Every Saturday morning for as long as I can remember, BBC Radio 3 has had a programme at 9am called “Building a Library”, in which a group of experts review recordings of classical music with a view to recommending the one(s) that the listener should contemplate adding to his or her ‘library’. The implicit model is that the music comes on a disc, which made complete sense in the pre-streaming era. The fact that the channel is still running the programme suggests that lovers of classical music still buy discs, which I guess really marks them out nowadays from lovers of pop, rap, etc., most of whom probably get their music from streaming sources. In which case a ‘library’ is now a playlist, I guess.
Category Archives: Asides
Fancy a job in Bletchley Park?
In late 1941, a mysterious Mr Gavin wrote to the Daily Telegraph offering £100 to be donated to charity if anyone could solve this crossword in less than 12 minutes. The competition was to be held at the Telegraph’s office in Fleet Street, London.
A few weeks later those who managed it received letters asking them to report to Military Intelligence (that well-known oxymoron), which then sent them on to Bletchley Park.
This recruitment method would never get past HR nowadays. But then, there was a war on.
(As you can see, someone in our house has been having a go at it!)
It’s different from the cryptic puzzles one finds nowadays in the posher newspapers — it’s a mixture of cryptic and quick clues.
FedEx goes the last mile
Dave Winer has bought a house in Woodstock, where it’s been snowing. He arranged to have some boxes of stuff that was in storage in California shipped to him via FedEx. Here’s what happened —- from his blog:
As you know I’ve had trouble with UPS, so I figured when Fedex was set to do a big delivery to my house just after a 1.5 foot snow in the area, that they would never get one of their big delivery trucks down the road to my house, and I’d end up driving somewhere to pick up the packages. But yesterday afternoon there was a knock on the door, and there was the Fedex guy with my packages. Smiling. I couldn’t believe it. #
The truck said Hertz, not Fedex. It was a small AWD vehicle. He said when they came to deliver the stuff a day before they realized their big truck wouldn’t make it down the orad, so they rented a smaller truck and drove that to my house with my package. He said we like to go the extra mile. Yes, they surely do! Compared to UPS, which has basically the same policy, trust the driver, but the ethos of this driver compared to whoever made the call at UPS (basically the customer can fuck off) was night and day. #
Hat’s off to Fedex. You win this contest, hands down. #
When dramatic licence morphs into slander
Last night we went to a performance of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus at the school where my wife teaches. It was an impressive adaptation, especially so given that all the parts were played by teenagers. The production also mixed some recordings of Mozart’s music, with live performances by a quartet on the stage. It adhered as much as possible — given the limitations of a school theatre and the casting — to Shaffer’s storyline, but on the way home I fell to thinking how unfair and misleading that line was. Its dramatic engine is the idea that Salieri, the Court Composer in the Austrian Imperial Court, was so jealous of Mozart’s transcendent talent that sabotaged his career in Vienna, leaving him destitute — and then, many years later, was so overcome with remorse that he tried to slit his throat and was thereafter confined to a lunatic asylum where a priest persuaded him to confess.
This makes for great theatre, of course, but historically speaking, it skates on rather thin ice. In the Oscar-winning film, Amadeus that Milos Forman made in 1984 (with screenplay by Shaffer), F. Murray Abraham (who won the Oscar for Best Actor that year) portrays Salieri as “a Machiavellian, Iago-esque character, who uses his connections to keep Mozart as the underdog and slowly destroy Mozart’s career”.
The play does not portray Salieri as a murderer but rather has him hastening Mozart’s demise through a series of plots, leaving him destitute. Salieri is characterized as both in awe of and insanely envious of Mozart, going so far as to renounce God for blessing his adversary; “Amadeus” means love of God, or God’s love, and the play can be said to be about God-given talent, or the lack thereof: Salieri is hospitalized in a mental institution, where he announces himself as “the patron saint of mediocrity”.
The hugely-informative Wikipedia page on Salieri suggests that while there was definite rivalry between Salieri and Mozart (as there would have been in the poisonous back-biting milieu of any Imperial court of the time), broadly speaking they got on fairly well. “Even with Mozart and Salieri’s rivalry for certain jobs”, it says,
there is virtually no evidence that the relationship between the two composers was at all acrimonious beyond this, especially after around 1785, when Mozart had become established in Vienna. Rather, they appeared to usually see each other as friends and colleagues, and supported each other’s work. For example, when Salieri was appointed Kapellmeister in 1788, he chose to revive Figaro instead of introducing a new opera of his own, and when he attended the coronation festivities for Leopold II in 1790, Salieri had no fewer than three Mozart masses in his luggage. Salieri and Mozart even jointly composed a cantata for voice and piano, called Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia, which celebrated the return to stage of the singer Nancy Storace. […] Mozart’s Davide penitente (1785), his Piano Concerto KV 482 (1785), the Clarinet Quintet (1789) and the 40th Symphony (1788) had been premiered on the suggestion of Salieri, who supposedly conducted a performance of it in 1791. In his last surviving letter from 14 October 1791, Mozart tells his wife that he picked up Salieri and Caterina Cavalieri in his carriage and drove them both to the opera; about Salieri’s attendance at his opera The Magic Flute, speaking enthusiastically: “He heard and saw with all his attention, and from the overture to the last choir there was not a piece that didn’t elicit a ‘Bravo!’ or ‘Bello!’ out of him […].”
Also interesting is the fact that Salieri, along with Mozart’s protégé Hummel, educated Mozart’s younger son Franz Xaver Mozart, who was born about four months before his father’s death.
So the historical truth about the relationship between the two composers could probably be summarised as “the usual professional rivalry accompanied by a degree of mutual respect” but where’s the dramatic interest in that?
Ironically, Salieri’s music was neglected for centuries, and it was only the world-wide popularity of Forman’s film in 1984 (and the travesty of its portrayal of him) that reawakened interest in it.
‘Middlemarch’ then and now
Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Mary Ann Evans, a woman whom we all know better as George Eliot. The New Yorker has a lovely essay by Rebecca Mead about Eliot and in particular about her great novel Middlemarch. Mead has already written a book about her own encounters with that novel — how she saw it differently each time she returned to it at various times in her own life. Middlemarch, she says “is a book that grows with the reader as the reader grows, which is why, two hundred years after Eliot’s birth, a reader can find it always has something to say to her or to him.”
But now she sees it in another, contemporary, light:
Lately, though, I have found myself thinking less about Eliot’s depiction of individual characters and more about the novel’s subtitle, “A Study of Provincial Life.” When Eliot set out to write “Middlemarch,” what she seemed to have in mind was a panoramic examination of a small town and its inhabitants that would capture not just the stories of individuals but would also say something about the way a community works, and about the state of the nation. “I am delighted to hear of a Novel of English Life having taken such warm possession of you,” her publisher, John Blackwood, remarked, when Eliot conveyed her intentions to him. Revisiting “Middlemarch” in the England of 2019—a year in which Britain was due to leave the European Union but instead has been mired in parliamentary paralysis, which the forthcoming election may or may not resolve—Eliot’s ironic observations about the electoral system have a new piquancy, and her representation of the innate conservatism of English provincial life has a topical relevance.
The parallel Mead sees is between the current UK government’s attempts to leave the European Union and the first Reform Bill of 1832. She focuses on one of the lesser characters in Middlemarch, Mr. Brooke, Dorothea Brooke’s uncle and guardian, who is a comfortable member of the landed gentry, and decides to run for office under the banner of Reform.
“There is no part of the country where opinion is narrower than it is here,” Mr. Brooke tells a reproving neighbor, Mrs. Cadwallader, the rector’s wife. Eliot shows, however, that Mr. Brooke’s commitment to reform is, at best, insubstantial. Having read theorists whose ideas underlie the movement, Mr. Brooke is inclined to ideas of liberalism, but, being a comfortable member of the landed gentry, his instincts are less than disruptive. (“Let Brooke reform his rent roll. He’s a cursed old screw, and the buildings all over his estate are going to rack,” one of the burghers of Middlemarch scathingly observes, when Brooke announces his forthcoming platform.) “This Reform will touch everybody by-and-by—a thoroughly popular measure—a sort of A, B, C, you know, that must come first before the rest can follow,” Mr. Brooke argues, to a voter, with “a sense of being a little out at sea, though finding it still enjoyable.” The hallmarks of Mr. Brooke’s character, and of his political campaign, are an inconsistency of mind and an absence of intellectual rigor.
Well, well. Which contemporary political figure does that bring to mind?
Quote of the Day
”I will not utter falsehoods, but I have no objection to making meaningless statements”
- A.J. Ayer
The governance of emojis
I’ve never knowingly used an emoji, not because I’m an old fogey (though in other respects I am) but because I see them in the same way as I’ve always viewed Facebook ‘Likes’ — as a way of enabling people to mime responsiveness with no cognitive effort. (What annoyed me about ‘Likes’ from the beginning was the absence of a ‘Dislikes’ button, which was effectively an attempt to squeeze all human response through the narrow aperture of approval.)
In today’s Financial Times (behind a paywall), John Thornhill has a column that has made me think about emojis, though. It turns out that the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organisation run by the big tech companies, maintains an “exclusive grip” on what constitutes an Emoji. There are, it seems, good reasons for doing so because Unicode is the means by which different scripts work universally across the Net.
But now — according to John — the adoption and use of emojis is the focus of intense corporate lobbying’ civic campaigning and geopolitical bullying. The Russian government, for example, has tried to stop operators using emojis of gay behaviour or approval. And the exponentially-growing use of emojis effectively means that they have become a new de-facto global language — a kind of visual Esperanto.
In which case, asks Keith Winstein, a Stanford CS professor, is it right that its evolution should be overseen by “a bunch of predominately white, predominately male, predominately American techies and coding engineers in California”?
Good question.
Ratmobiles
Now you really couldn’t make this up:
Researchers at the University of Richmond in the US taught a group of 17 rats how to drive little plastic cars, in exchange for bits of cereal.
Study lead Dr Kelly Lambert said the rats felt more relaxed during the task, a finding that could help with the development of non-pharmaceutical treatments for mental illness.
The rats were not required to take a driving test at the end of the study.
Sheer genius!
The Telegraph’s cartoonist is a genius. No other word for it.
Two-finger QWERTYUIOPing
From Vice
A new study from researchers at the University of Cambridge has revealed that people are now typing on their smartphones almost as fast as they can on a keyboard.
A good typist can type around 100 words per minute (WPM) on a desktop keyboard, but most of us only type around 35-65 WPM. According to the research, people using two thumbs can achieve typings speeds averaging 38 WPM on smartphones.
“[That’s] only about 25% slower than the typing speeds we observed in a similar large-scale study of physical keyboards,” Anna Feit, a researcher at ETH Zürich and co-author of the study said in a statement. Feit said the number of people who can achieve speeds of 100 WPM on a keyboard is decreasing.