No, it doesn't quite have the same resonance as The Long Silence from Jarvenpaa. And if putting a foreign name at the end instead of a bland Manchester suburb doesn't illuminate anything for you, I should perhaps explain that Jarvenpaa in Finland was where Sibelius lived for the latter half of his life, and The Long Silence the period from the mid-1920s to the composer's death during which he wrote pretty much nothing at all.
No one really knows why Sibelius stopped writing. He worked on an 8th Symphony, but, pestered by the conductor Koussevitsky who wanted the premiere for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, delayed and delayed completion and is thought eventually to have burned the score. Perhaps he felt that his music was diametrically opposed to the spirit of the modernist times. Perhaps he had written himself out. It has happened to plenty of others, Elgar for instance.
At a slightly more mundane level, this year is the first for more than 30 during which I have written, thus far, pretty much nothing at all myself. I am in the middle of a set of four orchestral pieces, tentatively entitled Absence of Clouds. My own more modest silence has come about because I am becoming very slightly more successful (if you start from a low enough base, there is nowhere to go but up). I have mostly been involved in revising some of my own pieces for performances and producing parts for them. It's a time consuming business. There have also been concerts to conduct, and builders to organise for the family dacha. It is a busy life of privilege, and no doubt when the Occupy protestors get fed up of picketing banks and start to look for people who are enjoying themselves too much, I will be put up against a wall. With any luck sufficient time will have passed for me to look old and pitiable.
Yesterday however I finally began writing the last movement of Absence, and I'll be carrying on when I've finished wasting time writing this blog.
There is one other silence to rectify. I haven't written anything directly about the Eurozone for months.
How to find the words to convey the sense of the economic bike chain being swung in the china shop, the ratcheting up of the financial stakes, the strain on political systems, the damage to living standards across the world, the incompetence of the leadership? The Euro was clearly not set up to bring our continent's economy to its knees, but if you had set out to create a device for doing so you would be pretty pleased with what the Euro has done.
Europe needs debt mutualisation and/or QE on a massive scale, now. With every month that passes in which this doesn't happen things in Europe will get worse and worse. First the Greeks can't pay their way. Then Spanish and Italian bond yields go through the roof. Mario Draghi's LTRO at the ECB takes up the strain for a few weeks, but now it becomes apparent that Spain's banking system is sitting on huge losses. The proposed bail out adds about a third to Spain's national debt, suborns Spanish bondholders (making it more expensive for Spain to borrow), and, bizarrely, forces countries like Italy, itself in trouble, to borrow at, say, 5% to lend to Spain at 3%. To call it an Alice in Wonderland world absolutely misses the dark and dangerous potentialities.
It doesn't help that the Eurozone has been hamstrung by bad leadership. Only yesterday Manuel Barroso was proposing to fix the Spanish banking problems by way of a banking union where there was Europe-wide regulation. Even a fool could see that this would never be a runner, because cross-Europe bank guarantees would enable southern banks to fund their governments, thus making northern European taxpayers responsible for southern debts, and Barroso was duly slapped down by Wolfgang Schauble. Could Barroso not have worked this out before opening his mouth? Apparently not.
I am reminded of Nero, fiddling while Rome burns. This is even worse. Now Nero is a committee (invent your own acronym), and it is not just Rome burning, but Madrid, Dublin and Athens too.
But of all the bad leadership on display, Angela Merkel must take the biscuit. Yes of course, the Greeks have been profligate and corrupt, and it is very difficult for Frau Merkel to sell the prospect of pouring German taxpayers' money into the Hellenic black hole. But where Merkel is truly guilty is in failing to explain to the German people (failing, so far as I know, even to acknowledge publicly) that while the Euro has made Greek exports expensive by shackling it to other stronger economies, principally Germany, the reverse also applies: Germany has benefited hugely by being tied to weak southern European economies which have lowered the value of the Euro and made German exports cheaper. In other words, Germany's prosperity has been achieved partly by being in the Euro with the basket cases of the south. Germany is trying to have its cake and eat it - it wants to have the benefit of a single currency without taking the responsibilities that must go with it if it is to work.
The Euro was meant to make everyone prosperous, but as I wrote a few weeks ago it has only served to make some countries very prosperous and others very poor. And it will carry on doing that as long as the Eurozone exists in its current form. The Eurozone needs either fiscal union, Germany's departure or total disbandment.
As for the prospects of getting any economic growth here in the UK, you can forget it until the Euro mess is sorted out.
