Grosse Fugue
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The therapeutic qualities of writing

23/8/2012

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“Writing is a kind of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.”
So wrote Graham Greene.

I’ve been thinking about the next book. Well, actually, more than thinking. Writing has begun or, to be more accurate, re-begun.

After Grosse Fugue was complete (or so I thought), I started another novel. With all the research demanded by the first one, I wanted to try something that required little or no background reading and could be written rather more seamlessly.


I won’t talk about the idea just yet; it’s all a bit early. What’s been interesting is that I’ve now picked it up again and been rather productive. 

Which is where Graham Greene comes in. 

My wife was recently diagnosed with a major health issue. It could be a game-changer. Worry suddenly clouds the horizon. But writing affords a refuge. Fernando Pessoa wrote ‘I read and am liberated’. For me, that goes for writing too. 

When the muse and fingers work in perfect harmony and the words flow, one can be free from fear, free, in fact, from everything. There’s a passage in Grosse Fugue where Reuben Mendel immerses himself so deeply into music that he can, for the moment, suppress his demons. 

I’m not sure I really understood what that meant.

Until now.
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50 Shades of Bald – the feather or the chicken?

10/8/2012

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That sound you can hear is not so much a bandwagon trundling by as a tumbril, taking the doomed hopes for uplifting literature to the guillotine.

What to make of 50 Shades of Grey? On one hand, we struggling authors look with the deepest green hue at the stratospheric sales, the publicity, the movie deal. On the other, we cleave to the general view that the writing’s a steaming pile of dinosaur crap.


We already know that the lookalikes and out-doers are in the pipeline but what’s a middle-aged male writer with virtually no hair (of whatever colour) to do?


So here are some new genre-busting suggestions.


Geriatric erotica: It doesn’t last long and you may have to break off for a pee.


Nostalgic porn: These are all the things I fantasised about doing before I put my back out.


Sexual Dementia: I know this used to go somewhere – but I’m fucked if I can remember where.


Isabel Allende said that the difference between erotica and pornography is that with erotica one uses a feather, with pornography the whole chicken.


You know you’re past it when that sounds tasty.

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What a load of Boulez

1/8/2012

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The word ‘revolution’ hung in the air over the Beethoven Symphony cycle from The Proms.

If the performances weren’t themselves revolutionary, the orchestra, Daniel Barenboim’s epoch-making West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (made up of young Arab and Israeli musicians), certainly is.


And, of course, there’s the nine symphonies themselves. While the First and Second are clearly the children of Haydn and Mozart, the Third, ‘Eroica’ is, quite simply, the most genre-busting piece in the classical repertoire. From its great opening chords to the final moments of awe-struck silence at the end of the Ninth, the symphonic journey is one of constant innovation and inspiration. He changed that world not only forever but irreversibly.


Interspersed with these immortal works was a selection of pieces by the French avant-garde composer, Pierre Boulez. Invariably, these involve electronics, something he believes classical music has to master if it is to thrive. He, too, sees himself as being in the vanguard of a musical revolution.


Anthologies of quotations are chock-full of predictions that now seem utterly foolish in their lack of vision. Let me join them. The output of Boulez et al is frozen in time, as relevant to the future as Egyptian hieroglyphs are to us, and just as comprehensible.


Music should speak to the heart and the soul, as well as the brain. If it tries to address only the cerebral and the intellectual, it ceases to be music and becomes something wholly different, something arid and inaccessible to all but a few.


Beethoven would, I am sure, laud the attempt and decry the result. He wanted to inspire, he wanted to write for posterity - but he wanted people to 'get' his music and would be distraught if, like the '
Große Fuge', it was seen as impenetrable. Boulez, perversely, seems to yearn for that. 

It all reminds me of the observation by Jascha Heifetz: "I play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven."

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