Some have suggested that music is on the decline in the UK. But “it only takes a trip to the local village hall or a knock on your neighbour’s door to discover that millions of Britons are still getting together to make music. Folk groups, rock bands, religious choirs, samba troupes, a cappella singers, programmers, rappers and DJs are all performing somewhere near you. Far from forgetting how to play, it appears that Britain is experiencing a musical renaissance, albeit a very amateur one.”
Tag: 06.06
England’s Civil Servant Eggheads
Where will you find many of Britain’s intellectuals? In the civil service. “The first consideration is money. Civil servants get paid significantly more than academics, and only the most successful writers are likely to earn more. Those joining the fast stream—many of whom have postgraduate degrees and so have had academia or teaching open to them—earn about the same as junior lecturers or teachers. But on promotion out of the fast stream—which is expected within four to five years, and many do it faster—the starting salary for the next grade ranges from £35-40,000, a figure that academics are only likely to achieve after twice that length of service.”
Teachout: Stravinsky Bio Is A Modern Classic
Terry Teachout has strong words for Stephen Wash’s new biography of Igor Stravinsky. “The Second Exile, like its predecessor, is an inspiring piece of work, at once comprehensive and beguilingly well written. After two careful readings, I feel safe in ranking it—alongside David Cairns’s Berlioz, Lewis Lockwood’s Beethoven: The Music and the Life, and Anthony Tommasini’s Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle—as one of the finest biographies of a classical composer to be published in the modern age of musical scholarship.”
Information As Commodity
“The stuff you dig out of the earth’s crust becomes, in an information economy, less important than the information that informs it, what you think about the stuff. Yet the more you ponder that information, the more you understand about that stuff, the more real the stuff becomes. To put it in terms of the art world Andy Warhol lived in, the more you see that style matters more than substance, the more you see the vital role, the vitality, of substance.”