musical archaeology

The other day a musician friend asked if I had any pieces for violin and piano. It is usually fatal to ask a composer such a question, because usually he or she will whip out a large suitcase, say "I've got thirteen of them", and demand that they all be performed forthwith at a large venue near you.

In fact I only have one such, and I couldn't immediately say where it was, or even if I still had a copy. Way back in the early 80s, before I went to Music College, I wrote a Violin Sonatine, an Opus 1 if you like. This was long before the days of Sibelius (the music notation programme which has become for composers what penicillin was to medicine), and the Sonatine was not available at the click of a few mice on the computer. The hard copy existed somewhere, and would have to be found.

In those far off days when everything was done by hand a great tottering pile of manuscript was never far from my desk, but computerisation was a great space as well as time-saver for composers, and via a series of moves, from London to Manchester, from one part of the house to another, my manuscript pile got put in a safe place. In other words it was lost.

Eventually I ran it to earth in a box under the bed in the spare room. It was so big the bed had to be lifted up to get it out. Clearing a space on the floor, I began to rummage through the enormous pile of paper.

What a lot of time I had wasted. From the period when I started composing seriously, through Music College until the mid 90s (when I borrowed some money and bought a computer), I had written everything out by hand. But it wasn't just that. The Violin Sonatine (which didn't seem to be in the box) had been written at a time when I knew almost nothing about contemporary music. I wrote what came into my head. But almost all the stuff I wrote afterwards had been done with an eye to what other people were doing, and what other people would think of it.

These were my formative years. Never mind the music, there were pages and pages of preparatory notes: rank upon rank of rows and numbers, bits of graphic design, bizarre necromantic symbols whose meaning I had forgotten, whole pieces I had forgotten, rough drafts which showed the mathematical underpinnings of my musical edifices, each pencil stroke pored and calculated over, put on one side, picked up again and consulted, finally put away in the hope that one day some Musicologist would stare in awed wonder at the complexity of my method.

As for the finished articles, my experienced eye looked at them with horror. The muddiness of the textures, the steadfast refusal to consider what an audience might make of it, the sheer lack of understanding what the music might actually sound like if you wrote notes down like these. And this was stuff which my teachers told me was good.

Amidst the utter rubbish, the detritus of one or two good pieces. I put the box back and looked elsewhere. But having failed to turn up the piece in one or two obvious places, I levered up the bed once more, dragged out the tottering heap, and with a mental holding of the nose began a second delving. This time it only took two minutes to find the Sonatine. I took it downstairs to the piano.

Of course I have no idea whether it is really any good or not, and anyway a while back I wrote a blog which I hope thoroughly deconstructed the notion of whether art can be good or bad. But I like it. It is simple, expressive, clear and terse. To my chagrin, the harmony in it - a kind of austere, expanded tonality with elements that would be familiar to lovers of Finzi, Berg and Sibelius - still forms the basis of what I do now. I suppose that in the wasted years that separate the Sonatine of 1982 and In My Love's House of 1991, say, I learned a few lessons and grew up a bit. But it doesn't say much for College that I was a better composer when I went in than when I came out.

If there was one mistake I made at the time - other than to ignore the obvious: that you should just get on with doing what you like - it was that because people more important than me said that tonality was finished, they must be right. I thought I would have nothing distinctive to say in tonal music. I was wrong. When I write tonal music, it still sounds like me. I find that I can do a lot with it. It's also what I like. (Incidentally the most startling unfamiliar music I've heard for years was not something by Stockhausen or Dusapin, but the Beach Boys' Smile, urged upon me by my 17 year old son, defiantly tonal yet from another world)

I am going to put the Violin Sonatine on the computer in the next few weeks, give it a polish, and send it off to get it played. Coming soon to a small venue near you.

The Polly Toynbee Triangle

Here's a mystery to rival the Bermuda Triangle and how bees fly: why (oh why) does the Guardian continue to employ Polly Toynbee as a columnist?

Exhibit A (but there could have been others), is La Toynbee's article from 15th March.

The Prime Minister, you may recall, has just been to Washington to meet the US president. "Never mind the barbeque", begins Toynbee, "did David Cameron bring home an economics lesson from President Obama? While UK growth stagnates, Obama's US grows by 2.2%. While the UK economy has shrunk 3.9% since the crash, the US has recovered all it lost, and more. As our unemployment rises theirs falls. Stimulus works, austerity sucks out the air. . . Impossible orders to squeeze the lifeblood out of country after country is fantasy economics no one believes: Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy can never cut what they pretend to promise. Socially, economically and politically it's impossible – and dangerous to democracy to try. Even the Dutch, chief austerity police of the feckless south, are missing their own cuts target by miles. Germany has failed to make half the cuts it pledged. This is Ebola economics, Europe feeding on its own flesh".

So apparently Britain should be doing what the US is doing and stimulate its economy; imagining that austerity for the UK is the answer to ballooning deficits is fantasy, even Ebola, economics; we like the PIIGS countries are doomed as long as we go down this path.

Here's what's wrong with Toynbee's argument:

1. Stimulating an economy which has been running a deficit for ten years can only be achieved by borrowing (something Toynbee does not acknowledge). The US is much better placed to do this than we are because a) it is the world's largest economy, largely self-sufficient in energy needs and less subject to external shocks and b) the dollar is the world's reserve currency. Accordingly it is much more likely to retain the confidence of the bond markets than we are in the UK.

2. Austerity will never work for Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy because those countries are in the Eurozone. We are not. Those countries can only carry out an internal devaluation, with indefinitely painful consequences, whereas we can devalue externally because we control our own currency (in fact since the credit crunch the pound has devalued somewhere in the region of 25%).

There is an argument against Osbornomics, but comparing UK to the US on the one hand, and the PIIGS (or GIPSIs if you prefer) on the other is fatuous. You might as well compare cheese with apples.

Why does Toynbee persist in writing about economics? And more to the point, why does the Guardian continue to let her? The observations above (the dollar being the world's reserve currency, the UK having its own currency) are not recondite statistics available only to specialists. They are bog-standard facts capable of being learned by anyone who reads the papers every now and again. How could Toynbee, who writes on politics for a living, be unaware of them? How could she misunderstand their consequences so risibly?

I can't answer this of course, but here are two more facts to finish: Polly Toynbee failed the 11 plus and only managed one A Level.

Talented bastards

If conducting other people's music offers an unrivalled way of studying the greats from the inside, sometimes concert schedules provide you with the opportunity to compare and contrast as well. Last weekend I did Brahms 2nd Symphony in Manchester, and in ten days I'll be conducting Tchaikovsky's 5th in Halifax.

These two pieces, only ten years apart (the Brahms written first, in 1877), are pretty characteristic of their composers' mature styles. Tchaikovsky is very much more at ease writing for orchestra. For a pianist, his string writing is surprisingly natural. There are none of the horrible meandering string-crossing figures with which Brahms unwittingly torments the violins, and you don't get the occasional sense that this is piano music arranged for larger forces (the clarinet arpeggios that erupt out of nowhere a minute or so into the last movement of the 2nd Symphony are a particularly egregious example of this, but there are many others).

Both composers write wonderfully for horns (the solo in the Tchaikovsky slow movement every bit as good as the coda of the Brahms first movement), and for solo woodwind generally, but taken as a whole Brahms' ensemble wind writing has the edge: Tchaikovsky is a perfectly good functional wind writer, and woodwind solos like the flute solo in the slow movement of the 1st Piano Concerto need no apology, but the way Brahms combines woodwind and horns has that extra sparkle based on a total understanding of sonorities which Tchaikovsky perhaps never quite attains.

So far so marginal. The real differences lie in the substance of the music. Brahms' symphonies are often built from tiny thematic fragments which saturate them from start to finish (a technique brought to the highest pitch of perfection by Sibelius); Tchaikovsky's construction is much looser and more pedestrian. But again, these are differences for anoraks. What about the music's heart?

Brahms has often been criticised for his emotional reticence; Tchaikovsky famously called him a "talentless bastard", and Britten once said that he played some Brahms once a year just to remind himself how bad it was (a remark which surely says much more about Britten than it does about Brahms). It's true that Brahms often makes an idea fold back on itself just as it threatens to get out of hand, whereas Tchaikovsky, a master of the sustained orchestral climax, likes nothing better than to cut loose; you can imagine him grinding his teeth at Brahms self-restraint. And yet I find that, for all his reticence, there is an emotional honesty to Brahms which, in his symphonies, Tchaikovsky attains only with the Pathetique. Elsewhere his raucous finales have a hollow ring; in fact one of the great constructive strokes of the Pathetique is the placing of a raucous march third, a movement which sounds like one of Tchaikovsky's bad symphonic finales until one hears the terrifyingly naked music which follows in the last movement. Was there ever a more brilliantly damning criticism by a composer of his own method?

On an altogether more mundane level the climax of the 5th, in which the motto theme of the opening is switched from minor to major, feels too pat a solution to the difficulties of the opening three movements; besides, the material simply isn't good enough in the major.

Psychologically, I find Tchaikovsky curiously simple. Although things are generally either good or bad, even the good times seem too good to be true; even his wonderful light music is only a step away from heartache. Brahms is much more enigmatic. You might begin by saying that Brahms is only a step away from - and then there would be a long pause because there is no obvious end to the sentence. But Brahms' restraint, however difficult to pin down, has the priceless advantage that it compels the listener to engage all the more closely for having suggested that there might be things going on that are not explicitly stated. I have been fortunate enough to conduct all the Brahms symphonies bar the 3rd (the Cinderella of the set) several times, and for me they are all totally convincing, in terms of material, psychology and pacing. Never do the upbeat finales of Tchaikovsky 4 and 5 ring true in the same way. Tchaikovsky never seems to address the depths of despair the earlier music expresses with such harrowing clarity. The triumph comes unearned, and might just as well be from a different planet.

All Brahms' symphonies come to a resolution which seems to be a consequence of everything that has come before. The 1st symphony is, famously, an object lesson in how to solve the problem of the symphonic finale: misery squarely confronted and overcome. The 4th faces death with a wintry magnificence. The 3rd subsides in stoic acceptance. Even in the 2nd, a much happier work on the whole, the last movement is no empty parade. Technically a sonata-rondo without a great deal in the way of darker moments, one feels as if in the eye of a D major whirlwind, occasionally experiencing the outer fringes of a tumultuous updraft but in the last few pages whipped up by the storm and carried away in a joyful buoyancy.

Rebekah Brooks and the horse

On the way home today I listened to ex Blue Peter presenter and former coke snorter Richard Bacon, now rescued from supermarket-opening obscurity and enjoying the limelight again with an afternoon show on Radio 5, announcing the names of his guests for the afternoon. One them, Bacon said, would be his Radio 5 colleague Simon Mayo.

Like many such shows, Bacon's programme often consists of him interviewing people who have a film, book or TV show to plug. It's a cheap way of making a programme, and the interviewees probably shift a few more units as a result. And yes, it turns out that Mayo, who used to present the afternoon programme himself (and actually still does so on Fridays), had a product to flog: he has written a children's book.

So Mayo gets to appear on the programme he used to present, to enable him to drum up more publicity for something out of which he hopes to make money. So far so unedifying.

What's this to do with Rebekah Brooks and the horse, lent to her by the Metropolitain Police? Well this was the top story on Bacon's programme, and the ingenuous presenter wheeled out two guests, Labour MP Denis McShane and phone-hacking solicitor Mark Lewis, neither of whom could find a good word to say about Ms Brooks (although neither did they have the wit to point out that if the Met was concerned to save money on surplus horses they might have done better to try and sell them). It seemed therefore that Ms Brooks, the Met and the horse = corruption.

On the other hand, Bacon plus Mayo plus book-plug is apparently quite OK.

It looks to me as if it's not just News International's stable which could do with a good clean out.

PS - On Bacon's programme the next day up pops Mark Austin, BBC Home Affairs Editor. Guess what Austin has done? Yes, he too has written a book. Just to make sure we know this, he mentions it twice in his first sentence. Bacon then refers to it as "your excellent book". Pass the sick bag.

Dangerous Abu Qatada

What to make of the furore surrounding "dangerous" Abu Qatada, the international terrorist wanted on, er, terrorism charges in Algeria, the United States, Belgium, Spain, France, Germany, Italy and Jordan?

(If this list is incomplete, please don't bother emailing - it is surely long enough to be going on with.)

The curious thing, if that's the expression I'm looking for, about Mr Qatada is that he has been in prison in Britain on and off for six years, fighting deportation to Jordan. The British Courts were persuaded that Qatada was too dangerous to release on bail. Only the other week the European Court ruled that Qatada couldn't be deported, because the Jordanian Court might admit evidence obtained by torture, and now the British Government has had to release him on "control order" bail, whatever that is, with total release in three months if there is no progress on the Jordanian trial negotiations.

A number of things strike me. One, I really don't like the idea of someone being detained for six years without trial just because the Government thinks they might be too dangerous to release on bail. "Control orders" are indefensible. Two, Qatada would rather languish in jail here without trial than take his chances with Jordanian justice. Three, Qatada and people like him tend to be very keen on the rule of law when it can be used in their favour, but are paradoxically quite happy to violate it by blowing other people up (or exhorting others to blow people up) when it suits them.

Fourthly, how short sighted is the European Court? After all, if there's a risk that evidence against a person has been obtained by torture, any lawyer worth their salt will have a field day discrediting the witnesses. Many a defendant going through the British courts would give their right arm to be able to cast such a slur. The proper course surely would be to let the Jordanian witnesses have their say, and then let Qatada's Defence lawyers off the leash. Assessing the evidence - whether it's any good or not - is the Court's function.

Of course if half the things our government says about Qatada are true, he would not last long on the outside in Britain without putting his foot in it somehow. Perhaps Qatada is a kind of Joey Barton of the Islamist world, unable to open his mouth without urging Jihad or the killing of all infidels. Given a decent amount of surveillance by Scotland Yard, it wouldn't be long before he had committed an imprisonable offence.

On the other hand it's perfectly possible that Qatada might come out and live peaceably amongst his family, doing nothing more dangerous than claiming benefits, going to the mosqe, keeping his nose clean and watching daytime Al Jazeera. What a life.

hockney v hirst - good and bad?

Reviews in the Guardian and Torygraph this morning of the David Hockney and Damien Hirst exhibitions running in London, at least one of which I would dearly love to see: since photographs of Hockney's landscapes started appearing in the papers a few years ago I have been beguiled by their generosity and proper reverence for the natural world.

Martin Kettle in the revamped Grauniad writes movingly in praise of Hockney, and thinks that the painter expresses and addresses "the kind of people and country that he and we wish we were . . . when Hockney takes a pop at Hirst, I, for one, will cheer, because he is taking a pop at the kind of country we have become, in which attitude is more important than morality, price trumps value, and in which to shock and make a name is privileged over doing something lovely or true . . . " Kettle writes that Hockney's work has "the sensibility and the feeling, even the moral feeling, which is missing from so much that is merely fashionable . . . The modernists, like the conceptualists today, believed that the past had nothing to teach them and the rules all had to change. They were utterly wrong".

It's very rare that someone in the Graun writes something I agree with wholeheartedly. Kettle's words remind me slightly of an interview with Nicholas Maw in which the composer, when taxed with his failure to follow the groundrules of modernism, said that he believed that he was the inheritor of a tradition, and he didn't want to stray too far from it. My sentiments exactly.

Over in the Torygraph Peter Oborne, an opinion farmer so splenetic that he makes me look positively restrained, also thinks he can detect something in the Hockney and Hirst exhibitions that tells us something about the state of the nation, as well as about aesthetics. Hockney's art, writes Oborne, "is accessible, which is why he is loved by ordinary people. He loves them back. At the artist’s request, his canvasses have been hung high on the wall of the gallery so that more people can see them. Hockney understands, in a way that the arts establishment abhors, that art does not belong to an informed elite. . . [Hirst's spot paintings on the other hand] are abstract and universal, lack humanity and have zero reference to time or place: his exhibition is being shown simultaneously at 11 galleries around the world. Skill is not required: no late nights at life class for Hirst, who gained an E grade at art A-level and scarcely knows how to draw. . . Hence the need for experts to explain to a baffled public why Hirst matters: the arts establishment love him so much because he gives them a priestly role. . . "

But it isn't just the arts establishment that is a fraud on the people, apparently - "Progressive ideas are being exploded, Conservative ones are coming back. This affects every aspect of our national life, not just politics. David Hockney did not return to Britain after a long stay in the United States because he had been told that David Cameron would be the next British prime minister, but his arrival here nevertheless says something very important about the national direction of travel. Appearance and reality are no longer identical. Good and bad are no longer indistinguishable . . . Britain is moving back towards a world with solid, enduring values in which, for the first time in many years, public figures can make confident judgments about truth, beauty and morality. It is a world in which David Hockney OM has an honoured place as the greatest artist of his age."

Now I have a soft spot for Hirst, who comes across as a surprisingly unaffected and unpretentious artist in person, and I feel Oborne is probably protesting slightly too much if he thinks Hockney's resurgence is attributable to a sea-change in aesthetic and political values. But the phrase that really grates is "Good and bad are no longer indistinguishable". Philosophers have argued for millenia whether it was possible to distinguish between moral good and bad, and, so far as I have been able to keep up with the debate, have come to no particular conclusion.

In aesthetics it is far easier. It is not possible to state whether one piece of art is good and another bad, because we can only do so by reference to aesthetic criteria - balance, subtlety of form, pithiness, clarity and so on. Even if we could agree on a complete list of such criteria, how would we begin to address the knotty question to what extent a piece of art satisfied one or other of them? And even if we could do that, how would we agree which of the criteria were the most important? What if one work had subtle form, but went on a bit? Or another were concise but a bit obvious in its construction?

I sometimes think the comparison with athletics (yes, athletics, not aesthetics) is instructive. You measure the best hundred-metre runner by lining up the athletes, firing the gun, and handing the garland to the person who gets to the tape first. In art however you aren't even inviting the artists to the starting line. You are saying, "Well you could begin at the starting line, but not necessarily; you could start by the long jump pit; and you don't have to run - you could walk, hop, crawl. In fact you don't even have to come to the Olympic stadium at all. You could just sit at home and watch Richard and Judy". That is how hard it is to measure one piece of art against another. You might just as well try and argue that one kind of cheese is "better" than another. It's a waste of time.

If there are no objective criteria there can be no objective evaluation. Ultimately one's instinctive feeling - that you either like something or you don't - turns out to be vindicated by an examination of the tools which criticism offers for the job. They are inadequate ones. Oborne is wrong about aesthetic good and bad. I liked him more when he was on Newsnight shouting at EU commissars; and I didn't like him much then.

I said at the top of this piece that the Guardian had been revamped, and so it has, with the sports section being lumped in with the main bit of the paper, and other changes in layout which I haven't quite come to terms with yet. This revamp is in the name of cost-cutting, and in a way it tells us more about the state of the nation than Oborne's beloved Hockney exhibition.

The Guardian, losing money hand over fist, has woken up to the fact that its own finances need putting in order, just about the same time that its editorial team - Kettle is I think chief leader writer - is grasping slowly that in the long run there is no alternative for a nation to living within its means. The Graun's readership is way behind on this still, and whenever Kettle writes a piece which shows some signs of an acquaintance with economic reality, the cries of "betrayal" on the following day's letters page are long and strident.

Oborne's sea-change really will have come about when the tone changes to glum acceptance. At the moment we're still in anger and denial.

Alex Salmond gets my groat

A sign this morning that the more we stop talking about the process of the Scottish independence referendum and the more we start talking about the substance, the harder it will get for the Nationalists to make their case. The unionist side, on which I broadly find myself, has some reasonably heavy hitters in Alastair Darling and Malcolm Rifkind, and now the Torygraph reports them saying something I've been thinking for a while now.

Alex Salmond used to say the Scots would join the Euro. For a time this was a sellable proposition, but as recent events have made this less and less credible, Salmond has reverted to saying a newly independent Scotland would keep the pound.

Fine. Let's assume Westminster agrees (although it might not). Now, who will be your central bank, Alex? Would it be the Bank of England, by any chance? And when that Bank sets interest rates, will it set them according to economic data from the UK as presently constituted, or will it just take data from England, Wales and Northern Ireland?

That's a no brainer: there is no way that a post-independence Bank of England will be taking account of what's happening in Scotland. For one thing, it would be politically unacceptable in England. No, after independence, if Scotland keeps the pound, it will have interest rates determined by the Bank of England, ignoring conditions in Scotland. That means that even if Scotland doesn't have the wrong base rate from day one, it'll have the wrong rate pretty soon after. Given that England tends to have stronger growth, in practical terms it means Scotland is likely to have base rates that are too high, strangling its economy.

And if Scotland were to join the Euro, what then? For the forseeable future it's a fair bet that national budgets of Eurozone countries will have to be vetted by Brussels. What kind of independence is it which exchanges the pooling of economic sovereignty with the rest of the UK for pooled sovereignty with twenty-odd other countries across a cold stretch of sea? Countries moreover with whom one has none of the ties of geography, language, culture, history and personal affection that bind, however loosely, the UK?

No, for the Jocks it'll be the Groat, or nothing.