Classical music and opera - including contemporary forms - from London and beyond.

Dead Hands

The Fallen: Searching for the Missing Members of The Fall, by Dave Simpson (Canongate Books)

‘the thing with punk was that it was ‘working- class’ music. But in fact it wasn’t. The Sex Pistols were on Virgin for Christ’s sake - they were the enemy as far as me and my friends were concerned’ (Mark E Smith sez).

Music for life

A talk given by Time Out deputy editor Rachel Halliburton to the Culture Wars Forum in London on 12 November 2008

How can music help improve young people’s lives? I suppose unlike the Music Manifesto I firmly believe that the answer comes as much in the discipline it instils as in the flights of creative self-expression it can let loose.

El Sistema – social engineering with inspiration

Imagine: how an orchestra saved Venezuela's children, BBC1, 18 November 2008

El Sistema takes children from varied backgrounds and abilities and forces them through a system that demands discipline and application, and the rewards have been inspiring.

Slightly mad but strangely workable

Opera Shorts, C Central, Edinburgh

One of the first Edinburgh Fringe musical shows to not be a ‘musical’, Opera Shorts is based on a similar format to the fashionable ‘Future Shorts’ film series, now a nationwide phenomenon.

Make some NOISE

The case for NOISE, the 'virtual' talent festival

In an industry where nepotism is truly rife, it seems that unless your parents are celebrities, or rich, it’s getting tougher to get a foot in the door. But for most people, art is something to be done during down-time, with the ‘McJob’ acting as an inconvenient yet altogether necessary cover for an alter-ego as a zeitgeist-defining fashionista or future Rock God.

Playing the building

Battery Maritime Building, New York

Participants queue up to operate the instrument on busy days, but to my untrained ear every tune sounded similar. This is amusing. In all probability players hope to add something new, imagine they are being empowered by the artist.

Presenting the Past

Who Gives a Folk?, Vibe Bar, London, Tuesday 29 July 2008

Is folk relied on to provide a sense of cultural identity in the absence of any form of social cohesion in society? From the floor the question came that if there is a lack of political or ideological certainty, should one turn to folk and the history it provides to give a sense of identity in the ‘cultural crisis’?

Being Frank

Mark E Smith, London Literature Festival 2008, Southbank Centre, London, Wednesday 16 July 2008

Mark E Smith is yet to become Self-Revealing Talkative Man. Just who thinks he should?

What is folk?

Music and cultural 'authenticity'

I find the rigidity and stuffy traditionalism of some ‘straighter’ folk traditions too much to enjoy them in isolation. Many would seem to come associated with very stuffy cultural values such as entrenched nationalism and ‘our country’ conservatism. On the other hand there seems to be something fundamentally ‘inauthentic’ to me about the sound of Western Art Music in the current climate.

Finish in time for fireworks!

Ariadne auf Naxos, Royal Opera House, London

Are we not the very ones who will be ‘falling asleep after dinner’, as Zerbinetta predicts? If art is being prostituted to please a philistine appetite, don’t they mean us, with our pre-theatre dinners and post-theatre drinks?

Apathy into tear-forming euphoria

Silver Mt. Zion, Scala, London, 8 April 2008

After the first song, the audience knew they were witnessing something special, the band certainly had no doubt, and despite the thumping percussion and apocalyptic guitar crescendos there was barely a bobbing head in the audience throughout. It’s called transfixion.

Piano rage

Vier Minuten [Four Minutes] (2006), directed by Chris Kraus

In the end, Four Minutes bears an unlikely resemblance to the Eminem movie 8 Mile. Just as Eminem’s character Rabbit invests himself completely in his ‘one shot’ – the few minutes he has to express himself in a rap competition – Jenny must live a whole life in the four minutes she has to perform at the piano competition.

Blood, guts and not much brain

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), directed by Tim Burton

The film made me glad to be a vegetarian. Tim Burton’s latest piece of Victorian Gothic is a celluloid chamber of horrors, stuffed with meat pies beyond even Jamie Oliver’s wildest nightmares.

What does music mean?

A Battle in Print essay from the Battle of Ideas 2008

Despite using no words, instrumental music speaks volumes. A simple jig makes people dance in delight and a melancholy melody reduces people to tears; union songs, hymns, football chants and even the national anthem bring people together with shared values, ideas and aims; and everybody has their own special songs.

The Sounds (and Politics) of Silence

Music, silence and shared meaning

Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again… in 1963 Simon and Garfunkel gave shape to the comfort of many melancholics to come, releasing a single now famous to folk fans and sometime drunks, ‘The Sounds of Silence’.