I bought the Economist today and in the Review section there�s a piece about the value of classical music � seen as being under threat. A book by Julian Johnson argues that such music is not just simple entertainment. It offers the deeper meanings which melody, harmony and rhythm can reveal through a process of composition.

Pop music rejects deep engagement. According to Johnson, the idea of humanity involves �the tension between the bodily and the intellectual, the material and the spiritual, the thing-like and its transcendence in thought.� Classical music is one means of reconciling the dialectical character of the human situation. It �engenders a squaring of the circle that we can claim as fundamentally human. We understand ourselves as physical beings but we also value the ways in which we exceed the physical � the ways our capacity for thought, feeling and imagination seem to transcend our bodily existence.�

According to JJ �Cool� is different � it denies complexity � and is embedded in a pattern of life where �chilling out� is the antedote to work.

Well � answers on a postcard? One could start with Joni Mitchell�s song �Darkness and Light� which is about the contrasts in the human condition that on JJ�s account classical music is best able to explore. Are we saying that Miss Mitchell sets an inappropriate goal given that she is only writing a short duration song � and that she misses the target too?

Another issue might be whether the process of composition is the only or currently the best way of presenting audiences with the opportunity to hear �deeper� meanings in music. Jazz � especially as rendered in the 30 years after 1945 � is one contender as an alternative . Against that you might cite the low and stable share of the market which jazz has. There is also the question whether �cool� is always �avoiding complexity� and relaxing. When we listen to �the Birth of the Cool� or Gerry Mulligan�s pianoless quartets are we hearing lack of complexity?

I was interested in what Ricardo had to say about playing in an orchestra. Its something that has never really appealed to me although it was to fit into an orchestra that I was encouraged to take up the flute. The last time I played with one was something called The Barclay James Harvest Orchestra. I find orchestral playing unfulfilling although I ought to be grateful for about five years (at school) where the conductor of the orchestra I was in had been a pupil of Webern � especially as Webern was quite a conductor himself by all accounts. I try to think what I might have taken from that experience � my conclusion is that Emile Spira modelled the idea that music as art was overwhelmingly important � that the thing to do was to commit yourself to it totally. Was that commitment presented as being worthwhile because music is about �deep meanings�? Possibly there was also the idea that there is �a leading edge� and that one ought to seek it out � but that there was also a connection with the past. Who knows � it was a long time ago.

JJ�s point of view seems to me to be similar to Sullivan�s and Huxley�s � that music offers some kind of release from metaphysical dilemma � or indeed William Mann:

�The essential characteristic of Mozart�s mature music is its equilibrium between lyrical melody and tonal drama � which is the musical equivalent of a precariously balanced civilization. Through the course of his life Beethoven achieved out of tonal drama a rebirth of the lyrical and contapuntal principle which is also a recreation of the religious viewpoint. Schubert with his romantic sense of separation has not the Mozartian equilibrium. Lyrcisim and drama are not miraculously at one but have to win through to a reconciliation.

The innocence that Beethoven attained was the fruit of experience � the innocence that Schubert seeks is like that of the Pastoral Symphony the expression of a pre-self-conscious taste. The music springs from an ambivalence between the anguish of a conscious mind and a nostalgic reversion to the simple acceptance of childhood. It is significant that where Beethoven discovered the song melody through his spiritually tormented life, Schubert was born with the gift of unpre-meditated song.�

When I read discussions of music in terms such as these, then I go back to my attempts to account for N Drake�s music in terms of the structural ideas developed by Adorno. That in modern times great music will express the �outsideness� of its creator�s position in society. This expression won�t be superficial but will be found at all levels within the work .

I set out to show that this is true of pretty much the whole of the Pink Moon album � but especially songs like The Harvest Breed and Parasite. In Pink Moon one finds utterly concentrated symbolism � on the model say that Freud explains in The Analysis of Dreams. This was all in an attempt to show that the music came out of an expressionist tradition. Thus Paul Hatvani in 1917, Schiele�s obitiuarist:

�In impressionism the world and the ego, the inner and the outer have been been united in harmony. In expressionism the ego inundates the world and there is no longer an outer world.�

In 1917 Stravinsky and Satie were writing deceptively short pieces at the leading edge of music and meaning � I suppose one might say the same of Webern.

I managed to get to a draft master of Cleveland�s concert � 6 tracks � using Clean software. I left a copy with Yvonne to see what she made of it.