The Real meaning of Live : Kathryn Tickell, Martin Carthy, Eliza Carthy and Norma Waterson broadcast live from Robin Hood's Bay on Radio 3's Music Planet

The Real meaning of Live : Kathryn Tickell, Martin Carthy, Eliza Carthy and Norma Waterson broadcast live from Robin Hood's Bay on Radio3's Music Planet (Tweets in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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New Year's Eve 2022

The Real meaning of Live : Kathryn Tickell, Martin Carthy, Eliza Carthy and Norma Waterson broadcast live from Robin Hood's Bay on BBCRadio3's Music Planet (Tweets in progress)

The felicities, candour and happenstances of live - ably and courageously, @kathryntickell broadcasts live from Robin Hood's Bay on @BBCRadio3 Music Planet :

All love, strength and wonder to @elizacarthy and Martin Carthy, beautifully remembering and celebrating Norma Waterson !

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 31, 2022

Lovely - partly as so unfamiliar* - to hear Martin Carthy, accompanying himself, in a different version of the tune to 'Scarborough Fair' ! :)

* And so, most importantly, we need not be distracted from *the words*, these puzzlingly parabolic words... :)

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 31, 2022

More to come...




































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Interview with Ruth Wall : Ockham's Razor, Kathryn Tickell and The Side, and other projects

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1 April

Harpist Ruth Wall – with compositions written for her by her husband (Graham Fitkin) – provided part of the music for Ockham’s Razor’s (@AlexOckhams') aerial-theatre show Not Until We Are Lost at The Corn Exchange, Cambridge (@CambridgeCornEx).

Sadly, although Ruth had played other gigs live, only the locally formed choir was not a pre-recorded element on this occasion. However, it was still an amazing accompaniment to hear in the space that had been made (by taking out the seating of the flat stalls), both at the dress rehearsal, and at the first performance.

On the strength of it, The Agent, having talked to Ruth (@RuthWallharp) when (as a member of the quartet The Side (@TheSideBand)) she played the first gig with Kathryn Tickell (@kathryntickell) at Childerley Hall, near Cambridge, asked her for this interview…



Q1

Thanks for agreeing to this interview, Ruth !

These questions were devised after hearing your playing (sadly not in person, but recorded) at the dress rehearsal for, and the first local performance of, the show of aerial theatre Not Until We Are Lost by Ockham's Razor (@AlexOckhams) (at The Corn Exchange in Cambridge (@CambridgeCornEx) last December).

I understand that, even when the score is performed live, there is a taped element : what does it comprise, and to what extent, and how, did you work with the composer (your husband Graham Fitkin) to determine its content ?


The show uses two harps, wire-strung and lever harp, and more than half of the tracks for the show are just solo harp, no pre-record.


I play as much as humanly possible, but, as Graham sometimes wanted the sound of more than one harp at once, we recorded the secondary lines and put them on the computer for playback. So I had in-ears [personal monitors, often custom fitted, to cut out ambient noise], with this other harp playing, so that the whole performance would be in time. It was complex, working out this element, and we used a click-track occasionally, too.


I worked closely with Graham in devising how all this could succeed, adding more lines to be played live as time went on. Graham also attended the first week of rehearsals, as the Ockhams' creative process took place later than the composition / music rehearsal, and he needed to add and change odd things.


Generally, a good fun process, though occasionally Graham shut the door on me to let me work things out alone – and also to avoid the expletives !



Q2

Please describe some of the techniques and effects employed in your part of the event, and also what challenges they can represent in live performance.


Complex counterpoint, very fast arpeggios, many harmonics, playing the red box [sound generator] with a bow and beater while also playing the harp with another hand, conducting the choir whilst playing (especially in rehearsal, and sometimes in performance), live control of the computer...

All this needed tons of practice on my own, with all the harps, red box and computer at exactly the correct height and position, as Fitkin music doesn't allow for any pauses. On top of that, the music is very tricky : rhythmically, I often play in two time-signatures at once, in different hands. It took SO much practice, and I did worry for months that I wouldn't manage it.


In performance, one last thing – I needed to watch the Ockhams', as I was synchronizing to their moves quite often.



Q3

Are there any favourite passages in the score, either because of what you are playing, or (as it has been said by the directors that it is too complicated for you to watch as you play) because of what you know that the performers are doing at the same time ?


Yes, when the Cat-flap (a massive construction of scaffold bars, which swings back and fore) is first released, the music is at its peak of complexity, and the performers are sliding down the scaffolding, or dodging the massive wall of iron bars. SCARY !


I really must NOT look then, but it is impossible not to see images flashing by, generally life-threatening images of little gymnasts flying through the air, trying to avoid this swinging wall.


Also, the first piece, for wire-strung harp, when Tina is in the Perspex tower, hidden. Amazing lighting and pacing in this, musically and visually... and, as the audience eventually discovers that there is a person hidden in the tower, there is a very special atmosphere in the room.



Q4

A few years back, you brought three types of harp that you like to play (with, of course, some of Graham's compositions for you) to a recital at Kettle'€™s Yard (@kettlesyard), in Cambridge. Congratulations on your CD, released at the end of last year, that now features three harps: what excites you most about the CD, and also the responses to it that you had ?



Thank you ! You are referring to The Three Harps of Christmas. It's an utter joy to play Graham's music – I met the music before the man, and love the complex harmonies and rhythms, as well as the wit and sensitivity, that he has employed in making these old Christmas carols new.


Each has a unique character – and the choice of harp for a specific carol is made carefully : hence, the wildly buzzing Bray harp for 'We Three Kings' – or the delicate, bell-like sound of the Gaelic wire-strung harp for 'Away in a Manger'.


To go and perform them then in beautiful historic houses, all around the UK, has been very special : the settings of Fyvie Castle, Holkham Hall, Culzean Castle, Glendurgan, etc., etc. Incredible atmospheres, and such a special tour – with Christmas decorations, candles and champers !



Q5

With this project with Ockham's Razor, you toured with the show for some time. With the group, or generally when on tour, what raises your spirits, or keeps you fresh ? (One imagines that it may be different things at different moments / in different moods ?)


I enjoy travelling on the whole, and love the chance to see new places, but I generally get excited as soon as I start playing.


The lights help, and the audience coming into the room as I play (in Ockhams' case), all get my adrenaline going. I also loved hanging out with the Ockhams' – they are a great crowd.



Q6

How much time do you spend touring nowadays, and do you have any more dates planned, playing as a member of The Side, with Kathryn Tickell ? The collaboration's first gig [reviewed here] was local – at The Long Barn at Cambridgeshire's hidden Childerley Hall – and do you have any special memories of that evening ?


I loved that first gig at Childerley – it was one of my favourites. Playing with Kathryn and The Side is amazing fun. I love the girls, and they are all such supreme musicians that being on stage with them is a wonderful experience. We will be touring more this year, and, having just finished a long, happy tour in February, I can't wait for the next outing!


At Childerley, Jocelyn and her friends looked after us so well, from the picnic in the garden, to dinner on the terrace, and then the most lovely wild party, with dancing – it was a total joy. The Long Barn is a great venue, and to see Joss and her family dancing down the aisle when we played was an incredible buzz !



Q7

Finally, what message would you give to someone coming to Not Until We Are Lost at another venue, and are there any other similar collaborations under way that you can tell us about ?


I would recommend the Ockhams' show totally, and also recommend that the audience keep wandering during the performance, not to get stuck with one viewpoint... and be prepared for some audio and visual magic !


I am working on my next show at the moment, with Graham again, a new album that we will be releasing in late summer, called LOST. The initial inspiration came from the Ockhams' music that Graham wrote for me, but, in the last year, he has transformed it, and only a couple of the original tunes remain.


The new album is for me on harps, and Graham on moog [synthesizer], autoharp, and red box. There are visuals in the live show, and it will involve video, and lighting.


The music has a mesmeric quality to it, highly intricate rhythmically, and focuses on how 'lost' we can feel in this world, including loss of faculty, understanding, memory, etc.


Thank you so much, Ruth, and I am sure that we all look forward to LOST, album and show, later in 2015, as the sensation of feeling out of place in this world is one that many are sure to find themselves relating to through the experience !

Mapping, a track from FitkinWall's new album Lost, really needs a listen (six minutes in) : https://t.co/ItvsKXdfNi pic.twitter.com/hXrjCEZ6yt

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 16, 2015

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

High-class cinema comes to Childerley

This is a Festival review of Edward Scissorhands (1990)

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14 September (14 April and 22 July 2015, Tweets added)

This is a Festival review of Edward Scissorhands (1990)

Agents on location, watching the cinema from afar...

The Long Barn at Childerley Hall, which (apart from yesterday, when I went on the wrong day) I had last seen when the pairing of Northumbrian piper and fiddler Kathryn Tickell and the trio The Side rocked the place, to-night had the treat of bespoke cinema, courtesy of Tony Jones, the director of Cambridge Film festival, and his dedicated team.

Just in case it rains, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS @camfilmfest Plan B at Childerley Hall is in this gorgeous grain barn :)X pic.twitter.com/nJTL8KjHnb
— Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) September 10, 2013

This was not just any projector and a screen plus sound-system in a wonderfully atmospheric space with beams, decorative chairs, an extensive bar, and even very tasteful fairy-lights - the image was sharp, beautiful, warm and magic, so that the resolution of the long-shots almost took one by surprise, and one could hear every detail of the soundtrack. I should have expected nothing less from people with these credentials, but I loved them for it.

First up, unexpected I will warrant by many, was something to preface the billed film, Edward Scissorhands (1990) - another Tim Burton number in Frankenweenie (1984). Yes, the original, not the one released in 2012.


So a proper, old-fashioned programme, but with links :

* Winona Ryder is Edward's Kim*, and is the voice of Elsa Van Hesling in the 2012 Frankenw.

* Both works deal with, address or feature the situation of the outsider who can only be loved, if at all,  by people being more than skin deep

* Who else to bring such an outsider from, or back from, another realm than Ben (Barret Oliver), a member of the Frankenstein family, and a Vincent Price at around 79, just a few years before the end of his life, and looking nothing like it ?

Tim Burton showing off a Halloween costume made by his mother, 1967. pic.twitter.com/0tSRicKbaQ

— History In Pictures (@HistoryInPics) July 22, 2015

* Nosy neighbours, to whom young Frankenstein feels obliged to account for his behaviour, and for whom Edward's arrival in an unnecessary bright yellow automobile is an instant source of fascination, intrigue, and fear

* One in pure monochrome, the other with two almost distinct colour-worlds, one being the washed-out one of Price as The Inventor on his eminence and Johnny Depp as the named work of creation**, the other a Dogville sort of a place, but with the distinction of largely pastel colours pushed to make Tobermory look drab, with hues so garish as almost to be fluorescent


A good night's viewing, with a nice role for a much younger-looking Alan Arkin, but perhaps one for Dianne Wiest that did not leave her much room to move - what was given to, and made of, by Depp, Ryder, Shelley Duvall, and Daniel Stern.



End-notes

* Nearly put Kim in Edward, but that did not feel right...

 ** Edward (even though we are shown how) is left in an explicably parlous state - more important to impart etiquette and poetry than the opposable thumb ? - unless one remembers the origins in Der Struwwelpeter, and what such thinking gave rise to in Haneke's The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band) (2009)


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Cinema at Childerley Hall

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25 August

Kathryn Tickell's gig with The Side was held at Childerley Hall*.

Next month, on 14 September, is a screening in the run-up to the Film Festival of Edward Scissorhands (1990), a 12 certificate. The film will not be shown until dusk, but there is a chance to acquaint oneself with the gardens, which I always lose myself in (in more senses than one !), from 6.00.


Picturehouse members (with proof thereof) count as concessions, as do students and whatever those of a certain age care to call themselves, at £10, otherwise the adult admission is £12.


PS And this is what happened...


End-notes

Those who, for some technological purpose, need to be told should make note of 3 Mill Yard, Dry Drayton CB23 8BA...


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Fancy tickled : A rough cut of my delayed review of Kathryn Tickell and The Side

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9 August

A report from the finale of this year’s Cambridge Summer Music Festival, a gig held at Childerley Hall, near Dry Drayton (Cambridgeshire), on 4 August 2013

Any event that begins with Bartók played at a suitable level over the PA system, followed by what I take for a legato performance of a rag (maybe Joplin, maybe Mayerl), promises well. This festival, which embraces not only the worlds of Northumbrian piper Kathryn Tickell and The Side, but also those of jazz, early music, modern composition, chamber recital, choral concerts, and the classical concerto repertoire, to name but a few, is where one would expect what is conventionally called eclecticism or variety – breadth, perhaps.

The breadth, indeed, that Kathryn Tickell herself represents, not just as an instrumentalist on Northumbrian pipes and fiddle, but also as composer, raconteuse, solo performer, arranger, teacher, vocalist, and band-leader, to name but a few of her roles or skills.

All images by kind courtesy of Reed Ingram Weir Photography

I was not wrong in writing the above : a very appreciative audience of some 500 listened to music of, indeed, breadth, and which was played with great feeling, in the beautiful venue of The Long Barn at Childerley Hall, one of the hidden secrets in the close locality of Cambridge.
Along with trio The Side (about whom more in a minute), Tickell gave a full evening’s worth of music, dancing and, above all, expressiveness – of her love of Northumbria and its people, landscape and fauna, of music, words, and other musicians, including – on stage with her – Amy Thatcher (accordionist, clog-dancer, and vocalist), Louisa Tuck (cellist), and Ruth Wall (lever-harpist).

The two-set gig ranged from a hornpipe (pipes and clogs) to Tickell’s wonderful (in its full sense) and instructive introductions, even to a Beethoven piano sonata* transposed and altered for brass quintet and then refigured further in the dance form of a strathspey, such that she hoped – in the nicest way – that there might be no trace left of the original at which she had hinted ! (Apparently, the score is saved on her PC as Beetstrath…)

Hardly surprising, though maybe he did not often go that far, that she named Percy Grainger as a leading favourite of hers, and that, with Thatcher, she had been involved in a 2009 Prom dedicated to his music – we had a taste of that night and of the collaboration as we were given first straight Grainger, and then a piece that had been reconstructed from one of his arrangements back to an idiom more akin to that of ‘Molly on the Shore’, the starting-tune.


Interlude

If Clive, one of the very genial owners of Childerley, had not spoken to me after the gig and when I was about to pursue getting the bulk of this review laid down, I would have more detail of which of the four played in what, when and what it was, but that may be lost to the mists of time… What I can say, from this visit and previous ones with the Summer Festival, is that the property is a delightful one for a picnic in the weaving – confusing, even – laid and other grounds. (There is a map, but some of us like to explore – even at the risk of getting lost.)

Thus I have seen it before, prior to the unusual experience of being in The Long Barn for jazz (big band, and also Jacqui Dankworth with smaller forces), which is very long (almost as if it had been not a barn, but a locomotive-shed), and very nicely appointed. One may need a compass and a good sense of direction to find Childerley Hall (that phrase about beaten tracks directly applies), and to go about the grounds, but it is all worth the trouble !


Back to work

As I checked after close of play, I knew that had seen Wall play before : indeed, she had had two other harps with her (at Kettle’s Yard, in Cambridge), and had played a fascinating programme (which included some pieces composed or arranged by Graham Fitkin, her husband). She told me (because I asked) that around 10% (maybe sometimes 20%) of what she had been playing was improvised (during the performance, I could see that she was moving sheets around between numbers at the base of her harp, and, without studying them, they seemed to set out the chordal structure.)

Tickell told us that she had worked with Thatcher on projects such as the Prom, plus the pair has a history of profile public music, such as a composition with delightful saxophonist Andy Sheppard for the millennium, Music for A New Crossing. Before we heard it, we were advised that this bridge is in Gateshead – and does not wobble !

All images by kind courtesy of Reed Ingram Weir Photography

Other than that she started leading the cello section of Royal Northern Sinfonia six years ago, the programme said relatively little about what Tuck has played (or where) as an orchestral or chamber soloist (but there is more here). No matter, since her playing said it all – crisply executed pizzicati, lovely resonant bass-notes, and a wholly sonorous accord in the ensemble.

Those comments, as to quality (if not to the detail), apply to all of the group : the tone of Wall’s harp had a real sparkle to it in the bright, upper range, as well as adding to the lower textures of the whole. From time to time, when there were radiant lead-notes for the harp in the harmony, I was put in mind of the musical discourse and style of The Poozies (thinking, especially, of their Infinite Blue album).

Maybe not when Wall really expected it, she was invited to take a solo, and, as with everything that we heard this night, it was met with immense enthusiasm. (In fact, when first welcomed to the stage, Tickell joked, with her typical well-judged timing, and with warm-hearted understatement, You haven’t heard us yet….)

Thatcher, one conceived, maybe could have had a chance to dazzle us more on accordion, but, of course, this was always billed as being headlined by Tickell, and, just as a matter of programming, it would actually have felt contrived to give all four a solo spot.

In fact, Thatcher almost had one (twice) on accompanied clogs, and the virtuosity that otherwise could not come so much to the fore alongside the pipes, because the reedy, shining upper part of the range would not fit so well (e.g. in the set of tunes with ‘The Wedding’), she exploited more when Tickell played violin, which she did in roughly equal measure, and with the same feeling and assurance.

Having cello and harp with their wonderful range (not least that warm, singing upper register of the former, for which so many have written with matchless beauty), as well as contributions from accordion and the drone part of the pipes, meant that there was a very full texture available, which some would call richness of sound, and this is where my point of comparison is with that of The Poozies. To my ears, everyone was also pitch perfect, and Tickell and Thatcher maintained a good tuning between numbers.

I have no doubt that many, as I was, were drawn by Tickell’s name and recordings, but, with a first outing together on stage such as this, it is important to stress what a good match for each other The Side and she are. When Tickell began the second set with two tunes, she played them with great expressiveness, with an almost keening quality in the second, drawing out the notes as if our heart-strings, and playing the music so sensuously that it felt akin to arousal.

Her skill, of course, is immense, and that is because the music, where it comes from and what it means to her are so deeply experienced, as she communicated to beautifully in her introductions, but in particular to that of ‘Yearing’ (? a title, taken from a place, that I cannot confirm), with the depiction of the morning air and the sound of the curlew.

This collaboration, with the gifted members of the trio and ranging from Thatcher’s or Tickell’s compositions to ‘Lads of Alnwick’, does not merely deserve to do well, it will do well – staid Cambridgeshire tapping its feet, whooping, and dancing in the aisles testifies to that !


Quite a number of months on, Ruth Wall had agreed to do an interview with #UCFF, where she tells us how it was for her, as a performer, being at Childerley for the first time in public in this line-up, and what she liked about this and other venues on the tour


End-notes

* The slow movement of an unspecified one. No one had the courage to guess which, although they guessed other challenges.

** As Tickell explained, they are pitch variable to accord with the key in which the chanter is being played.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)