Veneer

It's very easy, if you're white and middle-class like me, to assume that we live in a more tolerant world than the one of, say, 30 years ago. That prejudices once taken for granted are now equally taken for granted as unacceptable. And yet if you stop and listen, it's amazing how quickly you'll hear casual, unthinking prejudice raise its voice in the most adamantly liberal quarters. I count myself lucky to have friends who face this at first-hand, because it gives me a second-hand view, which is better than ignorance. Whether it's the funny voices of those funny foreign people with their funny foreign names and extra melanin, or the utter lack of awareness of the issues involved in day-to-day getting about if you're disabled, or the assumptions people make about people whose chromosomes developed rather differently to most of us, or those who fuck their own sex, don't assume that because we don't have advertising like the picture above (memorably featured in the film of Daniel Clowes' Ghost World) we're necessarily better than we once were. Just not quite as gob-smackingly awful, all of the time.

Other people have fought battles to bring us even the tiny step forward we've come, and one such man was Julius Eastman, whose remarkable music I've been listening to and will write about soon.

I'm just as bad as anyone else, of course, it's just that I have people in the immediate vicinity who keep me aware of the awful thoughts that lurk within. Everyone's a little bit racist, after all.

Cue music...

Eight Songs for a Mad King

A heated debate on the Grauniad blogs in response to an article by Joe Queenan on why all modern SCCM* is rubbish (of course I put my tuppenceworth in) takes me back to when I was 11 or 12 and encountered my first bit of real, proper, honest-to-god modern music: Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King.

It was an LP in school, performed by the excitingly named Fires of London, conducted by the composer and with a chap called Julius Eastman singing (well, vocalising, anyway) and it was one of the most extraordinary things I had ever heard. I started off laughing, then being delighted at the extraordinary sounds that were coming out of the speakers, then finally captivated and shocked by the realisation that what I'd first taken for comedy was in fact searing horror.

I grew up in a house where music abounded, but I'd heard nothing like this: my parents' favourite composers were Mozart and Haydn, and the other sounds I heard were my brothers' and sister's rock and pop records. This was something entirely new: it was wild, crazy, untameable stuff, and it felt as though I'd lived a life in black and white** and suddenly been catapulted into the most garish technicolour imaginable.

I (and several of my friends) became obsessed with the piece; I ordered in the score from my local music shop and marvelled at it - it seemed to function as much as a work of art in itself as a set of instructions for which notes to play when. We harboured the idea that we might try and get hold of the parts, construct the giant cages in which the players sit, and perform it. We never did of course. I wish we had, though. It would almost certainly have been a terrible performance, but it would have been a hell of an exciting thing to do.

It's that feeling of intense excitement, that I'd discovered a new world and could never think of things in quite the same way ever again, that set me off on the road to this disreputable role we call "composer", and it's the feeling I still look for even now, which is why I still listen to new music and refuse to sink into comfortable middle-aged predictability. It's also why, when I want to explain what contemporary SCCM is and how magical it can be, I think of that record first.




*So-Called Classical Music

*Well, orange and brown; I grew up in the 70s, after all.