Eighty-Eight, The City

The Postern, Barbican

Happy Christmas.

November 2018 Review

Am I the only person who leaves it way too long between changes of guitar strings? I had to clean the fretboard and bits of the soundboard with a slightly damp scouring pad applied gently, which is far more than you really wanted to know. And spray furniture polish over the whole neglected instrument. So I now have nice new bronze wound light-guage strings on my guitar.

I read Julia Blackburn’s Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske, Ben Judah’s This is London: Life and Death in the World City, Hamilton Gregory’s McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War; Richard Taruskin’s Music in the Late Twentieth-Century; Anonymous’ The Secret Teacher; and Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden.

I saw Red Lights, 10,000km, The Wanderers, Season of the Witch, and The Apparition on MUBI; and I, Anna, and A Pigeon Sat on a Tree Reflecting About Existence, on Curzon Home Cinema; and Tout va Bien, Revenge, Taken, Taken 2 and Taken 3 on DVD. Those Takens are well-made ninety-minute action movies.

Sis and I had supper at Picture on Great Portland Street. We like the other Picture, but we like sitting at the bar in Great Portland Street more.

And the slump went on. How do I know I'm having a slump? I watch way, way too much You Tube. I feel tired and start to lose enthusiasm for the gym. These days I feel like I put a lot of effort into sleeping, especially into dreams with incredible levels of detail.

The trick with slumps is not to try to explain them with some pop-psychology cliche so worn out it gets used the script for a Channel Four movie. No, it’s not the weather. Nor is it the ‘andropause’, or a reaction to a friend dying. Any of those things might have triggered it, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is getting out of the slump. Slumps aren’t exited by the entrance, but by the exit. That came in December, when I used the lack of hot water at the gym for a week to give myself a decent rest.

There is also the fact that it’s one thing to wake up, drag yourself off to work and wish you didn’t have to do it; and another to wake up, drag yourself off to work, and know that you can stop doing it in about fifteen months, if you want to. The cure for that is to enjoy the days that one has to drag oneself off to. It’s also to remind yourself that only people with a long and ambitious to-do / project list get the feeling they are slipping. Everyone else goes home and watches the match.

Fountains, The Barbican

Brexit Chaos aka Democracy In Action

Puzzled or infuriated by what’s happening in the House of Commons around Brexit? It’s called democracy. Democracy is supposed to be messy when big decisions are at stake.

The EU does not want the UK in the EU anymore. It is too Socialist and the UK is too Free Market. The EU countries love being run by administrators who went to good schools - like the ENA - while the politicians are rendered powerless by their lack of education and inability to make friends. Quick, how many European countries have a two-party system? Yep. The UK. The EU wants an European Army and there is no way that Her Majesty - the C-in-C of the UK’s Armed Forces - is turning her lads over to a Belgian General who is at the behest of a bunch of unelected officials. The EU wants the unrestricted immigration of unskilled, uneducated young men from all over the world who have been thrown out of their home towns and villages for bad behaviour. The UK thinks would rather have well-behaved, educated, skilled people who speak English from all over the world.

Theresa May has known this all along. So did David Cameron. What do you think MI6 and GCHQ have been doing all this time?

The EU bureaucrats and other elitists thought that they could do a deal and not involve Parliament. Really. That’s elitists for you. Theresa May knew that even if she got The Best Deal Ever, she would have to present it to Parliament. This is because the UK is a democracy. There aren’t many of those in the world, so it’s not surprising that you don’t recognise one in action when you see it.

No negotiator, no Cabinet member, not the Prime Minister, nor even HRH QE2, can decide the terms on which the UK leaves the EU. Only the elected representatives of the British people can do that. Only they can do it, because only they can lose their jobs if they go too far against the wishes of their constituents. Read that again carefully: unless I can get rid of you, you don’t get to make decisions that affect me. That’s the basis of democracy.

Those elected representatives have had their orders for a long time. The opinion polls confirm month after month that those orders have not changed. Sovereign courts and border control. Free trade is a nice-to-have.

Hence Theresa May had to work hard to get the best deal from the EU that she could get. So we would see how devious and one-sided it was. She has to champion that deal, because it is her deal. The House of Commons should rightly reject the deal and send her back to the EU to re-negotiate. Because they know that the EU never folds until 23:59:59. And if it isn’t going to fold, it has to be the EU who is shown to be intransigent and devious.

It’s supposed to be all about The Backstop. The Irish border is the biggest non-issue in contemporary politics. Anyone who makes it one is effectively threatening us with a new IRA / UDA bombing campaign. Everyone knows this, and no-one is going to make a decision about the UK’s political status on threat of a few IRA bombs. We did this already. Remember? Bombing the British doesn’t work. We’re stubborn like that.

Right now, the matter is in the hands of the members of the House of Commons. No lawyer predicts the jury decision. I hope they feel they have blustered too loud now to turn and accept the deal after Christmas. Unless it turns out that when Junker clarifies ‘No’ he means ‘Yes’. The Honourable Members will not be voting for a hard Brexit, but for more negotiations. If the EU refuses, the EU will be the one forcing a hard Brexit.

So expect lots of noise about preparing for a hard Brexit. Which is, I repeat, something that your employer should have done already. My suspicion is that most companies will have done this, or replaced their EU business with exports somewhere else. If you are working for a company that does business in Europe, and does not know how it will carry on if the UK is not in a free-trade zone with Europe, look for another employer NOW. And ask the interviewers what their hard Brexit plans are.

Richard Taruskin's The Oxford History of Late Twentieth-Century Music

Recently I read Richard Taruskin’s Music in the Late Twentieth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music. Now, I get that the Oxford History of Music will have a bias towards ACM (Acoustic Composed Music). That’s what has survived, because it was written down. There was no Now That’s What I Call A Drinking Song! double-CD in the seventeenth century. Nobody wrote down the popular tunes. We know there were popular tunes because the Church composers used to get told off for adapting them, and other composers swiped them for their written work. We just don’t know how many others there were. Or what the Top Ten sounded like.

The point is, that for the majority of the Twentieth Century, we do. The traditional excuse for only covering the music of the church, aristocracy and popular opera - because we don’t know what else there was - does not apply after, say, 1920. There’s no excuse for not covering it.

What has to be covered? In no special order: flamenco and its revival in the 1980’s; the development of jazz from be-bop to free jazz, perhaps told through the careers of Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, and the rise of chord-scale Euro-jazz; the continued use of orchestral music in film; the Beatles and Bob Dylan (a Nobel Prize winner, for heaven’s sake), Jam and Lewis, and Stock, Aiken and Waterman; the Hollywood and Broadway musical; ambient and electronic dance music; the evolution of rock music from Chuck Berry to Nirvana; and finally, to the factory-like output of modern chart music. On the composed side: serialism, minimalism, electronic music, and a chunk on the Period Performance movement and its re-discovery and re-habilitation of dozens of composers. If I was commissioning such a history, I would ask the writer(s) to show, with examples in score, the links between the Minimalists and ambient music; or between the harmonies and chord changes of the Beatles and earlier composers; and I will happily contribute an essay on rock musicians’ plundering of the avant-garde for technical and musical devices.

There would not be much about the academic music to which Taruskin devotes much of his book. First because there was very little of it. Second, because only the same one hundred people ever listened to it once, and fewer a second time. Taruskin makes this seem like a virtue: here is music so pure, nobody can actually stand it. It’s true that only a handful of people ever listened to a Hayden string quartet, at the time, and wanted something new afterwards, but now those string quartets sell in the thousands every year and are listened to again and again in people’s homes. That’s going to be true in a hundred years’ time. In a hundred years’ time, no-one will listen to Boulez’ first piano composition, except out of sheer curiosity for a couple of minutes on You Tube, and they will agree with the first comment: there is a cat on the piano?

The court composers wrote music for a wealthy economic and political elite, but it was written to entertain and delight the audience, and in some cases, show off the playing skills of its sponsors. It was popular in intent, for all that it was aristocratic in audience. When it was made available to larger audiences, they took to it. When a larger bourgeois audience appeared in concert halls, they took to the earlier aristocratic music, and to the music written especially for them. When that music was made available on recorded media, it was and still is bought and enjoyed by people from all walks of life.

The career challenge for young composers in the twentieth century, who were being turned out in ever larger numbers by an expanding music education industry, was finding a way of making an impact, of being shocking and surprising without turning away the audiences. Stravinsky more or less sealed that off. Where do you go after the Sacre du Printemps, the fin de musique for the twentieth century? All twentieth-century string quartets sound like one or other of the six Bartok quartets. The options seem to be that you either write perfectly competent stuff that might have been written in the middle of the nineteenth century (with the addition of a couple of bracing twentieth-century harmonies), or you write stuff that very few people will ever listen to.

Read Taruskin and you may imagine that every music department in the Western world turned serialist. You might imagine the same about mathematics departments and category theory as well. The truth is that music departments went on teaching common practice, regular ol’ triads, inversions and all the other stuff available in Hindemith or Piston, in the same way that mathematics departments carried on teaching real analysis the epsilon-delta way. Serialism was confined to a handful of academics in a handful of elite colleges, the journalists that hyped them, and the foundations and clients that backed them. Electronic music and musique concrete, by contrast, was rapidly taken up by broadcasting companies to accompany dramas. How it came to be regarded as the signature "serious music" of the last half of the twentieth-century is the subject for a book on history, hype, personalities, and politics.

Taruskin calls the academic music he’s writing about, literate, as if to separate it from popular music, which is not written. Except it is. Jazz musicians pride themselves on their ability to play at sight, and most popular music session musicians read fluently. The prolific pop producers of the 1980’s all wrote music, and the virtuoso soloists of rock and jazz both extemporised and read the charts. The only significant musical tradition that does not use written music is flamenco. The legend is that Joni Mitchell had no background in music theory and composed entirely by ear, but she is remarkable exactly because almost no-one else could produce music of that quality without the theory and the staves.

So should you devote the many hours needed to read this volume of Taruskin’s History? I don’t regret it: I do after all have Varese, Xenakis, Berio and Boulez in my collection. I understand more about serialism than I did, and appreciated the coverage Taruskin gave to some research that concluded that serialism was, in fact, profoundly unmusical. I don’t mind his coverage of that period: I do mind reducing the entire history of Miles Davis’ music to a few quotes from critics about the politics of his later adoption of ‘rock music’. Taruskin doesn’t even discuss the well-known suggestion that On The Corner was influenced in part by Stockhausen. Taruskin’s book is also very heavy on the politics - but then to understand Russian music in the twentieth century we do have to be reminded of life under Stalin. So, no, you don’t need to read it. It’s not a history of later-twentieth century music.

The Orange Tree (Barbican)

This has to have been one of the best and longest-lasting autumns I can remember. This was taken at the end of October and most of the tree is still green.