Wednesday 27 January is Holocaust Memorial Day. It honours the date on which Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Soviet soldiers.
Set aside some time today and read the information on the website of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. The BBC also has a section on its website with broadcasting-related material from its archives.
Amongst the programmes scheduled by the BBC is a documentary on the pianist and survivor Alice Sommer Herz.
The Guardian has a piece with survivors' stories, reminding us of the fact that as time goes on, the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling. This makes the imperative to remember the Holocaust, and Bosnia, Cambodia, Darfur, and Rwanda all the more urgent. Today's political realities forbid us from not remembering these catastrophes.
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
Sunday, 24 January 2010
Mahler, kinda remixed
Kaleidoscopic Mahler, as if his own music wasn't chaotic enough. I feel I have come late to Uri Caine. I've been branching out lately, sampling music beyond my rigidly confined tastes. I'm on Spotify as I write, listening to Caine's Urlicht, as pictured above in the beautiful edition from Winter and Winter. This is a short post to say I've bought this album and look forward to exploring Mahler through Caine's multi-refracted prism; a veritable postmodern hall of mirrors if ever there could be such a thing - both veritable and postmodern. I change my mind all the time: Mahler is modern one minute, could be postmodern the next; at least Caine is there, chronologically-speaking. It's worth knowing that a new piece by Uri Caine is being premiered by the Hallé and Mark Elder as part of the mammoth Mahlerfest in Manchester. After what I wrote in the previous post about Mahler's music and childhood, the title of Caine's new piece, Scenes from Childhood, sounds fascinating. I should go.
Friday, 22 January 2010
Mahler
This year the world will celebrate the 150th anniversary of Gustav Mahler's birth.
As I'm sure will be the case with thousands - millions? - of people around the world, for many years Mahler's music has guided me through life. His life and work captivate like no other artist. The idea of the bridge he provides between Wagnerian, late-Romantic aesthetics and twentieth-century modernism continues to fascinate me. I have written elsewhere on this blog that Mahler's music is like a hall of mirrors, reflecting and refracting in complex and startling ways a multiplicity of voices and formal ideals. In purely musical terms he conjures both actual and mental landscapes, from the opening passage of the First Symphony through to the Seventh Symphony's 'Nachtmusik' movements. Written at the advent of psychoanalysis, Mahler's music feels deeply like an imaging of the unconscious, if such a thing were possible. (Mahler was in analysis with Freud for a very short period of time. In customary Mahlerian fashion, the couch was eschewed for the pathways of Vienna. Freud claimed that of all the patients he had treated, it was Mahler who most intuitively understood the psychoanalytic process.) This blurring of real and imagined landscapes, mined as they seemingly were from the depths of the unconscious, represent the pinnacle of European art. Mahler's horn writing evokes the vast forests and animals of European history, reanimating through musical means an almost mythical past that was lost to the composer's own time. You sense that in the klezmer of the First Symphony's third movement, Mahler is working through his Jewish heritage; but having been written in fin-de-siecle Vienna, it is also a stunning document of the German-Jewish symbiosis. Mahler's klezmer vividly encapsulates his hall of mirrors sensibility. The First Symphony might present the clearest example of the composer's klezmer inflection, but fragments appear in unsuspected corners. Listening recently to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sing 'Oft denk ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen' from Kindertotenlieder, a clarinet figure unfurled like a memory of klezmer that the composer had rescued from childhood.
Then there is the military band music, given distinctly Mahlerian ironic treatment through constant refractions and distortions. Like klezmer, band music - as any listener will no doubt intuit but also as critical consensus goes - forms part of a working through of memory as Mahler remembered marching on the street below the family home as his mother was being beaten by his father. Apocryphal or not, it is a compelling reading of the incongruous, not to mention inescapable, military style of his music. But Mahler's ambivalence towards this music is part of his nascent modernism, the very sensibility to whose formation he massively contributed. Some argue that Mahler was nostalgic rather than forward-looking. Much of what I have said in this post might accord with this view, though surely nostalgia is too loose a term for the workings of the unconscious. Perhaps one of the many reasons Mahler continues to captivate us is that he distilled the sense of an age on the cusp of its own death throes, anticipating events to come as Vienna shed its imperial image and power only to substitute it for a pact with a far more virulent authority.
*
Mahler celebrations have begun in Manchester and Liverpool. Both the BBC Philharmonic and The Hallé have teamed together to perform the entire oeuvre, partnering Mahler's music with recent or new commissions. Liverpool is taking a slightly more conventional approach by playing the symphonies alongside works either contemporaneous to Mahler or similar in stylistic conception. Either way, with Vasily Petrenko on the podium, the results with his Royal Liverpool Philharmonic will be intriguing if not provocative. The Guardian celebrates Mahler in the North on today's editorial page. Northern spirit will certainly be in abundance when both Manchester orchestras, together with a vast array of choirs and soloists, assemble on the stage of the Bridgewater Hall for the mighty, epic Eighth Symphony. I was sorely disappointed, if also warmed, to learn that the concert has already sold out. Those who aren't lucky enough to have a ticket for the main event can purchase one for £10 for the afternoon rehearsal. I anticipate the announcement of Liverpool's performance of the Eighth Symphony, which surely will be held in one of the city's gigantic cathedrals. By the time Petrenko gives the downbeat for that epic journey, the world will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of Mahler's death...
As I'm sure will be the case with thousands - millions? - of people around the world, for many years Mahler's music has guided me through life. His life and work captivate like no other artist. The idea of the bridge he provides between Wagnerian, late-Romantic aesthetics and twentieth-century modernism continues to fascinate me. I have written elsewhere on this blog that Mahler's music is like a hall of mirrors, reflecting and refracting in complex and startling ways a multiplicity of voices and formal ideals. In purely musical terms he conjures both actual and mental landscapes, from the opening passage of the First Symphony through to the Seventh Symphony's 'Nachtmusik' movements. Written at the advent of psychoanalysis, Mahler's music feels deeply like an imaging of the unconscious, if such a thing were possible. (Mahler was in analysis with Freud for a very short period of time. In customary Mahlerian fashion, the couch was eschewed for the pathways of Vienna. Freud claimed that of all the patients he had treated, it was Mahler who most intuitively understood the psychoanalytic process.) This blurring of real and imagined landscapes, mined as they seemingly were from the depths of the unconscious, represent the pinnacle of European art. Mahler's horn writing evokes the vast forests and animals of European history, reanimating through musical means an almost mythical past that was lost to the composer's own time. You sense that in the klezmer of the First Symphony's third movement, Mahler is working through his Jewish heritage; but having been written in fin-de-siecle Vienna, it is also a stunning document of the German-Jewish symbiosis. Mahler's klezmer vividly encapsulates his hall of mirrors sensibility. The First Symphony might present the clearest example of the composer's klezmer inflection, but fragments appear in unsuspected corners. Listening recently to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sing 'Oft denk ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen' from Kindertotenlieder, a clarinet figure unfurled like a memory of klezmer that the composer had rescued from childhood.
Then there is the military band music, given distinctly Mahlerian ironic treatment through constant refractions and distortions. Like klezmer, band music - as any listener will no doubt intuit but also as critical consensus goes - forms part of a working through of memory as Mahler remembered marching on the street below the family home as his mother was being beaten by his father. Apocryphal or not, it is a compelling reading of the incongruous, not to mention inescapable, military style of his music. But Mahler's ambivalence towards this music is part of his nascent modernism, the very sensibility to whose formation he massively contributed. Some argue that Mahler was nostalgic rather than forward-looking. Much of what I have said in this post might accord with this view, though surely nostalgia is too loose a term for the workings of the unconscious. Perhaps one of the many reasons Mahler continues to captivate us is that he distilled the sense of an age on the cusp of its own death throes, anticipating events to come as Vienna shed its imperial image and power only to substitute it for a pact with a far more virulent authority.
*
Mahler celebrations have begun in Manchester and Liverpool. Both the BBC Philharmonic and The Hallé have teamed together to perform the entire oeuvre, partnering Mahler's music with recent or new commissions. Liverpool is taking a slightly more conventional approach by playing the symphonies alongside works either contemporaneous to Mahler or similar in stylistic conception. Either way, with Vasily Petrenko on the podium, the results with his Royal Liverpool Philharmonic will be intriguing if not provocative. The Guardian celebrates Mahler in the North on today's editorial page. Northern spirit will certainly be in abundance when both Manchester orchestras, together with a vast array of choirs and soloists, assemble on the stage of the Bridgewater Hall for the mighty, epic Eighth Symphony. I was sorely disappointed, if also warmed, to learn that the concert has already sold out. Those who aren't lucky enough to have a ticket for the main event can purchase one for £10 for the afternoon rehearsal. I anticipate the announcement of Liverpool's performance of the Eighth Symphony, which surely will be held in one of the city's gigantic cathedrals. By the time Petrenko gives the downbeat for that epic journey, the world will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of Mahler's death...
Wednesday, 20 January 2010
Disparity
I never fail to be amused at the advertisements juxtaposed in newspapers. On two pages facing each other in last Saturday's Guardian were two ads, a full page one and a medium sized box one. The full page was dedicated to the Disasters Emergency Committee, and facing it was Sotheby's announcing a forthcoming auction of finest and rarest wines. The irony! These juxtapositions bring home the reality of the world without ever having to call attention to it. I did wonder what taste sensations lay in wait for the filthy rich who could afford to buy those wines, and, given that they would be an investment, whether they would ever drink them. The disparity between such choices and those facing the Haitians the DEC is trying to help is astonishing.
Startling.
Unfair.
Sad.
Forget finest and rarest wines and donate to the DEC.
Startling.
Unfair.
Sad.
Forget finest and rarest wines and donate to the DEC.
Thursday, 14 January 2010
Again
And then there was Haiti. Indeed. I was startled by the title of a Guardian article on the history of Haiti. It uses what has become the word of the week. I won't mention it. Let it speak for itself by reading it here.
'Hell' was not the right word
OK, so on reflection my use of the word 'hell' in the titles of the previous two posts was misguided. Look, I knew I was being slightly self-indulgent, but I was pushed forward by my honesty, which made me feel that the words I was using were just.
How words come back to haunt you.
The distribution of a word throughout many contexts of astonishing value and magnitude.
Words become talismanic objects, either forging the links between you and other contexts, or separating you from them. The former is true in my case. In his television essay on Obama's first year in office, Simon Schama referred to the president's keen awareness of American history. Schama placed Obama's problematic stance on Afghanistan in the context of Truman's decision-making over his country's intervention in Korea. The definition of sound governance in the case of a nation going to war is based on there being sound reasons for going to war in the first place, the implication being that Afghanistan falls outside this paradigm. In his customary eloquent way, Schama argued that the Second World War and Korea proved to be the opposite of what Afghanistan presents to us today. Reminding his viewer of the sacrifices made by servicemen in the case of conflicts from the past, Schama used something like the phrase 'Every war has its hell'. And there I was, frozen by a word that I had used earlier in the day but which suddenly assumed a depth of meaning for which I could not have anticipated. But in a way, it was the relief, contrast, contradistinction, or irony of my use and Schama's use of the word 'hell' that made me all too aware of the traumatic, catastrophic histories to which his programme referred. Like a flipped coin, I was confronted with a truer, direct meaning than that of my own purely metaphorical rendering.
And then there was Haiti.
How words come back to haunt you.
The distribution of a word throughout many contexts of astonishing value and magnitude.
Words become talismanic objects, either forging the links between you and other contexts, or separating you from them. The former is true in my case. In his television essay on Obama's first year in office, Simon Schama referred to the president's keen awareness of American history. Schama placed Obama's problematic stance on Afghanistan in the context of Truman's decision-making over his country's intervention in Korea. The definition of sound governance in the case of a nation going to war is based on there being sound reasons for going to war in the first place, the implication being that Afghanistan falls outside this paradigm. In his customary eloquent way, Schama argued that the Second World War and Korea proved to be the opposite of what Afghanistan presents to us today. Reminding his viewer of the sacrifices made by servicemen in the case of conflicts from the past, Schama used something like the phrase 'Every war has its hell'. And there I was, frozen by a word that I had used earlier in the day but which suddenly assumed a depth of meaning for which I could not have anticipated. But in a way, it was the relief, contrast, contradistinction, or irony of my use and Schama's use of the word 'hell' that made me all too aware of the traumatic, catastrophic histories to which his programme referred. Like a flipped coin, I was confronted with a truer, direct meaning than that of my own purely metaphorical rendering.
And then there was Haiti.
Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Hell is my own work
For a start, will I be able to grasp other people's work? Will I be able to respond articulately and succinctly to an individual who asks me to summarise other people's work? How can I topple the diminutive devil on my shoulder taunting me by whispering 'Is this really what they said?' in my ear? Even down to the odd term or neologism - can I be so sure that I have a workable definition under my intellectual arm? (The other arm, which remembers the naivety of childhood, works with the shoulder-residing diminutive devil.) Can I ever break free of naivety? This is before I consider the beast that is STRUCTURE. The work of some other people testifies to a wonderfully fluent argument that is like a pair of freshly-ironed pyjamas slipping over an exhausted body. It refreshes the mind - and its field, the subject in hand - by being so sure of itself. Note-taking proves difficult with such arguments: it's as if by omitting the sentence that precedes or follows the chosen quotation, you are depreciating the argument overall, and thus of its eventual integration in your own writing, where it sits like an odd garment.
These and other woes of being a PhD student.
These and other woes of being a PhD student.
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