How the mind works – Page 12 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

Schubert Piano Sonata D959: Andantino

Towards the beginning of Lockdown, I was bingeing on Haydn symphonies. And I did that posting pretty much so that I could remember having done this. I don’t suppose many of my mere readers even read that posting.

Now here’s another posting about another classical music binge I am still not entirely finished with, again, so that I at least can have a record of this binge having happened and what triggered it. This recent binge began as a mere attempt to have another binge, which can be interesting, but which is not the real thing. I would binge, I decided (you don’t decide these things – they decide you), on the piano music of Franz Schubert.

However, this pseudo-binge became genuine when I listened to the CD by pianist Christian Zacharias the cover of which you now see to your right. I had found myself concentrating not on Schubert’s piano sonatas, but on the smaller pieces, with titles like Dance (of some sort), or Moment Musical, or Impromptu. And I was finding the first of the “other pieces” on this disc, the one described as “Sechs Deutsche D820”, particularly diverting, not least because I don’t recall ever having heard it before. I must have played this CD through when I first bought it, because I play through all the CDs I buy, but that piece at least left zero impression on me.

But, probably because when it had finished playing it I couldn’t be bothered to get up and change it, I started listening to this CD again from the start. And the second movement of the big piano sonata that the CD is mainly devoted to, the one snappily entitled “D959”, really got my attention. This movement begins with a gently conventional tune. But then, after about two and a half minutes, perhaps because Schubert was a dying man and he knew how this felt to him, it starts to veer off into a strange parallel universe, all of it composed by Franz Schubert, but sounding more like the arrival of a demonic anti-Schubert from the future, who shoves real Schubert off his piano stool and instead starts improvising around the theme that real Schubert had been playing, with ever more oddity and ferocity and lack of good taste, culminating in passages of such manic brutality that it sounds more like some fifth-rate failure of a late twentieth century German would-be classical composer whose only means of attracting any attention is to take a masterpiece from the established repertoire and smash it to pieces, and then con Deutsche Grammophon into making a recording of resulting mess, which is bought by gullible idiots, or by people like me because it’s in the £1 box on the floor of my favourite second-hand CD shop, and we all then listen to this derangement once and never again. This bit of genuine Schubert really is that deranged.

The illustration above on the cover of that CD, ought to include an angel of death, or some such thing, in the background of that cosy domestic scene.

Here is how expert music critic Misha Donat describes this movement and this extraordinary episode in the middle of it, in the sleeve notes that he wrote for this Mitsuko Uchida box of Schubert Piano music:

Like several of Schubert’s late slow movements, it has a more dramatic middle section; but never did he conceive a more astonishing outburst than occurs at the heart of this piece. It is a moment that offers a vision of wild despair, if not actual madness, and its impassioned style anticipates the keyboard writing of a much later generation of composers.

So it’s not just me that is astounded by this extraordinary musical moment.

If you want to hear what I and Donat are writing about, here is a video of Alfred Brendel playing this amazing movement, which lasts about eight minutes in all by the time it has almost (but never quite) calmed down again. I have already gathered up every recording I have of it, and am listening to it again and again.

Learning how to photo my Last Friday of the Month meetings

Here’s a photo photoed years ago during one of my Last Friday of the Month meetings, at my home.

It took me quite a while, as in many years, to get that photo. What I wanted was what my meetings were like, but with no faces visible. Convivial, but with no conviviality being facially expressed. And it took me years to work out that the best way to get what I wanted was to stand on a chair and hold the camera up as high as I could, photoing lower limbs, but no faces, and photoing the kind of (decidedly junky) food that I serve.

It will definitely be quite a while before there are any more such meetings. Public moods can change radically, so never say never, but if the public mood concerning socialising remains at all like it is now, these meetings may already have seen their last. We shall see.

More generally, this is why photoing is a specialist activity, by which I mean that you have to work away at particular sorts of subjects before you get the hang of how best to photo them. I have photoed lots of digital photographers and have got quite good at it. I have not photoed many social groups.

You may say, well, given what you wanted – lots of youngish and casually attired bodies but no faces, a down-market style of hospitality – an aerial photo was the obvious answer. Well, yes, once I realised this, it was obvious. Once the obvious becomes obvious, it is indeed obvious.

A great deal of knowledge (all knowledge?), I believe, consists of that which is – has become – obvious. It’s just that it takes a while for the obvious to become obvious, for the penny, as they say, to drop. Many learning experiences have an element of Why-did-I-not-think-of-that-until-now? about them. Learning stuff need not lead to arrogance; it can lead to humility, as each step forward in knowledge proves how slow-witted you were to make it as slowly as you did.

Some recent animal tweets from SS-W

Whenever Friday comes around, I like to do postings that involve the other animals with whom we share our planet. I mean, this is the internet. And currently my favourite source of animal stuff is the Twitter page of Steve Stewart-Williams. He wrote a book about one of the apes, The Ape That Understood The Universe, in other words: us. And his animal tweets often illustrate stuff he has already said in that.

But then again, sometimes he is just saying, along with the rest of the internet: Wow. take a look at this. There follow links to just a few of the many creaturely tweets SS-W has done lately, ones that particularly caught my attention.

Take a look, for instance, at this hammerhead shark skeleton. Wow. Or the amazing camouflage of the great grey owl. Wow again.

All the cute animal stuff on the internet is so cute because it shows animals plucking on our heart strings by behaving the way human children behave, often because they’ve evolved to do exactly that. Our animal pals can be unselfconsciously enthusiastic, eager to please, eager to try things. And as often as not they do all this with big round eyes.

Like this dog that plays volleyball with humans, or this baby rhino learning new dance moves. From a goat.

But don’t get too carried away with the cute. Take a look at how this stork throws one of its babies out of the nest. Take that, internet. And, don’t get all superior to Mummy Stork there. Humans are only as nice as they can be, and are regularly as nasty as they feel they have to be. For many centuries, resource-stretched human parents would give up on their less promising young ones, and I bet there are out-of-the-way spots on our planet now where they still do this kind of thing. Plus, you know, wars and massacres and whatnot. So yes, Mother Nature can be a bitch.

But then again, sometimes she’s a generous bitch. Venom from honeybees has been found to rapidly kill aggressive and hard-to-treat breast cancer cells. I wonder how they found out to investigate that. Guess I’d better now read the article.

Bingeing on Haydn symphonies

Every so often, a combination of my ever more gargantuan classical CD collection, of my own shifting tastes in classical music, and of my particular life circumstances result in me experiencing musical binges, of various sorts over the years, during which I binge-listen to a particular category of music.

Sometimes a binge will focus on a single piece of music. At other times, as recently, it consists of constantly listening to a particular category of music.

When Lockdown began, at that now vanished time when I and millions of others were genuinely scared that our lives might be about to end prematurely, I found myself listening to, of all things, Haydn symphonies, again and again and again and again. I possess many CDs of Haydn symphonies. Here are about two thirds of them:

That’s a lot of Haydn symphonies, and there are about half as many again still on the shelves, which I also listened to. Plus I even bought another great box of them, because I already had one of the CDs in question and really liked it when I listened to it again.

Haydn is in many ways the “ideal type” of the Classical Music Composer. If you really like his orchestral music, then it can be said with confidence that you really like classical music. What makes me say this is that his music seems to me to posses an absolutely satisfaction with the musical means that were available for its making, and no feeling whatsoever that “art” means in some way feeling obliged to transcend these means, in the manner of someone breaking out of a prison or of dreaming of such a breakout. Put it like this. If Mozart or Beethoven had lived at a different and later time, when musical technology had expanded, you get the strong feeling that their music would have sounded very different and a lot more dramatic. With Haydn, I feel as if it would probably have sounded much as it sounds now.

This is especially true of his earlier symphonies, which I found myself preferring, during my binge. My habit was to assemble all the performances of Haydn symphonies by one conductor and ensemble, and then listen to them in chronological order. And I found that the later symphonies, to my ear, had a bombast and an assertiveness about them that I found, by comparison with the earlier ones, unappealing. Basically, the symphonies he wrote for his aristocratic bosses in Vienna and nearby places struck me as wonderful, utter perfection. But, the later symphonies that he wrote for bigger and less grand audiences, less old money and more new money, in places like Paris and London, London especially, felt to me like Haydn forcing himself to express feelings that his audiences felt more strongly than he did.

It may very well be that actually, Haydn felt horribly imprisoned when he wrote his earlier symphonies, and liberated when writing his later ones. But what I was hearing was a case of one kind of atmosphere, which I found perfectly (and I do mean perfectly) appealing, compared to another that was less congenial. Raucous brass instruments, and above all the percussion, started to interrupt the serene perfection of the earlier symphonies. Bang bang bang, wah wah wah. The later symphonies sounded to me, by comparison, to be bourgeois, in a bad way. Nouveau riche, rather than old riche. New money waving itself in the air, rather than old money simply taking its ease, without fuss or the need to assert itself too stridently. It was as if Haydn had moved from a world where he was in perfect command of his art, to one where he was stressing and straining after something that came less naturally to him.

The irony being that the official programmes of many of Haydn’s earlier symphonies are concerned with exactly such stressfulness and strain. There is even a famous group of earlier symphonies collectively know as the “sturm und drang” – storm and stress – symphonies. But these felt to me like serenely detached descriptions of such emotions, rather than any sort of effort to be engulfed by such feelings on behalf on an emotionally incontinent audience of upwardly mobile poseurs.

I suspect that finding myself being treated as a gentleman of leisure by Haydn, rather than as some sort of new man, a stresser and strainer after such things as “improvement” and “solutions” and “radical progress”, was exactly what I was finding so congenial. Lockdown demanded nothing of me. Literally, it demanded nothing. And, as the owner and operator of a CD player, I could pause the music at will with one touch of a button, which made me even more of an aristocrat than Haydn’s bosses were. How they would have loved to be able to push a button and pause their musicians in mid bar, while they, having been delayed by other business, sat themselves down and made themselves comfortable at the beginning of a musical performance, or while they needed to deal with a discreet interruption from an underling about something that needed a quick answer. And how the likes of Beethoven and Wagner, Wagner especially, would have been outraged by my pause button! My music, Wagner would have shouted, takes precedence over your little life! Shut up and listen, in darkness, and have your emotions aroused and sculpted by me, the Great Composer. I am not hear to amuse you with my art, you are hear to worship me and my Art.

Haydn, especially in his earlier Viennese, pre-bourgeois form, made no such demands upon me. And during the early, serious bit of Lockdown, he was, for me, the perfect musical companion.

If you have read this far, thank you. I hope you’ve already worked out that I am not asking you to agree with me about Haydn. Rather I ask you to think of whether you have had similar bursts of aesthetic enthusiasm, and to reflect on them, as I have on this recent one of mine.

The main thing about such episodes, I would say, is that they can’t be forced. You can’t decide to have one of these binges. They just happen.

A crazy sports day

I don’t usually set the video to record MOTD, or for that matter MOTD2, but I’ll have to this evening. First it was Leicester, unbeaten until today, who were today beaten 0-3 at home by West Ham, but okay that’s a reasonably normal scoreline. However, ManU 1 Spurs 6 is not reasonable, but that was the result of that one. Nor is Aston Villa 5 Liverpool 2, which is the score in that after an hour. Whatever else happens in that game, which I would still not put it past Liverpool to win, the score will definitely be crazy.

Now it’s Villa 6, Liverpool 2. First time ever both Liverpool and Man Utd have conceded six goals on the same day. (I copied and pasted that from the BBC report of the Villa Liverpool game.)

And, in freezing October, the county cricket T20 finals finally got under way this afternoon, after being totally washed out yesterday. Surrey won their semi and made 127 in 16 overs against Notts, which doesn’t seem like nearly enough, so boo hoo there, probably.

However, more interestingly for the kind of folks who read this blog, because of the dates that these T20 quarter finals and finals were played (October 1st and October 4th), these T20 games … :

… were the first professional cricket matches played in England in October since 1864 – Cambridgeshire & Yorkshire v Kent & Nottinghamshire at Newmarket, October 6th to 8th.

They postponed these T20 games until now so that, maybe, actual people could come and watch, which could and should have been allowed by now but of course wasn’t.

OMG, more copying and pasting:

GOAL – Aston Villa 7 (SEVEN)-2 Liverpool

Like I said, crazy.

I recall speculating here that there having been no sport in the early version of Lockdown caused a lot of unfocussed energy to insert itself instead into political demonstrating. Notice how, since sport has resumed, even sport in deserted stadiums, the demonstrating just fizzled out. If I didn’t speculate thus, I should have.

Yes, I did a posting in July about Der Bomber, a German footballer called Gerd Muller, and I ended it thus:

The passions that used to attach themselves to bombing now have to find another outlet, and that outlet is now, mostly, sport. I believe that in recent months we have experienced what a gap is left in our world when sport is lacking. The sooner our politicians feel able to allow people back into sports stadiums, there to cheer on their preferred “bombers”, the better.

It turned out that to take their minds off being violent in the streets, people didn’t have to actually attend sporting events. There merely had to be sporting events, the results of which people cared about. This was enough to fill the sport-shaped holes in their souls.

LATER: boo hoo.

The rise of global political parties?

I see that Brazil’s President Bolsonoro has been having a go at what Joe Biden said in the US Presidential debate, about Brazil and its rain forests and what he, Joe Biden, was going to do about them.

I am antique enough to remember when only Bolsheviks would plunge into what were then called “the internal affairs” of foreign countries. I suppose the EU was a big old exception to that rule, but that was only in a rather abstract and windy sort of way. Trouble is, modern communications, and I don’t just mean the internet although that is certainly part of this story, make such self-control ever more impossible. Thanks to the electric telegraph, and now its big bully of an offspring, the internet, it is the work of a moment to become acquainted with an argument in a far away country, and now, no matter who you are, you can join in. So, the idea that nobody should is doomed. Gonna happen. Just pick up a phone and start mouthing off to some foreign journo, and if you’re anyone at all big in the cheese department, they print it, or something related to it. Or, just say something about a foreign country shindig in one of your public performances, and those foreigners will maybe pick up on it anyway. Now, just sit down at your keyboard and bang away.

Communists, as I say, have been doing this ever since they got started in the middle of the century before last, during the first few years after the electric telegraph got started (Samuel Morse – 1844). Said the communists, contemplating this latest technological wonder: Workers (which was almost everyone in those days) of the World Unite! And from them on, whether in office or merely trying to be powerful, in public, in private and in the strictest secrecy, they interfered as much as they could in the internal affairs of other countries and they gloried in it. I mean, that was the whole idea.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, the world did not abandon nationalism. Quite the reverse. As it turned out, the most important customers of those international electric telegraphs were newspapers, who were printing strictly national versions of world events to suit their strictly national readerships, and businessmen, who didn’t much care and who just want to get rich.

So, towards the end of the twentieth century, most politicians were still going through the motions of not being too public in their disagreements or (perhaps more interestingly) their agreements with politicians in faraway countries. Who the people of The Republic of Elsewhere choose as their leaders is a matter for them, and we will work amicably with whoever they choose, for the greater good of mankind. Blah blah. In private it got more heated, but in public that was the etiquette to be followed, and it mostly was.

Maybe it’s only my personal proximity speaking now, but I’d say that the Reagan Thatcher moment was when this hands-off-the-foreigners rule started being seriously put to one side. Those two made no secret of the fact that the warmth of their connection was not just based on him being President of the USA and her being PM of the UK, special relationship, blah blah. No, they downright agreed with each other, and by clear implication, wanted each other to win all their various elections, against other locals, with whom they clearly disagreed. It helped that all this happened within the Anglosphere.

More recently, I recall President Obama making it very clear who and what he wanted to win the British EU referendum. He was told my many of those who did not share his opinion not to interfere in our internal affairs, but given that he wanted to interfere, there was nothing and nobody to stop him.

Now even the Nationalists are at it, forming what is quite clearly a sort of global National International. Trump and Trumpists everywhere (think Nigel Farage) are starting to show up on the same platforms and to be more than usually friendly towards each other. Trump fights for his corner, which is the USA. And he expects other political leaders to do the same for their countries and to be equally upfront about that. And he wishes them well in their elections, against other politicians who have different tastes in such matters.

Trump has also been sceptical about climate change, as has Bolsonaro, which is all part of why, thanks to all those electric telegraphs, the American Left now hates Bolsonaro with a passion and can spend its entire day hating him, should it be inclined. So, Biden having a go at Brazil is popular with a lot of the people whom he wants to be voting for him. And Bolsonaro makes a similar calculation and hits back at Biden.

There’s lots more I could say about all this, as I often like to say when I am about to stop, but one thing worth emphasising is that the old arrangement – keeping one’s hands off of the other fellow’s back yard and him doing the same – was an unstable equilibrium. It worked if everyone did that, near enough. But once any big time politician breaks from this cosy arrangement, the pressure on the others to follow suit is irresistible.

Thoughts and a purchase provoked by a hand operated mechanical swimming whale

Here.

This is total trivia. I mean, what serious use is this, besides to amuse?

But, the fact that Twitter is full of trivia is not itself trivial. Consider the politics of this. This kind of nonsense appeals to people of all merely ideological inclinations, and is regarded as totally damn silly by lots of other people of all merely ideological inclinations. It thus serves to shake up and to dilute the merely tribal relationships of politics, which must never be allowed to become the only relationships that matter.

Also, my claim that this twiddle-it-yourself swimming whale is mere trivia could be wrong. Many a great invention has begun as a piece of fun.

Let me see if the Internet can back me up on this. Yes, here we go:

Play is a frivolous pastime only to be indulged once the real work of the world is done. Or so we tend to think. But what if play is actually a key driver of progress? In Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, Steven Johnson argues that many of our most important innovations – from probability theory to artificial intelligence – have their origins in human beings just trying to have some fun.

Now on its way to me, via Amazon.

I love the Internet.

Also, this is why I like to do quota posting as well as proper posting. Quota postings can lead you (I of course mean me) to all sorts of stuff that proper posting wouldn’t.

At least they seem willing to end Lockdown

From this tweet, concerning a piece behind the Telegrap paywall (thankyou Adriana Lucas) …:

It’s rather reminiscent of Medieval physicians, attributing any sign of recovery to the effectiveness of bloodletting; any deterioration to insufficient application of leeches.

… I found my way to this thread, which summarises the case against the Plague policies of most governments around the world, the case that I have been passing on here, and the case which I hope will become the orthodoxy concerning this ghastly episode. The Plague was not that bad. The overreaction to it has been one of the great public policy blunders of all time.

However, if Johnson, Hancock and their equivalents elsewhere are thinking that they can now end Lockdown, because Lockdown has worked, I’ll take it, for now. The right thing getting done for the wrong reason, is surely better than the wrong thing continuing to be done for some other wrong reason. The argument to the effect that Johnson and Hancock and their ilk are off their chumps and should be dustbinned as major politicians can then proceed in a more relaxed fashion.

LATER: It seems that I may have underestimated their willingness to end Lockdown. Hancock is still threatening more Lockdown. But the government is rapidly losing its own backbenchers, who may soon compel a return to normality, because of all the reasons I’ve been going on about here. At which point, the government may then be allowed to declare their failed policy to have succeeded, just so long as they stop doing it any more. The backbenchers will maybe then go along with this charade, to avoid humiliating their own government more than is absolutely necessary and in order to get something resembling normal life back again, even though lots of them already think that Lockdown was a total failure rather than a good policy. Like I say, I’ll take that.

Blue mountains in the far distance

Here is a panoramic photo by 6k, of a striking local (to him) scene. Panoramic presumably means that he photoed a big spread of photos and then some cunning computer programme stitched them together into what you now see:

Like 6k says, wow. That’s my 1000 thingies across version, but the original is massively bigger. From it I picked out these very distant mountains, and even they had to be shrunk to fit here properly:

Thereby making the already horizontalised even more horizontalised. And in this case I’m horizontalising with an actual horizon.

I assume that these very distant mountains are blue for the same sort of reason that the sky is blue, which is that between us and it there is lots of space for blue light to wander into the picture, because blue light does that, more than other sorts of light. It must also help that in the foreground of the picture there is lots of yellow and orange, like one of those photos of an indoor scene at night, artificially lit, which turns the grey outdoors that you see through the window into bright blue, which it really isn’t when you look at it.

I sense also that this illusion is relevant. It shows how our eyes adjust when scanning the same thing but in a setting that changes, in a way we just can’t stop ourselves doing. Which cameras don’t do. It takes software to do that.

So, we don’t see those mountains as blue when we home in them, but when a camera doesn’t home in on them, but is being very hi-res and we merely crop out the distant mountains, they’re blue.