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Brass Band France Blog

Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2014 6:06 pm
by Robert Tulip
Brass Band France Blog
I am travelling around northern France and Belgium with my daughter Diana who is the singer for the Eastern Australia Brass Band. Today we were in Paris. I went with some others from our hotel near Laplace into Notre Dame by train. We managed to get into Notre Dame Cathedral with no queue, being early, so I filmed the stained glass windows, which are magnificent. Myself and a friend nicknamed Tex had a cup of coffee on the left bank of the Seine River, where we discussed some of the psychological difficulties of life, including the relation between existence, anxiety and freedom. As you do.

We then wandered down to the Louvre Museum, which is surrounded by the most magnificent and astounding sculptures, redolent of the mythology of the human conquest of nature. France follows the cult of supreme reason, so the Louvre has sculptures of all the gentlemen of logic, such as Descartes, Laplace, Colomb, Rousseau, Voltaire, all around it. We checked out the arch in which Napoleon celebrates crushing Austria at Ulm and Austerlitz, and the obelisk that Napoleon stole from Egypt, then strolled down the river to the Eiffel Tower, past some disconcertingly attired riot police, who were there to keep the protesting communists under a watchful eye.

Seeing Notre Dame amidst the rationalist names such as Laplace inspired me to explain to Tex some of my views on religion, given the obvious veneration that the people who designed and built this magnificent catherdral soaring to the heavens felt for their imagined God. Religion should be about offering people a sympathetic ear, as a way to help heal some of the psychological damage of the world. Instead, religion has largely morphed into an expansionist political organisation that has destroyed its social trust by trying to brainwash people with bullshit, and as a result is in a state of crisis. Back to that stuff another day. The rest of this post is about brass bands.

The Eastern Australia Brass Band, with about fifty members, played a concert together with the leading brass band of Paris. It was great. Sadly, it seems that brass bands are a fossilized genre, dating from the era just before amplification when they were the loudest thing around, so got popular on that basis. Once electricity transformed music, the public audience dropped brass like a stone, partly because of its stodgy obsolete religious associations. So all those rotundi in town parks are rotting away, when a hundred years ago they were the hub of the community.

These days, brass bands exist for the enjoyment their members get out of playing, with any entertainment for the public just an accidental bonus. Diana is a wonderful singer, so fronting a big band to sing Autumn Leaves and Roses of Picardy at the first world war centenary is very special. I will share some scratchy film on youtube.

Re: Brass Band France Blog

Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2014 10:08 pm
by youkrst
excuse me while i turn green with envy :-D

Re: Brass Band France Blog

Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2014 11:26 pm
by Robert Tulip
This post starts with some information and comment about brass band music, and then explains what we did today, with exquisite and evocative performances. The second part is more interesting, but please read the first bit if you are patient.

Information on the brass band genre is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_band_(British_style) Brass bands are fiercely competitive in Australia, with contests from A Grade down to D Grade. Gunnedah Shire Brass are the current national champions. I keep finding out things I never knew. The tenor horn and the baritone horn are main brass band instruments, but are less well known because they are not generally part of the classical or jazz scene. Adding a singer in the big band style is innovative, since they do tend to be conservative, but Diana fits in beautifully and is really lifting the tour. Brass bands were designed to be easy to join, so even beginners could participate. It is a shame that this participatory attitude to music has been overwhelmed by the rise of passive electronica such as the matrix pod (my characterisation of how people are being zombified by new technology). ABC radio’s classic FM station used to have a regular program of brass band music, but it seems the ABC regards tradition and diversity with some disdain, so has cancelled this program.

I first acquired a love of brass when I studied the wonderful classical piece Concerto for Orchestra by Bela Bartok at school. A brass chorale in the second movement brings out the wonderful lush and rich and mellow tones of brass harmony. I have not been able to find a youtube recording of Bartok’s brass chorale, but will keep looking.

I should just mention while I think of it, before getting on to what we did today, yesterday morning as Tex and I were wandering along towards the Champs Elysess from the Louvre, what should we stumble upon but the most magnificent statue of the Goddess Diana you could dream of. In their idiosyncratic way, the French spelt her name Diane on the plinth. Also known as Artemis, Diana is depicted in this statue with a hound ready to tear in pieces anyone who might by chance see her swimming nude. As moon goddess of the hunt, Diana has a superb statuesque dignity and nobility and divine beauty in her personality. The number of astounding statues in Paris is very impressive.

So with apologies for such extensive asides, today (Friday 20 June, the summer solstice), the Eastern Australia Brass Band played at three concerts, at the Australian Embassy, in the gardens of Notre Dame Cathedral, and at the Arc de Triomphe. This was a very special and memorable day, steadily escalating in its political symbolism, emotional resonance and spiritual intensity.

The Embassy concert featured a quintet from the band, made up of two cornets, two horns and a tuba, augmented by two flugelhorns in one piece, followed by a piece for trumpet and keyboard. Then, my daughter Diana sang Still as the Night (in French), Fly Me To The Moon (in English), and, after the return of the quintet to play Waltzing Matilda and an Australian folk song suite, Diana joined the quintet for an encore, Autumn Leaves (in English and French). Diana was utterly stunning, making it very difficult for me to restrain my beaming pride, try as I might in deference to her modesty.

His Excellency Australian Ambassador Ric Wells spoke with high praise of our host Eric Brisse, saying that the brass band connections between France and Australia are part of our diplomatic links. Eric lives in Villiers Brettonaux, and has arranged our tour.

Our second concert today, on a rotunda in the gardens behind Notre Dame, was even more special, with a wonderful appreciative audience and an extraordinarily simple but powerful location, nestled among the deep green trees.

And then, the ceremony of the flame at 6pm at the Arc de Triomphe. We stopped traffic on the Champs de Elysses while the band marched at the head of a military procession with representatives of France and Germany. The band then continued to play while the invited guests assembled around the eternal flame in the centre of the arch. Community, diplomatic and military representatives from the three countries, including children from our touring party and Ambassador Wells, laid commemorative wreaths, and the band played the three national anthems. I marched with the band associate group and was able to film the event from the front row, just two metres from the flame. Joining Australia together with France and Germany in this solemn remembrance of service and valour and loss, this ceremony symbolised solidarity in culture and steadfast commitment to peace and stability.

In chatting with one of the band members, I learned that Roses of Picardy, Diana’s signature song for the tour, is the provincial song for Picardy. Thinking of the red poppies of Flanders strongly reminds me of the song for the fallen, Flowers of the Forest, usually played on bagpipes only at funerals and memorials for soldiers who have died in battle. At the memorial for my grand uncle Jack Grant in Vignacourt Military Cemetery on 26 June, Diana will read from a letter from her great great grandfather informing her great grandfather Robbie Grant of Jack’s death, and I will say a few words.

I again filmed everything today on my camcorder, so look forward to uploading some highlights.

Re: Brass Band France Blog

Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2014 9:56 pm
by youkrst
C'est magnifique! A triumph.

Re: Brass Band France Blog

Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2014 12:56 am
by Robert Tulip
France Brass Band Blog #3 Saturday 21 June 2014

Apart from the wonderful brass music, my interests in visiting Europe include astronomy and philosophy. So I would like to use this post, while travelling on the bus with the band from Paris to Champagne in the northeast of France, to comment on these topics.

But first, what a magnificent and memorable day yesterday! I have been playing my footage of the three concerts for the band members on the bus, and I don’t mind if I whet your appetite by saying that some of it is worth watching.

Coleridge has a line in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ‘the sun he rose upon the left’ to signify the clockwise motion of the sun across the southern sky as seen from England. Then, as the cursed vessel heads into the albatross-filled wastes of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, Coleridge tells us ‘the sun now rose upon the right’, signifying the apparent anti-clockwise path through the day of the sun across the northern sky, as viewed from southern latitudes.

Coleridge’s tutor at Christ’s Hospital travelled with Captain Cook on his second voyage after going to Canada to inspect the transit of Venus, which Cook saw in Tahiti.

My reason for this poetic discursion is that we southerners are literally disoriented when visiting the north, so when the sun is at noon we imagine the orient is the occident, that east is west, because it looks like the sun stands in what for us is the northern point, when actually it crosses the meridian at due south. This sense of the sun going clockwise for someone born and raised in Australia seems as intuitive as the old idea, described by Lewis Carroll in his poem Old Father William, that people in the antipodes must walk on their heads. Similarly, the moon today, in its last quarter and about five days before new, appears in the sky in the position that only the new moon occupies in southern skies.

So the sense of astronomy starts with the intuition of the path of the sun and moon as a means of orientation, to acquire what the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger called directionality, or a sense of place and relatedness. We extend from this main observation of the two great lights to view the stars. I am very much looking forward to seeing the northern circumpolar stars, the little bear, the dragon and king Cepheus, stars that will not be seen in Australia for another ten thousand years or so.

As a way to gradually segue back from astronomy to music, and this visit to France, today, Saturday 21 June, the summer solstice, is celebrated every year in France with a national festival of music, the Fête de la Musique, also known as World Music Day.

The concept of an all-day musical celebration on the days of the solstice, was originated by American musician Joel Cohen and adapted as a national celebration each June 21 in France. The idea was embraced and made official by the French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang. In October 1981, Maurice Fleuret became Director of Music and Dance at Minister of Culture Jack Lang’s request, and applied his reflections to the musical practice and its evolution: 'music everywhere, concert nowhere'. When he discovered that one child out of two played a musical instrument, he began to dream of a way to bring people out on the streets. It first took place in 1982 in Paris as the Fête de la Musique. Ever since, the festival has become an international phenomenon, celebrated on the same day in more than 460 cities in 110 countries. Its purpose is promote music in two ways:
• Amateur and professional musicians are encouraged to perform in the streets. The slogan Faites de la musique (Make music), a homophone of Fête de la Musique, is used to promote this goal.
• Many free concerts are organized, making all genres of music accessible to the public. Two of the caveats to being sanctioned by the official Fête de la Musique organization in Paris are that all concerts must be free to the public, and all performers donate their time for free. This is true of most participating cities, now, as well.

Next is about our first day in Champagne.

Re: Brass Band France Blog

Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2014 2:09 pm
by Robert Tulip
22 June 2014
Yesterday, we left Paris at 7am and drove to Champagne. We stopped at a champagne maker, Goutorbe, http://www.champagne-henri-goutorbe.com/en/Default.asp in the small village of Aÿ for a tour of the bottlery, including the cellars or caves dug out of the chalk soil. Flanders poppies are flowering on the edges of all the fields, of wheat, lucerne, corn, beet and barley. Driving up the Marne River Valley we reached the village of Sillery, for an open air concert in the Parc de la Vesle as part of the Fête de la Musique, together with the Brass Band de Champagne. http://www.brassbanddechampagne.fr/

Locally, this concert was part of the official program of the music festival of Reims, Les Flâneries Musicales http://www.flaneriesreims.com The Champagne Brass Band played first, with superb energy and attack. Our program included four songs sung by Diana with the big band, Moondance, Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Fly Me to the Moon, and Autumn Leaves. It was a remarkably picturesque location, with the deep green of the trees along the bank of the Vesle providing a beautiful backdrop for the stage. Happily my recordings were fine, if slightly wobbly, like the champagne effect on the brass players.

The quality of the French bands is very high. In chatting on the bus, I commented that Australia is not as musically strong as some other countries such as France, where ability to participate in music is much more widespread. We see the growing indifference to music in Australia in the decline of brass bands, which used to be sponsored routinely by shire councils as a central part of the construction of social capital. I don’t feel the passive bleakness of duf-duf music is much of a replacement, since brass is a genre that is accessible to all ages, built on participation rather than anomie.

The Riems festival hosted the band for dinner. I was able to sit with my friend John, who shares my interests in the analysis of Christian origins and the status of philosophy. Having already ventured to discuss abstrusity here more than perhaps I should dare, I will just say we solved the problem of Heidegger’s deconstruction of Descartes, in terms of human identity as a social construction built upon the relational framework of the axiomatic principle of the meaning of being as care, as the basis for a systematic existential ontology.

John and I walked together through the music festival in the city, which was full of free music, although the subwoofer style of modern electronica seems quite depressing to me. We walked around Rhiems Cathedral, which is an immense thing, former location for the crowning of the kings of France, and came upon a large audience listening to a Mexican music and dance performance.

This celebration of the summer solstice in music reminds me of Christmas in Australia, with midsummer the high point of the year. This coming Tuesday 24 June is Saint John’s Day, marking the peak from which the length of the day decreases until Christmas, from when it must increase, as John the Baptist explained at John 3:30.

Today, Sunday, we travelled to the ancient city of Laon, and I am writing this sitting in the magnificent old cathedral, beneath a ceiling nearly forty metres high in the glorious soft light of the beautiful stained glass windows. The eastern rose window, about ten metres across, is shaped like a clock, with twenty four circles around the perimeter, and circles inside that of twelve, twelve and four in number, and at the centre the single circle of the Blessed Virgin Mary with Baby Jesus. This building is nearly a thousand years old, and has stood up well against the vicissitudes of time, although the spirit of liberty, equality and fraternity brought some destruction to this monument to the divine blessing on the established social order.

Next Saturday, 28 June, is the centenary of the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand of the Austro Hungarian Empire in Sarajevo, the event that set in train the cascading alliances that brought the great powers into the conflict of the first world war. We will be in major Australian sites of mass death, in Amien and Villers-Bretonaux. On the drive into Champagne we saw a military cemetery in a small town. It is one of those many places across France where countless white crosses stand in mute witness to man’s blind indifference to his fellow man, as Eric Bogle put it. Each cross is a life snuffed out short, fallen in battle like the flowers of the forest.

My new friend John explained to me that the First Battle of the Marne in 1914, the first effort of German blitzkrieg, was part of the front in which the plucky Belgians held up the Germans for long enough for Britain to send troops to enable the trench stalemate.

Sitting now at the main western entrance to Laon Cathedral, under the statue of the virgin crushing the snake, brings on the contemplation of how and why this awesome edifice was built. Above the right door, a frieze of the Last Judgment shows an angel at the feet of Christ sending the nobles to hell and the poor to heaven, like in the story of Dives and Lazarus. So there is a sense that the mythology of the cathedral aimed to protect the poor, in a recognition that the rich are evil. But it didn't work, since the fury of the poor kicked out the rich in the French Revoluion.

Here is a photo of Diana singing in Champagne yesterday
Diana Tulip Champagne Concert June 2014.jpg
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Re: Brass Band France Blog

Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2014 4:49 pm
by Robert Tulip
Monday 23 June
Once again, sitting in front of a cathedral, St Martins in Ieper (Ypres/Wipers) in Belgium. Today the Eastern Australia Brass Band played at the ceremony of the Last Post at the Menin Gate in Ieper. The Menin Gate lists the names of the fallen allied soldiers in the Ypres Salient who do not have a grave. There are thousands of names. It is appalling. The scale of death on the Belgian front indicates a pathological level of depraved insanity.

The Last Post is played on the bugle every evening at the Menin Gate. Tonight there were four bugles, and a big crowd. The band played after the buglers and the minute silence, while about fifteen wreaths were laid by different groups. After the ceremony, the band marched down the cobblestone road to the central square to play a concert.

The Musée Louvre has extra galleries in the town of Lens, which we visited today. It is an extremely modern gallery, purely designed to showcase the art. The free area which we visited is organised on a timeline, beginning with Cycladian art from 3000 BC and gradually moving through to the nineteenth century. I particularly liked seeing a big marble Tauroctony, with all the usual characters. And an Iranian star sphere clearly dated from about 1400, detectable from the position of the X formed by the ecliptic and the equator in Pisces.

Re: Brass Band France Blog

Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2014 12:23 am
by Robert Tulip
Robert Tulip Paris 18 June 2014.jpg
Robert Tulip Paris 18 June 2014.jpg (155.11 KiB) Viewed 12040 times
Tues 24

Sightseeing Ghent
In Ghent, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghent you get the feel you are in the heart of Europe. Our tour guide commented that while the French identify themselves by province, the Belgians identify themselves as European. Ghent is not as well known as some other places, but it is rich, orderly, and displays strong attention to detail, in the manner of the famed Belgian dentist.

I have a thing about cathedrals, and it was magnificent to have a tour of the Cathedral of Saint Barf in Ghent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Bavo_Cathedral This building was apparently consecrated in 942 AD, making it 1070 years old. Belgium has been regularly invaded, as punishment for being rich, flat and near some big mean countries. Saint Barfs has beautiful paintings by Rubens and other masters, which they hid in the crypt while marauding armies passed through. The capitalists of the linen market formed the order of the golden fleece, so it is unsurprising that the pulpit in Saint Barfs is crowned by a dragon guarding a golden apple tree, reminding me of the myth of the Hesperides. Under the pulpit the angel of time, Saturn, Kronos or El, engages with an angel of the book, standing on the world. My favourite piece of art in the cathedral was a painting on the wall of the crypt of Jesus Christ carrying his cross with the foot forward, a miraculously impractical position, perhaps suggesting the Chi Rho cross as cosmic symbol.

For lunch a small group of us went to a restaurant by the river in Ghent, where I had a plate of mushrooms and a glass of Petrus, a dark beer that was so rich and intense in its unique and complex delicate flavour that I had a second glass. On the drive from Kortrijk where we are staying to Ghent we passed a ten metre high nude plastic Cyclops, and sang Abba songs in the bus.

In the afternoon I went for a wander around Kortrijk, and found Saint Martins Cathedral which was empty, apart from some magnificent art work. One of the principles of the Gothic cathedral construction seems to be the idea that the spirit of God can be captured in a high ceiling, as a resonant space that echoes with holiness, giving people in the building an emotional feeling of connection with the divine. I tested out this theory by sitting before the altar stone and meditating.

These places that have been used for worship for a millennium are now considered as quaint and obsolete tourist attractions from a previous false culture, such is the extent of Europe’s conversion from Christianity to humanism. Our tour guide explained that people do not want to get married in cathedrals for three reasons – it is too expensive, they no longer believe in God, and they fear they will be embarrassed by divorce. I regard the loss of Christianity as an unfortunate trend in cultural evolution, since using cathedrals as worship devices can still be a way to engage the ethics of social psychology.

The constructed sense of place in a cathedral is powerful. As I said, I tried to test that out by meditating, exploring the concept of the body as the tree of life, joining the imagined roots of the soul beneath the cathedral floor with the eternal heavenly wonder of God captured in the high ceiling space. It is a very interesting thing to try, since it generates a quite pronounced involuntary Indian head wobble. Meditating in a cathedral produces this neural effect more strongly than anywhere else I have experienced. I use the chakra mantra system loving right now you’re holding on, with each syllable a note of the major scale ascending from the base of the spine to the rainbow crown of astral unity.

We are in Kortrijk for a concert with the local brass band. http://www.kortrijkbrassband.be/en-uk/p ... index.html
The general assessment of the Eastern Australian Band was that the Kortrijk Band was far better than any community brass bands in Australia, as their ensemble tightness and power is astounding in playing such difficult music, with a conductor who is great fun but a tyrannical perfectionist. I recorded the whole concert on my camcorder from the sound and light box at the back, in a beautifully well designed theatre, as one might expect from these superbly modest and talented Belgians.

Diana sang like an angel, performing two songs with the full brass band, Moondance and Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal. The highlight from the band was Ash Wednesday, written in response to the 1983 Victorian bushfires, performed with a powerpoint of bushfire related photos. The scale of Australia’s bushfire carnage does not compare with the First World War, but the overall themes of loss and struggle against incomprehensible forces are similar. Thinking about these comparisons helps to place the war centenary in a meditative framework of memory and mourning, with music having a healing power of harmonic redemption.

Today we drive to Mons, for another joint concert this evening with the Mons Band http://www.monsstgeorgesbrassband.com/

The hospitality of the European bands has been wonderful, even if, as I say, the popularity of the brass band concert as a genre is less than it deserves for the quality of the entertainment.

Re: Brass Band France Blog

Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2014 8:49 am
by Robert Tulip
With apologies for any indiscrete statements, I must note that my comments here are just impressions, not always fully informed. Contrary to my last comment, the top Australian brass bands would compete more than adequately against the bands of Europe. The British brass band tradition is actually quite young in Europe, and their superior overal musical culture has not yet let to a superiority in the brass band genre. So I am sorry for any offence, and welcome any corrections of my errors.

More on cathedrals. Brass bands cannot really play in them because the reverberation is so strong that the echo turns the sound to mush. So it seems cathedrals were designed to provide amplification of the human voice in the days before electronica, and of course with the organ. I tried whistling several slow hymns in an empty cathedral today – Personent Hodie, Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, Come Immediate Being, and the melody from Bach’s Passacaglia in C minor. The smallest sound fills the space.

Re: Brass Band France Blog

Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2014 6:45 pm
by Kevin
You rock, Robert. And by some coincidence I'm listening to Glenn Miller.