It's rare that I find something I agree with in the Guardian, and when I do it generally it isn't something written by someone the paper employs. But one must not let the best be the enemy of the good. The following leapt out of a report on 20th May by Ian Traynor on the forthcoming European elections:
"A senior Spanish politician points out how difficult it was to campaign for office and be taken seriously when budget, spending and fiscal policies were being decided elsewhere by a troika of anonymous men in suits from the European commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. "'The voters are not stupid. They know you cannot deliver on what you're telling them. They don't believe you. You lose legitimacy', he said."
Hallelujah.
If you give up your right to decide economic policy to people you didn't elect who live and work in another country and whose sense of engagement with your own is modest at best, the consequences are not just that you tend to end up with an economic policy that doesn't suit you, but that because your domestic politicians are powerless to do anything on the economic front domestic politics are marginalised and emasculated. This is what happens when you concede sovereignty.
In the UK we had the great good fortune that Gordon Brown (credit where due to the miserable old bubble-blower) applied a healthy dose of Scottish Presbyterian scepticism to Tony Blair's hello-clouds-hello-sky approach to the prospect of Eurozone membership. Pity the poor Italians, Irish, Spanish, Portuguese and Greeks. Not only have their countries been comprehensively stuffed by a decade of the wrong interest rate and the wrong exchange rate, there is nothing (and this is the killer) their own politicians can do (or can promise their electorates to do) to make anything better. Is there a better recipe for loss of faith in politics? A more fertile seed-bed for extremism anywhere?
Of course we have our own version of this problem, which is that long, long ago we conceded control over European immigration to the EU, with the consequence that when Labour allowed the populations of new EU members the unrestricted right to work here in 2004, immigration soared. The young people of older but financially crippled EU countries have since followed.
Is there anything a British political party can do?
No. Because any British politician who promised reform of border controls or immigration policy would also have to promise to leave the EU. And this points up the sheer madness of ceding control over any policy (not just immigration) to an outside body. You can't get it back without leaving.
The need to make EU exit noises has helped UKIP and hindered the Tories, making them look like a party of Euro haters (which undoubtedly some of them are). But is that any surprise? For me the astonishing thing lies in the proposition that at one point in time you sign up to something which must then remain fixed for all eternity.
Are people serious about this? We signed up to open borders when the EU had half a dozen or so members, all prosperous, none of whose citizens had much incentive to move, whereas the EU now has nearly thirty members, countries with a wide disparity of living standard amongst many of which adoption of the Euro has wreaked havoc. The world is very different to the one we envisaged at the time of signature.
If David Cameron is wrong to threaten withdrawal from the EU in the absence of fundamental reform (and wrong in principle rather than just on this specific issue), how long would we have to wait before the changing world or changing domestic political opinion would make it OK? Twenty years? Fifty years? A century? And in the meantime what should domestic politicians say to their electorates? Sorry, but on the issues which poll after poll show you feel most strongly about, we can do absolutely nothing?
I am no visceral hater of the EU, but the present arrangements are not working. In fact they are a boon to the extremists.
Wednesday 21 May 2014
Tuesday 20 May 2014
Fargo and the problem of evil
I had high hopes of Channel 4's reworking of the Coen brothers' magisterial Fargo. Hopes and fears too, because I loved the original so much I was afraid they might wreck the remake. And in a way they have.
Sure, it's well acted, the snowy exteriors look great, Molly, the new Marge Gunderson, is just as wonderful a character as Frances McDormand's original. And yet.
Here's the thing. The makers of the new Fargo have fallen into the trap so carefully avoided by the Coens. It turn on the character of Lorne Malvo, played with concentrated malevolence by Billy Bob Thornton (we may well find that the writers have chosen this name in fact because it is so nearly an anagram of malevolent). What so distinguished the bad guys in the original was that they seemed like real people. As a former criminal lawyer I can testify that very few criminals are bad in an interesting way. I never met a single one like Lorne Malvo (just in case we hadn't worked out how bad Malvo is, the writers gave him a charming little speech about bestiality in the last episode).
The ones I met were stupid, panicky and damaged rather than clever and imperturbable. And this was true in the Coen's version too. I remember the Steve Buscemi character for his bad teeth and whining voice; the guy with the bad blond dye job was altogether nastier, but he was also thoroughly dim. Together they did bad things, but the Coens realised that essentially these were individuals with low-wattage IQs, and in my experience that's true to life.
Curiously this was something the Coens got wrong in No Country For Old Men, and I mused then about why it was that novelists and film directors felt obliged to present bad people as edgier versions of themselves - people perhaps who liked wearing black polo neck sweaters, had interesting hair cuts and once had a tattered copy of The Glass Bead Game in their greatcoat pocket. Next time you watch Thornton as Malvo see if like me you can picture him as an ageing hipster, tramping the streets of Hoxton in search of an internet start-up. In films it's generally not enough to present criminals pitiable losers - directors have to make us feel, as with No Country For Old Men, that in some way the perpetrators are evil personified, Lucifer on his day off, the devil incarnate. They're wrong and it makes for bad art. Bad people are boring and - pace Hannah Arendt - banal.
PS A small bet that the new Fargo won't replicate the old one's famously downbeat ending. In the original we see the blond man feeding Steve Buscemi's leg into the woodchipper as Marge approaches through the snow, revolver in hand. Surely, we think, vulnerable Marge, gun or no, can't possibly succeed in arresting this awful man. But next shot there is Marge driving back to town in her squad car with woodchip man in cuffs in the back. Slowly the audience exhales and unknots its stomach. It is the end. I think the new Fargo will funk this. Molly will arrest Lorne. But it'll be a conventional cliff-hanger without the Coens' downbeat surprise.
Sure, it's well acted, the snowy exteriors look great, Molly, the new Marge Gunderson, is just as wonderful a character as Frances McDormand's original. And yet.
Here's the thing. The makers of the new Fargo have fallen into the trap so carefully avoided by the Coens. It turn on the character of Lorne Malvo, played with concentrated malevolence by Billy Bob Thornton (we may well find that the writers have chosen this name in fact because it is so nearly an anagram of malevolent). What so distinguished the bad guys in the original was that they seemed like real people. As a former criminal lawyer I can testify that very few criminals are bad in an interesting way. I never met a single one like Lorne Malvo (just in case we hadn't worked out how bad Malvo is, the writers gave him a charming little speech about bestiality in the last episode).
The ones I met were stupid, panicky and damaged rather than clever and imperturbable. And this was true in the Coen's version too. I remember the Steve Buscemi character for his bad teeth and whining voice; the guy with the bad blond dye job was altogether nastier, but he was also thoroughly dim. Together they did bad things, but the Coens realised that essentially these were individuals with low-wattage IQs, and in my experience that's true to life.
Curiously this was something the Coens got wrong in No Country For Old Men, and I mused then about why it was that novelists and film directors felt obliged to present bad people as edgier versions of themselves - people perhaps who liked wearing black polo neck sweaters, had interesting hair cuts and once had a tattered copy of The Glass Bead Game in their greatcoat pocket. Next time you watch Thornton as Malvo see if like me you can picture him as an ageing hipster, tramping the streets of Hoxton in search of an internet start-up. In films it's generally not enough to present criminals pitiable losers - directors have to make us feel, as with No Country For Old Men, that in some way the perpetrators are evil personified, Lucifer on his day off, the devil incarnate. They're wrong and it makes for bad art. Bad people are boring and - pace Hannah Arendt - banal.
PS A small bet that the new Fargo won't replicate the old one's famously downbeat ending. In the original we see the blond man feeding Steve Buscemi's leg into the woodchipper as Marge approaches through the snow, revolver in hand. Surely, we think, vulnerable Marge, gun or no, can't possibly succeed in arresting this awful man. But next shot there is Marge driving back to town in her squad car with woodchip man in cuffs in the back. Slowly the audience exhales and unknots its stomach. It is the end. I think the new Fargo will funk this. Molly will arrest Lorne. But it'll be a conventional cliff-hanger without the Coens' downbeat surprise.
Monday 19 May 2014
Richard Scudamore lives - for now
On an evening in which Manchester United appointed Louis van Gaal as manager and Ryan Giggs, taking up the reins of deputy manager, retired as a player, Radio 5's 7 p.m. sports programme led with . . . . yes, the news that the Premier League had decided not to take any action against Richard "Sexist" Scudamore. The panel of middle-aged sports journalists plus token woman mused over the issue self-righteously for the first twenty minutes of the programme.
Not once did any of the panellists suggest that, loathsome though they might personally find Scudamore's leaked private sexist emails, they worried about a society where one step out of line could result in a media campaign for you to lose your job. The BBC is far from being the worst offender in this case, but their news headline went along the following lines - Peter Scudamore will keep his job despite (and this was the word which stuck in my craw) being revealed as a chauvinist pig. "Despite" implies that Scudamore had done something wrong. After all, you wouldn't say he kept his job "despite" having eaten porridge for breakfast. But I don't need the BBC to tell me whether Scudamore has erred - I can make up my own mind - and it worries me that the Corporation employs people who don't understand this basic point. Either that or they don't understand what words mean.
But I guess that's kind of person who works for Radio 5, and if I don't like it I shouldn't be listening to it.
Of course the most sickening aspect of the holier than thou broadcasters was that football has always been a deeply sexist sport. One doesn't have to read the tabloids to get an idea of the Caligulan scenes which take place when a gang of footballers meets a gaggle of impressionable wannabe Wags. Out of many, two vignettes spring to mind. One anecdote was in Ronald Reng's book about Barnsley's German goalkeeper, and concerned, well, let's just say it concerned group fellatio. The other concerned the former Chelsea player Gavin Peacock, a Christian, who sometimes travelled to away games in the luggage compartment of the team bus. This was because the then manager showed porn movies to the players en route and Peacock didn't want to watch them. Football is a profoundly sexist game, female referee's assistants notwithstanding, a sexism which extends from players to fans to management and, yes, to journalists; that's to say the same journalists now agitating for the hapless Scudamore to lose his job. It is still very a largely working class pursuit, even in the prawn sandwich seats at Old Trafford, and the working class are, by and large, less careful to hide their sexism under a cloak of "respect" for the opposite sex than Proust-reading liberal humanities graduates like me.
Under the circumstances it's not surprising the Premier League clubs voted unanimously to back their Chief Exec. No doubt they would have done so even if Bruce Buck, the Chelsea chairman and one of the panel who examined the issue, had not been a shooting partner of Scudamore.
What, I wonder, would the Premier League have done if Scudmore's remarks had been racist? I expect they would have sacked him, and I think they would have been right. Racism is much more serious an issue than sexism. That's because a society can't function properly where people can be discriminated against just because of the colour of their skin. But sexism doesn't quite have the same heft. That's because while most men may be sexist to one degree or other, we all have mothers, wives, sisters, partners and daughters. We all mingle with each other in a way in which, even now, most black and white people don't. If a crude summary of male/female relations might be Can't live with them, Can't live without them, it doesn't seem unreasonable that men (and women) should be able to give vent to their feelings about the differences between the sexes from time to time. It doesn't mean that anyone is going to do anything horrible about or to the opposite sex. I thought Scudamore's remarks were bad; but nothing like as bad as it would be to sack him because he made them.
PS As Allison Pearson pointed out in the Torygraph a couple of days later, it's interesting to compare the UK media interest in Scudamore with their lack of interest in Meriam Ibrahim, a Sudanese Muslim sentenced to death for adultery; and not because she actually committed adultery, but because she married a Christian. Ms Ibrahim is pregnant by the way. Where are the double page spreads and radio phone-ins about her? The Sudanese court exercised a degree of clemency by the way - it is going to allow her to have her baby before she is stoned to death.
In a society which, for all its faults, is almost certainly getting less sexist by the day, the fuss over Scudamore and the silence about Ibrahim reveals our media to be contemptible to a degree which overruns the boundaries of the word.
Not once did any of the panellists suggest that, loathsome though they might personally find Scudamore's leaked private sexist emails, they worried about a society where one step out of line could result in a media campaign for you to lose your job. The BBC is far from being the worst offender in this case, but their news headline went along the following lines - Peter Scudamore will keep his job despite (and this was the word which stuck in my craw) being revealed as a chauvinist pig. "Despite" implies that Scudamore had done something wrong. After all, you wouldn't say he kept his job "despite" having eaten porridge for breakfast. But I don't need the BBC to tell me whether Scudamore has erred - I can make up my own mind - and it worries me that the Corporation employs people who don't understand this basic point. Either that or they don't understand what words mean.
But I guess that's kind of person who works for Radio 5, and if I don't like it I shouldn't be listening to it.
Of course the most sickening aspect of the holier than thou broadcasters was that football has always been a deeply sexist sport. One doesn't have to read the tabloids to get an idea of the Caligulan scenes which take place when a gang of footballers meets a gaggle of impressionable wannabe Wags. Out of many, two vignettes spring to mind. One anecdote was in Ronald Reng's book about Barnsley's German goalkeeper, and concerned, well, let's just say it concerned group fellatio. The other concerned the former Chelsea player Gavin Peacock, a Christian, who sometimes travelled to away games in the luggage compartment of the team bus. This was because the then manager showed porn movies to the players en route and Peacock didn't want to watch them. Football is a profoundly sexist game, female referee's assistants notwithstanding, a sexism which extends from players to fans to management and, yes, to journalists; that's to say the same journalists now agitating for the hapless Scudamore to lose his job. It is still very a largely working class pursuit, even in the prawn sandwich seats at Old Trafford, and the working class are, by and large, less careful to hide their sexism under a cloak of "respect" for the opposite sex than Proust-reading liberal humanities graduates like me.
Under the circumstances it's not surprising the Premier League clubs voted unanimously to back their Chief Exec. No doubt they would have done so even if Bruce Buck, the Chelsea chairman and one of the panel who examined the issue, had not been a shooting partner of Scudamore.
What, I wonder, would the Premier League have done if Scudmore's remarks had been racist? I expect they would have sacked him, and I think they would have been right. Racism is much more serious an issue than sexism. That's because a society can't function properly where people can be discriminated against just because of the colour of their skin. But sexism doesn't quite have the same heft. That's because while most men may be sexist to one degree or other, we all have mothers, wives, sisters, partners and daughters. We all mingle with each other in a way in which, even now, most black and white people don't. If a crude summary of male/female relations might be Can't live with them, Can't live without them, it doesn't seem unreasonable that men (and women) should be able to give vent to their feelings about the differences between the sexes from time to time. It doesn't mean that anyone is going to do anything horrible about or to the opposite sex. I thought Scudamore's remarks were bad; but nothing like as bad as it would be to sack him because he made them.
PS As Allison Pearson pointed out in the Torygraph a couple of days later, it's interesting to compare the UK media interest in Scudamore with their lack of interest in Meriam Ibrahim, a Sudanese Muslim sentenced to death for adultery; and not because she actually committed adultery, but because she married a Christian. Ms Ibrahim is pregnant by the way. Where are the double page spreads and radio phone-ins about her? The Sudanese court exercised a degree of clemency by the way - it is going to allow her to have her baby before she is stoned to death.
In a society which, for all its faults, is almost certainly getting less sexist by the day, the fuss over Scudamore and the silence about Ibrahim reveals our media to be contemptible to a degree which overruns the boundaries of the word.
Ed Miliband's target
Ed Miliband has proposed a long-term link between the median earnings and the minimum wage. In case you think this might amount to a promise, Miliband says it's a target he hopes his government will reach by 2020 or thereabouts. But does it make any sense?
The median wage isn't the same as the average wage. It's the wage in the middle, which is to say if you arranged the salaries of all Britain's 33 million workers in quantity order, the one about 16.5 million from the end (or the beginning, come to that). It seems a funny benchmark, since it doesn't reflect what most people earn.
There are several problems with Miliband's proposal. The first is that higher wages tend to mean fewer people having jobs. You can express it like this - the minimum wage (or the living wage if you like) means more money for the people with jobs, but fewer people having jobs at all. (Incidentally, before anyone points out that employment levels actually aren't that bad considering we've had the minimum wage for quite a long time, let me point out that levels might have been even better if we hadn't had one at all).
Moreover Miliband is ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that bottom end wages are low because Labour allowed in the best part of a million East Europeans after 2004, increasing the pool of available labour and easing pressure on employers to compete for staff by raising wages (thereby increasing inequality and, it might be added, increasing demand for housing not only by sheer weight of numbers but also by keeping interest rates low and encouraging people to borrow more).
Effectively Miliband is trying to fix a problem his party was instrumental in causing by attacking its symptoms rather than its cause. The cause is too many people chasing too few jobs.
And of course as long as our immigration policy remains outsourced to the EU, continental Europe with its stagnating and dysfunctional economic system can continue to export its surplus labour to Britain, where it provides jolly good service in the hotels, turnip fields and coffee shops, ensuring that wages remain low at the bottom end and British people (many of them with brown faces) languish on the dole.
Of course this doesn't mean that Miliband's target won't hit a target of its own - the ignorance and gullibility of some of his natural supporters.
The median wage isn't the same as the average wage. It's the wage in the middle, which is to say if you arranged the salaries of all Britain's 33 million workers in quantity order, the one about 16.5 million from the end (or the beginning, come to that). It seems a funny benchmark, since it doesn't reflect what most people earn.
There are several problems with Miliband's proposal. The first is that higher wages tend to mean fewer people having jobs. You can express it like this - the minimum wage (or the living wage if you like) means more money for the people with jobs, but fewer people having jobs at all. (Incidentally, before anyone points out that employment levels actually aren't that bad considering we've had the minimum wage for quite a long time, let me point out that levels might have been even better if we hadn't had one at all).
Moreover Miliband is ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that bottom end wages are low because Labour allowed in the best part of a million East Europeans after 2004, increasing the pool of available labour and easing pressure on employers to compete for staff by raising wages (thereby increasing inequality and, it might be added, increasing demand for housing not only by sheer weight of numbers but also by keeping interest rates low and encouraging people to borrow more).
Effectively Miliband is trying to fix a problem his party was instrumental in causing by attacking its symptoms rather than its cause. The cause is too many people chasing too few jobs.
And of course as long as our immigration policy remains outsourced to the EU, continental Europe with its stagnating and dysfunctional economic system can continue to export its surplus labour to Britain, where it provides jolly good service in the hotels, turnip fields and coffee shops, ensuring that wages remain low at the bottom end and British people (many of them with brown faces) languish on the dole.
Of course this doesn't mean that Miliband's target won't hit a target of its own - the ignorance and gullibility of some of his natural supporters.
Saturday 17 May 2014
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.
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.
Thursday 15 May 2014
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.
"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.
Tuesday 13 May 2014
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".
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".
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