I’d forgotten about the Friday cat thing, but then this afternoon I chanced upon this window display.  It’s John Lewis, in Oxford Street.

And then I went inside John Lewis and got myself a DAB radio that will record stuff.  I chose the Roberts rather than the almost identical (although not at all identical looking) Pure competitor because the Roberts has treble and bass nobs, which I really like because I like to be able to turn down the treble.  And I went to John Lewis because they are the only place in London which stocked both that I could find and where I could compare them, in the flesh.

Back home, within minutes of opening it up, I was recording a cello concerto, onto one of those little SD cards, like I also now use in my Billion Monkey camera.  Not all of the piece, just a bit, to check out the principle.  And then, moments later, it was playing on my computer.  Next step, copying something on the radio, then putting it on a CD, and playing that on my CD player which also plays mp3 files.  But, the radio creates mp2 files.  Will that work?

Convergence, I think this is called.

Norman Lebrecht is getting a lot of friendly ribbing from bloggers for (a) hating bloggers and blogging, but then, finally, via all kinds of (b)s, arriving at (c), himself becoming a blogger.  Until now I have only been able to go here.

Lebrecht is an ideal blogger, because of both his huge strength and his huge weakness as a writer about classical musical.  His huge strengths are his eye for detail and his ear for a story and his willingness to speak his mind, whatever it happens to contain at this or that moment.  His weaknesses are his grand theories, which seldom add up and often seem to contradict themselves in the same paragraph or even sentence.

Consider the title of his big book called The Maestro Myth.  If this was a book about how conductors contribute nothing to the making of orchestral music and the worship of them is all bunkum, well, bunkum, but a logical title.  But the book is nothing of the kind.  It’s just lots of stories about maestros, some of them (he says) superb, others (he says) rather or very over-rated, and about many other things classical that spring to his mind that are too juicey to omit.  (Strongly recommended by the way.)

One moment he denounces public subsidy, and later he says that the government should pay for violinists to have Stradivarii.  But the government would be no better at picking winner violinists than it has been at picking winner car-making companies.  The true would-have-been winners would be crowded out.  And once that became hideously clear, Lebrecht would be the first to say so.  Plus, Lebrecht has a giant blind spot about pop music (Abba is not crass to start with – it only becomes crass when sung operatically), which he regards as not really music at all, which is why he is so irrationally desperate about the alleged death of classical music.  Like many classical obsessives, he confuses classical music (a blink in the eye of history albeit a very impressive one) with music (which will last as long as humans do – or smart aliens with anything like ears elsewhere if there are any).  But, worrying that music itself is doomed gives his writing the desperate feeling that this is all terribly important which it might otherwise lack.  (I know that music is safe and needs no saving, by me or by anybody.  Which means that I can safely ignore writing about it for weeks at a time and just listen to it.)

But the point is, Lebrecht’s stuff is always interesting and worth reading.  Each bit contains fascinating truths and delightfully entertaining stories.  Lebrecht loves gossip, more than he can possibly fit into his various paid outlets.  Which makes him a perfect blogger.  If he fails to see the big picture properly all the time, well, that’s good because this doesn’t then blind him to the entertainingness of the next entertaining anecdote.

His latest bit of fun is this, about two CD covers by different companies, taken in the same place.  What does this mean?  Nothing probably.  But: heh!

And as if to prove my point, while just now googling for The Maestro Myth, what did I find?  Another book by Lebrecht called The Book of Musical Anecdotes.

There are stories of appetites (Handel eating dinner for three), embarrassments (Brahms falling asleep as Liszt plays), oddities (Bruckner’s dog being trained to howl at Wagner), and devotions (a lovely admirer disrobing in tribute to Puccini). There are memorable accounts of Stravinsky telling Proust how much he hates Beethoven, of Tchaikovsky’s first bewildering telephone call, of Dvorak’s strange love of pigeons, and of Verdi’s intricate maneuvering to keep the now-famous melody of “La donna è mobile” top secret.

...

Collected from thousands of books, articles, and unpublished manuscripts (with historical sources provided in extensive notes), these anecdotes appear in their original form, throwing fresh light on familiar figures in the musical hall of fame. For browsing, reading, research and amusement, this book is a grand entertainment for concert-goers, record-buyers, operamanes, gossips and music lovers everywhere.

The blogosphere is the perfect place for this kind of thing.  Welcome to it, Mr L.  You will quickly discover that you have written another book, and another ...

Next stop along from Ali G Town is Egham, which is just down the hill from Englefield Green, where my mum, who I visited today, still lives.

On my way back to the station, later somewhat cropped, this:

I love how the light from the sun turns the branches red, by being bent around in the muggy, misty air.

Normally, if you point a Billion Monkey camera at the sun you just get total whiteness and no distinctions whatever.  But today the mistiness took the strength out of the light.  Sort of, I think, like those filter thingies that Real Photographers use.

Bruno Monsaingeon’s film Glenn Gould - Hereafter, concludes with the following words, spoken by the pianist himself:

I would like to think that there is, especially in more recent years, a kind of autumnal repose in what I’m doing.  It would be nice if what we do could involve the possibility of some degree of perfection, not only for purely technical but also and above all of a spiritual order.  But I’ve had all my life a tremendously strong sense that indeed there is a hereafter, and that the transformation of the spirit is a phenomenon with which one must reckon, and in the light of which indeed one must attend to live one’s life.  As a consequence I find all the here and now philosophies repellent.  On the other hand I don’t have any objective images to build around my notion of a hereafter.  And I recognise that it is a great temptation to formulate a comforting theory of eternal life so as to reconcile oneself to the inevitability of death.  For me, it intuitively seems right.  I’ve never had to work at convincing myself about the likelihood of a life hereafter.  It is simply something that appears to be infinitely more plausible than its opposite, which would be unliving.

Glenn Gould died in 1982.

Assuming that Gould really does find the likelihood of a life hereafter to be “infinitely more plausible” that its opposite, then here is vivid proof indeed of how very different people are from one another, in their tastes, and above all in what they are convinced to be the truth.  To me (and to the late Alan Turing - see the previous posting here), eternal life is far less plausible that its opposite.  Why on earth would you believe in such a thing?  Only if you have been told, a lot, to believe it, by people who seem truthful about everything else, would have been my answer not so very long ago.  Except that according to Gould that’s not it.

It’s obviously not that Gould was stupid.  The idea is ridiculous.  More that, faced with arguments about the actual likelihood of eternal life, he just was not interested.  He felt no threat from such arguments, and no desire to engage with them.  They made no sense to him.  They were even “repellent”.  And he had other things to get on with and to think about.

Since I find Gould’s way of thinking on these matters so deeply foreign and bizarre, I have probably described it very badly.  Those who (approximately) agree with him would be most welcome to describe his view better.

What this quote tells me is that religion survives not just because religious people insist that it must.  (How did they get religion in the first place?) It survives because it is inherent in human nature for at least some humans truly to believe in it.  If religion didn’t exist, it would be invented.  If it died out, it would be reinvented.

Gould said that he felt no desire to attach pictures to his beliefs.  But that was because, I surmise, he didn’t feel that he needed to convince himself, or anyone else.  He didn’t need conventional religion because he believed in his actual religion so completely.  He needed nobody else’s agreement to shore up his own belief.  Conventional religion, I surmise, is created by people who pretty much believe in actual religion, but who have their doubts.

I have this in common with Gould.  I have no need for the equal and opposite phenomenon to organised religion, which is what you might call “conventional atheism” or “organised non-religion”.  By this I mean the practice of self-proclaimed atheists and anti-religionists joining groups of fellow disbelievers to proclaim their disbelief, and to chant in a chorus, as it were, the shared hymns and mantras of their disbelief.

It’s different if religious people deduce real world projects from their religious beliefs that I disagree with, or even feel threatened by.  Then, I go for their beliefs, all of them, including their religious beliefs, if only to remind them that not everyone shares these beliefs and that they never will, and if they try forcibly to impose their beliefs on others, they will encounter huge resistance.  But that is a mere means to the end of political victory, insofar as one can ever achieve such a thing.  Trying to spread religious disbelief as such seems to me a bizarre way to spend more than a tiny fragment of my life, and only then as a byproduct of me simply say how religion looks to me.  But, of course, that just goes to show how different other people can be from me, including other atheists.

More from Electric Universe (see also here and here), this time about Alan Turing:

There had been some efforts to build a computer in 1820s England, but the prevailing technology of steam engines and ball bearings and metal cogs was too crude ever to make it work. The failure was not just in technology but in imagination.  Even a full century later, in the 1920s, there were many ingenious machines in the world - there were locomotives, and assembly lines, and telephones, and airplanes. But each did only one thing. Everyone accepted the idea that to get a different task done, you needed to build a different machine.

Everyone was wrong. Alan Turing was the man who first showed in persuasive detail how it would be possible to change that. His life ended in tragedy, for although he conceived a perfect, clearly describable computer, and although the new insights about how electrons can leap or seemingly stop might have allowed him to construct it, the technology remained elusive.  New ideas in science don’t automatically produce new machines. He would be lauded in death - but not while he lived.

As a boy, in the 1910s and early 1920s. Alan Turing loved the way he could think his way out of problems. He had trouble distinguishing right and left, so he dabbed a red dot on his left thumb, and then was proud that he could get around as well as other children his age. Soon he could outnavigate both children and adults. At a picnic in Scotland, to get his fathers approval for being suitably brave and adventurous, he found wild honey for the family by drawing the vector lines along which nearby honeybees were flying, and charting their intersection to find the hive.

But as an adolescent and then a young adult, he found it harder and harder to blend in. By the time he was sixteen he realized that he was physically attracted to men, which was bad enough, but he also realized he was without question an intellectual, and in 1920s England, especially at its private schools, that was even worse.

His father was far enough away, serving in India with the Civil Service, not to have to pay much attention, but his mother, who was from a proper upper-middle-dass background, would have none of it. Alan was a normal boy, she insisted, who would one day leam to control his strange musings on beauty, consciousness, and, above all, on science. She was sure he would also - as he seems to have dutifully suggested in his letters from prep school - quite soon bring back for a visit one of those pretty girls he hoped to meet at nice London parties.

Instead, by age seventeen, he’d fallen in love with an older boy at his school, Christopher Morcom. They built telescopes and peered out of their dormitory windows late at night. They read physics books together, and talked about stars, mortality, quantum mechanics, and free will. In their discussions, they ‘usually didn’t agree; Alan happily wrote, ‘which made things much more interesting.’

But then, just a few months after they met, Morcom died of tuberculosis. Turing had been reserved with his mother until then, but now opened his heart: He and Morcom had always felt there was ‘some work for us to do together; he wrote, ‘… [Now] I am left to do it alone; But what was that work?  Many people question their faith after someone they love dies, but adolescent deaths are raw, immensely so: the survivor experiences the intensity of adult emotions, yet can’t place what happened in familiar cycles of life. A hole is ripped in the universe.

Turing seems to have lost whatever religious faith he once had. He angrily dropped the usual Edwardian belief that only the body is lost in death, and that an immortal soul, not made of any earthly substance, lives on. Morcom was gone. People who tried to comfort him by saying his friend somehow survived were liars.

That anger, that belief in cold materialism, was indispensable for the great electrical device that Turing imagined just a few years later. Its hard to conceive of creating an artificial device that duplicates human thinking, if you believe in an immortal soul.  The perishable stuff that the computer has to be made of – the wires or electrons or whatever – will lack all semblance of that soul.  But if you’re sure, with all the anger of adolescence, that nothing but dead earth is what remains when we die, then cold wires will do just as well as any living being.

I have been lazing about all weekend.  I have had plenty of time to put something good up here, but did not do so.  So, a quota photo, taken recently, of the Floral Street bridge that connects, I believe, the Covent Garden ballet school to Covent Garden.

Photoshop is a wonderful thing, or it was when I last used it.  I now have a clone, which is better in some ways, not better in others, and just the same when it comes to brightening and contrasting.

I took this photo last night, I think it was.  During the Australia South Africa game.  I was wandering around London with Michael Jennings, and he was phoning up for the score.  Later we went to a South African pub, and caught the vital moment of the game, when the South African captain, a man with the dazzlingly glamourous name of Smith, got hurt.  That slowed South Africa down in their run chase and they ended up losing quite badly.

I have signed up to do some blogging at Michael‘s about the cricket.  This evening I was working on my first posting, and sodding Wndows had a “problem” and ate it all.  Usually I write my blog postings out in my Word clone beforehand, and this is why.  Come to think of it, I haven’t done that with this either, but at least I’ve saved it up until here.  Which happens to be the end.

Quota quote:

“A man who’s always declaring he’s no fool usually has his suspicions.”

That’s from the Playwright Wilson Mizner, quoted in The New York Times, requoted by The Week, this week, and now rerequoted by me.

Apparently this has been around for some time, so sorry if you’ve heard it before.

From a letter by David Mitchell of Brecon, in the latest Spectator (March 24th 2007):

We never had mice until we got our cat.  He brings them in through the cat-flap alive and undamaged.  They are then released by the cat for a merry chase around the furniture, my wife and myself until they find safe refuge.  Then they take up residence, once in the washing machine, but mostly in the cupboard containing the dried catfood, where they live in comfort.  Once established, they are totally ignored by the cat.

Interesting.

I suspect that foxes are also caused by foxhunters, who make a big public fuss of chasing foxes, and constantly criticise them in the media for their murderous way with chickens, but who secretly encourage them, feed them, and perhaps even supply them with cheap rented accommodation.

Last Monday I posted an excerpt from Electric Universe by David Bodanis.  Here is a second excerpt, this time about the career of Thomas Edison, the world’s first great systematiser of large-scale industrial and technological research and development.  Alec Bell, the man Edison started out battling against, was Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone.

Bell’s work in the 1870s was the start of a great outpouring of new discoveries. A proconsul from the Roman Empire, suddenly transported to the muddy swampland of the American settlement of Fort Dearborn, in the year 1850 A.D. - a little before Bell’s work - would not have been especially surprised at what he found. There were horse-drawn vehicles and wooden houses, and candles or oil lamps to hold back the night. The few telegraphs that might be found in big cities had scarcely changed the quality of daily life. But if that proconsul had returned a single lifetime later, in 1910, that muddy town would have exploded to become the city of Chicago - and amid the cars and electric lights and telephone poles, where powerful electric charges were led whirling along at immense velocities, our time-voyaging pro-consul would have been utterly startled.

This second generation of transformations was begun by individual inventors such as Bell. But as the 1870s went on, an increasing number of discoveries were made by larger groups of researchers, working in a new style of industrial research laboratory. They were the ones who produced the generators and streetcars and motors and lighting systems that created modern Chicago and other great metropolises around the world.

Running these big research labs required a different personality than that of the gentle Alec Bell. The new research directors had to understand electricity, of course, but they also had to be willing to work on assignment ... and not worry too much what those assignments were.

Thomas Edison was the most powerful of these new industrial research chiefs, and one of his great successes came in 1877 when he accepted an important assignment to crush Bell. The world’s largest telegraph company. Western Union, had been watching what Bell was doing, and even before his final model was ready, they’d tried to get him to leave a prototype overnight at their New York headquarters so they could ‘examine’ it. Bell was a trusting man, but not that trusting; he kept the prototype secure in his own hotel room.

Once he had his patent, more-direct measures were needed, for who was going to let an upstart undercut a giant industry?  Certainly not William Orton, the head of Western Union. His strategy was almost embarrassingly simple. America after the Civil War was a violent place. Strikes were often resolved with rifles and dynamite; patents were stolen; fledgling investment houses were destroyed by established firms. It wasn’t surprising that within the technology field, predators began to appear, generally bankrolled by rich financiers. When they identified a new electrical product, they would try to find a technological mercenary skilled enough to produce the same device using a slightly different process. The original inventor would be destroyed; the company that had arranged for the copy - and the mercenary who produced it - would become rich.

Because Bell’s telephone threatened to undermine the entire telegraph business, Orton had to go to the most skilled enforcer he knew. This was the young Thomas Edison, a man who, as Orton happily explained to a friend, ‘had a vacuum where his conscience ought to be.’

Edison was almost exactly Bell’s age, but from a very different background. Instead of the doting parents and uncles and education in Scotland and London that Bell had, Edison had a father who had once whipped him in a public square, and he had left school in frontier Michigan when he was barely a teenager. He’d supported himself as an itinerant telegraph operator for years, sleeping in cheap hotels and rooming houses across America. This would have been hard enough for any fifteen-year-old, but Edison was also very hard of hearing.  When he wanted to hear a piano properly, he’d have to get a piece of wood, bite down on it, and then push the wood as hard as he could against the piano. (’I haven’t heard a bird sing since I was twelve years old,’ he once casually remarked.)

When he got married, young, he ended up with a woman with whom he soon found he had almost nothing in common; when he tried his first legitimate invention, a quick vote-counting machine for legislatures, he found that he was laughed at: everyone in the know understood that legislators did not want their votes to be counted quickly.

By the time he reached New York he was resentful, and he was poor, and he was bright - just the man to coldly undercut another man’s work. In time he would redeem himself, but not yet. There was a flaw in Bell’s work, and Edison accepted Orton’s assignment to attack it.

Bell’s design depended on sending the vibrations of the human voice into a microphone, to start the electric current that would run through the wire stretching from one telephone to the next. But to get a signal to travel more than a few hundred yards, you had to yell, and the signal often died or became too feeble to hear before it got more than a few miles away.  Edison thought about it and saw there was a way to keep an electrical signal going as it traveled further through the phone wires. Before anyone even exhaled into the phone, he had a dedicated battery pump a strong, steady electric signal through the wires. When the speaker began to talk, his breath had only to modify the already robust battery signal, making it a little bit stronger or a little bit weaker. The result was that the speaker’s voice didn’t fade so quickly, and phone messages could be sent dozens of miles.

Orton was delighted, and paid off Edison with the equivalent of several million dollars in today’s money. But Orton’s delight didn’t last long, for although Bell was meek, his new father-in-law was not. There were lawyers hired, leaks to the newspapers; it’s possible there were some quiet threats to Orton. Bell ended up keeping the main phone patents, although Western Union got some income from the improved microphone.

None of this mattered to Edison and his team. For Edison’s stint as a patent-breaker had led him to think some more about the way Bell used the resistance in a wire to modify a moving electric current. Other devices, he realized, could use the same twist. And indeed, on October 30,1878, J. Pierpont Morgan wrote to his Paris representative:

‘I have been very much engaged for several days past on a matter which is likely to prove most important to us all. ...  Secrecy at the moment is so essential that I do not dare put it on paper. Subject is Edison’s Electric light. ...’

Edison liked gruffly pretending to his friends and to visiting newspapermen that he was just a simple man who had no interest in anything more than patching together a few practical devices. But that wasn’t true. When someone’s smart enough to duplicate or improve an important invention, as Edison had done with Bell’s telephone, he’s usually smart enough to wish to come up with important insights of his own. Edison had tried to read through Newton’s writings as a youngster. He wanted to make an original contribution to this new world of electricity in which his technical skill had allowed him to get rich. An effective lightbulb would be a good start.

For decades researchers had dreamed of making a practical artificial light, but no one had come close to succeeding.  Anyone who had watched a cast-iron stove knew that heated metal glowed first red, then orange, and finally it might even glow white. If a piece of metal could be connected to a battery and heated up that much, it would produce light. But how to make the glowing metal last long enough to be useful?

This is what no one had managed. The microworld was so little understood that it was hard to control how electric power jumped out when it was tapped. As early as 1872, the Russian Aleksandr Lodygin had placed two hundred electric lamps around the Admiralty Dockyards in St Petersburg, but when he switched them on, they burned so powerfully that the metal filaments melted in just a few hours.

The lure of an electric light didn’t go away, though, for the oil or gas lights that were the best alternative had problems of their own. Great groups of whales had been destroyed in the early 1800s to get a relatively clean oil for lamps. When that got too expensive, kerosene and other heavier oils were used, producing, however, smoke, smells, and - when the lamps were knocked over - fires. Natural gas was a little better, but it was expensive and hard to pipe for any distance, and users had to keep on adjusting their lamp burners to keep streams of soot from billowing out.

The first metal that Edison considered for his electric lights was platinum, since it has one of the highest melting points of any known metal. But ifs also one of the most expensive metals known, and pretty soon he moved on to cheaper ones, at one point thinking he might succeed with heated nickel wires. This didn’t burst into flames as much as his previous tries, but even when it just glowed, the light was too strong: ‘Owing to the enormous power of the light; Edison jotted in his notebook, ‘… suffered the pains of hell with my eye last night from 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. ... Got to sleep with a big dose of morphine.’

In time he managed to build the nickel-wire lamps without staring at them, but they still burned out too fast. A colleague recalls one of his first demonstrations, to Wall Street backers: ‘Today I can see these [nickel wire] lamps rising to a cherry red, like glowbugs, and hear Mr. Edison saying “a little more juice,” and the lamps began to glow. ... Then ... there is an eruption and a puff; and the machine shop is in total darkness.’

The first trick Edison used to keep the filaments from burning out was to stop any oxygen from getting to them. That meant surrounding them with little vacuums. He bought pumps that would pull air out of glass containers, and he hired a top glass blower, and he improved the pumps, and before too long, there in his rural New Jersey laboratory, his team had created small glass containers in a shape that reminded onlookers of tulip bulbs - our ‘lightbulbs’ - that had less air inside than is found at the top of Mount Everest, or even several hundred miles higher above the Earth. By late 1879 he had small glass bulbs that held barely one-millionth as much air as the ordinary atmosphere.

They still didn’t work. Any metal filament Edison put at the center of one of these bulbs got so hot that it would bum or melt or crack or - despite the low air pressure in the bulbs - just sizzle along to failure. He realized he had to try something other than metal.

For a while Edison put strips of charred paper between two electrodes to see how well they would glow, and he also tried fragments of cork, and then cotton threads. The cotton seemed especially promising, and for a long time he trumpeted that as his great success. But in time that too failed, and in exasperation he examined the paper fragments under his microscope, only to find that he couldn’t magnify them enough to see the electrical sparks that he imagined running through them. All he had was the belief that any gushing electric particles would bump and slap along inside one of his filaments, hitting so hard that the wire or thread would get hot - just as the friction of rubbing your hands together quickly makes your palms heat up. He decided to search for a smoother filament.

‘I believe,’ he told his workers, almost in exasperation, ‘that somewhere in God Almighty’s workshop there is a vegetable growth with geometrically parallel fibers suitable to our use.  Look for it.’

And this his team did. He had more money than any of the other inventors working on electricity - those nearly limitless funds from his New York backers - and more important, he had the most motivated workers. Edison knew that his drive came from having been poor, and he generally hired others like him: there were tough, itinerant technicians who’d done who knows what in the Civil War; there was a bright London Cockney, Samuel Insull, and many others. The team had developed expertise in wire filaments and air pumps; now they collected learned volumes on plant fibers. When hunting through books still didn’t yield an answer, they started traveling: one worker to Cuba, another to Brazil, a third to China and other points east.  And there, in south-central Japan, they came across the Madake bamboo. It had a fiber far better for Edison’s needs than platinum, nickel, or even the highly scorched cotton that had been the best till then.

When Edison’s men connected strands of Madake bamboo to the wires from the battery metals and turned the battery on so that powerful charged electrons poured out, a faint glow came from the bamboo. When they slipped a glass bulb around the bamboo and pumped the air out of it, the bamboo strand got brighter, and would glow and glow and glow. The platinum bulbs in Russia had lasted twelve hours at best; efforts by Joseph Swan and others in England, around the same time as Edison’s experiments, had reached a few dozen hours. But the Japanese bamboo, glowing away in its airtight bulb, as isolated as if it were in the vacuum of outer space, lasted for more than 1,500 hours.

To make his invention truly practical, Edison and his men had to create numerous related inventions. Their first impulse, as always, was to steal from other patents. But they were venturing into such fresh territory that it wasn’t always possible simply to copy other people’s work. The electric bulbs had to be easily fitted into sockets, for example, yet no one else had needed to do that, so the team came up with an original way of modifying the screw stoppers of kerosene cans (whence our screw-top bulbs today). They attached the vacuum bulbs so tightly to the screw that no air would seep in and make the glowing filament bum too fast.

Still more inventions were needed. They needed a system of automatically measuring the electricity that was used (so they could then bill for it), and there had to be improved ways to power the bulbs, and soon Edison and his team had so much new ground to cover that, without realizing it, they’d almost entirely stopped copying patents. A single telephone could be invented by a single individual. But Edison’s network of power stations required dozens of synchronized developments in switches, fuses, power lines, underground insulators, and the like. Edison wasn’t a cheat anymore. He was a creator.

I have so far written only once, at CNE IP, about the Joyce Hatto fraud, and then only in briefly comparing the amount of harm it has done with the amount of harm done by people who sell fake medicinal drugs.  Very little and a hell of a lot being my point in that piece.  For, as I think this guy pointed out (so I read somewhere), the Hatto affair really wasn’t a big deal.  The Hatto CDs achieved some reputation but very little circulation.  As soon as they started getting around in anything resembling non-trivial numbers, the fraud was discovered.

For those who don’t know, what happened was that Joyce Hatto, who died last year at the age of 77, a quite good pianist but past her peak because stricken with cancer, was passed off as a pianist of genius by some combination of her husband William Barrington-Coupe (definitely) and herself (maybe).  He (they) copied and in some cases electronically mucked about with the CDs of a variety of other pianists.  A small critical buzz of approval and sentimental excitement - so ill, so talented, so accomplished, what a story, etc. - began to spread.  But then, someone stuck a Hatto CD into a computer and was told that yes it was Liszt, but no, it was not Hatto.  It was played by somebody called László Simon.  Audio analysis confirmed that answer, and other unmaskings of other Hatto CDs followed in a rush.

But really, who suffered?  A few critics were made to look rather foolish, especially one unfortunate who (I read somewhere at the time when the fuss was at its height) compared the Joyce Hatto version of something favourably with another version of the same music by somebody else which, he said, wasn’t nearly so good, unaware that they were identical CDs, the Hatto being a straight and unaltered copy of the other!  Then, worse, he tried to brazen this out as not ridiculous!  So, egg on face there.  But other critics quite reasonably pointed out that being defrauded by frauds is no great sin, and that they stood by what they had said about the actual “Hatto” performances that they had reviewed.

The very few people who parted with a lot of money for “Hatto” CDs are no doubt feeling somewhat hard done by, but as I pointed out in my CNE piece, it’s not as if these CDs aren’t really the music of Chopin, Rachmaninov, Beethoven, Brahms and the rest of them.  Only the packaging is lies.  In some cases the timings were manipulated, so those CDs aren’t very real, although still perfectly recognisable as that particular music.  As I say, who really suffered?

Certainly not the musicians whose performances were “stolen”.  The inverted commas are there, as so often when one writes about intellectual property matters, because this kind of “stealing” is not at all like someone stealing your car or your camera.  That really hurts.  That really costs you.  You suffer.  You curse.  You call the police and demand – well, hope – for some action.  But if someone “steals” your rather obscure recording of some Debussy, and as a result, your name gets in the papers, maybe years after you recorded the thing, are you angry?  Hardly.

Consider the non-plight of Yefim Bronfman, whose recordings of Rachmaninov’s Second and Third Piano Concertos were copied and reissued under the Hatto flag, with their own made-up conductor supposedly conducting (rather than Esa-Pekka Salonen).  The Bronfman/Salonen CD in its bona fide packaging is still available, and all that has happened to Bronfman is that some highly welcome attention has been paid, again, to how good his Third Piano Concerto performance in particular was.  There must have been a few extra sales of this CD, because of the Hatto affair.  Is anyone suggesting that this CD has now become of less interest to classical CD buyers as a result of the Hatto affair?

The reaction of the boss of BIS (some of whose recordings were also copied, including the one by László Simon, also seems to me to be spot on.  He just sad: this is a very sad story about which we are going to do nothing.

My friend Julian Taylor may now be feeling very slightly embarrassed, for blogging to the effect that the truth about Joyce Hatto has now “finally” been revealed.  Personally, I regard the Barrington-Coupe admission that he links to as a retreat in the face of overwhelming force rather than a genuine surrender, that is to say the final truth.  He has cheated until now, so why now believe that he has suddenly turned over a new leaf and is telling not just some of the truth, but the whole truth and nothing but the truth?  More likely is that he admitted what he had to admit, and then concocted another bogus yarn designed, not to tell anyone what really happened, but to enable him to cling, at least in his own eyes, to some shreds of dignity.  His dignity being, I surmise, now, still, being something that he takes a lot more seriously than anyone else does.  Meanwhile, I like the speculation here, that Barrington-Coupe has been trying to recoup (sorry couldn’t resist) his losses by auctioning Hatto CDs on eBay.  For, as I speculated in my CNE piece, the price of Hatto CDs has surely now gone up.  There is general agreement that the Hatto Barrington-Coupe team at least chose pretty good recorded performances to copy.  I would certainly not now part with the Hatto Chopin CD that I bought second hand for eight pounds for anything less than about thirty.

A further rather amusing embarrassment can be found in the latest issue of the Gramophone (April 2007), in which there was an article (pp. 26-27) by editor James Inverne summarising the story of the fraud.  Inverne carefully pulls his punches and refrains from saying bluntly what everybody (including him surely) thinks, presumably for legal reasons, but he makes it all fairly clear.  But then, the final paragraph of a review by Bryce Morrison of a Chopin Complete Waltzes CD, on page 83 of the exact same issue of Gramophone, reads thus:

Mursky offers the five additional Waltzes in performances more prosaic than necessarily persuasive and also a world premiere of an alternative version of the A flat Waltz, Op 34 No 1.  This includes some ear-tickling rather than substantial variants and, disappointingly, dispenses with its whirlwind coda.  Profil’s sound is tight and claustrophobic and so there is little rivalry for legendary recordings by Cortot, Lipatti, Zimerman and, most of all, Joyce Hatto who once more gives us the most richly inclusive performance of all.

Technically that’s true.  But presumably she only “gives” it to us after getting it from somebody else, although I haven’t been able to find out who.  And I suppose that that “richly inclusive” means that this could just be a deliberate joke.  If so, I think it misfires.  Far more likely is that this is exactly what it seems, an editorial blunder.

It has been said that Barrington-Coupe couldn’t possibly have done all this for money, because – hey! - he didn’t make any!  It doesn’t follow.  I think he hoped to make lots of money.  He just didn’t succeed.  I think he hoped that the fraud would last, perhaps for ever, and that he would make not only tons of money, but also lots of dignity points, as the Great Recording Engineer for the Late Great Pianist.  Saying that he wasn’t trying to make money is like saying that failed bank robbers weren’t trying to steal money, merely because they didn’t succeed in stealing any.

Had the iTunes software that immediately flagged up the Hatto fraud not worked its magic, then serious money might have changed hands in Barrington-Coupe’s direction.  Serious harm might have been done to the sales of rival CDs, by the pianists who actually made the Hatto recordings, and by other rival pianists offering the same music in different performances.  If the fraud had then finally come to light, after years of Barrington-Coupe bragging about what a Great Pianist his wife had been, CD retailers might eventually have been stuck with expensive and unsaleable crates of Hatto.  I might have spent fifty quid on a second hand set of the complete Hatto, and regretted it.  But none of that happened.  (I actually spent eight quid on that one Hatto Chopin CD, the real player of which I now know, and am decidedly chuffed to own it.  Nice conversation piece for the future.)

Which is why the whole truth about the Hatto affair will almost certainly never be widely known.  Type “Joyce Hatto” into google news, and it becomes clear that this story is now over.  About a dozen of the hundred or more Hatto CDs have been unmasked with detailed analysis as being really by this or that other pianist, or pianists.  Are the rest of them fakes?  Almost certainly, but who cares?  They aren’t for sale any longer, so far as I am aware.

My guesses and everyone else’s guesses about Barrington-Coupe’s motives and about the precise degree to which Joyce Hatto herself was involved in all this cheating will probably remain guesses.  A further flurry of embarrassment is perhaps now being suffered by anyone who wrote this business up when it hit the newspapers as the “biggest fraud in the history of classical music”, “the world of classical music has been rocked to its foundations”, “nothing will ever be the same again”, or whatever.  And, that will be that.

I’ll end by telling you what a real, big classical music fraud would be like.  Suppose that it were now to emerge that from about 1957 onwards, Otto Klemperer was in fact totally ga-ga, and that all his rehearsals and all his recordings from then on had been supervised by others, and his actual performances were really bossed by the leader of the orchestra, the senior violinist, with Klemperer merely waving his hands vaguely at the orchestra in time with the music, like me when I conduct my stereo.  Suppose that cleverly placed mirrors, or perhaps electronic signalling devices of some kind, had been used during performances to disguise how little attention the musicians were paying to Klemperer, and how much to their real boss, the senior violinist.  Suppose an elderly recording engineer now broke cover and described all the exhausting and time-consuming cheating and timing manipulation involved in bodging together a late Klemperer CD, far more than anyone had realised, then or since.  Now that would really be something!

Norman Lebrecht hints in this piece that a more or less severely diluted version of that syndrome might indeed apply in not a few cases of very esteemed but very elderly and decidedly past-it conductors.  And you often hear critics grumbling about how much editing is involved in contriving classical CDs, by artists of all ages.  This is why many people now like buying “live” recordings.  Too bad that they too are often severely manipulated, with rehearsal “performances” freely plundered to paper over all the cracks in the performance on the night.  Or, as often happens now, performances on the nights.

I’m not so bothered about all this contrivance, any more than I care about the alleged menace of pop music that is entirely contrived in recording studios, with artists who could never do it for real, accompanied with real old fashioned musical instruments, on a stage.  I actually like a lot of what is called “manufactured” pop.  I think it has added an extra dimension of fun and creativity to pop music.  Indeed I think that such contrivance is a major part of what makes pop music so great.

What matters to me is the musical result.  The fact that some particular performance owes rather more to the recording engineer and the editor, and rather less to the bird or bloke whose picture is on the cover, for me, matters a bit, especially with classical music performances, but not that much.

I spent the last few weeks, ever since this Hatto drama first erupted, wondering what the hell to say about it all, what with me being an occasional classical music blogger, a sort of one-eyed classical expert in the land of the largely classical-blind bit of the blogosphere that I inhabit.  But what to say?  It was interesting, yes, and I gleefully shared the story with my less classically switched-on friends.  But honestly, what was there to say?  It’s not that big a deal, I thought, as I kept postponing my bloggings about it all.  And then I thought, well, that’s what I’ll say.

I see that right wing bloggers are getting all excited about right wing pop songs.  I think this is sad.  It’s trying to be cool, and trying to be cool is the very essence of not cool.

I prefer this.  (Which I found my way to by going to here and then here and then here and then here.)

This virtual keyboard, virtual because it shines itself onto your table from a thing like a cigarette lighter rather than itself being the size of a keyboard, is my favourite among the gadgets I’ve recently noticed, and I first heard about it not here, or here, but here.

I guess you need to avoid red tables.  More blather needed to stop the picture busting out of the box.  That should be enough.

I like the way this person writes, quite aside from me having a weakness for Asian babes, and despite being opposed to fashion.  If it turns out that this blog is written by a fat white fifty-five-year-old fantasist man with really quite severe psychological problems, well, them’s the breaks.  He’s doing well so far.

Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only, fashion is in the sky, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.

No, fashion is clothes, and shoes and hats.  Plus a few extras like bags.

I had an argument recently with crypto-fashist Paul Coulam (I think it was) about whether or not I care about Fashion.  I said I didn’t and he said I did.  And I think he’s probably right.  I go to quite a lot of trouble, and incur enormous expense in the form of all the job and media offers I don’t get as a result, to dress badly.  I actually don’t possess and would spend moderate money and suffer definite discomfort to avoid wearing any garment that is cerulean coloured.

Anyway, back to Susie Bubble.  What clinched her spot on my blogroll (aside from her being a Londoner) is her habit of self-photoing herself and her various ever-changing fashion statements in a mirror while using her camera to hide her face and retain at least a little of her anonymity.  Billion Monkey Susie Bubble!  The most recent Susie Bubble snaps in this genre are to be found here.  Or scroll down here, and you’ll really see what I mean, although personally I prefer the ones that aren’t her photoshopped in front of fashion pages.

The economics of all this is (are?) interesting.  If you look in the sidebar on the left, you find this:

Just to reiterate an earlier post I am now offering to purchase items from the UK to ship internationally for those of you that covet something Brit-tastic.  I can even, time permitting, buy stuff in-store in London depending on how specific you are with what you want.  Here’s how it works:

1) Pick/Choose what you want to buy - email me with the request.  I will check availability and work out shipping costs and tell you the grand total.

2) You Paypal me the money first and then I will order/purchase the items requested.

3) Once I receive the items, I will then ship to you straight away = happy days!

Interesting, yes?  People sometimes ask me if bloggers can make money.  The answer is yes by the Emma Maersk load, but only if they combine blogging with something economically significant, like e.g. clothes buying.  Economically, blogging is like telephoning.  You can scratch a living by just telephoning and being paid pennies per call.  But that’s not living as in doing anything beyond not starving.  The trick is to phone people up about something you are interested in.  Then you can make money.  Blog about something you are interested in, ditto.

UPDATE: No she doesn’t!  See comment number two.  She charges cost of item plus cost of shipping, plus nothing.  There goes that posting.

One of my minor objections to Expression Engine is that there seems to be some kind of size limit to headlines.  So, for instance, the headline of this posting should really have read more like: Billions Monkeys break into a house in Austin Texas and steal stuff and take photos of themselves but then leave the camera behind with all the pictures of themselves in it!:

Police say pictures documented a party and crime in which $5,000 worth of expensive alcohol, including $800 bottles of wine and high-dollar scotch, were stolen.

The self-surveillance society. 

Does Alice in Austin know about this entertaining circumstance?  I’m hoping not, but that she reads about it here.  I love the way you learn about things in your own back yard by reading a blog written in Hawaii or some such place.  I hope I do that to people myself, sometimes, with things like Russian bridges, and to Alice about this.

(I think I found out about this at either engadget or Gizmodo.  But it was yesterday that I saw it, and the day before yesterday (I think) that it was posted, so the posting is long gone from the gadget blog radar.)

I missed this, at the beginning of the month:

A light sculpture and large pedestrianised areas are part of a £40m proposal to transform some of the world’s most famous shopping streets.

Westminster Council’s Oxford, Regent and Bond St (Orb) Draft Action Plan hopes to renew the central London area.

The light sculpture will be suspended 30ft in the air encircling Oxford Circus.

That faked photo on the right being the only one of this phenomenon I could find.  (UPDATE: just found a bigger version here.) I’m sure Alessandro Volta (see below) would have been very impressed.  I just hope they make the thing big enough not to be twee and ridiculous.

I also agree with Londonist’s take, who entitles his posting Oxford Circus to follow in the steps of Roger Moore, with an accompanying snap of Mr Moore in his Saintly persona.

Many a Billion Monkey will be crouching down in the vicinity of Oxford Circus, to make sure his snappee has his Halo on right.  Londonist fears that gawping pedestrians will slow things down in and around Oxford Circus even more than now, but the inevitable increased pedestrianisation willl presumably accommodate at least some of the gawpers.  And the Billion Monkeys.  Behind whom I will surely also be crounching, doing some Billion Monkeying of my own.

I’ve started reading Electric Universe – How Electricity Switch On The Modern World (2005) by David Bodanis.  Here is t