'Building a library'

Depending on the music under consideration, I enjoying tuning in on Saturday mornings to Building a Library on BBC Radio 3. Strange concept: I've never in my life met anyone who sets out to ‘build’ a library of classical music, on the basis, it appears, of wanting the best recording of every piece of music that exists. On that basis the programme, which deals with three or four pieces in three hours and a quarter, has a while to run before it has covered the lot. Doesn’t nearly everyone buy opportunistically -- ‘I like that -- I think I'll buy it’?

Whoever the intended audience of the programme is -- all ten of them -- they must be incredibly expert. The fascination is the discriminations that the presenter is able to offer between performances I can’t hear the differences between. Today he commented on one performer who, though good, was ‘unfortunately below the note’, which I presume meant ‘flat’ -- could have fooled me and I'm amazed that someone can be a professional who gets on recordings and plays flat.

The problem for me in listening is not that I'm not building a library but that I don’t know how to listen. The chap will make some point about the passage he’s about to play: by the time it’s a few bars in I’ve forgotten what I'm supposed to be listening for, or else I don’t know which bit is supposed to contain the feature he’s drawn attention to.

It’s still a good programme for the likes of me -- or at least the odd twenty-minute sample is. It’s like reading a book and finding a couple of lines of poetry quoted, indented, italicised and set off from the text. That often strikes with particular force. So it is with hearing a burst of music embedded in the prose of professional commentary. I’d love to see a breakdown of the actual audience -- it must be very different from that select community of library builders. So, keep Building a Library and pay no heed to charges of elitism -- though I suppose I'm elite so I would say that.

RE my musical education: some time ago [http://petemedway.blogspot.com/2011/07/ability-to-draw.html] I mentioned I was looking for an art class to join because I wanted to draw. The first class of the course I've ended up in, life drawing, run by Kingston Council Adult Ed, was a model of the sort of thing I need in music. We drew a skeleton, several times, quite fast and once from memory. In between the teacher ‘took us through’ the skeleton, showing us how it could be regarded as made up of three basic forms and suggested the features we regard as primary and those we’d be best ignoring till well on with drawing. She broke it into parts and identified them: the job was done by a mixture of pointing, gesturing and handling with naming or ‘attaching’ a verbal comment, so as to make them retainable in memory and thought.

I need the equivalent of that for music. Perhaps it exists online -- the internet would be the right medium: it could show the score and the player and the viewer could run it back to replay sections.

London, Berlin, Mexico

What a week for treats I could have had in very few other places than London.

Sometimes I fantasise about a move to the country (where I've never lived), partly in preparation for the coming breakdown of environment and society, which may or may not happen, in my lifetime or for years after, but more because I love views of landscape and having birds around other than the magpies, gulls and pigeons that are all we get in Surbiton apart from the occasional parakeet. (I've saw a single swift on a couple of occasions, and distant swallow once or twice.)

But then I think about the stuff I've been able to do this week by virtue of living in London (on the outer edge but with fast, frequent and free trains to the centre).

Here are the highlights.

Monday evening: a conversation between six writers, historians, journalists and other experts on Berlin, the Wall and the division of Germany. Memorable readings from two autobiographical pieces about the East, comments out of long experience by Misha Glenny with a passionate appeal to make the EU work for the sake of the peace and security of Eastern Europe including the Balkans which should eventually be brought in, and a quite different account, quiet and thoughtful, by David Chipperfield the architect on his restoration -- or reconstitution -- of the Neues Museum, with slides.

Tuesday morning in the British Library, looking at stuff I've had on a list for a year or two. Lovely place to work and the system seems to work beautifully. Because I'd got something wrong in my ordering one item hadn’t been delivered so I'll be back today to get it -- they’re faxing it from Boston Spa, their depository outside Leeds (a talk by the LCC Chief Inspector of Schools in 1948 about the London School Plan.)

Tuesday evening: Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle at the ENO (English National Opera) -- the production got a bit silly but the singing and music were ravishing. I first discovered this opera (1908 0r 1911 as I remember -- that terrific exuberant, inventive, iconoclastic first phase of Modernism) in a tv series on 20th century music, Leaving Home, by Simon Rattle and his Birmingham Philharmonic on Channel 4. I taped it and later bought the DVDs and have replayed them several times. When does C4 do anything like that now?

Yesterday evening: the South Bank again for another conversations: Robert Service and Tristran Hunt on their biographies of Trotsky and Engels. This calls for a separate post. It was as terrific as all those ‘conversations’ on the South Bank are. I've been to loads and never a dud one.

What, in the country, I ask myself, would I be doing at the times when in London I have experiences like these? going for walks? enjoyable once in a while but when the weather’s dull they can be really boring. Gardening? I used to do that and a large part is mindless drudgery.

Could see myself rapidly declining into Marx’s (and Hazlitt’s) state of rural idiocy: fitter and healthier but bored and stupid. So here I stay for the next little while.

Fragments shored up etc

Just to confirm I'm still here, more or less. No new photos.

What I have to say is just:

1. London beautiful in December, winter light. The best building in London, since cleaning and restoration, is the Festival Hall. Pure modernism: long horizontal windows, piloti, clean shape, not nervous about big expanses of flat surface. The back is the best view, now that the surrounds have been made lovely with paving and the masonry is pristine.

Much depends on the beauty of Portland stone. Contrast the concrete on the rest of the South Bank, which looks good at fewer times – and most of all when lit at night. The RFH cries out for photographs. I'll try and oblige.

2. I'm all for bikes in cities but they have one feature that can make them dangerous. I saw how today, off Chancery Lane (going to King's College library, the former Public Records Office, and another magnificent building, at least on the inside where it’s been restored and repurposed with flair and sensitivity – the finest library building I know, besides the British Museum Reading Room, Leeds University Brotherton Library (another rotunda) and the 17th century libraries of Oxford and Cambridge). Yes, bikes. One came out of side street into a more major road, causing a van to swerve to give him room – as the cyclist counted on him doing. The problem rarely spoken of is that cyclists don’t like to lose momentum: they value their stored energy and are reluctant to slow down because they’ll have to work hard to get their speed back again. Fit bikes with huge flywheels that could give them a starting boost in such situations.

3. I joined SofaCinema and ordered The World at War without quite realising that the DVDs would come one after the other, using up my whole monthly allocation so I'd be unable to watch anything else until I'd got through the whole series.

It’s great though. From the last episode I watched: a fed-up soldier waiting in a landing craft off the English coast ready to be towed in the next few hours to Normandy and D-Day. He comments cynically on the fatuous messages of cheer issuing from the top brass. Monty, brilliant but a fool: ‘God speed, and good hunting in the fields of Europe!’ Prat. One can appreciate how that went down with the fox-hunters of Wigan and the Gorbals.

One gain from the series: the name and music of Carl Davis, who I hadn’t heard of. The music you get at the start and end of each episode is haunting: thrillingly modernist and discordant with that tragic Central European note one gets in Bartok and Martinu, one to which I always mentally attach the phrase ‘the dark days of 1942’. But not without, too, a suggestion of the ‘broad sunlit uplands’.

I wish I could put a link so you could hear it, but of course it’s copyright. It’s at times like this, when a piece of music affects me profoundly, that I wish I had the musical knowledge to identify the features causing the impact.

I can’t get enough of World War II, while my inclination is to avoid anything about WWI. Is that because WWII’s in living memory – even mine, just; I remember my dad being in the army? Or because it isn’t done to death in school history, poetry anthologies, novels etc?

‘Dapper’ and the meaning of music

On my way back from the shops I was practising walking with longer strides (I've noticed they’ve got shorter; once, I used to overtake everyone) and holding myself upright as I advanced my stride vigorously in front, when the image came into my mind of one of my teachers who used to walk like that, perhaps because he had been a naval lieutenant, if indeed he had. The word ‘dapper’ came into my mind and I realised that it neatly illustrated how meaning gets attached to things (like words, or, strictly word-sounds or word-marks) that thereby become signs.

I could not define dapper, nor could most people who happily use the word; any definition would just gesture at what it is, picking out one or two partial indicators. (I'll look it up, but not yet.) But it’s there all right -- dapper exists; we all recognise it when we see it. Some of the connotations are pressed creases, smart (but not military: navy, not army), trim, neat, without anything excessive; any more so and it would be uptight, anal, repressed. Rather it might go the other way: canary-yellow waistcoat and bow tie (another of my teachers, but too lanky and languid to be dapper).

So, yes, that configuration of characteristics of person and dress exists. But so, presumably, do many other configurations that haven’t attracted names. Being able to attach the name to the phenomenon may indeed make it definite and identifiable, distinct from the general blur of overlapping similarities and differences in my field of awareness. Dapper becomes an object of cognition; as far as consciousness is concerned, the phenomenon of the dapper could be said to be brought into existence by the word. Conversely, the word wouldn’t work if there were not something already in our awareness for it to latch onto. It was a word that, when it was invented, we were ready and waiting for; we latched onto it for its truth.

Now, compare a piece of music that appears from nowhere and catches on, gets taken up, becomes known, gets played among friends, becomes an object of shared appreciation. I think it’s functioning like ‘dapper’. It enters the world beyond its producers as a signifier with a limited meaning produced by the references of the lyrics, and by features of sound and structure that suggest certain associations of mood or situation and perhaps generate direct physiological and psychological effects, as certain chemicals do. Then we, the listening public, attach the music to some state that we vaguely apprehend and that’s waiting to attain definition; the music becomes the word for the state; the state becomes the meaning of the music. The music, that is, becomes a full sign; a physical entity (sounds, audio effects), meaningless in itself (just noise) acquires meaning by being associated with something other than itself, a state (of feeling, of consciousness, of circumstances). It becomes the name for the state; but the state in a sense wasn’t there, not as a clear, discrete phenomenon, before it had this signifier, the music, attached to it. The state could not have been named in advance of the music; it wasn’t sharply enough there. But now the music stands for it and evokes it, making it a reality of which we deliberately induce the full consciousness by listening to the music or letting it come into our heads.

Turn back to language: certain words, like ‘dapper’, but more interestingly whole configurations of words, such as poems, operate like music. We (especially English teachers) are easily deceived by the fact that poems are composed of words, which we take to have definite meanings. Some words don’t, like ‘dapper’, but even if other words do, the meaning of the ensemble of words, the entire poem, can’t be got at by working through the meanings of the component words and syntactical structures. The whole thing ‘stands for’ something that otherwise has no name, for a state (to call it that again) or state of affairs or state of being; the experience of the poem is like recognition--we know what it’s referring to, even though that referred to state has never been named and can’t be named. It’s still like recognition even if we haven’t had any previous awareness of the state; even if, indeed, that state has been brought into existence, as a thing in our consciousness, only by the poem. Now the state has a name or a tune or a song, the poem, and can become an object of shared experience between all the people who share the language it’s written in.

Now let’s consult the OED online: dapper, a.

[Not found in OE. or ME. App. adopted in the end of the ME. period from Flemish or other LG. dialect (with modification of sense, perh. ironical or humorous): cf. MDu. dapper powerful, strong, stout, energetic, in mod.Du., valiant, brave, bold, MLG. dapper heavy, weighty, steady, stout, persevering, undaunted, OHG. tapfar, MHG. tapfer heavy, weighty, firm, in late MHG. and mod.G., warlike, brave. The sense of ON. dapr ‘sad, downcast’ appears to be developed from that of ‘heavy’. Possibly cognate with OSlav. dobr good.]

1. Of persons: Neat, trim, smart, spruce in dress or appearance. (Formerly appreciative; now more or less depreciative, with associations of littleness or pettiness; cf. b.)

c1440 Promp. Parv. 113 Dapyr, or praty, elegans. a1529 SKELTON Image Hypocr. 95 As dapper as any crowe And perte as any pie. 1530 PALSGR. 309/1 Daper, proper, mignon, godin. 1594 NASHE Unfort. Trav. 1 The dapper Mounsier Pages of the Court. 1648 HERRICK Hesper., The Temple, Their many mumbling masse-priests here, And many a dapper chorister. 1673 R. LEIGH Transproser Reh. 9 As if the dapper Stripling were to be heir to all the Fathers features. 1749 FIELDING Tom Jones I. xi, The idle and childish liking of a girl to a boy..is often fixed on..flowing locks, downy chins, dapper shapes. 1828 SCOTT F.M. Perth viii, The spruce and dapper importance of his ordinary appearance. 1861 Sat. Rev. Dec. 605 Our dapper curates, who only open their mouths to say ‘L'Eglise, c'est moi!’ 1885 M. E. BRADDON Wyllard's Weird I. 89 A good-looking man..well set up, neat without being dapper or priggish.

Well. It seems that in medieval England a word that was imprecisely understood, being Flemish for strong or heavy, (as dapper was imprecisely understood when I first came across it), and was thus an only-partly-formed signifier, was purloined by English speakers and used to name a state, dapperness, for which a word didn’t already exist but which was ready for one.

Where is the music?

I listened to a radio recording of a concert, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela playing Shostokovich’s Tenth Symphony in last summer’s Proms. I've heard the symphony on CD and it may be just the crudity of my musical sensibility but I found this performance especially powerful, and the players’ apparent passion infectious.

That’s not the point I want to make here, though, which concerns not that piece or that performance but something more general about music. I think it relates most particularly to classical music, though I'm open to correction on that from those better attuned to rock and pop, who came of age before they really happened.

The recording was of a live event and there were people coughing. Perhaps mainly one person, but it was bloody annoying--until I realised that if I listened properly it didn’t spoil the experience. I couldn’t block out the coughing but I could get myself to hear it on a different wavelength or on a different channel. The music belonged to another dimension and was unaffected by extraneous sound; it continued on its predetermined course regardless. The coughing belonged to a trivial sublunary world onto which this entity (Shostakovich’s) had dropped from space, its receptors deaf to worldly noise. Descended, it calmly laid out its site and in its own time and at its own pace unfolded its vast and complex construction.

It was a thing of another order come amongst us. Although manifested in sound, it was also an architecture, its reality residing as much in its abstract structure as in its audible material embodiment. It occupied time, but at another level made its own time, setting up its own measures of fast and slow, hurrying and loitering, patient attending and nervous interrupting. We were in the presence of a contingent incarnation of a timeless abstraction that had for the occasion made itself flesh. It was relentless, impersonal, beyond our reach (while apparently alluding to and actually evoking human emotion).

The effect of the coughing was to enforce awareness of the incommensurability of our world of accidents and sensual experience and the abstract structure and system that was being provisionally and partially translated into something our ears could follow. Presumably that gap is discernible at any live performance where instruments are at different distances from us and there’s some ambient noise, and even in a studio recording in which individual players and their particular instruments make sounds that are unique to them and perhaps unique to that day. At best they are alluding to something the nature of which we grasp not with our ears but with fleeting intuition.

Perhaps what intrigues us about music is its always ambiguous status. Which is real, the underlying idea or its ‘realisation’ in a performance? (A misguided way of thinking, as if the triangle I draw on a piece of paper is more real than the triangle it’s a drawing of—concepts are real but immaterial.) The same score generates many performances: are they like drawings of it? But the score is only a notation, not a likeness. A notation of what, then? The composer’s intended sound-structure? But what if a conductor, while staying faithful to the score, produces a performance that the composer hadn’t envisaged? And how do we know that the composer had anything particular in mind? Are the performances equally valid creations, as if the score is one creation, in one medium, and the performance a second, in another? (Here’s entity A, the score, and also in the world are entities B1, B2, B3, performances.) Or are the performances alternative stabs at catching the true music? This is bewildering. There is indeed something there behind the performances, and for all the physical reality of the latter (sound waves affecting our senses) we have to accord the status of reality to the composition that gives rise to them.

Or is all that just hopelessly pretentious? I'm not sure.