Stanley Bate

[JimL]

Out shopping earlier this year I had a Stanley Bate CD in my hand, going for the price of 1 Naxos and ... put it back again. [Confessions]

Hand or head, you must remove the offending organ immediately! 

[eschiss1]

There's a pun there somewhere... but put feet on that organ's pedal, anycase.

[Dundonnell]

I have raged in the pages of this forum on previous occasions about the declining standard of the reviews published in that formerly august publication "The Gramophone" but have still never actually got to the stage of making a decision to cancel my subscription- a subscription which I have maintained for 48 years.

The new(April) edition carries a review of the Bate/Reizenstein piano concertos release from Dutton. The review is written by Peter Dickinson, himself a distinguished composer, onetime Professor of Music at Keele University and elsewhere, and author of the standard text on the music of Sir Lennox Berkeley.

Dickinson devotes half of his review to telling his readers about the careers of the two composers, essentially summarising the content of the cd booklet notes. (One might have thought that in this day and age readers could be expected to find these sorts of details as readily on the internet and that what they really need is to be told about the music )

As to the music, this is what Dickinson writes:

"Stanley Bate has already had a good innings(with the previous releases from Dutton of his music, presumably)...........The Reizenstein is relentlessly energentic in the outer movements but, as a Hindemith pupil, he knew about continuity so the pace and the virtuosity never let up, except in a pleasantly cool if unmemorable slow movement. Bate's concerto is much less disciplined. His almost comic opening presages debts to Prokofiev; there's a meandering slow movement and a fizzing finale with stock-in-trade figurations. Agreeable mainstream stuff...."

and that's it. There is a further sentence about the performance which is called "truly outstanding".

This review has, finally, made up my mind for me If this is what passes for a serious review in Britain's oldest music magazine then that is a utter disgrace and a quite appalling insult to the memory of the generations of distinguished and erudite writers on music whose reviews graced the pages of the magazine throughout its 90 year history.

[Gareth Vaughan]

Exactly so. Farewell "The Gramophone" - requiescat in pace.

[Dundonnell]

Exactly so. Farewell "The Gramophone" - requiescat in pace.

As they say........."Sad But True"

[Jimfin]

What finally turned me from it was the review of the 'Gothic', saying something like "now it's been performed lately, it can be put back on the shelf for another 40 years" and "I've never enjoyed a second-rate work so much". I could take genuine criticism of Brian, but damning with faint praise was just too much. I'm now happily subscribing to the IRR

[Dundonnell]

I don't think that the wretched magazine actually cares anymore about losing readers like us It obviously still sells..........but to whom, I wonder

[Alan Howe]

I still buy it: it's not all bad, although it's nowhere near as good as it used to be - a sign of the general dumbing down of culture in our day, I suppose. However, I do find it useful for information purposes and, after all, not everything gets reviewed in IRR, superior though that magazine is. Of course, if I were on a limited budget, it would have to be IRR...

Apologies: back to Bate!

[petershott@btinternet.com]

The debate about 'Gramophone' is long-standing - which is not to say it is moribund, for it seems to occur each month coinciding with the publication date of the wretched magazine.

For good or ill I maintain a subscription - which is as yet uncancelled, but then I groan as it drops through the letterbox and I think to myself of the chore of flicking through its pages and probably becoming very irritated at most of its content.

So why not cancel that subscription? Good question, and I've no convincing answer. I suppose, like Alan, I see it as a source of information. All of us, save those who work within the music business, are pretty much in the same boat. Our only 'access' to the world outside us (including what is being performed, the scope and nature of a composer's works, information about composers we don't yet know about, and in general all the stuff that makes us buzz) is what we read about on our computer screens or in comics like 'Gramophone'. So I keep up with 'Gramophone' simply because I'm prone to nightmares about something I might otherwise miss.

And I sure don't appreciate Gramophone on account of the quality of its content. That is just plain dismal - and it seems to degenerate just a little bit further each month. I agree at least 120% with Dundonnell's final comment. Dumbing down seems to be the order of the day. The next bit might easily offend someone who earns their crust within a university, as indeed I did until a few years ago when I was able to get out. Peter Dickinson is certainly a respected academic (among all the other things he does). But sadly the passage quoted is just sheer tosh. I'm sure he would curl up in horror with a moment's reflection on what he'd actually written. Certainly within the 'humanities' (and I hope for all our sakes the same is not true of the natural sciences) much academic writing these days is just facile, semi-plagiarised, second rate, flibbertigibbet, pretentious rubbish that contributes not a jot towards any kind of enlightenment or real understanding, and it is just casually tossed out with the aim of showing that its author is 'right on', can talk the jargon, and maybe can make a useful contribution to improving a RAE rating. That rather harsh judgment has a global application.

Perhaps one little example might suffice. Couple of years ago permission was given to a fairly prominent American academic to go ahead with a hopefully definitive 'life, letters and works' project on my father-in-law. The academic in question is 'director' of a graduate school and has a list of publications longer than anything yet devised by Dundonnell. Besides articles with titles such as 'Rape and Buggery in the Modern English Novel' (heavens, I thought, has she actually read any modern English novels?) I also noticed she has published a number of books on 'conducting research in humanities', 'study skills for graduate students', 'completing doctoral projects' and so forth. A pretty nifty person in the academic world, one might think. However life over two years became more and more of a nightmare. Each day one, two and sometimes five e-mails would arrive asking about (generally) some perfectly clear cut issue or something that anyone with sense could determine for themselves.

One day in a fit of temper over one particular e-mail, I just replied "Work it out yourself. Do your own damned work. End of correspondence." The e-mail in question had read:

"Hi, who is this guy Harold MacMillan who keeps getting mentioned? Hope you can help (and quickly 'cos I'm wanting to move on). Thx."

Truly!!! The book was eventually published at the end of last year. In two vast great volumes priced at £80 per volume. By some university press in America of whom I'd never even heard. Imagine a total of 600 pages filled with the kind of garbage indistinguishable from that in the Reizenstein review. And its author admitted to me that she's got no interest at all in whether people actually read it. The important thing is to publish, to push up the ratings, and to make your work invulnerable to any kind of critical discussion by keeping it entirely bland and facile.

And there you have my view of much of the current academic world. Just had to express that grouch, and I'm conscious it is far away from 'Gramophone' and even further away from Stanley Bate and Franz Reizenstein.

[Dundonnell]

Very interesting, Peter Maybe I should just keeping buying the wretched publication for the reasons given by Alan and yourself

Picking up however your point about Peter Dickinson and his comments on the Bate Piano Concerto, I was talking over dinner earlier this evening with a friend who ran the Music Department at a university before becoming a BBC music producer and finally the managing director of a BBC orchestra. He was equally shocked when I told him about the review but reminded me that Dickinson does have a very distinguished career as a writer on music and is now 78 years old.

To be charitable therefore I will go with your suggestion that this was a review which Dickinson himself will regret writing and is not a fair reflection of his quality as a writer on music.

[Jimfin]

Having on occasion had articles published in the Japan Times, I know how much one's original writing can get mangled, rewritten and then taken out of context, so it is possible that Dickinson didn't mean to sound quite how he comes across. Slashed and edited articles have a tendency to sound dismissive, precisely because all the caveats and softeners have gone. But the one person who cannot be exonerated from blame for the content is the magazine's editor.

I must admit I occasionally buy 'Gramophone', just because it is quite a different type of magazine from the IRR. The latter is entirely about reviews, whereas 'Gramophone' has longer articles about music in general. They are often patronising and full of facts that a three-year-old would know, but they can be interesting. This month I flicked through the pages and was not tempted to purchase, however.