Rare, Ravishing Romantics

When alliteration goes too far.

One of the most satisfying concerts I have given for a long time. The building (Emmanuel URC) and the instrument (a Kawai grand with a huge dynamic range and golden touch) were magnificent. And the programme, despite my nagging doubts up until 12.58pm yesterday, proved not to be cloying, but rather rousing.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) Three-Fours (Valse Suite), Op. 71 , I, II & VI
His songs and smaller instrumental works were all the rage in the early part of the century, but it all went quiet until Classic FM rediscovered and popularised Coleridge-Taylor’s violin concerto a few years ago. This set of waltzes reveals the hand of a fine pianist with a real gift for melody. The first is very ambiguous in mood and tonality until the final few lines. The second is what one might call ‘cheesy’, a languid, ravishing dance. The sixth is hammer and tongs all the way. His father, from Sierra Leone, had faced insurrmountable predjudice in starting his medical career in England, but Samuel was perhaps too successful: extensive concert tours and a professorship at Trinity College London contributed to his early death from exhaustion.

Theophilus Ayo Bankole (1932-1976) Rhapsody on a Theme from Egun
Bankole’s roots were even more firmly in Africa: though he studied in London and Cambridge he returned to his homeland of Nigeria to take up a distinguished composing and conducting career, cut tragically short. The theme has two essential elements: a set of chords heard at the start, which almost hum with melancholy and mystery, and a haunting melody which overlays the chords. Each of the episodes of the work varies one or both of these elements. Occasionally the music goes off in an unusual direction, and many of the central passages are exciting and upbeat, but it closes as it began, in haunting simplicity. The Rhapsody was never published and only exists today because of a transcription made of Bankole himself improvising at the keyboard.

Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943) Prelude in B minor, Op. 32, No. 9 & Prelude in B major, Op. 32, No. 10
The last great romantic left Russia forever in 1917 and settled in the US. He already had three piano concertos and two symphonies to his name, but was forced to make his living as a pianist – not that this was a great problem, since Rachmaninov was one of the most talented virtuosi who has ever lived. Many recordings he made survive to demonstrate that. There could hardly be a greater contrast than between these two preludes – the first a funereal monster, dark, brooding, even savage in places; the second, light and airy, in the manner of a Siciliano, a Renaissance courtly dance.

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) Album-Sonata in A flat
In 1875, while recovering from the long task of completing Götterdämmerung, the final opera in his Ring cycle, Wagner wrote to Betty Schott, widow of the famous music publisher. He had promised her a work many years previously, and was now able to deliver this, his final work for piano. Unlike the juvenile sonatas, which are very much pastiches, this piece speaks with Wagner’s own voice. It is in a single movement, slow-fast-slow, noble and only rarely agitated. As we might expect the textures are rich and the small amount of melodic material is transformed and reinvented on every page.

Richard Addinsell (1904-1977) Warsaw Concerto
The film Dangerous Moonlight, about a Polish pianist/pilot who joins the RAF during the Second World War, was a patriotic romance that suited the needs and mood of audiences of 1941. The centrepiece of its score has stood the test of time rather more successfully. Its enduring popularity lies in the fundamental quality of the material such that it transcends mere pastiche. This arrangement for solo piano is by Henry Geehl.

...to the scary

Perhaps it's not really all that surprising when you reflect on the nationalist and Islamic presuppositions of Turkey, and a very tense political atmosphere, but it was still a shock to read this.

Ministry of Justice Laws director-general Niyazi Guney as saying that missionaries were more dangerous than terror organizations, and that missionary activity was spreading uncontrollably, much as it had during the last days of the Ottoman Empire.

In contrast AKP deputy Husrev Kutlu stated, "A real Muslim cannot convert to Christianity, so there is nothing to be afraid of regarding missionary activities."

Of course both are right and both are wrong.

I pray for Turkey's Christians that they may stand firm in their precarious position and for the rest of the people of Turkey that they might accept the wonderful gift of life in Christ.

...to the ridiculous (weeeeee)

This story about seventh century urine caught my eye and, I must confess, made me grin (well, the Romans did use it as a dental whitener). Extreme and relentless hagiography does tend to lead in this direction (I think with shame of the relic idiocy of Catholic medieval Europe), so it was interesting to hear the opinions of the Egyptian Mufti's critics regarding the authenticity of hadith literature. One man's idea of coherence is clearly not another's.

from the sublime

Cambridge Papers will shortly publish a paper on A Christian Response to Islamism, written by Colin Chapman, a thoughtful author on Muslim-Christian interactions who is pretty sternly anti-Zionist (though gracious and gentle in his manner, and a delightful guest at the Writing Group meetings). See Whose Promised Land? and Cross and Crescent, for example...

The meetings of the Writing Group certainly helped me to shed some caricatures of Islam that I had been unfairly lugging around. One caricature that remains is that Muslims don't admit they're wrong (I'm not talking about at a personal level, but at the grand level of justifying themselves or other Muslims in the political and social arenas). And then the other day I came across this remarkable editorial in a Qatari paper about the root causes of terrorism. The author, an Islamic legal scholar, dismisses the excuses (denial, minimising, socio-political justifications) and blames a culture of hate. Wow.

Internet Watchdog

These bits of software are extremely useful. It's not just kids who need protecting from the internet, it's adults, especially blokes, and especially me. How easy it is to idly find damaging and offensive material, and how easy it is to look just that little bit longer. The software we've got really needs to be updated to prevent access to a sub-species of pornography currently not in its database. Professional Wrestling, whose association of sexuality and violence is in fact hideous. I grew up watching the occasional episode of Sunday afternoon wrestling on the telly - kind of fun, kind of silly, kind of fascinating. But in recent years it seems to have got nastier (surprise, surprise) and involves more unnecessary soft porn than [insert tacky celeb magazine here]. Perusing the webpages of the wwe led to another Being John Malkovich moment (do we really need to watch it to know about its nastiness? What do we gain from that?) - except without the excuse that what I was could access pretended to be art or in any indirect fashion ennobling. I rather think that's called sin. Which is not trivial.

It can hardly help men who struggle against pornography (which I think includes all of us) to have such a cheapening of the body - of the person - on display at every turn.

...part deux...

The combination of direct selection, kin selection, and reciprocal altruism provides the sociobiologist with a battery of speculative possibilities that guarantees an explanation for every observation. The system is unbeatable because it is insulated from any possibility of being contradicted by fact. If one is allowed to invent genes with arbitrarily complicated effects on phenotype and then invent adaptive stories about the unrecoverable past of human history, all phenomena, real and imaginary, can be explained.

Lewontin, Rose & Kamin, Not in our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (NY: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 261-2.

What happens if we substitute 'average evolutionist' for 'sociobiologist'?

With thanks to Walter James ReMine's remarkable exposure of evolutionary theory's varied and contradictory expressions, The Biotic Message (St Paul, Minn.: St Paul Science, 1993).

out of the mouths of...

If one simply cannot measure the stated variables or the parameters with which the theory is constructed, or if their measurement is so laden with error that no discrimination between alternative hypotheses is possible, the theory becomes a vacuous exercise in formal logic that has on points of contact with the contingent world. The theory explains nothing because it explains everything. It is my contention that a good deal of the structure of evolutionary genetics comes perilously close to being of this sort.

Richard Lewontin, The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change (Columbia UP, 1974), p.12.

must stop reading blogs

not only have I got a lot of work to do, but it's all rather disheartening. Here's a story almost too frightening to be true, and almost enough to turn me into a libertarian...

more cross bloggers

Surprising as it may be to any Euro-Anglo-American liberals out there, there are places in the world where national and cultural differences do arouse the passions somewhat. I don't quite know what to make of this remarkably cross blog from an American in Japan. Our many personal contacts with Japanese people have been almost entirely positive, indeed we have hosted many Japanese friends in our house for evenings, weeks and even months! So, it's no anti-Japanese animus that has inspired me to put this link. Rather the creeping suspicion that the world really is in a mess (that's not just Reformed dogma) and that looking under stones across the globe does not always bring delight.

Looking under the stone of my heart does not do so either, so I shan't be casting anything of hard mineral matter just yet.

more Reformed bloggers

The devil makes work for idle surfers. Sometimes, so does the Lord.
Just came across this interesting cultural blog, and a very exciting sounding cookbook by Robert Farrar Capon (whoever he is, he sounds very interesting), which was too good to refuse...

after Proverbs 30:18-19

There are three things that are too amazing for me, four that I do not understand.
Kate resting under my left arm,
The perseverance of the saints, and of God with His saints,
The elusiveness of self-control,
The too-painful nobility of Elgar's First Symphony.

not all that profound

Being John Malkovich struck me as deeply sad, more than anything else. Once you get past the zany carapace you are left with people who treat each other like objects and whose only meaningful contact, whether spoken or touching, is sexual, in a shallow mode.

What also struck me (in that way that things are wont to do, when one is thinking about A, everything seems to link to A somehow...) was the cross-sex theme. Characters muse on inhabiting the bodies of the opposite sex, and some do so as well. Ultimately it's all within a simple binary framework, and some of their comments are rather trite, but it all resonated with the research I have been doing on sex/gender for the Jubilee Centre. This really has challenged my assumptions and forced me to do some serious thinking and engagement with scholarship totally opposed to the biblical gospel. At the moment, rather like BJM, my thoughts on gender/sex are not all that profound, but lots of what I'm reading truly is, so it may make its way to the blog at some point.

Being John Malkovich

This is not really a film about voyeurism, but as I watched it this afternoon I wondered whether I did so as a voyeur.

As a Christian I am called to this standard - Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things (Phil 4:8). It is all too easy to fall short of this. There are, after all, so many wonderfully thought-provoking films out there, films with real quality performances, great concepts, clever execution, genuine humour...
But if the content is significantly tawdry does that invalidate the film? More precisely, does that invalidate it for me? If my conscience is active in this reasoning does that signal that, no matter the artistic merit (at least in a humanist sense), there are better things to do with my mind and time?

So, I watched Being John Malkovich, even though I knew it would trample on things I hold to be precious and cheapen by display that which is of almost inestimable relational value. I watched it 'tentatively', not willing to engage fully or embrace it (of course that would be improper, I could hear myself telling myself) but not willing to stop watching it either. I was watching it purely to see it, because it's a film highly respected by the cinema cognoscenti. I was watching myself watching it. Very much hovering, almost voyeuristically. Unlike the characters, I did not want to be John Malkovich, nor to manipulate him like a puppet, rather (I think) I both wanted and did not want to see what all the fuss was about, and feel smug for having enjoyed quality cinema, quirky cinema, not just another action movie, or whatever.

It left me admiring and also wondering whether or not I'd have been better off not watching it.
Predictable, you might say.

mystery, enigma, riddle... Turkey

Wow. A place with historical significance that is is almost unsurpassed, wonderful food, warm people, a bursting economy, beautiful and varied landscape, architecture, and yet so full of contradictions and tensions and violence... For an insight into Turkey, the newspaper Zaman is a good place to start.

Although Christians are martyred every day, in great numbers, across Africa and the Indian subcontient, these three murders (the first Protestant Christian martyrs since 1924, by some accounts) caught the attention of various portions of the world media (though not the BBC, oddly).

The ethnic and political difficulties in modern Turkey are quite remarkable. Whether it's Kurds or Armenians or Greeks, everyone apparently has it in for the Turks. I have not seen many internet debates hotter than those surrounding the events of 1892-1917, which are still very much alive to thousands, if not millions. Proper scholars debate the 'genocide' question, it's not just net fiends, and there are reasons to tone down the rhetoric and listen carefully to the official Turkish position regarding these events.

But brutalities aside for a moment (there is not much I can meaningfully say about them from the comfort of Cambridge), what I struggle to understand, as an Englishman, for whom diffidence about my nationality is part of what patriotism means, is how this incredible patriotism works alongside all the undercurrents of cultural Islam (not to mention all the varieties of Islam found in Turkey). And I have scarce come a across people so keenly aware of the injustice against them in the eyes of the world, so willing to mutter darkly about conspiracies. Orhan Pamuk's Snow was a wonderful dramatisation of some of these tensions (not that everyone likes his style), but it's easy to poke and provoke - much harder to achieve something constructive. So, in my wonder, confusion and frustration at Turkey recently it was wonderful to come across the blog of a Christian Turk. He rightly points to the need for the gospel (a weapon of mass forgiveness and love) if there is to be any deep reconciliation there, as indeed is true for all nations, all regions, all families, all people.

When in my ignorance and prejudices I am confronted by Turkey, it is necessary to be humbled, to realise that so many people have more right to speak than I do, and to pray for God's mercy. The witness of believers in Turkey today, such as the public forgiveness of their husbands' killers expressed by the Malatya widows, is what offers hope.

Around the World in 80 Days

For ages now I've been meaning to stick something up about this film. (It's doubtless a perennial complaint among self-conscious bloggers, but I'll say it anyway - 'why is there never enough time to post stuff? And when there is time, why do I always want to do something else?' Probably something to do with having a high opionion of my mutterings and opinions until I actually have to share them with my readership of 4...)

Steve Coogan and Jackie Chan star in this cartoonish romp from 2004. Chan was a favourite of mine in my teenage years - Police Story, Police Story 2, Police Story 3 (nothing like a good franchise), Armour of God, Armour of God II, etc... - and he didn't disappoint in this film, which genially abused Jules Verne and raised a few laughs. The cultural vignettes and hilarious cameos (including Arnold Schwarzenegger) were definitely worth it. It seems rather too convenient that the actress playing 'generic attractive French female lead' was called Cecile De France, but apparently it is her real name.

What quite took my breath away was the startling anti-creationist slant. The character of Lord Kelvin (who appears in all the London scenes) is as an old-fashioned, obscurantist establishment figure, who confidently blusters about a young earth and about theology in contrast to the dynamic pioneer Phileas Fogg. Now, I'm no expert on Kelvin in real life, but I don't think this is quite fair to the guy. He might have made some comments regarding radio and 'planes that now seem silly, but he was hardly a young-earth creationist in the mould of Henry Morris and co., and he was an innovative scientist and engineer with a lively Christian faith. It was a cheap trick on the part of the film-makers to take a swipe at young-earth creationists and try to equate them with a denial of the possibility of heavier-than-air flight.

The icing on the cake, however, was the prostration of Fogg before the Buddha towards the end of the film, after a neat interpolation of a mini martial arts movie about three-quarters of the way through. So, rationalism "defeats" biblical thought, only to be swiftly supplanted by eastern mysticism. A remarkable tour of recent Western cultural history!

And I thought it was just a silly comedy ;-)-