Bernstein’s posthumous victory

Last Saturday morning they chose the best recorded version of Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. In the course of this, the guest chooser, Edward Seckerson, read out this excerpt from a poem that Bernstein sent to the New York Times:

For hours on end, I brooded and mused
On materiae musicae, used and abused;
On aspects of unconventionality,
Over the death in our time of tonality, …
Pieces for nattering, clucking sopranos
With squadrons of vibraphones, fleets of pianos
Played with forearms, the fists and the palms
— And then I came up with the Chichester Psalms.
These psalms are a simple and modest affair,
Tonal and tuneful and somewhat square,
Certain to sicken a stout John Cager
With its tonics and triads in E-flat major,
But there it stands — the result of my pondering,
Two long months of avant-garde wandering —
My youngest child, old-fashioned and sweet.
And he stands on his own two tonal feet.

Backstory to this here.

When Bernstein wrote the Chichester Psalms, and this poetic description of how he created the Chichester Psalms, the self-styled musical “avant garde”, inspired by the theoretical musings and compositions of Arnold Schoenberg and his comrades in the “Second Viennese School”, was fast approaching its decline and replacement by more appealing sorts of music. As the change in the dominant atmosphere at the BBC, Radio 3 in particular, illustrates.

There are many reasons for this transformation. Classical music, although still very popular, no longer has the effortless cultural clout that it had then. Then, classical music was an eternal fact, and the only questions were things like: Where is classical music (which was typically then referred to as “music”) going? Where should it go? Now, classical music jobs are as appealing as ever and students are being cranked out by the colleges as never before. But now that the core repertoire is all recorded, pretty much, performers now make their livings by performing to live audiences, and post-Schoenbergery may be enough to sell some records around the world, but it won’t fill a particular hall in a particular place, unless they make it part of the price of the ticket by surrounding it with popular favourites. Which only turns indifference into active hatred.

If you like Schoenberg and his post-WW2 imitators and followers, then I’m very happy for you. But if you do, you are in a minority within a minority. Since the time when Bernstein wrote as he did above, tunefulness and melodiousness and rhythm has come back into the classical world with a bang. (Well, often more like a tinkle.) Christians have refused to stop writing their stuff, and though fewer now believe in such Christian messages, they (we) still love the sounds that they can inspire.

On Radio 3, you are now far more likely to hear old jazz classics, or famous French chansons or South American tangos, than you are to be subjected to 12-tone dissonance. Successful music contains at least some melody, some harmony, some rhythm, and some novelty. When they first arrived, the atonalists at least sounded different, but by the end of their brief moment, they weren’t even doing novelty, because it all sounded alike, and all equally off-putting.

Oddly enough, some of the “avant garde” music of those days has kept its appeal, to a few. But that’s typically because some of it deviated from the theoretical template, and actually smuggled in melody, harmony, rhythm, and novelty of the sort that wasn’t just novel in being so very horrible to listen to. One of the most obnoxiously bullying prophets of all this stuff, Pierre Boulez, often wrote music which broke his own rules, by sounding more like post-Debussy and post-Ravel rather than post-Schoenberg. Boulez used to announce that recent composers he disapproved of were not “important”, as if lots of people just liking these guys was an irrelevance. Well, Sibelius and Shostakovich, and now Adams and Glass and Ligeti, are embedded into the classical canon, put there by the audiences and the orchestral musicians, who loved them from the get-go, and institutions like BBC Radio 3 had to either go along with that or fold their tents.

LATER: And as I forgot to mention, the late Lenny’s own first recording of his Chichester Psalms was the one that Edward Seckerson said is still his favourite. 30 mins 20 secs in for that part of the programme.

Do you love robots now that they can dance?

I watched this video, and resolved to repost it here, only then to realise that I had encountered it because my favourite Twitterer, Steve Stewart-Williams was the reason I was seeing it in the first place:

Remarkable. And, I agree with SS-W, a bit scary too.

Funerial thoughts

Strange day. I spent a lot of it planning my own funeral, which will, as is traditional, be an event at which I will be present but not paying any attention, if you get my meaning.

The thing is, it’s no good saying: Look, I don’t care, do whatever you like. If you say that, you are liable to cause endless arguments and at the very least uncertainties among your loved ones about “What he would have wanted”. So, you have to say what you want, even if you aren’t actually that bothered.

Plus, although I say I’m not bothered, I can imagine plenty of scenarios which even the thought of would bother me, so a period of introspection was called for. Just saying “Do whatever you want” would be very selfish, in a bad way. Saying exactly what I want is selfish in a good way.

Apparently David Bowie (the old blog seems to be back working again without any
Screen of the Red Death
) had a very private cremation, followed by a more public ceremony at which celebs took it in turns saying how great he was. But not being that great myself, I figure the people present at my funeral ceremony would appreciate knowing that this is the actual funeral. If they suspect that the real funeral, the one I was actually burnt at, was earlier, they might not want to be at the later pretend funeral. So, just the one event for me, and everyone will see me being fed into the incinerator room. It’s what I would have wanted.

And now, my Designated Best Friend is in my front room, chucking superfluous paper into supermarket bags:

Since that photo was photoed, three SIX more entire bags of totally obsolete bumph have accumulated.

In other funerial news, earlier today GodDaughter2, the one who has just finished learning how to sing, accepted the job of being in charge of my pathologically huge classical CD collection, when I am dead and burnt. So, if you love classical CDs, and even if you hardly now know me, leave a comment that this is a list you’d like to be on. Don’t wait for me to die before expressing such interest. Think of my beloved CDs not as inanimate objects but as a colossal pack of puppies each of which I am seeking a good home for. If I can die knowing that my CDs will be well cared for and listened to, rather than just thrown into about three skips, well, … that’s what I would have wanted and meanwhile do now want. GD2 herself leads too mobile a life just now to be wanting such responsibilities, and in any case CDs are, for her, absurdly twentieth century and completely superfluous to requirements. But if you, like me, feel differently, then like I say, get in touch, now.

A good day. Good not merely because it was pleasurable, but because I got some difficult and important things decided and done. And because other such things were done for me, by various loved ones. The least these people should be getting from me is a description of what I would have wanted, even if it is a bit of an effort to work out what that might be.

The Airbus A390 “Clickbait” – etc.

Indeed:

I encountered this glorious airplane on Twitter, but just now Twitter is refusing to load onto my computer, for some idiot reason to do with me refusing to update or generally do as commanded, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. The posting in question is, in any case, unworthy of a link because if was one of those “15 airplanes that should never have been built”, adorned by an annoyingly small version of the above photo. Like a fool I took the bate bait (see first comment), and there were more like a hundred airplanes, many of them rather sensible, but none of them were the above goose airbus. Liars. I really should know by now not to disappear into these multi-click lists of foolishness. But then I googled “goose airbus” and found the bigger version of the photo that you see above.

Speaking of clickbate clickbait, yesterday I emailed David Thompson, with news of this crane inserts London bus into London pub garden posting here, in the hope that he might include it in his Friday ephemera clutch today, and he did (“Crane use of note”). So traffic here has jumped upwards. Check it out if you’ve not seen this. It’s a great photo. (This posting is now going to be another of these.)

David Thompson’s ephemera postings are a good source of weird animal stuff, and today, there’s a link to a story about a sea slug that keeps its head but grows another body.

I wish I could do that.

I also liked, although this is vegetable rather than animal news, this photo of unsupervised potatoes. Says DT’s first commenter (“Lady Cutekitten of Lolcat”): I once saw The Unsupervised Potatoes open for Rod Stewart.

M AGA

Here‘s the big reason why Trump is going to win. He wants everyone to vote for him, black or white, gay or straight. He’s not picky. All you have to be is pro-American!

Ricky Rebel explains his video, in one of the great pro-Trump speeches of the campaign so far. Conservatives are in on the joke! It’s driving liberals crazy! Some of my best friends are Republicans! … Trigger all the Libs!

Following.

“This is how people are in London …”

Apparently there have been complaints about this:

I agree with DebApre, replying to an American complainer:

This is not an issue in England. We share culture. We don’t consider this appropriation. You can’t sully something that’s meant to be fun and claim racism. This is not it. I used to wear Saris because one of my best friends was of Indian heritage. This is how people are in London.

Melting Pot London. Love it.

Also from DebApre, this:

Also, i lived in Dubai for 2 years and I dressed like Middle Easterners and Indians. The world is your oyster and experience if you want it to be. I still wear Indian outfits. I have never once been accused of appropriation.

So what’s happening? Well, I just put a comment on Samizdata which says a little of what I think about this stuff:

They aren’t “alarmed”. They are focussing attention on white racism, white racism being what they now want, and have done ever since the working class let them down by not wanting to join their revolution. They want a race war, because they reckon their side might win that.

The way to react is to frame this not as these races versus this race, but as civilisation versus barbarism, with all the socialists, national and international, on the same barbaric side. The recent Republican Convention would appear to have done this splendidly.

What the “alarmed” people were doing there was talking up white racism, in the guise of denouncing it (in connection with a demo about wearing masks). And with this Adele photo, they’re trying to stir it between white people and black people once again.

God forbid people should actually just get along with each other.

The Plague has brought back the Seventies

I remember when people looking like this were all over Top of the Pops:

Following a heavy dose of injury, Surrey quick bowler Reece Topley is today back playing international cricket for the first time in four years.

The one difference from the Seventies: tattoos on the arms.

Antisocial Benches

Remember Jeppe Hein’s red seat sculptures outside the Royal Festival Hall. Well, when I went back there, in early May of this year, when Lockdown was getting started, to see how the red seats looked in bright sunshine (strictly for the essential exercise you understand), I discovered that what Stein called his Modified Social Benches had been modified, to look like miniature crime scenes. They had been smothered in red and white tape, thus:

However, towards the end of the time I spent photoing all these benches that had been modified to make them anti-social, I photoed this lady and her bike, resting in one of the benches:

She either didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to be sitting there, or she knew but she didn’t care.

You can see how they wouldn’t want the tape to be, to echo the name of some popular entertainers of yesteryear, simply red. (a) Too much like smothering these things in red tape, and (b) what with the benches already being red, the red tape might be rather hard to see.

First photos with the FZ150

I can still remember the Great Leap Forward that the Panasonic Lumix FZ150 “bridge” camera was. For me if not for all of photoer-kind. For me, the best “bridge camera” I could have was my perfect camera. Tons of zoom, but no faffing about with different lenses to at once capture whatever scene presented itself to me, near or far.

I went rootling through the photo-archives looking for some early photos I photoed with this wondrous new contrivance, looking at the first photo-expeditions I embarked upon, along the River, to the Victoria Docks, or just to Westminster Abbey and Bridge, to photo my fellow photoers, to pick out some photos that brought back the shock of pleasurable surprise I had when I first got my hands on it.

But then I realised I was looking in the wrong place. What I needed to see were not merely some “early” photos, photoed days or even weeks after I got this super-camera. What I wanted to see were the absolute first photos I took with this camera, on January 26th 2012.

And the very first one of all was this:

That scene, of my kitchen window and surroundings as seen from my swivel chair around which most of my life revolves, if you get my meaning. (It’s the chair that does the actual revolving.) I am happy to report that the big grey Thing, bottom left, which was for making ice, has been replaced by a slightly bigger black box, which also makes ice, and also looks after food of many other sorts, including in particular ice cream. Otherwise, nothing has changed.

On each side of the window are CD shelves, and the next few photos I photoed were all close-ups of CDs, edge on:

That was when it hit me, and I believe I can still remember this glorious moment. This was the camera I had been waiting for, all my life. The key point was not just that these were successful photos of distant details. I can tell from the numbering of these photos in the archive that there were no failures. None. All of my first dozen or so photos with this new camera came out fine, even the one of my pop music department, which was where it still is, way off to the left and way up near the ceiling.

Only the following day did I photo anything beyond my front door.

The first outdoor photo I photoed with my new FZ150 was this, dated January 27th, i.e. the following day, just before it got dark:

That’s looking across Vincent Square at the building activity in and around Victoria Street, which has been pretty much continuous, one place or another, for the last decade. Mmmmmm, cranes.

Since then, I have upgraded to the Panasonic Lumix FZ200 and then to the FZ330. But they are both really just the FZ150 with frills added. If my current camera, the FZ330 were to be snatched away from me, and I was given another FZ150 and told that this would be my last camera, I’d not be that bothered. Were I told that I would have to go back to the crappy camera I had before the FZ150, that would be a disaster. Soon after acquiring this FZ150, I wrote about it at some length for Samizdata. This confirms what, up until re-reading that, I had merely remembered. The FZ150 really was a huge step forward.

Hurrah for capitalism. It really is ridiculous that the world’s schools are now cranking out a whole new generation of nitwits, an appallingly significant proportion of whom seem genuinely to want to put a stop to this glorious process.