Results tagged “alan rusbridger” from Slipped disc

A Dutch-American blogger, Marc van Bree, has compiled a preliminary list of classical music writers and institutions on Twitter. The list, displayed here, makes no claim to be comprehensive and Marc warmly solicits additional contributions.

There is something of the zeitgeist about this catalogue. Last week Alex Ross, pioneer of the music-crit blog, froze his main site and announced that his future contributions would be rather more occasional and under his employer's banner.

Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, in a thoughtful article on media trends of the decade, cited google, wikipedia and twitter as top three and omitted blogging altogether, except as a by-product of his newspaper's reader-response policy.

Two twitter storms have just generated a minor constitutional crisis in the British Parliament and an advertisers' retreat from a newspaper site that carried an article criticising the gay lifestyle of the late Boyzone singer, Stephen Gately. These are very much signs of our times, and both were driven by the agendas of print newspapers.

So could it be that the cultural blog has had its day? Certainly many of its functions are gravitating to twitter, facebook and other places of savvy congregation. Many writers use them as eye-magnets for articles they have placed in traditional newspapers. 

Some of those newspapers are now planning to put up paywalls, which means that if you're intrigued by the tweet you may not be able to access them for free.

A new convergence is emerging between old print media and new social sites. Does this signal an economic revival for arts journalism? Too soon to tell but the straws in the wind are not uninteresting. As this long-running mini-series indicates, we are in the thick of a fast-moving story. 

The first victim of the next Conservative government was sacrificed in this morning's Times. Liz Forgan, chair of the Arts Council, was reported to have vetoed Veronica Wadley as the Mayor of London's arts chief, on the grounds that her nomination was motivated by political preference rather than cultural commitment.

Come again? Every such appointment, including Lefty Forgan's is overtly political and her own head is now on the line. The next Government will not forgive her bias and she will be gone from the Arts Council within months, to be followed in all likelihood by the Arts Council itself.

For what it's worth, and I know her better than most, Veronica Wadley was more committed to the arts as editor of the Evening Standard, 2002-9, than any boss of any other paper with the possible exception of the Guardian. As her Assistant Editor, I had a free hand to campaign on all arts issues so long as the paper stood four-square behind the expansion and elevation of London's arts. Her commitment can be vouched for by the heads of most major arts institutions in the city.

It is unfortunate that Liz neglected to mention her personal animus against Veronica - she hates the newspapers she worked for, and has often told me so - but I cannot deny her a shaft of sympathy since this row, now bubbling over the British press, was not of her making.

It seems she was dropped into it by Ben Bradshaw, the inept Culture Secretary, who is driving an anti-BBC agenda in the last months of a dying government. Bradshaw knows he is not long for this world. But he doesn't want to die alone, so he has dragged Liz down first.

As for Veronica's appointment, it is still in the gift of the Mayor of London. If the present government won't ratify it, the next one will.

A number of people walked out of Andras Schiff's lecture-recital on Haydn at the Wigmore Hall on Friday night, so I'm told.

The erudite Hungarian pianist is in the chrysallis stage of morphing from concert artist to public intellectual, a transition last successfully achieved by Alfred Brendel.

Schiff's 2006 Beethoven lecture recital was received with rapture by the editor of the Guardian newspaper, himself an avid pianist, and his residence at the Wigmore is one of the hall's outstanding trademarks.

So why did people walk out when Schiff was at full steam? Apparently, it had something to do with the language he used. One young person was heard asking an usher what was meant by 'tonic and dominant tonal relationships'. Others were visibly puzzled by such helpful advisories as 'moving to the minor chord with the altered 5th'.

Musicians in the hall knew exactly what he meant. These are terms they assimilated in first-year college and use among themselves as shorthand, in the way heart surgeons refer to capillaries by letters and numbers. In an academic lecture, these terms would have been perfectly in place. But in a public presentation they sundered those in the know from those without and alienated the curious beyond risk of return. What was intended by the hall as an educational venture achieved the very opposite function.

Musical terminology is often clumsy and seldom irreplaceable. Most things that are done in music can be expressed in words that an unprepared audience will understand. There are plenty of artists who welcome listeners pithily into their world and plenty of critics and writers who advance the process of communication by avoiding technical jargon.

I don't want to single out Andras Schiff as an antedeluvian elitist. He is pursuing an honourable path of enlightenment in the language he knows best. But Schiff should remember that if he invites the public through the door he should speak to them in expressions and metaphors they can readily understand. Using shorthand may be handy among friends, but it always makes strangers feel unwanted.

The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, has written a tender-hearted feature about his former schoolteacher, Derek Bourgeois, a composer who claims a British national record for writing the most symphonies.

With 44 in his folder, Bourgeois is well ahead of the unstoppable William Havergal Brian, who composed 32 symphonies, two-thirds of them between the ages of 78 and 96. One of Brian's works, the Gothic, drew a twitter of attention when it was taken up by a member of the Grateful Dead - I once discussed structure and tempo with Phil Lesh - but for the most part these mass-production outpourings seem destined to remain unheard.

Bourgeois, who had an early symphony performed by Adrian Boult, ascribes his neglect to the 'avant-garde', which seems unfair. He is a versatile composer with a solid career. A soundtrack for the BBC's dramatisation of Mansfield Park lingers in my ear and there's a trombone concerto on my shelf, recorded by Christian Lindberg. Does it not occur to him that, as he piles symphony upon symphony, musicians will shy away from sheer volume and give the whole lot a miss?

He is by no means the only man who cannot stop writing symphonies. The Finnish conductor Leif Segerstam, a full-bearded master of orchestras, has composed 215 symphonies, ten of them in the month of August 2008 alone. Segerstam is an exceptionally skilled interpreter, able to pull together a last-mi nute performance with a minimum of fuss. What is it that makes him carry on writing symphonies, and listing them at the Finnish Music Information Centre? Does he not appreciate that a snowball would stand greater chance of success and longevity in Dante's Inferno? 

Myself, I blame Papa Haydn. The format he invented for the symphony is so inviting that, like a cake mould, anyone with the right technique feels obliged to fill it. Haydn wrote 104 symphonies, certainly too many. 'He was the father of us all,' said Mozart. And so say Derek Bourgeois, Leif Segerstam, William Havergal Brian and all.