One at a time.

You know my taste in wet, deservedly-obscure jangly indie bands, but you may not know that my favourite pieces of music of all time are J. S. Bach's Cello Suites, apparently written solely for private practice at the request of a pupil. Each Suite is based on the same tune, using the same forms of (originally dance) rhythms and styles: there's the Prelude, then an Allemande, a Courante, a Sarabande, Minuets, Gigues and Gavottes.

Benjamin, otherwise a very discerning chap and prize-winning author, was firmly resistant to my urging - it took a world-famous author, a professor of music and a PhD student (who fully deserves a scholarship for her part) with a baroque cello to persuade him of the Suites' worth. Giving him makes him a better human being.

My work with him done, I turn to you: listen to this, over and over again until you realise that this is definition of genius. Here's an extract from No. 4, my favourite. It's played by Rostropovich, second only to Yo-Yo Ma's version.



The Allemande from Suite No. 6:



And the ultimate, the sublime Prelude and Sarabande to Suite No. 1, this time played by Yo-Yo Ma and Mischa Maisky

Educational Ambrosia

My friend Benjamin is doing Manchester University's famed MA in Creative Writing - led by Colm Tóibín and staffed by a range of top quality authors who are too good to make a living by selling books.

This was yesterday's class:

…how music can affect our writing. Tóibín brought in the head of music with a stack of different recordings of Bach's Cello Suites (which, incidentally, you're right about and I was wrong about) to explain the variations between them. Oh, and a PhD student, with a baroque cello, to play some of them live. Heaven. 

I am utterly jealous. How I wish all students could have this kind of experience. How diminishingly likely it is that - underfunded and understaffed and unresourced as we are - that our students will get chances like this.

Bach to the Future

I suspect that, like the aeroplane makers I mentioned earlier, this is an all-male preserve. A man has taken an obsolete computer running on floppy discs. Then he's added 3 more floppy drives. Then he's used each disc's capacity to play 4 notes of music to make the computer play Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

That's a lot of work to make something sound quite bad. So why am I so impressed?



Here's what it should sound like.

Sound and fury

Oh look, today's music is Bach. I'll do you a favour and pass over everything this composer wrote in one day's entry (although Douglas Adams claimed that he wrote so much that 'Bach' was a cover for aliens).

I've got choral music, the complete organ works (that's 40CDs alone) and my favourite pieces of music ever, the Cello Suites. Everybody knows the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (check the great animation below), and the Passions have never been unpopular, but the Cello Suites were basically forgotten about until Pablo Casals (a great lefty cellist) happened upon a manuscript in a junk shop. They never fail to inspire me. When I'm happy, they suit my mood. When I'm tired, they lift me, when I'm unhappy, they soothe.

A little bit of culture

Ah, Monday. It seems like only a couple of days since Friday and my office chair is still warm.
That said - excellent weekend. Very cultural, apart from my language while watching Stoke City lose a cup match to Chelsea.

Saturday night saw me attend Mumford and Sons, a young indie-folk band making waves over here. I knew they'd become the centre of a cult but hadn't actually heard a note of their music - I went because I got Emma a ticket for Christmas and thought it would be rude to send her solo. The only other thing I know about them is that Cynical Ben thinks they're the Worst Band In The World.

Are they? No. Live, they (and the support band, Fanfarlo) are brilliant - a mix of folk, Arcade Fire, Beulah and (in the odd apocalyptic number, War of the Worlds). The album, to which I listened the next day, is much flatter and the lyrics don't stand up to close scrutiny, but they are utterly thrilling live.

Sod off, by the way, to the bunch of students behind me. They chattered extremely loudly and inanely through all the songs, breaking off occasionally to shout the first line of a chorus half a bar before the band, presumably to prove that they knew the words. They are, collectively, a warty buttock.

In total contrast, I went to see Simon Rattle conducting Bach's St. Matthew's Passion at Birmingham Symphony Hall (3 hours, distinctly anti-semitic, in German - though with electronic surtitles in an very good typeface). A sellout crowd heard a period-instrument rendition (complete with viols, which I love), a children's choir for the first movement and a stunning set of soloists. The snobs next to me told each other that it was too fast but as I'd read the same opinion in a newspaper recently, I suspect they were trying to impress each other. I'm not expert enough to know whether the rapturous reception Rattle and the performers got at the end was due to the music or his superstar status, but I went away extremely happy.

Accordion Crimes

Sorry to any Proulx fans. This isn't a crime. I always thought the accordion was for drunks at village weddings. I think so no longer, having heard this Ukrainian chap playing Bach's Passacaglia in C Minor and making it sound like he had a church organ on his knee. (Via Alex Ross)

Court Short

What an appalling waste of a day. Rather than swimming, writing and blogging, I dragged myself out by 8 a.m. to get to Brierley Hill, where Dudley County Court is based. It's a converted office block in the midst of a depressing business estate (mostly To Let) - but at least the legal toffs have to travel through the concrete jungle to get there.

Once inside, the victim, her mother, their (Lithuanian) translator and I were left in an airless, featureless room for 6 hours. We got over the language barrier and chatted a bit: our first meeting was rather fraught and social niceties weren't observed. I've been to Lithuania so we talked about Vilnius, and the translator studied in the Philology department at Vilnius University, where I gave a paper, so we discovered mutual acquaintances, but after a while, boredom, the upcoming confrontation, and the artificiality of the situation intruded on our sunny dispositions.

Turns our there was nothing to anticipate. First the defendant's lawyer and his interpreter (don't know which language) went to the cells to point out that he was guilty as sin and should give up now in exchange for a lighter sentence. Then there were apparently several hours of legal argument. Then we were informed that the defendant had sacked his lawyer and the new one would need a few months to acquaint himself with the case.

So my day was wasted, the victim was left without resolution and still clearly terrified of this bloke, a professional translator had been hired for the day, plus a night in a hotel, plus the very expensive legal teams (all paid for by the state) - what a farce. And it's all going to happen again at some point in the future. At least I got to read the paper in peace, get a long way through Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and avoid a deathly staff discussion day, though the architecture and decor were virtually indistinguishable from the university. There's a joke about incarceration and Kafka in there somewhere, but I'll leave it to you.

Still, I saw a little bit more of the West Midlands and can tick it off the list of places to visit. Dudley was closed and Brierley Hill had clearly recently been used for a post-apocalypse film (although Survivors made the postwar city look livelier and cleaner). There's something rather sweet about listening to Bach's Cello Suites while gazing out on post-industrial decay, the grey relieved only by the occasional splash of vomit on the pavement.

How's your day been?

Soothing the savage breast

I was listening to Tosca earlier. Despite its passion, I decided it was the wrong material for marking - wild, bloody and furious as it is in places. Now I'm listening to the Tortelier recording on Bach's Cello Suites and I'm feeling much more generous. Up next - probably Flos Campi (my favourite Vaughan Williams) or some plainchant.

The moral is: if you want better marks, buy me the right kind of music.

Wig Out to the In Sound from the 18th Century

Today's an all-Mozart, all-CD affair. The latter because S-Z in rock and all my classical vinyl are inaccessible due to the 1m x 1m x 1m cube of unread books currently testing the floor joists at the end of the bed. The former because I decided that I should acquaint myself a little better with old Wolfgang and invested in a 170-CD complete works. I'm heavily into medieval and Renaissance music, utterly devoted to Bach (the cello suites will be this planet's greatest contribution to galactic civilisation long after our extinction), and hugely into 20th-century classical music, but there's a yawning void where my knowledge of Mozart, the Classical composers and the Romantics should be.

I'm no snob - I'll happily make comparisons between the Field Mice, the Boo Radleys and Johann S. and distrust those devoted solely to classical music (the last one I met recommended Bruckner because 'the Fuhrer listened to his music after dinner every evening'), and there's an awful lot of conservative dross (on heavy rotation over at Classic FM), but at the same time, classical music doesn't have to pander to playlists, short-term profit or people half-listening. Dylan eviscerated mainstream America in the 60s and 70s - many of the major classical composers did the same. You can't listen to Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, or certain Stockausen without understanding that music, even wordless music, can pose just as great a challenge to the status quo as any other protest song. It's only when rich people, subsidies and 'the great and the good' hijack this stuff that all the life's sucked out of it.

So I guess that all I can do is encourage you to storm the concert halls and take them back. Start by going to the Music Maze for Adults run at the CBSO Centre by the Birmingham Contemporary Music group. Turn up with any old instrument from your loft (they'll give you one if you don't have anything), and spend the evening making thrilling, visceral music - skill levels unimportant. 15th May, CBSO centre, 6.o0-9.30, £10. Listen to Late Junction on Radio 3, the show that plays anything from anywhere in the world (including rock, dance and probably even donk) as long as it's interesting.

First video up is an extract from the Penderecki - it's horrible because, well, nuclear war is horrible. Could pop music do this? Possibly, but the industry and our expectations aren't really set for 'searing' as a positive term. The second on is Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach rather beautifully.

I've given up - the people across the road are playing dancehall so loud that my windows are shaking. I'm unmoved.