Design and Change

I spend a lot of my professional life persuading people (as much as possible those with political power) to open their eyes in a particular way to recognise and question how the human world has been designed. 

This is in stark contrast to my views on the natural world, where the crucial argument to win is the beauty of non-design, of a universe without prescient origin, end or purpose.

The argument goes: if you understand how the world is designed, then you can understand better how to change it. Before I started working in this field I too, as an amateur observer and fan of good design, had failed to understand just how socially and politically strident design can be, whether judged ‘good’ or ‘bad’. My colleague Jocelyn Bailey writes consistently strongly on this question (her blog is here) and I have so far kept this blog unprofessional in that I don’t tend to discuss the strands of my life that pay the rent. However, following a recently conversation we had whilst jaunting about the Houses of Parliament, Joss asked if I planned to write up my thoughts on the topic in question - namely whether the design of buildings is a barrier to change - I decided to dip my toe in the water of professional and personal cross-over.

The study of making policy is frequently a study of not making policy, i.e. why nothing changes and the status quo dominates. I came to the conclusion that in order to battle against the great static, resistant monoliths (or Leviathans, as I heard Conservative MP Jo Johnston recently describe the NHS) such as the Civil Service, the comprehensive school system, or indeed the NHS, you have to approach them as huge discursive structures which exist because of the linguistic patterns that flow through them, and stay the same because this quality is ignored. 

Bear with me. The above is a one paragraph summary of a rather self-indulgent (but I think interesting) 12,000 word dissertation. Essentially, my argument was that shifting norms in public bodies (or indeed any static and resistant organisation) is all about tapping into their background music, if you like, and changing attitudes and behaviours from the inside out. These are institutions in the cultural and discursive as well as historical and bureaucratic sense, and their behaviours and quirks are fixed in their wallpaper; they are not simply the sum of the opinions and attitudes of individuals who work there. The famous criticism of the Metropolitan Police post-Stephen Lawrence was its institutional racism – prejudice was in the air you breathed, and would not disappear with the removal of racist officers. 

(By the by, I once heard Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse use just the argument that the racism would disappear because the bad eggs would soon retire. My heart sank.)

The New Labour Governments appeared to understand this in certain fields. Look at how they embedded the idea of ‘customer’ within the front line benefits system as a way of changing culture and reflecting an important policy shift. This word ‘customer’ saturated departmental magazines, staff bulletins, ministerial speeches, training manuals, and represented a huge policy shift away from the perceived benefit entitlement culture of the early 1990s to a system that hoped to place benefits payment within a clear system of exchange. No more ‘something for nothing’; the 'customer' in a supermarket pays for their bread and we were expected to pay for our benefits through training programmes, or gaining experience through volunteering. A similar example is their approach to sexism (think of chairperson above chairman). 

What does this have to do with design? Well, I’ve started to think that my earlier thesis could be expanded. Why not look to the literal as well as metaphorical wallpaper of public bodies and see if we learn anything about why they don't change? Institutions don’t change because their design, as well as their discourse, can reflect an embedded status quo. 

The modernist architects understood this. Le Corbusier was almost revolted by earlier models of housing where status, wealth and political power were reflected in architectural opulence. In his version of housing - the great, stark, flawed Unité D’Habitation in Marseille - he managed to link a new political view of equality through housing to a particular design and tried to break with a long tradition of slum housing where poverty was compounded in your architectural circumstance.

Take a Victorian theatre. Never was there a starker example of social division made true through design. As you reach the rafters, as the prices go down, the seats shrink, the decor loses opulence, and your view is obscured. The wallpaper is always less extravagant in the cheap seats too. One might argue that opera as an institution will never rid itself of the label of elitism until the great Houses of the world are knocked down and replaced with Greek-style amphitheatres (Denys Lasdun’s 1963 Olivier Theatre at the National – a modernist masterpiece – is just that) where status is not embedded in their design. 

Only kidding.

Now apply these ideas to current pressing questions of the elite in public life. It is said to be problematic for both front benches to be dominated by a particular background, or indeed a particular school and University. Following my thesis, it’s hardly surprising that nothing has changed in this regard when you look at the design of the institutions that we are trying to shake up. Eton, Oxbridge, Parliament – the same carpets, the same wallpaper, waiters in the same clothes, courtyards based around the same essentially medieval idea of secure open space for those with something to protect. When Charles Barry was designing the Houses of Parliament, a nod to the hierarchical structures of the past served the need for Governmental buildings to emanate legitimacy and power. Also, I am sure he was keen to make sure MPs and Peers felt comfortable in their new Palace, and so gave them a building that felt, smelt, and sounded just like their school and university. The same is true of the Inns of Court, each like a small Oxbridge College (the bar and bench receive similar criticisms of elitism to those levelled at Parliament). You could say that the march of the elite through our public institutions is laid out for them in the design of the buildings they inhabit through the first decades of life.

Am I suggesting that if we knocked down the Palace of Westminster and built a new Parliament inspired by a 1960s comprehensive school, we would solve the problem of elitism in politics? No, I’m not. Well, almost. I think it is worthwhile to imagine how the elitism question would be tackled had the Luftwaffe destroyed more than simply the Commons Chamber during the Blitz.

Constancy is often something to be proud of. Ours is one of the world’s oldest Parliaments, founded on principles that I hope we never loose. But our political and governmental system also contains seemingly unbreakable blocks, which we should not see as unfixable quirks (House of Lords reform, for example, but that’s for another blog). I would suggest that politicians look around them, listen to their surrounding, and only then think how they can change the institution of which they themselves are a fundamental element. 

Destructive Lyrics

Some days, my job involves a lot of self-conscious marching from breakfasts to coffees to meetings to drinks. I say 'self-conscious', because I am hyper-sensitive to how I must appear to passers by. Long legs, go-go gadget arms, short body (currently elongated by a Jill Sander-inspired green mac - or 'lab coat' as some have said) and far too much hair. It doesn't help that the colleague with whom I work closest is (although female) of a similar height and build, and holds a similar love, it seems, for having loud and distracting conversation whilst strutting. Not that I shy away from this image; one might as well pre-empt judgements others make, and present them with confidence. It's a power thing, of course.

Today has not been one of those days. Today has been entirely office-based and administration-heavy. The great benefit of which has been the chance to listen to music all day long. Such a rare luxury these days, and today's choices were rarer still as I almost without thinking turned to an old university favourite: AccuBroadway.com. It is an exclusively musical theatre-oriented free online radio. It's true, it doesn't have the most diverse collection (far too much Gypsy for my taste) but there are no adverts, it's Sondheim-heavy, and the sound quality is good through office headphones.

Listening to too much Sondheim in one working day can be counter-productive. Every so often, through the e-mail chains and reports, your ear catches a lyric that is so totally devastating it penetrates right to your core, and you have to go and brew a mug of Earl Grey. I should be used to this by now, and at least prepared for the danger points. I have been totally convinced of the genius of our greatest living songwriter since I was sixteen, but owing to free time restrictions, domestic privacy, and maybe a little self-preservation, I can't recall the last time I sat and listened to a whole Sondheim show right through.

A recent conversation amongst friends was about our favourite lyrics in popular songs. "What's your favourite lyric, Thomas?" It was hard. I've always been a novels above poems boy; music above lyrics. Honestly, I can find lyrics distracting, and often embarrassing. There's a blockage, somewhere in my head, around discussing the emotive, human content of English lyrics, unless they form part of a piece of theatre, like Sondheim. My favourite lyricist, excepting Sondheim, is Jacques Brel. Talking about French lyrics seems easy, and almost natural. The one-step-removal of a foreign language provides a kind of theatricality and encourages a bit of objective distance from the subject matter, which makes it easier to deal with (for me, at least). The one and only love letter (cringe) I have ever attempted was a veiled confession of that fact, and included reams from Brel's most romantic songs. Whilst writing it, I couldn't relax, let go, and say what I (thought I) really felt. Shows that the chap in question probably wasn't worth my attentions.

(He never responded to the letter, by the way. Said he'd written one but would never send it. How pretentious.)

Lyrics, for me, are also intensely, almost unbearably, nostalgic. Sondheim's lyrics are so evocative of University life: the vast green sofa in my third-year room, the almost lacquered dark brown floorboards strewn with papers and piles of toast-crumby side plates (white, with a blue rim). The Divine Comedy, one band whose lyrics I can talk about without blushing, is so closely tied to the (and sorry Charlie for this) oddly musty but comforting smell of one of my closest friend's room. And through nostalgia, comes inevitable sadness, which is where lyrics and musical content differ. I don't feel sad listening to the melodies, the overtures, or the countless pieces of orchestral music I enjoyed through University.

I have just begun reading Iris Murdoch's The Book and the Brotherhood, which contains one of the most powerful descriptions of 'the past' I've ever come across: A character - now in his 50s - is visiting the rooms of his University supervisor:

Gerard got up and went to the shelves, knowing where to look, and as he touched the books he felt some fierce and agonising sense of the past. It's gone, he thought, the past, it is irrevocable and beyond mending and far away, and yet it is here, blowing at one like a wind, I can feel it, I can smell it, and it's so sad, so purely sad.

Having written the all the above, it's becoming clearer why one particular song that came through my headphones today has had such an effect. It's the title song from one of Sondheim's worst-performing shows, Anyone Can Whistle. Not a piece I know at all well, but I've heard this song a few times. But never has it struck so loud a chord as it did this afternoon. Read it, if you like, and tell me why.

Or tell me I'm being sentimental.


Anyone can whistle,
That's what they say. Easy.
Anyone can whistle
Any old day. Easy.
It's all so simple:
Relax, let go, let fly.
So someone tell me why can't I?


I can dance a tango,
I can read Greek. Easy.
I can slay a dragon
Any old week. Easy.
What's hard is simple.
What's natural comes hard.
Maybe you could show me how to let go, lower my guard, learn to be free.
Maybe if you whistle,
Whilst for me.

In Memoriam Andrew Shaw: mentor, idol, and friend

It is late June 2006, and a stunning, wide-skied Lincolnshire afternoon. I have just graduated, and alongside a few friends from Cambridge, many generations of the Kohut and Cullum family are on deckchairs and benches in our newly-gazebo-ed garden for my 21^st birthday barbeque. A Lincolnshire barbecue has a very particular scent: pig-manure on the fields mixed with the burnished herb and spice blend of an over-cooked sausage. 

Our garden was very long, and impracticably thin. Horse stables running along the right, and the wall of our neighbour’s bungalow on the left, rather pompously built up higher than our own house. This patch of grass  didn’t ever fully perform the function of a garden in the ‘English Country’ sense. Sheep ran through it in a bid for freedom at least once each month; my sister and I failed to persuade tennis balls to bounce on it to any practical height; it flooded whenever the rains came for longer than ten minutes (causing my mother near heart-attack-inducing stress before the house was sold). It was also often a muddy drive-way leading up a short bank to our fields at the rear, with ‘uninterrupted views out to the Wolds’ (Estate Agent Brochure, 2007-2009). On this afternoon, owing to my widespread popularity and expansive birthday guest list, cars were driving across the garden at regular intervals, and parking in the field.

My Grandmother and her sisters (all three alike in look, temperament, and a predilection to think themselves better than most) are lined up on a bench facing the garden-cum-drive, no doubt positioned specifically to pass judgement on those arriving. At about half past two (I am playing some kind of racket and ball game with a cousin’s son) I hear the sound of a car skidding too fast down the gravel portion of the drive by the house. Crossing the garden at speed is a bright blue open top convertible with my former music teacher, and dear friend Andrew in the driver’s seat, shirtless, hair spiked with blonde highlights, wearing aviator-sunglasses, an array of neck-ware, tight jeans, and with a perfectly even, deep brown tan, waving with flamboyant abandon as he drives. Grandma and her sisters have faces that betrayed a mixture of shock, awe, and confused lust.

It is one of my fondest memories of Andrew, bulldozing into people’s lives with an unashamed declaration of who he was.

Throughout these two months of Andrew’s illness, many of his former students have been speaking of how much he touched their lives. Like others, I’ve been trying to come to terms with the possible, now actual loss of someone who was so fundamental in shaping who I am: my tastes, my talents, my attitudes. I wrote a blog up here about being as much oneself as possible at all times, so that achievements can be measured alongside who you are truly. I now realise that this was something I learned from Andrew.

As a student of Andrew’s, I was in awe of him. His manner of teaching was that of a musician and music lover: we’d listen and he’d talk. During those four years, music became a history of shattering moments: when Bach completed his 48 Preludes and Fugues and western harmony was set; the bass entry in the first performance of Beethoven 9; the first resolution of the Tristan Chord in performance; the riot at the premiere of The Rite of Spring, the poor amateurs of Leeds Festival Chorus trying to sing Belshazzar’s Feast; the opening of the newly restored Coventry Cathedral alongside Britten’s sublime, subversive War Requiem.

But for Andrew, music was much more than simply a series of great works, and so too for his students. It was about the live, real performance and experience of some of the world’s greatest noises. It is here that is influence is most keenly felt, day-to-day, amongst many generations of Lincolnshire schoolchildren, and where his loss will be most hard to bear for generations to come. I find it tough even writing about my experience on stage at school, and Andrew’s role in that part of my life. In those hours inside and outside of classrooms, in rehearsal rooms, in churches, on stage, I learned to understand how music and theatre get inside your muscles and sinews, works of art becoming absolutely tuned to your sense of self, part of what makes you tick as you walk around in this flawed, clunky, ugly, real world.

I consider myself so lucky to have had a relationship with Andrew that developed from student to friend as soon as I left King Edward. When I fell unrequitedly in love after about 45 minutes of being at University, he was the first person I called for advice (he’d been there before, got the t-shirt, etc).

It has been such a tremendous privilege to join him as a staff member on music tours to Belgium, to see for myself him continuing to guide and shape the values of young people as he had done for me. And goodness me, did we have fun.

I recently told Andrew that almost all of my life’s greatest experiences can be traced directly back to his influence or guidance. He scoffed, as you’d expect (for such a natural showman, he was unexpectedly modest at times). I don’t for a second think this will change now he’s gone. Whenever I sing, whenever I hear wonderful music, see a great opera, whenever I drink coffee with at least 2 inches of Grand Marnier in the bottom, it will be thanks to him.

One writes, that `Other friends remain,'

That `Loss is common to the race'—

And common is the commonplace,

And vacant chaff well meant for grain.

That loss is common would not make

My own less bitter, rather more:

Too common! Never morning wore

To evening, but some heart did break

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H

Poppies, Dame Helen, and Remembrance

First off, I want to make it clear that I wore a poppy yesterday, and will continue to do so for as many years as human beings are stupid enough to take up arms against each other. I would like to put in a plea, however, that the poppy/pin design is modified to better cope with today’s thickly-woven jackets, and tube-travelling lifestyles. By 11pm last night, mine was not up to a standard of neatness that I would usually strive for.

Each year that I’ve been old enough to choose to wear a poppy myself and not have it pinned on by my Grandmother, I’ve thought hard about why I wear it, and discussed my feelings towards it with friends. If any of us, as adults, decide to wear such a bold, culturally-laden symbol as a poppy, it is only sensible that we question why we do it, each time we do it. It’s very easy to drop 50p into the tin and pin one on because everyone else at the tube station is; even easier to change your Facebook profile picture to a poppy; add an avatar to your twitter. You’ll not be shocked to hear that I’m pleased by the debate around poppy-wearing this year – it’s healthy, it’s to be expected, and I feel much more comfortable living in a nation where we continually question and challenge our behaviour, rather than blindly follow path-dependent cultural norms.

Let me lay down my stall on poppy wearing: difficulty comes for me when attempts are made to load the poppy with multiple sentiments that do not necessarily sit comfortably next to one another. For many, the poppy is a largely pacifist symbol of remembrance: we remember our Grandfathers, and their Fathers, whom the state, on our behalf, conscripted, and dispatched across the world to fight fascism and tyranny. The ultimate loss of liberty in order to protect ours. We are free today because they, for those years of war, were not.

It’s an important point of contrast between the soldiers of today and the soldiers of the Worlds Wars that soldiers of today choose to join the Armed Forces, and are free to leave at any time. The relationship between those soldiers and us, through the mechanisms of the state, is different. As a friend of mine said yesterday, the thought of modern conflict – Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya – makes one angry, politicised, opinionated. The loss of life today is no less upsetting than the loss of life in 1916, but my reaction is too big, too complex, and too contrasting to my reaction to the Somme, that wearing a poppy alone cannot support that.

This year, the object of debate for me has been the British Legion poster with Dame Helen Mirren, showing her wearing a poppy with the quotation: “Our troops are the real stars.” The tag-line for the campaign this year has been ‘shoulder to shoulder with those who serve’, clearly marking a correlation between the wearing of the poppy and recognition of support for the UK armed forces. I don’t blame the British Legion for trying to keep the Poppy Appeal relevant. With fewer and fewer surviving veterans, they pointedly extend the remit of their appeal, beyond merely remembrance.

I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the celebration of ‘our troops’ above many other public servants. Social workers, nurses, teachers - they can be such remarkable people. And the context in which they operate doesn’t make me feel as uncomfortable as the hierarchical, tightly structured, wholly rigid, compliant, aggressive, homo-violent culture of the military. Let’s think about the word ‘stars’. ‘Stars’ emote glamour, excitement, glory. That’s not war, for Dame Helen’s sake.   

So, how to conclude? First, people who wear a poppy should think hard about why they wear it, and resist blindly and easily following the crowd. Your poppy will hold much more weight if you can fully articulate what it means to you, what messages it carries. Similarly, people who choose not to wear a poppy shouldn’t be branded as ignorant. If the message of the British Legion marketing campaign is too much ideology for their poppy to support, then so be it. There’s no shame.

There also shouldn’t be an assumption that wearing a poppy means buying-in to military pomp or standing ‘shoulder to shoulder with those who serve’. There are people for whom watching a military parade is the emotional equivalent of a enjoying a really good bottle of red wine with a re-incarnated French poet from the 19^th century. They wear a poppy, and so do I. Hey ho; never mind, eh?

During the two minutes silence yesterday, I was in the Terrace café in Parliament – moments from where votes were cast to send UK forces to Iraq in 2003, and a minute’s walk from the nation’s set-piece of collective mourning at the Cenotaph. At 11:02, the House of Lords display screen read ‘We Will Remember Them’, the boats on the Thames sounded their horns, and conversation re-started, with a collective intake of breath. I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, speculate what those 20 or 30 individuals then enjoying their coffees had thought during their two minutes. Anger fired by politics, pride from pomp, or remembrance. I simply hope it wasn’t blind, automatic, or thoughtless. 

--

A small post-script. @DavidUnderdown9 has pointed out that conscription was only introduced in 1916 in the UK. A useful reminder, yet I would be very reluctant to make a strong comparison between the volunteer armies, the 'pals' battalions' of 1914 and 15 and the trained soldiers of 2011. 

Buy-in to the social contract

There is certainly no worth in people like myself, with too many opinions on too many subjects, pretending that we understand all the causes, and have the solutions to the problems of the last few days. I have also read a lot of drivel across the interweb, with some truly notable exceptions commenting with wisdom and understanding (such as Zoe Williams of the Guardian here, and Camila Batmanghelidjh in the Independent here).

But then, watching the gradual destruction and disintegration of this city’s already declining built environment, caused by the very people it is designed to protect, nurture and serve, is undeniably powerful, and I don’t judge the results of an immediate compulsion to tweet in a less than considered manner; to blog a list of causes and solutions from a position of ignorance; to describe human beings as ‘feral rats’ who, quite frankly, have fairly shit life-prospects compared to the owner of a baby clothes shop in Ealing.

I’ve seen reactionary, racist, authoritarian points of view expressed by close friends, and I must admit, on listening to an audio-boo of a couple of girls describing the thrill of looting, a quick whack with a police baton didn’t seem too concerning. 

I think Ed Miliband is playing the political discourse just about right. Condemning the criminality first and foremost, ensuring order is restored (not at the expense of civil liberties and human rights), but keeping in mind the societal messiness and the need for nationwide soul-searching. The sooner we can restore the rule of law, the sooner we can sit back and ask ourselves how so many young people, from so many areas across the UK, have total disregard for their own lives and for the communities still in the process of bringing them up.

The problem with ‘Broken Britain’ and the ‘Big Society’ that was trumpeted to fix it  (I use the past tense because I cannot see any politician daring to use either term with seriousness after this week) was that it saw simple reasons for individuals’ decisions not to buy into the social contract of liberal democracy. Apparently, Labour had made it too easy for individuals to decide to ‘opt out’ of respectful, hard-working, law-abiding Britain. They could sit on their arses, practically haemorrhaging babies, because Labour would pay them to.

But what of the converse? Did I, aged 13, decide that I would opt into a social contract? Did I decide, having had the morals of right and wrong explained to me, that I would not covet my neighbour’s flat screen TV and blue-ray player? Of course I didn’t – the truth is simply that there was no other frame of reference throughout my upbringing other than that which involved buying into the social contract.

However, this ‘frame of reference’ is more complicated than simply not having been exposed to breaking the law – it’s about understanding what is lost if you do. I have been mugged twice since living in London, and both times my mind went through the same thought process: ‘I can stand here and fight, risking injury, or I can let go of my bag and stamp my foot as they run away’. Both times I let go, because there is too much to lose in fighting back and perhaps being beaten up. There was clearly not 'too much to lose' for my attackers in mugging me. I also have too much to lose in smashing up a shop window, or setting fire to businesses on my local high street. My liberty, my family, my friends, the joy I gain from simply living my life – these are all too precious to risk losing. This is my frame of reference instilled since childhood. 

How would I feel if this weren’t the case, if I didn't know the thrill of achievement, the love of a supportive family, the freedom to travel and see the world?

It’s a quite breathtaking piece of good-bad timing that last Friday saw a performance in London from the Simón Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela. This orchestra is the pinnacle of the country’s El Sistema musical-education-cum-social-inclusion programme, within which 90% are youngsters from severe social disadvantage. I don’t have time to write about how a similar nation-wide programme in the UK might affect our social fabric. It is interesting, however, to consider what happens if you give a child an instrument, give them the prospect of excelling in it and the ultimate goal of touring the world with it. It instils a frame of reference across society which includes long-term goal-setting, and perhaps most important, the chance of failing, and losing it.

The liberal-democratic social contract works because we understand and value that which is lost if we don’t keep up our side of the bargain. It’s the same with religion: not wishing to be inflammatory, but Christianity exists through fear of eternal separation from God following the day of judgement, and belief in the value of his eternal presence.

I don’t buy into the Christian contract, because I don’t care about eternal separation from God (I don’t believe in it, in other words). The same is true of those rioters:

Why buy into the social contract of liberal democracy if you don’t believe in what is lost in breaking it? 

A short confession, and some evidence gathering.

For the regular Londoner, the tube is the cramped, airless, oft-broken embarrassment that is tolerated because no-one will visit you if you live near a National Rail station.

As such, the tube – its stations, lines, maps, history, design (can you sense my heart beating faster?) – evokes, in most, feelings of mild annoyance, of frustration, but mostly of apathy. I would like to suggest that the great majority of people reading this won’t know of a consultation just underway into the extension of the Northern Line to Battersea Power Station? Or that the Queen’s Park to Euston Overground route may be diverted via the freight line just by the Camden junction, to join the existing Richmond to Stratford Overground line (a controversial one – probably won’t go ahead because of public opposition from residents of the commuter-belt north of Harrow).

You might think that transport-geekery is reserved for the anorak-ed men who stand with pad and pen on railway platforms, making careful record of train numbers as they pass. Gents of Lincolnshire do this on the line from Grimsby to Doncaster. What do they expect might happen? Are they waiting for the day a major signalling error diverts a Japanese bullet-train via Scunthorpe, or the day Phillip Hammond mislays the train numbers floppy disk database?

I am here to disclose to the world the existence of a hitherto unspoken-of band of nerds, for whom nothing is as exciting as riding through a ‘dark’ station on the Piccadilly Line. As you can gather, I am a fully paid-up member. In fact, I’m the Honorary Treasurer and Social Secretary.

Since living in London, my soul has been warmed by the numbers of gay men of my socio-politico-intelligentio demographic who get excited by public transport. In fact, in my circles, it’s only gays who are train geeks like me. Quite literally, I am never happier than when using a new piece of transport infrastructure for the first time. On the rare occasions that I am late for a rendez-vous, it usually due to my getting overexcited by choosing a subversive tube and bus route.

My continued analysis of this phenomenon hasn’t proven particularly fruitful. Simply being attracted to the ‘glamour of rail travel’ doesn’t quite cover the public policy element of infrastructural change. Yes, we all love Celia Johnson, but we’re equally jelly-legged after encountering some Crossrail-related demolition. Similarly, I’ve noticed a shared love of the 1920s and 30s ‘speed’ aesthetic in transport advertising, but again it doesn’t permeate the nerdish qualities that will see me waste hours on the individual tube lines’ Wikipedia pages.

So, any ideas, folks? Any gays out there have some transport geekery to confess? You’re welcome to comment below, or simply dismiss these ramblings as my final attempt to prove that I’m not a geek.

*turns on DVD of driver’s eye view of the complete Bakerloo line journey*

A View from the Gothic

First, a Murdoch-style apology. I’m very sorry for dangling the prospect of a regular blog like a disembowelled shrew over your eaglet mouths, only to cut short and stop writing due to both work and play having gone mental. Things calm down this week, so a couple of simmering blog-pans will be cranked up to a full boil. (Note: I’m making up for my absence by showering you with cloying metaphors; be thankful).

Before that, I thought some of you might be interested in my thoughts on last night’s Prom, a performance of Havergal Brian’s much-neglected Symphony Number 1, the Gothic. As a member of the London Symphony Chorus, I was lucky enough to take part in this ‘once-in-a-generation’ event. It was an opportunity for us all to ask the question: is the establishment’s neglect of the Gothic due to a lack of musical quality, or a lack of administrative ambition?

From where I was stood (back row of the Upper East Choir), and from where I’ve been sat in rehearsal rooms for the past month or so, that’s not an easy question to answer. The rehearsal process was laborious, frustrating, and exhausting. Choral singers are trained through an ability to recognise musical patterns, cadences and modulations, and their voices instinctively fall to those ingrained codes. This remains the case with even with the most difficult advanced tonality. With Brian, there was nothing on the page, nor in the ‘air’, that allowed the choruses to rely on instinct. The writing is so bizarre that even the perfect sight-readers amongst us were struggling.

Through choral rehearsals, we strive towards achieving clarity of sound. When you feel that clarity taking hold (normally just before the conductor’s piano rehearsal) it’s a wonderful feeling, particularly with challenging or atonal work. With the Gothic, even when we were pitch-perfect, the choral texture is so mushy and lumpy that rather than striving towards clarity, we were striving towards a kind of fortissimo soup.  The same was true when we joined the other choirs in Birmingham for a massive group rehearsal, and once again in Alexandra Palace for the first tutti. With each step towards the concert, the soup got lumpier and louder, but apparently ‘better’.

All this aside, I do think that the Gothic has merit. The sight of 800 singers standing in unison to the might of the Royal Albert Hall organ must have been thrilling. Music is so much more than notes on a page: it is people and place. The spectacle is of merit in itself, and all involved in the logistics should be applauded, not least Maestro Brabbins.

There is some very bad writing, however. Pitching 200 voices, singing in the middle of their register, against a large brass band playing at cross rhythms to the choir is never going to work. The pink panther clarinet solo and subsequent la la la-ing is daft. And call me a conservative, but Tudor-eque double reed interjections should never follow deeply unsettling chromaticism.

But then we come to the Coda. In setting non confundar in aeternum (let me never be confounded) Brian unleashes hell, quite literally – some of the most horrifying noises I’ve ever heard, and one of the most profound statements of post-WW1 turmoil put to paper. Timpani explode from each corner of the hall with remarkable rhythmic complexity as trombones try in vain to cut through the chaos with short phrases of jollity. Painful homophonic shouts from the chorus try and bring about order, but their attempt at some kind of harmonic unity or optimism is utterly futile as each chord becomes progressively more disturbed.

Once quiet descends, stunningly well-played cello and oboe melodies brought the piece to a close with a quiet and contemplative chorus, accepting of what has gone before. It’s in these final passages that the Gothic makes sense – it’s a work totally overwhelmed by the traumas of the First World War. WW1 was a marker in history that shone an ugly light on the potential for humanity to suffer. In his Gothic, Brian is looking back at that history, celebrating it, teasing it, and altering our perceptions of it through the horrors he and his contemporaries had just experienced. It’s very much like TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) in that regard, from which these lines are taken:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow       

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,   

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only      

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,               

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,              

And the dry stone no sound of water.

Don’t try and compare the Gothic to the 19^th century choral masterworks, because it won’t stand up. It’s isn’t a 1920s Symphony of a Thousand, not least because it is a musical representation of horrors quite beyond the comprehension of Mahler. And whilst it may not be as refined as TS Eliot, or as disturbing as Ezra Pound, it has many more natural companion pieces in poetry canon, than in the musical one.