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The Messiah meets Purple Haze - The Open College of the Arts

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The Messiah meets Purple Haze


Music composition – and indeed other – students may be interested in an event on Saturday 4 June at 2:00pm in London.  Harpsichordist Jane Chapman will be performing a selection of new pieces for harpsichord and electronics by composition students from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.  OCA students with a valid student card will qualify for a discounted £5.00 entry fee. The venue is the Handel House Museum in central London. 
Which brings us to the question: what does the guitarist Jimi Hendrix have in common with the composer Georg Friedrich Händel? Perhaps the most obvious answer is that neither was British but both enjoyed the most successful periods of their career in London. However, what is even more striking is that they both occupied space in the same house (23 to 25 Brook Street).
The building is now occupied by The Handel House Museum and carries English Heritage Blue Plaques in memory of both Handel and Hendrix; indeed it’s the only Hendrix site anywhere in the world to be officially recognised. After moving to Brook Street in 1968 with Kathy Etchingham, Hendrix learned of the Handel connection with the building and apparently visited both One Stop Records in South Molton Street and HMV in Oxford Street to pick up whichever records of Handel’s music he could find.
Two and half centuries earlier, the Brook Street property was the first London house Handel occupied in his own right. He stayed there for 36 years until his death in 1759. Although away from the artistic centres of Soho and Covent Garden, it was within easy walking distance of St James’s Palace, where Handel conducted his official duties, and the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, the focus of his Italian opera career at the time.
On blues and rock numbers with vocals, Jimi Hendrix generally took the vocal line himself. Handel, however, had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with singers. According to the Percy Anecdotes (1820) an operatic tenor became irritated with Handel. “If you don’t change your style of accompaniment,” he said, “I’ll jump up on your harpsichord and smash it.” Handel apparently responded: “Let me know when you plan to do that so that I can advertise it. I’m sure more people would come to see you leap off a harpsichord than would ever come to hear you sing.”


Posted by author: Andrew Fitzgibbon

2 thoughts on “The Messiah meets Purple Haze

  • “If you don’t change your style of accompaniment,” he said, “I’ll jump up on your harpsichord and smash it.” Handel apparently responded: “Let me know when you plan to do that so that I can advertise it. I’m sure more people would come to see you leap off a harpsichord than would ever come to hear you sing.”
    Hahaha. An excellent nugget in this context, with Hendrix setting fire to his guitar at Monterey to upstage the Who. The tenor sounds a bit more like Jerry Lee. ‘ }

  • I am reminded of this exchange between GB Shaw and Churchill:
    George Bernard Shaw telegrammed Winston Churchill just prior to the opening of Major Barbara: “Have reserved two tickets for first night. Come and bring a friend if you have one.”
    Churchill wired back, “Impossible to come to first night. Will come to second night, if you have one.”

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