A jumbled note about memorising

Soldier 1: 'I'm putting in that your helmet is like an Easter bonnet'. Soldier 2: 'You're a damn lyre!' Soldier 3 (losing his head): 'Don't shoot him, he's only the peony player.'

While we’re on the subject of the Fischer-Dieskau family, here’s an interesting extract from an interview with Martin Fischer-Dieskau, conductor and son of Dietrich. Music and speech really aren’t that different from one another; in fact, a musician friend emailed the other day and told me that since she studied poetry a few years ago her music has changed: ‘I’ve become more of a composer’.

Anyway, Fischer-Diekau told the interviewer:

Q. Why do you conduct from memory?

A. Because it gives you more freedom. It allows a more objective sound picture. You can listen to what you do much more carefully. You are not bound to a piece of paper in front of you. It’s more honest in a way.

Q. And not more frightening?

A. Ah, no, but a hundred times more preparatory work.

Q. I imagine that in the process of memorizing, a tremendous amount of studying takes place.

A. Yes, that is true. I am not trying to criticize my colleagues here, but many conductors take on so much work. One is tempted to accept far too many offers, and then all of a sudden there is no time for preparation. You wake up and you stand there and you wave your arms and it has nothing to do with the piece. There is no identification with the music, no knowledge behind it. This makes for so much trouble between orchestras and conductors worldwide. I think most conductors who are busy want to stay busy; they are spending their time on the telephone instead of over their scores.

In other words: if you’ve done the work, you are the work. A conductor memorising the entire musical score and conducting from memory is a very deep expression of the idea that art resides in, and is propulsed through, the body. Art as a form of breath, even in conducting. Maybe it’s because his father was the singer.

Okay, from the top: 'I want to break free-ee...'

It reminds me of when I went to hear Alice Oswald ‘reading’ from her epic Homer book, Memorial, in February. She stood at the lectern and the lights went out: it was just her. after a minute the hush in the auditorium grew into an entity of its own, and then she began to speak. A very short introduction , and then:

The first to die was PROTESILAUS
A focused man who hurried to darkness
With forty black ships leaving the land behind
Men sailed with him from those flower‐lit cliffs
Where the grass gives growth to everything
Pyrasus     Iton      Pteleus     Antron
He died in mid‐air jumping to be first ashore
There was his house half‐built
His wife rushed out clawing her face
Podarcus his altogether less impressive brother
Took over command but that was long ago
He’s been in the black earth now for thousands of years

All this spoken at a slow, loping pace. Then I realised she had carried no book out with her. She had no water bottle. I can’t recall what she was wearing; there was just a dark stage, and her, small. (Compared to her, the picture above looks like a Queen concert.) She barely blinked, didn’t appear nervous, and never interrupted herself. She went on:

Like a wind‐murmur
Begins a rumour of waves
One long note getting louder
The water breathes a deep sigh
Like a land‐ripple
When the west wind runs through a field
Wishing and searching
Nothing to be found
The corn‐stalks shake their green heads

And then something happened. Something that would happen over and over during the solid hour and a half we were to sit there listening to her calmly recite her entire book.  Yes, that’s right. And she never got nervous and speeded up. Or got nervous and slowed down. Or stuttered, or even cleared her throat, let alone coughed.

What happened was this:

Like a wind‐murmur
Begins a rumour of waves
One long note getting louder
The water breathes a deep sigh
Like a land‐ripple
When the west wind runs through a field
Wishing and searching
Nothing to be found
The corn‐stalks shake their green heads

… After about half an hour I learned to recognise which stanzas would be repeated. And I came to realise that Alice Oswald probably composes her poems while she is out walking – at the very least she learns and revises them that way. The rhythm of the body, its movements and its breath, its solidity and its air, is the rhythm of the poem.

A few weeks earlier in January, one day when things were a bit grim, I’d gone out for a walk, and memorised ‘Ode on Melancholy’ as I tramped up and down a park in Dulwich, and up and down the roads, past houses and cars and people who probably wondered why I was muttering to myself. It was a great feeling. There’s a road that, while I walked along there I was saying the second stanza over and over: ‘Or on the wealth of globèd peonies’… And now, when I look back on it, I see peonies, as if they’d been everywhere.

I realised that once you’ve incorporated those words, you no longer need to remember them: they really are tucked inside there with your breath, as if it were a pocket; and in your mind’s eye as if you’d actually seen them.

Exactly ten days earlier a writer and blogger had spotted these 'globèd peonies' in New York.

So one by one we honoured the fallen of the Trojan War, and with them many fallen, and their wives and children and friends, and the earth they fell on, and the time they fell out of… and an hour and  a half passed in a sort of trance, as if we were walking to somewhere far away with Alice Oswald… and you think, maybe that’s what poetry used to be like in the old days. (‘No, no! Go not to Lethe…’)

And there’s another thing: the Guardian’s obituary for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau says that after he retired from singing, he took up a second career, reciting literary texts.