Modernism in classical music - it's not just me

Has modernism failed?  That's a big question, and one which I'm vaguely qualified in only one field - classical music - to answer.

I suppose it depends on what you think the modernists set out to do. You could argue, in a charitable frame of mind, that they wanted to reflect the increasing mechanisation and alienation of modern life, to develop a musical language which enabled music to mirror the death of the romantic ideal and to explore the increasing awareness of the dark side of the human soul, revealed as clearly in Freud's Viennese consulting rooms as in the trenches of the Somme.

And to some extent they succeeded. The difficulty is that music, like all other art, is meant to be enjoyable (construing that word very broadly). Reflect horrible things too faithfully, and art stops being enjoyable and becomes something of a chore. Mozart's Idomeneo is written in a lean, accessible melodic style, but it is still the most horrifying opera I've ever seen. It succeeds because the experience is mediated by the music, which offers a stylised analogue of suffering rather than attempting to mimic the suffering itself. On the other hand I once had the misfortune to sit through Aribert Reimann's modernist opera Lear, a very tough three hours, and frankly I'd rather cut my own leg off than repeat the experience. Moreover, audiences know very well that whilst quite a lot of life is unpleasant (and quite a lot of people around the world lead lives that must be very unpleasant indeed), much of it is actually rather enjoyable. The raw, bleeding sensibilities that modernism urges on us seem no more realistic than, for example, P G Wodehouse's arcadian country house froth. And at least Wodehouse is funny.

Certainly classical music's decline must partly be attributed to the truly toxic effect aggressive new work has had on audiences. With your cynic's hat on however, you might argue that the modernists have succeeded only too well - Schoenberg's serialism was explicitly intended as a rebuke to comfortable bourgeois certainties. All of which is fine - we bourgeois can now consider ourselves thoroughly rebuked. But then what? Encouraging the middle class to turn to other pursuits has worked well enough on this view of modernist ideals, but has implications for the infrastructure of classical music which I'll come to in a moment.

My contention is not just that modernism has done a good deal to strike at the viability of the classical music industry. It is that modernism is inherently alien to classical music. Let me explain. Our idea of the modern and new is intimately associated with technology. You can see this must be so just by looking back at what it was that got modernism going in the first place - industrialisation, the telephone, the aeroplane, the atom bomb, space travel. Now look at the symphony orchestra. A medium which hasn't changed in more than a century. No one is every going to look at a symphony orchestra again and think, "That's new". That doesn't mean the orchestra isn't one of the most wonderful collective institutions ever developed by humanity. It just means that it's never going to be cutting edge again.

You might think that the amazing development of digital signal processing could be harnessed to acoustic instruments to give classical music the gloss of novelty. And it can, up to a point. But the core classical repertoire doesn't demand it, and in fact I can't think of a single electro-acoustic piece which has entered the orchestral repertoire, even though composers have been trying on increasingly sophisticated equipment for fifty years.

The desire to be modern and new, to be original, is hard wired into the DNA of every composition student leaving a conservatoire. But it is a chimera. How to go forward is a subject for another day, but modernism in classical music has failed to grip the public, which saw it as a misreading of its own life-experiences and which stayed away from the concert hall in droves. It has been moreover rendered impossible by the march of acoustic technology. Modernism no longer has the option of sounding new. For a time a hundred years ago it sounded new and ugly.  Now it can only sound ugly.

Views like these are as unpopular with the classical music establishment as they are commonplace outside it. And yet I was prompted to write this piece by an article in the Guardian today written by Mark Simpson (no relation - for the uninitiate Simpson is a fabulous clarinettist who won BBC Young Musician and is now a well-thought of young composer supported by the BBC in a way that can only make some of us sigh a little wistfully). He writes, "perhaps these changes signal . . . a diminishing belief in the value of contemporary classical music.  Stravinsky famously said that classical music is not for the masses.  His Rite of Spring was a piece that blew me away in my teenage years and aided my commitment to classical music.  But Stravinsky died during the time when the modernist movement of the 1960s and 70s was favouring intellectual procedures over purely emotional ones. The effects of this can still be seen in the reluctance of many audiences to encounter contemporary music that they fear will be jagged and atonal.  There's no denying that the great pieces of the past stirred our emotions in a way that modernism has failed to do, and audiences have been alienated as a result".

So it's not just me then. "Audiences have been alienated as a result". And what will happen is that as audiences shrink, so will the political justification for public subsidy. I went to the Royal Opera House last week, and looking around at the sleek faces of the rich and powerful in the bars and restaurants I wondered what would happen if poor people saw this, or if they knew that the ROH consumes the largest tranche of (taxpayer-funded) Arts Council spending. Modernism has helped to push (helped - there are other causes) classical music towards a place where the infrastructure of orchestras and ensembles, players and audiences, is no longer economically or politically viable. If it ever gets there that will be an awful shame.

Richard Scudamore - traducing new British certainties

Apologies to anyone who thinks I'm becoming obsessive about freedom of speech, but the Guardian has waded further into the debate about Richard Scudamore and his sexist emails. The beleaguered Premier League chief exec "must go", rails the leader column today.

"Do we have the right to be repellent?", it begins by asking, concluding that while "perhaps people have the right to think appalling thoughts" Scudamore the Sexist's musings were inconsistent with his being the "public face committed to women in football".

It's big of the Graun to concede our right to think whatever we like, although that "perhaps" has an ominous ring to it which is symptomatic of its attitude.  "He was lucky that the emails were sexist and not racist", it writes.

Would that be "lucky" as in "lucky for Scudmore that he isn't a racist"?  Or "lucky" as in "lucky for racist Scudamore that his racist emails weren't stumbled upon by his temporary PA and leaked to the press"? Since the Guardian presumably has no idea whether Scudamore is racist or not, I'm presuming the former; but if I were him I'd be reaching for my lawyers and asking for clarification.

I suppose by this standard I'm lucky that the police haven't discovered corpses buried in my back garden. Lucky in the sense that I never had the urge to kill anyone and dispose of them beneath the lawn on a moonlit night.

Scudamore's pensees are fairly symptomatic of male attitudes which range from at one end of the continuum no more than a raised eyebrow and at the other disparaging and reductive attitudes to women which might make disgraced former Sky presenter Richard Keys blush.  These no doubt have their equivalent in semi-humorous attitudes to my gender of the "all men are useless and can't multitask" variety, though since men have more power than women we can't complain that we sometimes face closer scrutiny.

If the Premier League clubs decide that Scudamore is more trouble than he's worth they could sack him for gross misconduct. Good luck with that. Sending emails on the firm's premises is not going to constitute gross misconduct, and as for lewd content the reason why the Premier League would be well advised not to do anything hasty is intimately connected with the reason Premier League clubs have thus far been conspicuously silent on the subject of Scudamore's embarrassment. One, they think he's a hard-boiled character who's doing a good job, and two, the upper reaches of football clubs are probably as intense a stew of sexism as any institutions I can think of. What, most of the chairmen will be wondering, is sexism? What expensive comedy would play out in an employment tribunal as Scudamore detailed some of the sexist shenanigans of his employers!

For me the tragedy of this attack on the right to be repellent - which really means the right to say things some other people find repellent - without fearing loss of liberty or livelihood is that it is coming from the liberal left. That is to say, the same political class which performed heroically in establishing the right to attack the certainties of empire, church, class, monarchy and the family. This group now has in mind certainties of its own. Woe betide you if you are a public figure and you traduce them.

Please please don't throw me to the liberals.

Liverpool's hostage to fortune

Hard times for the red half of Manchester, as City finally shake off the pursuit and win the Premiership. What's a United fan to do? Answer, be very glad that Liverpool didn't win it instead.

A few weeks ago it looked rather likely that they would. Some very, very foolish Scouser, excited by the resurgence in Liverpool's fortunes and still nettled by Alex Ferguson's decades old promise to knock Liverpool "off their f***** perch", displayed the following banner at Anfield:

I'll be thinking of that image for the rest of my life.  Whenever I hear the words "hostage to fortune".

Having to do with Jeremy Clarkson

So first of all it's Jeremy Clarkson, muttering the unexpurgated version of Eeny Meeny Miny Mo in an unbroadcast segment.  Then a hapless Radio Devon DJ David Lowe playing The Sun Has Got His Hat On, unaware that it contained the lyric "He's been tanning n------ out in Timbuktu / Now he's coming back to do the same to you".  Today the Premier League chief Richard Scudamore is in trouble for emails in which he advised a friend to keep a female colleague "off your shaft" and compared an ex-girlfriend to a double-decker bus - "happy for you to play upstairs but her Dad got angry if you went below".

(Hypocritical hats off to the Daily Mirror for laying into Scudamore whilst repeating the comments for the amusement of anyone puerile enough to be entertained by them.)

Let's deal with Scudamore first.  His emails reveal him to be boorish and sexist, and his comments have been attached by such luminaries as Tessa Jowell and Women in Sport; a Labour MP comments that his position as Premier League boss has been "undermined".  Well maybe.  But if Scudamore is unfit for his post, so are an awful lot of other men.  A brilliant doctor friend of mine once complained of "the creeping feminisation of the NHS", and observed of a woman we know that she was certainly "towards the danger end of the female irrationality spectrum". These half-serious musings on the temperamental differences between the genders, sexist if you like, are part of the small change of conversation between many men. You may find Scudamore a degree more loathsome, although it's not his fault that private musings - best kept in the locker-room - were published.

As for the n----- word, the idea that someone on Radio Devon should be sacked for playing The Sun Has Got His Hat On is surely just bizarre.  Boris Johnson's contention that the BBC is hypocritical for showing Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, with its plethora of n----- words, doesn't quite wash for me, but nevertheless shows how complex the issue is. The BBC swiftly offered David Lowe his job back, but Lowe has had enough.

What banning "n-----" reveals is that these decisions are made by individuals according to individual tastes. The Scudamore stuff suggests more clearly, being borderline, that what's offensive is a matter of opinion. I personally find "n------" pretty horrible because it is redolent of a time when black people were regarded by (often quite nice) white people as little better than animals. But my view, although widely shared in Britain now, is not universally accepted, and its use by black people to one another shows, like Johnson's Pulp Fiction point, that nuances are at work. When black people use the word, it means something quite different from its use by 1930s English dance band leaders; itself different again from its use by a Southern redneck at a lynching; itself different again from its use by a portly petrolhead reciting a nursery rhyme out of English cultural antiquity. In other words, context is everything.

In 1960s or even 1980s Britain, the status of black people in society was sufficiently precarious to justify the argument that racist language should be outlawed.  However even its most zealous defenders would have to acknowledge that something has been lost in terms of freedom of speech.  There's nothing quite so insidious as the notion that certain things are sayable and other things aren't. In Britain today the penalty for transgressors can be unemployment or even jail. It's a tempting path as long as people who agree with you are holding the reins of power, but it leaves those who don't buy in to your value set excluded; and when the reins are taken away from you, what then?

Moreover, the outrage that greets the broadcast of The Sun Has Got His Hat On fails to recognise the transience of social attitudes.  In 1932 people thought it was OK to say n------. Now most of them don't. Who knows what people will think in the future? One of the fatuities of our age is the notion that the attitudes we have are correct, perhaps even definitive, the rounded gleaming Platonic certainties towards which our forefathers were groping in their fumbling way. What rubbish. Our views are merely staging posts on humanity's long march, clung to by us, laughed at by our grandchildren.

I grew up in the 1960s with Eeny Meeny Miny Mo. It was part of my cultural heritage, along with Meccano, the Johnny Seven gun and Mamod steam engines. It was probably part of Clarkson's too. I'm surprised he hasn't tried to claim his own heritage is being denied.  After all, the white liberal metropolitan elite is quite keen on protecting everyone else's culture. Why not its own?

There were traces of this in the Guardian the day after the Scudamore story broke. The G2 cover ran a spoof pointing up the tendency of the tabloids to run anti-Muslim scare stories, while inside the main paper David Conn, that most po-faced of journalists, reported the "growing clamour" about Scudamore's sexism. It's ironic that the sexism of Islam, often rampant, gross, inhuman and endemic, should be overlooked so frequently by the Guardian and its fellow-travellers, whilst some pathetically unfunny comments by a football administrator should attract the whole of its attention. There's surely an element of self-hatred here.

Ultimately the right not to be offended, which so many people seem to think should be a feature of an open society, is unworkable (who decides?) and in any event should be trumped by the right to free expression. If freedom of utterance means anything it means the willingness to listen to something you don't like, because not liking it is not as bad as the other person not being able to say it.

PS  The version of The Sun Has Got His Hat On played on Radio Devon was by Ambrose and His Orchestra. What a delicious irony it would have been had Mr Lowe played instead a rival version of the song recorded in the same year. It was by Henry Hall's BBC Dance Orchestra.

Lee Rigby, Britain First and the Electoral Commission

With the news that the Electoral Commission is hand-wringingly apologetic about allowing the right wing Britain First movement to allow the slogan "Remember Lee Rigby" on its local election ballot papers, the thought strikes me (not for the first time) that not many people seem to be bothered about free speech any more.

The fate of Lee Rigby, hacked to death in Woolwich by Islamic fundamentalists, was grisly, ghastly and undeserved.  In my opinion his death deserves to be remembered, and not just by Britain First (whoever they are); but on the other hand there'll be people who think Rigby was an agent of a corrupt and warlike state who got what was coming to him. And all shades of opinion in between. That's pluralism.

While I might find distasteful an attempt to make political capital out of Rigby's death, I wouldn't dream of standing in the way of any political party that wanted to do so. If freedom means anything, it means the freedom to say things that other people don't like.

So many of my fellow liberals seem to think that freedom means being able to say things that they themselves more or less agree with.

Extremists are defeated when people can see what they stand for and don't support them. Telling them what they can and can't put on the ballot paper merely helps turn Britain into the kind of country they claim it is already - one where ordinary people's voices are stifled, a kind of liberal police state where free expression is thwarted. People should be able to judge for themselves what Britain First are about and decide whether to vote for them accordingly.

This seems so self-evident to me that the really shocking thing is not that a loony Right party should use Rigby's death as a gory rallying flag, but that the press can report the Electoral Commission's embarrassment without the hint of a suggestion that there might be something undemocratic about it.

Sympathy for the fundamentalists

Events in Birmingham suggest an Islamist plot to take over state schools.  I'm not a natural supporter of anything concerning Islam, a religion which I think on the whole treats women pretty poorly, but I would like to spare a thought today for the beleaguered men of Allah.

In the first place, pressure groups of all kinds are at liberty to try and get themselves elected onto school governing boards.  It's a thankless job done generally by the middle-class great and good (my wife does it). Why shouldn't Islamists have a go?  There's nothing, as far as I'm concerned, preventing any organisation - boy scouts, naturists, the Woodcraft Folk, Morris dancers et al - from trying to do the same thing.

No, my objection lies with the people who are surprised that this is happening.  In the first place, how dare they object when people try and get involved with local democracy.  That's their right!  Second, the objectors - Labour councillors who run Birmingham Council - are precisely the kind of people whose open door immigration policy invited the Islamic hardliners in to start with.

If you allow in an awful lot of people from a relatively small rural part of Pakistan (surprisingly, most of them from the area surrounding the town of Mirpur), you are going to find that population will pretty quickly start demanding that political and social rules come to reflect the mores and norms of the society they've left behind.  Who can blame them?

And what norms those are.  Muslims, extremist or otherwise, have radically different views about the role of religion in society, about the extent to which religion should dominate the individual's life, about the extent to which an individual should be free to marry whom they choose, about whether people can have sex before marriage, about whether women can go out to work or interact freely with other British people, about the way women should dress, about relations between husbands and their wives, about which legal system should govern their affairs, about women's right to enjoy sex without being hacked about, and even about the right of women to inherit money.

The idea that Muslims, extremist or otherwise, might want these cultural practices to be reflected in some way in the kind of things children should be taught at school seems to have come as a shock to some people.  Not to me.  It's inevitable, and all the more so when you dish out quite large sums of money to "community" groups, encouraging migrants to regard themselves as a self-contained pocket of the Asian sub-continent rather than New Britons.

I don't blame the Islamic fundamentalists for having a go. It's the people who brought them to Britain who need to have a look in the mirror.

RIP David Moyes

Just like one of those old cowboy stories where the hero knows from the circling vultures up ahead that something bad has happened - the homestead sacked, the stagecoach waylaid - we the public have been able to tell from the sententiously regretful newspaper articles about the Manchester United manager's debut season that something bad was going on behind the scenes at Old Trafford.  And now we have ridden around a bend in the draw to find the denouement laid out before us -  yesterday David Moyes was "to be sacked"; today the tense has changed to "has been". The owners announced it on Twitter.

So United turn out to be just like any other club. The illusion fostered during the long years of Fergie's success that Man U were somehow different - the trope that the boardroom had stuck with the irascible Glaswegian during three years of mediocrity, had reaped the benefits of that stability and were going to pursue the same policy with the new man - is now gone. As is glassy-eyed Fergie Lite. Now United are going to be scrabbling around for someone with the Midas touch just like everyone else. How Jose Mourinho must be laughing this morning.

Whose fault is all this?  Not much of it is David Moyes'. He inherited a squad whose young players (many of them fostered by Ferguson) weren't good enough, and whose good players were getting too old. Rio Ferdinand is so slow now that Moyes himself could probably run faster. The fear that used to inhibit opponents and referees went when Ferguson did. There have been perhaps more injuries than usual. Some players haven't stepped up, which is unprofessional and an insult to the fans.

None of these things could be laid at Moyes' door.

There have no doubt been individual decisions Moyes got wrong, although no-one will ever be able to prove that. The summer failures in the transfer window might be partly to do with him, although surely the board must take some responsibility for failing to spend big when it was so evidently needed.  But that's been true for several years now.

Which brings us to the Glazers. The Americans borrowed massively against the security of the club in order to buy it, and have transformed it from one with negligible debt to one massively in hock to the banks. It beggars belief that that change in ownership had no effect on United's ability to buy world beating new stars.

Actually David Moyes inherited a club that desperately needed an infusion of new talent. That's the fault of its owners.  The same people who sacked the manager this morning.  As I was saying, that's the vultures you can hear Twittering.

PS - As for the much-hyped managerial credentials of the journalists' darling Ryan Giggs, I would bet a hefty sum that when he turns to management he'll be as rubbish as so many other former stars.  Giggs strikes me as a bit thick, which won't help, but doesn't preclude success in the dugout.  No, the reason I think he'll fail is for the simple statistical fact that most people do.  Individuals like David Moyes, humiliated as he now is, are exceptional in being able to do the job at all.  People like Mourinho and Ferguson are rare as hen's teeth.