Schoenberg

Tuesday

Alexandra Coghlan

Robin Holloway lambasts some of our most beloved composers

Irreverent, outspoken and unfailingly opinionated, with knowledge as broad as his vocabulary, Robin Holloway is exactly the person you’d want to sit next to at a concert. The warmest of interval chardonnays would spontaneously chill and fizz at his exhilarating put-downs; the music would be brighter, clearer and more compelling for his idiosyncratic analysis. But travel companions are a different breed. Would you set out on an odyssey through the history of western music with him as your sole guide and companion? Holloway is a fixture of British classical music – as a significant composer, teacher of other yet more significant composers and, since 1975, one of the longest standing

Thursday

Craig Raine

Kingsley goes to the toilet

In 1978, I gave a poetry reading at Hull University. Philip Larkin was glumly, politely, in attendance. I was duly appreciative, knowing what it must have cost him. He was deaf as well as disaffected. Perhaps the deafness helped. The next day, we had a lunchtime drink at the University bar. We talked about Kingsley’s recently published Jake’s Thing, a fictionalised account of Kingsley’s sexual relations with Jane Howard. Larkin was puzzled: ‘It’s determinedly foul-mouthed, which I like, but there is a central implausibility. Jake can do it, but he doesn’t want to.’ An innuendo? A suggestion that Jake, and by implication Kingsley, couldn’t? He sipped something improbable like a

Wednesday

Damian Thompson

Schoenberg owes his survival to crime drama

George Gershwin once made a home movie of Arnold Schoenberg grinning in a suit on his tennis court in Beverly Hills but, sadly, never filmed one of their weekly matches. According to one observer, the composer of ‘I Got Rhythm’ played with languid strokes in a ‘nonchalant and chivalrous’ manner against the ‘choppy, over eager’ strokes of the creator of Erwartung. That figures. But how odd that the two men should be friends and passionate admirers of each other’s work. Gershwin paid for the first recording of Schoenberg’s gnarliest string quartet, the Fourth; when the younger man died, Schoenberg described him as ‘a great composer’ and expressed ‘the deepest grief

Thursday

Alexandra Coghlan

The history of music – at breakneck speed

From Ladybird’s The Story of Music (a dinky 50 pages, generously illustrated) to Richard Taruskin’s five-volume epic The Oxford History of Western Music, the history of classical music has been sliced and stretched in print to fit every possible length, format and agenda. Andrew Gant’s Five Straight Lines joins the cluster of works jostling and elbowing at the midpoint of these extremes. The Oxford-based academic (whose previous books on carols and hymns have introduced us to a genial, approachable narrator, with a welcome glint in his eye), shouts no provocative argument or USP from his cover, makes no novel claims for his survey. This is, quite simply, a narrative of