Don’t mess with me on music!
Certain readers have taken umbrage at my contention some columns ago that a great deal of what passes for modern music is mindless garbage. And to think I thought I was putting it mildly.
“Shiny, Happy Person” of Edgemead accuses me of “sarcastic generalisations”, sweeping observations which she maintains are the result of prejudice, ignorance and a closed mind.
“Ode to Joy” of Claremont is even less flattering. He claims I know “sweet bee-all” about music of any variety or persuasion and should not have the gall to address the subject.
Well, “Ode to Joy” of Claremont, you have gone too far. And, having led with your chin, we shall see how much punishment that chin can absorb.
To start with, let me tell you that I was once a concert pianist! In fact, not once, but numerous times.
It happened in the Transkei when, as a matric pupil, I was a member of a travelling concert troupe called, somewhat obscurely, “The Ginger Nuts”. I was the nut on the keyboard for one whole season, playing classics and music hall selections.
My career might have blossomed further but prominent Umtata citizens persuaded my father to send me to university. Or anywhere, they said expansively.
At university in Durban, my thirst for musical knowledge was unquenchable. I played with a number of campus groups which all unfortunately – for one reason or another – fell into disarray. (Someone laughingly suggested I must be some sort of Jonah.) But those groups were great fun while they lasted.
Much of my spare time was spent browsing in libraries and second-hand bookshops or sitting around in sleazy bars, the sort of places where musicians of the time gathered. So a good measure of my musical education was ad hoc, as it were, although I learned the darndest things.
Are you aware, for example, “Ode to Joy” of Claremont, that Frederic Chopin never wrote all those nocturnes and polonaises for which he was given credit?
No, I thought not. They were composed, the whole lot of them, by an Irishman named Jack Clancy whom I actually met in one of those bars to which I refer.
We ran into each other a few times before Jack Clancy finally broke down and told me his story, in great confidence, one evening when he’d had a few beers. He must have been quite an old man by then, though he carried his age well.
But I don’t believe he can still be alive, which is why I feel free to relate this.
It seems Clancy encountered Chopin in a bordello in Berlin where he (Clancy) was working between concerts for the celebrated Prince Radziwill. Clancy happened to dash off on the resident baby grand a norturne (his very first) which he had written the previous evening.
Chopin was so impressed he entered into negotiations with Clancy that very night. And for 18 years Jack (as he insisted I call him) provided most of Chopin’s material. Clancy admitted he had some problems with the polonaises but was helped by the fact that his grandmother had been Polish and had imbued in him the spirit of resistance.
I said to Clancy that, had I been he, my spirit would have resisted fiercely the idea of my compositions being plagiarised for the price of a few regular vodkas (which apparently was the arrangement) but Clancy, essentially, was a humble man.
Yet a man big enough to concede that Frederic Chopin, at the end of the day, wasn’t at all a bad pianist.
Pursuit of musical knowledge has led me, over the years, down the highways (and the byways) into areas often murky. But, through my investigations, I have been able to overturn numerous popular myths.
How many people know that Wolfgang Amadeus Beethoven was not deaf at all?
It’s true. When Beethoven was a child, and was forced to do his scales and arpeggios every day, he formed such a dislike for the piano that he was driven to simulate deafness. It became a defence mechanism.
His mother would call him from the playground, where he and his mates were playing the German equivalent of cricket or touch rugby, and Wolfgang Amadeus would pretend not to hear. The louder his mother shouted, the more deaf he became.
Then a day dawned when the young Beethoven discovered he really enjoyed music – tinkling the old ivories and composing a bit on the side. By then, however, it was too late. He could not blow his cover without immense social implications, not to say deep filial problems. So he was stuck with his ear trumpet for life.
Coincidentally, a distant relative of Wolfgang Amadeus Beethoven did happen to be deaf. His name was Ludwig and, while W A Beethoven’s biographers fail to mention him, I have heard he did something in music too.
And what about that other immortal, Johann Sebastian Mozart, the babychair composer, generally adjudged to be the most precocious of them all?
After careful research, I am able to reveal another little-known fact. Which is that Mozart was born on February 29, 1756, a leap year. So he only celebrated his birthday every four years.
Thus his first attempts at composition, just after his fifth birthday, actually occurred when he was 20. And when Mozart died at the age of 35, he was indeed 140 – not a bad innings at all, all things considered.
Nor have my pursuits into the rutted field of music been confined to the classics. I could speak with authority about Fred Dillon, Malcolm Jackson, Noel Diamond, Fleetwood Mike et al.
And on another note, so to speak, how many people know that the Beatles were not actually brothers?
No, “Ode to Joy” of Claremont, my credentials to express an opinion on music of all kinds are impeccable. And if you cannot be civil, at least get your facts straight.
John Ryan’s Midweek column
Speaking at this moment in time . . .
Travelling steerage on an Airbus some days ago, I was puzzled to encounter an object with a label proclaiming it to be a “motionary discomfort receptacle”.
Puzzled I was, for a while, because the thing looked just like an airsick bag and unquestionably would have been able to serve the same purpose.
It was even in the pocket behind the seat where one expects to find airsick bags, along with the last encumbent’s toffee wrappers and the airline literature, always so graphically illustrated, that shows passengers where to store their dentures before the moment of impact and how to conduct themselves in a lifebelt once the aircraft is to the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
What has happened, of course, is that obfuscation simply has taken to the air. And, indeed, why not? What better place for jet-age jargon than in a jetliner?
Not that obfuscation is a modern phenomenon. Far from it. But it certainly has never had so many apostles.
Obfuscation, as if you didn’t know, is the art – or science, since it generally seems to be employed in scientific directions – of saying what you have to say at as great a length as possible, using the most obscure terms available. (To obfuscate means to darken the mind.)
Obfuscationists come in many categories of competence. Down around the lowest rung is the person who talks about “parameters” and refers to “this moment in time”, when he means “now”. But then, as you might imagine, it’s an exacting science or art, since a person’s natural inclination is to be as direct as possible in thought and speech.
Who is to say how much midnight oil is burnt along the corridors of science, commerce and industry as departmental scribes strive to bring the highest degree of obscurity to their memoranda and reports? Or how many person-hours went into that single instruction that came with your new lawnmower telling you how to “reverse the transit screw adjuster bolt at the rear of the baseplate co-ordinating catch before depressing the upper support stay”?
As if to confirm my belief that obfuscation has gone into the air travel business, a Government notice landed on my desk yesterday about “conditions relating to the disposal or use of aviation fuel”.
In it the author outlines various regulations that apply to “power-driven, heavier than air machines deriving their lift in flight, chiefly from aerodynamic reactions on surfaces which remain fixed under given conditions of flight”.
He means aeroplanes.
These regulations, it seems, are different from others that have to do with “heavier-than-air machines supported in flight by the reactions of the air on one or more power-driven rotors on substantially vertical axles”.
He means helicopters.
The author almost lost me with one reference to “an air transport service in connection with which flights are undertaken with such a degree of frequency that they cannot reasonable be regarded as merely casual or isolated but are undertaken between points which do not vary . . .”
Of course, he’s talking about regular flights. But how clever to put it that way?
Obfuscationists get around. There is at least one in our company, witness a memo that reached me recently about a sister newspaper with “approximately four per cent more manpower than was estimated as being adequate”.
This state of affairs, the memo concluded, was “mainly due to the under-utilisation of the Leave provision”. Or, to put it another way, because some people weren’t taking their holidays.
Another example of obfuscation at its best comes from a brochure seeking applicants for the Boston Consulting Group, wherever that might be. It says: “Financial compensation for successful performance . . . is certainly likely to be sufficient to remove it as a constraint upon any reasonable standard of living.”
Which means the pay’s okay if you’re good enough
Or how about this, from a house magazine, advertising an in-company health scheme? The ad says, “The only applicants likely to be refused entry are those with multiple pre-existing medical episodes.“
Or people who get ill a lot.
Curiously, one of the great crusaders against obfuscation is the Old Thunderer, The Times of London. The newspaper frequently runs angry letters in its readers’ columns about obfuscation – like one this month from a professor at Queen’s College, Oxford.
“Sir,” it read, “would someone please inform our politicians and political writers that ‘parameter’ does not mean ‘rule’ or ‘convention’ or ‘limit’?
“Yesterday, parameters were being observed. No doubt we shall soon be having them loosened up, thinned out and boiled down.”
Excellent advice, I’m sure, if you happen to have any dealings with parameters. Personally, I wouldn’t presume to touch them with a barge-pole.
If, that is, they are capable of not being touched with a barge-pole.
John Ryan’s Time Wounds All Heals column
John Ryan 