BBC sees the Light

Just as Glastonbury is getting under way, the BBC is having a light music moment, the Light Fantastic, I think it's called, and on Saturday Radio 3 ran a discussion on the subject with Petroc Trelawney, Anne Dudley, the estimable John Wilson and one or two other worthies.

There is a poignant connection between these two phenomena.

I have to declare a lack of interest here, because light music is not my thing. On the other hand, since I started conducting amateur orchestras five or six years ago I've had to perform a fair bit of it, something I did with a certain sniffiness at first, then with a degree of grudging admiration and latterly almost with enthusiasm (I am trying to stop it going any further).

Often with discussions like this one the really interesting thing is not what's said, but what the broadcasters leave out. This was a rare occasion however where the issue you think they aren't going to touch on at all is not just included, but actually given a full five minutes of full-frontal, that issue here being the extent of the BBC's own involvement in light music's decline.

Now obviously there are many reasons for the decline, economics being one of them, technology being another, the rise of pop culture another still. But undoubtedly the BBC played its part, setting up Radios 2 and 3 without dealing adequately with how light music was going to be catered for. Light music was pushed into the margins on Radio 2, and in the Glock-era it was ridiculous to imagine that Radio 3 was going to be playing any Haydn Wood when it couldn't bring itself to love Robert Simpson. There are apparently numerous anguished memos written by a BBC bigwig to Radio 3 wondering why so little light music was getting played. One might as well ask why bears were defecating in the woods.

Hats off to the BBC for allowing these heretical views to be heard. My son, who was in the kitchen whilst I was listening to this self-flagellation, said, "You can't imagine Sky doing that".

Several other things stood out for me. One was the often-told story of Ernest Tomlinson, furious at the BBC proposing to clear out its light music library, an act of musical Stalinism if ever there was one, offering the use of a barn on his Lancashire farm in which the thousands of orchestral sets could be stored. Tomlinson, a very fine composer, set up a library of light music, still going today, which did much to preserve music which would otherwise have been lost. He is said to have come upon a skip full of parts outside the London Palladium and hired a van on the spot to save them from destruction. A friend tells me that MGM destroyed its sheet music library in Hollywood - to build a car park. Yes, a car park.

The other stand-out was Anne Dudley recounting her experience at Music College of finding the composition department dominated by the avant garde (as most music departments in most conservatoires were and still are), and being bemused to find Eric Coates regarded as a joke figure rather than a serious musician. This is an experience I had too, although I was lucky to have lessons with John Tavener, who stood firmly outside the mainstream, a place I have stood myself ever since.

The widespread assumption, shared by the programme, that light music is a different genre to classical music, or at best a sub-genre, isn't really accurate in my view. Lots of classical composers - Mozart, Elgar, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius and many others - have written light music (by which I mean music which sets out to entertain), and this should give us a clue that there is a bigger and broader question hanging in the air here, about the approachability of light music, and the extent to which it that quality has been lost from classical music generally in the last century.

To put the question the other way round, to what extent is it legitimate for a classical composer to set out not to entertain? Two things seem obvious to me. One, that all music (indeed perhaps all art) should be entertaining (I use that word in a very wide sense, as I'll explain in a minute). The other is that a lot of music is being written, indeed has been written in the last century or so, which has no intention of entertaining whatsoever. Indeed, if you ask its composers and performers, many would scorn the idea of doing anything so base as to give their audiences a good time. For me, entertaining means many things - stimulating, challenging yes, but also soothing and consoling. The point about art is that it is a mediation of human experience, not the experience itself (the most horrifying opera I've ever seen is Idomeneo, a terrible story mediated by music of unsurpassed luminosity and grace).

Ultimately it is easy to regret the decline of light music, because it is readily, though I think inaccurately, rendered as a separate genre whose exponents were once famous and who, amongst musicians at least, are still household names. What is much less easy, because it is harder to identify them, is to lament the obscurity of all the composers at the more serious end of the classical spectrum who did not disdain their audiences, and who wrote music that was approachable, that sought to entertain in the very broadest sense, and who were pushed into obscurity by the same institutional forces (the conservatoires, the universities, the broadcasters) that did for so-called light music.

Why is the fate of these individuals important? Because on the whole the public is not interested in avant-garde music, and, particularly in a time of austerity, the public subsidy which keeps the infrastructure of classical music going is harder to justify when so much of its output is devoted to pushing a kind of music which, statistically speaking, almost no-one likes. Less money for classical music does not just mean fewer performances of Boulez and Berio. It also means less Berlioz and Brahms.

Ultimately, those of us who love classical music have to find new repertoire which can enthuse the public. Otherwise classical music will become increasingly marginalised in schools, in the public imagination and in public spending priorities. At the moment it doesn't seem to me that anyone is trying to reverse this trend.

Traditionally the middle-class turn to classical music in middle-age. The weekend of the Light Fantastic however, many of my middle-class middle-aged friends have gone off to Glastonbury.

dos and don'ts for young soloists

I've been fortunate enough to do many concertos with student soloists, always an interesting experience. Here is the sum total of my wisdom in DO and DON'T form.

DO try and know your speeds beforehand. Most inexperienced soloists have spent much more time playing on their own or with a pianist than with an orchestra, and don’t realise that, even with the Classical repertoire, there is a great deal of subconscious tempo variation. In other words, you will play some passages quicker or slower than others without being aware of it. It helps enormously if you can tell the conductor which ones these are beforehand. This doesn’t just save time in rehearsal, it also gives the conductor time to work out how, for example, to get back into the main tempo when your more relaxed second subject has finished. It’s worth practising with a metronome, not because you are expected to play metronomically but because it enables you to judge where you want to push the speed on and where you want to relax.

DON’T watch the conductor too much. He will generally be beating slightly ahead of the orchestra, so if you try and keep up with him the music will get faster. As a rule the orchestra and conductor’s job is to keep up with you, not vice versa. It is sometimes the case that your passage-work is so fast that you have to follow the orchestra instead: one example is in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto first movement just after the cadenza, where the soloist plays arpeggio semi-quavers over the recapitulated first subject: listen and play with them. There are many other examples in the standard repertoire.

DON’T be afraid to ask for things to be done differently. The orchestra is there to serve you. There are ways of doing this however. Don’t say to the orchestra directly, “Can you do it this way instead?” The conductor has probably spent some time with the orchestra, in good faith, getting the orchestra to do it the way you don’t like. Ask the conductor. “Would it be possible for the woodwind to ....." Nine times out of ten the conductor will be pleased to oblige. There may also be good reasons why the conductor has done it his way, reasons you aren’t aware of, and you don’t want to end up in a situation where the conductor is saying to the orchestra, “No, don’t do that. Do it the way I originally asked you”.

DON’T be nervous. You are probably the best player in the room, and the orchestra will think you are wonderful.

DON’T be arrogant either. The orchestra might not be as good at their instruments as you are at yours (although sometimes some of them will be), but the likelihood is that they will be vastly more experienced musicians who have seen young prodigies come and go. Send the conductor a card afterwards. Do you want another gig or don’t you?

DON’T play without the music unless you are 100% sure you can do it. You don’t want to ruin your opportunity for want of a music stand.

DON’T do things differently in the concert from the way you did them in rehearsal. As Beecham said, an orchestra is not a piece of elastic. It cannot instantly accommodate your interpretative whims.

DO enjoy it. It might not happen again often, for a while, at all. Make the most of it!

Ed Balls goes Greek

Amidst dramatic scenes across the country, riot police clash with protestors demonstrating against austerity measures. This is Greece of course, not the UK, and I am not going to give a hostage to fortune by claiming that where Greece leads, we will inexorably follow.

Here is a prediction however. It is that the EU bail-out, even if it goes ahead, will fail (I said this about the first bail-out, but that prediction was made in private and doesn't count; I do however feel emboldened to go public on this one). It will fail because the austerity measures necessary for it to work will be intolerable to the Greek people. Even if the country is far enough away from the centre of the whirlpool for the measures to work (and it may well not be), the Greeks themselves won't put up with them. They'll bring down the government, or force the government to default, wholly or in part.

It's interesting to consider how the EU got into this situation, and what that says about what kind of institution it is. For those countries signing up to monetary union, there was a cap on how much money it was permissible to borrow. Many countries breached it, but the EU did nothing, or at least nothing concrete - letters were written; knuckles were rapped. No mechanism existed for penalising countries for breaking the rules. It could scarcely have been otherwise, because no electorate would have permitted its government to sign up to a currency where control of its own borrowing (and therefore its economy) was effectively handed over to an unelected Central Bank in another country hundreds of miles away. Handing over control of interest rates was bad enough, but this would have been politically unsellable.

So enthusiasts for the Euro set in place a project that was bound to fail sooner or later, because one of its members was bound to borrow too much, and would be unable to escape from its position by devaluing its currency. That's now happened to Greece, with other countries sliding towards a similar position.

In other words, faced between setting up a system which would inevitably fail, or not setting up monetary union at all, Eurocrats opted for the former. I am not viscerally anti-EU, but this looks like madness. Ironically Britain too received strictures from the EU for its borrowing even though we were not in the Euro at all. For such institutions reality doesn't matter - it is the outward appearance that counts.

Which brings me to Ed Balls's latest suggestion, namely that the UK Government cuts VAT by 5% or so to kick-start the economy. I don't know how much this would cost in lost revenue, but it would be in the region of billions. Where would that money come from? The money markets. Yes, that's correct. Balls is suggesting that in order to get the deficit down, we put the deficit up.

Perhaps I am slow, but I do not understand how this can work. It seems particularly counterintuitive when you consider that the first thing that would happen is that our borrowing costs would go up; that is, we'd not only have to pay interest on the extra money we'd borrowed, but we'd have to pay more interest on money we were going to borrow anyway, because the gilt markets would be worried that we had changed our minds about getting the deficit down.

This scheme of Balls', which incidentally he didn't think to clear with Ed Miliband first, reminds me somewhat of Milo Minderbender in Catch 22, buying eggs for 4 cents in one place and selling them at a profit for 2 cents somewhere else. It took me a while to realise that this was satire on Joseph Heller's part (I was young), and of course satire can't have been Balls' intention. I think his aim instead is to appeal to the vast majority of people in Britain who aren't interested in economics and don't have the faintest idea of how it works. His aim is to deceive.

I don't know what will happen to George Osborne's plan; no-one does. I've written previously on Osborne's gamble being, if anything a rather smaller gamble than the one proposed by Labour (just keep and borrowing and hope for the best). Interestingly, the gilt markets, gifted with no more clairvoyance than anyone else but at least removed utterly from the taint of political bias, seem to think Osborne is doing the right thing. We know this because the UK is paying very low rates on its borrowing. If the markets thought we were not going to get any growth, and the deficit never come down, we would be paying sky-high rates.

I sometimes think that with Osborne at the helm HMS Great Britain is sailing slowly in a fog, knowing that there are rocks somewhere but not knowing exactly where. Ed Balls, on the other hand, appears to know exactly where the rocks are. They are in the direction of Greece, and he is proposing that we sail that way full steam ahead.

slut-walking comes to Britain

When America sneezes, the UK catches a cold; and when young American women take to the streets in their scanties to protest against some ill-chosen words by a Canadian policeman, it's not going to be long before young Britons start doing it too. Cue slut-walking demonstrations the length and breadth of the nation.

Since my ruminations on this subject a few weeks ago, I've been musing not just on the practical aspect of the furore (why it should be so unreasonable to suggest, in a world in which they have never been totally safe and never will be, that women might want to take steps which will make them safer), but on why women might want to dress in a sexually provocative way in public at all.

For millenia, attractive young women have used male/female inequality of desire - the only inequality that works in their favour - to advance their cause personally and economically. I get that. But why flaunt it in public? At the very worst, provocatively dressed women risk attack. Further down the scale of seriousness, they risk harassment in the street. They risk harassment in clubs and bars from men tripping over their own tongues. They get attention of men who are only interested in them for sex, and they are treated less seriously at work by men who can't disengage their libidos. In fact, for every man they might want to attract, there will be 99 whose attentions they cannot possibly want (including mine). What is in it for women?

I have been married long enough to know that women often dress to impress other women rather than to attract men, and I'm aware that a single woman wants to look attractive, but it genuinely baffles me as to why anyone would want the inconvenience of teetering along the high-street in a microdress, risking hypothermia as well as the ills detailed above. I also find it rather annoying. A picture in the paper yesterday showed a woman in fishnets and heels carrying a sign saying, "You can't touch this". Fair enough, I know I can't touch it. In which case, I want to shout, why make me want to touch it?

Women, the slut-walkers say, only want the right to express their sexuality. Leaving aside their confusion as to the meaning of the word, why on earth would they want to express it? We all know that most women like men, and vice versa. Why go on about it? (Thank God we men don't find the need to express our sexuality. I shudder to think what a male slut-walking march would look like, but my suggested name for it - gut-walking - might be an unpleasant clue).

The most hilarious people in the slut-marches are the earnest looking young men hanging around in the back of the photos. For all their right-on beardiness you just know that part of them is thinking, "Phwooar! Look at the enbonpoint on that! You would wouldn't you? Eh? Eh?" Surely some of them are fifth columnists, perhaps police informers along the lines of the chaps who infiltrated the environmental movement; but I guarantee that every heterosexual one of them is enjoying the view immensely. There are probably men taking a Wedding Crashers approach, marching to see if any of the participants wishes to express their sexuality in private afterwards. It says a lot about naivety of the slut-walkers that they allow men anywhere near them.

If I were a slut-walker I'd be thinking to myself, "Hang on. How is it that my view of how I should behave is shared by Hugh Hefner, Paul Raymond, Richard Desmond and Jeremy Clarkson?" (a list to which, being as prone to provocation as the next man, they might have added Nick Simpson).

It seems to me a very poor sort of feminism whose definition of edifying female conduct involves dressing in a way which appeals to mens' most basic instincts. The best place for dressing provocatively is behind closed-doors.

Coming soon - Serbia

The news of the arrest of Ratko Mladic pushed everything else to the bottom of the news agenda yesterday. Mladic, the Serbian general allegedly responsible from the Srebrenica massacre, has been on the run for the best part of ten years, although like Osama he doesn't actually seem to have been doing much running - complicity of the Serbian authorities seems to have facilitated a quiet life in a rural village. All that changed with the visit of a Brussels commissioner, bearing the news that the failure to apprehend Mladic was having a negative effect on Serbia's campaign to join the EU. Lo and behold, Mladic is caught, and the path to the EU is wide open.

Overshadowed by this was a report into conditions in state-run institutions that made my hair stand on end. Inmates, it appears, were left hungry and thirsty, and sat for hours in pools of their own urine and faeces. Where did these outrages take place? Abu Ghraib? Guantanamo Bay? No. In British hospitals. To be exact, in Alexandra Hospital in Redditch, at Ipswich Hospital, and in the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead. And to be fair, the report, by NHS watchdog the Quality Care Commission, did not mention the bit about urine and faeces. It said, "While the reports document many examples of people being treated with respect and given personalised, attentive care, some tell a bleak story of people not being helped to eat and drink, with their care needs not assessed and their dignity not respected". The faeculent matter came via a Radio 5 phone in on the subject, to which I listened whilst bowing parts for a concert in June. It made chilling listening.

The overall picture is bleak and scandalous. It also accords with a vignette observed whilst in the Homerton Hospital in London nearly fifteen years ago. An elderly patient, perhaps slightly demented, was in the bed opposite me. He had been badgering a nurse in a semi-coherent way about something trivial. She took exception to this, and took away his meal, saying, "And you won't be getting this back till you learn some manners".

No-one did anything. I didn't do anything. I thought, "Well he is a stupid old git". But I was wrong. She took away his food, and didn't bring it back.

I can't help feeling that if British soldiers had done these kind of things abroad, we would all be jumping up and down about it. But if British nurses do it to old people in Britain, it goes way down the news agenda. I searched in vain for mention of it in the Guardian this morning.

Two other reports were pushed out of the headlines by Mladic yesterday. One suggested that 20% of working graduates are now in non-graduate employment. Another that net immigration to the UK has reached an all-time high, with many Polish workers returning to Britain after finding that things at home aren't so rosy either. Given that a recent Department of Work and Pensions report (19 May) recorded that in the previous 3 months 81% of new jobs went to people born outside the UK, it will be interesting to see whether the government signs up to a similar open-door policy when the Serbs finally get the EU green light. Personally I wouldn't bet against it.

First Strass-Kahn, now Ken Clarke

For those whose patience with my postings about sexual politics is wearing thin, be assured that this is about journalism. Even though it begins with rape. Really.

So Ken Clarke thinks some rapes are more serious than others. Or perhaps not, depending on which of his interviews yesterday you read. And now he is in trouble.

First, Mr Clarke is right. Some rapes are more serious than others. If a sixteen-year old has consenting sex with his fifteen-year old girlfriend, that's rape, and it's a less serious than a rape in which a woman walking home at night is dragged into bushes and attacked by a gang. It's to reflect this divergence in seriousness that guidelines equip judges with such a wide range of sentences.

For what it's worth, I think Clarke was rattled by his interviewer, Victoria Derbyshire, because his new plan to give convicted rapists 50% sentence discount on an early plea could, Derbyshire pointed out, result in some rapists serving as little as 15 months.

Clarke's appeal is that he sounds like a real person, unlike most politicians, who seem to have been produced in a factory specialising in unattractive, evasive, bland middle-aged white men. Here however he sounded like a real person who had not thought the issue through properly, or at least not read his brief. And he was flustered.

But how did the BBC react? Well, I listened to a lot of news coverage from lunchtime until the early evening, and the part of the story which excited them, on Radio 5, Radio 4 and on TV, was the bit about some rapes being more serious than others. The real meat, the admission that what is essentially a cost cutting exercise might lead to convicted rapists being on the streets after not much more than a year, featured only in re-runs of Derbyshire's initial interview.

By late afternoon, when Clarke had attempted to clarify his comments, the news headlines were leading with "Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke has apologised for appearing to suggest that some rape cases were more serious than others". I heard this line again and again, and it is worth a bit of deconstruction.

In the first place, Clarke didn't apologise. Secondly, in none of his interviews did he withdraw from his original position. Thirdly, the BBC's use of the word "appearing" is a time-honoured formula used when the Broadcaster doesn't quite want to commit itself to a particular allegation. "Wayne Rooney appeared to strike the Tottenham defender" might be a characteristic use of the word, even though millions of TV viewers have seen the spud-faced nipper give Jamie Carragher an elbow in the face en passant. But Clarke did not just appear to say the controversial words; he did say them, and the BBC kept playing the tape of him saying them over and over again.

But lastly, "Kenneth Clarke has apologised for appearing to suggest that some rape cases were more serious than others" carries with it, however faintly, two assumptions. One is that Clarke had done something wrong and that an apology was called for; the other, more seriously, that Clarke's original statement - that some rapes were more serious than others - was wrong. This is a subtle point, but it must be right, because otherwise the Corporation would have been reporting that Clarke had apologised when he didn't have to, for having done something right; and that would have been the story instead.

Now of course, when a politician loses the plot slightly on your network, you are going to push the boat out on it, particularly on a slow news day. The BBC could hardly be blamed for that. But as this story kept growing - Ed Miliband in the Commons calling for Clarke to be sacked - I kept wondering, "When are they going to get a lawyer on to find out whether he's right or not?" And the answer was that the BBC had plenty of time for political correspondents, and for politicians of both right and left, but none whatsoever for anyone who might have been able to tell them whether the law really did treat some rapes as more serious than others.

In other words, the BBC extracted a telling admission from the Justice Secretary, ignored it, ran a story instead about another assertion he had made, took no steps to find out whether it was true, reported him as apologising when he had not, and made assumptions about his statement which an elementary check would have revealed were wrong.

Although at the time I engaged in a death-struggle to get out of the profession, I am quite proud that, before I became a not-quite award-winning composer and conductor, I was once a lawyer. If nothing else, it has equipped me with the priceless realisation that, since the media is almost invariably wrong when it pontificates in this field, it is likely to be wrong in most others as well.

Start, fellow-citizens, from the assumption that the media is populated by people who are less intelligent, less scrupulous and less well-informed than you are, and the path to enlightenment is yours.

Lady Gaga and the slut walkers

Let's assume that I've made a pie, and I stick it on the window sill to cool. Some nefarious so-and-so comes along and pinches it. Now, it's wrong to steal, and the thief shouldn't have done it, but I also am an idiot for leaving it outside.

What has this to do with the Canadian police officer who said that women should "avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised"? This man has unsurprisingly been taking some flak for his remarks, thus reigniting an issue that has been filling column inches about once a decade for the last thirty years or so and provoking "slut-walking" demonstrations across America.

Let me explain about the pies. There are two separate issues here - one is the conduct of the pie thief, the other the conduct of the baker. Calling the baker foolish is not to diminish the maleficence of the thief; and neither is counselling bakers to cool their pies out of reach giving thieves licence to roam freely.

Applying that logic to the slut-walkers, women should of course be able to wear whatever they like in public without being molested or attacked; men who attack them are doing something wrong. On the other hand women are inevitably more likely to be attacked if they dress provocatively, and you might think it was uncontroversial for the police officer to suggest they could minimise that risk.

The organiser of a "slut-walk" in Boston, Mass., 20 year old Siobhan Connors explained to the Associated Press, "The event is in protest of a culture that we think is too permissive when it comes to rape and sexual assault. It's to bring awareness to the shame and degradation women still face for expressing their sexuality... essentially for behaving in a healthy and sexual way".

Ms Connors doesn't get it, and aged 20 could perhaps could hardly be expected to. Sex is mens' achilles heel - it flicks a switch that bypasses our brains and diverts our energies, well, elsewhere. We see the signs that nature or nurture have implanted in us, and from then on we really are thinking about only one thing. Thinking may not actually be the right word. For millenia this weakness has acted as a cruel double-edged sword. While women have youth and beauty, the world is theirs to command. Women who exploit it draw men towards them, and some of that attention will be unwelcome. When those attractions have gone, society pushes women to the margins. Most women, the unlucky majority, do not make it beyond the margins in the first place.

That is the cruel law of sexual attraction, and most women who have lived a little longer than Ms Connors understand it only too well. Rather than criticising the policeman, Ms Connors should be saying, "Fine, let's be aware that showing a bit of leg could get us into trouble, but now let's make sure that our streets are properly policed and that sexual assaults - which happen to people modestly dressed too - are properly investigated and prosecuted."

Last night I watched with my daughters bits of Radio 1's big weekend (in Carlisle - someone at the BBC has a sense of humour). The headline act was Lady Gaga. The New York chanteuse did three or four anonymous Euro-disco numbers in rubber leggings; an incongruous trumpet solo followed while she changed costume, emerging in a rubber mini-dress and fishnets to sing an incongruous jazzy torch song (surprisingly well); she went to the piano (an instrument with which she showed prior acquaintance, even while standing on it in her spike heels) and sang something slow and passionate; she went off stage and emerged in a rubber crop top and hot pants with a crucifix on the front. More disco. We yawned, switched off and went to bed.

There was less sexual content to the material than I'd thought there would be. The fetish stylings were an add on. Ms Gaga came across as a Madonna for the new century, only more talented and more vulnerable (she threw herself into it with an uncontrolled passion which is unfakeable). But Gaga knows that sex sells, and of course I wondered what my daughters made of it and whether they should be watching at all. But the reality is that this stuff is out there on the internet, and short of shutting them in the house without computers and TV, there is nothing you can do to stop them watching it, or stop them coming to the conclusion that this is how women should be.

I think of myself as a feminist (my wife laughs a bitter laugh when I say it), but I sometimes think that all sexual liberation has done for women is to free them to be more like the way men would like them to be.

The slut-walkers of America, parading along in their bra and knickers, are marching to a man's tune that apparently they can't hear.