A Conversation with Composer John Metcalf: “Everybody Has Genius”

The week before our visit with composer John Metcalf, a student had come up to him and said, “My teacher says you can’t write tonal music in 2010."  Metcalf replied, "Well, just tell him you can’t write atonal music in 2010."

Listening to Wales: The National Eisteddfod

The National Eisteddfod of Wales is “the largest festival of competitive music and poetry in Europe.”  It is conducted entirely in Welsh, and its origins date back to the 12th century.

A Conversation with Composer John Metcalf: Rethinking Musical Forms

For composer John Metcalf, traditional musical forms are meant to be challenged and rethought.

I really passionately believe in the type of education that’s for the world we want, not the world we’ve got.  So, every time we’ve got any kind of orthodoxy, or if somebody says you can’t do that or you shouldn’t do that, or something seems to be a given, then immediately I want to say, why is that?

Listening to Wales: Arvo Pärt and the Vale of Glamorgan Festival

Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer, turns seventy-five this September, and he’ll be celebrating part of his birthday week in Wales.  From September 5th through 11th, his glorious music will form the centerpiece of the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, and Pärt will be in attendance September 8th and 9th.

Traveling in Wales: The Brecon Beacons

Of places to visit in Wales, the Brecon Beacons are typically overlooked in favor of Snowdonia and other higher peaks.  That’s a mistake, for the Brecon Beacons National Park is breathtaking in its beauty and full of things to see and do.

Michael Foot (1913-2010): “Wales’s Most Brilliant Adopted Son”

Michael was perhaps Wales's most brilliant adopted son.

Never again will we see such soaring oratory, socialist passion and wit.

--Secretary of State for Wales Peter Hain, March 3, 2010

His is a dying breed.  Our politicians have looked more and more like grey-suited purpose-built machines ever since Labour's image-makers forced Neil Kinnock to throw away his houndstooth suit.

--Francis Beckett, The Guardian, March 31, 2007

Michael Foot, who died March 3, 2010, at the age of 96, served as Ebbw Vale’s MP for thirty-two years.  Foot was a grand old man of the British Labour party, an unreconstructed radical, one of the last of his kind.  He was known equally for his erudition and his disheveled appearance, most notably the jacket he wore at the Remembrance Day ceremony in 1981.  (Not all were opposed to his sartorial choice:  the Queen Mother complimented him on choosing “a smart, sensible coat for a day like this.”)

For He Was Welsh, You Know: Reading Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth

Fluellen:  And I do believe your majesty takes

no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy’s day.

King Henry:  I wear it for a memorable honour,

For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman.

As I listened to John Metcalf’s Mapping Wales, I conjured a sky thick with Welsh archers’ arrows.  The arrows weren’t the stuff of my imagination, but a scene from Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V.  As one thing so often leads to another, I thought it time to give the film another look.

Armchair Traveling: Mapping Wales, the Music of John Metcalf

Despite several trips to Great Britain, I’ve never been to Wales.  My partner of many years felt marooned there for a time, and that may be the reason we haven’t gone.  (Back then, if an English grammar student had no Latin, attending university in England to study English was next to impossible—Wales was almost all there was.)  The other association we have with Wales is no better:  we’d met a Welsh singer who, we were told, had a lovely voice, but what we encountered was a decidedly unlovely drunk.