Sawyl

11:38 pm: A fun evening out
An evening out for the first time in quite a while. So much so, that the others ruthlessly mocked me for my stay-at-home tendencies. A fun time was had by all, initially at the Rusty Bike and later at The Angel, before I decided to call it a night.

Tags: bricolage

10:04 pm: The Rest is Noise
It's taken me a month or so, but I've finally finished The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross' excellent history of 20th century classical music, starting with the shock of Strauss' Salome and ending with John Adams' dazzling Nixon in China.

I really enjoyed the book — hardly surprising, given all the quotes I've blogged along the way — and I've learnt a alot, particular about the friendships and rivalries that developed between particular composers and particular schools of composition. And if there is a slight tendency to neglect British composers in favour of their American contemporaries — although Britten and, particularly, Peter Grimes, are covered in some detail — this is probably only a sign of provincialism on my part.

Just in case any further proof is needed as to the greatness of the book, I'll conclude with a short quote from the epilogue about the relationships between classical and popular music:

[S]ome of the liveliest reactions to twentieth-century and contemporary classical music have come from the pop arena, roughly defined. The microtonal tunings of Sonic Youth, the opulent harmonic designs of Radiohead, the fractured, fast-shifting time signatures of math rock and intelligent dance music, the elegaic orchestral arrangements that underpin songs by Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom: all these carry on the long-running conversation between classical and popular traditions.

Amen.

Tags: books, reviews, the rest is noise

06:35 pm: Astrology versus astrophysics
A truly excellent correction from the Guardian:

In Pass notes No 2,677: The universe, we contributed a further surprising element to the discovery that the universe is beige-coloured by revealing that two astrologists had conducted the research. Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry are astrophysicists (4 November, page 3, G2).

I'm impressed — the word "astrologist" is completely new to me...

Tags: guardian, schadenfreude

09:05 pm: Messiaen's sweet tooth
It seems as though Olivier Messiaen's life really was simple and blameless as might be guessed from his music:

For the last three decades of his life, Messiaen lived with his second wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, in an old building in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris, in the area of Montmartre. As Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone report in their biography of the composer, the accommodations were fairly spartan, with one communal bathroom on each floor of the building. The main living quarters were decorated in devout Catholic style, plastic crucifixes all around. When the composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen called on Messiaen, he looked to see what books and records were on the shelves, but could find only a copy of the Bible and various recordings of Messiaen's own works.

No one reported anything like a seamy underside to the composer's personality. The conductor Kent Nagano, who collaborated closely with Messiaen in his last years, was once pressed to tell some unflattering or otherwise revealing anecdote about his mentor, and all he had to offer was a story about how Messiaen and Loriod had once devoured an entire pear tart at one sitting.

Elsewhere, Alex Ross reported that Messiaen's sweet tooth played a role in the commissioning of Des canyons aux étoiles…, which the composer reluctantly agreed to undertake after being plied with an enormous cake covered in crême chantilly and pistachios.

Tags: the rest is noise

09:34 pm: Scientific and political ethics
It seems to me that Evan Harris, in a letter in today's Guardian gets the ethics of being an independent scientific advisor just right:

If a distinguished scientist — following appointment as an adviser to the government — has to adapt his or her comments, depending on the government's policy, then they are not independent.

When they become government advisers, the only additional requirements scientists take on — with respect to public comments — is that of confidentiality, and making clear that they do not speak for the government.

Tags: politics

10:27 pm: Hippy-dippy tendencies
Another quote from Alex Ross, this time on Karlheinz Stockhausen:

Bright, glib, fair-haired, collegial, Stockhausen exuded what would later be called postive energy, although deep-seated authoritarian tendencies made him a sometimes insufferable colleague. In later years he revealed a mystical streak, bordering on the hippy-dippy; it turned out that he had lived many past lives, and that he claimed to be extraterrestrial in origin. Stockhausen was, in fact, born in a village outside Cologne, in 1928.

Tags: music, the rest is noise

10:20 pm: A good end to the weekend
Despite having done both in isolate, today was the day of the first biking/running set since before my vacation and I wasn't looking forward to it in the slightest. But I needn't have worried. The bike ride was good and the run was, well, a positive delight. I enjoyed it so much that I seriously considered running the same route a second time just because I could. Definitely one of the best runs of the last few months.

Tags: cycling, running

02:39 pm: The problems of rationalism
Via BoingBoing, I happened across this piece in Wired on vaccines and the antivax movement. Skipping the medical stuff, I was rather taken with these two paragraphs which rather neatly sum up some of the problems of rationalism:

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people "know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling." Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. "A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society," Sagan wrote of certain Americans' embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. "There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community."

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

Tags: quotes, scepticism, science

05:00 pm: Agatha Christie on Halloween
Much to my surprise, today's dramatisation of Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party on BBC7 was completely new to me. Although the story was rather slight, I enjoyed the allusive qualities of piece, with it's obvious references to The Tempest and, unless I miss my guess, Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. Not being familiar with the book, I can't be sure whether these were present in the original or whether they were added and/or emphasised by Michael Bakewell's excellent adaptation.

Tags: radio

04:26 pm: Halloween food scare
I suspect that these photos of Bear's chili dog casserole in the making might just be the scariest thing I'll see this All Hallows' Even...

Tags: fear, food

04:02 pm: Boulez on the XXth Century
More withering sarcasm from Pierre Boulez via Alex Ross, focused this time on Nicolas Nabokov's CIA funded Masterpieces of the XXth Century festival held in Paris in 1952:

Boulez's Structures 1a figured in Masterpieces of the XXth Century as a sample of what the younger generation was doing. The composer and his erstwhile teacher Messiaen played it at 5:30 one afternoon, with Stravinsky and Craft in attendance. Boulez's involvement in Nabokov's festival was grudging; he could not have been pleased to be lumped together with the likes of Britten and Thompson. Two years later he would accuse Nabokov of creating a "folklore of mediocrity" and recommend that a future festival celebrate the twentieth-century condom.

Tags: music, quotes, the rest is noise

10:43 pm: Boulez on Cage
Today's quote from Alex Ross' superlative book, The Rest is Noise, captures the falling out between Pierre Boulez and John Cage:

...this was too much for Boulez, who was soon speaking as witheringly of Cage as he had of so many others. By the seventies, he was calling his former friend a "performing monkey" whose methods have betrayed "fascist tendencies"— thereby putting Cage next to Strauss, Sibelius and Stravinsky in the crowded room of composers who had been labeled fascist for one reason or another.

Tags: music, quotes, the rest is noise

09:30 pm: Superfreakonomic problems
Back from my holiday and associated internet vacation, my attention has been snagged by John Crace's scathing take on Superfreakonomics:

Did you know that it took a maverick doctor to point out that puerperal fever was caused by other doctors not washing their hands? Oh you did. Well, anyway, some global problems can easily be solved, but people reject the solutions because they appear too cheap and easy. Take hurricanes. They are caused by a slight rise in the surface temperature of the sea in key locations. Professor Lysergic Acid of the University of Middle-Earth has come up with an ingenious answer. Dump all the world's unwanted fridges in these areas and you will kill two birds with one stone. But for some reason no one wants to listen to him.

And Crace isn't the only one to be sceptical. Here, via Bookslut, is a Washington Post smackdown on the whole drink-driving thing:

It's terrifically shoddy statistical work. You'd get dinged for this in a college class. But it's in a book written by a celebrated economist and a leading journalist. Moreover, the topic isn't whether people prefer chocolate or vanilla, but whether people should drive drunk. It is shoddy statistical work, in other words, that allows people to conclude that respected authorities believe it is safer for them to drive home drunk than walk home drunk. It's shoddy statistical work that could literally kill somebody. That makes it more than bad statistics. It makes it irresponsible.

Ouch.

Tags: scepticism, snark

05:06 pm: Das klagende lied
I can't remember the last time I listened to Mahler's early cantata Das klagende lied. Probably not since I was a student. But catching a delightfully creepy performance — the part of singing bone was played by a child — on R3 this afternoon, I think I'm going to search out a recording...

Tags: music

06:41 am: Exeter Cathedral Choir on R3
Excitingly, today's broadcast of choral evensong comes live from Exeter Cathedral. One for the iPlayer, I think...

Tags: exeter, radio, religion

09:49 pm: Give it to me, hairy eyebrows. I'll kill the fascists for you
Daniel Kalder has been reading the semi autobiography of Leonid Brezhnev, sometime ruler of the Soviet Union and twice voted best eyebrows ever to grace the Lenin Mausoleum by the Central Committee for the Dialectical Analysis of Facial Hair in the All Union Communist Party (Bolshevik).

The memoir sound terminally dull, but Kalder's manages to find some macabre humour in a few of Leonid Illyich's war experiences:

At last Brezhnev locates his hands and seizes a machine gun, opening fire. However, this moment of action comes to a swift conclusion when real soldiers arrive in the trench. "One of them touched my arm," says Brezhnev. "Let a machine-gunner take over, comrade colonel," he is told.

I found this scene curiously affecting. I could see the battle-hardened Soviet soldier watching the pompous propagandist playing at being the warrior, and then gently intervening as if to say "there there, give it to me, hairy eyebrows. I'll kill the fascists for you."

This last phrase is so wonderful that I'm determined to try to find a way to inject it into every day conversation, regardless of how challenging this might be...

Tags: dictator lit, guardian

09:46 pm: Transubstantiation and elevators
Taking the trouble to catch up on things for the first time in a while, here are a couple of posts from Pharyngula that caught my eye.

Firstly, I think this might be the piece of God that passeth all understanding. Secondly, I'm intrigued by the vexed question of whether it is acceptable to use weight activated elevators on the sabbath.

Tags: religion

10:33 pm: Semele from the Proms
I've noticed that one of the great delights of The Sixteen's Handel Prom, Carolyn Sampson's arias from Semele, have made in on to YouTube. Despite being tempted by Endless Pleasure, I've decided to go with Myself I Shall Adore, just because it's so much fun:


(As an aside, this reminds me of my profound disagreement with P.D. James about a one of the musical elements in The Private Patient. At one point, we are told, the stuffy and egotistical surgeon George Chandler-Powell is annoyed when his plans to spend his evening listening to Semele on CD are disrupted by a visitor. It seems to me quite at odds with the serious and humourless character of Mr G.H. Chandler-Powell that he might possibly enjoy something as light and funny as Semele. He seems far more like a Parsifal man to me...)

Tags: opera, proms, videos

10:12 pm: Gains for my pains
My recent obsessive bouts of cycling feel like they're really starting to pay off. Putting in some road time during a brief weather window over the weekend, I felt that my sustained pace was better than it had been and that the whole experience was far less draining than my recent training rides.

Tags: cycling

01:23 pm: Music Matters Max edition
Today's edition of Music Matters, which celebrated Peter Maxwell Davies' recent 75th birthday, was quite the best bit of radio I've heard in a while. Tom Service was a insightful and relaxed, while Max was wonderfully forthcoming about both the hows and the whys of his music and his methods.

There were some really charming moments. An moment of brinkmanship with the tide on a beach walk; Max talking about the famous swan pate incident; his partner Colin Parkinson talking about how he and Max met; Max's comment that perhaps his small-scale compositions for school children were more important in some ways than his symphonies.

The whole programme was a total delight. Not so much an interview as a discussion — and a series of walks — with friends.

Tags: radio