Written by Keith Krut
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Until I was about 16 I exhibited very little, if any interest in music. I had never touched an instrument, nor requested to be allowed to. What little exposure I had came between the ages of 8 – 13 when I went to live with my father in Johannesburg. He has a good knowledge of classical, and had at that time a fair selection. However, I was only interested in two recordings: a copy of Beethoven’s Ninth (Seija Ozawa conducting) and a recording of Vivaldi’s four seasons.
My sister had a few records, Barclay James Harvest, Abba, Ziggy Stardust, Boston, a Beatles Anthology and one or two others that escape me now. I wasn’t really interested in pop music much. Every now and then I listened to Springbok radio and Forces Favourites. This was the extent of my musical knowledge. I regarded "tie a yellow ribbon" and "the green berets" (regular requests on Forces Favourites) as pinnacles of Western music. This stayed the situation until I became a teenager.
It became fashionable when I was about 16 to have what in those far off days was called a "music centre", a three in one record player, cassette deck and radio. I got my hands on a second hand one, which became my pride and joy. One day, my father took me off to Hillbrow records, and bought me two classical records: A recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (i Solisti Veneti) which I wanted, and the Brahms piano concerto no. 2 (Eugen Jochum) which I didn’t want. I also got myself Ziggy Stardust.
From that moment I was hooked on classical. Vivaldi paled, and the Brahms 2 became and has remained a firm favourite. I started to buy up a selection of concerti, like Beethoven, Rachmaninov, Saint Saens, Mozart etc. My tastes were conservative, and I found my ear very slow to take to the unusual variety of harmonies and rhythms in the music. Often I would force myself to listen to a new concerto three or four times before my ear would attune itself and I would start to like it. I ascribe this to early and bad listening habits and general mental weakness brought on by Springbok radio. Even today, I sometimes take a while to get into a new piece or composer.
Even at this early stage, I was a bit of a collector, preferring to have a more comprehensive collection rather than music I actually enjoyed – an annoying personality trait I know. So I collected all 5 Beethoven concerti, a good selection of his symphonies, Rachmaninov, Grieg, Schumann, quite a bit of violin, particularly the Paganini concerti, the Mozart concerti, the Brahms, Lalo, Bruch etc. I had about 50 records by the time I got to the end of Matric.
By the time I got to Varsity, my collection, which had never been particularly eclectic, had begun to grow a little stale. My ear was slowly attuning itself to classical, but only a very specific kind of classical, namely pure classical, romantic and a little bit of latish romantic. There was a touch of baroque, but not much. I found long symphonies boring, and preferred lighter classical. Wagner, Mahler and modern composers were right out of my frame of reference, and Brucker and early music were unheard of.
Whilst at Varsity, I began singing in choirs. I did this because I was a destitute and starving student, and the shul down the road from me was offering choristers R15 per service. That was a lot in those days. Thus began my first experience with harmony, which until that time I had never heard of. I was amazed to learn that members of a choir need not necessarily sing the same thing at the same time. I also discovered that I was a bass, which is the most unusual voice type after true tenor. I also discovered that although I was bad, I could hold a tune, and had some real musical talent. I have sung in choirs ever since, and have done some other secular work – I sang with the Wits choir for a while (until they found out I couldn’t sight-sing and threw me out) and regularly sang (and still sing) traditional Christmas Carols every year with an all-Jewish vocal carols troupe (go figure). I actually performed in the Beethoven Choral Fantasia which was a great experience. I also sang with the Johannesburg Jewish Male Voice Choir for a few years. They went on world tours, so I got, almost for free, two trips to America, including stop-off’s in Paris and London. The JJMC (as it was known prostituted itself) shamelessly, and even went to Detroit to sing happy birthday to an old rich American in return for payment. But we did get round the world. Eventually the repetitive reportoire, the politics and backbiting, and the "nogschlepping" of choristers who could not sing ("nogschlepping" is when you can’t do it but you pretend you can and those around you have to take up the slack) broke me and I walked out after a particularly acrimonious rehearsal where I accused the choir of being lazy, singing flat, and singing rubbish. This was true as it happened, but impolitic. This pretty much ended my association with Orthodox shul choirs, or their association with me.
As regards musical education in classical, I was fortunate to have a very good and experienced teacher, a friend of mine who was a music student and who truly understood music. My musical education over the next few years was due entirely to his influence. I also began for the first time to appreciate the importance of the recording. No longer would it be sufficient for me to buy a version of a piece played by the Zagreb secondary youth orchestra on special; it had to be Karajan, Klemperer, Bohm, Levine, Furtwangler, or some other luminary. Too many times I wasted money on a wonderful piece, which turned into a dull and drab bore under the listless baton of some starving East European who only became a conductor because some party functionary told him he had talent. I stuck to the greats, particularly Karajan, as I did not have the discernment yet to determine who was good and who was bad. The Penguin Guide to Classical Music became a treasured tome, and the last word in all situations of doubt.
I began with some early music; polyphony, particularly Thomas Tallis and William Byrd. Then I had to learn a fair amount about Christianity to be able to follow the programmatic elements of religious music. I spent some time on the baroque, particularly Monteverdi, which also tied in with the early music movement. I was now in a position to listen to the Beethoven Missa Solemnis, which to this day I regard as the greatest single achievement in western music. Many people regard the Klemperer recording as the greatest (which is coupled with a nice recording of the choral fantasia), but for me there is no contest; the greatest recording of the greatest musical work in the West is Herbert van Karajan’s recording with the Berlin Phil; Gundula Janowitz (soprano), Christa Ludwig (alto), Rene Kollo and Fritz Wunderlich. There’s a good recent recording with Harnoncourt on the Archiv label, but if you ask me nothing compares with the "Herb" recording.
After that, I got stuck into Mahler – particularly the first and second symphonies, and the Das Lied, which I would listen to with score. It made a great impact on me. I began to realise that there was a hell of lot of good music out there. After that, Bruckner, symphonies 7,9,4 and the religious music, the motets and masses. The Bruckner 7 blew me away; another recording by von Karajan and the Berlin Phil. It was one of the most beautiful pieces of music I had ever heard, although I had not yet saved up enough money to go buy the massive 8th. Eventually, by hook and by crook, I got hold of the 8th, which, after the Beethoven Missa, is for me the most mindblowing musical achievement in music. It has only been performed once in South Africa - under a Swedish conductor whose name I foorget. The impact of the recording was as nothing compared to the live performance.
Mahler also became an influence. I started off with the 2nd, the "Ressurection", which is a massive piece, and came as a real shock after the classicism that I had become used to. Then the 1st, the "Titan", which is a fun symphony. Funnily enough, I was never mad about the 4th, which, because of the adagio, is his most popular. The fifth is magic, and the first movement is, together with the introduction to Act three of Wagner’s "Tristan" the saddest piece of music I have ever heard. The sixth is a very difficult piece, which I have never really got to grips with. When Mahler conducted it for the first time, he was apparently in such a state of depression brought on by the music that he was almost unable to finish the piece. I however found it to be totally incomprehensible. The eighth is another mighty piece, requiring an augmented orchestra, a brass orchestra, an extra childrens choir, about eight soloists and about 2 hours to perform, and sounds like Armageddon with a headache. The first part is a setting of the Veni Creator Spiritus (Mahler converted to Catholicism to secure his appointment as resident conductor in Berlin) and the second part is a setting of part of Faust. The whole thing is totally overblown and it seems like Mahler just wanted to write the biggest symphonic blowout ever. It does however contain some incredible moments; particularly the end of part one, which out-Beethovens Beethoven. Mahler got quite far on his ninth, but mercifully died before he had a chance to finish it. A version was completed by Derycke Cooke, and one fears that if Mahler had had his way, it would have rivalled the Ring in length.
Bruckner by contrast is remarkably single minded; whilst Mahler (who he taught) explored new things with each new symphony, so that each symphony is quite unique, Bruckner only had one real idea, which was to glorify God. Bruckner was extremely devout. His music is nearly always the same idea; vast symphonic soundscapes, of unbearable intensity. Some might find the repetition of this idea boring; I have a particularly soft spot for Bruckner, both as a character and as a composer.
At this point I still had a mental block against Wagner, and the thought of sitting through 16 hours of the Ring was too intimidating at first. It was pointed out to me that this resistance was ridiculous, as Wagner is the precursor of Mahler and Bruckner, my favourites at the time.
Eventually I gave in, and started with some selected pieces of Wagner: parts of Tristan, and extracts from the Ring. It was immediately plain from listening to the Liebestod from Tristan where Bruckner (who adored Wagner almost as a god) had picked up his overwhelming intensity. The roots of Mahler were also evident from every bar of Wagner. Eventually I plucked up the courage to try the full Ring. The warning words of (Strauss?) were in my ears; that Wagner has good moments and bad half hours. It took four weeks, one opera per weekend, on vinyl records with the old greats: Windgassen, Hotter, Wunderlich, Janowitz, Schwartzkopf, Ludwig and directors Solti, Bohm, Karajan, Levine, Klemperer. I remember the final scene, of the immolation of Brunnhilde, after four weeks and sixteen hours of Wagner – just at that point my then flatmate decided he had to watch the rugby. But I did it. And from that moment I was hooked. Since then I have listened to the entire Ring cycle about 3 more times. It is true that it has bad half hours. At times even bad hours. But listened to as a whole, it is beyond shattering. It contains moments unique in music. It was at one stage my dream to attend the Beyreuth festival; but I do not think that this will ever happen. It is interesting that no opera from the Ring cycle has ever been performed in South Africa, although there have been performances of Lohengrin and der Fliegende Hollander.
The next Wagner milestone for me came with Lohengrin. Again, I had vinyl records from the Johannesburg music library. It was a wonderful recording (Rudolphe Kempe), which I have subsequently bought on CD. I put on the record and for the first time in my life, (I am embarrassed to say) heard the almost unearthly strains of the overture. It was a seminal moment. I lacked the discrimination to be able to identify the harmonic elements that made up the whole, partly because I lacked experience, and partly because the music is so unique. The result is that the music achieves a shimmering effect, which is staggeringly effective.
Once my ears had become somewhat attuned to Wagner, it was time to try Tristan, as the border between classical and modern classical. Again some of the music in Tristan – particularly the third act – is unique. I bought (again on the unchallengeable authority of the Penguin Guide, the Bohm recording.)
Amazingly enough, I have never got it together to listen to Die Meistersingers, Rienzi, or Das Feen.
I have to digress at this point to say that at the time that I moved out of home into a flat, I had two flatmates. The one flatmate has an exceptional baritone, and had a taste for light opera and a particular kind of light music. As a result, I was exposed to a lot of Callas and Pavarotti, and the "light opera" repertoire. I also had exposure to musicals, and the old iron-lunged tenor of yore, Lanza. There was quite a wide selection of singers, but basically the repertoire of light performance opera is limited. But I digress.
I started to nibble at the borders of the modern. Unfortunately, my tastes are set quite firmly in the post-Romantic era. However, I took a stab at Schoenberg, particularly Verklarte Nacht and Pierrot Lunaire. Both are magnificent. After that, I tried Berg, Webern, Cage, Glass, Bernstein, Strauss and a whole host of modern classical composers. Generally the music is very demanding, and it takes an enormous amount of effort by the listener to get the same "buzz" as one gets from earlier, more harmonic composers. A case in point is the Bernstein Mass, which I have consistently said is well worth listening to – once. I can still see no point in listening to it twice. It is intellectual, shocking, quite nauseating in parts, and generally speaking a brilliant achievement. It is however, not pleasant listening, a complete period piece and quite repulsive.
Naturally, the same cannot be said of all moderns; much of the music is interesting, stimulating and even melodious (there seems to have been a return to melody in recent years), but without wishing to be dismissive, the music is mostly too difficult for any but very skilled ears, or those with the time and energy to grapple with it. A favourite larger scale "modern" piece of mine is the Messaien ‘Quartet for the end of time’. Another problem is the sheer quantity of such music. In an age of prolific composition, an abundance of both talent and talentlessness on the side of composers, and an equal lack of discernment on the part of the public and record labels, the sheer volume of music produced makes it nigh-impossible for the non-professional listener to get to grips with modern music. Indeed, it is hardly possible to get to grips with the standard classical repertoire.
Looking back on what I have written, I feel bad that I have not even mentioned some composers that are like old friends to me; like Bach, Tallis, Pergolesi, Verdi, Saint-Saens, the Beethoven concerti and sonatas, Vivaldi Gloria, RV 588 and 589, Palestrina, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms (ah, Brahms!) Haydn (the beyondness of "the Creation" and the masses), Mozart (!) Rachmaninov, Rossini, Gounod, and a host of others. But I have tried to limit myself to those pieces that changed the way I saw music, that really knocked me out at the time. This of course is partly a personal matter of taste, and so what I have chosen is no guide to what is and is not important in Western Classical Music.
Throughout this process, I had begun to read up about classical music, and I also took up the classical guitar. So I learned to read music – not well perhaps, but it was a step forward. I still play the guitar badly. That too exposed me to another whole reportoire.
Today, my tastes have drifted back pretty much to what they were; classical and romantic, however my musical appreciation is a lot broader.
In 1997, I started to sing in a rock band. This represented a fairly radical departure for me. I did not really consider rock or pop to be music, and I really did it because I was bored and I was looking for another hobby. I heard of a band that had recently lost a singer and I decided to give it a go. I also, as can be gathered from what I have set out above, had absolutely no knowledge about pop. I knew and could vaguely recognise some songs from parties I had been to; some I even vaguely liked, but generally speaking when it came to what I shall henceforth refer to as popular music, I had no clue.
I went to the first session. The characters there were pretty wild (more of this later) and we had a go. They were all a bit nonplussed at my voice, which was a kind of semi-operatic bass, not really the ideal voice for a rock or pop band. What they were looking for was essentially a pretty ruined but intimate high baritony or tenor voice, and their first prize, as they made no bones about telling me, would have been a woman with big tits, even without a voice, or someone who could sing and play rhythm. We ran through a couple of numbers, and I sang them through like choral numbers, concentrating on note values, pitch and a clean timbre. Wrong on all three counts as I was later to learn, but they seemed impressed, firstly that I could hold a tune at all, and secondly that the voice type was perhaps unusual enough to merit some investment of time and energy. On this basis, I was accepted into the group.
The name of the group was a bit of an issue at first, and they wavered between various options before settling on Praying Mantra, chosen supposedly on the type of music that best suited my voice.
The people in the group were by and large insane. My connection to the group was Dave "Hippo" Robinson, so called because he allegedly has a voice like a hippo and was the only person in the group positively forbidden to sing. Dave is a walking encyclopaedia on sports issues, a teacher of English and married to the Soprano in my carols group. The leader of the group was a guy called Meinhardt Greeff, a database manager for a publishing house, self confessed nut and depressive. We used to practise in his basement, tenanted by lots of amps and musical stuff and rats. The last member of the band was Eric "Armageddon" Loos, drummer from Hell, a supervisor at Stuttafords. I used to joke that when he played the drums, it looked and sounded like he was clubbing seals. He had a nice tenor voice, good for harmonies over the top which I couldn’t reach. He and Meinhardt went way back, and Meinhardt would scream at him and sometimes hit him when he failed to get the rhythm. Eric found this to be A Good Thing. I think the picture is coming across here. I have to mention that Meinhardt was staggered by my utter ignorance of the rock and pop genres.
Band practices were pretty intense. We went for some frantic songwriting, sometimes writing four a night. During this time I started to learn that what I considered singing "properly" was not necessarily what was needed in a rock band. I found that rather than singing well, what was needed or sought after was a kind of throaty intimacy, usually only attainable by people who have so badly abused their vocal chords in the past that they are beyond help. Rather than keeping to note values (a virtue in other kinds of music), what was sought was rather an easy familiarity with the music which enabled the singer to dispense with conventions like holding the note or phrase. Some of the music was in fact required to be implied. I found this very very difficult, and I don’t know how well I actually got it. By the end of my second year in the band, I sort of got a bit of a handle on it, but the bottom line is I was never going to be a rock star. I also finally understood what rock and pop is about, which is performance. The music, generally speaking, is shit. What is important is that the emotion comes across; there is a feel and an emotional content which is a lot more important that the lyrics. The lyrics, in fact, are useless, except insofar as they create or heighten the emotional content. So it was that our songs are generally totally meaningless, with lines in them like
"this is the era of the bloodshot eye
My fridge is empty and I dont know why"
Or
"Why’d I have to eat the fish"
Or our highly original attempt at pop lyrics:
"Boom Boom Boom went my heart
I felt so good when I saw you cross the room
Bang Bang Bang went my brain
I think about you and I go insane."
or somesuch nonsense.
As I was saying, we were writing songs at the rate of knots. The evening would usually start off with Meinhart shitting over me and Dave for being late. Once this was over, we would go into the rat infested basement and Meinhardt would hand out books he had taken from work – remainders, books no-one wanted to publish or that were to be returned for pulping. Eric got astronomy, Dave got poetry and English literature related stuff, and I got crackpot pyramids, mysteries of the Inca’s, religion, that sort of stuff. We would then usually discuss some weird and obscure point. Sometimes Dave and Meinhardt would go off on semiotics, or literary theory or somesuch, or would talk about design specs of world war 2 planes and stuff, and sometimes Meinhardt and I would go off on some point of biblical archeology, and sometimes conversation would veer wildly between topics so diverse that we could not ourselves keep track of what we were talking about. Every now and then Eric would tentatively bash his drumkit and Meinhardt would scream at him. It became really esoteric, and Meinhardt used to talk in a kind of dialect or code, and say things like "gat in a visblik" and "guar" which just made the conversation even more incomprehensible than it was already. He and Dave also spent hours talking about running – they were both Comrades Marathoners. I could never see exactly what was so interesting about pounding the pavement for hours on end, but they managed to spend serious time discussing the ins and outs of Polly Shorts and other running related things.
Anyway, at one point Meinhardt started to lose his mind completely, and became obsessive about writing songs and going on stage and making it on the South African music scene. It got really intense and we nearly split up. Then things mellowed, and we decided to cut a demo as a way of getting a few gigs. We got 12 songs together, practiced them till they were tight, and hit the studio. We did the whole album in one day, although Eric and Meinhardt had to go back to lay drums and mix. The album is, in my opinion, quite good. We had the tapes duplicated, the cover professionally designed, and even managed to flog a few to unsuspecting friends and family. I only managed to sell two, and gave the rest of my 50 tapes out as gifts to loyal supporters. Dave had more success, and sold enough to cover his outlay and then some. Eric- well, no-one will ever know. Meinhardt threatened his friends with death, and they also bought some. The whole recording thing was a good experience for me, though it was quite humbling to hear my voice played back solo through the setup.
We got a few live gigs at a place called Wings Beat Bar in Braamfontein. The clientele were scary, but we got an OK response, despite my nerves and Erics frenetic attacking of his long-suffering kit. On the last gig we did there, Eric lost it completely and went into a kind of Voodoo frenzy thing where he just hit everything in front of him as hard and as often as he could. He came off whatever trip he was on to see Meinhardt glaring at him and realised he had no idea where the beat was – and he was the drummer. I was singing right in front of the kit and all I remember is that it sounded like a never ending train accident behind me. I also remember that on that night there was a really freaked out sound engineer who pumped everthing up so loud you could hear Eric from the street singing his high harmony flat, and what I sounded like I don’t really want to think about. But most of the clientele were too spaced out in any event to tell the difference between flat and sharp, and our friends (some of whom could tell the difference) who came to see us were very kind. We made R50 each that night – the only money I’ve ever made out of rock.
Meinhardt then announced that he had met a woman on the internet, and was packing up and moving to Aussie . This was the end of the band. We started to wind down. Band practices became less and less about music and more and more about obscure questions of psychology, philosophy, language and religion. Eric would, every now and then disconsolately bash the snare, but we were not to be distracted. At the primary instigation of Dave, we decided that the balance of our oeuvre was to good to be lost to posterity. We decided to have another go at the studio – another 12 tracks. Some good, some bad. We also produced a very home made video, which was cut together by my wife-to-be, a video editor. She managed, out of about 15 minutes of footage, to produce 3 minutes of music video, which was quite an achievement, given that we were all pretty wooden and camera shy.
We did the thing about two days before Meinhardt left the country. My business was not doing well at that point, and I wasn’t in any mood to spend big bucks to do this, but we went ahead anyway. It took food off the table, but we finally got out, about R1000,00 poorer each, with another demo. The drumming on some of it was so bad we actually had to fade it out the mix during some songs.
Meinhardt was gone, Praying Mantra was gone, and it was back to Christmas Carols, Verdi and Wagner again. It was a relief not to spend all those hours in the basement, but I do miss it.
As a result of my experiences in the band, I developed a new respect for popular music, but most of the better stuff (exceptions excluded) doesn’t make it without big marketing, and of that, the good stuff is primarily good because of performance rather than intrinsic musical worth.
The journey continues…
Kieth Krut
January 2000