I’ve been to Birmingham on Christmas Eve. The train from London was far too expensive for what you got. The smell of diesel exhaust was pervasive and the interior, fully made of cheap looking blinky-winky plastics, felt fake. I wondered where these enormous amounts of plastic would end up at the end of the train’s life. But, who cares after all? The journey went quick and comfortably. Before I could have imagined, I was a willy-nilly tiny part of the crowd in New Street, blown away by the phoney stuff in the Christmas stalls that formed a trace of white and purple lights in the middle of the road. It looked as if a substantial part of the German Schwarzwald had been chopped down in order to make this circus happen. The stalls weren’t made from plastic but from real thick trunks. At least these durable stalls could be reused over the course of the next hundred years.
It was Black Friday, the 24th of November. About four months before Brexit would take place. The stalls carried German captions like Pfannkuchenhaus, Schoko Träume and Himbeer Glühwein. The whole spectacle appeared like a strange fascination for everything that wasn’t British. At least, I will never understand the idea of heating wine as if it were soup.
The streets were noisy, amplified not in the least by what some may have called music. To me, it rather felt like a resonating goo that hides its real ingredients. Some people looked happy, others even enthusiastic, but many rather apathetic. On one corner, there was a sparse stall with a couple of bearded men that praised the Quran. People didn’t pay attention. Many men carried a one litre pint of beer, so a Quran wouldn’t fit in their hands anymore.
Everything went on in peace. Precisely what you’d expect the day before Christmas, having been carried there by a friendly, moustache-nosed bolide of Virgin Trains. Why does a train need a nose anyway? It doesn’t have to smell the track it’s following.
At the end of this street of enlightenment, there was a small remembrance of another imaginative world. Saint Martin in the Bull Ring Catholic Church seemed tiny and overwhelmed by the massive buildings that surrounded it. Or was it gently pushed by the power of commerce towards gliding off the hill? It was by all means clear which one had taken over the minds of most of the people around. After passing this Victorian church – in which a quick glance told me that a mass was taking place, with some 8 participants – I soon left this scam of western society and headed for my cheap hotel.
The low-priced reservation happened to be a scam as well, carried out by a fake online travel agency, based in Turkey. How could I have been so stupid? Looking at the voucher again, I realized that there were at least some suspicious aspects about it. The bastards at the other edge of Europe didn’t even answer my phone calls. I soon found out on the web that the reservation was really fake. I couldn’t help the idea popping up in my mind that Turkey is an islamic country. The autonomy of one’s brain can reveal strange connotations. But the people at the hotel desk were very understanding and helpful. So, I ended up in the last vacant room they could offer, with a free cappuccino to soothe my mind. The coffee kept me from sleeping.
La chûte d’Icare – Pieter Breughel de Oude
The day after, I attended a workshop by Music Maze, led by Nancy Evans of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. On this Sunday morning the streets were empty, although full of rubbish, and the prickly smell of exhaust particles still seemed to be replacing most of the real air. The workshop’s theme was based on La Chûte d’Icare, a serial composition by Brian Feyrnehough, inspired by the famous painting of Pieter Breughel De Oude.
I thought the theme to be a strange coincidence. This famous Flemish painter was born in Peer, some 10 kms from where I work. I was really amazed that many of the small but diverse group of nine to eleven year old children knew the story of Icarus. The workshop was very well thought out. It applied the way Feyrnehough uses elements of chance in order to establish a 12-tone series. At the same time, leaving enough room for creativity. Even better, the approach invited participants to behave creatively. In music, as when traveling, it’s always a good idea to embrace chance and at the same time follow at least some rudimentary plan. Or sometimes the other way round: embrace your plan, and allow chance to happen.
After determining a series of tones through the use of playing cards, the children together with their bunch of tones, were divided into three groups of five. Each mini-ensemble got its own professional music coach, all of them members of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. A student of music education and a student of composition joined them. Together with these musical experts, the game of chance could go on. Each group put their part of the series in the found order by using sound rods and chimes. Throwing a dice decided the amount of times each of the notes should be played. Throwing a penny, heads or tails, established its length. Children are still eager to accept chance and its immediate consequences. Of course, in life, chance can be much more cruel. Imagine being born in Mosul during the last decade. It might well be, that you’d already be dead.
After establishing and rehearsing the overall structure of the composition, some children were invited to bring in their own instruments. Many of them immediately started to mesh around with rhythms and melodies. They soon found some musical stuff that was interesting enough to become part of the composition. The children’s attention span and their joy of playing musical games was amazing. It was clear that, although the group was really a reflection of Britain’s super diverse society, the children rather represented the upper middle class. Nevertheless, the workshop appeared to be free of charge. As Nancy confirmed – and I agreed with her, the real challenge is not so much the ethnical diversity of the group, but rather to establish mixed groups with middle class and lower class children altogether. Probably a much better approach would be to raise the latter out of underprivilegedness. I’m afraid time is too short and the city of Birmingham too big to achieve this before the next workshop. Anyway, these children were cooperating with their coaches and with each other so exemplarily, that after the final performance, my hope for humanity got a tiny little boost.
I left Birmingham in a much better mood than when I arrived. The sun at least did an effort to add some colour to the day. Walking through New Street again it felt like people do behave more reasonably during the day than by night. The stalls were still there. They were even open. But apparently no one felt invited to spend any attention, and certainly no money on them.
Back into London Saint Pancras station, a massive dark-skinned lottery seller was exploring some melodies with nothing more than three fingers on an upright piano in the station hall. His body hid almost two thirds of the instrument, bringing the weight of both protagonists somewhat in balance. The man persistently experimented on a small motif in dorian mode and already practiced the art of repetition and transposition by octave. The contrast between his stiff lottery-uniform and the sheer humanity of the situation was striking. When I stood in the row and finally passed the first check-in counter, his musical endeavor in front of everyone still went on without any trace of fatigue nor shame. It seemed clear to me that music made him luckier than the lottery.
Any sensitive music teacher would be proud of a pupil like him. They would encourage him to go on with this exploration of fundamental musical creativity. The motif in dorian mode would become the start of a new composition for sure. Famous composers of the past already demonstrated sufficiently that any two or three note motif is more than enough as a basis for a composition. If the lottery seller had known that simply adding an obstinate bass tone – which I’m sure he would have been able to perform instantaneously with any fourth finger – would add enormously to the emotional power of his musical inventions, his stubborn wanderings on the keyboard would strike most of the hasty passengers that now simply passed by, each towards their own destiny.