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Sam Richards is one of those people who as well as being
multi-talented is also extremely modest, as a recent performance (as poet) at
Plymouth art centre testified. His rant 'against excellence' made the point
succinctly with his usual good humour as well as including an unmistakeable
political barb. Although an accomplished poet/performer Sam's major role is
as a composer/musician, one who has combined a long interest in improvisation
with a role as collector of folk song. His mixing of the vernacular with the
'highbrow' (or rather, his questioning of the terms and their history) has
always been a feature of his material and output. He's also a writer on
music, having produced, among other tomes, a book on John Cage and another on
music and society in the twentieth century, entitled Sonic Harvest
(Towards Musical Democracy).
His new book, The Engaged Musician,
is organised on the one hand, in what I'm going to call a practical yet
'theoretical' argument, combined with alternate chapters, which take some
aspect of contemporary practice, via concrete examples of working musicians,
to expand upon and flesh out the arguments. It's a novel approach which is
stimulating and effective, and for a non-musician like myself, not too
difficult to follow. Richards' approach is political in the sense that he
regards music, rightly, as a key aspect of our cultural life together and
makes the point that it's actually virtually impossible to be 'apolitical',
with verve and impressive engagement, avoiding dry and arid language yet
making his points with clarity. Where he doesn't have answers he lets you
know this but the word 'engaged' in the title is no accident - this is a
writer who thinks about what he is doing as he does in his work as a musician
and facilitator of other performers.
The starting point for the book itself is fascinating, a detail of a Hogarth
print, dated around 1741, entitled The Enraged Musician. In it, a court musician is looking out from an open
window onto a street scene which is crowded with characters and clearly with
a variety of sounds and noises. Some of this clamour comes from actual
instruments or singing - a 'parallel figure' to the indoors musician, for
example, is facing the window and playing a clarinet-like instrument. He is
'of the street' and shabbier than his counterpart but a musician
none-the-less and he is surrounded by clamour and bustle. There is the
beginning of an argument here, between the 'bewigged, interior musician',
with his ears covered to keep out the noise, and the world of the street,
with its multitude of distraction and 'cacophony', an introduction to the
music of the twentieth century perhaps, in its questioning of the nature and
diversity of music and of the power relations which enable its production and
dissemination. Richards takes on technology in its ever developing and transgressing
forms and the institutions which make possible and control the outputs and
the manner in which these aspects can be mediated and challenged by the grass
roots and by those with a more democratic world view. He is not devoid of
critiquing those who he may clearly otherwise feels sympathy towards -
Cornelius Cardew, for example, or even in some senses Ewan MacColl, when he
feels the 'approach from above' is ineffective and potentially patronising,
but he always sees the complexity within work where a composer is attempting
to marry the social with the musical and is most critical, quite rightly, in
my view, of music which does nothing but service a shallow but pervasive
commercial interest. The chapters which deal with practising musicians all
contain links to the music so it's quite possible to follow-up on the
arguments and also find yourself introduced to a variety of music which you
might not come across otherwise. This is a stimulating book which favours the
imagination over the advert and which brings together a vast amount of
musical material to suggest a future rich in possibility and diversity but
one which is constantly threatened by an economic system which professes
freedom but genuflects to money and to narrow commercial interests. As Ursuala
Le Guin puts it in the preface to The Engaged Musician:
The exercise
of the imagination is dangerous to those who
profit from
the way things are because it has the power to
show that the
way things are is not permanent, not universal,
not necessary.
Richards' thinking is often subtle and
detailed - and all the better for it - but he knows how to speak to the enemy
when necessary. This is a fascinating book which is a must for contemporary
music students and for just about everyone else, I'd say.
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Kelvin Corcoran is a poet whose work I feel a need to
re-engage with after reading this impressive bunch of essays edited by Andy
Brown. Large-scale commentaries on an author's work - particularly a
contemporary poet whose impressive output is ongoing - can seem like an
intimidating addition to the work itself but I feel that this substantial
book, together with Corcoran's New and Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2004), provide a great introduction to the work of a writer whose
reputation is on the rise. Corcoran's ability to merge the political with the
lyrical in a postmodern manner which retains a serious approach while also
delighting the attentive reader, is pretty much unique in the British poetry
scene and it's good to see his work attracting this kind of useful critical
attention.
I can't provide an essay by essay meta-criticism here but I will point
towards some of my favourite pieces and hopefully suggest why these essays
are worth engaging with. They range from the subject of Corcoran's relation
to Greece (both in myth and how this relates to our world in the here and
now) where Peter Riley's seminal approach suggests how the worlds of then and
now are mediated and also adds some biographical details which are
invaluable. Andy Brown adds a political critique which embraces the NHS and
also provides intriguing commentary on Corcoran's actual methods of
composition. John Hall focuses intensely on the lyrical qualities of
Corcoran's writing, making some fine distinctions between the nature of song
and poetry and refers, perhaps surprisingly, to Eric Burdon and Burt
Bacharach in passing. The relationship between high art and popular culture
is a theme which re-emerges here at various points as does the sophistication
of Corcoran's approach, which combines direct statement and emotional
openness with a postmodern sensibility more often connected to surface glitz
and technique. In this respect I was very taken with Luke Kennard's quite
complex yet explanatory essay on 'the prose poem' which I'm still thinking
about days after having read it. I feel after having read this piece that I
understand, for the first time, the full implication of Adorno's comment on
'the impossibility of art after Auschwitz'. Kennard's application of
surrealist art in relation to Corcoran's work (he's not suggesting that
Corcoran is a surrealist) is both deep and thought provoking and something
I'm going to have to think about more seriously.
Jos Smith takes on the subject of landscape in Corcoran's oeuvre and seems to
have been influenced by Andrew Duncan's perceptive notion of separate frames
which overlap but never quite interlock, creating an almost cubist notion of
time and space. Smith also puns on the notion of umbrage (as in shady -
'umbrageous', and in 'taking umbrage', as in being insulted) and Marvell
seems to be an unacknowledged reference point here. Much is made, by several
commentators, of Corcoran's exploration of 'Eng-a-land' and its relation (in history and literature)
to Greece and the colonial mindset, while Zoe Brigley Thompson focuses
primarily on his poetry about art, with particular emphasis on the work of
Roger Hilton. Simon Smith's succinct and exacting essay combines Corcoran's
interest in W.S. Graham with his ambivalence towards Pound and the way in
which this feeds into Corcoran's own presentation of history, both personal
and in terms of class, committed yet provisional, critical yet not reductive
to slogans and empty rhetoric. He also writes perceptively about Corcoran's
collection written after he experienced a stroke - Words Through a
Hole Where Once There Was a Chimpanzee's Face.
Then there are the more personal reflections, including those by Corcoran's
friend and fellow-poet Lee Harwood (Corcoran is probably the poet most alike
to Harwood in terms of his subtle dialectical approach) and a moving tribute
by Alicia Stubbersfield on Corcoran's qualities as a teacher from the
perspective of a fellow-worker and poet.
There are other impressive pieces by Scott Thurston, Kate Peddie, Ian
Davidson, David Herd and Martin Anderson, which interweave and overlap with
the above themes and it's interesting how different critical approaches can
bring a more 'overall grasp' of an individuals' work. If Andrew Duncan is
strangely missing from the list it's probably fair to say that he's written a
lot about Corcoran's work elsewhere, both suggestively and eloquently and his
writing is easily traceable in a number of relevant volumes. Mention is also
made of the huge importance of Barry MacSweeney as an influence on Corcoran
(among many others) and there are 'three conversations' between editor and
subject throughout the book which bring a more personal focus on Corcoran's
material. Finally there is a section of poems from Glenn Gould and
Everything, a recent collection by
Corcoran, which talks about illness and the uses of variation, as exemplified
in both writer and interpreter of Bach, in particular.
These essays come highly recommended. If you're at all interested in
contemporary poetry and its possibilities you might like to be acquainted
with the work of Kelvin Corcoran. Read his New and Selected Poems and then get hold of a copy of these exceptional
essays. You won't be disappointed.
© Steve Spence 2014
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