There is a vile, parochial, kleinstadtisch perspective from some of our cultural commentators which outwardly eschews elitism, but is profoundly motivated by an ideology of resentment and grievance. When portraits were rehung in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, the Scottish government-supporting journalist Lesley Riddoch threw a tantrum in the pages of the Scotsman. She wanted portraits of Liz Lochhead, James Kelman and Alex Salmond rather than Allan Ramsay and King George III. Old=bad; new=good. English, royalty, bourgeoisie=bad; Scottish, socialist, ‘down-to-earth’=good.
Kevin Williamson is a writer, publisher, far-left activist and vice-convenor of the Scottish Independence Convention. He called for an independent Scotland to conduct a ‘social audit’ of all government officials and public employees to discover their ‘demographic’ and ‘who they speak for’….
We regret to share news of the death of Alex Danchev, a brilliant writer who spanned the fields of politics and the arts, writing a landmark biography of Cézanne. The announcement from the University of St Andrews says it all:
Dear Colleagues
It is with deep sadness that I have to inform you of the death of our friend and colleague Alex Danchev, Professor of International Relations.
Alex died suddenly at the weekend. He was 60.
Alex was an extraordinary Professor of International Relations, who took a cross-disciplinary approach encompassing broad-ranging interests including; art, global politics, war, ethics and military history. His chief interest was in works of the imagination, and in putting the imagination to work in the service of historical, political and ethical inquiry. He took as credo and manifesto Seamus Heaney’s inspiring declaration that “the imaginative transformation of human life is the means by which we can most truly grasp and comprehend it.”
As a teacher he was rated extremely highly; having won the Dearing Award for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, and a Political Studies Association Award for Innovation in Teaching.
He was also a committed researcher, who loved discovering a line of enquiry and then following it no matter where it led. He wrote extensively on art and politics and good and evil in the modern world, published a prize-winning new translation of The Letters of Paul Cézanne, and authored of a number of internationally acclaimed biographies. His was an academic life brimming with lives – his 2012 biography of Cezanne was widely praised; his biography of the philosopher-statesman Oliver Franks was on the Observer’s ‘Books of the Year’; his biography of the military writer Basil Liddell Hart was listed for both the Whitbread Prize for Biography and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction; and his unexpurgated edition of the Alanbrooke Diaries was listed for the W.H. Smith Prize for Biography. In 2009 he published On Art and War and Terror, a collection of essays on the most difficult issues of our age and, in particular, the nature of humanity in times of conflict; followed by his most recent book, On Good and Evil and the Gray Zone – a sequel published last year.
Alex was born in Bolton, the son of a mining engineer, and brought up in Alloa and Huddersfield. He was educated at University College, Oxford; Trinity Hall, Cambridge; and King’s College London before his academic career began as an officer in the Royal Army Education Corps in 1979. His journey continued at Keele University where he became a Professor in his mid-thirties. He then took up a Professorship at the University of Nottingham, where he held a chair, before being appointed to the School of International Relations at St Andrews in 2014.
Alex enjoyed working in St Andrews, where he found an openness to cross-disciplinary enquiry and continued his life’s work of exploring what it means to live well as a human being. He set us a great example. Colleagues in the school remember a man of great personal warmth, hugely committed to his students; and who was passionate, and deeply articulate, about the wide range of topics that interested him. Both in the school and across the wider university, we will recall his profound commitment to an interdisciplinary exploration of the power of the artistic imagination to illuminate the human and social worlds.
I know you will all wish to join me in extending our heartfelt sympathies to his wife Dee, two step-children, and grandchildren.
The funeral will be held in Oxford, and there will be a memorial service in St Andrews at a later date. Details will be available in due course from the School and the Chaplaincy.
I leave you with a quote from Manifesto 90 by Lebbeus Woods (100 Artists’ Manifestos), which Alex cited as his personal favourite:
“I declare war on all finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength then ‘melt into air’.”
Professor Garry Taylor
Acting Principal and Master
We have long suspected that the number of fans claimed by many stars are, somehow, not truly reflective of the real state of their popular base.
Now, there is a device that shows which artists are buying likes by bulk, and where these phantom fans come from.
Here are a few examples, taken at random, discovered by entering the artist’s ID into likescheck.com.
The violinist Julian Rachlin boasts 47,533 ‘likes’ on his Facebook page.
Using the checker device, we can ascertain that his largest group of fans – 12.7% – are in Bangladesh, his second largest – 11.9% – in Afghanistan and the third largest in Libya.
In other words, most of Julian’s page fans are phoney. He may be unaware of this deceit; it may have been an innocent mistake on his part or his agent’s. But the stats are incontrovertible.
Take the relatively unstarry German pianist Valentina Babor. Her page has 63,243 likes. The highest proportion – 57% – come from Iraq.
The young Austrian pianist Ingolf Wunder, 22,000 likes, has his largest group of fans in the Philippines, his second largest in Mexico. *See update below
And so on …. and on.
What is happening here is a double-blind – the public are being deceived and the musicians are being ripped off.
Anybody who comes along offering a miracle boost to your social media profile, just press delete. Don’t pay.
*UPDATE From Ingolf Wunder:
Neither myself, nor my management has ever bought any “likes”, followers or anything else of that kind. Being mentioned in connection to such a topic is insulting and damages my reputation. I insist that the responsible person has enough dignity to make a corrective statement immediately. I established my FB Page in 2009, before virtually everybody jumped with full force on that train and long before the older generation was probably even aware of it. My wife is doing my social media in close connection with myself and I’m personally behind all of my posts. All the posts get a lot of organically generated traffic, which is not the case if one buys “pages likes”. The organic reach (not boosted or promoted posts) of each post is approx. 5.000 – 762.000(!).
We have never used any artificial methods (buying likes, bots etc.) to enhance the “page like counter” artificially, which does not serve any purpose.
Here’s a tale of woe from the Australian oboist Rachel Bullen, who plays in the Esbjerg Enemble and augments her income with other musical activities. Apparently, that’s not on in the state of Denmark. Here’s Rachel’s story:
So about 6 months ago, I was fined 50,000DKK (10,000AUD/7,000€) for playing concerts with groups other than Esbjerg Ensemble and teaching oboe.
Nowhere in the information I received about my permit to work in Denmark does it state that I am not allowed to do that. Nor on the New to Denmark website. Nor even in the Danish law. If you try to ask STAR about it, they probably won’t answer. If you get a response, it is a non-answer.
I contested the fine, and my court hearing was yesterday.
The prosecutor was unprepared and didn’t really have an argument.
My lawyer was great and it really looked like I was going to win.
Then the judge announced he’d be back with a verdict in 20mins – this was a surprise, we thought we would have to wait a week. 90 mins later he came back with a guilty verdict. He said I was at best grossly negligent (for not finding information that is not there). He did however reduce the fine. I am now looking at 15,000DKK, plus around 10,000 legal costs on top of the 8,000DKK I have already paid. Or I can go to prison for 12 days (and start writing the Danish answer to Orange is the New Black).
Or I can appeal to the high court, which my lawyer would like me to do.
For anyone wanting all the gory details and/or to see me looking like a stressed-out mess, my case was filmed by DR2 and there will be an episode of Forsvarsadvokat (Counsel for the Defence) about me on TV in January.
So Denmark. I have received your message loud and clear. You do not want me or my music. Never fear: I will soon go back to where I came from.
The New South Wales Government has announced plans to upgrade the iconic building, 43 years after its opening, with a view to improving the appalling acoustics of its concert hall and opera auditorium.
But the amount allocated – A$200 million, or US$154 million – looks far too small, given that it will also be spent on a new function centre and other structural upgrades.
Both of London’s concert halls have spent similar sums on revamps in recent years without achieving more than marginal and temporary improvements to the prevalent murk. It won’t be easy or cheap to make the Sydney Opera sound as good as it looks.
MüllerBBM, a German company, were appointed accousticians for the Concert Hall element in September 2015.
She had been playing in Argentina with Daniel Barenboim and his West-East Divan orchestra, but the great pianist does not feel well enough to perform at the summit festival.
Barenboim will play the concerto in her place, conducting from the keyboard. He will play Mozart K595 instead of the scheduled Liszt concerto.
Recently uploaded to Youtube. No violin player or music lover will be unmoved.
We have belatedly been notified of the death in June – unreported in other media – of Philip Nelson, Dean of the Yale School of Music from 1970 to 1980. He was 88.
Chair of the music department at SUNY Binghamton until he became Dean at Yale, Philip turned a dusty faculty into an enterprising one. He appointed Krzysztof Penderecki, Otto-Werner Mueller and Claude Frank as teachers, adding the Tokyo String Quartet as artists-in-residence.
He founded Music at Yale and was forever open to ideas that enabled music and scholarship to reach a wide public.
In a highly unusual initiative that crosses hardline ethnic prejudices, players in the Czech Philharmonic are running a music and dance camp for around 60 Roma kids.
Petr Kadlec of the orchestra’s education department says:
‘We want to support children and youth in socially excluded localities and we are trying to do it with the help of music.
‘As you know, in the socially excluded localities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia there is no-one or almost no-one who takes care of talented Roma children and youth, and that is something we are trying to change with this project.
‘So we are trying to support talented singers and dancers and to work with them. We believe it might a kind of life-changing experience for them because they experience themselves in a positive situation. We hope that they can gain more self-confidence and more self-assuredness, so that is in short the reason why we, as the Czech Philharmonic, are taking part.’
Last summer, the Academy of La Scala terminated the studies of young mezzo Lilly Jørstad after two years, even though the opera house was engaging her in serious roles.
Lilly has continued to win roles since then. Now she has been awarded Norway’s Arctic Talent 2016 scholarship, worth €43,000 ($48,000), to help further her career.
The Philharmonia announced this morning that it had failed to identify a successor to managing director David Whelton, who is retiring next month after nearly 30 years.
As an interim measure, joint principal trumpet Alistair Mackie will manage the company until a suitable candidate is identified.
Horn player Kira Doherty will chair the board in his absence.
This is not a brilliant outcome.
Five months ago the Philharmonia released its inventive director of Creative Projects James Williams to become manager of the rival Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
Patrice Munsel was the Met’s youngest-ever debutant when, in 1943 at the age of 17, she sang Philine in Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon.
She went on to become a house fixture as Adele in Die Fledermaus. But she yearned to sing Violetta in La Traviata and walked out on the Met in 1958 after Rudolf Bing refused to give her the role.
By this time, she had made 225 stage appearances and earned her own TV show. Pat Munsel was a household name.
