After a sleepy day, recovering from yesterday's late visit from Bennett and Merrie, I put myself together to walk down through the northeastern suburbs, between the universities, down through the center of a practically deserted Sunday-night town, and over the river to the Sage Gateshead (our dazzling new-ish local concert hall) for a work by Chris Wood, a brilliant 'traditional' musician. We have a lot of folk/traditional people in the music department here – this is in fact a national center for it – and they tend to be very lively, familial, and not incidentally highly skilled players; but Chris, who occasionally works with our people, is exceptional, as a player and as a composer.
A few years ago, he'd sent me a short version of his radio piece Listening to the River (a 25-minute version, later finished as an hour-long broadcast work commissioned by the BBC). It was like Steve Reich's Different Trains, but frankly a vastly better piece – in the same way, Wood taped a number of people's voices (in this case, people living in the Thames Valley, which is where he grew up, talking about the river itself) and used them as material, composing tunes and textures based on the rhythms and pitches of the spoken voice. Although I've never heard the whole piece, the short version was one of the best things I'd ever heard – naturally, easily gorgeous music, delicate and intelligent and marvellous and amazingly touching – I've played it for many people over the past couple of years.
Tonight's performance was Christmas Champions, and it had stories, traditional tunes, and several newly written songs in it; the actual material would seem pretty slight if you described it, but what he and storyteller Hugh Lupton did with it was really wonderful. This is about the deepest skill – the ability to make most subtle and sophisticated of work seem completely casual and natural; Wood's own assertive, occasionally hilarious charm in live performance made it even better. I was sitting there stunned at one point, while he held his own fiddle negligently in the air, one-handedly doing pizzicati as an accompaniment to his own voice, as natural as breathing and with as little apparent attention – but with small shifts and details that made it subtly finer than most performances that exhibit more sheer hard work.
Is there any way of putting into words exactly where his skill lies? – maybe there isn't, but I keep trying. Something about the delicate precision of small sounds, lightly done, in unexpected relations with each other – no, that's too conceptual, it's more immediate than that... the close musical lines, the dense tangles of notes, the slight difference from the traditional expectation, but not different in a conceptual way – almost: different in a way that seems even more rooted in the innate, in the deeply, archaically natural....
And yes, a couple of references to short life, death, loss (typical of folk music) were good for me, given the past week; I did admittedly cry two or three times in the evening.
Anyway: I'm glad I bought the CDs they had on hand. A great antidote to the appalling Christmas music that keeps popping up in restaurants and stores all this week.
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