And now for something very different indeed

Yesterday's music was Maslanka's harmonious Woodwind Quintets. Let's go to the other end of the scale with a massive dollop of Luciano Berio. If you asked someone relatively bright what modern classical sounded like, they'd mutter about screaming and no tunes.

They'd be thinking, I suspect, of Berio, Stockhausen (genius, but barking mad) and perhaps early Turnage. I therefore recommend Berio's Sinfonia and Eindrücke, both of which fulfil these criteria, though the latter is slightly easier on the ear.

The point is that this music is like death metal: it's meant to reproduce the experience of a world without rationality, a world in which one lot of people can put 6 million other people in gas chambers without losing a night's sleep. The harmonies, tunes and neat structures of old classical music, like the poetry and art of the time, just don't tell the truth of the human condition. We had the most advanced technology and skills in every sphere of achievement, and we used them to kill each other on a monumental scale: this is what's meant by modernism. So artists, poets, novelists, sculptors and composers (gradually) stopped writing pretty music for summer afternoons.

Sinfonia isn't directly about the horrors, but it is explicitly about the strange new world we found ourselves in: the text sung is fragments of Claude Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked, a founding text of modern anthropology - and literary criticism - which first proposed structural analysis (of myths, in this case).

Or at least, the good ones did. The second-raters still took commissions for pretty music from cowards. I still listen to plenty of it (Bax, for instance) because there's lots of beauty in the world and I can't spend my entire life contemplating the holocaust (unlike death metal enthusiasts). But there's certainly a need for ugliness and challenge in music. Here's the first movement of Sinfonia and some 'nice' Berio - his Folksong arrangements.

Cravat Twats

The Map Twats went indoors yesterday, for a performance by the National Youth Orchestra at Birmingham Symphony Hall. Before that, we went to The Wellington, a fine real ale pub in central Brum which encourages customers to bring their own cheese. Dan did the honours, providing some fine Brie, and Oxford Blue, some goats' cheese, good bread, Greek olives and onion marmalade. I turned up with Italian salami and game pie. The other customers seemed to be divided between admiration and contempt for our effete picnic. 

The concert was partly aimed at getting under-25s into classical music. Musically, it was a great success, but demographically it was an utter failure. The thin crowd consisted of players' relatives, very old people and the Map Twats (average age 33). The 12-year old behind me loftily informed his mother that the NYO are 'copying the NCO and aren't nearly as good this year as they were last year'. I moved seats. Unfortunately, the man next to me was no improvement. He poked me every time the Berio and Strauss pieces quoted from Mahler, recommended Bruckner's Fourth because 'Hitler played it after supper every evening' and then poked into my shopping bag. I'd bought a new shirt from Lewin, reduced from £85 to £25: he told me that when he worked in the city, Lewin used to make 'good' shirts but now they might come from anywhere…

Anyway, audience aside, the concert was stunning. The Berio was complex, fun and compelling, the Wiegold piece they started with was a nice piece of lightweight contemporary theatre, and the Strauss (Richard) was, well, German. Huge orchestra, kitchen sink, post-Romantic but impressive in its way. 

Today, it's the university's Black Wednesday meeting - I'll be live-blogging my last day in employment.

Culcha

New year's resolution: actually do more cultural stuff than buying Crumb CDs and listening to them in my room. As a good start, the Map Twats are having a rare foray inside, to hear the National Youth Orchestra playing Strauss (yuck), Berio and something new by Wiegold. All for £5: it's tomorrow so you can still make it.