On Saturday 23 June, as part of Southbank Centre's Sounds Venezuela 2012 Residency with Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela (23 to 26 June), I am hosting a cello class.
I once heard the great Dutch cellist Anner Bylsma morph something previously billed as a cello festival 'masterclass' into a 'laboratory' and I like this principle: there will be no Grand Masters lecturing or imparting august bodies of knowledge about performance. Instead there will be a bunch of mixed-age cellists and interested members of the public sitting in a room, musing on music and the interpretation and transmission of it. A laboratory also implies enquiry, experiment and independent evaluation for everyone taking part.
The central philosophy of El Sistema fosters a natural reflex to share and teach principles of music, once gained, to a younger generation. It is useful for older cellists observing to think about the methodology for teaching younger cellists; however I intend for the class to be alert to the fact that surges and moments of inspiration are unpredictable and ageless.
Originality can strike anywhere. We are not perpetuating a mimetic tradition or aping legions of classic recordings; instead we seek out the innate ideas and processes at work in music of the past that ring true into the present. The ideas resonate as feelings and transformations in the mind - this is the work for interpreters.
And what of the room itself? There is a line of enquiry running through the work I've made in the last couple of years concerned with rooms and performance, involving specific pieces like David Fennessy's The Room is the Resonator or Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room. More broadly it stems from ideas I find to be musical and transferable in certain sculptural art, such as that of Robert Smithson or Mike Nelson.
My friends know how I talk manically and at length about the link between music performance and context; I've not written about it before, only tried to devise and curate experiences that prioritise listening and clarity of structure. In Nelson's work there is a formal organisation of architectural material which creates elaborate theatre-set-like works in which a lingering 'presence of absence' is felt by the visitor who moves through the space. The attention to sculptural detail helps structure the experience; the 'ephemera', the atmosphere and the gap between known and unknown is where the work exists.
In Smithson's trail-blazing career he articulated the dialectic of 'site' and 'non-site'.
In the former he advanced the notion of a place in the world where art is inseparable from context, where artistic interventions in the land can induce awe. And recently I devised a notional 'land-music', performing on an outdoor estate in West Sussex with a concealed sequence of cello sets as an emotional response to the terrain. I played 15 minutes of Bach to an audience standing on a gradient, the whole performance area encircled by a flowing brook. Our ears were half-filled by the Bach stream, half the brook's own music.
The second was an unaccompanied version of the Elgar Cello Concerto in the forest near Brinkwells - Elgar's home at the time of composing - with silences in place of orchestral music, on a site where the composer used to take regular walks. The audience stood independently along the forest paths, some imagining Elgar's music as it could have come to him.
'Non-site' was the name Smithson gave to museums and art galleries, man-made structures in which works of art exist in tension with their context and have a metaphorical relationship with the world outside.
We cellists on Saturday will be in the White Room at Southbank Centre. It is a medium sized room with a high ceiling in an area which is run by the Learning and Participation department. Sometimes theatre sets are stored there; sometimes it is where groups of schoolchildren eat their lunch; sometimes it is used for an installation. Connection with the outside world is felt through a small slice of pavement overhead. The cellists will play, amongst other things, Poulenc Sonata and Dvořák Concerto. We will explore how to transform the room with their rich languages.