Coppola Comment

It has been a horrible week. A post on Pieria was the cause of a series of really rather nasty personal attacks both in the comments on the post and on Twitter. It seems that some people didn't like me criticising one piece of sloppy work by an academic econometrician whose other work they admire. I find this bizarre. One piece of poor work does not invalidate someone's entire output. When I was at the Royal College of Music, I attended a Stravinsky Festival at the South Bank. It went on for weeks and covered Stravinsky's entire instrumental output. By the end of it I never wanted to hear another piece of Stravinsky ever again. But one of the things I learned in the course of this was that great composers are fallible. Igor Stravinsky is a great composer. The Rite of Spring is one of the greatest orchestral pieces ever written. But that doesn't mean that every piece he wrote is great. Far from it. Some of his output is frankly rubbish and should be consigned to the...

This morning, I had a rather depressing conversation with two people who, like me, are professional musicians who rely for much of their income on giving instrumental lessons to children. And I have had similar conversations with other instrumental teachers over the last few weeks. Things are not good in the instrumental teaching world. Instrumental teaching is strongly cyclical: numbers are at their highest in the autumn, when children take up music lessons on starting at a new school, and they gradually drop off after Christmas as children lose interest and exam pressure takes over. And we have a horrible gap in August when even those who intend to continue their lessons go on holiday. Inevitably, during August we take on debt and we pay that off in the autumn when things pick up again. Except that this year, they haven't. The number of new students starting lessons is pitiful - it is nowhere near enough to make up the losses over the last year. My teaching hours are down fro...

It is often thought that the essence of music is harmony - and, indeed, that the essence of human life is harmony. The goal of humanity is to live in harmony with ourselves, with each other and with our surroundings; let wars cease, let there be no anger, no suffering, no exploitation. The lion shall lie down with the lamb; “they shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain”, as the Bible has it. When humans who don’t know each other well sing together spontaneously, they sing in harmony. It’s quite surprising how rich that harmony can be, but it is ONLY harmony. No-one dares to step out of line, to be at odds with the group, so the basic harmony remains the same. Passing dissonances, blue notes and so forth may appear as transient variations, but they don’t effect change. If the singing started on a chord of D, it’s still on D after 5 minutes. If the group knows each other better they may attempt more varied harmonies. They may even move from D to the dominant, A, and bac...

Throughout this post I shall use the British shortening of the word "mathematics". I struggle with maths. Well, ok, as the proud possessor of a maths 'A'-level and a finance MBA I suppose I don't struggle with it that much, really, compared to many people. But in my head I struggle. I look at a page of equations and my eyes glaze over. I can't look at a graph and imagine the equations that explain it. Nor can I look at an equation and work out what shape of graph it would create. I can visualise the forces in a mechanical system, but converting that into algebra is a bit of a problem as I can never remember what the letters stand for. I have the same problem with econometrics too - even when the terms are clearly documented at the top of the page, by the time I'm halfway down it I've forgotten what they mean and have no idea what the equations are supposed to show. Many people have the same problem when faced with a musical score. But I don't. ...

Throughout history, there has been a tendency of elites – moneyed elites, intellectual elites, dynastic elites, religious elites – to regard themselves as fundamentally different from the rest of humanity. All fields of human endeavour develop elites, which are the brightest and best in those fields: so, for example, Olympic athletes are “elite” physical sportsmen and women, whose sporting prowess far exceeds the capability of ordinary mortals. But in many fields, once elites have developed they have a vested interest in maintaining themselves, whether or not they still have genuine excellence. And they create barriers to admission of people who are not “one of them” but who possess genuine ability. They use special language that is not known to ordinary people. They require particular social connections: in the most extreme form elite membership is restricted to members of the same family (dynastic elitism), but more commonly it is restricted to people who move in particular social ...