Have your say…

Cage on stage

It was good to read about Julius Eastman in your July issue.

The story about John Cage being angry with Eastman’s performance in Song Books is important, but when Claire Jackson writes ‘… surely this is the very essence of chance performance’, that is to misunderstand Cage’s ideas. John Cage said he used chance operations in composition so that nothing would be left to chance in performance. Eastman was actually trying to out Cage as being gay, but John considered his sexuality a private matter. Petr Kotik, of the SEM Ensemble, told me that on that occasion John furiously thumped the table and said to Eastman: ‘Of course, anything goes; but you can’t just do what you want.’ Think about it; it makes great sense. Robert Worby, London

Joint ventures

In the June issue Terry Blain, writing about Seven Ages of Women on the cover disc, says ‘The notion of several composers banding together to write a single piece of music is not popular in classical music.’ Yet this is your second cover disc to present such a work: the CD for your November 2002 issue contained Bright Cecilia – Variations On A Theme By Purcell, a single work that comprised sections composed by Purcell (arr. Matthews), Colin Matthews, Judith Weir,

Poul Ruders, David Sawer, Michael Torke, Anthony Payne and Magnus Lindberg.

Mark Jones, Bristol

Cartoonly inspired

Tom Service’s June issue column about the musical references and stylistic innovations in cartoons such as Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry was interesting. He might have mentioned that the Chinese pianist Lang Lang has often said that he first became interested in classical music whilst still a youngster as a result of watching Tom & Jerry cartoons on television, particularly when Tom was pictured seated at a piano in ‘The Cat Concerto’.

Garry High, Guildford

A future role?

I was delighted to read in the June issue your excellent tribute on the approaching 75th birthday of the great bassbaritone Sir Willard White. I was privileged to go to the 1986 Glyndebourne production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in which he sang Porgy. However, unlike that role, most if not all his major operatic roles were originally written for a white singer. It is thus very sad and depressing for me that he never got the opportunity to sing the eponymous role of Koanga, an enslaved African prince, in the opera by Frederick Delius. The opera was scheduled at ENO for 1982 but was one of those

cancelled due to Arts Council cuts that year. Surely this was an operatic role which he would have relished. Is it still too late? He mentioned in the article that he has no plans to retire! David Green, Fakenham

Beggars aplenty

Berta Joncus is surely correct to say in the May issue that John Gay wrote The Beggar’s Opera ‘to needle high-end consumers’. But Gay’s creative genius had a very material goad. The speculative South Sea Bubble had burst a few years earlier and, as Sir William Blackstone later recalled, ‘beggared half the nation’ – John Gay among them. Although the libretto is filled with London lowlifes – pimps and prostitutes, highwaymen and receivers – the company of beggars remains in the background. John Gay, who introduces himself in line one, is the Beggar.

John Orth, University of

North Carolina, US

A Humphrey harumph

Having just read Humphrey Burton’s superb autobiography, In My Own Time, I feel compelled to comment on its review by your critic Geoff Brown in your July issue.

I have read many books about musicians, but few have held my attention as has Burton’s, which provides much fascinating detail and is written with style. I think it a great shame that the review fails to be more generous in acknowledging the massive contribution that Burton has made in promoting classical music in the UK and abroad. Barry Bloxham, Taunton

Sir John in time

Talking of extraneous sounds on recordings (see also Letter of the Month, left), there are numerous examples of Sir John Barbirolli vocally urging his players to achieve maximum emotional expression. One is towards the end of the first movement of his 1964 recording of Schubert’s Great C major Symphony, where he can be clearly heard beating time with his baton on the music stand. When this was once mentioned to him by his recording producer, he reputedly replied, ‘Well I’m only human, aren’t I?’

Keith Wellings, Halesowen

Tavener’s tweets

Regarding unwanted noises, there’s an old BBC Radio Classics CD of Tavener’s Akhmatova Requiem; his Six Russian Folk Songs, which complete the disc, were recorded at the Camden Roundhouse – in which birds can clearly be heard singing high up in the rafters above the stage. Might Olivier Messiaen have also been up there, jotting down the commentary of the avian audience?

James Argles, London

Grunting Glenn

Glenn Gould’s irrepressible humming while playing the piano inspired one of his colleagues to pick up a gas mask at a military surplus store and to bring it as a joke to a recording session. Amused, Gould strapped it on and sat at his piano, pretending that he was actually going to use it during takes. A visiting photojournalist snapped his shutter a few times. Dismayed, Gould finally persuaded the photographer not to use the photos, knowing that his image as an eccentric was already too well established.

David English,

Massachusetts, US