Category: Posts

               The most potent assumptions about the world are those we take for granted and don’t even know we are doing it. But once we see what we once failed to see, we are changed for ever, and so is our world. For example, the assumptions we make about musical tuning when we listen to music provide a helpful analogy for the recent debates about ‘woke’ culture and the defenders of a traditional ‘white male’ view of history.

              ‘Western’ minds hear music with a smudged sense of tuning that we absorb during our childhoods. This tuning system was only invented in the late seventeenth century, and popularised by J.S.Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. What is this ‘smudged’ sense of tuning? Well, string players such as violinists and cellists do not tune their strings to perfect fifths – that is, following the Pythagorean wavelength ratios of exactly 2/3 going up in pitch (or 3/2 going down). If they did, their highest or lowest strings would be out of tune with the equally-tempered keyboard  and woodwind instruments that they play with. Instead string-players tune to narrow fifths to avoid the accumulated consequences of the ‘Pythagorean comma’. No wonder Gregorian chant, Elizabethan madrigals, Indian ragas, Balinese Gamelan music and Chinese theatre music feel as though they belong to different worlds – in terms of tuning, they do.

               Once pointed out, the inherited perceptions of equal temperament – and the assumptions that come with it – become a tool of consciousness and a means to encounter different types of music with liberation and open-mindedness.

               The same applies to history. There is no going back, once we realise the Anglo-centric assumptions of ‘1066 And All That’ history – King John was a ‘bad king’, and the British Empire was a ‘good thing’. This is a history of false binaries, the ‘good’ versus the ‘bad’, in which historical figures are one thing or the other. There is no room for examining the questionable decisions of heroes like Winston Churchill, or to note attitudes that would not be acceptable today. It becomes obvious that there are many perspectives to human history, none of which has any legitimate claim to have more significance than any other. The perceptions of UK residents who are of the Windrush generation, or of those who came with the Ugandan Gujurati immigration in the 1970s will be very different, and different again from the perceptions of UK residents of white English ‘stock’.

               So how do we characterise the current British government’s ludicrous defence of statues of slave-traders, and insistence that British schools teach the story of white kings and queens irrelevant to many school children? Is this a problem of perception among intelligent white males, brought up in predominantly white society, educated in white schools and universities, who cannot see what they cannot see? Or is it a fear that once you give an inch, it is impossible to justify any new borderlines? Or is it a cynical appeal to a highly prejudiced and fearful sector of the electorate for self-interested political motives?

               Whatever the motives of conservative politicians, the reflex appeal to values of law and order, or to the Union Jack, cannot succeed long-term in creating a community spirit.

               And it is tone deaf.

(For a straight-forward introduction to equal temperament, see Howard Goodall’s Channel 4 Big Bangs of Music series of documentaries, episode 2, posted on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41g2fSYZ4Sc )

How to celebrate International Women’s Day on a blog about people’s experiences of illness and recovery…?

I want to draw attention to Clemency Burton-Hill’s first time as a broadcast host since she disappeared from the airwaves last year (2020), after a brain haemorrhage. She experienced a 17 day coma following her bleed, and woke up unable to speak. For a broadcaster and a young mother this was almost unthinkable. Clemency was a regular presenter on the BBC, host of Young Musician of the Year, and for me, company on my drive to work as a host of Radio 3’s Breakfast programme. She was interviewed in January 2021 for Women’s Hour, and this morning turned the tables on Emma Barnett who was her guest on Classical Mix.

She has made huge progress with her rehabilitation, walking out of the hospital in April, and now working hard on her speech. So today, I want to encourage you to listen to ‘Clemmy’, back on the airwaves via BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000syd2

Her Woman’s Hour interview with Emma Barnett is also available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000rdkq where you can hear her articulate what it feels like not to have speech, even when you can understand what other people are saying.

Laura Spinney’s opportune history of the Spanish Flu, Pale Rider (2017), is an arresting work. As we live through the current lockdowns in response to Covid-19, we can learn by looking back to previous pandemics. It is reassuring to see how far medical knowledge and technology have improved since 1918, but also disconcerting to observe how we repeat the mistakes of the past.

In 1918 doctors and biological scientists knew about bacteria but not viruses. They were aware of the values of vaccines, but had only the beginnings of the techniques to construct them. So we have come a long way, in that modern science can identify the genetic and molecular structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and invent a variety of vaccines to combat it within a year of its discovery.

But many features of human response to pandemics have been repeated a century on from the Spanish Flu – a pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people. Where speed of response was essential, governments have delayed their actions, allowing the virus to spread, to become more established, and the number of cases and deaths to multiply many times.

In 1918, some countries successfully applied quarantine and a cordon sanitaire to block infected immigration. Whereas American Samoa had a very low level of infection, neighbouring New Zealand administered Western Samoa was decimated. This time around, New Zealand has been one of the beacons of quick effective action, whereas the UK was remarkably lax at checking the initial inflow of infected individuals.

Crowds welcoming back fighters from the European killing fields provided ideal circumstances for the Spanish Flu to spread. In Chile, the crowds were to greet the local pilot who had become the first to fly over the Andes. In 2020, many governments were unwilling to cancel what became ‘super-spreader’ events – the March Cheltenham race-meeting, the Liverpool football match with Atletico Madrid, or the Republican political rallies in the USA.

The human tendency to blame others for a virus whose mutation to become the agent of pandemic is common to both 1918 and 2020. The Spanish Flu was probably not Spanish in origin: the first cases were in military camps in America and in Etaples, France, although it is hard to pinpoint exactly where. Human agrarian and urban society, with opportunities for mixing between humans and domestic and wild fowl and swine populations seem to be essential environments for viral progression to a pandemic. In 2020, Donald Trump repeatedly referred to the ‘China virus’, although again the full story has still to be established.

Pale Rider points out that in the aftermath of 1918-20, contemporary literature featured a theme of on-going sickness, including what came to be called ‘post-viral fatigue’. Writers like D.H.Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T.S.Eliot, and Dashiel Hammett had their own medical problems, and were writing in a society characterised by many mourning citizens and many living with post-viral symptoms. Asylum records in neutral Norway showed a seven-fold increase in admissions for mental illnesses in each of the six years following 1918. We are already conscious of long-Covid and mental health problems, but the consequences for our society, its culture and economy, are still to work themselves out.

The absence of world leaders struck down by illness, men like Woodrow Wilson, Clemenceau, Mahatma Gandhi, and others, had important ramifications for decisions taken after World War I. In the last twelve months, the absence of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Macron and others, may have delayed decisive action.

Above all, the pandemics of 1918 and 2020 have shown contemporaries the gaps in the current medical and public health provision, and the gaps in information. Test and trace systems can only work if there is a good system of public health laboratories that can process results quickly and engage with local communities (as recommended in the 2016 GHRF report about pandemic preparedness). Hence we see the relative successes for Test and Trace in Germany and S.Korea, and the relative failure in the UK.

Laura Spinney’s book is engrossing, and also well-written. It has a perspective that encompasses much more than a simply Western view of the flu pandemic, including vignettes from India, Persia, S.Africa, Samoa, Alaska and S.America. A great read.

Spinney, L (2017) Pale Rider. The Spanish Flu of 1918 and how it changed the world, London, Vintage