Thierry Henry and Climate Change

Climate change deniers the world over will have been delighted by the mass hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. What a can of worms they reveal.

Details are all over the web, but in summary they destroy the credibility of a leading climate change Cassandra, Professor Phil Jones. They reveal him in turn to be conspiring to suppress papers by climate change sceptics ("Kevin and I will keep them out somehow", he writes), conspiring to marginalise a journal which had published papers by sceptics ("I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor"), trying to downplay the extent of the Mediaeval Warm Period on the basis of a "gut feeling, no science", threatening to resist Freedom of Information requests to reveal data even to the extent of destroying it, and proposing a "trick" to substitute one set of data for another in a publication. More extraordinary still they show him corresponding with a colleague baffled at absence of recent warming ("The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't... ").

So should we stop worrying? Probably not. The people revealed by these leaks to be manipulative anti-scientists are not the only ones working in the field. They are merely some of the most influential. I do realise that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I was in the Alps in the summer and I saw with my own eyes how the glaciers were retreating.

But hasn't the climate always changed? Didn't we have glaciers in Scotland at the end of the 19th Century? Hasn't humanity has always managed to adapt, hating change at the same time as being really good at dealing with it? And though the science is persuasive, can we really be sure that humanity is actually responsible for global warming? What if it's just nature? And shouldn't we be worrying about the next ice age instead?

On the whole I, like Professor Jones, would rather keep the Climate Change gravy train going. Not because my department's funding and my reputation depends on it, but because it offers the best hope of getting out of the ludicrous cycle of consumption and over-population which besets Western society, wrecking natural habitats and turning us all into mall-zombies.

But when that arch clown George Monbiot apologises in the Guardian today for misleading his readers, revealing himself unexpectedly to be a bigger man by far than Thierry Henry, the handball cheat whose manual assist got France into the World Cup finals and kept the Irish out, you know that something truly extraordinary has happened.

Houllebeq's "Atomised" (2)

Attentive readers (if there are any) of this blog may recall a piece back in May on Michel Houllebeq's novel Atomised. It tells, I wrote at the time, "the miserable life stories of two French half brothers Bruno and Michel, abandoned by their hippy mother in childhood. Bruno turns out an inadequate sex pest; Michel an unfeeling scientist. The West, Houellebecq tell us, has given itself over to a cult of individualism. The more selfishly we behave, the more unhappy we are." I agreed with much of Houllebeq's analysis, whilst disliking his book thoroughly, finding it badly written and boring.

Now what's this in today's Guardian? A Comment piece which contains the following - "But just because big government has helped atomise (my italics) our society, it doesn't follow that smaller government would automatically bring us together again". And later, "The big government approach has spawned multiple perverse incentives that either discourage responsibility or actively encourage irresponsibility. The paradox at the heart of big government is that by taking power and responsibility away from the individual, it has only served to individuate them (great verb, individuate). What is seen in principle as an act of social solidarity has in practice led to the greatest atomisation of our society."

Has the Graun taken to commissioning op-ed pieces from reclusive French writers now resident in Ireland? Er, no. This was by David Cameron.

I guess the disparagement of big government would be the give-away.

He goes on, "The once natural bonds that existed between people - of duty and responsibility - have been replaced by the synthetic bonds of the state - regulation and beauracracy." Spot on.

So now we know: the Tory leader has been reading Atomised. Is this a good thing? Probably: after Messrs. Thatcher and Major, whose tastes ranged from Milton Friedman all the way to Jeffrey Archer and the cricket scores, any fiction-reading Tory leader would be progress. Can he fix Broken Britain? Probably not. But identifying what's wrong might be the first step.

The BNP on Question Time redux

Apologies for revisiting a story that already feels like stale buns.

As predicted, Nick Griffin was less than impressive on Question Time. He isn't a bright bloke, but I suppose it shouldn't come as any surprise that a party of meat-heads can't find anyone better. You would have thought however that in the absence of brains, the BNP could at least come up with someone with a bit of charisma. Think of Wodehouse's Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts: now there was a man to make the average arts graduate quail.

What garment should Griffin endorse? There is something of a fascist John Major about him, and I favour a variant on the underwear theme. The Black Y-Fronts has a certain ring to it.

After the show was broadcast Griffin made a complaint against the BBC, saying he felt as if he had been attacked by a lynch mob. Since he's admitted to having shared a platform with a Ku Klux Klan leader, this might not have been the most tactful way of expressing himself. Although I suppose intimates of the Klan ought to know if anyone does what a lynch mob is like.

I found it heartening the other day to hear Rio Ferdinand telling all and sundry that Griffin had the right to be heard. You can tell the depths of folly the liberal no-platform lobby has plumbed when a fading Manchester United central defender has a better grasp of the issues than Oxbridge-educated Guardianistas.

The BNP on Question Time

OK. Disclaimer time. I am not a BNP supporter and I would never vote for them.

Now that's out of the way, what to make of the furore surrounding Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time tonight?

Well, first I have been absolutely baffled by the people who say he shouldn't be given the platform. Really? Don't they understand what democracy's about? It isn't a spectator sport. It's something everyone can have a go at; otherwise it's not democracy at all. Mrs Thatcher made a similar mistake when she banned the IRA from the airwaves. So hats off to the BBC for giving Griffin an appearance - a refreshing display of moral courage from Mark Thompson.

I believe Griffin will be condemned out of his own mouth. I once heard him interviewed on Radio 5, and for a Cambridge graduate he was woefully ineffectual. I find his assertion that you can't be black and British repellent, but also perplexing. I really don't understand how you can say that someone born and raised here can't be British just because they have a brown skin. I am a bit old school on this - for me Kevin Pietersen shouldn't be playing cricket for England: living here for a few years doesn't count. On the other hand Monty Panesar is as English as buttered toast, and it's irrelevant that he's a Sikh. He's a Luton boy through and through.

The Guardian has been full of hand-wringing nonsense about Griffin in recent weeks. Its leader writers settled for opposition to his Question Time appearance, illustrating that one of the seductive tendencies of extremism is to make otherwise reasonable people into idiots. Gary Younge, writing in today's paper, urges that the solution to racism might be, er, anti-racism. I'm afraid I have no idea at all what this means.

The reality is that the BNP is thriving because it is the only political party which opposes immigration. Its leadership and supporters may well be racist, but I suspect most of the people who vote for it aren't. There is a case to be made against immigration on grounds of economics, the environment and cultural cohesion, and yet public discussion of the issue has been as thoroughly vetoed by today's polite society as discussion of prostitution was vetoed in the Victorian drawing room. There's an interesting article here (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/6400553/Cowardice-on-immigration-has-allowed-the-BNP-to-flourish.html) by Frank Field and Nicholas Soames of the Parliamentary cross-party Balanced Migration group which makes exactly this point.

Incidentally the BBC reported the Office for National Statistics' quite extraordinary prediction yesterday of a population increase to 70 million in the near future as largely attributable to "migration". I suppose we should be grateful the prediction was reported at all, but it's precisely because of this kind of mealy-mouthed attempt to avoid drawing attention to the consequences of unrestricted immigration that the BNP are on Question Time tonight.

Barry Manilow and the decline of classical music

A couple of recent conversations, both with educationalists, have filled me with gloom about the future of classical music in the UK. The distinct impression gleaned from both is of the slow death of classical instrumental teaching in schools. "My school used to have half a dozen outstanding musicians at any one time", one said to me. "But now they all want to do electric guitar or drums". Another lamented the death of the local youth orchestra. "They lost the endangered instruments first, oboes and bassoons, and then they just didn't have enough players and had to shut it down". What, I asked, was the prospect of finding a good local young soloist to do a concerto? Much shaking of heads. "You might find someone, perhaps in one of the private schools. But I'd have to put out feelers. I can't think of anyone off hand." This autumn a local University renowned for its music department, one told me, had no string players in its new intake of students.

It is a cliche that things are not what they used to be, one widely mocked because we all know that things have a tendency to remain exactly the same; but let me record one way things truly were different in the 1970s. I had violin lessons till I was 17, but hardly had I got into double figures when I realised that girls had an irrational weakness for boys who could play the electric guitar. So the violin was a chore (enjoyed playing, hated practising), whereas the guitar was a pleasure to be indulged whenever there was a free moment. The school had a visiting guitar teacher, but the kids who had lessons were universally useless at rock and roll. That's because you cannot teach someone to play it. You have to work it out for yourself. Classical music requires technique, and if you can acquire one it will take you almost to the highest level, where only the last few percentage points of musicality marks the difference between Alfred Brendel and a journeyman. But rock and roll is not like that. In a discipline which prizes above all else the ability to improvise, every player has to find their own way: after all, the great masters of the electric guitar, from Hendrix to Richard Thompson to Tom Verlaine, have styles so divergent they might be playing different instruments.

Not only were lessons useless, but they were given by adults. Pop music was ours, the music of the young, and we would no more have let them teach us about it than they would have known how. You may say that the slow death of classical music (if that's what it is) is just a natural consequence of an art form's obsolescence. Perhaps. But is not that also true of pop music? Is it not the case that when a medium is taught in schools, when there are exams you can take in it, when Phd students pore over the lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon, the medium's time is up? When my children know more about the Beatles and AC/DC than I do, when the latest in electro-pop (Lady Gaga, La Roux) is just the 80s revisited, when pop is condemned to rehash the cultural stylings of its heyday for a new generation, when the X-Factor churns out singing strippers who would make perfectly capable cruise-ship chanteuses in another life, isn't that the sound of a dead horse being flogged? When will the new punk come to sweep it all away? And if it does, will it just be a re-hash of the old?

Kids do not need adults to tell them about pop. They will spend their youth discovering it and making it for themselves. But they do need adults to tell them about classical music. Why? Well, because although it's amongst the greatest art the West has ever produced, because although once discovered it is an emotional and psychological resource for life, most kids won't find it on their own: they are put off by the language and the lack of surface glamour which most pop music strives assiduously to cultivate. There are other reasons for the decline of classical music in Britain, but a woeful blindness on the part of educationalists must take its share of the blame. I have heard teachers say in all seriousness, "We're glad we don't have to teach classical music at GCSE any more: it helps with inclusivity. Now we're doing keyboard and karaoke more kids want to get involved". It is with difficulty have I restrained myself from shouting, "Take that, you smug bastard", whilst beating them with a riding crop. Would they make the same argument about Shakespeare? Can you imagine someone saying, "We don't bother with Macbeth or Hamlet any more, because the kids don't want to get involved. We let them do Harry Potter or Garth Nix instead"? And yet that is effectively the place we have reached. A generation of teachers who were themselves taught little about classical music is now responsible for teaching a new generation of children. We have sown the wind, and are reaping the whirlwind.

My remedy? How long have we got. I would start, and it would only be a start, at the very bottom, in primary school. Every classroom has a CD player already. Make teachers play classical music every day while the kids are doing reading or drawing. This already happens in my youngest daughter's school. Play the Brandenburgs. Some Handel. Start them off slow. Get the language into their heads. That would do to get them going.

Unfortunately my daughter's teacher is a Barry Manilow fan. She now knows the words to Copacabana by heart; but when I conduct Beethoven's 5th tomorrow night I know my wife will struggle to persuade her to come.

Alan Green at the Proms

As the umpteenth Proms season grinds its way to a close, I find guiltily that yet again I have failed to listen to more than a fraction of the concerts. There are several reasons for this. The pressures of family life. Being away on holiday. Not liking some of the programmes. And, it must be admitted, reluctance to face the sobering reality, experienced annually by the vast majority of British composers, that one's own music does not feature. Again. This chilling douche makes the Proms as much a horse-syringe sized injection of humility as a great music festival. Attendance can be as painful as it is enjoyable.

The Proms and I go way back. As a student I queued for hours outside the Albert Hall to hear Rattle conduct Mahler, or Elder with the NYO doing bits of Valkyrie with Gwyneth Jones as Brunnhilde (quite the loudest singer I have ever heard). It was there that a performance of Nielsen's fifth left me speechless for a full ten minutes. And after the concerts we'd literally run down the street to the Queen's Arms to get two pints in and somewhere to sit before the crush of listeners and orchestral players arrived, arguing the toss about the music we'd just heard. Later, when I was working near Chancery Lane, I'd get the Tube to Marble Arch and walk across Hyde Park in the evening sunshine to meet my wife outside. It was a thoroughly civilised and invigorating thing to do, and now, ten years after having left London, it is still the only thing I miss about living there.

Notwithstanding all the concerts missed this year, there were still some great performances. Maris Yanssons doing Sibelius 1 with the flair and conviction of a great conductor at the top of his game. The Lebecq sisters playing the Poulenc Double. And has there been a more arch performer since Liberace than the uber-charismatic Lang Lang? For all his eye-rolling and gurning at the piano, he made the Chopin F minor concerto look really easy, and played with all the grace and finesse you could ask for.

To the downside, I didn't like any of the newer stuff. I caught bits of a Xenakis piece which sounded truly dreary, and there was something by Louis Andriessen which did nothing very much before lumbering and stumbling to the finishing line. Did Roger Wright really have to commission Goldie, the former electronica luminary, a man who does not even read music, to write an orchestral piece?

And the BBC TV coverage was infuriating. Yes, no-one else would do this - and thank God for the BBC generally - but did the pundits have to be so bland? Not all performances were great, and neither was all the music. Strauss's Alpinesinfonie is a monstrosity. The English singers in the otherwise wonderful John Wilson prom were wooden and lacklustre. The programme of the Gustav Mahler youth orchestra concert was a turgid fin-de-siecle Viennese-fest in which the lightest item was the Kindertotenlieder and rows of empty seats were clearly visible behind the presenter. You wouldn't know any of this from the coverage, because in this the best of all possible worlds everything was great, the audiences loved it all and classical music was in rude health.

Does it have to be like this? I was reminded by contrast of the BBC's football commentries, and in particular of Alan Green, a fearless Ulsterman who tells it like it is. The BBC no doubt pays him handsomely for his efforts, and pays handsomely for the right to broadcast those efforts to us. But Green couldn't care less. "This game", he'll tell listeners, "is rubbish. The standard of football has been woeful. I'm doing my best to stay awake, and thank goodness it's nearly half time".

Why can't we have that kind of punditry at the Proms? You may object that Alan Green knows nothing about classical music. Possibly not. But that didn't seem to harm Goldie's prospects.

Dino Powell

Every now and again, sitting in the cinema as the final credits roll, I see that the music for the film I've been watching was by John Powell. It happened to me yesterday when I took my youngest daughter to the cinema. Seeing John's name makes me smile because twenty years ago I was at College with him. A small bloke, handsome in a slightly chubby way, he had the most dazzling white teeth: if there was ever a Brit who didn't need his teeth fixed to make it in Hollywood, Powell was the man. He displayed no outstanding talent for composition, but worked hard in the Trinity recording studio, was easy to get along with, and was quite good at just about everything.

How did he get into films? It must have helped that he was close friends with Gavin Greenaway, son of Roger "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" Greenaway, a luminary in the world of advertising jingles. And Hans Zimmer famously got Powell the job of scoring his first movie, the John Woo action thriller Face/Off starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. But you don't get a second job by doing the first one badly, and I think John deserves his success. He can do a bit of Holst, a bit of Strauss, some Copland, some electronica. In fact, as he demonstrated at College, Powell can do just about everything quite well.

Sometimes when I'm sitting there I think, "Should I be feeling envious that he writes film scores that are heard all over the world, whereas I'm just a moderately successful classical composer and conductor of amateur orchestras?" On the whole, no. John must be rich; he lives in sunny L.A. But I've got drink in the house and money in the bank too, and I quite like it here in rainy Manchester.

But there is one thing I envy him. Composing is an isolating and isolated business. Sometimes you get asked to write pieces, but a lot of the time you write something just because you want to, not knowing for certain whether you'll be able to persuade anyone to put it on. John, on the other hand, must feel loved when he gets the phone call. It may not be real love, but it's pretty close and it must make him feel pretty good.

Would I like it if someone rang me up and said, "We're willing to pay you a lot of money to write some music which will be heard by millions of people all over the world"? Yes, I think I would. But - and this is where John Powell and I part company - I might not like it quite so much if the music I had to write was the soundtrack for Ice Age 3 - Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Whingeing Aussies

When I came home for an hour on Saturday between rehearsing Bruckner's 4th Symphony in the afternoon and performing it in the evening, I'd intended to rest. But the Test Match had reached such pitch of tension that I had to sit and listen to the denouement instead. After being outplayed comprehensively, England managed to hang on for the draw; needing to take only one more wicket to win, the Aussies simply ran out of time .

Amidst scenes of great drama, two things left a sour taste in the mouth. The first was the time-wasting of the England physio and 12th man, making spurious visits to the middle to use up a few precious minutes. The second was that the Aussie captain Ricky Ponting should have chosen to complain about it.

What a hypocrite! Firstly, he would have done exactly the same. Secondly, when did the Australians sign up to the Corinthian ideal? Or did I miss something?

No, for the men who invented sledging, the moral high ground is a long way up and far, far away, lost in the clouds and unattainable by those in the baggy green caps.

Celebrity Composers

It was perhaps predictable that, after posting a month or so ago about the forthcoming performance of Rufus Wainwright's opera Prima Donna at the Manchester International Festival, my wife would buy a pair of tickets and insist we go. "I'll be miserable", I protested. "Either it'll be brilliant, in which case I'll be jealous, or it'll be dreadful, in which case I'll be furious". But my objections were in vain, and off we went last night to the packed Palace Theatre.

Actually Prima Donna was neither brilliant nor dreadful, and I was neither jealous or angry. Wainwright is clearly a very talented guy, and about a quarter of the opera worked really well. OK, a lot of it sounds like Puccini, but perhaps better so than Birtwhistle, and there is after all a lot of Haydn in Mozart. A lot of other bits reminded me of no-one at all.

As for the remaining three quarters, the word which sprang to mind was amateurish. Wainwright cannot write a climax and does not know how to make the music move forward. He doesn't always know how to write music which underscores and amplifies the (fairly melodramatic) story, often serving up the bland at what should be the most gripping moments (the suspended dominant chord when the heroine may or may not be about to chuck herself from the window ledge perhaps the most memorably dreary example). Some of his writing for voices is leaden and unsympathetic (just because tenors can sing high doesn't mean you have to make them sing high all the time). It came as no surprise to read in the score that Wainwright had needed the assistance of an "orchestration assistant". I read this as meaning, "Rufus doesn't know how to score for orchestra, so we'll get a guy in who does".

The truly depressing thing about Prima Donna is not that it is no good at all, but that all these superbly professional people - the singers, designers, producers and orchestra all aquit themselves honourably - had been put at vast expense at the service of someone who is essentially an inexperienced amateur. Why? Because Wainwright is famous; the fact that he is famous for doing something else does not seem to have bothered the people who commissioned his piece. This is exactly the same mistake as that made routinely by the chairmen of football clubs, who appoint managers thinking that because they were good at football they must also be good at management. Bobby Charlton, John Barnes, Paul Gascoigne and many others tried it and failed. The best managers in the English league on the other hand in the last few years - Fergie, Mourinho and Wenger - were all average or worse as players. The gifted player like Mark Hughes who makes a good manager is an exception.

So now as well as celebrity managers we have celebrity composers. Is Leona Lewis writing an opera? Not so far as I know. But her agent should get onto it as soon as possible, because I'm sure that the organisers of some arts festival somewhere would like to hear from her. I am available if she needs an orchestration assistant.

The Quality of the Invention, stupid

Three things recently have conspired to remind me of the great John Williams, composer - I almost said "film composer" - extraordinaire.

Firstly, the Halifax Symphony Orchestra blasted its way through a Star Wars medley last Saturday, a performance it was a privelidge to conduct, with the brass section on coruscating form (by the way, in the eyes of the Courier's reviewer I was "lively" this time - does she read my blog?  Is she teasing me?).

Secondly, I've been reading Alex Ross's (otherwise excellent) history of 20th c. music The Rest is Noise, in which nonentities such as Varese get a dozen references but Williams is missing altogether.

Thirdly, I went to see the new Star Trek movie the other night, and found it pretty much like Star Wars only with mediocre music; which made it a pretty mediocre experience.

Why should John Williams feature in Ross's book?  After all he's not a classical composer.  Wrong.  Actually Williams has written quite a bit of concert music, including concertos for violin, clarinet and cello (this last for Yo Yo Ma).  But that's not quite the point.  Ross finds space for several Hollywood composers of the 30s and 40s, forced out of Europe by the rise of Nazism.  Why not space for one Hollywood composer of the 80s and 90s forced out of the concert hall by the rise of Serialism?

For all the debt Williams owes to Shostakovitch and Prokofiev (isn't there a good deal of Beethoven in Brahms?), he has one priceless quality afforded only to the very, very lucky.  A gift for memorable harmony and melody.  And what makes music last is not its originality, the sublety of its construction or the superficial allure of its intellectual foundations: it is the quality of the invention.  

That's why Williams's is a greater composer than Varese, and why his music will still be played when Varese is long forgotten.

britten's national opera?

I was reminded yesterday of an uncomfortable fact by a gushing review in the Grauniad of a new ENO production .

I don't like Peter Grimes.  

This is close to heresy for a British musician, and I apologise for transgressing.

To be clear, I love the Four Sea Interludes, so it's not the music that's the problem. It's the story. To understand Grimes it helps to grasp that Britten and Pears were interested in George Crabbe's poem because its protagonist was an outsider in his community, The Borough, in much the same way as they felt themselves to be sexual outsiders in post-war Britain.  

Early drafts of Montagu Slater's libretto make it clear that Grimes is a violent monster, responsible by negligence at the very least for the deaths of the three apprentices under his charge.  But Britten changed the libretto as he went along to make Grimes a more ambiguous figure, so that we never know to what extent he is responsible for the first two deaths, and the third boy dies when scrambling down a cliff to Grimes's boat.  The audience sees no violence, although Grimes does threaten the boy.

According to the Graun's review, in the new ENO production, the boy dies when Grimes, distracted by a vigilante crowd from The Borough, lets go of the rope holding him.  So here Grimes has tried to safeguard the boy, and The Borough is partly responsible for his death.

This just won't do.  Part of my discomfort, sitting through the opera, has been that no-one in it is terribly sympathetic.  Grimes is horrible.  The Borough are all hypocrites.  The boy is a cipher, who doesn't even sing.  Now I accept that it may be too much to ask that all art depicting human relationships should have someone nice in it somewhere; but life is short, and three hours in the company of unpleasant people is not something you should have to pay for, however good the music.  Moreover, the opera portrays a whole society, and how many societies are entirely made up of such thoroughly disagreeable people?

But it's not just that.  The drama is fundamentally unbalanced.  We are asked to believe that Grimes is both a victim and a creation of The Borough, and that, according to the Graun's reviewer, they are "hypocritical . . . . a totally dysfunctional community, fuelled by religious bigotry . . . "  Well yes, but even these are nicer people than Grimes.  Grimes is a twisted self-hating bully, whereas they are just hypocrites.  Who would you rather get stuck in a lift with?  Ah yes, reply Britten enthusiasts, but Grimes is twisted because the Borough hates him.. No!  The Borough hates him because he is horrible and does horrible things.

This curious moral blindness reminds me of something Frank Kermode once said.  He found that when teaching Camus' The Outsider he was always amazed by how readily his students identified with the existentially tortured murderer; yet almost none of them were interested in the anonymous Arab victim. 

Yes, it's true: for artists, no matter how ghastly you might be, there's no crime worse than provincial conservatism.

Houllebeq's "Atomised"

The borderline Aspergers being over-represented in the Males from Hale, the men-only reading group I frequent, scores are assiduously kept on our resident accountant's Crackberry.  In answer to my Stato-like query as to which book had the historic highest mark, Atomised by Michel Houellebecq turned out to be the winner. So I bought it for my wife at Christmas.  She hated it. "Give me Jane Austen any day", she grumbled after thirty pages, tossing it over to my side of the bed.

I have just finished it. From the reviews plastered on the cover I was expecting a cross between the King James Bible, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Joy of Sex. Only better. Sadly not. Atomised tells the miserable life stories of two French half brothers Bruno and Michel, abandoned by their hippy mother in childhood. Bruno turns out an inadequate sex pest; Michel an unfeeling scientist. The West, Houellebecq tell us, has given itself over to a cult of individualism. The more selfishly we behave, the more unhappy we are. Bruno and Michel are certainly unhappy. Michel's researches lead him to opportunities for cloning humans, and at the end of the book (spoiler coming) we learn that humans are obsolete and have created their genetic successors, free from weltschmertz and fear.

So far, well, quite interesting. There is, if you like that kind of thing, a great deal of rumpy-pumpy. I guess if you want to say that people are having a lot of empty sex with people about whom they care nothing, you have to show them actually doing so. Which Houellebecq obligingly does, page after tedious page. This palled fairly quickly for me. 

Then there's the technical problem of how, if your novel is essentially one of ideas, you weave those ideas in without lecturing. Astonishingly, Houellebecq makes almost no attempt to do this, so there are endless passages which read like a pamphlet, sometimes with the narrator addressing the reader directly, sometimes half-heartedly stuck into a scene such as the one in which the half-brothers tell each other about Aldous Huxley.  It is quite extraordinarily lazy and often very boring.

Neither is Houellebecq's book free from internal implausibilities and contradictions.  An early teenage admirer of Michel's, whom he unaccountably failed to shag at the time, turns up after 25 years and still carries a torch for him. "I just want you to give me a baby", she says (a characteristic piece of Houellebecq dialogue).  She is beautiful, of course. After an accident, Bruno's sex-buddy becomes disabled, and throws herself down the stairs in her wheelchair when he hesitates a fraction of a second too long before agreeing to look after her. We never find out exactly how Michel's human cloning manages to do away with all the painful aspects of life-before-death. Nor why humanity, of which the tortured Michel and Bruno are not exactly typical, was willing to connive in its own obsolescence.

All of which is a shame, because Houellebecq is right about lots of things.  We are obsessed with the idea of personal freedom, often with devastating results.  Atomised is mercifully free of PC so hardly anyone escapes a kicking. There are some odd patches of truly luminous writing. But reading the gushing blurb (Julian Barnes in particular should have known better) I was struck by how fearful are critics of discovering they have failed to get on the right bandwagon. And learning that the book had won Houellebecq the Prix Novembre, it occurred to me that bad novelists everywhere should take heart - Will Self, David Baddiel, Jeffrey Archer - nil desperandum: one day all this could be yours.

In and Out of the Loop

We went to see Armando Ianucci's In The Loop over the weekend.  

Despite the film's anti-war premise, and despite being someone who thought invading Iraq might turn out to be marginally better than leaving Saddam in place, I laughed till my face ached.

But it wasn't just the antics of uber-angry Malcolm Tucker (right) that were funny.  There were two other things about the film which made me smile.

Firstly, the alleged sexing up of the WMD intelligence, on which the film turns, overlooked the crucial point that almost no-one believed Alastair Campbell's dodgy dossier at the time.  Sure, there are left-wing Labour MPs who claim that they wouldn't have voted for the war if it hadn't been for Campbell's gilding the lily; but they have short memories.  Not long after it was produced, the dossier was widely ridiculed when a PhD student pointed out that some of it came from his work published on the internet. Then, as now, public credulity was in short supply.

But although the direct evidence was small, we knew Saddam had had WMD; we knew he had used gas on Kurdish villages; we knew he was doing everything he could to thwart Hans Blix and his colleagues; we knew that in Iraq's police state, where torture of dissidents and their families was routine, it would be very difficult to recruit informers, and hence the lack of direct evidence was not surprising.

Thus the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming, and not surprisingly everyone I spoke to (and this was a period in which bruising rows with my friends who opposed the war were routine) believed Saddam had WMD. Without exception.  The idea that the UK's parliament, the US government and the UN Security Council were swayed into war by a bad-tempered Scottish spin-doctor is itself a piece of spin.  Because, unappealing though the British government's manoevres may have been, they made no difference to the outcome.  As a public, we believed Saddam had the weapons anyway.

Of course Mr Ianucci would say, "It's a satire; a fictionalised account.  It's not meant to be a historical reconstruction".  Well OK up to a point.  But when real opponents of the war argue that we were led into it by a foul-mouthed Scottish spin doctor who sexed up the intelligence, and - lo and behold! - that's exactly what happens in Ianucci's film, it's a claim that will only run so far.

The second thing that struck me was, where was Saddam in all this? Nowhere. In Ianucci's film the war was to take place in abstract. That it would have the effect of removing from power one of the twentieth century's most ghastly dictators was airbrushed from sight.  

Why should this make me smile?  Because it confirms my thesis that if there's one thing the anti-war brigade don't want to hear about it's talk of Saddam. How inconvenient to be reminded of how things were under his regime!  As for what things would have carried on being like (after Saddam, his sons, then some other Ba'ath Party strongman), these are things opponents of the war cannot even begin to contemplate.  For them, success would have meant vast and peaceful rallies in London and Washington, followed by a climb-down by Bush and Blair.  

And for them, Iraq would have continued to be "a faraway country", to borrow from Neville Chamberlain, "of which we know nothing".

Rufus "Anonymous" Wainwright

So singer Rufus Wainwright has written an opera, and it's going to be put on at this year's Manchester Festival.  Lucky Rufus.  Last year it was Damon Allbarn's Monkey.  A while back the London Sinfonietta was looking for a composer to work with.  Who did they go for?  Answer, Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead.  

The moral?  If you want your work put on, don't bother going to Music College, learning your craft, sending your music to people who'll never read it, going in for the same competitions everyone else is going for, trying to scrape a living while you write in the little unused corners of your spare time that aren't taken up by your domestic life.

No, instead become a pop star, because apparently that's a bit of a draw for the powers that be in classical music.  

Don't get me wrong, these people may be talented and their work may be really good.  May be. But let's face it, they got the gig because they were who they were.  If they want to see how much their talent counts for, next time let them submit it anonymously.

Finally, spare a thought for poor old classical music, poking around in the bottom of the barrel for something the public might actually pay to see. Without wishing to labour the obvious, putting on works from composers the public quite likes might be a good place to start.  Why not stop commissioning Birtwhistle and Rihm, whose stuff the mass audience cordially loathes, and encourage instead composers who care about whether the listener has a good time and can understand what's going on?

After all John Adams can't be the only one who can do it.

hypocrisy central

The Guardian has had its knickers in a twist in the last few weeks over corporate tax avoidance, running a series of self-righteous articles under the heading Tax Gap.  In its most recent scoop, it published details of transactions undertaken by Barclays to minimise its tax exposure, which the Bank promptly got an injunction to suppress.

But now what's this?  The current issue of Private Eye suggests that the Guardian's owners have been doing a little avoidance of their own.  Last year, it says, they bought Emap, a magazine publisher, via a parent company in Luxembourg and a string of offshore subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands.  The aim?  According to the Eye, to avoid paying stamp duty on the purchase of Emap shares.

Pass the sick bag. 

Looking like Brad Pitt

Over in Halifax, the orchestra's concerts are dutifully reviewed in the Courier by a lady I have never met called Julia Anderson.  Her reviews are almost unfailingly kind to the orchestra and its Music Director.  However she has described my conducting style as "energetic" so often that it came as no surprise that after last Saturday's concert - Tchaikovsky 4 and the Emperor concerto - she felt the need for a new adjective.  

This time I was "attentive".  I'm not sure I like it quite so much as "energetic", but perhaps it was time for a change.  

For the soloist in the concerto, however, one word was not enough.  Ms Anderson found Duncan Glenday both "young" and "very slight of frame".  In a dark theatre appearances can be deceptive, but although all things are relative, "young" is probably pushing it a bit for Duncan.  And when am I going to get my own descriptive just deserts?  Who knows, if Ms Anderson thinks Duncan's young, she may well feel I look a bit like Brad Pitt.  

From the back, of course.  In a dark theatre.

Yes, I was in favour of the war!

Although my experience of having been - reluctantly - in favour of the Iraq war, amidst a class of people who were overwhelmingly against it, is a subject for another time, I was reminded of it this morning by a letter in the Graun about civilian casualty figures.  One Geoff Simons, author of Iraq Endgame: Surge, Suffering and the Politics of Denial, claimed that estimates of the dead topped one million.

Of course, no-one knows how many casualties there were, but it just so happens that the only organisation that has tried to count the actual individuals killed, Iraqbodycount.org, puts the total at slightly less than one tenth of that figure, ie at about 95,000.  Now that is a lot of people, but it is a lot fewer than one million (presumably that's why it was ignored by Mr Simons), and in any event as a marker of whether the war was a bad idea or not is meaningless unless you consider "but for" test.  Ie, but for the war, what would have happened?

Well, it's reasonable to assume that Saddam would have remained in power; that he would have continued to butcher and starve the civilian population as previously; that on his death he would have been succeeded by one or both of his sons; and that on the eventual collapse of the Ba'ath party regime, perhaps a generation into the future, a bloody sectarian power struggle would have ensued, only this time without the Americans to hold the ring and pay for the reconstruction.  In other words, more of Saddam would probably have been deadly too, and to come to a fair assessment you need to set the war casualties against those who would have died if Saddam had been left in place.  Unfortunately, you can't count those people, because no-one knows who they are; neither can you show emotive interviews with their grieving relatives on TV.

It seems to me, contra Mr Simons, that it's those opposed to the invasion who are in denial, because, however dreadful, it was probably no worse than the alternative.  It must be hard for people like him to accept that it's because Bush and Blair ignored their protests that Iraq now has a democratic government.  

A small satisfaction then of the post-invasion period has been the way in which the case against it has unravelled in the slowest of slow motion.

Symphonie Fantastique!

You can think you know a piece pretty well, but some new things struck me after conducting Berlioz's masterpiece on Saturday night for the first time.  

Extraordinarily, the Symphonie Fantastique was written in the same period (late 1820s) as Schubert's Great C Major symphony.  But where Schubert does his wonderful best to follow in Beethoven's footsteps - Schubert lacks more than a small part of Beethoven's great gift for construction based on motivic development, but nevertheless the Great C Major is recognisably designed on the same principles - Berlioz's method is something altogether new and different.  True, there are tunes, one of which recurs throughout the work, but Berlioz is less interested in contrasting and developing these than he is in the bravura opposition of brilliantly vivid and idiomatic orchestral textures; you might even say that this is the principal constructive device.

It shouldn't work.  It should be rambling and incoherent.  But it isn't.  Why?  Partly because the above-mentioned idee fixe ties it all together; partly because the ideas themselves are so wonderful; and partly because in the second half of the piece Berlioz cranks up the rhythmic excitement so successfully after the long silences of the central slow movement that you seem to be caught up in some crazy dance, a party that's got out of hand but that no one wants to end.

Conducting long symphonies like this one, I am sometimes just relieved to have got to the final bars without mishap.  But on Saturday, admiration for Berlioz's achievement came welling up at the finish, and now I can't wait for the chance to do it again.

Institutionally rubbish?

A lot of hot air in the paper yesterday marking the 10th anniversary of Stephen Lawrence's death at the hands of racist thugs.  Was the Met Police force still "institutionally racist", as the Macpherson report had it?  

In a former life I used to be a solicitor in East London, working with largely black clients, in and out of its police stations in the early hours of the morning, dealing with mostly white police officers.  Yes, many of them were racist; but that was not because the institution was racist - in fact it had tried strenously at management level to do the right thing - it was because Met police officers tended to come from lower middle or working class backgrounds, often outside London, and thus tended to be from the social class most likely to be overtly racist and to have least personal experience of living and working alongside black people.  Moreover, because the areas in which they worked were largely black, most of the criminals were black too. So it's not hard to see how the black = criminal equation grew up in the minds of these officers.  Not that that's any excuse, mind.

I thought of this today because an independent report has looked into the death of Stuart Lubbock in Michael Barrymore's swimming pool.  And guess what?  It says that the police failed to secure the site and failed to secure crucial items which might have been used to assault Lubbock and which later "disappeared".  In all, six complaints by Lubbock's father were upheld.  

For anyone used to seeing the way the police work from the inside, the real lesson of both these cases is that the police are very often mediocre at what they do.  The Met were probably never institutionally racist, but they were certainly institutionally rubbish.

The arctic south

I spent Friday and Saturday with a friend climbing some hills either side of the A9 in the Central Highlands, an area that lacks almost all of the drama of Glencoe and the west but has something of what I imagine to be the grand scale of the Arctic tundra or the Russian steppes.  There had been heavy snowfall which was now melting, but although we waded exhaustingly through acres of slush, the ground underneath was still frozen solid.  The benevolent looking weather belies the strength of the wind - you could hardly stand upright in it. It's worth clicking on the picture to see the wonderful striations of snow, and to get the sense of the high plateau, one of the most southerly Arctic environments in the world, apparently going on forwever.

Freedom of certain kinds of speech?

Two pieces of bad news for lovers of free speech last week.  First, the turning away at Heathrow of the right-wing Dutch MP Geert Wilders and then the hoo-ha over Richard Bean's play England People Very Nice at the National Theatre.  To be clear, I haven't seen either the play, or the film that Mr Wilders proposed to show at Westminster.  But if "free-speech" means anything beyond an inaccurate platitude, it means allowing people to express opinions you don't like.  

Justifying Wilders' ban on the grounds that letting him in might cause a riot, it must have embarrassed David Miliband to discover that Wilders had been over a month previously without any such thing happening.  You should be able to describe the Koran as "fascist", however wrong that might be, without attracting the attention of either the law or the Muslim great and good.  

As for Mr Bean, it disappointed me that so few of the usual suspects lined up against him seemed to realise that the fact that they didn't like his play was absolutely irrelevant in the context of freedom of speech.  I personally believe that racism is stupid as well as wrong, but that's only a matter of opinion, and the fact that it's the PC brigade which is edging towards a state where some opinions are officially OK and some not gives me concern.  Think how easily the jack-boot might be transferred to the other foot.

The fact is that immigration makes a lot of people in Britain extremely uneasy, and the more their voices are marginalised and brushed under the carpet the more likely it is that in the medium-term support for extremists will grow.

Bankers in the dock?

The Grauniad has its knickers in a twist again over the credit crunch, the inquisition of banking CEOs by the Treasury select committee apparently meriting a double-page spread.  Methinks a bit of deflection at work here - so capitalists take enormous risks and put immediate personal gain ahead of long-term sustainability!  What next?  Bears crapping in the woods?

No, if Governments let them, bankers run riot.  And who set up the UK's banking regulatory system?  One Gordon Brown.  No sign of him in the dock though.

According to a bold splash in the Graun, their MP inquisitors thought it worth while asking the erstwhile Masters of the Universe whether they had any formal banking qualifications.  I didn't bother reading the answers.  A few miles from where I'm writing this, Alex Ferguson is going off to work.  Without any formal football qualifications.

So farewell then Scolari!

It's hard to feel much sympathy for Chelsea fans after their club sacked their fourth manager in five years: I've tried, and failed.  They've had the good news with Mr Abramovich - his shed loads of money bought them a great manager and some instant trophies - but now here comes the bad news.  

It's hard to believe, I know, but here's an owner who thinks he knows more about football than the people he pays to run the team, who wanted success now, who didn't understand that sometimes things get worse before they get better, and who has become reluctant to throw good money after bad.  It's downhill all the way from here.

Directing bruckner

Went to see Bruckner 8 played by the BBC Phil at the Bridgewater on Saturday.  Gunter Herbig was conducting.  Unlike many, he conducts only fractionally ahead of the beat, so that there does appear to be some relationship between what he does and what the orchestra does.  There was no single point where I thought, "He got that wrong", but sometimes did feel a lack of direction in the music, a common fault in Bruckner performances, and it's interesting to think why this might be.  

Bruckner tends to write in self-contained paragraphs.  One ends and another begins.  Over time you get previous paragraphs repeated, sometimes nearly verbatim, sometimes very much altered.  Because of the huge stretches of music involved, repetition of these long paragraphs can make you feel as if you're going round in a circle.  Hearing the music after a long and busy day, there were times when I imagined myself in a dream-state; my fourteen year old son fell comprehensively asleep and his heavy breathing punctuated the silences between the movements.  

When the final chord began at (what turned out to be) the end of the last movement I found myself thinking, "This could be the end.  On the other hand he could just contrive a diminuendo and get it going again with something else".  There was no sense that this had to be the conclusion; it was almost as if Bruckner had merely had enough and thought, "Right, let's bung a bit of C major in - that'll round things off nicely".  That could be the conductor's fault, of course, but it's a feeling you rarely experience in Sibelius or Nielsen: their grip of musical argument is so masterly that you are never in any doubt that the music has got to where it's been going all along.

At the moment I'm rehearsing the Gorton Phil for a performance of Symphonie Fantastique at the end of February, and my other gripe concerned Bruckner's orchestration.  If only he had had a fraction of Berlioz's imagination!  With Bruckner it is sumptuous strings or heaven-storming brass; or both.  But his woodwind writing is pedestrian - they are reduced to the occasional cursory solo.  No wonder wind players don't tend to rate Bruckner much.  Of course one reason Mahler's symphonies are on the whole better regarded is that his writing for the orchestra is a hundred times more varied and idiomatic than Bruckner.  But then, like Berlioz, he was a conductor, and conductors understand the way an orchestra works in the way few composers can.