Norrington, Mahler and vibrato

As recorded elsewhere in this blog, the only thing I miss about not living in London any more is The Proms. During the season I still listen to bits of it; last night as the washing up was coming to an end, we switched the radio on. It was clearly Mahler 9, about ten minutes into the first movement. I used to really like it.

"Bit of a thin string tone", I said to S. "Wonder who's playing?"

A few minutes later a suspicion began to dawn.

"I bet it's Norrington and the Stuttgart orchestra. Where's the paper?"

The cat was sitting on it, as he does on just about any useful bit of paper, and looked most aggrieved to be moved.

"What did I say? It's Norrington and his no-vibrato wonders".

"I've been telling you that for the last two minutes", S said. "I heard a trailer for it earlier on".

"Did you?", I said, aware only that she had been talking and, excited about the possibility of being right about something, I had been ignoring her.

Either I was very lucky, or Sir Roger has contrived a sound for his orchestra which renders it utterly distinctive. I personally don't like it. I heard him playing Elgar a while back, and it felt as natural as wearing socks in the bath. But hats off to him. No vibrato is Norrington's USP, and he has made a career out of it, firstly with the classics, then on to Brahms and now, inevitably, Elgar and Mahler.

I don't like Norrington's conducting, but I have to acknowledge that he is very good at it. In comparison with some stick-wavers, Norrington's movements impart useful information about speed, volume, phrasing and articulation (compare him to some other toilers in the field: "How on earth do you cope when X is conducting?", I asked a friend in the Halle. "Oh we just don't watch when we have him", she said).

But back to vibrato. I have never studied the history of string playing, and I am not in a position to say that Sir Roger, who undoubtedly has, is wrong to get his orchestra to leave the vibrato out; only that I don't like the results. I have my own theory as to why vibrato was introduced, based on absolutely zero research but instead on quite a bit of playing experience, a theory which explains why playing the Romantics without it leaves me - and it must be said most other people - cold.

In the high Baroque we find that instrumental music is largely contrapuntal. That's to say that rather than music having a tune and accompaniment, it tends to be all tunes, or at least mostly tunes, woven together like a plait. Now if you have the tune, you can do phrasing. By phrasing a musician means altering the volume and weight of a melodic line to impart musical direction: the feeling that the line is going somewhere, and having got there, is going away again. Most phrases have a point of weight towards and away from which they move. To take the opening line of God Save the Queen as an example, the weight there would be on the first syllable of gracious; gracious in fact. Interestingly, if you were to speak the line aloud, the stress would be on Queen; but Haydn's tune imposes musical obligations strong enough to override natural speech rhythms. That's why the Messiah aria And We Like Sheep makes me laugh every time I hear it.

Now if you play a line without phrasing or vibrato it doesn't just sound "thin", the usual complaint about vibrato-less playing, it also sounds static. I think that if players didn't use vibrato until about a hundred years ago (the Norrington view, although many people disagree, feeling that the conductor has read his sources selectively), they must have had to work much harder at phrasing, because that was what made their music come alive. I think that in the pre-vibrato era, melodic lines were always either growing or waning.

How would the players have done this? By varying the speed and pressure of the bow. Volume is, to put it crudely, a coefficient of these two things. The harder you press the bow down (and the quicker you move it) the greater the volume produced. So in baroque music, where most people have a melodic line most of the time, the players look instinctively - and this can even be done sight-reading - for the high or low point in the line and aim for it.

Now as the 18th century matures and passes into the 19th, musical textures change. If there is a tune at all, it is more likely to be a tune with an accompaniment, that's to say a figuration, static or mobile, which provides chordal support for the melodic line. As a player with one of these supporting lines, it is much harder to know where the weight in the phrase (which you are not yourself playing) should lie. This is the crux of the difficulty, and in my view it's where vibrato comes from. Playing these passages, lacking on the face of it obvious opportunities for phrasing, imposes the need for animating them. Hence vibrato. Because if you do use vibrato, you don't have to work anything like as hard with the phrasing. Your line sounds pleasing even when it is static.

I didn't just find the Stuttgart orchestra's tone thin in Mahler; it also lacked direction (the problem was even worse with Elgar because the players didn't know the piece well). It isn't enough just to get rid of vibrato - you also have to re-educate the players in the necessity of phrasing with the bow. And in this late Romantic repertoire that means putting shape on every bar of the music, no matter how static the individual part.

Of course, this is all speculation. I am not a musical academic and I can't prove it. But here are a couple of bits of circumstantial evidence. The first is that in order to produce this ever waxing / waning tone, you need to move the bow quicker, which means you run out of bow sooner. That means fewer slurs for the players and much more bowing as-it-comes. Now look at old fiddle parts. There isn't much in the way of bowing. It looks as if slurs, where many notes are gathered together in one bow, start to arrive en masse when players discover that vibrato enables them to utilise a slower bow speed and that fewer bow changes are necessary.

Recently I found myself bowing a Handel Concerto Grosso from a 19th century edition for a performance without vibrato. The thing I did most was cross out slurs and write in hairpins, trying to get living players to do what their 18th century forebears would have done instinctively.

I'm not against no-vibrato performances in the right period. I love the English Concert's performances of Haydn symphonies. But it isn't enough to think that getting rid of vibrato alone is a good musical solution. What would be really interesting would be to see how a Baroque group managed with some romantic repertoire. What would the English Concert make of Elgar's Serenade for Strings?

The Norrington concert got five stars in the Guardian. Martin Kettle, the reviewer, described it as "quite simply, one of the most important symphonic concerts in a very long time", a statement in which pomposity jostles with hyperbole for the upper hand.

Kettle likes music a lot, but he is the chief leader writer, not an arts critic, and his musical qualifications are, so far as I know, approximately zero.

On the whole people should stick to their field of expertise. I have no current plans to pass judgement on the efforts of participants in the Tour de France, even though forty years ago I passed my cycling proficiency test.

Steve Coogan and Princess Diana - a discussion

The stats counter on this site tells me that there's nothing like putting a celebrity's name at the top of a page to attract readers, and my all-time most popular post thus far, in an admittedly uncompetitive field, has been Steve Coogan and the Mexicans, musings on the comedian's excoriation of Top Gear for racism in the light of his own contribution to Mexico's drug-addled woes.

So if there's water in the well, let's go there again.

Coogan was on Newsnight the other night laying into a hapless tabloid journalist over the News of the World phone-hacking saga. Emily Maitlis did her (incompetent) best from stopping Coogan talking over the hack, but there was no holding him. "Morally bankrupt", was the comedian's repeated cry, as if repetition trumped all argument.

Before I deal with get this, a digression in the direction of Princess Diana. Not being one of those stricken by the bizarre wailing and gnashing of teeth when the Princess died, I found it curious even then how the thousands lining the Mall and gushing out their feelings in the book of condolences did not see their own complicity in their idol's death. For Diana's car crashed because the paparazzi were chasing it; the paparazzi chased it because they knew that newspapers would pay handsomely for their photos; and the papers were prepared to pay because a large section of the public, the same by and large gripped by the Princess's death, were willing to buy newspapers with her picture in.

There is something here analogous with the Coogan situation. The press is interested in what Steve Coogan does because they know his fans will buy newspapers featuring stories about him; and this is the element missing when Coogan goes on Newsnight to shout at some tabloid cockroach. Coogan is rich and feted because people will pay to watch his work; because they like his work they want to read stories about him; because people want to read stories about people like Coogan, the tabloids seek stories out (or make them up) and print them. Just like Princess Diana, Coogan is in a tri-partite dance with the press and the public which pays his wages. Viewed from this angle, the press are not the simple villains Coogan thinks, merely the mediators between him and us.

Coogan ought to know by now that in showbiz you cannot have riches without fame, and you cannot have fame without public interest in your private life. When he goes on Newsnight and accuses the red tops of printing stories about him "just because it sells newspapers", he thinks he is making an accusation about the press; instead he is just stating the reality of his relationship with them and with the public.

He's entitled to try and manage this relationship to his own advantage (Diana did when it suited her), but he is not entitled to do as he did on Newsnight and accuse the hapless hack of "moral bankruptcy". Actually Coogan has elected to join a dance all of whose participants - celebs, press and public - are compromised.

My knowledge of what it's like to be famous is less than zero, but I imagine it helps if you don't cheat on your wife with a pair of hookers, or spend a fortnight in a hotel room with Courtney Love shoving ounces of Mexico's finest up your nose. Perhaps next time temptation calls, Steve, you could try staying in with a good book. See if the tabloids want to print that.

And when someone offers you a few million quid to appear in Night at the Museum Parts 1 and 2, you might read the name on the cheque first. Apparently the films were produced by Twentieth Century Fox (prop. one R Murdoch). But obviously you didn't know that when you agreed to appear in them. Because if you had known, you would have turned the money down, wouldn't you?

Full steam ahead, Captain Brown!

I discovered the other day that the Guardian archives blog posts on its CommentIsFree website. Now as someone who has spent an excessive amount of time bashing the qwerty keyboard on CommentIsFree, arguing the toss with three or four other wastrels, I was curious to revisit Time Wasting: The Early Days to see just how bilious was the colour of my bile way back in 2007. One post caught my eye. It was in response to a Guardian leader in February that year on the spending choices facing Gordon Brown's government, ending thus:

The chancellor can also take comfort from less-reported aspects of yesterday's report, which underlined just how impressive his record has been. The books are in better shape than they were in 1997 - an achievement that stands out for having been delivered in tandem with the extra resources for health, education and alleviating poverty. Mr Brown's credibility has suffered from his bending of the yardsticks by which his performance is measured. But the underlying purpose of these fiscal rules is to avoid things spinning out of control, and he continues to avoid that. Yesterday's report concludes that the track Mr Brown is following can be sustained economically - if not in terms of public services - without tax rates going up.

Yes, in the light of subsequent events it does read rather like an interim report from the Captain of a certain well-known ocean liner, just before the iceberg strikes. I am rather proud of my response, which read as follows:

So "The books are in better shape than they were in 1997" are they? I seem to remember the Tories delivered Brown a fairly hefty public account surplus when he arrived in office (this is actually wrong); and where are we now? A deficit of £35 billion or thereabouts, that's where. Only in cloud cuckoo land are the books in better shape.

"Yesterday's report concludes that the track Mr Brown is following can be sustained economically - if not in terms of public services - without tax rates going up." But public services are the whole point, aren't they? It's a bit like saying "the Titanic is doing fine, except in terms of floating".

We have enjoyed a decade of economic good times built on both government and citizens spending money they did not have. We now learn that the government can't afford its spending plans without either raising taxes or cutting spending, both of which will reduce economic activity and risk recession. We may well find that the trad Keynesian way out of recession is unavailable because the Government borrowed too much during the good times. And let's not forget that current Government provision is looking inadequate in areas other than health and education - the armed forces, prisons and care for the elderly spring to mind.

The Brown Boom will end in tears.

You read it there first, 18 months before the credit crunch.

Or at least three or four of you did.

Fudging the Dilnot report

So Andrew Dilnot thinks that the elderly and incapable with assets of over £100,000 should pay £35,000 towards their long-term care. Speaking as someone with, at the moment anyway, a bit more than that in the way of assets, I suppose I should be pleased. If I had no more than £135,000 I'd be a bit hacked off - why, I'd be asking, should I be taxed at 25% when someone with more money would pay a lower rate?

Something strange is going on here. We all happily pay taxes so the NHS can provide cancer treatment that we may not need ourselves. I think we would all do the same to provide long term care for others, even though the clammy fingers of dementia and incontinence might never close around our own necks. But instead Dilnot has come up with a system, however much better than the disgraceful existing one, where the unlucky individual pays directly (unless of course he has been too feckless or unfortunate to build up any assets, in which case he pays nothing), and then when the limit is reached the state takes over. This has all the hallmarks of a compromise; and if it looks like a compromise and walks like a compromise, it's probably a fudge.

I'm with Dilnot in that we need a system that spreads the load widely across society, so everyone contributes according to their means. Fortunately we have just such a system in place already. It's called taxation. Funnily enough a report commissioned by Tony Blair over a decade ago came to just this conclusion. That Blair shelved the idea in a time of plenty (preferring to spend money instead on diversity co-ordinators, street football facilitators and the war in Iraq) should tell us a lot about the chances of this approach being adopted by the Cameron government today, and perhaps also about the process which informed the Dilnot approach: after all, why recommend the simple and logical solution that HMG has recently rejected when you can adopt a complex and untried one that costs the Government less, taking the money instead from people who were naive enough to acquire modest savings?

It seems to me that there are two things to infer from this, one obvious, the other not. The less obvious one is that we are now entering the debatable lands where public spending priorities, previously taken for granted, compete with each other for favour. And that existing commitments, however unappealing, are more likely to survive than new ones, however meritorious, are to be taken on.

The other point is that if you have built up an asset, the Government will come for you. In the end. If it doesn't happen after the Dilnot report, it will happen eventually. New Labour left Britain borderline broke, and if you've got some money, the Government will be looking for ways to take it off you.