Xenakis at the Queen Elizabeth Hall

To the QEH Saturday to hear an hour's worth of Xenakis.

The QEH is a 900-seater with reasonable rake up the rows. The stage is fairly narrow

and these look like acoustic treatment panels

as these

look like speakers. As you can see from the stage photograph (click to enlarge) there were mics all over everyone. So I'm not sure if they were recording, or if were really hearing the PA rather than the live instruments. It felt like we were hearing the live instruments.

The band was the London Sinfonietta. This is a long-established, well-respected crew that specialises in contemporary music. Most of the players have quality careers and academic positions.

The last piece was Thallein, which was written for the Sinfonietta.

It so happens I have a recording of Thallein. (Doesn't everyone?) Boulez, Ensemble Contemporian, 2007. I tried to listen at comparable volume levels, without scaring the neighbours.

Boulez' interpretation has a lighter touch, a better sense of pace, and brings out the tunefulness and rhythm of some of the phrases. It might have been a different piece of music.

The recording / mixing / mastering engineers on Boulez' session knew what they were doing. Placement and separation of instruments. Clarity. Neither the percussion nor the piano over-whelmed, even when it was required to be loud. On stage the percussion was in the centre and overwhelmed everyone when it hammered forth. On the recording, it's on the right speaker: it's loud, but it's localised. On stage the piano was on the left, as it is in the recording, but on the recording it's one instrument out of many, whereas on stage it was the instrument when it had a part.

The CD + Hi-fi win this one.

Now let's talk briefly about post-war avant-garde music. Most of it was produced by academics or composers with generous government grants. It was deliberately written to be hard on the ear - lest any moment of it sound like Mozart or Wagner. It has many instruments playing different notes at the same time, but they are not playing a chord (not even a C dim flat 4 sus 5 add minor 11), as the intention is to make a LOUD NOISE rather than even a wonky harmony. It is very easy to interpret this music in this way, and played like that, it is barely listenable. That's why Boulez' recording is such an eye-opener.

Had the Sinfonietta's interpretation picked out the strands in the music more clearly, turned down an f in the forte-s, and found reason to be delicate at times, as well as to insist on some rhythmic structure to the phrases that might support it, well, it still would have been Xenakis, but much better-tempered. He started as an architect: architects do rhythm and elegance and nice little surprises - even the Brutalists - why would he change when writing music?

Which brings me to ticket prices. I was sitting down front, in the sweet spot, and it cost £30. For just over an hour. On Amazon the Boulez 2-CD is £8.84 with free Prime delivery. It's available on Qobuz. When I go to a live concert, I'm not paying to hear the music: I can do that almost for free at home. I'm paying for the quality of the interpretation by conductors and instrumentalists, nearly all of whom are very smart people with degrees and years of playing experience and scholarship behind them. I want them to let me hear something I haven't heard from anyone else before, that makes me go home and listen again to what I have.

For that £30 would be cheap. Without that, it's too much.

Clown-World And Other Media Content

I used to write about political and social issues.

Do that now, taking the media as one's lead, and one winds up dealing, mostly, with four kinds of content: clown-world, freak-show, temper-tantrums, and press releases.

Clown-world is a denial of economic or practical rationality, possibly accompanied by a recital of dubious research and a liberal dollop of bullshit. Masks are clown-world. CNN shouting Russia, Russia, Russia for three years. Putin starting a conventional ground war against the Ukraine. The IMF asking the British Chancellor to do what Gordon Brown would have done. Anyone who thinks that the world's economy can live with sub-5% interest rates forever. Anything backed up by unanimity, rather than overwhelming data, is clown-world.

Crucially, Indulging the freak-show is also clown-world behaviour.

The freak-show is any attention-seeking behaviour: a) for causes that have no basis in fact, or that has no economic benefit to the participants or anyone else; or b) reaches the levels expected from a borderline or bi-polar personality disorder.

Tik-Tok is an all-day freak-show. A Trade Union march for higher pay and better conditions is ordinary business. Pulling down statues to protest behaviour that happened two hundred years ago is freak-show, as is ostentatious Veganism. Modest religious practice is normal life. Almost all virtue-signalling is freak-show, if it isn't already clown-world. Extinction Rebellion is pure freak-show, because its cause is... unfounded. Pride Week is pure freak-show. On the other hand, drag acts are not freak-show since the drag artists get paid, and Morris dancing is just weird. Quintin Crisp was an eccentric, because he didn't care if people noticed or not.

Having a protest march to keep open a traditional right-of-way that some landowner wants to close is just fine - as long as they also raise the associated legal applications. Otherwise it's either naive, or a temper-tantrum.

The first huge temper-tantrum was after the Brexit poll, then Trump 2016, followed by the 2019 Brexit debates in the House of Commons, and more recently the EU threw one when Italy electing the "wrong" person, and the markets throw one every time a Chancellor does something they need him not to do. A group of people throws an enormous hissy fit, bad-mouths whatever it was, and tries to sabotage it, while also claiming that the people who made the "wrong decision" are everything from merely ignorant to Putin's stooges to the kind of criminal who has to be put in solitary for their own protection. One group of people exhibit the most open, snarling, vicious, seething contempt for whoever it was made the "wrong decision", and would rather burn down the world than shrug, move on, behave like a pro, and make it work for them.

Then there's the PR masquerading as news (any article based on something a charity says, or that tells you what a Minister is going to say, or in which a company name or senior manager is prominent, or reports an "expert" or a "scientist" pushing a political policy), and on the extreme end of that is outright propaganda, as with Covid. In newspapers and news shows, this covers the arts reviews, the sports reporting, anything on fashion and lifestyle.

As the good Lord Rothermere (or the other one) said: news is anything someone doesn't want you to know. Look at any newspaper in that light and find me one item of news.

Where Is Everyone? The Empty Universe Problem

Here's a nice video I stumbled across, about the perennial question of why ET hasn't visited us yet.



Here's another kind of answer: look at our own planet. There are / have been a number of major cultures / civilisations. At the start if the 19th century there were the Japanese, Chinese, Muslim / Arabic, Hundu and other Indian, African, South American, Native American, Aboriginal, plus smaller civilisations on ocean islands.

I may have missed one, but I'm sure we would still have had steam engines, dynamos, AC current, penicillin, powered flight... what's that?

Some of those cultures (Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Indian) at one stage or another deliberately decided to stop developing? And the rest simply didn't have the resources to develop? It was only the unwashed, disease-ridden, war-inclined, Europeans (counting the Western Russians as European) who developed advanced science and technology? And not all of them at the start.

That's the other answer.

The Universe is full of other civilisations. Most of whom are still struggling to survive on planets with even more marginal environments than ours (and most of our own is only good for the fishes, and a lot of the rest is sand, rock and ice), while the others at some stage decided to stop with all this intellectual development lark. It's a very popular political policy for the ruling class: wait until the circumstances are nicely beneficial for the rulers, and set everything in aspic forever. As long as everyone on the planet does that, it's going to work. Feudal bucolic bliss forever.

The question isn't where is everybody, it's what makes rulers tolerate revolutionaries and even take up the new ideas?

Never mind being alone in the Universe. Imagine if we weren't, and then found out that everyone else was pleasant but didn't have one idea to rub between them?

What do you mean: you don't need to imagine that?

I Turned Round... And There Was This (Hanworth Air Park)

I was walking round my Air Park, turned round, and there was this. The best camera is the one you have with you, and it was the iPhone. Photography is magic-by-selection.

Stereo At The Festival Hall w/ Iveta Apkalna

The Royal Festival Hall was infamous for having the driest sound of any concert hall ever anywhere. Musicians would enter it and instantly be de-hydrated. Bass notes would set off from the stage and fail to make it past Row H. It was just dandy for string quartets, folk singers, jazz bands, and electronic music, but nineteenth-century symphonies just shrivelled. (This sounds a lot like much modern hi-fi equipment, a lot of which is also fine for string quartets, folk singers, jazz bands, and electronic music, but gets confused by a 90-piece orchestra blasting out Bruckner.) The Hall was re-furbished in the Oughties, and the organ was re-furbished over a period of years, ending in 2013. There are larger organs in the world, but mostly in America and mostly for show. In practical terms, the Festival Hall organ is as good as it gets.

The range of this (and any other) organ is two octaves below middle C, and three octaves above. An 88-key piano goes a tenth below and another octave above. The lowest notes are just above the point where hi-fi speakers and the human ear start to roll-off on the bass, so there's no need for a sub-woofer, and that extra octave on the piano is mostly a plink sound. The organ has all the notes the human ear needs.

At first sight the layout of the pipes look like a mirror image. Look at this guide and especially pages 8-9, for the layout of the pipes. This is really four organs in one: a solo organ (top far right), a Swell organ (top far left), a Great organ on the rest of the left and upper near right, and a Positive organ on the rest of the right(*). There are four keyboards: Solo, Swell, Great and Positive, plus pedals for the bass notes.

As a result, if you are sitting in the equivalent of the Hi-Fi Sweet Spot, listening to the organ should feel stereo-ish - if the music is written to use the different sections one at a time. When the big pipes kick in, and the Swell gets going, it's just one vast splendid noise, and the sustained notes bounce off the diagonal reflecting boards at either side of the stage.

Some hi-fi reviewers talk about the way some gear will make the transients (that happen when a string is struck, for instance) clearer, and also make the way a note fades clearer. They are not listening to recordings of large organs when they hear those things. Live, there are no "transients" or "fades" when a large organ is even at half-steam. Subtlety is not a thing with big organs: go to recitals in small churches on one- or two-manual instruments for that.

It's also loud. I'm not going to be playing my Buxtehude or Messian CDs at that volume at home.

The organist was Iveta Apkalna. Organists can move all three of their hands and both their feet independently, and tap their head at the same time. They are not as other musicians, let alone as other mortals. There are no "bad" organists - it's one of those things that has to be done well or it can't be done at all.

She played a short piece by Philip Glass, an extract from the Musical Offering by Bach, and Widor's Fifth Symphony for Organ. All of it was enjoyable and fascinating, especially the more playful parts of the Widor (I know, not the adjective you were expecting for an organ symphony).

Maybe a couple of those Wilson tower speakers with a £150,000 pre-amp + monoblock set up could get something like the live sound. My kit won't. People forget that "classical" music can be VERY LOUD at times, way too loud to play with the neighbours in.



(*) I have no idea what those mean. There's a limit to how much research I'm prepared to do!

Welcome To Barking Riverside

I go to all the glamorous places.

The first trip earlier this year was on a sunny day, which was marred by my awful handling of my camera. I had jogged the exposure compensation dial something nasty and all the shots came out too dark. I vowed to go again, now that I knew better. Except I didn't, and it's a good thing I looked at some shots in the screen, and sorted out the problem. In my head, the X-E4 is still an OM-10. My head is not always a sensible place.

This time the sky was grey, which at least removed any chance of the bright blue bits making the other bits too dark. Here's the obligatory shot of the Emirates ski-lift (all of these can be clicked for an even larger view)

And here's the almost obligatory Manhattan-on-Thames view...

One or too shots are perhaps almost worthy of the Bernd and Hilda Becher, except I don't fade my skies a uniform dull white like they did.

One question asks itself every time I see these riverside tower blocks....



.... who on earth would live here? I'm kinda parochial about London: if it isn't on a line to Waterloo, I'm not going to even discuss it. But these flats are miles from anywhere. Okay, now two shots of a commercial cargo boat at the Tate and Lyle moorings.

Now, who doesn't like a photograph of some containers? This is landscape in these parts...

As the river gets wider, the view gets bleaker. And I think 'bleak' is a fair word here. I think those wind generators actually make it look even more empty somehow...



And then, finally....

Defining The Seasons

Did you know there are official seasons? In fact two sets, one for the meteorologists and one for the astronomers. These are for the Northern Hemisphere.

Meteorologists:
Winter: December, January, February 

Spring: March, April, May 

Summer: June, July, August 

Autumn: September, October, November

Astronomers:
Winter: 22nd December (Winter Solstice) to March 20

Spring: March 21 (Spring Equinox) to June 20 

Summer: June 21 (Summer Solstice) to September 21 

Autumn: September 22 (Autumn Equinox) to 21 December

I offer instead, the Phenomenological Seasons:
Winter: when it starts to be cold all the time to when it stops being cold all the time, and there are no leaves except on evergreens 

Spring: when it's cold in the morning and evening, but warm-ish during the day, and the leaves appear

Summer: when I can wear a tee-shirt all day, and the leaves are all the same shade of green 

Autumn: see Spring, but the leaves are falling

Hence in the UK...
Winter is the five months from November to March (or, from when the clocks go back, to when the clocks go forward)

Spring is about eight weeks from April to May

Summer is the three months plus a week or so from June to sometime in September

Autumn is about six weeks from September to end-October