Sorry, guys. I've got blogblock. Too many gigs. I have knitted quite a lot of my Christmas Scarf (all the men in my life get one of these at some point), however, waiting in the wings. I look forward to completing it during the Northern Sinfonia's L'Enfance du Christ later this week, where the harp only plays for five minutes during the third act.
The time is right for time-killing in the toon - the Sage is up, and I'll be nosing around.
2 new blogs to note: Leonard Bast, and closer-to-home Images. Both use blogs as a chance to discuss the arts and find a level of self-elevation and fufilment therefrom. Both also allude to literary characters who are as deeply ordinary as they are passionate: Leonard Bast, obviously, to Forster's man, and Images to the haunting Lovesong of J.Alfred Prufrock. Both characters never really elevate themselves, wherein lies their tragedy (for Bast, his love of books won't lift him out of his grimly poor existence, no matter how hard he tries; Prufrock knows he will be laughed away by the beautiful, cultured women who talk of Michaelangelo); but at the same time, they are only powerful and moving because we know how deeply they feel, whether or not they are successful. As Images remarks:
"it's all very well 'hiding behind bottles' with these hidden, internal, smug beliefs in the beauty or acuteness of our own dreams, but until we express them somehow, they're thin, untested and almost unreal. And I wanted this blog to be a place to express the thoughts I have - to challenge myself to ask whether I am a good dreamer or just indolently carrying around a few half-baked ideas."
There's a lot to be said for openess and putting oneself on the line, even if you run the risk of looking like an idiot. Emotional honesty coupled with the wisdom of humility add up to self knowledge, like Wilde in De Profundis.
A propos of humility, I am not going to do my planned post on Sinatra and the American psyche. Why Sinatra Matters is jolly good, but is one slim volume; I have only been to the States twice; and what the book says is not what I was expecting, which will teach me to think I can predict the content of books on subjects I know nothing about.
An arts funding debate is all happening at Artsblogging. I am better at quoting poetry than I am at political commentary but my two cents are here.
Free harps for all, that's what I say.
I have been playing away (in a strictly virtual sense) with a post on Artsblogging, George Hunka's new blog.
This is nothing to do with music, but touches a shared nerve.
I have decided to get a cleaner. Tom is in Tuscany and flatmate Ben is singing G&S in Buxton, and I am left not only with the frightening task of cooking for myself (since my summer in NYC I have been storing shoes in my oven) but of maintaining some sort of domestic order. Since Ben's cats arrived from foster care in Finsbury this is an uphill battle as they are the hairiest and most energetic cats ever, and I think the girl needs a trip to the Islington cat shrink (the boy is OK - he sleeps and eats a lot, mirroring the human domestic set-up).
Anyhow I also have to learn Das Lied von der Erde for Monday and a bunch of trio repertoire and I'm jolly well not scrubbing the lavatory too. I have toenails to manicure. So I went on the internet and found cleaning companies.
Here's the dilemna. The best company only pays its cleaners £5/hour. I am sensitive to issues of poor pay because I am a musician. But the other companies only pay them about £6/hr, and charge whopping agency fees as well. I can only just about afford a cleaner, so I am tempted by the £5/hr one.
However such is my Middle Class Guilt I would vastly prefer to find an individual to whom I can pay £8/hour directly, or I will feel hypocritical because I've always turned down pittance-paid hotel residencies, etc, because It's Just Not On To Work For Such Low Pay. Anyone know a good cleaner in the North London area?
Yikes. Scott Spiegelberg rightly suggested that if I'm going to post nice quotations about Blogging Being The Answer, better come up with some answers myself. I generally only have one thort ricocheting round at a time, and I used it up on the Britten post, but here goes.
I put Greg Sandow's post up because his recognition of classical music's diversity struck a chord. Some months ago I was encouraged to try and put together an overview of the current state of classical music in the UK. I haven't finished it, partly because in addition to surfing the internet I do play the harp for a living, but primarily because of the enormity of the task. As Sue Sturrock at the Royal College of Music wrote to me:
"Overarching questions such as this are not easily addressed by statistical research because of sheer scale. We end up, as you say, with what seem like subjective, anecdotal summaries by individuals based on others' data and interpretation, plus their own experience/opinion/agenda. I think you must break the question down into manageable chunks and do your best to find answers that you believe are honest. Are you interested in the arts economy? Or the impact of new media on professional performers in the future? The paucity of music provision in schools? Widening participation and its implications for classical music? These are three (of many) key issues you could look at but all could merit a book which would be out of date by the time of publication because things are moving so fast."
So to follow Sandow's suggestion of, in a blog, approaching the question of classical music's future "all in little pieces, following thoughts wherever they lead", is as good a method as any for such a vast topic. It is up-to-the-minute, highly diverse and, crucially, can be a rapid meeting of minds across continents and across different fields of musical expertise.
For example, Scott's "little piece for the moment" is that "the current division between classical music and popular music will continue to blur, creating a new aesthetic or musical language that will be the basis for the next generation of art and popular musics." This comment has got me thinking about an aspect of classical music, namely the contrast between the situation Scott describes in the States (Alex Ross blogs similarly: see his post "The End of Music") and that I know about in Britain. Certainly when I was in New York in 1998 I was keenly aware of this, working with Kitty Brazleton and the Hildegurls. There's also a strong sense of fusion and avant-garde musics in Berlin particularly and Germany generally, backed up by the score Friedemann Schmidt-Mechau has written for me. But in the UK I am less aware sucessfully of crossing the classical divide. There are commercially driven, artistically dishonest attempts at "crossover" music, where violinists play in wet T-shirts and wind trios have moody unsmiling arty photos, and there is some ultra-beard-stroking contemporary music supported by the Park Lane Group and the Huddersfield festival, but there is not the same multi-referential, successful genre-bending activity that I have enjoyed abroad.
The follow-on to this is, of course, why not? Or, if it does exist, why don't I know about it and therefore why is a non-musician even less likely to know about it? I'll get working on a piece on this, the question of conservatism in British classical music, and will this (rather like the Major government), be its downfall?
In the meantime, hopefully someone else will feel inspired to write on this topic, and the blogging tree-leaves will reach onward and upward...
