Bach

5.     Johann Sebastian Bach. If you have been listening to a composer in church, at home, and everywhere else from the year when you were born, then that composer has formed your musical taste. When we listen to Mozart we are Mozartians. What do we hear listening to Bach? We are told we are hearing the formation of a whole musical language, that there is before and after Bach. We know we are listening to the early eighteenth century. The keyboard is a mechanism but country and city co-exist with an unmechanical ease and productivity. Community is at work, with opportunity to speak solo or share new harmonies given all the time in the world. One could go on saying more, as Bach was aware. Then, there is Glenn Gould. Here he is on the plinth (construction: Charles Anderson) in the form of 38 CDs and 6 DVDs in a box. I have Susan Southall to thank for this gift, she seeming to have decided it was time to move this amount of information someplace else. I am eternally grateful, as I can now listen to any amount of Bach from the Canadian prodigy, aware that this music only came to my attention (it had already all happened) after his death in Toronto in 1982. Exits and entrances. The photograph shows him “choosing a piano at Columbia’s 30^th Street Studio, New York City, April 1957.” Piano being the operative word and the operating instrument. Gould does things with Bach we were never warned about. The works of Bach are the university, the testing ground, the fresh canvas for him to try new things. It’s like listening to someone like Keith Jarrett stretching the standards, the standards in this case being the keyboard works of Bach. One moment we question if two hands can go that fast, the next moment find ourselves somewhere so slow, yet familiar, we don’t know when he will or will he won’t he strike the next note.    

Jazz

4.     Jazz. My earliest encounter with jazz was this eclectic album, which my father would have brought into the house in 1960. It includes ‘All Blues’, a cool school work by Miles Davis that my father found took things a bit too far, but I found the most fascinating track on the disc. (I should say here, this is the same person who listened for hours to Messiaen, Bruckner, and Mahler, very loud.) My education in jazz began twenty years later when living with Paul Grabowsky and other musicians in Carlton, when I did jazz shows on 3-RRR. These people pursued the meaning of bebop, free form, seventies funk, and other styles through the night and all of the weekend. I saw for the first time that ‘All Blues’ was an improvisation performed by artists who themselves epitomise jazz music’s endless possibilities, part of what became a classic, ‘Kind of Blue’ (1959). There is Miles himself, central to the invention of hard bop, modal cool, fusion, electric funk, you name it. “Cannonball” Adderley, another leader in his own right, a master of the bebop form; he plays alto saxophone. Bill Evans on piano, a musician I play all the time at home, so many records, an inimitable artist who some people think is the central cause of the ‘Kind of Blue’ mood. Jimmy Cobb on drums, the last surviving player from the session, now in his nineties, but at that time a sign of the future of jazz performance. Paul Chambers on bass, as we would say matter-of-factly on late night radio. And then the majestic figure, both musically and physically, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone. To this day his entrance on any track inspires a nervous laugh of wonder at what is about to happen. The depth and feel of his powerful playing, always in sync with what’s going on but at the same time on some other level of expression, is one extravagant gift on top of all the others that these great musicians have brought to this listener, and millions more.

Monteverdi

3.     The 1610 Vespers. French, Spanish and Italian music of Claudio Monteverdi’s time, especially anything Venetian, has been a passion of mine since my early thirties. At home we sometimes play nothing but Venice (Lassus, the Gabrielis, &c.) whole weekends, especially at Easter, which has the effect of floating continuously hours on the second glass of prosecco. The operas and madrigals delight in their discovery of a colour, light and movement (‘mo-bi-le’ as the Italians say, also ‘so-a-ve’) not previously translatable into sounds. Jerusalem is the centre of the world, but when I hear Venice singing about Jerusalem in 1610, Venice is the centre of the world. I had cassette copies off the radio of this 1966 recording, which is a landmark of Early Music. Concentus Musicus Wien (pictured on sleeve) play on original instruments under the inspiration of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and direction of Jürgen Jürgens. ‘Original instruments’ was an emerging concept that assisted in the almighty war of attitudes about how to play and sing this music that has raged ever since. That’s their problem and our good fortune if it makes more prosecco music. I have several recordings of the 1610 Vespers that chart fifty years of progress, from Monteverdi-if-he-was-Beethoven to Monteverdi-if-he-was-Ligeti. I bought this set (‘Grand Prix du Disque’) for $5 at the Spensley Street Primary School Fair in Clifton Hill in 1997. I could hardly believe what I was looking at in the milk crate.