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A while ago I wrote a posting here about how Stalin had maybe made Shostakovich a better composer. Deeper, less flippantly modernistical, more soulful, more significant, that kind of thing. In one way, Soviet repression certainly made Shostakovich preferable to me, because I dislike opera, that is to say, I dislike the sound that it makes. Political repression meant that Shostakovich wrote less opera and more instrumental music. There is no doubt that if Shostakovich had had his way, he would have felt safe enough to write more operas, and that would surely have meant fewer symphonies, concertos and string quartets. All of which I adore, except when the symphonies burst into song, as they did towards the end.
I just do not like the way that most classical music singing is done. All that wobbling and bellowing. This style was developed to fill opera houses before microphones, and during the pre-microphone era this was all that there was, if people were going to be able to hear it at the back of the hall. But now, when I compare the average din, so to speak, of this this style with the best of the twentieth century microphone-savvy singers, I find the operatic manner very off-putting and a serious barrier to my enjoyment of and understanding of classical music as a whole. See also this recent posting over at my personal blog about Sting doing a CD of some songs by John Dowland, which I of course welcome. Since writing that posting I have actually heard Sting sing Dowland in a broadcast concert. Frankly, I thought his voice sounded far too strained and I did not enjoy it. But many clearly did, and maybe the CD will sound better. Either way, the attempt was definitely worth making, and I hope other pop singers follow his lead. This concert can be listened to courtesy of the BBC for the next week or so.
Ironically, one of the things about the operatic style of singing that particularly annoys me is that even if you do know the language they are supposed to be singing in, you often cannot hear the damn words, and have to resort to reading along with a little book if you want to know what is being said, just as if it was in a foreign language. This drains much of the spontaneity out of the experience. But, even if I can hear the words, I still hate all the wobbling and bellowing. On the other hand, if there is little or no wobbling or bellowing I often love it, even if I cannot understand the foreign words. I just listen to the sound of it, as if the singing was a violin or something.
If you, on the other hand, like the way the typical opera singer sounds, then I am very happy for you. I am absolutely not arguing that you should make yourself suffer from my dislike of opera singing even if you now do not. Lucky you.
But meanwhile, I personally wish some way could have been contrived to have made Shostakovich’s great English compositional contemporary Benjamin Britten write more symphonies, concertos and string quartets, and fewer operas, without ruining the political culture of the country where he happened to be born and to live, which happens also to be mine. I love Britten’s concertos, symphonies and string quartets, such as they are. But almost anything of Britten’s involving singing, particularly solo singing (classical choral singing I find less annoying), especially if the solo singing is being done by Peter Pears, causes me to switch off. Ironically, had Britten lived half a century later than he did, he might have felt a lot more inhibited about expressing his true ideas, given that so many of them involved the fact that he loved beautiful boys! He might instead have written fewer operas and more string quartets, and critics might then have argued about the alleged paedophilic sub-text of said quartets. And I could have ignored all that and loved the music a whole lot more than I now love Britten’s operas.
Anyway, I now want to speculate that maybe this Shostakovich/Britten contrast can be generalised, to throw light on the bigger story of Western classical music. → Continue reading: Political repression and the development of Western classical music
Over at the Vololkh Conspiracy group blog of writers on legal issues, there is this interesting posting:
Millennials are those with birth years 1982 to roughly 2002. They are a larger group than the Boomers, and they are the most diverse generation ever. The core personality traits are: special, sheltered, confident, conventional, team-oriented, achieving and pressured.
However, the author is not all that convinced that one could, or should lump whole generations of people together under a single category, assuming them to have common traits, whether they are parts of the ‘Greatest Generation’, ‘Baby Boomers’, the ‘Me-Generation’ or ‘Generation X’.
This isn’t to say that times don’t change; technology can shape social experience, and those growing up with new technologies naturally have a different relationship to it. But I guess I am pretty skeptical that ‘the Millennials” are much different from ‘Generation X,’ or that ‘Generation X’ was much different from whatever you want to call the generation before that. I tend to think that for the most part, people are just people.
Pretty much my view, in fact. Yes, some of the current annoyance of my generation (I was born in May 1966, a rather good time for English soccer, not so good for our economic dynamism) at the Baby Boomers stems from a perception that those born after WW2 enjoyed a relatively cushy deal, not least in the form of things like final-salary pensions. The younger generations, caught up in the demographic changes caused by aeging and longer lifespans, may feel that older people have had it easy. But I think this can be overstated somewhat. Sometimes, when I hear of a certain kind of commenter waxing indignant about Babyboomers, one is struck by the bitter edge, and a sort of peeved dislike at having missed out on a permanent party.
I was all set to concoct a posting called something like “Why I am not a Christian – reason number seventeen” ho ho, about how you can’t expect much in the way of a robust defence of Civilisation against Islamic barbarism from people whose basic belief about their enemies is that they should love them, turn the other cheek, etc.
And then (via Instapundit) comes this:
THE former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton has issued his own challenge to “violent” Islam in a lecture in which he defends the Pope’s “extraordinarily effective and lucid” speech.
Lord Carey said that Muslims must address “with great urgency” their religion’s association with violence. He made it clear that he believed the “clash of civilisations” endangering the world was not between Islamist extremists and the West, but with Islam as a whole.
Carey even launched a new word, or at any rate one I’ve not heard before: “Westophobia”.
Don’t get me wrong, Carey perpetuates as many clichés as he challenges. For instance:
He said he agreed with his Muslim friends who claimed that true Islam is not a violent religion, …
Perish the thought. But at least …
… he wanted to know why Islam today had become associated with violence. “The Muslim world must address this matter with great urgency,” he said.
Simple, I’d say. The founder of Islam believed strongly in violence, was himself very good at it, and recommended it enthusiastically to his followers. They have obliged, century after century after century.
But still, you can feel the Western brain cells being rubbed together. See also – another example among many – this rather blunter pronouncement along similar lines. And, for a response to all this moderate Muslim guff, see also this recent blog posting from Peter Saint André.
The idea that the West’s response to the Islamic challenge will only ever consist of the first hasty and opposed responses to 9/11, which were entirely what people already thought – “We all ought to get along better”, “We are provoking them”, “They must become more democratic”, and so on – is very foolish. The West – a vague label I know but it will serve – is the most formidable civilisation that the world has yet seen. It has faced down several recent and major challenges to its hegemony, and it will face down this one, I think, with whatever combination of sweet reason and cataclysmic brutality turns out to be necessary to get the job done. This challenge now seems bigger than the earlier ones. But they always do at the time, don’t they?
I cannot find on the internet the full text of Carey’s speech. If it can all be linked to, my apologies for suggesting otherwise, and could someone else please supply a link?. If it cannot be linked to, then, given the incendiary nature of this debate, this is an error that should be speedily corrected. The technology is now in place to spare us from having to rely on journalists to tell us what is in potentially important pronouncements of this sort, and it should be used.
UPDATE: Link to the full Carey speech. Thanks Julian.
Presenter of Seven Man Made Wonders on BBC 2 television on Thursday 14th of September.
“After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the old Pagan Roman ways were pitted against the new Christian ways of the invading Angles and Saxons”.
Interesting to see licence fee (i.e. the BBC tax) money going on ‘educational’ stuff like this. I suppose they never heard of the Emperor Constantine.
This book states what the revisionists have questioned: the fall of the Roman Empire sucked and the Dark Ages really were dark and a regression for civilisation. Looks like a must-read for fans of ancient history.
One day, I have no doubt, we ourselves shall be dispossessed – though only if we forget that a territory belongs really to those willing to possess it.
– From ‘The Column of Phocas’, a novel by Sean Gabb.
On Tuesday August 22nd BBC Radio Four’s ‘PM’ programme had a piece on what would have happened if Otto Von Bismark had drowned (which he almost did) off Biarritz (a French resort that I have long wanted to visit) in 1862. The historian Nicolas Davies was interviewed and explained that Bismark was not a very important person in 1862 – just a representative of Prussia in France… but in fact Bismark was already the most important minister of Prussia and had convinced the King to collect extra tax money in order to expand the army without the approval of the Prussian Parliament, thus cutting the control of the purse strings by the legislature and undermining hopes of constitutional government in Prussia (and setting it off on its lawless road to expansion).
We were also told that the death of Bismark might have had an effect on the ‘French Republic’. I am sure that his Imperial Majesty Napoleon III would have been interested to learn that he was living in a ‘Republic’.
Having recently become a struggling podcaster myself, I have been paying a lot more attention than I otherwise would to podcasters who sound like they have got past the struggling stage. And of all the podcasts I have heard, the one that has impressed me most in recent weeks has been this one, in which Russell Roberts interviews Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.
At Cafe Hayek, where I first learned about it, Roberts describes this podcast thus:
According to Bruce’s worldview, every leader, no matter what the system, tries to stay in office and prosper. The relentless application of this simple idea turns out to have very interesting implications for foreign aid, the relief of poverty around the world and about a thousand other things. Bruce has a big brain with a lot of interesting things to say. It’s a very long podcast (about an hour and a half) and it opens with a fairly intense discussion of the theories in Bruce’s book. From there he talks about a wide range of applications.
And at EconTalk, Roberts writes:
This lengthy and intense conversation covers a wide range of topics including the evil political genius of Lenin, the dark side of US foreign aid, the sinister machinations of King Leopold of Belgium, the natural resource curse, the British monarchy in the 11th century, term limits and the inevitable failure of the standard methods of fighting world poverty.
King Leopold II of Belgium is a particularly revealing example.
→ Continue reading: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on the logic of political survival and the two faces of King Leopold II of Belgium
A while ago I briefly referred to a book by Simon Winder about Britain in the decades immediately following the Second World War. The book takes the idiosyncratic approach of looking at post-war Britain through the prism of Ian Fleming’s James Bond adventures. I cursorily flicked through the pages and it appeared to be an amusing and quite cleverly-done piece of work. Winder seems to have added something fresh to what is already a crowded cottage history of Bond studies. Winder’s book, at first glance, looked like a zany and rather affectionate recollection of what it was like to grow up as a young English middle class boy in the era of Meccano toys, WW2 comics and James Bond film premieres.I can identify with some of Winder’s own upbringing and views. So I bought the book and sat down to read it to pass away a few hours. What I read was in fact rather different, more serious and more annoying than what I had expected.
Winder makes a lot of astute points about post-war British history but a lot of his book is spoiled by an insistent, splenetic hatred of the English upper classes and Britain’s colonial history. He is determined to lay it on a bit thick, in the manner of a rather earnest sixth-former trying to creep up to his leftwing history master.
In fairness, he does grasp how Britain, victorious in the war but materially and financially shattered, rapidly lost its global position, overtaken not just by the already-mighty USA but also by France, West Germany and Japan. While Konrad Adenauer was helping to turn the devastated western half of Germany into an economic dynamo – with a little help from Hayek-influenced economics minister Ludwig Erhard – Britain built its ‘New Jerusalem’ of a welfare state, nationalised industries, crushingly-high income taxes, currency controls and a still-heavy military spending burden. Winder gives an easy pass to the Labour government after 1945 and is savage to the Tories under the elderly Churchill and his deputy, Anthony Eden. For Winder, the Tories are a bunch of old pin-stripped duffers more used to shooting grouse in the Scottish highlands than wrestling with Britain’s supposedly rightful position as a meek European power. His attacks on the Tories seem to be more about their accents and backgrounds than on what they actually did or did not, do. He misses the chance to make what I think is the really serious charge against the Tories of the time, as made for example by historian Andrew Roberts in Eminent Churchillians: these men failed to even make the slightest dent in the Attlee socialist creation. They accepted, for example, the trade union legal privileges and regulations that helped pave the way for the economic near-collapse in the 1970s and early 1980s. It is a harsh charge, but Winder does not make it as it would not, I think, occur to him to do so if my judgement of his political views is accurate. → Continue reading: An entertaining but infuriating book about British post-war history
A number of bookshops in Britain seem to be selling reproductions of the advisory books that were given to Allied servicemen readying for D-Day in 1944 and for U.S. Army Air Force personnel arriving in Britain in 1942. I bought a copy of the latter and it is, in its way, a wonderful snapshot of how Britain was viewed by Americans more than 60 years ago and makes me wonder if many of the descriptions could still apply. The book is called Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain. Here’s a couple of paragraphs:
“A British woman officer or non-commissioned officer can – and often does – give orders to a man private. The men obey smartly and know it is no shame. For British women have proven themselves in this way… Now you know why British soldiers respect the women in uniform. When you see a girl in khaki or air-force blue with a bit of ribbon on her tunic – remember she didn’t get it for knitting more socks than anyone else in Ipswich.”
“Do not be offender if Britishers do not pay as full respects to national or regimental colours as Americans do. The British do not treat the flag as such an important symbol as we do. But they pay more frequent respect to their national anthem. In peace or war “God Save the King” (to the same tune as “Our America”) is played at the conclusion of all public gatherings such as theatre performances. The British consider it bad form not to stand at attention, even if it means missing the last bus. If you are in ahurry, leave before the national anthem is played. That’s considered alright.”
The book is printed from the original typescript that was used by the War Department in the States. Some of the descriptions now may strike us as a sort of cozy, simplified portrayal, but actually I was rather impressed by the strenuous efforts of the author(s) to describe the privations of a nation at war, its habits, differences and qualities (I love its descriptions of attitudes to sport). It also struck me that the US authorities clearly felt it was necessary to take steps to educate servicemen and women a bit about the people they would be meeting as allies in the war against Hitler. While those who have reprinted the book may think they are making some sort of clever-dick post-modernist point by re-issuing these things, I find them rather moving.
By coincidence, on the same day that I bought the book, I drove up to see friends in Cambridgeshire. About a few miles away from the house of my friends, I passed by a rather neat row of hedges, screening a rather fine little white-washed building. The Stars and Stripes were flying from a masthead. I slowed down and realised that it was one of the cemeteries to commemorate the U.S. aircrews who flew hundreds of missions from the flatlands of East Anglia in aircraft such as B-17 Flying Fortresses or P-51 Mustangs. There were hundreds of such airbases, some of which are now either just strips of busted concrete in a wheatfield, although a few preserved airfields remain, complete with the old control towers and huts. On my father’s farm in Suffolk we used to find the odd .50 shell case that had been ejected from a passing aircraft. Chuck Yeager, the legendary U.S. Mustang fighter jock and test pilot, flew from Leiston, a few miles away from my old home.
Some of the men who lie in the soil of Cambridgeshire probably had read that guidebook and wondered about the country they were operating from all those years ago. At a time when cheap anti-American bromides fill up the airwaves and newsprint, it is no bad thing to reflect on the debt we ‘Britishers’ owe to those who came over to this island in 1942. May they all rest in peace.
Amongst all the the bad things about the French Revolution – the murders, the mutilations, the rapes, the robbery, the paper fiat money (and so on) there were some good things… and these good things happened during one session of the ‘National Assembly’ – a session about the time of the 4th of August 1789 (there was some night work – but there is no great need to complicate matters).
Serfdom may have covered only a tiny minority of the French population and courts may not have been in the habit of enforcing it – but it was still good to have it abolished. The old taxes may soon have been replaced by worse taxes – but it was good to have so many of the old ones abolished. It was of course wrong to later rob the Church of its lands (and later to plunder other people of their land, and to rob a lot of other people of various things), but tithes were wrong – and they went in the August 4th session.
Of course such things (that some books give credit to the Revolution for) such as religious toleration and the end of torture had been granted by Louis XVI long before the Revolution (and were soon violated by the Revolutionaries anyway), but it was nice to have formal statements about the end of ‘putting the question’ and freedom of conscience.
If any day in the Revolution deserves to be celebrated (most of the Revolution being a matter of robbery and mass murder – mostly of ordinary people) it is August 4th.
Certainly July 14th should not be celebrated. The Bastille contained about half a dozen people (including de Sade) and it was not ‘stormed’ at all. The Governor of the Bastille gave up the defence of the place when he was offered safe conduct – he was then promptly murdered.
When talking of the French Revolution it is normal to make a nod to the Declaration of the Rights of Man – but I have read it (in translation) and the drafting does not compare very well to (for example) the American Bill of Rights. At first glance the French Revolutionary document looks like a defence of individual rights, but the more one reads it and thinks about the wording the less good it is. To put it American terms – the thing smells of Thomas Paine (not the libertarian a lot people think he was).
My career in student politics lasted approximately 2 minutes. Recollected, hazily, over a distance of 25 years, it went like this:
GH to Conservative stallholder at fresher’s fair, eagerly: Is this where I join the FCS?
Student hack (horrified): Oh no, we don’t have anything like that here!
So I never did join the FCS. Unlike, I suspect, many of blogistan’s more venerable residents. Now Tim Hames is doing a radio history for the BBC. I am not sure how to read this. Are people like us now history? Or has Hames persuaded someone in the commissioning department that the FCS generation is about to come to power, as a generation of 70s New Lefties did under Blair, in heavy disguise, but with their ideals intact?
That would be a lovely thought, but there is a problem with that theory. Part of the reason the Tory Party was in such an appalling mess by the 90s was the foolhardy destruction of the FCS which drove out of the party a generation. Old Labour, in the 70s, on the other hand, clasped the New Lefties to its bosom: paid for fraternal trips to Cuba and Bulgaria, gave them speechwriting and policy jobs, helped them in the Long March Through The Institutions that was achieved by the turn of the century. The New Left base is strong. The New Right are even now outcasts. They (we?) are not close to power, unless I am much mistaken. Not even in alliance with the RCP…
Still Hames’ piece is full of delightful quirks. I liked in particular his treatment of Marc Glendenning, whom he insisted on giving the full grandeur of Marc-Henri, “a philosopher-king among politicians”. I did not meet Marc until quite recently, and though I have thought of him up to now as a conspicuously pleasant and interesting chap, I will look at him now in a whole new light. Would bended knee be appropriate, I wonder?
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