the schlock of the new

Two recent visits to the Opera - one Opera North, the other at the RNCM - have had me thinking about novelty in art. Samuel Barber's Vanessa is a late-romantic melodrama in which the eponymous heroine, having waited twenty years for her lover to return, finds herself competing with her niece for the attentions of his son. Mieczyslaw Weinberg's The Portrait, on the other hand, concerns a struggling artist who compromises himself for fame and fortune, with disastrous results; Weinberg, a friend of Shostakovitch, is enjoying a resurgence, although on the face of it it's hard to see why - his opera I thought badly structured and paced, the music of uneven quality.

The two pieces had one thing firmly in common. They both sounded dated. Of course the Barber, first produced in the early 50s, was firmly out of step even at the time - a lush mixture of Strauss and Berg, with even some Puccinian flourishes at the emotional climaxes. But the Weinberg, much more aggressive and modernist in tone, had suffered just as much: I found myself thinking, "Ah yes. This kind of musical language", and without much pleasure.

The BBC producer John Walters once said that he ceased to be working class the first time he tasted an avocado. Thus the transforming power of novelty. But what did Walters think the second time he tasted one? Or the third? There's an old story of an 18th century gent showing a friend round his newly landscaped grounds. "The theme of my garden, sir," he says, "is one of surprise". His friend, a wag, replies, "But what, sir, is the theme the second time one walks around it?"

For the new is only new once. When it is no longer new, we are left with a thing's inherent qualities, be they avocado or opera. I didn't enjoy the Weinberg much. Once I might have been knocked backwards by its novel savagery. But now the music-loving public has heard a fair bit of this stuff. Shostakovitch did it better (and even Shostakovitch wrote some dross). The Barber, for all the muddiness of its plotting, I enjoyed a lot more. For my taste, it is over written and over-orchestrated, but Barber has a compassion for his characters (which I am afraid I find hard to detect in Britten) and an ability to write memorable music which suits their predicament. I can still hum some of the tunes 36 hours later.

Bernard Keeffe, my old conducting teacher, used to say that what makes music last is the quality of the invention. Whilst this is undoubtedly true, I prefer a more utilitarian explanation. Music lasts if people will keep on paying to hear it. Newness and originality are not on their own enough. On this score, dated or not, Barber's music will survive; but Weinberg should enjoy his day in the sun.

myth busting #4

It's time we had another one of these.

The Coalition is taking a reckless gamble with the economy.

Like many myths, today's contains an element of truth; but it is an incomplete part of a larger picture, and the larger picture renders it misleading.

Yes, cutting spending at a time when the economy is emerging from recession is a gamble. To be clear, the coalition risks a double-dip recession if taking demand out of the economy makes it start shrinking again. But what about the alternative? Labour's policy - smaller cuts, and slower - involves a different kind of gamble, namely that the gilt markets will be sufficiently convinced that we're serious about reducing the deficit to carry on lending us the money, at rates we can afford, or at all.

There are two reasons for thinking that the Coalition's gamble is in fact much less reckless than Labour's. The first is that the consequences of losing the gamble are much worse if we don't cut fast enough. Losing the confidence of the gilt markets will either drive us into the arms of the IMF, in which case you will see cuts which make Osborne's efforts resemble the proverbial vicarage tea party, or, worse, will force the UK to default on its debts: if that happens we will be living within our means not in four years or ten, but now, today. Because no-one will lend to us any more. Then the money truly will have run out.

But it's not just that the consequences of Labour's gamble failing are worse. The mechanism on which they are gambling is so much more febrile. For Labour proposes gambling on the patience of the gilt markets. A market is a human construct, dependent on human qualities, ruled by greed at the top and fear at the bottom. A market can change its mind twice in the same afternoon. And in this case it is a market that was making anxious noises about Britain's credit rating more than a year ago.

The coalition on the other hand is gambling on something slow moving and to some extent quantifiable, namely the ability of the economy to grow its way out of recession at the same time as a certain amount of demand is being withdrawn in spending cuts. It's not just that this is a more impersonal mechanism than the excitable gilt market: it is also a mechanism that can to some extent be measured and tweaked as it operates - by altering tax rates for example or, in a last resort, by more quantatitive easing.

Although I have no idea whether George Osborne has got it right, or whether we'd be better off in the hands of Ed "no cuts are necessary" Balls, for these reasons, given the choice of where to put my money, I'd bet the farm on the Coalition any day.

Economics is not an exact science. As Irwin Stelzer said, "Decimal points were invented to show that economic forecasters have a sense of humour". So whatever we do now is a gamble.

institutionally rubbish #2

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.

PS This post was originally put up in February 2009. I've posted it again in its entirety because of news yesterday that the Met have had to apologise for failing to nick the rapist and robber Delroy Grant, aka the Night Stalker, on one of many previous opportunities. After the most egregious lapse - witness sees Grant's car leaving crime scene, Grant's wife confirms that it's his, lead then not followed up - Grant is estimated to have committed over 140 further offences.

Red noses all round

Like most people, I have deeply equivocal feelings about giving to beggars. Fork out, and you're funding someone's drug habit; keep your hands in your pockets and you're off to hell via the entrance marked "Scrooge". So it was that last Friday I sat down with my children to watch Children in Need with the usual sensation of unease.

In between the segments where celebs were mildly / very / not at all funny, simultaneously soothing their consciences and boosting their careers (the apotheosis of the win/win situation), were heart-rending films of terribly poor people, mostly in Kenya, living in shocking circumstances. David Tennant reported from a hospital where one young doctor, bespectacled and earnest, laboured in inadequate conditions to treat a never-ending stream of anxious parents bearing glassy-eyed infants, most in the final toils of malarial infection. "Give a fiver", said Tennant. "Give a tenner. Buy mosquito nets. Buy malaria testing kits".

Graham Greene once said that every artist's heart contains a sliver of ice, and, aware of the perhaps justified emotional manipulation going on, I said aloud, "Where are all the old Kenyan doctors? Why is it you only see the young ones in these programmes?" And then amidst a horrified silence, "Probably working in the NHS, that's where".

When I repeated this remark around the dinner-table with friends the following night there was an audible intake of breath. I had no idea whether it was true or not, which was clearly reckless. But I do now. If you google "kenyan doctors in uk" the first thing that comes up is an article published on the Bio Med Central website by some World Health Organisation academics, which confirms extensive migration of Kenyan doctors, not just to the UK, where about 70 seem to be working, but to other western countries as well.

"Our study", says the conclusion, "estimated the economic loss incurred by Kenya as a result of emigration of one doctor to be about US$ 517,931 and one nurse to be US$ 338,868. However, we suspect that the magnitude of the socioeconomic loss due to brain drain is likely to be even larger than our estimates.... Developed countries continue to deprive Kenya of millions of dollars worth of invaluable investments made in the production of health workers.... Economic arguments notwithstanding, ultimately the price of emigration of human resources for health from Kenya to developed nations is paid in unnecessary debility, morbidity, human suffering and premature death among Kenyan people. This unacceptable situation should be urgently reversed..."

No kidding.

African poverty is attributable to a variety of political factors, including past and present interference by the West, the lack of effective democratic institutions, the lack of fair trade, and a widespread culture of corruption. It is arguable that giving money on Red Nose Day does no more than spread a small quantity of sticking plaster over the gaping wounds.

The people from Comic Relief would no doubt say, "Fair enough; but we are putting the politics on one side; we aren't interested in that bit of it; we are only interested in helping individuals whose plight is desperate". To which I would say, "OK, but by applying the sticking plaster you are helping to sustain a fiction, which is that Africa's problems can be made alright if we in the West give a tenner here and there. But that is untrue. At root, Africa's problems are political. Migration of skilled medical staff is a political issue. How can you ignore it when it's right under your noses? In your own flipping film?"

It may be a small point amidst the general misery, but as far as I know there is no shortage of British people who would quite like to be doctors. Why then do we have to import them?

Towards the end of the evening we gave Comic Relief £50. Better to be a mug than be mean. But I still feel a mug.

walton #1

The Irish composer conductor Hamilton Harty would have been surprised to discover that, 70 years after his death, he is best remembered not for his own pieces, but for an arrangement he made of bits of Handel's Water Music. The original suites are long, fragmentary and scored for a small orchestra of string section plus a few winds and brass, so Harty made an arrangement of his favourite bits for full symphony orchestra (minus trombones) lasting 16 minutes. It suited professional orchestras of the day, short, full of good tunes, and is still often played now; in fact we performed it at Halifax last night.

Another minor claim to fame of Harty's is that in the mid-thirties he gave the first performance of William Walton's Symphony No 1. Actually Harty gave, paradoxically, two first performances, one with the LSO of the first three movements, when Walton had struggled for the inspiration needed to complete the work, and the second with the Halle when he had finished the job. At Halifax we were unaware of the Harty connection when programming both the Handel and Walton for last night's concert.

There was another poignant connection for me - HSO's first trombonist, Frank Mathison, played bass trombone on the record of Walton 1 I had as a teenager, played by the LSO under Previn. I liked the piece then, for its grim Sibelian severity, swept aside by the exuberant finale, but hadn't heard it for years - it isn't often played - and was curious to rediscover it; and to rediscover whether I liked it.

On the whole, no.

The musical world of the 1930s was a divided one. From Europe, and from Vienna in particular, came new sounds and structures which alienated as many as they attracted. For the Anglo-Saxon wing (remember that America is now an important part of this equation) there was one composer who stood as an antidote to the new cacophony - Sibelius. By any standards the Finn was a great composer, and, vitally, he showed it was still possible to write great music in C major. In Britain critics and composers looked to Sibelius for inspiration. The final chapter of Constant Lambert's wonderful book Music Ho!, published in 1934, is entitled Sibelius and the music of the future; as late as 1944 Vaughan Williams dedicated the 5th Symphony to Sibelius. Until Benjamin Britten's star burst onto the London musical scene in the late 30s, British music-making set its face against developments in Central Europe, and looked north.

If it's not surprising that the young Walton, embarking on his first symphony, should look to Sibelius for his model, it is surprising that he should borrow so wholeheartedly. It's not just the long pedal points, the harmonic tics (for example the major chord IV in minor key passages) or the brass chords emerging from the orchestral texture to end up dominating it; Walton steals whole melodic ideas, from the Lemminkainen Legends amongst others, but most egregiously from the Fourth Symphony (a tune in tritones in the scherzo, but also the unison string notes which close the Fourth's slow movement, and which Walton uses to open and close his own slow movement: so slavish is the copying that Walton even uses the same pitch, C sharp).

Does any of this matter? Perhaps not - there's a lot of Haydn in Mozart, for example, and a lot of Beethoven in Brahms. But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, can anyone say they really enjoy hearing one person flatter another? The imitation is so sincere, particularly in the first movement, that Walton's own musical personality is very largely effaced, emerging strongly again only in the finale. Moreover, it is only Sibelius's outward manner that Walton is aping. He shows no taste for or understanding of the truly distinctive features of the Finnish master's style, nothing of his economy, or capacity for transforming and connecting musical ideas. Instead we get big brassy fanfares and interminable ostinati, taken from Sibelius and fed steroids, but without any understanding that in Sibelius these are merely external manifestations of a process, not the process itself.

I have conducted some Bruckner, a composer notorious for rambling and semi-coherent structures, and felt that by the time the concert arrived I had got to grips with the direction of the music. With Walton 1 I was no wiser after weeks of rehearsal - particularly in the first and second movements.

There are four problems. The first is that Walton does not know how to write a climax; or rather he does not know how to use a climax. By definition, a climax is a point set apart from surrounding events; by definition these surrounding events must be of a different character. In music you show these differences by technical means - contrasts of volume and orchestration, for example - and by the character of the music itself. But Walton bangs on, particularly at the end of the first movement, with almost permanent orchestral tutti, the high points emerging rather like Dartmoor tors, pimples on a drab landscape, rather than mighty alps, amidst a musical affect of near-continuous angst. The effect is wearing.

Secondly, at nigh-on forty five minutes the symphony is simply too long. Again, the first and second movements are the chief culprits. At the start of the piece Walton says nothing after the first ten minutes that he hasn't said already in the first ten minutes. So why carry on? The scherzo, a dancing gremlin of a movement, does its stop-start, bang-crash, pp / ff business (very much derived from the scherzo of Sibelius 1) for five minutes or so; and then just carries on doing the same thing for a few minutes more. There is no emotional or psychological conclusion or development towards the end - for all its jittery jumpiness, after a while it is just boring.

Thirdly - and this is perhaps another aspect of the same fault - Walton has no idea how to do pacing, that most elusive of the musical arts; in other words how quickly to make the music move on from one passage or area of feeling to another, the instinctive dramatic grasp of when the listener will have heard enough of a particular section and want to continue to the next, when to make the music stop, when to make the flow continuous so the listener is caught up in its momentum. In part this is because the first three movements of the symphony always inhabit pretty much the same area of feeling; so how can he move on when the music is largely always saying the same thing? But within this continuous mood there are differing areas of tempo, and the first movement spends too much of the middle five minutes marooned in a tasteful angst-ridden torpor; the pace quickens for a couple of pages, then - and my heart sank every time we played it - back comes the second subject, slower, a wide-intervalled tune, usually in the horns - and at a stroke the momentum is gone again.

Lastly, orchestration. There is a moment, towards the end of the scherzo, where Walton has made up his mind that, having said all he has to say in this movement, he is going to say a bit more of it anyway; here a simple rhythmic idea is bounced between the woodwind and the strings. The ear greets this easy juxtaposition with a sigh of relief. For once Walton has written a simple open texture, devoid of doubled melodic lines, without complex divisi strings, without rampaging brass. But this is a rare moment, for I have never conducted a piece so over-orchestrated, so determined to be complex when being too simple would have been better (and to be sometimes simple and sometimes complex would have been better still). There are reams and reams of notes in this symphony which could simply have been erased. No one seems to have told Walton that sometimes it is better to withhold - because by witholding something its reintroduction is itself an effective musical ploy. If you want a climax, work out where that climax is going to be, then distribute your musical forces so that they have maximum impact at the moments when you need them; then start taking them away again.

All of which brings us back to Hamilton Harty. His Water Music arrangement is wildly anachronistic in this day and age; it bears little relation to Handel's original, and even given the early 20th century full-orchestra premise, there are some bizarre moments capable of making the modern musician gape with appalled wonder. And yet here was a man who knew how the orchestra works, and understood the psychology of the listener. The textures are spare and clear; the different orchestral groups are used for contrast rather than relentlessly mixed. The trumpets are cunningly held back to the last movement so their introduction comes as a thrilling fillip. You might even call the orchestration Sibelian. No wonder people still want to play it.

As for Walton, for all its pacing problems, in the last movement the composer does at last cast off his Sibelian shackles, with some glorious brass writing, a few poignant pages of tenderness amid the mayhem, and an over-the-top conclusion complete with ringing tam tam and cymbals.

Perhaps after the first first performance Hamilton Harty had a word with him.

liberal intervention in Libya

Until recently it had all gone rather quiet on the liberal intervention front. True, our gallant lads were still coming home in body bags from Afghanistan, but the issue of what we're doing there hasn't cropped up in any saloon bar conversation I've heard; Iraq rumbles on with occasional reports of a car bombing here, a victory for democracy there; Kosovo has gone quiet; can anyone remember exactly what we did in Somalia? Was it Somalia?

But now comes the Jasmine Revolution. In North Africa, governments have been swept from power in Tunisia and Egypt, and rebels in Libya have decided that they might as well have a go too. Of course in Tunisia and Egypt it was easy for the West - those in charge had just enough grip on reality to realise the game was up. Not so in Libya however, where Gaddafi is clearly mad enough (and then some) to imagine that the people against him are drug fiends or Al Qaeda stooges. Gaddafi is fighting back. So what should the West do?

I am posting this at a time when it's far from clear what the outcome will be (it seems more honourable than waiting to see who wins, and then deciding what you think). It's been fascinating to read the British papers in the last couple of weeks. The Left, adhering to its view that intervention in Iraq was a disaster, is on the whole against it in Libya, but is enjoying a bit of hand-wringing over what Gaddafi will do to his opponents if the coup fails. The Right has never had much time for arabs, and is sceptical about the equation arabs + islam + democracy = happiness. Moreover, they say, we couldn't afford to do anything even if we wanted to - we don't have the money, and defence cuts together with our other commitments (see Afghanistan above) mean that we don't have the manpower or materiel. Best let Johnny Foreigner get on with it.

A plague on both their houses. There is something we could do, if not on our own then with other nations. We could enforce a no-fly zone over the east of Libya, which would prevent Gaddafi's air force bombing his own citizens, or bombing the ammunition dumps which might provide his citizens with the means of overcoming him. We could even, if we wanted, bomb the living daylights out of Gaddafi's bits of Tripoli. After all, it worked with Slobodan Milosevic. We could in other words decide that this is the tipping point for Gaddafi, and with one or two firm shoves consign him to the dustbin of history.

But we probably won't. Why? Firstly, because the Americans don't want to get involved: President Obama talks the talk of freedom, but is less interested in walking the walk required to get there. Secondly, because getting involved would require competence and resolve from Messrs. Cameron and Hague, who have, on the contrary exhibited all the resolution of Hamlet's jellyfish siblings. They floated the idea of a no-fly zone in public, but were firmly slapped down by the US and have gone quiet since. Thirdly, the UN would never sanction it.

As well as the financial, legal and diplomatic considerations, there's something else. After Bush and Blair sanctioned the invasion of Iraq, they faced a tsunami of criticism, ranging from electoral hostility to threats of war crimes prosecution via serial public inquiries, criticism from people who were less interested in the opportunity for democracy the invasion presented to Iraqis and more interested in getting after political leaders they disliked. If you were leader of a Western country now, would you want that kind of hassle? 24 hour police guard? Indefinite trip to the Hague ten years down the line? I know I wouldn't.

So if Western countries are physically exhausted by the financial, legal and diplomatic fall-out from Iraq, they are also facing a kind of moral exhaustion. Our politicians would rather do nothing than get involved; and that is because we too are happy for them to do nothing. I hope Col Gaddafi doesn't win. But I fear he might.

PS The BBC's lunchtime news reported that rebels have retreated from the town of Bin Jawad and have fallen back on the oil terminal of Ras Lanuf. John Simpson has reported that "There has been quite a lot of bombardment here over the past couple of hours". Good old Libyan air force. The BBC's website now reports that rebels are now "fleeing" Ras Lanuf as well.

PPS Events have rather moved on since I wrote this post, and having made the schoolboy error of predicting what was going to happen in excessively concrete terms, I am now going to wait until the dust settles a bit before writing about how wrong I was.

AV - 2nd past the post?

And so the juggernaut gets under way. On 5 May Britain will vote whether to adopt AV for Westminster elections. As ever, a certain drowsy numbness pains my sense (Keats? Can't bother to look it up, I'm afraid) when confronted with the need to master this kind of issue. How much time d'you have to put in before you can justify making the trek to the polling station? How is it the intellectual faculties required can still be demanded of the middle-aged, faculties last given a gallop at the towering fence marked "quadratic equations", and ever since then immured in a darkened stable?

OK. I confess. I actually have thought about AV a bit, and here is my gift to the No campaign.

If AV means anything, it means that the candidate with the second largest number of 1st preference votes can win. This happens because if the "winner" gets less than 50%, 2nd preference votes are taken into account as well. And they are given the same weight as 1st preferences.

Why does this matter? Because the likelihood is that people will have put a cross by their 1st preference candidate with a great deal more enthusiasm than for their 2nd preference candidate. To put it another way, why should my vote for the candidate I really wanted to win count for no more than your vote for the candidate you could just about tolerate?

In some cases 3rd, 4th and 5th preferences will be taken into account too. Here it's even worse. Here my 4th preference vote for a candidate I wouldn't touch with a bargepole counts just as much as yours for the candidate you really wanted.

There are a number of other arguments against AV. The counting arrangements will be more expensive. The results will be more susceptible to delay. The Lib Dems will probably do better and a hung parliament will be more likely. Of these, the possibility of not liking the result seems to be the weakest. But the strongest is the sheer unfairness of the process set out above.

Enthusiasts for AV say that the public is crying out for electoral change, and that it's necessary for rejuvenating faith in the political process. Really? Seems to me that what destroys faith in politics is politicians relying on spin, refusing to give straight answers, fiddling their expenses, saying one thing in opposition and doing another in office, preferring lies the public will swallow to hard truths, and putting short term electoral gain ahead of long term benefit to the UK. These are the things destroying faith in politics, not the electoral system.

Still confused? OK. Here's a much easier test. Which side are the Luvvies on? You can save yourself a lot of effort in these situations by simply voting against the people with most Luvvies on board. Because they are almost certainly wrong.

The No to AV campaign have a mixture of politicians from Right and Left, but no one beautiful.

But the Yes campaign! John Cleese, Joanna Lumley, Eddie Izzard and Stephen Fry! And Helena Bonham Carter! And Colin Firth!

That clinches it. AV = 2nd past the post. You read it here first.