emotional tourism

Writing in today's Guardian, Martin Kettle bangs the drum for Rattle conducting Mahler 1 at the Proms tonight, thus calling to mind Frederick Delius's famous quote. "Now it is Sibelius", wrote Delius - this was in the 30s, I think - "and when they are tired of him it will be Mahler or Bruckner".

And lo it has come to pass. Why Mahler now? My answer would be that we live in an age of rampant individualism, and what Mahler serves up is a brilliantly realised justification of the self, with all its inward-looking narcissism. He offers listeners the sense that their lives are full of passion, drama, heroism, struggle and grief. But this is a partial truth at best, a distortion at worst. Most of life involves more quotidien activities like going round the supermarket, washing up, making sure your children have done their homework. Opportunities for glory and heartbreak are, perhaps fortunately, relatively few and far between for most of us.

Our lives are not like Mahler imagines them, and to sit and listen to one of his symphonies is to experience a form of emotional tourism. It makes us feel more important, but that shouldn't blind us to the essential falseness of the experience. I wouldn't quite go along with Aaron Copland, who compared listening to Mahler to watching a very great actor walking along the street pretending to be a great composer, but do I see what he was getting at.

This is not to say that Mahler was not an outstanding musician, nor that the 6th Symphony is not a perfectly realised piece, nor that he was a very great orchestrator (but parts of Das Lied are horribly overscored and in general Mahler leaves no pudding under-egged). It merely means that judged by the very highest standards, in contrast to Bach, Beethoven, Brahms or the Salzburg Wizard, what Mahler is saying panders to an unattractively self-centred aspect of humanity which currently dominates western cultural traditions. The essential hollowness of Mahler's vision is embarrassingly clear in the finale of the 7th (even, I would say, in the finale of the 5th). Only a virtuoso conductor can make Nos. 2 and 8 sound anything but rambling and incoherent. Virtually all of his symphonies could have been half an hour shorter without being any worse.

Sibelius has much more to say about the relationship between man and nature; he also has the gift of writing profound and subtle light music, which Mahler (and virtually everybody else) lacks. The Dane Carl Nielsen has much more to say about what it means to be a person, and how to live your life with courage and dignity. He also said it a lot more pithily, and having said it, shut up about it.

None of which means that I won't be listening tonight. It merely means that I'll be switching over every now and again to watch England -v- Bulgaria on ITV. Now that promises to be an emotional roller-coaster.

breakfast surprise

I nearly choked on my cornflakes this morning when I read this (try and guess the author):

"There is nothing progressive about a government who (sic) consistently spend more than they can raise in taxation, and certainly nothing progressive that endows generations to come with the liabilities incurred by the current generation. There will need to be significant cuts in public expenditure, but there is considerable waste in public expenditure."

Any ideas? Some Tory hawk? Lord Tebbit? Roger Scruton?

Er, no. It's Lord Myners, former Labour minister. The quote concludes - " I have seen that (waste) in my own experience as a minister".

Remember him saying anything like that when he was in office?

No, I don't either.

myth-busting # 1

Credit crunch myths - a guide for the Left.

1. "It was all the bankers' fault".

Because after all, no-one could have possibly predicted that when left to their own devices bankers would go for short-term gain and self-enrichment ahead of economic stability, could they? What next? Bears defecating in the woods? And the Government had no idea whatsoever that the City was parcelling up mortgage obligations and selling them on the open market; it had no idea that high-street lenders were offering 125% loan-to-value on houses, or that with so-called Lie To Buy (oh OK, Self-Certification) mortgages you could write any income you liked on the application form and no one would ever check whether it was true or not.

I'm wearied by my own irony - of course HMG knew about all these things; and did nothing about them. Why? Because the going was good, that's why. The City was booming, the High Street was thronged with shoppers, unemployment was low, house prices were buoyant (removed by one G Brown from the measure used by the Bank of England to target inflation), tax revenues were flooding into the Treasury coffers and then out again into the public sector. What was not to like? After all, the Chancellor told us he had put an end to Tory boom and bust. Where could bust possibly come from?

The Government rode the wave of debt like a surfer who can't believe there are rocks ahead. But rocks there were, and when the economy hit them Brown discovered a new variant on Keynes - borrow when the good times are rolling, and when the bad times come, borrow even more. And so the debt piles up, or at least it does as long as the gilt markets will carry on lending to us.

All the bankers fault. Yeah right.

nostalgia not what it used to be shock

I should have known when, a couple of years ago, there was a minor kerfuffle in the media about the thirtieth anniversary of punk - the features, the documentaries, the grizzled veterans, the ubiquity of Billy Bragg - that following hard on its heels would come the New Romantics. And here they are: a dramatisation of Boy George - the early years - on TV; the reformation (no, not that one) of Duran Duran (or is it Spandau Ballet? Or both?) - anyway, the reunion tours, the features, the documentaries, the ubiquity of some style guru or other. And so wearyingly on.

I have an interest to declare here, because I was a punk before you were a punk (perhaps: at least I was a punk after seeing the Stranglers play at the Doncaster Gaumont on June 16th 1977, a date that must have changed my life because I've remembered it for all this time). And after the stripped-down truth-seeking rawness of the best that punk had to offer, the mincing synthesisers (Ooh Vienna!), awful clothing, awful haircuts and vacuous partying of the New Romantics signalled less of a new dawn than a return to the proggish self-indulgence of the 70s. Plus ca change.

Other people's nostalgia is usually less attractive than your own, but my dislike of this latest outbreak is tempered by a chastening recollection. My generation, in its forties and fifties, in power in TV, in the newspapers and in politics, looks back fondly on its funny clothes, its hairstyles, the drugs it took and the music it listened to. What did my parents look back on in their flabby nostalgia for their own glory years? The austerity of the war and the struggle against Hitler.

Ignoring the critics

A review by Andrew Clements of James Macmillan's trumpet concerto in this morning's Graun has put my back up.

 Clements wrote "(The soloist's) virtuosity was unfailingly impressive, MacMillan's mix of bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch as depressing as ever".

 It's worth pausing for a moment to savour the use of language here. Note that Clements doesn't say, "MacMillan's mix of bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch was as depressing as ever". No. The was is in the previous clause praising the soloist, and we the readers carry it by inference into the criticism which follows.

Why so shy Andrew? Surely you don't lack the cojones to come right out with it?

Note also that MacMillan's bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch are taken as a given. Clements has no room to persuade us that MacMillan's music features such qualities, preferring to record his own reaction at finding those things.

As ever with criticism, this is opinion masquerading as objectivity. After all, one person's bombast is another's grandeur, and my kitsch may well be your expressiveness.

But these are run of the mill objections to art criticism, I hear you say. Fair enough. Yet what irked me about Clements's snide little put-down was not the inherent weaknesses of the shabby trade it reveals, but the sheer lack of manners and class.  Whatever else you can say about MacMillan, it seems pretty certain that he is ten times the musician Andrew Clements is. Does the critic not feel even moderately embarrassed to find himself excoriating in print someone who has forgotten more about the composer's trade then he himself will ever know?

Sibelius once said, "Ignore the critics. No statue was ever erected to a critic."

 If only it were so easy.

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.