On Thursday I went with my wife and a friend to hear the last of the BBC Phil's Sibelius concerts, with John Storsgard conducting Nos. 3, 6 and 7. Storsgard doesn't seem to be one of the glib grandstanding conductors; in fact he turned shyly to face the audience at the end, with all the diffidence of a Swedish yeoman farmer asking the local squire for his daughter's hand. There were some mannerisms in the 3rd Symphony, but the rest of it was solid and well done. It must be a knackering evening's work, getting through all that knotty music.
Afterwards my wife was underwhelmed. She likes some bits of Sibelius, particularly Night Ride and Sunrise, but she doesn't know the less popular symphonies. "There was just so much waiting around for something to happen", she said of the Sixth. "I mean, I liked the purple passages, obviously, but the hanging around inbetween was unbearable".
It's always hard to explain why you like something, all the more so when you've liked it for years and years and it's part of your having become who you are. When I was a kid my Dad used to take us to Wythenshawe library, and we were allowed to borrow one record per week. After a few months of Bach and Haydn, I thought, "Well perhaps I'd better try some of this modern stuff". I was only about ten, and as it happened Sibelius was only about ten years dead. The LP of Sibelius 2 had a nice landscape on it, so I took it home. I can truthfully say that within ten seconds of the music starting I knew two things; one, that this person was writing for me, and two, that I wanted to be a composer.
I'd like to think too that I immediately recognised that behind the wash of D Major strings there was an understated subtlety and complexity at work - were the rising string crotchets a tune or an accompaniment? Was it an accident that the chattering woodwind figures which follow are a severely compressed inversion of the rising pattern? This may be wishful thinking; but I know loved the invention straight away.
Brought up in post-industrial Manchester, surrounded by the bare Pennine moors, and spending parts of the year in the wilds of Scotland, Sibelius had written music for all my landscapes, internal and external. As a teenager I absorbed his music so thoroughly that today I almost never listen to it. I can imagine it whenever I like. Going to hear it is an occasional diversion, not an inner need.
If Sibelius had just carried on doing the kind of thing he did in the first two symphonies I would still have loved him; but something happened to him, as I found myself telling my wife on the way home, between about the Violin Concerto and the Third Symphony. In the Third we enter a new world, in which although much is superficially the same the outcome is profoundly different; and different in a way which I think has implications for Sibelius's successors.
In writing about the Third most commentators focus on the last of the three movements, in which Sibelius seems to construct the piece from a series of fragments as it goes along. It is rather like a flat-pack symphonic movement, except that unlike an IKEA wardrobe, it functions perfectly well as it's being assembled. But although this is a piece of technical wizardry unparallelled in the repertoire (can anyone imagine Mahler or Shostakovitch being able to accomplish the same thing? Britten could have done it perhaps, but few others) I think the true significance of the Third lies elsewhere. In particular it lies in the occlusion of the symphonic narrative idea which stems from Beethoven and, perhaps, reaches its apotheothis in Mahler.
I have been fortunate enough to conduct quite a lot of the great Germanic repertoire, from Haydn onwards. At the end of the 18th century music tends to be formalistic; it is in a major or minor key, and there is a ritualistic quality to its premises, processes and conclusion. But as the 19th century goes on, harmonic resources become more complex and expressive - you can see it starting to happen in late Mozart - and by the time we get to the Eroica and the 5th symphony, Beethoven is starting to construct narratives of great psychological depth and power.
The finale of Beethoven's 5th is seen (and felt) as a convincing riposte to the drama of the opening, the pathos of the slow movement and the uncertainties of the scherzo. This cumulative narrative power proved inspiring to generations of composers, who struggled to repeat and explore it with varying degrees of success. My own feeling is that Tchaikovsky managed it in the Pathetique but not elsewhere, and Rachmaninov only, courtesy of his great melodic gifts, by the skin of his teeth in the 2nd. But the point is that even in the hands of a great master like Brahms, there is a certain predictability of outcome. Of course, all is going to end well (or tragically as the case may be).
But triumph and tragedy are not the only outcomes in life, and in any event both rather depend on a solipsistic view of the world in which Romantic individualism is applied to the consciousness of the Enlightenment. And as Kipling said, triumph and disaster are imposters both. By the early 20th century the time was surely ripe for music with a different affect.
We all know that the serialists solved this problem in a way which became the dominant trope in the following hundred years. But, starting with the Third Symphony, Sibelius had his own ideas. The point of the Third, it seems to me, is not its technical brilliance, but the composer's refusal to adopt the narratives of Romanticism whilst nevertheless retaining much of its musical style. (You might argue that the serialists did the reverse; that they continued and heightened those narratives - Expressionism? - whilst junking much of the style. Much good it did them)
So the convenient and satisfying (if somewhat pat) conclusions of Sibelius's first two symphonies are gone, and in their place he leaves something altogether more disjointed and ambiguous. I don't have time, space or energy to demonstrate how he does this (and it is not all in the structure), but the Third has a terseness, a concision where ideas of great emotional potency (first movement second subject for example) are ruthlessly constrained (which can be annoying in Brahms but seems to work here); the music is always finding quiet corners to go into, disrupting its flow (Storgards and the BBC Phil did these really well); at what should be the emotional high points (end of the first movement) Sibelius clothes his ideas impersonally in woodwind and horns rather than the full tutti, saved for the last two dignified chords.
And this was just the start for Sibelius. The Fourth symphony, my favourite, takes understatement to new heights. If you want objective evidence, it is the only piece I can think of in the repertoire which ends mezzo-forte. That one dynamic speaks volumes (actually many conductors on record, including Von Karajan, cannot bear to follow the composer's instructions: they don't understand what he is trying to do). Sibelius experiments here with minimalism - the ostinati of the last movement of the 2nd were the means to create a great cumulative climax, whereas in the Fourth Sibelius is stopping the music almost for its own sake; surely John Adams had been listening to the Fourth when he wrote Shaker Loops. The Fifth is more conventional in affect, although its structure is one of great originality and looks forward to the Seventh. In the Sixth we are back in the territory of the Fourth, with its stop-go sense of motion and simple poignant endings, sometimes abrupt and unexpected.
Yes, said my wife, but it's all so disjointed! Well, to a degree, it may be. But the point about all these pieces, from the Third onwards, is that when you know them well you realise what a great sense of interconnectedness and unity they all have. And it is this unity that Sibelius is working towards with the one-movement Seventh symphony. The people who described the Third symphony as Neo-Classical meant it in the musical sense, but I think this is a truer term when one considers Sibelius's later works in the light of the Classical Greek ideas of beauty and unity. If he accomplishes these ideals anywhere it is in the Seventh. In a miraculous piece of skill rivalling the finale of the Third, this is music with many speeds yet only one. Don't ask me how he does it.
In 1994 my wife and I bought a small house in North London. She was six months pregnant. To have somewhere which was in some respects mine and which would do for the start of family life, after ten years precarious peregrination (Balham, Shepherd's Bush, Notting Hill, Holloway), was quite overwhelming. On the first evening I unpacked the stereo and played Sibelius 2. She found me sitting on the sofa in tears. In November I'll be conducting it again in Halifax.
As a mature composer Sibelius set his face against Romanticism, but the subtlety of this personal transformation and the means by which it is accomplished continue to fascinate and inspire.
PS Almost uniquely amongst major composers, some of Sibelius's best pieces are amongst his least well-known. Try Tapiola. And although the Violin Concerto is one of the greatest written for the instrument, the Six Humoreskes are better still - short pieces of immense pathos and charm, without a trace of sentimentality. Lastly, a plea for the Three Piano Sonatines Op.67, minatures by a twentieth century giant who still had time for small things.
PPS Sibelius is credited with the following quotes, all three amongst my favourites. "Ignore the critics. No statue was ever erected to a critic". "While the others serve cocktails of various hues, I have nothing to offer but pure spring water" (a bit pious that one, but you get the drift). And lastly, "All the doctors who told me to stop drinking are dead". Amen to that.
Monday 17 June 2013
Thursday 13 June 2013
Measuring out my life in replacement dishwasher baskets
The great literature of the 20th century is full of disenchantment with the human condition. From Kafka to Koestler, from Camus to Canetti, from Heller to Houllebeq, its heroes - no, its everymen - rail and chafe against the impersonality and alienation of modern life.
But though I scanned their pages full of sympathy and fellow-feeling, usually from within the seams of a charity shop overcoat, nothing has ever filled me with greater boredom and horror than the experience of ordering a new dishwasher cutlery basket from E-spares.
I've nothing against E-spares, a domestic part replacement website which seems to do a terrific job. But oh Jesus. There is a video ("Hi. I'm Matt from E-spares") with bouncy theme music. In it the chap tells you to order the one that's exactly right for your dishwasher if you can, before considering the universal dishwasher basket. I watched all 42 bland seconds of it with my mouth wide open.
That was bad enough. But what's this? When I go to the universal dishwasher basket page I see that a staggering 672 people have written and posted comments about it. Why? On the first page one reads "better then the one i had and better for big familys". I am tempted to scream, to read them all and jump out of the window in equal measure.
Never in all my life have I felt the sheer pointlessness of human existence so keenly. That it should come to this. "Measuring out my life in coffee spoons"? Eliot didn't know the half of it.
But though I scanned their pages full of sympathy and fellow-feeling, usually from within the seams of a charity shop overcoat, nothing has ever filled me with greater boredom and horror than the experience of ordering a new dishwasher cutlery basket from E-spares.
I've nothing against E-spares, a domestic part replacement website which seems to do a terrific job. But oh Jesus. There is a video ("Hi. I'm Matt from E-spares") with bouncy theme music. In it the chap tells you to order the one that's exactly right for your dishwasher if you can, before considering the universal dishwasher basket. I watched all 42 bland seconds of it with my mouth wide open.
That was bad enough. But what's this? When I go to the universal dishwasher basket page I see that a staggering 672 people have written and posted comments about it. Why? On the first page one reads "better then the one i had and better for big familys". I am tempted to scream, to read them all and jump out of the window in equal measure.
Never in all my life have I felt the sheer pointlessness of human existence so keenly. That it should come to this. "Measuring out my life in coffee spoons"? Eliot didn't know the half of it.
Wednesday 12 June 2013
So farewell then GCSE coursework
As I have often said here, the plural of anecdote is not data. But (as I have often gone on to say) -
A few years ago a friend's daughter came round to my house to do some coursework on my computer. She was doing the composition module of her GCSE music. At some point in the day she played it to me. "It's bloody awful", she said. Privately agreeing, but searching for something good to say about it, I said, "I quite like the middle section". "Oh, Mr Beech wrote that bit", she replied. Mr Beech was the head of department.
A relative of mine was doing GCSE art. She had got stuck with a big painting and brought it home. Her Mum is quite a good artist and spent an hour or so working on it. The daughter got an A, and for a year or so the painting figured prominently on the school's promotional literature.
A teenager was telling me recently about her French GCSE aural. Apparently the kids have to write and then memorise the answers to some questions (actually where the parents are literate in French, the parents tend to do it for them). In the aural itself the examiner, who is their teacher, asks the questions and marks the kids on their ability to recite the answers. The exchange is recorded on tape, but, this teenager told me, that doesn't stop the teachers giving visual clues when candidates have a memory lapse, or even writing words down on paper and holding them up for the candidates to see.
I have a lot of sympathy for teachers faced with yet another shake-up of the exam system. But coursework has got to go. There is overwhelming temptation for parents and staff to cheat.
A few years ago a friend's daughter came round to my house to do some coursework on my computer. She was doing the composition module of her GCSE music. At some point in the day she played it to me. "It's bloody awful", she said. Privately agreeing, but searching for something good to say about it, I said, "I quite like the middle section". "Oh, Mr Beech wrote that bit", she replied. Mr Beech was the head of department.
A relative of mine was doing GCSE art. She had got stuck with a big painting and brought it home. Her Mum is quite a good artist and spent an hour or so working on it. The daughter got an A, and for a year or so the painting figured prominently on the school's promotional literature.
A teenager was telling me recently about her French GCSE aural. Apparently the kids have to write and then memorise the answers to some questions (actually where the parents are literate in French, the parents tend to do it for them). In the aural itself the examiner, who is their teacher, asks the questions and marks the kids on their ability to recite the answers. The exchange is recorded on tape, but, this teenager told me, that doesn't stop the teachers giving visual clues when candidates have a memory lapse, or even writing words down on paper and holding them up for the candidates to see.
I have a lot of sympathy for teachers faced with yet another shake-up of the exam system. But coursework has got to go. There is overwhelming temptation for parents and staff to cheat.
Tuesday 11 June 2013
Obama is watching you, apparently
I am greeting the news that Obama is watching me with a shrug.
No doubt what the US is doing is terribly wrong and infringes our right to privacy. No doubt in the hands of an even less benevolent state than the US the information might be put to bad use.
Nevertheless I don't think Edward Snowden has told us anything very earth shattering.
The obvious reason is that I don't have anything to hide (although in the world of the security services that's probably a matter of opinion; and mine may not count).
Secondly, it's one thing for the CIA to be monitoring and storing my emails (and my posts on this blog), but I don't flatter myself that anyone is actually reading them (if you are, greetings all, and long live the special relationship).
Thirdly, did we seriously expect that we could have devices in our homes receiving and sending information all the time and that no-one would watch what we were doing? We might just as well be surprised that Tesco Value Burgers should contain horsemeat.
I have long resigned myself to the idea that Orwell's Telescreen in every home, watching citizens as they watched it, has come to us a mere ten years after 1984 (actually the Telescreen is even more ubiquitous than Orwell imagined, since in his novel the proles are considered too unimportant to have them). If English Country Cottages can get adverts to scroll down the sidebar of my browser, did anyone really imagine that the Government couldn't get into our PCs as well?
When you go online, you lay yourself open to the world.
No doubt what the US is doing is terribly wrong and infringes our right to privacy. No doubt in the hands of an even less benevolent state than the US the information might be put to bad use.
Nevertheless I don't think Edward Snowden has told us anything very earth shattering.
The obvious reason is that I don't have anything to hide (although in the world of the security services that's probably a matter of opinion; and mine may not count).
Secondly, it's one thing for the CIA to be monitoring and storing my emails (and my posts on this blog), but I don't flatter myself that anyone is actually reading them (if you are, greetings all, and long live the special relationship).
Thirdly, did we seriously expect that we could have devices in our homes receiving and sending information all the time and that no-one would watch what we were doing? We might just as well be surprised that Tesco Value Burgers should contain horsemeat.
I have long resigned myself to the idea that Orwell's Telescreen in every home, watching citizens as they watched it, has come to us a mere ten years after 1984 (actually the Telescreen is even more ubiquitous than Orwell imagined, since in his novel the proles are considered too unimportant to have them). If English Country Cottages can get adverts to scroll down the sidebar of my browser, did anyone really imagine that the Government couldn't get into our PCs as well?
When you go online, you lay yourself open to the world.
Sarah Tisdall - The Guardian's missing whistleblower
In the wake of the furore about President Obama's data gathering exercise, the Guardian prints this morning a piece in G2 consisting of interviews with whistleblowers from various fields, detailing their tribulations - loss of job, loss of home, loss of health, relationships etc. As I read this piece I couldn't help noticing that one of the most famous whistleblowers of recent years was missing.
This was Sarah Tisdall, a civil servant who in 1983 leaked details about the arrival of US cruise missiles in Britain to a newspaper. The paper complied with a court order that it reveal the identity of its source, and Tisdall as a result was sent to prison for four months.
The newspaper in question? The Guardian of course.
This was Sarah Tisdall, a civil servant who in 1983 leaked details about the arrival of US cruise missiles in Britain to a newspaper. The paper complied with a court order that it reveal the identity of its source, and Tisdall as a result was sent to prison for four months.
The newspaper in question? The Guardian of course.
The end of the Eurozone. Or not.
Today in the German Constitutional Court at Karlsruhe a case begins which could signal the end of the Eurozone. Or not.
The head of the Bundesbank, Jens Weidmann, is asking the Court for a declaration that the European Central Bank exceeded its mandate when it said last year that it would be prepared to buy up the sovereign debt of troubled southern peripheral member countries. ECB head Mario Draghi's Outright Monetary Transaction mechanism is widely credited with putting a cap on bond yields in Spain and Italy, thereby preventing default and Eurozone break up.
Now the Court has no jurisdiction over the ECB, but it does over the Bundesbank, and it could in theory declare that Germany's central bank could not lawfully take part in Draghi's scheme. OTR has cast such a formidable spell on the bond markets that no country has yet had to use it, and what would happen to bond yields if the Court ruled OTR unconstitutional is anyone's guess.
But while we're in the business of guessing, my money is on the Court finding in favour of the ECB.
Why?
Because the great and the good in continental Europe have been brought up on Every Closer Union with their mother's milk. If I had to bet the mortgage, I'd wager that the eight judges of the Bundesverfassungsgericht won't upset the apple cart.
The head of the Bundesbank, Jens Weidmann, is asking the Court for a declaration that the European Central Bank exceeded its mandate when it said last year that it would be prepared to buy up the sovereign debt of troubled southern peripheral member countries. ECB head Mario Draghi's Outright Monetary Transaction mechanism is widely credited with putting a cap on bond yields in Spain and Italy, thereby preventing default and Eurozone break up.
Now the Court has no jurisdiction over the ECB, but it does over the Bundesbank, and it could in theory declare that Germany's central bank could not lawfully take part in Draghi's scheme. OTR has cast such a formidable spell on the bond markets that no country has yet had to use it, and what would happen to bond yields if the Court ruled OTR unconstitutional is anyone's guess.
But while we're in the business of guessing, my money is on the Court finding in favour of the ECB.
Why?
Because the great and the good in continental Europe have been brought up on Every Closer Union with their mother's milk. If I had to bet the mortgage, I'd wager that the eight judges of the Bundesverfassungsgericht won't upset the apple cart.
Tuesday 4 June 2013
Ed Balls smells the coffee
I've been pointing out for five years that the credit crunch is a much more serious problem for the Left than the Right, and there are a couple of signs today that late risers are at last beginning to smell the coffee.
Firstly, the Grauniad reports today Ed Balls's speech to the effect that under the next Labour government the most affluent pensioners won't get the winter fuel payments any more. This reform is long overdue, and it shows a dawning acknowledgment that future governments really are going to have to cut spending.
Secondly, the paper has a wonderful quote from the Institute of Public Policy Research, the Left-leaning think-tank, whose director Nick Pearce writes, "The challenge for Labour is to assemble an alternative social democratic strategy that better controls costs".
It's been obvious since about 2009 that the boom in UK government spending had been largely built on the state taking on more debt, and on the tax revenues generated by consumer debt. All the credit crunch did was demonstrate the truth of the maxim that What Can't Go On Forever Must Stop.
The consequences for social democracy, as the IPPR seem at last to be recognising, are devastating. Social democracy's big idea is that the state will spend the large sums of money required to support people who need supporting. What's immediately obvious from the 1997/2010 record however is that the UK government could not afford its public spending commitments even though its course almost exactly coincided with the longest period of economic growth in British history (1993-2008).
If public spending was unaffordable during the very best of economic good times, my reasoning goes, it isn't going to be affordable in the more straitened times to come. That's why I've been boring friends and family for years with the proposition that social democracy as we have known and sometimes loved it is in very deep trouble.
So when an IPPR director says Labour must "assemble an alternative social democratic strategy that better controls costs" it is a cherishable "no really" moment for those of us in the reality-based community.
You have to hand it to Ed Balls. No one else in British politics could possibly utter his line about "iron financial discipline" - this from Gordon Brown's chief lieutenant - and maintain a straight face.
His winter fuel payment cut will save about £100 million, it is calculated. The UK's projected deficit for 2013-14 is close to £120 billion.
Deckchairs. Titanic.
Firstly, the Grauniad reports today Ed Balls's speech to the effect that under the next Labour government the most affluent pensioners won't get the winter fuel payments any more. This reform is long overdue, and it shows a dawning acknowledgment that future governments really are going to have to cut spending.
Secondly, the paper has a wonderful quote from the Institute of Public Policy Research, the Left-leaning think-tank, whose director Nick Pearce writes, "The challenge for Labour is to assemble an alternative social democratic strategy that better controls costs".
It's been obvious since about 2009 that the boom in UK government spending had been largely built on the state taking on more debt, and on the tax revenues generated by consumer debt. All the credit crunch did was demonstrate the truth of the maxim that What Can't Go On Forever Must Stop.
The consequences for social democracy, as the IPPR seem at last to be recognising, are devastating. Social democracy's big idea is that the state will spend the large sums of money required to support people who need supporting. What's immediately obvious from the 1997/2010 record however is that the UK government could not afford its public spending commitments even though its course almost exactly coincided with the longest period of economic growth in British history (1993-2008).
If public spending was unaffordable during the very best of economic good times, my reasoning goes, it isn't going to be affordable in the more straitened times to come. That's why I've been boring friends and family for years with the proposition that social democracy as we have known and sometimes loved it is in very deep trouble.
So when an IPPR director says Labour must "assemble an alternative social democratic strategy that better controls costs" it is a cherishable "no really" moment for those of us in the reality-based community.
You have to hand it to Ed Balls. No one else in British politics could possibly utter his line about "iron financial discipline" - this from Gordon Brown's chief lieutenant - and maintain a straight face.
His winter fuel payment cut will save about £100 million, it is calculated. The UK's projected deficit for 2013-14 is close to £120 billion.
Deckchairs. Titanic.
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