Busking it – the new Prom
The Times, Neil Fisher, 25th July 2005

Plenty of composers have pushed deadlines to the limit. Beethoven had a habit of alarming his page-turners by unveiling piano concertos with half the music unwritten.  Less dramatically, Thomas Ades was orchestrating his overture to The Tempest just days before curtain up at Covent Garden last year. But would you trust 44 teenagers to make good on the deal if you gave them a week to write their own work from scratch?
And when I say write, the first thing to note about one of the most thrilling Proms commissions in years is that it isn’t even going to be notated on paper. No, these teenagers  - culled from four British ensembles – are memorising as they compose Invisible Lines, which will be premiered at the Albert Hall on Saturday.
So what will it sound like? “You haven’t got any idea until it fits together,” says Stephen Du, a 16-year-old violinist from Newcastle. “That’s what makes it exciting.”
Exciting is one word. Terrifying is another. “Have the courage to make it immensely wrong sometimes” is not an instruction I remember from my years of piano lessons, but it’s one of several unorthodox exhortations issued by the team helping the youngsters to make Invisible Lines a reality.
That team is Between The Notes, a group whose methods won’t be familiar to those brought up on a diet of scales and arpeggios. In the past months this five-man group has been touring the country alongside professional musicians from the BBC Symphony Orchestra to prepare the youngsters for their challenge. They use improvisation and physical interaction as their basic tools – “Music that comes from your body and your imagination,” explains BTN’s Matthew Barley.
It’s fertile ground for ridicule to a sceptic like me, but Barley’s argument is powerful. Improvisation, a fundamental tool of the pop and jazz musician, gives much more responsibility to the individual performer. “In almost all orchestras and choirs there are passengers,” says Barley, “people simply doing a job, following a leader and being there. We’re trying to promote a way of making music in which absolutely everybody is completely alive and really going for it.”
Watching the young musicians cope with the challenges of building up a piece of music without a text soon makes the difference clear. Victoria Mattinson, a 17-year-old violinist who first worked with BTN in Gateshead, says: “I thought beforehand it was going to be a complete mess but the piece we composed worked really well. It’s a huge change from playing with an orchestra.”
Learning directly from the BBCSO players also worked wonders. “It comes back to the basic principles of good playing without the worries of the printed text,” says the BBCSO cellist Michael Atkinson. “A lot of young players aren’t tuned to the physicality of playing, of it simply becoming about putting your fingers in the right place.”
The great thing about these players is their willingness to tackle anything, coupled with a refreshing lack of egotism. Some fancy a crack at making it as professionals, others aren’t sure yet. “But they always enjoy what they’re doing,” enthuses the world-class violinist Viktoria Mullova, who has joined some of the groups over the past weeks and will be playing a new violin concerto in the same Prom. “Whereas when I was their age I was rigid, just concerned with not making mistakes.”
Invisible Lines may as yet still be invisible, but the musical fragments that have been coalescing are hugely promising. A passage for percussion, drums, electric guitars and double basses sounds like Mark-Antony Turnage with a dash of Herbie Hancock. The brass have a solemn fanfare that manages to sound like blues and Vaughan Williams, while one string section propels a furious stabbing passage that bears more than a passing resemblance to Ligeti. It’s as if Heston Blumenthal had tried his hand at composition, and the result is musical fusion.
The Proms is casting its net wide this year – Bobby McFerrin, Baaba Maal and Ravi Shankar are all on the bill – and it’s exhilarating to see a similarly diverse set of influences coming up from a younger generation. But Barley points out that classical composers have always reached for wider horizons. “Bach was fascinated by dance forms from his world. Now it’s Turnage and contemporary jazz. I think classical music is in an amazing position: it’s an umbrella term that is spreading itself wider.”
That’s the kind of proselytising that the genre needs. But Barley’s brand of musical education is still not being given the support needed to emphasise that universality, despite the launch of the Government’s Music Manifesto – a programme that’s full of good intentions but hasn’t promised the cash to make good its aims.
Lecture over – and time to revisit Stephen and Victoria both in rapt conversation about their Proms appearance. “When I saw the Sage being built I thought if I could ever play there then that would really be something,” says Stephen. “And now you’re playing at the Albert Hall!”
“So where do we play after that?” asks Victoria.



Making a Song and Dance

Programme note for Between The Notes performance with 100 children at the opening night of Salisbury Festival 2000

Writing a programme note is usually quite a straightforward process: you find out what the music to be performed is going to be and who the artists are, you research details of both, and hopefully file a nicely rounded, informative and readable note. Sometimes life is a little more difficult, when a new piece of music is being performed, for example, and you have only the composer’s word for what is about to happen. If the composer doesn’t know what to say about the piece, what chance do the rest of us have? But Making a Song and Dance is another breed completely. The performance is obviously happening tonight, Friday 19 May, but in order to be incorporated into a festival programme book, this programme note had to be written a few weeks in advance. Accordingly, I met up with the thirty children from Leaden Hall, Salisbury Cathedral and Bishop Wordsworth’s schools on Saturday 29 April - less than three weeks ago. And what can we reveal as a result of that thoroughly entertaining and stimulating day? That Making a Song and Dance is going to be a thoroughly entertaining and stimulating performance. But only that. Three weeks ago, the creative processes that led up to tonight’s performance in the Cathedral had only just begun. Nothing at all was in place. But to witness the working methods adopted by Matthew Barley and his colleagues, together with the extraordinary attention being given them by the members of the core group of young performers, was quite an extraordinary experience.

The secret of working with young performers is always to maintain a balance between natural exuberance and the required level of concentration. A quiet classroom can either mean a teacher has entranced his or her pupils...or that they have dozed off.  There was absolutely no danger of these children dozing off.

Creating Making a Song and Dance was a remarkable two-way experience. First the group of children were introduced to certain working methods that will live with them long after the project  has filled the inspiring space that is the Cathedral. They played games in which they gradually learned to listen to each other and to respond to each other. Standing in a circle they were given sounds and rhythms to work with, encouraged to develop them in their own way, and then pass them on to their neighbours. They then listened to certain elements of musical vocabulary - chord sequences, the creation of musical moods, harmonics produced both by voice and Matthew Barley’s wonderful cello playing - before discussing emotions and their musical response to them. Then they went away to write down pieces of text based around these emotions that would form elements of poetry to be set to music.

Throughout all of this, Barley and his colleagues demonstrated a sympathy with the children that even teachers present found remarkable. Barley and pals weren’t teaching the children; they were working with them. And as he spilled mushroom soup over himself in a burst of enthusiasm over lunch, Barley was keen to stress that the Salisbury project was not an education project; it was a performance project. He wasn’t showing the children how to perform; he was enabling the children to create their own performance - and if they learned something from it (which they most surely will) - fine. But ultimately, Making a Song and Dance was to be a collaboration between a group of young performers working with a group of older performers, albeit ones who had a tad more experience than their juniors.

That title: Making a Song and Dance. A very interesting one, this. In Britain, we are often discouraged from ‘making a song and dance’. It is a negative term that suggests an unnecessary fuss is being made about something. But let’s look at that again. What better thing can there be than singing songs and dancing dances Both surely mark out the difference between we human beings and the animals. To sing and dance is just about the most joyous thing imaginable, so why should the phrase have negative connotations? This is something that Barley and colleagues are determined to address. ‘Lets make a song and dance about everything. It’s who and what we are’ - seems to be the underlying message.

So what will you be seeing and hearing tonight? Well, what is known is the fact that, between items created by ‘the assembled company’, the group that is Between The Notes will perform some of the pieces it has created by its own process of osmosis and improvisation during its three-year history. Formed in 1997 to take apart in a major creative project in another of Britain’s cathedral town - Lichfield - Between The Notes has subsequently found itself all over the world, reproducing the kind of concerts that are almost unreproduceable. Indeed that is pretty well the group’s principle raison d’etre: to experiment with different forms of concert using different groups of performers. This is a philosophy that should clearly play well in Salisbury where, for some years, Festival audiences have known to expect the unexpected.

As I mentioned earlier, quite what you can expect to hear tonight remains clouded in mystery - and promise. Between the Notes is itself likely to play pieces entitled Tangerine Dance, Row your Boat, the Prince song Sometimes it Snows in April and the enigmatic sounding Schwing 42.4, but otherwise it is over to the combined creative juices of the 100 children and their five adult colleagues. Enjoy!

Programme © Stewart Collins