The Quality of the Invention, stupid

Three things recently have conspired to remind me of the great John Williams, composer - I almost said "film composer" - extraordinaire.

Firstly, the Halifax Symphony Orchestra blasted its way through a Star Wars medley last Saturday, a performance it was a privelidge to conduct, with the brass section on coruscating form (by the way, in the eyes of the Courier's reviewer I was "lively" this time - does she read my blog?  Is she teasing me?).

Secondly, I've been reading Alex Ross's (otherwise excellent) history of 20th c. music The Rest is Noise, in which nonentities such as Varese get a dozen references but Williams is missing altogether.

Thirdly, I went to see the new Star Trek movie the other night, and found it pretty much like Star Wars only with mediocre music; which made it a pretty mediocre experience.

Why should John Williams feature in Ross's book?  After all he's not a classical composer.  Wrong.  Actually Williams has written quite a bit of concert music, including concertos for violin, clarinet and cello (this last for Yo Yo Ma).  But that's not quite the point.  Ross finds space for several Hollywood composers of the 30s and 40s, forced out of Europe by the rise of Nazism.  Why not space for one Hollywood composer of the 80s and 90s forced out of the concert hall by the rise of Serialism?

For all the debt Williams owes to Shostakovitch and Prokofiev (isn't there a good deal of Beethoven in Brahms?), he has one priceless quality afforded only to the very, very lucky.  A gift for memorable harmony and melody.  And what makes music last is not its originality, the sublety of its construction or the superficial allure of its intellectual foundations: it is the quality of the invention.  

That's why Williams's is a greater composer than Varese, and why his music will still be played when Varese is long forgotten.

britten's national opera?

I was reminded yesterday of an uncomfortable fact by a gushing review in the Grauniad of a new ENO production .

I don't like Peter Grimes.  

This is close to heresy for a British musician, and I apologise for transgressing.

To be clear, I love the Four Sea Interludes, so it's not the music that's the problem. It's the story. To understand Grimes it helps to grasp that Britten and Pears were interested in George Crabbe's poem because its protagonist was an outsider in his community, The Borough, in much the same way as they felt themselves to be sexual outsiders in post-war Britain.  

Early drafts of Montagu Slater's libretto make it clear that Grimes is a violent monster, responsible by negligence at the very least for the deaths of the three apprentices under his charge.  But Britten changed the libretto as he went along to make Grimes a more ambiguous figure, so that we never know to what extent he is responsible for the first two deaths, and the third boy dies when scrambling down a cliff to Grimes's boat.  The audience sees no violence, although Grimes does threaten the boy.

According to the Graun's review, in the new ENO production, the boy dies when Grimes, distracted by a vigilante crowd from The Borough, lets go of the rope holding him.  So here Grimes has tried to safeguard the boy, and The Borough is partly responsible for his death.

This just won't do.  Part of my discomfort, sitting through the opera, has been that no-one in it is terribly sympathetic.  Grimes is horrible.  The Borough are all hypocrites.  The boy is a cipher, who doesn't even sing.  Now I accept that it may be too much to ask that all art depicting human relationships should have someone nice in it somewhere; but life is short, and three hours in the company of unpleasant people is not something you should have to pay for, however good the music.  Moreover, the opera portrays a whole society, and how many societies are entirely made up of such thoroughly disagreeable people?

But it's not just that.  The drama is fundamentally unbalanced.  We are asked to believe that Grimes is both a victim and a creation of The Borough, and that, according to the Graun's reviewer, they are "hypocritical . . . . a totally dysfunctional community, fuelled by religious bigotry . . . "  Well yes, but even these are nicer people than Grimes.  Grimes is a twisted self-hating bully, whereas they are just hypocrites.  Who would you rather get stuck in a lift with?  Ah yes, reply Britten enthusiasts, but Grimes is twisted because the Borough hates him.. No!  The Borough hates him because he is horrible and does horrible things.

This curious moral blindness reminds me of something Frank Kermode once said.  He found that when teaching Camus' The Outsider he was always amazed by how readily his students identified with the existentially tortured murderer; yet almost none of them were interested in the anonymous Arab victim. 

Yes, it's true: for artists, no matter how ghastly you might be, there's no crime worse than provincial conservatism.

Houllebeq's "Atomised"

The borderline Aspergers being over-represented in the Males from Hale, the men-only reading group I frequent, scores are assiduously kept on our resident accountant's Crackberry.  In answer to my Stato-like query as to which book had the historic highest mark, Atomised by Michel Houellebecq turned out to be the winner. So I bought it for my wife at Christmas.  She hated it. "Give me Jane Austen any day", she grumbled after thirty pages, tossing it over to my side of the bed.

I have just finished it. From the reviews plastered on the cover I was expecting a cross between the King James Bible, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Joy of Sex. Only better. Sadly not. Atomised tells the miserable life stories of two French half brothers Bruno and Michel, abandoned by their hippy mother in childhood. Bruno turns out an inadequate sex pest; Michel an unfeeling scientist. The West, Houellebecq tell us, has given itself over to a cult of individualism. The more selfishly we behave, the more unhappy we are. Bruno and Michel are certainly unhappy. Michel's researches lead him to opportunities for cloning humans, and at the end of the book (spoiler coming) we learn that humans are obsolete and have created their genetic successors, free from weltschmertz and fear.

So far, well, quite interesting. There is, if you like that kind of thing, a great deal of rumpy-pumpy. I guess if you want to say that people are having a lot of empty sex with people about whom they care nothing, you have to show them actually doing so. Which Houellebecq obligingly does, page after tedious page. This palled fairly quickly for me. 

Then there's the technical problem of how, if your novel is essentially one of ideas, you weave those ideas in without lecturing. Astonishingly, Houellebecq makes almost no attempt to do this, so there are endless passages which read like a pamphlet, sometimes with the narrator addressing the reader directly, sometimes half-heartedly stuck into a scene such as the one in which the half-brothers tell each other about Aldous Huxley.  It is quite extraordinarily lazy and often very boring.

Neither is Houellebecq's book free from internal implausibilities and contradictions.  An early teenage admirer of Michel's, whom he unaccountably failed to shag at the time, turns up after 25 years and still carries a torch for him. "I just want you to give me a baby", she says (a characteristic piece of Houellebecq dialogue).  She is beautiful, of course. After an accident, Bruno's sex-buddy becomes disabled, and throws herself down the stairs in her wheelchair when he hesitates a fraction of a second too long before agreeing to look after her. We never find out exactly how Michel's human cloning manages to do away with all the painful aspects of life-before-death. Nor why humanity, of which the tortured Michel and Bruno are not exactly typical, was willing to connive in its own obsolescence.

All of which is a shame, because Houellebecq is right about lots of things.  We are obsessed with the idea of personal freedom, often with devastating results.  Atomised is mercifully free of PC so hardly anyone escapes a kicking. There are some odd patches of truly luminous writing. But reading the gushing blurb (Julian Barnes in particular should have known better) I was struck by how fearful are critics of discovering they have failed to get on the right bandwagon. And learning that the book had won Houellebecq the Prix Novembre, it occurred to me that bad novelists everywhere should take heart - Will Self, David Baddiel, Jeffrey Archer - nil desperandum: one day all this could be yours.

In and Out of the Loop

We went to see Armando Ianucci's In The Loop over the weekend.  

Despite the film's anti-war premise, and despite being someone who thought invading Iraq might turn out to be marginally better than leaving Saddam in place, I laughed till my face ached.

But it wasn't just the antics of uber-angry Malcolm Tucker (right) that were funny.  There were two other things about the film which made me smile.

Firstly, the alleged sexing up of the WMD intelligence, on which the film turns, overlooked the crucial point that almost no-one believed Alastair Campbell's dodgy dossier at the time.  Sure, there are left-wing Labour MPs who claim that they wouldn't have voted for the war if it hadn't been for Campbell's gilding the lily; but they have short memories.  Not long after it was produced, the dossier was widely ridiculed when a PhD student pointed out that some of it came from his work published on the internet. Then, as now, public credulity was in short supply.

But although the direct evidence was small, we knew Saddam had had WMD; we knew he had used gas on Kurdish villages; we knew he was doing everything he could to thwart Hans Blix and his colleagues; we knew that in Iraq's police state, where torture of dissidents and their families was routine, it would be very difficult to recruit informers, and hence the lack of direct evidence was not surprising.

Thus the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming, and not surprisingly everyone I spoke to (and this was a period in which bruising rows with my friends who opposed the war were routine) believed Saddam had WMD. Without exception.  The idea that the UK's parliament, the US government and the UN Security Council were swayed into war by a bad-tempered Scottish spin-doctor is itself a piece of spin.  Because, unappealing though the British government's manoevres may have been, they made no difference to the outcome.  As a public, we believed Saddam had the weapons anyway.

Of course Mr Ianucci would say, "It's a satire; a fictionalised account.  It's not meant to be a historical reconstruction".  Well OK up to a point.  But when real opponents of the war argue that we were led into it by a foul-mouthed Scottish spin doctor who sexed up the intelligence, and - lo and behold! - that's exactly what happens in Ianucci's film, it's a claim that will only run so far.

The second thing that struck me was, where was Saddam in all this? Nowhere. In Ianucci's film the war was to take place in abstract. That it would have the effect of removing from power one of the twentieth century's most ghastly dictators was airbrushed from sight.  

Why should this make me smile?  Because it confirms my thesis that if there's one thing the anti-war brigade don't want to hear about it's talk of Saddam. How inconvenient to be reminded of how things were under his regime!  As for what things would have carried on being like (after Saddam, his sons, then some other Ba'ath Party strongman), these are things opponents of the war cannot even begin to contemplate.  For them, success would have meant vast and peaceful rallies in London and Washington, followed by a climb-down by Bush and Blair.  

And for them, Iraq would have continued to be "a faraway country", to borrow from Neville Chamberlain, "of which we know nothing".

Rufus "Anonymous" Wainwright

So singer Rufus Wainwright has written an opera, and it's going to be put on at this year's Manchester Festival.  Lucky Rufus.  Last year it was Damon Allbarn's Monkey.  A while back the London Sinfonietta was looking for a composer to work with.  Who did they go for?  Answer, Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead.  

The moral?  If you want your work put on, don't bother going to Music College, learning your craft, sending your music to people who'll never read it, going in for the same competitions everyone else is going for, trying to scrape a living while you write in the little unused corners of your spare time that aren't taken up by your domestic life.

No, instead become a pop star, because apparently that's a bit of a draw for the powers that be in classical music.  

Don't get me wrong, these people may be talented and their work may be really good.  May be. But let's face it, they got the gig because they were who they were.  If they want to see how much their talent counts for, next time let them submit it anonymously.

Finally, spare a thought for poor old classical music, poking around in the bottom of the barrel for something the public might actually pay to see. Without wishing to labour the obvious, putting on works from composers the public quite likes might be a good place to start.  Why not stop commissioning Birtwhistle and Rihm, whose stuff the mass audience cordially loathes, and encourage instead composers who care about whether the listener has a good time and can understand what's going on?

After all John Adams can't be the only one who can do it.

hypocrisy central

The Guardian has had its knickers in a twist in the last few weeks over corporate tax avoidance, running a series of self-righteous articles under the heading Tax Gap.  In its most recent scoop, it published details of transactions undertaken by Barclays to minimise its tax exposure, which the Bank promptly got an injunction to suppress.

But now what's this?  The current issue of Private Eye suggests that the Guardian's owners have been doing a little avoidance of their own.  Last year, it says, they bought Emap, a magazine publisher, via a parent company in Luxembourg and a string of offshore subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands.  The aim?  According to the Eye, to avoid paying stamp duty on the purchase of Emap shares.

Pass the sick bag. 

Looking like Brad Pitt

Over in Halifax, the orchestra's concerts are dutifully reviewed in the Courier by a lady I have never met called Julia Anderson.  Her reviews are almost unfailingly kind to the orchestra and its Music Director.  However she has described my conducting style as "energetic" so often that it came as no surprise that after last Saturday's concert - Tchaikovsky 4 and the Emperor concerto - she felt the need for a new adjective.  

This time I was "attentive".  I'm not sure I like it quite so much as "energetic", but perhaps it was time for a change.  

For the soloist in the concerto, however, one word was not enough.  Ms Anderson found Duncan Glenday both "young" and "very slight of frame".  In a dark theatre appearances can be deceptive, but although all things are relative, "young" is probably pushing it a bit for Duncan.  And when am I going to get my own descriptive just deserts?  Who knows, if Ms Anderson thinks Duncan's young, she may well feel I look a bit like Brad Pitt.  

From the back, of course.  In a dark theatre.