It’s been longer than I imagined, perhaps longer than I re-imagined as the deadlines came and went, but we’ve finally released a new version of gigglemusic, our social network app for musicians. It’s nicer, it’s prettier, it’s easier to use and it does more than it ever did before.
Of course, I should know about software – I’ve been managing software development projects for more than thirty years – and I know it takes longer than you think to get something done, but, to be frank, even I hadn’t anticipated how complex it is to upload, compress, chop, store and prepare images, audio and video files for re-transmission to gigglemusic users. Hats off to Facebook, Instagram and all the rest. (I wish we had their budgets.)
So, what’s new in gigglemusic 1.6?
The big change is that you can now post pics, audio files and video files and see the media posts of friends, the people you follow, and users who share groups with you. You can like and comment. And if there’s something offensive about what you see (not including, please, that you don’t like the music they’re playing or the way they play it) you can report the posts you think we should remove (in the end we decidewhether to follow your advice).
We’ve also improved graphics and navigation.
And we’ve loaded masses of data:
If you’re a music lover you can find 30,000 events all over the world. And don’t forget, you can publicise your own, or your groups’ events too.
If you’re looking for opportunities, there are nearly 600 professional jobs listed in gigglemusic, consolidated from European and American websites. But don’t forget (and this is the main point), you can offer gigs and jobs yourself if you’re looking for someone to play with, or if your group needs more players.
You can offer items for sale.
You can publicise your business.
You can look for musicians, teachers and other music lovers around you.
You can also endorse others if you feel inclined and publicise your own skills, experience and qualifications.
And you can keep a diary of your commitments so that others can check your availability.
For a fascinating and illuminating summary and debate on the competing suppressor and ripper arguments, consider the articles below from The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal but now known only by the acronym). The articles and responses are somewhat technical, but bear in mind that the BMJ website cautions us that it’s ‘intended for healthcare professionals.
This one makes the case that’s there’s level of natural immunity to Covid-19 despite its ‘novel’ character (and it’s worth reading the ‘rapid responses’):
The suggestion is that the luckier amongst us may possess a natural immunity to Covid-19 (derived from experience of various strains of the common cold), that this may vary from one part of the world to another, and that in almost all populations the pessimistic assumption, that a herd immunity threshold of around 60% is required before the virus stops spreading, is false. The writer suggests that declines in rates of spread in some communities are a result of the herd immunity threshold being approached or reached already, not the result of suppression alone.
You would think that such a view might be amenable to falsification, in that, where the herd immunity threshold has not been reached, current rates of resurgence would reflect the prevalence of immunity. That makes it science!
So, it’s worth reading the ‘rapid responses’ to the main article. Some are supportive, some contrarian, but most are ‘scientific’ (though who am I to judge such a thing!). Worth noting that one of them discusses evidence to support the view that Vitamin D can help us ward off the virus and improve our chances if we get it. I’m taking it myself!
Overall, the consensus seems to be that it’s likely there’s some kind of natural immunity, to Covid-19, but whether that means the herd immunity threshold, initially and pessimistically modelled at around 60%, is as low as 20% is uncertain. Given the current resurgence, probably not.
The question, then, as to whether the rippers or the suppressors are right in respect of the science is unresolved for the moment (though how this question might be resolved is certainly becoming more clear). How ‘the science’ might then inform policy is a matter for political and ethical debate.
In the UK, Intensive Care Units are not yet overwhelmed, but their use will rise over the coming weeks, irrespective of lock-down levels. Would I bet my soul on letting the virus rip, in the belief that they won’t be overwhelmed due to our approaching the threshold of herd immunity, or in the belief that the vulnerable can be shielded? Probably not.
I’m not exactly sleepless with anxiety, but I’m ever more dismayed and confused by two competing theories about the virus.
There are those who cry, ‘Suppress, suppress’ whilst others insist we should ‘Let it rip, but protect the vulnerable’.
Both sides tout evidence to support their views.
The suppressors say that:
If we let the virus rip then hundreds of thousands will die
Our healthcare systems will be overwhelmed
Young people will also get very sick
‘Long’ Covid is a serious risk for all
Post-Covid immunity is not guaranteed
It’s impossible to identify and shield the vulnerable
The rippers say that:
The elderly and vulnerable can be protected
Much of the population has a natural immunity
The virus has ripped already and has done its worst, which wasn’t even half as bad as others predicted
Herd immunity (even without the aid of vaccines) is the only way forward
The damage done by suppression exceeds the benefit by far
Much of this is conjecture. If it weren’t, the issue would surely have been resolved.
The only facts we can be sure of are the simple historical ones about what’s already happened – that large numbers of people got sick and died, and that at various times in various places our health services were overwhelmed. Why that happened, what happened at the cellular level, or exactly how the virus passed from one person to another, and when, we still don’t know.
Policy makers claim they’re ‘guided’ by, or ‘informed’ by, the science. The trouble is, the scientists can’t agree on what ‘the science’ is. Some of them, I suspect, don’t even agree on what ‘science’ is.
But whatever the science tells us, what we do is also governed by what our principles are. If you’re a strict utilitarian you’d probably put the wider long-term welfare of the many ahead of the acute need of the few. But, in terms of guiding principles, my own view, and probably the instinctive view of the majority, is that we mustn’t allow our health services to be overwhelmed, even if that comes at considerably long term cost to wider society. The acute need for intensive care of those who would otherwise die at home, must be met.
Putting principles aside, what irks me about the suppressors and the rippers, is that you rarely hear them say what would prove either of them right or wrong. How exactly are we to decide between them?
One of the first books of philosophy I read before studying the subject at university was A J Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, a work of logical positivism that sought to show that the meaning of a sentence lies in its method of verification. Put simply, for a sentence to have meaning you’ve got to understand what would demonstrably have to be the case for it to be true. That leaves statements such as ‘God is Love’ or Blake’s ‘the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction’ in a limbo of meaning and usefulness beyond the Kuyper Belt. (Hoist, as it were, by his own petard, Ayer could never explain how to verify his own ‘The meaning of a sentence lies in its method of verification.’)
You might wonder what that’s got to do with the virus. Well, I suppose verificationism can’t entirely be nonsense. Truth, at least of the kind promoted by rippers and suppressors, must have something to do with fact.
Digressing still further, hard on the heels of verificationism, at least in terms of the philosophy curriculum, came falsificationism, Karl Popper’s contribution to the philosophy of science. Whilst descriptions (though probably not of the ‘tigers of wrath’ or the ‘God is Love’ kind) are often made sense of through their correspondence to things we see or measure in the physical world, scientific statements, to be truly scientific, must be capable of falsification. They will never, otherwise, advance our understanding of the world. Scientific hypotheses must be capable of prediction, and susceptible to falsification, and rejection (or in most cases reasonable elaboration). Newtonian physics was useful (it’s still useful for most of us and easier to live by than relativity) but in the end it was falsified and improved.
And it’s said of three of the Big Theories of the 19th century – Marx’s, Freud’s and Darwin’s – that only Darwin’s is resembles a scientific theory. I’ve never grasped what could disprove Freudian explanation, though, to be fair, Freud and Marx mightn’t have claimed full ‘scientific’ status for their theories.
But that’s my problem with the rippers and the suppressors. They don’t sound like scientists. They sound like priests. They’re professing Faith rather than Fact. When do we ever hear them saying, ‘If this happens, then I’m wrong?’
To celebrate Version 1.4 of gigglemusic – now available on the App Store and Google Play – my teacher, Jan Thuri, and I recorded a Covid-19 compliant performance of a short duet by Telemann.
It’s a hard time for musicians, but play we must. If this is the only way, then so be it.
You may notice that we’re closer to each other than recommended by the International Oboists’ Guild (we’re playing from the same score), but we took the extra precaution of muzzling our instruments’ bells.
Make of it what you will. And please forgive us our mistakes. It is harder to play behind a mask than you might imagine.
If you’re eager to make contact with other musicians during these difficult times, try gigglemusic. It’s a new network for classical musicians. We released our first version just as Covid struck, and we’re still holding off from widespread marketing until our strapline ‘bringing musicians together‘ makes more sense, but we’re eager to add more users.
gigglemusic lets you find other musicians, concerts, music businesses, groups, opportunities and items for sale. Register, promote your own skills, add your own events, and let us know what you think. It costs nothing.
Antal Dorati (1906 to 1988) is generally known as a conductor, but he was also a fine composer. Born in Budapest to musical parents, he studied at the Franz Liszt Academy with Kodaly and Bartok.
His Five Pieces for Solo Oboe, written for Heinz Holliger, are amongst the most imaginative (and difficult) solo works for the instrument. The least difficult is this one, which I recorded this morning at home. There’s a wrong note (other oboists will surely notice it), a chickening-out of the harmonics in the last bar, and a number of other deficiencies. One can always do better. Here it is, anyway.
Today is the birthday of two great musicians – my nephew, Frederic Bager and the composer, Richard Wagner.
Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813, Frederic in London in 1991, where he studied at the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music.
Time will in due course adjudicate between them, but in the meantime judge for yourself whether execution trumps composition in this tribute by Frederic to Wagner, an eight-hand sleight-of-hands performance of The Ride of the Valkyries from Wagner’s Die Walkure.
Frederic is available as a recitalist and soloist (max. two hands). Wagner is not.
When I was a seven-year-old at prep school, maps of the world were predominantly red – British colonies, dependencies and, of course, the motherland herself. But I suspect our geography teacher was a die-hard, nostalgic imperialist. This was 1965, and India remained red, nearly twenty years after independence. It must have been an old map, a reminder of those more glorious times when the British were at their world-beating best – when they bestrode the world.
Boris Johnson went to a similar kind of school, I suspect, though he’s a few years younger than I am. Rather less of the world was red when, famously, he first dreamt of being king of it.
But the ethos endures, and I was reminded of it when yesterday he announced that the UK would soon have a ‘world-beating’ test, track and trace regime.
The British are Best, after all.
Or is it the Americans who are Best?
Donald Trump made a very similar claim a day or two ago. The USA has the world’s best testing regime, he said.
What I don’t understand is why the two of them have turned this into a competition. For a start, best is irrelevant if you’re the best of a bad bunch. And what does ‘best’ or ‘world-beating’ mean? Could we agree on a common standard of measurement?
‘Virus-beating’ is good enough for most of us. Or ‘excellent’, or ‘as good as possible in the circumstances’. Not ‘world-beating’. Not ‘best’. The enemy in this ‘war’ is not other ‘lesser’ nations but a squiggle of RNA that endangers all of us without regard to nationality.
They’re different people, Trump and Johnson, but both sound the drumbeat of nationalism too readily for my taste. It’s unnecessary and it’s dangerous.
Tired of Netflix, I took refuge, the other night, in YouTube and found myself binge-watching and listening to three of my favourite Wagnerian tenors of yesteryear – Jon Vickers (1926-2015), Siegfried Jerusalem (1940-) and Alberto Remedios (1935-2016), all of whom I saw performing in London in the ’70s and ’80s. I was a huge enthusiast for Vickers and Jerusalem even then, but have only more recently come to appreciate how splendid and exceptional Remedios was.
Great heroic Wagner tenors, such as these, are ever thin on the ground. They must be heroic in two senses at least – both stylistically and emotionally. They need voices resonant enough to convey the heroism of the characters they sing, and personal heroism in order to be able to walk onto the stage and sing the arduous roles that composers such as Wagner have written for them. Few can keep it up for long. They peak and they fade. I was lucky to hear and see all of them at their best.
Jon Vickers was probably the most extraordinary of the three. Indeed, he had one of the most extraordinary tenor voices of the 20th century, an elemental force that he could barely control (he’s probably loved rather less by those who know how singing works). It suited the operatic characters he inhabited, men struggling with feelings and faults that they, also, could barely control – Otello, Siegmund, Tristan, Peter Grimes, Canio, Samson – rough physical men, acting violently and impulsively.
Here he is as Siegmund (in Die Walkure):
And here as Canio (in Pagliacci):
He was also a profoundly religious man, and temperamental. He had his own strong views as to how a character should be portrayed and sung and, like Peter Grimes, he was averse to ‘interference’. He viewed Wagner’s Tannhauser as blasphemous and withdrew from a Covent Garden production in the 1980s.
He also sang lieder, but to my ears and eyes he never sounded or looked quite right in the more domestic setting of the lieder recital hall, straining at the leash like a wild animal tamed.
So besotted was I by Vickers the singer/actor that I even wrote to him in the 1980s to ask for his autograph, which, courteously, he sent me. I still have it, scrawled across a photograph of him as Samson, in chains.
I was turned on to Siegfried Jerusalem by an article the great journalist Bernard Levin wrote in The Times in the early 1980’s after hearing Jerusalem sing at Bayreuth, hailing him as the yearned-for newcomer heroic tenor, possesed of a splendidly easy, heroic and burnished voice. There was certainly a dearth of good heroic tenors at the time. Peter Hoffman and Rene Kollo were already sounding strained.
Here he is, also singing Siegmund:
It’s a beautiful and eloquent performance. The sheer quality of his voice, the sound itself, is amongst the most beautiful I’ve heard. But in comparison with Jon Vickers it seems emotionally light.
So besotted was I by Jerusalem the singer that I wrote to the Royal Opera House to suggest they engage him more frequently. They replied, courteously, that he lacked the tessitura required for the larger Wagner roles. I think they were wrong about that. He sang Siegfried at Bayreuth and Parsifal at the Met to great acclaim.
I heard and saw Alberto Remedios in the ENO English-language production of the ring, conducted by Reginal Goodall, who was famous for making Wagner’s operas last longer than any other conductor.
Remedios was Liverpudlian through and through, his grandfather an immigrant from Spain. Semi-professional footballer, shipyard welder, laddish, I suspect, to the day he died, he possessed a naturally wonderful voice and an aversion, sadly, to learning roles in foreign languages – one of the reasons he never sang at Bayreuth (they also considered his voice too lyrical). I read somewhere that he had difficulty in learning roles in English, too, and on one occasion gave the flowers he was presented with at the end of an opera to his prompter.
Here’s his Siegmund (in German):
And Peter Grimes:
Listen also (on Spotify) to the last act of Reginald Goodall’s Twilight of the Gods. I’ve never heard Siegfried sung more ardently or gloriously.
To learn more about Remedios, you might watch him as he’s cornered by Eamonn Andrews for This is Your Life. You will marvel at how awful TV used to be.
They were three wonderful tenors, and though there are equally great Wagnerian tenors singing today (Jonas Kaufmann, amongst a few others) I miss these three particularly – and Jon Vickers most of all.
I spent much of my first summer in London in 1980 standing in the queue at the back of the Albert Hall for the BBC Proms (I had more patience and energy when I was 22). If you wanted a good vantage point you had to be there by 4pm, though for the more popular programmes it had to be the night before. All in all, you’d be standing for six hours at least, if you count the concert itself, though the more professional Prommers were equipped with collapsible camping stools, thermos flasks, and so on. There’s a lot of oneupmanship when it comes to Promming.
For three hours or so, before you bought your ticket, you couldn’t go anywhere. The most annoying aspect of this was the ‘chuggers’, the good people collecting money for charity, though I don’t think that’s what they were called back then. They lacked the big buckets that today’s kind hijackers carry. Of course, they were well-meaning young people and I don’t doubt they were collecting money for excellent causes.
And they were in chugger heaven chugging the Prommers behind the Albert Hall. We were relatively rich and easy pickings, I suppose. And there was no possibility of escape, save by forgoing some particularly wonderful and obscure piece by Stockhausen, Cage or Ligeti, pieces I’d been longing to hear since infancy. The chuggers had us, as Molesworth might have put it, ‘like a Treen in a disabled spaceship.’
They usually worked backwards from the head of the queue, methodically and determinedly, and, of course, nearly everyone gave them something. Most would have felt embarrassed not to. The moral pressure was almost irresistible.
Only I hated, even then, doing something just because it was expected of me. The greater the moral and peer pressure exerted, whatever the cause, the more I wanted not to. So usually I didn’t.
‘You don’t think this is a deserving cause?’ they’d ask.
‘Do I have to explain myself?’ I’d say, and you could see them beginning to enjoy themselves. Torturing a refusenik like me was what made chugging fun.
‘I think you do,’ they’d say. ‘After all, everyone else here is giving, and I’m sure you’re as comfortably off as they are. Is it that you just don’t care about people/donkeys/the Amazon rainforest/injured soldiers/cystic fibrosis/torture/rococo plasterwork/the overuse of hydrocarbons?’ And so on.
The more there was of this sort of thing the more I dug my heels in, however contemptuous the looks of the Prommers to the right and left of me.
Then, and now, if I give time or money to charities (which I promise you I do, from time to time), I like to do it authentically, not because everyone else does it. Acting authentically (after all, existentialism was fashionable in the early 1980s) was important to me then, as now.
I was reminded of this by my friend Jo Weaver’s blog, yesterday, in which she writes about the ‘flag-shamers’ and ‘clap-shamers’ who terrorise the meanies who don’t ‘join in’ in the UK. If you didn’t fly a flag on VE Day or don’t clap the NHS on Thursday evenings you’re as likely as not to be abused by your neighbours.
Whatever happened to tolerance and minding your own business?
I’d never thought of the UK as a totalitarian state, where conformity in thought and deed is a requirement of citizenship. If I were in London I probably would clap the NHS on Thursday evenings, but I don’t think I’d fly a flag on VE Day. If I did neither it would be no one’s business but my own.
My parents fought in the Second World War, my father in the Royal Artillery with the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkerque, and the Eighth Army under ‘Monty‘ in North Africa and Italy, my mother in the ATS (the Auxiliary Territorial Service) in England and Wales, calibrating guns and helping to test radar technology. For both of them it was a socially liberating experience, my father being promoted to the ‘officer class’ at Alamein, my mother, along with millions of other women, finally allowed to do something useful in a man’s world.
I am proud of them both.
I don’t doubt that my brother and I brought our parents joy and satisfaction in their post-war years. We were their highest priority, but nothing, I think, could compare in intensity and influence to the years between 1939 and 1945.
The War marked them in different ways. My father saw terrible things on the front line but rarely spoke of it, though, by character and bearing, he remained a military man to the end of his life. My mother, by contrast, spoke of the War nostalgically, especially in the company of my godmother Anne, with whom she served. ‘Comrades in arms’, cantankerous friends for seventy years, for Anne and Tizzy (my mother’s abbreviated maiden name), the War was a time of levity and joy, as well as seriousness and sadness (my mother spoke of a Polish airman lost over continental Europe).
Jonathan and I were conscious of the War from our earliest years. It was the background to everything. The schoolmasters who taught us at our prep schools were often former military men, uncomfortable, like my father, in civvy street. Diminished by demobilisation, they’d been robbed of purpose. Commander Varley’s history lessons would conclude with a noisy re-enactment of the Japanese fighter planes that divebombed his convoy in the South China seas. His grasp of the more distant past was slender. In the playground we played at Spitfires and Messerschmitts. The films we watched, including my favourite, The Sound of Music, took the War as their starting points, and television was saturated with series such as Tenko, ‘Allo ‘Allo, Colditz, and Dad’s Army (my mother’s favourite), all harking back to that finest hour.
My generation is rooted in our parents’ experience of the War. It formed them, and, by extension, it formed us too. Our lives were made safer and more comfortable by the sacrifices they and their generation made. We have never known real danger or want (even at boarding school in the 1960s). Political misjudgement in the 1930s made the inevitable worse, but it was a war that had to be fought. We must be grateful to them.
Adam Bager 