Sebastian Rochford & Kit Downes @ Kings Place. Photo (c) John Earls
As part of Arcana’s 10th birthday celebrations, we invited our readers to contribute with some of their ‘watershed’ musical moments from the last 10 years.
Regular contributor John Earls writes:
A Short Diary consists of seven short piano pieces composed by Sebastian Rochford in memory of his father, the poet and academic Gerard Rochford, who died in 2019. An eighth piece was composed by his father. It is a profound and moving expression of loss. Rochford’s drumming combines beautifully with Kit Downes‘ piano playing.
When I heard it my own father had a few months before been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (I am still a co-carer for him). This has been both an uplifting and consoling collection for me.
As part of Arcana’s 10th birthday celebrations, we invited our readers to contribute with some of their ‘watershed’ musical moments from the last 10 years.
Gary Carey writes:
I heard this around the time of the early stages of the Covid pandemic, when I watched the film, Shutter Island, which I would also strongly recommend, though only when you’re in a good place mentally.
The reason I like this piece so much is that it really seems to offer emotional energy, in both Max Richter’s melancholic orchestral composition and the almost desperate, cry-for-help, of Dinah Washington’s vocal accompaniment.
I believe both pieces were originally produced as completely separate works, which were then combined together for the film soundtrack’s finale.
However, this does not seem evident in the finished piece itself, which is a further testament to the production and mixing expertise involved, ultimately producing a compelling new piece of music, collaborating from generically disparate and musically separate sources.
Ben Hogwood adds:
As a postscript to Gary’s memorable moment, I would like a piece of music used earlier in Shutter Island that had a dramatic effect on me – the use of Penderecki‘s Symphony no.3 to highly dramatic effect:
As part of Arcana’s 10th birthday celebrations, we invited our readers to contribute with some of their ‘watershed’ musical moments from the last 10 years.
David Gutman writes:
This is a peculiar time for music and politics but perhaps it’s been that way for longer than we think.
Christopher Rouse, my favourite ‘living composer’, has been dead since 2019 and is rarely played in the UK but we’re continuing to discover ‘new’ works by him online and on disc. Rouse began as an academic evangelist for rock music as it was understood in the 1970s but took his ‘classical’ calling seriously enough to take an unfashionable stand: “I’m not going to talk about rock ‘n’ roll any more. It doesn’t need my help. It’s not that I no longer like that music, but I feel the wagons have been circled, and I’m going to stick with my high-falutin’, élitist, dead white European male brethren and, if necessary, go down fighting.”
His Organ Concerto of 2014 appeared only last year in a Naxos collection of American Organ Concertos played by Paul Jacobs. The Rouse is the highlight, his usual wildly eclectic mix, only around 20-minutes in length and traditional in form but pugnacious in content, whether tonal or atonal. There is also drumming. Its central Lento, which hostile critics have already misheard as ‘sentimental’, is another of the composer’s heartfelt meditations on the nature and acceptance of grief. This matters as we age (this listener is 67 ½) while the finale’s return to consonance and affirmation despite noises off is not just for show. It moved me very much. Rouse wrote the piece ‘the old-fashioned way’ with pencil and paper, on a table.
You can listen to the whole piece on Tidal below – the Rouse is tracks 5 – 7:
Charles Villiers Stanford by William Orpen Image Credit: Trinity College, University of Cambridge
As part of Arcana’s 10th birthday celebrations, we invited our readers to contribute with some of their ‘watershed’ musical moments from the last 10 years.
Celia Lister writes:
“My musical discovery from the last decade is Charles Villiers Stanford’s Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in G.
As an oboist specialising in solo and baroque ensemble performance, I was until recently hugely ignorant of vast swathes of church music. That all changed when my children became old enough to be church choristers, a hobby which my husband (an ex-lay clerk) was keen for them to pursue. As a result, over the last few years, I have been exposed to a huge quantity of music which was new to me, ranging from the early Spanish polyphony of Tomás Luís de Victoria to the anthems of Howard Goodall. A firm favourite genre in our house is liturgical Victoriana – Stanford, Wesley, Parry, Wood and Elgar to name but a few. Choral evensong is a highlight of the calendar, and a one of the most wonderful new pieces was Stanford’s ‘Mag & Nunc’ in G.
My daughters are lucky to have inherited my husband’s dulcet tones rather than my mezzo squawking, and my eldest recently had the pleasure of singing the not inconsiderable soprano solo in this wonderful work, with her siblings and parents on sop 2, alto and tenor respectively. Hearing her voice soaring to the rafters was undeniably special, as a parent and as someone who loves music, and was the culmination of hours of church practises, services and RSCM study sessions. It makes the seemingly endless taxi service I perform to shuttle my daughters to and from innumerable rehearsals worth it.
So in a way, it’s not that Stanford in G is a single piece which I can’t do without; it’s that for me it represents the pinnacle of a genre of music which I’d hitherto largely ignored. Liturgical music – not only, but largely Victorian – now affords me great pleasure for both musical and personal reasons. Now all I need to do is wait a few more years until they are trained up for the Passions…
If you’ll forgive the indulgence…Happy Birthday to us!
Arcana is 10 years old today, a chance to celebrate a decade of sharing great music with our readers. I would like to thank you all for your encouragement and interaction with the site, to thank our guest writers – principally Richard Whitehouse and John Earls – for their excellent contributions and insights in recent years, and to thank my wife Sam Hogwood for her unerring support. This is an enterprise that run outside of working hours, so it is inevitably a balancing act where time is concerned!
As part of our birthday celebrations, we have invited readers to contribute with their ‘watershed’ musical moments from the last 10 years. I’m looking forward to sharing them with you over the next few days; there are some crackers! It’s not too late to share yours either, by contacting me on e-mail (editor@arcana.fm)
In the meantime, here is an appropriate piece of music to mark the occasion – while at the same time giving a clue to what is upcoming on Arcana in the coming months:
Image by Alexander Raths
Published post no.2,428 – Saturday 1 February 2025
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