How does gathering together diverse people who's creative energies collide, jam, and ride out the chaos, bring forth a great deal more fruit and a longer lasting after-effect than a neatly organised and regimented "conference experience"? How do we turn event into process, dissolve usual politics into excitement and turn energy into creativity?

Around May/June 2001, I was doing the rounds of informing all British Council arts managers in the world about „The Turn of the Tide“ project in Croatia, how fantastic it had been, and how many children it had reached.

This was a tough but hopeful time for me. Waiting to see what would come back, and how everything would develop.

Then, quite unexpectedly, British Council Belgium in the form of arts manager Penny Rae dropped me a line asking me to become part of the steering group for a conference on the artistic provision for asylum seekers in Europe called “The Journeys in Between“.  Wow! I remember thinking, why me? So, the dutiful academic springing into the breach, I replied that it wasn't really my field, but I would do my best. A couple of weekends of research on the web later, I was sitting round a very beautiful dark wood conference table, perhaps dating back to the 18th century, with a dozen people I didn't know from various NGOs, arts funders and facilities.  One such person I recall was Bob, the director of „Le Petit Chateau“, Europe's largest holding centre for asylum seekers, in Brussels.

Here, I have to clarify a very misunderstood area.

An asylum seeker is someone who enters a foreign country and seeks permission from the government to stay there under the provision of the Geneva Convention.

A refugee is someone who has been granted asylum status and accepted as needing refuge from war, political oppression and so on.

Television shows us images of refugee camps, extreme poverty, disease and crisis management. That is certainly true in other continents, but here in Europe, our system has a clear definition of when a person becomes a refugee.

So, next thing I know, I had been asked to talk on artistic rights for asylum seekers in Europe, moderate the plenary sessions and teach the delegates how to sing 2 Ghanaian children's songs in the language of Ga.  Trying to speak on behalf of people you've never met is a big challenge, so my next stop was Artists in Exile, a group in London which had recently hit success, and more importantly, funding from London Arts Board. There, I met the key people, sat in on a monthly meeting and just talked with folk. Predictably, most of my time was spent throwing lines out to far flung places through the internet.

However, when the conference arrived, I had whittled what I wanted to say down to 5 minutes, and got a short round of applause for my two main points, which were:

1. why do artists working with asylum seekers always have to work for nothing?
2. why do institutions regard people simply living in the present and being who they are as profoundly threatening?

My little artistic interlude was a ten minute slot teaching “Shae Shae coolae“ and „Sin jen jen jen jen gemee tandanzo“ (apologies to the children of Ghana for that transliteration!) to a bunch of grey suits from the European Parliament and various NGOs. Nigel Osborne, composer extraordinaire bless him, was there, after much persistence from me, and was able to correct me afterwards on my Ga grammar.  I've never done this before with European politicians, seven year olds, yes, so perhaps there wasn't such a leap of faith, and they were really game after I'd warmed them up with Frère Jaque.

For some reason that I suppose someone had regretted, I was invited along to an exclusive discussion round with the European Minister for Culture, Education and Sports. How amorphous is that?!! When the mike was passed to me, as one of the 30 odd exclusively bored audience, I asked if his website's directive to create a new European identity had anything to do with the modernist Europe after WW2 or the Europe of the Greek/Roman and Enlightenment cultures. The answer I got could be paraphrased as:

1. both

2. European identity is diversity

3. when I go to America or Asia I feel distinctly "European"

Well, even though I'm distinctly European, my heart sank through the floor at such a response. Basically, diversity is not, in itself, an identity. What you do with diversity can be forged into an identity.  Imagine two towns. Both mayors say they have diverse communities. In one town, the communities separate themselves into ghettos, rarely having much to do with each other. In the other town, communities mingle, do business with each other, grow up together and create new, dynamic cultural realities, always connected to their roots, but fluid in their creativity. Diversity is a  spread of resources from which the future can grow.  But it is not, in itself, an identity.

The conference was chaotic, imperfect, packed solid with brilliant contributions and a huge success. We set something marvellous in motion.

Standing in front of an exhausted and exhilarated conference after 2 days, I led the plenary session where people were bursting to say things within the creative interpretation of 2 minutes that they were instructed to have - the masterful conductor archetype rapidly turned into a swerving acrobatic routine with time  in the heat and heart of people's wish to express themselves.

You can find out more about  Turn of the Tide, Artists in Exile, Le Petit Chateau and Penny Rae, the then organiser and arts officer of British Council Belgium on the following links.

In Part 2 of Musicians in Exile, I tried to turn the ideas of the conference into reality.

http://www.britishcouncil.org/arts-performing-arts-worksh...

http://www.artistsinexile.org/

www.palmer-rae.com

http://www.fedasil.be/Klein%20Kasteeltje/home

www.counterpoint-online.org

http://www.exiledwriters.co.uk/

It's funny. You're reading this on a computer through the internet, a medium that brings millions of people together regardless of age, race, gender or belief. In our daily social experience, how are we separating each other out into groups that love this music or that music? How are we creating distance between faith, wealth, culture and age group?

Having returned to Cologne with one of those „why me“ feelings, I decided it would be hypocritical not to investigate the issue of asylum seekers a little further. I knew of a multicultural centre called Allerweltshaus* in Cologne and visited director Sophie Henning, fluent in English, French, German and Persian.

She agreed to my idea of a project called „Musiker in Exil“. The concept was a simple weekly meeting place where musicians who were asylum seekers or refugees in Cologne could meet.
She gave me a list of holding houses for asylum seekers in Cologne, including a boat on the Rhein. I also had two contacts to meet from the social arms of the catholic and evangelical (German protestant) churches, Caritas and Diakonie respectively. At this point, you need to know that 92% of all asylum seekers' applications in Cologne are rejected, but the process of moving from asylum seeker to refugee (or not)  in Europe can take anything up to several years.

My job was to find these places and trace the people who might be interested in forming a group.
Mahyar Heydari was my first and best contact.  An Iranian musician, he had formed an illegal rock band in Iran called „Oxide“ and performed underground.  It should be noted that every song that is intended for performance must be vetted by 3 different Mullahs (religious teachers) for compatibility with the Koran and the Iranian revolution. One day, doing what many young Iranians do, he tried to push his luck by walking down the street on Tehran carrying his electric guitar in his case, and was arrested and put in prison for 3 days.

His band was subsequently secretly filmed playing in an underground venue and the members found themselves in a position where they had  to leave the country or face seven years in prison.
He fled to Germany, leaving his wife and daughter behind.

Diakonie had heard that an Iranian musician was in one of the asylum holding centres in Cologne, a converted school on the outskirts.  He was the first to visit the group.

The Bestvaters are an elderly Russian couple living in a tower block on the right bank of Cologne. There, in the ground floor, I met a very  enthusiastic social worker in a less than well equipped office who assured me that she would talk to them to persuade them to come along to one of the meetings. Herr Bestvater and his wife are among the many ethnic Germans who found themselves trapped in communist Russia and who, after the fall of that union, were offered a life in the West by the German Government.  The miserable tower block, in the style of true German “efficiency“, contains only members of this estranged German minority.  Herr Bestvater is a traditional Russian accordion player who composes his own beautiful romantic pieces about daily life and plays them without nostalgia, in an artful, accomplished and thoughtful way. He speaks no German, and his wife, who does, accompanies him to translate. They became occasional members.

17 year old Bijan, who accompanied his father to Germany from Iran, awaiting refugee status, came along to play the violin. His level was beginner and I couldn't help him much, but I became grateful that his smiling face was always there to greet me. For me, it was a project, for them it was survival.

Hassan and his wife and son had escaped from Iraq shortly before the second Gulf war. A fluent English speaker and music teacher, he found himself washing dishes in Cologne to keep his family alive. He was also a fairly regular member.

Then there were two quite marvellous refugees, Teofik a guitarist and psychoanalyst from Bosnia and Mehrdad, a Persian folk musician, both of whom had been in Cologne as accepted citizens of Germany for many years. Teofik worked night shifts at the post office sorting mail because his qualifications weren't acknowledged in Germany. His force within the group was stabilising and loving.

Mehrdad is an exceptional folk singer and musician, working around the large Iranian community in Cologne. Both were unfailingly kind and generous, which our group needed in large doses throughout its existence.

Oh yes, and then there was me. Its hard for a young Scottish conductor to admit that he's "exiled" himself to Germany, but that's what I had done.  When I came, I had no job, no language and no contacts. I wasn't much different from them. As the group leader, it was clear that the members, the real asylum seekers, should lead their own artistic process between them.  Who was I to tell them what to play? I would simply turn up with my ridiculously heavy Yamaha P80 electric piano slung over my shoulder every Saturday morning at 10 am and open the door of Allerweltshaus and facilitate their wishes. 

How would one describe the process? Every week at 10 am, there would stand Mayhar and Bijan, smiling as I struggled up the road with the keyboard.  I would let us into Allerweltshaus.  Other members would surface throughout the morning. Mahyar was very clear about what he wanted to do - sing his pop songs in Persian.  Bijan would do his best to accompany, and I would fill in at the keyboard, except first I had to learn to read chord symbols right to left, as they were written by Mahyar above Persian script.

This is where I remember the key theme of the Journeys in Between Conference in Brussels - when an artist leaves their home to claim asylum, most lose everything, leaving them with their inner cultural and artistic identities, and nothing more.  The host cultures aren't aware that their societies are not constructed to support even the most basic cultural needs of  asylum seekers. Add to that the waiting for an answer to ones asylum application, and its no wonder that the mental health of so many asylum seekers suffers. How many refugee artists would love to create works of art about normality, love, positive passions, only to discover that their host cultures are only interested in images of torture, death, torment and primitivism?

I remember the best day of Musiker in Exil in Allerweltshaus.  In the main room we had Mahyar, Bijan and a wonderful Russian cabaret singer and pianist, Natasha, working on accompaniments for a folk singer from Bangaldesh. In the cafe are we had Kijan, a very gifted young flamenco guitarist with half German, half Iranian blood and Teofik and Herr Bestvater working together to make  music. This kind of experience happened only a few times over the two years.

Each week was different, and many weeks were nothing more than the duty of turning up, setting up the keyboard, and trying to get them to work together, because that's pretty much all they had.
If anyone is thinking of duplicating this project, let me tell you now, guitar chords are the global musical language. Forget notes. Forget language. Give a bunch of musicians who can't speak to each other, from differing musical traditions and abilities a set of chords and let them hear a tune and they're away!

This was always going to be an experiment on my part. Can it be done? What does anyone get out of it? But we did a few performances in community centres and art galleries and so on.  We did get out there and try to make it work.  As with all these projects, you have to grow up, and remember that the intercultural nirvana which we created in full-blooded form a few times, and mostly not, is really secondary to the need that people have to meet other people and work together to share what they have on a musical and human level, in its vastness and power.  Just to see others smile and get into the groove.

Things had become so erratic in the last 6 months of this two year project that I called an end to the project.  Mahyar and I met for about four months thereafter and improvised passionately between electric guitar and electric piano. Our music would last one and a half to two hours nonstop. People in Allerweltshaus would come in to listen and sometimes to dance. I hadn't felt such a deep connection to a keyboard in years.

For me, this project represented a small step towards a common ground through the diverse people who participated. We didn't do it through measurable results and eventability, but through patience, perseverance and process.

Last year, November 2004, after the project had ended and Mahyar had been given permission to stay in Germany, he and the other exiled members of Oxide got together in Bonn to play music for an exhibition organised by Caritas, containing self portraits of asylum seekers who were participating in a group arts workshop.  I was invited on condition that I would bring the keyboard along, one last time.

The photos are below.

*Allerweltshaus in German is a metaphor for an open door, a  normal, everyday abode where everyone is welcome

http://www.allerweltshaus.de/
http://www.diakonie.de/
http://www.caritas.de/

THE TURN

 

OF THE TIDE

I flew in to Zagreb with not a little trepidation. Maxwell Davies on full brazen form can assail the ears, and I had my reservations about hundreds of eager youngsters pounding home their environmental message at full blast.

This was Zagreb's Lisinski Hall, stage filled to the gills with 450 Croatian schoolchildren, all fabulously disciplined -- not a note or a flicker out of place. The Zagreb Radio Orchestra, a bit long-faced in a frothy opening piano concertante work by its rather over-eager soloist, Sanja Drakulic, but then enlivened by a sizzling performance of Thomas Ades' Asyla, masterfully directed by the perceptive and able young British conductor Paul MacAlindin, was by now on peak form.

But what actually turned the tide for me was the playing of the children, which was simply stunning. Maxwell Davies's The Turn of the Tide is a kind of Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra for the millennium, closer to A Midsummer Night's Dream than to Britten's original. Visualise members of a black-tailed symphony orchestra surrounded by swirls of emerald green-clad children. They invade the platform. They hover in the wings. They sidle among the second violins, seethe amidst the oboes and slither below the double basses. They corner a lone cellist and upstage the leader. And then the children start to play. They 'turn the tide'. First twangings -- soft tambourine, a sound like a woodblock; then a sad, haunting saxophone; a Pied Piper-like trumpet; then a whole bevy of tuned and untuned (but never tuneless) instruments. Caliban would have been mesmerised.

MacAlindin, always a sensitive conductor and shrewdly intelligent accompanist, kept The Turn of the Tide's large orchestral sonorities on a tight leash, which had the best possible effect : instead of the children's contributions, brilliantly worked up by workshop coordinator Richard Frostick and a team of Croatian teachers, being the mere fillers, they became the very substance of the piece, as if Davies, still the old leopard, were defiantly turning 'educational' work -- with its slightly patronising connotations -- on its head, much as he did when he first penned O Magnum Mysterium for his pupils at Cirencester Grammar School some four decades earlier.

The Turn of the Tide features several adult pied pipers : four or more orchestral string soloists play along with and engage in dialogue with the youngsters, notably a lightly arpeggioed, folky second violin (narodna violina), and articulate double bass. The elderly Croatian cellist, with his gently lined Slavonic features and wispy beard, a Papageno hauled from retirement, looked as if he'd been pied piping in his youth and was sagely reviving an ancient art. The children's phased tambourine crescendo and diminuendo near the start was astonishing, like a leaf opening and then curling -- James Blades, doyen of postwar percussionists, couldn't have managed it better. Soothing double flutes and sad bassoon in the main orchestra, intelligently guided and subtly shaded by MacAlindin, yielded to eerie wailings of woodblocks and celesta, horns of almost Götterdämmerung gloom and a gentle, hypnotic sad snap in trumpet and pizzicato strings.

My own student days first memory of concerts behind the Iron Curtain was of workers from the Skoda factory, sleeves rolled up and Bulgarian cigarettes drooping like Gauloises, strolling in to the Prague National Theatre for early evening Dvorák. A hundred miles or so south, this Turn of the Tide concert had some of the same buzz. Parents might have worked in a bank, in the council office, on the bottle factory shopfloor or hawking washing machines at the nearby Zagreb fair. They devoured the whole concert, and the Lisinski Hall was full to the gills : as an introduction to new music, quite some achievement.

But the children were the heroes, arguably above all the stunning young boy trumpeter, all of 12, sizzling through the kind of deft chromatics that the Radio Orchestra brass had earlier baulked at. There was a cheek to the youngster's playing, an assurance and an uncanny sense of rhythm, occasion, and an almost instinctive drama. The fourth 'interlude' (though I lost counting) -- a plethora of xylophone, crotales, croaking frogs, ringing telephone -- must have been one of the 'greener' environmental bits : a glorious controlled pandemonium yielding to saxophone, pipes, a superb young clarinet player, and a child fiddler, with the boy trumpeter, gaunt cellist and tuned percussion joined in for good measure.

Introduced as the composer from 'otoce Orkney' -- the Orkney isles -- Davies urged, like an inspired dance teacher, that a key element in his concept of music 'Education' was that children should be freed from straitjackets : not afraid of expressing themselves in bodies and voices. The master of Expressionistic parody needn't have worried. Maestro MacAlindin -- deservedly hailed afterwards by a massive cheer from the children and audience alike -- brought the occasion to a triumphant close with an intriguing Davies build-up (Mahler, Sibelius, Debussy -- you name it) and culminating children's chorale -- a kind of 'green' prayer, in clear descent from Maxwell Davies's Orkney pieces (Black Pentecost, The Spider's Revenge, Yellow Cake Review), and sung in impeccable English, a little parroted but with spot-on 'awkward' intervals and effortless two-against-three rhythms, in the unmistakable diminished fifths (paired minor thirds) modality that has been a characteristic of Davies's writing since the Fifties. The Turn of the Tide, with its 'Evergreen' message, may receive other performances of punch and precision, but the musical verve of these Croatian children deserves to become a legend in its own right.

The Turn of the Tide began its public life in 1993, when 25 British Orchestras performed with local school kids up and down the UK, in a concerted effort to bring children into active participation with their local orchestras. The link below tells you more about the musical how and why.

By the time I became involved through the British Council head office in London, Richard Frostick, director of Islington Music Centre and freelance music educator, had been out to Zagreb, Croatia, several times to initiate the idea of composing in the classroom.  Croatia, like many central European cultures, was very supportive of classical music education for students who showed promise, but for those who hadn't had the luck to show anything, there was next to nothing. Richard's job was not to convince those kids they could compose, it was to convince the parents, teachers, school directors and politicians that getting their children making music, even on the simplest level, was not only possible, but the healthiest of things for a Croatian child to do.  How he did that is really his story, not mine, but on arriving on my first visit to Zagreb in January 2001, the majority of school groups had, over a period of 2 years, gone from absolute start to composers and performers of finished pieces.

Turn of the Tide is themed around man's evolution and destruction of the environment. Each short orchestral movement by Davies is followed by a slot where the children compose a short piece based on the musical ideas and perform it using classroom instruments, sitting in groups amidst the orchestra.

The January visit introduced me to all the children's groups, waiting to perform for Richard in a leaky school gym in downtown Zagreb.  Richard's charisma and gigantic presence, along with his pedagogical skill, managed and energised all 300 of them to sing African songs, perform their pieces musically and listen in complete silence to their schoolmates make music, all of this through an interpreter.  You wouldn't have thought it possible if you hadn't seen it.

On top of that, I was to work with the Radio and Television Orchestra of Croatia for two days, familiarising them with the music, the project and its unusual logistics, and the Tom Adès piece, Asyla, which they caught onto very quickly indeed.  After that, I was taken to another school to meet the choir directors of 10 children's' choirs in Zagreb, who would amalgamate into a 350 voice choir to sing the final chorus of Turn of the Tide. 

The week before April 23rd, the performance, was my second visit to Zagreb ,and the Zagreb Biennale was already in full swing.  The orchestra and I worked for a week on the full programme, with piano concertos from Sanja Draculich and Dubravko Detoni, Asyla by Adès, and in the second half, Turn of the Tide.

However, on top of that, there was the most important job of all, which was to travel round the schools before and after rehearsals making sure that the various groups of young composer/performers knew exactly what to do and expect when working with the orchestra and fitting into the piece. This involved 12 hour days, with a wonderful assistant from the Biennale making sure I ate something periodically.  The first rehearsal with the choir, packed tight into a school hall, was amazing.  They knew Max's knotty English text and quirky music inside out, and could vary the tempo at my wish.  The sound was breathtaking!

The day of the concert, a Monday, we had rehearsed and integrated everyone on stage, the orchestra, the 125 composer/performers in 5 groups, the choir of 350.  The Lisinski Concert Hall, a 2,500 seater, was predictably full of families, children, politicians, press and TV cameras.  The children all had new instruments paid for by the Ministry of Education just a month beforehand and imported from Vienna. The concertos, played by Sanja Draculic and Detoni's son Daniel, went incredibly well, and Asyla took everyone's breath away.  Turn of the Tide, for those there, was unforgettable, and changed music education in Croatia permanently.

Since then, some promoters have rejected the idea of organising such a big event, and yet a great project doesn't need to be a big project. They say their children "don't do that", because they, the adults, have never given them a chance. Of course the children can compose, even when the adults can't. It also means community and creativity, here and now. With orchestras closing down because their potential young audience is musically illiterate and their regular subscriptions are falling (San Jose Symphony is a good example), what quality do the other options have?

How much can we count on our local schools to teach music?

How much responsibility lies with us? 

Who else is going to give classical music to young people, if not us?

Looking at the tiredness, sacrifice and negotiations of the three years leading up to that concert, many of the organisers were utterly exhausted and deeply glad that it had come to such a phenomenal point of closure. 

For me, this was a time of proving myself, growing, learning and letting go of barriers I could no longer live with.

http://www.maxopus.com/works/turntide.htm

http://www.britishcouncil.org/arts-performing-arts-worksh...

http://www.britishcouncil.org/arts-music-education-mused-...

http://www.biennale-zagreb.hr/kat1_en.php3?id=4

http://www.britishcouncil.org/croatia.htm

What a privilege it was to perform on that day.  So many of our friends came along to The Loft in Wissmanstrasse, Cologne to sit and hear us perform while outside, the blistering sunshine was filling the beer gardens with people who had anything but a concert of contemporary music on their minds.

My good friend and colleague, the Brazilian baritone Mauricio Virgens, had worked carefully with me to integrate the new songs into our classical repertoire. Here's the programme to give you an idea:

Jane Gardner - A Bird in Spring (premiere)/Emily Dickinson

Barber - I hear an army

DuParc - La Vie Antérieure

Vaughan Williams - Silent Noon

Fauré - En Sourdine

Maxwell Davies - Amor Ritorna (premiere)/ an unfinished Sonnet by Michaelangelo

Interval

Mozart - Hai gia vinto la Causa - Marriage of Figaro

Maxwell Davies - I Pray You People * - the Jester's Aria from act 1 of Taverner

Patrick Nunn - We 2 Boys Together Clinging (premiere)/ Walt Whitman

John Adams - News, News! from Nixon in China +

Verdi - Eri che tu macchiavi from Un Ballo in Maschera

Encores - 2 sambas by Dorival Caymmi #

The idea of 21st Century love Songs came when I was living in London and I contacted an old friend in the promotion dept of a publishing house. I wanted to know how many living classical composers had written love songs. Two weeks later, she came up with just 2 works.

The project finally became real this year. Mauricio and I had been having problems finding baritone repertoire from the last 50 years (perhaps because „repertoire“ and „last 50 years“ is an anachronism).  That which we did find was predictably about death, destruction, madness, war, politics and all the usual things that composers have recently occupied themselves with.

So I rang up a few composer pals who wrote us a few love songs to drop into our usual programme. By the way, what is it with living composers and love songs? A tradition that goes back to when people could first open their mouths and sing, seems to have died in the classical world, taken over by some very good, and very many definitely not good love songs in the pop and jazz world.

What so many composers seem to have forgotten, is that love is nothing to do with romanticism, and ought not to be discriminated against simply because of a modernist dislike of romantic music. Then there are a number of more sensitive issues. I can't think of a more messy, complex, confusing and utterly emotional minefield than love, and yet, somehow, today's composers have by and large shunned it as a medium for their own complex expressions of music. Then we're looking at the many sides of love; filial, spiritual, carnal, paternal, maternal, agape. Am I missing one? So, are today's composers emotionally mature enough to actually write a love song that sounds like something more than a stick of candy?

A wonderful exception to this is Elliot Carter's „Of Challenge and Love“, which I adore.  What a journey into a passionate terrain that is. Our next concert will have premieres by Gordon McPherson (http://www.slowbabymusic.com/) and David Paul Jones (http://www.davidpauljones.com/). You can also find out about Patrick Nunn at http://www.patricknunn.com/. Please feel free to contact Hannah Waddell at hwaddell@intermusica.co.uk about a possible publication date for Tondo di Michelangelo, a whole song cycle of Michelangelo's love sonnets which Maxwell Davies has written for us. You can also visit the site of The Loft,  an innovative chamber music venue, at http://www.loft-koeln.de/

Jane Gardner, a really beloved friend of mine, wrote "To my Mountain" as a wedding present for our mutual friend, Rhiannon Mathias and her new husband, John, last October.

The footnotes are designed to help a little in the often fruitless quest that baritones have to find something which constitutes a really great aria from the last 50 years. Any additional suggestions you have would be gratefully received in a comment below.

* N.B.  "I pray you people..." is an aria for the Jester constructed out of two parts from the end of Act 1 of Taverner (1970). Starting at bar 509 (p.133 of the vocal score), Andante, quarter = 100, through to 543, and beginning again at 640 through to 696. The split was agreed upon by the composer. Another excellent baritone aria from the end of Act 2 is the white abbot's "I am fell..." before being burnt at the stake, beginning at bar 156 (p.247 of the vocal score) through to 242. You can also lead in with "My Lord Abbot, prepare yourself for the fire" from 140. Regardless, you need a lot of pp from the head voice. Taverner isn't performed these days, though the BBC SO made a studio recording of it under Ollie Knussen in 1999.

The vocal score can be purchased under:

http://www.boosey.com/pages/shop/product_detail.asp?id=67...

and backup info found at:

 http://www.maxopus.com/works/taverner.htm

+ N.B. "News, News..." from Adams' highly acclaimed Opera Nixon in China,  is Nixon's opening aria as he arrives in Beijing. We took it from bar 374, (p.27 in the vocal score) to 653, leaving the final crescendo to hang in thin air in true "minimalist" fashion. The vocal score can be purchased at:

http://www.boosey.com/pages/shop/product_detail.asp?id=62...= 

# N.B. Dorival Caymmi, born 1914, who at the time of writing is still alive, is Brazil's legendary samba writer, making a name for, among others, Carmen Miranda! He is also, of course, Mauricio's countryman. One of his favourite sayings is: "Whoever doesn't like samba is either sick in the feet or sick in the head."

http://www.slipcue.com/music/brazil/caymmi.html