Steve Jobs - a Luddite speaks

I am writing this as the proud owner of a new phone. For too long, to the genuine embarrassment of my family, I have carted about the five-year old cast-off my daughter had for her 11th birthday. How could anything so relatively new look so old already? Attempting to get it to charge, or looking bemusedly at incoming texts apparently sent three days ago, always reminded me of the moment in Star Wars when Han Solo, unable to get his space ship to start, thumps vigorously on the dash board - cue the lights coming on and the engines firing up.

My wondrous new gadget, an iPhone knock-off with its GPS, email, camera and no doubt all manner of other devices calculated to make the jaw drop, would not have happened, or at least not so soon, without Steve Jobs, finally overcome by cancer yesterday after a long struggle.

Would we have been worse off without stuff like the iPhone? Without the computers which I'm using to write this and you to read it? There's an easy way to tell. Just think back to what it was like beforehand. I don't remember the pre-digital age being so bad. We got by with books, maps and landlines. We certainly weren't tempted to waste time blogging when there was ironing to be done and music to write.

Jobs' iPhone and iPad are things of beauty and ingenuity, but perhaps we didn't really need them. If Apple and Pixar aren't enough to satisfy you as to Jobs' worth, hunt out his Commencement Address to Stanford Students. I heard parts of it on the radio and it makes moving listening. There's a transcription here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/09/steve-jobs-stanford-commencement-address. This speech alone makes Jobs quite a man.

The Nasty Party and the Euro

One consequence of my lurch towards the clutches of The Nasty Party has been the process of getting to know the columnists of the Torygraph as well as I do those of the Grauniad. For while the Graun has those hand-wringing numpties Freedland, Toynbee and Kettle, a dismal roster redeemed only partly by the brilliance and common sense of Deborah Orr, the Telegraph has its own parade of usual suspects, foam-flecked and angry where their Left of centre counterparts are anguished.

You wouldn't expect them to be angry, not when their party is in power; but they are. Partly of course this is because the Tories, constrained by the Lib Dems and by Cameron's desire to appeal to the centre ground, are nothing like Tory enough for them. But I have detected a new note of anger and impatience in recent days, about the EU.

To the extent that the debacle over the Euro has vindicated the Eurosceptic right, and revealed the architects of the single currency (and their cheerleaders in Britain) as arrogant and foolish, some of this anger is justified. But The Tory Pundits aren't satisfied with being right. They know they have been vindicated, and so, I think, would any impartial and fair minded person; they said monetary union wouldn't work without fiscal union, and by golly it hasn't. But why, they want to know, isn't there any blood on the carpet? Why hasn't Greece defaulted yet? Why hasn't the Eurozone gone up in flames? Why isn't there any concrete proof of failure?

Because, it seems to me, it never pays to underestimate the capacity of European leaders, both at domestic and EU level, to do things their electorates don't want.

Very few people get to the top in European politics by being Eurosceptic. Even domestic leaders like Merkel and Sarkozy have got there by subscribing to the consensus rather than opposing it. These people are not going to give up on the Euro, or on Greece's membership of it, without a heroic struggle. If that has to involve signing away billions of taxpayers' money, so be it. The German parliament's ratification of the July 20 plan to pump money into the EFSF was hailed as a triumph, even though it was opposed by the majority of Germans and, by common consent, won't be enough. Now the Eurocrats are reported to be looking for ways to leverage the fund (by which they mean use the fund as security to borrow yet more money), again in the face of the opposition by their electorates. Belatedly, EU leaders are looking for ways to foster greater fiscal union. Their electorates probably don't want it, and it certainly isn't provided for in EU treaties. But their leaders will do it if they can.

Will any of this keep Greece in the Euro? Probably not. Monetary union without fiscal union was bound to lead to fatal imbalances; the EU set it up anyway. Greece didn't meet the criteria for entry into the Euro; she was allowed in nonetheless. The Greeks haven't met the conditions required to get the next tranche of their bail-out money; but you can bet that the EU will give it to them anyway.

This willingness to trim and shuffle to evade the demands of the moment tells you all you need to know about the way the Eurozone was set up and why it is in its present crisis. It is also why The Tory Pundits may have to wait a bit longer for their pound of flesh.

Lies, Damned Lies and Ed Balls

Gordon Brown is the most dishonest politician I can remember.

I am not going to defend this controversial view here - Jeffrey Archer? Jonathan Aitken anyone? - merely show that Brown's Mini-Me, Ed Balls is running his mentor very close.

In his Labour party conference speech yesterday Balls made some very public confessions. Labour had made mistakes - the 75p pension rise; immigration (hallelujah); failure of bank regulation (another No Shit Sherlock moment). But we should always be wary of politicians who apologise. Their commonest deception exploits the public's inability to distinguish "sorry that" from "sorry for". Saying "I am sorry that your economy is wrecked" is not quite the same thing as saying "I am sorry for wrecking your economy".

A more subtle ploy is to make a list of errors in the hope that the public will think that it is complete, tactfully forgetting other matters in the hope that we do too. To be fair to Balls, he has a novel variation on this one. His list of errors is followed by a ringing declaration of something he is not going to apologise for: "Don't let anyone tell you", he blustered, "that a Labour government was profligate with public money, when we went into the crisis with lower national debt than we inherited in 1997". So even though we got these things wrong, here is one thing we definitely got right, and don't you dare tell us otherwise!

But Balls is not comparing like with like. When Labour came into office in 1997, Britain was only five years out of the 1990-1992 recession. You would expect the public finances to be in bad shape. By 2008 we hadn't had a recession for sixteen years. In fact, as I weary of writing, the period 1993 - 2008 was the longest consistent period of economic growth in British history. You would expect the government to be sitting on a pile of cash. It wasn't. Gordon Brown had spent it all, and was running a substantial deficit.

Does Balls know this? Of course he does. And like his mentor, his pants are well and truly on fire.

Pierre Boulez, great Wagner conductor

Listening to Start the Week this morning I was reminded what a great Wagner conductor Pierre Boulez was.

One of Andrew Marr's guests on the programme had written a book on Wagner and Verdi, and another was long-time Boulez associate the French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, so the subject naturally came up in conversation. Aimard was there to plug his forthcoming festival, Liszt and Boulez - Composers of the Future, taking place on the South Bank in the next few days.

What depths of irony lie in that title. Liszt was without doubt a great musician, and a great pianist. But he was not a great composer, and neatly exemplifies my long held view that talent will only get you so far in composition. Liszt is famous not because the public likes his music, but because he was a vastly talented pianist who wrote music which pianists enjoy playing. That is not the same thing.

My favourite Liszt story concerns the visit paid to him by Edvard Grieg. At the time Liszt was one of the most famous musicians in the world, and Grieg very much the young supplicant. As they played through the last movement of the Norwegian's Piano Concerto, reaching the grand tutti where the spacious A major theme is heard for the final time, subtly altered from its first appearance, Liszt cried out approvingly, "Of course! The G sharp this time!", thereby conferring the magisterial weight of his approval on Grieg's effort.

And yet Grieg's Concerto, although far from being his best work, is worth all of Liszt's compositions put together. Grieg was no intellectual, but he was a real composer, as distinct from someone who knew how to compose but not why. His music has artless tenderness and grace, with a melodic gift Liszt could only have dreamed of. It will live as long as there are people to listen. Yet whilst it is impossible to imagine the South Bank having a Grieg festival - the opportunity was passed up in 2007 on the centenary of his death - Liszt is, apparently, a Composer of the Future.

This seems unlikely in both major senses. Firstly Liszt was not a terribly influential composer. Secondly if Liszt had been going to take a grip on the public imagination you might have thought that would have happened by now. But it hasn't, and I wouldn't waste a tenner betting that it will in the next fifty years.

What then about Boulez? Another of Andrew Marr's guests was Simon Jenkins, who bravely voiced the opinion that he didn't much take to the Frenchman's music - it reminded him, he said, of the brutalist architecture of the 1960s. Interestingly Jenkins, not a man given to displays of public humility, made this confession in apologetic terms. But why? I don't like Liszt, or Saint-Saens, or for that matter Phil Collins, Kasabian, Dido and a hundred other mediocrities. It's nothing to apologise for.

When Aimard was asked to describe Boulez, I knew, in the pause which followed, what he was going to say. An intellectual, replied Aimard. But if Boulez is an intellectual, I'm a banana. An intellectual is someone brainier than the rest of us who thinks rarified thoughts and reaches the right conclusion. But Boulez reached the wrong conclusion. He thought that the rigorous systems of total serialism would make "better" music (whatever that means); moreover he poured buckets of personal vitriol over those who disagreed with him, and used his own personal power to dominate the institutions of French music - and the aesthetics of modern music generally - for half a century. That a man as forthright as Jenkins should feel obliged to apologise for disliking Boulez's music is a measure of the extraordinary cultural cringe that he and his disciples have succeeded in imposing on intelligent people who like music. Hilariously, Alex Ross (in The Rest is Noise) has Boulez responding to a question about why so few major works of the fifties and sixties had become repertory pieces by saying, "Well, perhaps we did not take sufficiently into account the way music is perceived by the listener". No shit, Sherlock. I'm not even sure that Ross understands how funny this remark is.

Boulez might be better described as a Composer of the Present, in the sense that he has made a pretty good career out of ruthlessly aggressive obscurantism, exploiting the gullibility and pretentiousness of the French political classes to fund and promulgate his own work, and his view of what other people's work should be like. This view, based on the modern age's desire to incorporate the technical language of science into something - composition - which is palpably unscientific (there is after all no scientific explanation why Grieg has the x factor and Liszt does not), has caused immense damage to the cause of classical music and kept bums off seats in concert halls across the western world.

Boulez will be lucky if his music lasts as long as Liszt's. Certainly only a statistically insignificant proportion of people like it now. If he is a composer of the future, classical music is in big trouble. His tragedy, if such a successful and lucrative career can be thus described, is that he had the talent to do great things.

Perhaps he should have stuck to conducting Wagner.

Richard Murphy and the 50p tax rate

So it turns out, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, that the 50p tax rate is costing the Treasury money. "Up to £500 million a year", according to an article on the Torygraph website this morning.

Given that we all know the IFS is as infallible as the Pope, it'll be interesting whether this revives last week's debate on the subject, and what the Martin Luther of the bash-the-rich campaign, Richard Murphy, has to say on the subject. Actually, beyond the headlines, Paul Johnson,director of the IFS sounds a bit less certain. He's quoted as saying, “It looks like the 50p rate may be too high and that it is possible it will reduce tax revenues." Hmmn. "Up to £500 million", "looks like", "possible it will reduce". We're not quite there yet.

I have followed this subject with interest ever since I discovered that a close family member pays a small amount of tax at the 50p rate. It's a salutary experience, discovering that the Government is taking half your marginal income. For some reason, whenever the BBC wants to get two people to go head to head, it wheels out Richard Murphy, director of Tax Research LLP, an articulate, passionate and well-informed maker of the case for higher taxation, and some Chicago-school back woodsman like Patrick Minford, from whose gabble it swiftly appears he made up his mind that lower taxes were a good thing back in 1946 and hasn't thought about it for longer than two minutes since.

That may be just a coincidence. In these debates the presenters always talk about "taxing the rich", as if the term were not itself loaded. Although I know quite a lot of people who undoubtedly pay tax at the highest rate, I wouldn't describe them as "rich". For me, the rich are people born with a silver spoon in their mouths sitting on their backsides in a country retreat, whose children are rah-rahing all the way to Klosters. The people I know merely have good jobs. That's not the same thing. The true rich tend not to have jobs at all. Moreover, none of the those people got where they are because of daddy's largesse. They got it by working really hard for the last thirty years. So when I hear people talk about "taxing the rich more", I have to give myself a nudge: they're really talking about taxing more the hardest-working. It doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Of course, when a country is broke, as we are, the Government needs every penny it can get. You can hardly blame it for taxing people who, if not actually "rich", at least have a fair bit of wine in the cellar. So does the 50% rate bring in more tax or doesn't it? Obviously I personally have no idea. I know of course about the Laffer curve, which postulates that there must come a point at which raising taxes brings in less revenue not more. But leaving aside the view of the IFS, reputed to be a thoroughly scrupulous organisation, I have sometimes thought that the way that Richard Murphy conducts himself in argument suggests that he might secretly hold the opposite to his publicly stated view.

Murphy always dismisses the idea that people might leave the country because of tax rises. His position is that quite a lot of people say they will leave, but he hasn't been able to find any evidence that any of them do. Now this begs the question, how hard have you looked? Which invites the possibility that some people may be leaving but Murphy doesn't know about them. Certainly when the Thatcher government cut marginal rates from close to 90%, a number of high earners returned to the UK, Michael Caine and Phil Collins among them (was this a good thing: discuss).

But more interesting is the stuff Murphy doesn't mention. One is that the truly rich, reluctant to up sticks themselves, might nevertheless move their assets somewhere else. That does not require removal men. It takes a couple of phone calls. Another is that a marginal tax rate hike from 40 to 50% provides people with a massive incentive to people who have never bothered with tax avoidance measures to start bothering now. Furthermore avoidance measures which didn't make economic sense two years ago can suddenly become viable when tax on marginal income has effectively increased by 25%.

I have never heard Richard Murphy acknowledge these factors.

A close family member reports in the following terms. "A couple of months ago we went on a routine visit to the accountant. He told us that as a result of the tax rise it now made economic sense to formalise the ad hoc work I did to support my partner's business. I would have to pay tax myself, of course, but at a much lower rate. The result of this was that the Revenue would now get about £3000 less tax from us than when the marginal rate was 40%. As far as we were concerned, the tax rise had cost the Revenue money".

This is tax avoidance, and perfectly legal. It turns out that Mr Murphy has been doing some avoidance of his own. Blogger Tim Worstall appears to be suggesting here - http://timworstall.com/2010/08/24/in-which-we-are-challenged-by-richard-murphy/ - that Murphy has gone further, in particular that he set up a company and paid himself and his wife equal dividends, even though his wife did little work. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but the blog is well worth a read and includes Murphy's response.

Stop press: Although I don't do Twitter, I understand Murphy's tweeted response to the IFS report is that the 50% tax rate must be working, or else no one would want to get rid of it. A superficially impressive point. If, thinking back to the Laffer curve, the marginal rate were 99% and people wanted to get rid of it, would Murphy still be saying that the rate must be working? No. That people want to get rid of a tax is no guide either way to its effectiveness.

Proust and the rioters

During the extensive period in which I attempted to cut an intellectual figure by reading books none of my friends had, I spent the best part of two years labouring away at the literary marathon that is Proust's A La Recherche. For those who've never bothered, there are occasional flashes of brilliance, but many, many tedious pages describing what this or that member of an imaginary Parisian aristocracy might have meant when they glanced across the Duchess de Guermantes' drawing room. Yadda yadda yadda.

For those seeking the long roman a fleuve, Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time sequence is shorter, funnier and equips those temperamentally suited to its stoic outlook with a mental armoury for dealing with the more unpleasant characteristics exhibited by people in pursuit of power. It's also British.

However Proust is so exhaustive in his examination of, well, just about everything, that for a long time afterwards all other writers seemed pretty superficial. And the enforced abstinence from reading anything else had the effect of cutting me off from new novels, an intermission from which I have never really caught up.

I mention this because the post-Proust out-of-touch feeling is tenuously analogous to the one experienced when you go on holiday and come back to find that in your absence the world has changed. In August quite a lot of people came out onto the streets and rioted; or rather rioted, looted and burned. Viewed on TV from the remote north of Scotland it looked rather weird and threatening ("Look", we cried, baffled, "there's the Arndale Centre. And it's on fire!"). The political and social environment doesn't seem quite the same as it did when we went away at the end of July, and it's irrationally annoying that its changed without our consent. Irrationally because if we'd been here it would have happened anyway.

What to make of the rioters' behaviour? Obviously looters are primarily a law and order problem rather than a political one, but it doesn't seem a complete waste of time to try and work out why they looted, if only to formulate ways of minimising the possibility of it happening again and to see what it might say about British society.

Are these people bad? Perhaps some of them; if they all are, we certainly have a lot of bad people in this country. But when I was a criminal lawyer I only came across one or two truly wicked people; the rest were stupid, feckless, greedy, desperate for drugs or drunk; or indeed any combination of the preceding. Given that even those of us that don't riot probably answer some of those descriptions some of the time, having those qualities clearly isn't enough to make you smash a window and nick trainers from JD Sports.

Much has been made of the revelation that four fifths of those arrested were known to the police in one way or other, and that most of them came from poor areas. I don't think this signifies. We shouldn't be surprised that most people committing criminal offences exhibit a habit of criminal behaviour; nor does the fact that most of them don't seem to have had much money mean that they stole and burned because they were poor. The riots were apparently organised by people who owned Blackberrys, which are expensive, and perhaps that's a clue. Perhaps they should have spent their Blackberry money on more useful things. But when you haven't got much money, spending a lot of it on something high-status but unnecessary might be a classic sign that you are going to do plenty of other stupid things as well. It's possible that the rioters who were out of work ended up out of work for the same reasons they ended up in trouble with the police, namely that they were stupid, feckless or drunk, as per the previous paragraph; in other words, their low socio-economic status and their criminality might both be effects of another cause.

If it's hard working out what makes people behave like this, what could we do that might minimise the risk of them doing it again?

I heard several rioters, or people sympathetic to them, complaining that "the Poles had taken all the jobs". Some of the complainants would evidently have had difficulty holding down a job till lunchtime on day one, since by then they would either have nicked something or told the boss to Eff Off. But they surely have a point. Surely some of the rioters would have stayed at home if they'd had jobs to go to, or prospects of a job. Unfortunately in 2004, when eight new countries joined the EU, the then Labour government allowed free entry of their citizens into the UK. By 2006 a BBC news report I found in a ten-second search said that the best part of 600,000 Eastern Europeans had come to Britain.

At that time the intellectually fearless Labour MP Frank Field, reported as saying that the number of migrants was "unmanageable and made it increasingly difficult for local people to get jobs", was a lone voice of dissent. Happily there is now much wider agreement that this open door policy kept wages down at the bottom end and made it much harder for British people (whether white, black, brown or any variant on the same) to get off the sofa and into work. In an economic boom, the last government missed a golden opportunity to shift a whole section of society into jobs, importing instead a labour force from overseas. As I weary of telling people, the Government's own figures tell us that over 50% of new jobs created in the period 1997 to 2008 went to people born abroad.

Saying that we shouldn't have started from here doesn't help solve our present problems, but you would hope that next time we get some economic growth (assuming we ever do), the Government of the day might try a little harder to make sure jobs go to the British.

All this assumes that jobs and the economic growth which creates them are a good thing; but surely another reason for looting is that our society is predicated on the seductiveness of shopping; people who can't shop, or can't shop much, feel entitled to loot. Blessed with more money than most people (although less desire to buy things than most), I am ill-placed to lecture others about the fatuity of this fetish. But buying things, and having things, is essentially shallow. It's doing things which is interesting. In this, if nothing else, I have some sympathy with the looters. Shorn of the ability to do something which society tells them is both their entitlement and the ultimate good, they have nothing to fall back on.

Of course, shopping and eternal growth are not just shallow. They're unsustainable. They can only be created by increased use of resources. And we are using far too much already. The world needs fewer people, and so does Britain. Ultimately we are going to have to work out how to set up a just society with fewer people and less growth.

We could start doing this by stopping paying people to have large families. As recent economic events have demonstrated with ruthless starkness, we cannot afford our current public spending. My favourite measure to reverse this trend is to restrict future child benefit payments to the first two children. Lots of people who don't work and have never worked, who aren't in a stable relationship and haven't ever seriously tried to maintain one, are being paid by the state to have children. Their children are disproportionately unlikely to work, disproportionately unlikely to form stable relationships, and, yes, disproportionately likely to take part in riots. Why subsidise them?

The liberal answer to this is to say, "Because they will have more than two children anyway, and those children will be brought up in even greater poverty". To which I would say, "Some of them will have more than two children, but not all, and perhaps quite a lot fewer. Moreover the parents who do have large families without being able to afford them might start to take greater responsibility for their decisions." Incidentally, no-one with enough to eat, a roof over their heads and access to free health care and education can truly be described as living in"poverty", and anyone who suggests otherwise is jumping up and down on language with heavy boots, as well as insulting the huge numbers of people around the world who will never own a Blackberry.

Thus the liberal's dilemma in a nutshell. You make a provision to help people who get into trouble; but as decades pass getting into trouble becomes more acceptable and more people do it. The liberal then asks for more and more provision to help them. The conservative says, No, you must allow people to take more responsibility for their actions, because then they will behave better. The liberal cries, But the children will suffer. So be it, says the conservative. It's an unattractive position, but not necessarily wrong.

Which brings me finally to absent fathers. It doesn't do young men any good to be brought up in families without a father. This isn't to say that it isn't possible. Just that young boys are surrounded by role models - footballers, pop stars, video games - which give them no clues whatsoever in how an ordinary adult man might live with dignity and self-worth. My Dad was a paragon - didn't get drunk, didn't womanise, didn't hit my Mum, held down a job he didn't like much - but even with his example I still find those things hard to do. Men who disappear as soon as there's a nappy to be changed aren't subject to any effective social censure. We wring our hands and say what a shame it is.

The solution to this problem is beyond one blog, beyond one person, and possibly beyond the reach of us all.

A postscript. This morning I read in the paper that, amongst others I have never heard of, a novel by one Patrick de Witt has made the Booker shortlist. Amazingly, I have read it already. My wife bought it for me when we were going on holiday. It's an engaging dead-pan Western called The Sisters Brothers. It has taken me twenty years, but once more I am, if not ahead of the race, at least running on the same lap as the leaders.

Or rather my wife is.

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.