Tips on the art of giving a lecture recital at 9.00 in the morning

Tips on the art of giving a lecture recital at 9.00 in the morning

by

Composer/Singer Susannah Self

My mission was to deliver an aspect of my practice based PhD research at The Royal Birmingham Conservatoire which is concentrated on Composing music for audiences who don't go to opera. I chose to show my compositional strategies in creating Quilt Song a new opera for Birmingham through the process of a Lecture/ Recital. This took place at The Royal Northern College of Music as part of the HARP, Hub for Artistic Research in Performance Conference on Friday 29th June 2018.  

Here firstly are my top tips for such an event

1. Don't panic about the early time, just calmly get up at 6.00 am in order to prepare mind and voice to be on all cylinders by 9.00am. Scientific research says it take three hours from waking to be on top form.

2. Make sure you arrange with the organisers the day before just how your Powerpoint is going to work. It is very unwise to leave it to the last moment.

3. Arrive at least an hour before the presentation just in case there is no piano! Yes this was the case in the Carole Nash Recital Room on the Friday morning in question. Fortunately RNCM has superb organisation and I got one installed in time.

4. Do not put leaflets on top of piano, it’s not allowed .

5. Make sure your presentation runs to time.

6. Make sure you get a feel for the piano (superb) and sing in the acoustic (superb) even if it means simultaneously warming up with an accordion and recorder player!

7. All ready to go, breathe, relax, all will be well.

8. Be entertaining and authentic: Opening phrase: “My new opera Quilt Song is about freedom but also the making of it is about my personal freedom as a composer escaping from the tyranny of the post-Darmstadt School”. 

My performance went really well and I was pleased with my growing skills at demonstrating ‘tit-bits’ of music in a musical and engaging way, thanks to watching Daniel Tong’s presentation “On the road to Heligenstadt: Kurt Schwertsik and Redemption on the Path to Beethoven’s Late Style”. Daniel makes his playing seem easy, like cutting through butter. The day before my presentation (my day off to engage with other presentations and presenters) I enjoyed the keynote speech by HARP organiser David Horne. He described with efficient bullet points the minutiae of how difficult it is to notate improvisation effectively and how stultifying the results can be. He demonstrated this on a video with the awesome composer/oboist Melinda Maxwell playing. She also had a talk the next day: “A key to Unlocking Strategies for Improvisation.” which was keenly honed by her playing skill, ‘live’ improvisation, artistic intrigue and her astounding laugh.

I was disappointed though that Adam Swayne, a professor at RNCM who presented a lecture /recital “New Music for New Politics”, didn’t attend mine ( I expect he was too busy doing professorial things) because I felt we had a lot in common. I think he would have enjoyed my compositional strategies which are partly informed by social issues. He mentioned Cornelius Cardew quite a few times which seemed a bit out of date, however, his piano playing was really nifty as was his use of Pink anti -Trump hats which he threw randomly into the audience. This proved a real winner. 

There were even more impressive jewels in the crown for me to enjoy at this neatly acronymned HARP conference. The ‘fat controller’ J Simon Van der Walt from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland explored the potential of ‘live’ coding in contemporary performance. As he improvised we saw a Tom Cruise ‘Minority Report’ type of coding flashing up on the presentation screen. The co-ordination of this with the variegated electronic sounds was hypnotic and engaging. The fact that he looked like a clone of John Adams added to the drama and I liked his laid back Master of the Universe performance style. We enjoyed a beer in the generously stocked RNCM bar afterwards. Again I wished he had stirred from his bed in the friendly local Ibis hotel earlier so as to attend my presentation since I felt we were kindred spirits. This was perhaps the one main problem of this conference where it was solely formatted as presenter after presenter. Many of these seemed to arrive just to do their  ‘thing ‘ and didn’t hang around to engage which after all is one of the main joys of such an event. Perhaps the conference could have been ‘messed up’ a bit with some delegates giving shorter "Provocations” of 5 minutes with flash discussions, such as we do at BCU. It’s amazing how much you can fit into five minutes to bring across a research angle. Also the format was three parallel sessions. Perhaps two parallel sessions with shorter slots of 15 to 20 minutes could give everyone a chance but have a hopefully higher audience attendance.

Recovering from my 9.00am start I very much enjoyed afterwards a lecture/recital by Naiara De La Puente from the swish Sibelius Academy. She played stunningly on a black lacquered Pigini button accordion (totally different technique to a keyboard accordion). She displayed the amazing compositional techniques and wizardry of composer Sofia Gubaidulina in a solo accordion piece called “Out of the depths I cry to thee O Lord”. Here the bellows of the accordion huffed and sighed in their searchings without specific pitches, this was then interfaced with dense polytonal chords.  “In Croce” for cello and accordion, also by  Gubaidulina, there was great sensitivity to the resources of the accordion showing that it has real provenance in the field of contemporary composition. Preceding this was a far more recessed and nuanced presentation by Giorgio Tedde from Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi: “Instrument ergonomics as a base for the composition of the performance: A specific application in composing for recorder”. Giorgio is as slim, elegant and humble as the Turin shroud. It was good to encounter an even more mature student than myself!  His piece for recorder featured haunting circular breathing which made the performer simultaneously powerful and vulnerable. The final performance/presentation I saw at HARP was “Finding a Place for Bob and Cynthia” delivered with great wit and authenticity by the adroit Paul Norman from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. He copiously took the philosophy of musical composition to the very edge of sanity. A sure soul mate of John Cage, Paul’s presentation left me none the wiser as to where composition could go, but nevertheless, I left the conference with a feeling of wild elation. I had achieved a sense of freedom which, like a Joycean acolyte, is one of the themes with which I started the top of this blog! 

The photo is a Selfie : Susannah Self taken with the 'found' piano just before her 9.00 am Lecture/Recital