Out of tune, as always.

Here we are again – another Friday rolls around and I try to make my sense of too much week.

Last week I read this article about Berlin underground managers trying to get rid of homeless people by playing classical music around their stations. Its headline is 'Art Shouldn't Be Weaponised'. Wrong. Art is, always has been, and always will be weaponised, if we accept that 'weaponise' is now an acceptable word.

In the narrow sense of course, the piece's horror at what was happening is entirely correct. Homeless people shouldn't be treated as inconveniences to be moved on out of sight, though you can understand the S-Bahn's sense that they can't deal with a wider social problem on their own. Nor should classical music be treated as kryptonite. It's happened in this country: every so often a news story appears explaining that a shopping centre or transit hub has started playing classical music to drive away the kids. In a variant example, high-pitched noises were played, audible only to children whose hearing hasn't yet deteriorated. Some of my students adopted these noises as their ring-tones so they could use their phones in class, which seemed fair.

So I'm annoyed in two ways: annoyed that children and the homeless are seen as a problem to be solved rather than as citizens who deserve fair treatment. But I'm also annoyed that classical music is assumed to be either so unpleasant or so bland that people will flee rather than endure it. I'm fully aware that classical music is seen as irrelevant to most people: I quite often try to introduce some when relevant to my classes, and it rarely evokes any interest at all. I mostly blame advertising and Classic FM, who between them have conspired to define 'classical' as 'nice bits to underscore a car ad'. It's spread to Radio 3 too, which is stuffed with very self-satisfied Tristrams, though at least Late Junction still exists.

I listen to a lot of music – indie, folk, bits of hiphop, the occasional metal album, some laptronica, a lot of twee and mathrock, and loads of music from the spectrum of 'classical' music – I like very early stuff, Bach, not a lot of baroque, some Classical, virtually no Romantics, modernism, serialism, minimalism and all the interesting stuff that's emerged in the twentieth century. There's a fair amount of music that's nice to have in the background after a tough day, but on the whole I'm thoroughly sick of the assumption that music of any sort, and classical in particular, is meant to be relaxing. Anything that relaxes us is conservative, lulling us into inaction. No wonder the worst regimes like the most hummable tunes. Or as Yes Prime Minister put it in 'The Ministerial Broadcast', 'Bach for new ideas', Stravinsky for 'no change' (around 19 minutes in). At least A Clockwork Orange paired horrendous antisocial violence – not just Alex's – with 'Ludwig van': ('he did no harm to anyone', says Alex as the state use his hero's music in a course of intensive aversion therapy):





Classical music addresses the tensions, excitements, horrors and social changes of existence, and therefore a lot of it isn't nice, relaxing or soothing for the savage breast etc.. At least the S-Bahn's goons understood that (atonal) music still has some emotional and intellectual power. One of the things I used to do in class was play whatever my students said was innovative, socially-challenging, heavy or rebellious music, and then introduce them to some of the more challenging pieces from the classical canon. Amongst them:







and of course these two notorious examples





(Yes, Stockhausen's Helicopter Quartet involves a quartet playing in separate helicopters. What of it?).

I don't hold any brief for the classical world and frequently find myself infuriated by its sexism, insularity and conservatism, but I do think that it includes a lot of thrilling, edgy work that attempts in a serious way to process or reflect the world we live in rather than provide muzak (the Penderecki above attempts to translate the moment of the Hiroshima bombing into music, for example), and I'm pretty sure that shorn of all its social paradigms, classical music by recent and living composers can reach new audiences. There is of course a counter-argument: that the more abstruse and deliberately jarring experimental music is, the more it becomes a closed shop for elite aesthetes who look down on the common herd as incapable of appreciating 'difficult' work. It's the same argument found in discussions of TS Eliot's poetry, and there's something in it – certainly Reich, Glass and some of the other minimalists reacted against serialism by returning to tonality, rock and jazz. However: if the lids are capable of listening to death metal, gabba, and the enormous range of EDM, they're more than capable of genuinely appreciating and enjoying Milton Babbitt, Stockhausen and George Crumb. But using the stuff to drive away young or poor people is no way to go about it, unless – and I may be grasping at straws here – the victims start to associate classical music with resistance and develop an underground anarchism-and-violas revolutionary movement.

Anyway, enough of this nonsense. This week's books: not many because I've been struggling with module guides and timetables (I lost). I finished Muriel Spark's Territorial Rights and wondered why I bothered. Some neat characterisation and witty observations but a hopelessly confused and pointless plot which went nowhere and didn't do justice to any of the weightier ideas thrown into the mixer. I also read another of the new slew of rural eve-of-fascism novels, following on from All Among The Barley. This one was Cressida Connolly's After The Party. Once again, the writing is very fine, the mode is simple realism and the structure is a retrospective narration designed to gradually reveal to the reader what the protagonist has got herself into. If you know much about posh British dabbling with fascism in the 1930s, you get the hang of it within the opening pages; if you don't, it takes a few chapters. After The Party concentrates on an upper-middle-class woman newly returned to Britain with her family, all of whom get sucked into the British Union of Fascism because 'something needs to be done' and it offers them a sense of community and purpose. You get a really good sense of the social milieu of genteel fascism as rural Tories' children abandon their social responsibilities and look (mystifyingly) for millenarian ways to prop up their ever-more-impossible way of life.

What doesn't work about it is Connolly's strategy of gradual revelation. The narrator tells us a lot about all the fun to be had at New Party/British Union of Fascists camps, so we assume that this is what hooks her. However, she also tells us that she's attending discussion groups, training sessions and all sorts of other events which would have been full of Mosley's specific, hard-edged attitudes and policies, such as anti-semitism and the abolition of democracy. The narrator doesn't try to downplay all this as a form of denial, it's just not present in any substantial way, which means that the problem is with the author, not the character. I'm not quite sure what I think about this but it feels like there's a degree of evasion, as though British fascists could be excused for their naivety within a febrile atmosphere, whereas an awful lot of them (see Richard Griffiths's Fellow Travellers of the Right) were under no illusions about what fascism meant at all. Yes, they probably did think that they'd still have drawing rooms and staff, but they also enthusiastically embraced Jew-hatred, feudalism and dictatorship on their own terms, not as by-products of putting themselves into the hands of the right chaps.

I also went to a fencing competition last week. Despite being old, fat and cack-handed, I came 5th and still bear the bruises to prove it. Only a couple of mistakes here and there stopped me getting even further too - annoying but better than being thoroughly trounced.

Enjoy your weekend.

Weir all crazee now*

Can you name a female composer other than Hildegard of Bingen? I bet most of us can't. I'm fairly knowledgeable about contemporary classical, and I struggle to get to ten (Nadia and Lili Boulanger, Saariaho, Imogen Holst (daughter of Gustav, still overlooked), Maconchy, Beamish, Bingham, Nicola LeFanu and Judith Weir. Why? Partly because I'm shockingly ill-informed of course, but also because classical music is one of the last bastions of patriarchal privilege. The 'High' Arts are where the men rule. They get the training, they get the jobs, they make the contacts and they get the critical attention. It's OK for women to perform – essential, given we've given up castrating boys thanks to the 'elf and safety mob as the Mail would no doubt put it – but there seems to be a structural resistance to women as creators of anything other than babies. There are female artists from the pre-feminist era, but relatively few because women weren't thought capable of philosophical, creative or abstract thought, barring them from the production, circulation and criticism of art. The music world is like the medical world: just as there are plenty of female nurses and junior doctors but almost no surgeons, there are lots of women filling the orchestral desks, few leaders, almost no conductors and very few regularly-performed composers.

A composer's sex shouldn't matter, but it does. Who knows how many great works have gone unperformed – or uncomposed – because a woman has been deterred from writing, or from learning to write, music? (And all this applies to non-white composers too). Classical music is split between the defenders of Culture who tend to be crusty reactionaries and hip young gunslingers eager to demonstrate the form's variety and openness to contemporary society. What brings them together is their white maleness. The 'new' composers are just as likely to be earnest young men playing with samplers as the traditionalists' heroes too which is really disappointing though as I say, it's structural. None of the composers, conductors, orchestra managers or whoever would admit to being sexist, but they do operate a boys' club. Why aren't women signing up for composition classes, or winning commissions, getting on the concert bills, or getting the various other hands up along the way? I refuse to accept the claim that they're somehow not good enough - there are plenty of mediocre men who get their work played (yes I'm looking at you, Terry Riley, Ravel, all the Strausses, Fauré, de Falla, Gorecki, Respighi

So here are some clips from some great female composers I like, starting with Judith Weir who has just been appointed Master (or Mistress, it's unclear yet) of the Queen's Musick. I know it's a silly title bound in to an embarrassing and outdated patronage system, but at least somebody has noticed that there are great composers with genitals on the inside. Enjoy.

Some Judith Weir (she writes operas too but I'm not that keen on those)





Some Nicola LeFanu, whom I really like:



Some solid Elizabeth Maconchy (mother of Nicola LeFanu - demonstrating that good role models and contacts help nurture another generation):



*Apologies. I couldn't resist that gag.

A grumpy old critic speaks

When I'm not listening to Bikini Kill and Graham Coxon demo tapes (he starts off with high-fi, the Royal Philarmonic string section and a full choir, then mixes it until he gets the desired lo-fi effect), I'm listening to a lot of choral music. Quite a bit of it is religious music, which is of course massively hypocritical of me given that I'm an atheist. I should also ask for my enthusiasm for ecclesiastical architecture to be taken into account.

In my defence, most of this religious music is in Latin. If I tried really hard, I could understand it, but I choose not to, so it's effectively a lovely meaningless sound drifting through my head. But it does bother me that I'm consuming music which is inspired by, and attempts to communicate, religious feeling and belief.

Oh well, I'm not going to avoid it in future. I just bought a CD of Wolfgang Rihm's choral music, and the excellent liner notes quote from Theodor Adorno, who has a similar problem with the genre:

choral sound, if it is not thoroughly worked out with full compositional force, already carries within it something illusory; that it produces the fatal semblance of a supposedly intact, secure world inside another which is completely different. This tendency originates in the very material of the choir, which all too easily allows the individual to believe he is subsumed in a mutual understanding and harmony between human beings of a kind that do not exist in the structure of present-day society; the conviviality of the chore engenders an artificial warmth. 

It's a very tempting argument, and one with which I have some sympathy. He's saying, essentially, that the loveliness of choral music allows the singer or listener to indulge in a fantasy of a perfect, harmonious world (that we've appropriated the term from music is significant). It's true: I listen to Tallis, Lauridsen and others when I want to wallow in a warm bath of sheer beauty. Adorno's right, too, in suspecting that this is evasive and lazy: modernist music that hurts your ears is music's way of representing the horrors of the twentieth century: Freud, WW1, the Holocaust, nuclear war. At the same time, we should also remember that this was true of Tallis and others in their own times: life was indeed nasty, brutish and short, even for composers (hence Tallis's very adroit turn from Catholic Latin music to English when Henry VIII started sharpening his axe). All the churches and monarchs for whom these composers wrote were committing genocide, torturing opponents and crushing their oppositions. It wasn't a secret - far from it.

I think we need to be a little more forgiving than Adorno. I don't think there's much wrong with occasionally turning away from the horrors and seeking a little peace. I am suspicious of modern composers who promote unrippled harmony, however. To know of the things we've done to each other and the planet and still churn out untroubled beauty is simply cowardice and dishonesty. Luckily, there are plenty of honest, unpretty composers out there. I'd like to post Rihm's Astralis, a work full of doubt but can't find it online. Here's one of his motets. And some prettier work.



Tallis's Spem in Alium. Perfect for lying on the sofa in the dark. And for recharging your religious batteries if you're that way inclined. Probably.



Finally, an extract of Garbarek's Officium. I don't like the saxophone. I don't like jazz. But Garbarek improvising round the monastic sung offices with a saxophone somehow works.

Back to the forest clearances

Normal service is resumed in terms of book deliveries - 5 today. Four of them are minor Keith Roberts novels and short stories, some of them quite disturbing. A cursory glance makes it clear that - like Robert Heinlein and Brian Aldiss - Roberts' response to the 70s/80s was more technology + less political freedom: no democrat he.

'The Shack At Great Cross Halt' presents a Britain made dystopian by motorways and consumerism, but 'The Ministry of Children' presents comprehensive schools as hellholes of savagery. In 'The Big Fans', wind farms cause the apocalypse (it's as though Roberts was writing Telegraph and Mail headlines 40 years in advance). 'Our Lady of Desperation' presents a Stalinist Britain which taxes artists at 100% (my guess is that Roberts had just received a tax bill), while 'Missa Privata' pitches a heroic opera singer against Communist Britain… all very tedious, and not very perceptive: the UK voted in Thatcher the same year this collection appeared.

Also appeared: Martin Johnes's Wales Since 1939, which looks really good, and comes with a complementary website full of extra resources. Talking of Wales, here's Welsh avant-gardist Jane Arden's Anti-Clock.



Also in today - the Berlin Philharmonic's 1964 recording of The Magic Flute. Weirdo masonic-occult text, amazing music.

Female composers' special

There's an interesting discussion going on over at the Guardian about why there are so few female classical composers. My hunch is that in past times - and still regrettably today but to a lesser extent - it's because women were though incapable of higher reasoning: writing, composing, philosophising etc. Book IV of Paradise Lost makes it clear that Adam's to do the thinking and Eve's 'happier' because she can rely on him. She likes prettiness and flowers and wind and water while he worries about the theology.

Women were also excluded from the formal and informal social networks which produced composers: universities, the master-student relationships which provided informal apprenticeships, access to orchestras and performance commissions. Like their author sisters, I suspect that women composers existed, but didn't get performed. In this regard, at least, pop music is streets ahead, though there's plenty of old-fashioned misogyny there too.

I'm largely talking about the modern period of course: before that, composition was - like most creative work - not something to which an individual attached his or her name. There were - as a Mel Marshall points out - 'squillions' of 'nun composers', one of whom is known to us individually, Hildegard von Bingen (I picked this particular clip so you can compare the advert's treatment of women and medieval culture's respect). Then there were occasional oddities, such as the rather impressive Barbara Strozzi

It's getting better, but there's still a worrying disproportion. So here are some snippets by my favourite female composers.

Nicola LeFanu:



Her Irish mother Elizabeth Maconchy:



Some Sally Beamish:



and finally some wonderful Nadia Boulanger:

I have a cunning plan

How's this for a way to separate the academic sheep from the goats?

Offer an optional exam paper at the end of the final year. One unseen question from anywhere on the curriculum. The grade you get for it will be the degree you're awarded.

First-class students might do it because they're confident. Other students can take a gamble. If you're failing or barely passing, it could be a lifeline, and you couldn't lose out. I reckon it's a winner.

Anyway, just a thought. The postman's been. I got the new REM album: the vinyl came in an empty box big enough for REM themselves to have been inside. You may be wondering why I've bought another REM album. It's traditional. The tradition is for all the press to claim that it's a 'return to form' and for the actual music to be 'not quite a return to form'. Actually, from the singles I've heard, this one may actually be the fabled return to form. Very annoyingly, even though the vinyl is quite expensive, they don't offer a free download as other bands do, so if I like it, I'll have to buy it again. Perhaps they assume that all vinyl fans are reactionary luddites. In reality, proper luddites stick to wax cylinders. Splitters!

It must be hard to be a band like REM: they created some of the greatest pop music of the last 30 years, so obviously not every song is going to be up there with Murmur or Document, but they don't want to give up because they actually care about music. The other problem is that quality isn't the only variable: critical and public taste changes in unpredictable ways: what was feted ten years ago can be dismissed by the very same critics, often for arbitrary reasons.

What else has turned up? James Herbert's 48 (28 Days Later but written earlier and with British Union of Fascist monsters in the ruins of London). Striggio's Mass in 40 Parts (a newly-discovered gem), a Tim Powers' Cold War fantasy thriller Declare (recently nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke prize.

Getting Mahlered

I wandered over to Brummidge last night for a performance of Mahler's 8th Symphony, with the CBSO, the CBSO Chorus, CBSO Youth Chorus, CBSO Children's Chorus (the only ones who sang from memory) and the Hallé Choir, conducted by Andris Nelsons, their hotshot star. The solo singers were Marina Shaguch, Erin Wall, Carolyn Sampson, Katarina Karnéus , Mihoko Fujimura , Sergei Semishkur, Christopher Maltman and Stephen Gadd. 


As you can probably tell, it's a monster - a choir of several hundred, a massive orchestra supplemented by pianos, organ and all sorts of other bits and pieces. I'm not a huge fan of Mahler or his period, but the 8th is currently hailed as the greatest symphony of all, so I thought I should slip along. 


It was an astonishing experience. The hall was completely packed - I got a seat right on the top level, eyeballing the lighting rig, high enough to make me a bit queasy leaning over the rail to watch the musicians. There was a huge buzz of expectation - if you're going to perform The Big One, you've got to get it right. It's the classical experience - massive choirs and huge set pieces literally shaking the hall, but also delicate solos, moments of tenderness and calm, crescendos and tiny, quiet interludes - the soloists have to be at the top of their game, but without a brilliant choir and orchestra, it can't be done.


It was done last night, in some style. The choir spilled out into the arena. A second brass section was installed in the upper circle. Singers appeared amongst the audience - one appeared silently a few yards from me, delivered the most beautiful solo, and glided away - and the children were as convincing as the adults, despite singing in Latin and German for 85 minutes without a break. Everything was perfect - the orchestra, the choirs, the soloists. No weaknesses, no languors, everyone responding to perfection in response to a conductor they clearly loved. It's the most complete musical experience I've ever seen. 


The crowd went wild at the end. I've been to some amazing concerts, but I've never seen 1000 pensioners (mostly) express genuine ecstasy before - stamping, whistling, demanding multiple bows from the performers. I was dazed at the end, genuinely overcome not only by the sheer noise, but by the artistic ability on display. 

Here's Rattle conducting the National Youth Orchestra in the opening and closing sections. Even if you hate classical music, turn it up loud and give it a go.

Welcome to my office

I really, really like this desk (in an architecture library, naturally). Given the rate at which I buy books, I could actually build it this afternoon.

Books in today:
Stewart Lee's memoir/exploration of how humour works, How I Escaped My Certain Fate.
Lumsdon's Best Shropshire Walks, which looks a little pedestrian (thankyewverymuch, I'm here all week).
A used copy of Weldon Kees' Collected Poems (I read a couple of them recently after an MA dissertation mentioned them, and was seriously impressed. Like Simon Armitage but American and even less likely to turn up to pre-arranged meetings as he disappeared without trace in 1955).
A secondhand copy of Ben Highmore's Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (or as his publishers have it, ben highmore's cityscapes cultural readings in the material and symbolic city - clearly capitals and punctuation COST MORE).
And a CD of Othmar Schoek's Notturno for string quartet and voice because it's brilliant.

I've just finished Terry Pratchett's latest novel, I Shall Wear Midnight, and I'm hugely impressed. He's got such emotional range, an active liberal political and moral sensibility and a real grasp on the pace of a novel. Now I've moved on to Murray's Skippy Dies - a comic tale of overprivileged Dublin schoolboys towards the tail-end of the ludicrous Celtic Tiger period, with a seriously dark heart - very good indeed (and now being filmed by Neil Jordan). Its accompanied very well by Pärt's Kanon Pokajanen - much less bland than the Symphony 4 which fills the rest of the CD.