Pandora's Looking-Glass – Page 3 – Cultural reflections at the University of Kent

Pot luck: music education funding ring-fenced

As reported over on The Guardian’s classical music blog, the culture minister Ed Vaizey reveals that there will continue to be a pot of money allocated to music education next year.

The previous government had set up a Music Standards Fund, dedicated to music provision, which is due to end next year. Vaizey declares that a ring-fenced amount of funding will replace it.

Music provision in primary education is a matter of hit and miss, dependent on local variables: it depends on whether the school values the arts generally and music in particular, whether it has a dedicated music specialist teaching a focused music curriculum; sometimes, it’s just a matter of whether a member of staff happens a) to have an interest or a facility in a particular musical discipline and b) to be sufficiently motivated to run such classess off their own bat.

This creates widespread inequality in provision at primary level across schools, quite apart from the LEA-allocation model that existed under the Conservatives in the mid-80’s. Hopefully, music education and county music provision will continue to be funded under the Coalition, although with arts funding cuts announced earlier this week, whether there will be musical opportunities for the current generation of primary school children when they come to the employment market as adults remains to be seen…

Posted by Dan Harding, Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent. Click here to read his music blog, ‘Music Matters.’

Letters, pray: more Larkin correspondence published

For over forty years, Philip Larkin wrote to Monica Jones, the woman who shared his life. As Anthony Thwaite, Larkin’s literary executor and friend, revealed in The Telegraph this weekend, letters and postcards the two exchanged have now been published for the first time.

Fantastic news for those who enjoyed Larkin’s Selected Letters published by Faber in 1993, and who read the replies to Larkin by his friend and fellow literary giant, Kingsley Amis when HarperCollins published a vast tome of Amis’ vibrant correspondence in 2001, The Letters of Kingsley Amis.

Notoriously reclusive, shunning travel and avoiding the limelight, not much of Larkin, other than the few slim volumes of poetry he published, reaches the public eye; at his request, Monica Jones destroyed Larkin’s journals when he died.

Some of the letters are published in The Telegraph here.

Where has the past gone ? Erasing history

I watched Westworld again recently, a Michael Crichton film from 1973 in which two characters go on holiday to a mock Western resort, populated by gun-toting robots. Holiday-makers can live out their fantasies of being cowboys, and shoot these robotic residents: alas, one of the robots malfunctions in a shoot-out and pursues the pair throughout the film on a relentless quest for revenge (the robot in question played with menacing remorselessness by a fantastic Yul Bryner.)

The formula of historical theme-park-going-wrong is one Crichton would repeat with greater commercial success with dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, and to a certain extent in the disappointing novel Timeline with knights.

Seeing the film again made me reflect that its whole scenario is akin to the way in which we perceive our own history, and how sometimes we experience it. Much of our view of history can come from film and literature – think of the multitude of Vietnam films such as Platoon or Full Metal Jacket, or Norman Mailer’s Vietnam-novel The Naked and the Dead,or Ridley Scott’s swords-and-sandals vision of Rome in Gladiator.

Our learning about the past can come filtered though the film-maker’s lense – Spielberg’s account of the Holocaust in Schindler’s List – or the novelist’s imagination – Bernard Cornwell, Henry Treece, etc.

Yul Bryner in Westworld — Yul never walk alone

Re-enactments and displays are popular ways of bringing historical events to some sort of ‘life;’ mock jousting tournaments at English Heritage castles across the country, or air displays featuring the dwindling number of aircraft from World War II. Like Crichton’s automaton-populated holiday resort mock-ups, these create an artificial snapshot of a generalised sense of a moment in the past, and purport to bring it to life for popular consumption.

But are we losing a real sense of our past, our history, buried under (or papered over by) a fictionalised representation of it ? And, like the remorseless robot in Westworld, will populist reinventions of our past, in representing it, actually destroy us in the end ?

Real history – if it possible to define something which we haven’t experienced for ourselves, because it occurred before we were born, as such – is being eroded by our reinventions, or re-imaginings of it; the glare of Hollywood’s limelight fails to illuminate most of history’s shadowed corners: in fact, it creates those obscuring shadows precisely because it spotlights heroes and villains for our entertainment. The same strobe lighting up the hero necessarily blinds us to the realities lost out of sight beyond the lit circle in which they stand.

Ironically, it’s almost as if the very media working to preserve history, whether for our education or entertainment, are instead serving, as the writer and cultural analyst Fredric Jameson puts it, ‘as the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia.’ (‘Postmodernism and consumer society’ in Gray & McGuigan, 1993: 205.) Fredric makes this point in relation to the function of news media, but arguably it’s also a pertinent definition of the methods by which film, television and historical novels are making history disappear in the very act of trying to bring it alive.

Where has our past gone ? Or, more accurately perhaps: where did we begin to erase it ?

Posted by Dan Harding, Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent. Click here to read his music blog, ‘Music Matters.’

Arts funding cuts: An Important Message

Video artist David Shrigley’s message about the proposed dangers to UK arts organisations in the face of proposed funding cuts (via a recent article in The Guardian).

Visit the blogsite at http://savethearts-uk.blogspot.com/

Posted by Dan Harding, Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent. Click here to read his music blog, ‘Music Matters.’

How does music mean ?

Picasso Three Musicians — 'Three Musicians,' Picasso

How does music mean ? Indeed, can it mean anything at all ? Does its meaning derive from its internal sequence of events, or is part of its secret its ability to resonate with a listener’s wealth of previous experiences ?

Thoughts on these, and a short video of the great Leonard Bernstein lecturing at Harvard on this very issue, over on Music Matters: click here to read.

Posted by Dan Harding, Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent. Click here to read his music blog, ‘Music Matters.’

A question of culture: in High School Musical

“The music in that show isn’t hip hop … or rock…or anything essential to culture.”

So says one basketball player to another in the otherwise yawn-inducing High School Musical. At that piece of dialogue, my brain was finally roused from the torpor into which it had slumped, driven there by the film, and emerged into the light of reason with the promise of something actually interesting to contemplate. (Such moments in the film are rare indeed: then again, I may not be its target audience).

What culture does he mean ? Contemporary youth culture ? Urban culture ? His own culture ? Or, more likely, anything connected with the Culture of Cool ?

Even more interesting is the idea of what is ‘essential’ to culture: what’s ‘cultural necessity’ ? Is it something that allows culture to thrive, to develop, to progress, to evolve ? Or something that allows culture to protect, to venerate, and to preserve ? Or is it something that allows culture to communicate, to be handed down from one generation to another, or across national divides ?

It’s probably a mixture of all of the above: as teenagers (perhaps even most of us as adults) do, they define culture perhaps in terms of their own interests, of peer pressure and their own growing and developing experience and tastes and what’s seen as cool, or hip.

Culture is what we define it as: what we read, watch, write, paint, listen to, indeed create. It’s also how we view our own society, our fellow citizens; it’s how we define our beliefs and creeds, what is important to us socially, morally, educationally and intellectually. It’s the ways in which society entertains itself, deals with its dead, dresses itself and raises its children.

It’s the mirror in which we view ourselves, define our values and judge our own actions. I wonder what the music in that show Chad was talking about actually was…

(Oh wait: this all took place in High School Musical: no, I don’t).

Posted by Dan Harding, Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent. Click here to read his music blog, ‘Music Matters.’

Keeping the Balance: art, narrative and the state of moral equilibrium.

(Or, more succinctly: who has to die ?)

Art is about form, structure and balance: the Golden Section, proportion, a sense of integrity that unifies a work’s formal elements, supporting an understanding of the work as a whole. Music uses sonata-form, and structural principles of harmonic motion through related keys: painting uses the Golden Section (as does music, admittedly) and ideas of proportion; some are often underpinned by a triangular shape holding them together (Picasso’s Guernica being a prime example). A fourteen-line sonnet is divided into two sections of eight and six lines, the octet and the sestet, with a ‘turn’ between the two sections leading the tone of the poem from one section to the other.

But balance can also operate in a moral sense too, particularly in literature and especially in film. There is a unifying thread of fairness which governs the way elements relate to each other, and that drives the narrative towards a conclusion that reflects this idea. Moral equilibrium is the balance between right and wrong being asserted as part of a work which maintains not only structural proportions but moral ones as well. The success of the whole depends not only on the unfolding narrative and its resolution but also the moral relationships operating across the work and an effective culmination that links and balances them.

Is there a case for arguing that in fact it is the establishing of the moral balance that is the governing factor behind a narrative’s architecture? Actions need reactions, choices need justification, wrongs need to be righted, evil needs punishing and virtue needs rewarding: all these elements need to be aligned for a work to feel complete in the resolution of its inherent conflicts.

In stories, characters are obliged to die because they have transgressed, committed some act which ordains their end in order to balance the moral state of the narrative; whatever steps they may take to redeem themselves will not be sufficient to allow them to survive. The queen in Snow White is irredeemable because she is jealous of the beauty of another, and condems herself by attempting to murder the object of her jealousy with a poisoned apple.

The more interesting works, though, are often those where the state of moral equilibrium is not established: the killer gets away with it, the monster is not vanquished by the hero but may still be alive somewhere; the wronged hero takes bloody vengeance and is not penalized for doing so.

Open-ended films are often more rewarding. Consider the Director’s Cut of Blade Runner; there is no tidy finale where the ends are all sewn up, all the issues resolved. Deckard flees with Rachel into the wilderness – will they be caught ? How long has Rachel left to live ? And is Deckard himself a replicant ?

At the conclusion of Thomas Harris’ novel, Hannibal, serial killer Lecter has seduced and won FBI agent Clarice Starling, and they sit together in a box at the opera. The film re-writes this ending – shamefully so – to allow Starling to attain a state of grace and redemption after leading the disastrous sting operation at the start of the film that results in the death of another agent. Perhaps the producers felt audiences would feel betrayed by the original ending in the novel.

Audiences often prefer these endings: stories that have a different resolution other than that which the moral imperative would ordain. They are more like real life, where problems often have no glib solution, where moral justice is often not attained.

In the controversial film American Psycho, if the film is not, as some readings of the end suggest it is, entirely in Patrick Bateman’s imagination, then there is no justice imparted in the film; the balance is not established, his villainy goes un-punished. Perhaps that’s why we don’t condemn the crooks in Ocean’s Eleven: Danny Ocean and his crew are villains, after all: but they are an amiable bunch who are breaking the law for what, from a moral perspective, seem to be the ‘right’ reasons: for the artistry of the challenge, for the re-dressing of former wrongs (Reuben Tishkoff’s casino was torn down by slickly villainous Terry Benedict to make way for, unforgivably, “some gaudy monstrosity,” thereby proving Benedict’s charlatanism by offending our aesthetic sensibilities as well. And not only that: Benedict has stolen Ocean’s girl.)

Perhaps that is why a series like The Sopranos has been so successful; secretly, the audience yearns for moral equilibrium not to be maintained, because life is like that…

Do you ?

Posted by Dan Harding, Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent. Click here to read his music blog, ‘Music Matters.’

The Colour of Magical Prose: Pratchett’s humour

I’ve loved Terry Pratchett’s Discworld sequence of novels for years, without really knowing why. I’ve always avoided trying to pinpoint exactly what it is about Pratchett’s prose that is funny: analysing humour is a bit like prodding a balloon with a pin – at some point, it’s going to burst.

But a moment of revelation struck me recently whilst reading Jingo, the twenty-first instalment in the prolific series.

People’s Exhibit A: Corporal Nobby Nobbs, a member of the City Watch, is so awful to behold that he has been given a certificate to prove he’s actually human. He is endeavouring to express some difficult sentiments – i.e. his lack of attractiveness of girls – to Sergeant Angua, a female colleague.

“What I’m sayin’ is, as you get older, you know, you think about settlin’ down, findin’ someone who’ll go with you hand in hand down life’s bumpy highway.”

“But I just don’t seem to meet girls,” Nobby said.” Well, I mean, I meet girls, and then they rush off.” (p.56).

Brilliant. Here, it’s what’s missing in the last sentence that’s the key to the humour. Left unsaid is the whole ‘I meet girls but they’re traumatised by my being hideous’ sentiment; what the reader gets is the first part and the last part, but without the middle section linking the two. This means that the bit about girls leaving in horror comes a lot sooner that we expect; and what a wonderfully concise manner of expressing it. ‘They rush off.’

People’s Exhibit B: two more officers of the City Watch, Commander Vimes and Captain Carrott, have just had one of their number kidnapped, and need to give chase in a boat. But they don’t have one, so they need to commandeer one from a disreputable smuggler named Captain Jenkins. Vimes, ever the figure of reasoned action, opens proceedings.

“Ah, Captain Jenkins! This is your lucky day!”

“It is ?” he said.

“Yes, because you have an unrivalled opportunity to aid the war effort.”

“I have ?”

“And also to demonstrate your patriotism,” Carrott added.

“I do ?”

“We need to borrow your boat.”

“Bugger off!” (p.217)

In this passage, it’s the juxtaposition of smooth legalese-speak and blunt coarseness that creates the humour; Vimes’ wonderfully articulate, law-abiding sentences offering the ship’s captain a chance to redeem himself, and the captain missing this completely, comprehending only what is expected of him when told directly – we need to borrow your boat – and his blunt response.

It’s the ideas of concision and conflation operating in Pratchett that gives rise to the humour: juxtaposing two ideas which imply an awful lot that is left unsaid, and expressing them in a brief yet telling manner. And often these two ideas collide because they are almost antithetical: articulacy and vulgarity, logic and confusion, grace and slapstick, great wisdom and downright stupidity (the latter usually, in Pratchett, The Law).

Pratchett’s humour also implies that his readers are intelligent and able to work out the parts that are left unexpressed; you admire his humour and are also able to pat yourself on the back for having worked it out (as he wants you to). Clever, eh ?

I’m fully aware that this brief examination of how the humour works in Pratchett’s writing may not have convinced you. It may not have worked At All. But the real way for it to get you, as with music, is to experience it for yourself. Read the books. They won’t let you down.

Posted by Daniel Harding, Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent. Click here to view his Music Matters blog.

Does it matter who killed Caravaggio ?

I watched Andrew Graham-Dixon’s programme, Who Killed Caravaggio? on BBC4 over the weekend. Caravaggio’s life (and death) are shrouded in violence, mystery, and a good deal of moodily-lit art.

David and Goliath by Caravaggio — Keep your head: 'David with the head of Goliath,' Caravaggio

Whilst the programme was interesting, it did make me think: does it matter ? By which I mean, does it matter to an appreciation of his art, solving the mystery of how and why he died ?

What we can forget, especially in the presence of great art – music, painting, literature or poetry – is that artists are like us: human. Caravaggio’s life was peppered with incidents (according to the programme) of sexual jealousy, a duel in which he killed his opponent, periods on the run, and artistic creativity. Like most people, Caravaggio was prey to the same desires, phobias and emotions as all of us: he just happened to paint as well. And rather brilliantly.

Of course, knowing that particular pictures were painted during a time when he was a fugitive and had to paint quickly, or that they were created in order to establish a reputation amongst the plethora of artists competing for attention at the time, can enhance or widen your perception of a painting.

But, ultimately, a work of art is experienced by meeting it at a particular moment, on your own terms. What led to its inception, the circumstances under which it was created, or its original intended audience or display-space: these factors don’t necessarily impact on the moment you view a painting or your reaction to experiencing it. They may inform your understanding, but your visceral or emotional reaction to it is perhaps beyond the biographical accounts of the artist’s life.

Graham-Dixon thinks that, after ten years of research, he has finally solved the mystery of Caravaggio’s death: murdered by one of the Knights of Jerusalem after he apparently escaped being imprisoned on Malta for sodomy. That’s all very worthy: but humanising him and investigating the facts of his life won’t add anything to his work for me. Like the work of great artists, no matter how human his story, Caravaggio’s art transcends all the squalor.

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Posted by Daniel Harding, Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent. Click here to view his Music Matters blog.

Lounge debrief #3: In Tents Comedy

Stand-up comedy tends to work best when people have paid to watch it. If you run a comedy night in a pub and let people come in for free, people don’t come especially to see it, they just wander in randomly. Rather than entertainment, the stand-up becomes little more than an unwelcome interruption to a quiet night out. If people don’t want to laugh they won’t laugh, even if the comedians are really good.

This makes stand-up at festivals a potential problem. The people who wander into the tent where it’s taking place are just generalised fun-seekers rather than punters who are actively seeking a good laugh. The comedy I programmed at the Playhouse at Lounge on the Farm last Friday night was exactly like that. People wandered in and out throughout the three hours of the show, and they were as likely to lie flat out on the rugs strewn over the grass as sit on the bales of hay provided for seating.

In this atmosphere, it’s near-impossible to establish the essential call-and-response rhythm of joke-laughter which stand-up relies on. The comedians are all ex-students from the stand-up course I teach as part of the drama degree at the University of Kent, and although they’ve all got at least twenty shows under their belts, I’m worried that they might not be able to adapt to this strangely spaced-out audience.

In fact, the show is fine. The audience response is ragged but respectable – a few solid but diffuse laughs followed by a quite patch, an isolated laugh from a punter at the back followed by a big laugh with spontaneous applause. Outrageous gags go down well, an obvious example being Carys Williams’ ukulele song about kinky sex. Jokes about the immediate circumstances are also enjoyed, but ask them too many questions and they get tired.

Perhaps my favourite moment is when Liz Page is about to launch into a routine about fellatio, and suddenly notices an angelic child with a mop of blond hair, hugging a red balloon, and staring earnestly up at her. Playing the dilemma brilliantly, Liz points the child out, wonders whether she’ll leave it with permanent emotional scars, then performs the routine by conjuring up appropriate euphemisms. Because we can see the fix she’s got herself into, we share her comic agony, and enjoy the way she wheedles her way out of the situation.

To be fair, the audience’s reaction comes and goes throughout the evening, but that’s no reflection on the comedians’ talent. The very good professional comedians who play the Playhouse the following night and Sunday afternoon get much the same kind of reaction.

The only exception is the excellent impro comedy show hosted by Phill Jupitus on the Sunday. The tent is simply packed, and there’s a big crowd watching from outside. The difference is that these people have definitely chosen to be here, drawn by Jupitus’s TV fame. Having said that, reputation might have brought them here, but it’s sheer talent that keeps them. Onstage, Jupitus is cheerfully aggressive, ridiculing someone’s hat here and telling someone to fuck off there, yet somehow still coming over as a big softie.

The improvisation is standard fare, but expertly performed – not just by Jupitus, but also by the excellent comics who join him onstage. Richard Vranch proves as able off the keyboard as on, Andy Smart exudes blokey charm even when taking on female roles, and Steve Steen has a rare comic delicacy which defies his short, round frame. While this show is on, the tent is longer holding a weird festival audience – it’s transformed into a genuine comedy gig.