A spirited defence of Russell Brand comes from Suzanne Moore, deploring "the ranks of the professionally sensible" who have attacked him. It's a novelty to find oneself bracketed, however unwittingly, as professionally sensible, but there we are.
Writing in the Graun, Moore thinks that Brand "nicely highlights the narrowness of our present political discourse . . . that discourse needs busting open . . . all the retorts amount to a defence of parliamentary democracy, a political process that many are clearly alienated from (sic) . . . those who accuse Brand of naivety are themselves naive about what voting achieves . . . Brand hits home because politics as it is enacted is dull and conformist . . . This system is so dead and closed that there feels little choice . . . In reality people are falling away from political parties. Brand's idealism is in part a response to this. . . He is right on many counts and while we are far from revolution we have a younger generation with high expectations and no means to meet them.
Some points in no particular order:
Parliamentary democracy has got flaws, but, as Churchill said, the alternatives are worse. Brand, as he readily admits, doesn't have a programme; but if he did, how would he go about implementing it?
Since parliamentary democracy is apparently deplored, I could only imagine this would be by violence.
Actually such an attempt would fail, partly because the machinery of the state would be exercised to suppress it, and partly because it wouldn't command majority support; but I hope it's enough for me destroy Brand's credibility to point out that violence would be the only plausible means. After all, he doesn't intend to do it via the ballot box.
Surely Suzanne Moore, writing for the benevolent falafel-chewing gluten-free Guardian, couldn't be endorsing violence, could she?
Secondly, the Anonymous protestors, with their sweat-shop made face masks, may be right about some things, but they don't represent anyone but themselves. Brand and his new friends may rail against Parliament, but the truth is that even tired old Parliament has more democratic legitimacy than they do.
Thirdly, if there feels little choice in our parliamentary democracy it's because, essentially, the big intellectual arguments have long ago been won and lost. There is a general consensus in Britain that people want a sort of social democratic capitalism, in which the market's dynamism is harnessed and tamed to provide economic freedom but also an adequate safety net for the poor.
This sort of model has been discredited by events of the last five years, partly because the capitalism which made a few people rich by providing debt to the rest of us collapsed in a heap; and partly because its collapse revealed that the welfare system paid for with the fruits of that debt wasn't affordable. But most people believe and hope it can still be made to work, and this is where British politics is now - arguing about the details. It might change, but the views of Brand and Moore are still in a tiny minority.
Lastly, the "younger generation with high expectations and no means to meet them" is almost worth a blog in itself, but I think Moore's analysis is partly right. It's quite possible that the rising generation might be the first in a long time to end up being poorer than their parents. I say might because when I look back at my own childhood I remember wooden toys, an orange in your stocking at Christmas, holidays in rainy Scotland, and not daring to ask if I could share a room when my girlfriend came to stay; whereas even the least fortunate of my children's contemporaries have had computer games and phones that would have made us gasp, cheap holidays in the sun, endless restaurant meals and no-questions-asked room-sharing when significant others come round. Living standards have gone up dramatically in the last forty years.
Ah, say Moore and her ilk, but what about jobs? What about getting on the housing ladder?
Boring I know, but unemployment was much higher during the Thatcher years, and as for the housing ladder, most people didn't ever think they would ever own their own property anyway; ironically it was Mrs Thatcher who put the notion into the public's mind. I didn't own a house until I was thirty six. It was the first time since leaving home that I had gone upstairs to bed, because I hadn't lived anywhere with two floors.
Actually, although loan-to-value levels are high, the proportion of mortgage payments to average earnings is very low by historical standards because interest rates are so low. People can't get on the housing ladder not because prices are too high but because, post-credit crunch, mortgage companies are demanding a sizeable deposit which they don't have. None of us is used to saving, and that's because we got used to a period in the nineties and twenty-hundreds when credit was easy to get: if you wanted something, you just went to the bank and the money was handed over.
This is where I agree with Moore. The younger generation has high expectations and no means to meet them. If they had a little more curiosity about the last hundred years of British history (and there are after all quite a lot of people available to ask about it) they would see that they are in fact incredibly fortunate - they have grown up in a time of enormous personal liberty, freedom from strife, unparalelled life expectancy and material affluence. It's a crisis of expectation. But not any other kind of crisis.
Thursday 7 November 2013
Wednesday 6 November 2013
Reflections on Russell Brand
As befits a comedian, Russell Brand has always seemed to me essentially a joke figure. Surprisingly, other people seem to be taking his ideas seriously. He's been on Question Time, been interviewed by Paxo on Newsnight, guest-edited an edition of the New Statesman and now has been given a full page article in the Grauniad.
Essentially Brand's argument is that the main political parties don't represent the views of ordinary people. They are in hock to the City and in any event are run by the pusillanimous and the corrupt. Democracy isn't working. We need to send a signal to politicians, and we can start by refusing to vote.
So far so sixth-form. But is he right about any of it?
First of all Brand is wrong to say that parties don't represent ordinary people. Actually a whole industry has grown up to inform politicians what ordinary people are thinking. Polling gurus read the runes and tell the parties what the man in the street is concerned about. The parties may be slow to react, but react they do.
For example, the number one issue which concerns the British - rightly or wrongly - is immigration. Poll after poll shows this to be true. For years both parties - but particularly Labour - ignored the issue, hence the apparently irresistible rise of the EDL and UKIP. The main parties have now responded; there isn't much they can do about the issue (our right to control our own borders has been largely ceded to the EU) but their policies have changed in so far as it is within their power to do so.
That's the way that two-party politics works. Labour and Conservative may be superficially the same old parties, but they do alter over time. The Labour party of Michael Foot was a different beast from the same party under Kinnock; it changed again under Tony Blair, and it's changing again under man-of-principle Ed Miliband. The same is true for the Tories.
So Brand's contention that the parties don't represent ordinary people seems unlikely to be true, because if there was something British voter were desperately concerned about the focus groups would be telling the pollsters, and the pollsters would be telling their political paymasters.
I think what Russell Brand means is that the parties don't represent him. That seems inevitable given that he has been given space in the press precisely because his views aren't mainstream.
Democracy's flaw is that to work well electorates should be intelligent and well informed. Ours isn't, and no-one exemplifies this better than Brand himself. I'm willing to believe he's an intelligent guy - he writes beautifully - but like many people who have other things to preoccupy them than the tedious detail of politics and economics, he doesn't actually know very much. Judging from his article in the Guardian today, his knowledge of what caused the financial crash and continues to impede economic growth is absolutely minimal.
I wonder whether, if you asked him, he would be able to tell you, without looking it up, what our debt to GDP ratio was currently, what Britain's current deficit was, how many years out of the last 50 we have run a surplus, when that was and why it happened, what activity the bankers were engaged in which enabled them to make so much money, how many jobs the City of London supports, how much tax revenue and foreign investment it brings in, why Alastair Darling had no choice but to bail out the banks, what the Glass Steagall Act was and why it was repealed, or what was distinctive about the period 1993 to 2008.
My guess would be that Brand would know no more than one or two of these things at most. And yet he thinks he knows better than everyone else what's wrong with our economy. That's democracy in a nutshell. It gives people who know next to nothing the same electoral influence as those who take an obsessive interest in politics. And that's as it should be. You can't have enfranchisement tests.
Ah, Brand might say, but hardly anyone else knows these things either; and he'd be right. And that's why we are wrong to complain about our politicians - they are the product of our own apathy and ignorance.
As for not voting, Brand is welcome to it. The fewer people vote, the more my vote counts for. His brand of Trustafarianism sounds to the outsider like the whining of a disappointed narcissist. I was going to suggest that he take a good look at himself in the mirror. But he's probably doing that anyway.
P.S. It occurred to me after writing this that the most plausible argument that our society needs sweeping away and starting anew is that so many people in it think Brand's arguments warrant attention. I guess I'm as guilty as anyone.
Essentially Brand's argument is that the main political parties don't represent the views of ordinary people. They are in hock to the City and in any event are run by the pusillanimous and the corrupt. Democracy isn't working. We need to send a signal to politicians, and we can start by refusing to vote.
So far so sixth-form. But is he right about any of it?
First of all Brand is wrong to say that parties don't represent ordinary people. Actually a whole industry has grown up to inform politicians what ordinary people are thinking. Polling gurus read the runes and tell the parties what the man in the street is concerned about. The parties may be slow to react, but react they do.
For example, the number one issue which concerns the British - rightly or wrongly - is immigration. Poll after poll shows this to be true. For years both parties - but particularly Labour - ignored the issue, hence the apparently irresistible rise of the EDL and UKIP. The main parties have now responded; there isn't much they can do about the issue (our right to control our own borders has been largely ceded to the EU) but their policies have changed in so far as it is within their power to do so.
That's the way that two-party politics works. Labour and Conservative may be superficially the same old parties, but they do alter over time. The Labour party of Michael Foot was a different beast from the same party under Kinnock; it changed again under Tony Blair, and it's changing again under man-of-principle Ed Miliband. The same is true for the Tories.
So Brand's contention that the parties don't represent ordinary people seems unlikely to be true, because if there was something British voter were desperately concerned about the focus groups would be telling the pollsters, and the pollsters would be telling their political paymasters.
I think what Russell Brand means is that the parties don't represent him. That seems inevitable given that he has been given space in the press precisely because his views aren't mainstream.
Democracy's flaw is that to work well electorates should be intelligent and well informed. Ours isn't, and no-one exemplifies this better than Brand himself. I'm willing to believe he's an intelligent guy - he writes beautifully - but like many people who have other things to preoccupy them than the tedious detail of politics and economics, he doesn't actually know very much. Judging from his article in the Guardian today, his knowledge of what caused the financial crash and continues to impede economic growth is absolutely minimal.
I wonder whether, if you asked him, he would be able to tell you, without looking it up, what our debt to GDP ratio was currently, what Britain's current deficit was, how many years out of the last 50 we have run a surplus, when that was and why it happened, what activity the bankers were engaged in which enabled them to make so much money, how many jobs the City of London supports, how much tax revenue and foreign investment it brings in, why Alastair Darling had no choice but to bail out the banks, what the Glass Steagall Act was and why it was repealed, or what was distinctive about the period 1993 to 2008.
My guess would be that Brand would know no more than one or two of these things at most. And yet he thinks he knows better than everyone else what's wrong with our economy. That's democracy in a nutshell. It gives people who know next to nothing the same electoral influence as those who take an obsessive interest in politics. And that's as it should be. You can't have enfranchisement tests.
Ah, Brand might say, but hardly anyone else knows these things either; and he'd be right. And that's why we are wrong to complain about our politicians - they are the product of our own apathy and ignorance.
As for not voting, Brand is welcome to it. The fewer people vote, the more my vote counts for. His brand of Trustafarianism sounds to the outsider like the whining of a disappointed narcissist. I was going to suggest that he take a good look at himself in the mirror. But he's probably doing that anyway.
P.S. It occurred to me after writing this that the most plausible argument that our society needs sweeping away and starting anew is that so many people in it think Brand's arguments warrant attention. I guess I'm as guilty as anyone.
Tuesday 5 November 2013
Brimming with political ideas - Ed Miliband and the living wage
Ed Miliband has demonstrated again his ruthless mastery of politics. I am not being ironic. The BBC reports today that he has "unveiled plans to deliver a living wage of at least £7.45 per hour for millions of people if Labour wins the next election".
Let's examine what the consequences of this would be. In the public sector, it would mean that there was less money to go round other areas of public spending. In the private sector it would make companies forced to go along with the proposal less competitive at a stroke.
In both cases it would mean a little more pay for some, but fewer jobs for others. You could caricature this as being more like a Tory than a Labour policy, concentrating wealth in the hands of the employed rather than those looking for work (who would now of course be less likely to find it).
I am absolutely sure that Miliband, who once taught economics at Harvard, knows full well what the consequences of this policy would be. And yet he promises it nonetheless. This is why I call him ruthless. Just as with his energy price cap, he knows that there are plenty of people in Britain ill-informed and desperate enough to vote for him on this prospectus.
I think we're going to see a great deal more of this before the next election. There's a distinction between policy and politics. Sadly, Miliband looks to me brimming over with political ideas but woefully short of plausible policy.
Ultimately there's only one way to widespread prosperity, which is for this country to pay its own way in the world by providing products and services that people in other countries want to buy. If living standards are falling, it's because we aren't doing that well enough. It's depressing to sound like an unattractive character in a Northern mill drama (or, for that matter, like Alderman Roberts of Grantham), but sometimes the truth is hard to swallow.
Let's examine what the consequences of this would be. In the public sector, it would mean that there was less money to go round other areas of public spending. In the private sector it would make companies forced to go along with the proposal less competitive at a stroke.
In both cases it would mean a little more pay for some, but fewer jobs for others. You could caricature this as being more like a Tory than a Labour policy, concentrating wealth in the hands of the employed rather than those looking for work (who would now of course be less likely to find it).
I am absolutely sure that Miliband, who once taught economics at Harvard, knows full well what the consequences of this policy would be. And yet he promises it nonetheless. This is why I call him ruthless. Just as with his energy price cap, he knows that there are plenty of people in Britain ill-informed and desperate enough to vote for him on this prospectus.
I think we're going to see a great deal more of this before the next election. There's a distinction between policy and politics. Sadly, Miliband looks to me brimming over with political ideas but woefully short of plausible policy.
Ultimately there's only one way to widespread prosperity, which is for this country to pay its own way in the world by providing products and services that people in other countries want to buy. If living standards are falling, it's because we aren't doing that well enough. It's depressing to sound like an unattractive character in a Northern mill drama (or, for that matter, like Alderman Roberts of Grantham), but sometimes the truth is hard to swallow.
Monday 4 November 2013
Chris Huhne and the Leveson proposals
For some inexplicable reason the Guardian, only a few months after his release from prison for getting his wife to take his speeding points, has taken to printing columns by the former energy secretary Chris Huhne. You may say that Huhne has paid his debt to society and well done Alan Rusbridger for sending some work in the direction of his former colleague (Huhne did a stint on the Graun's European desk many many years ago). I'm not so sure. The Huhne-Pryce saga revealed Huhne to be a man of insatiable ambition, a bully, a liar, and someone who thought the law of the land did not apply to him. I think his presence diminishes the paper. Other columnists are available after all. But what do I know? I'm only one of the small and dwindling band of people who still pay to read the Guardian.
Today's Huhne column is particularly hard to stomach, since it's on the subject of the new press regulator. (That the Guardian expects its readership to fork out to read his comments on this change in the law is particularly galling, since Huhne, when in office, showed absolute contempt for it. But that's the Guardian these days. Its sense of righteousness only extends so far.)
The article is trailed by the headline, "Self-regulation failed for bankers. Why should it work for journalists?" Well of course it won't. Even the threat of criminal prosecution didn't deter them from phone-hacking (although more of that in a minute). But why then does Huhne think a new state-sponsored regulator will? Huhne's article finishes with the prediction, "The system will bed down. Everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about."
It's curious how the high-profile people gunning for the press have an interest in seeing it muzzled. MPs are unhappy at their hounding over expense claim abuses, Hugh Grant didn't like their reporting his use of prostitutes or revelation of his fathering a child from a brief fling, and Steve Coogan was unhappy with the Mail for its own prostitutes plus cocaine stories.
My sympathies for celebrities are limited. Both Coogan and Grant have made films for the Murdoch empire (did they not read the name on the cheques?), and both have made lavish use of publicity interview tours to promote their work. The words "heat" and "kitchen" spring to mind.
The people who do need protecting from the press are the innocents like the parents of Milly Dowler; and yet the people who hacked into her phone are either in prison or currently facing a gruelling and humiliating trial at the Old Bailey. The criminal law did not deter their persecutors, but it will deter anyone with any brains who sees what has happened to them. As usual, we are changing the laws in a panic when it would have been better to make sure the - perfectly adequate - existing ones were enforced.
It'll be interesting to see which papers sign up to the new regulator. The Spectator and Private Eye have said they won't, undeterred by the threat of punitive libel costs. My guess would be that the publishers of the Guardian will. That's because Rusbridger and his colleagues are pusillanimous hand-wringers, lacking the cojones to defy the government and damn the consequences.
It's worth dwelling for a moment on what those consequences are. A non-Leveson compliant publication which is sued for libel but wins will nevertheless be liable for its own costs and for the costs of its unsuccessful opponent. I've italicised this because costs are a crucial issue in litigation. Just imagine if you are a trigger-happy litigant nursing some semi-imaginary grudge. Even if you lose your action against a non-compliant publication you have nothing to lose overall because they'll have to pay your costs anyway. The libel courts will be flooded by the over-sensitive. Non-Leveson publications might as well give up now.
If you take on a non-compliant publication and win, the newspaper will have to pay you extra punitive damages.
These costs orders will be enforced by the State.
And yet advocates of the Leveson approach deny that it involves any element of political control of the press.
None of the above will apply to publication on the internet. Leveson's report has only a couple of pages on it.
As I've sometimes observed here, you can tell an awful lot about an idea by the people who support it. This one is advocated by Chris Huhne, which seems about right. It's a right Chris Huhne of a proposal.
Today's Huhne column is particularly hard to stomach, since it's on the subject of the new press regulator. (That the Guardian expects its readership to fork out to read his comments on this change in the law is particularly galling, since Huhne, when in office, showed absolute contempt for it. But that's the Guardian these days. Its sense of righteousness only extends so far.)
The article is trailed by the headline, "Self-regulation failed for bankers. Why should it work for journalists?" Well of course it won't. Even the threat of criminal prosecution didn't deter them from phone-hacking (although more of that in a minute). But why then does Huhne think a new state-sponsored regulator will? Huhne's article finishes with the prediction, "The system will bed down. Everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about."
It's curious how the high-profile people gunning for the press have an interest in seeing it muzzled. MPs are unhappy at their hounding over expense claim abuses, Hugh Grant didn't like their reporting his use of prostitutes or revelation of his fathering a child from a brief fling, and Steve Coogan was unhappy with the Mail for its own prostitutes plus cocaine stories.
My sympathies for celebrities are limited. Both Coogan and Grant have made films for the Murdoch empire (did they not read the name on the cheques?), and both have made lavish use of publicity interview tours to promote their work. The words "heat" and "kitchen" spring to mind.
The people who do need protecting from the press are the innocents like the parents of Milly Dowler; and yet the people who hacked into her phone are either in prison or currently facing a gruelling and humiliating trial at the Old Bailey. The criminal law did not deter their persecutors, but it will deter anyone with any brains who sees what has happened to them. As usual, we are changing the laws in a panic when it would have been better to make sure the - perfectly adequate - existing ones were enforced.
It'll be interesting to see which papers sign up to the new regulator. The Spectator and Private Eye have said they won't, undeterred by the threat of punitive libel costs. My guess would be that the publishers of the Guardian will. That's because Rusbridger and his colleagues are pusillanimous hand-wringers, lacking the cojones to defy the government and damn the consequences.
It's worth dwelling for a moment on what those consequences are. A non-Leveson compliant publication which is sued for libel but wins will nevertheless be liable for its own costs and for the costs of its unsuccessful opponent. I've italicised this because costs are a crucial issue in litigation. Just imagine if you are a trigger-happy litigant nursing some semi-imaginary grudge. Even if you lose your action against a non-compliant publication you have nothing to lose overall because they'll have to pay your costs anyway. The libel courts will be flooded by the over-sensitive. Non-Leveson publications might as well give up now.
If you take on a non-compliant publication and win, the newspaper will have to pay you extra punitive damages.
These costs orders will be enforced by the State.
And yet advocates of the Leveson approach deny that it involves any element of political control of the press.
None of the above will apply to publication on the internet. Leveson's report has only a couple of pages on it.
As I've sometimes observed here, you can tell an awful lot about an idea by the people who support it. This one is advocated by Chris Huhne, which seems about right. It's a right Chris Huhne of a proposal.
Friday 1 November 2013
Lou Reed, post modernism and the avant-garde
Suzanne Moore writes an interesting piece in the Graun today about The Velvet Underground, the death of Lou Reed, which she feels deeply, and how, as the headline puts it, post-modernism has killed the avant-garde.
All the great Velvets' songs (Sweet Jane, Waiting For My Man, Venus in Furs) were essentially three (or sometimes two, or even one) chord pop songs. The band flattered their fans into thinking they were listening to something radical, whereas essentially they merely took a lot of drugs, played badly, were recorded badly, and wore sunglasses.
All over the anglophone world young people from the suburbs of provincial towns (Moore was born in Ipswich) illuminated their lives by imagining themselves as outsiders, glamorous acolytes of Andy Warhol. The fans weren't so keen on the Velvets' forays into sonic experimentation. As Moore herself says, Reed's most successful solo album, Transformer, pushed boundaries only in its suggestions of transexuality (a trope perhaps borrowed from David Bowie and Mick Ronson, who produced it, and who had been exploiting the sexual ambiguity thing for several years); otherwise Transformer was unashamedly commercial. It's no accident either that Reed's follow up, Metal Machine Music, was returned to record shops in droves as "edgy" fans baulked at its wall of noise.
In a way Reed's career demonstrates only too well what the avant-garde should be, and what pop actually is. The Velvets experimented. People didn't like it. They recorded simple pop songs about the joys of drug taking and S&M, and people who would never indulge in either bought the records in their thousands.
You have to applaud the willingness of artists to experiment and fail (particularly when they don't ask the general public to pay for their efforts); and yet the cult of experimentation has probably got too deep under our cultural skin, so the young and aspiring have for decades now made originality their mantra. Originality is all very well, but Transformer was a much better album than Metal Machine Music even though it was so derivative.
(I have personally always quite liked Nicholas Maw's notion of having inherited a tradition and not wanting to deviate too far from it.)
Moreover the entrenchment of avant-gardism as an artistic practice has been self-consuming. As experiencers of art, we have become unshockable. Our exposure to so much that seeks to startle has made us alive to the likelihood that any new piece of art will attempt to do just that, and accordingly we are inured to its impact. Not so much The Shock of the New as The Predictability of the New.
So I don't agree with Moore that post-modernism has killed the avant-garde. The avant-garde has eaten itself, and I actually don't think post-modernism has killed anything. If there is any kind of argument for this proposition it is that by showing their technical contrivances and by juxtaposing conflicting artistic languages, artists have undermined the persuasiveness of meaning: that we can no longer take seriously an artistic language because we have become too aware of the processes which underpin it and of the possibly of a different language existing alongside.
But here in the world of classical music we have been dealing with this for well over a hundred years. As soon as composers began making specific reference to music of an earlier period the authority of a contemporary style began to be undermined. If post-modernism has killed musical language it's strange that people still play and enjoy the Holberg Suite, or Dumbarton Oaks; or that people can enjoy a piece from 1830, say, when they have just finished listening to one from 1930.
The reality is that in any sphere, not just music, a language which is persuasive will draw in those experiencing it, and persuade them, if only for the duration of that experience, that it represents a convincing view of the world. If a language fails to do that it will atrophy.
You don't seem many attempts today to go beyond (or even as far as) Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Today's avant-garde usually becomes tomorrow's blind alley.
All the great Velvets' songs (Sweet Jane, Waiting For My Man, Venus in Furs) were essentially three (or sometimes two, or even one) chord pop songs. The band flattered their fans into thinking they were listening to something radical, whereas essentially they merely took a lot of drugs, played badly, were recorded badly, and wore sunglasses.
All over the anglophone world young people from the suburbs of provincial towns (Moore was born in Ipswich) illuminated their lives by imagining themselves as outsiders, glamorous acolytes of Andy Warhol. The fans weren't so keen on the Velvets' forays into sonic experimentation. As Moore herself says, Reed's most successful solo album, Transformer, pushed boundaries only in its suggestions of transexuality (a trope perhaps borrowed from David Bowie and Mick Ronson, who produced it, and who had been exploiting the sexual ambiguity thing for several years); otherwise Transformer was unashamedly commercial. It's no accident either that Reed's follow up, Metal Machine Music, was returned to record shops in droves as "edgy" fans baulked at its wall of noise.
In a way Reed's career demonstrates only too well what the avant-garde should be, and what pop actually is. The Velvets experimented. People didn't like it. They recorded simple pop songs about the joys of drug taking and S&M, and people who would never indulge in either bought the records in their thousands.
You have to applaud the willingness of artists to experiment and fail (particularly when they don't ask the general public to pay for their efforts); and yet the cult of experimentation has probably got too deep under our cultural skin, so the young and aspiring have for decades now made originality their mantra. Originality is all very well, but Transformer was a much better album than Metal Machine Music even though it was so derivative.
(I have personally always quite liked Nicholas Maw's notion of having inherited a tradition and not wanting to deviate too far from it.)
Moreover the entrenchment of avant-gardism as an artistic practice has been self-consuming. As experiencers of art, we have become unshockable. Our exposure to so much that seeks to startle has made us alive to the likelihood that any new piece of art will attempt to do just that, and accordingly we are inured to its impact. Not so much The Shock of the New as The Predictability of the New.
So I don't agree with Moore that post-modernism has killed the avant-garde. The avant-garde has eaten itself, and I actually don't think post-modernism has killed anything. If there is any kind of argument for this proposition it is that by showing their technical contrivances and by juxtaposing conflicting artistic languages, artists have undermined the persuasiveness of meaning: that we can no longer take seriously an artistic language because we have become too aware of the processes which underpin it and of the possibly of a different language existing alongside.
But here in the world of classical music we have been dealing with this for well over a hundred years. As soon as composers began making specific reference to music of an earlier period the authority of a contemporary style began to be undermined. If post-modernism has killed musical language it's strange that people still play and enjoy the Holberg Suite, or Dumbarton Oaks; or that people can enjoy a piece from 1830, say, when they have just finished listening to one from 1930.
The reality is that in any sphere, not just music, a language which is persuasive will draw in those experiencing it, and persuade them, if only for the duration of that experience, that it represents a convincing view of the world. If a language fails to do that it will atrophy.
You don't seem many attempts today to go beyond (or even as far as) Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Today's avant-garde usually becomes tomorrow's blind alley.
Thursday 31 October 2013
Mark Elder and Nigel Kennedy lock horns
In August the Graun ran an interview with Nigel Kennedy, in which the "bad boy" violinist apparently said, "I think conductors are completely over-rated . . . because if you love music, why not play it? Why wave around and get off on some ego shit? I don't think the audience give a shit about the conductor . . . no one normal understands what the conductor does. No one knows what they do! They just wave their arms out of time."
Fast forward to October, when the paper printed a short Q & A with Sir Mark Elder, in which the Halle's MD was quoted as saying, "(Kennedy) and I have given wonderful performances together, and yet there he was saying we're all a load of wankers, and that nobody knows what we're there for".
The notion that no-one knows what the conductor does is widespread. Conductors don't after all make any sound during performances (apart from a little grunting from time to time), and it must seem to the general public like a rather inexplicable profession. But conductors do do something. Several things. Here are some of them.
In an orchestra someone needs to take a broad view of the tempo and shape of a work, and in rehearsal it's useful to have someone involved but not playing to identify problems that need to be fixed. Conductors control the speed of the music (otherwise which of the players would decide?), and with their hands help provide information about dynamics, articulation, balance and phrasing. Anyone who thinks that what conductors do with their hands makes no difference has not tried it. Von Karajan used to say that by varying his upbeat he could make the strings, or woodwind, or brass, play early in a tutti chord, and although I probably couldn't do that I have enough experience to be pretty sure that it's true. The players often say they don't watch (and certainly listening is just as important), but it's funny how you can get them to play the same passage differently by beating in a different way.
So conductors are useful in performances and vital in rehearsal. But are they "a load of wankers" just the same? Well quite possibly. This is where I disagree with Elder. It's quite possible to conduct great performances and be a plonker at the same time. It's not only possible, but likely that plonkers are going to be over-represented in the stick-waving business, given that it tends to attract people who like standing on a box, talking down to others, making their own separate entrance and getting an extra round of applause from the audience. I should know.
Next, Kennedy will be telling us that policemen are more than averagely likely to enjoy hitting people with sticks, or that footballers quite like playing football. Who knew?
Next, Kennedy will be telling us that policemen are more than averagely likely to enjoy hitting people with sticks, or that footballers quite like playing football. Who knew?
I actually think that orchestral players expect the conductor to be a bit of a divvy. Inevitably some of them are. It's tempting to play up to this expectation actually, because often one's own real personality is just not adequate to the task of rehearsing an orchestra for three hours at a stretch. One becomes larger than life. I once had a piece performed by a conductor who wore an embroidered waistcoat. In the rehearsals. I actually didn't think he was a plonker. He was just doing what the players expected him to do.
But Kennedy is also wrong if he imagines that only conductors can be idiots, and in this regard he betrays a lack of self-awareness which is fatal to his argument. It's quite possible for a soloist to be a plonker as well.
You may well think that only someone with a very narrow set of interests could possibly be sufficiently driven to acquire the technical skill to make an international career as, for example, a violin soloist. You might find a person like that adopting a succession of eccentric hair styles and outfits in an attempt to make themselves seem more interesting. Such a person might be tempted to adopt a "mockney" accent to disguise their middle-class background, and try a foray into other musical styles for which they had only a modest aptitude; jazz for example.
I leave it to you to decide whether this photograph depicts such a person.
You may well think that only someone with a very narrow set of interests could possibly be sufficiently driven to acquire the technical skill to make an international career as, for example, a violin soloist. You might find a person like that adopting a succession of eccentric hair styles and outfits in an attempt to make themselves seem more interesting. Such a person might be tempted to adopt a "mockney" accent to disguise their middle-class background, and try a foray into other musical styles for which they had only a modest aptitude; jazz for example.
I leave it to you to decide whether this photograph depicts such a person.
National security - back to the steam age
I can't have been the only person to notice that if you hack into the private communications of the government, you face jail; whereas if the government hacks into your private communications that's perfectly OK.
I don't generally have much time for attention seekers like Bradley Manning, but it does seem curious that getting unauthorised access to, for example, the US National Security Agency's records, is punishable with a long prison sentence (or in Edward Snowden's case, years of exile; or in the case of one British hacker a long struggle against extradition); whereas if the US National Security Agency hacks into your emails or phone calls, be you a private individual or a friendly foreign leader like Angela Merkel, that's just the kind of routine stuff the state does every day.
There are arguments which go some way to explain this strange disparity of outcome, but nevertheless it's striking that the state can do whatever it likes, whereas we can't.
Orwell's vision of a telescreen in every room, watching us while we watch it, is becoming truer by the day.
If I were a terrorist of any kind, I'd be doing my plotting by Royal Mail. It's easy and cheap to set up computer systems which monitor email and search for keywords - "terrorist" and "plotter" for example (and it's a big hi to all the good people at GCHQ!) - but it's time consuming and expensive to steam open envelopes in a back room of a sorting office.
I don't generally have much time for attention seekers like Bradley Manning, but it does seem curious that getting unauthorised access to, for example, the US National Security Agency's records, is punishable with a long prison sentence (or in Edward Snowden's case, years of exile; or in the case of one British hacker a long struggle against extradition); whereas if the US National Security Agency hacks into your emails or phone calls, be you a private individual or a friendly foreign leader like Angela Merkel, that's just the kind of routine stuff the state does every day.
There are arguments which go some way to explain this strange disparity of outcome, but nevertheless it's striking that the state can do whatever it likes, whereas we can't.
Orwell's vision of a telescreen in every room, watching us while we watch it, is becoming truer by the day.
If I were a terrorist of any kind, I'd be doing my plotting by Royal Mail. It's easy and cheap to set up computer systems which monitor email and search for keywords - "terrorist" and "plotter" for example (and it's a big hi to all the good people at GCHQ!) - but it's time consuming and expensive to steam open envelopes in a back room of a sorting office.
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