Thursday 18 October 2007

on holiday, Isle of LismoreWe visited the absurdly spectacular Castle Coeffin today, a ruin on a hillock on a cliff.

It's very very quiet here but it's not isolated: a wee boat goes over to the mainland every hour from about 100 metres away, and it's a 20 minute bike ride to the only shop. The week's been more relaxing than I could have guessed, largely because here the car is not king. There are roads and cars, sure, but the cars form a small minority of road users. Perhaps it's because most of the stress of living in the city is car-related. Noise, danger, status, pollution, space: all of these are dominated by the car. Make the car subservient to other modes of transport, and life becomes quite sane all of a sudden. Am I over-simplifying here?

Talking of simplification, I've neglected all the books I've brought here in favour of John Carey's The Faber Book of Science from the house's well-stocked library, and I now understand for the first time what a black hole is.

Also on simplification, before we left I got sent the parts for a piece composed in the 1990s in which I agreed to play harmonium. The part is very simple but the rhythmic notation is complex, so that an occasional 'new music' player like me has to spend considerable time and effort decoding it. It feels like a very 20th-century and thus outdated way to notate music, leaving the musician in a powerless situation, a slave to counting complex microbeats for a very straightforward musical result. But then I've never been comfortable with the Boulez model of an army of highly skilled musicians spending weeks slavishly learning one small part of the god-like composer's new opus. Laziness on my part probably.

But it's important for any musician to be involved in music which is genuinely contemporary: playing all this old stuff, I don't mind working in a musical museum but I don't want to live in one. If you engage seriously only with old music, it can give you quite a bizarre cultural outlook.