Arts Review - St. Andrews Day

Arts Review

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Arts Review - St. Andrews Day Arts Review - St. Anrews Day 2010

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Pages 4- La Bête Humaine

6- Georgian Architecture

8- Eadweard Muybridge

10-The Beatles Controversy

12- Breaking Barriers in Music

14- The Evolution of Cinema

16- Bombay Bolly-Boom

18- Tashi Lhunpo - Visit to Eton

20- Forgotten Food

22- The Final Pages

Contents

The Front and Back Cover are both copyright of Alex Forjaz. The photos in the article on Tashi Lhunpo are copyright of MGHM and Leila Clarke. All other photos are copyright of their respective owners.

The Arts Review would like to thank: SEH, JLG-M, ARML, Phil Hart, Leila Clarke, Shiva Chauhan, Jamie Touche, Hisham Za-man, Alex Forjaz, David Britto, Dame Joan Sutherland, Tashi Lhunpo Monastery, Tap, The Design Department, The Printers, Wayne Rooney, The Chronicle, and everyone in the team!

Dear Reader,

A storm is coming and we would do best to ride it out. There can be no doubt that the Chronicle has for a long time ruled the waves, but history is finally on our side, we have invented the torpedo. It started the day our own esteemed David Cameron, whom we shall now claim worked all along on a clandestine operation for the Arts Review, came to our hallowed school, and today it begins again. In the past, Etonians have kept their eyes fixed only on European and American shores, and now we travel further, back both in time and space, in our Past Issue, and over to India and Tibet to explore the East.

The Arts Review has once again declined the opportunity to write essays in the li-brary and is now sat in the impeccably clean design schools from where we have begun our scheming. We have decided that Eton needs a new code of ethics, a new belief system, and a new style of government. Our favourite radical, Dave, has already lead the way, but now we need to go further : the Big Society for Eton. “You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the Big Soci-ety.” The Big Society is about a huge culture change……where boys, in their everyday lives, in their rooms, in College, in Birley……don’t always turn to poppers, housemasters or the lower man for answers to the prob-lems they face ……but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their houses.I hope you enjoy this issue, and that you’ll take pleasure in creating this new world with us.

Best Wishes,

The Editorial Team

Editorial

The Arts Review is:Master-in-Charge: JLG-M

Editor in Chief: Theo Park

Sub-Editors : Hamish McLaren, Laurence Booth-Clibborn, Harry Eagles, Charlie MacKeith, James Hogan

Classicist in Residence: Eugene Loh

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La Bete Humaine

Undoubtedly one of Emile Zola’s most violent, salacious and controversial novels,La Bete Hu-maine is a biting critique of man, modernity and France, struggling forward blindly, shrouded in the seedy twilight of the Second Em-pire. The entire novel is firmly based around the most potent symbol of 19th century industrial-ization and ‘progress’, the railway. However La Bete Humaine’s depic-tion of the power of the railway hardly casts modernity in a be-nevolent or even benign light. The steam engine emerges as a ravening beast, trampling and goring hapless victims along its steel-shod, berserk gallop into an uncertain future. The imagery Zola so provocatively employs casts overtones of hell across the modernity symbolised by the railway, ‘...a vast dreary, watery expanse...pricked here and there by a blood red fire.’ Perhaps even more disturbing is Zola’s agonis-ing description of these lumbering locomotives whistling, ‘...like the piercing shrieks of women being ravished.’

Entwined within Zola’s dam-ming description of modernity is a fascinating strand of 19th century social theory. Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909), a prominent criminolo-gist working amidst great public interest published L’Uomo dilin-quente, roughly a decade before La Bete Humaine left the printing

presses of Paris. Within L’Uomo dilinquente Lombroso presented his shocking thesis that two thirds of felons were ‘born criminals’, furthermore Lombroso went on to state that these ‘born crimi-nals’ all displayed a distinctive set of grotesque physical deformities caused by, in his thesis, a hereditary genetic regression back towards a violent, unsophisticated ‘ape-like’ state. Distinct echoes of Lombroso’s theories leer, eerily from the pages of La Bete Humaine, the first in a string of murderers is described meticulously as having a, ‘...rather squat head, with its low forehead, thick neck and round, ruddy face...’

These brutish characters act impul-sively, Roubaud through murderous jealousy, Jacques, through a savage, pathological need to not just ‘pos-ses’ a woman, but to, ‘...posses her to the point of destroying her.’ Thus the ‘born’ criminals depicted by Zola act atavistically, reproducing in their persons, ‘...the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity, and the inferior animals.’

Forever the ardent cham-pion of the individual against the state, Zola savagely condemns the insidious corruption that had crept through the Ministries of the Second Empire, in particular that of the Judi-

“Undoubtedly one of Emile Zola’s most violent, salacious and controversial novels”

ciary who, ‘...pursue the case against the innocent Cabuche.’ for reasons of political convenience, whilst they quietly drop the case against the guilty Roubaud. Disgusting revela-tions over the sexual appetite of the pederast President Grandmorin, ‘...chief presiding judge at Rouen...guilty of assault.’ complete Zola’s oily canvass of the whole rotting edifice of the French judiciary under the Second Empire. In a final flourish of pathetic irony the corrupted Judge, Monsieur Camy-Lamotte, mockingly dismisses the truth of Raubaud’s broken confession over the murder of Grandmorin as, ‘...a far-fetched

tale...’, whilst accusing him of the brutal murder of his wife, Severine, and confronting him with her real murderer, Jacques, as a witness, ‘...oblivious to his crime...’

Literature

Hamish Mclaren explores the work of Emile Zola...

The entire blood-drenched novel closes amidst a haunting, lurid display of symbol-ism, the driverless locomotive, ‘...a wild boar...turned loose upon the field of death...laden with its freight of cannon-fodder,’ hur-tling ahead unheeding, ‘...of the blood that was spilled...’ towards the carnage of Sedan and the Franco-Prussian war. Such apoca-lyptic language evokes the litera-ture spawned by the trenches of Verdun or Ypres an entire genera-tion after Zola. Yet the terrifying metaphor for France’s wild gallop into the perils of the future, ushered in by the driving force of modernity seems remarkably prescient beside the cemeteries of 1870, 1914 and 1940, filled by their wasted, ‘...freight of cannon-fodder...’

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The Georgian Period is seen by many as the Golden Age of not only architecture, but also leisure, aesthetics and development. Indeed, with a new constitutional monarchy established and the start of the Industrial revolution just around the corner, England was ascending to new heights. Ask

an English beak about this period and they may begin enthusiastically lecturing you on one of literature’s greats: Jane Austen, who conjures up an image of Bath’s socialites gliding elegantly around majestic ballrooms. Indeed, just as we are influenced by this literature, so were the Georgians by Classical literature.

Many of the period’s youth, fresh out of educational establishments, such as Eton, would embark on The Grand Tour, soaking up classical architecture on their journeys and would proceed to pour out Palladian buildings all over the countryside, creating wonderful estates awash with Greek follies and Roman bridges.

But it was not only vast parks in unscarred rural England that contained diamonds of the period; there were also gems emerging in the towns in the form of crescents, assembly rooms and squares such as Covent Garden. All of these public buildings, built using the great wealth of the merchants and developers, highlight the ethos of the time in that only farmers and their animals need go to bed at nightfall: Instead, any respectable Georgian Town would have its own nightlife scene ranging from a newly built ballroom attached to the local inn, to grand pump rooms adjoining Romanesque spas; it truly was a magnificent period in history to be part of the more and more affluent middle class.

Unfortunately, this simplification of Georgian Architecture would most likely result in an historian lecturing me on the limitations and uncovered truths that actually existed in the eighteenth century. Out in the countryside, peasants’ living conditions remained abysmal. Whilst in towns, massive urban expansion contributed to problems of over-crowding, disease, sewerage and lack of water supply. Indeed, even the middle class

were affected by this and despite living in four storey houses on their fashionable crescents, as the 20th Century architectural critic Reyner Banham once stated: Georgian houses are simply a way of stacking people.

However, these problems paved the way for a great deal of development: pleasure gardens were created in towns, the smallpox vaccination put into general use and town planning could come into effect to solve the problem of urbanisation and to continue the lengthy rebuilding of the Capital after 1666.

But why is Georgian architecture still so close to many people’s hearts? It could be the spacious, elegant interiors that show many similarities to today’s tastes: plenty of natural light, wooden floors adorned with beautiful rugs and pale walls contrasting with soft, sumptuous, floral fabrics on the furniture; it could be nostalgia of England’s beauty, energy and naivety preceding the industrial revolution; or perhaps it is the presence of Athenian order and architecture in our very own towns. What definitely is clear though, is that the social, urban and sanitation developments made hand in hand with these buildings maintain as much significance today as they did for Jane Austen and her companions.

Phil Hart reasons with our love for Georgian architecture...

Art & Architecture

Architecture in Georgian England

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The Tate Britain’s new exhibition of Eadweard Muybridge marks a revolutionary change in the way in which we view his works. The exhibition encourages us to analyse his photography as art rather than science and invites us to contemplate anatomical biology as an art form. This exhibition would not have looked out of place in the London Science Museum and yet its appearance in an art gallery is extremely significant. Pictures of Muybridge portray him to have an almost Darwinian appearance, distinguishing him as a scientist as opposed to 19th Century artists such as John Everett Millais.

Muybridge’s ability to paralyse motion through his long exposure times creates an entirely different feel to the photographs of Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams. He emphasises not only the destructive nature of water but also its ability to sculpt and mould the stones and pathways through which it flows. Similarly he demonstrates natures imposing expansiveness and its capacity to overwhelm in capturing mountainous scenery from over 3000ft high in Yosemite. He was a great pioneer and photographic thinker in developing pictures that capture phenomenal fluency in stop-time photographs. His developments eventually led to the creation of modern day cinema

through his creation of comic strip like animations. His construction of the zoopraxiscope in 1879 was the precursor to the invention of cinema. In the late 1800s, he entertained the royal family by exhibiting dynamic illustrations of boxers endlessly pounding each other, which they found extremely amusing.

Having worked in the book trade for many years, Muybridge achieved his breakthrough in motion photograph by manipulating the international press to make his works known. Until the early 1870s, Muybridge published under the pseudonym Helios, claiming an affinity with the god of the sun. His empathy towards the gods not only shows how he identified with deity but also how he aspired to alleviate himself from his modest upbringing. This became ever more apparent when he changed his Christian name in order to match that of the Anglo

Saxon monarch, King Eadweard.

The photographer also had the incredible ability to capture time, a running theme throughout his works. Whether he was capturing the cliff faces at Yosemite or the vast expanses of ocean on the Pacific Coast, Muybridge wondrously allows his us to see the unimaginably ancient natural forms that seem to possess a divinity that he may be alluding to in his moniker, Helios. In his photograph Pigeon Point Lighthouse, Muybridge captures the immeasurable breadth of ocean creating a sense of vacuity, an emptiness which is mirrored in the profound loneliness evident in many of his later self portraits. He creates an esoteric mystery through his photography by capturing elemental creations that elude human conception. Muybridge’s photographs of a Californian benefactor show him with his ghost.

This juxtaposition of life and death not only reveals a spiritual side to Muybridge but also his interest in changing time.

His study of the mobility of water captures miniscule metamorphoses too subtle for the human eye to see. He achieves this by having several electrical trip switches connected to a series of cameras. Muybridge makes such a simple motion look like artistry as the miniscule droplets twist and turn and possess an anthropomorphic quality. Like a living entity, it becomes the centre piece to the photograph.

Muybridge was fascinated by the optical phenomenon and the human perspective and so captured grandiose vistas throughout California. As a result, included in the exhibition, is a thirteen plate, 360 degree panoramic view of San Francisco that can only be viewed by moving from left to right across the room. He complements this piece by capturing large scenes in very small photographs in which you have to use a magnifying glass to identify details. This contrast creates the enormous diversity to Muybridge’s work; something that I believe gives him more variety than other photographers of his time.

By the late 1870s, Muybridge’s rigorous experimentation with stop-motion photography resulted in him abandoning his photography of landscapes. In 1877, Leland Stanford, the former Governor of California, hired Muybridge to answer the question whether all four of a horse’s hooves are off the ground at the same time during a gallop, which he termed “unsupported transit”. In order to create scientific exactitude,

Muybridge precisely placed trip wires on a track connected to 24 cameras, parallel to a white backdrop. In order to achieve this, Muybridge innovatively created a new shutter technology that was fast enough to capture his images. He included scientific and descriptive details of the horse’s gaits. All of his negatives were precedents which were to make up a 20,000 large collection called Animal Locomotion in 1887.

Muybridge’s later studies at the University of Pennsylvania resulted in Animal Locomotion, a compendium of images referred to by artists such as Francis Bacon and Cy Twombly. The university funded much of his work and enabled him to utilise the more versatile, dry plate process which started the photographic movement which became known as Pictorialism.

Eadweard MuybridgeOur Reporter went to the Tate Britain...

“He was a great pioneer and photographic thinker”

Art & Architecture

Not only was he a pioneering photographer but he also created a synthesis between art and science. In spite of the scientific value of Eadweard Muybridge’s photography, I believe many of his works seem to portray personal and elusive beauty. For example, his series of photographs depicting a woman washing nude and naked men running seems to hint at an almost voyeuristic quality to his works rather than a purely anatomical description of his subjects. In this sense, his works seem to be imbued with a personal quality that comes across very strongly by the end of the exhibition.

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Music

Anyone who frequents the music blog Consequence of Sound will have seen that they recently took the dangerous decision to pub-lish a ‘Top 100 Albums of All Time’ article. In actual fact it wasn’t that interesting, because the album in question was, with a horrible inevi tability, The Beatles’ Abbey Road.

Well, of course. Some more digging revealed that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had topped Rolling Stone’s Top 500, with Abbey Road swinging in at No. 14. Time magazine included no less than four records by The Beatles in its Top 100, and in NME’s ‘Top British Bands of All Time’ Revolver claimed ninth place. In fact, it’s hard to find any such article in which The Beatles aren’t overwhelmingly prominent. No other act in history can equal their pop cul-ture influence and supremacy. In his review of the remastered version of Abbey Road Consequence of Sound’s Mark Roffman claimed that ‘Abbey Road is hands down the greatest piece of musical work on this planet.’ This statement seems reasonable before you take a minute to realise exactly what Roffman is saying: that nothing ever created is comparable to Abbey Road. Forget any classical, choral, opera, jazz and blues. Forget the cornucopia of 1960s rock bands which sounded more or less identi-cal to the Beatles (or often, in my opinion, considerably better). Forget your favourite band. None of these can come close to Abbey Road, or, for that matter, any other Beatles album you care to mention, as this is the opinion of a surprisingly large number of music journalists, critics,

and other supposed cognoscenti. There are The Beatles, then there is all other music, and these things are separate, and can have no point of intersection.

Perhaps it should be estab-lished at this point that I do not hate The Beatles. I do not even dislike them. I simply think that they have an entirely undeserved monopoly on musical limelight, that they are held in overly high, almost blind regard by many otherwise rational music fans, and that they were roughly equiva-lent in instrumental talent and song writing ability to The Box Tops, an Memphis rock band formed in 1963 of whom almost no-one who was not an original fan has heard.

The common argument for The Beatles’ unassailable posi-tion is their revolutionary impact on popular music. ‘No band has influenced pop culture the way the Beatles have,’ asserts the band’s biography on Rollingstone.com, going on to claim that ‘virtually every rock experiment has some precedent on a Beatles record’. It’s hard to argue against this, given that a ‘precedent’ can be found in almost anything if you’re sufficiently dedicated to finding it. Certainly the Beatles were influential and in-novative, but it seems ludicrous to suggest, as many do, that -insert rock band here- would not have existed without them, because, in the end, if the Beatles hadn’t made the musi-cal leaps (which they unarguably did) which paved the way for future generations, someone else would have. Often they did, at the same time: bands such as the Animals and the Yardbirds were contemporary with the Beatles, and were arguably equally significant.

Indeed, some of the biggest and best rock acts of the seventies

hardly seem to have been influenced by the Beatles at all. Led Zeppelin owed more to blues artists like Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf than the Beatles’ psychedelic meanderings. Black Sabbath, the progenitors of metal, took the blues and combined them with a down-tuned, deliberate-ly oppressive sound that, regardless of Rollingstone.com and its sweeping statements, had virtually no prec-edents at all. Other great seventies acts such as Genesis and Pink Floyd took the groundwork laid by the Beatles and others and expanded upon it in ways that would never has been envisaged by the bands of the sixties. Genesis was also influ-enced by Buddy Rich and the jazz fusion outfit Mahavishnu Orchestra, amongst others.

The point of all this is not to denigrate the Beatles in any way, but to show that they were just a part in the complex process that was revolutionising music in the 1960s and 1970s. They took music into places hitherto unexplored and crafted a sound from 1950s skiffle and rock that was irrefutably of great significance, but were ultimately too limited technically to take this further than breezy pyschedelica, and would have been even had they continued into the next decade. The people who pigeonhole the Beatles as the ‘best, most consequential band in the world’ or any similar sen-timent, miss the point in a way that is painfully obvious: music is more complicated that they will admit, and no artist has or will ever change things entirely by him or herself. The Beatles, along with their contempo-raries, were purely in the right place at the right time, whisked away in the great explosion that had been rewriting the musical rulebook for several decades already.

HE

Jamie Touche and

Harry Eagles debate...

I love music, but only good music. Now I know what a lot of you are thinking: ‘Great. Another opin-ionated biggot who wants to tell us what to listen to.

That is exactly what I am go-ing to do.

If a person knew only what music I listened to and then was asked to guess my age, the results would be shocking: definitely a man, (no woman in the world listens to Pink Floyd) long haired and by now in his mid-50’s, but having gone back to university only a few years previ-ously to finish off what he started (and dropped out of) as a druggy, hippie-ish quasi-intellectual liberal with a ‘nobody cares man’ attitude. I’d be someone who lashes out at controversial political announce-ments, but ends up doing nothing about them in person, and someone who drives a VW ‘Bulli’ (or a ‘hippie van’ as it is often known).

For that reason alone you should take what I say with a sizeable pinch of salt, although you ought to

be pleasantly surprised to hear that I adore the Beatles, and I adore their timelessly psychedelic and endear-ing rock music, which really did help make music what it is today. All modern musicians can and do learn a lot from what this band did. Perhaps it’s wrong to try and diagnose exactly why we (should) love the Beatles, and we should just ‘roll with it’.

I am going to try, though. To be honest it is a hard question. Why, for instance, are the Beatles raved about in almost every copy of every magazine about music ever?

Many of our parents lis-tened to the Beatles when they were young. Today, every once in a while, they still listen to them. For the original fans, who had never heard anything like the Fab Four before, the music warrants many repeat listening. We hear this, and they rub off onto us. This is, somewhat simpli-fied, how some artists remain in pop-ular culture, whereas others simply drop out of common knowledge.

‘Everyone loves you when you’re six feet under the ground’ - John Lennon

From the musical point of view, the Beatles were one of the first bands of their type who played almost entirely original material. The Animals, for example, one of the Beatles most famous contemporary bands, made their name with their famous cover of House of the Rising Sun, and I defy you to think of any other song by said band that is anywhere near as well known. Their work shows incredible variety and creativity. It is hard to define the genre of music which the Beatles played, as it crosses so many, from the strings-based beauty of Eleanor Rigby, the orchestral sound of Sergeant Pep-per’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the trippy joy of Yellow Submarine to the woozy brilliance of I Am The Walrus. They were true masters of experimentation and yet somehow they still seem to keep that raw rock sound. The Beatles were and still are extremely catchy. It hard to pin down quite why, but they had that wonderful talent of crafting songs so memorable that they are literally impossible to remove from your head after several listens.

This is why the Beatles are so raved about; they did what no other band had done before or has really done since. Their sheer tal-ent to create such artistically bril-liant music, as well as more or less summing up pop music before and since in their short period of fame can give all of us something to contemplate and learn from, and something by which to be inspired.

JT

The Beatles Controversy

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‘I can’t understand why people are frightened of

new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones’ - John Cage

Music

Just occasionally you listen to a piece of music, and, having heard it, you say, ‘OK, but where’s the music?’ The example of this that springs most readily to my mind is the track ‘Treefingers’ on Radio-head’s 4th studio album, Kid A: nearly 4 wandering minutes of synthetic noise, interspersed with sporadic chirps and ornaments. You can discern a tune, but it slides in and out of the wall of sound, and never becomes the focus of the track. The overall effect is pleasing in the context of the (excellent) album, but it makes you realise that, as a musi-cian, you can get away with more or less anything nowadays. This phe-nomenon is manifested in what has been called ‘noise music’ and ‘sound art’, examples being Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins and Jimi Hendrix’s various feedback experiments. Metal Machine Music in particular is bor-derline unpalatable and would have not been considered as music by anyone before 1970 or so (even now the debate over whether it actually qualifies as music continues).

Perhaps the most heinous crime of artistic labelling is the divide between ‘classical’ music and ‘pop’ or ‘contemporary’ music, as it implies that there is no connection between the two and that the latter arose separately from the former. Indeed, many classical purists main-tain that this is so, and some will not even concede that anything else can be called music at all: and yet

‘contemporary classical’ composer John Cage’s 1952 work ‘Four, thirty-three’ which treats the listener to four minutes thirty-three seconds of unabridged silence is equally unlistenable as Metal Machine Music, as indeed is much of Cage’s output. Other composers who are generally considered too highbrow and sophisticated to be classified as ‘popular’ music (that being the term classical purists use most often, with great disdain) such as John Tavener have created music that is equally impenetrable and monolithic as Metal Machine Music, and such music therefore, in theory, cannot be separated from Lou Reed’s brainchild in terms of classification.

This simple fact destroys the classical purist’s argument, because it removes the wall that exists in common perception between ‘clas-sical’ music and ‘popular’ music (you’ll notice now how both of these terms are essentially meaningless in any case). Despite this, there are so many fans of classical music, and even fans of classic rock, punk, jazz and other genres, who genuinely believe that we are in a fallow period musically, a sort of musical recession. They will tell you that as soon as soon as what is irresponsibly lumped together as ‘pop’ music came along, true music was doomed, and that nothing now can save it. ‘Modern music’, they state sweepingly, ‘is terrible. It is talentless, banal, and unintelligent.’ This is a myth that must be dispelled, as it is so ludi-crously wrong that it almost defies belief, and the easiest way to do so is to look not at the present, but the past.

The basic point is that there is no form, style or branch of music that is not complexly linked with many other forms. Almost no style

of music can truly be said to have evolved separately of any influence. Music follows a path of evolution, and can all be ultimately considered under one umbrella. The fact that we have come to the artificial crawl of Radiohead’s ‘Treefingers’ from the rigidly guarded music of the medi-eval and renaissance periods is really to do with the breaking down of artistic barriers in music.

Throughout the medieval period, and to a marginally lesser extent through the European re-naissance, music was limited quite severely. Nothing discordant or clashing was considered acceptable for public performance. Much of the music of these periods was and still is incredible, and it is testament to the genius of certain composers that such constricting parameters could be used to create such incredible art, but in general it is fair to say that music pre-1600 or so could only be experimented with to a decidedly small degree. The Baroque period brought increased complexity and virtuosity into music, the classical allowed for greater changes of mood in compositions, but not until the romantic period did experimentation outside of the imposed boundar-ies become truly prevalent, with composers such as Wagner utilising innovative, previously rarely used

devices such as diminished sevenths and new chord progressions. For the romantic composers, freedom of expression and the ability to articu-late huge levels of emotion were the most important factors. Wagner in particular was instrumental in push-ing the limits of the tonal system that had restricted composers, and paved the way for the wild experi-ments that occurred in the twentieth century.

The twentieth century itself, often known as the ‘Dissonant Peri-od’, is beyond doubt the century that saw the greatest revolutions in music that the world has ever seen, and be-yond what anyone beforehand could ever have foreseen, music branched and split into innumerable styles and forms. The French composer Claude Debussy spearheaded the impres-sionist movement, which focused on implicit, sensuous music that showed instead of told. Charles Ives promoted the use of polyrhythm and polytonality (the use of more than one key at once), and Arnold Schoen-berg, arguably one of the most important 20th century composers, explored atonality and the ‘twelve-tone technique’. Another contender for Schoenberg’s title, John Cage, invented the ‘prepared piano’ by doctoring an instrument to create altered versions of its sound, in addi-tion to possibly his most controver-sial work, the aforementioned ‘Four, thirty-three.’ See the back page to read what Cage said of the piece’s premiere:

Alongside all of this, ele-ments of European music fused with African and Afro-American traditional methods to create jazz, which emphasised improvisation, and, according to jazz critic Joachim Berendt, ‘a spontaneity and vital-ity’ that separates it from European

music. Composers such as Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin then spliced jazz with older techniques to create further variation. Jazz, argu-ably more than any other musical style, is an excellent vehicle for in-novation and experimentation, and, as the twentieth century progressed, it split into countless different styles, many of these constantly pushing at the edges of musical technique and expression.

Towards the second half of the twentieth century, this evolu-tion of music redoubled its pace. The seeds for the rock explosion that took place in the 1960s had been laid by the fusion of more conservative jazz and country music into rockabilly and rock ‘n’ roll, which enjoyed a brief period of chart supremacy in the 1950s thanks to artists like Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry. Then the ‘British Invasion’ of bands such as the Beatles, the Yardbirds, the Kinks and the Who, among others, rein-vented rock ‘n’ roll by adding psyche-delic and blues-influenced elements to the formula, and from there, music never looked back. Jimi Hen-drix did things with a guitar never previously imagined. 1970s giants Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis and their ‘progressive rock’ fellows replaced the short, poppy songs of the 1960s with elaborate extended jams and innovative fusing of jazz, rock and classical traditions, whilst Led Zep-pelin melded folk, rock and the blues into a timeless whole, and bands like Black Sabbath and the May Blitz, arguably the most significant devi-ants of all, took the darkest elements of their influences and fashioned the monster that has become heavy metal, which was initially critically lambasted. Lou Reed’s aforemen-tioned Metal Machine Music came out in 1975, and, the debate over its artistic merits notwithstanding, it

was a landmark record, which set a precedent for experimental music to come. Cabaret Voltaire and Throb-bing Gristle created in the 1970s what would be popularised by Nine Inch Nails and Ministry as industrial music in the 1990s: Allmusic.com de-scribes it as initially being ‘a blend of avant-garde electronics experiments and punk provocation.’ By the 1990s, anything was more or less accept-able. The Melvins’ 1994 album Prick contains more seemingly random sound samples and experimental oddities than actual songs, and ex-Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton’s project Mr Bungle mixed rock, funk, ska and free jazz in what critic Steve Huey called ‘a dizzying, disconcert-ing, schizophrenic tour through just about any rock style the group can think of, hopping from genre to genre without any apparent rhyme or reason, and sometimes doing so several times in the same song.’ Out-side of the rock scene, Richard David James, better known under the pseudonym Aphex Twin, was key in bringing ambient music, which Brian Eno (often referred to as the father of the genre) described as the ‘cusp between melody and texture’, music that need not be actively listened to, but simply washes over anyone ex-periencing it. Similarly, experimental electronica project Massive Attack have crafted both lush, exotic sound-scapes and moody, minimalist cuts, taking influences from rap, hip-hop, soul, reggae, rock and other, more obscure areas.

The end result of all of this is that, far from being in an era of mu-sical poverty, we have never had it better. The possibilities and opportu-nities, for the first time in history, are endless. Nothing is seen as too ex-treme, too eclectic, too bizarre. From here, a musician can go anywhere, in any direction, and achieve anything.

Harry Eagles tracks the artistic liberation of music...

Arnold Schoenberg: a pioneer of dissonance

Breaking Barriers in Music

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During a year in which James Cameron has big blue people pranc-ing around Pandora, Christopher No-lan is turning cities upside down, and you’re not allowed to see Toy Story 3 in any fewer than three dimensions, it’s easy to forget the humble origins of film, an art form that has evolved for over a century. It took time to get to this state of cinema that we enjoy so regularly, but the progression of cinema has been a fascinating one.

The first ever ‘motion picture’ to be created was something called The Roundhay Garden Scene of 1888. Or at least, it’s most often agreed that it is so – naturally it’s unsure whether Roundhay or any number of other contemporary short films came first. Further confusion abounds: calling Roundhay a film might be called into question, because, if you sit down to watch it, by the time you have opened the popcorn and got com-fortable it will have ended. It only lasts for two seconds. How a direct-ing credit can go to anyone is aston-ishing: the clip is reminiscent of your Dad accidentally turning on the cam-corder and filming his own foot – ex-cept Dad usually takes a bit longer to realise that he’s recording. The ‘film’ is silent, of course, as sound was to be developed in film a lot later; the first time sound films were to be shown in Paris in 1900.

However, the lack of sound did not hold back the progress of film. Despite containing Intertitles, telling us what the actors are thinking and saying, which now seem hilariously primitive, and the then necessary

overacting to convey feeling without sound, silent film became a very im-portant art form and a thriving indus-try. In its early years, however, film was very much a novelty, something that was showed in travelling tents and exclusive venues. Film became more of an event because the scores for each film were not incorporated into the film itself, but were played live in the venue by a musician or musicians (at best, a whole orches-tra) for each film and each showing. Charlie Chaplin, for example, was someone who held live music in cine-ma very dear – he was even reluctant for his films to be televised for fear that the effect would never be the same without a musician to play the films jingles, often written by Chaplin himself. Of course, this music carried the important responsibility, along-side Intertitles and excessive gasping, of putting across the tone or emotion of a scene without words. Another notable difference between the film

of today and that of the early 1900s is that comedies took a greater hold of the industry, mainly due to overacting being something natural to comedy, and far more of a hindrance to dra-ma. Most bizarrely, the idea of there being no set speed for the projection to run at meant that silent films are often seen and were shown as jerky and unnaturally fast, a factor that tends to put off a modern viewer.

Today, silent film is dead, overwhelmed by the idea of speech in a motion picture that first saw uni-versal recognition with 1927s The Jazz Singer. Thus, silent film is per-haps more famous for the careers it launched, rather than its short-lived popularity in the movie world. Through the thriving medium of si-lent film, Charlie Chaplin became the first superstar of cinema, a per-fect remedy to a world that came stumbling out of its First World War. Chaplin won hearts with his brilliantly executed slapstick visual humour. He began as a stage actor, and burst onto the film scene with the charac-ter of the Tramp, appearing in a series of shorts that would earn him fame and recognition consistently through to the last silent film he ever made,

Modern Times. The character of the Tramp became the most recognisable individual in silent film, and lived with Chaplin throughout his entire career. Such a star had Chaplin become that he was given complete artistic license by the Mutual Film Corporation to produce comedies, and set to good use his skills as a composer, actor and director. Chaplin’s abilities were so vast that he is even credited with cho-reography in one of his films. Chap-lin’s talent didn’t fall by the wayside with silent film, either. Despite resist-ing converting to ‘talkies’, Chaplin’s first, reluctant attempt at the rising genre is often considered his finest film. Chaplin’s trademark pantomime style of acting remained in The Great Dictator, his last hit film, in which he bravely parodied Hitler’s rise to power in the 30s, portraying both the vicious dictator of Tomania (a short

anti-Semite with a trademark mous-tache and a fiery temper) and one of the dictator’s victims, a persecuted Jew – yes, Chaplin did play both, and rarely leaves the screen throughout the whole film. However impressive that may sound, Chaplin’s true genius was to pull such comedy out of a film whose subject matter, racial persecu-tion, seemed so grim. Chaplin’s piece packs weighty political punches, and includes unsentimental poignancy but is hilarious from start to finish, its famous set piece showing this ‘great’ dictator prancing ballerina-like around his stateroom with a bouncy ball globe. Chaplin’s message was hi-larious and bold - so bold in fact that he was accused of being ‘un-Ameri-can’ by J. Edgar Hoover for the under-lying agenda in the film: that it was an embarrassment that the U.S. was not to be doing something to stop

Hitler. After a trip home to England, Chaplin was refused entry into the States and was thus put into exile. The ensuing negative effect on his career ensured that Chaplin never again became as productive in cin-ema as he was.

This, it seems, is where show business really began. Chap-lin’s life, full of scandal, controversy, wealth and numerous relationships with co-stars half his age like Pau-lette Goddard, seems scarcely re-moved from the life of the modern day movie star. With Chaplin, the man to conquer both silent and sound movies with his comedy, his directing and his music, the movie business moved into its recogni-sable form. Chaplin had big, bold ideas and made large-scale, in their way, pictures that took the world by storm. Surprisingly, it didn’t take long for film to develop from an ex-periment to an art form very similar to the one we still know. Chaplin was a real game-changer, and the very first. It’s hard to exaggerate how much he changed and embod-ied cinema – it is also hard not to wonder what might have happened had his career not been so gravely interrupted by the American exile fiasco. Needless to say, Chaplin be-gan what we now call cinema, and took it from silent to brilliant in one lifetime – every modern film watch-er is indebted to him for that.

..to Cheeky Chaplin Charlie MacKeith tracks the evolution of film into its recognisable form...

Film

From Archaic Roundhay

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You may have heard of a remarkable Indian cinema called Bollywood; probably from the movie Slumdog Millionaire which ironically was not a Bollywood movie at all, but a Hollywood one. Many people have another major misconception related to Bollywood, namely, that it is all Indian cinema has to offer. Bollywood is not representative of the whole of Indian cinema, but in fact a small sector of it. It is formally called Hindi cinema, as the language of the cinema is Hindi, but frequent use of English (both being the official languages of India, in itself span-ning twenty different languages) and Urdu (similar to Hindi) is common. Now, Bollywood is one of the larg-est film producing centres and even produces more films on average an-nually (about 1000) than Hollywood (about 700).

The Bollywood phenomenon began with the Lumiere Brothers in 1896 who introduced sound-less movie clips to India, inspiring the first Indian director Dadasaheb Phalke in 1913 to produce the first soundless Indian film, Raja Harish-chandra. The extraordinary thing was that it had subtitles in both Hindi and English. This kick-started the industry and the 1920s saw the rise of several film directors to make silent Indian movies.

The industry took off in 1931 with the release of the first sound film Alam Ara. Then a breakthrough struck in 1932, Bombay hosted its very own first Indian film festival which gave further inspiration to

young, new directors to produce better quality films with directors like Satyajit Rai and Mrinal Sen. These directors also introduced films to the worldwide audience in places like Britain, the USA and the Middle East. At this time, the lavish romantic musicals and melodramas were the staple fare at cinemas.

Colour films soon came along with Kisan Kanya (the first colour movie, directed by Ardeshir Irani-of Alam Ara fame). Perhaps one of the greatest films of all time was released Mughal-e-Azam which was based on the great Moghal Emperor Akbar and the relationship with his son Salim who falls in love with a Hindu girl (the Moghals were a sect of the Monghals-Ghengis Khan’s

people-but separated from them by migrating into South-East Asia and conquering India). With this genera-tion came some unforgettable faces; actors like Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar and Manoj Kumar, actresses like Nargis, Vyjantimala and Saira Banu became household names in the 1960s. Films during this time were of great social value as they brought together entire streets and whole villages together to watch a single film on, most likely, the only screen they had. Not only actors, but also popular playback singers like Mo-hammed Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar (the woman who has sung over a thousand songs in her lifetime).

The period from the late 1940s to the 1960s is regarded

by film historians as the ‘Golden Age’ of Hindi cinema. ‘Golden Age’ cinema was so tremendously differ-ent from the conventional ‘Modern Age’ cinema that we see today that tastes between older people and the younger generation differ tremen-dously. Examples include the Guru Dutt films: Pyaasa (1957), Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) and the Raj Kapoor films Awaara (1951) and Shree 420 (1955), all of which were films expressing social themes such as the working-class urban life in India. Pyaasa was so good a film that it was featured in Time magazine’s ‘All-Time 100 best movies’ list. Many other Hindi films were in the Sight & Sound poll, including Awaara, Mother India and Mughal-e-Azam, which were in the top category. Hindi films of this time often went on to compete for the Palme d’Or, at the Cannes Film Festival.

Still some Hindi filmmakers continued to produce realistic ‘Paral-lel Cinema’ throughout the 1970s. However, this sector of the industry came under heavy scrutiny of not doing enough to encourage com-mercial cinema. Thus the 1970s were inflamed with films such as Sholay (1975), one of the most memorable Hindi movies of all time. It is a crime film, pitting a policeman against his gangster brother (played by Amitabh Bachchan, the greatest Bollywood actor of them all). The film, called Deewar, was released in 1975 and was directed by Yash Chopra – one of the most famous Hindu directors of modern times. The film made such an impact that Danny Boyle com-mented saying that the movie was ‘absolutely key’ to Indian cinema. Shortly afterwards, Mira Nair’s Sa-laame Bombay! (1988) was released

which not only won the Camera d’Or at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, but was even nominated for the Acade-my Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, the pendulum swung back towards family-centric and roman-tic musicals with successes such as Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) and Dil-wale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) with a new generation of actors such as Aamir Khan and Madhuri Dixit. However, at this point in time, comedy and action were also gain-ing popularity with actors such as Govinda (probably the most famous comic relief actor) – and Akshay Kumar. The decade also welcomed a change to more independent films being released, some of which have succeeded commercially. The best known example of this was Satya (1998); the film also brought about

the beginning of a new genre in films – Mumbai Noir, urban films reflecting social problems in the city of Mumbai. This led to a resurgence of Parallel cinema by the end of the decade.

Overall, the path for Bolly-wood has been woven in such a way that movies have become more than just Saturday night watching; they have become the front line of Indian culture. Instead of conventional folk songs being played on the street, every shop and every home bursts out with sounds from Bollywood. Bollywood has even overtaken its cousin in Hollywood through number of tickets sold, movies released and sheer popularity. Bollywood’s domi-nation of the world is only about to begin.

Film

Shiva Chauhan explores the wonderous world of Bollywood...

Bombay Bolly-Boom

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After their performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank, during their annual European tour, eight Tibetan Buddhist monks from Tashi Lhunpo Monastery which was re-established in exile in 1972 in Karnataka State, South India, visited Eton College on 9th November 2009. Meditation techniques and their unique style of Debating were introduced to some Tutor groups, and an F block Double School had the chance to experience just how much breath control was needed to produce more than a small gurgle from the Khangling (bone trumpet), Gyaling (oboe), Dungkar (conch shell trumpet) and the Dungchen (longhorn) (PHOTOS) – a sort of Tibetan alpenhorn – whose sustained boom can be heard for miles around, announcing morning and evening prayers.

(PHOTOS). They gave a performance of sacred Cham dance and chanted prayer accompanied by traditional instruments in the Music Schools’ Concert Hall, packed with local schoolchildren, and a second performance for the Eton community in School Hall in the evening.

shi Lhunpo Monastery, in Shigatse, Tibet’s second largest city after Lhasa, (PHOTO) was founded in 1447 and became the seat of the Panchen Lama, second only to the Dalai Lama as a spiritual leader in the Gelugpa (Yellow Hat) tradition. After

invading Tibet in 1950 the Chinese brutally suppressed the 1959 Tibetan Uprising when the present Dalai Lama was driven into exile, and between 1966-80 during the Chinese Cultural Revolution more than 6,000 Tibetan monasteries and nunneries were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Tibetans followed the Dalai Lama into exile, establishing monasteries and refugee communities in India, Nepal and Bhutan. There are approximately 6 million Tibetan exiles worldwide.

The 11th Panchen Lama, Gedun Choekyi Nyima did not escape. He was recognised as the true incarnation by the Dalai Lama on 14th May 1995 and within days the six year old boy (PHOTO) and his family were taken into “protective custody” by the Chinese and despite repeated international requests for news of their wellbeing, they have never been seen again. So Tashi Lhunpo monastery is deprived of its spiritual leader.

The head of the Monastery is the Khen Rinpoche (Abbot), a man of high academic distinction appointed

by the Dalai Lama, assisted by four Chantzöd (Administrators) who are elected from amongst the monks within the community. They are responsible for the day to day running of the monastery, such as finance, the health of the monks, external community relations and the provision of food and transport. The Tsokschen Geykoe Chenmo is also elected from the community of monks with particular responsibility for internal matters. His assistant. the Tapön. takes charge of organising the special prayers requested of the monks by the Tibetan community, which are the principal source of the monastery’s income. The Omzé (Chant Master) is elected for his ability to memorise texts and the quality of his voice, and oversees the content of the prayers and performance of the chanting. The Kachen Choera (Debate Kachen) oversees the teaching of debate and sets the higher monastery philosophy exams. The School Principal runs the monastery school which has more than 180 pupils who study Tibetan, English, Chinese, Mathematics, Social Science, General Science, Drawing, Religious Debate,

Buddhist Philosophy (Dharma) and most recently computer studies, after the equipping of the new Computer Room and Library.

It takes 16 years to complete the course in religious education (Lobnyeir). Arts of Healing, Sanskrit, Arts and Crafts, Metaphysics, Dialectics and the Philosophy of Religion are studied. The latter are the most important and divided into five branches: Prajnaparamita (The Perfection of Wisdom – 6 yrs), Madhayamika (the Middle Path focusing on the avoidance of extremes – 2 yrs), Vinayana (the Canon of Monastic Discipline – 2 yrs), Abhidharma (metaphysics – 2 yrs) and Pramana (Logic, developing mental powers and dialectics – 4 yrs). Written and oral examinations are held every year, and the final debate examination twice a year held in the Dukhang (temple) before the main monastery officials. Successful candidates at Tashi Lhunpo are awarded the degree of Kachen, the equivalent of the Geshe Lharampa degree in other traditions. Should 16 years of concentrated study not be enough, the next step is to join the monastery’s Tantric College. This

is a lifelong commitment to intense spiritual development, studying the four tantras, learning the ritual hand gestures (mudras), and the arts of butter sculpture (torma), mandala-making in paint, sand or carved wood, music and chant and the performance of the masked Gutor Garcham dances which are performed for the last eight days of the Tibetan year, enacting the struggle between good and evil.

The original Shigatse monastery was one of the four great Yellow Hat Monasteries of Tibet, where up to 6000 scholars and student monks from all over the Buddhist world studied and taught in the tradition of Mahayana Buddhism. Tashi-Lhunpo Monastery in India currently has around 300 monks coming from Tibet and the Himalayan regions of Spithi, Khunu, Ladakh and Arunachal. Numbers constantly grow, as more refugees are driven out by religious persecution in Chinese–occupied Tibet (just possessing a picture of the Dalai Lama means a lengthy prison sentence) creating the necessity for larger prayer and debate halls, more hostel accommodation, and school facilities. Many novice

monks, who usually enter the monastery at the age of 7, are the sons of poor subsistence-level farmers whose families cannot offer even a basic subsidy for robes, books, food, medical expenses or accommodation. In Tibet the large and prosperous city of Shigatse would have supported the monastery. In India the impoverished community of Tibetan exiles is in no position to provide such support. No-one is ever turned away for lack of money, and monks stay for life, so this lays a serious long-term financial burden on the monastery.

The monks from Tashi Lhunpo Monastery have dedicated their lives to developing a balance of peace and harmony within themselves so that they may become good human beings whose every action is motivated by compassion and a deep respect for all sentient beings, and by a commitment to service, sacrifice and responsibility to others

If you would like to support the monastery, by making a donation or sponsoring a monk, or just find out more about the UK Trust and the monastery and its community, please do take a look at the websites. The Tashi Lhunpo Monastery UK Trust is: www.tashi-lhunpo.org.uk The monastery itself is www.tashilhunpo.org

Etonians Go East!

The Tashi Lhunpo Visit to EtonLeila Clarke on the visit of Tibetan monks to Eton...

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Nowadays you’ve probably had more ready meals than cooked meals, and still don’t even know what an onion looks like till that fateful day your parents let you out into the world, at 23. Unless of course you’re an Etonian, sat in the award-winning Bekynton (possessing a 4* hygiene award, don’t ask me how they rate this, and the cost sector chef of the year from the Craft Guild of Chefs 2009, Michael Godfrey), in which case you will be well in tune with the pleasures of hot meals. But spare a thought for the rest of the world, and perhaps for your own, often meagre, cooking skills. (Now who hear will confess to burning them-selves the first few times in debate? You don’t touch the hot plate; you put the pan on it...)

Back in the days of British Empire, yes they had copious servants to do it, but the recipes are broadly very attemptable. So ditch that Chicken Tikka, stop sipping that Cobra, don’t even think of putting another bag of chips in the oven or eat that ‘white trash’ (some people call it Hovis), and most certainly do not, I repeat do not, dig into your second tub of the Ben & Jerry’s you were saving for a special occasion. I can’t tell you what’s wrong with that meal or those dishes, but I’m sure a thou-

sand nutritionists could, and a mil-lion dieters would drop their heads in shame. Of course we’re all dieting, but, like many others, only the sight of a Krispy Kreme will swiftly end that diet. End? Merely a break; a regular, daily, fat filled break.

Instead dig into a Groaty Dick, wash it down with some homemade Cider,

Cider

- Some Apples- 5g Champagne Yeast (per 20 litres)

Take a long piece of wood. Lay out the apples on a table, preferably away from neighbours who might think you were doing something else. Put ear defenders on. Beat apples to a pulp. Put this into a juicer (if you have one) or otherwise beat the apples some more, before putting into a vessel. Wait 24 hours before adding the champagne yeast. If you’re a real man, add sugar. It sounds contradictory, but sugar makes for a stronger cider (5 -8%).

Pickled Cucumbers

- Salt Water (or a bucket of tears for the less hygienic)- Things from which plants grow. - Vinegar- Pepper, Cloves

In salt water the cucumbers go. Boil the outsides with the seeds, add vinegar, and then put in the salt water for a few weeks. Boil it again, add a dash of pepper, vinegar and salt, leave for a month. Wait again, put some more vinegar in, leave for two months. Boil again. Decorate with seeds. Have fun. You’ve waited 4 months for this moment. Now do you see why vegetarianism suffered in the 19th century?

Groaty Dick

- 250g Oats- Hot Water to cover.- 750g Beef (shin not steak!)- 500g Leeks- 2 Onions - Salt, Pepper, Anything else you can afford really.

Use the wooden stick to get the beef into small pieces. Use on the leeks and onions. Place all the ingredients in a casserole dish and bake slowly for at least three hours, longer if possible.

Economical Potatoes

- Herbs (You pick.)- 5 shallots or 3 onions.- 2 cups leftover meat- 1kg potatoes- 50g butter- 2 eggs - Salt. Pepper. Flour. Oil for frying.

(Aren’t those just obvious?)

Boil then mash potatoes (half an hour should do.) Chop everything (the wooden plank yet again, may help,) and mix it all together. Shape into medium patties by rolling them in flour and dipping them in egg white. Place in frying pan (with hot oil!) Cook till brown, then drain with paper rolls. Bet you never thought they served a practical purpose other than for when you get dirty, did you?

Fresh Crusty Bread

- 500g Strong White Flour - 1.5tsp salt- 5g Yeast Sachet - 300ml Water

Look over at the bread machine. Does it work? God knows. Turn your eyes away from it. Put everything into a bowl quickly. Stir as if your life depends on it (the same piece of wood as used previously will suffice.) Take dough. Either knead lovingly, or beat to a pulp with the wood. Leave to rest for an hour, a day, or longer, though preferably not long enough for mould to set in. Put in oven for half an hour. Do not look. That would be unmanly. Remove bread from oven. Did you use a tin? If so, then start eating, otherwise, start clean-ing.

Forgotten FoodTheo Park brings back the old ways of cooking...

Delicious?

Tried and tested on

F Blockers?

Healthier than

chips?

Really?

Yes.

and for sides, let your tastebuds siz-zle at the thought of post-revolution French food, like potato patties, and perhaps even, if you want to get rid of that pot belly, or simply sell your house, try some homemade bread. We could stretch to some vegeta-bles, but what’s the use? You’re not going to eat them anyway.

The RecipesFood

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The Final Pages

The shocking news spread across the world, catching on to every opera-lovers mind like a forest fire which is most likely still ablaze. It seems we were all fairly convinced about the grand old lady (who has until very recently been active sitting in the judge panel of prestigious voice competitions) and her relative state of health, that the thought of Dame Joan Sutherland passing away so suddenly never crossed our minds. Or perhaps, noone of us wanted to believe it possible. With so many of the great sopranos (Callas, Nilsson and Schwarzkopf, just to name a handful) permanently silenced, I suppose we wanted to cling onto the knowledge that Caballé, Price and Dame Sutherland were still alive and well.

La Stupenda (for such was the love of Italian audiences for her voice that they nicknamed her thus) had such a glorious and dazzling career

as very few other singers have quite managed to equal. From her 1965 London Lucia di Lammermoor to her farewell to the stage in 1990, no other singer (perhaps Callas, if her career had been longer) has achieved her breadth in terms of operatic roles. Her contribution to the bel canto revival is argubly even greater than Callas, since it was her who travelled extensively throughout Italy salvaging copies of long lost bel canto scores and ‘premiering’ them herself. And what a heroic quest it was! In her lifetime she portrayed practically all the known bel canto roles, and most of her interpretations are considered unparalleled to this day.

Many wrongly consider her to be solely an interpreter of bel canto, without knowing of her highly succesful forays into dramatic soprano (most notably her 1972 Turandot recording with Pavarotti

La Stupenda è Mortaand Caballé) and her exceptionally warm versions of perenial favourites from French, Italian and even Czech lieder. She was instrumental in reviving Massenet’s long forgotten opera Esclarmonde, whose title role is so difficult technically that her retirement has again threatened to percipitate its plunge into oblivion. She herself recognised that Esclarmonde was one of her greatest achievements in music.

The Arts Review, or rather Eugene Loh, would like to pay our utmost respect to this grand lady of opera, who gave her whole life for the sake of art. May you rest in peace, and entertain those blessèd souls in heaven who will now have the chance to rejoice in the glory of your voice forever more. Thank you for all that you have given us.

Viva La Stupenda!

One Final Note :‘They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was

silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds.

You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the

second, raindrops began patterning the roof, and during the third the people

themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.’

John Cage

Vulturius... Vulturius regressus est. anni, quos in exilio inter caesariem Boris Johnsonis egi, confecerunt, bonum itaque est domo esse. praeterea, sunt etiam plures locorum in quos hoc anno insidere possum! Collegio Sacello arcanis falis obscuranto, Vulturius, sedens, se delectatur despecto utiendo. coetus ta-men gratior non est – complures clamosiorum domum sacrum et antiquum occupavisse videntur. quae autem eum minime vexabant, quoniam aliquid infaustius pone frontem magnam et albam, pergere videbatur. atque non quaestio est usus parvi organi loco magni. sed ille subsecivus erat. fieri a Vulturio non potest aliter. adsuefactus a Curatore Gadget OE ipso, experitus artem cognitionis, ex expectatione, arcanum enodavit. Magister Little re vera mandavit ut ingens radius lucis, qui aliquem sero pervenientem ad ecclesiam antemeridianissimam meditationis Magistri Lam-berti velociter deleant, una ex parte Collegii Sacelli aedificaretur. radius lucis gothicus certe erit, ne ornamento tecti confligat. locatam pecuniam firmam, putat Vulturius – Davidus Cameron numquam duravisset si ingentes radii lucis / Magistri Lamberti apud se essent.

The Vulture’s back. The years spent in exile in Boris Johnson’s hair have taken their toll, but it’s nice to be home. What’s more, there are even more places to perch this year! While College Chapel is shrouded in mysterious scaffolding, the Vulture has enjoyed sitting and making use of the vantage point. The company however has not been so entertaining - a selection of rather noisy men seem to have occupied the old house of the holy. This however, was the least of his worries – there seemed to be something more sinister going on behind the big white façade. And it’s not the use of the small organ instead of the big one. But that was odd.

The Vulture couldn’t help himself. Having trained under Inspector Gadget (OE) himself, he put his investigative skills to the test, and, as expected, has solved the mystery. Mr Little has in fact commissioned a giant laser to be constructed on the side of College Chapel, which will do the job of destroying anyone arriving late for Mr Lambert’s early morning reflection services. The laser will of course be late gothic, so as not to clash with the ceiling decoration. A sturdy investment, thinks The Vulture – Dave Cameron never would have lasted if there were giant lasers/Mr Lamberts in his day.