Nice for swans

Very high six metre tide at 5pm this afternoon outside my front door and round the corner on Putney Embankment.

¡Documentary Now! Again

Very difficult, when you’re running a conference, to properly take it in when the moment arrives, so these notes on the third ¡Documentary Now! are not your normal conference report. ¡Documentary Now! was initiated in 2007 by Mike Wayne, of Brunel University. The following year, while Mike was away on research in Venezuela, Alisa Lebow (also of Brunel) and myself, now at Roehampton, decided we should try and keep it going, and succeeded in raising funds from our respective institutions for the second edition. Following Mike’s initiative, we wanted to keep it free and centrally located, and thanks to Ian Christie, we were able to hold it in the splendid new cinema in Birkbeck’s Gordon Square building. For this third edition we managed to repeat the funding trick, and also received generous assistance from Brian Winston, the Lincoln Chair of Communications. We shifted from November to January, and benefited from the best of conference assistants, Holly Giesman, a PhD candidate in documentary at Roehampton. Many thanks to one and all! And thus we gathered last Friday afternoon, the snow and ice and slush of the preceding week finally gone, and although very wet and no sign of the sun, at least a wee bit warmer.

The biggest difficulty we’d had was the rich response we received to the call for papers—more than last time, and twice as many as space and time would permit. We were struck by their range, and the number that came from abroad—selection wasn’t easy and apologies to those we had to leave out. But I’m happy to say, the result was the best attended and most international edition to date. Panelists came from Holland and Spain, Canada and the USA. Given the international make-up of the postgraduate student community in London, it felt even more international—there were people of at least a dozen different nationalities among the more than one hundred conference-goers. (This is the beneficent side of London’s metropolitan attraction—not the financial concentration a mile away, but the cultural intercourse of its world city cosmopolitanism.)

This in turn meant that we heard presentations on documentary in China, India, Latin America and Europe, we heard about work being undertaken in South Africa and the Caribbean, and about Mexican migrant video culture, but very little from the USA. Even if large regions of the world, like the Middle East or Australia, were missing, the effect was intriguing, because it also demoted the superpower of cinema (and of geopolitics), and thus, instead of the usual perspective which always reproduces the hubris of empire, it becomes possible to re-envision the cultural impact of globalisation from a decentred position.

Judging by the feedback in the pub at the end of the day, the conference was a success. At any rate, it managed to create a suggestive dialogue between scholars and practitioners, which many people commented on, a small space where you could be both without feeling a freak, and where creativity and analysis could encounter each other and find out about current investigations alongside the cutting-edge of digital production techniques. A PhD student lamented that there had been no ¡Documentary Now! when she was doing her MA, but this time there were MA students from several places, as well as doctoral researchers in both practice and theory, and a number of unattached free spirits. (Very interesting to observe their mixed provenance, some of them coming from other disciplines, which reflects another feature of digital culture and the resurgence of documentary: the way it draws people in from different backgrounds and breaks down barriers between discourses and fields.)

There was universal praise for the film we saw in the opening plenary, the Bolivian short La Chirola, presented by its director, Diego Mondaca. Made as his graduation work for the international film school in Cuba, the EICTV, with an international crew of fellow students, this was the UK premiere of a film much garlanded with festival awards in Europe and Latin America. ‘Chirola’ is Bolivian slang for jail. The portrait of a former guerrilla, drug addict and prison inmate named Pedro Cajías, the film is a moving meditation on the paradoxes of freedom, and as Variety would say, visually superior.

There was also lively interest in our closing keynote, in which media artist Florian Thalhofer from Berlin presented the latest version of a piece of software he invented for interactive documentary, or what he calls database films, for streaming over the web (so the first thing to do is visit their web site and look at the numerous examples by people experimenting with it). The Korsakow system is an open source software programme which has now reached version 5, for authoring non-linear narratives, something people have been dreaming about for years. (I think of Julio Cortázar’s novel Rayuela (Hopscotch), and even more of the aleatory composers of the post-war avant garde, the followers of Cage in America and Boulez in Europe, and of Umberto Eco’s classic theoretical account of the aesthetics of The Open Work.) Korsakov, with its SNUs (single narrative units) and POCs (points of contact), may well have discovered the trick of how to do this deftly with multimedia, combining ease of use with huge potential. At any rate, I’m eager to start experimenting with it myself as soon as I can.

​

(The photos were taken in the seminar rooms, not the cinema.)

Cuba in Paris

From Buenos Aires to Paris, for a conference on culture in Cuba. Unfortunately the organisers invited Cuban speakers from both Havana and outside, without realising that those from Havana would not attend, not out of individual choice but because it’s policy — the Cuban government operates a ban on allowing its artists and intellectuals to appear in public alongside those who have opted to leave the country and call themselves exiles. Since the final session is given over to a couple of the latter, Abilio Estévez and Zoé Valdés (although Estévez, who now has Spanish citizenship, goes back on visits), the conference ends on a downer. It’s certainly instructive to hear what they have to say, but it’s impossible to enter into dialogue with them, because they tend to have a rather fixed perspective.

I listen to their accounts and it strikes me that I have friends in Cuba who have personal stories almost exactly the same as these but who haven’t chosen to leave. This is to say that the term ‘exile’ is misleading: it’s a self-exile. It’s true that the State imposes pressures on writers of a kind that are hardly acceptable in the western democracies, but this is a kind of half-truth. For one thing, the mainstream media in the latter are hugely censorious in the attitudes they deem acceptable; to get new ideas taken seriously is a hard and bitter struggle. In other words, the State doesn’t need to intervene — except when it feels threatened by a broadcaster, say the BBC, stepping of line.

But there’s another side to this. Let me draw what will seem to some an outrageous comparison: with Israeli intellectuals who have chosen to take up residence abroad because they reject the basis of the Zionist State. They are not forced to leave, indeed their freedom to publish in Israel is not curtailed, but their position, were they to stay, would become extremely uncomfortable. But again, there are others — not many, but a few, who occupy similar positions but nevertheless remain. Should we call those who have left exiles or emigrants?

What you also have to take into account is that the bitter rejection within Cuba of those who left as gusanos and counter-revolutionaries and escoria belongs to history, and since the early 90s, an increasing number of emigrants have left for economic reasons. Among the first were film-makers and technicians and musicians, for whom overseas employment was relatively easy to obtain — although there was also a wave of emigration by a generation of young artists, the avant garde of the 80s, as the result of official disfavour. None of this is a secret in Cuba: the themes of emigration and divided families, exile and internal exile, the desire for forbidden travel, all these have been played out in Cuban films of every genre since the early 90s.

The final session of the event also revealed a certain difference between generations in the audience. Almost all the questions to the two writers came from the younger listeners, the postgraduate students whose politics will have been shaped by post-communism. The questions were neutral (‘Would you go back to live in Cuba if it were possible?’ asks one) and produced subtly different responses.

Clearly both writers were aware of the susceptibilities of an academic audience, and the experiences they described did not amount to a claim that Cuban communism can be equated with Stalinism. Indeed Estévez, recalling the 70s as a grey decade, emphasised grey, not black, and enumerated all the things it wasn’t — there were neither disappearances, nor concentration camps, nor labour camps (which is also to say, though he didn’t actually say so, that the labour camps of the late 60s, the UMAPs, were short lived, and no longer a threat to non-conformists like himself).

None of this, I should add, implies any judgement on whether they are good writers — I cannot say, because I haven’t read them. What I know a little bit about, and spoke of when it was my turn, is that there’s a very lively and exciting independent video movement in Cuba, which is taking on the role of a cultural vanguard that isn’t cowed by the weight of the one-party state. In this field, at least, Cuba is not living in the past, any more than the rest of Latin America, which has brought Cuba back into the fold in defiance of Washington — in short, a contemporary hemispherical reality which Obama has not yet recognised.

Imagining Documentary in Atlántida

Arriving in Atlántida, the location for Uruguay’s documentary festival Atlantidoc, gave me a very strange sensation. A sleepy coastal town near Montevideo, I had the feeling that I’d been here before, or somewhere very much like it. Searched my memory for other seaside towns in Latin America visited over the years, but none quite fitted the bill. Later I realised. It wasn’t a place but a film I was thinking of: a Argentine documentary from a few years ago by Mariano Llinás appropriately entitled Balnearios (‘Bathing Resorts’). For the next few days I feel like Kafka’s butterfly dreaming he was a man who couldn’t decide if he was really a man dreaming he was a butterfly.

I’m here to deliver a workshop in directing documentary, more advanced than the last one I did in Spain a few weeks ago (see the post for 25 October, Curtocircuito). Here the participants are already active film-makers, sometimes with several credits, and the projects they’re presenting are already in an advanced stage of preparation. They even have budgets attached, and some of them have already raised a little money. In several cases they’ve already been out there shooting. All told, about a dozen projects from several countries: Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.

This makes for an exciting and intense few days, with small groups in the mornings and everyone together in the afternoons. Whatever they might be learning from me, I am learning a great deal from them: because we’re talking documentary, I’m getting glimpses of the way things are around Latin America, on ground level, so to speak. It strikes me that every one of these projects has a strong social dimension, whether the stories they investigate, they subjects they present, are individual or collective. They’re not much interested in the psychological, much more in collective experience, even when looking at individuals.

Some are about social memory. A Chilean project investigates the role of the church after the Pinochet coup in 1973, which they initially supported and then lamented, through the photographic documentation of the disappeared undertaken by a church-sponsored human rights group. An Argentinian film-maker is making a film in Cuba, to celebrate the work of Santiago Alvarez, who for thirty years was in charge of Cuba’s weekly newsreel. Three generations of Cuban film directors learnt their trade by working under his aegis. But this is not to be a hagiography: the film will ask what significance the newsreels have for today’s youth. A great way of trying to find out how they see the Revolution itself.

Others are about identity. An Argentinean project proposes to accompany a thirty-year-old son of a European mother and a Mapuche father on a trip to Patagonia in search of his indigenous roots. A Bolivian film-maker intends to investigate the life of his Aymara grandfather (a language he himself does not speak) through the memories of his three sons, one of whom is his father.

There are two projects about communities. One comes from Argentina, and focuses on a small company town where a backward teenager has been the victim of a vicious attack by a group of youngsters. Since everyone knows everyone else, this reminds me strongly of one of the most interesting genres in Latin American cinema, the small-town movie, of which there are both tragic and comic varieties. Will the film-maker have recourse to reconstructions? The other is from Colombia and has an urban setting, where inhabitants of a poor neighbourhood in Medellin belong to a scheme that allows them to pay for a local cable television service by collecting rubbish for recycling. The question hanging over this film is whether another kind of television is possible.

The ecological theme is shared by a project by another Argentine film-maker in the form of an ethnomusical and anthropological trip along the Rio Paraguay by the Orquesta Rio Infinito (Infinite River Orchestra), a group of itinerant musicians from several countries who take their boat along the rivers of Latin America, stopping to work with local musicians and in local schools, and giving concerts. The confluence of rivers and music, which both flow across borders. There’s a great video of their trip through Central America up on YouTube:
YouTube - Orquesta del Río Infinito – Documental

Another thing that strikes me is that all these projects are rooted in local realities but their social projection is outwards. The concerns they address are immediately recognisable everywhere south of the Rio Grande, despite the huge diversity of the twenty-something countries that make up the region. It’s as if, despite the ethnic and cultural differences, it is possible in every Latin American country, to see the circumstances of any other as if they’re watching an actual—or possible—version of their own. If documentary in Latin America has ever been thus, the main difference from forty years ago—apart from the new aesthetics of digital video—is a political shift. The militant mode of the 60s and 70s pioneered in Argentina and Cuba has given way to a more questioning sense, more like the Brazilian model. And the subject matter has shifted to questions of memory, human rights, and the concerns of ecology. Anyway, I came away strongly hoping that every one of these films gets made, and quite sure the film-makers will do their subjects justice.

To the South

Well I’ve just had one whirlwind of a trip. First, five nights in Atlantida, a very sleepy seaside town just along the coast from Montevideo (which I didn’t get to visit) on the La Plata estuary, for a small but extremely friendly documentary film festival called Atlantidoc, where I taught a workshop in directing documentary. Fifteen participants from half a dozen Latin American countries, not students but young film-makers out there hustling to get their films made, highly intelligent and articulate. Lots of animated conversation in the festival cafe on the beach, and late night screenings in the open air. More about this later.

Then on to Buenos Aires on Sunday morning, where my friend Guillermo De Carli was a wonderful host. Had lunch on Sunday at a excellent Yiddisher restaurant (much better than New York—and by the way, saw lots of black hats walking around), then a long walk through the centre of the city during the afternoon, where we encountered all sorts of street music. But the most extraordinary sight was a large ornate cinema built in the 1920s which has now been converted into a bookshop. The frame grab is from a poor quality video which I took on my mobile, but you can just make it out.

Of course what struck me immediately was the ironic contrast with the cinema we filmed in Detroit, which fell into disuse and was converted into a parking lot.

During the day on Monday, when Guillermo had meetings and a class to teach, I went shopping for DVDs and had lunch at a parrilla where Piazzolla wrote one of his famous tangos, then to top it all, Guillermo organised a little gathering with half a dozen friends. We ate empanadas and drank wine, and finally broke up about 4am. This was brilliant—highly convivial, and rich conversation, ranging from the state of documentary in Argentina currently to everything you wanted to know about Peronism but never dared to ask (and not because I did ask, but because it came up anyway… In two words: an empty signifier—everyone makes what they want of it; and this from a Peronist.) Lots to think about as I board the plane back on Tuesday afternoon.

And lots of graffiti in the streets. My favourite:

“If the government has no culture, culture has no government!”

Reality Effects in London

Over on ‘Open Spaces‘, Patty Zimmerman recently wrote about the vitality of cinema studies south the Rio Grande. She talks about attending a conference in Mexico and how she ‘heard brilliant analyses of films I didn’t know about. I listened to debates that never migrate al norte. I met passionate scholars mining the theoretical complexities of Mexican and Latin American cinemas beyond the confines of national identity formation. It was exhilarating. I loved being thrown into a place where I didn’t have any of the usual coordinates.’

Here in London we have been fortunate over the last few days to enjoy the same thing on a smaller scale at a conference attended by scholars from Brazil and Argentina, brilliantly devised and organised by Jens Anderman at Birkbeck, in the second of a series of three events in the three countries under the general title of Reality Effects, which included screenings of three recent films which all challenge the conventions of documentary.

From Rio de Janeiro, José Carlos Avellar’s keynote established two of the key ideas that guided us through the ensuing debates: that in documentary, reality is the co-author of the film, and it isn’t the character alone who acts, but the camera. The papers that followed (I hope I can be forgiven for not mentioning everyone by name) developed in different directions to consider topics ranging from first person documentary — several speakers mentioned both Andres Di Tella’s La T.V. y yo (2002) and Santiago (2007) by João Moreira Salles, both of them first-person films about the film-maker’s family history — to the shifting relations between documentary and fiction—going both ways.

If the linking theme was ‘the return of the real’, then it became clear that this was neither a return to innocence nor the same postmodernist turn described by Hal Foster in his 1996 book of that name, but a new kind of realism about realism, a critical realism more akin to Brecht which is widely manifest in many forms in a whole range of recent films, both documentary and fiction, from the two countries under discussion. But of course this isn’t limited to Latin America. Film culture is international, despite taking national forms, and these preoccupations are found in many other cinemas on different continents—only not usually in mainstream genre cinema which continues to be dominated by escapist fantasies.

The three films we saw represented three very different takes on the kind of critical realism under discussion, one from Argentina, Martín Rejtman’s Copacabana (2006), and two from Brazil, Andrea Tonacci’s Serras da Desordem (Mountains of Disorder, 2006) andViajo Porque Preciso, Volto Porque Te Amo (I travel because I have to, I come back because I love you, 2009), by Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes.

There are two things which all three have in common. The first is a rhythm and sense of time that derives from sheer fascination with watching, which allows them to escape both semantic and discursive domination. These films are not dominated either by the spoken voice or by an argument that frames them. This is a cinema of the patient and attentive eye, the eye which as Jean Renoir once put it (in another context) sometimes draws attention to things, ands sometimes lets things draw attention to themselves. The second thing is the fact that precisely on this account, you’re not likely to see them on television.

In the film by Rejtman, all he does is to film scenes of the Bolivian community in Buenos Aires which he then presents in a kind of reverse order—starting with the annual fiesta of Nuestra Señora de Copacabana, then the dance troupes rehearsing, the workshops where the costumes are made, and finally, the bus journey which brings the immigrants from the border when they first arrive. The camera hangs back, there is no direct engagement with individuals (except one off-screen voice showing the camera his photo album of his homeland). This is a minimalist kind of documentary observationalism which is both formalist in construction and through the denial of a story line and eschewal of any kind of discursive information, enigmatic in effect. Perhaps a little too minimalist. Variety’s comment: ’shorn of any crutches like graphics or narration, demands observant viewers’.

The film by Aïnouz and Gomes is a reworking of travel footage which they shot several years before on a trip to the Sertão in North East Brazil, which is here given a fictional first person narration (with some additional material woven in). The speaker is a 30-something geologist engaged in surveying the territory for a planned canal, who has a sad love story to recount. A fictional autobiography which invites us to see a real place through other eyes, both analytical and metaphorical at the same time. This reminded me strongly of two films, Patrick Keiller’s London (1994) and Ignacio Agüero’s Sueños de hielo (1993), which also both attach fictional narration on the soundtrack to impeccably documentary footage, and I was able to ask Karim if he had come across either: he had not. But the film has already suffered the same problem as those two, being classified by film festivals and journalists as a ‘false’ or ‘quasi-documentary’ — Cineplayers calls it ‘Um quase-documentário com protagonista de corpo ausente’, which could also apply to the other two — when it’s something much more intriguing: a film which is fiction and documentary at the same time.

Something similar is true, but in quite another vein, in the case of Tonacci’s Serras da Desordem, in which events of ten years earlier are re-enacted by the protagonists of those events. The story is that of Carapiru, an Indian who survived a massacre of his tribe, spent years wandering alone in the rainforest, is then adopted by a friendly family of campesinos, and finally removed by the authorities to be returned to his tribe on a reservation, but not before fortune has smiled and he is re-united with his son, who also survived the massacre. A long and unhurried film, Tonacci richly fulfils Fredric Jameson’s thesis in ‘The Existence of Italy’, which Jens recalled in his introduction to the conference, that realism involves two contradictory claims, because it must both conceal and reveal the construction of the real.

(It does so, by the way, in a way that strongly recalls that other Brazilian documentary that Jens reminded us Jameson also discusses in this connection, Eduardo Coutinho’s Cabra Marcado Para Morrer (1985).)

To begin with, Tonacci’s film positions us as external observers who cannot understand the language being spoken by the Indian tribe whose daily life we are watching — there are no subtitles; but unlike the distant and uninvolved camera of both the other two films, here the camera is observing closely, forever picking out detail, and then, after the irruption of the massacre, becomes the constant companion of the protagonist. This allows us to enter his world by a simple reversal, by imagining Carapiru’s incomprehension of the Portuguese he hears being spoken around him (which for English-speaking viewers is subtitled). But this is only one of a complex series of filmic tropes, using diverse material (montage sequences, television news footage, observational filming etc.) which, in the inimitable language of Variety again, ‘packs a strong moral wallop’ — except that it isn’t just moral: this is a deeply political film, because it will change the way you think about quite fundamental social concerns.

These are just some preliminary observations. I shall doubtless write more soon about documentary in Latin America because I’m off tomorrow to Atlantida in Uruguay, for the documentary festival, Atlantidoc…

Beckett’s pauses / Students’ Warning

Two letters in the Guardian this week past caught my attention. The first concerns the pauses in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Murray Marshall of Salisbury writes:

• The obituary for Timothy Bateson (Obituary, 8 November) mentioned the difficulties that original cast had with grasping the meaning of Waiting for Godot. The author himself was apparently not a lot of help. A friend of mine was assistant stage manager on the first production, and the cast and crew eagerly awaited Beckett’s visit to a rehearsal. They assembled after performing to be enlightened by the great man. After a suitably Beckettian interval, he said: “The pauses were not long enough.”

I also have a story about this, which comes from the horse’s mouth, or anyway, Peter Hall, who directed that first production in 1955. Many years ago, when I was taken to visit him at his house near Wallingford, he told us what happened when they played in Blackpool before coming to London, and the audience was mystified and bored. Someone noticed that the last train back to London on a Saturday night left before their scheduled finish, so in order to catch it, they decided to eliminate the pauses. The play went by like a flash, the audience found it very funny and laughed a lot, and they got their train!

* * * * *

The second letter is an altogether more serious matter. This is from almost 200 student union officers warning MPs that unless they sign a pledge to vote against an increase in fees, they will be named and shamed. As student leaders, they say, they are appalled by the parliamentarians’ attempts ‘to duck difficult questions on student fees and finance at the next general election (Report, 10 November). We are in no doubt that a review panel dominated by business and university leaders is designed to stitch up students with yet another inflation-busting hike in tuition fees.’

This has happened before—in 1997, when higher education was taken out of the election campaign by the appointment of the Dearing Committee, whose convoluted report the new government implemented hastily and selectively, using the summer recess to avoid any proper public discussion. It was the incoming secretary of state for higher education, David Blunkett, who proceeded to scrap grants and introduce means-tested fees in a form that Dearing had not recommended.

This was surely the first sign of New Labour’s consistently cavalier attitude to opinion both within the sector concerned and in the wider public on all matters of policy, culminating, of course, in Tony Blair’s disdainful disregard for opposition to the invasion of Iraq. (Well, not culminating, since it still goes on under Gordon Brown’s pathetic, lame-duck premiership.) According to the student leaders, opinion polls consistently show that the overwhelming majority of the public are opposed to higher fees. They also remind MPs that the student vote can make a significant difference to election results, and conclude that the message is clear: ‘candidates must vote with us, or students won’t vote for them’. But then the question remains: who will they vote for?

Curtocircuito: Materia

Here’s the third film from the Curtocircuito workshop, Materia by Pablo Fontenla and Marce Magán. This one hardly needs subtitles. The text at the end says ‘Everything exists or doesn’t exist. Something can be at the same time itself and something else.’ A quote from Engels’ Anti-Dühring (although I believe Wittgenstein said something very similar).

Non-compliance

This morning I caught the end of a story on the BBC news which concluded ‘The government says it wants universities to treat students more like consumers’. I respond by emitting an exclamation which cannot be repeated in polite language. How long have we been suffering from this worse than asinine instrumentalism? This kind of consumerisation is the negation of all pedagogic values, which depend on a dialogue between teacher and pupil which does not exist between buyer and seller. Teaching and learning are not separate processes but a dialectic. To ignore this is a violation of the student’s humanity, a denial of the hope that education offers to intelligence and imagination (or what’s left of them after getting through the school system). I therefore refuse to comply. To do so I should consider to be a dereliction of my responsibility as a professor to show academic leadership.

Checking the BBC website I learn that this comes from a speech by Business Secretary Mandelson to the CBI, who said that there should be ‘a greater degree of competition between institutions’.
This is what the Thatcherites wanted, and look at the damage they did by imposing new forms of managerialism on higher education (a topic I wrote about some twelve years ago). But what a pretty pass has been reached when universities are considered a business under the remit of a Business Secretary who continues to promote as solutions to the recession the very policies which helped to create it.

It seems he also said in this speech that ‘If there are people, or approaches or systems that are failing then we have got to be prepared to call time on those people or those systems or those approaches.’ This, Mr Mandelson, applies to yourself, and the government you belong to. Only don’t hold your breath that whatever government replaces them next year will be any better.

1 November 2009 09:10

The last piano factory (in England)

It makes me a little sad to hear that the last piano factory in the UK, Kemble’s in Bletchley, is closing today, with a loss of 90 jobs (and the skills they comprise). I visited this factory back in the mid-1980s when I was doing research for a film I never got to make on the social history of the piano (instead, it became a chapter in my book Musica Practica).

You might suppose that this closure is yet another sign of the recession, but in fact it reflects a much longer term trend, with the recession merely the last straw. As Arthur Loesser explained in his wonderful book ‘Men, Women and Pianos’, ‘The history of the piano does not coincide with the development of musical genius; it follows the development of industry and commerce’. In line with this, Kemble’s, founded in 1911, was bought by Yamaha in 1986 (also now the owners of Bösendorfer, which they bought last year), who are now shifting UK production to Asia, where almost all today’s piano manufacture is located—and it’s far from a dying trade. On the contrary. I discovered from my research that as a result of the rise of piano manufacturers in Japan, China and South Korea, the output of new pianos was higher than it had ever been at any previous time in its history.

This should also be seen in much longer historical perspective. Sixty years before Kemble’s came into existence, the London piano manufacturer Broadwood’s was one of only about half a dozen factories in the capital that employed more than 500 workers. A quarter century before that, Broadwood’s laid claim to high international status when they sent their latest model as a gift to Beethoven—the same model, I discovered, on which I myself learned to play as a child, since my parents had been able, just after the Second World War, to pick one up very cheaply. Now it would be a museum piece. But the piano and pianism are still very much alive, and it is part and parcel of this history that many of today’s leading pianists, from the great Mitsuko Uchida (here she is on the radio as I write this) to the young and infectious Lang Lang, hail from East Asia.

One of the lessons to be learned from all this is prosaic but fundamental: the effects of the recession cannot be understood if it is not re-inserted into history. Kemble’s is not so much an incidental victim of a contraction in the luxury goods trade, or something like that (in fact it seems that despite the tough economic climate sales of Kemble pianos actually increased last year), but a symptom of much bigger shifts in the production of musical instruments at a global level already long in evidence.

This shift points to another crucial lesson, that the history of the global spread of European classical music teaches us something rather different from the standard theories of cultural imperialism. This is not a simple conquest of other cultures but turns out to be a process of cultural exchange, in which the other culture appropriates the instruments of cultural production and sends them back where they came from, along with new interpreters and interpretations. This goes on in every strand of musical culture, from classical to hip-hop, and is possible because artistic creation, and music especially, is a utopian realm which transcends the socio-political arrangements in which it arises, and speaks across the gulfs and rifts which divide people by class, religion, ethnicity and nation. A hopeful sign: youth orchestras in the barrios of Venezuela, young Israeli and Arab musicians joining forces in the concert hall. Obviously the problem is not the irrelevance of dead white male composers, but rather, as a certain Elie Siegmeister wrote in a pamphlet for the Workers Music Association in 1938, ‘that, as in other fields, capitalism has created the most magnificent apparatus for the production, distribution and consumption of music that the world has ever seen: yet this apparatus is so riddled with contradictions basically economic in origin that it negates its own potentialities…’