Cartoon of the day

By Huw Aaron, Prospect’s cartoonist of the month

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Who’s afraid of the avant-garde?

Looking at Rothko: no harder to “see” than wallpaper

Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen
By David Stubbs (Zero Books, £9.99)

The writer Joe Queenan caused a minor rumpus in the austere world of contemporary classical music last year by complaining about how painful much of it is. He called Berio’s Sinfonia (1968) “35 minutes of non-stop torture,” Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte (1953) like “a cat running up and down the piano” and Birtwistle’s latest opera The Minotaur “funereal caterwauling.” “A hundred years after Schoenberg,” he wrote, “the public still doesn’t like anything after Transfigured Night, and even that is a stretch.”

Inevitably, Queenan was lambasted as a reactionary philistine. Performances of “modern” works like this were well attended, his critics said. And while Queenan took pains to distance himself from the conservative concertgoers who demand a steady diet of Mozart and Brahms, his comments were denounced as the same old clichés. Yet clichés become clichés for a reason. It’s true that these challenging works will find audiences in London’s highbrow venues, but the fact remains that Stockhausen and Penderecki, whose works are now as old as “Rock Around the Clock,” have not been assimilated into the classical canon in the way that Ravel and Stravinsky have. When someone like Queenan has earnestly tried and failed to appreciate this “new” music, it’s fair to ask what the problem is.

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David Cameron: spinning the political record

Cameron: ready or not, here I come

I have a political theory. It perhaps runs contrary to the thinking of the majority of serious pundits and scientists of this most inexact of sciences. And it is this: the core message of the party leadership can be defined by one thing—not what the leader says or what the spinners enchant later but, quite simply, from the refrain of the elevator music played after big speeches.

I make no guarantee as to the unfailing accuracy of this guide, but I think you’ll find it surprisingly effective. Here are a few, admittedly random, examples:

Conservative Party Conference 2004 and Michael Howard, party leader, following a bloodless coup, raises his hands anticipating applause. The music fires up, encompassing the message chosen to reflect the leadership’s determination to unite a fragmented party riven by debates about tax cuts and spending plans, Europe and the middle east. And, not least, the leadership question which dogged Iain Duncan-Smith’s years and dominated grassroots debate. Naturally, the song chosen is “A little less conversation” by Elvis Vs. DJ JXL, with that refrain: “a little less conversation, a little more action.” Very pointed.

Skip forward one year to the Labour Party Conference of 2005: Tony Blair faces “his toughest conference yet”—the commentators said—after dividing his party over Iraq and losing what was left of his reputation for honesty with an electorate who felt their prime minister was a very different man from the one elected in 1997. The song which followed his barn-storming address to the disaffected party faithful? Eric Prydz’s “Call on me”—the cover of the Steve Winwood track “Valerie,” with that ever so subtle refrain: “I’m the same boy I used to be.”

And yesterday, following David Cameron’s “aperitif” address to the Tory conference, we got to the beating heart of what the party leadership want to do this week: reach out to floating voters. Playing as Mr Cameron left the stage, therefore, was “Ready or not” by The Delfonics, a track memorably covered by The Fugees in 1996. And that core message? According to the Delfonics: “Ready or not, here I come. You can’t hide. Gonna find you, and make you want me.”

That’s as fair an approximation of Eric Pickles’s “love-bombing” strategy as any pop song will give, no?

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Prospect recommends

Above: Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Faun, from The Spirit of Diaghilev at Sadler’s Wells
 
MUSIC

Take the risk
South Bank Centre, 2nd-4th October, Tel: 0871 663 2500,
www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Most of the world’s music is improvised, even if there’s a melodic formula or mode or rhythm that guides the rhapsodic outpourings of the musician. We think of western classical music as the great exception. It’s the tradition that’s governed, or some would say tyrannised, by the written note. But this is a myth. Improvisation played a big role in performance right up to Mozart’s time, and even into the early 19th century. Lately there’

s been a revival of improvisation in the Baroque era by singers like Cecilia Bartoli, and pianists like Robert Levin have brought back to life the thrill of improvised cadenzas in Mozart concertos. Yet improvisation in earlier times is still mostly terra incognita. This series, curated by the lutenist Paula Chateauneuf, aims to bring it out of the shadows. It roams across the varieties of improvisation that were current in medieval and Renaissance times, including such exotic repertoires as Spanish medieval song. It promises to be a revelation.

Ivan Hewett is the Telegraph’s music critic

FILM

Katalin Varga
dir Peter Strickland. On general release from 9th October

What’s strange and most arresting about Katalin Varga—a rural revenge tale set in Hungarian-Romanian Transylvania—is that it looks and sounds as if it could be part of the recent flowering of Romanian cinema that brought us California Dreamin’ and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. It’s strange because its director is an Englishman from Reading and a member of the Sonic Catering Band (who record the sounds of cookery and turn them into electronic music), who funded his shoot with a £30,000 inheritance from his deceased uncle. And it’s arresting because the story is given a vibrant and atmospheric treatment that recalls Tarkovsky—not something you usually hear said about a British film. Katalin, the titular mother, and her 11 year-old son are forced to flee their village when her husband discovers the boy is not biologically his. She realises her only choice is to return to the dangerous backwoods to find the men who raped her, one of whom is the father. Her horse and cart journey through into the Carpathian mountains quickly moves into a thrilling mythic register, aided by a complex sound design that includes some of the most haunting film music I’ve heard in years.

Nick James is editor of Sight & Sound

ALBUM

Embryonic
The Flaming Lips (Warner Bros)

Originality is not a virtue normally associated with contemporary pop music but the Flaming Lips’s ceaseless innovation, both live and in the studio, continues to set them apart in the world of alternative rock. Their ability to mix vast tympanic beats with studio electronica, grungy guitars and orchestration, has won them three Grammy awards, including one for best engineered album. But it is Wayne Coyne’s vulnerable, lofted vocal which provides the band’s emotional core. Lyrically, his blend of philosophical inquiry and quirky sci-fi imagery are delivered like troubled missives from a technocratic dystopia, in which anything from a festering spider bite to a fight with a pink robot may occur.

In their early career, the Flaming Lips released a quadruple album, whose four discs are to be played simultaneously on four separate machines. This new double album Embryonic is somewhat less experimental. Three tracks already pre-released on a digital EP, including the groovy “Silver Trembling Hands,” are more traditionally psychedelic than their 1999 classic album, The Soft Bulletin, though still proffer the same dynamic and stylistic extremes for which the band is known. Live, on the other hand, their shows are as wild as ever, more akin to concept-art spectaculars than drab, alt rock services. Their latest performance has the band being born from an animated, 6ft vagina projected onto a screen, with Coyne himself emerging to surf the crowd in a 10ft see-through bubble.

Nick Crowe is a music writer

ART

The Dark Monarch
Tate St Ives, 10th-October-10th January 2010, Tel: 01736 796 226,
www.tate.org.uk/stives

Surrealism, though the reference books do not always tell you this, was often profoundly informed by the occult. André Breton, the movement’s leader, may have thundered against it from time to time, but the other leading surrealists were passionate students of the western esoteric tradition. This penchant for the magical and mystical was, if anything, even stronger in the British wing of surrealism, most spectacularly in the case of Ithell Colquhoun, who was not merely an artist but a proper, practising witch.

Colquhoun and her cohorts are being given their place in the sun once more by this exhibition at Tate St Ives, subtitled “Magic and Modernity in British Art.” The modernity side will be familiar enough—works by Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth; it’s the magic that will be the novelty. Expect plenty of menhirs and stone circles, ley lines and geomantic patterns—but also to find out, for instance, how Derek Jarman was a follower of Dee and Paracelsus as well as an angry gay polemicist. And for those who care for such things, there is a Damien Hirst piece in untypically whimsical mode: a vitrine display, featuring not a shark or sliced cow but a cute unicorn.

Kevin Jackson is a writer and broadcaster

DANCE

In The Spirit of Diaghilev
Sadler’s Wells, 13th-17th October, Tel: 0844 412 4300, www.sadlerswells.com

One hundred years ago the great Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev founded his itinerant company, Les Ballets Russes. Based in Paris, but largely composed of Russian dancers fleeing political turmoil at home, Les Ballets Russes brought a wild creative energy to ballet at a time when, in Europe at least, it had nearly died of boredom. Charismatic and inspired, Diaghilev persuaded leading artists, composers, dancers and choreographers to collaborate on works that changed modern ballet for good. All this year, different institutions have been honouring his achievement, reviving ballets where records remain. Alistair Spalding at Sadler’s Wells has taken a different tack. Emulating Diaghilev’s own generative genius, he has commissioned four of the world’s leading contemporary choreographers to create four new ballets. Each of the four—Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Javier De Frutos, Russell Maliphant and Wayne McGregor—has been matched with contemporary composers, costume, theatre and lighting designers, and, in the case of McGregor, artists Jane and Louise Wilson, to come up with four very different takes on Diaghilev’s legacy. Cherkaoui has the brief to reinvent l’après-midi d’un faune, Vaslav Nijinsky’s legendary tour de force; De Frutos has imagined how Jean Cocteau might have used Ravel’s music, La Valse, which was commissioned but then rejected as “undanceable” by Diaghilev; Russel Maliphant’s AfterLight is inspired by Nijinsky’s own geometric drawings and paintings as well as photos of him dancing, while Wayne McGregor has taken Ernest Shackleton’s epic Nimrod expedition to the South Pole in 1909 as the starting point for Dyad. Together they will give us a perspective on what Diaghilev unleashed and where it might yet take us.

Emma Crichton-Miller is an arts writer

PLAY

Comedians

By Trevor Griffiths, dir Sean Holmes, Lyric Hammersmith, 7th October-14th November, Tel: 0871 221 1722,
www.lyric.co.uk

No playwright of the 1970s wrote more passionately on politics and revolution than Trevor Griffiths. But both Occupations, about Gramsci, and The Party, on the media’s channelling of the Paris événements (which saw Laurence Olivier’s final stage appearance, as a Glaswegian Trotskyite) were eclipsed by Comedians in 1975.

First directed by Richard Eyre at the Nottingham Playhouse, this study of a working-class night school for clowns run by a fading old pro made Jonathan Pryce a star, launched Eyre’s career in London and was performed all over the world. It questions the nature of laughter and what dark secrets within us trigger those mirthful responses to dangerous subjects like sex, ethnic minorities and physical disability.

Sean Holmes, the impressive new director of the Lyric Hammersmith, revives the Comedians in the wake of political correctness, celebrity culture, and the transformation of light entertainment on television into a long-running amateur talent show. A new generation of theatre-goers should relish one of the best plays of a previous era. Former game show host Matthew Kelly—whose revived stage career in Albee and Shakespeare has been one of the year’s highlights—takes the role of the gnarled old comic, with David Dawson, a recent Nicholas Nickleby on stage, in the Pryce skinhead role.

Michael Coveney is a theatre critic for Whatsonstage.com and an author

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Why the future of the book lies in the past

The ancient ways may be the best

A striking piece has recently appeared on essayist and programmer Paul Graham’s website, and attracted plenty of comment elsewhere, on what he calls “post-medium publishing.” The thesis – which Jeff Jarvis has already declared to be seminal (or close to it) – is that it’s a mistake to think that consumers of any kind of medium have ever, really been paying for content. They may have bought things because of the content but, Graham argues, the economics have always been about the cost of creating and then distributing a physical medium (paper, vinyl) that happens to have stories or pictures printed on it, or makes a nice noise. The trading of valuable information is, Graham concedes, a different game, but a marginal one, and from a different world to most publishers’ crumbling houses of entertainment and diversion:

Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won’t pay for content anymore. At least, that’s how they see it… In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more? A copy of Time costs $5 for 58 pages, or 8.6 cents a page. The Economist costs $7 for 86 pages, or 8.1 cents a page. Better journalism is actually slightly cheaper… Now that the medium is evaporating, publishers have nothing left to sell. Some seem to think they’re going to sell content—that they were always in the content business, really. But they weren’t, and it’s unclear whether anyone could be.

It’s provocative stuff. But what aren’t touched on here – much as in most of the ongoing debates about what digital media mean – are two themes that I would like to see explored in proper depth: the history of commercial publishing; and what the future looks like not only for the book or the magazine, but for the author. Read more »

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