Fooling the fools

I'm back. Slowly - left handed typing!

This caught my eye from Tim Shipman in the Sunday Telegraph:

George W.Bush once joked: "You can fool some of the people all of the time and those are the ones you want to concentrate on."

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Back soon

I'm afraid I won't be able to post for a while. I'm having an operation tomorrow which will put my my right hand will be out of action for a few weeks.

I'll be back asap - but will be typing with my left hand so posts will be brief! 

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The day English classical music died (The Times)

I have a piece in today's Times on Vaughan Williams. Here it is:

Do the names Alexander Goehr or Nicholas Maw mean anything to you? Here are two slightly better known names from the same profession: Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Sir Harrison Birtwistle.

Still no idea? This one's the giveaway: Ralph Vaughan Williams.

They are all, as the last name will have told you, English composers. But while Vaughan Williams was and remains a household name, the other composers are known only to the coterie that now listens to contemporary music. Sir Peter is Master of the Queen's Music (the musical equivalent of Poet Laureate) and Sir Harrison is regarded by those who care about such things as the leading composer of his generation. Yet I doubt if anyone but a few people have listened to their works.

Vaughan Williams died 50 years ago tomorrow. He had a good innings - he died at 85 - but his death was symbolic of another death: that of contemporary classical music as a mainstream cultural activity.

In Vaughan Williams's day, the premiere of a new work of music was a significant event. No one would be considered culturally aware unless they were au fait with the new Vaughan Williams symphony. Today, any averagely informed person has read the latest fiction and seen the buzz films and theatre. But new music - serious rather than pop or rock - is a cult pursuit among a tiny proportion of the already small minority who are interested in culture.

Classical music took a wrong turn in the period after the death of Vaughan Williams. The ruination of music as part of mainstream culture came largely because of subsidy. Composers stopped writing for their public and wrote instead for the small clique that was responsible for commissioning pieces. The cultural commissars were obsessed with theories of music that held that melody was no longer a legitimate tool and only atonal music was appropriate to the age. Their dominance of the subsidy racket meant that not only were composers freed from any obligation to secure an audience for their music, but they were pilloried and starved of funds also if they did attempt to do that.

Vaughan Williams was the last composer to speak directly to a wide audience, with music that could be appreciated by listeners who did not have degrees in musical theory. One reason was basic: he wrote tonal music. But another was that there was something very English in his music. It wasn't just his use of folk music themes or the stories and places on which he based so much of his work - pieces such as A London Symphony, In the Fen Country, Norfolk Rhapsody, Five Tudor Portraits, Sir John in Love, A Pilgrim's Progress, the Fantasia on Greensleeves, and the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. It was the sound itself. His most frequently played piece, The Lark Ascending, captures the lyrical essence of the still, quiet idealised English countryside. And there is a similar, if indefinable, Englishness about almost everything he wrote.

But just as in so many areas of our lives the English often conceal passion under a calm exterior, so Vaughan Williams's music had far more to it than the lyricism of The Lark Ascending. His Symphony No. 6, for instance, which was premiered in 1948, has violent thrusts and agonised harmonies, and many of his other pieces have dark undercurrents.

The only contemporary composer who had anything close to Vaughan Williams's recognition was Benjamin Britten. Despite his avowed attempt to excise from his work what he regarded as the stultifying parochialism of the English musical scene, he too was a recognisably English composer. His breakthrough came with Peter Grimes, an opera set in a village that could easily have been his home town, Aldeburgh. And his lover and musical partner, the tenor Peter Pears, sounded as English as the Queen.

After decades in which contemporary music lived in a ghetto, a new generation of composers started to emerge in the 1990s. As the older generation lost its grip on the purse strings, so younger composers have started to write music that wider audiences can enjoy. James MacMillan, a Scottish composer, is as intellectually rigorous as any of his predecessors but has the priceless gift of connecting with audiences. The norm for performances of contemporary music was a premiere and perhaps one or two further subsidised repeats, then deserved obscurity. MacMillan's music has entered the mainstream repertoire because audiences want to hear it.

The leading young English composer is Thomas Adès, whose opera Powder Her Face won rave reviews in 1995 and has since been repeatedly performed around the world. He has been commissioned by the likes of the Royal Opera House and the Berlin Philharmonic and has produced pieces that have won instant audience acclaim.

Adès may be English but, unlike Vaughan Williams, there is almost nothing in his music to show that. Vaughan Williams may no longer be the last to write serious music for general audiences but, as a recognisably English composer, he was indeed the last of his kind.

 

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Can we beat Andorra?

There's a great post on Bryan Appleyard's excellent blog:

Quote of the decade from England captain John Terry after another dismal performance by the worst football team in the world.

'Hopefully,'  said the ashen-faced skipper, 'we can get off to a good start against Andorra and go from there.'

The poverty of ambition of England footballers never ceases to amaze.

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Brown at it again

is Gordon Brown all there? Seriously. I wonder if his brain is functioning properly. Speaking to the troops in Afghanistan he said this:

This week we are celebrating the Olympics where we have had great success. But this week also I believe that our Olympic athletes and everybody else in our country will remember that you have showed exactly the same courage, professionalism and dedication. You make our country proud every day of the week and every week of the year. You are truly the heroes of our country.

When will the PLP rid us of this overpromoted incompetent?

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God forbid we get to keep more of our own money

Monday.

Lord (Chris) Smith, New Labour arts and quango factotum and the voice of the liberal establishment:

Smith, now the chairman of the Advertising Standards Authority...has been convinced by Channel 4's argument that it will need assistance to the tune of more than £100m a year.

He said that if it came down to a choice between giving top-sliced licence fee money to Channel 4 to spend on public service broadcasting output, or BBC3, he would choose the former.

"If I was secretary of state and I had £100m of licence fee money to deploy, with public service broadcasting values in mind, would I spend it on BBC3, or would I spend it on helping Channel 4? I think that's a very difficult question for the BBC to answer," he said.

Smith added that in his view the funds would have to go to Channel 4 because it is "absolutely" more important than BBC3 when it comes to fulfilling the goals of public service broadcasting in the UK.

..."I believe they are a very important part of the broadcasting landscape. We must look seriously at where that help could come from."

From the Guardian:

Channel 4 is understood to have decided to bring back Celebrity Big Brother to its main network next year.

Discussions have been taking place with the programme's producer Endemol for some months, and Channel 4 executives have now agreed to bring the show back, MediaGuardian.co.uk has learned.

Don't you just love the mindset of Lord Smith? The license fee funded BBC3 is a pile of crap. Instead of drawing the appropriate conclusion - that the BBC is clearly getting too much money and wasting it on rubbish - he thinks it should go to another channel built on ratings-chasing crap.

It would never cross his or his ilk's mind that the case for funding Channel 4 is as bad as the case for funding BBC3, and the answer to the 'very difficult question' is not to take the £100m in the first place.

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It's those secret plotters again

Wow. This must qualify for scoop of the century award. Johann Hari has uncovered a secret plot to 'kill the UN': 

Does John McCain have a "hidden agenda" to "kill the UN"? That's what the man who devised McCain's big set-piece foreign policy proposal says – and he's delighted it is sailing silently through the presidential election campaign towards success.

And your clinching evidence for this secretive plot is a triumph of detective work:

Charles Krauthammer, the conservative journalist who invented the plan, says: "What I like about it is, it's got a hidden agenda. It looks as if it's about listening and joining with allies... except the idea here, which McCain can't say but I can, is to essentially kill the UN. Nobody's going to walk out of the UN. There's a lot of emotional attachment to it in the US. How do you kill it? You create a parallel institution." Gradually – over decades – McCain hopes it would make the UN wither away.

Pathetic.

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Brain of Britain

A friend sent me this: 

I’ve just watched the Weakest Link, which had the following marvelous exchange:

Anne Robinson:  
Which famous British elite military force is best known by its initials?

Contestant: 
Is it the Liberal Democrats?

Anne Robinson: 
No, it's the SAS.

Neither elite, nor military nor a force.  To be fair to the contestant, maybe he misheard Anne Robinson and thought she "effete, drippy farce."

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Evolution means not having to sleep outside

Jonathan Freedland begins his piece on camping thus:

If I promise not to show you my holiday snaps, could I be allowed to mention one moment from my vacation, just completed? It was late evening, already dark, on a camp site in the Cévennes national park in France. I had joined a queue of fellow campers, when I caught the eye of one man, Dutch I think, clutching his roll of toilet paper, waiting to use one of the site's two non-flush lavatories (a sign urged us to put paper in the accompanying box, rather than risk blocking the septic tank). His expression, part amused, part plaintive, part weary member of the international fraternity of dads said: "I have a BMW parked just down the hill. I'm not short of money. I could have afforded a hotel. Why am I here?"

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Drugs companies are a boon, not our enemies (The Times)

I have a piece in today's Times on profit and drugs research. Here it is:

Which of these is most deplorable: an organisation selling guns used to kill civilians; an organisation selling cigarettes that cause cancer; or one researching and producing drugs to cure disease and suffering?

Silly question? In the film of John le Carré's The Constant Gardener, one of the heroes describes drug companies as worse than gun runners. Somehow, the idea has taken hold that companies that make a profit by researching and conquering human illness are not a wonderful boon to humanity, but our enemy.

I run a think-tank in Brussels. I am proud that some of our funding comes from pharma companies, which do so much good. Yet we are attacked for taking money from them, as if they are somehow beyond the moral pale.

The latest figure to have a pop at pharma companies is Professor Sir Michael Rawlins, the chairman of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), who yesterday attacked them for ripping us off: “Pharmaceutical companies have enjoyed double-digit growth year on year and they are out to sustain that.”

It's perfectly legitimate to want to reform the pricing arrangements for drugs. Indeed, the Government has recently changed the NHS's purchasing methods. But more often than not, such discussions reveal a more fundamental criticism of the pharmaceutical industry: that the companies make profits. Everything would be so much better, it is argued, if the state or charities took charge of research, instead of letting big pharma take us for a ride.

Yes, drug firms make profits. That's what makes worthwhile their extraordinary investment in research. In 2003 the Tufts University Centre for the Study of Drug Development calculated that the total cost to research and develop a new prescription drug is $897 million. Only 21.5 per cent of drugs that reach human trials will even be approved for marketing.

The idea that the state or charities can offer a serious alternative is risible. Look at the research record where profit is barred. It wasn't Cuban or North Korean researchers who turned HIV from being a certain death sentence to a disease that can be managed. It was research by pharmaceutical companies.

In all of the Soviet Union's existence, where research was considered a priority, not one discovery was made that scientists in the free world considered worth using. The only Soviet discovery that had an impact in the West was weaponised anthrax.

Pharma companies are an easy target for some. But God help us if we have to live in a world devoid of their products, and get ill.

 

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