Lollipops at The Wigmore Hall

The live music experience experiment ended in December with two recitals of what are known in the trade as `lollipops': short, familiar favourites. First up was Gautier Caucon (Cello) and Jerome Ducros (Piano) with a selection ranging from Barber's Adagio For Strings to My Way and Singing in the Rain. I was sitting eight rows back in the middle (cheap seats Saturday lunchtime). Someone had turned the volume of the piano down (or those other pianists really were ham-fisted) so I didn't have to rush to the exit to protect my hearing. Monsieur Capucon prefaced each piece with a little explanation or story, and the two of them played together as well as if they had been rehearsing to make a CD. Oh. Wait. They had. The sound was still louder than I would dare at home: one forgets how loud even acoustic music is. The performances were well-judged and nicely emotional.

Next up was what I thought was a jazz trio: Martin Frost (Clarinet), Roland Pontinen (Piano), and Sabastien Dube (Double Bass). They even had two pieces by that well-known Baroque composer Chick Corea (1655 - 1702). The only piece I knew was the Poulenc Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, which they did in a spirited manner (which is a nice way of saying `a bit fast for my taste'.) Forst enjoys playing the clarinet ("an ill wind nobody blows good") and seemed to be doing most of it from memory. This time I was at the back on an aisle seat, but I didn't have the feeling that I was hearing reflections (as long as the reflection paths are less than 12 metres shorter than the direct path, you won't. The Wigmore is a long rectangle, so it's not likely.). perhaps I had had enough practice at listening to live music by now, because I got carried away by the whole thing. I didn't even listen to any music on the way home, but used the ANC on the in-ears.

So in summary (so far)

The concert hall sound experience is not the hi-fi experience. Hi-fi is quieter, the soundstage is clearer and more defined, and the sounds are more precise. The live sounds don't have a sense of reflection or echo, but that 35ms buffer gets used, with the result that the sounds are very open and slightly blurry round the edges. Soundstage is not really a thing unless you're right in front of the players, and for acoustic chamber music, it was never intended to be. The music should come as one piece. Nothing involves quite so much as volume - as long as it stays below wince level - and live music can and is be played at more involving levels than I can get in my 'umble mid-terrace house, where I tend to listen at around 60dBA, which is less than the volume of my acoustic guitar or the human voice.

Will I be listening to more live music in 2023? Almost certainly. Orchestral rather than chamber, I suspect, and since I need to defend what's left of my hearing, I won't be going to see Above and Beyond at Printworks in April.

What Black-and-White Excels At

 A kid, his Dad, a bloke walking down stairs, some random lines... in colour it would be... meh. For some reason, in black-and-white, it really works. The people are more significant than they would be in colour.

Happy Christmas

 

Tone is Not (Only) In The Fingers

Everyone says tone is in the fingers.

Here's an experiment.

Take your guitar with your favourite schredmeister tone.

Play My Favourite Things, you know, the song Coltrane made a hit.

Uh-huh.

You sound like a guy playing My Favourite Things with a metric tonne of distortion.

Not a wicked schredmeister.

A mixture of sound effects only becomes a tone when it fits the style of music.

Only the Blues can survive anything from an acoustic to heavy fuzz. Everything else only works within a fairly narrow range of tonal variation.

Choose the genre you are playing, and within that, what the song demands.

There is a cottage industry of people creating effects, from downloadable settings for modelling amps, to complicated plug-ins for DAWs.

I'm going to leave DAWs for now, so this is about getting tones from an amp and/or pedals.

The starting point is easier for most guitarists than it sounds: to judge by what the majority of YT guitar guys say, we take up the guitar because we want to play like (enter name of hero(s) here).

I was horribly mislead in my early years by wanting to sound like John McLaughlin, who has himself at one time said he’s what people who don’t play guitar think is a good guitarist. I have no urge to be a virtuoso. Allan Holdsworth leaves me cold (I know, I will be saying several Hail Marys later), as do all the heavy metal shredders and a lot of the jazz virtuosi. Playing hundreds of notes a minute and permuting arpeggios is what people with no musical ideas do. Not that I want to be controversial or anything. Shredding is the rock / metal version of those be-bop solos that relay on playing arpeggios. Done well it sounds and can be impressive, but it’s one of the first styles that will turn up as an AI plug-in.

I liked what Indian raga players did, those long slowly-developing single-string improvisations based around some traditional changes and themes. It has moments of high skill, but always at the service of the groove music.

I prefer Bert Jansch to John Renbourn, even though it is obvious Renbourn has the superior technique. The players I admire most are Neil Young, Larry Carlton, Eric Clapton, Dave Gilmour, Jimi Hendrix, Steve Cropper, and Frank Zappa before he started shredding. None of those guys play fast, all of them play intense, sometimes funky, and even melodic. All of them can do the important thing, which is make one note count.

All of them were fussy as heck about their instruments and sound. If you want to make one note count, you kinda gotta be fussy about tone.

The search for tone is also the search for soloing style. By now I was realising that what I did / do on the acoustic was NOT going to translate to a Les Paul.

But let's start by getting a) a decent clean tone, b) a decent distortion-y Blues tone, c) some nice Ambient-y sounds.

Another Classic Street Photograph, London Bridge

 

Yep, the one with the guy turned into a black shadow against strongly-lit stone buildings.

First Sessions With The Les Paul

Okay. Les Pauls are a touch zaftig.

All electric guitars are heavy, but Les Pauls are the king of heavy. There's a Rhett Schul video about buying a Les Paul, and he weighed the ones he was trying out. 3.8 kg. I paused the video and weighed mine on the bathroom scales. 4.1 kg, just over nine pounds. I weighed my acoustic for comparison, 1.2 kg.

At first it kept sliding to the right from my knee. Was this a bad guitar? Was I doing something wrong? Did I need to wear a strap? All the cool guys in the videos had their LPs resting naturally on their right leg with nothing holding it. Maybe I wasn’t cool enough to do this?

Then I picked up the acoustic, and was reminded it was neck-heavy, so my left arm held it up slightly. Muscle memory that transferred itself to the Les Paul. Which is body-heavy and so kept sliding off, because I was lifting the neck. So I made myself hold the neck down and it stayed on my lap. That took a few hours to become natural. Playing a musical instrument is a lot about getting the physical relationship to it so it becomes a part of you.

Here's something else no-one will talk about.

Electric guitars do not sound great out of the box.

Unless you know what you're doing, which as a first-time buyer, I didn't.

Out of the box, electric guitars sound pretty... meh. When I was choosing in the shop, I was choosing between one meh and another. I just didn’t know it at the time.

Now began the real learning curve with electric guitars.

The Search for Tone. Learning how to play the amplifier and pedals.

Another Classic Street Photography shot, Waterloo Station

 

I really am starting to understand how those B&W guys took so many evocative shots.

In Which I Buy an Epiphone Les Paul Standard

Yep.

I am now a two-guitar household. I've been noodling on that steel-string acoustic since about 1972. I bought it from a music shop in Kingston that has long since gone. It cost the equivalent of £325 in today's money, which is bit more than half the price of the Martins it's a copy of. I never intended to play live: it was for personal pleasure. I never had (or never made) the time to dedicate to learning licks, chords and the like.

I'd been thinking about buying an electric guitar for some time. After watching a few YT videos on guitars, I realised something, and while looking up stuff for this, I found a Fred Frith quote that says it very well:

There is actually no such thing as an electric guitar. This [holding up his modified Gibson ES-345] is not really an instrument...it doesn’t become an electric guitar until I plug it in. And also send it through whatever I want to send it to [indicating his pedalboard]. It’s only this, plus that, plus that [pointing to amplifier], which is an electric guitar.

So if it's my first electric guitar, I have to buy the amp and some pedals as well. (Well, duh!)

Now here's the surprise.

The price of an iPhone 13 Pro with 256GB RAM is £1,049.

A perfectly acceptable, brand-name, entry-level electric guitar, and a perfectly-acceptable brand-name amp, can be had for less than that.

Epiphone (aka Gibson), Mexican Fender (aka Fender), plus a cheaper Vox or Fender amp.

Less than an iPhone. That you have in your pocket.

So towards the end of September, I boarded the train for Epsom, where there is a branch of GuitarGuitar.

What? You expected me to go to Chandler’s. You think I’m rich or something?

Having watched a whole bunch of YT videos, I intended to buy a Mexican (Fender) Telecaster. You know, the twangy one that country players use. Because I’ve always liked the look of Teles and with the right strings and pedals they can be made to sound not like a country guitar. I didn’t want a Strat or an ES335, as those are for people who are going to play live.

Here's the most important thing about buying your first electric guitar: if you know someone who knows their way round electric guitars, pedals and amplifiers, take them with you. This is not a something you can figure out from reviews. I don't so I couldn't, but you should.

Here's the second thing: don't sweat it too much. You might buy The One. But it probably won’t be. It’ll be good, or you wouldn’t have bought it, but it’s not going to be the only one. I may only buy one because of my mature years, but you youngsters are going to buy more than one. And you’ll maybe trade in the first and others.

When you buy the second one, you will have a much clearer idea of what you want in terms of feel, tone, interaction with your amp and pedals, and all that other stuff. The first time is an experiment.

I tried this Tele, that Tele, something else, I may even have tried a Strat, I nearly tried an ES335...

I came away with an Epiphone Les Paul Standard.

For those who aren't familiar, Les Pauls are at the opposite end of any guitar spectrum you want to construct from a Telecaster.

The Les Paul felt right, more comfortable than the Fenders: this is because Les Pauls have a neck length about the same as acoustics. So it felt familiar. Humbuckers have a fatter sound than single-coil (I knew that, but I didn’t know how much fatter it was.) and I was used to the rounder tones of an acoustic. And damn, Telecasters are twangy.

Delivered it the next day. Along with a 50W BOSS Katana (I don’t need 50 watts, but it gets me all sorts of electronic gadgetry), a 3m cable, a replacement set of strings so I don’t buy 11 gauge from sheer habit, and a strap with locking loops. I have picks.

Blatant Back-Fills of Missed Posts

A lot of catching-up to do. I've been doing stuff that it didn't make sense to talk about at the time, as you will see. Also it's that time of the year when my life / will-power / moral fortitude / ability to plan / anything else falls apart for a while. I get bursts of energy, and then days where I do a bit of this and a bit of that. Also it's been darn cold, coldest weather since 2010, according to the Met Office. So here's the first photograph to kick off.

Bruckner 9 at the RFH

This was the one I really wanted to hear. The London Philharmonic doing Bruckner. Big Band stuff.

I've heard a big ol' pipe organ, and some older and modern chamber music. I have not been amazed by the difference between live and my hi-fi. My generic memory from when I used to listen to live chamber music was that it was much better than anything I could get at home. That was a good few years ago, and my reaction now speaks to a) the vastly improved quality of digital sources, DACs, amplifiers and speakers, and possibly b) the deterioration of my hearing.

For Bruckner 9, I was two seats to the left of the conductor and two rows back from the orchestra. I could hear the cellos and violas on the right, the violins on the left, and the horns and winds in the middle. With a clarity that is simply not available on a hi-fi. Unless maybe one plays it at 80+ dBA, which would have the neighbours complaining. (I tested the bit where the orchestra comes out and everyone plays through the bits they find difficult one more time, and that was around 80dBA.)

When the orchestra was giving it the full triple-forte, even close up, it was an overwhelming wall of sound dominated by the cellos, violas, brass and woodwind. I could see the basses sawing away over to the right, and the second violins over to the left behind the first violins pretty much disappeared as well. When the wind section stopped playing and the cellos calmed down, then I could hear the basses and the second violins. This is pretty much the experience of listening to a CD as well: it's a function of the sheer volume that cellos, violas and wind can put out. It's why a lot of orchestral recordings seem to be biased to the right: because that's where all the noise is.

When the orchestra was playing at regular or piano intensity, the depth and quality of the sound easily exceeded anything I've heard on CD or CD-quality streaming over the speakers and certainly over headphones.

No comparison. Totally different experience. I have two more chamber music tickets left from this round, and next year I'm only doing Big Bands doing Big Band music. I will change up where I sit as well.

Sitting that close... no comparison between a live and hi-fi. Live was a real experience.

Royal Airforce Museum - Lancaster

Sis and I took a trip to the RAF Museum in Colindale (Northern Line and take the bus). It's free and it is well worth the visit. They have the bi-planes and tri-planes and jet planes and the WW2 stuff. And then there is this mofo. It's big. Nope, it's bigger than that. Only the Vulcan is bigger, but not even the Vulcan has the sheer presence of this beast.

If it was 1944 and you saw a sky full of these things, you would not want to carry on with a war. The Lancaster is brutal. It has no other purpose than to leave the target in unrecoverable ruins. Carrying on when those things were dropping bombs was just crazy. Read Len Deighton's Bomber, if you haven't already. It describes the havoc those things could wreck in unsparing detail. 

Tech note: not my finest shots, but doesn't blur look better in B&W?

More B&W - I'm Starting To Like This (Richmond on Thames)

Oh yes, I like these three. Impossible in colour. 

 Also, I use f4 as my default, since on an APS-C frame f8 gives way too much depth of focus. The first photo would not work if I used f8.

Black and White vs Colour (Richmond on Thames)

 Some subjects are better done in B&W, and others in colour. 

I think both of the table-photos have good points. Each has a different atmosphere.

Here the B&W looks a little self-conscious, whereas the colour one looks like a picture. 

Whereas these...

 ...are what B&W is for. You have to look for the person, but once you see them, there's nothing to distract you from them.

First B&W Pictures (Richmond Station)

 There comes a time in every hobby photographer's life when they have to try taking black-and-white. Nothing but for at least three - six months to really get the hang of it. My time has come. Here are the first shots. It doesn't have to be art, it just has to be black-and-white.

Of course it has to be trains! And a coffee shop.

Did 500,000 Retirements Cause Inflation?

tl;dr Uh, no, because there weren't 500,000 extra retirements.

The Bank of England is blaming inflation and our current recession on 500,000 mostly older people who quit working before 65 over the last two years. This, according to the Bank, is creating an upward pressure on wages and hence prices. It's talking nonsense, of course, but then, that's it's job(*).

Let's go find those miscreants. The Labour Force survey looks at the economic activity of everyone aged 16-64 (it's still living in an age when 65 was a mandatory retirement age). If there are 500,000 people who should be in the labour force but retired early, we would expect to see 500,000 more people retired in the 2022 Labour Force surveys. There were 501,000 retired 16-64 y/o men at the end of 2019, and 523,000 in summer 2022 : an increase of 22,000. For women the numbers were  610,000 in 2019 and 658,000 in 2022: an increase of 48,000. That's a total of 60,000 more retired 16-64 y/o people, 12% of the Bank's claim.

There's more. According to the ONS 

Our latest estimated number of workforce jobs for June 2022 (next updated December 2022) was a record high of 35.8 million, an increase of 171,000 jobs from December 2019, and the first time it has exceeded pre-[lockdown] levels. The total number of jobs includes both employee jobs and self-employment jobs, with both rising in the quarter to June 2022. Employee jobs in June 2022 continued to grow and are now at a record high of nearly 31.5 million, 710,000 above their December 2019...level. However, this rate of growth has not been seen in the self-employment jobs which remain 548,000 below December 2019 levels.

So there are more people in full-time work than there were before the lockdowns. Not less.

What is getting everyone excited is this graph 

showing that there were 1,246,000 vacancies at the end of September 2022 against 820,000 at the end of 2019: an increase of 426,000.

Vacancies arise from a) economic growth that creates employment, b) industrial re-structuring as new sectors appear, c) everyday churn as people leave this company and join that one, d) people leaving employment to e.g. care for family members or take up education, e) retirement. Vacancies decline because of a) economic recession, b) improvements in productivity, c) industrial re-structuring as existing sectors decline, d) removing jobs as people leave. Net all that out, and we get an underlying rate of around 600-700 thousand vacancies a quarter (plus or minus economic trends). Which is two-three per cent of the number of jobs in the economy.

Vacancies fell in 2020 because employers whose work was expanding (parcels companies, supermarkets) could find people as soon as they needed them, so those new jobs were never reported as vacancies, while the employers who were shrinking (cafes, hotels, airlines) had no vacancies because they were being prevented from doing business. Vacancy levels returned to the underlying rate in Summer 2021, despite many industries still being in hibernation. People carried on retiring, changing jobs, and temporarily leaving the workforce, effectively migrating out of sectors which were not hiring into sectors that were. As the lockdowns and economic restrictions eased during H2 2021, and then were removed in Spring 2022, a lot of hibernated jobs become available again. "Pent-up demand", if you like. But the people who would have done those jobs, are now working somewhere else (maybe back in their home countries) at better jobs.

What kind of jobs are not being filled? The largest numerical increases in vacancies are in "Accommodation & food service activities", "Human health and social work activities" and "Professional scientific & technical activities". Aka baggage handlers, airport security, zero hours retail jobs, on-call cleaners, cooks, care workers, hotel staff... 400,000 mostly low-paid / fake-self-employed / zero-hours s**t jobs that no-one wants. Pre-2020 those jobs were done by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons: many left the country, or they switched sectors, found full-time work, or signed on(**).

So that's why that's happening.



(*)The job of the Bank of England is not to provide insightful analysis, but to lead the harumphing



so everyone can protect their phoney-baloney jobs. Nothing does that better than claims that can't be checked and blame a bunch of harmless victims.

(**) The Claimant Count was 1,240,000 at the end of 2019. It's 1,554,000 now, an increase of 314,000.

Music of Today - Purcell Room

To the Purcell Room for a free concert of four string quartets by friends of New York based Anna Clyne, who is composer-in-residence everywhere right now. It was all very pleasant and post-minimalist, or whatever they are calling stuff that actually sounds like music now. The sound was excellent, because the Purcell is the smallest of the concert halls and very well-proportioned. Any hi-fi that sounded that good would be very good indeed.

What struck me this time was the interaction between the players. There wasn’t any. Occasionally the second violinist would glance at the first, as much, I suspect as to make sure he wasn’t going to poke her in the eye with his bow while fidgeting in his seat. The viola player kept her eyes on the score all the way through all the pieces. The closest they came to interaction was at the start, when whoever had to play notes at the same time would make slightly exaggerated nods or gestures to indicate they were about to start.

All very different from jazz, flamenco, or rock, where one of them will play a note or a chord, and the others will pile in on the next beat. Because they can feel when the next beat is due and know they are all wanted - or that they have to wait until some other event. They look at each other, and listen to each other. On the rare occasions they have to play together, they do so with uncanny accuracy - or at least the pros do.

They can do this because they have absorbed the style of music they are playing into their bodies: they have musical reflexes. They know the repertoire as well, but most of it is a physical understanding of the music.

Bach wrote a different cantata for ears week for two years or so when he was at Leipzig. His band got one rehearsal during the week, and then played it that Sunday. A modern conductor will take days to rehearse a Bach cantata, and that will build on more days of thinking about the piece and listening to other recordings. How did Bach’s band do it? Because they only played Baroque music. There wasn’t anything else. Baroque music has as many conventions as jazz, and as many licks. Composers stole phrases from each other all day. The instrumentalists could sight-read as well as any of today's players, but because it was all in one style, they could read and interpret it much faster than even a virtuoso today. They would not need to think about it, because it was the only way to play. A modern player has to load up different ways of playing for each change of genre, and sometimes, of conductor. They have to work against muscle memory, whereas the players in Bach’s band could rely on it.

The sight-reading skills of today’s classical instrumentalists are considerable, and it’s why they don’t need to pay attention to what the others are doing, except to check their cue for entry after a short break.

I find the sense that the players are listening and reacting adds something intimate to the performance. One is watching other people co-operate, work together. Too much sight-reading of material that is more than a little arbitrary and the performance can seem like four people co-ordinating independent actions. But it’s a consequence of the genre.

The Man At The Lambeth Palace Bus Stop

 

Divine and mundane, sacred and profane. And other such thoughts.

Another Street Photograph, Lambeth Bridge

 Yep, a fine Mark 1 street photograph. You know 'em when you see 'em.

The Lake at Victoria Park

 

Sis and I made a trip to Victoria Park earlier in the year, at the height of the Great Parching of Britain's Grass, and it wasn't a wonderful experience. A couple of weeks ago, we walked there from Haggerston along the Regents Canal (more photos to come) and it was a glorious day. We had sandwiches at the cafe, which is excellent with lots of outdoor seating, and has these views from the bench.

Cirrus Sky, Hanworth Air Park

It's been a long time since we've had an Autumn like this.

That Terrible Piano At The Wigmore Hall

I have described the first part of the concert by the Silisean Quartet in another post.

There was an interval, when the Wigmore's piano was wheeled out, for Juliusz Zarebski's Piano Quintet in G Minor.

The band trooped out, took their seats, and prepared to play.

The pianist, Wojciech Switala, looked like a man familiar with the ideas of finesse and light touch, touched the keys, and all hell broke loose. However much he might have tried to do justice to the light, skipping phrases on the sheet music in front of him, what came out were blurred phrases, indistinct runs, and chords that could have had any notes jammed together, so hard was it to hear any harmony in the sheer noise. The musical effect was of standing on a seaside promenade during a bad storm: great crashing waves of sound drenching the poor band in front of the piano, and a dense sonic spray soaking the audience.

I had first heard this ghastly racket in a lunchtime concert given by some music students. I imagined that the young pianist was, however skilful, simply over-excited and hence heavy-handed. Switala is undoubtedly skilful, and looked every inch the consummate, experienced professional. And he could not hold back the crashing waves of deafening sound that over-sized horror produces.

It is so loud that when played quietly it provides a useful accompaniment to the unemployed busker at Piccadilly Circus underground, and renders inaudible the announcements at Euston mainline station. At a brisk forte, commercial airline pilots on approach to landing at Heathrow have been known to wonder if their engines have failed, as the piano effortlessly drowns out the engines' sound.

That monstrosity clocks up over 90 dbA at full thump. I measured it. 90 dbA is as loud as the big bass drum of the Royal Household Guards. It's as loud as the Rolling Stones playing a ballad in concert. There are quieter lawnmowers and pneumatic drills. 90 dbA is in more-than-thirty-minutes-is-hazardous territory. By the end of the piece, my ears felt slightly numb, a feeling I have previously only associated with huge stacks of loudspeakers and amplifiers. I heard less sheer noise from the organ in the Royal Festival Hall recently.

And the Siliseans may as well have been playing Mozart or Bartok for all they could be heard.

That piano is just TOO DARN BIG. It's at least half the width of the stage.

It's TOO LOUD.

It makes the best pianists sound like ham-fisted key-thumpers with no sense of interpretation or subtly of touch.

For the sake of the reputation of any pianist who plays there, get a smaller piano.

For the sake of the audiences' ears, GET A SMALLER PIANO.

Silesian String Quartet at the Wigmore Hall

To the Wigmore Hall one fine evening earlier this week to hear the Silesian String Quartet.

The Silesians played the two string quartets, Bacewicz's Fourth, and Weinberg's Third, in the first half of the concert. At some point, I realised that they were not playing £400 instruments from Chimes at the Barbican. Theirs sounded like the real thing: audible and clear without being loud or shrill, warm and articulate. As far back as I was, the music was in mono, and I had to watch the players' hands to link the sound with the instrument, but that's live music for you. We see the different strands of music rather than hear them: or at least amateurs like me do. The Silesians sounded like a top-flight string quartet is supposed to sound: confident, clear, familiar with the music, but not having over-thought it.

Polish composers from the mid-twentieth century have became a Thing a couple of years ago. Even I have Grazyna Bacewicz' string quartets, and some Mieczyslow Weinberg symphonies, on CD. Good listenable stuff it is too. Looking at the cover, oh, silly me! It was recorded by the, ah, Silesian String Quartet. The live performance of the Fourth was definitely clearer and the playing at once more relaxed and precise: maybe they have grown much more familiar with it since the recording.

That first half was how I remembered live chamber music. I could let it wash over me, or listen to the details, depending on how I felt at the moment, and both were rewarding.

Then came the interval.

See the next post.

Epping Forest

We west-London-suburb people think we have the best parks: Richmond Park, Bushey Park, Virginia Water, Hampton Court. All terribly royal.

But we don't have Epping Forest.

How has it taken me so long to go there?

Because I'm for sure going back.

I met Sis at Liverpool Street, we took the Overground to Chingford, turned right outside the railway station, walked through the bus station and so help me it's right there. Open parkland and forest stretching into the distance.

For our first outing, we stuck to the east side, walked up to Connaught Water and turned right to go to Loughton to pick up the Central Line. Nice little walk. We'll do the big stuff off to the west on the next trip.

(Shots like these are the benefit of fancy cameras. This picked up all the detail from quite shady scenes.)

Hastings

Sis and I went to Hastings recently.

OK. Stop rolling your eyes. We didn't know, okay?

A day or so afterwards, I started to wonder: what am I taking photographs for anyway?

The camera-phone stuff I took on my way to work was basically pretty. Striking buildings, blue skies, odd contrasts, reflections in office windows, the sort of scene that makes your day feel a bit better.

Hastings... is not pretty.

What I wanted was a "nice day out" and some pretty photographs.

Didn't happen.

So I took a few shots and gave up.

I look at these now, and you know? They're they're not great, but neither are they bad. The hotels going diagonally across the frame; a perfectly serviceable joggers-on-the-promenade shot; the shops underneath the hotels, and that long iron-stain on the front of the Palace Court. You get some kind of feel for the place.

Then there were these decay-as-art shots...

And here's the pretty one to end with. A study in greys worthy of Whistler.

The next trip to the coast we make will be prefaced by enough research to ensure sandy beaches. With sunshine.

If I was a real photographer, I would make trips to Kent Coast towns with pebbly beaches and take well-framed shots of tired 1890's buildings, closed shops, unsightly modern developments, and whatever attractive views there may be.

But I'm a tourist. I want a nice day out and some pretty pictures.

Which is sort of an answer to my original question, but now I want to add: is that all?

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....