john lanchester in the lrb

John Lanchester has been writing about Marx in the LRB. I detect a creeping change of tone in Lanchester's writing. One of the attractive qualities of his journalism used to be the self-deprecating air bewilderment as he delved deeper and deeper into the murky cupboard of capitalism's baser practices; increasingly this is being replaced by self-assurance and a willingness to pronounce. If he's not careful he will end up sounding like a blogger, or worse, referring to himself in the third person.

But what of Marx? Lanchester speculates about what the great man might have made of recent events from his redoubt in the British Library reading room. He would surely have been astounded, not just at the level of material prosperity we enjoy in the West, but at the social welfare programmes which have brought child mortality down from the eye watering levels endured in 19th c. Britain.

He might also have asked whether the economies of the West have merely outsourced their proletariat to the Far East, getting dollar-a-day wage slaves in China to do the dirty work that used to be done down mines by nine year old children here. Of course the Chinese may well have the last laugh, lending us the money to buy their goods and getting affluent on the proceeds, as well as getting the West by the financial short and curlies, borrowing from China the money we need to pay back the money we'd borrowed from them previously.

Lanchester records the recent outrage at revelations about Apple's manufacturing plants, admitting that Western revulsion had led to a 25% increase in wages overnight. He might have commented that even before the dramatic pay-hike many Chinese still thought they were better off making iPads for you and me than labouring in the paddy fields.

Personally I think we are living through a crisis in capitalism, rather than a crisis of capitalism. We have had the boom, and must now endure the bust. Seen in larger terms, capitalism is only doing what it does so well, enabling people who are prepared to make things cheaper to get prosperous, and punishing those who have become affluent and complacent. That is no comfort to those losing their jobs in the West, but that's where we are. In time the Chinese will start demanding higher wages and the pendulum will begin to swing the other way.

I wonder if I'm the only person to notice that there's a contradiction in asking for both better living standards and more jobs. The higher our wages are, the less we'll export and the fewer jobs there'll be. If we paid ourselves less, exports would go up and there'd be more jobs to go round. Thank God we are not enduring the kind of internal devaluation membership of the Euro has forced upon Greece et al; but what is a wage freeze but a de facto internal devaluation? In a typically British way, we are having a mild external and internal devaluation. Moderation in all things!

The real crisis of capitalism will come - and here's where I read Lanchester at last with relief - when there are too many people and not enough resources to go round. Where will the growth come from then?

Genre fatigue - the Piano Quartet

A couple of weeks ago I went to a chamber music concert for an evening of Piano Quartets (that's to say piano plus violin, viola and cello). There were three pieces, an early Beethoven, really not very distinctive and too similar in style to the much better Mozart that followed it, and thirdly the Brahms C Minor.

One of the players told us that the Mozart had been part of a projected set of six quartets which his publisher had cancelled, complaining that the first two were too difficult for prospective purchasers.

Who were these purchasers to have been? In the days before radio, TV and cinema, when all households who could afford one had a pianoforte, a lot of people played chamber music. There was good money to be made selling sheet music in various instrumental combinations. String quartets, piano duets, piano trios, string trios, clarinet quartets and so on. Listening to the Mozart quartet I found myself sympathising with the publisher. The piano part in particular was little short of a concerto, something which even a good amateur would struggle to get round, lovely though the music was.

The problems with the genre were even more evident in the Brahms. Again, a ferociously difficult piano part, written much more heavily than the Mozart, against which the three strings struggled to make themselves heard. And the substance of the music, darker, weightier, did not have the character of a salon piece: this was a concert work on a symphonic scale, ending in C major, but a troubled C major more like the dominant of F minor, with that sense of major key unease that Brahms does so well. Who could imagine the enthusiastic amateur sitting down after dinner to bash through this?

I mention all this because the piano quartet seems to me to exemplify a tired genre. Yes of course, you could still write one now: if you got rid of the heaviness of the piano writing, and used the instrument to colour and harmonise the weaving string lines, there would still be plenty of mileage in it. But who would play it, and where? Not amateurs of course; but what about professionals?

The players I went to listen to, all solid pros from the city's Conservatoire, are trying to set up a chamber music series, and must have been dismayed to find themselves playing to about thirty people. It was early days of course, and these things sometimes take time to grow. The concert had a retiring collection rather than an entrance fee, as we were reminded at least once too often by the players, but you cannot make a living from the contributions of thirty divided by four. As someone with ten years' experience of putting on concerts to a public that is largely indifferent to classical music, there was a certain rueful recognition in this: the sight of people protected to some extent from the realities of the outside world being brought up sharp by row upon row of empty seats.

For the problem faced by Mozart and his publisher is still with us. Who are the purchasers of chamber music - live or in sheet music form - now? For that matter, who are the purchasers of orchestral music now? That's a subject for another day, save to say that for every hundred people who go to a few orchestral concerts a year, there will be only half a dozen who go to a few chamber concerts as well.

John Lanchester's Whoops!

A couple of things in the papers this morning reminded me that I have been meaning for a month or so to write about John Lanchester's Whoops!. Lanchester, an amiable and intelligent man by all accounts, is author of one very good novel (The Debt to Pleasure) and others not quite so good. He also writes for the Left-leaning London Review of Books, in whose pages he has become a kind of guru on The Financial Crisis.

Whoops!, his collected thoughts on What Went Wrong, is well worth a read. Lanchester has realised that the Credit Crunch (and subsequent events) has been the big news story of the last five years or so, a jaw-droppingly dramatic and serious shudder in the foundations of the economic West, readable and informative in equal measure. To his great credit, Lanchester really has bothered to learn about the minutiae of the market in derivatives, credit default swaps and the like. His astonishment and anger at the behaviour of the bankers is refreshing and immediate.

So what's wrong with Whoops!? Well Lanchester's surprise that bankers should behave greedily smacks a little of naivety. What next? Bears squatting down in the woods? He isn't keen to emphasise the role played in this by Labour, the party he supported, both in terms of its deregulation of the City and its irresponsible, counter-cyclical running of a deficit after 2001. I know from his writing in the LRB that he believes the Government should be stimulating the economy by higher public spending, which is all very well but ignores (and Lanchester always does ignore this) that such spending can only be got by borrowing (of which more later); it also falls into the trap of assuming that for every problem there is a pain-free solution.

Lanchester says he has spent the last two years thinking and researching about the financial crisis, and it shows, both in his impressive command of the detail and his failure to grasp the bigger picture. I have been thinking about economics for nearer ten years than two, and while I learned a lot of new stuff reading Lanchester's book, I can't help thinking he has missed the wood for the trees (perhaps the same trees amongst which the bears are squatting).

For the sad reality about Britain's economic plight is that even if the bankers had behaved themselves (and even if Gordon Brown had discovered Keynes when there was still time to do the hard part - put money aside for a rainy day) it would not have affected our long-term economic position. This was very well expressed in Robert Peston's TV programme about the crash. The jobs we used to have in manufacturing have gone East, and with them has gone our prosperity. We have been allowed to maintain it only because the East was willing to lend its surpluses back to Western governments; which then recycled the money to its consumers; who then bought more Chinese goods. Viewed from this perspective, all the bankers did was find more and more ingenious ways of keeping the party going.

Poignantly, Peston showed archive footage of trade union meetings from the 1970s (a feast of bad clothes, bad hair and bad glasses), at which the comrades were voting not to accept management's offer. Again and again. You can hardly blame them. The unions wanted to improve the lot of their members. Management on the other hand wanted to protect their profits. They were both fighting a losing battle. I remember my Dad saying of some industrial dispute, "They're pricing themselves out of jobs". How right he was.

At some point the West's borrowing spree would have come to an end. China could not continue to lend us the money to buy its goods indefinitely. Actually it would probably have come to and end sooner if the bankers had not used their imagination to persuade us all that loans to people with no visible means of support were a good idea.

To put it the other way, anyone who thinks - and Lanchester apparently does - that if it had not been for the banker induced Credit Crunch none of this would have happened, and we would all be sailing serenely on as before, is wrong. The reality is that we would all have started to feel worse off anyway, and perhaps a lot sooner. The readjustment we are all having to make in our public and private spending would have happened at some point, Credit Crunch or no Credit Crunch. It would have happened even if Gordon Brown had not gone on his spending spree. At some point our outgoings would have had to begin to fall in line with our income.

This is happening now, but painfully slowly. I said there were two things in the papers this morning which reminded me of Whoops! The first was a piece in this morning's Torygraph by Jeff Randall. Randall points out that Britain's debt, despite the Coalition's efforts to cut the deficit, is increasing by £2 billion a day. Lanchester wants the Government to stimulate the economy by borrowing even more. Randall reminds us that the Government has hardly begun to cut public spending, quoting an analyst from Tullet Prebon as follows: "No one has yet explained why the British state must spend £700 billion today, having managed perfectly well on £450 billion, at today's values, 10 years ago."

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Lanchester's book is not what is between the covers, but what it represents. Lanchester's political class - well-educated, liberal - is not on the whole interested in the nitty-gritty of economics. For them businessmen fall into two categories, both equally unappealing. On the one hand is the besuited City capitalist, eating babies for breakfast. On the other, the manufacturer of widgets from the East Midlands, boring and, no doubt, speaking with something of a Birmingham accent. Money just is, or just happens. The prosperity we need to provide schools, hospitals and benefits comes from, well, where? The government? Traditionally the Left likes spending it, but doesn't much like investigating where it comes from. A book like Lanchester's would not have been possible, or necessary, or intellectually respectable were it not for the ignorance of the constituency to which it appeals.

The other thing which reminded me of Whoops! was the news that at the Guardian's open weekend the speaker at a seminar about the future of capitalism was - John Lanchester.

Pope is Catholic shock.

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.