It’s a boiling hot day – at least by British standards – so I think it’s time to chill out in the shade of my garden with some drinks. Here’s some appropriately smooth jazz sounds from a classic performance by the wonderful Anita O’Day recorded at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958 and used as part of the film Jazz on Summer’s Day. There are two numbers here: Sweet Georgia Brown, in three movements of contrasting style, followed by a scintillating up-tempo version of Tea for Two with its wry chase sequence that brought the house down.
Desperate for something to blog about other than the World Cup, I decided to end the working week with an evening of Opera at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay. The new summer season of Welsh National Opera consists of only two operas; the one that has received the most press attention – and excellent reviews – has been their new production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg starring Bryn Terfel. Although not long ago I promised to make an effort to get to grips with Wagner I’m afraid I couldn’t face the six-and-a-half hours running time and decided to give it a miss. Maybe next time. However, I couldn’t do without any fix of Grand Opera so decided to go to WNO’s production of Verdi’s Rigoletto.
Rigoletto is best known for a clutch of famous set-pieces, especially the tenor arias Questa o quella and La donna e mobile, Caro Nome, a spectacular coloratura piece for a soprano, and a truly beautiful quartet Bella figlia. If you hear these joyfully exuberant pieces on their own, you will probably get quite the wrong idea about what the Opera is actually like. It’s actually one of the darkest tragedies to be found on the opera stage.
The hunchback Rigoletto is employed as a sort of court jester for the Duke of Mantua, a cynical Lothario possibly made by the same firm who constructed Don Giovanni. Rigoletto entertains the Duke not so much by telling jokes but by making fun of his enemies, and sometimes the other members of the court. The decadent Duke, who apparently has difficulty keeping his trousers on, is eventually confronted by Count Monterone whose daughter the Duke has dishonoured. Rigoletto swings into action and abuses the Count who lays a curse on the hunchback. Somewhat surprisingly, the curse has a powerful effect on Rigoletto who suddenly becomes remorseful and anxious for his future. He’s been pretty good at making enemies, and feels that payback time must be coming. Thus the tragedy is set in motion, and we know something very bad is going to happen.
Incidentally, there’s more than a hint of Don Giovanni, both musically and dramatically, in Count Monterone’s arrival at the Duke’s palace in Act I Scene I. I don’t know enough about Verdi to be sure, but I’m pretty convinced that it’s a deliberate homage to Mozart’s own tragic masterpiece.
On his way home, Rigoletto runs into a sinister character called Sparafucile who turns out to be a professional assassin. He offers his services should they ever be needed. When Rigoletto gets home we find out that he has a beautiful daughter, Gilda, whom he adores.In this scene we see the human side of Rigoletto. He’s no longer simply grotesque and nasty. He’s a troubled and vulnerable man, coping with his deformity in the only way he knows how and doing his best to provide for and protect his daughter. He’s despised and he knows it. Rigoletto is not a hero, but he’s not really a villian either. That ambiguity plays large part in giving this opera such emotional impact.
It then turns out the Duke is trying to seduce Gilda. To complicate matters further, the Duke’s courtiers kidnap Gilda as a prank thinking that she is Rigoletto’s mistress. When he finds out what has happened he eventually rescues Gilda, but swears revenge. Perhaps Sparafucile will come in useful after all…
Unfortunately, Gilda is bewilderingly naive and has actually rather taken to the Duke. She sings Caro Nome about him, but it’s actually a false name he’s given her. This aria works so well in the setting of the Opera because the audience knows that the Duke is a scumbag. Only Gilda doesn’t. It turns out, though, that Sparafucile has other irons in his fire; he also pimps for his sleazy sister Maddalena. At Rigoletto’s request he lures the Duke to his pad to have his way with Maddalena. Rigoletto brings Gilda along to see the Duke’s infidelity at first hand. She’s shocked, and he sends her away while Sparafucile gets ready to top the Duke. A thunderstorm gathers.
But Gilda’s so smitten with the Duke that she can’t bear to see him killed. Neither can Maddalena. He’s obviously quite a stud, this Duke. Maddalena tries to persuade Sparafucile to kill Rigoletto, when he returns with the payment, instead of the Duke. That way he’ll still get his money. In a moment of deliciously black comedy, Sparafucile refuses with words to the effect of “Do you think I’m some kind of crook?”. But Gilda returns to Sparafucile’s house in the storm, dressed in man’s clothes and pretending to be a beggar. Sparafucile doesn’t know who it is, and conceives a cunning plan. He kills her, puts her body into a sack and passes it off as the remains of the Duke. Rigoletto returns, and can’t resist looking inside the sack. Gilda isn’t quite dead, but she dies in his arms. The curse has been fulfilled.
This revival of James MacDonald’s production places the action not in 19th Century Mantua but in Washington DC of the early sixties. There’s more than a hint of JFK in the Duke, his palace is the White House, the street scenes evoke West Side Story, and so on. Gilda in bobby socks works pretty well too. The problem is that it’s not obvious how Rigoletto fits into this setting, nor why people are wandering around Washington DC talking about coming from Burgundy and going to Verona.
Unfortunately, Gwyn Hughes-Jones was indisposed so Shaun Dixon had to stand in at short notice as the Duke. In the circumstances he gave a creditable performance but his voice lacked the power needed to shine in the big tenor arias and he didn’t have much in the way of stage presence, either. It’s quite difficult to understand Gilda’s credulity unless the Duke possesses considerable charisma, so he was a bit of a weak point.
On the other hand, baritone Simon Keenlyside was absolutely smashing as Rigoletto, and so was David Soar as a magnificently creepy Sparafucile. Even better than these was American soprano Sarah Coburn as Gilda. Caro nome is heard so often – in commercials and elsewhere – that it’s very hard for singers to do something special with it. Sarah Coburn has wonderful control but her rendition was not only a flawless exhibition of vocal gymnastics; she also invested it with a heartbreaking vulnerability completely in keeping with Gilda’s character. Her Caro nome was worth the ticket price on its own, I’d say. It was too much for the lady in the seat in front of me, though, who burst into tears half way through.
I’ve wanted to post this little clip for some time, just because it’s so marvellous.
I wonder what you felt as you watched it? What went through your mind? Amusement? Fascination? I’ll tell you how it was for me when I first saw it. I marvelled.
Seeing the extraordinary behaviour of this incredible creature filled me with a sense of wonder. But I also began to wonder in another sense too. How did the Lyre Bird evolve its bizarre strategy? How does it learn to be such an accurate mimic? How does it produce such a fascinating variety of sounds? How can there be an evolutionary advantage in luring a potential mate to the sound of foresters and a chainsaw?
The Lyre Bird deploys its resources in such an elaborate and expensive way that you might be inclined to mock it, if all it does is draw females to “look at its plumes”. I can think of quite a few blokes who adopt not-too-dissimilar strategies, if truth be told. But if you could ask a Lyre Bird it would probably answer that it does this because that’s what it does. The song defines the bird. That’s its nature.
I was moved to post the clip in response to a characteristically snide and ill-informed piece by Simon Jenkins in yesterday’s Guardian. Jenkins indulges in an anti-science rant every now and again. Sometimes he has a point, in fact. But yesterday’s article was just puerile. Perhaps he had a bad experience of science at school and never got over it.
I suppose I can understand why some people are cynical about scientists stepping into the public eye to proselytise about science. After all, it’s also quite easy to come up with examples of scientists who have made mistakes. Sadly, there are also cases of outright dishonesty. Science is no good because scientists are fallible. But scientists are people, no better and no worse than the rest. To err is human and all that. We shouldn’t expect scientists to be superhuman any more than we should believe the occasional megalomaniac who says they are.
To many people fundamental physics is a just a load of incomprehensible gibberish, the Large Hadron Collider a monstrous waste of money, and astronomy of no greater value to the world than astrology. Any scientist trying to communicate science to the public must be trying to hoodwink them, to rob them of the schools and hospitals that their taxes should be building and sacrifice their hard-earned income on the altar of yet another phoney religion.
And now the BBC is participating in this con-trick by actually broadcasting popular programmes about science that have generated huge and appreciative audiences. Simon Jenkins obviously feels threatened by it. He’s probably not alone.
I don’t have anything like the public profile of the target of Jenkins’ vitriol, Lord Rees, but I try to do my share of science communication. I give public lectures from time to time and write popular articles, whenever I’m asked. I also answer science questions by email from the general public, and some of the pieces I post on here receive a reasonably wide distribution too.
Why do I (and most of my colleagues) do all this sort of stuff? Is it because we’re after your money? Actually, no it isn’t. Not directly, anyway.
I do all this stuff because, after 25 years as a scientist, I still have a sense of wonder about the universe. I want to share that as much as I can with others. Moreover, I’ve been lucky enough to find a career that allows me to get paid for indulging my scientific curiosity and I’m fully aware that it’s Joe Public that pays for me to do it. I’m happy they do so, and happier still that people will turn up on a rainy night to hear me talk about cosmology or astrophysics. I do this because I love doing science, and want other people to love it too.
Scientists are wont to play the utilitarian card when asked about why the public should fund fundamental research. Lord Rees did this in his Reith Lectures, in fact. Physics has given us countless spin-offs – TV sets, digital computers, the internet, you name it – that have created wealth for UK plc out of all proportion to the modest investment it has received. If you think the British government spends too much on science, then perhaps you could try to find the excessive sum on this picture.
Yes, the LHC is expensive but the cost was shared by a large number of countries and was spread over a long time. The financial burden to the UK now amounts to the cost of a cup of coffee per year for each taxpayer in the country. I’d compare this wonderful exercise in friendly international cooperation with the billions we’re about to waste on the Trident nuclear weapons programme which is being built on the assumption that international relations must involve mutual hatred.
This is the sort of argument that gets politicians interested, but scientists must be wary of it. If particle physics is good because it has spin-offs that can be applied in, e.g. medicine, then why not just give the money to medical research?
I’m not often put in situations where I have to answer questions like why we should spend money on astronomy or particle physics but, when I am, I always feel uncomfortable wheeling out the economic impact argument. Not because I don’t believe it’s true, but because I don’t think it’s the real reason for doing science. I know the following argument won’t cut any ice in the Treasury, but it’s what I really think as a scientist (and a human being).
What makes humans different from other animals? What defines us? I don’t know what the full answer to that is, or even if it has a single answer, but I’d say one of the things that we do is ask questions and try to answer them. Science isn’t the only way we do this. There are many complementary modes of enquiry of which the scientific method is just one. Generally speaking, though, we’re curious creatures.
I think the state should support science but I also think it should support the fine arts, literature, humanities and the rest, for their own sake. Because they’re things we do. They make us human. Without them we’re just like any other animal that consumes and reproduces.
So the real reason why the government should support science is the song of the Lyre Bird. No, I don’t mean as an elaborate mating ritual. I don’t think physics will help you pull the birds. What I mean is that even in this materialistic, money-obsessed world we still haven’t lost the need to wonder, for the joy it brings and for the way it stimulates our minds; science doesn’t inhibit wonder, as Jenkins argues, it sparks it.
Strange day. After a few days dominated by departmental duties I actually started to get down to doing some research, or at least trying to remember where I was with half-a-dozen projects I haven’t looked at for a while. Hopefully I’ll get some of them finished in the next few weeks now that the students have gone for the summer, but inevitably my concentration’s disrupted a bit by the World Cup. It’s so tempting just to have a quick peek at the scores…
It was the turn of the department’s contingent of Italians to slope off to watch their World Cup match this afternoon. Strangely, though, they didn’t come back afterwards. Perhaps it was something to do with their team – the current holders of the World Cup – losing 3-2 to Slovakia and now being out of the competition.
After a somewhat disappointing start, the tournament is producing some smashing games – although perhaps not if you’re Italian! Tonight I watched a splendid performance from Japan, who beat Denmark 3-1 in great style. Many of my most recent research collaborations have involved scientists from Denmark, Italy and Japan. I know which group will be happier tonight!
More importantly, after an initial dearth it’s good to see a recent increase in the number of clichés being deployed by the comentators, especially in the final third and at the end of the day, defending deep and holding a high line. Tonight’s match even produced a mention of the Last Chance Saloon, which is one I haven’t heard for a while.
Coming home around 7pm I walked in the bright evening sunshine past the cricket ground at Sophia Gardens which is where England were playing Australia in a 50-over one-day international. In fact when I walked to work this morning, spectators were already arriving. That surprised me because the game didn’t start until 2.30pm. Quite a few Australians among them too.
I had toyed with the idea of going myself but never got round to buying a ticket. I’m not as keen on one-day cricket compared to Test matches so decided to give it a miss. As I meandered home through Bute Park, I did stop to watch a bit of the England innings from the Taff embankment from which I saw Monty hold off the Australians for a hard-earned draw at the end of last summer’s test match. The curious thing was that although the sun was shining, all the floodlights were on. I suppose that’s to get the players used to the lights in good time before they’re actually needed.
The other noticeable sign of a big cricket match was an extraordinary blend of food smells wafting up from the assorted purveyors of greasy comestibles surrounding the stadium. I can’t say the smell was particularly enticing, although it didn’t put me off my dinner.
I’ve waited to post this until the match finished, which it has now done. I could hear the roar from my garden as England won by four wickets with 5 overs to spare. No doubt the England supporters will be heading for the local pubs for a few drinks before closing time. Come to think of it….
My agenda for today was dominated by three events, each involving a different form of progression. The timing was a coincidence, I think.
First, this morning, a bunch of interviews with our first-year postgraduate research students. Like most universities, the first year of a PhD at Cardiff University is a probationary period so we get the students to write a report on what they’ve been doing and also get input from their supervisor. This is then followed up by a panel interview, with 3-4 members of staff, at which a judgement is made as to whether to allow them continue. This used to be a relatively informal thing involving supervisor and one other member of staff, but I’ve recently taken over as Director of Postgraduate Studies in the School of Physics & Astronomy and made the process a bit more rigorous, having the same panel talk to all the students. It all passed off pretty well apart from the fact that a couple of students are away and I’ll have to put them through the process later on in the summer when they get back from their observing trips and whatnot.
After a spot of form-filling and a quick lunch we went straight into another examiners’ meeting, this time for undergraduate students. We already went through the marks for graduating students a couple of weeks ago, but today we had to look at the results for our Prelim candidates, and Years 1 and 2. Here the focus for most staff is on their personal tutees, usually 4 in each year, checking they all progress as intended to the following year and presenting any special circumstances. This meeting can be quite fraught, but this year went smoothly.
Which brought us to the last issue of progression, and the one I was less optimistic about prior to the event. However, England did manage to win their game against Slovenia in the FIFA World Cup by the not entirely convincing scoreline of 1-0. That means they too progress to the next round, although how much further than that they can go is not very clear. Well done to the USA too, who beat Algeria to win the group and take their place in the last 16.
All in all, a busy but productive and satisfying day. Now I’m going to watch one more game of football and have a glass or two of wine before having an early night.
Another beautiful summer’s day here in Cardiff just happened to be the day when the new ConDem government unleashed its much-feared budget. I suppose we were all expecting some combination of tax rises and spending cuts but nodody I know had managed to predict the details. A big rise in VAT (to 20%) is the headline figure most of the newspapers seem to be running with, but the other side is the one that caught my eye; average cuts of 25% in “unprotected” Whitehall departments. That means basically everything outside Health and Education, and “Education” doesn’t include Higher Education which falls within the remit of the Department of Business Innovation and Skills. Universities (in England; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run their own budgets for HE) and the Research Councils are therefore bracing themselves for cuts of 25% or even more; if some departments are cut less than this average, then some will be cut more…
However, the details of how these cuts will be implemented – and, of particular relevance to me, how much the Science and Technology Facilities Council will be chopped – will have to wait until the Comprehensive Spending Review to be announced in October 2010. No doubt the STFC Executive will be using all their political skills and powers of persuasion to argue for a positive settlement. Like they did last time. In other words, we’re doomed.
Incidentally, you can hear Lord Rees’ scathing comments about the inept management of STFC here, although to so involves shaking hands with the devil that is iTunes.
There’s also a two-year freeze on public sector salaries – again, not entirely unexpected – but obviously that will only apply to those who keep their jobs after the departmental budgets are cut by a quarter.
Anyway, no point in griping. We all knew this was coming. The big question now is whether the increases in unemployment and tax rises will stop our feeble economic recovery in its tracks, and how badly the cuts in investment will jeoparside future growth. I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable about economics to comment sensibly on this.
Coincidentally today was also the day that STFC Council met here in Cardiff. Of course they did so behind closed doors, but they also had a quick tour of the buildings and a briefing by our Head of School, Swiss TonyWalter Gear. I’m told one of the Council members asked “Excuse me, but what is Planck?”. Apparently the question was posed by one of the non-scientists on STFC Council. So that’s alright then.
Still, there’s always the elimination of France from the World Cup to gladden the heart of an Englishman. Like STFC, the England football team will learn its fate soon eough …
I’ve only just recovered from the shock of seeing the sheer hopelessness of British science education laid bare last week. Indeed, I was so staggered to discover how poorly conceived the current GCSE science examinations are that I forgot that I’d already blogged about the lamentable tendency of the modern education system to concentrate on getting kids to swallow and regurgitate little bite-sized factoids, rather than actually learning to think for themselves. Leaving aside the issue that quite a few of the things that are being taught seem to be wrong anyway, my point there was that teaching science isn’t about teaching facts at all, it’s about trying to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills. At least that’s what it should be, if only the dumbers-down would stop meddling.
Well, I’d almost come to terms with my despair when I saw another article (from Friday’s Guardian) which tells a tale that’s not just idiotic, but also sinister and offensive. Here’s the full text
One of the country’s biggest exam boards is developing different GCSE courses for boys and girls, it emerged today.
The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) said it was looking into creating a science GCSE with more coursework in it for girls, and one which gave more weighting to exam marks for boys.
Studies have shown that girls perform better in coursework than boys, while boys do better in exams.
AQA said it would not prevent boys from taking the girls’ course and vice versa.
The courses in English, maths and science could be available from September next year.
Bill Alexander, the exam board’s director of curriculum and assessment, told the Times Educational Supplement: “We could offer a route for boys that is very different to a route for girls.
John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers, said it was “extremely dangerous” to get into gender stereotyping. “There are lots of boys who like the investigative element of coursework as well,” he said.
John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said it was a “wild generalisation” to state that boys did better in exams, while girls performed better in coursework, but that it had “more than a grain of truth” to it.
However, he suggested that as well as sitting the gender-specific exams, pupils’ work should be marked in part by professional assessors.
Experts believe that this year could end a 20-year trend for girls to outperform boys in GCSEs because many new courses have no coursework. Instead, pupils complete work over a prolonged period, but under exam conditions.
There’s also a longer piece on the same topic in the Times Education Supplement.
Different courses for boys and girls? Are they serious? This is gender stereotyping of the worst possible kind. I find it absolutely abhorrent that anyone in any position of authority in the education system could even have contemplated doing something so offensively patronising. What’s next, different courses for different racial groups?
I sincerely hope that the new government intervenes and stops the AQA from going along this road. Better still, it should scrap these worthless examination factories and sack the profiteering dunderheads in charge who are responsible for turning the education system into a national disgrace.
It’s been a lovely sunny weekend and I’m feeling too lazy to blog properly, so I thought I’d resurrect and update an old post. The video clips in that older version were deleted a while ago, but have now been replaced by one long clip which gives me an excuse to replace this post about the wonderful film Jazz on a Summer’s Day. Not that I need an excuse…
At the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, Mahalia Jackson (“The world’s greatest gospel singer”) played a lengthy set on the Sunday evening, and her whole concert was so good it was subsequently made available on CD. She wasn’t really a jazz singer, but she was born in New Orleans (in 1911) and her style developed in the shadow of both the jazz and blues traditions that had their origins in her home town.
Three tracks from her 1958 concert made it into the film. Two of them are the sort of exuberant up-tempo stompers typical of Southern gospel music; there’s something about that beat that sets your pulse racing and makes it almost impossible to resist clapping your hands on the off-beat. The fine example here are a jaunty finger-clicking Walk all over God’s Heaven and a highly locomotive rendition of Didn’t it Rain, a tune written by the world’s greatest composer “Trad”. Both of them have the crowd of jazz fans leaping about in the aisles.
As you can hear, Mahalia Jackson’s voice is simply phenomenal. She has so much power and emotional expressiveness that she is in a class on her own when it comes to this kind of music. In fact she gave singing lessons to the young Aretha Franklin, the one “soul “singer who came anywhere close to that quality of voice. But if you really want to hear music with from the soul, listen to Mahalia Jackson.
Although she had a number of hit records, Mahalia Jackson refused to sign for any major record label and performed throughout her life almost exclusively on gospel radio stations. I think she could easily have become a pop star if she had wanted to, but she saw her mission in life to communicate her faith to others through music. She also used a great deal of her earnings to help others by founding school bursaries and through other charitable works.
As in this concert, she usually performed with a backing band of piano, bass and organ but despite the lack of a drummer they build up a tremendous forward momentum.
Terrific though the first two tracks undoubtedly are, what comes next and last is truly sublime. The Lord’s Prayer is such a familiar piece of text to anyone brought up in the Christian tradition that it is difficult to imagine in advance of hearing this performance that it could be sung in such a way. The contrast between this and the previous track is immense, which makes it even more effective. This is no rumbustious rabble-rouser, just a simple and pure expression of her own deep religious faith.
Almost as moving as her singing are the cuts to the audience reaction – the same people who were leaping about a few minutes earlier sit in deep and respectful contemplation. And who wouldn’t.. I’m not a religious man but there is certainly religious music that moves me very deeply, and this is a prime example.
I’m struck by the fact that “Dr” Mark Brake looks very much like actor Antony Sher, one of whose most celebrated roles was as Howard Kirk in the BBC TV adaptation of a certain novel by Malcolm Bradbury..
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In the Dark 