Music begins where the possibilities of language end…

As I mentioned a while ago, I play French Horn in the Stroud Symphony Orchestra, a happy group of amateur musicians who rehearse weekly and play 3 concerts a year. The immediate aftermath of our most recent concert, last weekend, prompted (almost compelled) me to write this post. The experience was almost overwhelming. We played Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with a terrific young soloist, Emil Huckle-Gleve, whose confidence and fearlessness was astonishing to behold. We then tackled the majestic 5th Symphony of Jean Sibelius. This is one of the pieces I have longed to play since I was a teenager…

In many ways I owe a lot to my school music teacher, John Willson. When I was 12, he suggested to my parents that “Christopher seems to be interested in music, and has some aptitude, perhaps he would like to learn an instrument…”. Indeed, he indicated he had a ‘spare’ French Horn that I could ‘try, if I liked…’. So began my musical ‘career’, in which I’ve regularly played as part of an orchestra for most of the last 25 years.I met my wife in the Exeter University Symphony Orchestra, and have lifelong friends from that same unruly mob of students!

I achieved Grade 7 in my late teens, but finished school too late to ever try for Grade 8. I haven’t had any lessons since leaving school, and am well aware of my technical limitations. I can get by in most amateur orchestras, and often relish the challenge of more demanding parts, as they force me to practise more regularly and indeed ‘properly’. Strangely, practising tends to make me a better player…

Playing in an orchestra is an immense privilege. I love playing the French Horn, and genuinely wouldn’t want to play anything else. It’s uplifting and moving in so many ways, the collective playing experience, the mutual respect for the talents of others, the relationships within a section, between sections, and between players and orchestra. Perhaps most of all, I can have strong physical and emotional reactions to music, especially when I’m helping to create the soundscape and it is developing around me.

I’m biased towards the ‘bigger’ orchestral pieces. There’s not a lot like a meaty symphony to stimulate body, mind and soul. I love the complexities, the layers of orchestration, the shifting harmonies and melodic invention.

I love the thrill as the brass really go for it and belt out a chorale or fanfare, like this one: 20 (unamplified) musicians filling The Royal Albert Hall. Forget Phil Spector’s produced ‘wall of sound‘, this is the real thing.

Some composers write cracking symphonies for huge orchestral forces, which can be exhausting and exhilirating to play. While it’s by no means my favourite piece, I was left literally breathless at the end of Mahler’s First Symphony. More than an hour long, it’s intensely demanding for every section of the orchestra. It ends in typically bombastic fashion, with tunes bouncing around all over the orchestra. Every instrument is playing hell-for-leather, everyone is exhausted, lips are at melting point, fingers and wrists aching, lungs burning. And then in an act of lunatic stagecraft, the composer notes in the score that the Horns should stand up, so as to rise above the rest of music. It’s adrenaline-pumping like few things I’ve experienced.

(this is quite a long clip which I really recommend for the full experience, but the climax kicks in at around 10 mins…)

It’s not all ear-bursting stuff though. This is another reason I love playing the Horn. I’ve never played this one outside of my own practice room though…

And then there are the parts I’ll probably never play, mostly because I don’t have the time for lessons, reconstructing my technique, the required hours of practice, or indeed the natural ability. But I can still bask in the amazing glow that such music offers me.

To aficionados out there, I realise I’ve selected a very partial set of clips and excerpts here that don’t even do justice to my full experience of playing music in an orchestra. They’re the ones that come to my mind. I would love to get other suggestions and recommendations. Thanks.

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You got me confused with a man who repeats himself…

I know: I said I would be reviewing Das Leben der Anderen next, as the final post in my linked series about The Politics of Fear. But my copy of that DVD has somehow corrupted (maybe it’s a sign, that THEY know I’m writing about them!?), so I’m currently awaiting a replacement.

In the meantime, let me return (with more than a little resignation) to a well-worn path: disjointed customer service. I realise that I’ve flogged this dead horse before, taking Clarks Shoes, Dunelm and Orange to task, but bear with me. This one is a shocker.

Most of my previous mishaps have been where corporate systems let down staff, forcing them into untenable positions that prevent them from serving the customer properly. That same dynamic repeats itself this time, but in this instance, a young man I’ll call Kevin, part of Vodafone’s Customer Service team in South Wales, plays an absolute blinder, but not in a good way.

In fact, this all happened to my wife, but as I was in the room during many of the phone calls and while she was grappling with the website, and was the sounding board for her frustrations afterwards, I feel qualified to relate the sorry tale.

Phones and communications technology are changing much faster than we can. Today the Apple iPad2 was launched in the UK, and hundreds of people queued for hours in central London in a way people used to queue to see their favourite groups or at film premieres.

Mobile phone companies, in their infinite wisdom, have recognised they’re at the whim of consumers wanting the newest gadget, and who are seemingly willing to change service provider. Despite years of their brand-building advertising and global sponsorships, we just don’t seem to get it. You can almost understand their disappointment, their resentment at our skittish behaviour, almost.

They aim to lock their customers into longer and longer contracts – usually at least 2 years if you want a decent deal on the handset. When you agree to these terms, they rest, satisfied their work is done. They go back to the fast-moving, exciting world of attracting new people with gazillions of minutes and unlimited texts. But they don’t seem to try and retain their customers, at least not until those customers make a massive fuss.

God help you if, before the end of your contract, you’d like an upgrade to a new phone – which almost certainly didn’t exist when you took out the contract, and unless you’re one of the uber-geeks who treats Apple like teenagers used to treat The Beatles, you couldn’t have forseen. If you want an upgrade,  it seems almost impossible, even to a more expensive tariff. Am I the only person who thinks this is insane, and wouldn’t be tolerated in other areas of life?

Imagine having a season ticket for your favourite football team. It’s not a great seat, but it suits you fine. Halfway through the season there are some new, better, more expensive seats available, so you try to upgrade, but the club denies your request. It’s not possible, at least not before the end of this season…

After calling a few people, it becomes clear you can upgrade, but only online.You decide to go instore to review the choice of phones and tariffs, and you get excellent service. You choose a new phone and tariff which the staff assure you will be fine for you. It’s 65% more than you currently pay, but it’s got much better online access and the handset (an HTC Desire) is lightyears ahead of the virtually prehistoric Samsung you currently loathe.

Encouraged and enthused, you go online. The Vodafone Upgrade site states clearly that you will

get the same cracking phones, plans and prices as our new customers. Plus, all our best offers are only available online.

Hurrah!

don't get me started on why existing customers should feel grateful they can get the same deals as strangers...

 

However, one hour and a very tortuous live-chat with someone in customer service later, and the promises are falling apart. Apparently the online service team can’t help existing customers, and the offer they’re offering is not as good as the one the staff in the shop said would be available.

So you resort to the telephone, and spend another fruitless hour getting nowhere. You try again later, you know, one last chance. This is where you speak to Kevin, who after a long, similarly painful series of exchanges, seems to lose it. You fall back on simple, common-sense arguments…

But your website declares that all your best offers are only available online…?

Well, that offer’s quite obviously not available to you, is it Rachel?

Sorry, but does Vodafone really care about keeping me as a customer?

That’s a silly question.

Actually, I don’t think it is. Your tone has been sarcastic and rude, and you’re not helping me to get what I have been promised. You called me silly.

Well, it was a pretty dull question…

Kevin then tells you that no, you can’t talk to a supervisor, but he could try to get someone to call you back within 48 hours.

A while later, after taping the phone back together and collecting the broken shards of glass from the floor, you try just one more time. You try to call the store, where you had received at least courtesy before. But you can’t call a specific store, only a central number. This time, you get through to Omar in Egypt: apparently many of the Customer Service  staff are based in Egypt. It was just bad luck you had to speak to Kevin in South Wales.  Omar is polite, efficiently sorts out the offer promised previously, and puts a note on file. He says that the store may not have any in stock now, but you  can go pick it up and all will be sorted.

Indeed, the store team are great. They give you their card with a direct line on, and call you a few days later when the phone arrives. All is well. The phone is a thing of beauty and simplicity. You are at peace.

Until you sign the document to confirm receipt of the phone, and beneath your personal details you see the description:

Customer value: low/medium

Well, at least that’s answered the silly and dull question that Kevin tried to dodge.

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I’m Spartacus…

Digital technology has fuelled churnalism, in that it has increased the speed of information flowing around the world, enabling newspapers and news organisations to cut back on actual journalists. It’s harder and harder to develop a genuine exclusive story, so they simply get regurgitated. It’s easier for companies, brands, interest groups to circulate their stories and agendas, so more of them do it, and more of their stories are picked up by the news agencies, reported and repeated.

This has democratised the news, in that anyone can access information in ways and at speeds that were inconceivable a generation ago. Like it or not, Twitter is at the vanguard of this, as it has accelerated real-time reporting around the world. On a domestic level, this has enabled and enriched my TV viewing, from the shared experiences of watching the UK election debates, reality shows like #strictlycomedancing, and even dramas. It is the mechanic for up-to-the-minute weather reports, through the brilliantly simple #uksnow…

Snowing around Glasgow...

…and it has enlightened the world with horrifying despatches from #egypt, #iran, and #japan.

But it has also fuelled the darker side of churnalism, by which I mean often desperately low standards of reporting, where stories get printed first and fact-checked only when they are exposed. A couple of examples from recent months…

Last year the Daily Mail failed to notice that the twitter account @realstevejobs wasn’t in fact the real Steve Jobs, and so it reported a tweet from this account as fact, that Apple might have to recall the new iPhone4.

Kat Arney spotted The Independent reporting The Big Chill Festival’s surprisingly original name, a ‘fact’ it acquired from Wikipedia.

The demand for stories about and obsession with ‘celebrities’ can mean that anything they say gets reported… even if the celebrity in question didn’t actually say it…

But all that’s pretty trivial really, in the big scheme of things. Twitter and Social Media have given freedom of expression a new dimension, in that apparently anyone can say apparently anything, and be heard across the globe. And sometimes ‘They’ are listening, and They don’t always share the same opinions.

Early in 2010, during a prolonged period of wintry weather that caused disruption across the UK, a man named Paul Chambers was trying to visit someone in Northern Ireland. He needed to catch a flight from the Robin Hood airport in Northern England. On finding he would be unable to catch the flight, he was understandably annoyed, and tweeted his frustration.

Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!

David Allen Green, through his Jack of Kent blog, has documented what happened next with brilliant clarity. Despite every ounce of common sense across the country and indeed the world suggesting this was a massive over-reaction and waste of public money when some other reprimand and punishment might be more appropriate, Paul Chambers was arrested, lost his job, and found guilty of sending a menacing message.

In a childish, petulant and marvellously futile show of solidarity, the twitterati came together to protest at the way the Crown Prosecution Service had applied the law. The CPS argued that the publishing of such a remark was menacing in its own right, regardless of whether there was any actual or intended menace. Reprinting the remark (as I have done above) was an offence. So I, and thousands of others, reprinted the menacing message, signing off with #IAmSpartacus, a tribute to the famous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s masterful film.

Image taken from mashable.com

Surely they couldn’t arrest us all? But why not? As is his wont, Charlie Brooker took this a step or two further…

A few days later, I noted a tweet commenting that in the aftermath of this sort of thing, Twitter had changed. It used to be like a conversation in the pub, full of bad humour, trivial nonsense, occasional bad taste and even mildly offensive jokes. Now it was still the same conversation, but in a pub in Soviet East Germany. You never knew who might be listening, and what they might think, and what they might do.

In my final part of this series of posts, I’ll review the tremendous Das Leben der Anderen, one of my favourite films of the last 10 years.

I’m not for a moment suggesting that Twitter has turned the UK into a paranoid police state, but I genuinely feel that the media and some elements of the state struggle to control it, simply because it cannot be controlled, at least not in a democracy, with Freedom of Speech, and all that.

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I read the news today, oh boy…

Nick Davies has been writing about the phenomenon of Flat Earth News for years now, documenting the way technology has been used by media owners to recycle and churn stories for a 24-hour rolling news cycle, with ever-decreasing standards of journalism and almost a brazen lack of care for the consequences.

Media power has been concentrating in the hands of fewer and fewer conglomerates in the last couple of decades, for example…

• Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation & Sky Television networks across the globe
• Axel Springer and Bertelsmann are based in Germany but extend across all of Europe in newspapers, publishing
• Silvio Berlusconi’s TV (Mediaset) Publishing (Mondadori) and Advertising (Publitalia) interests control 3 out of 7 national TV stations, and through his role as head of state, he can influence the 3 state-owned RAI channels
• Richard Desmond in the UK owns two national daily newspapers and Channel 5
• Time Warner, Sony BMG, Walt Disney… the list goes on

There’s no a priori reason why this concentration should necessarily degrade standards. Concentration occurs in many if not most capitalist markets, but I Reckon that in the media environment it has resulted in stripping our costs (fewer journalists) and ever-faster turnaround times (more stories of whatever quality presented more quickly, but having less longevity).

Most significantly, this has led to a culture where almost everything that anyone says is reported, regardless of their significance. (Even) the generally world-class BBC isn’t immune to this. BBC Radio 5 Live has been reiterating its approach for at least a year, that they will present…

…Your views on the stories that matter to you.

Sorry to disappoint the BBC, but that’s not what I expect or want from a news broadcaster. I’m looking for facts, and some clever, interesting, important and relevant people to interpret those facts for me. This is something the BBC has historically been pretty darn good at. I don’t want to hear what John from London or Diane from Leeds thinks about bankers’ bonuses or house husbands. I have a reasonably good idea in my own mind What I Reckon about most things. And if I don’t, I’d prefer a learned expert to inform me, rather than Susan from Wrexham.

Increasingly, 24-hour rolling news in 2011 is characterised by churnalism, by which organisations with an agenda can reach an increasingly large audience increasingly quickly. Greater concentration of media outlets means fewer contact points for news aggregation services like AP or Reuters. Broadband technology & social media mean that ideas spread more quickly than ever before around the globe. Stories get reported, re-reported and spread virally before anyone actually stops to ask if they are true or accurate, let alone interesting.

Richard Peppiatt, a reporter from The Daily Star in the UK, resigned this week, in a very public outburst. He openly acknowledged fabricating stories to fill pages.

Daily Star favourite Kelly Brook recently said in an interview: “I do Google myself. Not that often, though, and the stories are always rubbish. “There was a story that I’d seen a hypnotherapist to help me cut down on the time I take to get ready to go out. Where do they get it from?”

Maybe I should answer that one. I made it up. Not that it was my choice; I was told to. At 6pm and staring at a blank page I simply plucked it from my arse. Not that it was all bad. I pocketed a £150 bonus. You may have read some of my other earth-shattering exclusives.

‘Michael Jackson to attend Jade Goody’s funeral’. (He didn’t.) ‘Robbie pops ‘pill at heroes concert’. (He didn’t either.) ‘Matt Lucas on suicide watch’. (He wasn’t.) ‘Jordan turns to Buddha.’ (She might have, but I doubt it.)

But churnalism means that stories are reported and regurgitated blindly without any semblance of fact-checking. Brands. companies, pressure groups, Government Departments, Media Owners with an agenda can secure massive coverage incredibly quickly. This contributes to and facilitates an environment in which The Politics of Fear can operate and thrive. Two examples…

Richard Peppiatt complained about an anti-Muslim agenda at The Daily Star. Its rival The Daily Mail also seems to pursue almost anything it deems to be ‘different’. Different = Threat.  In November 2010 The Daily Mail ran an article that was ostensibly complaining about incomplete food labelling of halal meat products, but in lurid terms decried the ‘cruel’ slaughter methods of this Islamic practice, and that this meat was now being served in ‘schools, hospitals… and famous sporting venues such as Ascot and Wembley are serving up halal meat to unwitting customers’.

In no respect does the article comment on any other form of animal cruelty, such as battery chickens or industrialised milk production, but instead plays on the fears of its readers that halal = alien culture = threat, but under the guise of cruelty to animals. The Daily Mail defends Christians the right to deny homosexuals a room in their B&B, but portrays halal slaughter as barbaric. It’s a one-sided, biased article that warps a tiny issue about food labelling into a major threat to ‘our way of life’.

Around the same time, in November 2010, rolling TV news in California reported a ‘mysterious missile’ off the coast near Los Angeles. The local TV station first noticed it, and reported it with measured tones…

Military Mum on nature of ‘Big Missile’ … a possible show of US military might… officials are staying tight-lipped …

And they trot out a former defence secretary to ask him what it might be, based on one grainy bit of unidentified footage. And then the TV news gets holds of it. And then the internet got hold of it. And the TV network commentators complained about the lack of comment or clarification from Government sources. In fact, the lack of comment was because nothing had actually happened. There was no missile or show of strength. Eventually it turned out that the contrail was consistent with what might be seen behind a large aircraft if you happened to spot it at sunset from the unusual aerial angle of a TV helicopter. In other words, it was probably an optical illusion.

But by the time that came out, the news channels have filled a couple of hours, and then moved on to whatever’s next (sports, probably). No one is apparently accountable for the rubbish they’d been previously touting as ‘breaking news’. No one apologises for any concern they may have caused to viewers. No one stops to think if maybe, just maybe it might be better not to conduct journalistic fact-checking on live television.

There are a number of media blogs like Tabloid Watch, and indeed the new churnalism site which do keep tabs on this, but they aren’t much more than bows and arrows against the lightning.

As this brilliant visualisation illustrates, the media have had a decade or more’s experience at making mountains out of molehills, from the looming apocalypse of The Millenium Bug, where aircraft could fall from the skies, to the plagues of SARS and Bird Flu which could wipe out tens of millions.

These stories come and go, but serve to reiterate a sense of threat and unease in our society. This can cause problems for Governments, who are forced to defend their planning for unlikely future disasters (if pens got hot…?). However, Governments also exploit this in turn either to promote their own agenda (the all-pervading yet rarely realised threat of terrorists lurking next door) or indeed to hide behind – notably the infamous email at around 2.55pm GMT (09.55 EDT) on September 11th, 2001 from Jo Moore, then advisor to a British Government Minister.

Now more than ever, we cannot believe everything we read: not necessarily because more people are lying, but because more people are saying things that are being reported more quickly, with less scrutiny and less accountability than ever before.

Coming next – the role of social media: how technology and twitter have made this even more complicated, and how law-makers are struggling to cope.

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