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.

Retirement Thoughts - Part Three

The longer I go on working, the later I have to live on a very much reduced income – though also with (not as much as you’d think) reduced expenses. However, I can’t say that I’m enjoying the life I lead while working. It’s not a drudge, but it is a chore – though that may be a fine distinction. There’s not a lot, if anything, about it that I’ll miss, and I have tried to make out a list of things that I really might miss. In terms of quality of life, I’m not convinced that life on a lesser income in retirement will be less than on this income working. Life will be different. Slower. Smaller things will feel like worthwhile achievements and it will take less to make a good day. (Pottering up and back to a museum between the rush hours will constitute a ‘good day out’, for instance. Some work in the garden or a spot of decorating will be a ‘good little job’). Right now, I’m not doing anything much except working, the gym, and basic housework / shopping / washing / stuff. This does not feel like achieving anything except a vague defiance of the Gods of Ageing.

You know the joke? The older I get, the less I pay to live. I get free NHS prescriptions, free eye tests every two years, and because I’m in London, I get free travel on London Transport at any time, plus free National Rail travel out to Zone 6 after the morning rush hour. After January 2020, my net salary will go up, because I won’t have to pay National Insurance (!), though the extra will be taxed. And I can take the State Pension and still work(!!), thought that will still be taxed. Tax or not, that’s a decent lump of money to put in the bank if made for a year, so maybe I should go on until June 2021 just because devilment.

I have been trying to figure out how to improve the quality of my life while I’m working, but that damned 05:30 wake-up and commute gets in the way. Maybe I need to accept that, at this age, simply getting up, commuting, putting in a day’s work amongst people half my age, three times my energy and in the same league as regards smarts, well, that’s enough for one day. I can get home, goof off reading or watching something, go to bed, and that’s been a good day. Sounds simple enough, but I’m having problems with the idea that it is enough.

Oh mutter mutter. This doesn’t have a neatly-resolved conclusion. I can tell. So here’s a photograph instead.

Retirement Thoughts - Part Two

“I can do twenty months, but I’d rather work out some way of not thinking of it quite like that”. That stayed with me for all of the Wednesday evening I wrote it and then evaporated on Thursday. My brave plans to commute in on Friday evaporated, and I schlepped the laptop home Thursday evening. Friday morning I was tired, tired in that I-have-to-physically-recover way, in the way that means the only thinking I wanted to do was the stuff on reflex, that happens in meetings.

Another twenty months of that?

I didn’t feel like this at the start of the year. I have spared you from reading all sorts of probably bogus pop-psych reasons why I might be feeling this way. Two major things have happened this year: my friend died over the summer. and we moved offices. Loss can be mourned, bad offices have to be worked in every day.

After leaving the Paradise that was the Shaftesbury Avenue office, they moved me to Bishopsgate. Where I am now makes Bishopsgate look like the West End. I get in at 07:30, and carry on with reading overlooking the back streets of the Barbican until 08:00. A few years ago, I would sit in the Caffè Nero near Holborn station for an hour, read, write or watch the people go by, but City workers are not watchable people and no City street has the presence of Kingsway. There’s no buzz in the City, just bustle. There’s a difference.

The new office is dark. The floor space is huge. The staff / desk ratio is 1.85:1. The per-person desk space is half what is was at the last office. There’s no assigned seating, so I can have total strangers sitting next to me. Even if I know them, it’s possible that we will go the whole day and not say anything to each other - office cameraderie is a thing of the past. This isn’t because I’m a mardy old git: I see the same happening to other people. They spend much of the day with headsets on, staring into an empty middle-distance. Before they would have travelled to a meeting, and actually seen the people they were talking to. Yeah, I know, productivity. However, a conference call is cheap, and if it’s a waste of time, who cares? Not so productive.

I can’t work in the chairs, and the desks are the wrong height, so I take my laptop, put on my Bose noise-cancellers and find an armchair(!) to work in for as long as I need to. I need the noise-cancellers because there are people talking in loud-and-clear telephone voices everywhere. No work requiring concentration gets done in that office except under headphones. Want to know why bank systems keep going wrong? One reason is that the on-shored workforce can’t concentrate because they keep bashing each other’s elbows, and they can’t focus enough to see the edge case they missed, which is why you see that webpage telling you there’s been an error. The air-conditioning is at least two levels cheap below where it needs to be for so many people and computers, and as we found out when there was a fire in the cafe on a lower floor, the air is re-cycled, not exchanged. The place smelled of damp-bonfire smoke all day.

It doesn’t help that the uber-manager is two hundred miles away and appears once a week. That affects the way the unter-managers are motivated and behave. They aren’t getting regular in-person verbal and body-language feedback from the only person who matters in their (working) lives. All they get are e-mails and the boss’s carefully managed behaviour on visiting day. The unters don’t feel secure or validated. Absentee uber-managers are not a good idea.

I find the place draining: lord alone knows how I get to the gym afterwards. The most I can hope for after this monumental whinge is that I stop wondering if it’s something physiological or some pop-science nonsense about getting older.

Okay. That’s the whinge over. Let’s try to be constructive here.

Retirement Thoughts - Part One

I can collect my State Pension from the 6th January 2020, about eight months later than they originally promised the schoolboy me. For some reason, this thought is at the front of my mind a lot of the time. Being able to ‘retire’, to give up the daily grind, to lay in bed until I want to get up, instead of when overcrowded trains say I need to get up. And most of all, never to have to go through the annual appraisal process, which is like going into a dark room where someone might throw the lights on and shout ‘Suprise’, or they might just stab you in the back over and over and then expect you to get back to your desk and work.

However, I’m cranky and odd enough at the moment as an older man who lives alone. Withdrawing from all contact with the human race might not be good for me. Except...

Was I the only person who wondered about equating dealing with the people at work and on trains as ‘contact with the human race’? Is it really? Are they really? I don’t mean that they may as well be Russian bots... no actually I do. Because the contact we have with people at work is not the contact the therapists and psychologists allege we need. And it’s certainly not the ‘intimate’ - the great weasel word of pop-psychology - contact they promise will make us all feel better.

Retirement partly promises a respite: the end of all the keeping-up-appearances for the sake of what-for-Christ’s-sake? Partly it’s a threat: much smaller income, no protection from inflation, continued exposure to property taxes and income tax. And sometimes I look at it as an opportunity: time to rest at last, to watch movies, to read and re-read, to potter round the house and garden, because that’s self-care as well, to work out at the local gym in the quiet periods. And maybe to go on the occasional Diamond Geezer-esque excursion on my Freedom Pass. I don’t want to go round the world: it’s not what it was when I was at school, and I can’t afford it.

So how long do I go on working? Until January 2020 at least. And unless I get a bad appraisal, I may as well hang around to collect what little bonus it will be, which means I stay until June. If I don’t take much holiday, I can walk away with three week’s holiday money as well.

Or I could ask to do a four-day week, and work from home Mondays. This still brings money in, but it’s the expensive option. I lose twenty per cent of my income and that’s where a lot of the cash saving is coming from. Reduced days feels like a compromise that won’t really work. The point is to be free of work forever, to change the way I live, not just to have an extra day off. ‘Working from home’ on Fridays gets much the same thing accomplished.

I retire full-time or carry on working full-time. And I do that until I really can’t do it anymore. As in, I get half-way to work on the morning commute and go sit in a caff until the rush hour passes. That’s going to be a long time.

Until then, and to get through to at least June 2020, I need to adjust how I’m eating, working, exercising, challenging and entertaining myself. It really is getting to the point where I believe that simply going through the commute-work-gym-commute cycle is taking as much energy as I have. This is not true, but thinking makes it so. It’s not forever, but the next twenty months. I can do twenty months, but I’d rather work out some way of not thinking of it quite like that. I may carry on working until I drop, or I may barely make it to June 2020. All sorts of political and economic mayhem can happen between now and then, and I may be working for the rest of my life, or lots of us might be out of work.

Get The Drums Right: The Free Jazz of Miles Davis

I’ve been listening to some of the Miles Davis live concerts from 1973. I love the studio album Get Up With It but I found Agartha and Pangera live albums a noise. Mind you, I found the first FIllmore album a bit ragged. This time round, I find the music oddly compelling, even though it’s still a mess compared to the studio work.

Then I realised. It’s Miles doing Free Jazz. As he’d been doing since the mid-60’s.

Go back to the early Sixties, and there’s not a lot of difference between Miles In The Studio and Miles On The Stage. The live performances are generally a little faster and more intense, the studio performances are more polished and considered. Then came the Second Great Quintet: Shorter / Hancock / Williams / Carter. Shorter, Hancock and Williams could all play free jazz, and often did, on stage. Miles let them: that’s what he had hired them for. Carter was there to stop them going totally berserk.

The cliches of ‘free jazz’ include lots of over-blowing, honking, squeaking, rattling percussion, discords, noisy guitars, a very busy but inaudible bassist, no obvious tune nor chord structure, and clearly some rule that a hint of a tuneful phrase will be punished by loss of any and all grants the player may be receiving. And Lord alone there’s still enough of that stuff going around. This is a less noisy but just as directionless example:


However, ‘free jazz’ can also have a defined rhythm and a something like a tune. Here’s Coltrane doing it:


Coltrane went on from the sublime heights of the Village Vanguard sessions to the organised chaos of Ascension...


...and then even further out. Miles did not follow. That sort of stuff was not going to buy him any Ferraris. He recognised as well that he couldn’t go on doing If I Were A Bell live. I suspect Miles realised that the Vanguard sessions work because of the telepathic communication between Elvin Jones and John Coltrane. One reason Ascension does not work is that not even Elvin Jones can figure out what he should be doing. The rhythm section comes across as an afterthought.

What Miles realised was: get the drums right, discourage honking and over-blowing, the soloists can blow as free as they like, and it will make sense to a reasonably hip audience. So he hired three guys who could do free jazz and let them figure out how to do free jazz in the Miles Davis Quintet. One of those was the seventeen year-old Tony Williams: Miles knew that kid could drum up a storm in three different time signatures at once. He followed Williams with Jack de Johnette, who drummed up a rock-influenced storm, and he followed de Johnette with the powerhouse combination of Al Foster and James Mtume, who did heaven knows what, because it’s not jazz, funk or rock, but is exactly what Miles needed to make his then style of free jazz accessible to the majority of jazz fans.

Because what’s going on over that percussion is as free and weird as anything anyone else in free jazz ever did.

Ben Judah's This Is London

I bought this book a while ago, but wasn’t in the mood to read what I thought it was until a couple of weeks ago. It isn’t a series of bleeding-heart tales of how bad life is for illegal immigrants to London. It is a kind of psycho-sociology. Judah says he wrote the book to understand this new London of the early 2010’s, full of Africans and Eastern Europeans, that has appeared in the last twenty years and that he doesn’t really understand.

Judah’s book avoids the bleeding heart. He lets his people speak, even when, like the rich kids, they are total jerks. He describes the quality of the light, the smells, the chicken shops, the smell, the damp, the bodies pressed together in the subways and the doss-houses. The description of the bus stop on the Old Kent Road at four in the morning, and the ride in to the City of London, is masterful. He shows us the strange London of the early 2010’s, that will be a distant memory by 2030 (“Daddy, were there really African witch-doctors in south London?”) because in the end, the best way to drive away the poor is to import the well-off, to gentrify, to build high-rise apartments in the Elephant and Castle. Then the doss-houses get converted to middle-class accommodation again. Look at what happened in Notting Hill, or Brooklyn today. And Judah sees that as well.

Invisible in his book are the middle-class immigrants, with their university degrees, knowledge-economy jobs, and reasonably stable family backgrounds, who are already integrated into the world-wide Westernised middle-class that exists in Egypt as much as Australia. This is a clue. It isn’t the foreign-ness of the people that strikes him, it’s the sheer poverty. Why would anyone come from Albania to some doss-house in East Zone Three?

Immigration is manifold. There is a constant, small flow of people from one country to another that has been going on forever: these are the hard-working, skilled, risk-takers of myth, the ‘Brain Drainers’ who went from the UK to the US in the 1960’s, the professionals who seem to happier in a different country than the one they were born and raised in, and in the 1980’s and 1990’s the children of the elites in politically unstable countries, sent to The USA or Europe for safety. To all intents and purposes they assimilate, even if they don’t eat British food and prefer to worship the Gods they brought with them. This is Good Immigration.

Then there are people who are imported to fill a specific need. The Irish who built the UK’s roads and railways in the nineteenth-century. The West Indians brought over on the SS Windrush to drive the buses and trains because London Transport would not or could not compete with the salaries being offered by the reviving post-war British manufacturing industry. The Poles who came over to fill the skilled-worker shortage caused by the abandonment of apprenticeship schemes in the 1970’s. And the nurses poached by agencies from every third-world country for an NHS that cannot or will not compete with the salaries that men and women who would have been nurses are now offered by banks and other service industries. This is Employer-Pull Migration: there are jobs waiting for the immigrants.

Then there is Push-Migration. The immigrants are more or less thrown out of their countries. Castro’s boat-lifts of the 1980’s and 1990’s are the paradigm: he emptied his jails and hospitals, added a few old people and children for press photos, and packed them off to Florida, seventy-five miles away. All those people who passed through Ellis Island? They were the weak men and obstreperous women who were going to pull the village or the small town down in the next bad winter after the last bad harvest: the people who could not (the men) or would not (the women) pull their weight when the going got tough. Don’t forget all those criminals the UK exported to Australia and to the US for about a hundred years. I’m sure other European countries did the same. Nobody now doubts that the million-strong Angela’s Army of 2016, mostly young men of military age, were the misfits, petty criminals, mentally-unstable and generally useless, carefully selected by the village elders, and shoved onto the NGO lorries, and told not to come back.

Pushed-Migrants are the unskilled, the weak, the mentally-ill, the criminal, the gullible and a horde of naive dreamers exploited by con-men telling them how easy it is to set up an International Business in London, where the money grows on trees. Polish builders brought over by dodgy agencies aside, these are the people Judah is writing about.

The third wave of immigration is driven by, populated by, and produces profits for, criminals, from drug-suppliers, through crooked landlords packing in four-on-the-floor and three-in-the-shed, to families who don’t pay their Filipina maid’s national insurance for years. (Judah blushingly notes that these are almost always Jewish employers: the French and the Germans and the British pay fairly and on time.) Criminal too are the agencies breaking UK employment law by only hiring Eastern Europeans, and only advertising the jobs in foreign countries, and then shielding employers from their full obligations to the workers with zero hours contracts and pseudo-self-employment. He sees it as exploitation, but actually it is crime.

The UN’s and EU’s ideal of Free Movement of People is not supposed to mean Free Movement for gangsters, drug barons, pimps and their prostitutes, and endless numbers of gulled low-skill workers. Yet it means that far, far more than it means Free Movement for decent middle-class graduates from Poland to get jobs as data analysts in market research firms in London. What we’ve learned is that the first people through newly-opened borders are not doctors and research physicists, but the advance guard of the gangs, looking for drug markets to take over, and flats for their prostitutes.

Judah notices how the poor immigrants bring their institutions, food, religions, social structures, crime, and beliefs with them. The woman who lives in Lithuania E16, shopping at a Lithuanian supermarket, speaking Lithuanian at home, watching Lithuanian television; the Africans with their witch-doctors and exorcisms. Everyone eating their home food and drinking their home beers - especially the Poles.

Which brings us to the idea of ‘integration’. We think that the integrated immigrant should ‘behave like us’. Who are the poor immigrants expected to behave like? They can’t afford the middle-class life, and who would want to behave like the English poor? Why watch awful British TV soap-operas when you can watch awful Lithuanian soap-operas whose characters you already know? In many cases, the immigrant poor sense they have better moral and social standards and practices than the English poor. The poor never live like the middle classes, as the middle classes never live like the rich. Who isn’t integrated with whom?

What does ‘integration’ mean in a post-modern economy and society? Immigrants must enter the country legally, else their first act on its land it to break its laws. Then they must do the same as any child born there: they must abide by its laws, earn a living, pay their due taxes, and behave in public as the locals do. How they behave in private is their business, as long as the taxpayer does not end up picking up the costs. These are the same requirements placed on the children of the citizens of that country. (The children must learn to speak and read the language, the adult immigrants should learn to speak and read ‘enough’. Some languages are almost deliberately withheld from non-natives, as the natives prefer to practice their English / French / other colonial language.) ‘Integration’ is not watching Eastenders instead of the Nigerian equivalent, it is letting daughters go to university, not using counterfeit train tickets to get to the building site, and not running a heroin distribution operation from the back of a dingy corner-shop, just as for the native children it is not disrupting classrooms and for the native businessmen it is not running Ponzi schemes. Native-born people can be as un-integrated as any Romanian sent by his debt collectors to beg on the streets of London.

I read the title of Judah’s book as This Is London (As Well). The Other London, where people have jobs, functional lives, friends, families, and don’t break the law. That London has no glamour, almost no piquancy, and little colour. After all, most of those people, on the trains into Waterloo and on the District Line, earn well into the top salary decile. And they have no secrets and no stories. At least, no stories that the reader will want to read.