A number of questions follow from the news that the Conservatives will appoint Niall Ferguson to overhaul the history curriculum in Britain's schools.
(1) What is the current condition of the history curriculum? What is omitted from or foregrounded by its 'narrative'?
(2) Dependent as this is on the answer to (1), what must now be revised, replaced, revamped, and in light of such alterations, redacted, to suit what the Conservatives described evasively in their manifesto as 'a proper narrative of British history'? (What a string of ideological puffery this is: though it is couched by the indeterminacy or openness - however you might like to see it - of the indefinite article, you can detect a lean to the right in that moralistic, potentially nationalistic 'proper', as if what currently exists by way of history in our schools is nothing but a failed opportunity to big up the Empire/colonialism/United Kingdom as a paragon of Western ascendancy, and so forth.)
(3) Given the diversity of voices and positions adopted by historians of either the popular or academic varietal, is it right or just to have one man - yes, man - overhaul a 'narrative' that will be foisted on millions of young people for generations? Does it not go against the norms of the academic process to have the terms of a syllabus written by a single historian? Surely such decisions must be arrived at collaboratively in order to reflect a range of positions that will, when filtered into a standard curriculum, encourage similar openness in the minds of young people as they engage intellectually with the facts of history.
(4) The Guardian describes Niall Ferguson as "the British historian most closely associated with a right-wing, Eurocentric vision of western ascendancy". Odd that a largely Europhobic party should wish such a vision on its young people. But in all reality, the Europe to which the Guardian refers in respect of the Conservatives can be identified as an Enlightenment-era, western conception of democracy, freedom, and 'civilisation', and under which ideological umbrellas the rise and rise of colonial power was pushed through. So the choice of Ferguson is an ideological one that has the capacity to straitjacket the minds of future young Britons with a ruling class conception of history aptly placed to excuse neoliberal economics, justify unfettered free markets, and enshrine ownership of property as one of the fundamental rights of the shrewdly individualist, autonomous Conservative. (Another Conservative manifesto pledge wishes to build Britain up as a 'property-owning democracy'.)
Sunday, 30 May 2010
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
Kräftig - Entschieden
For me, Mahler's Third is his most experimental. Every one of his symphonies seems to reinvent the genre, but the Third has an indefinable quality that cannot be pinned down by structural analysis alone. It's that first movement: a vast half hour structure that unfolds across three massive climaxes, fittingly organic for a section whose original title was 'Summer marches in'.
We know that Mahler was at war with himself. He is the most psychoanalytic of composers. Freud was astonished at the extent to which Mahler understood analysis so implicitly. His music is a formal realisation of the dialectical interplay of psychoanalysis, and the first movement of the Third vividly demonstrates this. If Mahler was at war with himself, the form of the first movement is also at war - with a conception of nature as pure sound. Conventional musical forms enter into a dialectic with Mahler's 'nature': the huge, groaning downward glissandi of the combined trombones, tuba, and double basses; the double basses alone, marking out legato lines at the tail end of long paragraphs of music, as if returning human-created sound back into nature; the rustling, clashing, pounding militarism of the percussion, placed somewhere between Mahler's detested military band and echoes from within the forests of Europe. Melody dissimulates; form attempts to recapture what Mahler fragments.
If this is what nature told him, nurture also has its say. Gravitating towards its gargantuan climaxes, the charge towards the ultimate synthesis grippingly experienced at the movement's end is constantly held back. Deferral becomes a structural principle. We know the end is in view, but we're not sure when. Solo trombone passages in between the climaxes give funereal pause for thought, encouraging us to reflect on the possibility of never reaching the end, coaxing us into a sustained state of reflective bliss that will be blasted apart.
What is Mahler trying to say about what nature says to him? The first movement is challenging not only for its duration; it casts us adrift in a welter of moods that question our state of mind. His music goes beyond the merely programmatic: Mahler is not depicting nature so much as embodying it. We literally feel the earth move. We might even be pushed over the precipice. Over the years, I have felt this myself. That figural fragment that caps the climaxes - less melody than primordial wail - forces me along with it, testing the boundaries of my own yearning. Though it may sound triumphant, the movement's abrupt end is a cessation confirming not ultimate fulfillment but the transient nature of yearning itself. Is what nature tells Mahler that nature is final? But this is the first movement: are the five sections that follow testament to nature rejuvenated? Second nature? Or are we, as W. G. Sebald said, after nature?
We know that Mahler was at war with himself. He is the most psychoanalytic of composers. Freud was astonished at the extent to which Mahler understood analysis so implicitly. His music is a formal realisation of the dialectical interplay of psychoanalysis, and the first movement of the Third vividly demonstrates this. If Mahler was at war with himself, the form of the first movement is also at war - with a conception of nature as pure sound. Conventional musical forms enter into a dialectic with Mahler's 'nature': the huge, groaning downward glissandi of the combined trombones, tuba, and double basses; the double basses alone, marking out legato lines at the tail end of long paragraphs of music, as if returning human-created sound back into nature; the rustling, clashing, pounding militarism of the percussion, placed somewhere between Mahler's detested military band and echoes from within the forests of Europe. Melody dissimulates; form attempts to recapture what Mahler fragments.
If this is what nature told him, nurture also has its say. Gravitating towards its gargantuan climaxes, the charge towards the ultimate synthesis grippingly experienced at the movement's end is constantly held back. Deferral becomes a structural principle. We know the end is in view, but we're not sure when. Solo trombone passages in between the climaxes give funereal pause for thought, encouraging us to reflect on the possibility of never reaching the end, coaxing us into a sustained state of reflective bliss that will be blasted apart.
What is Mahler trying to say about what nature says to him? The first movement is challenging not only for its duration; it casts us adrift in a welter of moods that question our state of mind. His music goes beyond the merely programmatic: Mahler is not depicting nature so much as embodying it. We literally feel the earth move. We might even be pushed over the precipice. Over the years, I have felt this myself. That figural fragment that caps the climaxes - less melody than primordial wail - forces me along with it, testing the boundaries of my own yearning. Though it may sound triumphant, the movement's abrupt end is a cessation confirming not ultimate fulfillment but the transient nature of yearning itself. Is what nature tells Mahler that nature is final? But this is the first movement: are the five sections that follow testament to nature rejuvenated? Second nature? Or are we, as W. G. Sebald said, after nature?
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