The harp and the flute, both in India and the West, often seem the most ethereal of instruments.  In India, the god Krishna plays a flute, and Saraswati – goddess of the arts – plays the veena, India’s equivalent to the harp;  in the West, we have Pan’s pipes, Apollo’s lyre, and the harps and trumpets of the angels.   In all cultures, the flute and harp are two of the most ancient instruments, and the two most symbolic of art itself. 

Flute and harp has a repertoire that is exceptionally unpretentious, warm, and emotionally honest.  Together with poems on similar themes, this concert explores how music, poetry, performance, and art in general can come from different countries, periods of time and systems of belief, but still express feelings and ideas that are universal. 

Notes

‘Adam and Jessica’ from Gifts: Poems 1992-1999 (Grevatt & Grevatt, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2002), by William Radice.  There are nine characters or voices in the book.  Adam, a pyschotherapist, is presented mainly as a husband and father.  This poem uses a simple form in which pairs of lines end in the same word.  The marriage it describes can also be a metaphor for the marriage of flute and harp.

Handel: Concerto in B Flat, Op. 6 No. 4, first movement (Allegro Moderato), from ‘Alexander’s Feast’.  Flute obbligato:  Paul Hurst

Handel’s concerto is one of the most famous harp concertos.  Less well-known is that it was composed as part of the music for Handel’s opera, Alexander’s Feast.  Love and Music hold a contest, and the harp concerto represents Music’s bid for superiority. 

Love wins, but not without some recognition that Music gave the competition a good shot!

Twelve very short poems from Rabindranath Tagore: Particles, Jottings, Sparks: The Collected Brief Poems, translated by William Radice (Angel Books, London, 2001).

The great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) wrote very short poems throughout his life, but particularly on his worldwide travels after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.  This book is a complete translation of the three main collections of them, nearly 500 poems in all.  Music is a frequent theme, and the flute and the veena are favourite images – as evidenced in the poems selected for today’s concert.  Tagore uses an endless variety of verse forms in these brief poems – almost every one is different.

Nino Rota: Sonata for Flute and Harp

Rota is chiefly remembered for his film scores, most notably “The Godfather”, for which he won an Academy Award.  Well acquainted with new musical developments from his youth (during which he enjoyed a long personal friendship with Stravinksy), Rota followed a quite different path in his own music, retaining the supremacy of melody, a tonality free of harmonic complexity, established patterns of rhythm and form, and a concept of music as spontaneous, direct expression of feeling.

Two sonnets from William Radice’s recently completed Green, Red, Gold, a novel in 101 sonnets.  It aims at truth of feeling, clarity of language and emotional intensity.  The sonnets use the Shakespearean rhyme scheme ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG, but are freer metrically, so as to incorporate rhythms that have entered English poetry since Shakespeare’s time.

Marguerite Roesgen-Champion: Sonnet, from Suite Française

Roesgen-Champion (1894-1976) is much neglected.  She was a clavicinist as well as composer, and a French delicacy suffuses all her writing.  She loved the flute and harp combination, and the repertoire is the richer for her work.  ‘Sonnet’ is taken from a three movement French suite, which also includes a mournful ‘Complainte’ and lively ‘Rondeau’. 

‘Rasa’, from the last part of Gifts: ‘One song to many tunes’.  In this section of the book, the nine characters merge into one voice.  Poems are written to favourite tunes: this one is written to fit ‘Musick for a while’ (words by John Dryden; music by Henry Purcell).  That is not to say they are intended to be sung: they explore the (spoken) rhythmic consequences of writing words to fit tunes, preserving the repetitions of the original.  This poem is about rasa in Indian tradition: the ‘juice’ or ‘flavour’ of feeling that is conveyed by art.  The suite by John Mayer that follows is based on the nine rasas that classical Indian theorists distinguished: wonder, laughter, love, etc.  But the nine rasas collectively embody a general concept of rasa (just as ‘music’ or ‘poetry’ are general concepts embodied in separate pieces or poems), and this is the subject here.

John Mayer: Nava Rasas

Nava Rasas was commissioned by Helen Radice and Catherine Goodman and premiered at the Nehru Centre in January 2003.  Like ‘Rasa’ and other poems in Gifts, it explores the Indian aesthetic concept of the nine rasas: the nine principal emotions art expresses.

Consequently, there are nine short movements, each one evoking a particular emotion:  Wonder;  Laughter;  Love;  Calm;  Disgust;  Heroism;  Pathos;  Fear;  Anger.

Traditionally the sequence ends with ‘Shanti’ or ‘Calm’, but John Mayer specified an angry conclusion in response to the conditions of the time.