also why Ma thought it apt for our time.

Like him, Rostropovich too thought of the Suites as a “cycle”, one that increases in intensity and complexity, each Suite’s Prelude increasing in length, until the final Suite is, as he terms it, “a symphony for solo cello.” He gave titles to each Suite: ‘Lightness (Suite no. 1, G major); ‘Sorrow and Intensity (no. 2, D minor); ‘Brilliance’ (no. 3, C major); ‘Majesty and opacity’ (no. 4, E flat major); ‘Darkness’ (no. 5, C minor); and finally, ‘Sunlight’ (no. 6, D major).  His views on key-colour relationships of the Suites are quite fascinating.

He chose to record the Suites in a church whose “severity of line and rhythm of architecture” so powerfully reminded him of Bach’s music. These considerations may not have been on Ma’s mind when he played for us at the NCPA’s Modernist-style Tata theatre, but we got lightness, sorrow, intensity, brilliance, majesty, darkness and sunlight all the same.

Ma strode onto the stage with a spring in his step, sat down, waited until latecomers had settled down, and proceeded to play the entire cycle, with barely an intake of breath between movements, and a brief pause between Suites. He seemed to be having an intimate conversation with the Universe, and we were mere eavesdroppers. If he did pause at “half-time”, after the third Suite, it was to make an emphatic point about the incessant coughing in the audience (more about this in another column, perhaps?), which quite visibly seemed to be disturbing his intense concentration. It disturbed the rest of us as well, but over time he and we tuned out the compulsive coughers who didn’t have the good grace to leave.

The concert was a Bach pilgrimage, with each of the 36 movements (six movements in each Suite:  prelude, allemande, courante, sarabande, two minuets or two bourrées or two gavottes, and a final gigue) revealing a different aspect of his genius. As Ma put it, the first three Suites seemed to him Bach’s way of showing us what the cello could do; the last three on the other hand, what the cello could NOT do, but Bach invites us, the listener, to “complete” it in our imagination.

It is interesting that both Ma and Rostropovich particularly love the intimate Sarabande in the fifth Suite. Ma chose to play this movement on September 11, 2002 at Ground Zero, while for Rostropovich it was “most genius composition – just three lines, that’s all, but so precious!”

When I was young, old-timers would tell me, “I heard Heifetz when he came to Bombay.” One day, I’ll tell my grandkids “I heard Yo-Yo Ma play all the Bach Cello Suites in Mumbai.” This is the stuff of legend.

(An edited version of this article was published on 17 February 2019 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

You can hear him play the Six Suites (at the BBC Proms 2015):

 

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Tambde Rosa

 

A little background: Vocal Colors is an a capella choir from Sweden, and very kindly offered to do a benefit concert for us, Child’s Play India Foundation.

One of its choral directors, Marie Bejstam, requested me to recommend a popular Konkani song that Vocal Colors could prepare as a surprise encore for the concert.

I suggested ‘Tambde Rosa’, and sent a recording, with lyrics, and much discussion over proper pronunciation of the lyrics.

They won the hearts of the packed audience at Menezes Braganza hall yesterday evening. I can honestly say I’ve not heard an a capella choir of such high calibre and capability ever sing here before!

Watch, listen and enjoy!

Vocal Colors

Child’s Play India Foundation (www.childsplayindia.org) completes a decade of its existence in 2019-2020! We’d like to really celebrate this significant milestone.

We begin the celebrations with a benefit concert by Vocal Colors, an a capella choral ensemble from Sweden.

In October 2014, I was one among 150 delegates from 28 countries (and the only one from India) chosen to participate in the first of its kind, a four-day International Sistema Teachers’ Conference organised by Sistema Scotland in Stirling. It offered me a unique opportunity to meet like-minded individuals also committed to music education and social empowerment, from a wide range of locations around the world: Australia, Austria, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Romania, Scotland, Serbia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, USA, Venezuela, Vietnam and Wales.

Among that vast community of nations, the Swedish contingent stood out pretty prominently. They kept breaking spontaneously into song at every opportunity, and their infectious enthusiasm got the rest of us singing as well.

This is where I first met Cecilia Öhrwall from El Sistema Södertälje, close to Stockholm, Sweden. She already had a connection with India, and had been visiting and working with a music school in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. She was planning a return trip to India the following year and suggested visiting us at Child’s Play India Foundation in Goa.

Her Sångföreningen Qöhr has since sung two benefit concerts for Child’s Play, in 2016 and 2018, to packed audiences, and she and her choir members have infused some of their enthusiasm to our children who participated in their workshops during their visits.

It is through Öhrwall that we are now welcoming yet another choir from Sweden, Vocal Colors.

Vocal Colors is a newly-minted vocal ensemble that sings a capella music of all genres. The warm-hearted, music-loving and well-trained young singers come from all over Sweden and gather for repetitions five weekends a year. In its second season, it embarks on its first international tour, with a benefit concert in Goa for Child’s Play India Foundation.

“A capella” literally means “in the manner of the chapel” in Italian, and is today used to refer to singing by an individual or group without accompaniment, or to music performed in this fashion.

The term was coined as a capella music originally referred to religious music sung in church. Jewish and Christian music were originally a capella. Today a capella music embraces all periods, styles and genres, ranging from sacred music, to pop, jazz, barbershop and more.

The European a capella tradition is especially strong in the countries around the Baltic and perhaps most so in Sweden as described by American choral conductor Richard Andrew Sparks (b. 1950) in his doctoral dissertation on postwar Swedish choral music (“Swedish A Cappella Music since 1945”, University of Cincinnati, 1997), later published as “The Swedish Choral Miracle” in 2000.

Swedish a capella choirs have over the last quarter of a century won around one-fourth of the annual prestigious European Grand Prix for Choral Singing (EGP) that despite its name is open to choirs from all over the world.

There are several reasons for the strong Swedish dominance in choral singing in general.  It has been estimated that as many as 6 to 7% of the Swedish population regularly sing in choirs. To put it differently, 600,000 Swedes are estimated to have an active involvement in choirs (2014) out of a population of just nine million.

The Swedish choral director and influential choral teacher Eric Gustaf Ericson (1918 – 2013) had an enormous impact on a capella choral development not only in Sweden but around the world.

Ericson went to study medieval music at the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Switzerland for a year and returned with a vision: a return to the music of the Middle Ages, but also those same vocal ideals. A pure, non-vibrato sound and line that would allow voices to blend perfectly, and allowing the collective body of sound to be moulded and shaped by the conductor as though it were one composite instrument.

After he took over the leadership of the Swedish Radio Choir in 1952, he took its level of excellence to such heights that it attracted the world’s great composers of the time, from Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland to Luigi Dallapiccola and György Ligeti, to say nothing of home-grown Swedish composers such as Lars Edlund, Ingvar Lidholm and Sven-Erik Bäck.

To quote Swedish arts journalist, critic, presenter and radio and TV producer Sofia Nyblom: “Eric Ericson’s work with choral singing is emblematic of the strength of a democratic society: pluralism of expression and submission under the vision of unanimity. It has certainly provided the hotbed for the stars of one of our major exports – music – and continues to provide a source for rejuvenation and creativity.”

Another significant reason that choral singing finds such fertile soil in Sweden is the fact that there are a large number of very popular primary and secondary schools (music schools) with high admission standards based on auditions that combine a rigid academic regimen with high level choral singing on every school day, a system that started with Adolf Fredrik’s Music School in Stockholm in 1939 but has since spread throughout the country.

The founders and musical leaders of Vocal Colors are the nationally awarded conductors Marie Bejstam and Charlotte Rider. They both lead several choirs in the Stockholm area. Together they also run a culture house, Kulturfyren (the Culture Lighthouse) which they founded in the central of the capital eight years ago. Marie and Charlotte are also often called upon to lecture and teach at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm.

(An edited version of this article was published on 13 January 2019 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

Things I learned from my Daddy

This column is overdue by little over a week. My father, Dr. Manuel Francisco Dias (27 November 1928 – 21 August 2000) would have been ninety this year. Although it is almost two decades since he left, all too soon, all too suddenly, it still seems like it transpired much more recently. Time has managed to dull the pain from a stab to an ache, but it’s still there.

In so many ways, he influenced the person I am today. I could write reams about this, but I’ll confine myself to a few vignettes:

I was inescapably surrounded by music. The very few memories of my toddler years in Berlin (then West Berlin, West Germany) involve staring transfixed at the glow of the bulb on our Philips record-player as I listened to music. In our Panjim home, there was even more music-related paraphernalia: the old family gramophone, stacks of shellac records, 78s, and later additions of 45s and LPs; the impossibly weighty spool- tape-recorder, precursor of the audio-cassette. The music spectrum included the earliest Hindi films, Konkani, and lighter fare, but the bulk was western classical music. The earliest ‘song’ Daddy taught my brother Victor and me, was the Ode to Joy chorus from the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in German: “Freude, schöner Götterfunken…”

To this day, I know that text by heart.

As if that weren’t enough, there were books about composers and operas, and record-sleeves, many in German and Portuguese and even other languages, but enough in English for me to try to make sense of the new sound-worlds. My impromptu ‘listening hour’ was in the afternoon, as the family rested. I began with nursery-rhyme records, moving on to light music, then Strauss waltzes, and then on to ‘heavier’ music, which initially I didn’t care for so much, but over time and repeated listening, grew on me. If Daddy caught a familiar segment, he would come in and ‘air-conduct’ with me, and if I had trouble understanding something on the record-sleeve, he’d explain it to me. He’d translate the lyrics of the songs of Edith Piaf, Amália Rodrigues and Heintje for me as the music played. Each time I hear those songs, I can still hear him do that.

One song that he could never sing without a lump in his throat or tears welling in his eyes, was ‘Adeus korcho vellu’. That effect has rubbed off on me too.

Our violin lessons were a throwback to his own lessons, from legends like Dominic Pereira and Micael Martins. One of my violins is a family heirloom, put together by my great-uncle Eng. Luís Bismarck Dias, from whom I got my own name.

On my tenth birthday, I was crestfallen to receive from Daddy, not an age-appropriate story-book or toy, but an unabridged copy of the epic ‘Os Lusíadas’ by Luís Vaz de Camões, in the original Portuguese, no translation. (This was a typical Daddy trait: presents to others were actually gifts for himself!). “It’s by another Luis!”, he told me cheerfully, ignoring my disappointment.  But then, on our regular trips to the old Central Library (Livraria Central, Pangim), he’d put the epic into context against the marvellous azulejo tableaux by Jorge Colaço in the entrance, and the cantos, stanzas and pictures would come to life as he recited them with much melodrama.

Today, I’m grateful he made that gift.

The house was, and still is strewn with books everywhere, in English, Portuguese, German, French, and to lesser degree in other languages. He introduced me to Shakespeare’s plays, and could recite many extracts from memory. I read Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas and so many others due to him.

I still remember the excitement when the full set of Encyclopaedia Britannica arrived in the 1970s, the ‘Google’ of its day. We’d pore over the atlas together, and he’d explain the strategic importance of the Suez canal, and hoe geography influenced history, and so many connections between seemingly disparate disciplines.

With me perched on his lap in his armchair,  Daddy quite literally showed me the world.

Everything he read, even borrowed library books, was underlined or marked by him. I found it very irritating then, and hid books from him that I treasured myself. But today, as I unearth his scribbles, almost on a daily basis, like time-capsules from decades ago, I feel he’s still communicating with me.

We had father-son tiffs galore, and I would give him the silent treatment, sometimes for days. His peace offering would usually be an earmarked newspaper or magazine article that he thought would interest me, left by my afternoon tea-cup. And so the ice would be broken.

He was obsessed with hanging porcelain plates on the walls, and we would be roped into the logistics. He loved to hand-paint outlines of drawings and paintings by Picasso, Chagall, Toulouse-Lautrec, on those plates. And he’d hang framed reproductions of the Great Masters on the verandah walls. Our task was to take them down when the breeze was too strong, and then put them back again. They were my entry-point into art, as were the paintings and sketches (each with their own little story!) of Angelo da Fonseca, a family friend and fellow Zuenkar.

He hero-worshipped the leading lights of the Independence movement, and pictures of Nehru, Gandhi and Ambedkar jostled for space alongside close family relatives, as if they were close family members themselves.

He didn’t believe in owing anyone anything, and even a utility bill had to be paid at once, as soon as it arrived, as if it were a ticking time-bomb.

When my brother and I were very young, much too young, he’d quiz us: “What can never be bought or sold?” The answer: “Integrity of character.” We would repeat it uncomprehendingly. But it stuck in our psyche.

Although Daddy’s family was among the first to own a motor-car in Goa, and during his childhood had three of them, he showed no inclination to learn to drive himself, or to buy one for his own family. I suspect he was more inclined to either public transport, or to walk or cycle. In his Wadia college days in Poona, “Mr. Dias” was a familiar sight on its streets, seen cycling here, there, everywhere.

I can still picture him in my mind’s eye, wheeling our first red bicycle into the house, and thus beginning our own love-affair with cycling. And how he loved to walk! Until the last decade or so of his life, one had a tough time keeping up with his brisk pace.

His stories of childhood pranks (many of them cycle-related) and memories of trips to the family property in Tontem, hearing the growl of tigers at night, are legion.

His knowledge of local history and family history was phenomenal, and I deeply regret not paying more attention when he attempted to tell us about this. This would usually happen at mealtimes, but when we were growing up, it all seemed much too abstract and faraway compared to all the interesting things at school and with friends. I can now remember only snatches of his monologues. The loss is mine, all mine.

Eclipses, comets and other celestial phenomena were major events in our house. We’d go armed with Xrays (many of them over each other) to view solar eclipses, and binoculars to gaze at nocturnal spectacles. It was more fun than any school assignment ever was.

We went through an arborics phase as well, collecting pieces of driftwood, roots, branches that variously resembled snakes, the human form, and the countenance of Jesus with crown of thorns.

His love of sprouted moong dal allowed us to watch the stages of germination of seeds.

Daddy was also my ENT doctor. He’d periodically sit us on his lap, and clean our ear canals of wax. Funnily enough, that’s one of the things I miss very much after he passed away

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, Daddy was extremely methodical. I see it now in the way he organized his books on bookshelves and in bookcases, and in the way family documents were filed away.

He wasn’t much of a cinema-goer, yet I remember him taking me to see Tchaikovsky’s ‘Swan Lake’ on Cine Nacional’s big screen; ‘The Great Waltz’, a biopic of the Waltz King, Johann Strauss II; and ‘Animal Safari’, which awakened a lifelong interest in wildlife, and a desire (still-unfulfilled) to visit that continent. ‘African Safari’ has an amusing side-story: Daddy wasn’t used to queuing for a ticket, and some misunderstanding led to us going to see ‘Pocket Maar’ instead! Daddy was furious, and marched me off (although I wanted to stay!) as soon as the film began.

Daddy wasn’t a church-goer either, but boy, did he know his Bible, in several languages! He could quote chapter and verse, and tell you which episodes in Jesus’ life were described in which Gospel, and the chronological order of Popes through history and so much more.

When I entered MBBS, he relived his student days vicariously through me, constantly poring over my textbooks (which I absolutely forbade him from underlining!), and offering aide-memoires. One that he found particularly funny was how to remember that the left heart valve was called ‘mitral’: “Remember, bishops wear a mitre, and bishops are never right!” and he’d laugh at the joke every time.

When I got to England in 1998, the streets were littered with connections to him: Covent Garden, the Globe and Stratford-upon-Avon, Baker Street (Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes), the National Gallery… I had the expectation that at some point my parents would come over, and we’d visit all these together. But in 2000, he was gone. Numb with shock, I came home to bury him, and returned to work. On a free weekend, I visited the National Gallery, and when I got to Caravaggio’s ‘The Supper at Emmaus’, I sat down on a viewing-bench. The floodgates opened and I wept uncontrollably as I hadn’t done before, knowing that we’d never experience all this together.

But he lives on in my son Manuel: the book-craziness, argumentativeness, love of chess, and the “I-need-to-be- alone, just- to-think” moments. Happy 90^th, Daddy! Always remembered, never forgotten.

(An edited version of this article was published on 09 December 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

 

It’s all about the Bass(line)!

Child’s Play India Foundation will enter its tenth year of existence in 2019-2020, a milestone we wish to celebrate very much.

From its inception, the strengthening of cello pedagogy has been uppermost on our mind. This is a dire need not just for Child’s Play for just for Goa, but for the whole country.

If you were to think of those in your family or your neighbourhood or in your circle of friends and acquaintances who play or are learning to play a musical instrument, chances are very high that the instrument is guitar, violin, keyboard or piano. Cello students are numerically extremely scarce, not just in Goa, but elsewhere in India as well.

This has huge repercussions when it comes to music-making. The bulk of the chamber and ensemble repertoire (certainly string chamber music and orchestral music) in western classical music necessarily requires cello. The paucity of cello pedagogy on the ground makes it difficult to have string trio (violin, viola, cello) or quartet (two violins, viola, cello), piano trio (violin, cello, piano) or piano quartet (violin, viola, cello, piano) music repertoire to even be contemplated, let alone studiously approached and performed. This deprives the music student community and the wider public of a vast chunk of the classical music oeuvre.

In ensemble playing as well, across India, upper strings (violin, viola) vastly outnumber cello, which, besides the obvious imbalance in register and harmony, limits the choice of repertoire that can be performed. In addition, a strong cello (and double-bass) line forms the firm foundation for the rest of the orchestra. One can have the most wonderful upper-string sections, but if the bass-line is weak or suffers from poor intonation, the whole musical ‘edifice’ comes crumbling down.

Although Child’s Play has had a cello project since 2013, it struggled to take root due to a lack of continuity and of a really qualified cello teacher. But in the past few months, with the arrival of Danish cello pedagogue Gry Nørby, our cello project has really begun to flourish. We currently have twenty-four cello students, drawn from the ranks of our children at two of our locations, Hamara School St. Inez and Auxilium School Caranzalem, and also from the wider community and a plucky handful of adult learners as well, all of whom just happen to be women!

So, although our upcoming Christmas concert ‘Joy to the World’ on Saturday 8 December 2018 at Menezes Braganza hall 6 pm (donation passes available at Furtados Music stores and also at the door just before the concert) rings in the Christmas season, coming as it does in the very first week of Advent with a lot of Yuletide cheer, it is also a celebration of that magnificent sonorous instrument, the cello!

We will showcase the versatility of the cello, first as a member of the orchestra, with a robust cello section (aided by a double-bass, itself a relative rarity on our concert stage!). We will also have as many of the twenty-four cellos that can possibly be crammed onto the Menezes Braganza stage playing a Nordic traditional folk song.  A smaller group will also play for us ‘The Happy Cello Player’ by Adam McKenzie.

Nørby will also highlight the cello as a solo instrument when she plays for us the Swan from French composer Camille Saint-Saëns’ humorous musical suite and ballet ‘Le Carnaval des Animaux’ (The Carnival of the Animals).  And when it comes to unaccompanied cello, what could be a better example than a movement from one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s six cello suites, considered by many as the pinnacle and most spiritual of his oeuvre.

We will also get a taste of the cello in chamber music when Trio Frangipani (Luis Dias, violin; Rasmus Nørby, viola; and Gry Nørby, cello) perform Franz Schubert’s String Trio in B flat major, D. 471.

Schubert wrote three string trios between 1814 and 1817 (around the same years he was taking composition lessons from Antonio Salieri), all of them for some reason in B flat major. D. 471 was begun in September 1816, but he completed just the first movement. This is hardly surprising, if you take into account the fact that Schubert was such a prodigious, prolific composer, that he was working on so many compositions simultaneously, that even he found it hard to keep track. In 1816 alone, he composed over two hundred works (that we know of and have survived), including at least two masses, several smaller sacred works, over a hundred songs and lieder, his Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, one overture, two concert pieces for violin and orchestra, three string quartets (one of them lost), at least four works for piano and one or more instruments, four other works for strings, winds and brass instruments, several piano sonatas (some lost) and other piano works, and God alone knows how much more that was unfinished or lost —  all while working full-time as a teacher in his father’s school. Whew!

This is a youthful work (he was just nineteen!), written for home rather than for public performance. It has some similarities with his Fifth Symphony, also in the same key, and from the same year.           The young Schubert was heavily influenced by Mozart, and we see it here too, with the use of three-bar and five-bar phrases and circle-of-fifth progressions, but with an early Schubertian fingerprint, what in jazz would be termed a ‘tritone substitution’ in the final cadence, possibly inspired from popular music of his time.

The concert also features the Child’s Play chorus singing an array of Christmas carols and songs, some of them in English, Konkani, Portuguese and (why not?) Danish as well. So come along to an evening of Yuletide fun to get into the Christmas spirit!

(An edited version of this article was published on 02 December 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

Who wants to Live Forever: The extraordinary musicianship of Freddie Mercury

I don’t how long Inox Porvorim has been around, but I was never tempted to visit until a few days ago, to see the much-anticipated ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, the 2018 biographical film about the British rock band Queen, whose flamboyant poster-boy was, of course, Freddie Mercury (1946-1991).

 

I wasn’t surprised to find so many familiar faces, young and old, in the auditorium. Queen’s music speaks across generations. And the big draw, on-screen as in real life, was Freddie Mercury.

The film didn’t disappoint, and the karaoke-style lyric texts certainly helped. I found the narrative a little disorienting, but I guess one does have to leap across time to cover such a vast career. I’m not sure how critical Bulsara Sr. (Freddie’s father) was of his son in real life. I’ve not come across explicit references, but I’m sure the film was well-researched.

 

The moments that truly moved me (to tears sometimes) were his awareness of his sexual orientation, the press hounding him about his lifestyle, and his devastating loneliness.

This is a Queen biopic, of course, so the songs from Mercury’s “break” period from the band don’t get screen-time. But the lyrics of Mercury’s solo song “Living on my Own” were certainly autobiographical: “Sometimes I feel I’m gonna break down and cry”; “I’m always walking too fast”; “Nowhere to go, nothing to do with my time”; “Everything is coming down on me”; “I go crazy”; “I don’t have no time for no monkey business”; I get so lonely”; “Got to be some good times ahead.”

What  amazes me about Mercury’s music is his impressive pianistic skill and his remarkable grasp of harmony, chord progression, polyphony, counterpoint and so many aspects of music that elude others with even a conservatory education.

The film and so many Mercury biographies just gloss over this crucial incubation period in his life.   But apparently the headmaster at St. Peter’s English boarding school Panchgani realized little Bulsara had a gift for music, and persuaded his parents to pay for piano lessons (an instrument his parents had started him on a year before, age seven) in addition to his school fees. This early encouragement and endorsement from such an authority figure must have been such a confidence-builder to the eight-year old. How different would Mercury’s life have been if this headmaster had not been so perceptive, or been indifferent? What if his parents had brushed away the advice and dismissed music as a frivolity?

 

 

 

The unsung heroes in Mercury’s life are this headmaster, his piano teacher(s), the director of the school choir and theatre company who gave him his first taste of music, of the stage and acquiring a stage presence. Sadly we don’t know their names. At Panchgani, he got to Grade IV level in both piano and theory. The lessons spanned just a few years, but must have given him a good musical foundation.

He and four school-friends formed a band, the Hectics, with him at the piano. Right then, a friend recalls he had “an uncanny ability to listen to the radio and replay what he heard on piano”.

London of course would have been a huge eye-opener in 1964 when the Bulsaras fled there from Zanzibar. They probably had a piano at home, and Mercury taught himself guitar. Much of the music he admired was guitar-oriented: Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Beatles, David Bowie and Led Zepellin.

How did he attain such phenomenal heights as songwriter, instrumentalist and singer with no real formal training? He was self-deprecating about his pianistic skills, to a fault. I know comparisons are odious, but in terms of sheer complexity, inventiveness, the colour and textural richness of his compositions, the poetry and wit in his lyrics, his pianism, his staggering vocal range (bass low F (F2) to soprano high F (F6)) and control, he far surpasses the likes of someone like Elton John for example, who did have the benefit of studying at the Royal Academy of Music and from private tutors. Take as exhibit A just the Queen Greatest Hits album, where 10 of the 17 tracks were his: besides ‘Bohemian Rhapsody, there’s ‘Killer Queen’, ‘Somebody to Love’, ‘We Are The Champions’, ‘Bicycle Race’, ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love.’ One doesn’t need to dissect or analyse any of them to know they’re pure gold, but they are, each in their own different way.

 

 

 

I think the secret was his deep passion for music. This meant that he would have spent hours at his instrument, whether voice, piano or guitar, practicing, experimenting, pushing boundaries all the time. He was constantly thinking in musical terms. The inspiration for ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ came to him while soaking in the bath-tub of a Munich hotel; he asked for the piano to be brought to the tub, and wrote it all down in ten minutes!

The other aspect is a spin-off on that same love for music: no genre was out of bounds or uninteresting for him. He probably listened to all kinds of music, on the radio and television, on his player, and live at pubs, theatres and concert halls. Too many musicians become ‘specialists’ too soon, and their growth is stunted precisely because they shut themselves off from such richness from those quarters. All genres, from opera to rockabilly, progressive rock, heavy metal, gospel and disco bled into his work. Music for him was not compartmentalized, but one great continuum.

I always thought Mercury was buck-toothed (his nickname in school was ‘Bucky’!); the film enlightened me about his supernumerary incisors: While most of us have four (two each in each jaw), he apparently had twice as many, certainly in his upper jaw! Whether this really widens the vocal range or not, I can’t say. But he never got any corrective dental work, precisely because he didn’t want to take even the slightest chance it could adversely affect his vocal range.

In an earlier column, we saw how impressed operatic soprano Montserrat Caballé was with his voice. The Who lead singer Roger Daltrey called Mercury “the best virtuoso rock ‘n’ roll singer of all time. He could sing anything in any style. He could change his style from line to line and, God, that’s an art. And he was brilliant at it.” David Bowie praised Mercury’s performance style, saying: “Of all the more theatrical rock performers, Freddie took it further than the rest… he took it over the edge… I only saw him in concert once and as they say, he was definitely a man who could hold an audience in the palm of his hand.”

Over a quarter-century after his tragically premature death, Freddie Mercury still holds us all in thrall. It’s A Kind of Magic!

(An edited version of this article was published on 25 November 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

 

Colonel Bogey!

When was the first time you ever heard the Colonel Bogey march? If you’re a Don Bosco past pupil and from around my generation, it almost certainly was at the school march-past, played by the school brass band.

Whenever I think of a “march-past”, as if on cue, this tune starts playing in my head like a Pavlovian reflex. And vice versa; when I hear the Colonel Bogey march, I remember school and the march-pasts. I used to love participating in whole march-past shebang, the drills and the actual parade, just to be able to hear this tune being belted out with gusto by the school band, many of whose members were my own classmates. If the march-past ended while Colonel Bogey was playing and they had to end it abruptly, I used to really feel cheated. They played other marching ditties as well, but none (to me) as jaunty as this one. I can still picture Mestre Cota conducting the band in the porch area of the old Oratory building, as we marched past on the ground in front of it.

I asked my band classmates what the tune was called, and seriously thought they were pulling my leg when they told me.

I used to be so envious of my band classmates; all I had was a measly violin and bow made of wood, horse-hair and strings, whereas they had shiny metal contraptions with convoluted tubing, complex valve mechanisms and keys. And their band could really pack a crash, bang and wallop that could drown out anything a bunch of strings could do.

The band project, if I’m not wrong, was the initiative of Mestre Santana Cota from Santa Cruz, a very versatile musician indeed. From my own personal recollection, I’ve heard him play the graceful pedal-propelled pump organ in the choir loft of the São Tomé chapel (which sadly sometime in the late 1970s was unceremoniously replaced by the electronic keyboard, a far cry from the delicious ground-vibrating sonority of its predecessor); I was also privileged to share a music-stand with him, playing violin for many a midnight Christmas mass and school operetta in the days of Fr. Bonifacio at Don Bosco; and of course he trained and conducted the wind band at Don Bosco (instructing each member to play their respective instrument, from flute to clarinet, saxophone, trumpet and French horn) and his native village of Santa Cruz.

The Don Bosco school band project was a wonderful after-school music education programme at a time when such terms had not yet gained currency. Looking back on the reasons for its success, there are several factors: a. The school authorities gave it their whole-hearted support. There was a dedicated band rehearsal room on the first floor of the boarding section, where the college section exists today. It also served as storage space for the instruments.  b. The band had a very good raison-d’être because there were opportunities galore for it to perform: in addition to march-pasts on school sports days etc, there were also major feasts, like the feast of Don Bosco, Mary Help of Christians, etc, and even if I remember right, after football matches c. The band members were largely boarders, although there were some day-scholars as well. This meant that there was complete control of practice schedules, and attendance at band practice was written into the after-school time-tables of those boarders in the band. You could only miss band practice if you were seriously ill; exams and the run-up to them didn’t affect music lessons, unlike now, where parents are known to take children off music lessons for a whole year, “to focus on their SSC” or HSSC or some other academic milestone. d. The most important reason, certainly, was the passion and dedication of Mestre Cota for music, his patience in teaching a motley group of boisterous boys of peri-pubertal age (no mean task, I can tell you! I have often watched their rehearsal sessions) for what must have been at best a modest salary, that sustained the school band for so many years and was the envy of other schools all over Goa. It was a labour of love for him.

The downside of a whole music education programme built and sustained by just one person as its linchpin of course meant that with his demise, it ground to a halt. It would be so wonderful to revive Mestre Cota’s initiative and take it to even greater heights.

But there are many learning points from that band project: If the parent organization (the school or children’s shelter) is really keen on music education, really gives it importance and sets aside protected time each day for it, and if it is led by competent, motivated and passionate teachers, the sky is the limit. And its continuity should be ensured by long-term, really forward-thinking planning.

The ‘Colonel Bogey March’ was composed in 1914 by British Army bandmaster Lieutenant Frederick Joseph Ricketts under the nom de plume Kenneth J. Alford, as service personnel at the time were not encouraged to have professional lives outside the armed forces.  Urban legend has it that the march took its name from a military man and golfer who whistled a characteristic two-note phrase, a descending minor third interval instead of shouting “Fore!” A descending minor third begins each line of the opening melody. Bogey is no a golfing term meaning “one over par.”

The march, in D flat major, is in rondo form, which means the opening ‘verse’ recurs, a total of three times, interspersed with two different contrasting ‘verses’: A-B-A-C-A. The B section is in the relative minor (B flat minor), while section C modulates to the subdominant major (G flat major) of the ‘home’ key of D flat major.

The march got a new lease of life during the Second World War, when its tune was set to lyrics basically making rude references to the unmentionables of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen Göring, Himmler and Göbbels.

It really entered popular culture after it featured in the 1957 British-American epic war film ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ directed by David Lean and which uses the historic setting of the 1942-43 construction of the Burma Railway by the Japanese, using prisoners of war.

After the film, it is often customary to whistle out the main tune even in performance.

It also seems to have ‘inspired’ Indian film composer S. D. Burman to use an adapted version of Colonel Bogey in the opening lines of the song ‘Yeh Dil Na Hota Bechara’ from the 1967 spy thriller heist film ‘Jewel Thief’ featuring Dev Anand and Vijayantimala.

The descending minor third at the start of each line is reversed into an ascending minor third, but the rhythmic meter of the initial melodic lines is the same as in Colonel Bogey, as is the march-like tempo.

(An edited version of this article was published on 28 October 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

‘The Gandhi Requiem’

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was sung last month at the BBC Proms. War and Peace have been among its themes this year in view of the centenary of the end of the First World War. But I’m surprised that, although the BBC is wonderful at noting all major milestones, no mention was made of this work’s Gandhi connection during its broadcast, despite it being Gandhi’s 150^th birth anniversary.

I wrote about it for Scroll.in. Read the article by clicking here.

 

“Barcelona – La musica vibró”: Montserrat Caballé (1933-2018)

Like so many of you, I am eagerly awaiting the release of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, the upcoming 2018 biographical film about the British rock band Queen, focusing on lead singer Freddie Mercury’s life.

Each of us will have a favourite (or more) of his songs. For some of us, that list may include the 1987 song that has been described as the “a rare textbook example of a combination of pop and opera singing which accentuated their differences”: ‘Barcelona’, the single released by Mercury and operatic soprano Montserrat Caballé.

It became one of the biggest hits of Mercury’s solo career, and such a sensation that it, for better or worse, defined Caballé as “the opera star who duetted with Freddie Mercury on Barcelona” even when the press worldwide broke the news of her death on 6 October 2018.

Mercury’s affinity for classical music in general and for opera in particular is well known. One would need to have a strong classical music background to be able to conceive and write a song as complex as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ It has been dubbed a “mock opera”, following “a certain operatic logic: choruses of multi-tracked voices alternate with aria-like solos, the emotions are excessive, the plot confusing.”

In the Queen song ‘It’s a Hard Life’, he opens with the ‘Vesti la giubba’ (‘Put on the costume’) theme from Leoncavallo’s opera ‘Pagliacci’. In the music video, the sets borrow heavily from the world of opera.

In 1979, he performed ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ with the Royal Ballet. He had never done any ballet before, but it was something he had always wanted to try.

In the video for ‘I Want to Break Free’, he emulated famed ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky in the legendary Ballets Russes production of Debussy’s symphonic poem ‘Prélude a l’après-midi d’un faune’ (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun).

He was especially fond of the singing voice of Montserrat Caballé and said so on Spanish television in 1986. They met the following year in Barcelona, Caballé’s home city. When she was asked to produce a song for the opening ceremony of the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, she roped him in. The idea excited her so much that it was decided that rather than just a single, they record a whole album together.

Caballé’s tight schedule complicated the planning of recording sessions, so Mercury recorded the song, with him singing her part as well, in falsetto, and then sent a tape to her to prepare her for the joint studio sessions.

During those sessions, Mercury was reportedly amazed at Caballé’s voice control; in the fadeout of the ‘Barcelona’ song, he had to step away from the microphone to decrease his voice intensity, whereas “she didn’t move at all”.

Merury’s own voice range was quite phenomenal for a ‘non-classical’ singer. Although his speaking voice fell in the baritone range, he sang most of his songs in the tenor range. He could sing a vocal range from bass low F (F2) all the way to soprano high F (F6).

He certainly impressed Caballé, who said that “the difference between Freddie and almost all the other rock stars was that he was selling the voice”.

She elaborated, “His technique was astonishing. No problem of tempo, he sang with an incisive sense of rhythm, his vocal placement was very good and he was able to glide effortlessly from a register to another. He also had a great musicality. His phrasing was subtle, delicate and sweet or energetic and slamming. He was able to find the right colouring or expressive nuance for each word.”

The music video that plugged the song was unforgettable, and broke new ground with the conductor wielding a light-sabre as baton, and the audience waving shimmering lights in a pre-mobile phone era.

Maria de Montserrat Viviana Concepción Caballé was born into a family of humble financial circumstances in Barcelona.

She graduated with a Gold Medal from the Liceu Conservatory in 1954 and then moved to Basel, Switzerland, where she made her professional debut in 1956 as Mimi in Puccini’s ‘La Bohème’.

A succession of roles in operas by Mozart, Richard Strauss, Gluck, Massenet followed, taking her to Bremen, Lisbon, and as far as Mexico.

But her big international breakthrough came in 1965, when she stood in for an indisposed Marilyn Horne in a semi-staged performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s ‘Lucrezia Borgia’ at Carnegie Hall New York, at which she deservedly received a 25-minute standing ovation. It was her first bel canto opera role which she learned in less than a month, and her achievement created waves in the opera world.

Subsequently she was invited to all the world’s opera capitals, singing a wide range of roles. She is best remembered as an exponent of the works of Verdi and of the bel canto repertoire, notably the works of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti.

A 1994 review in the Independent gushed:  “Caballé is one of the last of the true divas. Callas is dead, Kiri Te Kanawa is busy making commercials for Sainsbury’s, and Mirella Freni has never really risen out of the narrow confines of being an opera lover’s opera-singer. Caballé, on the other hand, has always had an enormous following, and it’s still with her today.”

In 2003, Gramophone magazine declared that “no diva in memory has sung such an all-encompassing amount of the soprano repertory, progressing through virtually the entire range of Italian light lyric, lirico-spinto and dramatic roles, including all the pinnacles of the bel canto, Verdi and verismo repertories, whilst simultaneously being a remarkable interpreter of Salome, Sieglinde and Isolde.”

Her voice was described as “pure but powerful, with superb control of vocal shadings and exquisite pianissimo.”

Paying homage to her after her death, tenor José Carreras said the world of opera had lost its “best soprano”, adding, “Of all the sopranos that I have heard live, I have never heard anyone like Montserrat.”

Queen guitarist Brian May in an Instagram tribute wrote: “RIP dear Montsy – inspiration to us all but especially to Freddie. Your beautiful voice will be with us forever.”

It will indeed. Those interested could visit YouTube not just for her ‘Barcelona duet with Freddie Mercury, but for so much of her operatic oeuvre. You can listen to a very young Caballé singing the aria ‘Al dolce guidami’ from Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, to which inevitable comparisons have been made to the great Maria Callas herself.

Or ‘Casta Diva’ from ‘Norma’ (Bellini)

or ‘Com’é bello’ from ‘Lucrezia Borgia (Donizetti); ‘Caro nome’ from ‘Rigoletto’ (Verdi);

‘Un bel di from ‘Madame Butterfly’ (Puccini).

She lives on, immortal in cyberspace and in our hearts.

(An edited version of this article was published on 14 October 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

Active Listening

A year ago, I had written an article titled “How should we Listen?” in this Sunday column. I’d like to resume the discussion and build upon some ideas from there.

In this relatively ‘new’, 21^st century, music is statistically more accessible and available to the public than it has ever been before. Looking back to the time of my own childhood, one couldn’t have dreamt of the portals available today: YouTube, Spotify, internet radio, and so many others that I haven’t even sampled yet. Just a few decades ago, this would have been outlandish, far-out science-fiction territory. But it is a reality that this generation takes for granted, as they perhaps should.

A 2013 survey of Global Recorded-Music Sales by Genre indicated that pop music accounted for 30.6%; rock 26.1%; and classical music a meager 4.9%; with “others” making up the remaining 38.4%.

Such statistics have been brandished time and again, as yet further proof of the moribund state of classical music. People have been sounding its death knell for at least the last two hundred years.

The British commentator (and author of the widely-read if often-controversial classical music blog ‘Slipped Disc’) Norman Lebrecht has in his writing, notably his 2007 book ‘Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness: The Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record Industry’, (marketed in the US under the title ‘The Life and Death of Classical Music’) lamented the decline and demise of the classical recording industry, if not of the genre itself, although his book expectedly raised hackles everywhere for different reasons.

But music education, especially for classical music, has been under attack for decades now, especially in the Western world, where one would imagine it to be nurtured the most; it is a soft target for cuts in funding whenever governments consider it necessary to do some financial belt-tightening.

Part of the problem with the failure to appreciate the importance of classical music is that we aren’t being taught how to listen well to it anymore, which contributes to the notion that it is “boring” or difficult to follow” or enjoy.

When I was a young child and began exploring my father’s bookshelf, one of the books that caught my attention was “William Shakespeare: The Complete Works”, which as you can imagine, was a weighty tome and difficult going for someone my age. But over time and keeping at it, I gradually began to unlock its secrets, and the process still continues. But the first time I cracked open the book’s spine, had I been daunted by the (then, to me) near-incomprehensible prose, the number of characters, the tangled plotlines, I would have been much the poorer for it, and a whole exciting world close off to me, merely for want of a sporting chance.

It is the same with classical music: one has to give it a chance, and repeated listening reaps huge rewards.

If one reads online forums devoted to music, and music listening comes up, often the well-intentioned advice is “Let the music just wash over you”, sometimes with the implied idea that the listener is passive in the process.

I submit that listening to classical music differs from many other genres of music in that to get its full benefit, one has to be an “active” listener. Be it a Mozart sonata, Beethoven symphony, Chopin waltz or even a Kreisler bonbon, one has to actively follow its musical “argument” and emotional “journey”, which is impossible to do if one is distracted and not giving it one’s fullest attention.

It is then that one better appreciates the beauty, the power and emotional intensity of the music. It helps us to become more intimately connected with the music, and it will stir emotions within us in ways that a cursory, distracted, “passive” way of listening to the same work never could.

In some ways, it is like reading a novel by a really good author. One has to follow the storyline, what happens to the protagonist(s), the villain(s) in the piece if any, but also the clever use of language, the painting of word-pictures, and so much more. The obvious difference of course is that one can put a bookmark in a book and take a break before returning back to it, whereas a piece of music needs to be listened from beginning to end. A possible exception could be the interval between Acts of an opera, or the gap of a few seconds between movements of a sonata, concerto or symphony, which are the equivalent of a ‘bookmark’, a pause before returning to the musical action.

Without meaning to denigrate pop music, which I love and enjoy as well, generally in pop music a much shorter attention span is necessary, with three-minute songs, with emphasis quite often on the lyrics and/or repetitive chord sequences and beats.

Listening to classical music is a different kind of experience which requires more “work” in comparison, but the rewards are huge. But active listening is an acquired habit that, like anything else, gets better and better with practice.  It is this discipline of active listening which dictates much of the concert etiquette: maintaining silence so that you focus completely and do not disturb others who are doing the same. It is courtesy and respect for others in the audience as well, to say nothing of the performers and the music as well.

It is so easy to begin practicing “active listening”, with the wealth of choices, from CDs (with the additional advantage of so much information available on the booklet that often accompanies CDs, although today anything can be Googled as well) to MP3 to all the internet options as well. Over time, one may (or not) gravitate to ‘favourite’ performers, composers, or even recording eras. Getting used to a new style or ‘musical language’ requires repeated acquaintance through repeated listening before one is really familiar with it and how it works.

Although one doesn’t need state-of-the-art music equipment, listening through decent speakers or headphones and at a reasonable volume is important.

Coming back to giving classical music a chance: it applies to composers as well. There were composers I initially disliked, or whose music left me cold or unstirred, but over the years, with repeated listening and understanding more about their lives, the background to those works, and what motivated their writing in the first place, I have come to really love them and install them among the ever-growing pantheon of my demi-gods of music.

(An edited version of this article was published on 07 October 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)