Musical handrails

Getting out of a bad patch of depression-derived inertia. Have been helped a great deal by listening to music:

Bach Brandenburg Concertos (Concerto Italiano/Alessandrini)
Bach Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1 (Till Fellner)
Elgar Dream Children (LPO/Boult)
Elgar Nursery Suite (ditto)

The Bach in particular is miraculous - a kind of spiritual tonic such as I'd forgotten exists until now.

In the street last night

My wife told me that a gang of youths were making their way down our street last night (before 3.00 in the morning), kicking wing mirrors off all the cars one side of the road and vandalising bins as they went. A student from a flat across the road was so outraged that he burst out of the house wearing only his pyjama bottoms and hared down the road after the gang. He seized one of the boys and dragged him back to his garden, followed by two girls from the gang who were trying to persuade him to let the boy go. My wife reckons the boy from the gang was about 20, and she saw him burst into tears and say that he hadn't done any of the vandalising and now he'd get all the blame. The student had his parents with him, and they called the police.

My wife told me the boy and the two girls from the gang seemed quite ordinary - not drugged up, high, or drunk. The girls were quite articulate: unfortunately my wife is suffering from some throat infection so I haven't got the full details of what they said to the student, but it seems they believed that the vandalism harmed no one since it could all be claimed on insurance. Of course they had no idea that those claiming their insurance would have their car insurance hiked up as a result. The student further told them that even if their friend was innocent he was a witness and could identify who had done the vandalism all along the street.

We have quite a few students living on our street. I remember from my time at university how much hatred there was for students from people who lived on the estate nearby. There was an incident when I was in the university library one afternoon: about three boys came up and started shoving piles of books off the shelves. I was so angry I got up and told them to leave. They half-heartedly challenged me, but I simply told them: 'I'm waiting for you to leave.' My voice was reasonably level but they would have heard my anger in it. They left, one boy defiantly shoving a pile of books off the shelf as he walked away.

Back to last night: my tentative theory is that those vandals were just taking their childish hatred of the 'haves' on our street. Of course their essential cowardice is shown up by the boy being abandoned by the rest of the gang except for the two girls who attempted to stick up for him.

Beyond sounds

My wife reminded me today of a Pete and Dud sketch about Debussy's La mer: 'You can just see her pouring the milk in her tea.' 'Just so!'*

I guess at one level that sketch is a piss-take of how the wrong-headed process of visualising music can actually get in the way of enjoying the music itself. Certainly I seem to recall one of my A-level teachers citing that sketch when I was studying music, suggesting that any visualising of the music was suspect. All too often, it's suggested that a superior way to listen to music is not to let the music stimulate one's imagination, or even simply convey some emotional landscape.

But then what was Holst up to if not to express emotional landscapes or temperaments in each of his Planets. And I'm sure Elgar, even in his supposedly 'abstract' works like the First Symphony and the Cello Concerto, was intending to communicate something more than simply well-crafted musical structures.

What does it matter, some people might ask. Well, consider the 'jokes' in Shakespeare's plays; take an average guy from the street today and plonk him in front of one of those plays, and he would probably no more understand the jokes than Pete and Dud understand La mer - yet no one would deny that one would get more out of Shakespeare if one understood what references he was making, and could 'get' his jokes. Similarly, one can get so much more out of Elgar if you know the music of Mendelssohn (who himself said how music can speak more exactly than words about certain emotional states), Wagner and Richard Strauss. Or more about Mozart's symphonies by knowing his operas, his religious works (as well as Haydn's) and so on.

Well, that's something to think on anyway. I might expand on all this later.

*I'm quoting from memory, so cannot vouch for absolute accuracy here!

Start!

Well hi. Thanks for checking in.

I won't make any grand promises as to what you'll find here, but I guess that you'll find postings to do with history (not 'facts' so much as how so much of what we do and believe is informed by what we believe to have happened in the past); books I'm reading/have read (not to limit what those might be, but to give an idea of what I read again and again see below*); film (mainly commercial, though I've particularly got a soft spot for what I think of as gothic adult fairy-tales - more usually identified as Amicus and Hammer horror - and the more intelligent end of sci-fi - Bladerunner, Alien, The Fly (Cronenberg) etc); music (mainly classical); more general cultural issues (especially relating to national identity); relationships etc.

Nor will I say too much about myself for now - you'll probably learn a lot on that subject as time goes on. Suffice to say I earn my living as a writer and editor, and from time to time I've felt the need for some personal space to express some thoughts without the pressure to meet some other editor's brief. And why 'Pierre'? That's not my real name, but a long time ago - when I was in my late teens - a very dear friend of mine said I reminded him of a character in Tolstoy's War and Peace. I didn't know what he meant at the time, and began to realise only recently when I saw a production of Prokofiev's opera based on that door-stopper of a novel (and, to my surprise, enjoyed the experience). I've tried to read the novel since: it's certainly excellent and psychologically penetrating, but to physically find the time to read it is a problem...

I'll sign off now - have plenty to do in the 'real' world at present, but I'm sure I will be back.

*A selection of books I've enjoyed so much that I've re-read them with pleasure years later (no particular order):

Paul Scott Raj Quartet
Russell Hoban The Mouse and his Child
George Orwell Homage to Catalonia
Richard Hughes A High Wind in Jamaica
AA Milne Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner