Margaret Throsby indulges her curiosity about musical questions from improvisation to why we get musical tingles.
What luxury! To be invited to guest edit this issue of Limelight was an opportunity too good to be missed. I grabbed the chance to indulge my curiosity about some enduring musical questions, which preoccupy many music lovers. One is the ‘lost’ art of improvising: lost, largely in classical music, but thriving, as ever, in jazz. Philip Clark, an expert in both, shines his musical searchlight, and comes up with some intriguing insights.
November 9 marks the 27th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Amidst the spontaneous celebrations that erupted in Berlin, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, seated on a borrowed chair in front of a heavily graffitied part of the wall, played Bach. “I did it from my heart,” he said later. Jo Litson looks at orchestras playing under the most difficult circumstances – from war zones to inner-city wastelands.
A question that crops up over and again is why some music engenders a physical response: goosebumps or tingles down the spine. Different strokes for different folks, you might say, but there is often commonality and the same piece will have the same effect on lots of people: think Wagner’s Liebestod, think the duet from The Pearl Fishers. Pianist-composer Benjamin Martin has entered the fray for us with his own take on this phenomenon. And Clive Paget examines the often magical collaborations between creators of music and writers of the words, from Mozart and Da Ponte to Goethe and Schubert to Gilbert and Sullivan and the Gershwins.
And this edition of Limelight celebrates a beautiful book I collaborated on with photographer Anthony Browell. It features Anthony’s wonderful pictures of members of the Australian Chamber Orchestra at work, at play and in private. We’ve included in the book transcripts of interviews I recorded with these astonishing musicians during their 40th anniversary celebrations in 2015. You can catch an advance peek in this issue.
We have the usual line-up of lively columns and stories, our Composer of the Month is CPE Bach, and we explore the artistic life of one of Europe’s oldest and most beautiful cities, Lisbon. It’s a real musical feast!
Margaret Throsby
Guest Editor, Limelight Magazine October 2016
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