Not ..... not .... NOT ACACIA AVENUE!

"Osborne's benefit reforms will force thousands into ....", began a Guardian headline wail yesterday. Into what, I wondered - poverty? Prostitution? Voting Tory?

Well no. It appears that changes to housing benefit rules might make some people move out of inner cities and into - cue sharp intake of breath - the suburbs.

I know. I know. The poor dears. Flood, famine, pestilence are bad; but the suburbs? Is there no limit to the beastliness of these ravening deficit-cutters?

Truly there is one destination the metropolitan media elite fears more than Gin Lane, Death Row and the good-intention-paved Road to Hell combined.

For the love of God please spare them from Acacia Avenue.

myth-busting # 2

Continuing my credit-crunch guide.

2. The best way to shrink a deficit is to have people in work paying taxes.

I found this gem in an article by Jonathan Freedland in this morning's Grauniad.

It sounds plausible until you think about it. If Freedland is right and HMG spends a million on wages, the taxes it recovers and the benefits it saves will come to more than a million. So the Government should be increasing public spending rather than cutting it.

According to Freedland's logic, the more people the Government employs, the less money it will need to spend.

If only Governments the world over could grasp this simple principle, no economy need fall into recession ever again, and no Government would ever have to run a deficit.

A poster on CiF destroyed Freedland's position more pithily than I could. He wrote, "Not if their salaries are being paid from money the government has borrowed".

brassed orf

Retaining an endearing capacity to surprise after nearly 20 years in the post, my wife - born Hampshire, educated Portsmouth, Oxford and Bar School, London - has recently exhibited a passionate enthusiasm for brass bands. On Saturday I volunteered to go with her to the Bridgewater for a Brass Band Gala Concert featuring Brighouse and Rastrick, Black Dyke and Fodens (Q - What is the difference between between a Concert and a Gala Concert? No, I don't know either).

Some miscellaneous impressions from a neophyte:

1. The audience was even older than the average Halle audience.

2. Judging by the repertoire, you could be forgiven for thinking that modernism had never happened. On the downside this meant that some of the repertoire was woefully unambitious and footling. On the upside, the amount of new repertoire, enthusiastically played and greeted, showed that Brass Band culture is alive and well, unashamedly directed at the enjoyment of both players and audience, and entirely free from the stifling intellectual navel-gazing that acts as a thick layer of cobweb around modern classical music. In particular, Peter Graham, Professor at Salford, has evidently written some very skilful and breathtakingly exciting band music.

3. The actual sound of the ensemble is surprisingly mellow, at least to those of us used to wincing as orchestral brass comes crashing boisterously into the room. I'd attribute this to the preponderance of tubas, both large and small: a rounded and almost woolly timbre, comforting as hot cocoa.

4. The only bandsman/woman not wearing a lurid military tunic was a percussionist with Brighouse & Rastrick, who turns out to be one Minesh Patel, a percussion teacher resident in Leicester. What a player Mr Patel was, but could the chaps (all chaps in B&R) not club together to buy him the proper outfit? But perhaps Patel needed his arms unencumbered for his unrestrained and witheringly accurate assaults on the xylophone.

5. My tastes must be getting lower and lower - a favourite moment was an arrangement of a Mario Lanza tune. "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is", wrote Noel Coward.

6. Judging by the hairdo of Aussie conductor David King, the mullet has not yet become taboo down-under. And please don't tell me he was wearing it ironically. Or, worse still, that it's making a come-back.

A right load of Kok?

Another interesting night at the Proms, with Rattle and the Berlin Phil's Viennese evening. No, not Strauss and Lehar, but Wagner, Strauss R, and the Second Viennese School.

First, you can knock Rattle for some of the musical decisions he makes, but not his means of executing them - every gesture considered and to the point, even in the more complex stuff. Valery Gergiev please note: enough with your gurning and flailing already.

As for the repertoire, I am afraid that I am no friend to the Second Viennese School. Music is meant to be enjoyed, not admired, and I just don't like listening to this music enough. I can see that it's very well done for what it is (and Berg in particular was clearly a supremely talented musician); I imagine it would be fun to conduct, and perhaps fun to play. But to listen to I find it ugly, restless and cold.

Schoenberg and his disciples would no doubt have told you they were broadening music's expressive range, and in some of Berg's work that's true (the Violin Concerto; but I can't think of anything else). What they were really doing, however, was chucking the baby out with the bathwater - there's more emotional and psychological contrast in Mozart's simple major and minor triads than than in this music. By excluding tonality more or less completely (and later on by excluding regular rhythm), it painted itself into a very small corner indeed.

Some of the quieter episodes have a kind of chilly beauty, but aside from this what else is there to enjoy? The routine crunching dissonances? Not for me. There is a desperate narrowness of affect; I find the music lacks breadth and contrast, the ability to present the listener with a variety of emotional and psychological landscapes. Even in these early pieces serialism's tell-tale constriction was there - already the reliance on timbre as a means of imparting life and contrast. But timbre is not enough as a constructive device, and there is a meandering quality to the music that I think due to lack of harmonic direction. Harmony without poles lacks magnetism; hence the reliance of legions of 20th Century composers on texture to get them to the finishing line. Hence the ever expanding orchestras and esoteric instruments.

I've always felt too that there was little mileage in the argument that this music was a necessary response to the political times. After all, war, famine and pestilence were not new things; they have always ravaged Europe. And modernism had reared its head in the form of Mahler's Ninth Symphony and Strauss's Elektra long before the Archduke Ferdinand was shot. It was a period in which composers were finding Romanticism unsatisfactory, and looking for other means of expression: Sibelius had already used a simpler, subtler style in his 3rd Symphony (1907); the darkness of his 4th (1911) is attributed to a diagnosis of throat cancer rather than fears of war. Strauss himself put expressionism behind him with Rosenkavalier (1911), and never went back.

No, the truth is surely that the human desire for novelty in the context of what looked like a worn-out idiom was as much responsible for Berg and Webern's experimentation as anything going on in the fields of Flanders; that and a desire to scandalize the conservative Viennese bourgeousie (surely the dreariest of motivations any artist can experience).

Whatever musicologists might say, there is no prescribed correct response to the times you live in. Each of us is free to respond in the way we like. The American critic Joe Queenan once wrote that he had personally responded to the threat of nuclear annihalation by listening to more Bach. I'm with Queenan on this.

In a way the most instructive thing associated with the evening (apart from the sublime Prelude to Act I of Parsifal, which sent me scurrying to the internet to look out the score), was the interview Rattle gave to the BBC in the afternoon. In it he recounted Felix Kok's story (Kok was for many years CBSO leader under Rattle) of turning up one day in 1948 to an orchestral rehearsal in, I think, the Kingsway Hall, London. The players had no idea what they were going to play or with whom. Then the door opened and in walked Wilhelm Furtwangler and Kirsten Flagstad. The music on the stand seemed to consist of four short orchestral pieces. There was no title, and no composer's name on the handwritten parts. However Kok said that as they began to play and Ms Flagstad to sing, they knew they were in the presence of greatness; and as millions of ordinary people have since discovered, the music was by Richard Strauss, and now bears the title Four Last Songs.

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.