Archives for category: Music
Newer Entries »

Music and Mental Illness

November 20, 2010 //
6

2010 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great Romantic-era composer Robert Schumann.

Schumann was perhaps the archetypal moody artist, alternating between blazing bouts of creativity and periods of antisocial depression.

It’s a common cliché that has, all too often, been sustained by sad life stories punctuated by tragic endings. Schumann died a broken man in an insane asylum. More recently, we’ve seen gifted musicians like Kurt Cobain and Elliott Smith take their own lives after struggling with depression.

There are many, many others who fit the cliché (Tchaikovsky, Billie Holiday, Joy Division’s Ian Curtis…the list goes on and on). Why are there so many artists and musicians that struggle with depression and other forms of mental illness?

Anthony Storr was a British psychiatrist who wrote about music and mental illness in his book Music and the Mind. He suggested that there might be a link between mental illness and creativity – he wrote: “The ability to think creatively, to make new links between concepts, is more often found in families which include a member who is diagnosable as mentally ill.”

I can’t be absolutely certain, but I’d be surprised if Schumann, Cobain and Smith weren’t at their happiest when they were writing and playing music. We’ve all experienced a moment in our lives when music has helped us get through a rough patch; when listening to or singing a particular song has just seemed to simultaneously hurt so good and help mitigate the pain.

Is it also possible that, for Schumann, Cobain and Smith, music was almost like self-medication, a treatment for their mental ailments?

I put together a short musical essay about music and mental illness that first aired on CBC Radio 2′s In Concert on Sunday October 24th, 2010. You can listen to it here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

For info on all the music I used in the piece, please look here and scroll down to the list of musical works.

Tags , ,
Categories Docs, Music, On the air, Radio

Carmen

November 19, 2010 //
0

This Saturday, on CBC Radio’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, I’ll be presenting a Canadian Opera Company production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, starring soprano Rinat Shaham.

Photo by Michael Cooper, COC

Carmen is an opera that’s impossible not to love (in my opinion). It’s not for nothing it’s one of the most popular operas of all time. And Carmen herself is a big part of that. She’s a powerful woman, irresistible, independent, bewitching, someone who meets every challenge head-on. Someone who loves the spotlight.

On the show, I’ll be taking a look at the Carmen archetype by paying tribute to singers who embody Carmen’s spirit: singers like Maria Callas, Edith Piaf, Loretta Lynn, and, especially to be remembered this year, the late Lhasa de Sela.

Lhasa passed away on Jan 1, 2010 in Montreal, much too young, after a battle with breast cancer. I was in Montreal that week and it felt like the city itself sensed the magnitude of the loss: it snowed for 40 hours straight – true, not an uncommon occurrence in Montreal in winter – but there was a palpable hush, as if Montreal’s musical soul was taking a moment to acknowledge the tragic loss of one of its most talented daughters.

Hope you can join me, Saturday, November 20th, starting at 1pm  (1:30 NT, 2 AT) on CBC Radio 2 across Canada or online from wherever you are at cbc.ca/radio2.

Tags , ,
Categories Music, On the air, Radio

Chopin’s Ghost

September 24, 2010 //
3

I always like it when something opens up my ears in ways I hadn’t considered.

That’s exactly what happened this week when I listened to a new piece by Gordon Monahan called A Piano Listening to Itself.

Monahan’s been creating compositions for years that force us to think about how we listen – he’s swung speakers around and he’s strung super-long piano wires in unexpected places, for example. I first encountered his work when I was producing the doc series, The Wire: the Impact of Electricity on Music.  He had a lot of interesting things to say about how we interact with the sounds around us and about the influence of the composer John Cage.

This time around, Monahan has strung six piano wires from the roof of the Royal Castle Bell Tower in Warsaw, Poland, and attached motors to them to make them vibrate with an acoustic signal of piano music by Chopin. You can sort of see the setup in the photo he sent me.

The impression you get is of listening to the ghost of Chopin.

Now, that’s the impression I got just listening to a recording. I’m imagining that’s what it must have been like to walk through that square in Warsaw and come upon that piano by chance – to feel as though you’d stumbled on Chopin’s ghost.

I didn’t get to go to Warsaw, but I did have a chance to speak with Monahan for this Sunday’s edition of In Concert, a weekly classical music program on CBC Radio 2 that I guest-host every once in a while.

The thing that struck me most about his new piece is that it’s the amplification of an electronic signal by acoustic means (piano strings playing back an  mp3 file via the motors attached to them).  If you think about it, that’s exactly the reverse of how we usually experience music these days – well, at least, music that isn’t electronic itself in the first place.

My ears also got opened this week listening to the miraculous playing of Austrian pianist Till Fellner, who plays Beethoven piano concerti exactly the way I like to hear them. He is a master of precision, and listening to him is like drinking some kind of mind-clarifying elixir. On Sunday’s program, he plays Beethoven’s 1st along with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Kent Nagano. Just absolutely glorious.

Tags , , , ,
Categories Music, On the air, Radio

The Cunning Little Vixen

August 20, 2010 //
0

When I was a kid, like many kids, the stories I loved best were the ones with talking animals, from Louis the swan in The Trumpet of the Swan, to the rabbits in Watership Down, to a certain frog named Kermit. There’s something undeniably magical about looking at the human world through the eyes of animals.

Now that I’m all grown up, I’ve noticed that apart from being fantastic and enchanting, and, well, anthropomorphic, all those stories have something else in common. They all somehow manage to strike at something deeper about nature and humanity and the cycle of life. (Yes, even Kermit.)

I loved all those stories, but I had one clear favourite: Fantastic Mr Fox, by Roald Dahl. But long before Fantastic Mr Fox was a glint in Roald Dahl’s eye (much less Wes Anderson’s), another talking fox was at the heart of another story, a story for grown-ups: The Cunning Little Vixen, the opera by the Czech composer Leoš Janáček.

It’s just as enchanting and just as powerful, and I’m lucky to get the chance to present it this Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, August 21, on CBC Radio 2, in a production from Florence with the glorious Isabel Bayrakdarian in the starring role. I’ll also be celebrating the life of the late Australian conductor and Janáček champion, Sir Charles Mackerras, who died this past July.

Tags , ,
Categories Music, On the air, Radio

Ode to the Salish Sea

August 9, 2010 //
3

Just over a year ago, I composed an audio artwork commissioned by the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio Art. I’m excited to share it as the first audio I’m posting here on my new website (now that I’ve figured out how to post audio).

It’s called Ode to the Salish Sea and it premiered in Toronto on May 30, 2009 in octophonic surround sound at the Wychwood Art Barns, during the Radio Without Boundaries conference. It was broadcast that month across Canada on the venerable and undeservedly discontinued CBC program Outfront, and has since been broadcast on KUOW in Seattle.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

At the time of the production of the piece, the Salish Sea was a proposed name for the inland waters that run from Olympia, WA, north to Campbell River, BC.  Last November, it became an official name in the USA, to be used on all new maps. I later produced a documentary for CBC’s The Current called The Sound and the Sea, based on Ode to the Salish Sea. (I’ll be posting that here too in a little bit, but if you like, you can hear it here now.)

A very long-winded description of the Ode, written during production, follows below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags , , ,
Categories Docs, Music, Radio

Sweet summer music

July 23, 2010 //
3

Once in a while I’m lucky enough to get to keep Sheryl MacKay‘s chair warm while she’s off on holiday.

This weekend on NXNW on CBC Radio 1 I’m thrilled to get the chance to listen to some of my favourite music and share it with folks listening across BC.  On July 24th I’m revisiting a feature interview I did with Bill Henderson from the band Chilliwack a couple of months ago.  I didn’t grow up in Western Canada so I wasn’t really aware of Chilliwack – I mean, they were on my radar, but only as a faint blip.  Now that I know their music a bit better, I think they’re underrated in the rest of Canada.  This was a great band, and some of their work in the 1970s was pretty groundbreaking.

On July 25th I’m delighted to have the chance to sit down with Aidan Knight.  He’s my favourite new artist of 2010, hands down.  Every song on his debut album Versicolour speaks to me in some way.  His voice and his melodies are beyond reproach, his songwriting and his arrangements are intelligent and beautiful, and he’s a skilled lyricist to boot.  What a treat.

Also on the 25th, I’ll speak with author Adam Lewis Schroeder whose new novel In the Fabled East just finished blowing me away about an hour ago.  (Now what do I do?  The downside of coming to the end of a great novel.)

Feeling pretty lucky.

Tags , ,
Categories Music, On the air
Newer Entries »